Trilling's "Sincerity and Authenticity" (1972)
I had dipped into Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity (1972) before, but in a desultory and superficial manner. Recently I sat down and actually read the whole thing. It’s a very remarkable book, I think. Indeed: I’m a little surprised it’s not better known, although I daresay part of the positivity of my reaction has to do with the happenstance that I read it whilst in the middle of a longer-term, (intermittent, but still ongoing) read of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age . This latter is taking a while, because Taylor’s book is … well: enormous, and complex. I’m halfway through it at the moment, and though I will finish it, that’ll take a while. Taylor’s core argument is that ‘we’, as human beings, have changed; that we no longer live in an ‘enchanted’ world but a secular one, that meaning and value are no longer predicated upon something exterior to reality (as in a divine cosmos) but interior to it—in us, our societies, our selves, our secular ‘modern moral order’; and that thi