SINCERITY AND AUTHENTICITY

Author: Lionel TRILLING
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674044460
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
“Now and then,” writes Lionel Trilling, “it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself.” In this new book he is concerned with such a mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one’s self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life—and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity. Instances range over the whole of Western literature and thought, from Shakespeare to Hegel to Sartre, from Robespierre to R.D. Laing, suggesting the contradictions and ironies to which the ideals of sincerity and authenticity give rise, most especially in contemporary life. Lucid, and brilliantly framed, its view of cultural history will give Sincerity and Authenticity an important place among the works of this distinguished critic.

Sincerity and Authenticity

Author: Lionel Trilling
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674808614
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Book Description
Trilling is concerned with the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one’s self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life—and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity.

The Ethics of Authenticity

Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674987691
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 155

Book Description
“Charles Taylor is a philosopher of broad reach and many talents, but his most striking talent is a gift for interpreting different traditions, cultures and philosophies to one another...[This book is] full of good things.” —New York Times Book Review Everywhere we hear talk of decline, of a world that was better once, maybe fifty years ago, maybe centuries ago, but certainly before modernity drew us along its dubious path. While some lament the slide of Western culture into relativism and nihilism and others celebrate the trend as a liberating sort of progress, Charles Taylor calls on us to face the moral and political crises of our time, and to make the most of modernity’s challenges. “The great merit of Taylor’s brief, non-technical, powerful book...is the vigor with which he restates the point which Hegel (and later Dewey) urged against Rousseau and Kant: that we are only individuals in so far as we are social...Being authentic, being faithful to ourselves, is being faithful to something which was produced in collaboration with a lot of other people...The core of Taylor’s argument is a vigorous and entirely successful criticism of two intertwined bad ideas: that you are wonderful just because you are you, and that ‘respect for difference’ requires you to respect every human being, and every human culture—no matter how vicious or stupid.” —Richard Rorty, London Review of Books

Real Black

Author: John L. Jackson Jr.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226390017
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
New York's urban neighborhoods are full of young would-be emcees who aspire to "keep it real" and restaurants like Sylvia's famous soul food eatery that offer a taste of "authentic" black culture. In these and other venues, authenticity is considered the best way to distinguish the real from the phony, the genuine from the fake. But in Real Black, John L. Jackson Jr. proposes a new model for thinking about these issues--racial sincerity. Jackson argues that authenticity caricatures identity as something imposed on people, imprisoning them within stereotypes--turning them into racial objects and inanimate things, instead of living, breathing human beings. Contending that such assumptions deny people agency--not to mention humanity--in their search for identity, Jackson counterposes sincerity, an internal and more productive analytical model for thinking about race. Moving in and around Harlem and Brooklyn, Jackson offers a kaleidoscope of subjects and stories that directly and indirectly address how race is negotiated in today's world--including tales of name-changing hip-hop emcees, book-vending numerologists, urban conspiracy theorists, corrupt police officers, mixed-race neo-Nazis, and high-school gospel choirs forbidden to catch the Holy Ghost. Enlisting "Anthroman," his cape-crusading critical alter ego, Jackson records and retells these interconnected sagas in virtuosic detail and, in the process, shows us how race is defined and debated, imposed and confounded every single day.

Sincerity: How a Moral Ideal Born Five Hundred Years Ago Inspired Religious Wars, Modern Art, Hipster Chic, and the Curious Notion that We All Have Something to Say (no Matter how Dull)

Author: R Jay Magill
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393080986
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
Explores the history, religion, art, and politics behind the history of sincerity, spanning a timeline dotted with Protestant theology, paintings by the insane, French satire, and the anti-hipster movement.

You and Your Profile

Author: Hans-Georg Moeller
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231551592
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 149

Book Description
More and more, we present ourselves and encounter others through profiles. A profile shows us not as we are seen directly but how we are perceived by a broader public. As we observe how others observe us, we calibrate our self-presentation accordingly. Profile-based identity is evident everywhere from pop culture to politics, marketing to morality. But all too often critics simply denounce this alleged superficiality in defense of some supposedly pure ideal of authentic or sincere expression. This book argues that the profile marks an epochal shift in our concept of identity and demonstrates why that matters. You and Your Profile blends social theory, philosophy, and cultural critique to unfold an exploration of the way we have come to experience the world. Instead of polemicizing against the profile, Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio outline how it works, how we readily apply it in our daily lives, and how it shapes our values—personally, economically, and ethically. They develop a practical vocabulary of life in the digital age. Informed by the Daoist tradition, they suggest strategies for handling the pressure of social media by distancing oneself from one’s public face. A deft and wide-ranging consideration of our era’s identity crisis, this book provides vital clues on how to stay sane in a time of proliferating profiles.

Genuine Pretending

Author: Hans-Georg Moeller
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231545266
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
Genuine Pretending is an innovative and comprehensive new reading of the Zhuangzi that highlights the critical and therapeutic functions of satire and humor. Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio show how this Daoist classic, contrary to contemporary philosophical readings, distances itself from the pursuit of authenticity and subverts the dominant Confucianism of its time through satirical allegories and ironical reflections. With humor and parody, the Zhuangzi exposes the Confucian demand to commit to socially constructed norms as pretense and hypocrisy. The Confucian pursuit of sincerity establishes exemplary models that one is supposed to emulate. In contrast, the Zhuangzi parodies such venerated representations of wisdom and deconstructs the very notion of sagehood. Instead, it urges a playful, skillful, and unattached engagement with socially mandated duties and obligations. The Zhuangzi expounds the Daoist art of what Moeller and D’Ambrosio call “genuine pretending”: the paradoxical skill of not only surviving but thriving by enacting social roles without being tricked into submitting to them or letting them define one’s identity. A provocative rereading of a Chinese philosophical classic, Genuine Pretending also suggests the value of a Daoist outlook today as a way of seeking existential sanity in an age of mass media’s paradoxical quest for originality.

The Practices of the Self

Author: Charles E. Larmore
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226468879
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
Charles Larmore develops a theory of the self that challenges the widespread view that the we always know our own thoughts.

The Rhetoric of Sincerity

Author: Ernst van Alphen
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804758271
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
The essays in this volume demonstrate how the performance of sincerity is culturally specific and is enacted in different ways in different media and disciplines, including law and the arts.

Performance and Authenticity in the Arts

Author: Salim Kemal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521454190
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Book Description
This book brings together a distinguished group of scholars from music, drama, poetry, performance art, religion, classics and philosophy to investigate the complex and developing interaction between performance and authenticity in the arts. The volume begins with a perspective on traditional understandings of that relation, examining the crucial role of performance in the Poetics, the marriage of art with religion, the experiences of religious and aesthetic authenticity, and modernist conceptions of authenticity. Several essays then consider music as a performative art. The final essays discuss the link of authenticity to sincerity and truth in poetry, explain how performance, as an authentic feature of poetry, embodies a collective effort, and culminate in a discussion of the dark side of performance - its constant susceptibility to inauthenticity. Together the essays suggest how issues of performance and authenticity enter into consideration of a wide range of the arts.