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PARTISAN REVIEW
composed. Most societies confine this chaos in public forms like religious
riruals or acts of obedience to secular ideology, which offer alternative modes
of expression to the display of raw psychic energy. When a culrure moralizes
the very existence of this energy, it ensures that its experience of the moral
life will occur only in fits and starts. The weight of circumstance, of getting
from day to day, will make the moments of self-exposure sudden upheavals
beneath the surface of everyday order. The upheaval people do not so much
greet with demonic glee as humbly accept, for when you are under the whip
of primal passion you are forced into heresy for real.
It
is true that a life of constant psychic disguise would be as intolerable
as a life of constant self-revelation. All culrures arrange some rhythm of
alternation between the two; the question is how people feel the rhythm:
do they believe there is equal value in moments of disguise and revelation,
or are people unmoved by the virrues of conventional, rirual behavior and
aroused only when self-display occurs? This question of the value placed on
self-revelation is a social and historical question; the seriousness with which
people take their psyches depends on the culrure in which they live.
It
is
important to keep these dimensions of the question in mind, for all too
often the critics of authenticity, after paying lip service to the conditions of
advanced capitalism and of secularism which have led people to be so con–
cerned with their private feelings, cast aside the social considerations and
c;riticize authenticity as an abstract psychological condition. Instead of being
regarded as a product of a deformed culrure, the desire for authenticity
comes to be seen as a sign of the innate sinfulness of human narure ..This
is the failing of Theodor Adorno's
The Language ofAuthenticity,
for exam–
ple. His critique of authenticity soon puts the reader on familiar conservative
terrain; the impulse life of man comes to be equated per se with the destruc–
tiveness of self-revelation; therefore social repression per se becomes a moral
good. One of the great virrues of Lionel Trilling's
Sincerity and Authenti–
city,
which is conservatism of an altogether different and more noble kind,
is
to show how the morality of authenticity is ineluctably the product of
historical changes in modern culrure. Moreover, Trilling has shown how the
emphasis on self-revelation which erupted in the last decade is not a freak
condition whose origins lie simply in the war between the generations in the
late 1960s; this self-absorption is the result of hidden changes in modern
culrure in the making since the French Revolution.
Self-revelation is also social, rather than an abstract psychological,
preoccupation, for the attirudes people have about their own emotions they
tend to project on others. People feel close, and their relationship seems
real, if they show themselves to each other; by contrast, it is hard for us
to
imagine that people determined to hold things back in each other's presence
