GCG Notes
Chapter 8: From Sincerity to Authenticity

Questions

1.    How are desires related to wishes? Some contents become beliefs and some becomes desires. How do wishes relate to those two endpoints of mental content?

2.    What is the connection between genealogical developments between truths or virtues of truth and the invention of new literary genres?

3.    Is this really an invention that didn’t exist prior to the 18^th century?

4.    Why is he concerned with history in general? Origins?

5.    Could his vindication of Rameau’s idiosyncrasy have problematic moral consequences? Excuse shitty behavior? What does he mean by steadiness?

6.    Diderot’s theory of self. How does that square with Williams’ theory of personal identity?

7.    Are the personal and social aspects of authenticity reconcilable?

8.    How might we articulate sincerity’s relation to avowal?

9.    Danger of inaction or perfectionism with sincerity?

-       Sincerity is associated with personal authenticity. What’s new with the 18^th century is the connection between sincerity and personal authenticity?

-       Rousseau’s sincerity as authenticity vs. Diderot’s sincerity as authenticity

-       New theory of self-awareness in the 18^th century – bearing one’s own survey conscience. But what kind of thing is Williams trying to isolate meta-philosophically?

-       The history of authenticity has something to do with Christian modes of self-inquiry

-       Authenticity as an overcoming of self-alienation

-       Williams is charting the emergence of ethical practices in the Enlightenment era

-       How are ideas related to sincerity?

-       Ideas give coherence to the complexity of the conditions

-       There are concepts and practices of authenticity

o   Williams seems to be giving more of a history of ideas than a history of practices

§  How can you give an idea as central to a virtue rather than a practice?

·      Concepts and practices are entangled

-       Sincerity is connected to dispositions to act

-       Williams is looking for the ideational connections beneath certain virtues

-       How can one give a history of dispositions, which we always already have?

o   There is a tension between the habitual and the natural

-       In the state of nature we have dispositions that could take the form of accuracy and sincerity… but in history these become different things

-       How is something like sincerity practiced by Diderot and Diderotians?

-       How practices form around these ideational origin moments such as the origin of objective history in Thucydides, authenticity in Rousseau and sincerity in Diderot?

-       Encyclopedia tradition comes out of there being too much information in response to skepticism

-       The messiness of Rameau’s Nephew might speak to a general bombardment of new information

-       Authenticity comes into distinctness when it is articulated

o   It is a reflective ideal

-       Virtues of truth are connected to our awareness of their being virtuous

o   You can’t just accidentally say something accurate. You have to know you are being accurate

§  Self-denial is pretending one’s practice is normative

-       Diderot is important to Williams because he is one in whom the moderns become conscious of themselves

-       Rousseau takes sincerity to far because of his understanding of the self

-       Williams is interested in the historical emergence of the specific forms of accuracy and sincerity that are most significant for us.

-       Rousseau’s lack of self-awareness is an assumption

o   Insofar as Rousseau is disclosing his faults, he thinks that will develop trust between himself and others

-       Diderot is more sincere because he thinks there is nothing essential in the self

-       Rousseau’s authenticity is not connected to sincerity in the way that Diderot

o   Rousseau pursues truth through authenticity in a way that it becomes detached from sincerity

§  Anti-social dimension in Rousseau – Rousseau is so deceived about himself that he can’t become a part of society

-       Rameau is not self-deceived

o   He is self-aware of self-awareness

-       A vindicatory genealogy of sincerity and accuracy would be genesis of conceptual self-understanding

-       There could be no authenticity if people did not have a concept of authenticity

o   Where is the need for a modern concept of sincerity coming from?

§  The conceptual or history of ideas dimension of this genealogy gives an account of practices that Foucault’s approach couldn’t