On Sincerity
Why we don't know who we are or what we are doing, and how the only way to find the self is first to lose it.
These are journal entries from the beginning of this summer, when I was looking back on all that had been on my mind throughout the spring.
I ended 2024 by rereading Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos while in bed recovering from the flu after Christmas. Lost in the Cosmos is a satire of a self-help book. It doesn’t really make any arguments; it only asks questions, but they are the perfect questions (even if they are frequently absurd) to chip away at the contemporary theorist-consumer edifice. By that, I mean the questions force the reader to confront what he does not know about himself and realize he can’t find happiness by adopting theories he (as the theorist) is not included in, or endlessly diverting himself from his hidden despair with new experiences and new things. I count Lost in the Cosmos among the few books I can truly say have profoundly and abruptly changed my life, though I must admit enduring such an existential assault for a second time while fading in and out of fever dreams is quite the tremendous, yet terrifying, experience one would imagine it is.
At the same time, I read a digital galley of
’s then-upcoming novel, The Sleepers, which I’d been asked to review. The Sleepers is about millennials in New York who have no idea who they are or even what they want. The main character, Dan, is a college professor whose personality is constructed around convincing others and himself that he’s intelligent. Deep down, Dan is ashamed of himself. Why? Because under all the self-imposed layers of deception, he is aware of his self-unknowing, his lack of sincerity. And, instead of addressing this problem, instead of filling the hole that has grown in his heart with something capable of filling it, he destroys his relationships, his reputation, his career, and eventually himself. There are better novels than Gasda’s, but I happened to read it at the right time, and it got me thinking. It got me thinking about sincerity.Months later, during Lent, I read Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, which, of course, also has to do with characters who, on one hand, long for wholeness and sincerity, yet, on the other, frequently deceive themselves. At the beginning of the novel, the elder monk Zosima tells Fyodor Pavlovich, the Karamazov father (and a self-described “buffoon out of shame”), not to lie to himself. He says:
“A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others.”
Then came the icing on the cake. It must have been in April when I read Kierkegaard for the first time. My buddy Slone convinced me to read Fear and Trembling, and it was probably not long after writing this entry that I had finished it. Kierkegaard stresses the “infinite resignation” of the knight of faith, who gives himself up but, in doing so, gains himself.
All of this fed so much contemplation on my part, not so much to identify tendencies in others as to identify tendencies in myself. I’d be lying if I said I am always a sincere person, but never am I more ashamed of myself than when I catch myself being insincere. In fact, I get so aggravated when others are insincere precisely because their insincerity acts as a mirror to my own.
But all sin is, in a sense, insincerity. It is acting in a way inconsistent with what one is, with what one was created to be. And shame is a natural consequence of sin. Only we should carry that shame to God, honestly and with a contrite heart, and not try to escape it through more sin, through more deception, through more obscurity. Such is the cycle of self-destruction, and is the greatest of the devil’s snares.
But enough of so long an introduction. Here are my thoughts on sincerity:
Thursday, May 1, 2025
All that I have read over the last several months has forced me to reckon with one of my deepest insecurities, perhaps man’s deepest insecurity of all; that is, that he does not know who he is or what he wants, that he is chronically insincere. I can’t help but ask: What is sincerity? Why does one want it? How does one reach it? What are the obstacles in our way?
Because we are creatures endowed by our Creator with free will1, we inevitably must bear the burden of certain primordial questions: What am I? What am I for? What am I to do? These questions are burdensome because they necessitate the possibility of the lie. We can lie to others, but we can also lie to ourselves and, thus, we can obscure our knowledge of the questions about our nature and purpose. This obscurity found its origins in the initial deception. The serpent convinced Eve that by eating the forbidden fruit, she could be like God.2 Henceforth, we were severed from the truth and exiled to a state of constant obscurity. Only by faith through revelation can we come to know the first principles necessary to reason proper answers to these questions. Faith must defy doubt. Doubt results from the obscurity of self-deception.
We do not know what we are or what we are to do due to this obscurity, also known as original sin, and, as I said, thus the truth about our nature and purpose must be made clear to us by our Creator, which is why we required the revelation of the Law and, ultimately, the Word Made Flesh. The Law provided us with standards by which to define ourselves universally, rules by which to live by, to check our desires against, but the Word gave us meaning individually. The Word is Love, which, through faith, surpasses the universal and thus instructs us individually by placing us in what Kierkegaard called “absolute relation to the absolute.”3
But when man retracts from the universal (does not surpass it but runs in the opposite direction), he supplants authenticity for sincerity. He abandons duty and, ultimately, love, for desire, only there he finds more obscurity, for his desires are volatile and provide him with no consistent definition. He who seeks to be authentic to his own desires, and not sincere in his commitment to his relationships with others and with God, is met with contradictory and shifting motivations at all times. Authenticity, therefore, is an ever-moving target and ends with the self devouring itself. It is a movement in the direction of the demonic,4 which is obscurity and ends ultimately at suicide, for man, confronted with self-unknowing, must fear himself, for he fears what he has no means of knowing, and what he fears, he either flees from or fights: he can find solace temporarily in diversions, but the fact of his own self-unknowing - his lack of any definite motivations (for the only definite motivations are exterior to him and he has given all that up) - catches up to him and his only remaining reaction is self-destruction.
We are less sincere today because we have chosen, by and large, authenticity over sincerity. Sincerity can only be recovered through relationships: duty to others through the universal, and love of God through faith. This requires disclosure, i.e., truth-telling. Love requires silence, through which one contains himself and listens to God. The sincere person, thus, speaks but speaks little,5 and he never intentionally obscures the truth. When he does act against the law or act against love, he confesses. Yet, when God calls him on a quest that is individually his, he does not feel obligated to express himself in universal terms other than that term: love.
Sincerity begins with piety, the holding sacred what is sacred: familiar and communal bonds, but most of all that which relates us to God: the liturgy, Scripture, the Magisterium, and, more than anything, the Sacraments. Piety respects the boundaries imposed by these bonds. Boundaries distinguish us in our relationships. Without boundaries, one is everything and nothing.
Yet, sincerity continues by faith, through what Kierkegaard calls “the virtue of the absurd.” St. Thomas must not think it all that absurd, but only seemingly absurd to one in the state of obscurity.6 One must “walk by faith,”7 for our attempts to coldly calculate sincerity are inevitably futile. Our eyes cannot see.8 Thus, we must take the Word as our guide.
As I think about this, I realize I am ashamed of my own insincerity, but my reaction is to despise others for theirs. That only negates the relationships through which sincerity must begin. I can neither hate my neighbor (even if he is my enemy) nor my past self for being insincere. I can only hate the deception itself; hate the sin, but not the sinner.9
L.W. Blakely is a writer in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of The Wayfarer, a newsletter where he publishes literary fiction, criticism, and musings. Learn more about L.W. and The Wayfarer on the About page, or (if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read) consider subscribing and sharing his work.
The debate about free will is not worth having here, though I foresee an entry on free will in the distant future. All I will say for now is that I find the most sensible position to be that we have free will, but that our free will is not unlimited. There are obviously things outside of our control, yet, on the other hand, the theorists who deny free will absolutely always seem to leave themselves out of their theory: If we don’t have free will, how did one come to his theory of determinism in the first place, if not by factors outside of his control (outside of his will, which everything must be if he has no will)? If Jack is a determinist, and Jack says, “Human beings don’t have free will,” Jack either thinks he is not a human being or that he came to know that proposition without free will, which would negate the objectivity he, by default, purports to have. The only way Jack could be true is if he supposes he discovered this truth merely by happenstance, that fight or flight responses, hunger, thirst, sexual urges, or social conditions, caused him to make this statement. But he probably doesn’t think that. He probably thinks that, though other human beings lack free will, he rendered himself objective, thought about something, and figured something out. But unless he makes room for this exception in his statement, rephrases it to “All human beings except me (Jack, the theorist) don’t have free will,” which would be suspiciously solipsist to say the least, his theory contradicts itself. If he is absolutely determined, he couldn’t purport to know anything objectively, including whether or not our actions result from free will or are determined by something else.
“Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?’ And the woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’ But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.” (Genesis 3:1-7, RSCVE)
Kierkegaard is infamous for being hard to understand, and he even admits he does not write to be understood clearly. But he is nevertheless a profound philosopher. Kierkegaard’s writing implies the existence of several existential “modes,” which are different ways we define ourselves and live our lives. Two of these modes, the two highest, are the ethical and the religious. The ethical man defines himself by the duties imposed on him due to his human nature and his relationships with other human beings. He can, therefore, be “disclosed,” or communicated in terms comprehensible to others. The religious man, like Abraham, takes the leap of faith through the virtue of the absurd and continues to take it, rendering continuous leaps into a dance. He infinitely resigns himself and gains himself back again, and, after confronting this paradox, he comes into “absolute relation to the absolute.” In other words, he comes to understand not only what God demands of him as a human being, but what God demands of him as an individual. Because the religious man is ultimately defined in individual terms, he cannot be disclosed, but must remain concealed.
See footnote 3. The lowest two existential modes are the aesthetic and the demonic. The aesthetic man defines himself by his experience. He seeks to render himself happy by optimizing his experience. Like the religious man, he is defined by individual terms, but the relationship he is defined by is not his relationship with God, i.e., the absolute, but his relationship with himself. If he keeps moving in this trajectory, he can become so absorbed in himself, he hates himself. He recognizes his despair but chooses to remain in it. This is the demonic mode. That is, at least, how I have come to understand it. Kierkegaard, it must be noted, does not explain these concepts directly.
And this is typically where insincerity creeps in for me. I often speak before I think. I often say more than I should.
St. Thomas, after all, said that “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary; to one without faith, no explanation is possible.” After I read Fear and Trembling for the first time last spring, I couldn’t help but think about how to square away Kierkegaard with Aquinas, as their ideas seem contradictory on the surface, Kierkegaard putting so much of an emphasis on the seemingly absurd aspects of faith, and Aquinas placing an emphasis on faith’s compatibility with reason using an Aristotelian framework. My friend Eli, however, put it succinctly: “Aquinas is not a rationalist. Kierkegaard is not a fideist.” There will most certainly be a future entry elaborating on this further, so I won’t belabor it here.
“So we are always of good courage; we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5:6-7, RSCVE)
“He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they should see with their eyes and perceive with their heart, and turn for me to heal them.” (John 12:40, RSCVE)