Anyway, Coetzee tells about a newspaper advertisement, where an American lawyer, an expert on legal liability, offers, for a fee of $650 an hour, to “coach Australian companies in how to word apologies without admitting liability.”
Coetzee comments (p. 109):
“First Adam Smith placed reason in the service of interest; now sentiment is placed in the service of interest too. In the course of this latter development, the concept of sincerity is gutted of all meaning. In the present “culture,” few care to distinguish—indeed, few are capable of distinguishing—between sincerity and the performance of sincerity, just as few distinguish between religious faith and religious observance. To the dubious question, Is this true faith? or, Is this true sincerity? one receives only a blank look. Truth? What is that? Sincerity? Of course I’m sincere—didn’t I say so?
“The expensive American coaches his clients neither in how to perform true (sincere) apologies nor in how to perform false (insincere) apologies that will have the look of true (sincere) apologies, but simply in how to perform apologies that will not open them to being sued. In his eyes and in the eyes of his clients, an unscripted, unrehearsed apology will likely be an excessive, inappropriate, ill-calculated, and therefore false apology, that is to say, one that costs money, money being the measure of all things.
“Jonathan Swift, thou shouldst be living at this hour.”
One thing Coetzee seems to me to be after here is the sense in which we may lose not only the ability to say whether others are sincere, but also deprive ourselves of the possibility of being sincere. And this, not just by overlooking the reasons for being sincere in a particular case, but crucially by succumbing to a temptation to see things from a perspective where the point of being sincere or insincere in general is lost on us. – The question does not make sense to us anymore. We lose the ability to be interested in things in that general way; we lose the concept.
Now, perhaps this only happens in extreme cases, and perhaps the sense of the importance of sincerity and truthfulness can be easily revived in most—I’m not sure. But I’m concerned with something else: with the relation of all that to first person authority. Whether we are sincere or not—about whether we are in pain, or in love, or whether we are truly sorry for what we have done—is normally a matter regarding which we have first person authority. And typically, first person authority is, and is taken to be, a given: something that cannot be taken away from us. But if Coetzee’s implied phenomenology is right, then we may, at least in some cases and at least in part, lose our first person authority: we may fall into such a condition where we cannot tell—indeed do not even know how to ask the question—about what we feel, or think, or want. And Coetzee’s case is indeed extreme. There are other cases in which we don’t quite know what we want, or think, or feel, or how to make decisions about all that. It is quite common actually: Is this true love? Is this the right career from me? Is my prayer sincere?
Not having first person authority, I take it, does not mean that someone else has the authority. I cannot—conceptually—have first person authority over your thoughts, feelings, or desires. Rather, not having first person authority means that no one has the authority, and in a sense there is no one to have it: It is a kind of absence of self. I’m not sure how to describe this condition. Can this be described in Kierkegaardian terms as absence of subjective existence (for having lost it, or not yet established it), or as ability to exist only objectively (perhaps willingly assuming such existence, or not being capable yet of anything else)?
In any case, if Coetzee is right and it is not a matter of course that we have first person authority, then it also seems to me that it is not easy to establish such authority either. Even if we have it, first person authority is not something we always have once and for all, or something that we are guaranteed to have. Rather, it is something we need to work at establishing and maintaining; and one way in which we establish it is by acquiring concepts: by learning to be interested in things in particular ways—e.g. in religion beyond observance, and sincerity beyond performance of sincerity. Can we call that self-examination?