She was sitting just five meters away on the square in front of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. I saw that she was reading a book, but of course, it was out of the question to go over and ask her what it was. These summer days were the first days of my first solo trip. I had just finished high school, and the idea of approaching a strange girl was a distant dream, as unrealistic as spreading my wings and flying over the roofs of Paris.
Accepting my fate and calming the rebelling part of me that wanted to get up and embrace life with all its dangers and treasures and unknown territories, I concentrated on my own book. A few minutes later, she came over and asked me what I was reading. She was half-Canadian, half-Lebanese and traveling by herself, like me. We went over to one of the busy cafés in the streets around the square and ended up talking for a good three hours. Since then, I never saw her again.
But our conversation permanently changed how I look at the world.
We were watching the crowd passing by, tourists and shoppers with full bags and busy faces.
"How beautiful these humans are." she said.
"What do you mean?" I said. "I find this exposition of consumption addiction and self-made stress rather ugly to see."
"Don't look at the masks," she said. "Look at the humans behind them. They're all fragile, fearful beings trying to make their way through the world."
Twenty-five years later, after degrees in philosophy and social sciences, traveling through dozens of countries and cultures, and countless more conversations, as well as countless hours of meditation and reflection in solitude, this still touches the essence of what I think of humankind.
We're all sentient beings born into this world, full of a longing for safety and certainty that can never be fully fulfilled. And in order to still find a way through life, we adapt all kinds of beliefs, worldviews, and identities.
The secret core
Even before my encounter with the half-Canadian, half-Lebanese girl, I had a feeling that something was off in the society I was living in. It seemed like somehow I couldn't be fully honest in my interactions with others and that the others weren't interacting honestly, either. For some reason, we all seemed to be playing roles. And on top of that, we seemed to judge others based on the roles they were playing, leading to all kinds of unnecessary conflicts.
In the last year of high school, my frustration about this feeling of dishonesty reached a level that left me determined to leave Germany as soon as I could. My plan was to travel for at least half a year and see if I could find places where I could feel more myself.
In the years that followed, I discovered a fascinating diversity of forms of human existence. And I realized that it seemed much easier to "be myself" when I was in cultural environments that were very different from the one where I grew up.
I also discovered something else in these years. No matter where I went, whether I volunteered in a hospital for disabled children in Guatemala, studied at eminent universities in England and France, worked with refugees in Sri Lanka, with former child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or with coders in Berlin, no matter how different people were, no matter how different the realities they lived in, there seemed to be this one common "secret core" in all humans.
Once I had trained my eyes for it, I could sense this secret core in everyone I met. It didn't take more than a quick look into someone's eyes. The difference seemed to lie in the types and thickness of walls and covers behind which people were hiding it. But the core always seemed to be there. I even saw it in the eyes of the guys who kidnapped me in Dar es Salaam and of the guy in Hamburg who punched a beer bottle into my face.
So what was this thing that I could sense in all humans no matter what their background was or what state of mind they were in?
Developing a Philosophy
About two years after the conversation in Paris, I decided to make the exploration of this mysterious secret core the focus of my life. My goal was to find a systematic understanding of what it actually was. And I wanted to figure out why all people I met (including myself, of course) seemed to bury it behind so many walls and covers.
At this point I had already observed that the types and thickness of these walls and covers seemed to differ between cultures and classes. There must be some structural causes for them, I assumed. These structural causes seemed to include political and economic factors, as much as cultural and personal ones.
The exploration of this became a guiding thread in my academic studies, where I tried to look into as many disciplines as possible to get a systematic understanding of these diverse structural factors. The search for the secret core also guided my explorations into Buddhist meditation and other ancient wisdom traditions.
While my quest started with books and academic lectures, I was seeking an understanding that was based as much on the diversity of real human life experiences as on scientific findings and existing philosophical theories.
My question was: Is it possible to weave all this into one coherent philosophy that could be of real, practical value for navigating human reality?
Now, 25 years and many sidetracks later, I feel ready to share the first version of a Philosophy of Sincerity.
This article is part of a book project for which I'm interviewing people from a variety of backgrounds. Any recommendations or feedback are welcome.
Starting with some simple intuitions
The simplified story goes like this: It's easiest to observe the "core of sincerity" in a baby who is looking at its surroundings with a mix of fear and curiosity. It's often still openly visible in little children. Then, as we grow up, we seem to be building all kinds of walls around it.
The tougher and more rigid the social environment we evolve in, the harder and more numerous these walls seem to get. And since we normalize our own walls, they become the lens through which we perceive and judge everyone else. We then develop our identities, needs, and preferences based on our distorted view of reality, which can lead to all kinds of troubles.
Whatever the origins of these walls, if we want to access the sincere core within us, we need to face and deconstruct our own walls. And while doing so is hard, life inevitably gets richer and more fulfilling the more sincere we get.
Of course, to some extent these observations are addressed in modern psychology and psychotherapy. Much research has been done on the "defense mechanisms" we develop in our childhood and through traumatic experiences, and how they might get in our way as our life continues. For well-known and accesible examples, see the work of Stefanie Stahl, Gabor Maté, or Brené Brown.
While I deeply value the academic and applied perspectives of psychology and psychotherapy, my goal was to develop a holistic theory that transcends the methods of specific disciplines and can serve as a coherent "life philosophy" for the time we live in.
Why a philosophy for the 21st century?
The Philosophy of Sincerity aims to fully embrace the advances in science that we've seen in the first quarter of this century and to be open to new insights that future discoveries are almost certain to bring. And it aims at giving a well-grounded orientation through the chaos of political polarization, economic disruptions, information overflow, and rapid technological developments that we're experiencing in our times.
The goal is to provide a coherent framework that moves beyond the still prevailing ideological blinkers of the 20th century, including "geopolitical thinking" and the dichotomy of "left" and "right." In my view, this is particularly important given the continuing rise of political populism, which promises to provide easy answers to the void and frustrations in people's lives.
As many former certainties continue to dissolve, I see a strong need for a solid philosophical ground that even holds for people who are skeptical of any religious faith or dogmatic beliefs. At the same time, it's important for me to not exclude people who consider themselves religious or spiritual.
And to add one more outrageous ambition: The Philosophy of Sincerity also seeks to offer an answer to the "hard problem" of consciousness, a discussion that came back into public focus with the rise of AI systems that an increasing number of people perceive as potentially conscious.
All right, this opened quite a lot of doors. So what is this "new philosophy"?
Developing a definition
As the name suggests, the Philosophy of Sincerity is centered around one core concept. All the more important to have a clear common understanding of what is actually meant by it.
Sincerity is one of those words that tends to be defined either by means of similar concepts, or by the absence of opposite concepts. For example, the Britannica Dictionary defines sincere as:
1. having or showing true feelings that are expressed in an honest way
2. genuine or real: not false, fake, or pretended
In a similar fashion, Wiktionary.org defines it as:
1. Genuine; meaning what one says or does; heartfelt.
2. Meant truly or earnestly.
3. (archaic) clean; pure
But these kinds of definitions didn't seem solid enough for the purpose of building a whole philosophy on top of them. Even more so, given that in everyday language we often make no clear distinction between words like sincerity, honesty, authenticity, genuineness, or openness. So I decided to develop my own definition, based on the original search for a systematic understanding of the "sincere core" in humans.
In the second part of this text it will get clear why a systematic analysis of the concept of sincerity can actually help explaining why people often find it so difficult to understand each other.
Separating the sincere core from our reaction patterns
In order to arrive at a clearer concept of sincerity, we need to look at the tricky challenge of separating our "sincere core" from our internalized reaction patterns.
As mentioned, these patterns are an important topic in psychology and psychotherapy. An important goal of therapeutic methods is to "reprogram" psychological patterns that might be harmful to us.
These patterns are also a topic in neuroscience. Part of neuroscientific research involves analyzing and modeling how we develop synaptic patterns of neurons in our brain. In a simplifying picture, these patterns are understood to create "pathways" for our thoughts and perceptions and resulting behaviors. In this sense, neuroplasticity then means the capacity of our brain to rewire the synaptic connections between neurons to create new patterns, allowing for new pathways of thinking and reacting.
Now these patterns are learned, in the sense that they evolve in reaction to our experiences in the world. But is it possible to distinguish my learned patterns from something like my "sincere core"?
The white hat example:
Imagine that when I was a little child, someone wearing a white hat came along and took my lollipop away. And now, as an adult, I get an unpleasant feeling of anger and helplessness whenever I see someone wearing a white hat.
Now I could tell myself that this reaction pattern is simply part of my "character." It's just "how I am." I simply don't like white hats.
But if I want to walk the path toward becoming more sincere, I have to face this aspect of my reality and overcome this distraction from my deeper being (who actually knows that white hats aren't that important after all).
This notion is an important aspect of the following definition, which is at the heart of the Philosophy of Sincerity:
A Definition of Sincerity
Sincerity is a commitment to face reality without deceiving ourselves, combined with a commitment to stay in touch with ourselves without being distracted or manipulated by external influences or internalized reaction patterns.
A few aspects are important to highlight here. According to this definition,
1. Sincerity is a commitment, rather than a static attribute that we have or not.
2. Sincerity is an attitude toward our own inner reactions, and only indirectly affects our behavior toward others.
3. Sincerity requires active effort to avoid distraction and manipulation.
4. Sincerity is a skill we can develop and improve.
This might seem counterintuitive at first, since we often use the word to describe a person's perceived behavior. But this definition is specifically aimed at differentiating the concept from others like "honesty" and "openness" or "authenticity."
Sincerity vs. openness vs. honesty vs. genuineness vs. authenticity
For the sake of clarity, the Philosophy of Sincerity defines these words with distinct meanings that still reflect language use, while allowing for a better understanding of what characterizes the Sincerity concept that is at the heart of the theory. In short:
Openness — Saying what you think.
Honesty — Saying what you mean (after reflecting on your thinking).
Genuineness — Being in touch with what you feel.
Authenticity — Acting and communicating in congruence with what you really feel.
Sincerity — Exploring where your feelings come from and allowing your deeper drivers to guide your actions and interactions.
An example: The dinner invitation
To illustrate these distinctions with a concrete example: Imagine a friend invites me for dinner and prepares a meal that, upon first bite, tastes terrible to me.
Openness would be saying something like: "Ugh! This tastes disgusting."
Honesty would take into account my empathy for my friend and my appreciation of their effort to prepare a meal for me. I honestly don't want to insult them, so I might say something like: "Thank you really for preparing all this. Unfortunately, since my childhood I have a strong resistance against these spices. It's annoying, but I can't eat anything with them."
Authenticity and genuineness, by contrast, might involve a deeper reflection on the whole situation. Maybe I realize that I'm uncomfortable being there at all, because I'd genuinely rather be by myself. An authentic response might be: "Hey, I'm really grateful for your invitation, and you know that normally I like hanging out with you. But I realized that at the moment, I really need an evening by myself."
Sincerity involves another fundamental step. It means exploring where my feeling actually comes from. What keeps me from enjoying the presence of my friend who I actually like? Why do I need to be alone to feel like being myself? It might not result in a direct idea of what to say about the food. But I might tell my friend that I'd really wish to get more in touch with myself. And that I think our friendship could deepen if we both faced some of our inner obstacles that I feel lie between us. Maybe we could even start exploring the question together: what would it mean for us to be more sincere?
We're never fully sincere
This brings me to an important implication of the Philosophy of Sincerity: we're never fully sincere. The idea of perfect Sincerity is vain because Sincerity is a path, not a state we can achieve. We can become more sincere and get closer to ourselves, but there's always more to explore. This isn't a judgment. It simply means that the exploration never stops.
We all have reasons for not being fully sincere. Many of them are deeply buried in our psychological traits that we developed in our early childhood and that continued to evolve throughout our life. In a way, they are walls against the hardships and perceived threats of the world we live in.
The good thing is that the journey of becoming more sincere means discovering ways of living deeper, happier, and more intensely. Though it may seem scary to dissolve some of the walls we have been shielding ourselves with, going on this journey can be deeply fulfilling by itself.
If we work on it, we can raise our level of Sincerity. But this isn’t a linear path. Our level of Sincerity even tends to vary throughout the day, depending on how tired we are, or how much we're exposed to distractions and influences. Even in the long run, the quest of becoming more sincere is a path that can go up and down. What counts is a continuous commitment to go deeper and to return to the path whenever we find ourselves off track.
The three dimensions of Sincerity
Over the past 25 years, my research has taken me from complex theoretical considerations to a quite simple framework. I found that much of the ambiguity and contradictions around the concept of Sincerity come from the tendency to understand it as a one-dimensional concept. We try to categorize people into more or less sincere and then often find other people's behavior and opinions hard to understand. This results in questions like "How can you do that?" or "How can you think like that?"
Much of of this can be resolved by seeing Sincerity as a concept of multiple core dimensions. By narrowing down potential candidates for relevant dimensions, I came to the point that our level of Sincerity can be analyzed in terms of three dimensions that are relevant across cultures, classes, and worldviews: awareness, (emotional) sensitivity, and rationality.
If we want to get more sincere, we need to balance our progress on these three dimensions. And in our current "modern" societies, this is much easier said than done.
1. Awareness
The degree to which we're able to consciously perceive our body sensations and external inputs.
Progress in awareness allows us to have a clearer picture of how we're affected by external impressions and even subtle stimulations, our thoughts and mental states, and the verbalized and nonverbal details of our interactions with others.
Our bodies are an essential part of us (from an externalized perspective, we simply are our bodies). By accepting this and by deepening our capacity to sense the signals our bodies receive and create, we can become more present with ourselves and other people.
2. Sensitivity
The degree to which we're able to feel our emotions.
Progress in (emotional) sensitivity allows us to have richer and more intense experiences, and to appreciate "the beauty of life."
It also enables involved empathy with the emotions of others (feeling other people's emotions, rather than just having "conceptual empathy" that allows us to predict, analyze, and describe them).
We're all affected by emotions, and this is an absolutely essential aspect of human existence. Without a minimum level of emotional sensitivity, we simply wouldn't be sentient beings.
3. Rationality
The degree to which we're capable of coherent rational reasoning.
Progress in rationality allows us to reach more coherent conclusions, gain a better understanding of complex logical and conceptual relationships, analyze and use abstract concepts, symbols, and formalized languages like mathematics, create scientific categorizations and models, and make more accurate predictions.
It enables us to both communicate more precisely with others and find inconsistencies in their views and thoughts.
Without a minimum level of rationality, we wouldn't be able to navigate the world or participate in any meaningful interaction.
It's important to note that progress on each of these dimensions is not linear: the higher you get, the more work you need to put into reaching higher levels. And it's crucial to understand that we can have different levels in each of the three dimensions.
Three stereotypical character types
To showcase how we can be more advanced in one dimension and less in the others, let's look at the following stereotypical "character types." Of course, we're all more nuanced than that, but for the sake of clarity, it can be helpful to outline exaggerated stereotypes.
1. The Meditator
Stereotypical combination: High awareness, but low sensitivity and rationality.
Strongly aware of subtle body sensations and anything that is present in their consciousness.
Observes body sensations that come with their emotions, rather than feeling them, with limited access to their deeper energy and the intensity of existence.
May struggle with mathematics and abstract logical reasoning, can drift toward incoherent theories and "esoteric" beliefs.
2. The Artist
Stereotypical combination: High sensitivity, but low awareness and rationality.
Strong capacity to feel and express emotions.
Easily overwhelmed and shaken by emotions.
Tends to act and react impulsively, with little awareness of their subtle body sensations and the consequences of their emotional reactions.
May struggle with mathematics and abstract logical reasoning, can drift toward incoherent theories and "esoteric" beliefs.
3. The Scientist
Stereotypical combination: High rationality, but low awareness and sensitivity.
Great at mathematics and logical thinking, tries to understand everything in terms of its functionality and through the development of abstract models and concepts.
Limited ability to feel their emotions and limited access to their deeper energy and the intensity of existence.
Limited ability to sense their body and the depth of sensual impressions.
Sincerity requires balance
A core implication of the Philosophy of Sincerity is that advancing on the path of Sincerity means advancing on each of these dimensions at a balanced level. If we focus our progress on just one of them, there might even be trade-off effects that lower our level in the other dimensions. These trade-off effects grow the more you try to reach very high levels in one dimension. In this case, we might actually end up less sincere overall.
I ran into this trade-off during my early years at university. By taking math as an extra subject, and by mostly choosing lectures and seminars in analytical philosophy, logic, and philosophy of science, I worked on my skills in rationality.
Increasingly, I tried to understand everything in terms of logical coherence and its functional role.
It was only when I advanced in meditation that I realized how I was "over-training" my brain in a specific kind of capacity, thereby becoming more ignorant of other parts of myself. I also created an increasing distance to other humans who weren't as focused on this dimension.
In fact, most people are stronger in one or two of the dimensions. The different versions of imbalances and strength in these dimensions are also one of the core reasons why so many people find it difficult to understand each other.
In particular, the imbalance in these three dimensions opens the door for judgment. People tend to judge others based on the dimension(s) in which they are strong and perceive those who are less strong in these dimension(s) as ignorant or incomprehensible.
How the Philosophy of Sincerity impacted my life
I can't overstate how much my life changed since the half-Canadian, half-Lebanese girl helped me recognize the beauty in all humans. The more I explored what this actually means, and what the mechanisms are that distract us from perceiving the beauty in people, the more I started building up a deep sense of security in this world.
It felt like I found a stable core of existence that depends neither on external validation nor on any belief that I couldn't fully understand. It allowed me to fully accept that we're just complex organisms that evolved on a tiny planet in an incredibly vast universe and at the same time appreciate the infinite value of each sentient being.
The more I developed a systematic understanding of the concept of Sincerity, the easier it felt to face the walls I had built around my own "sincere core." It also seemed to get easier and easier to see the core of others. Likewise, it started to feel easy to understand people's actions and reactions, no matter how different they were from what I would do or say.
Many other "difficult" things have become easy, like embracing the reality that we're all getting older, that there are phases of pain and suffering in all of our lives, and that we all die. I definitely still fear dangerous situations, and I can get very upset about injustice. But the Philosophy of Sincerity has given me a stable ground from which I feel able to face overwhelming threats like climate change and horrible realities like war and the immense suffering caused by global injustice and environmental destruction, without making my life heavier.
It has always been important for me that my inner peace doesn't depend on any beliefs about higher powers or any other spiritual claim that can't be systematically explored.
At the same time, I'm happy to have found a philosophy that wouldn't require anyone to give up their belief in God, or some kind of existence after death, or the oneness of the universe, or whatever spiritual belief is important to them.
Next steps
There is another important implication of the Philosophy of Sincerity: Being more sincere than others doesn't make us a "better" person than them. Rather, the more we advance along the path of Sincerity, the more we overcome the tendency to judge others and ourselves. In fact, according to this philosophy, our inclination to judge is nothing but a symptom of insincerity.
This claim will be discussed in more detail in the next article in this series, which will focus on both the philosophical foundations of the Philosophy of Sincerity and the question why we all seem to be insincere to some extent.
Of course, this first article leaves many questions unanswered. My goal is to paint the full picture step by step by alternating texts that lay out the theory and text that apply it to real-life challenges, like the adoption of artificial intelligence into our societies and the growing mental health pandemic.
As mentioned, this series builds the ground for a book project in which I explore the perspectives on Sincerity of people from various backgrounds. Please feel invited to share your own perspective in the comments, or to reach out in case you're interested in discussing this in more depth.
Even if this first impression of the Philosophy of Sincerity leaves you with some resistance, or if it seems trivial and nothing new to you, I encourage you to have a look at the next articles where I dive deeper into its foundations. It took me many years and many detours to get to this point where I feel confident to share it, and I'm certain that it will continue to evolve from here. After all, the exploration of the precious sincere core in us never ends.
As always, you're invited to subscribe here for free to receive the next texts. And please consider if you can support my work with a paid subscription (of $5 per month).
Whether you're able to make a financial contribution or not, I would be immensely grateful if you share this text with anyone who might be interested in this topic.