Lionel Trilling’s Literary Moralism

The fine American teacher, writer, and literary critic Lionel Trilling of Columbia University died just fifty years ago. An agnostic Jew, Trilling intermittently considered himself a philosophical “naturalist,” influenced by the Enlightenment—especially Denis Diderot—and by the vast, voluble, vague presence of his senior Columbia colleague John Dewey, a Hegelian progressive who was, for several decades, widely considered the most influential philosopher in the world. Dewey—whom I used to have to teach to doctoral students—was, in my view, the worst expository prose stylist of any major writer that I have ever read. Trilling himself admitted that, as a lecturer, Dewey was also notoriously unintelligible.