Sentimentality

Sentimentality originally indicated the reliance on feelings as a guide to truth, but in current usage the term commonly connotes a reliance on shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason.

Sentimentalism in philosophy is a view in meta-ethics according to which morality is somehow grounded in moral sentiments or emotions. Sentimentalism in literature refers to techniques a writer employs to induce a tender emotional response disproportionate to the situation at hand (and thus to substitute heightened and generally uncritical feeling for normal ethical and intellectual judgments). The term may also characterize the tendency of some readers to invest strong emotions in trite or conventional fictional situations.

"A sentimentalist", Oscar Wilde wrote, "is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it." In James Joyce's ''Ulysses'', Stephen Dedalus sends Buck Mulligan a telegram that reads "The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done." James Baldwin considered that "Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel...the mask of cruelty". ''This Side of Paradise'' by F. Scott Fitzgerald contrasts sentimentalists and romantics, with Amory Blaine telling Rosalind, "I'm not sentimental—I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't."

18th-century origins

In the mid-18th century, a querulous lady had complained to Richardson: "What, in your opinion, is the meaning of the word ''sentimental'', so much in vogue among the polite...Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word...such a one is a ''sentimental'' man; we were a ''sentimental'' party". What she was observing was the way the term was becoming a European obsession—part of the Enlightenment drive to foster the individual's capacity to recognise virtue at a visceral level. Everywhere in the sentimental novel or the sentimental comedy, "lively and effusive emotion is celebrated as evidence of a good heart".Ousby, p. 845 Moral philosophers saw sentimentality as a cure for social isolation; and Adam Smith indeed considered that "the poets and romance writers, who best paint...domestic affections, Racine and Voltaire; Richardson, Maurivaux and Riccoboni; are, in such cases, much better instructors than Zeno" and the Stoics.

By the close of the century, however, a reaction had occurred against what had come to be considered sentimental excess, by then seen as false and self-indulgent—especially after Schiller's 1795 division of poets into two classes, the "naive" and the "sentimental"—regarded respectively as natural and as artificial.

Modern times

In modern times "sentimental" is a pejorative term that has been casually applied to works of art and literature that exceed the viewer or reader's sense of decorum—the extent of permissible emotion—and standards of taste: "excessiveness" is the criterion; "Meretricious" and "contrived" sham pathos are the hallmark of sentimentality, where the morality that underlies the work is both intrusive and pat.

"Sentimentality often involves situations which evoke very intense feelings: love affairs, childbirth, death", but where the feelings are expressed with "reduced intensity and duration of emotional experience...diluted to a safe strength by idealisation and simplification".

Nevertheless, as a social force sentimentality is a hardy perennial, appearing for example as Romantic sentimentality...in the 1960s slogans 'flower power' and 'make love not war. The 1990s public outpouring of grief at the death of Diana, "when they go on about fake sentimentality in relation to Princess Diana", also raised issues about the "powerful streak of sentimentality in the British character"—the extent to which "sentimentality was a grand old national tradition".

Baudrillard has cynically attacked the sentimentality of Western humanitarianism, suggesting that "in the New Sentimental Order, the affluent become consumers of the 'ever more delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of our own attempts to alleviate it. There is also the issue of what has been called "indecent sentimentality... npornographical pseudo-classics", so that one might say for example that "''Fanny Hill'' is a ''very'' sentimental novel, a faked Eden".

However, in sociology it is possible to see the "sentimental tradition" as extending into the present-day—to see, for example, "Parsons as one of the great social philosophers in the sentimental tradition of Adam Smith, Burke, McLuhan

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