The Ethic of Feeling

Abstract

Campbell outlines the key features of the cult of sensibility, noting that the term was regarded as a personal quality as well as an ideal of character, one generally involving a susceptibility to tender feelings, typically manifest by a show of tears. Viewed in this way sensibility can be seen as a charismatic quality akin to the gift of grace, one that evolved directly from the Calvinist’s emotionalist doctrine of signs. Campbell uses material from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility to illustrate key features of the cult. Crucially ‘sensibility’ became an aesthetic as well as an ethical issue, with the key concept of ‘taste’ uniting the two, covering as it did feeling sorry for others and being moved by beauty. This meant manifesting sensibility was essential in order to be thought a ‘good person’ as well as the possessor of ‘good taste’, with obvious implications for one’s consumption practices.