What is Wrong With Sentimentality?

Abstract

It is generally agreed that there is something unwholesome about sentimentality: it would certainly be a mistake to think it a virtue. But just what sentimentality is and why it is objectionable is something of a mystery. Of course we know that it is an emotional quality or range of qualities, and that it is expressive of (or in itself) an ethical or aesthetic defect; but we don't know quite what it is that makes certain emotions sentimental or why it is that certain emotion types are more likely hosts for it than others. Nor is it -clear what sort of objection we are making when we call something sentimental. Sometimes the charge seems to impart nothing more than mild ridicule; on other occasions it has more sinister implications. And between these range usages expressing more or less serious rebuke. What we ordinarily say is, in this case, a peculiarly poor source of illumination. Our intuitions about what counts as sentimentality and why we find it, in varying degrees, objectionable seem very frail. There are some very general reasons why this should be true within the context of the Anglo-American ethical tradition. The influence of Kant towards the theoretical denigration and neglect of the role of emotion in moral life is part of the story. The empiricist tradition of Mill and Moore has been equally neglectful and equally influential. But there are special reasons in addition to these why sentimentality should be obscure to us. For a start, it is a relative newcomer to the vocabulary of critical abuse. 'Sentimentality' has undergone a rapid evolution since it first appeared, in the eighteenth century, as a term of commendation. It was then a fine thing to be sentimental-it set one apart from the coarser types. One had refined feelings, not brute passions. It could be said without a sneer that 'your squires are an agreeable race of people, refined, sentimental, formed for the belle passion'. By the first quarter of the nineteenth century there were signs of disaffection. In i 823 the poet Southey wrote of Rousseau that he 'addressed himself to the sentimental classes, persons of ardent and morbid sensibility, who believe themselves to be composed of finer elements than the gross multitude'. Despite the mocking tone, 'sentimental' still fits best