On What is Wrong With Sentimentality?, by Mark Jefferson

Mind (I983) Vol. XCII, 5 I9-529
What is Wrong With Sentimentality?
MARK JEFFERSON
(I have the full article as a PDF)

“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 -clearwhat 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.” 519

“'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.

So it is interesting to me that now it gets allied with animal representations a lot since before it was something “brute” NOT to be sentimental

Animals are brought up almost immediately in an essay not specifically devoeted to animals at all as a quintiessential definition of sentimatality: “At street level there is an insistence that sentimentality is the near exclusive preserve of those who buy Christmas presents for their dogs. With this goes the view that sentimentality is just a sort of silliness, not particularly damning and not worth much serious attention.” 520

. . .Mary Midgley's short piece, 'Brutality and Sentimentality'.1 Her chief purpose in this was to undermine the wantonly perverse suggestion that it is sentimental to attribute feelings to animals. I cannot see that this is a particularly worthy target thesis for her but, that aside, in the course of her demolition job she does make some promising remarks about sentimentality. In particular, she claims that being sentimental is 'misrepresenting the world in order to indulge our feelings' (ibid. p. 385).

This makes me think a couple of things. One is that, in an era (today) marked by multiple truths and subjectivity, the idea of one truth or reality seems pretty impossible, so is it really possible then to say that sentimentality mis-represents anything? If there is no true representation? And, what if it can be shown that the representations ARE accuruate? Are they still sentimental then? Perhaps I am mis-understanding the idea of mis-representing. :)

It is true that we misrepresent the world in order to indulge in many types of emotion-'soft' and 'hard'-but it is not true that every sort of emotional indulgence is equally objectionable. There are significant differences in the sorts of misrepresentation required for different kinds of indulgence. What gives sentimentality its claim to be properly formed is the peculiar nature of the misrepresentation it involves; and this is also what makes it more objectionable than many other sorts of emotional indulgence. (523)

. . .

My contention is that sentimentality is objectionable because of the nature of its sustaining fantasy and not simply because it must employ one. Indeed I am not convinced that there is a good moral case to be made against any sort of emotional indulgence that involves misrepresenting the world. (424)

“What distinguishes the fictions that sustain sentimentality from those that occur in other forms of emotional indulgence? Well, chiefly it is their emphasis upon such things as the sweetness, dearness, littleness, blamelessness, and vulnerability of the emotions' objects. The qualities that sentimentality imposes on its objects are the qualities of innocence. But this almost inevitably involves a gross simplification of the nature of the object. And it is a simplification of an overtly moral significance.” (527) and this: “Though the sentimentalists in the poodle parlours may have a morally warped view of their little darlings no- one need be too alarmed by it.” THIS IS SO DISMISSIVE. I kind of hate that. :)

“But sentimentality does have its moral dangers and these are rather more apparent when its objects are people or countries. For the moral distortions of sentimentality are very difficult to contain just to its objects. Frequently these objects interrelate with other things and sentimentality may impair one's moral vision of these things too. The parody of moral appraisal that begins in sentimental response to something, natur- ally extends itself elsewhere. The unlikely creature and moral caricature that is someone unambiguously worthy of sympathetic response has its natural counterpart in a moral caricature of something unambiguously worthy of hatred.” (527)

Oh, this makes more sense. Like, maybe the sweetification of animals is not necessarily so inaccurate, but that it creates a colloarary, the evil scientist, which is of course much more provable as inaccurate – and vilifying the researcher is certainly a tactic that takes place, allowing ALF to bomb someone’s house without feeling terrible about it.

“Sentimentality is rightly connected with brutality because it is a principal component of the sort of moral climate that will sanction crude antipathy and its active expression.” Not a thought I had before.

“For to maintain the innocence one has projected upon a favoured object it is often necessary to construct other, dangerous fictions about the things that object interacts with.1” (529)

Some thoughts of self-awareness

You can run yourself ragged with self-awareness. It seems lke self-awareness is the necessary condition, an obligation, for all cultural prodcution now. and its exhuasting, to try and anticipate all criticisms, reactions, and thoughts and them off by demonstrating your thoughtful awareness of yourself. This is why deeply sincere things, cultural products of earlier times, seem so attractive to me, I think. There are those who are blissfully un-self-aware. Often, we make fun of those people, laughing at their ideas and feeling alright for doing so because they surely won't even be aware of themselves enough to notice we are laughing at them. Like this man on the Little Grey Book lecture series who owns a presidential museum in Ohio and who claims that George Washington was not the first president, among other things, with illogical, self-aggrandizing committment. The audience laughes at all his direct quotes - they are indeed, laughable, implausible or impossible arguments, far-fetched and amazing propositions, all filtered through a supremely un-self-aware personality. It's easy to LIKE this man, for all his obviously misguided notions, in fact, they make him endearing, but only in so far as he is unaware of how ridiculous they sound. He is piteous more than respectable. But we really only like him because he is funny to us, the audience. There are those who deeply and earnestly beleive in something, who have no patience or maybe even lack the sense of humor to make fun of themselves, and do not elicit laughter, like (here is comes. . . .) Carl Sagan. His "cosmos" seem to be a product of an earlier time when you could be serious without the need to acknowledge the irony of what you were doing. I love traveling to his place, via pixellated youtube clips, because, as soon as I got over the slightly cheesy graphics, the outdated and therefore kind o fhumorous musical scores and the occassional bad joke, i realized he had won me over with his overwhelming sincerity. I couldn't laugh at him walking among models of planets anymore once I saw the earnestness with which he was sharing his beleifs to us. I admire this. It is refreshing and endearing and deserving of respect in a very different way than the cold, removed, distant irony of so many cultural products today. I think it is because these videos could so easily fall into ironic appreciation that I love them even more, because they defy you to like them that way. You can try, and get your joke tshirt with carl sagan's head on it, but that just betrays your superficial rleatiosnhip to it all. If you allow yourself to put aside the obligation of hyper-self-awareness, you can see something very lovely and true unfolding, or at least that's how I see it. And that's the place where I'd like to be.

Sincerity before I could articulate it. . .

I guess for me, this is the central conflict of my work and perhaps my own life - I am wedged squarely between two opposing ideas. That we should celebrate and be thankful for and enjoy the humor of the excesses and abundances and over-the-topness of our country, and meanwhile we should ashamed of it, disgusted by it.

On the one hand, I want to be serious about these issues, but on the other, I want to have a sense of humor. To laugh at something that is so blatantly too much . . . I mean, things that are grossly out of proportion are in and of themselves somewhat funy, aren't they? I really love that Jim Gaffigan joke about explaining dessert to someone in a starving country (actually mentioned in another posting). I think it his the nail on the head because there is something almost laughable about this fact when we put it into context. He navigates this line well because it is really a horrific thing and the guilt that would accompany actually explaining dessert to someone starving face to face is crushing, but it's told with a sense of humor, with an appreciation for what is unbeleivably funny about the situation. How does one do this visually?