David Egan Philosophy

The political disruptions of the past week meant that I didn’t get a chance to discuss the topic of sentimentalitywith the students in my aesthetics class. To make up for that loss, I thought I’d discuss it with you instead.

Sentimentality in art evokes tender or warm emotions by presenting some idealized object from which all the messiness and complexity of real life has been distilled away. The sitcom Full House, whose every episode ends with a smarmy family love-in after an all-too-easily-resolved conflict, is an example. So is the scrappy derring-do and tragically noble death of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the film Titanic. And so is pretty much every painting Normal Rockwell ever made. The complaint against sentimentality is that it’s in some way manipulative or false or self-indulgent.

A favourite of writers on this theme is the character of Little Nell in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. Unstintingly selfless and good, Nell endures great hardship in taking care of her vulnerable grandfather and ultimately dies from her efforts. Dickens describes her death thus:

She was dead. No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon. She seemed a creature fresh from the hand of God, and waiting for the breath of life; not one who had lived and suffered death. Her couch was dressed with here and there some winter berries and green leaves, gathered in a spot she had been used to favour. “When I die, put near me something that has loved the light, and had the sky above it always.” Those were her words.

The book was a great hit when it was first published in 1841 but posterity has sided with Oscar Wilde’s verdict half a century later: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”
 
I tend to side with Wilde on this one. A passage like the one I quoted above is ridiculous and saccharine, and almost embarrassing to read. But what, exactly, is wrong with sentimentality? And what kind of a failure is it?
 
As a starting point, one might say that the passage is manipulative, but that requires further explanation. Sure, Dickens is trying to make us feel something, but isn’t that what art does? Why should we be more suspicious of the emotions that Dickens evokes here than the emotions evoked in a less sentimental novel, like Moby-Dick or Crime and Punishment?
 
Similarly, it’s tempting to say there’s something false about Dickens’s treacly writing but, again, we need to be more precise than that. Every work of fiction directs our emotional attention toward events that never happened to characters that don’t exist.
 
Fiction is fictional—there’s no denying that. But nevertheless we expect our fictions in some sense to be true to life. Perhaps the problem is that Little Nell is too good to be believable. But then Captain Ahab and Raskolnikov, to cite the examples of Moby-Dick and Crime and Punishment again, aren’t exactly believable characters either. Why do we react so much more strongly against characters who are implausibly good than ones who are implausibly driven by vengeance or an Übermensch complex?
 
Let’s take a step back and consider what’s at stake here. The worry about sentimentality seems based in a worry about what I might call emotional hygiene. There’s a concern that the wrong kind of art can make us feel the wrong kinds of things, or direct our feelings toward the wrong objects, or that it comes by those feelings too cheaply (Wilde again: “a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it”).
 
Reflecting on sentimentality, then, raises some deeper questions about what emotions are for and which emotions are right or fitting, and when, and why. Writing in defense of sentimentality, Robert Solomon notes a deep vein of distrust toward emotion in the history of Western philosophy. Philosophy prizes reason and correspondingly downgrades emotion. Plato and Aristotle both place the emotional aspects of our being in a subordinate position in relation to reason. The Stoics go one further, banishing emotion altogether from the domain of what’s properly ourselves. The Stoics counsel us to concern ourselves only with what’s within our rational control and to disregard everything else as external to the self. In the modern era, Kant argues that only rationally chosen actions are morally worthy. Actions driven by emotion might have good or bad consequences but they’re no more praiseworthy or blameworthy than good or bad weather.
 
On these models, the emotions are forces that inflict themselves on us from the outside, like a rainstorm or an infection. Until fairly recently, emotions were known as “passions,” suggesting our passive stance in relation to them. Your choices and your actions are your own, but your emotions are just things that happen to you.
 
This way of thinking about emotion informs many of the attacks on sentimentality. In subjecting ourselves to the pull of sentimental emotions, this thinking goes, we surrender our self-control and our responses can’t be trusted. We should be wary of strong feelings, and carefully ration our exposure to them in art.
 
But this picture of emotions as non-rational and ourselves as their passive victims is misleading. Feeling doesn’t stand in contrast to thinking; it’s one of the modes in which thinking takes place. Emotions are lenses that focus our attention and help us perceive the salience of the situations we apprehend. Emotions move us: they provide the motivational nudges that take us from thought to action. A person who was entirely without emotion would be a person to whom nothing, and no one, could matter.
 
For that reason, I agree with Solomon when he says that the philosophical tradition’s suspicion of emotion is misguided. But I think that same misguided model of emotion—the one according to which we are the passive recipients of non-rational emotions that impinge on us from without—also helps us understand what’s wrong with sentimentality. Sentimental artworks, and the people who indulge in them, are disappointingly incuriousabout the emotions involved. The distinct pleasure—such as it is—of sentimental art comes from letting strong feelings simply wash over you, while you allow yourself to be their passive recipient.
 
But if the emotions are rational, and if they inform our thinking and deliberation, they warrant critical scrutiny every bit as much as thought does. Feelings shouldn’t be stoically suppressed, but they should be examined and investigated, weighed and measured. This isn’t a matter of subjecting feeling to the judgment of thought but rather of subjecting both feeling and thought to the judgment of further feeling and thought. We should think about what we feel and reflect on how we feel about what we think. These two procedures aren’t so different from one another.
 
Art provides a potent forum in which this rumination can take place—this is one of art’s many gifts. Art calls up various emotional responses in a controlled environment that allows us to savour them carefully, rolling them about on the tongue, as it were, and getting a precise measure of their character. By painting in broad strokes and discouraging careful reflection, sentimental art offers us an impoverished emotional experience.

Critics of sentimentality sometimes point to its negative consequences. Indulging our feelings in this way can inhibit action or lead us to invest in the wrong courses of action. But in the end, I think the explanation is simpler than that. To the extent that art invites us to reflect on our emotional experiences, sentimental art does this in a crude and clumsy way. The problem with sentimental art is simply that it’s bad art.

1. The expression “tongue-tied” has a clinical origin. Ankyloglossia, known colloquially as a tongue tie, is a condition in which the lingual frenulum—that ribbon of flesh underneath your tongue that attaches it to the floor of the mouth—is unusually short or rigid. The condition limits the movement of the tongue, which leads to speech impairment. (source)
2. The US Department of Defense owns or maintains properties whose total area is greater than that of Pennsylvania. (source)
3. Burmese pythons started arriving in Florida in the 1970s as part of the exotic pet trade. Some escaped into the wild, where they’re thrived—there are now as many as 100,000 roaming free in the Florida Everglades. As a result, the number of fur-bearing animals in the Everglades has dropped by 90% since the early 2000s. (source)
4. Between 1978 and 2013, the average price of university textbooks in the United States rose by 812%, outpacing not just inflation, but also home prices, health care, and almost every other commodity. (source)
5. 7% of the people working in the newspaper business in the United States work for the New York Times. (source)
6. The Trump family fortune got its start in Canada. Friedrich Trump, Donald’s grandfather and an immigrant from Germany, made a modest fortune running a restaurant, hotel, and brothel for gold miners in the Yukon during the Klondike gold rush, which he then invested in real estate in New York. (source)
7. In 1930, Great Britain was home to about 3% of the world’s population but was the importer of 99% of the world’s exports of ham and bacon, 63% of its butter, 62% of its eggs, 59% of its beef, 46% of its cheese, and 28% of its wheat and wheat flour. (source)
8. In 2023, 22% of the foreign aid by rich donor countries was spent at home. In Poland, Ireland, and Czechia, more than 50% of their foreign aid was spent at home. Hosting refugees, some scholarship money, and administrative costs all count as “foreign aid.” (source)
9. About half of the proteins that are digested and absorbed in the small intestine come not from the food you eat but from your own body. (source)
10. A Medieval story of the saints Barlaam and Josaphat originated from the story of the Buddha. “Josaphat” was a corruption of “bodhisattva” as the story spread from Uyghur and Persian texts in Central Asia into Arabic and then Georgian before it reached Europe as the story of an Indian crown prince who defies his father by converting to Christianity. (source)
11. The Black Plague struck western Europe in 1346. The population of England didn’t reach its pre-Plague level again until 1625. (source)
12. Philosophers contribute more annually to the global economy than computer engineers. (source)