sentimentality
Sentimentality (from French le sentiment = " feeling ", " mood ") is a state of mind that is characterized by emotion. She uses her external cause as a pretext to then step inside herself; So indulging in mostly comforting, longing , romantic and passionate feelings, but also melancholy . Sentimentality is thus a form of emotional self-stimulation without an impulse to act. This psychological mechanism can induce, for example, to passively endure existing stressful situations , to comfort oneself or to ignore conflicts instead of actually having to think through or tackle them.
The “sentimentalization of the self”, the focus on the suffering ego, makes it an object. This does not harm others directly, but it can block one's own activities that could alleviate the suffering of others, or have a negative effect on interaction partners through emotional contamination. Erich Fromm defines sentimentality as “feeling under the condition of complete detachment. [...] You feel, but you are not really and specifically related to something in reality. "
A special form of sentimentality is melancholy, in which a dark, brooding mood of the soul that revolves around death and the afterlife is often perceived as a pleasurable state at the same time.
Sentimentality in Literature
The sentimentality in literature, the predilection for exuberant feelings in connection with strongly morally colored thinking, as it developed in the age of sensitivity , is related to the rise of the bourgeois family and a phase of sublimation of the intellectual life that deals with criticism in Cartesian rationalism . The social historian Otto Brunner traces the emergence of sentimentality following Max Wieser to the breakup of the man-dominated whole house or extended household, which in Western Europe ensured the livelihood of extended families and servants, into male-specific rational business forms on the one hand and female-dominated emotional family relationships on the one hand on the other hand back.
The term sentimental was coined in England around the middle of the 18th century. The sentimental novel , the main representative of which was Samuel Richardson with the letter novel Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (1748), which was also widespread in Germany , was written in England around the middle of the 18th century. During this time, the English adjective sentimental was coined, which initially referred to moral virtue. In 1768 Laurence Sternes' A sentimental Journey through France and Italy appeared , which combines a wealth of sensual experiences with the “sympathy of the heart” and contributed to the discovery of new areas of the soul's life. A forerunner of the sentimental novel in France is Manon Lescaut (1731) by Abbé Prévost .
As early as the 1740s, Henry Fielding parodied Richardson's novels of virtue, which he found morally hypocritical. In the 1770s there was a devaluation of the term "sentimental", which was increasingly used in English in the sense of false pity or false feeling. Even Goethe , however, used the term in the sense of German sensibility entirely positive. For Schiller , “sentimental” poetry is the opposite of “naive” poetry. While this only utters the “dry truth”, the sentimental poet reflects on the “impression that the objects make on him, and the emotion into which he is himself and us is based only on that reflection”, his poetry reflects and So only projects more primal feelings. Doeses naive, natural, however, cannot be repeated in the present: “Our feeling for nature is like the sick person's feeling for health.” Friedrich Schlegel integrated the sentimental feeling into his definition of the romantic.
The emergence and cultivation of sentimental domesticity in the Victorian age , as reflected in William Thackeray's novel ( Vanity Fair , 1847/48), is seen as an attempt to construct a close relationship between inner feelings and moral action. Above all, romantic love affairs and marriages should be kept out of the expanding sphere of the capitalist market and through a veil of emotion should be prevented that marriage is only viewed as one capitalist form of exchange among others.
Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) is an example of the sentimental tradition of US literature, in which the physical and mental suffering of others comes to the fore . The sentimental New Age literature of the 20th century offers self-help with one's own psychological suffering.
Since the end of the 19th century there has been an even more massive devaluation of sentimentality, as in the case of Josef Kohler, who identified sentimentality with untrue or feigned feelings and as a “pathological consequence of poor inactivity and the inability [...] to find oneself in the world and to find their way around their wealth ”.
The Scandinavian artist Sophie Wennerscheid points out the close connection between sentimentality and cruelty in modern literature. B. with Knut Hamsun , Hans Henny Jahnn or Karen Blixen .
Sentimentality in Painting
In the late phase of the Enlightenment, a wave of sensibility passed through Europe, which was also reflected in painting. Instead of the heroes, the everyday life of the common people came to the fore; in some cases, poverty was portrayed in a glorifying way. An example are Jean-Baptiste Greuzes sentimental painter narratives.
The flight to the petty-bourgeois family idyll, which began again after the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars since 1815, was expressed in the painting through comfortable interiors, depictions of everyday activities, childish play and unheroic portrayals of people. This era, later referred to as Biedermeier, is characterized by a touching sentimental expression such as B. in the works of Carl Spitzweg (1808–1885).
Sentimentality in Popular Culture
Sentimentality has a constitutive character in many forms of hits , trivial literature , snotty or kitsch . Kitsch sentimentalizes one's own experiences; it is consciously chosen by consumers and readers, but is also disseminated through the “massive and conscious market calculation” of the consumer industry. The trivial literature "follows the patterns of the fairy tale and thus meets original needs". These forms of entertainment foster a permanent feelgood - or feel right - mood and thus encourage escapism . Eva Illouz sees a tendency to emotionalize and sentimentalize consumption as a whole, while the emotional subject proceeds more and more economically in everyday life.
Sentimental love
Sentimental love is a state in which love is only experienced in the imagination and not in a concrete relationship with another person. It can be found in the forms of “substitute satisfaction that the consumer of love films, love stories in magazines and love songs experiences. All unfulfilled longings for love, union and human closeness find their satisfaction in the consumption of these products. ”According to Josef Kohler, sentiment degenerates into sentimentality when the lover sinks into inaction. A literary example is the enormously influential novel L'Éducation sentimentale by Gustave Flaubert , published in 1869 .
literature
- Andreas Dorschel : Sentimentality. About a category of aesthetic and moral devaluation. In: Perspectives of Philosophy. Neues Jahrbuch XXXI (2005), pp. 11-22 online
- H. Emmel: Sentimental. In: Hist. Wb. Philos. 9, 1995, p. 681 f.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Joseph Kupfer: The Sentimental Self , in: Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 26 (1996) 4, pp. 543-560.
- ↑ Erich Fromm: The Pathology of Normality of Today's Man (1953), in: Erich-Fromm-Gesamtausgabe, Volume XI, Munich 1991, p. 247.
- ↑ Max Wieser: The sentimental man. Seen from the world of Dutch and German mystics in the 18th century. Gotha 1924.
- ^ Otto Brunner: New ways of social history. Lectures and essays. Göttingen 1956, p. 42 ff.
- ↑ Friedrich Schiller: About naive and sentimental poetry , 1795.
- ↑ Julia Kent: Thackeray's “Marriage Country”: The Englishness of Domestic Sentiment in Vanity Fair. In: Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 30 (2008) 2, pp. 127–145.
- ↑ Rebecca A. Wanzo: Apocalyptic Empathy: A Parable of postmodern Sentimentality. In: Obsidian III, Vol. 6, No. 2 / Vol. 7 No. 1 (2005/2006), pp. 72-86.
- ↑ Josef Kohler: Sentiment and Sentimentality. In: Journal for Comparative Literature History, New Series 9 (1896). P. 275.
- ^ Sophie Wennerscheid: Sentimentality and Cruelty: Ambivalent feelings in Scandinavian and German modern literature. Münster 2011.
- ↑ Norbert Honsza: Literary Kitsch , in: Ders. (Ed.): Studies on popular literature in the 20th century , Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego, Wroclaw 1987, pp. 50–52.
- ↑ Eva Illouz: Feelings in the Age of Capitalism. Frankfurt am Main 2006.
- ↑ Erich Fromm: Die Kunst des Liebens (1956), in: Erich Fromm Complete Edition Volume IX, p. 499.
- ↑ Josef Kohler: From Petrarch's sonnet treasure. Free reseals. Berlin 1902, p. Xii.
