The Cult of Feelings

I have recently finished reading Immortality by the Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera. Like his masterpiece The Unbearable Lightness of Being this book is a digressive tale about the meaning of love, relationships, human existence and the nature of "being" in the modern world. What struck me in the book however was one small passage where Kundera discusses the nature of human feelings and sentiments and puts it in a historical perspective. He coins a new term for the new kind of human being. He calls him Homo Sentimentalis:

“Homo sentimentalis cannot be defined as a man with feelings (for we all have feelings), but as a man who has raised feelings to a category of value. As soon as feelings are seen as a value, everyone wants to feel; and because we all like to pride ourselves on our values, we have a tendency to show off our feelings...

I don't know if it is the influence of the crazy new-age philosophies or those dimwitted theories imagined by management "gurus" (they call it "emotional intelligence") or perhaps it is just plain, old conspiracy by the greeting card companies against our collective brain, whatever it is, the pressure on individual human being to not just keep "feeling" about everything under the sun but also to show off what he is feeling, is just enormous. Everywhere you see, on TV, in films, in newspapers, in celebrity interviews and autobiographies, the fascism of sentiments continues unabated. There is even a neologism coined for this trend. People call it "Oprahfication". I personally find this public display of artificial emotions immensely embarrassing at best and absolutely loathsome and irritating at worst. I will even go so far as to say that I find even pornography more wholesome and tasteful than those celebrities tell-it-all on the oprah-winfrey show or those two hankie fest of Karan Johar movies.

Anyway, Kundera continues further in the same passage and credits Cervantes of understanding the idea behind the artificial display of emotions. He says:

No one revealed homo sentimentalis as lucidly as Cervantes. Don Quixote decides to love a certain lady named Dulcinea, in spite of the fact that he hardly knows her (this comes as no surprise, because we know that when it’s a question of wahre Liebe, true love, the beloved hardly matters). In chapter twenty-five of Book One, he leaves with Sancho for the remote mountains, where he wishes to demonstrate to him the greatness of his passion. But how to show someone else that your soul is on fire? Especially someone as dull and naïve as Sancho? And so when they find themselves on a mountain path, Don Quixote strips off all his clothes except for his shirt, and to demonstrate to his servant the immensity of his passion he proceeds to turn somersaults.

I think Don Quixote is a good example of a solid critique of the idea of sentimentality in literature. The idea that sentiments are enough to make all the right moral decisions in life, or that we should always "follow our hearts". What better to show this, than to recount all the follies of Don Quixote, be it tilting at the windmills, freeing the prisoners or attacking a herd of sheep. Of course it is an exaggeration but the idea remains the same. In fact in one of his essays, perhaps collected in his Testaments Betrayed, Kundera says that the worst disasters mankind has suffered were spawned by those who followed the dictates of their heart most passionately. All those dictators and tyrants were Don Quixotes, perhaps not as benevolent, but Quixote nevertheless.

Actually, it is not just a question of tempering your passions with rationality (the plain old Platonic concept) but rather it is about authenticity and what is true. Sentimentality is all about generating artificial emotions to extract favourable responses from the audience, be it in cinema or in real life and this is what I find absolutely detestable. Kundera further says:

It is part of the definition of feeling that it is born in us without our will, often against our will. As soon as we want to feel (decide to feel, just as Don Quixote decided to love Dulcinea), feeling is no longer feeling but an imitation of feeling, a show of feeling. This is commonly called hysteria. That’s why homo sentimentalis (a person who has raised feeling to a value) is in reality identical to homo hystericus.”

This is also the reason why people, who at one moment bask in glorious emotional connections with each other, suprise each other with their supreme indifference the next moment without any trouble. Because once you "decide" to feel something, you are no longer feeling it authentically and it is easy to get over that feeling without any trouble at all. That feeling then has no basis in reality at all. It is absolutely artificial.

Long post and it sounds all hotch-potch now. But I have no time to edit it now. In short it is, Down with Oprah-Winfrey Show, Down with Karan Johar films, Down with Greeting Cards (and other emotional packaging products). It is down with sentimentality! Let's give the old, lame guy Reason a little helping hand instead!