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LYRICAL EMOTIONS and SENTIMENTALITY Author(S): Scott Alexander Howard Source: the Philosophical Quarterly (1950-), Vol Scots Philosophical Association University of St. Andrews LYRICAL EMOTIONS AND SENTIMENTALITY Author(s): Scott Alexander Howard Source: The Philosophical Quarterly (1950-), Vol. 62, No. 248 (July 2012), pp. 546-568 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St. Andrews Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41684314 Accessed: 20-03-2020 23:54 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41684314?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Scots Philosophical Association, University of St. Andrews, Oxford University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Philosophical Quarterly (1950-) This content downloaded from 141.218.30.136 on Fri, 20 Mar 2020 23:54:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 62, No. 248 July 2012 ISSN 0031 -8og4 doi: 10.nn/j.1467-9213.2012.00072.x LYRICAL EMOTIONS AND SENTIMENTALITY By Scott Alexander Howard I investigate the normative status of an unexamined category of emotions : ' lyrical 3 emotions about the transience of things. Lyrical emotions are often accused of sentimentality - a charge that expresses the idea that they are unfitting responses to their objects. However, when we test the merits of that charge using the standard model of emotion evaluation , a surprising problem emerges: it turns out that we cannot make normative distinctions between episodes of such feelings. Instead, it seems that lyrical emotions are always fitting. Although this claim is counterintuitive, the price of denying it is to hold that such emotions are never fitting - an equally strange result. If this is correct, then the commonplace discourse of sentimentality surrounding lyrical emotions lacks normative moorings. I. INTRODUCTION This paper is about a type of emotion experience that has received no attention in contemporary philosophical studies of the emotions. This is inversely proportional to the significant attention it receives in literature. Emotion experiences of this sort can best be described as poetic, or, as I will prefer to say, lyrical. Lyrical emotions are consciously focused on the fleetingness of things, construed as a general condition of the world. A familiar example is the affective state embodied and evoked by haiku, in which the impermanence of a particular thing stands in relief against a vast temporal backdrop. It is the feeling native to what Philip Larkin called 'the long perspectives / Open at each instant of our lives'.1 My question concerns a surprising problem that emerges when we try to normatively assess such emotions. Lyrical emotions can be criticised for not 'fitting' their objects. Such complaints are often expressed using the epithet of sentimentality - a term which is central to our critical discourse 1 P. Larkin, Collected Poems , (London: Faber, 2003), p. hi. © 2012 The Author The Philosophical Quarterly © 2012 The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford 0x4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Maiden, ma 02148, USA This content downloaded from 141.218.30.136 on Fri, 20 Mar 2020 23:54:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms LYRICAL EMOTIONS AND SENTIMENTALITY 547 about lyrical emotions in art and life. One can experience a lyrical emo- tion and then, in its wake, reproach oneself for being sentimental. But when this self-criticism occurs, who is correct: the person in the first moment, convinced by the emotion, or the person in the next, who judges it unfitting? To explore this question, I turn to the standard story in the philosophy of emotions about how to evaluate emotions for fittingness. This model is a composite of prominent views in the literature, drawn in particular from Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson, Ronald de Sousa, and Peter Goldie.2 On this model, an emotion episode is typically fitting if its particular object instantiates the formal object of lyrical emotions. But when we attempt to use the standard model to evaluate lyrical emotion episodes, we generate what I will call the overinstantiation problem : essentially, lyrical emotions' formal object is always instantiated, so their conditions for fittingness are almost always satisfied. It therefore seems that nearly all lyrical emotion episodes are fitting; and I argue that the best attempts to avoid that counterintuitive conclusion (including rejecting this model of emotion evaluation) would only lead to the equally unwelcome verdict that they are never fitting. Either way, we seem unable to support the claim that some lyrical emotions are fitting while others are not. That claim is a condition of a robust normative discourse about these emotions, and, as such, its truth is both desirable and widely presupposed. However, I will argue that this commonsense view cannot be sustained. Instead, lyrical emotions can hardly ever be said to be unfitting - and our resources for cancelling out this strange result, such as by criticising these feelings on other grounds, are limited. This does not mean that lyrical emotions are therefore a false category of emotion, that they are irrational, or that the standard model of emotion evaluation is faulty. Instead, it reveals a mystery at the heart of emotional normativity: an apparent clash between these powerful emotion experiences, the critical discourse that surrounds them, and our philosophical framework for evaluating emo- tions. Since none of these can be given up, my conclusion is aporetic. It is a truism that emotions give meaning to our lives; but the emotions most associated with thoughts about life's meaning frustrate our attempts to assess them. 2 J. D'Arms and D. Jacobson, 'The Moralistic Fallacy: On the 'Appropriateness' of Emotions', Philosophy and Phenomeno logical Research , 61 (2000), pp. 65-90; R. de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion , (MIT Press, 1987); and P. Goldie, 'Emotion, Feeling, and Knowledge of the World', in R. Solomon, Thinking About Feeling, , (Oxford UP, 2004), pp. 91-106. © 2012 The Author The Philosophical Quarterly © 2012 The Editors of7 he Philosophwal Quarterly This content downloaded from 141.218.30.136 on Fri, 20 Mar 2020 23:54:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 548 SCOTT ALEXANDER HOWARD II. LYRICAL EMOTIONS Lyrical emotions are consciously directed at the fact of life's transitoriness - that is, at the ultimate fleetingness of things. Their affective quality is bittersweet or poignant , combining sadness with the enjoyment of beauty.3 They are ordinarily experienced as being important: profundity is their natural register. Feelings of this sort are familiar to most of us, but poetry is the best resource for specific examples. My first example is from the autobiography of the poet Philip Levine. In our passage, a Spanish friend of Levine 's has asked him to translate the work of the early 20th century poet Antonio Machado into English. Levine does not feel equal to the task. To entice him, his friend begins reciting the poems to Levine, 'occasionally rising in the dusty center of his tiny campus office to declaim a passage that moved his soul with its beauty'.4 Levine, considering this, poses the question to his readers: Have you ever been moved in the soul? I know that is a ridiculous question, but I ask it because much of my life I didn't know such a thing was possible. .As solitary obser- ver and memorializer of the Castilian landscape, Antonio Machado is often moved in the soul. He tells us again and again without the least reserve, he tells us with such simplicity and clarity we come to believe him absolutely, and in doing so we come to understand our own deepest experiences and to believe entirely in their authenticity.5 What might it be, to be so moved? This passage indicates two salient fea- tures of the experience: depth and persuasiveness. Depth is suggested not only by the description of these experiences as, precisely, our deepest, but also by the reference to the soul, which, while figurative, conveys the ele- mental level on which such an emotion resonates. The persuasive charac- ter of the feeling is suggested by the language of absolute belief. This gives us clues about the form of the feeling, but not about the content. However, there are examples elsewhere in Levine of what being moved in this way is about In the following passage, Levine imagines returning to his hometown after fifty years. He writes: I owe it to myself to return to the Ontario side of Lake Huron and stand in the damp silence embracing my mortality for all I'm worth, knowing for certain - at least for a day - that all true stories are autumnal.6 3 See H. Ersner-Hershfield, J. Mikels, S. Sullivan, and L. Garstensen, 'Poignancy: Mixed Emotional Experience in the Face of Meaningful Endings', Journal of Personality and Social Psychobpy, 04 (2008), pp. 158-67. 4 P. Levine, "The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography, (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 193. 5 ibid. ibid ., pp. 136-7. © 2012 The Author The Philosophical Quarterly © 2012 The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly This content downloaded from 141.218.30.136 on Fri, 20 Mar 2020 23:54:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms LYRICAL EMOTIONS AND SENTIMENTALITY 549 Like the feeling described in the passage about Machado, this emotion is almost quintessentially profound.
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