Robert C. Solomon

Robert C. Solomon (September 14, 1942 – January 2, 2007) was a philosopher and business ethicist, notable author, and "Distinguished Teaching Professor of Business and Philosophy" at the University of Texas at Austin, where he held a named chair and taught for more than 30 years.

"In Defense of Sentimentality" (1990)

 * Philosophy and Literature, Volume 14, Number 2, October 1990, pp. 304-323


 * The prejudice against sentimentality, I want to argue, is ill-founded and in fact is an extension of that all-too-familiar contempt for the passions in Western literature and philosophy.
 * p. 305


 * Sentimentality ... is not an escape from reality or responsibility, but, quite to the contrary, provides the precondition for ethical engagement rather than an obstacle to it.
 * p. 305


 * It is worth noting that the offensive epithet "sentimentalist" has not long been a term of abuse: just two hundred years ago, when Schiller referred to himself and his poetry as "sentimental" (as opposed to Goethe's "naive" style), he had in mind the elegance of emotion, not saccharine sweetness and the manipulation of mawkish passions.
 * p. 307


 * Kant's unprecedented attack on sentiment and sentimentalism was at least in part a reaction, perhaps a visceral reaction, not only against the philosophical moral-sentiment theorists (whom he at least admired) but against the flood of popular women writers in Europe and America who were then turning out thousands of widely read pot-boilers and romances which did indeed equate virtue and goodness with gushing sentiment. It is no secret that the charge of sentimentalism has long had sexist implications.
 * p. 307


 * It is simply not true, as more than one great cynic has claimed, that sentimentality betrays cynicism. It is rather that sentimentality betrays the cynic, for it is the cynic and not the sentimentalist who cannot abide honest emotion.
 * p. 309