sentiment

What is it about sentiment? What is sentiment? I’ll tell you what I think before I go get the “real” definition. I guess I don’t know. The real definition is something like communicating a thought or feeling through words, acts or gestures, but that is independent of words, acts or gestures themselves. I guess that’s pretty good, but can that really happen? I mean, if I tell you a story, can I really tell you anything more than what my words, acts or gestures convey? Go through the list, if I tell a very sad story, and cry, and my face looks all pathetic and distorted, my eyes are glossy with tears—well all of those things fit into words, acts or gestures, so how is that emotion transported from me to you, or is it? Maybe we just have these reflexes to react to whatever emotion we see portrayed, but that can’t be it; why do I laugh when guys get hit in the crotch on America’s Funniest Home Videos? Presumably they are experiencing a very different emotional response than I am. Well, what if I, as listener, am trying to put myself in their shoes? Am I really getting to where they are, and experiencing the same emotion they are trying to communicate? I mean, how do I know what it is like for them to lose a loved one? Maybe their dad was a big jerk, and your dad is great, so you picture losing your dad, and you miss the connection because you don’t know what it was like to have their dad. Hmmm, what if the words, acts and gestures just remind us of what our experience was with that person? Maybe their dad was always nice to me, so I experience a small loss, and that’s what I feel, and not the emotion they feel and want to share. But why do people cry in movies where the characters are totally fictitious? Or are people more touched in movies or books of true accounts? What about sympathy and empathy? Maybe sympathy or empathy are the mirror emotions in us when we hear a sad story? That’s getting off topic a bit, because sentiment, where we started, is really a “shared” emotion, but that seems impossible to communicate. Okay, so maybe sentiment has to be based on a shared experience, and not just the communication of a thought or emotion independent of words, acts and gestures. So what are we left with, a few people go through an experience together, then they have this common bond because they went through the same thing? Well that seems implausible, because even though two people go through the same experience, their individual history will do more to interpret that experience than any actual thought or feeling shared during the experience. For example, if an angel came down and stood in front of two close fiends, one very righteous and one very wicked, wouldn’t they each be feeling very different emotions? Or maybe they weren’t as close of friends as we thought, because it seems like the more shared history, the stronger the bond between two people, and the more similarly they will experience a shared event. But shared history doesn’t automatically mean harmony or agreeability; maybe they hate each other. So is sentiment real, or is it fake? And if its real, how is it communicated? I know some people would say that it is the most “real” type of communication, is that what I think? Am I trying to answer my real question, or is there a bigger question underlying this small potato? Hey, and by the way, what is it about music and art that “moves” people, or communicates with people? And why does it change through time, I guess it must be socially based. No, I’m on the wrong track; there is definitely something there, some communication that’s not based on words, acts or gestures. I feel like I’m just hacking up decades of philosophical reflection with haphazard thought experiments and blind bias, but, what else am I supposed to be doing? Oh yeah, homework. Ps. I think mood has something to do with it too.