I would define this as seeking emotion for its own sake.
I may have said this before. This is an important topic, since most of our public discourse is motivated by sentimentalism.
Sean Penn is perhaps emblematic of this. I’ve probably said this too. He wants not just to strike a stance, and adopt a pose, but suffer heroically, empathize heroically, and above all FEEL feel feel. All the feelz.
Now, feeling is better than not feeling. That is why sentimentalism is such a value in our culture: most of us are numb. We are shell shocked and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of inputs, particularly as combined with their banality and often mendacity. It’s a hard world to be awake in, to any extent at all. It fractures most of us into alternating numbness and sentimentalism.
When we feel PATHOS for the Ukrainians that is good, but this whole narrative comes with an emotive movie soundtrack, readily identifiable good guys and bad guys, erasure of nuance, and large swings which would not happen naturally in most of us.
I might put it this way: sentimentality is an orchard planted in clear rows, in clear patterns, and which is weeded of complications. True perception is a natural, uncut wood. There is nothing clearly delineated, but what is seen is what is there. The world only separates into clean categories when we impose violence on it, in our minds, or in the actual world.
What I might contrast with sentimentality is mature perception. Perception necessarily involves an emotional aspect. But I think in an optimized consciousness emotion serves as a signaling system. It provides information you can act on.
Emotion, for a mature person, is a MEANS to an end, not an end in itself. You certainly don’t reject emotion, but neither do you make it the be all and end all of existence in the way, say, that was preached in The Titanic.
If you make emotion an end, you are destined to endless ups and downs. Thrills and spills. At the essence of every spiritual tradition I know of is the sense that behind all this is something so much better it is foolish to even try and compare the two.
The sentimentalist is a child. Growth involves giving up the childish.