It’s Saturday, September 24, 2022 at 1:38 p.m. and dry eyes are gone: Swiss tennis star Roger Federer (41) has just finished his last professional match with Rafael Nadal (36) at the Laver Cup in London. and burst into tears. In this sleepy time, more than half a million people in Switzerland are also in tears in front of the television.
We were touched. The crying man touched our hearts, we felt an inner feeling, emotion, that’s what the word “movement” means in German since the 18th century. It’s a feeling of celebrating his birth at Christmas – in front of adult family members hugging after a long hiatus and children standing in front of brightly adorned trees.
This year already presented many poignant scenes: before Federer’s farewell game, millions of spectators sat in front of televisions or stood in the streets for days in Great Britain due to the death of the Queen (September 8); Moved to see how a Ukrainian family hugs their son after the withdrawal of Russian troops (5 April); and Federal Council Member Simonetta Sommaruga (62), leaving the President of the National Council on 7 December, said: “Thank you very much for your words, I am very impressed.”
“The New Tendency to Sensitivity”
“Today there is a trend towards a new sensibility,” says Roger Fayet (56), Director of the Swiss Institute for Art Studies (SIK-ISEA). The art history doctor is an expert in this field, as he gave his keynote speech on “Emotion” as a lecturer at the University of Zurich in 2018. On the Aesthetics of an Unappreciated Emotion». Next year Fayet will publish a poignant book with Basler Schwabe-Verlag.
“Emotion is not widely appreciated in art and is seen there as a sign that the subject is not very demanding,” he says. Words often used in this context are emotional and shallow. Kitsch is also something that can be touched. “And those who are touched are often not seen as demanding and intellectual people,” says the SIK director. Still, there are moments of tears, calluses and knots in the throat in life. “So it would be wrong to suppress emotion or ignore it as something that shouldn’t happen,” says Fayet.
It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that an art historian takes up this topic, because it’s primarily writers, philosophers, and historians who write about emotions. “Our understanding of crying comes not from medicine or the psychological sciences, but from the myriad representations in poetry, fiction, and drama,” writes US author Tom Lutz (69) in the cultural history of tears.
In fact, “Dorsch,” the most important encyclopedia of psychology, does not contain an entry for the keyword “touch.” And the famous emotion researcher, American psychologist Robert Plutchik (1927-2006), in his “Wheel of Emotions” (1980), lists 32 terms with eight basic emotions and their ratings—from “anxious” to “happy” to “angry.” – , but there is no “tapped” anywhere.
Interest in crying has grown, at least in recent years, so much so that psychologist Lauren Bylsma (41) of the University of Pittsburgh (USA) was able to provide an overview recently. “Empathetic people often cry a lot more,” summarizes the results in Psychology Today. Women cry much more often than men and people from Western countries cry much more often than Asians.
Quoting the findings of “Psychology Today” Bylsma, “Only as the years go by do we improve our ability to cry for positive reasons.” “Human suffering often makes adults cry more than children.” Here we get to the heart of the emotion: when we see Federer and Sommaruga crying or watching the British royal family at the Queen’s funeral, we sympathize.
Necessary positive ending for emotion
But as the German poet Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) noted in his work “On the Cause of Enjoyment in Tragic Objects” (1792), emotion is not just pity: you see something surprising that shouldn’t really happen, you experience it. own personality as a moral authority and has a positive experience in that sense.
The positive ending is an essential element of emotion in the narrower sense, otherwise it would just be sadness and therefore emotion in the broader sense. “When the feeling of rebellion is replaced by a sense of reconciliation, you feel impressed,” says Fayet. At the Queen’s funeral, the ceremony shows that death is not all over: the Queen is dead, long live the King!
What about King Roger? “She and the audience experienced that the effort was worth it and everything worked out in the end,” says Fayet. This can be observed in many athletes who, after long pains and hard training, have won an Olympic victory or a world championship title, as was the case with the Argentina national football team in Qatar last Sunday.
In the last century, James Bond’s motto was “Shaken, not stirred”. Many people today are touched and shaken. “There’s been a lot of work lately where emotions play a big role and there’s been tremendous interest,” says Fayet. The artist couple named Hubbard/Birchler’s video installation at the Venice Art Biennale in 2017 “Flora” and named the performance of Patti Smith (75), who received the Nobel Prize in Literature (81) for Bob Dylan in 2016.
Irish Teresa Hubbard (57) and Swiss Alexander Birchler (60) filmed a tribute to US sculptor Flora Mayo (1899-2000), who fell in love with Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) in the 1920s. While Giacometti is in every art dictionary, Mayo is only a footnote in his biography. “Flora” was supposed to be a repair and salvation for the artist – after all, the audience burst out of the Swiss Pavilion in Venice in 2017, emotional.
On December 10, 2016, despite the harsh atmosphere of the Swedish royal family’s presence in the Stockholm concert hall, invited guests were also touched: in the absence of Dylan, who should be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, singer Smith, Dylan’s song “A Hard Rain’s A -Gonna Fall” for the best – and fail. She has to interrupt her show and says embarrassingly, “Sorry, I’m so nervous.” Applause! And as you can see in the video on Youtube, someone in the audience here and there is wiping a tear from their eyes.
Intellectual Distance in the Last Century
In times of crisis, weakness and failure touch people more, they show more interest in each other. At least since the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, the West has become aware of its vulnerability and has developed a certain sensitivity in society. More recent crisis experiences, such as this year’s Ukraine war, have strengthened societal sentiment.
In the 1980s and 1990s, when there were largely no crises, the situation was completely different: Back then, even when faced with murder and manslaughter, people were hardly impressed and instead laughed. Examples of this are movies where blood splatters into the human body, such as “Drowning by Numbers” (1988), directed by Peter Greenaway (80), where people die in droves (1988) or “Pulp Fiction” (1994) by Quentin Tarantino (59). car after a headshot – and the whole cinema burst into laughter.
The brain before the heart: “Intellectual distance was maintained in the postmodern era of the 1980s and 1990s,” says Fayet. However, thinking is not necessarily far from feeling (1790), as the rational Enlightenmentalists of the 18th century were the first to deal with the issue of emotion, as in the “Critique of Judgment” (1724-1804) by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).
But the first theoretical discussion from this point on does not mean that there was no emotion before. Fayet, historians from the Middle Ages know of how there were expressions of extreme emotion during peace negotiations between enemy war delegations – when the treaty was signed, everyone wept with joy to show each other how important this step was. “Today, such behavior is considered unprofessional,” says Fayet.
And a touching scene is already known from ancient Greece. Homer describes the reunion of Odysseus and his wife Penelope in the 23rd canto of “Odyssey” (7th century BC) after his long adventure after the Trojan War: her heart and knees trembled when she realized it. / She ran upstairs crying and spread her arms / threw herself on her husband’s neck (…)»
So, was inner emotion always inherent in sensitive humans, could it be that Neanderthals (25,000 BC) shed a tear of emotion? Nobody knows, but Fayet thinks it’s possible.