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With glittering eyes, the children stand in front of the decorated Christmas tree and create touching scenes.
Daniel ArnetEditor of Sunday Blick magazine
It is 1:38 on Saturday evening on 24 September 2022 and not a dry eye remains: Swiss tennis star Roger Federer (41) has just finished his last professional match alongside Rafael Nadal (36) at the Laver Cup in London and breaks down in tears. In this sleepy period, more than half a million people in Switzerland also have watery eyes in front of the TV.
Boys don’t cry – absolutely not: Roger Federer (left) and Rafael Nadal represented the most touching moments of the year.
We have been touched. The crying man moved our hearts, we felt an inner emotion, an emotion, which is what the word “movement” has meant in German since the 18th century. A sentiment that celebrates his birth at Christmas – in front of adult family members who embrace after a long time, and children who stand in front of decorated trees with bright eyes.
This year has already offered many touching scenes: before Federer’s farewell match, an audience of millions sat in front of televisions or stood for days on the streets of Great Britain due to the death of the queen (September 8 ); moved to see how a Ukrainian family was able to embrace their son again after the withdrawal of Russian soldiers (April 5); and federal councilor Simonetta Sommaruga (62 years old) when she left the president of the National Council on December 7: “Thank you so much for your words, they moved me a lot”.
“Trend for new sensibility”
“Today there is a trend towards a new sensibility,” says Roger Fayet (56), director of the Swiss Institute for Artistic Research (SIK-ISEA). The Doctor of Art History is a specialist in the field, having given his inaugural lecture as a lecturer at the University of Zurich in 2018 on the topic “Emotion. On the aesthetics of an unappreciated feeling». Next year Fayet will publish a touching book with Basler Schwabe-Verlag.
“Emotion is not as valued in art and there it is seen as a sign that the subject is not too demanding,” he says. The words that are often used in this context are sentimental and superficial. Kitsch is also something that can be heartwarming. “And those who are touched are often not considered demanding and intellectual people,” says the director of the SIK. However, there are such tears and calluses and lump in the throat moments in life. “So it would be wrong to suppress the emotion or dismiss it as something that shouldn’t exist,” says Fayet.
It does not seem a coincidence that an art historian deals with this topic, because it is mainly writers, philosophers and historians who write about emotions. “Our understanding of crying comes not from the medical or psychological sciences, but from innumerable representations in poetry, fiction, theatre,” writes US author Tom Lutz (69) in his cultural history of tears.
“Thank you very much for your words, they moved me a lot”: federal councilor Simonetta Sommaruga at her greeting.
Indeed the “Dorsch”, the foremost encyclopedia of psychology, does not contain an entry for the keyword “touch”. And the famous researcher of emotions, American psychologist Robert Plutchik (1927-2006), lists 32 terms in his “Wheel of Emotions” (1980) with eight basic feelings and their gradations – from “anxious” to “happy” to “angry”. – , but nowhere is there a «touched».
At least with regard to crying, interest has increased in recent years, so that psychologist Lauren Bylsma (41) from the University of Pittsburgh (USA) was recently able to present an overview. “Empathic people generally cry much more,” summarizes the findings of Psychology Today magazine. Women cry much more often than men, and people from Western nations more often than Asians.
“Only over the years do we develop the ability to cry for good reasons,” quotes the findings of “Psychology Today” Bylsma. “The suffering of other human beings generally moves adults more than children to tears.” Here we get to the heart of emotion: when we see Federer and Sommaruga cry or watch the British royal family at the Queen’s funeral, we sympathize.
Positive ending essential to emotion
But emotion is not only pity, as the German poet Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) stated in his study “On the reason for jouissance in tragic objects” (1792): You see something surprising that shouldn’t actually happen, you experience it own person as a moral authority and in this sense has a positive experience.
The positive ending is an essential element of emotion in the strict sense, otherwise it would be just sadness and therefore emotion in the broad sense. “When the feeling of rebellion is replaced by a feeling of reconciliation, then you feel touched,” says Fayet. At the queen’s funeral, the ceremonial shows that not everything ended in death: the queen is dead, long live the king!
And King Roger? “He himself and the audience experienced that the effort was worth it and that everything turned out well in the end,” says Fayet. This can be seen in many athletes when they achieve an Olympic victory or a world title after long suffering and hard training, as happened with the Argentina national soccer team last Sunday in Qatar.
“Shaken, not stirred” was James Bond’s motto in the last century. Today many are touched and shaken. “Recently there have been works where emotion plays a big part and they’ve received tremendous attention,” says Fayet. You title the video installation “Flora” by the artist duo Hubbard / Birchler at the Venice Art Biennale in 2017 and the performance by Patti Smith (75) for the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan (81) in 2016.
The Irish Teresa Hubbard (57) and the Swiss Alexander Birchler (60) filmed a tribute to the American sculptor Flora Mayo (1899-2000), who in the 1920s had a love affair with the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901- 1966). While Giacometti is in every art dictionary, Mayo is just a footnote in her biography. “Flora” is supposed to be a reparation and salvation for the artist – with the result that the public rushed out of the Swiss Pavilion in Venice in 2017, moved.
Even the invited guests were moved on December 10, 2016, despite the stiff atmosphere in the presence of the Swedish royal family in the Stockholm concert hall: without the presence of Dylan, who was supposed to collect the Nobel prize for literature, the singer Smith performed Dylan’s song “A Hard Rain’s A -Gonna Fall» for the best – and fails. She has to interrupt her performance and embarrassedly says: “Sorry, I’m so nervous.” Applause! And in the audience someone wipes here and there a tear from the eye, as can be seen in the video on Youtube.
Intellectual distance in the last century
Weakness and failure touch people more in times of crisis, they pay more attention to each other. At least since the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, the West has realized its vulnerability and has developed a certain sensitivity in society. More recent experiences of crises, such as this year’s war in Ukraine, have strengthened social sentiments.
It was completely different in the largely crisis-free 1980s and 1990s: Back then, even in the face of homicides and homicides, people were unmoved and laughed instead. Examples are films such as “Drowning by Numbers” (1988) by Peter Greenaway (80), where people die in droves, or “Pulp Fiction” (1994) by Quentin Tarantino (59), where blood splashes inside of the car after a blow to the head – and the whole cinema erupted in laughter.
Brain before heart: “In the postmodern era of the 80s and 90s, intellectual distance was maintained,” says Fayet. But thinking is not necessarily far from feeling, since the rational Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century were the first to address the theme of emotion, such as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in his “Critique of Judgment” (1790).
Right about feeling: Enlightenment Immanuel Kant was one of the first to deal with the theory of emotion.
However, the first theoretical discussion from this point on does not mean that there were no emotions before. Fayet knows of medieval chroniclers who report how there were expressions of extreme emotion during peace negotiations between enemy war delegations – when the treaty was signed, everyone wept with joy, also to show each other how important this step was. “Today, such behavior would be considered unprofessional,” says Fayet.
And one touching scene has already been known from Greek antiquity. This is how Homer describes the reunion of Odysseus and his wife Penelope in the 23rd canto of the “Odyssey” (7th century BC) after his long odyssey following the Trojan War: “He said it; but his heart and his knees trembled when she recognized the signs that Odysseus announced to her. / She ran upstairs weeping and with open arms / threw herself on her husband’s neck (…)»
So, inner emotion has always been inherent in sensitive people, could Neanderthals (25,000 BC) have shed a tear of emotion? No one knows, but Fayet thinks it’s possible.
