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born failure which betrays how such people speak to themselves
that glance which is a sigh! If only I were someone else, sighs
that glance: but there is no hope of that. I am who I am: how
could I ever get free of myself? And yet I am sick of myself!
(GM III, Section 14)
In his last book and philosophical autobiography Ecce Homo, Nietzsche
repeats nearly verbatim Schopenhauer s insight into the deep pain caused
by thoroughgoing dissatisfaction with the self ( Why I Am So Wise, Sec-
tion 6). In this essay Nietzsche articulates the link between Schadenfreude
and ressentiment.
Nietzsche s understanding of ressentiment reflects an apprehension,
absent in Schopenhauer, of the dispositional (or habitual, as opposed to
episodic) nature of this reactive attitude. People who yearn to be someone
else, those who fundamentally dislike themselves, exhibit a properly dis-
positional trait. They are fertile soil for ressentiment. Someone simply
having a bad day, on the other hand, doesn t necessarily dislike him- or
herself. A sporadic or temporary crisis of self-esteem differs in scope, du-
ration, and consequences from the state of mind that leads to ressenti-
ment. This second class of persons may, when rationally assessing the
misfortune of another, include in their thought process an element of feel-
ing inferior. (Of course, this feeling of inferiority or disempowerment is
continuously subject to revision.) Nobles may feel resentment, but they do
not suffer from ressentiment.
Difficulties of all sorts befall us. Difficulties, regardless of their extent,
bother some of us more than others. Nietzsche s view of human life, a
view he shares with Schopenhauer, is not cheery:
Here we must beware of superficiality and get to the bottom of the
matter, resisting all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially
appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker;
120 When Bad Things Happen to Other People
suppression, hardness, imposition of one s own forms, incorpora-
tion and at least, at its mildest, exploitation but why should one
always use those words in which a slanderous intent has been im-
printed for ages? (BGE, Section 259)
For Nietzsche, this omnipresent suffering is a consequence of the will to
power. The most repellent aspect of human misery for Nietzsche is its irra-
tionality. Nietzsche cares about suffering, but he warns us not to allow
preoccupation with it to interfere in the task of living our lives.
Nietzsche views ressentiment as a lasting mental attitude caused by the
systematic repression of certain emotions and affects. Later, Scheler identi-
fied these emotions: Rache (revenge), Hass (hatred), Bosheit (malice),
Neid (envy), Scheelsuch (impulse to detract), Hämischkeit (spite) Groll
(rancor), Zorn (wrath), Rachsucht (vindictiveness, vengefulness), and
Schadenfreude. In On the Genealogy of Morals I, Section 8, Nietzsche as-
sociates the modus operandi of this repression with Judaism. Though he
initially blames Judaism for ressentiment, Nietzsche takes pains to make
clear that Christianity is just as guilty, because Christianity eagerly ab-
sorbed the perversion of values underlying ressentiment.
Invoking God to justify the suffering of others lies at the heart of the
slave revolt in morality. As I have said, Nietzsche accuses the Jews of ini-
tiating that revolt. Their misery over failing to attain the values of the
noble, the powerful, the masters, the rulers led Jews to substitute a new
system of values such that
the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone
are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious,
alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone and you,
the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the
lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in
all eternity the unblessed, accursed, and damned! (GM I, Section 7)
Christians subsequently embraced this revolt wholeheartedly. Nietzsche
calls the ideal of Christian love, agape, the triumphant crown of Jew-
ish hatred. First the Jew and then the Christian learned to transfer to
Celebrating Suffering 121
God the vengeance he himself could not wreak on the great. Ressentiment
thus began as a distinctly religious phenomenon.
It is a mistake to think of ressentiment as necessarily a function of reli-
gion. It would be more accurate to think of envy as the culprit. The suc-
cess of ressentiment does not hang on religious belief. Ressentiment
poisons the consciences of life s winners, who start to doubt whether they
deserve to prosper. Even the strong have their weary hours, Nietzsche tells
us. Once life s winners start doubting their right to happiness, ressenti-
ment has worked its black magic. Even an atheist, though, might worry
about the misery he sees around him: he doesn t need a religious voice to
compel him to look at the suffering of others. Religion may fuel ressenti-
ment, but religion is not a necessary cause.
Further, it is a mistake to dismiss cynically all of the Jewish/Christian
morality. Against Nietzsche, Scheler defended the concept of Christian
love as an expression of strength rather than weakness, as a sign of vitality
rather than decadence. He suggested that Nietzsche had confused authentic
love with Schopenhauer s version of Christian culture. Scheler regarded the
culture of bourgeois society as the most profound manifestation of nega-
tive ressentiment. In particular, he condemned the bourgeois endorsement
of utilitarian philosophy as a perversion of true values and a subversion of
genuine feeling and Christian love. These reservations notwithstanding,
Scheler was one of the first serious thinkers to understand the extraordi-
nary importance of Nietzsche s moral insight.
The following passage from On the Genealogy of Morals most clearly
explains how the transvaluation underlying ressentiment works:
The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself be-
comes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of na-
tures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and
compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every
noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself,
slave morality from the outset says No to what is outside, what
is different, what is not itself ; and this No is its creative deed.
This inversion of the value-positing eye this need to direct one s
view outward instead of back to oneself is of the essence of
122 When Bad Things Happen to Other People
ressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a
hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external
stimuli in order to act at all its action is fundamentally reaction.
(I, Section 10)
Like Schadenfreude, ressentiment is a function of reaction, not action.
Ressentiment involves a distortion of reality, a distortion of facts. Recent
philosophical attention to sentimentality has focused on how this emo-
tional indulgence distorts the world.15 Sentimentality causes people to fal-
sify the object of their emotions. They may actively cultivate false beliefs
about some object in order to make an object appear appropriate to their
feelings. A film or novel, for example, might sentimentally portray a child
molester by emphasizing his own sad childhood (the loss of a mother, the
cruelty of a father, the death of a pet) instead of focusing on his pattern of
damaging the lives of children. As John Kekes has put it, sentimental
people change the world (in fantasy) to accommodate their feelings, as
opposed to changing their feelings to accommodate the world.
Why is ressentiment any worse than sentimentality? First of all, remem-
ber that sentimentality enjoyed a great deal of popularity until this century.
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