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Ressentiment & Counter-Ressentiment:
Nietzsche, Scheler, and the Reaction Against Equality
Perhaps the word ‘genre’ in English is roughly comparable;
‘genre’ is of French origin, but it is also an English word,
although again one not spoken by the man on the street; to
the educated person, a ‘genre’ expresses something more particular
than a ‘kind’ of something. The problem is, in English the
word, ressentiment, always italicized, is not natural
the way ‘genre’ is. As Robert Solomon says (118) it sounds
more sarcastic en français. We have our own word,
‘resentment,’ and the very closeness of the French word to
ours indicates that the Nietzschean use must be something
special, something different. Whereas in German (and for that
matter French) Nietzsche’s word is the same word used ordinarily,
albeit with a special use, in a special ‘language-game,’ in
English it is a downright exotic word used only within in
Nietzschean context. Some other factors intrude here: French
words are most often learned borrowings accessible to the
intellectual elite, so the Frenchness of ressentiment
rarefies it, makes it part of elevated parlance. “The German
word has . . . the connotations of a word of foreign origin,”
(128) says Rudiger Bittner. Thus it risks sounding pretentious
by using a French word which has so obvious an English equivalent.
Or perhaps, since nearly all of the people who would use ressentiment
in English are intellectuals, and ressentiment, as
a concept, implies that intellectuals are ill-motivated and
have erected their systems as a revenge against the naturally
strong, as a kind of trahison des clercs, an overtone
of resentment creeps into the enunciation of ressentiment
because the intellectuals who use it are, inferentially, admitting,
or appearing to admit, that they are up to something dirty.
In even mentioning the word ressentiment, intellectuals
are exposing their own false consciousness. Also, perhaps
there is an unease about not pronouncing the word correctly,
especially as it is so easy to leave out the extra syllable.
Thus, even in the epiphenomena of ressentiment, resentment
proliferates.
Though most intellectuals who use the word ressentiment
are conscious in the first instance of its Nietzschean origins,
it is Max Scheler who really popularized the term in a sociological
sense. Scheler (1874-1928) is an unusual figure, somebody
with a world reputation, but somebody who was judged as recently
as 1967 by a sympathetic biographer, John Raphael Staude,
to be a comparative failure (Staude 253). Scheler passed through
a series of intellectual phases, from Catholicism (to which
he converted at fourteen) to agnosticism, from an adamant
support of Kaiser Wilhelm to a begrudging acceptance of the
Weimar Republic. (Staude says [257], with reluctant candor,
that, though the principles of Scheler’s thought were ethically
opposed to those of Nazism, Scheler’s tendency to trim his
intellectual sails according to which side was winning would
have made him vulnerable to supporting Nazism if he had lived
to see it come into power). Scheler is seen as contributing
to fields as varied as phenomenology and sociology of knowledge,
and was a great intellectual inspiration to the late Pope
John Paul II. Scheler’s monograph on ressentiment
is an early book, and, for all its fame, lacks the intellectual
depth and technical sophistication of his fuller treatises
such as The Nature of Sympathy and Formalism
in Ethics. Some of what Scheler talks about as ressentiment
seems more like garden-variety resentment. For instance, he
mentions a mother-in-law’s resentment of her daughter-in-law
not only for stealing her son but for being a younger, prettier
woman. This not only seems rather gendered for our own day
but too trivial and mundane in apposition to Nietzsche’s far
more abstract and urgent rehearsal of the term. If the mother-in-law,
who Scheler terms “a tragic rather than ridiculous figure”
(64) generalizes her resentment of the younger woman into
a critique of youthful hegemony, and then, rather than contesting
it, assumed a posture of scornful superiority toward it, that
would indeed be ressentiment in the Nietzschean sense.
But all Scheler seems to be pointing to is a kind of backbiting.
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Similarly, Scheler mentions the case of e.g. a former President
now out of office who resents the fact he no longer has the
power held by his successors. Scheler’s primary reader would
think only of Otto von Bismarck, and Scheler indeed says,“The
‘retired official’ with his followers is a typical ressentiment
figure” (64). But Scheler ignores the more complex factors
at work here. Bismarck certainly resented that he was out
of power and that Caprivi and later Hohenlohe were in power,
but surely Caprivi and Hohenlohe also felt resentment that
their reputations would never be as great as Bismarck, that
they were known and ridiculed as hand-picked men of the new
Kaiser who could not stand competition from Bismarck, and
that they did not command the ear of Europe the way that Bismarck
did. In fact, Bismarck’s successors were no doubt more jealous
of him than vice versa. This entire example incidentally,
posits ressentiment as quite a modern phenomenon
indeed, because it is no relatively recently that there were
such a thing as ex-heads of government. Diocletian aside,
Roman history proffers no Emperors Emeriti; Galba was not
around to kibitz about Otho from the back seat of the chariot,
simply because society was not stable enough to accommodate
both power-holders and those who formerly held power. In both
the mother-in-law and ex-President examples, Scheler’s sense
of motivation seems impoverished compared to what a novelist
or dramatist of any distinction would do with these situations.
Scheler seems to assume a rather petty level of mentality,
that of the homme moyen sensuel, and leave it at that. Both
of these examples show Scheler retreating from Nietzsche’s
bracketing of the term ressentiment to include long-term
cultural patterns, not individual instances of resentment.
Surely the resentment you feel towards, say, the person who
replaces you in your job or runs off with your spouse is not
of the same order as the ressentiment that Nietzsche
says the weak, as a class, feel against the strong, as a class?
One understands the popularity of Scheler’s book among
sociologists, since sociologists, unlike literary critics,
are laudably undistressed by individual lapses, or even the
fundamental inauthenticity of the basic premise of a work,
if they can use it in formulating a methodological
frame. One also understands the value of Scheler’s other
writings to phenomenologists and philosophers of religion.
Nonetheless, Scheler’s ressentiment is a bit of a letdown
to actually read. It is a monographic polemic, and there is
an element of occasional writing, almost of
journalistic commentary, to it. Nietzsche’s very outlandishness
insulated On The Genealogy of
Morals from seeming like an Op-Ed piece, which is what Scheler’s
work often resembles: an informed, thoughtful commentary by
a prominent public intellectual on the editorial page of a
center-right newspaper. Witness Scheler’s offhand remark
that “The dictum of Wilhelm II about the ‘social
ministers’ is extremely pertinent and striking”
(133), or, even more hilariously, in a footnote, “Our
present-day semi-parliamentarism the German Empire is conducive
to the inner health of the people...” (177).
Even if
we bracket whatever our own feelings are towards Wilhelm II,
even if he had made a seemingly kind remark about the Weimar
Republic (as he was later, if with notably lesser enthusiasm,
to do in the 1920s) this sort of specificity, lacking both
Nietzsche’s wide vision and gestural brio, demonstrates
the limits of Scheler’s mode of analysis, its tendency
towards the journalistic and prudential. This prudential quality
constrains what M. J Bowles, in “The Practice of Meaning in
Nietzsche and Wittgenstein” (14-15) says of the creative possibilities of ressentiment: “Far from indicating the collapse of life, ressentiment in fact marks
the potentiality of a tremendous energy source. The question, alas, has always been, not how can
we save the mouse from running round and round on its treadmill, but how can we harness this
raw source of energy? What can we build with it?” It is not just, as Scheler seems to think,
something that is ‘wrong’ with society, something that can potentially be, in the medium-term at
least, cured. Scheler’s diagnosis only pertains to ‘current’ circumstances, with little long-range applicability.
Nietzsche’s ressentiment is not resentment, but resentment that has become internalized, in
which the weak have rationalized their own weakness by inversely privileging it as morally
superior to the strong. There is still resentment in the petty sense, but it is systematized in an
(inverse) transvaluation of values. On The Genealogy of Morals, though written in the 1880s, was
distinctly not just a tract of those times.
Nietzsche introduces ressentiment in On The Genealogy
of Morals, when he is contrasting the (historically situated,
though not actually historical) replacement of the dichotomy
of ‘good and bad’ with that of ‘good and evil.’ In the Homeric
aristocracy and similar tribal oligarchies, Nietzsche says,
there were simply the well-born and the base, and only what
we would today call class distinctions, not moral ones between
good and its obverse. The bureaucratization of organized religion
in the Mediterranean world, Nietzsche says, had a leveling
effect. With its ideas of sin and guilt internalizing the
physical struggle for existence, the priestly class operated
as a kind of disciplinary intellectual cadre. “He has to defend
his herd, but against whom? Against the healthy people undoubtedly,
but also against their envy of the healthy. He has to be the
natural opponent and critic of all rough, stormy, unchecked,
hard, violent, predatory health and power. The priest is the
first form of the more refined animal which despises more
easily than it hates. He will not be spared having to conduct
wars with predatory animals, wars of cunning (of the ‘spirit’)
rather than of force, as is obvious” (GM, III, 15).
This substitution of despising for hatred, the replacement
of straightforward antagonism with insidious envy, is the
characteristic mode of what Nietzsche terms ressentiment.
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Scheler’s book falls into two parts: a preliminary, and, as I have said, at times trivial
accounting of resentment in ordinary society, and then an impassioned argument refuting
Nietzsche’s assertion that Christian love was an expression of ressentiment. Scheler opposes
ancient Greek love, which, as in Platonic love, moves from the lower to the higher, to Christian
love. The Christian acts in the “peculiarly pious conviction that through this ‘condescension,’
through this self-abasement and “self-renunciation; he gains the highest good and becomes equal
to God.” The change in the notion of God and his fundamental relation to man and the world is
not “ the cause, but the consequence of this reversal in the movement of love” (86) Scheler sees
Christian love as being a kind of noblesse oblige, a shining of the light of surplus happiness from
the saved to the unsaved. This may be true of the love of Christ himself--the doctrine of kenosis
expounded by St. Paul in his Epistle to the Philippians, and commented on so thoughtfully in the
twentieth century by Romano Guardini, where Christ empties out his own divinity in order to save
mankind.
But it is more arguable whether, in Christian terms, it is
wise to say that this kind of love, what Scheler calls "sacrifice
for the weaker, the sick, and the small" springs from "inner
sanctity and vital plenitude" (90). For the Christian, Christ,
as God, certainly has these attributes. But the believing
Christian human being does not, qua Christian human
being, have them. The condescension of the naturally strong
towards the unfortunately weak sounds overweening when it
is cited as the source of Christian love by Christian human
beings to other humans. Surely the starting point for that
kind of love is our sense of our own inadequacy and smallness.
As opposed to Scheler's immediate analysis, when Nietzsche
singles out (his) contemporary anarchists and anti-Semites
as nodes of ressentiment, he means anarchism and
anti-Semitism as practiced throughout the nineteenth century,
not just in the 1880s. Nietzsche's scope of the present is,
say, a century long, whereas Scheler's is a decade. Thus Nietzsche's
critiques of the present are, in themselves, more abstract
than...
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Ressentiment
& Counter-Ressentiment: Nietzsche, Scheler,
and the Reaction Against Equality By Nicholas Birns