Conclusion

What can we conclude from the foregoing? Resentment is an affective response to the fact that a wrong has not been righted, which harms my sense of self-worth directly (I am the vic-tim) or indirectly (someone else is the vicvic-tim). We also argued that the injustice is not a fea-ture of the action (or omission) itself, but of the fact that a wrong remains unremedied.

Resentment is a kind of anger, which is marked phenomenologically by the fact that it lasts longer than the affect of anger and that its characteristic impulses cannot be acted on. For resentment to occur one first needs to become the victim of an offence, or perceive a state of affairs as a personal wrong, which is a wrong someone inflicts on me or a friend, or by any-thing perceived as a wrong inflicted upon me or a friend, and against which one cannot retaliate on the spot. Resentment's formal object is the disvalue of the fact that the wrong has not yet been righted, the disvalue of injustice. By contrast, the formal object of ordinary anger (Ärger) is the disvalue to me of whatever frustrates my projects, including the inanim-ate world or a wrong that can be righted on the spot. This definition departs from traditional approaches that consider the wrongful act against me to be the bearer of the disvalue of injustice.

Our definition of resentment allows us to understand: 1) resentment's “concern for justice”

and “relevance for the self”; 2) the concomitant desire for revenge; and 3) why acts as diverse as a trifling insult (pride-injury), torture or the mere lack of recognition (dignity-in-jury) may cause resentment. It also explains why 4) the resenter always attributes respons-ibility for his condition to some entity (person, group, or deity) that is the proper object of resentment and 5) the fact that that my sense of pride and dignity can depend on another person's fate. This definition also encompasses cases in which resentment is felt after an offence is inflicted upon someone other than me. The phenomenology of resentment reveals that the individual's painful experience revolves around the fact that a past wrong is still not

125 Fehr & Gächter, 2000

redressed, and that the wrongdoers get away without being punished for their actions.

Finally 6), resentment's proper object is the person or group who wronged me or is per-ceived to have done so. The formal object of resentment – the injustice that a wrong is not righted – is damaging to my sense of self-worth qua dignity or self-respect. One can feel resentful if others get wronged only when the offence they suffer is experienced as impinging on me (e.g. wrongful actions against my family, friends, compatriots, etc.). Indigna-tion on the other hand is an emoIndigna-tion triggered when others fail to instantiate my values, which is experienced as an impersonal wrong. I become indignant when those wrongs are not redressed and their authors never punished. This is indignation qua response to injustice. But there is also indignation qua response to immodesty, cowardice, or laziness, for one can also be indignant when others fail to be modest, courageous or healthy as they are important values to me. All cases of indignation are cooler than resentment as they do not hurt one's self-respect.

Our definitions of resentment and indignation will allow us to untangle the recurrent confu-sions that persist when they are related or reduced to the phenomenon of ressentiment proper. Of course, the lexicographic similarities lead to challenging semantic difficulties, and the fact that both resentment and indignation seem to be part of the experience of ressenti-ment just adds to its complexity. One intuition in particular is regularly advanced: the kind of resentment or indignation harboured by the man of ressentiment is not authentic, but propped up, and a mere posture. A theory of ressentiment will allow us to understand what lies behind this claim.

3 W

?

We shall now present a theory of ressentiment. But before we start, let us briefly review the history and etymology of this rather modern word. “Ressentiment” was originally a French expression, which made its way into German in the second half of the 19^th century thanks to the controversial writer Eugen Karl Dühring. In the many editions of his book Der Wert des Lebens (1865), Dühring develops the idea that all concepts of justice (Gerechtigkeitsbegriffe) have an affective grounding in the reactive feeling of ressentiment, which belongs to the same family as revenge.¹²⁶ Some authors trace Nietzsche's usage of the term back to the French critic and historian Taine, whose writings on the French Revolution were allegedly highly admired by the German philosopher.¹²⁷ It has also been argued that Kierkegaard used the expression even earlier and thus anticipated the Nietzschean concept. This, however, is the unfortunate outcome of Theodor Haecker’s anachronistic translation (1914) of the Danish word for envy (misundelse) as ressentiment, which, by then, was already a common philo-sophical concept.¹²⁸ Today, ressentiment is still used by Germans as a synonym for holding a grudge.¹²⁹ In vernacular French, the word has an older history. Originally, it was used as a synonym for the mere memory of painful experiences, especially when they touch one’s pride or self-love.¹³⁰ But Sévérac rightly points to another possible meaning, recorded in Furetière's Dictionnaire universel (1690), where the word designates the emotional reaction to both good and bad events (or to the memories thereof). The positive meaning (related to good events) has disappeared. Yet the reactive dynamic and the importance of thoughts and memory in the form of a recollection of past bad treatments remain essential to the concept.¹³¹ Only in the 19^th century did the French word start to designate a phenomenon

126 Small, 1997, p. 40-41; Dühring, 1865, p. xviii. In this first edition of his book, the German author explains:

Das Rechtsgefühl ist wesentlich ein ressentiment, eine reaktive Empfindung, d.

h. es gehört mit der Rache in dieselbe Gefühlsgattung. Ist nun die bisher stets übersehene Beziehung, in welche wir die Rache und das ganze System aller moralischen und juristischen Rechtsbegriffe setzen, richtig, so folgt mit Notwendigkeit, dass auch die Vorstellungen von einer transzendenten Gerechtigkeit auf dieselbe Quelle, nämlich den Rachetrieb, zurückzuführen sind (Dühring, 1865, p. 219).

127 Cate, 2002; Meltzer & Musolf, 2002.

128 Calinescu, 1987, p. 343; Poole, 1993, p. 304; Kaufmann, 1980, p. 125. Later (1940), Alexander Dru followed Theodor Haecker's translation.

129 Bittner in Schacht, 1994, p. 128.

130 He explains: “Le ressentiment est donc un retentissement, le retentissement d'une souffrance, d'un mal causé dans le passé mais qui continue à produire, au présent, ses effets” (Sévérac in Grandjean & Guénard, 2012, p. 115). And later adds: “De Pascal nous pouvons d'abord retenir que le ressentiment […] se vit […]

comme le retentissement intérieur d'un amour de soi blessé” (ibid., p. 130).

131 Note that Pascal, Leibniz, and Spinoza have all described parts of the mechanism of ressentiment as we shall define it later. However, they designate the phenomenon in different terms, namely as anger, hatred, or vengeance. The usage, in French, of “ressentiment” proper remains quite rare (Sévérac in Grandjean &

Guénard, 2012, p. 117).

closer to our modern understanding of resentment as an affective reaction to offences, injustices, or unflattering social comparisons coupled with an intense desire for revenge. In ordinary speech, its closest synonym is “rancour”, although the latter lacks any form of intense revengefulness. At the time of the second industrial revolution, the term was used by the French elite to depict and condemn what they perceived to be the secret motivation of revenge behind the proletariat's protests.¹³² Ressentiment is now also associated with a form of shallowness, or inauthenticity. For example, the expression is often used to criticise grand ideologies or doctrines such as Nazism, feminism, egalitarianism, or communism; ressenti-ment, many authors believe, is the ultimate motive behind these movements and it is differ-ent – less admirable – from the motives they profess.¹³³

The expression became notorious with Nietzsche's extremely influential Genealogy of Morals (1887), which has been subject to many readings.¹³⁴ The philosopher aims to give an argu-ment that is largely empirical and offers to unveil the social, historical, and psychological conditions that allowed early Christian morality to gain momentum.¹³⁵ Yet Nietzsche’s ulti-mate goal is to assess the value of that same morality,¹³⁶ and this can only be achieved – he claims – by gaining a better understanding of morality and its origins, which are rooted in the psychological mechanism of ressentiment.¹³⁷ Nietzsche of course had a tremendous impact on European philosophy and literature. His psychological insights, and the concept of ressentiment in particular were seriously considered by Else Voigtländer, a phenomenologist and student of Theodor Lipps, who discusses the concept as early as 1910.¹³⁸ In her book

132 Jarrige in Grandjean & Guénard, 2012, pp. 83–85.

133 Angenot, 1997; Jarrige in Grandjean & Guénard, 2012, pp. 82–83; Schuman, 1936.

134 For an overview of the reception of The Genealogy, see Schacht in Gemes & Richardson, 2013, pp. 323–342.

135 As Nietzsche puts it: “eventually my curiosity and suspicion were bound to fix on the question of what origin our terms good and evil actually have” (GM, Preface, 5). Leiter suggests that the Genealogy's ambi-tion is clearly historical and aims at providing a factual account of the origins of (Christian) morality (see:

Leiter, 2002; Jaggard in Gemes & Richardson, 2013, p. 348). Note that here we will follow what we believe to be the most plausible line of interpretation of his account of morality, one that strongly departs from the (traditional) postmodern reading by considering Nietzsche to be a philosopher of human nature whose aim is to provide a naturalistic, psychological, and historical set of arguments for his theses (Leiter, 2002;

Schacht in Gemes and Richardson, 2013, pp. 323–343).

136 As Nietzsche explains:

[W]e stand in need of a critique of moral values, the value of theses values itself should first of all be called into question. This requires a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances of their growth, development, and displacement (GM, Preface, 6).

An important distinction to bear in mind is that the reevaluation of values which the philosopher wants to trigger is different from the reevaluation of values characteristic of ressentiment.

137 Nietzsche makes this very explicit in EH, when he reviews the aim of GMwhich is concerned with “the birth of Christianity out of the spirit of ressentiment” (EH, III). He also claims that “morality is just a sign language of the affects” (BGE, 187).

138 Schuhmann in Poli, 1997, p. 48.

Vom Selbstgefühl, Voigtländer embraces the Nietzschean view and defines the phenomenon as an alteration of values. Her analysis stresses the importance of the feeling of self-worth, and how, more particularly, ressentiment is the mark of a wounded self-esteem that tries to find a compensation in a reevaluation.¹³⁹ But the most notable reaction to the Nietzschean project comes from a famous colleague of hers, Max Scheler, in his Das Ressentiment im Auf-bau der Moralen.¹⁴⁰ In this essay, the then Catholic philosopher argues against Nietzsche, that Christianity, and its concept of love, are completely devoid of ressentiment. Interestingly, however, he agrees with Nietzsche on the central role of ressentiment in modern ideologies and the bourgeois ethos, and embarks on a very detailed description of its many facets, which in some respect builds on Nietzsche's descriptions.¹⁴¹ Scheler's argumentation, unlike Nietzsche's, has a clearly conceptual part and offers an explicit definition of the phenomenon that he famously associates with a self-poisoning of the mind, as well as a typology in which he discusses, for example, what he takes to be forms of ressentiment such as the love of humanity (Menschenliebe) or relativism. More recently, the expression has been discussed in the context of transitional justice,¹⁴² in Merton's sociological theory,¹⁴³ and of course by Niet-zsche exegetes with a renewed interest in his moral philosophy.¹⁴⁴ But in general, “ressenti-ment” is still used only marginally. Under a different name, however, the phenomenon and its variants have had more success, especially in the philosophy of emotions and the philosophy of self-deception. An important example in that respect is Elster's theory of sour grapes.¹⁴⁵ Perhaps because of this philosophical heritage, and the decision made by most (German) philosophers to keep using the French word, the educated English person now has two dif-ferent expressions at his disposal: “resentment” and “ressentiment.” The latter remains uncommon and primarily restricted to academic jargon. In more recent philosophical literat-ure, resentment and ressentiment are regularly used interchangeably, causing much confu-sion.¹⁴⁶ Ressentiment is often thought of as “a particular and especially virulent and patholo-gical form of resentment, amounting to a kind of hatred of others to whom one is in thrall”.¹⁴⁷

139 Voigtländer, 1910, p. 46; Vendrell Ferran, 2008, pp. 227–228.

140 Three revised versions were published between 1912 and 1919. We will use the version of 1915 exclus-ively.

141 “If we look at European history, we are struck by the enormous effectiveness of ressentiment in the forma-tion of moralities. Our task is to determine its role in the formaforma-tion of Christian morality on one hand, of modern bourgeois morality on the other.” (RAM, p. 53).

142 Améry, 1968; Minkkinen, 2007; Brudholm, 2008.

143 Merton, 1997.

144 Leiter, 2002; Poellner, 2007; Wallace, 2006; Reginster, 1997.

145 Elster, 1983; Elster, 2010.

146 The translation of Nietzsche's works into English has not always been consistent in this respect. In the 1918 version of Horace B. Samuel, ressentiment is replaced by resentment.

147 Schacht in Gemes & Richardson, 2013, p. 329.

Finding out whether both concepts are truly distinct and, if they are, determining how they are related is an important desideratum for any theory of ressentiment.

The expression has no adjectival or adverbial form; of an individual experiencing it, we thus have to say that he is a “person of ressentiment”. We will therefore use the acronym POR (per-son of ressentiment) from time to time, if only in order to avoid too many repetitions.

If “ressentiment” denotes a real phenomenon in ordinary life, we should all have some pre-theoretical grasp of it. Let us try to illustrate this grasp with some examples. To start with, we may be familiar with such characteristic figures as the failed artist who condemns fame and praises authenticity and other virtues precisely because the former eludes him; or the self-righteous politician who likes to disparage the rich and famous because he secretly envies them. The religious ascetic who craves sensuality but condemns the morals of our society as depraved. We may also be familiar with the envious man who criticises his suc-cessful neighbour and congratulates himself for the virtues of humility and frugality he believes himself to possess. Or the intellectual who struggles with mathematics and logic and as a consequence of his struggles comes to claim that they are less important than the field of rhetoric. Then of course there is the popular fable of the fox and the grapes which represents the frustrated animal who is unable to reach the grapes and eventually comes to pretend they are sour. And then, the less common, but still important, example of the priests in Nietz-sche's Genealogy of Morals who suffer from their weakness in comparison to the rulers, but turn their incapacity into a virtue.

We will begin our inquiry with a description of the experience of ressentiment and its differ-ent characteristic parts, namely, an original sense of impotence and inferiority, hostile emo-tions such as envy, revenge, and its typical marker Schadenfreude. In response to this, the POR, according to both Scheler and Nietzsche, indulges in a process of reevaluation – an essential mechanism that will be analysed in the second section.

In the following, we will first determine the relation between ressentiment and other psycho-logical states such as envy, hatred, malice, anger, resentment, indignation, and a desire for revenge (3.1.1). We shall focus on their respective formal objects, especially when these emo-tions occur as a part of the broader phenomenon of ressentiment (3.1.2). Additionally, we will reconsider two central – and often confused – phenomena: the feeling of inferiority and the feeling of impotence, and contrast them with the experience of frustration and unfulfilled desires. We shall claim that the feeling of inferiority rather than mere frustration or acknow-ledgement of one’s impotence constitutes the initial experience of ressentiment (3.1.3). Also, we will suggest a distinction between two families of self-regarding attitudes which greatly clarifies the very nature of the POR's experience compared to genuine episodes of

resent-ment or indignation. We will argue that ressentiresent-ment expresses a damaged sense of self-esteem rather than self-respect (3.1.4). In conclusion, we should then be able to determine the very nature of ressentiment, and delineate it from all other central categories of the philo-sophy of emotions.