What does ressentiment feels like?

Feelings of impotence and inferiority

The phenomenon begins with the apprehension of one's own inability to realise a state of affairs that has a positive value. The POR, in other words, is pained and distressed by the fact that she remains incapable of doing what is required to get the job, the car, the partner, the status, the talent, the power, the recognition, the beauty, the wealth, or the happiness she dearly values.¹⁷⁶ This distress is often triggered by other persons and their relative successes or believed to be triggered by other persons and their relative successes. Wallace rightly claims that the men of ressentiment, because of their impotence, “find themselves in a con-ceptual situation in which the negative affect that dominates their emotional lives is directed at individuals whom they themselves seem compelled to regard as exemplars of value and worthy of admiration”.¹⁷⁷ The experience of ressentiment is claimed to be long-lasting, pain-ful, and to have an intensely corrosive effect on our lives.¹⁷⁸ Despite this unpleasantness, the phenomenon is grounded in a positive valuation which is often overlooked. The POR grasps the positive value of a state of affairs which she appears to be incapable of bringing about.

Physical infirmities, economic disadvantages, personal shortcomings or social conventions are some of the many obstacles preventing the POR from living up to her own values. Note that all of these obstacles may also just be imagined, in which case the POR will only believe that she is incapable of doing what is necessary to obtain the coveted good.¹⁷⁹ Certainly, the incapacity to bring about something we value can be a distressing experience, but such a common situation does not necessarily lead to ressentiment. Suppose I value living in a beau-tiful mansion. The fact that I cannot afford one may indeed be depressing, but does it neces-sarily turn me into a POR? Likewise, I may be fascinated by mathematics, admire the brilliant minds contributing to it, and yet find myself performing poorly in this field without being crushed by a sense of inferiority. In other words, shortcomings or external obstacles can be

175 RAM, p. 20.

176 As Wallace puts it: “[ressentiment] emerges under conditions in which people find themselves systematic-ally deprived of things that they want very much to possess, without any prospects for improvement in this respect” (Wallace, 2006, p. 218). Or Milosz: “First and foremost, a special mechanism had to be constructed in such a way that at every step, man stumbles over insurmountable obstacles to the realization of his aspirations, so that his aspirations are continuously impeded” (Milosz, 2005, p. 33. Emphasis added).

177 Wallace, 2006, p. 220.

178 Smith & Kim, 2007, p. 58.

179 Stopford writes: “it is not the fact of inferiority but feelings of inferiority that are decisive to the psychology of ressentiment” (Stopford, 2009, p. 66).

acknowledged without much drama. I admire my best friend's talent for mathematics, des-pite being incapable of competing with him; I value splendid properties and the status they bring with them, despite being unable to afford one. For the POR however, such impotence is fundamentally a distressing experience.

One may wonder what distinguishes ordinary cases of frustration and distress from those that eventually lead to ressentiment. Ressentiment seems to be triggered only when the frus-tration of a desire weighs on one's sense of self-worth because of the awareness of one’s abil-ities and inabilabil-ities. Considering the previous example again. The fact that I cannot afford to buy a mansion can be depressing and damage my self-worth, making me painfully envious of all my friends who can. In the same vein, my inability to understand formal logic can be depressing and trigger an unpleasant feeling of impotence. To say that we cannot always live up to some of our values is a platitude and such inability does not necessarily lead to ressen-timent. The crucial triggering element for ressentiment is that a particular good is experi-enced as important for one’s image of one's self-worth, and as a result its inaccessibility is damaging to one’s self-worth. Note that ressentiment does not necessarily involve another person, the POR’s distress may for example just depend on painful feelings of impotence. But many examples discussed by Nietzsche and Scheler involve another person or a group who possesses desirable goods and traits. In these cases the POR's distress is a feeling of inferior-ity compared to the person or group who enjoys the goods or virtues she covets. Byrne sum-marises the point:

[Ressentiment] connotes a particular feeling that is being re-felt, namely impotence. One's own impotence can be experienced in a wide range of concrete circumstances: whenever one is in the presence of something stronger, more intelligent, more beautiful, more noble, more holy than oneself.¹⁸⁰

The first distinguishing feature of ressentiment is, therefore, the enduring and unpleasant experience of one's impotence in bringing about a valued state of affairs or in preventing a negatively valued state of affairs from obtaining (from now on we shall, for simplicity’s sake, concentrate on the first type of case). The fox is miffed because he cannot acquire the coveted grapes; I feel distressed because my lack of talent prevents me from fulfilling my ambitions. A second feature is that the positive value must be relevant to the person's sense of self-worth so that the impossibility of realizing this coveted value damages her self-image.

In most cases, the POR's impotence is real but it can be imagined and its measure is always relative. My great talent as an acclaimed musician does not prevent me from feeling depressed and envious because a rival is even better.

180 Byrne, 1993, p. 217. Emphasis added.

Grasping a positive, self-relevant, value and being distressed by a feeling of impotence or inferiority make up the very first stage of ressentiment. This departs from some traditional accounts, according to which the phenomenon is mainly associated with the occurrence of particular emotions such as envy, malice, anger, spite, hatred, or a desire for revenge. But these emotions (and desires) can be distinguished from the painful moment in which the superior value of a rival is felt and one's impotence is simultaneously apprehended. Also, the POR, in particular, does not first come to the conclusion that he is inferior to a rival in some respect, or that he remains powerless to achieve a valued goal; the initial stage of ressenti-ment is typically an epistemic but non-conceptual contact with values. He is initially struck by his impotence and this typically leads to the thought of one's impotence which, in itself, is a deeply unpleasant experience. This epistemology of values will be described in more detail in Section 3.2.

Ressentiment-emotions

Let us now describe the emotions that characterise and reveal the sentiment of ressentiment.

These emotions respond to the original grasp of value and the awareness of the disvalue of impotence. What are the emotions that react to this initial unpleasant contact with reality?

Many have stressed that ressentiment is derived from the more familiar emotions or senti-ments of hatred and the desire for revenge.¹⁸¹ Yet, the most commonly cited response to impotence and inferiority are envy and anger.¹⁸² The POR comes to envy her more talented friend or her wealthier neighbour. A suggested common property of ressentiment's typical emotions is that they are intense and consuming. More than ordinary states, they are pas-sions that drain our energy away. As Nietzsche explains:

Nothing burns you up more quickly than the affects of ressentiment.

Annoyance, abnormal vulnerability, inability to take revenge, the desire, the thirst for revenge, every type of poisoning – these are definitely the most harmful ways for exhausted people to react: they inevitably lead to a rapid consumption of nervous energy […].¹⁸³

Other descriptions refer to the component emotions as negative. This is unclear though, for

“negative” can mean unpleasant or hedonically negative, sometimes however it means mor-ally bad, sometimes it just means bad, sometimes it denotes hostility.¹⁸⁴ We should therefore refrain from using it in order to avoid any confusion.

181 Leiter, 2002, p. 203.

182 Leach in Smith, 2008.

183 EH, I, 6.

184 RAM, p. 21; Solomon & Stone, 2002; Solomon, 2007, pp. 170-179.

Apart from being intense, ressentiment-emotions also involve several shared characteristic action tendencies, where an action tendency is a “readiness to execute a given kind of action”.¹⁸⁵ In particular, they involve tendencies to disparage a rival, criticise them, humiliate them, hurt them, strike back at them or cut them down to size. Australians use the expres-sion “Tall Poppies” to describe this tendency to downgrade the tall and successful individual of a group. The POR tends to try to cut down tall poppies.¹⁸⁶ We will refer to the action tend-encies as hostile attitudes.¹⁸⁷ The proper objects of the emotional episodes involved in res-sentiment is either a rival or an obstructing agent (or a person believed to be such) whom one wants to hurt or punish, or see hurt or punished. The POR may also want to take revenge on the individuals she believes are causing her unpleasant state, but these tendencies must nevertheless be distinguished from the hostile attitudes, for hostile emotions do not neces-sarily involve the attitude of blaming that revenge always presupposes. I may for example be pained by my neighbour's superior achievements and gleefully seek to tarnish his reputation without feeling wronged by him and thus without assuming he bears any responsibility for my suffering. Revenge on the other hand responds to the belief or impression that one has been wronged; it is therefore directed towards an agent who is perceived to be causally responsible for offending one (see Chapter 2). Scheler makes the point that blame is already present in invidious envy when one believes, erroneously, that one has been deliberately deprived of a good by a person or a group who possesses it.¹⁸⁸ This perceived responsibility appears, for example, when one blames the rich for one's own (poor) economic condition.

The POR's envy is often marked by her blaming of a group she apprehends as the cause – and locus of responsibility – for her psychological distress. Most notably, the importance of blame explains the presence of revengefulness in addition to mere envy. Envy entails blame when the envier comes to the conclusion that his inferiority is caused by a rival who is thus also a wrongdoer. He eventually comes to hold a person or a group responsible for either causing his suffering (“I feel bad and oppressed by his superior talent”) or his impotence (“All routes to success are barred by the rich/the patriarchy/white males/the Jews...”). Nietzsche believes it is a psychological law that suffering leads to blame and claims that:

[…] every sufferer instinctively looks for a cause of his distress; more exactly, for a culprit, even more precisely for a guilty culprit who is receptive to distress, –in short, some living thing upon which he can […] vent his affects, actually or in effigy: for the venting of his affects

185 Frijda, 1986, p. 70.

186 Elster, 1996, p. 1387; Feather, 1989; Mandisodza et al., 2006.

187 Not all hostile attitudes are emotions; a desire or thirst for revenge is a conative state, for example.

188 “Our factual inability to acquire a good is wrongly interpreted as a positive action against our desire” (RAM, p. 30).

represents the greatest attempt on the part of the suffering to win relief.¹⁸⁹

Poellner points out that “the ressentiment subject takes some other agent(s) to be respons-ible, either by actively causing [some experience of suffering] or passively by providing a focus of invidious comparison”.¹⁹⁰ Note that the expression of one’s hostility through blame comes with the advantage that the individual’s anger and general hostility seem justified as he then just seems to respond to some wrong (e.g. resentment or indignation).

One could argue that hatred is the general sentiment of the man of ressentiment and that hostile emotions are the affective episodic expressions of this hatred. Hatred is directed at an individual seen as an enemy¹⁹¹ as in Nietzsche's master and slaves parable in which the rival becomes an evil enemy. Hatred is also a possible motive; one says it is out of hatred that the POR originally developed deep-rooted dispositions for hostile and retributive emotions which are its characteristic manifestations.¹⁹² But ressentiment is a sentiment the manifesta-tions of which are hostile emomanifesta-tions (revenge, envy) as well as blaming attitudes (resentment, indignation). The distinction between hatred and all ressentiment-emotions is essentially the distinction between a sentiment and the emotions that belong to it. In sum then, ressenti-ment's characteristic emotions are intense, consuming, hostile and sometimes they involve blame. Hatred we shall later argue (Section 4.3) is sometimes seen to alter our valuations in a fundamental way. Hatred may for example be linked to value-blindness as it prevents the person to grasp or to be sensitive to new positive values.

Repression and reliving

Scheler mentions two additional properties of the POR’s emotions, namely the fact that they are 1) relived and 2) repressed. Let us start with the first condition. It is part of Scheler's definition that ressentiment is “the repeated experiencing and reliving of a particular emo-tional response or reaction against someone else”.¹⁹³ Or as Byrne puts it, it is: “an inability to let go of that experience; one keeps reliving and rehearsing it, causing it to swell and fester”.¹⁹⁴ We have previously argued that the mere frustration of desires does not suffice for the sentiment of ressentiment; there must also be self-relevant goods and values that are or seem unreachable, and which are often possessed by a rival compared to whom the POR feels inferior and against whom she turns her hostile emotions. For example, a distressing episode of envy felt after hearing about an old classmate's successful business venture does

189 GM, III, 15.

190 Poellner in Dries & Kail, 2015, p. 201.

191 Kolnai, 1998.

192 GM, I, 8.

193 RAM, p. 20. Emphasis added.

194 Byrne, 1993, p. 217.

not trigger my ressentiment on its own. However, if I were to be confronted with that person and her successes (say she is my rich neighbour), this would constantly remind me of my shortcomings and repeatedly arouse my envy. Note that the recurrence of the feeling, and my affective responses to it, are not dependent on the recurrence of the triggering event. One single confrontation or humiliation may suffice. What is repeated, if not interactions with the rival? The same hostile emotions may occur in response to repeated thoughts and relived feelings about an unpleasant fact, rather than a constantly renewed reaction to actual events.

The characteristic thoughts of an affective experience have often been reduced to mere beliefs, and especially to beliefs about the causes of the experience.¹⁹⁵ But this is too reduct-ive since the typical thoughts characterizing an emotion are rather occurrent “plans and fantasies” people have.¹⁹⁶ In Leutnant Gustl, Arthur Schnitzler portrays an officer of the hon-ourable Austrian-Hungarian Army, who is incapable of responding on the spot to an embar-rassment at the opera caused by a humble baker. Profoundly distressed and frustrated, Gustl enters into an obsessive grudge and ruminates on the event; he re-experiences the incident, revives his humiliation, and fantasises about ways in which he could have redressed the insult.¹⁹⁷ Depressive rumination intensifies and prolongs these sorts of negative moods. The POR dwells on the negative event and engages in counterfactual thinking. So ressentiment may also occur just because the individual constantly remembers an important and unpleas-ant event. In fact, such obsessive thoughts of past wrongs or humiliation are an importunpleas-ant mark of the phenomenon. Bernstein puts this point as follows:

Each slight, each abject compromise or moment of cowardice is lived through again and again, and since the sense of injured vanity can never be assuaged, existence itself is experienced as an endless recurrence of humiliations, fresh only in their infinite variety but dreadfully familiar in their affect and structure.¹⁹⁸

This reliving is the result of “a stubborn memory, impervious to time”.¹⁹⁹The POR's mind

“feeds itself on the past, chewing over painful memories of humiliations, insults, and injuries”.²⁰⁰

For Scheler ressentiment's characteristic thoughts are “not a mere intellectual recollection of the emotion and of the events to which it 'responded' – [they are] a re-experiencing of the emotion itself, a renewal of the original feeling”.²⁰¹ The phenomenon of re-experiencing

emo-195 Schachter & Singer, 1963.

196 Sabini & Silver, 2005, p. 52.

197 Schnitzler, 2002.

198 Bernstein, 1992, p. 102.

199 Marañón, 1956, p. 10.

200 Oksenberg-Rorty, 2000, p. 90.

201 RAM, p. 20.

tions has been the object of extensive empirical investigations in the context of post-trau-matic stress disorders (PTSD).²⁰² Re-experiencing can be very strong when negative memor-ies pop into the mind unbidden. A PTSD flashback, for example, is a vivid, emotionally laden, and involuntary episode. Similarly, the POR not only remembers past twinges of inferiority, he also re-experiences them.

But what exactly is the POR remembering and reliving? What are the objects of her rumina-tions? And how do her thoughts and memories relate to the fact of re-experiencing hostile emotions? Reliving or re-experiencing an emotion or any perceptual information associated with a memory is part of the remembering process itself. Memories with more sensory details are more emotionally intense. This re-living of humiliations, and the repeated presentation of one's own impotence and inferiority in thought, is an essential phenomenolo-gical characteristic of ressentiment. Ruminations on the past are stressed by Nietzsche, who regularly insists on the POR's inability to forget; she understands, he claims, “how to keep silent, how not to forget, how to wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble”.²⁰³ And such ruminations are deemed harmful:

Forgetting is essential to action of any kind, just as not only light but darkness too is essential for the life of everything organic. […] there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing, whether this living thing is a man or a people or a culture.²⁰⁴

Repetitive thinking is a core feature of emotional disturbance²⁰⁵; it tends to intensify the revengefulness and hostility of the individual,²⁰⁶ and to stiffen the character, rendering for-giveness harder if not impossible.²⁰⁷ Nietzsche takes it to be axiomatic that: “[…] there could be no happiness, cheerfulness, hope, pride, immediacy, without forgetfulness”.²⁰⁸ Unpleasant memories are sometimes relived as a destiny (Schicksal), nourishing an intense, and repressed, revengefulness.²⁰⁹ For Scheler, some destinies are particularly potent sources of ressentiment-ruminations. Cripples or Jews, he claims, may be obsessed with the thoughts of impotence or the fate of their exclusion and constantly relive it as something that needs to be avenged.²¹⁰ A humiliating rank in society – acquired or inherited – may also play this role

202 FOA et al., 1989.

203 GM, I, 10.

204 WPP, II, 60.

205 Watkins, 2008

206 Anestis et al., 2009.

207 Berry et al., 2005; Murphy & Hampton, 1988.

208 GM, II, 1.

209 RAM, p. 28.

210 “First in the discrepancy between the colossal national pride of 'the chosen people' and a contempt and discrimination which weighed on them for centuries like a destiny, and in modern times through the added

when a lower status or caste is imposed on some individuals as a permanent disgrace – a fatality which then triggers typical ruminations and sometimes forms of protest. As the

when a lower status or caste is imposed on some individuals as a permanent disgrace – a fatality which then triggers typical ruminations and sometimes forms of protest. As the