Internalisation

According to a very different account of ressentiment, “to be fully effective, ressentiment ree-valuation requires that the agent fully internalises the new values he creates”.⁶⁸⁹ If this were true, that is, if the POR did indeed manage to remove all traces of the old, unreachable, value-impressions from her experience, then ressentiment would involve neither a form of self-de-ception, nor its associated psychological tension. But what does internalisation here actually mean? Possible candidates are perhaps best described in common parlance as what we believe in – the verb Nietzsche uses above – or what we refer to as “our values”. Internalisa-tion is the identificaInternalisa-tion with a value, a consistent sensitivity to its obtaining and non-obtain-ing, and a series of characteristic emotional responses to it. According to some accounts – mostly, in fact, to some passages in Scheler's monograph –, ressentiment leads to a complete internalisation of the new values, for example, by altering one’s valuations and making one entirely insensitive – in fact even blind – to what originally was grasped as hopelessly desir-able, such as, say, the wealth of our neighbour or a talent like the talent of a friend. On this view, the fox apprehends the grapes as sour and simply carries on without any disagreeable consciousness of any kind.

One possibility that early phenomenologists have analysed in their epistemologies of values is that the POR simply grows value-blind. Value-blindness, a relative of Gestalt blindness and expression blindness, is understood as the inability to feel values of a certain type.⁶⁹⁰ In ordinary language, this is often ascribed by saying someone has no sense of or for, say, grace, injustice, or rudeness. May this also be the case in examples of ressentiment? Has the fox really altered his perception of values so that he fails to see that the grapes are sweet?

Hildebrand distinguishes two kinds of axiological blindness, one of which is an inability to use the concept of a value-property and apply it correctly, and a second one which refers to the insensibility to certain values, for example to the affective inability to feel aesthetic val-ues.⁶⁹¹ Some are more sensitive to aesthetic values than others, some are more sensitive to the elegant than to the sublime. One possible cause of insensitivity to one type of value is a strong sensitivity to a different category of (dis)values. An obsession with justice may make charity invisible. An obsession with the sacred, as in one whose overriding concern is to do the will of his God, might make all less important values invisible.⁶⁹² One plausible, Sche-lerian, explanation of the POR’s alleged blindness might invoke the role of hostile emotions, of which the most extreme is hatred which causes value-blindness.⁶⁹³ Scheler remarks that

689 Reginster, 2006, p. 258.

690 Mulligan in Goldie, 2009, p. 486; Mulligan in Merker, 2009, pp. 141-162.

691 Mulligan in Goldie, 2009, p. 486; Hartmann, 1963, chap. 16 e),

692 Hartmann, 2002, Vol. I, p. xx.

693 Spader, 2002, pp. 91-100.

the act of hatred makes the ears and eyes of the feeling of value and of value-preference deaf and blind.⁶⁹⁴ Scheler’s main argument for this claim seems to be that hatred always involves the detraction of the hated object. If this is true, two cases may be distinguished. The detrac-tion could involve coming to see what originally appeared to have positive value as being axi-ologically indifferent. Or it could involve coming to see what originally appeared to have pos-itive value as having negative value. It is the latter case that Vendrell Ferran has in mind when she points out that “hatred implies a closing down of possibilities of its object and in this sense it is blinding for values, not blind to values.”⁶⁹⁵

Ressentiment, then, is depicted as making us blind for values and their hierarchy. And, as opposed to cognitive states, value-feelings and preferences are non-conceptual. Their altera-tion is therefore an illusion, not an error according to Scheler's distincaltera-tion. On this view, res-sentiment is a deception of preferring.⁶⁹⁶ As Scheler puts it: “when we feel unable to attain certain values, value blindness or value delusion may set in”.⁶⁹⁷ One could therefore imagine the following:

Therefore a man who “slanders” the unattainable values which oppress him is by no means completely unaware of their positive character. It is not as if they simply “did not exist” in his experience. In that case we could not speak of a “delusion.” Nor can we say that he feels these values, but contradicts his own experience by false judgments—that would be a case of “error” or mendacity. The phenomenal peculiarity of the ressentiment delusion can be described as follows: the positive values are still felt as such, but they are overcast by the false values and can shine through only dimly.⁶⁹⁸

The POR is deluded. Her self-deception is an illusion and involves, it seems, a durable and irremediable alteration of her value-feelings and preferences: illusion of value-feelings is at the root of weak ressentiment and illusion of correctly preferring is at the root of strong res-sentiment, since correct preferences reveal the relative importance of values.

Ressentiment’s self-deception is therefore a form of blindness because the POR fails to grasp certain values, more particularly the very values (or exemplification thereof) that she denies are exemplified: the sweetness of grapes, the importance of mathematics, the prestige of an

694 As Scheler puts it:

Hass […] ist darum vernichtend im strengsten Wortsinn, da er (für diese Sphären) faktisch die höheren Werte venichtent und darum auch als Folge die Augen des kognitiven Vorziehens und Fühlens für sie stumpf und blind macht (GW, VII, 156).

695 Vendrell Ferran, forthcoming.

696 FORM, p. 88.

697 RAM, p. 35.

698 RAM, pp. 35-36.

expensive car. And this characteristic blindness allows the POR to feel better about herself as she becomes entirely insensitive to the very qualities she originally admired but that made her feel bad about herself.⁶⁹⁹ In the absence of those value-feelings and their associated feel-ings of impotence and inferiority, the hostile emotional responses vanish too. Scheler sug-gests that strong ressentiment, which is a blindness for relations of height and importance between different values, achieves just this, for:

[…] the impulses of revenge against those who are strong, healthy, rich, or handsome now disappear entirely. Ressentiment has brought deliverance from the inner torment of these affects. Once the sense of values has shifted and the new judgements have spread, such people cease to be enviable, hateful, and worthy of revenge.⁷⁰⁰

It seems one can distinguish a further phenomenon of the same kind namely the sensitivity to values that are not exemplified. The classic example for the latter kind of blindness is the man in love who sees the world through rose-coloured spectacles. In ressentiment, this mechanism may be at play when the individual turns into a Pharisee who sees moral dis-value, “unethical” behaviour, everywhere.

Our two types of ressentiment (weak and strong) correspond to two types of blindness: there is the blindness limited to the case where ressentiment makes the individual blind to certain values of certain objects (as in weak ressentiment), and there is also the blindness to rank-ings – hierarchies – of values (as in strong ressentiment). As Scheler puts it:

[...] when we feel unable to attain certain values, value blindness or value delusion may set in. Lowering all values to the level of one‟s own factual desire or ability [...], construing an illusory hierarchy of values in accordance with the structure of one‟s personal goals and wishes – that is by no means the way in which a normal and meaningful value consciousness is realized. It is, on the contrary, the chief source of value blindness, of value delusions and illusions.⁷⁰¹

Our distinction allows for the possibility of a value-blind POR who eventually grows insensit-ive to the prestige of her neighbour's cars, the musical talent of her friend and the power enjoyed by a rival but whose blindness or delusion consists in her coming to take social status, talent and power to be less important values and virtues than, say, the pleasant or the useful. Note that the notion of the relative importance of values, as we have pointed out, may be understood in an absolute fashion or it may be relativised to individuals or societies and it may be understood in subjectivist or objectivist terms. In sum, the view involves the claim that strong ressentiment irremediably alters the POR’s preferences in the same way weak

699 RAM, p. 34. Spader, 2002, pp. 91-100.

700 RAM, p. 49.

701 RAM, p. 35.

ressentiment affects the POR’s value-feelings. In both cases, they become blind or insensitive to the original values.

The central premise of this approach is that the reevaluation mechanism successfully numbs the POR's capacity to feel, prefer, and thus know, the positive values, or the scale of values, which causes her distress. This remedy is not a cognitive change (that is, an alteration of beliefs) nor a change in the emotions based on such belief, but a transformation of the intu-ition or awareness of values (value-feelings and preferences), which are affective non-con-ceptual acts and states of mind:

What is called “falsification of the value tablets,” “reinterpretation,” or

“transvaluation” should not be mistaken for conscious lying. Indeed, it goes beyond the sphere of judging. It is not that the positive value is felt as such and that it is merely declared to be “bad.” Beyond all conscious lying and falsifying, there is a deeper “organic mendacity.” Here the falsification is not formed in consciousness, but at the same stage of the mental process as the impressions and value feelings themselves: on the road of experience into consciousness.⁷⁰²

There is an important corollary to this set of claims. Judgements based on the altered value-feelings, and the emotions based on the latter judgements, are granted a semblance of justi-fication. The fox feels the grapes to be sour, the priests and the envious neighbour feel their humility and moral goodness, and Peter intuits that logic is less important than rhetoric. The axiological judgements and beliefs rooted in these feelings are thus defeasibly justified by the subject’s affective appearances. Scheler adds that the POR’s judgements are therefore experienced as perfectly sincere and genuine since she really feels the grapes to be sour and her neighbour to be greedy:

He who is “mendacious” has no need to lie! […] The value judgement is based on this original “falsification.” It is itself entirely “true,” “genuine,”

and “honest,” for the value it affirms is really felt to be positive.⁷⁰³

Ressentiment qua illusion suggests the new values are internalised on a fundamental and affective level.

But do the coveted positive values completely disappear from the POR’s experience? Most examples seem to suggest, on the contrary, that the POR never fully internalises the original values. The fox does not become blind to sweetness, nor do I grow blind to the virtues and achievements of my neighbour. In fact, the POR rather becomes obsessed with these positive, but for him unreachable, values, the experience of which he then tries to repress in some way or the other. One problematic consequence of the application of the concept of value-blind-ness within the illusion theory is phenomenological. Blindvalue-blind-ness seems to provide the POR

702 RAM, p. 49.

703 RAM, p. 36.

with a complete and durable relief from the psychological tension of ressentiment. But this is at odds with our ordinary understanding of the phenomenon which apprehends it as a

“poisoned sense of life”.⁷⁰⁴ Ressentiment, even in its later stages, is a practically irrational strategy – a strategy that, as Nietzsche puts it, makes the “sick sicker”, that soothes the POR’s wounded self-esteem but poisons the wound at the same time. A second issue is that, if the POR’s value-feelings were indeed altered entirely, her emotions would be defeasibly justified.

The reason for her indignation would be, for example, her apparent knowledge of her neigh-bour’s greed and immorality.

Although Scheler’s description conveys the impression that he thinks that ressentiment involves a successful internalisation of new values, in other passages, he claims, inconsist-ently, that such internalisation remains in fact imperfect. The relief which the attempted illu-sion provides is never complete because the experience of values remains mixed. As he puts it

[…] the positive values are still felt as such, but they are overcast by the false values and can shine through only dimly. The ressentiment experience is always characterized by this “transparent” presence of the true and objective values behind the illusory ones – by that obscure awareness that one lives in a sham world which one is unable to penetrate.⁷⁰⁵

Above we introduced the distinction between valuations and evaluations by noting the ana-logy between this distinction and the more familiar, but by no means uncontroversial, dis-tinction between the non-conceptual content of perception and the conceptual content of perceptual judgement. But Scheler’s claim here entails a disanalogy between the two distinc-tions. The sensibility to value stands to axiological beliefs and judgements in many respects as seeing to perceptual judgement, but not in all respects. For in perceptual illusion, as when I take the cat to be a dog, there is no background awareness of the cat as a cat. But when the POR takes a good object to be bad there is indeed a background awareness of the object as good. It is because of the experience of such background awareness that ressentiment is prac-tically irrational: it does not provide a durable relief and the POR continues to be sensitive to the very values she tries to ignore. It also forces her to continually support the newly acquired values and preferences. Scheler’s account may provide an interesting description of cases such as the one where I feel my neighbour to be greedy while, in the background, I still apprehend him as an admirable and courageous entrepreneur. Note however that such an account is hardly conceivable for the rare – and, we argued, mostly theoretical – cases where reevaluation manipulates opposite values, for example by turning sweet grapes into sour ones, or a beautiful car into an ugly one. For, can the perception of something as ugly really

704 RAM, p. 49.

705 RAM, p. 36.

coexist with the background awareness that it is beautiful? Perhaps ressentiment never really faces such a difficulty, because, as we argued, the reevaluation process does in fact manipu-late values of a different domain. Hence, the POR may feel the car is racy and prestigious and come to feel that its owner is greedy. Greed is a disvalue but in no way is it the polar opposite of raciness or prestige. Scheler's account may therefore suggest that ressentiment entails a deep rooted change of focus. The non-conceptual grasp of a neighbour's greed is what dom-inates the POR’s experience, but she is still acquainted with the positive values of the car. It is the apprehension of the neighbour as greedy which, in this example, is considered to be an illusion.

This account clearly avoids the pitfalls of doxastic incompatibility since here ressentiment’s psychological conflict only involves the alteration of our non-conceptual perception of val-ues. But, at the same time, it assumes that the POR is only the passive victim of a convenient illusion. When the POR comes to take her neighbour to be greedy, the change is quite funda-mental and therefore very different from simply coming to believe her neighbour is greedy because she wishes to hold such a belief (wishful thinking) or because her judgements and beliefs – not value-feelings – are biased and motivated by (repressed and relived) episodes of envy. It seems rather difficult to reconcile this view with the fact that value-feelings are only passive and not subject to the will, and somehow still present as the POR continues to show an intense sensitivity to the very values he denies. The difficulty has to do with the fact that ressentiment and the reevaluation strategy are ordinarily apprehended as, in some sense, an intentional strategy. The POR is not an admirable character who is the victim of a massive delusion, but someone we consider responsible for her own Pharisaism, Tartufferie, and mendacity - someone who knowingly and intentionally avoids being confronted with experi-ences of values that make her feel bad. Therefore, we should reject the view that ressenti-ment involves a successful internalisation of new values and a blindness to the original, pos-itive, but distressing values.