Envy and Ressentiment

1 Introduction

In his well-known, provocative, and engaging book The Age of Anger Pankaj Mishra explores the historical origins and mental mechanisms behind the current rise of global right-wing political movements, political authoritarianism, or religious foundationalism, which permanently haunt civil societies and contribute to the current social, economic, and political crises all around the globe. In the context of this article, I cannot discuss the “big picture” that he draws, but will limit myself to two theses by way of introduction.

As far as the question of origins is concerned, Mishra draws a line from the present to the European Age of Enlightenment, finding the historical root of many current conflicts in the mostly unfulfilled promises of individual equal rights, freedom, and progress. These boil down to two related influences, that “the culture of individualism went universal,”^[1] and that, rather than meeting the associated expectations of social and individual well-being, individualization has fallen victim to capitalist power interests, relegating freedom to a more or less empty economic category for many people. Political and religious radicalizations are therefore interpreted as reactions to these transcultural developments.

Mishra draws on the concept of ressentiment to explain the mental mechanisms motivating these conflicts, thus drawing on what has become a technical term, particularly since Nietzsche’s famous critique of morals. Expanding on Nietzsche and the theoretical perspective, he understands ressentiment as a universal driving factor in the struggle between socially and economically advantaged and disadvantaged individuals, groups, and social milieus: “An existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness, ressentiment, as it lingers and deepens, poisons civil society and undermines political liberty, and is presently making for a global turn to authoritarianism and toxic forms of chauvinism.”^[2] Ressentiment thus not only gains a global psychological function in the conflicts societies have to face, it seems to gain an almost ontological status, becoming a “defining feature of [the, C.S.] world”^[3] we live in. How this supposedly ontological claim can be understood is likely to be disputed; less controversial, however, is the psychological thesis about the social and political functions of ressentiments, especially as an almost undeniable number of more recent studies provide supporting historical and empirical material.^[4]

In this article, I take up these multifaceted debates about the manifold cultures of ressentiment, but, unlike Mishra, I am not interested in the global “big picture”, the construction of which raises plenty of difficult methodological questions. Rather, I am interested in the “small picture” of certain subjective and intersubjective ethical dynamics expressed in the emotional attitudes of envy and ressentiment. Of course, the treatment of this subject presents its own methodological difficulties, since both attitudes tend to hide and mask themselves, taking on other different forms. The challenge, thus, consists in bringing the more or less hidden mechanisms that subtly shape our relationships with each other to light, even in the case of morality and religion. I will attempt to address some of these difficulties by combining different methodological approaches, namely, a mix of psychoanalytical (Lacan), phenomenological (Scheler), and genealogical (Nietzsche) perspectives. The combination of such different theoretical tools may seem arbitrary and unjustified at first glance, but on closer inspection it becomes clear that these methods are not mutually exclusive, but complementary. This is somewhat due to the psychological significance running through all three approaches. Nietzsche and Scheler were, after all, great psychological observers in their own way. All three employ various tactics of discovery and exposure, aimed at problematizing the seemingly transparent and self-evident nature of everyday consciousness by peeling away its individual layers and analyzing its laws and elements, much like an archaeologist who digs deeper and deeper into the ground, in order to discover the whole structure of his object.^[5] In addition to this methodological point, there is an ethical concern that unites all three thinkers: they are interested in exploring the structural abysses and alienations of human existence and thus work on strategies to deal creatively with this situation. Their strategies may be very different in outlook and content, but they all touch on the liberation of the subject. In the first case, the psychoanalytical, the work of this liberation takes place originally through the so-called “cure of speech”, by means of which the subject can discover the hidden and repressed truth of their desire; in the case of phenomenology, it takes place through the person’s acts of feeling and will, realizing the value qualities and value modalities of the so-called “Ordo Amoris”.^[6] In the third case, the genealogical, it is ultimately about the individuals who free themselves from the coercive practices of traditional morality by creating their own law and thereby coming to a radical affirmation of their existence. Obviously, very different ontologies play a role in each case, but do not play a role here in my treatment of the topic.

I use these approaches for several reasons. On the one hand, Scheler and Nietzsche are known to be among the classical theorists of envy and ressentiment, providing insights into their origins, psychological mechanisms, and social effects that are still relevant to our contemporary understanding of the conditio humana. They thus serve as sources for exploring the pragmatic and semantic dimensions of these emotional attitudes. Lacan, on the other hand, is helpful in determining the general structure of the problem at hand. As is well known, desire is central to Lacan’s “return to Freud”. This is a starting point for the central premise of my considerations: I understand envy and ressentiment as emotional strategies for dealing with the situation of failed, unfulfilled desire. The chosen focus on desire seems to express a strong subject orientation. This impression is partly correct, as the human subject is at the center of my considerations. However, it will become clear that the individual subject, in turn, must be understood as a social structure. I therefore believe that a clear distinction between subject-oriented and non-subject-oriented approaches is misleading in the case of my topic.

Against this background, I will proceed as follows: After a brief methodological note (2), I will define the anthropological horizon of the problem (3). This sets the stage for a closer look at envy (4), its radicalization in ressentiment (5), and some ethical implications of this development (6).

2 Methodological Orientation

In talking about emotion here, I follow a basic definition that is widely accepted in recent philosophies of emotion,^[7] even where detailed explanations are still controversial. In this article, I will adopt a mostly conceptual orientation, which allows these controversial details to be set aside, in order to focus on emotion as a class of feelings that includes at least the following elements: quality of feeling, intentionality, evaluation. The first element takes up insights from the empiricist tradition which indicate that emotions have a specific quality of experience (Erlebnisqualität) that is also physically manifest; the second element emphasizes the situational embeddedness and object-relatedness of emotions and thus extends the empiricist focus to the quality of feeling; the third element indicates that emotions are accompanied by an evaluation of the situation in which the subject is engaged, although it is debatable whether the evaluative function is more judgmental or perceptual. These three aspects taken together suggest that emotions are best understood in relation to the actions that are motivated by them. This way of looking at things has brought about a profound change in the explanation of emotional life in the realm of analytical philosophy. This is despite the fact that the central insight into the intentionality of emotions is much older and, in the continental context, primarily associated with phenomenological approaches, which are understood as a further development of the concept of intentionality used by Franz Brentano.^[8] Husserl takes up this idea, but radicalizes it so that intentionality is no longer understood as merely psychologically descriptive, but rather as an invariant structural principle of consciousness that precedes any empirical psychological fact as its “Apriori.”^[9] In the following, I take up these older insights and expand on them in two respects:

Under the influence of Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre draws attention to an important methodological issue in his early sketch for a theory of emotions.^[10] He argues against a practice of psychological research that examines emotions merely as separate, specific events, treating them as if they were individual atoms, without paying attention to the context in which they stand and from which they derive their meaning. In other words, he criticizes a research practice that loses sight of the structural relationship between the part and the whole, and considers it is sufficient to examine individual emotions in themselves from a purely analytical perspective. His counterproposal is that a theory of emotions can only succeed if it is understood within the framework of a hermeneutics of existence, which, based on the notion of a “totalité synthétique”^[11] of the human being, understands individual emotions as acts in which human reality as a whole is expressed – even if only in perspective, and approximate: “l’émotion signifie à sa manière le tout [...] de la réalité-humaine.”^[12] From the opposite perspective, therefore, it can also be said that the analytical exploration of individual emotions already involves, or, to put it more strongly, presupposes, a more or less elaborate understanding of human existence. Analysis thus requires synthesis; perhaps it even presupposes from the outset a form of synthesis in the mode of the imagination.^[13]

This consideration points in the direction of a holistic understanding of emotion that includes both the bodily subject and the situation in which it is practically engaged. This approach is, of course, already determined by the concept of intentionality, according to which the relation between self and situation functions as a basic relationship that can no longer be transcended. Neither the self nor the situation exist in isolation from each other; rather, they function as irreducible moments of a relationship that includes them equally; they thus presuppose each other. If one follows this idea, an analysis of specific emotions such as fear, joy, hatred, or envy will not only examine the informational content that an emotion provides with respect to its object, but will also ask what this emotive connection conveys about the subject’s relationship to itself and what reference to action becomes effective in the process. Intentionality would then not be understood as linear, but circular, moving through different phases and comprising facets of the relationship between the self and the situation that mutually determine and enrich each other in terms of content.^[14] Thus, under our first approach, the emotional attitudes of envy and ressentiment not only have a historical cause and a situational reference, but also function as motivating factors of behavior, i. e., they make certain forms of a practical relationship to the world possible, restrict other forms, and in turn make others completely impossible. This ethical perspective, particularly, its negative forms, are of primary interest here. Determining its systematic locus more precisely requires us to follow the method proposed by Sartre and to mark the synthetic point from which human existence is to be grasped, that of desire.

3 Anthropological Matrix

Envy and its radicalization in ressentiment are social emotions.^[15] This is often justified by the fact that envy involves an evaluation of oneself and one’s social position in relation to others. It is thus related to a form of interpersonal comparison. It is not my intention to deny this connection, but I doubt it provides the central anthropological insight needed to determine the locus of envy and, building on it, ressentiment, in the fabric of human existence. Without going into the many factors at play here, one probable condition for the development of envy is that people are denied something others have that they themselves would like to have. This circumstance, in turn, is an expression of the fundamental fact that human beings are beings who relate to their world in different modalities of wanting. One of these modalities is desire. Understood in this way, envy as a social emotion is first and foremost an “Emotion des Begehrens” (emotion of desire).^[16] It reveals humans not as beings who first exist and then, subsequently, develop desires in addition, but as beings who can be structurally described as fundamentally desiring.

The study of envy and ressentiment thus leads us directly to the discourse of desire, which can be traced from Plato and Augustine via Shakespeare, Spinoza, and Schopenhauer to Sartre, Simone Weil, or Lévinas, to name just a few options. I take up this discourse through the lens of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, for which the concept of desire stands out more than any other in terms of systematic importance. Lacan was familiar with “désire” as the French translation of the “Wunsch” which had guided Freud’s thinking since his Traumdeutung. More broadly, Lacan had also been introduced to Hegel’s concept of desire by Alexandre Kojèves. This combination clearly reveals that Lacan’s understanding of desire incorporates not only insights he finds in Freud, but also a wealth of motifs from Western intellectual history.^[17] For this topic, I will limit myself to a brief conceptual differentiation and an interpretation of the theorem that captures the first key scene in the discovery of desire: the mirror stage.^[18]

To classify the concept of desire correctly, it is important to recognize that it is a mode of wanting distinguished in Lacan’s work from two other modes: need (besoin) and demand (demande). Desire differs from the biologically rooted need which can be physically satisfied, in that desire is located beyond the possibility of satisfaction. It becomes more complex in the case of demand, which for Lacan is always a demand for love. This is not surprising if we consider the situation of the child, who on the one hand can satisfy hunger by eating food, but on the other hand is not only concerned with his relationship to food, but also longs for the closeness, security and love of another person. Thus, the need for things is always accompanied by a need for love. The satisfaction of a demand appears to be more complicated than the satisfaction of purely somatic needs, but it does seem possible for the demand for love to be satisfied, at least temporarily. The dynamic of desire goes even further, by being declared fundamentally unfulfillable. According to Lacan’s thesis, desire is “la différence”^[19] that results when need is removed from demand. In this process, the determinacy of desire emerges within the framework of the symbolic, which, however, does not form a closed order, but rather an open system whose meanings are constantly reassigned. Seen in this light, even symbolically formed desire is neither clearly determined nor finally definable. It remains ambiguous and open-ended; its truth is hidden rather than revealed.

This rough outline reveals to what extent the identification at work in the mirror stage is an attempt to escape this systematic incompleteness. It should be noted in advance that although this theorem is not explicitly concerned with the topic of envy, it does focus on structures that can be regarded as conditions of the possibility for the development of envy and ressentiment. Its significance for developmental psychology is therefore marginal to this discussion, as I am primarily interested in the permanent structural moments that are established at this stage of the child’s development. These moments should be called “permanent” because they shape the human relationship to reality into a categorical perspective, leading Lacan to speak of a “structure ontologique du monde humaine”^[20] established in the mirror stage.

Under this assumption, a central point of the model is to set up a context for an early discovery of desire, primarily in the register of the imaginary, wherein the illusion of apparent fulfillment occurs. In his remarks, psychological observations and anatomical data are synthesized with philosophical ideas; one could even say that Lacan interprets psychological and anatomical information in the light of a basic philosophical idea taken from Kojève’s remarks on Hegel.^[21] This choice leads him to subject the early phase of infant development to a dialectic in which an antagonistic element is introduced. At the heart of this dialectic is the thesis that desire arises in the encounter with the other, the other being a certain image (imago) that the child acquires of itself. The well-known phenomenon that Lacan takes as a starting point for his interpretation is that children between the ages of 6 and 18 months show a spontaneous reaction of joy when they perceive their own image in a mirror. He also points out that the child immediately seeks reassurance from the person holding it in front of the mirror or supporting its bodily motor function. The child therefore seeks reassurance through the approval of a third, which transforms the initial dual relationship into a triadic one. The instance of a third can be a specific individual, but it can also be what Lacan calls the “Big Other” in an anonymized form. Examining the structure of this phenomenon highlights the experience as one of difference. A “discordance”^[22] arises between the child’s diffuse sense of self, which at this age cannot yet properly control its bodily functions, and the image in the mirror, which presents a complete Gestalt in which everything apparently fits together coherently, a fictitious ideal of wholeness: “one is an image, apparently coherent. The other is a complex of incomprehensible sensations, emotions and confusions.”^[23] This experience of difference gives rise to a complex psychological dynamic, two aspects of which I have chosen to examine in more detail:

The first aspect concerns the reference point of identification. The difference between the diffuse sense of self and the perception of the perfect image is processed by the child in such a way that it identifies with the “forme [...] de sa totalité”^[24] given in the mirror image. To a certain extent, it seeks the “unité idéale”, the “imago salutaire,”^[25] that image offers. In this way, the child fixes its unstructured, chaotic desire into a supposedly perfect image of itself. The child thus identifies with a figure given to it by an external environment, although it should be noted that this figure, i. e., the child’s self-image, is not made up of the subject’s own achievements. Rather, it is formed through a deceptive fiction that replaces experienced fragmentation with an ideal of wholeness, thus creating a situation in which an idea alien to the child marks the reference point from which what the child wants to be is formed. This early childhood situation reveals a pattern that is fundamental to our humanity: it shows that desire is experienced in confrontation with what we are not, that is, what we lack. The discovery of desire and the discovery of lack are interdependent, and the illusion of the mirror stage is to believe that one can successfully satisfy one’s own lack. This is an illusion because under the premise that desire is fundamentally unsatisfiable, the subject’s existential lack cannot be filled by anything in the world. There is always a hole in being.

The second aspect concerns a social dynamic that is already prefigured in the process of identification. It has to do with the fact that the fictional reflection not only constitutes an ideal self-image, but also creates an antagonism. The ideal of totality turns out to be a “rival other, on whom one can never steal a march.”^[26] This is because the ideal other possesses qualities that the subject lacks, and which the subject considers desirable and seeks to acquire. To enjoy them, therefore, one must affect the other’s desire and succeed in the social struggle for prestige. The erotic relationship of desire with one’s own image^[27] is thus mixed with a moment of aggression that provokes a reaction of envy, since it refers to the completeness of the image. In this context, Lacan, with reference to Charlotte Bühler, speaks of an original jealousy, a “drame de la jalousie primordial.”^[28] Here, too, a fundamental pattern of human existence seems to emerge. For Lacan, the early childhood experience of the mirror stage seems to be a kind of anticipation of a social struggle for prestige motivated, among other things, by envy and jealousy, because it is in this stage that fundamental structures are formed in the relationship between the self and the other. The fact that these structures are characterized by a certain asymmetry can be seen prototypically in the movement of the child, who seeks an affirming gesture from the adult. Without this confirmation, it would not be possible to assign a stable value to the ideal image. The social dynamic is thus constructed in a triadic structure that unfolds in the confrontation between the subject, the other, and the object, and that gains further contours in the Oedipal conflict. Desire and aggressiveness go hand in hand here: on the one hand, for the ego function itself, since the identification with the “unité idéale” of the image establishes an idea of the self that must necessarily fail, which in turn evokes self-accusation and grief. On the other hand, desire/aggressiveness play a role in the social situation and the competition for prestige, as those dynamics take place in a complexity of motivations that makes it virtually impossible to speak of a clear either-or. In this sense, Lacan notes the ambivalence of identification expressed in the mirror stage: “Cette forme se cristallisera en effet dans la tension conflictuelle interne au sujet, qui détermine l’éveil de son désir pour l’objet du désir de l’autre: ici le concours primordial se précipite en concurrence agressive, et c’est d’elle que naît la triade de l’autrui, du moi et de l’objet.”^[29]

The brief sketch of the mirror stage has highlighted a theoretical option for grasping the structural conditions of envy as an emotion of desire. According to the indications given, envy is based on a certain configuration of the relationship between the awareness of a lack and the discovery of desire in the confrontation with others. According to Lacan, erotic and aggressive impulses are equally effective in this situation, with the result that the structure of the subject in relation to itself and others is already characterized by a peculiar ambivalence of desire that is in principle insatiable. Seeing things in this way leads me to the thesis that strong forms of envy and, above all, ressentiment lead to formations of desire that tend to dissolve this ambivalence unilaterally in favor of the pole of aggression, without, however, being able to completely negate the erotic attachment to the object. Against this background, ressentiment, could be described as by Cynthia Fleury, as a form of desire that is essentially misguided: “[...] ce n’est pas seulement que l’individu désire ce qu’il ne devrait pas désirer, c’est qu’il travestit la notion même de désir; en s’aliénant à l’objet désiré, il désire mal.”^[30] This thesis will be developed in more detail below.

4 Envy

The above considerations confirm the initial assumption that envy as a social emotion is also an emotion of desire. It presupposes a social frame of reference, which – as indicated in the mirror stage – is integrated into the structure of subjectivity from the outset. We desire something that we lack and that others possess. We desire it because we hope it will validate our existence. Envy makes us feel we live in a situation characterized by human plurality and in which we cannot take the place of another person in order to claim the good that that person has for themselves.^[31] Envy is therefore about the experience of constitutive differences among human beings, to which the non-fulfillment of one’s own desire structurally belongs. Among other things, objects that others possess, but also social positions (prestige) and personal characteristics (talents, appearance, etc.) can be envied. However, it is not so much the goods that seem to be of primary relevance, but rather the symbolic meaning we attach to them, meaning which is charged with social imagination. If this is true, then we envy others for a good primarily because it is associated with the idea that it gives them, for example, a positive attitude to life or an advantageous social position that we lack. Seen in this way, the specific good functions as a placeholder for something else whose social value we can visualize in the medium of imaginative scenes. These scenes reflect our social being in a way that goes beyond the actual good, thereby endowing it with an aura of social significance that allows us to expect not only affirmation from others, but above all affirmation from the Big Other. Envy, then, is a triadic relation, not a dual one.^[32] Furthermore, if we follow Lacan’s logic of desire, these imagined benefits ultimately aim to replace the existential lack with a fantasy of fulfillment. For desire “is primarily a desire for what will make us whole.”^[33]

These considerations suggest that the interpersonal comparison of envy is about the self-reflexive clarification of the question of who we want to be in relation to others. For, in striving for what we are not and do not have, but others are and do have, a subject attempts to become certain of its own existence in the mirror of others by designing itself qua comparison with an imagined ideal figure of itself. It is thus always about one’s own value, one’s self-image in the face of others.^[34] Two forms are possible, a positive and a negative. Firstly, the positive form, which, however, only expresses a weak form of envy: I can envy another person in such a way that I would like to have something that they have, and thereby enter into a competitive struggle with them to acquire this good for myself. In this case, envy can be used to develop active, productive potential for shaping our relationship with the world. The negative form seems to be more concise and at the same time more difficult. For, I can also envy someone for something in such a way that I want the good for myself, but it is impossible for me to obtain it in social competition. This is likely to be the case in particular with personal qualities, since I cannot take the place of other people: although I desire to be like another person, I am unable to do so due to the plural nature of human affairs. This situation is suffered in a certain way: its hallmark is passivity in confrontation with others; its medium is the experience of one’s own powerlessness in the face of unfulfillable desire. A decisive effect of this seemingly passive experience consists in the fact that the aggressiveness it provokes is projected onto others, whereby I do begrudge the other person the good in question, whether it be a possession or a characteristic which distinguishes him as a person. Ultimately, this means that I cannot endure the differences that are constitutive for human beings. In this case, Max Scheler speaks of “Existentialneid” (existential envy).^[35] It is probably the strongest form of envy.

If it is true that envy is about the search for one’s own self-worth in the face of others, this second form of envy implies an ambivalent point resulting from the logic of the mirror stage.^[36] One could also speak of emotional ambivalence,^[37] in which love and hatred are felt towards the same object: on the one hand, my relationship to another person is negatively determined, because I do not grant her what she has and what she is. I negate it in her and thus negate her. In doing so, however, I achieve no positive gains for myself, but am committed to another person in what at first glance appears to be a primarily negative relationship. On the other hand, there is also positive moment in this relationship. For insofar as the relationship to another person is structurally central to being able to develop a self-image at all, in the act of envying I also affirmatively bind myself to the other person. In this act, moreover, the original associations and images are not simply erased from the mental process; they form the positively charged background to the ressentiment. An affirmative component thus emerges, but at the service of negation. Seen in this light, “Existentialneid” is tantamount to an attempt to define oneself through an act based on ill will, which consequently negates itself in its execution, since it cannot bear the reality of its object. It thus forms a relationship to the self and the world that is inherently negative: “Alles kann ich dir verzeihen; nur nicht, daß du bist und das Wesen bist, das du bist; nur nicht, daß nicht ich bin, was du bist, ja, daß ‚ich‘ nicht ‚du‘ bin.”^[38]

This constellation is qualitatively reinforced in ressentiment and made permanent in terms of time. While existential envy can still be tied to specific cases, ressentiment shows a strong tendency to expand, culminating in an imaginary closing off of the self against the factual challenges of human existence. This leads to an essentialization of the roles of perpetrator and victim, in which the subject loses not only an awareness of its own responsibility, but also the attitude of openness to the world. Following Nietzsche and, particularly, Scheler, it is this aspect that interests me.

5 Ressentiment

To better understand ressentiment, I will ignore the opposing philosophical programs of these thinkers and focus exclusively on what helps to analyze the phenomenon. The word “ressentiment” is a loanword from French, derived from the verb ressentir, which can be translated as “to feel” or “to feel vividly, to sense after-effects”. It is assigned an important function in Nietzsche’s critique of Platonic-Christian morality although Nietzsche himself does not develop an elaborate theory of ressentiment. Of central importance is the observation that in ressentiment the reactive forces of human life gain the upper hand; they are no longer exercised in relation to other people, as an act, but they are internalized, reflexively transformed, emotionally charged, and lived through in the imagination.^[39] In this way, the reaction to the non-fulfillment of desire is shifted to the inner life of the subject and permanently reproduced emotionally. This insight led Scheler to identify “das wiederholte Durch- und Nachleben” (the repeated reliving and reliving)^[40] of an emotional reaction and its negative quality^[41] as the two basic elements of ressentiment, which he ultimately defined as “seelische Selbstvergiftung” (mental self-intoxication).^[42] This definition makes it clear that the formation of ressentiment is not a purely passive event to which the subject is merely exposed. It is a self-intoxication, consisting of an action the subject inflicts on itself without necessarily being aware of it, and which may therefore be constantly repeated. Subject and object become one, which makes it difficult to simply identify this phenomenon somewhere. Despite this difficulty, there are some aspects which can be pointed out as consistent.

What ressentiment initially has in common with existential envy is the experience of powerlessness in the face of the social position of others. Crucially however, ressentiment becomes reflexive in some way, and the situation of powerlessness is understood by the subject as a direct humiliation at the hands of the other. The fact that I begrudge my counterpart his position, envy him his existence, extends to render the difference between us a direct humiliation of my person by the other. This perception of difference manifested as aggression transforms into ressentiment, with the other person being assigned an imaginary role as the agent of humiliation, which then shapes my determination of my social role. For the external observer, this difference as deliberate humiliation may not appear to be a necessary conclusion, but for the subject of ressentiment, it seems incontrovertible. This reaction is reminiscent of the pattern of the mirror stage, although here it is not the imaginary assumption of an ideal figure, but rather the reverse, a suffering from the difference, which is expressed in an aggressive reaction in the course of which I interpret the existence of the other as humiliating. While in the first case, the subject believes it can calm its desire by imagining an ideal wholeness, in the second case it seems to find no other way out of the pain of its own incompleteness than in a systematic devaluation of the other. The mirror effect is therefore negative. The fallacy, however, is that this strategy does not alleviate the pain but contributes significantly to intensifying and cementing it. This is because the experience of the situation, which cannot be expressed in words or deeds, is deposited in memory traces that are relived over and over again, with the effect that the pain remains trapped in the subject. Two points are relevant here:

First, it shows the active function of memory in the formation of ressentiment. This leads to a peculiar fixation on the past, which alienates the subject from the present and narrows their future horizon.^[43] In this way, ressentiment displays a proximity to trauma, at least when one aspect of trauma consists of being repeatedly haunted by a past event: “To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event.”^[44] Referring back to Nietzsche at this point, this fixation can be described as not wanting to forget the original experience; it is an active “Nicht-wieder-los-werden-wollen, ein Fort-und fort-wollen des einmal Gewollten.”^[45] The consolidation of the experience in the form of memory traces is therefore not a purely passive fate, but it has an active, volitional component. One does not want to let go of certain primordial scenarios of experience, but actively binds oneself to them by returning to them again and again. The more this happens, the more the subject gets caught up in these mechanisms. They become knots of identity. The power of memory therefore is quite productive in Nietzsche’s approach to ressentiment, primarily in a negative sense: “Man weiß von nichts loszukommen, man weiß mit nichts fertig zu werden, man weiß nichts zurückzustoßen – alles verletzt. Mensch und Ding kommen zudringlich nahe, die Erlebnisse treffen zu tief, die Erinnerung ist eine eiternde Wunde.”^[46] We see in this statement that Nietzsche ultimately interprets ressentiment as a disease. Memory is like a “festering wound” that does not want to heal. That is why everything the subject comes into contact with hurts, the good as well as the bad.

Secondly, the productive tendency of ressentiment to expand and generalize is already apparent. This has to do with the fact that with repeated reliving, the original association of powerlessness, ressentiment, and humiliation becomes more and more detached from its historical cause, and the affections associated with it are repressed. As we know, repression does not mean that the emotional reactions become ineffective; rather the opposite is the case. They retain their effect, but it is expressed in forms in which the historical cause is no longer recognizable. As a result, the original emotional preoccupations are shifted to imaginary complexes that are no longer directly related to them, but indirectly through a chain of associations. Against the background of this interaction of repression and displacement, Scheler now develops his far-reaching thesis that the original emotional reaction is increasingly detached from its object-relation and shifted to “unbestimmte Objektkreise” (“indeterminate object circles”).^[47] The more this happens, the more actual specific persons and their characteristics are abstracted and the perspective of a general object reference is introduced, which in turn shapes the relationship to the self and the world. Specific individuals, whose otherness I experience as a humiliation of my existence, are replaced by generalized persons, generalized characteristics, and generalized situations, with the result that even encounters with others that seem to have nothing to do with the original experience of powerlessness can act as a trigger for the feeling of constant humiliation:

Im Maße aber als diese Impulse ‘verdrängt werden’ [...], löst sich der Impuls von diesem bestimmten ‘Grunde’ und schließlich von diesem bestimmten Menschen mehr und mehr los. Er geht zunächst auf alle möglichen Eigenschaften, Handlungen, Lebensäußerungen, die dieser Mensch hat, weiter auf alles, was mit ihm zusammenhängt an Menschen, Beziehungen, ja Sachen und Situationen. Er “irradiiert” in allen möglichen Strahlen.^[48]

In this way, the unarticulated pain of one’s own incompleteness when confronted by the imagined completeness of others is decoupled from its historical context and can thus be recalled in all possible encounters that are associatively linked to the historical occasion through processes of displacement. Scheler emphasizes the suddenness and abruptness of the affective reaction,^[49] which is reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s definition of the demonic: “The demonic is inclosing reserve [...] and the unfreely disclosed.”^[50]

For Nietzsche and Scheler, of course, this is not the end of the story, since ressentiment itself becomes creative. It unfolds its full power as “Spreng- und Explosivstoff”^[51] by re-evaluating the situation and even forming concepts of social identity. In this way, new values are created, a common ethos is established, not through active participation and public determination of the situation of human affairs, but through an idiosyncratic abstention from overt active expression. Even if the interest in action is there, it remains in the imagination and is not acted upon. By dissociating from explicit action, the subject becomes entrenched in its agonizing inner life and combines this reaction with a systematic attribution of guilt and devaluation of others. Concepts of identity are thus created on the basis of a reactive counter-image that carries a continuous negative reflex: because you are bad, I am good.^[52] Of course, these processes take place without any substantial change in the underlying experience of humiliation. The scenario of mortification thus remains in the background, experienced emotionally over and over again, but paradoxically cloaked in the expression of symbolic power. This sheds light on some of the ethical dimensions of the development of ressentiment, which I will briefly discuss in conclusion.

6 Ethical Implications

The question of the ethical significance of envy and ressentiment can be approached in different ways. I will bypass the socio-ethical dimension of the issue, especially the connection between the development of envy and structures of social justice as discussed by John Rawls. Rawls even goes so far as to identify a variant of envy that is morally excusable because it is “a reaction to the loss of self-respect in circumstances where it would be unreasonable to expect anyone else to feel differently.”^[53] This is important and deserves mentioning, although it goes far beyond the interest of this present exploration. For me, two points in particular come to mind when discussing the significance of envy and ressentiment.They draw not so much on the question of justice as on the ethical foundations of human agency.

(a) Since ressentiment’s conception of identity is based on a negative mirror reflex, in which the mere otherness of others is interpreted as humiliating, an essentialization of social positions occurs that goes hand in hand with the illusion of being able to delegate responsibility for one’s own existence to others. The “because you are bad, I am good” reasoning means one does not rely on one’s own position as a center of initiatives that can make a difference in the relation between oneself and the world, but rather imagines oneself as a kind of closed Gestalt at the receiving end of an external initiative, thus assigning to others the responsibility for one’s own fate. Seen in this light, ressentiment could be described as “délire victimaire,”^[54] as a delusional essentialization of one’s own role as a victim. Saying this, I am not denying that we are all embedded in differentiated relationships of dependency in which we are exposed to each other and always must suffer and endure each other, of course in varying degrees of intensity. In this sense, a completely unharmed life does not correspond to reality. Ressentiment, however, draws an empirically unfounded conclusion from this fundamental interpersonal situation that has far-reaching ethical consequences. Essentializing the positions of victim and perpetrator not only leads to the delegation of responsibility, but also abandons the potential identification of breaking points in the repetition of the original traumatic experience. Such fractures can open ways in which the initial interpretation of this experience can be recoded, that is, they can open up possibilities for self-efficacy and resistance. Denying these possibilities has implications for the structure of ethical judgment.

(b) After observing that the cultivation of ressentiment leads to a generalized attitude toward the world, Scheler traces how this attitude undermines the capacity for differentiated, objective judgments. At least since Aristotle, distinguishing individual cases from one another has been ascribed to the ability to judge, determining what is common and what is different and, on this basis, searching for appropriate, case-related solutions in the mediation of situations and more general orientation schemes. Ressentiment not only resists such efforts to differentiate, but it seems incapable of doing so at all. According to Scheler, there are two main reasons for this structural narrow-mindedness: on the one hand, the generalization of ressentiment creates a mental structure that, even at the perceptual level, leads one to pay attention only to those facets of the situation which seem to confirm one’s own subjective position. Everything else is ignored. The scope of interest is thus clearly delineated against the background of the repressed historical origin: “So ‚verleumdet‘ er unwillkürlich Dasein und Welt zur Rechtfertigung seiner inneren Verfassung des Werterlebens.”^[55] On the other hand, this leads to a process that Scheler, in contrast to Nietzsche, understands not only as a revaluation but also, against the background of his ethics, as a “Verfälschung” (falsification)^[56] of values. In any case, what is structurally decisive is that positive values are turned into their opposite, ultimately creating a mental pattern that he describes as “organische Verlogenheit” (organic falseness).^[57] The emphasis here is less on individual value judgments that are made repeatedly; the term “organische Verlogenheit” refers rather to the ability to judge as such that has been severely compromised: it does not aim at differentiation and experimental mediation of different kinds of situations, but at compulsive generalization and blind unification. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that the complexity and ambiguity of reality are relentlessly subjected to a binary logic and that cognitive simplifications, sharp boundaries, and unambiguous, clear devaluations are used. In Fleury’s words, one could say that ressentiment thus aims at the end of the moral ability to differentiate: “[...] la fin du discernement, tel est le but du ressentiment: ne plus faire part des choses, viser la tabula rasa sans autre.”^[58]

The subject, entrenched in itself, thus no longer faces reality in the modality of searching, with curiosity and wonder, but has always already found it. The openness of the search has been exchanged for an attitude that believes that all relevant questions have already been settled. This is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to enlighten cultures of ressentiment about themselves. The ability to judge is itself affected by the “self-poisoning” mechanisms of ressentiment. Having reached this point, the next step would be to think about ways to change or perhaps even overcome cultures of ressentiment. Unfortunately, this is not possible within the scope of this article. If we want to think further in this direction, affective and cognitive strategies that rely on mental opening and openness, re-narration and re-evaluation become important, not to mention considerations about structures of social justice.