Max Scheler in the Contemporary Events of Philosophy (Max Scheler im Gegenwartsgeschehen der Philosophie) – Max Scheler

Ressentiment as a Self-Poisoning of the Mind

What the Work Is

Ressentiment is a 1912 book by the German philosopher Max Scheler, published in German under the fuller title Über Ressentiment und moralisches Werturteil (On Ressentiment and Moral Value Judgment). Scheler, a leading figure in the phenomenological tradition and a developer of the method of Edmund Husserl, wrote the work as an investigation of a distinctive psychological and ethical phenomenon. The book is a study in ethics and social psychology, and it is often described as at once Scheler’s darkest and his most psychological and sociological topic — one that foreshadowed later findings in those social sciences. The French spelling of the term has been retained by convention in philosophical circles to preserve its broad range of discursive meaning.

What the Book Is About

The book examines what Scheler calls “a special form of human hate” and the related social and psychological phenomena that furnish a descriptive basis for his concept of ressentiment. Ressentiment, in Scheler’s account, is a self-poisoning of the mind with definite causes and consequences: a lasting mental attitude produced by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects that are themselves normal components of human nature. When such emotions are repressed, they generate a constant tendency toward particular kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments. The emotions chiefly involved are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite.

As a concept belonging to ethics, ressentiment represents the antithetical process of Scheler’s emotively informed, non-formal ethics of values. Where the direction of personal transcendence and ethical action runs toward positive and higher values, the direction of ressentiment and unethical action runs toward negative and lower values. The book thus stands as the dark underside, or inversion, of Scheler’s vision of a personal and transformational ethics of values.

Key Ideas and Themes

The hierarchy of value modalities. Ressentiment must be understood in relation to what Scheler terms the a priori hierarchy of value modalities. Values, on this view, are emotively experienced with reference to a universal, objective, constant, and unchanging hierarchy. From lowest to highest, these modalities — each with a positive form and a corresponding negative dis-value — are: the sensual values of the agreeable and the disagreeable; the vital values of the noble and the vulgar; the mental or psychic values of the beautiful and ugly, right and wrong, and truth and falsehood; and finally the values of the Holy and Unholy, of the Divine and Idols.

Genesis in ordinary feeling states. Ressentiment has its origin in negative psychic feelings and feeling states that most people experience as normal reactive responses to social life: envy, jealousy, anger, hatred, spite, malice, joy at another’s misfortune, mean-spirited competition, and the like. These may be occasioned by almost anything — personal criticism, ridicule, mockery, rejection, abandonment. The ethical and psychological question becomes how the energy from such feeling states will be channeled, whether to the benefit of the individual and society or toward their harm.

Comparison and the coveting of another’s goods. Ressentiment is highly situational: it always involves mental comparisons and value judgments directed at other people who appear to lack such feelings and who exhibit genuinely positive values. It may begin with something like admiration and respect but ends in a coveting of another’s qualities and goods — advantages of beauty, intelligence, charm, wit, personality, education, talent, skills, possessions, wealth, achievement, or family affiliation. This early stage resembles what is today called an inferiority complex. The comparison can extend to externally acquired markers of status — a lavish house or car, expensive fashion, special privileges, even cosmetic surgery — the dynamic captured in the colloquialism of “keeping up with the Joneses.” The subliminal result tends to lend credence to the idea that one’s self-concept, self-image, self-esteem, worth, or social desirability is linked to inclusion in or exclusion from a favored superior class able to insulate itself from the rest of society.

Social roles and generational divides. Ressentiment also typically attaches to inherent social roles — relationships that frequently occasion interpersonal value judgments and accompanying negative feelings, suggesting dominant and submissive positions not unlike Nietzsche’s master–slave dichotomy. Scheler’s analysis ranges across the subordinate gender roles historically assigned to women in sexuality, child rearing, and nurturing; generational divides, in which an older generation rejects a younger one out of an inability to accept its own changes, and the reverse; and the many frictions of family and blended-family life — younger siblings resenting elders’ sense of entitlement, the hyper-critical mother-in-law toward the daughter-in-law, the abandonment of an ex-spouse for a “trophy” partner as a status symbol, neglect of children from a previous marriage, the mediocre child straining to live up to a high-achieving parent. The classic adversarial relationship between employee and employer belongs here as well.

Moral weakness and the turn to surrogates. Ressentiment triggers what Scheler calls man’s inherent fundamental moral weakness: a sense of hopelessness that predisposes a person to regress and seek surrogates of lower value as a source of solace. When personal progress becomes stagnant or frustrated at a relatively high level of vital or psychic attainment, there is an inherent tendency toward regression — indulgence in traditional vices, physical and psychological addictions, and self-destructive behavior such as drug use. This tendency to seek surrogates to compensate for frustrated higher attainment inserts itself into consumerist materialism as an insatiable, self-defeating need to have more, filling the void of philosophical bankruptcy and spiritual poverty.

Pathological ressentiment and impotence. Scheler refines the concept further, observing that ressentiment is chiefly confined to those who serve and are dominated at the moment, who fruitlessly resent the sting of authority — though it can also arise elsewhere through psychological contagion, since the spiritual venom of ressentiment is extremely contagious, or through the violent suppression of an impulse that subsequently revolts by embittering and poisoning the personality. Certain advanced characteristics link the phenomenon to what would today be called personality disorders. Ressentiment proper — pathological ressentiment — is not materially linked exclusively to socio-economic status but cuts across all strata, reaching even the most powerful.

A sense of impotence develops in those experiencing ressentiment-feelings, especially when situational and social factors render a person unable to release or resolve negative feelings constructively — what is today called repression. Originally, ressentiment is defused whenever one has the power and ability to retaliate or act out against an oppressor; when negative feelings can be acted out, no ressentiment results. But when a person cannot release these feelings against those evoking them, develops a sense of impotence, and re-experiences the feelings over time, ressentiment arises. For Scheler, however, the essence of this impotence has less to do with the actual presence of an external oppressor than with a self-inflicted sense of inadequacy over limitations in the face of positive value attainment itself. The feelings are re-experienced in a self-perpetuating manner, fueled primarily by an inadequacy felt within the self that the “other” really only occasions — one may have every advantage and yet lack the talent to achieve one’s own goals. These re-experienced feelings of impotence become rationalized on a subconscious level as knee-jerk attitudinal projections: prejudices, bias, racism, bigotry, cynicism, and closed-mindedness.

The abstract focus of ressentiment. A noteworthy feature is the abstract focus of ressentiment: specific individuals are no longer required for the feelings and their rationalized expressions to continue. One needs only a representative member of the class that is the focus of resentment. Members of a group can become random targets of hate borne out of impotence that seeks to level the group. This random, formal treatment of otherness offers a plausible explanation for hate crimes, serial killings in part, genocide, the framing of an enemy in faceless non-human terms, and any top-down or bottom-up class-warfare agenda. A psychic distancing and depersonalization between the perceptions of “the other” is required for ressentiment to operate effectively.

Value delusion. Pathological ressentiment entails value delusion: a tendency to belittle, degrade, dismiss, or reduce genuine values and their bearers. This is done in a distinctively non-productive manner, because ressentiment does not lead to the affirmation of counter-values — the ressentiment-imbued person secretly craves the values they publicly denounce. Value delusion represents a horizontal shift of value judgment concerning things and the world from a positive to a more negative orientation: what was once loved or thought good becomes devalued as “sour grapes” or “damaged goods,” while what was previously lacking in value is elevated to acceptability. Despite this negative direction, the ressentiment-subject remains plagued by the distractions of unattainable values, emotionally replacing them with disvalues issuing from impotence. Behind this illusory and self-deceiving overturning of positive values, the true objective order of values and their ranks remains transparent. The demands of value delusion manifest in what is commonly called a superiority complex: arrogance, hubris, hypocrisy, double standards, denial, revenge, and the projection of one’s own negative qualities onto the opposition. Negative feeling states suggest the absence, repudiation, or flight from positive values, yet negative values never stand on their own intrinsic merit — they always refer back to correspondingly positive values. Emotionally, value delusion turns happiness to sadness, compassion to hate, hope to despair, self-respect to shame, love and acceptance to rejection or competition, resolve to dread. Delusion is essential for the ressentiment-imbued person to maintain any semblance of mental homeostasis.

Metaphysical confusion. Pathological ressentiment ultimately manifests as metaphysical confusion — a form of value delusion in which the value shift is more vertical, occurring as a twisting or false inversion of the value hierarchy, wherein higher value-contents and bearers are viewed as lower and lower as higher. This is what is commonly called having one’s priorities out of order. Scheler illustrates such an inversion in his analysis of Western civilization’s humanistic, materialistic, and capitalistic propensity to elevate utility values above vital values. Carried to its logical extreme, ressentiment brings its most important achievement when it determines a whole morality, perverting the rules of preference until what was evil appears good.

The deadening of feeling. Pathological ressentiment results in a deadening — a psychological numbing — of normal sympathetic feeling states and of all higher forms of psychic and spiritual feeling. Against a pure, well-ordered emotive life (the ordo amoris) appropriate to the ethical person created in God’s image through love, pathological ressentiment produces a disordered heart, a “hardened heart.” For Scheler, morality finds expression in response to the call of the hour, or the exercise of personal conscience, grounded in the heart’s proper order of love in relation to positive and higher values. Ressentiment, with its value delusions, willfully favors a disordered heart and twisted emotions consistent with personality disorders. It is precisely the failure to feel for and identify with their victims — even to the point of deriving sadistic pleasure — that characterizes the sociopath, the psychopath, the serial killer, the dictator, the rapist, the bully, the corrupt executive, and the ruthless drug dealer. Common law refers to this quality as “cold-blooded.” The ressentiment-imbued person maintains such pronounced psychic distance from victims as never to achieve lasting satisfaction through unethical action; retaliation of this sort yields no good, and expression of this sort lacks all possibility of positive results. In true ressentiment there is no emotive satisfaction, only a lifelong anger and anguish in feelings compared with others.

Psychic contagion and the socio-political realm. Finally, pathological ressentiment bears a particular relation to the socio-political realm through what Scheler describes as man’s lowest form of social togetherness: psychic contagion — the phenomenon of uncritically following the crowd, or mob mentality. Positive examples include good-natured crowds in a pub or at a sporting event; a negative example is violent rioting. As a concept, psychic contagion bears an affinity to Nietzsche’s assessment of the slave-type mentality. To the extent that the politically powerful — whether a “master” faction or a “slave” faction — can stir up collective cultural animosities through psychic contagion, they increase their ability to achieve their underlying socio-political objectives. Such methods usually take the form of incendiary rhetoric, scapegoat tactics, class warfare, partisan politics, propaganda, excessive secrecy, closed-minded political ideology, jingoism, misguided nationalism, violence, and the waging of unjust war.

Structure and Approach

The book proceeds by descriptive analysis rather than by formal system-building. Scheler’s method is to isolate a phenomenon — ressentiment — and to trace its causes, its typical manifestations, and its consequences across personal, social, and cultural life. His observations and insights concerning this special form of human hate furnish the descriptive basis for the concept. The analysis moves from the ordinary feeling states out of which ressentiment grows, through the situational and role-based comparisons that sustain it, to the advanced or pathological forms in which it becomes a settled disposition, and finally to its collective, socio-political expression. Throughout, the treatment is at once psychological and sociological, and it is framed within an ethical theory of objective values.

Significance and Influence

Ressentiment occupies a distinctive place in Scheler’s thought as the inverse of his ethics of values, and it has drawn continuing interest for its psychological and sociological insight. Scheler’s contributions on the topic cannot be fully appreciated without reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, who used the term to explain a degenerative morality arising from the distinction between the strong “master” type and the weak “slave” type. Where Nietzsche viewed Christianity as supporting a slave morality that undermined the strong, Scheler ultimately viewed the universal salvific nature of Christian love as contradicting Nietzsche’s assessment. Scheler was himself skeptical of the unchecked power of mass culture and the leveling power of mediocrity upon ethical standards and upon the individual person as a unique sacred value, yet he remained a theistic ethical objectivist. For him, ressentiment principally involved spirit — as opposed to will to power, drives, or vital urge — and entailed deep personal issues: the distortion of the objective realm of values, the self-poisoning of moral character, and personality disorder.

It is a mistake, on Scheler’s account, to assess ressentiment chiefly as a theory of psychological pathology, though in part it surely is that. It is also a philosophical and ethical concept for assessing the spiritual and cultural health of individual persons and of society as a whole. For Scheler, ressentiment is essentially a matter of the self in relation to values, and only proximately an issue of social conflict over resources and power. What is called “having class” is not one-dimensional — not merely power, money, or goods and services — but has to do with who one makes of oneself as a person, involving moral character, integrity, talents, aptitudes, achievements, education, virtues, and reciprocal respect among diverse individuals.