On Resentment (Sobre el resentimiento) – Max Scheler

A phenomenological study of the self-poisoning of the mind and the inversion of moral values

What the Work Is

Ressentiment — published in German under the full title Über Ressentiment und moralisches Werturteil — is a 1912 book by the German philosopher Max Scheler, a leading figure in the phenomenological tradition and a thinker known for his work in ethics and philosophical anthropology. The book is a study in ethics and social psychology, and it is the work in which Scheler sets out his account of a distinctive form of human hatred and the psychological and social conditions that produce it. The French spelling of the central term has been retained by convention in philosophical circles, in part to preserve the broad range of meanings the concept carries.

What the Book Is About

Scheler’s subject is what he calls a “special form of human hate” and the related social and psychological phenomena surrounding it. His central claim is that resentment is not simply an emotion but a lasting mental attitude — one produced when certain normal human feelings are systematically repressed and then, over time, turn inward and poison the personality. The book’s aim is to describe this condition and to trace its consequences for how a person judges value, both in themselves and in the world.

As a concept belonging to ethics, resentment stands as the antithesis of Scheler’s own emotively grounded, non-formal ethics of values. Where his ethical thought describes a movement of the person toward higher and positive values, resentment describes the opposite movement: a turning toward negative and lower ones. The book is at once Scheler’s darkest topic and his most psychological and sociological one, and it anticipates many later findings in those fields.

Key Ideas and Themes

Scheler defines resentment as a self-poisoning of the mind with definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude brought about by the systematic repression of emotions and affects that are, in themselves, normal components of human nature. The feelings chiefly involved are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite. When these are repressed rather than expressed, they produce a constant tendency toward value delusions and the value judgments that follow from them.

A first essential feature is that resentment must be understood in relation to what Scheler terms the a priori hierarchy of value modalities. Values, on his account, are experienced emotively and stand in a universal, objective, constant order. From lowest to highest, these modalities run: the sensual values of the agreeable and the disagreeable; the vital values of the noble and the vulgar; the mental values of the beautiful and the ugly, right and wrong, and truth and falsehood; and finally the values of the Holy and the Unholy. Resentment is the dark underside, or inversion, of this ordered vision of value.

Resentment begins in ordinary negative feelings — envy, jealousy, anger, hatred, spite, malice, joy at another’s misfortune — that arise as normal reactions to social life. The ethical and psychological question is how the energy from these feelings is channeled. Resentment is highly situational: it always involves mental comparisons with other people who appear to possess genuinely positive values. It may begin in admiration or respect but ends in a kind of coveting of another’s qualities and goods — beauty, intelligence, charm, education, talent, possessions, wealth, achievement, family standing. This early stage resembles what is now called an inferiority complex, and it extends to externally acquired markers of status as well, feeding a consumer-based economics of comparison.

Resentment also attaches to inherent social roles — relationships that carry dominant and submissive positions, not unlike Nietzsche’s master–slave dichotomy. Scheler’s examples include subordinate gender roles, generational divides in which each age group rejects the other, tensions within families and blended families, and the classic adversarial relationship between employee and employer.

Scheler identifies a further tendency he calls man’s inherent fundamental moral weakness: a sense of hopelessness that disposes a person to regress and seek surrogates of lower value as solace. When progress toward a higher value is frustrated, there is a tendency toward regression into vices, addictions, and self-destructive behavior, and this tendency feeds consumerist materialism as an insatiable need to have more in order to fill a spiritual void.

Scheler distinguishes what he calls resentment proper, or pathological resentment. By its very origin, he writes, resentment is chiefly confined to those who serve and are dominated, who fruitlessly resent the sting of authority; where it appears elsewhere it is due either to psychological contagion — the spiritual venom of resentment being extremely contagious — or to the violent suppression of an impulse that later revolts by embittering and poisoning the personality. Pathological resentment is therefore not tied exclusively to socio-economic status but cuts across all strata, reaching even the most powerful.

A central feature of pathological resentment is impotence. Originally, resentment is defused whenever one has the power to retaliate or act out against an oppressor; when negative feelings can be acted out, no resentment results. But when a person cannot release these feelings against those who evoke them, and the feelings are re-experienced over time, resentment arises. For Scheler, however, this impotence has less to do with the presence of an external oppressor than with a self-inflicted sense of inadequacy in the face of positive value attainment itself. The feelings are re-experienced in a self-perpetuating way, fueled by an inner sense of inadequacy that the other person merely occasions. These feelings become rationalized on a subconscious level as prejudices, bias, bigotry, cynicism, and closed-mindedness. Notably, resentment becomes abstract: specific individuals are no longer required, only a representative member of the resented class. This helps explain hate crimes, serial killings, genocide, the framing of an enemy in faceless terms, and class warfare, all of which require a psychic distancing and de-personalization between the resenting and the resented.

Pathological resentment also entails value delusion — a tendency to belittle, degrade, dismiss, or reduce genuine values and those who bear them. This is done non-productively, because the resentful person secretly craves the very values they publicly denounce. What was once loved or thought good becomes devalued as sour grapes, while what was previously lacking in value is elevated to acceptability. The resentful subject remains plagued by the unattainable values they have emotionally replaced with disvalues, and behind this self-deceiving inversion the true objective order of values still shows through. Value delusion manifests as a superiority complex — arrogance, hubris, hypocrisy, double standards, denial, revenge, and the projection of one’s own negative qualities onto the opposition. Emotionally, it turns happiness to sadness, compassion to hate, hope to despair, self-respect to shame, love to rejection, and resolve to dread; the delusion is necessary for the resentful person to maintain any semblance of mental balance.

At its deepest, pathological resentment manifests as metaphysical confusion — a form of value delusion that is vertical rather than horizontal, a twisting or false inversion of the value hierarchy in which higher values are seen as lower and lower as higher. Scheler illustrates this with Western civilization’s humanistic, materialistic, and capitalistic tendency to elevate utility values above vital ones. Carried to its extreme, resentment achieves its most important result when it determines a whole morality, perverting the rules of preference until what was evil appears good.

Pathological resentment finally results in a deadening of normal sympathetic feeling and of all higher psychic and spiritual feelings. Against the well-ordered emotive life — the ordo amoris appropriate to the ethical person — resentment produces a disordered heart, a hardened heart. Scheler holds that morality finds expression in response to the call of the hour, in the exercise of conscience grounded in the heart’s proper order of love; resentment, with its value delusions, favors a disordered heart and twisted emotions consistent with personality disorders. The failure to feel for and identify with one’s victims — even to the point of deriving sadistic pleasure — is what the sociopath, the psychopath, the serial killer, the dictator, the bully, and the ruthless criminal share, a quality common law calls cold-blooded. The resentful person keeps such psychic distance from victims that the desired lasting satisfaction never arrives; retaliation yields no good, and expression lacks any positive result. In true resentment there is no emotive satisfaction, only lifelong anger and anguish.

Scheler connects pathological resentment to the socio-political realm through what he calls psychic contagion — his term for the lowest form of social togetherness, the uncritical following of the crowd, or mob mentality. When the politically powerful can stir up collective animosities through psychic contagion, they advance their objectives, typically through incendiary rhetoric, scapegoating, class warfare, partisan politics, propaganda, excessive secrecy, closed-minded ideology, jingoism, misguided nationalism, violence, and unjust war.

Structure and Approach

The book proceeds by description and conceptual analysis rather than by formal argument alone. Scheler’s method is phenomenological: he examines resentment as a lived phenomenon, distinguishing its ordinary and situational forms from its pathological development, and tracing how repressed feeling states give rise to value delusions and, ultimately, to a disordered relation to the objective order of values. His analysis moves from the psychology of the individual to the social and political consequences of resentment, treating the phenomenon as at once personal, ethical, and collective.

Significance and Influence

Scheler’s account of resentment is a recognized contribution to ethics and to the psychological and sociological study of human hatred, and it has furnished a descriptive basis for his philosophical concept of resentment. The book is regarded as anticipating later findings in psychology and sociology, and its concept has remained a subject of interest and discussion. Scheler’s works were placed on the Nazi book burn list.

The book emerged against the backdrop of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual concern over Western civilization’s collective drift away from old-guard monarchical and hierarchical societal structures — in which one’s station in life was determined primarily by birth — toward the relative uncertainty and instability embodied in Enlightenment-era ideals such as democracy, nationhood, class struggle, human equality, humanism, egalitarianism, and utilitarianism. In this context, resentment as a phenomenon was first viewed as a pseudo-ethically based political force enabling the lower classes of society to rise at the perceived expense of the higher or more inherently “noble” classes. It thus first emerged as what some might view as a reactionary and elitist concept by today’s democratic standards, while others of a more conservative mind-set might view it as liberalism disguised as a socialist attempt at usurping the role of individual responsibility and self-determination.

Scheler’s contributions on this topic cannot be fully appreciated without some cursory reference to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who used the term Ressentiment to explain an emerging degenerative morality issuing from an underlying existential distinction between what he saw as the two basic character options available to the individual: the Strong (the “Master”) or the Weak (the “Slave”). The Master-type fully accepts the burdens of freedom and decides a path of self-determination. The Slave, rather than deciding to be the authentic author of their own destiny, chooses a repressed, unsatisfying mode of life, blaming by projection his submissiveness, loss of self-esteem, and pitiful lot in life upon the dominant Master figure and their entire social class, who by contrast seem to flourish at every moment. This assessment is a true enough one, given that economic exploitation always seems to lie at the heart of any intrinsic Master/Slave social arrangement, along with the Master class “washing their hands,” so to speak, of the burdens of social responsibility. This underlying resentment forms the rationale for a code of conduct belonging to the Slave-type or class — “Slave Morality” — encompassing passive acceptance of abuse, fear of reprisal for asserting personal rights due to implied intimidation, or inability to enjoy life.

Nietzsche was an atheist and harbored a particular disdain for Christianity, which he viewed as playing a key role in supporting Slave Morality: in supporting the Weak and disadvantaged of humanity, Christianity undermined the authority, social position, and cultural progress of the Strong. He viewed the progress of such Slave Morality as a sort of violation of the natural order and a thwarting of the authentic advancements of civilization available only through the Strong. This view of a “natural order,” so typical of nineteenth-century Europe, is expressed in Nietzsche’s principle of the Will to Power. Scheler, by comparison, ultimately viewed the universal salvific nature of Christian love as contradicting Nietzsche’s assessments, and in later life developed an alternative metaphysical dualism of Vital Urge and Spirit: Vital Urge as closely allied to Will to Power, and Spirit as dependent yet truly distinct in character.

Contrary to Nietzsche’s ultimate intent, much of his legacy ultimately led to an implosion of objectivity in which truth became relative to individual perspective, “might ultimately made right” (Social Darwinism), and ethics would become subjective and solipsistic. By contrast, Scheler — who was also skeptical over the historically emerging unchecked power of mass culture and the prevalence and leveling power of mediocrity upon ethical standards and upon the individual human person as a unique sacred value — was nonetheless a theistic ethical objectivist. For Scheler, the phenomenon of resentment principally involved Spirit, as opposed to Will to Power, Drives, or Vital Urge, which entailed deeper personal issues involving distortion of the objective realm of values, the self-poisoning of moral character, and personality disorder.

The Author and the Work’s Place

Scheler was considered in his lifetime one of the most prominent German philosophers, and he developed the philosophical method of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. After Scheler’s death in 1928, Martin Heidegger affirmed, with Ortega y Gasset, that all philosophers of the century were indebted to Scheler, praising him as “the strongest philosophical force in modern Germany, nay, in contemporary Europe and in contemporary philosophy as such.” Scheler died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1928, leaving a vast body of unfinished works; extrapolations from his thoughts have always since piqued interest and discussion on a variety of topics.

Folk wisdom comes closest to Scheler’s meaning by recognizing resentment as a self-defeating turn of mind which is non-productive and ultimately a waste of time and energy. Maturity informs most of us that sustained hatred hurts the hater far more than the object of our hate. Sustained hatred enslaves by preventing emotional growth from progressing beyond the sense of pain having been precipitated, in some way, by whom or what is hated — another person, group, or class of persons.

Further Features of the Concept

The objective sources of the negative feeling states in which resentment has its genesis might be occasioned by almost anything: personal criticism, ridicule, mockery, rejection, abandonment, and the like. For the individual person, the ethical and psychological issue becomes how the energy from these feeling states will be channeled so as to better benefit the individual person and society.

The principle of comparison extends to externally acquired qualifiers having the potential for negative valuations which also tend to support a consumer-based economics: status-symbol possessions such as a lavish house or car, expensive fashion accessories, special privileges, club memberships, plastic surgery, and the like. This principle is expressed in the common colloquialism of “keeping up with the Joneses.” The subliminal result of all of these comparisons tends to lend credence to the idea that one’s self-concept, self-image, self-esteem, worth, or social desirability is linked to one’s social inclusion or exclusion in a favored superior class having the means to insulate themselves from the rest of society.

Among the situational social roles to which resentment typically extends, the source material lists the subordinate and/or submissive gender roles assigned to women in terms of sexuality, child rearing, and nurturing tasks; generational divides, in which the rejection of a younger generation by members of an older generation is due to the latter’s inability to accept their own changes and to move beyond the value pursuits proper to those preceding stages of life, and conversely the rejection of an older generation by members of a younger generation due to the latter’s inability to accept the fact that the older generation understands and sympathizes with the challenges they face; progressive forms of inter-family and blended-family relations, such as younger siblings toward the elders’ sense of entitlement, the hyper-critical mother-in-law toward the daughter-in-law, the abandonment of an ex-spouse in favor of a “trophy wife” or “trophy husband” as a status symbol signaling an increase in social status, relational neglect toward children from a previous marriage over ones of the current, the reactions of peer friends and family to a romantic relationship involving partners of vastly different ages, and the efforts of a mediocre ne’er-do-well child to live up to the standards of a successful high-achieving parent; and the classic employee/employer adversarial relationship.

Regarding the tendency Scheler termed “Man’s Inherent Fundamental Moral Weakness,” the source material specifies that when personal progress becomes stagnant or frustrated in moving from a negative to a more positive plateau given a relatively high vital or psychic level of value attainment, there is an inherent tendency toward regression in terms of indulgence in traditional vices and a host of other physical and psychological addictions and self-destructive modes of behavior, such as the use of narcotics. This tendency to seek surrogates to compensate for a frustration with higher value attainment inserts itself into the scenario of consumerist materialism as an insatiable, self-defeating need “to have more” in order to fill the void of one’s own philosophical bankruptcy and spiritual poverty.

Impotence, Abstraction, and Value Delusion

The source material illustrates the defusing of resentment with the example that an ancient Roman citizen, as Master, could be expected to take revenge straightaway upon his Slave, while the reverse would be unthinkable. It also notes that one can have every advantage in life given to them, yet prove to lack the talent for achieving the goals set for him- or herself. The re-experienced feelings of impotence become rationalized on a subconscious level as knee-jerk attitudinal projections: prejudices, bias, racism, bigotry, cynicism, and closed-mindedness.

On the abstract focus of resentment, the source material states that members of a group can become random targets of hate, borne out of impotence that seeks to level the group. Such random formal treatment of “otherness” offers a plausible explanation for hate crimes, serial killings in part, genocide, the general framing of an enemy in faceless non-human terms, as well as any top-down or bottom-up form of class warfare agenda. Hence there must be a psychic distancing of de-personalization between Master and Slave perceptions of “the other” in order for resentment to operate effectively.

Regarding value delusion, the source material states that resentment does not lead to affirmation of counter-values, since resentment-imbued persons secretly crave the values they publicly denounce. This aspect of value delusion represents a horizontal shift of value judgment concerning things and the world from a positive to a more negative orientation. In spite of this decidedly negative direction, the resentment-subject is continuously “plagued” by those distractions of unattainable values in that they emotionally replace them with disvalues issuing forth from their impotence; in the background of such an illusory and self-deceiving overturning of positive values with illusory negative valuations there still remains transparency of the true objective order of values and their ranks. Negative values do not stand on their own intrinsic merit: they always refer back in some way to correspondingly positive values.

Metaphysical Confusion and the Deadening of Feeling

Metaphysical confusion is described in the source material as a form of value delusion in which the value shift is more vertical in character, in relation to the a priori hierarchy of value modalities; today we commonly refer to this phenomenon as “having one’s priorities out of order.”

On the deadening of feeling, the source material describes the ethical person as created in God’s image through love (ens amans), and the disordered heart as désordre du cœur. Among those sharing the common denominator of failure to feel for and identify with their victims — even to the extent of deriving sadistic pleasure — the source material lists the sociopath, the psychopath, the serial killer, the dictator, the rapist, the bully, the corrupt CEO, and the ruthless drug dealer.

The source material quotes author Erik Larson’s book Devil in the White City, which renders with great precision a literary description of this deadening of higher feeling states in reference to America’s first serial killer, Herman Webster Mudgett, also known as Dr. H. H. Holmes: “Holmes was charming and gracious, but something about him made Belkamp uneasy. He could not have defined it. Indeed for the next several decades alienists and their successors would find themselves hard-pressed with any precision what it was about men like Holmes that caused them to seem warm and integrating but also telegraph the vague sense that some important element of humanness was missing. At first alienists described this condition as ‘moral insanity’ and those who exhibited the disorder as ‘moral imbeciles.’ They later adopted the term ‘psychopath’ … as a ‘new malady’ and stated, ‘Besides his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath.'”

The source material further observes that our particular era suffers from a pronounced inability to feel higher levels of vital psychic (intellectual and sympathetic) and spiritual feeling states. For example, the process of our legal system tends to convert the absolute character of moral sentiments to a “blameless” game of negotiation of cost versus benefits. It asks whether we can even imagine the moral education furnished by such archaic practices as the stockade or tar and feathering so as to invoke real public humiliation for crimes. In addition, we as a culture have become so desensitized to feelings of outrage over public persons of power and stature lacking in all feelings of shame over their wrongdoings that our greatest moral problem becomes one of complacency.

Psychic Contagion and Societal Impact

Psychic contagion is described as the phenomenon of uncritically “following the crowd,” or mob mentality, like lemmings charging over a cliff. Positive examples given are good-natured crowds in a pub or at sporting events; a negative example is violent rioting. As a concept, psychic contagion bears an affinity to Nietzsche’s assessment of Slave-type mentality. The source material states that the use of such methods of negative psychic contagion can be viewed as having propelled such historical figures or movements as the Nazis in 1930s and ’40s Germany, with the genocide of the Jews and the Aryan Master Race agenda, or Trump and the MAGA movement in the contemporary USA.

Conclusions

The source material argues that it is a mistake to assess Scheler’s concept of resentment as chiefly a theory of psychological pathology, though surely it is that in part. In addition, resentment is a philosophical and ethical concept from which to assess the spiritual and cultural health both of individual persons and of society as a whole — a task which seems all the more urgent given economic globalization, that is, a tendency toward carte blanche predatory capitalism. For example, it is entirely acceptable to view human ethical transcendence as complementary and commensurate with a bottom-up psychology of needs and drives so long as the arch of that qualitative direction is positive in nature. However, the reverse is false: negative parallel aspects are irreducible to Scheler’s top-down metaphysical principle of good as emanating from our personal development as spiritual beings. This distinction is illustrated by the many cases in which negative role models can, and do, emerge as highly self-actualized, economically powerful individuals from a psychological standpoint — clearly “Superman”-type persons — but who are entirely lacking from an ethical, social, and spiritual standpoint: for example, the drug kingpin or pimp as a person young boys admire and look up to, or the corrupt CEO who absconds with obscene bonuses while his company goes bankrupt and the employee pension fund disintegrates. These negative manifestations of values and value inversions demonstrate how the philosophical conception of resentment rests upon qualitatively different grounds transcending science and pure economics.

For Scheler, resentment is essentially a matter of self in relation to values, and only proximately an issue of social conflict over resources, power, and the like (Master/Slave, or dominant/submissive relationships). What we call “having class,” for instance, is not something as one-dimensional as power, money, or goods and services readily sold or purchased; rather, like the array of the a priori hierarchy of value modalities, “class” has to do with who you make of yourself as a person, which involves a whole range of factors, including moral character, integrity, talents, aptitudes, achievements, education, virtues such as generosity, reciprocal respect among diverse individuals (active citizenship), and the like.

Since society must be guided by the rule of law above power, we must promote government which relies upon fairness (see John Rawls) and egalitarian principles in terms of channeling our national economic forces. Self-interest (as in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”) is humanity’s — and nature’s — most highly efficient means of positively converting a Vital Urge into human economic benefits, the point at which “the rubber hits the road,” but it is also a force highly susceptible to greed. Therefore, governments must ensure that such raw pursuit of utility value is not purely an end in itself, but must serve primarily to form an economic base upon which genuine value strata and culture can take root and flourish for the common good as well as everyone’s respective individual needs. We should realize that living with less materially does not diminish in any way our access to greater emotional, intellectual, artistic, and spiritual fulfillment. Only in such ways can virtue truly become its own reward.