The Causes of German Hatred (Die Ursachen des Deutschenhasses) – Max Scheler

A phenomenological study of resentment, moral value, and the self-poisoning of the mind

What the Work Is

Ressentiment — published in German under the fuller 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: an examination of a particular form of human hatred and the psychological and moral mechanisms that produce it. Scheler deliberately retained the French spelling of the term ressentiment rather than translating it, a convention that has persisted in philosophical writing in order to preserve the broad range of discursive meaning the word carries.

What the Book Is About

At its core, the book investigates what Scheler called “a special form of human hate” and the related social and psychological phenomena surrounding it. His observations furnished the descriptive basis for his philosophical concept of ressentiment, which he defined as a self-poisoning of the mind with definite causes and consequences. Ressentiment, in Scheler’s account, is a lasting mental attitude produced by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects that are otherwise normal components of human nature — chiefly revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite. When these feelings cannot be discharged, they are repeatedly re-experienced over time, and this repression generates a persistent tendency toward value delusions and corresponding value judgments.

The book belongs to the study of ethics, and ressentiment stands as the antithetical process to Scheler’s emotively informed, non-formal ethics of values. It is at once his darkest topic and his most psychological and sociological one, anticipating later findings in those social sciences. Folk wisdom comes closest to Scheler’s meaning by recognizing ressentiment as a self-defeating turn of mind — non-productive and ultimately a waste of time and energy. Maturity teaches most people that sustained hatred hurts the hater far more than its object; such hatred enslaves by preventing emotional growth from moving beyond the sense of pain that some person, group, or class is believed to have precipitated.

Key Ideas and Themes

The hierarchy of values. Ressentiment must first be understood in relation to what Scheler termed the a priori hierarchy of value modalities. While personal transcendence and ethical action move toward positive and higher values, ressentiment and unethical action move toward negative and lower ones. Scheler held that values are experienced emotively with reference to a universal, objective, constant, and unchanging hierarchy. From lowest to highest, these modalities — with their positive and corresponding negative forms — 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 the ugly, right and wrong, and truth and falsehood; and finally the values of the Holy and the Unholy, of the Divine and of Idols. Ressentiment represents the dark underside, or inversion, of this vision of a personal and transformational ethics of values.

Genesis in ordinary feeling. As a personal disposition, ressentiment has its genesis 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. These may be occasioned by almost anything — personal criticism, ridicule, mockery, rejection, abandonment. The ethical and psychological question then becomes how the energy from these states will be channeled, whether to the benefit of the individual and society or otherwise.

Comparison and social roles. Ressentiment is highly situational: it always involves mental comparisons and value judgments directed at other people who appear to be free of such feelings and who exhibit genuinely positive values. It may begin with something like admiration and respect but ends in a kind of 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 same comparative logic extends to externally acquired markers of status — a lavish house or car, expensive fashion, special privileges, club memberships — the dynamic captured in the colloquialism of “keeping up with the Joneses.” The subliminal result is to lend credence to the idea that one’s self-concept, self-image, self-esteem, worth, or social desirability is linked to inclusion in a favored superior class able to insulate itself from the rest of society. Ressentiment also typically attaches to inherent social roles that involve dominant and submissive positions, not unlike Nietzsche’s master–slave dichotomy: the subordinate gender roles historically assigned to women; generational divides, in which an older generation rejects a younger one out of inability to accept its own changes, or a younger generation rejects an older one out of inability to accept that the older generation understands its challenges; the tensions of blended and extended families, from younger siblings resenting elders’ sense of entitlement to the hyper-critical mother-in-law, the abandonment of a spouse for a “trophy” partner as a status symbol, the neglect of children from a previous marriage, or the struggle of a mediocre child to live up to a high-achieving parent; and the classic adversarial relationship between employee and employer.

Moral weakness and surrogate satisfactions. Ressentiment triggers what Scheler termed 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 vital or psychic level of attainment, there is an inherent tendency toward regression — indulgence in traditional vices and a host of physical and psychological addictions and self-destructive behaviors. 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, in order to fill the void of philosophical bankruptcy and spiritual poverty.

Pathological ressentiment and impotence. Scheler refined 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; when it occurs elsewhere it is due either to psychological contagion — the spiritual venom of ressentiment being extremely contagious — or to the violent suppression of an impulse that subsequently revolts by embittering and poisoning the personality. These advanced characteristics link the phenomenon to what would today be called personality disorders. Ressentiment proper, or pathological ressentiment, is not materially linked exclusively to socio-economic status but cuts across all strata, including the most powerful. In pathological ressentiment a sense of impotence develops, especially when situational and social factors render a person unable to release or resolve negative feelings constructively — what is today called repression. Originally understood, 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, and when the feelings are continuously re-experienced over time, ressentiment arises. For Scheler, however, the essence of impotence here has less to do with the actual presence of an external oppressor than with a self-inflicted personal 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 in life and still lack the talent to achieve the goals one sets. These re-experienced feelings of impotence become rationalized on a subconscious level as knee-jerk attitudinal projections: prejudices, bias, racism, bigotry, cynicism, closed-mindedness. Noteworthy 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 — an account that 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 form of class warfare. A psychic distancing and de-personalization 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 — those imbued with ressentiment secretly crave the values they publicly denounce. Value delusion represents a horizontal shift of value judgment 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 still remains transparent. Value delusion manifests 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. Emotionally, it 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 shift is more vertical in character, a twisting or false inversion of the value hierarchy in which higher value-contents and bearers are viewed as lower and lower as higher. This is what is commonly meant by having one’s priorities out of order. Scheler illustrated 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 as well as all higher forms of psychic and spiritual feeling. As opposed to a well-ordered emotive life — the ordo amoris appropriate to the ethical person — pathological ressentiment produces a disordered heart, what is commonly called a hardened heart. For Scheler, morality finds expression in response to the call of the hour, 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 varying degrees of a disordered heart and twisted emotions consistent with personality disorders. It is precisely the failure to feel for and identify with 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 a pronounced psychic distance from victims as never to achieve the lasting satisfaction desired 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. Scheler further observed that his era suffered from a pronounced inability to feel higher levels of vital, psychic, and spiritual feeling — as, for example, when legal processes convert the absolute character of moral sentiments into a blameless game of negotiating costs against benefits, or when a culture becomes desensitized to outrage over powerful public figures who feel no shame for their wrongdoings, so that complacency becomes the greatest moral problem.

Psychic contagion and the socio-political realm. Finally, pathological ressentiment bears a particular relation to the socio-political realm through what Scheler described as man’s lowest form of social togetherness: psychic contagion. This is 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 of the “master” or “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 forms of incendiary rhetoric, scapegoat tactics, class warfare, partisan politics, propaganda, excessive secrecy and non-transparency, closed-minded political ideology, jingoism, misguided nationalism, violence, and the waging of unjust war. The use of such methods of negative psychic contagion can be viewed as having propelled historical figures and movements such as the Nazis in 1930s and 1940s Germany, with their genocide of the Jews and Aryan master-race agenda.

Structure and Approach

The book proceeds by way of phenomenological description: Scheler’s method is to observe and describe the phenomenon of ressentiment and related social and psychological phenomena, then to refine the concept by distinguishing ordinary reactive feelings from ressentiment proper, or pathological ressentiment. His analysis moves from the genesis of ressentiment in normal emotional life, through its situational and comparative character, to its advanced structures — impotence, value delusion, metaphysical confusion, the deadening of feeling — and finally to its collective, socio-political expression in psychic contagion. Throughout, the account is grounded in Scheler’s ethics of values, treating ressentiment as the inversion of an objective, emotively experienced hierarchy of value modalities.

Significance and Influence

Scheler’s treatment of ressentiment is a recognized contribution to ethics and to the psychological and sociological study of hatred, anticipating many later findings in those social sciences. The concept has drawn enduring interest, and extrapolations from Scheler’s thought have continued to provoke discussion on a variety of topics. His works, including this one, were placed on the Nazi book burn list.