The Man of Resentment (L’homme du ressentiment) – Max Scheler

A phenomenological study of how repressed emotion poisons moral judgment and inverts the order of values

What the Work Is

Ressentiment is a book by the German philosopher Max Scheler, published under the full German title Über Ressentiment und moralisches Werturteil (On Resentment and Moral Value Judgment). It first appeared in 1912, with Scheler’s own discussion of the concept dating the book to 1913. Scheler was a leading figure in the phenomenological tradition and a philosopher of ethics and philosophical anthropology; the book is a study of a particular psychological and moral phenomenon, written in German and belonging to the fields of ethics, psychology, and social theory.

The French spelling of the term has been retained by convention in philosophical circles, in order to preserve the broad range of discursive meaning and application the word carries. The book is sometimes described as at once Scheler’s darkest and his most psychological and sociological topic, and as foreshadowing later findings in those social sciences.

What the Book Is About

The book examines what Scheler calls “a special form of human hate” and the related social and psychological phenomena surrounding it, providing a descriptive basis for his philosophical 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 otherwise normal components of human nature. That repression produces a constant tendency toward particular kinds of value delusions and the value judgments that go with them. The emotions chiefly involved are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite.

The concept belongs to ethics, and it stands as the antithetical process to 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. Ressentiment is thus the dark underside, or inversion, of Scheler’s vision of a personal and transformational ethics of values.

Folk wisdom comes closest to Scheler’s meaning by recognizing ressentiment as a self-defeating turn of mind that is 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: it enslaves by preventing emotional growth from progressing beyond the sense of pain that some person, group, or class is felt to have precipitated.

Key Ideas and Themes

The genesis of ressentiment. Ressentiment begins 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: criticism, ridicule, mockery, rejection, abandonment. The ethical and psychological question then becomes how the energy from such states is channeled, for better or worse, for the individual and for society.

Comparison and impotence. Ressentiment is highly situational: it always involves mental comparisons and value judgments directed at other people who appear to lack such feelings and to exhibit genuinely positive values. It may begin in admiration and respect but ends in a kind of coveting of another’s qualities and goods — beauty, intelligence, charm, wit, personality, education, talent, skills, possessions, wealth, achievement, family affiliation. This early stage resembles what would today be called an inferiority complex, and it extends to externally acquired markers of status, from lavish houses and cars to expensive fashion and special privileges — the dynamic captured in the colloquialism of keeping up with the Joneses. The subliminal result is the suggestion 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.

Ressentiment also attaches to inherent social roles that involve dominant and submissive positions, not unlike Nietzsche’s master–slave dichotomy. Scheler’s examples include subordinate gender roles assigned to women in sexuality, child rearing, and nurturing; generational divides, in which each generation rejects the other out of an inability to accept its own changes or to recognize the other’s understanding; progressive forms of inter-family and blended-family relations, such as younger siblings toward 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, reactions to relationships between partners of vastly different ages, and the efforts 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 terms man’s inherent fundamental moral weakness: a sense of hopelessness that predisposes a person to regress and seek surrogates of lower value as 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 into traditional vices and into physical and psychological addictions and self-destructive behaviors, such as narcotics use. This tendency to seek surrogates 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. Scheler refines the concept further: by its very origin, ressentiment is chiefly confined to those who serve and are dominated at the moment, who fruitlessly resent the sting of authority. Where 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 ressentiment to what would today be called personality disorders. Ressentiment proper, or pathological ressentiment, is therefore not materially tied to socio-economic status alone; it 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 make it impossible to release or resolve them 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; an ancient Roman citizen, as master, could be expected to take revenge straightaway upon his slave, while the reverse would be unthinkable. When such feelings can be acted out, no ressentiment results; but when a person cannot release them against those who evoke them, develops a sense of impotence, and re-experiences the feelings over time, ressentiment arises.

For Scheler, however, the essence of impotence in pathological ressentiment has less to do with an actual external oppressor than with a self-inflicted sense of inadequacy over limitations in the face of positive value attainment itself. Ressentiment-feelings are re-experienced in a self-perpetuating manner, fueled primarily by an inadequacy felt within the self that the other only occasions — one may have every advantage and still lack the talent to reach one’s goals. These re-experienced feelings of impotence become rationalized on a subconscious level as knee-jerk 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. Only a representative member of the resented class need appear, and members of a group can become random targets of hate born of an impotence that seeks to level the group. This offers a plausible explanation for hate crimes, serial killings in part, genocide, the framing of an enemy in faceless non-human terms, and top-down or bottom-up class warfare. A psychic distancing and depersonalization between master and slave 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 non-productively, because ressentiment does not lead to the affirmation of counter-values — those in its grip 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 the illusory and self-deceiving overturning of positive values, the true objective order of values and their ranks 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 that is vertical rather than horizontal in character, occurring in relation to the a priori hierarchy of value modalities. Here the value hierarchy is twisted or falsely inverted: higher value-contents and bearers are viewed as lower, and lower as higher — 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 psychic and spiritual feelings. Against the 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, 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 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 calls this quality cold-blooded. The ressentiment-imbued person keeps 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 society. 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. The concept 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 socio-political objectives. Such methods typically take the form of incendiary rhetoric, scapegoat tactics, class warfare, partisan politics, propaganda, excessive secrecy and non-transparency, closed-minded political ideology, jingoism, misguided nationalism, violence, and unjust war.

Structure and Approach

The book proceeds by descriptive analysis. Scheler’s method is to isolate ressentiment as a phenomenon, specify its causes and consequences, and distinguish its ordinary from its pathological forms, drawing throughout on concrete social roles and situations — gender roles, generational divides, family relations, employment — as illustrations. The work is at once psychological and sociological in its approach, and it is framed within Scheler’s broader ethics of values, so that the analysis of a feeling-state is continuously tied to a theory of objective value and its hierarchy. Scheler’s account of ressentiment is inseparable from his engagement with Friedrich Nietzsche, who had used the term to explain a degenerative morality arising from the distinction between the strong master type and the weak slave type. Scheler ultimately held that the universal salvific nature of Christian love contradicts Nietzsche’s assessment, and in later life developed an alternative metaphysical dualism of vital urge and spirit — vital urge closely allied to the will to power, and spirit dependent yet truly distinct in character. For Scheler, the phenomenon of ressentiment principally involves spirit, rather than will to power, drives, or vital urge, and thus entails deeper personal issues: distortion of the objective realm of values, the self-poisoning of moral character, and personality disorder.

Significance and Influence

Ressentiment is a philosophical and ethical concept for assessing the spiritual and cultural health of both individual persons and society as a whole — a task the book treats as urgent. It is a mistake to assess Scheler’s concept as chiefly a theory of psychological pathology, though it is partly that. 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, for instance, is not one-dimensional — not merely power, money, or goods and services — but concerns who one makes of oneself as a person, involving moral character, integrity, talents, aptitudes, achievements, education, virtues such as generosity, and reciprocal respect among diverse individuals. Scheler’s observations and insights concerning this special form of human hate furnished a descriptive basis for the concept, and his works were placed on the Nazi book burn list. Extrapolations from his thought have continued to provoke interest and discussion on a variety of topics.