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 Ressentiment

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Lyssa
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Lyssa

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PostSubject: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyThu Nov 14, 2013 11:26 am

Quote :
"There are various kinds of impotencies from which, strangely enough, the very strength of ressentiment feelings well up. They can be psychic, mental, social, or physical impotencies, disadvantages, weaknesses or deficiencies of various kinds. The individuals and groups concerned suffer from a blockage to communicate with others. They tend to come on slow and, if at all, they can hardly vent what keeps on plaguing them.

Any feeling of ressentiment stemming from the impotency in a ressentiment-subject is accompanied by hidden feelings of self-disvalue over against others. The overwhelming dissimilarity between a ressentiment-subject and other people causes a disorder in value experiences and of all feelings conjoined with these disarranged values. In a marked contrast to such a ressentiment-subject, an individual of strong personality has no need to compare himself with his fellow humans, even if they happen to be superior in specific respects and abilities. The strong person is always ready and willing to accept values higher than those he represents.

Therefore, no ressentiment can come up. Because of this emotive readiness, is not easily embarrassed or ashamed about himself. Feelings of resentment, however, are irritated by the unattainability of positive values that others represent. Therefore, the inner experiences with others and of himself are in constant disarray. There is always present in ressentiment a disorder of the heart or a "désordre du coeur." That is, ressentiment is a state of constant aberration from the order of values, from the order of feelings and of love in which acts values are first given, i.e., from the "ordo amoris" or the "ordre du coeur." All this amounts to a damaged moral tenor of the individual person constantly charged with ressentiment feelings.

The constant state of ressentiment is distinguished sharply from furious reactions or outbursts of anger. Whenever a prosaic resentment-feeling finds satisfaction by way of, say, successful revenge and retaliation, there is no resentment proper at hand. It is therefore not the case that there is ressentiment in those who act out various types of terrorism, we are so familiar with in our time. Types of terrorism, such as murdering people because of hate, of holding hostages, of placing explosives under parked cars, or the terrorism of devastating whatever may be nearby, etc., happen as a rule acted because criminals want to find an inner fulfillment in their revengeful terrorism since there are little or no other means to this end.
While persons committing acts of violence may entertain a prosaic resentment, one must, reading Scheler's text, come to the conclusion that throughout terrorism resentment is prone to be found among those who do not place bombs to kill, etc., but among those who stay behind such acts. Thus, ressentiment-subjects are often to be found among sympathizers of violence rather than among the criminals themselves doing violence." [Manfred S. Frings, Introduction to Scheler's 'Ressentiment']

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyThu Nov 14, 2013 11:28 am

Quote :
"In ressentiment proper, however, no such gratification of revenge occurs. This is because the impulse to revenge, but no revenge itself, keeps on simmering without end and relief in sight. The impotency and powerlessness concerned blocks the venom of ressentiment from being washed away by a factual revenge. Of course, revenge can in certain cases be fulfilled over and over again after each revenge taken and be suffused with ressentiment. This is the case with certain serial killers with whom the impulse to take revenge is not completely diluted by one kill alone. Resentment is so deep that it can well up again and again after each revenge taken.

Another literary example helps us to come closer to ressentiment. It is Aesop's well known fable of "The Fox and the Grapes," which Scheler alludes to. There are the sweet grapes tempting the fox, but out of his reach. After leaping up and up to get a hold of some, the fox gives up trying. Leaving the scene, he convinces himself that those grapes were not sweet but sour anyway.
Aesop's fable comes closer to ressentiment proper, because there is an impotency involved which is at the root of a valuedeception. It is a physical impotency, which the fox can not overcome because he lacks the strength to jump high enough for the grasp of a grape. This makes the fox powerless to taste the grapes' sweetness. The powerlessness, in turn, makes him detract and diminish the value of their sweetness into "sour grapes."" [Manfred S. Frings, Introduction to Scheler's 'Ressentiment']

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyThu Nov 14, 2013 11:30 am

Max Scheler wrote:
"Ressentiment is a self-poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments. The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite.

Thirst for revenge is the most important source of ressentiment. The very term "ressentiment" indicates that we have to do with reactions which presuppose the previous apprehension of another person's state of mind. The desire for revenge -- in contrast with all active and aggressive impulses, be they friendly or hostile -- is also such a reactive impulse. It is always preceded by an attack or an injury. Yet it must be clearly distinguished from the impulse for reprisals or self-defense, even when this reaction is accompanied by anger, fury, or indignation. If an animal bites its attacker, this cannot be called "revenge." Nor does an immediate reprisal against a box on the ear fall under this heading. Revenge is distinguished by two essential characteristics.

First of all, the immediate reactive impulse, with the accompanying emotions of anger and rage, is temporarily or at least momentarily checked and restrained, and the response is consequently postponed to a later time and to a more suitable occasion​.
This blockage is caused by the reflection that an immediate reaction would lead to defeat, and by a concomitant pronounced feeling of "inability" and "impotence."
Thus even revenge as such, based as it is upon an experience of impotence, is always primarily a matter of those who are "weak" in some respect. Furthermore, it is of the essence of revenge that it always contains the consciousness of "tit for tat," so that it is never a mere emotional reaction. These two characteristics make revenge the most suitable source for the formation of ressentiment. The nuances of language are precise. There is a progression of feeling which starts with revenge and runs via rancor, envy, and impulse to detract all the way to spite, coming close to ressentiment. Usually, revenge and envy still have specific objects. They do not arise without special reasons and are directed against definite objects, so that they do not outlast their motives.

The desire for revenge disappears when vengeance has been taken, when the person against whom it was directed has been punished or has punished himself, or when one truly forgives him. In the same way, envy vanishes when the envied possession becomes ours. The impulse to detract, however, is not in the same sense tied to definite objects -- it does not arise through specific causes with which it disappears. On the contrary, this affect seeks those objects, those aspects of men and things, from which it can draw gratification. It likes to disparage and to smash pedestals, to dwell on the negative aspects of excellent men and things, exulting in the fact that such faults are more perceptible through their contrast with the strongly positive qualities.

Thus there is set a fixed pattern of experience which can accommodate the most diverse contents. This form or structure fashions each concrete experience of life and selects it from possible experiences. The impulse to detract, therefore, is no mere result of such an experience, and the experience will arise regardless of considerations whether its object could in any way, directly or indirectly, further or hamper the individual concerned.

In "spite," this impulse has become even more profound and deep-seated -- it is, as it were, always ready to burst forth and to betray itself in an unbridled gesture, a way of smiling, etc. An analogous road leads from simple Schadenfreude to "malice." The latter, more detached than the former from definite objects, tries to bring about ever new opportunities for Schadenfreude.

Yet all this is not ressentiment. These are only stages in the development of its sources. Revenge, envy, the impulse to detract, spite, Schadenfreude, and malice lead to ressentiment only if there occurs neither a moral self-conquest (such as genuine forgiveness in the case of revenge) nor an act or some other adequate expression of emotion (such as verbal abuse or shaking one's fist), and if this restraint is caused by a pronounced awareness of impotence. There will be no ressentiment if he who thirsts for revenge really acts and avenges himself, if he who is consumed by hatred harms his enemy, gives him "a piece of his mind," or even merely vents his spleen in the presence of others. Nor will the envious fall under the dominion of ressentiment if he seeks to acquire the envied possession by means of work, barter, crime, or violence.

Ressentiment can only arise if these emotions are particularly powerful and yet must be suppressed because they are coupled with the feeling that one is unable to act them out -either because of weakness, physical or mental, or because of fear. Through its very origin, ressentiment is therefore 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 either due to psychological contagion -- and the spiritual venom of ressentiment is extremely contagious -- or to the violent suppression of an impulse which subsequently revolts by "embittering" and "poisoning" the personality."

Ressentiment is the repeated experiencing and reliving of a particular emotional response reaction against someone else. The continual reliving of the emotion sinks it more deeply into the center of the personality, but concomitantly removes it from the person's zone of action and expression. It is not a mere intellectual recollection of the emotion and of the events to which it "responded" -- it is a re-experiencing of the emotion itself, a renewal of the original feeling. Secondly, the word implies that the quality of this emotion is negative, i.e., that it contains a movement of hostility. Perhaps the German word "Groll" (rancor) comes closest to the essential meaning of the term. "Rancor" is just such a suppressed wrath, independent of the ego's activity, which moves obscurely through the mind. It finally takes shape through the repeated reliving of intentionalities of hatred or other hostile emotions. In itself it does not contain a specific hostile intention, but it nourishes any number of such intentions." [Ressentiment]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyThu Nov 14, 2013 11:32 am

Max Scheler wrote:
"Impulses of revenge lead to ressentiment the more they change into actual vindictiveness, the more their direction shifts toward indeterminate groups of objects which need only share one common characteristic, and the less they are satisfied by vengeance taken on a specific object. If the desire for revenge remains permanently unsatisfied, and especially if the feeling of "being right (lacking in an outburst of rage, but an integral part of revenge) is intensified into the idea of a "duty," the individual may actually wither away and die.

The vindictive person is instinctively and without a conscious act of volition drawn toward events which may give rise to vengefulness, or he tends to see injurious intentions in all kinds of perfectly innocent actions and remarks of others. Great touchiness is indeed frequently a symptom of a vengeful character. The vindictive person is always in search of objects, and in fact he attacks -- in the belief that he is simply wreaking vengeance. This vengeance restores his damaged feeling of personal value, his injured "honor," or it brings "satisfaction" for the wrongs he has endured. When it is repressed, vindictiveness leads to ressentiment, a process which is intensified when the imagination of vengeance, too, is repressed-- and finally the very emotion of revenge itself. Only then does this state of mind become associated with the tendency to detract from the other person's value, which brings an illusory easing of the tension.

The following factors contribute to strengthen these preconditions:
The desire for revenge, which is itself caused by a repression, has powerful repressive tendencies. This is expressed in the saying that "revenge is a dish which should be taken cold."
Everything else being equal, it is therefore always the attitude of the weaker party. But at the same time, the injured person always places himself on the same level as his injurer. A slave who has a slavish nature and accepts his status does not desire revenge when he is injured by his master; nor does a servile servant who is reprimanded or a child that is slapped. Conversely, feelings of revenge are favored by strong pretensions which remain concealed, or by great pride coupled with an inadequate social position.

There follows the important sociological law that this psychological dynamite will spread with the discrepancy between the political, constitutional, or traditional status of a group and its factual power. It is the difference between these two factors which is decisive, not one of them alone.
Social ressentiment, at least, would be slight in a democracy which is not only political, but also social and tends toward equality of property. But the same would be the case -- and was the case -- in a caste society such as that of India, or in a society with sharply divided classes. Ressentiment must therefore be strongest in a society like ours, where approximately equal rights (political and otherwise) or formal social equality, publicly recognized, go hand in hand with wide factual differences in power, property, and education. While each has the "right" to compare himself with everyone else, he cannot do so in fact. Quite independently of the characters and experiences of individuals, a potent charge of ressentiment is here accumulated by the very structure of society." [Ressentiment]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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Lyssa
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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyThu Nov 14, 2013 11:33 am

Scheler wrote:
"We must add the fact that revenge tends to be transformed into ressentiment the more it is directed against lasting situations which are felt to be "injurious" but beyond one's control -- in other words, the more the injury is experienced as a destiny. This will be most pronounced when a person or group feels that the very fact and quality of its existence is a matter which calls for revenge. For an individual, a case in point would be a physical or other natural defect, especially one that is easily visible. The ressentiment of cripples or of people of subnormal intelligence is a well-known phenomenon. Jewish ressentiment, which Nietzsche rightly designates as enormous, finds double nourishment: first in the discrepancy between the colossal national pride of "the chosen people" and a contempt and discrimination which weighed on them for centuries like a destiny, and in modern times through​ ​the added discrepancy between formal constitutional equality and factual discrimination. Certainly the extremely powerful acquisitive instinct of this people is due -- over and beyond natural propensities and other causes -- to a deep-rooted disturbance of Jewish self-confidence. It is an overcompensation for the lack of a social acknowledgment which would satisfy the national self-esteem.

In the development of the labor movement, the conviction that the very existence and fate of the proletariat "cries for revenge" also became a mighty dynamic factor. The more a permanent social pressure is felt to be a "fatality," the less it can free forces for the practical transformation of these conditions, and the more it will lead to indiscriminate criticism without any positive aims.
This peculiar kind of "ressentiment criticism" is characterized by the fact that improvements in the conditions criticized cause no satisfaction -- they merely cause discontent, for they destroy the growing pleasure afforded by invective and negation. Many modern political parties will be extremely annoyed by a partial satisfaction of their demands or by the constructive participation of their representatives in public life, for such participation mars the delight of oppositionism. It is peculiar to "ressentiment criticism" that it does not seriously desire that its demands be fulfilled. It does not want to cure the evil: the evil is merely a pretext for the criticism." [Ressentiment]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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Lyssa
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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyThu Nov 14, 2013 11:34 am

Scheler wrote:
"Envy does not strengthen the acquisitive urge; it weakens it. It leads to ressentiment when the coveted values are such as cannot be acquired and lie in the sphere in which we compare ourselves to others. The most powerless envy is also the most terrible. Therefore existential envy which is directed against the other person's very nature, is the strongest source of ressentiment. It is as if it whispers continually: "I can forgive everything, but not that you are -- that you are what you are -- that I am not what you are -indeed that I am not you."

This form of envy strips the opponent of his very existence, for this existence as such is felt to be a "pressure," a "reproach," and an unbearable humiliation.

In the lives of great men there are always critical periods of instability, in which they alternately envy and try to love those whose merits they cannot but esteem. Only gradually, one of these attitudes will predominate. Here lies the meaning of Goethe's reflection that "against another's great merits, there is no remedy but love." In his Torquato Tasso (Act II, Scene 3) he suggests that Antonio's relations with Tasso are characterized by this kind of ambiguity. An analogous dynamic situation is seen between Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Brutus. Besides these cases of existential envy, which are rare, the innate characteristics of groups of individuals (beauty, racial excellence, hereditary character traits) are the chief causes​ ​of ressentiment envy."
[Ressentiment]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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Lyssa
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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyThu Nov 14, 2013 1:57 pm

Scheler wrote:
"The manner in which ressentiment originates in individuals or groups, and the intensity it reaches, is due primarily to hereditary factors and secondarily to social structure. Let us note, however, that the social structure itself is determined by the hereditary character and the value experience of the ruling human type. Since ressentiment can never emerge without the mediation of a particular form of impotence, it is always one of the phenomena of "declining life."

But in addition to these general preconditions, there are some types of ressentiment which are grounded in certain typically recurrent "situations" and whose emergence is therefore largely independent of individual temperament. It would be foolish to assert that every individual in these "situations" is necessarily gripped by ressentiment. I do say, however, that by virtue of their formal character itself -- and quite apart from the character of the individuals concerned -- these "situations" are charged with the danger of ressentiment.

First of all, woman is generally in such a situation. She is the weaker and therefore the more vindictive sex. Besides, she is always forced to compete for man's favor, and this competition centers precisely on her personal and unchangeable qualities. It is no wonder that the most vengeful deities (such as the Eumenides, that sinister generation of vipers) have mostly grown under matriarchal rule. Aeschylus' Eumenides present an extremely clear and plastic picture of a power which heals from ressentiment -that of Apollo and Athene, the deities of a new masculine civilization. We also note that the "witch" has no masculine counterpart. The strong feminine tendency to indulge in detractive gossip is further evidence; it is a form of self-cure. The danger of feminine ressentiment is extraordinarily intensified because both nature and custom impose upon woman a reactive and passive role in love, the domain of her most vital interest. Feelings of revenge born from rejection in the erotic sphere are always particularly subject to repression, for communication and recriminations are barred by pride and modesty. Besides, there is no tribunal which repairs such injuries, provided they violate no civil rights. It must be added that women are forced to great reserve by stronger barriers of convention and modesty. Therefore the "old maid" with her repressed cravings for tenderness, sex, and propagation, is rarely quite free of ressentiment. What we call "prudery," in contrast with true modesty, is but one of the numerous variants of sexual ressentiment. The habitual behavior of many old maids, who obsessively ferret out all sexually significant events in their surroundings in order to condemn them harshly, is nothing but sexual gratification transformed into ressentiment satisfaction. Thus the criticism accomplishes the very thing it pretends to condemn.

Anglo-American sexual morality is proverbially "prudish," and the reason lies in the fact that these countries have long been highly industrialized. Everything else being equal, the representative feminine groups of such countries will be increasingly recruited (probably even by hereditary selection) from those individuals who lack specifically feminine charms. Their "calculations" and their active participation and rise in an essentially utilitarian society are relatively unhampered by the cares of love and motherhood. The purer feminine type tends to be pushed into prostitution if it has no inherited fortune. Ressentiment imitates genuine modesty by means of prudery.

Conversely, it depreciates true modesty, for the prostitute's criteria come to be representative of the prevailing morality. Genuine feminine modesty, which conceals what it secretly knows to be beautiful and valuable, is interpreted as a mere "fear" of revealing physical defects or faults in dress and makeup. For the prostitute, those qualities with which she herself is insufficiently blessed are nothing but "the result of education and custom." At the end of the 18th century, especially in France, the prostitute's ressentiment governs not only public opinion, but actually inspires the theories of moralists and philosophers." [Ressentiment]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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Lyssa
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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyThu Nov 14, 2013 2:05 pm

Scheler wrote:
"In the 'earliest stages of civilization, old age as such is so highly honored and respected for its experience that ressentiment has hardly any chance to develop. But education spreads through printing and other modern media and increasingly replaces the advantage of experience. Younger people displace the old from their positions and professions and push them into the defensive. As the pace of "progress" increases in all fields, and as the changes of fashion tend to affect even the higher domains (such as art and science), the old can no longer keep up with their juniors. "Novelty' becomes an ever greater value.
This is doubly true when the generation as such is seized by an intense lust for life, and when the generations compete with each other instead of cooperating for the creation of works which outlast them. "Every cathedral," Werner Sombart writes, "every monastery, every town hall, every castle of the Middle Ages bears testimony to the transcendence of the individual's span of life: its completion spans generations which thought that they lived for ever. Only when the individual cut himself loose from the community which outlasted him, did the duration of his personal life become his standard of happiness."
Therefore buildings are constructed ever more hastily -- Sombart cites a number of examples. A corresponding phenomenon is the ever more rapid alternation of political regimes which goes hand in hand with the progression of the democratic movement. But every change of government, every parliamentary change of party domination leaves a remnant of absolute opposition against the values of the new ruling group. This opposition is spent in ressentiment the more the losing group feels unable to return to power." [Ressentiment]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyThu Nov 14, 2013 2:16 pm

Scheler wrote:
"Two specifically "spiritual" varieties of ressentiment humanity are the "apostate" type and to a lesser degree the "romantic" state of mind, or at least one of its essential traits.

An "apostate" is not a man who once in his life radically changes his deepest religious, political, legal, or philosophical convictions -- even when this change is not continuous, but involves a sudden rupture. Even after his conversion, the true "apostate" is not primarily committed to the positive contents of his new belief and to the realization of its aims. He is motivated by the struggle against the old belief and lives only for its negation. The apostate does not affirm his new convictions for their own sake, he is engaged in a continuous chain of acts of revenge against his own spiritual past. In reality he remains a captive of this past,​ ​and the new faith is merely a handy frame of reference for negating and rejecting the old. As a religious type, the apostate is therefore at the opposite pole from the "resurrected," whose life is transformed by a new faith which is full of intrinsic meaning and value. Tertullian ( De spectaculis, 29ff.) asserts that the sight of Roman governors burning in hell is one of the chief sources of heavenly beatitude. Nietzsche rightly cites this passage as an extreme example of apostate ressentiment.

In a different sense, ressentiment is always to some degree a determinant of the romantic type of
mind. At least this is so when the romantic nostalgia for some past era (Hellas, the Middle Ages, etc.) is not primarily based on the values of that period, but on the wish to escape from the present.
Then all praise of the "past" has the implied purpose of downgrading present-day reality.
Hölderlin's love for Hellas is primary and entirely positive; it springs from deep congeniality with the Greek mind and character. On the other hand, Friedrich Schlegel's nostalgia for the Middle Ages is strongly tinged with ressentiment." [Ressentiment]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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Lyssa

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Ressentiment Empty
PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyThu Nov 14, 2013 2:18 pm

Scheler wrote:
"Modern philosophy is deeply penetrated by a whole type of thinking which is nourished by ressentiment. I am referring to the view that the "true" and the "given" is not that which is self-evident, but rather that which is "indubitable" or "incontestable," which can be maintained against doubt and criticism. Let us also mention the principle of the "dialectical method," which wants to produce not only non-A, but even B through the negation of A (Spinoza: "omnis determinatio est negatio"; Hegel). All the seemingly positive valuations and judgments of ressentiment are hidden devaluations and negations.

Whenever convictions are not arrived at by direct contact with the world and the objects themselves, but indirectly through a critique of the opinions of others, the processes of thinking are impregnated with ressentiment. The establishment of "criteria" for testing the correctness of opinions then becomes the most important task. Genuine and fruitful criticism judges all opinions with reference to the object itself. Ressentiment criticism, on the contrary, accepts no "object" that has not stood the test of criticism." [Ressentiment]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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Lyssa
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Ressentiment Empty
PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyThu Nov 14, 2013 2:38 pm

Scheler wrote:
"The "slaves," as Nietzsche says, infect the "masters."
Ressentiment man, on the other hand, now feels "good," "pure," and "human" -- at least in the conscious layers of his mind. He is delivered from hatred, from the tormenting desire of an impossible revenge, though deep down his poisoned sense of life and the true values may still shine through the illusory ones. There is no more calumny, no more defamation of particular persons or things. The systematic perversion and reinterpretation of the values themselves is much more effective than the "slandering" of persons or the falsification of the world view could ever
be.

What is called "falsification of the value tablets," "reinterpretation," or "transvaluation" should not be mistaken for conscious lying. Indeed, it goes beyond the sphere of judging. It is not that the positive value is felt as such and that it is merely declared to be "bad." Beyond all conscious lying and falsifying, there is a deeper "organic mendacity." Here the falsification is not formed in consciousness, but at the same stage of the mental process as the impressions and value feelings themselves: on the road of experience into consciousness. There is "organic mendacity" whenever a man's mind admits only those impressions which serve his "interest" or his instinctive attitude.
Already in the process of mental reproduction and recollection, the contents of his experience are modified in this direction. He who is "mendacious" has no need to lie! In his case, the automatic process of forming recollections, impressions, and feelings is involuntarily slanted, so that conscious falsification becomes unnecessary. Indeed the most honest and upright convictions may prevail in the periphery of consciousness. The apprehension of values follows this pattern, to the point of their complete reversal. The value judgment is based on this original "falsification." It is itself entirely "true," "genuine," and "honest," for the value it affirms is really felt to be positive."
[Ressentiment]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyFri Nov 15, 2013 6:20 am

Scheler wrote:
"The modern doctrine of equality as a whole -- whether it pretends to be a statement of fact, a moral "postulate," or both -- is obviously an achievement of ressentiment. The postulate of equality -- be it moral, social, political, ecclesiastical equality or equality of property -- seems harmless, but who does not detect behind it the desire to degrade the superior persons, those who represent a higher value, to the level of the low? Nobody demands equality if he feels he has the strength or grace to triumph in the interplay of forces, in any domain of value! Only he who is afraid of losing demands equality as a general principle. The postulate of equality always involves "selling short"! It is a law that men can only be equal in their least valuable characteristics. The notion of "equality" as such, as a purely rational idea, can never actuate the will, the desire, and the affects. But ressentiment, unable to acquiesce in the sight of the higher values, conceals its nature in the postulate of "equality." In reality it merely wants to decapitate the bearers of higher values, at whom it takes offence!

The man of ressentiment is a weakling; he cannot stand alone with his judgment. He is the absolute opposite of the type of man who realizes objective goodness against a whole world of resistance even when he is alone to see and feel it. Thus the "generality" or "general validity" of a judgment becomes his substitute for the true objectivity of value. He turns away from his personal quest for the good and seeks support in the question: What do you think? What do all people think? What is the "general" tendency of man as a species? Or what is the trend of "evolution," so that I may recognize it and place myself in its "current"? All collectively are supposed to see what no one alone can see and recognize: a positive insight is to result from the accumulation of zero insights! A thing that is never "good" in itself is supposed to become good simply because it was so yesterday, or because it is a direct descendant of yesterday's good!

Already the philosophy of the Enlightenment has pushed this substitution of "generality" or "general validity" for "objectivity" to the utmost extreme. In all problems of value -- whether they concern law, the state, religion, economy, science, or art -- that which all men can produce and judge takes on the importance of an "ideal" by which we should measure the concrete and positive creations of civilization. The meaning of the expression "generally human" is endowed with the highest value. However, the psychological basis of this attitude is nothing but hatred and negativism against every positive form of life and civilization, which is always a courageous rise above what is merely "generally human" and must therefore come to naught when judged by this criterion." [Ressentiment]

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"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyMon Dec 09, 2013 12:12 pm

Why did I not read Diderot before?!

The portrait of the "Abject Hero" ties in a lot with ressentiment and even Han, best presented in a fantastic book called 'Bitter Carnival' by Bernstein through the figure of Rameau, Diderot's character.
The archetype of the Abject Hero also relates to a large extent with Sloterdijk's 'Cynic' / 'Kynic'... and is just as profound and interesting.
Some excerpts...

Quote :
"In our culture a pure monster may possess, as Jean-François Rameau sees with discomforting lucidity, a kind of grandeur-in-evil that compels, if not quite awe, then at least a distinct prestige for the intensity of his pas- sion: “If it is important to be sublime in anything, it is especially so in evil. One spits on a petty thief, but can’t withhold a sort of respect from a great criminal. His courage amazes you. His brutality makes you shudder. One admires integrity of character above all.” But to be abject is never to have experienced the monster’s single-mindedness. Instead, there is a cringing defiance deprived of any trust in one’s own power and vitiated by a self- contempt at least equivalent to one’s loathing for others. And yet the Ab- ject Hero’s defiance is just as intractable, his nature just as “incompatible with the existing order” as that of the most ruthless monster. The Abject Hero often longs to be exactly such a creature; his rare words of praise are reserved for the transcendent villains, and his whole being is a helpless dialogue between the urge to curse and attack without restraint and the anxiety immediately aroused by even the slightest danger. Where the mon- ster is monologic in his self-absorption, the Abject Hero is condemned to dialogue, since his consciousness is an echo chamber of incompatible de- sires and prohibitions, a sound box in which the voices of the monster, the contentedly successful citizen, the desperately hungry parasite, and the re- signed failure exchange insults and advice with bewildering inconsistency. But precisely by being denied the glamor of a Promethean rebel, by occu- pying the logically impossible space created by the intersection of the sa- tanic and the servile, the Abject Hero is both a more complex and ulti- mately a more subversive figure than the monster whose self-identity re- mains inviolate.

Abjection has received so little critical attention primarily because its lack of glamor makes it too distasteful to contemplate at length. But in ressentiment, for all its shabbiness and self-loathing, there is a potential for extraordinary violence and a rage whose ferocity has been repeatedly mobi- lized by political movements.

Abjection and ressentiment can be distinguished most readily by their different relationships to temporality and to the urge for vengeance: abjec- tion suffers constantly new, and usually externally imposed, slights and degradation, whereas ressentiment is trapped forever in the slights of the past. A lacerated vanity nourishes both abjection and ressentiment, but repetition is less crucial to abjection than to ressentiment, which experiences its existence as a perpetual recurrence of the same narcissistic injury. More- over, the man of ressentiment is actually “proud” of his abjection, and, as in Notes from Underground , he sees in it both his torment and the sign of his higher consciousness. The sufferer from abjection derives no such compen- satory pride from his humiliation, but neither does he dwell as obsessively on fantasies of revenge on imaginary enemies. What “empowers” someone afflicted by ressentiment is the intensely focused, but impotent, hatred with which he feeds his sense of having been treated unfairly, and his hope of someday forcing others to suffer in his place. Particularly in Céline’s novels, characters tend to fluctuate between the two states, exhibiting traits of both abjection and ressentiment in the course of the narrative. In Dos- toevsky, though, one can schematize the differences in more clear-cut ways, since he presents, along with abject and ressentiment-riddled souls like The Brothers Karamazov’s Smerdyakov, characters like The Idiot’s Lebedyev, who are thoroughly abject but with none of the murderous desires of ressentiment."


Quote :
"What the Abject Hero seeks to exploit is a double authority deriving from a double ancestry. The first is the freedom of the King’s fool, who, as the Abject Hero recalls from his own reading, is always shown by the most respected texts, whether classical or modern, as understanding more in his folly than do the self-servingly rational court- iers. This is a licensed clown, as the Abject Hero also recognizes, whose insights the audience has learned to applaud for their perceptiveness and justice. The second role model is the archetypal “wild man from the desert” whose imprecations and prophecies proved true when all the philosophies professed by the officially sanctioned sages were revealed as hollow. The Biblical model of the “vox clamantis in deserto,” although not unique, is Western culture’s most powerful instance of this archetype.22 And indeed, considering how text after text shows us the disastrous consequences of mocking such an inspired visionary, who would still be ready to disregard him without considerable hesitation?

But the Abject Hero is also aware of how potentially ludicrous his invo- cation of such archetypes must appear, and he himself is far from convinced of their pertinence to his condition. The Abject Hero is ready to wear motley, but only in order someday to replace the well-dressed courtiers; and he is willing to thunder against the court’s degeneracy, but only in the hope of being invited to share in its delights. His burden is not merely the contempt he senses from society’s spokesmen but, more gallingly, his awareness of being a meretricious fraud, usurping without authentic title the oppositional rhetoric invented long before by a host of genuinely for- midable and inspired outsiders.

For the abject consciousness, self-knowledge, instead of providing the relief of a certain distance from one’s predicament, only intensifies it, and a lucid irony about one’s plight may be the worst torment of all, since it immediately converts into an additional, especially acute symptom of the very state it is intended to diagnose. Here, self-awareness is not part of the solution; it is the very core of the problem. In Philip Roth’s cruelly accurate account: “Oh, ironic paranoia is the worst. Usually when you’re busy with your paranoia at least the irony is gone and you really want to win. But to see your roaring, righteous hatred as a supremely comical act subdues no one but yourself.”

The Abject Hero may feel a Juvenalian outrage at his society, particularly at his exclusion from its privileges, but, like Horace’s Davus, he will never be able to shake off a servile longing for approval from the targets of his wrath. Still worse, he will be lacerated by the galling suspicion that in truth he deserves no better than his subservient status."



Laughing

Quote :
"...consider this outburst of aggrieved self-defense by Jean-François Rameau, failed composer, failed parasite, and unhappily patronless “allowed fool”:

There is no better role in the company of the great than that of a fool. For a long time there was an official king’s fool but never an official king’s wise-man. I am Bertin’s fool as well as that of many others; right now, perhaps, I am yours, or, perhaps, you are mine. A sage would not keep a fool. Therefore, whoever does have a fool isn’t a wise man, and if he is not a wise man, then he must be a fool, and if he is a king, then perhaps he is only his fool’s fool."

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyMon Dec 09, 2013 12:15 pm

Quote :
"Imagine, as a momentary illustration, the following, perhaps familiar, situation: two men meet in a bar or bus station and one begins to tell the other of his woes, introducing numerous details of his well-deserved failures in life, his despair, and so forth, always interspersing his story with outbursts of wild self-praise and congratulations. But the listener keeps interrupting, “You know, I’ve already read that in Diderot and Dostoevsky. Aren’t you only imitating Jean-François Rameau and the Underground Man? Isn’t all this just the old Karamazov idea: the performance of the self in all its vileness out of the sheer compulsion to perform? Can’t you find a more original problem or at least a new story?” And if, indeed, the first speaker is not only familiar with these authors but quite aware that no matter how he tries, his narrative can never emerge except as a variation on their literary paradigms, then, presumably, the last possible claim for his own dignity will have been proved derisive.

Faced with so helpless a predicament, the Abject Hero’s most promising option is to attempt to pass himself off as a monster. The very reading that has helped blight his self-esteem has shown him the curious prestige habit- ually attached to the monster. If he were to succeed in embodying, both for himself and his interlocutor, the role of civilization’s daemonic double, the madman who rages forth when all the compromises and repressions of socialization have been shattered, then the Abject Hero might indeed effect a sudden reversal in his wretched position. And so Rameau, the Under- ground Man, Fyodor Karamazov, and the Célinian narrator keep trying to sound ever more monstrous. But for them, even that tone—one that ought to issue forth as an untamed natural force—is itself as mediated as all of their other attitudes and poses. To mimic the monstrous is still to be only a mimic, and to model one’s speech after the mad is still to be dependent upon prior examples. But, paradoxically, to desire such a voice for oneself is genuinely monstrous, and to attempt to convince others of its truth is, in its very fraudulence, a distinctly mad enterprise. So the Abject Hero is again doomed to a doubled existence: parodying a role that is, in reality, already his own, and imitating a state that he already inhabits.


Because the Abject Hero exists only in relationship to others, the charac- ter of his interlocutor is as crucial in determining his options as any inner impulses. After all, the listener is under no obligation to endure a stream of whining taunts and sarcasms, and a good index of the Abject Hero’s skill lies in his ability to seduce someone from a radically different social and moral sphere into a real dialogue. Stefan Collini shrewdly asks, “What mix- ture of masochism, anxiety, self-criticism or other discontent lies behind the half-acknowledged wish to be arraigned and harangued by licensed lash-wielders?”24 To this list, richly suggestive as it is, Collini might have added a curious species of vanity, the kind of self-congratulation that re- wards someone who permits himself to be openly criticized, thus giving public evidence of his own tolerant sophistication and lack of unseemly self-defensiveness. Of course, such a strategy may also cloak the most acute anxiety, and the readiness to expose oneself to extravagantly absurd criti- cisms is often just a means to evade accusations that are more threatening, because they lie too close to one’s own fears. The shrewdness of the Abject Hero can be gauged by how successfully he takes the measure of his in- terlocutor, how effectively he can break down his partner’s self-assurance and force him to acknowledge that his whole being is at stake in their confrontation.

In order to fascinate, the Abject Hero must first persuade us that in spite of the obvious unpleasantness—or, more accurately, exactly because of that unpleasantness—conversation with him will yield the benefit of an other- wise unavailable insight into both human nature and the workings of soci- ety. Crucial to his success is the Abject Hero’s exploitation of the knowl- edge that the dominant culture itself has endowed his marginal position with the compensatory prestige of an access to truths supposedly “denied to those blinkered by or imprisoned in the assumptions of their own soci- ety.”25 Paradoxically, to refuse the Abject Hero his say would risk con- demnation by the eminently reputable conventions that branded him dis- reputable in the first place. For example, in the anecdote I just recounted, the unwilling listener might as easily be telling himself, “Well, yes, every- thing I’m hearing is just a garbled compendium of literary citations. But how can I be sure he isn’t suddenly going to reveal something true that I’ve always been afraid to acknowledge? If I dismiss him without a thought, am I just exposing myself as one more smug coward? Even if he is just parrot- ing Rameau and the Underground Man, how does my repugnance distin- guish me from the philosophe’s complacency or the obtuseness of Dos- toevsky’s rationalist ‘gentlemen’?” And so the dialogue continues, between the speakers and within each one as well, the voices doubled and then dou- bled again until it is closing time in the bar, or the bus finally arrives, taking each man in a different direction, one home to his burrow in the Under- ground, the other to his duplex in the company (or faculty) compound."[Bernstein, Bitter Carnival]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyMon Dec 09, 2013 12:18 pm

Quote :
"In one of his most striking phrases, Freud described “the narcissism of minor differences,” the need we have to distinguish ourselves from others, no matter how paltry the demarcations are in objective terms. It is here that the Abject Hero is most vulnerable, his narcissism most easily wounded: since the accents of his anger are themselves only quotations, his claim to even the most “minor differences” is necessarily suspect. Out of this wounded narcissism arises a compensatory urge: the fantasy of seizing the platform, not just to draw everyone’s eyes to himself and exhibit his humiliations as evidence of a victimized sensitivity, but to insult and injure the audience that has “compelled” him to become a licensed mountebank. The initial theatrical image is gradually transformed from Juvenal’s vexa- tion at being relegated to the audience and denied his rightful place on stage to Céline’s hallucinatory vision of everyone trapped together in the same violent arena, without either stage or stands remaining as a place of refuge.

The most intriguing aspect of this transformation is that it found its literary structure not in Juvenal’s monologic indignation but in Horace’s subtly modulated dialogues, in the metamorphic possibilities of a Saturnalian confrontation between servitude and mastery, wisdom and folly.
If Juvenal insists it is anger that prompts his verse, there is a counter- claim that seems at least as plausible; namely, his verse itself entirely creates the anger in the first place, an indignatio that exists only for its rhetorical possibilities as a poetry-engendering stance.

Juvenal has no reformist or pedagogic impulse: the satires only exist in order to rail and by virtue of the breathtaking technical brilliance of their raillery. For Juvenal, the kind of “wisdom” Horace both accepts and mildly satirizes (largely a form of humane Stoicism) is essen- tially irrelevant. The world has gone so totally astray that the wisdom of the all-observing Juvenalian eye can breed only anger, disgust, or despair, and beneath these emotions a distinctly audible delight at its own wit in fash- ioning a matchingly corrosive idiom. Moreover, in the Juvenalian canon one vice immediately turns into another and still another, thereby generat- ing both the poet’s vision and the poem’s structure: a kind of epic catalog of horrific negative exempla (cf., Satire 8.183–84), linked by a kind of demented metamorphosis vitiarum in which degeneracy and folly reign su- preme. In such a universe, the concept of a meliorative wisdom seems the height of delirium because, were it to exist, it would be so utterly impotent.

Since the Juvenalian voice can do nothing but rail, the suggestion that virtue may actually exist is registered as only another provocation, as some- thing the poem can not incorporate except by denouncing. In Satire 6, for example, the lengthy description of the horrors of female sexuality is interrupted by a crucial supposition. What if there really still existed, Juvenal asks, a woman who embodies all the perfections, who is the exact opposite of the monsters he has expended such vitriol denouncing?

sit formosa decens dives fecunda, vetustos porticibus disponat avos, intactior omni crinibus effusis bellum dirimente Sabina.

[with beauty and charm, fertile, wealthy, her hall / A museum of old ancestral portraits, grant her Virginity more stunning than all those dishevelled Sabine / Maidens who stopped the fighting.]

Surprisingly, Juvenal does not deny the possibility that so rare a Roman maiden can still exist amidst the corruption of the age. Instead he takes the more shocking tack of insisting that this picture of perfection is actually the most appalling prospect of all:

quis feret uxorem cui constant omnia? malo, malo Venusinam quam te, Cornelia, mater Gracchorum.

[Who could stomach such wifely perfection? I’d far sooner / Marry a penniless tart than take on that virtuous / Paragon Cornelia, Mother of Statesmen.]

Beyond the obvious, and probably self-mocking, misogyny characteristic of the whole satire, what is more revealing about this passage is that Juvenal’s verse cannot tolerate any sort of “paragon.” What cannot be attacked also can not be narrated within the restricted emotional compass of his lines. Juvenal continuously decries his era’s lack of genuine nobility or virtue, but his poetry is deeply complicit with the corruption it indicts since it is incapable of accommodating even a fragmentary remnant of an ideal without renouncing its character as monologic raillery. Like all raillery, Juvenal’s satire is tremendously excited by what it attacks. The imaginative energy of each satire is roused into the greatest verbal activity by the most ferocious examples of degradation, and the poem’s savage indignation is entirely dependent on fantasizing an in principle unending puppet-show of human viciousness, each instance compelling the poet to new—and more thrilling—verbal pyrotechnics. But because Juvenal is neither a reformer nor particularly interested in problems of representation, his satires are united purely by a narrative voice, rather than by any consistent psychological self-portraiture (e.g., the often contradictory description of his tastes, etc.) or moral/logical thematic unfolding. Juvenal writes about the pleasures of writing, specifically about the pleasures of writing about being furious, and he does so by blatantly undermining both narrative plausibility and authorial psychology.

Rameau is not merely a parasite and unmasker but also a father, grieving widower, and failed artist, whose familial relationships—he is, after all, known primarily as the crazy nephew of France’s greatest living composer—and debilitating penury are crucial both to his temperament and to the specific charges he levels against Moi’s complacent confidence. An equally significant consequence of this particularization is that the Nephew reflects on his role as a “licensed fool” and makes of that condition his central grievance against himself, the philosophes, and the society in which occupations like his are simultaneously sought after, scorned, and rewarded. For Rameau, the banter of the “licensed fool” is a grotesque kind of career decision, and much of his self-laceration consists precisely in trying to understand and justify what he sees sometimes as an involuntary degradation of his voluntary stance and other times as a voluntary self- abasement to which he is driven by ineluctable human need. Folly may be common to everyone in the world of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and servitude may be the lot of all of Augustus’s subjects, but Rameau is the first literary character to unite both the fool and the slave with the painful self- consciousness of a man convinced both that he is doing exactly what most fits his skills and that he has been debased by a world in which survival is possible only by letting one’s own ignobility flourish."[Bernstein, Bitter Carnival]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyWed Dec 11, 2013 3:12 pm

Quote :
"It was the Jews who, rejecting the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = blessed) ventured with awe-inspiring consistency, to bring about a reversal and held it in the teeth of their unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless), saying, ‘Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble, the powerful, you are eternally wicked, cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will also be eternally wretched, cursed and damned!'..." [N.]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyThu Dec 12, 2013 5:25 pm

Quote :
"Consider, for example, how important a part of Socrates’ aim it is to elicit his interlocutors’ agreement about their misconceptions. What Rameau wrests from his abasement is, not victory, but the knowledge that his humiliation condemns himself and his opponent equally." [Bernstein, Bitter Carnival]


Quote :
"The transposed variant "freudenschade" has been invented in English to mean sorrow at another person's success."

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyFri Dec 13, 2013 7:12 pm

Quote :
"To be ashamed of oneself is more often the consequence of a boundless and wounded vanity than of any finely tuned moral scruples, and knowing this himself, Fyodor Karamazov echoes and elaborates on the elder’s advice: “Indeed, I always feel when I meet people that I am lower than all, and that they all take me for a buffoon. So I say, ‘Let me really play the buffoon. I am not afraid of your opinion, for you are every one of you worse than I am.’ That is why I am a buffoon. It is from shame, great elder, from shame”.

But Fyodor Karamazov’s account shows how entwined inner impulses and external judgments, the sense of being ashamed and the aggressive pleasure of exhibitionism, really are. The Dostoevskian buffoon humiliates himself to forestall the humiliations he knows lie in wait for him, and then revenges himself by bringing to light the buffoonery of his humiliators—a buffoonery that he hopes to mark as even more pettily sordid than his own because it is unwitting rather than “freely” chosen. But the hopelessness of such a tactic is evident when one considers how hollow the claim to a “free choice” really is. The endless reverberations between inner and outer scorn cannot be frozen in a single formula, since the original prediction about the reactions of the Other operates as a self-fulfilling prophecy and serves less as a plausible etiology of abjection than as another symptom of the disease it would diagnose. One of the central dilemmas of abjection is this impossibility of distinguishing between inner and outer pressures, between self-loathing and social humiliation, cunning mockery and a pathetic need for attention. Irrespective of its origin, Dostoevskian abjection functions as a weapon of global aggression, whose sting is all the more venomous for continually traversing the complex passage between internal and external targets. It is as though the initial, desperately seized-upon gambit of carica- turing one’s own feelings not only justifies but also focuses the malice cas- cading outward from one’s psyche in a kind of noxious deluge from whose contamination no one escapes unbesmirched.

The psychologization of the Saturnalian carnival is readily apparent in the image of such a leveling deluge. Indeed, Dostoevsky’s novels are a po- tent index of how bitter such a carnival has become and how deeply wounded all of its participants must be to perform their customary parts. The Saturnalian dialogue is central to Dostoevsky’s art, but instead of the usual optimistic interpretation of the carnivalesque, Dostoevsky insists on its kinship to the Gadarene swine’s headlong rush to disaster. There is con- siderably more laughter in Dostoevsky’s novels than we tend to remember, and there are times when he seems, after Flaubert, the supreme comic nov- elist of the nineteenth century. But his humor has a distinctly hysterical edge, and the most riveting moments of his characters’ laughter are often accompanied by murderous impulses towards self and others. It is these impulses, the longing of the tormented for the absolution of utter chaos, that Dostoevsky depicts as underlying the Saturnalian ecstasy. Jean- François Rameau would have recognized the urge and would have been careful to keep his deepest longings in check, just like Fyodor Karamazov, who “in the last resort . . . could always restrain himself, and had indeed marveled at himself sometimes on that score.”

He had no clear idea what he would do, but he knew that he could not control himself, and that a touch might drive him to the utmost limits of obscenity, but only to obscenity, to nothing criminal, nothing for which he could be legally punished.

Saturnalia may indeed abolish the “footlights . . . between actors and spectators,” but by making everyone an actor, the festival’s histrionic element is dangerously heightened. And the problem with the histrion’s role is that usually no one is willing, or indeed able, to separate the elements of charlatanism and sincerity in the performer’s character." [Bernstein, Bitter Carnival]



"
Quote :
"Fyodor Karamazov knows that he is usually acting a part, that even his “righteous anger” no longer exists except as a series of poses in a third-rate spectacle:

With old liars who have been acting all their lives there are moments when they enter so completely into their part that they tremble or shed tears of emo- tion in earnest, although at that very moment, or a second later, they are able to whisper to themselves, “You know you are lying, you shameless old sinner! You’re acting now, in spite of your ‘holy’ wrath and your ‘holy’ moment of wrath.” (p. 64)

It is often unclear if he has any emotions left at all that are not in large measure dramatic performances. Dostoevsky had already written what is virtually the comic apotheosis of this dilemma fifteen years before The Brothers Karamazov, in the Underground Man’s description of “the moans of an educated man of the nineteenth century who is suffering from a toothache”:

particularly on the second or third day of the attack, when he has already begun to moan not as he moaned on the first day . . . simply because he has a toothache, . . . but as a man affected by progress and European civilization. . . . His moans become nasty, disgustingly spiteful, and go on for whole days and nights. And, after all, he himself knows that he does not benefit at all from his moans . . . he knows that even the audience for whom he is exerting himself . . . do not believe him for a second . . . they understand that he could moan differently, more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only indulging himself like that out of spite, out of malice.

Such faith in one’s own pain, that it really is one’s own and not merely another theatrical costume, is what abjection makes impossible, and this denial of any authenticity constitutes a central strand in the net of abjection’s worst torments.

Abjection entails an obsessive and involuntary theatricality, expressed in a kind of manic logorrhea that is haunted by the fear that every genuinely inward feeling has been leached out in the very act of representation. This fear is one of the many ties uniting figures like Rameau and Fyodor Karamazov and helps explain their frequent moments of fatigue and depression." [Bernstein, Bitter Carnival]



Quote :
"Robert Belknap has articulated this disjunction with the greatest precision:

Gratitude implies benefits received, and just as buffoonery was a twisted re- sponse to poverty and blows received, so the nadryv [lacerated soul] is a twisted response to wealth and benefits received, or at least offered. . . . The nadryv is the exact opposite of buffoonery, involving pride, riches, dignity, and a pressing fear of being base, while the buffoon embodies humiliation, poverty, shame, and pursuit of baseness. The buffoon makes himself laughable in order to make oth- ers so. The nadryv causes a person to hurt himself in order to hurt others, or, perversely, to hurt others in order to hurt himself.

I think there is a good deal of justice in Belknap’s analysis, but he seems to me to ignore one of the central features of Dostoevsky’s characters: that is, their nervous motility, their disconcerting tendency to switch in an instant from buffoon to lacerated soul and back again, or, still more alarmingly, to exhibit both personae at the same time."[Bernstein, Bitter Carnival]

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"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyFri Dec 13, 2013 7:12 pm

Quote :
"Let us, for the moment, simply listen to an early passage in which the Underground Man offers, in the process of his ironic self-description, what is virtually an itemization of ressentiment’s major preoccupations:

There, in its nasty, stinking underground home, our insulted, crushed and ridi- culed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all, ever- lasting spite. For forty years together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most shameful detail and every time will add, of itself, details still more shameful, spitefully teasing and irritating itself with its own imagination. It will be ashamed of its own fancies, but yet it will recall everything, it will go over it again and again, it will invent lies against itself pretending that those things too might have happened, and will forgive nothing. Maybe it will begin to revenge itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind the stove, incognito, without believing either in its own right to vengeance, or in the suc- cess of its revenge, knowing beforehand that from all its efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom it revenges itself, while he, prob- ably, will not even feel it. On its deathbed it will recall it all over again, with interest accumulated over all the years.

The crushing sense of one’s own insignificance, evoked in the image of a mouse, was prefigured earlier in the assertion that “I could not even [manage to] become an insect” —a quest that Kafka’s Gregor Samsa carried to a successful conclusion—but what is crucial about this passage is the thoroughness with which ressentiment’s grievances are itemized. The spite is cold because it is denied any sudden and passionate purgation through action; it is venomous because it poisons both the sufferer and whatever he encounters; and it is everlasting because without forgetfulness, no release can be conceived. More important, though, is the admis- sion that not only does the memory of an injury continue its torment forever but the passage of time adds fresh details and new provocations to the reminiscences. Ressentiment does not merely recollect slights; it creates them from its own imaginings, establishing a psychological economy of abjection in which time breeds a quarterly dividend of new shame to swell the capital already deposited in the sufferer’s emotional account. The whole question of an original outrage is deliberately undermined, since the Underground Man freely confesses the fictional status of his sufferings and admits his authorship of the very humiliations and reminiscences that victimize him. What “might have happened,” the degrading images of his “own imagination,” and the taunts actually encountered in society are all spun into a single narrative, whose self-reflexivity heightens, rather than mitigates, the intensity of the hysteria. In Nietzsche’s lapidary account, the cry of ressentiment, “I suffer: it must be somebody’s fault,” reveals both the factitiousness of any external agent in creating the sufferer’s misery and the need to blame someone and everyone for his lacerations. Or, in the Underground Man’s parallel formulation: “though you can’t come up with an enemy, you do have pain.”

Ressentiment is like an author in search of characters to populate the seedy dramas of its own spite, and like an author it creates scenarios to justify what is only—but also never less than—the narratives it will then remember and ceaselessly amplify. The narrative of memory and the memory of narrative are indistinguishable in their effects, and it makes no difference that ressentiment is as ready to blame itself as another, since the self is already experienced as radically multiple, constantly divided from itself in the exteriority of time experienced as pure repetition."[Bernstein, Bitter Carnival]


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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyTue Feb 25, 2014 5:12 pm

Nietzsche wrote:
“To be incapable of taking one's enemies, one's accidents, even one's misdeeds seriously for very long—that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget (a good example of this in modem times is Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and vile actions done him and was unable to forgive simply because he—forgot). Such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others; here alone genuine 'love of one's enemies' is possible—supposing it to be possible at all on earth. How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies!—and such reverence is a bridge to love.—For he desires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor! In contrast to this, picture 'the enemy' as the man of ressentiment conceives him—and here precisely is his deed, his creation: he has conceived 'the evil enemy,' 'the Evil One,' and this in fact is his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and pendant, a 'good one'—himself!” [EH, on GM]


Nietzsche wrote:
“While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself (gennaios 'of noble descent' underlines the nuance 'upright' and probably also 'naïve'), the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how not to forget, how to wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble. A race of such men of ressentiment is bound to become eventually cleverer than any noble race; it will also honor cleverness to a far greater degree: namely, as a condition of existence of the first importance; while with noble men cleverness can easily acquire a subtle flavor of luxury and subtlety—for here it is far less essential than the perfect functioning of the regulating unconscious instincts or even than a certain imprudence, perhaps a bold recklessness whether in the face of danger or of the enemy, or that enthusiastic impulsiveness in anger, love, reverence, gratitude, and revenge by which noble souls have at all times recognized one another. Ressentiment itself, if it should appear in the noble man, consummates and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, and therefore does not poison: on the other hand, it fails to appear at all on countless occasions on which it inevitably appears in the weak and impotent.” [ib.]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyFri May 30, 2014 8:39 am


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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyFri May 30, 2014 9:31 am

And so idealization of anything is this cutting away of the concept from its roots, from its reason, its purpose, its motive, its past - it is a detachment from the burdens of space/time.
A actualization of a behavior, a spiritualization, that may become the religious spirit of surrendering to the ideal, or the idol.
The shrinking of the spirit either in idealized asceticism, self-denial, and/or in idealized hedonism, debauchery of carefree carelessness - both a nihilistic spirit...one as an immersion in other, and the other as a self-destruction and a surrender to circumstance, to chaos.
Both are death-wishes...one promising eternal life after death, after the complete destruction of self (ego), and the other as the complete surrender of self to fate, to chaos, justified as a surrender to the moment, the immediate gratification, the sensation with no cause and no effect.    

What applies to asceticism applies to its denial in hedonism, materialism.
The behavior is detached from its purpose, and made self-referential.
It is "good" in and of itself, so as to absolve the thinker from justifying himself to himself, or to other.

And so man gives his behavior meaning by controlling himself, and not abandoning himself to the sensation.
He gives his becoming a purpose, a meaning, a motive.
Now the idea(l) is not "good" or "bad" in itself, for it is but a means of directing the will towards or away - the idea(l) become a tool, a method, a way of orienting consciousness and directing the Will.
It is a form of training.

Te turning of the will against itself by shaming it, is a way of disarming the organism of its only method of self-orientation.
The Will is supplanted by an other's Will, turning the slave into a docile slave, now trainable by an external, to it, Will.
The surrender to pleasure, as the way of detaching one's self from the experience of existing, is another method of manipulating the slave by suing its own primal tastes and addictions.

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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyFri May 30, 2014 11:07 am

Satyr wrote:
And so idealization of anything is this cutting away of the concept from its roots, from its reason, its purpose, its motive, its past - it is a detachment from the burdens of space/time.
A actualization of a behavior, a spiritualization, that may become the religious spirit of surrendering to the ideal, or the idol.
The shrinking of the spirit either in idealized asceticism, self-denial, and/or in idealized hedonism, debauchery of carefree carelessness - both a nihilistic spirit...one as an immersion in other, and the other as a self-destruction and a surrender to circumstance, to chaos.
Both are death-wishes...one promising eternal life after death, after the complete destruction of self (ego), and the other as the complete surrender of self to fate, to chaos, justified as a surrender to the moment, the immediate gratification, the sensation with no cause and no effect.    

What applies to asceticism applies to its denial in hedonism, materialism.
The behavior is detached from its purpose, and made self-referential.
It is "good" in and of itself, so as to absolve the thinker from justifying himself to himself, or to other.

And so man gives his behavior meaning by controlling himself, and not abandoning himself to the sensation.
He gives his becoming a purpose, a meaning, a motive.
Now the idea(l) is not "good" or "bad" in itself, for it is but a means of directing the will towards or away - the idea(l) become a tool, a method, a way of orienting consciousness and directing the Will.
It is a form of training.

Te turning of the will against itself by shaming it, is a way of disarming the organism of its only method of self-orientation.
The Will is supplanted by an other's Will, turning the slave into a docile slave, now trainable by an external, to it, Will.
The surrender to pleasure, as the way of detaching one's self from the experience of existing, is another method of manipulating the slave by suing its own primal tastes and addictions.
 


Great Post.

When I listened to it, I was thinking in terms of your recent remark on Schmuck about the Martyr.

The Martyr's absence of ressentiment or resentful hate for his persecutors - Schmoe's "good intentions" to you and his thinking of you as his persecutor, Christ's "good will" in the face of his enemies... their bad conscience towards life is so much that their bad conscience towards their persecutors never manifests.

Like a sponge, it never enters their consciosuness.

Quote :
"Well, Nietzsche claims that moral valuations born out of ressentiment are objectionable because they are reactive. His claim is that a lesser moral system has developed out of an adversarial relationship between masters and slaves; and this lesser moral system is due fundamentally to the condition of ressentiment, which the slaves hold. In other words, because the slaves don’t enjoy their position in the world, they alter their moral valuations to see themselves in a better light.

Ressentiment constitutes a poisoning of the mind that has clear consequences. It is a persisting psychological state caused by the repression of negative emotions that exist in humans more generally, such as hate, revenge and envy. This form of repression causes people to have deluded judgements about the values of things.

The word ressentiment is french, and it differs from the English word resentment in a fundamental way. Moral resentment differs from ressentiment in that ‘ressentiment’ is used to explain the source of the morality which the word ‘resentment’ presupposes. Ressentiment is not just a moment of hatred, a moment of resentment; rather, it is a continual feeling of the emotion, where one relives a particular negative emotion over and over. The continual feeling of the emotion means it is not merely the recollection of the particular emotion that caused the resentment, but it is rather a constant renewal of the original feeling. For instance, if you were to dislike someone immensely, and you constantly feel hatred for that person rather than moving on and forgiving them, you would be experiencing ressentiment. I guess it’s kind of like scratching off a scab so it can never heal."
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And what is the etymology of the Martyr?

Old English martyr, from Late Latin martyr, from Doric Greek martyr, earlier martys (genitive martyros), in Christian use "martyr," literally "witness," probably related to mermera "care, trouble," from mermairein "be anxious or thoughtful," from PIE *(s)mrtu- (cognates: Sanskrit smarati "remember," Latin memor "mindful;" see memory).


It is from the inability to forget.

Schmoe HAS TO PIMP his abuse and make a CAUSE of it for EVERYONE. His constant recollection has to be unburdened, and he turns it into a cause, a goal of his life, a purpose, a mission.

He feels good.

He feels no ressentiment to his persecutors...

He's generalized everything out of its particularity...



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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyFri May 30, 2014 11:15 am

The martyr becomes the communal witness of shared suffering.
He points to the source, sacrificing himself by revealing himself, revelation.  
He is the member of the herd that exposes himself to the hunter, so that the rest might escape.

His death, his suffering, is transmitted to them as this witnessing of their nature as victims of circumstances. The hunter, the predator, being an agency of circumstances, of all those events, in the past (nature) that culminate in that moment of sublime sacrifice.
In that moment of death he exits life, and reports back to the herd, the true nature of hunted and hinter, as good and evil.

The theoria, of seeing through God's eyes.
The hedonist goes the other route. He surrenders to the moment, shrinks space/time to where he is immersed in the action, without cause/effect.
He is absolved of responsibility and so escapes a greater suffering.
The thing-in-itself is felt as infinite pleasure as an end-in-itself.
God turns to thing.

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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyFri May 30, 2014 11:21 am

Satyr wrote:
The martyr becomes the communal witness of shared suffering.

Yes. So you see it from an external memory.

I try to understand it from an internal memory.

Ressentiment is constant recollection of being witness to its abuse and humiliation, and so now it unburdens itself in the outside, in society by generalzing its humiliation as it suffering for everyone.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyFri May 30, 2014 12:21 pm

Lyssa wrote:

Ressentiment is constant recollection of being witness to its abuse and humiliation, and so now it unburdens itself in the outside, in society by generalzing its humiliation as it suffering for everyone.
Yes...
It's a way of coping.
It is not the only sufferer, shame concerning its nature...and so all must be sufferers.

When the other is the sufferer, a projection of self, then you can become your own hero.
you enter the scene to save the other, which is you, from its situation.
Shem turns to pride.

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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptySun Jun 29, 2014 9:04 pm

Quote :
"The fox is an underling, and it is characteristic of underlings both to despise and to glorify their masters. They are likely to resent their subordination to "such as can wear a better cloak", and to entertain fantasies of revenge or of displacing the master; but they may also derive gratification from their association with "so great a master", or at least from fantasies of serving some imaginary great master. To be an underling means to endure continual frustration and deprivation, and this to have continual reason for envy and resentment. But underlings cannot afford too much of such angry feelings, or at least they must learn to contain and disguise them through self-control, and through the safe and indirect devices of humor and wit, paradox and ambiguity.
For the fool… is exempt from the usual rules of decorum and courtesy; he is not a serious competitor and therefore can say what is forbidden to others: the fool may insult the king and be praised for his wit to boot. Indeed, the court fool's special license is traditionally symbolized by the jester's cap, whose jagged points figure an inverted crown. Playing the fool, moreover… can be a prudent form of self-concealment while one awaits the right time for revenge for even for an open seizure of power."[Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman]

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"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyMon Jun 30, 2014 3:28 am

Sympathizers of violence often enough over a period of time become initiators of it themselves. Thoughts and feelings eventually lead to actions.

It is natural to resent those that have more than you or those that do you harm overall.

It is natural to want to see them killed.

It is natural to wish them pain.

It is natural to want to kill them yourself.

It is natural to want to see their tortured souls shorty before they die.

Of course, what would the will to power be without resentment?
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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyThu Jul 03, 2014 5:30 pm

LaughingMan wrote:

It is natural to resent those that have more than you or those that do you harm overall.

It is natural to want to see them killed.

It is natural to wish them pain.

It is natural to want to kill them yourself.

It is natural to want to see their tortured souls shorty before they die.

Only the impotent would resent and envy and will their destruction, because they are unable to create themselves.
If you can't climb up, the abject underling would derive contentment in seeing the other pulled to his level, or destroying whatever disturbs his eye, his sensation of pain.

Quote :
Of course, what would the will to power be without resentment?

There is a self-loathing from a "more of myself" and there is a self-loathing from a "wanting to be somebody else"... yea?

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"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Ressentiment Ressentiment EmptyThu Jul 03, 2014 6:21 pm

Leave it up to a woman to recite some bullshit out of Atlas Shrugged in her praise of the productive class.

I have news for you doll, if I can pull down the person above me on the ladder and kill them inheriting all of their possessions that would make me the more superior of the jungle.

John Galt can go fuck himself.
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