Ressentiment (Scheler) - Essential Structures of Ressentiment Proper:"Pathological Ressentiment"

Essential Structures of Ressentiment Proper:"Pathological Ressentiment"

Further refining Ressentiment, Scheler wrote:

"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."

Hence, certain advanced characteristics of Ressentiment link this phenomenon to what we might refer to today as personality disorders. As such, Ressentiment Proper ("Pathological Ressentiment’) is not materially linked exclusively to issues of socio-economic status, but rather cuts across all socio-economic strata of society to include even the most powerful.

6) In Pathological Ressentiment a Sense of Impotency develops on the part of those experiencing ressentiment-feelings, especially if situational and social factors weigh so heavily so as render a person unable to release or resolve negative psychic feelings and feeling states in a positive and constructive manner: what we refer to today in psychological terms as repression.

Originally understood, Ressentiment is defused whenever one has the power and ability to physically retaliate, or act out, against an oppressor. For example, an ancient Roman citizen, as Master, could be expected to take revenge straight away upon his Slave while the reserve would be unthinkable. "When can be acted out, no ressentiment results. But when a person is unable to release these feelings against the persons or groups evoking them, thus developing a sense of impotence, and when these feelings are continuously re-experienced over time, then ressentiment arises."

But for Scheler, the essence of Impotency as characteristic of Pathological Ressentiment has less to do with the actual presence of an external oppressor, and more to do with a self-inflicted personal sense of inadequacy over limitations in the face of positive value attainment itself. Hence, Resesentiment-feelings tend to be continuously re-experienced over time in a self-perpetuating manner primarily fueled by a sense of inadequacy felt within the self which the "other" really only occasions. For example, one can have every advantage in life given them, yet prove to lack the talent for achieving the goals set for him or her self.

These re-experienced feelings of impotency become rationalized on a subconscious level as knee-jerk attitudinal projections: i.e., prejudices, bias, racism, bigotry, cynicism, and closed mindedness.

Noteworthy is the "abstract" focus of Ressentiment: the fact that specific individuals (i.e., the "Master figure" or their counterpart "Slave figure") are no longer even required for Ressentiment feelings and their rationalized forms of expression to continue and drive forward. One only needs a representative member of the class of one's focus of resentment to be represented in some way. "Members of a group can become random targets of hate, borne out of impotence that seeks to level the group." Such a random formal treatment of "otherness" offers a plausible explanation for hate crimes, serial killings (in part), genocide, the general framing of an enemy in faceless non-human terms, as well as any top-down or bottom-up form of class warfare agenda, etc. Hence, there must be a psychic distancing of de-personalization between Master and Slave perceptions of "the other" in order for Ressentiment to operate effectively.

7) Pathological Ressentiment entails "Value-Delusion". Value Delusion is "a tendency to belittle, degrade, dismiss or to ‘reduce’ genuine values as well as their bearers." However, this is done in a distinctively non-productive manner because "ressentiment does not lead to affirmation of counter-values since ressentiment-imbued persons secretly crave the values they publicly denounce." This aspect of Value Delusions represents a horizontal shift of value judgment concerning things and the world from a positive to a more negative orientation. What was once loved or thought of as good becomes devalued as "sour grapes" or "damaged goods" in the mind of the Ressentiment-imbued person, and what was previously lacking in value is now elevated to the status of acceptable.

In spite of this decidedly negative direction, "the ressentiment-subject is continuously 'plagued' by those distractions of unattainable values in that he emotionally replaces them with disvalues issuing forth from his impotence. In the background of such an illusory and self-deceiving over-turning of positive values with illusory negative valuations there still remains transparency of the true objective order of values and their ranks." Hence, the demands of Value-Delusion manifest in what we commonly refer to as a superiority complex,i.e., arrogance, hubris, hypocrisy, employment of double standards, denial, revenge, and self-projection of one's own negative qualities onto the opposition.

Correspondingly, negative feeling states suggest the absence, repudiation or flight from positive values. But nonetheless, negative values do not stand on their own intrinsic merit: they always refer back in some way to correspondingly positive values. Emotionally, Value Delusion turns happiness to sadness, compassion to hate, hope to despair, self-respect to shame, love and acceptance to rejection (or worse, competition), resolve to dread, and so on down throughout the human emotional strata.

Delusion is essential for the Ressentiment-imbued person in order to maintain any semblance of mental homeostasis.

8) Pathological Ressentiment ultimately manifests as "Metaphysical Confusion". Metaphysical Confusion is a form of Value Delusion in which the value shift is more vertical in character, in relation to the apriori hierarchy of value modalities. In this dimension, Value Delusion occurs a sort of twisting, or false inversion, of the value hierarchy wherein higher value-contents and bearers are viewed as lower, and lower as higher. Today we commonly refer to this phenomenon as "Having One's Priorities Out of Order." Scheler illustrated such an inversion in his analysis of Western civilizations humanistic, materialistic and capitalistic propensities to elevate utility values above those of vital values. Carried to the logical extreme, "Ressentiment brings its most important achievement when it determines a whole "morality," preventing the rules of preference until what was "evil" appears "good."

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9) Pathological Ressentiment ultimately results in a deadening (psychological numbing) of normal sympathetic feeling states, as well as all higher forms of psychic and spiritual feelings and feeling states. As opposed to a pure well ordered emotive life (Ordo Amoris) appropriate to the ethical person as created in God's image through love (ens amans), Pathological Ressentiment emotively results in a disordered heart (de’ordre du coeurs), or what we might commonly refer to as a "hardened heart."

For Scheler, morality finds expression in response to "the call of the hour", or exercise of personal conscience, which is based the heart's proper order of love (Ordo Amoris) in relation to positive and higher values. By contrast, Ressentiment with its corresponding Value-Delusions willfully favors varying degrees of a disordered heart (de’ordre du coeurs) and twisted emotions consistent with personality disorders. For example, it is precisely the failure to feel for and identify with their victims (even to the extent of deriving sadistic pleasure) which characterizes the sociopath, the psychopath, the serial killer, the dictator, the rapist, the bully, the corrupt CEO and the ruthless drug dealer—all share this same common denominator. Common Law would refer to this quality as "cold blooded".

Author Erick Larson in his book Devil in the White City renders with great precision a literary description of this deadening of higher feeling states in reference to America's first serial killer, Herman Webster Mudgett, alias Dr. H.H. Holmes

"…Holmes was charming and gracious, but something about him made Belkamp uneasy. He could not have defined it. Indeed for the next several decades alienists and their successors would find themselves hard-pressed with any precision what it was about men like Holmes that caused them to seem warm and integrating but also telegraph the vague sense that some important element of humanness was missing. At first alienists described this condition as "moral insanity" and those who exhibited the disorder as "moral imbeciles." They later adopted the term "psychopath"…as a "new malady" and stated, "Besides his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath."

The Ressentiment-Imbued person exercises such a pronounced psychic distance from his victims so as to never fully achieve the desired lasting satisfaction produced though his own unethical actions. "Retaliation" of this sort no longer yields any good, and "expression" of this sort lacks all possibility of positive results. "In true ressentiment there is no emotive satisfaction but only a life-long anger and anguish in feelings that are compared with others."

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