Ressentiment

How is ressentiment different from ordinary resentment?

Ressentiment comes from the French verb ressentir, "to feel again"; German had no exact word for it, so the French was borrowed as it stood. It resembles grudge or rancour, but Nietzsche gave it a more specific sense: the poison that forms when someone who has suffered insult or defeat, but is too weak to strike back at once, swallows the feeling and chews on it for a long time. In section 10 of the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) he wrote that ressentiment is the feeling "of such beings as are denied the true reaction, that of the deed, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge".

das Ressentiment solcher Wesen, denen die eigentliche Reaktion, die der Tat, versagt ist, die sich nur durch eine imaginäre Rache schadlos halten.

What marks this feeling, for Nietzsche, is that it can move only by leaning on something outside. Slave morality always needs an opposing outer world first in order to arise; its action is "fundamentally reaction". Where the noble person affirms himself and only afterwards marks something as "bad", the man of ressentiment first imagines the "evil enemy" and then sets himself up, by contrast, as "the good one". Nietzsche described him thus: "His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors."

die Sklaven-Moral bedarf, um zu entstehn, immer zuerst einer Gegen- und Außenwelt, sie bedarf, physiologisch gesprochen, äußerer Reize, um überhaupt zu agieren – ihre Aktion ist von Grund aus Reaktion.

What did Nietzsche explain with it?

Nietzsche used ressentiment as the key to the history of morality. When ressentiment becomes creative and gives birth to values, the "slave revolt in morality" begins, and "good and evil", born of the grudge of the weak, take the place of "good and bad", born of the self-affirmation of the strong. As the impulse to revenge could not be discharged outwards and was handed over to God, and later to the punishments of the state, human beings turned inwards and the modern moral concepts of guilt and conscience arose. Nietzsche traced the "will to equality" of modern European democracy to the same root.

One occasion for refining the concept was Nietzsche's quarrel with Eugen Dühring. In The Value of Life (1865) Dühring had derived all concepts of right, justice included, from the feeling of revenge; Nietzsche turned this round and attacked the very attempt to explain justice by ressentiment as a product of ressentiment. In section 11 of the second essay he wrote that the plant of ressentiment now "blooms most beautifully among anarchists and antisemites", who repeat the attempt "to sanctify revenge under the name of justice". Dühring was an antisemite who influenced the socialist movement, the very man Engels criticised in Anti-Dühring.

diese Pflanze blüht jetzt am schönsten unter Anarchisten und Antisemiten

How was the concept used after Nietzsche?

The German philosopher Max Scheler analysed Nietzsche's concept phenomenologically in Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (Ressentiment in the Construction of Moralities, 1912). Scheler rejected Nietzsche's suspicion that the Christian ethics of love came from ressentiment, but held that ressentiment itself was a typically modern phenomenon: a kind of self-poisoning of the soul that spreads, above all among those who serve and are ruled, in societies where people are formally equal yet differ greatly in power, education, wealth and status. This analysis was later often cited in sociology and political science to explain a politics of resentment.

In France Gilles Deleuze, in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), defined ressentiment as the type in which active forces are dominated by reactive ones, and this reading was central to the French reception of Nietzsche from the 1960s on. Today the word is often used in analyses of populism and far-right movements, a usage closer to Scheler's sociological interpretation than to Nietzsche.

How did Marxism answer the critique of ressentiment?

The most conspicuous modern case of ressentiment for Nietzsche was socialism. In section 57 of The Antichrist (1888) he wrote: "Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the worker's instinct, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his small existence, who make him envious, who teach him revenge." To Nietzsche the labour movement's demand for justice was the grudge of the weak dressed up as morality.

Das Sozialisten-Gesindel, die Tschandala-Apostel, die den Instinkt, die Lust, das Genügsamkeits-Gefühl des Arbeiters mit seinem kleinen Sein untergraben – die ihn neidisch machen, die ihn Rache lehren...

Marxists answered that socialism rests not on moral indignation or vengefulness but on an analysis of relations of production. Marx did not denounce the individual capitalist as a villain but treated him as the personification of an economic category, and explained exploitation not as a moral matter but as the structure in which surplus value is produced. In 1891 Franz Mehring criticised Nietzsche for drawing from the relativity of morality "not, like Engels and Marx, the historical conditionedness of morality, but the unconditional nullity of all morality". The gist of the Marxist rejoinder is that reducing the anger of the oppressed to the psychology of ressentiment makes the social conditions that produced the anger invisible. At the same time some twentieth-century thinkers on the left used Nietzsche's concept as a tool of self-criticism, warning that revolutionary movements risk hardening into a politics of grudge and retaliation instead of a project of emancipation.