Ressentiment and Rationality :: Philosophy Philosophical papers

Ressentiment and RationalityABSTRACT This paper is an investigation of the condition of ressentiment. It reviews the two most prominent philosophic accounts of ressentiment Nietzsches genealogy of ressentiment as the moral perversion resulting from the ancient Roman/Palestinian cultural conflict and giving birth to the ascetic ideal and Schelers phenomenology of ressentiment as a convoluted affective unit fat of its own affects and values. A single sketch of the typical elements of ressentiment is drawn from the review of these two accounts. One element in particular, the exigency of rationality, is highlighted. The rationality of ressentiment is found to be essential to the phenomenon as a whole and to its constitutive parts. Curiously, while their accounts imply and suggest the role of rationality, neither Nietzsche or Scheler make the centrality of rationality to ressentiment implicit.Ressentiment is a verbalise of repressed feeling and desire which becomes generative of value s. The condition of ressentiment is complex both in its internal structure and in its relations to various dimensions of human existence. art object it infects the heart of the individual, it is rooted in our relatedness with otherwises. On the one hand, ressentiment is a dark, personal secret, which most of us would never reveal to others even if we could acknowledge it ourselves. On the other hand, ressentiment has an undeniably public face. It can be creative of social practices, mores, and fashions of scholarly attitudes, academic policies, educational initiatives of political ideologies, institutions, and revolutions of forms of religiosity and ascetic practices.The concept of ressentiment was first certain systematically by Nietzsche in his account of the historical emergence of what he terms slave morality and in his critique of the ascetic ideal. While references to this condition can be found throughout his works, the chief sections in which he develops this notion are i n his early work The Genealogy of Morals. Max Scheler provides an eidetic account of this complex affective phenomenon in his book entitled Ressentiment. The picture of ressentiment that emerges from these two thinkers is in part a function of their methodological memory accesses and their abiding philosophic interests. Nietzsches historical approach to the development and the corruption of morality is empiricist and deterministic, but it does not have the marks of the narrow positivism that emerged later. His historical method is informed by his philological educational activity in ancient Hellenic texts and by Enlightenment ideals. So, although Nietzsche writes of cultural conflicts in the ancient world as historical fact, he actually uses them as models with cosmopolitan anthropological significance.