A Reading Recommendation: Max Scheler's Ressentiment

an excellent and insightful short work about a key topic in ethics and psychology

It’s been a while since I made a reading recommendation, that is, a post where I suggest a text you might find useful or interesting to get your hands and eyes upon, and explain what I think you might get out of reading that text. So it’s a good time for me to make one, since I do have a book in mind. It’s one that I reread several times recently, prompted first by mentioning it to students in my online Nietzsche’s Genealogy class, and then by my decision to produce a new series of core concept videos on the work.

It’s a short book, with a one-word title, Ressentiment, a study by Max Scheler that plucks out one key concept from Friedrich Nietzsche’s work, that of ressentiment (a term deliberately chosen, not the same as the similar resentment). One of the main places Nietzsche explores this is in his Genealogy of Morals, and that is the text that Scheler references the most.

I should mention that the book bore two different titles in the original German. The original text published in 1912 was Über Ressentiment und moralisches Werturteil (On Ressentiment and Moral Value-Judgment). The expanded version of the text published in 1915 was called Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (Ressentiment in the Construction of Morality).

Ressentiment is a useful concept, and one that can arguably be found, generally going under different names, in other works by other authors, a prime example being the attitude of the “underground man”, who calls himself a “mouse”, in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. It is an entire dynamic that develops among people who experience certain affects, like the desire for revenge, hatred, or envy, which they are not only unable to discharge or express, but eventually unable to even acknowledge or admit to themselves.

Nietzsche views ressentiment as widespread in late modern culture, but also as something that has been festering away since human prehistory, particularly among two groups of people, namely the priests and the herd. And it lies behind the transvaluation of values that in his view results ultimately in the dominance of “herd” or “slave morality” and the ascetic ideals at work not only in the priest, but also many philosophers and even people of science.

Scheler thinks that Nietzsche is indeed on to something, but that he has so to speak overplayed his hand by making too-sweeping claims in his analyses, in particular in thinking that Christian morality is from the very beginning and through its entire development driven largely by ressentiment. So in this short work, Scheler sets out to provide better philosophical analyses of the moral and psychological phenomenon than Nietzsche did in his books.

Part of what Scheler accomplishes in this respect is to qualify Nietzsche’s assertions by more thoroughly unpacking the notion of ressentiment along a variety of vectors, for example looking more closely at the range of emotions or affects involved, how and why those affects are repressed and what results are produced by this dynamic. He also expands the inquiry to considering more examples of persons, situations, and social dynamics characterized by ressentiment than Nietzsche originally did in his works.

That qualifying work on Scheler’s part is evident when it comes to considering whether or not Christian morality is necessarily connected with, or even more strongly put stems from, ressentiment, the main topic for the third part of the work, where Scheler is perfectly willing to concede that there are plenty of “Christians” who do seem filled with and motivated by ressentiment (including early Christians like Paul or Tertullian), but demonstrates persuasively that there is something very different motivating the radical divergence between Christian and earlier Greek and Roman moralities.

Modern “bourgeois morality” and “humanitarian love”, according to Scheler, are entirely different matters, and are reflective of ressentiment, as he discusses in parts 4 and 5 of the book. As with earlier parts, he makes a number of useful distinctions to flesh out and support these judgements. And he appeals to, in outline, something else that he brought up earlier in the work. Before authoring this short study, Scheler had developed a complex ethics based on the notion of value, preference, an order of love, or an objective hierarchy of values. If you’re particularly interested in that, there is a much longer book you can check out, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. Ressentiment draws upon some concepts from that work, such as value blindness and delusion, in ways you may find quite interesting and illuminating.

That’s probably enough said about this short book at this point. It’s quite easy to find and although technical, a fairly quick read. And I highly recommend it to readers interested in ethics, the emotions, or psychology.

If you have previously read Ressentiment, or if you come back to this recommendation post after having read it, feel free to leave a comment with your own take on the work!