Ressentiment and Rationality :: Philosophy Philosophical papers

Ressentiment and RationalityABSTRACT This paper is an investigation of the hold back of ressentiment. It reviews the two most prominent philosophic accounts of ressentiment Nietzsches genealogy of ressentiment as the virtuous perversion resulting from the ancient Roman/Palestinian cultural conflict and expectant birth to the ascetic ideal and Schelers phenomenology of ressentiment as a complex emotional unit generative of its own affects and values. A single sketch of the normal elements of ressentiment is drawn from the review of these two accounts. One element in particular, the touch of rationality, is highlighted. The rationality of ressentiment is found to be essential to the phenomenon as a hearty 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 state of repressed feeling and require which becomes generative of values. The condition of ressentiment is complex both in its internal social system and in its relations to various dimensions of human existence. While it infects the heart of the individual, it is root in our relatedness with others. 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 give the sack be creative of social practices, mores, and fashions of scholarly attitudes, pedantic policies, educational initiatives of political ideologies, institutions, and revolutions of forms of religiosity and ascetic practices.The concept of ressentiment was first authentic 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 thi s pattern are in his early work The Genealogy of Morals. Max Scheler provides an representational account of this complex affective phenomenon in his book entitled Ressentiment. The notion of ressentiment that emerges from these two thinkers is in part a function of their orderological approaches and their unchanging philosophic interests. Nietzsches historical approach to the development and the corruption of morality is empiricist and deterministic, only it does not have the marks of the narrow positivism that emerged later. His historical method is informed by his philological training in ancient authoritative 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 universal anthropological significance.