Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

ENVIOUS INTRIGUE AMONG LITERATI
Watches, no doubt, with greedy hope to find
His wish and best advantage, us asunder,
Hopeless to circumvent us joined, where each
To other speedy aid might lend at need:
Whether hisfirst design be to withdraw
Our fealty from God, or to disturb
Conjugal love, than which perhaps no bliss
Enjoyed by us excites his envy more . ..
Envious intrigue among literati
It is in no way due to certain peculiarities of our own time that the
majority of the so-called intelligentsia, especially men of letters, have
adopted towards their own society a somewhat malicious attitude of
defiance. This goes back even further than the eighteenth century. The
tendency of many writers to become the spokesmen of social resentment,
to appeal, that is, for envy directed against all those who have in
any way succeeded by conventional means, must rather be understood in
terms of the psychological situation of genius, above all, of unrecognized
genius.
We find an example of this in the section of Edgar Zilsel's book on the
origin of the concept of genius devoted to L. B. Alberti. As a young man
in the late sixteenth century, Alberti enviously compares, in his writing
On the Advantages and Disadvantages of the Sciences, his lot as a man
of letters with professions that are economically more rewarding, and
adopts an attitude not often found until the eighteenth century. Alberti
begins by listing all the hardships that await devotees of the sciences,
such as all-night study, lack of time for pleasure and so on, and goes on to
ask why so many men of learning are forced to live in wretched circumstances.
He even provides figures, according to which only three out of
three hundred literati can ever achieve any success, while knaves have no
difficulty in reaching the summit. He maintains that only three kinds of
brain-worker grow rich-lawyers, judges and doctors. 47
Zilsel points out the tendency in other writers around the middle of the
sixteenth century to paint a gloomy picture of the brain-worker's life.
47 E. Zilsel, Die Entstehung des Geniebegriffes, Ein Beitrag zur ldeengeschichte der
Antike und des Fruhkapitalismus, Tiibingen, 1926, p. 198.
191