Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

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Envy among the Greeks
ENVY AS THE SUBJECT OF PHILOSOPHY
In December 1872, Nietzsche discusses in Greek Philosophy and Other
Essays what he describes as Homer's contest. He suggests that nothing
so much distinguishes the Greek world of antiquity from our own as its
recognition of the agonistic element, the fight and joy in victory. This
serves to explain the difference in tone between individual ethical
concepts, for example those of Eris and of envy. The whole of Greek
antiquity shows a view of resentment and envy entirely different from
our own, hence the predicates resentment and envy were not only
applicable to the nature of the wicked Eris, but also to the other goddess,
good Eris. Nietzsche writes:
The Greek is envious and conceives of this quality not as a blemish, but
as the effect of a beneficent deity. What a gulf of ethical judgment between
us and him! Because he is envious he also feels, with every superfluity of
honour, riches, splendour and fortune, the envious eye of a god resting on
himself, and he fears this envy: in this case the latter reminds him of the
transitoriness of every human lot: he dreads his very happiness and,
sacrificing the best of it, he bows before the divine envy.41
Nietzsche next supposes that this conception did not lead to estrangement
between the Greek and his gods, but rather only to his renouncing
all competition with them, so that he was impelled into jealous competition
with every other living being, and even with the dead whose
fame alone could excite consuming envy in the living. Nietzsche's
interpretation of the institution of ostracism is almost the same as the
argument used in America in the twentieth century to justify anti-trust
laws; an institution, that is, which, by banning or silencing the greatest,
safely restores competition among a number of the less great.
'The original sense of this peculiar institution however is not that of a
safety-valve but that of a stimulant. The all-excelling individual was to be
removed in order that the contest of forces might reawaken .... ,42
The basic assumptions of these aphorisms in Human, All Too Human
devoted to envy might be summed up as follows: Envy and jealousy, 'the
41 Friedrich Nietzsche, Collected Works, London, 1910, Vol. II, pp. 55--6.
42 Op. cit., Vol. 7, p. 57.