Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

RESENTMENT AND REVENGE 219
ing Nietzsche, he sees as the resentful man. Like Nietzsche before him,
he stresses the subjective time factor necessary to the development of the
sense of impotence: there is, of course, the expression 'impotent anger. '
Resentment arises when a man is forced by others or by circumstances to
remain in a situation which he dislikes and feels to be incommensurate
with his self-evaluation. Here Scheler anticipates by several decades the
frustration theory of aggression, so dear especially to American social
psychologists.
Scheler's approach was necessarily limited because he worked exclusively
on the hypothesis of so-called resentment types to which, by
definition, woman belongs since she is always subordinate to man.
Scheler does not recognize envy's universal role in human existence, and
more important still, he knows nothing of the conclusively significant
body of data on envy among primitive peoples. He touches on envious
crime, an example being the murderer who, in the early days of motoring,
satisfied his hatred of motor-car drivers by fastening a wire between
two trees across a main road outside Berlin, thus neatly decapitating a
passing motorist. Scheler examines in detail the role of envy and
resentment in political parties and in the demand for equality. Since he
published his work before the First World War, it is not surprising that he
felt able to make some very tart comments on the envy inherent in
democracy.
Resentment and revenge
Scheler begins by explaining that the French word ressentiment is
untranslatable, and further that Nietzsche had made of it a technical
term. As such it must be retained. He believed the elements of the usual
meaning of the word in French to be significant: 'Ressentiment implies
living through, and reliving, over and over, a certain emotional response
reaction towards another, whereby that emotion undergoes progressive
deepening and introversion into the very core of the personality, with a
simultaneous distancing from the individual's sphere of expression and
action. ,55 The term further comprises the meaning that the quality of this
emotion tends towards hostility. Scheler then quotes at length from
55 Max Scheler, Gesammelte Werke, Bern, 1955, Vol. 3, p. 36.