Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

CAUSAL DELUSION IN ENVY 23
pete. But to restrict envy to genuine and factual rivalry is to go too far,
for it blurs its distinction from jealousy. There is no doubt that envy may
occur where competition has been only imagined, or even where it is
inconceivable. What is decisive, however, as we shall see repeatedly, is
the envious man's conviction that the envied man's prosperity, his success
and his income are somehow to blame for the subject's deprivation,
for the lack that he feels. Now if the capacity for envy derives from the
experience of sibling jealousy, this aspect of envy becomes explicable;
for within a family the favouring of one child (even if this be purely
imaginary) will necessarily involve discrimination against the other (or
will arouse a sense of injury).
According to Adam Smith, envy, malice and resentment are the only
passions which could bring someone to injure another's person or
reputation, yet few people succumb frequently to these passions and the
worst scoundrels only on occasion. And even if one does give way to such
feelings, little is gained. Therefore, Smith opines, in most human beings
envy is restrained by rational reflection. 4
The evidence for Smith's confident assumption is, of course, the fact
that it would not be possible to imagine any kind of orderly co-existence
if the prevailing society had not succeeded in largely suppressing mutual
envy.
Causal delusion in envy
Scheler is responsible for a very important conceptual clarification. He
sees envy, in the ordinary sense of the word, as the product of the feeling
of impotence
which inhibits the striving after a possession that belongs to another. The
tension between such striving and such impotence only leads to envy,
however, when it is discharged into an act of hatred or vindictive behaviour
towards the owner of the possession; when, that is, owing to a delusion, the
other with his possession is experienced as the cause of our painful failure
to have the possession. This delusion, whereby what is in fact our impotence
to obtain the possession appears to us as a positive force 'opposing' our
striving, has the effect of somewhat reducing the initial tension. Genuine
4 Adam Smith, Wealth ojNations, Modern Library edition, p. 670.