To be human is to be weak. This is not the whole story, of course. We are not just weak. But weakness is an unavoidable facet of our being, interwoven into all dimensions of our fragile, finite lives. Most of the time, mercifully, we can suppress the knowledge that our radical contingency could give way at any moment to injury, disease, and even death. However, sometimes, we experience our weakness with remarkable force. Sometimes, we may trip and laugh at ourselves for being so pathetically and gloriously human. In such moments, the abstract possibility of felt weakness gains flesh and moves into the phenomenological neighbourhood.
What we do with this feeling is more important than we may realise. Feeling is often a window onto what is valuable, after all. The feeling of being weak can certainly grant us access to what is valuable, especially when the preciousness of things—of people too—is connected to a sense of their impermanence. “The way to love anything,” writes the cheerful G. K. Chesterton, “is to realise that it might be lost.” Even his philosophical and psychological opposite, Arthur Schopenhauer, author of various German misfortune cookies, agrees: “Mostly it is loss” or perhaps the anticipation of possible loss “that teaches us about the worth of things.”
Feeling can connect us to the real. What we feel about the world is intertwined with our values and evaluations. I am not just talking about our moods. Our moods can tint the world in different shades, certainly, but this doesn’t necessarily involve transforming how we take everything in. Feeling differs from mood in being more intentional; it is a matter of directed perception. It recasts within us how we walk through the world and regard what things in the world are about, what they are meant for. It takes hold of the world as much as it takes hold of us. This is especially worth paying attention to when considering a possible negative consequence of feeling weak. Our sense of weakness—although capable, as I’ve said, of bringing to mind what we ought to appreciate—can also distort values. Such a feeling can foster disconnection. It can create false values. It is this that I want to focus on here as one of the most common signs of our times. In my conclusion, I return to some of what appreciation might mean given the prevalence of the impulse to detract that results when vulnerability is experienced only negatively.
So much of the world now has been constructed around rendering people passive, helpless before the demands of workplaces, structures of production and consumption, bureaucracies and governments, and the demands of certain forms of oversocialisation. This can be observed in banal things as much as in matters of more personal importance. It is, arguably, one of the dominant results of modernisation. When we become accustomed to seeing signs of decline everywhere, for example, as happens to be one consequence of having agency taken away in so many areas of our lives, our posture towards the world is likely to change for the worse. We revalue the world but not in a happy light. The contingency that haunts our movements starts to appear less as a condition of being and as a possibility for humour than as a menacing force that will reduce being to nothingness.
One of the dominant forms of revaluation that takes place when a sense of powerlessness overwhelms the human psyche was noticed by Friedrich Nietzsche in what he called ressentiment. I assume Nietzsche knew the feeling well. He was so often at the mercy of his own weakness. He knew that ressentiment needed to be contradicted. To be clear, though, he made a few serious errors in his assessment of ressentiment, particularly in connecting it so definitely with Christianity and Christian morality. Ressentiment has no place within Christianity, which emphasises what ressentiment will not accept, namely the right ordering of objective values. Christianity regards being as such as good. Ressentiment does no such thing.
That French word ressentiment is now a technical term in philosophy; it implies more than the English word resentment does. I can’t possibly discuss the idea in full here, so I recommend that you take the time to consult Max Scheler’s astonishing study on the subject if you want to go deeper. I intend to attend to only three things. First, I look at what the idea means. Second, I describe how it transforms values especially through reframing the idea of equality. And, finally, I show how this ultimately ends up reversing the order of real values. Towards the end, I offer a few provisional thoughts on what sort of positive view we can adopt to ensure that this demon has little to no place in our minding of being.
So, what is ressentiment? Very simply, the term refers to the reordering of the sentiments and a reversal of the evaluating gaze. What would typically be praiseworthy is recast as worthless. The most famous illustration of ressentiment is in that marvellously perceptive little story, The Fox and the Grapes, one of Aesop’s fables. The story goes that a fox wants some grapes high up on a trellis. Unfortunately for the little beast, his efforts to get the grapes prove—I apologize in advance for the pun—fruitless. (Actually, I’m not sorry). He is confronted, in his failure, with his weakness. He is humiliated as his ontological deficits become quite suddenly and disturbingly apparent to him. He doesn’t have the fortitude of character to laugh at himself, so he seeks out a different strategy.
To counteract his terrible humiliation and to maintain some sense of superiority, the fox denounces the prize he was after. The grapes were, he says, only sour grapes. How could he know this without having tasted them? The grapes are sour because and only because their taste is inaccessible to the lowly creature. They are psychologically and not ontologically sour. Importantly, as Max Scheler writes, “The fox does not say that sweetness is bad, but that the grapes are sour.”
We see such a sentiment—a re-sentiment—echoed in so many displays in our time. It’s there, for instance, in how people commonly disparage marriage because so many marriages fail, or disparage relationships because so many of them don’t work out the way they wanted them to. Almost anything can be the victim of the impulse to detract. What we cannot immediately understand is especially likely to fall prey to this mode of perceiving. It is bad, not because it is really bad, but because we do not possess the wherewithal to see it rightly. Such ressentiment is echoed, more broadly and as Douglas Murray has explored at length in his book The War on the West (2022), in how the West—the target of more kafkatraps than anyone can count—is so often derided because of certain failures, although such failures are by no means unique to the West. The achievements of the West are so commonly disparaged by the reversal of the evaluating gaze. Why? Well, very simply, because it is much easier to do so than to find a way to reach sweet grapes placed so very high up on the trellis of history.
The essence of ressentiment is its reactivity. This is partly why I mentioned the rise of passivity in our time. Ressentiment, Nietzsche claims, “seeks out its antithesis in order to affirm itself.” It requires a world turned against it in order to act. The ressentiment-subject doesn’t feel any need to change himself when he notices that he doesn’t meet the standard required of him to achieve a particular goal. To his mind, the world has to change to suit him. In this, we see that the reversal of the evaluating gaze means flipping around where the values come from. The ressentiment-subject is the maker of values now, not reality. He is in charge, not the world of meaning. The ressentiment-subject does not ask what he can do for his country, for example; he asks what his country can do for him. The ressentiment-subject, so ashamed and so belittled, is a natural product of what Christopher Lasch calls a culture of narcissism. Such narcissism is one consequence of what Rieff calls the triumph of the therapeutic.
Fascinatingly, a reordering of the sentiments does not really solve the problem of the powerlessness of the subject. Rather, it confirms it. He is weak and can do nothing to change himself to fit the demands of the world. He is helpless and that’s just the way it is. Nevertheless, in this, he is able to somewhat create the illusion, thanks to the power of self-deception, that he still has some kind of dignity and strength. He is now a maker of values, after all. He feels, if only shallowly, that he has dignity, even if he possesses no such thing. He feels that he is a great man, even though he is a pathetic little weasel. Ressentiment resembles the impulse to commit revenge. It wants to downgrade things. It may even want, if only secretly, to murder. But ressentiment reframes even that terrible urge. The point is not primarily to act to change the world but to merely amplify and reproduce itself. Ressentiment is therefore fond of sparking a contagion of feelings. Such feelings are deep and disturbing. Malice, envy, and vindictiveness are concealed beneath the masks worn by ressentiment-subjects everywhere.
One of the chief modern expressions of ressentiment is often found in the notion of equality. Just bringing this up is probably enough to generate all kinds of misunderstandings, if not outright rage. Equality is a sacred cow in our time and suggesting that a certain disease may be pulsing through its veins is unlikely to impress many people. To be clear, then, there is a positive and wholesome sense in which equality can function and I’m not here to beat or slaughter the beast on account of what it means at its best. If it means that justice in the world should be applied equally to all people and that no one should be treated differently on the basis of an arbitrary quality like wealth or status or race or religion, the idea makes wonderful ethical sense. Equal rights should assume, for instance, that ethics and reciprocity and fairness are all necessarily intertwined. This is a sketch, not a detailed picture, but it should be sensible enough to say that, if this is what equality means, then it is a superb idea. We don’t have to slaughter the sacred cow after all. It can continue to graze happily in the fields of our postmodern paradise.
But the ressentiment-subject is adept at modifying even something potentially wholesome like equality. He injects enough poison into the veins of the sacred cow that it soon comes to self-identify as a raging bull in an axiological china shop. Soon equality stops meaning that everyone is striving to reach for and be measured by the highest standard. It starts meaning, instead, that everyone ought to be measured by the average—or even by what is below average. There is a meme on the subject I’ve seen that suggests raising up those who are short to be able to reach the heights and see the views of those who are tall. Finding a place in the world for everyone is certainly a noble and beautiful aim. Ensuring that no one feels that they belong in this world less simply because they don’t have certain capacities and gifts is something I wholeheartedly support.
However, in reality, this is not what always happens, because ressentiment is so rife. Rather, what happens is the proverbial tall folks are decapitated to be the same height as the proverbial shorties. Ressentiment zero-sum-gamifies the real, choosing as its competitive standard the values of the lower over the values of the higher; it sees being as essentially competitive—and not in any sportsmanlike way. Subtly, then, behind the idea of equality may lurk a desire to degrade people of particular skills and graces for no other reason that that they represent the mimetic ideals of ressentiment-subjects. People of a higher calibre are suddenly seen as immorally privileged and so they need to be brought low. Ressentiment-subjects will never admit the real reason for disparaging others—the real reason being their own terrible feeling of inferiority—but would rather supply other reasons. Ressentiment-subjects want to signal their virtues, not their vices, even though it is their vices that drive them. The last thing they want to do, then, and quite understandably, is call attention to their own incompetence. They will find other ways to spit on the achievements of those who are much better than they are. And since ressentiment is so contagious, it is not difficult to find allies who support their malcontent.
The desire to sacrifice is very strong in any ressentiment-subject. What is most valued in society is relevance, as determined by the consensus, and not excellence. The widest possible audience for the most mediocre thoughts is the goal. This is the forte of the ressentiment-subject. But, as we might expect, the ressentiment goes further. It does not merely mediocratise the world but reorders all values. This is the second key thing I’ve been trying to point out regarding this strange way of looking at the world. It sets up an inversion of an original hierarchy of values. What is aimed for is not that we should end up on a level playing field, as would be the case in a genuinely egalitarian world, but that mediocrity will be raised while excellence is denigrated.
Here is the final aspect of ressentiment that I want to cover here. As Scheler notes in his study, one of the markers of the ascendency of ressentiment is in how utility ascends to become the highest value on the scale of values. In reality, utility is the very lowest value. Utility works best when it is subordinate to and in service of other higher values. I think of the legend told of a fifteenth-century Japanese shōgun named Ashikaga Yoshimasa, who accidentally broke his favourite tea bowl one day. He didn’t want to throw it away, though; and since he couldn’t just pop into a supermarket or buy a factory-replicated tea bowl, he had to make another plan. So he sent the bowl away for repair. The repair was, however, severely substandard. It conformed only to the standard of utility. Crude metal staples had been used to fit the pieces together. The shōgun was disappointed to see his precious tea bowl looking even worse than it did in its simply broken state. The story ends well, though. The shōgun tasked a local craftsman with finding a more aesthetically pleasing solution, thus requiring a lower value to be brought into alignment with higher values—values that reflected the shōgun’s appreciation for the tea bowl. The result was the now famous Japanese art of kintsugi. Kin means golden, and tsugi means joinery. Kintsugi used gold-peppered lacquer to patch the crack and put the bowl back together. What a fantastic symbol of what it means to bring the highest values into play in addressing the practical problem of disuse!
We like things to work, of course. Functionality is marvellous. But ressentiment makes efficiency and functionality and practicality the main point. And yet, it does seem that this reordering of the values, this inversion of the evaluating gaze, is commonplace in so many dimensions of our lives today. This is at least part of Nietzsche’s and Scheler’s point: modern ethics has been deeply infiltrated and corrupted by ressentiment. It is not that the ressentiment-subject is the exception in the modern ethical sphere. He is the new rule. We see this exemplified in the entirely utilitarian way that health is treated nowadays—especially in how any genuine concern for the holistic wellbeing of people gets subsumed under corporate and financial interests. We saw this during the pandemic but the exaggerated healthism of that time really brought into focus what has been going on for a long time now. Ivan Illich was already saying so much about this in his book Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health published nearly fifty years ago in 1974.
A more recent example of how health is expropriated by the utilitarian gaze is in the form of the push to encourage entomophagy. Bug ingurgitation. Yuck! In a recent tweet from the European Commission, the benefits of rearing insects for food were suggested to be as follows: it is efficient, produces less greenhouse gas emissions, uses less water and arable land, and reduces food waste. Such benefits are entirely utilitarian. No mention was made of how lovely bugs are to eat. Why? Well, because they aren’t lovely to eat. The health dimension of this disgusting source of food, mind you, is not unquestionable. There are claims by some researchers that eating insects may not be without sometimes very negative consequences for the body. The trouble that this shows is that, when utility becomes the highest value, it becomes close to impossible to properly interpret what health itself means. This is particularly evident, also in the medical field although on a different issue, in research done that resulted in the recent shutting down of the Travistock Centre in the UK. The research revealed, thankfully, just how horrifically utilitarian the approach there was in dealing with profoundly complex issues around gender dysphoria. Utility, being the highest value, does not work. When utility is granted exaggerated importance, its success is precisely an indication of an unbearable failure of moral imagination. Wherever utility reigns, unbelievable damage will always be done. The rise of the ad hominem in contemporary discourse is another clear sign of this. Ad hominems work, of course, and they do terrible damage. But they are not good. Truth and justice are sacrificed for the sake of a quick fix.
So how do we get our values in order? How do we overcome ressentiment? It helps to begin to notice the truth that sparks and sustains ressentiment. The rejected grapes are desired because sweetness really is good. Sweetness really is a higher value than utility, even as sweetness serves the even higher value of vitality. Ressentiment is a reaction against a primary recognition of values; it is parasitic upon the right-ordering of values. It starts in a full awareness of the real order of things. Moreover, the fact that ressentiment relies on generating consensus also reminds us of a deep truth about our nature. We need recognition as co-participants in being. The ressentiment-subject, like all tribalists, interprets this as a need to have his desires precisely echoed by others. His feelings about the world are reified and rendered essential to his identity. Thus the need for such a repetition of his desires through social contagion. This is a false application of a good principle: we are all in this together. That’s how it’s meant to be. What is central in all this is the fact that the ressentiment-subject cannot really accept his weakness and so must manufacture ways to restore his sense of strength.
Scheler notices that one of the more insidious results of ressentiment is that objective values have been totally subjectified. The ressentiment-subject feels, having subjectively reordered the world of objective values to suit himself, that all values must be subjective and malleable. One of the consequences of this denial of objective value—the denial of the fact that some things really are objectively better than others—is that consensus alone becomes acceptable as a substitute for the objective system of values. “The man of ressentiment is a particular type of weakling,” writes Scheler. “He cannot stand alone with his judgment. He is the absolute opposite of the type of man who realises objective goodness against a whole world of resistance even when he is alone to see and feel it.” But this consensus generation requires a misinterpretation of a fundamental reality, which we can only perceive rightly when we see it in participatory terms. Our weakness signals first and foremost our dependence. And this is not a terrible thing! If we cannot reach what is sweet, as symbolised by those grapes on that trellis in that fable, perhaps we can rely on the help of others. We can appreciate, too, that others have gifts that we don’t. And perhaps there are some things not meant for us, even if they may be meant for others.
Because of my awareness of my own capacities, for instance, I am more than cognizant of how many thinkers out there would out-think me without much effort at all on their part, and I can celebrate that such greatness exists in others. It is only in an awareness of a community of being that this is not a painful realisation but a source of wonder and hope in me. I see this first hand most of all in my marriage, in the gifts my wife has that I don’t, and in the gifts I have that she doesn’t. Complementarity is the soul of true equality. But one of the most terrifying achievements of modernity was in how it atomised people—and then sought to eradicate all differences. Everyone got turned through modernity’s perceptual machinery into a totally interchangeable part. How wrongheaded. This amounted to denying the unique giftedness of people, and the deep value of individual people, even though it is such a natural thing for us to want to admire people for being so utterly irreplaceable. This truth should be obvious, although it is never obvious to the ressentiment-subject. No one has the resources within themselves to do life alone, and yet modernity overstretched the notion that the individual is supreme, and so ressentiment became a shield against the harshest feeling anyone can feel: the feeling of being desperately and utterly alone. But it is, ultimately, a refusal to accept that this is a lie; that individualism is an invention—and not a very good invention at that.
I mentioned something about appreciation at the start, this sense of gratitude for the givens and gifts of being. I honestly believe gratitude is central to opposing ressentiment. This is not to say, however, that there are no complexities to gratitude. In fact, I don’t think it can be separated from any of the virtues—faith, hope, love, wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance—without ceasing to be gratitude. I do not think, in other words, that gratitude can stand alone any more than we can stand alone as individuals. Gratitude assumes an awareness of one’s entanglement within the realm of goodness, within the gifts of being. For the ressentiment-subject, to cure his impulse to denigrate, gratitude must be especially supported by forgiveness—a releasing of the shame that underpins his turning away from the good. He must forgive himself for his weakness even as he accepts his weakness as no real ontological deficit. And he must forgive the world for its failings. In fact, the ideas of gratitude and forgiveness share an etymological link. Both are bound up in an awareness of the gift.
I cannot help but notice in our world now, that one of the most essential things needed for gratitude is time. We need space to linger, to be able to notice and pay attention to the good we receive. Ressentiment is inseparable from haste, another product of modernity in the form of its accelerationism. Haste fosters in us a negative sense of our weakness and powerlessness because it gives us less time to recognise the community of being that we are part of. In contrast, gratitude is inseparable from appreciative lingering, which fosters in us a positive sense of our weakness and powerlessness. It shows us that our belonging is not threatened or compromised by our vulnerability. In fact, our vulnerability makes our belonging and our sense of belonging possible.
One of the perhaps inadvertent consequences of the rise of atheism in the West has been that vulnerability does not appear to have any such reasonable grounding. Any feeling of arbitrariness and loneliness and atomisation is philosophically supported by the atheistic position, which would logically imply that there is really and inescapably no plan, no order, and no community of being. Everything really is just a random world of rioting bits and pieces that conform to patterns only randomly constructed through mental projection. The loss of objective value in ressentiment is no doubt a facet of the widespread feeling that God is dead. It is something noticed by Chesterton, the Catholic, that the greatest tragedy in atheism is that the atheist will feel thankful without having anyone to really thank. As much as my atheist friends are unlikely to take kindly to my pointing this out, it must be said that atheism is particularly prone to ressentiment. Nietzsche knew this too, and a sense of this is articulated particularly well by another atheist, Jean Baudrillard:
In the past, we could give thanks in one way or another to God or some other agency; we could respond to the gift with a sacrifice. But now that all transcendence has disappeared we no longer have anyone to whom to give thanks. And if we can give nothing in exchange for this world, it is unacceptable. It is for this reason that we find ouorselves having to liquidate the natural world and substitute an artificial one for it—a world built from scratch and for which we will be accountable to no one.
I am not here to judge, nor am I here to solve this intractable problem. Still, I have to point out that it is there. Gratitude does not merely involve feeling thankful and walking away but involves a level of self-sacrifice that does not fit well in a culture that prizes self-actualisation so highly. It does not fit well in a world in which the trend is for reality to disappear only to reappear as a simulation. It does not fit in a world that has elected to choose the demands of mere materiality over the call of transcendence. Without the deepest possible recognition of the need to serve that which is of ultimate importance, ressentiment will stand ready to apply its reevaluating gaze. With no clear source of being, gratitude becomes a question and not an answer. Still, I do not think that it is possible to properly counteract ressentiment without it.
Chesterton says, and I agree with him, “that thanks are the highest form of thought, that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” Unless we make gratitude the defining feature of our lives, our souls will certainly atrophy; false values will be created and lower values will be given higher priority. We will tear the world apart, instead of building it up. Without gratitude, in other words, we are likely to make the world in the image of the very worst parts of ourselves. Without gratitude, without being able to take the complexities of our lives and filter them through an awareness that there is goodness here that we never deserved and never even asked for, we cannot begin any journey towards wholeness. Without gratitude, we can never really have the lightness of being that allows genuinely happy laughter. For to laugh is to recognise, if only for a moment, that vulnerability itself may be the key to transcendence. For what is faith—genuine, deep, abiding faith—but weakness? It is a special kind of weakness. It rests, not in the illusion of its own strength, but in a strength that comes to it from beyond itself. Faith itself is a gift.