Ressentiment and Rationality :: Philosophy Philosophical papers

Ressentiment and RationalityABSTRACT This authorship is an investigation of the condition of ressentiment. It reviews the two most prominent philosophic accounts of ressentiment Nietzsches genealogy of ressentiment as the moral perversion resulting from the antediluvian Roman/Palestinian ethnical conflict and giving birth to the ascetic ideal and Schelers phenomenology of ressentiment as a complex affective unit generative of its own affects and values. A maven sketch of the typical cistrons of ressentiment is drawn from the review of these two accounts. One element in particular, the exigency of rationality, is highlighted. The rationality of ressentiment is found to be essential to the phenomenon as a whole and to its constitutive parts. Curiously, while their accounts imply and suggest the part of rationality, neither Nietzsche or Scheler make the centrality of rationality to ressentiment implicit.Ressentiment is a state of reduce feeling and desire which becomes generative of values. The condition of ressentiment is complex both in its internal structure and in its relations to various dimensions of human existence. magic spell it infects the heart of the individual, it is rooted in our relatedness with others. On the one hand, ressentiment is a dark, person-to-person secret, which most of us would never reveal to others even if we could acknowledge it ourselves. On the other hand, ressentiment has an undeniably public face. It can be creative of affectionate practices, mores, and fashions of scholarly attitudes, academic policies, educational initiatives of political ideologies, institutions, and revolutions of forms of religiosity and ascetic practices.The construct of ressentiment was first developed systematically by Nietzsche in his account of the historic emergence of what he terms slave morality and in his critique of the ascetic ideal. piece of music references to this condition can be found throughout his works, the chief sections in whic h he develops this notion are in his early work The family tree of Morals. Max Scheler provides an eidetic account of this complex affective phenomenon in his rule book entitled Ressentiment. The picture of ressentiment that emerges from these two thinkers is in part a race of their methodological approaches and their abiding philosophic interests. Nietzsches historical approach to the development and the putrefaction of morality is empiricist and deterministic, but it does not have the marks of the narrow favourableness that emerged later. His historical method is informed by his philological training in ancient Hellenic texts and by Enlightenment ideals. So, although Nietzsche writes of cultural conflicts in the ancient world as historical fact, he actually uses them as models with world-wide anthropological significance.