Ressentiment & Consequences
on Wokeism & What Scheler Got Right About Nietzsche’s Insight
“God is dead . . . And we have killed him.”
It is perhaps the most recognized, most polarizing quotation in modern philosophy, evoking energetic emotional responses at both ends of the faith binary. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote it just a few years before his descent into madness. It’s almost certainly the quotation from the controversial thinker most known by Christians. And though its meaning is arguably more complex than is typically asserted, for obvious reasons it has set the tone for a prickly relationship between the faithful and the provocative German philosopher.
Nietzsche’s antagonism to Christianity is not limited to that phrase, of course, and this is so even though, if one combs through the entirety of his work, one finds a position with respect to Christianity that is more nuanced than is commonly believed. It is not hard to comprehend why much Christian engagement with him is straightforwardly hostile.
It is certainly not my intention to endeavor to convince Christians to completely suspend their suspicions of Nietzsche. The rebellious son of a pastor gives us abundant evidence that he has misunderstood the faith of his father, and his influence on those whose hatred of the faith is not nuanced by any of Nietzsche’s intelligence has been profound.
But not all the ideas of the iconoclastic author of Thus Spake Zarathustra are useless to us. One in particular, arguably his most important, is eminently recuperable, even if we must chastise and correct Nietzsche for misunderstanding how it applies to Christianity.
This idea is that of ressentiment, a French word meaning “the memory one retains of a wrong, an injustice, or an injury that one suffered, with the desire for vengeance.”
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche argues that “a slave revolt in morals” had commenced when the Jewish “prophets fused ‘rich,’ ‘godless,’ ‘evil,’ ‘violent,’ [and] ‘sensual’ into one and were the first to coin the word ‘world’ as a term of infamy.” An inversion of values takes place here, he goes on, in which the lowly are raised to the level of the sacred and what was once holy is reframed as debased. Though he would write with vigorous energy against German anti-Semitism and defend other aspects of the Jewish contribution to the West, there is little room to challenge the charge that on this point his thought is pointedly critical of what he takes to be the core of Judeo-Christian culture.
Ressentiment culture insists on turning itself into a hapless and righteous victim of the wicked depredations of the oppressor, which must be transformed into an evil entity simply because it does not share the culture of those it dominates.
In the Nietzschean view, ressentiment evaluates the moral status of persons based on the extent to which they are seen as victims of some monstrous, immoral enemy. Thus, the only framework of values that kind of culture can produce is not self-sufficient but dependent on the desire for revenge against the oppressors. From this, we get a perverse celebration of weakness and victimization and a hatred of noble value systems that emphasize the overcoming of suffering, even its potentially positive value.
Scheler’s Critique: Victims & Suffering
How then can Christians recuperate this concept?
Alexander Riley is a senior fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars.
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