Ethics

Ressentiment

♡+

Max Scheler

1913

Ressentiment is Scheler's phenomenological engagement with Nietzsche's most provocative claim: that Christian morality — the ethics of love, humility, and care for the weak — is itself a product of ressentiment, the impotent revenge of the weak against the strong, a covert revaluation that crowns defeat as virtue. Scheler accepts Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment as a psychological and moral category — the poisoning of the soul by impotent envy and revenge that secretly drives many apparent acts of goodness — and he agrees that ressentiment has corrupted much of what passes for Christian ethics in modern culture. But he argues that Nietzsche fundamentally misread genuine Christian love. Authentic Christian agape does not originate in impotent hatred of the strong but in a positive overflow of love that moves from the strong to the weak — a love that is prior to and independent of ressentiment. The book is both a defence of Christian ethics and a subtle analysis of the psychological mechanisms by which genuine values can be counterfeit.