The Fox and the Grapes (Ressentiment in Politics)

 Guest Post by Alejandro Martín Navarro [translation S.V. Lowery]

            There's an old fable attributed to Aesop that tells of the strenuous attempts by a fox to reach a bunch of grapes that was too high up. After repeatedly failing, the fox moves off and cries, disdainfully: "They're still green!"

            I use this story in class to illustrate the concept of "ressentiment" [roughly equivalent to "resentment" or "bitterness" in English] in Nietzsche: the hatred that we express toward that which we secretly want but which we aren't capable of reaching, hatred born of impotence that changes the value of things.  Another example I sometimes use is of a person who falls in love but is not loved in return, and so ends up saying: "I don't know how I could have fallen for someone so ugly and stupid!" Daily life is full of examples of this perverse value change that lets us overcome frustration but is only a simplistic psychological mechanism for emotional survival. "From their impotence," says Nietzsche, "hatred grows in them until it becomes something immense and sinister, in the most spiritual and poisonous sense."

            However, it happens that this reversal of values (disdain the good that isn't within our reach, esteem the mediocre that is) affects not only external things (mature grapes, pretty girls, hard assignments, deserved fame) but also the internal: thus, the fool tends to disdain intelligence; the ignorant, culture; the weak, strength; the crook, honesty. Max Scheler, another of the great theorists, says that resentment is psychic self-intoxication: in the depths of our dark psychological cave, we avenge ourselves on a reality that insists we are not up to the mark.

            Resentment in this sense is a disguised hatred of life: a life that doesn't give us what we want, that fails to unfold according to our will. Thus, resentment necessarily leads to a psychological scenario where no one is better then me, where nothing valuable exists unless it pertains to me, where the mature grapes are never too high. Hierarchy, difference, is offensive to one who is resentful. As G. K. Chesterton suggests, it may be that a good definition of mediocrity is to stand next to greatness and fail to notice it.[1]

            Apart from embracing resentment, one has two options with regard to greatness: one can strive to reach it by effort and perseverance, or one can simply admire it, recognizing that it's far beyond oneself and enjoy the fact that at least others can reach it: one can aspire to intelligence, to wisdom, to virtue, or one can at least admire them in others. Both options respect the hierarchical nature of values: they are where they should be. "A sensitive soul," says Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human, "feels annoyance in learning that it must be given thanks; a vulgar soul, in learning that thanks must be given."

            Nietzsche was the first to see how resentment was capable of framing value systems throughout history and also the first to notice that this mechanism permeates, alarmingly, the whole spiritual life of modern Europe. His intuition was developed, along different lines, by Scheler and by Ortega. Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen [English translation: Ressentiment] by Scheler appeared in 1912, and La rebelión de las masas  [English translation: The Revolt of the Masses] by Ortega y Gasset, in 1929. Both were published when the social and political symptoms of an illness diagnosed by Nietzsche twenty years before the end of the 19th century were already clear in Europe, an illness that has now reached its full development in our own time. “Ye higher men," cried Zarathrustra, "Learn this from me: In the market-place no one believeth in higher men. But if ye will speak there, very well! The populace, however, blinketh, answering: 'We are all equal'."

            The dominant morality denies differences, excellence, merit, along with moral and intellectual nobility. What Ortega calls the "mass man"--the individual undifferentiated from any other due to any special quality--becomes the prototype for existence. "What is characteristic of the time is that the common soul, knowing it is common, has the boldness to assert the right of ordinariness and imposes it wherever." This is confirmed whenever one takes the trouble to note what human type, what paradigm of existence, is modeled in television programs, social media, political party rolls, sports idols.  Everywhere, occupying the primary spaces of ordinary life, there are vulgar persons convinced that their vulgarity is the measure of all worth. As he says in España invertebrada [English title: Invertebrate Spain], "the romantic revolt of the masses, the hatred of the best [of men], the scarcity of these--here I have the true cause of the fall of Spain. " And this phenomenon reaches all European public life: "The European who begins to dominate, in relation to the complex civilization into which he was born, would be a primitive man, a barbarian emerging through a trap door, a 'vertical invader.'" This vertical invader is also the person who, in contemporary political terms, appears in the pervasive dogma of direct democracy: everyone is as good as everyone else, policy needn't be entrusted to any representative because representation is in itself a hierarchy, and thus the last remnant of inequality.

            Another of the characteristics of political resentment is historical amnesia. There has never been, in the history of mankind, such a long period of peace, prosperity and freedom in the world as the present liberal democracies enjoy, among all the numerous religious, moral, political and social organizational systems that have existed. But the embittered are unable to accept something that would imply acknowledgement of their own conditional nature: that the simple fact of existing puts us in a position of inferiority and dependence in relation to the past. We are always an effect before being a cause. "Those who belong to the rabble," says Nietzsche, "have memory reaching only to the grandparent, time ends in the grandparent."

            This leads to what Ortega calls "the radical ingratitude toward how much has made possible the facility of their existence." There is a childish belief that historical achievements, the rights acquired, are innate in existence itself, rather than that they are something won, and consequently, subject to a constant risk of loss. Civilization as nature, not as endeavor. It would seem that, in his general intuition this is the terrain on which the moral and the political condition of our time is in play: between negation of the past, at

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times clothed in false progressivism, mediocrity elevated to a collective virtue, and refusal to acknowledge the value of the best among us, the true aristocracy of merit and of condition--not that of blood or social class--which has always guided the great historic endeavors of humanity.

              

            

[Alejandro Martín Navarro is an award-winning poet who teaches philosophy and ethics at the secondary level in Andalusia, Spain, often using finger puppets to depict the great characters in philosophy. Please see my comment below for further information on this post.]

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[1] Unable to find the source of a Chesterton quote to this effect, I've restated it because retranslation almost never works, and I didn't want to misquote Chesterton.