Friedrich Nietzsche, in explaining his concept of ressentiment, spoke of it as the prevailing sentiment that the have-nots express towards those whom they perceive to be more powerful. But the twentieth-century German philosopher and phenomenologist, Max Scheler, took that concept ahead in a more interesting and modernist way. In his book Formalism in Ethics and a Non-Formal Ethics of Value (1913-1916), he argued that ethics depend on lived experiences of exchanges of value, rather than some abstract rulebook. Scheler believed that we do not calculate duties before attaching human feelings to them. Instead, we first encounter people and situations as bearing values of dignity, that we are able to grasp intuitively, because these are undergirded by questions of depth, rank, status, and their expressions in the tone of exchanges.
Often we find in socio-professional settings scenes of avoidance, snobbery, quiet refusal to engage or even a tacit willingness to humiliate certain people, not necessarily because of the latter’s perceived smallness but their surplus competence. For Scheler, love and hate were central acts through which the human world acquired meaning, primarily. Scheler’s response to Nietzsche in his book Ressentiment (1912) expressed that human societies not only harbor private bitterness but also a distorted moral economy, wherein envy, repression, and perceived social injuries generate warped judgments about others. Accordingly, some people, no matter their position of power, are unable to confront others who are apparently powerless but are nonetheless superior in their intellectual or some other capacities. Thus, the former convert their frustrations into a moral depreciation of the latter. The former dislikes the latter for no rational reason, except the fact that the latter is seen to disturb a room’s settled hierarchy. The latter is not subjected to some grand melodramatic tragedy. However, he or she is subjected nonetheless to an institutional diminishment, due to envy, and a subsequent refusal of recognition otherwise deserved. Often we are snubbed or disallowed to speak not because of our lack of ability but because we are profoundly overstocked in it.
Arup K. Chatterjee 