~ 4 Asceticism And Resentment ~
One really ought to worry about the contradiction of today’s on-stage sophists who might promote “personal responsibility”, or individuality, as they still cultivate a following. In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche wrote that “the formation of a herd is an essential step and victory in the fight against depression” (100). Yet, more specifically, “All the sick and sickly strive instinctively for a herd-organization, out of a longing to shake off dull lethargy and the feeling of weakness: the ascetic priest senses this instinct and promotes it; wherever there are herds, it is the instinct of weakness that has willed the herd and the cleverness of the priests that has organized it” (100-1). Nietzsche on the ascetic priest’s following, which could be Peterson’s own, in contrast to a genuinely goal-oriented community of individuals, even of socialists:
it should not be overlooked: the strong are as naturally inclined to strive to be apart as the weak are to strive to be together, when the former unite, this takes place only with a view to an aggressive collective action and collective satisfaction of their will to power, with much resistance from their individual consciences; the latter, on the contrary, gather together with pleasure at this very gathering, – their instinct is just as satisfied in doing this as the instinct of the born ‘masters’ (I mean here the solitary species of human beast of prey) is basically irritated and unsettled by organization.
– “Third essay: what do ascetic ideals mean?”, On The Genealogy of Morality, 101.
So it is no wonder that importance today is placed on the fact of crowd turnouts and book sales, neither actual goals nor the authentic, individual strengthening of our Peterson men, or else our Trump men. Just as Kierkegaard ridiculed sophistic middle-class men for their “parrot-wisdom of routine experience”[1] in his time, so did Nietzsche have a term for our chattering speakers of today: ascetic priests, who discourage utopianism only to preserve their utopia, which itself suffers of spiritless illness and failure as in Anne-Josèphe’s tyrannical stepmother, Therese, or the fictional character Adora in the suburban paradise of Sharp Objects, but not just them.
Nietzsche described the psychology of the ascetic priest, which holds true of many stoics, Christians, many of the middle-class, and of objectivistic philosophy and science:
the ascetic ideal springs from the protective and healing instincts of a degenerating life, which uses every means to maintain itself and struggles for its existence; it indicates a partial physiological inhibition and exhaustion against which the deepest instincts of life, which have remained intact, continually struggle with new methods and inventions. The ascetic ideal is one such method: the situation is therefore the precise opposite of what the worshippers of this ideal imagine, – in it and through it, life struggles with death and against death, the ascetic ideal is a trick for the preservation of life. The fact that, as history tells us, this ideal could rule man and become powerful to the extent that it did, especially everywhere where the civilization and taming of man took place, reveals a major fact, the sickliness of the type of man who has lived up till now, at least of the tamed man…. [the ascetic priest] brings ointments and balms with him, of course; but first he has to wound so that he can be the doctor; and whilst he soothes the pain caused by the wound, he poisons the wound at the same time – for that is what he is best trained to do, this magician and tamer of beasts of prey, whose mere presence necessarily makes everything healthy, sick, and everything sick, tame. Actually, he defends his sick herd well enough, this strange shepherd, – he even defends it against itself and against the wickedness, deceit, malice and everything else characteristic of all those who are diseased and sick, all of which smoulders in the herd itself, he carries out a clever, hard and secret struggle against anarchy and the ever-present threat of the inner disintegration of the herd, where that most dangerous of blasting and explosive materials, ressentiment, continually piles up…. the priest is the direction-changer of ressentiment. For every sufferer instinctively looks for a cause of his distress; more exactly, for a culprit, even more precisely for a guilty culprit who is receptive to distress, – in short, for a living being upon whom he can release his emotions, actually or in effigy, on some pretext or other: because the release of emotions is the greatest attempt at relief, or should I say, at anaesthetizing on the part of the sufferer, his involuntarily longed-for narcotic against pain of any kind.
– “Third essay: what do ascetic ideals mean?”, On The Genealogy of Morality, 92-3.
The historical John Howard, a crucial reformer of the British, modern prison system and the inventor of solitary confinement, was religiously ascetic too and to such a degree of indifferent lifelessness that one could suspect he drove his own son to insanity and suicide[2]. John Aikin, Howard’s friend and biographer, wrote of him:
Regarding children as creatures possessed of strong passions and desires without reason and experience to controul them, he thought that Nature seemed, as it were, to mark them out as the subjects of absolute authority, and that the first and fundamental principle to be inculcated upon them was implicit and unlimited obedience. This cannot be effected by any process of reasoning before reasoning has its commencement; and therefore must be the result of coercion.... The coercion he practiced was calm and gentle, but at the same time steady and resolute.
– A Just Measure Of Pain, 48.
Coined by Scheler, “negative asceticism” – as the same paternal moralizing applied more broadly on free, grown adults – is still a religious and deceptively positive outlook on life today lending itself to hustle-and-grind culture, to an economic/stoic morality insisted on others, even where one isn’t religious. It’s propagated by seemingly expert public speakers today and encouraged among working people to performatively show they are accomplished in the marketplace, selling their life to commerce and to others in Bad Faith as Sartre defined Bad Faith[3]. That is, they’re selling their freedom and the end result is more burnouts than success stories. To further understand asceticism’s normalization of suffering, life-negation, and deception, one can psychologize the psychiatrist, Pinel, who was mythologized as a “breaker of chains”, as a liberator, in his modern asylum in France. This was in the spirit of 18th century Enlightenment, “which is laden with hidden absurdity”, as Husserl explained[4]. Rather, Pinel actually worked to tame his patients – making them servile and dependent on him, and mechanistically “useful” to commercial society in general – as Foucault documented in “IX: The Birth Of The Asylum”, Madness and Civilization.
Religiosity is frequently projected[5] [6] onto the atheistic left by its religious antagonists in spite of there being no expressed indication that the radical left today is religious in belief, though they did employ asceticism, as in Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? or else the asceticism of a party man committed to using people as mere means to the revolution’s end, as in Jack Hilton, a shrewd expert on “human nature” and a supporting character in Richard Wright’s The Outsider. On the other hand, religion is expressly at the forefront of the socio-economic morality of religious conservatives such as Peterson[7].
Traditionally stoical/Christian asceticism is partnered with stoical/Christian naturalism as a further doubling down of manic-depression and self-denial where our economic norms are concerned. During Europe’s 1795 food scarcity, Burke expressed both asceticism and naturalism in a letter to the British Prime Minister William Pitt – this is in spite of having a duty as Britain’s wise and competent rulers to act in the interests of the people: “It is not in breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God, that we are to place our hope of softening the Divine displeasure to remove any calamity under which we suffer.” It’s contradiction to naturalize yet super-naturalize artificial laws in one breath, or to insist that such human laws aren’t what they are: constructed and fallible laws in service to their human creators/actors, not absolute laws for one to submit to unthinkingly and in admitted suffering. Amity Shlaes, a classical liberal, tweeting, “I still believe in markets. Markets do not fail us. We fail markets” proves the existence of market theology and economic masochism, which can render liberal market society illiberal for many.
Middle-class men of market society dare not admit their class even exists as a class, as much as Shapiro’s “objective observation” and “subjective perception” is mere pseudo-philosophical doublespeak privileging certain subjective perceptions (namely, his or that of his group) over others. In a similar gaslighting manner of obscuring one’s own role in matters, Sartre explained that, “The bourgeois could be recognized by the fact that he denied the existence of social classes and particularly of the bourgeoisie”[8]. Such is the profound self-ignorance constituting Hicks’ interpretation of “Ressentiment” in Explaining Postmodernism. In it, he justifies it pettily, “I want to use Nietzsche against the postmodernists for a change”. His book completely ignores the “Ressentiment” project, or class war, of the classically liberal middle-class, Hicks’ class, for the last eight centuries to establish and defend its values and power, which was exemplified by the French Revolution itself. The following by Smith speaks to today’s commonplace middle-class resentment towards public expenditure where private, frugal morality is concerned:
The whole, or almost the whole public revenue, is in most countries employed in maintaining unproductive hands. Such are the people who compose a numerous and splendid court, a great ecclesiastical establishment, great fleets and armies, who in time of peace produce nothing, and in time of war acquire nothing which can compensate the expense of maintaining them, even while the war lasts.
– Wealth Of Nations, 454.
And yet this quote perfectly distinguishes a 1st estate (the church) and 2nd estate (the noble court) as in the French revolutionist Siéyès’ historic pamphlet What Is The Third Estate?, which was published 13 years later and galvanized France into revolution. It’s not necessarily the causality of the revolution speaking in Smith’s Wealth Of Nations, yet it is the correlation of middle-class resentment altogether. “The revolutionary bourgeoisie seized power in 1789 because they already had it”, said Camus in The Rebel. Nietzsche even knew this. But these facts have been obscured by the revolution’s own historians and art. Middle-class class prejudice seeps through their gendered, victimized, and withholding resentment today anyway as a sanctimonious class above those deemed “low-class”:
The alternative to valued responsibility is impulsive low-class pleasure. And you saw that in the Pinocchio story, right? That’s pleasure island. It’s like, well, why lift the load if there’s nothing in it for you? That’s another thing we’re doing to men that’s a very bad idea, and to boys, it’s like you’re pathological and oppressive. It’s like, fine, then why the hell am I gonna play? If that’s the situation, if I get no credit for bearing responsibility you could bloody well be sure I’m not going to bear it.
– Jordan Peterson, Maps Of Meaning 11: The Flood And The Tower.
Middle-class resentment seeps into their own morality, their economics, and their science as well. They have a dogmatic truth. It is a dingy castle built on biological nature or naturalistic innateness, empirical surveys of pseudo-scientific certainty, ascetic disdain for pleasure and excess as developed out of stoical and Judeo-Christian morality, uncritiqued institutions and hierarchies, objectivist axioms, and thought-terminating cliches wherein actual free individualism finds its small corner. Their writers weaponize Nietzsche against radical leftists without reading Nietzsche closely enough – without realizing they recommend the existential books[9] to undermine their very own herd, these ascetic priests, who even fashion “personal responsibility” as a quack cure to a sickness that might require social responsibility as well.
“In sinning, each man sins against all, and each man is at least partly guilty for another’s sin”, Bishop Tikhon said to the disturbed Stavrogin in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. That might be to say, there is complicity from all of us in what we ourselves see as bad throughout the world – not necessarily in the manner of Universal Guilt, as in the Christian concept, but in universal responsibility: The causes and effects of all our actions and inactions in the world. In the manner of Kierkegaard, then, the problem is addressed by our inward and action-oriented project to concretely resolve it. This is far and above a shallow, external, inconclusive chatter about it as an overly-reflective public[10] does in debates, radio, podcasts, lecture halls, and comment sections irrespective of individualism or results. Kierkegaard clarified of anonymous public opinion that, “The public is not a people, not a generation, not one's age, not a congregation, not an association, not some particular persons, for all these are what they are only by being concretions.”[11] Rather, by being a nothing, a third-party neutrality, one is the abstracted objective observer devoid of responsibility.
A fine example of being an abstracted opinion is Murray’s new 2022 book War On The West. Just as Hicks decontextualizes Nietzsche’s Ressentiment for his particular, relativistic interests (not objectively truthful interests), so does Murray decontextualize Ressentiment from Scheler’s Ressentiment book. Trying to build on Hicks’ weaponization of Nietzsche for conservative interests, you’d get the sense that Murray quotes Scheler only for victory in the particular case, not because of the objective “universal” knowledge he so values. That’s the full extent the middle-class is willing to go in its scholarship to defend itself. Any further than that – such as actually reading the whole book by Scheler, then Murray would actually have to do some self-criticism. He would have to reckon with the capitalist system he conserves, since the pro-aristocracy Scheler plainly argues in his book that liberal and middle-class manufacturing (as capitalism as we know it) is a Ressentiment system.
Between Nietzsche and Scheler, Ressentiment as a psychological term was developed by pro-aristocrat sentiments with explicit criticism of middle-class capitalism, not for its un-critical defense. Henrik Ibsen speaks more accurately of Nietzsche here than Nietzsche ever did of Ibsen: “[Nietzsche] had a remarkable talent, but because of his philosophy he couldn't be popular in our democratic age.” So Peterson and Murray appealing to aristocratic arguments in defense of their democratic age – their liberal democracy – is absurd. But that is the absurdity of the middle-class at times. One foot marches in the interest of the masses, the other in elitist resentment of the masses’ deviant behaviour; its immorality; its freedom. In his twilight years in reaction to “the labour question” in his time, Nietzsche nevertheless attributed utopic predictions to the working class that aren’t even different from Marx’s own.
The workers are doing far too well not to ask for more, little by little and with diminishing modesty. At the end of the day they have the great number in their favour…. Workers were enlisted for the military, they were given the right to organize, the political right to vote: is it any wonder that workers today feel their existence to be desperate (expressed morally - to be an injustice)?.... If you want slaves, then it is stupid to train them to be masters.
–Twilight Of The Idols, 216.
In defense of “the west”, Murray paraphrases Scheler on only one page as saying “A is praised solely and wholly in order to denigrate and devalue B”[12]. If the west for Murray isn’t resentful, it should stand on its own merits. But if it’s resentful, it denigrates and devalues a referent, B, as a scapegoat or effigy: Its critics. Murray defends the west in reference to the humanities department on college campuses, in spite of sporting an English degree in the humanities as his education:
Conservatives used to joke that the wildest fringes of academic thought had boundaries that would be asserted naturally.... People were welcome to get themselves into debt studying for useless humanities degrees that educated them in non-disciplines. Because all the time, reality and the facts would continue to assert themselves in the STEM subjects.
– The War On The West, 195.
In Murray’s resentful denigrating and devaluing of the humanities here, there’s a subtle but important significance of the word “useless” for Scheler. Scheler theorized that the “vital” values of life had been supplanted by the “useful” values of middle-class capitalism. He wrote negatively in the context of asceticism,
it has become a rule of modern morality that useful work is better than the enjoyment of pleasure. This is an example of a specifically modern type of asceticism, equally foreign to antiquity and to the Middle Ages. Its mainspring is an essential component of the inner forces which led to the formation of modern capitalism.
– Ressentiment, 75.
Of course, this modern morality of “useful/useless” is ressentiment for Scheler. Harping on about the revenge/envy/resentment in his political antagonists, Murray doesn’t account for the revenge/envy/resentment in himself towards these antagonists. So, for all his performative intelligence, he is shamelessly ignorant – devoid of responsibility – regarding his own knowledge and speech.
Much of the rhetoric today on free speech is to draw attention to oneself, first of all, but this subject of free speech is chattered about as an expression of freedom always in mere form, always about itself. It is therefore devoid of substantive content. As a feministkilljoys.com essay called “You are oppressing us!” argued back in 2015, “the narrative of being silenced from speaking has become an incitement to speak: it incites the very thing it claims is being stopped.” As a broader statement about this speech monopolization, the essay argues, “Whenever people keep being given a platform to say they have no platform, or whenever people speak endlessly about being silenced, you not only have a performative contradiction; you are witnessing a mechanism of power.”
On the other hand, here is Kierkegaard in his Master’s thesis on the example of Socrates as he de facto equipped himself for war with the sophists:
The sacred was not to be taken in vain; the temple had to be cleansed before the sacred would once again take a seat there. Truth demands silence before it will raise its voice, and Socrates was to bring about this silence. For this reason, he was purely negative. If he had had any positivity, he would never have been so merciless, never such an ogre as he was and as he was obliged to be in order not to fall short of his mission in the world. For this he was indeed equipped. If the Sophists had an answer for everything, then he could pose questions; if the Sophists knew everything, then he knew nothing at all; if the Sophists could talk without stopping, then he could be silent – that is, he could converse. (210)
And as a footnote here, Kierkegard said “The loquacity and long speeches of the Sophists are like a sign of the positivity they possessed” (210). By continuing to follow the signs, Kierkegaard, like Nietzsche, found many priests and professors to be sophistic: “those greedy and prolific parasites who even have the brazenness (which, indeed, other parasites do not possess) to want to be counted as the true friends and adherents of those whose sufferings they live off of”[13]. This also brought him to ridicule his own commercial society in Denmark: “they have freedom of thought” yet “they demand freedom of speech!”[14] With an existential and phenomenological eye, it is no wonder Husserl also declared regarding the crisis of the sciences, “Everywhere, when we also take into account the rapid growth of bourgeois education, erudition, and literature in the nineteenth century, we observe that the confusion was becoming unbearable.”[15] This is not a pretext to stifle free speech or freedom of opinion. Rather, we’re watching in real-time how chattering and reflection can become inauthentic, drown out the views of others, and maintain a one-sided ideological narrative. As such, many people are actually being silenced, not listened to. And this isn’t even so that platform-less objectivity reigns. Rather, certain subjectivities are favoured over other subjectivities.
Man is still a tribal or political animal, especially when “individualism” is appealed to in mere rhetoric from a non-individualistic herd. A particular self-contradiction of Haidt/Lukianoff’s The Coddling Of The American Mind is to decry “us vs. them” politics while having blatant ideological targets that nevertheless orient an “us vs. them”. The crowd may be the untruth, as Kierkegaard said. But who isn’t part of a crowd today when communication and completing our projects are essentially an appeal to another?
Consider: a crowd says the crowd, as in the “leftist mob”, is untruth. You assent and join the alternate crowd. It turns out this crowd (though it is truth now by acknowledging crowds to be untruth) thinks the same; argues the same; looks the same to the detriment of being individualism itself. Wouldn’t that be an irony worthy of Kierkegaard, bolstered (as he said of sophistical Christendom), “with the help of theater sets”? “And in the same way the ten thousand adherents of the truth would also be a theatrical entertainment”, he wrote in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. A phenomenology of groups exists in our individualistic society, which makes everything topsy-turvy. Even in Wealth Of Nations, wherever Smith speaks of “combination”, he meant the frequent formation of groups, whether of employers against employees to stagnate wages or employees against employers to increase wages. In The Blood of Others, Beauvoir points out lower, middle-class individualism for being yet another concept mummified as mania: “It’s only another way of being exactly like each other”. No doubt, when Haidt/Lukianoff write as evolutionary naturalists that, “Humans are tribal creatures who readily form groups to compete with other groups” or, in the Smithian way, “Like bees, humans are able to work together in large groups with a clear division of labor”, they lack the cognitive dissonance required to transcend their own tribalism, their own “us vs. them”. In spite of that herd, and this is me trying to be optimistic, the individual could still exist and harbor spontaneous, self-conscious, and human freedom.
“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is”, as Camus said[16]. So it is with women and trans people also. With Camus’ sentiment, we can even decipher one of Sartre’s most cryptic existential blurbs: “Man is a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being”[17]. This doesn’t sound so ridiculous now if one understands that one has the self-consciousness, the freedom, to be negating no matter how perfect or accepted it is in another’s opinion, or how much they dogmatize nature, i.e. the stoical/resentful acceptance of the body and the world as it merely is, as in Epictetus’ Discourses going off on a resentful tangent about men who ought to look like men and women who ought to look like women. Despite his sentiment that “A woman is by nature smooth-skinned and delicate”, women’s hair happens to grow in places, not even against nature but in conformity with nature.
Still, one may decide that the previous or present being is a lack of being. To rebel against this lack is to be free. To rebel against the most rational plan demonstrates that human will precedes reason, affirming even Dostoevsky’s Underground Man as he rails against mathematics, or else utilitarianism, as a basis to improve society[18]. Yet it’s not reason altogether that one might rebel against. It can be the reasoning of others as they have made you their object or it can be your own reasoning as you have chosen another reasoning or another aim – in a transcending direction. Here’s why we give each other so much grief: Reason only goes where and as far as each consciousness wills it.
What should be understood of Existentialism is that individuality, authenticity, freedom, and consciousness are negating to begin with. But it’s trendy now to reject this rejection out of the mind’s sheer terror of itself. And this is pervasive to such an extent that human consciousness disdains human consciousness, devalues itself as “subjectivity”, and deems it insane, emotional, sinful, or else inferior to mere animality, to nature, to order, to scientism, or to God. Camus quoted Nietzsche as saying, “Every Church is a stone rolled onto the tomb of the man-god; it tries to prevent the resurrection, by force”! True autonomy, creativity, and knowledge in the minds of each – for they comprise each individual’s spirit – are shackled in favour of the most abstract of minds, that of God or else the objective observer. Epictetus himself pawned his own opinion as God’s to imbue it with more authority as he speaks to someone:
once you’ve heard what I’ve had to say, go away and tell yourself, ‘It wasn’t Epictetus who told me all that—for how could he have come up with it?—but some kindly god speaking through his mouth. For it would never have entered the mind of Epictetus to say such things, because he isn’t in the habit of speaking to anyone.
– Discourses, 146.
Thus Epictetus’ speaking might have contributed to Christianity, yet more likely to 18th century Enlightenment philosophy. By the historical spread of ideas, many liberal Enlightenment thinkers read Epictetus, formed nations on stoical grounds, and Xenophon was well-liked, especially by US President John Adams[19]. Xenophon’s portrayal of Socrates is favoured most by stoics yet Kierkegaard noted just how much Socrates was mischaracterized by Xenophon to the point of becoming a well-intentioned absurdity: “Instead of the good, we have the useful, instead of the beautiful, we have the utilitarian, instead of the true, the established, instead of the sympathetic, the lucrative, instead of harmonious unity, the pedestrian”[20]. Kierkegaard asked, “And what preestablished harmony in lunacy, what higher unity in madness is there not inherent in Plato’s and the Athenians’ uniting to put to death and immortalize such a good-natured bourgeois as that?”[21] Having listened to Xenophon’s works, Apology and Memorabilia, which even the stoic-leaning Ward Farnsworth concedes is boring[22], I think the Xenophontic Socrates deserves Kierkegaard’s criticism.
As Kierkegaard’s interpretation goes, “The Xenophontic Socrates stops with an emphasis on the useful; he never goes beyond the empirical, never arrives at the idea.”[23] As such, Xenophon ended up arriving only at a finite, surface-level understandings of Socrates, not the idea of Socrates as an infinitely negative subjectivity. Such finite, surface-level understanding in Xenophon could even be a preliminary criticism of Enlightenment’s empirical sciences as it overtook metaphysics, i.e., philosophical rationalism. Today, Empirical Enlightenment has twisted “reasoning”, even “Socratic questioning”, into a rhetorical, performative tool. By defending Socrates from his – if I may say – “cancelling”, Xenophon eliminated all that was “cancelling” in Socrates’ own freedom of thought, just as Kierkegaard said, “by eliminating all that was dangerous in Socrates, Xenophon actually reduced him totally in absurdum in recompense, probably, for Socrates' having done this so often to others”[24]. So when nothing about Socrates was negative, stoics – as the new, positively-upbuilding sophists – could justify themselves to appropriate Socrates, taking Hippias’ Natural Law along with them. So too do many stoics, doctors, psychologists, and historians understand things only at surface-level regarding women, radicals, reason, anxiety, depression, and Anne-Josèphe.
Being himself absent from Socrates’ trial, Xenophon still deigned to intervene, Kierkegaard argued, as when “a helpful third party kindly takes it upon himself to reconcile the disputants, to take the whole matter back to a triviality”[25]. Later in Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard criticizes trivialities as a spiritless adult’s substitute for actual wisdom. At 36 though 6 years before his death, Kierkegaard said of the prejudice that assumes despair belongs only to youth,
it is very foolish and simply shows a lack of judgment as to what spirit is—along with a failure to appreciate that man is spirit and not merely animal—to think that faith and wisdom come that easily, that they come as a matter of course over the years like teeth, a beard, etc. No, whatever a man may arrive at as a matter of course, whatever things may come as a matter of course—faith and wisdom are definitely not among them. As a matter of fact, from a spiritual point of view, a man does not arrive at anything as a matter of course over the years; this concept is precisely the uttermost opposite of spirit. On the contrary, it is very easy to leave something behind as a matter of course over the years. And over the years, an individual may abandon the little bit of passion, feeling, imagination, the little bit of inwardness he had and embrace as a matter of course an understanding of life in terms of trivialities (for such things come as a matter of course). This—improved—condition, which, to be sure, has come with the years, he now in despair considers a good thing; he easily reassures himself (and in a certain satirical sense nothing is more sure) that now it could never occur to him to despair— no, he has secured himself. But he is in despair, devoid of spirit and in despair. Why, I wonder, did Socrates love youth if it was not because he knew man!
– Sickness Unto Death, 58-9.
Trivialities also arise from Peterson’s mediation of order and chaos in his two casuistry books, which still lean to the side of order and responsibility; therefore, to spiritlessness or unfreedom – a hatred of freedom. Enlightenment, as an ideal in philosophy, pertains to acquiring truth. In many ways, one expects to put the chaos of phenomena in order for one’s mind. Yet anxiety and despair pervade existence, in youth as much as in our elder years, because possibilities are explored in the mind, just as in the world, in a raw tension against the necessities of the world and existing with others. That is to say, in contradictions. Others make existence infinitely complicated because individuality and sociality, or the private and the public, are actually in paradoxical tension, just as living with negativity and positivity is in such paradoxical tension.
As human minds encounter one another, individualism and collectivism become paradoxical too, perhaps because one comprises the other. There’s an evident degree of failure regarding both individualist and collectivist philosophies, just as there is success. Nevertheless, Pascal said, “We do not show greatness by being at one extreme, but rather by touching both at once and filling all the space in between” (Pensee). That is why Existentialism, contra Peterson and Haidt/Lukianoff as attempted mediators, weighs all ideas, reads The Gulag Archipelago and The Invention Of Capitalism, yet without negating the principle of contradiction regarding all ideas – without negating negation itself. This is the sense Kierkegaard meant regarding his criticism of the present age as well as Hegel’s mediation:
The present age is essentially a sensible age, devoid of passion, and therefore it has nullified the principle of contradiction. From this consideration a variety of features may be deduced, which the author with fine artistry and elevated composure had depicted so disinterestedly. Naturally, the author's own opinion is nowhere discernible; he merely reproduces the reflexion. Generally speaking, compared to a passionate age, a reflective age devoid of passion gains in extensity what it loses in intensity.
–Two Ages, 97.
Extensity could be, by Kierkegaard’s meaning, the capacity to talk, mediate, and reflect, neither to act nor negate. Yet by negating intensity, extensity is a kind of negation.
Negation can precede positive creation, it can precede life, while reactionaries today are hypocritical (hence the comical) because they defend the objects and values of the status quo that were themselves radical and negating once in the face of the status quo. As a matter of historical text, Abbé Sieyès and Madame Roland exhibit their negating attitudes and class resentment as oppressed burghers, or middle-class bourgeoisie, in What is the Third Estate? and The Private Memoirs of Madame Roland respectively. Sieyès’ class resentment is quoted in his first scene, whereas I’ll reference Madame Roland’s here. Recounting a pre-revolution visit to aristocratic Versailles, she wrote that “the unrouged face of my respectable mother, and the sober decency of my apparel, announced that we were bourgeois”. She goes on:
My mother inquiring if I was pleased with my visit, "Yes," replied I, "if only it be soon over; a few days longer, and I shall so perfectly detest these people that I shall not know what to do with my hatred." "What harm do they do you?" "They give me the feeling of injustice, and oblige me every moment to contemplate absurdity."
–The Private Memoirs of Madame Roland, 159-60.
As a crafty bit of tone-policing in our time, reactionaries of the middle-class such as Hicks, Peterson, and Murray are accusing radical leftists and progressives of harboring resentment, cherry-picking their Nietzsche[26], yet I would maintain that resentment can possibly correspond to actual injustice in the world. In which case, resentment is a sentiment one can freely express, and from across the political spectrum; even our reactionaries themselves can express it as they clearly already express it towards those who refuse their own ideal society. It’s only a matter of 1) not living hypocritically in the manner Peterson resentfully claims he isn’t resentful[27] and 2) finding actual release from resentment through intersubjective and creative transcendence instead of letting it build up within or projecting it onto others.
In his book Ressentiment, Scheler offers excellent insight into “ressentiment” – more than Nietzsche does himself. Scheler, in turn, frees the concept from Hicks, Peterson, and Murray’s politically one-sided weaponization of it, as in Peterson’s 23rd rule “Never Allow Yourself To Become Resentful, Deceitful, or Arrogant” while he ends up being all those things. We find resentment everywhere in modern, commercial society today as a consequence because Scheler explained:
ressentiment is always to some degree a determinant of the romantic type of mind. At least this is so when the romantic nostalgia for some past era (Hellas, the Middle Ages, etc.) is not primarily based on the values of that period, but on the wish to escape from the present. Then all praise of the "past" has the implied purpose of downgrading present-day reality.
– Ressentiment, 49.
Regarding the French Revolution itself, this indeed could’ve been the case with classical liberals overloading their revolutionary writing and speeches with references to classical (Greco-Roman) antiquity, and resentfully against the tyranny and inequality of monarchy, nobility, feudalism, and ecclesiasts. On the conservative side of things, however, Burke’s aforementioned nostalgia for an “age of chivalry” also harboured resentment. Just as Hicks, Peterson, and Murray, even where they praise classical liberalism, now blatantly show resentment towards radical leftists in academia, Scheler explained again:
The formal structure of ressentiment expression is always the same: A is affirmed, valued, and praised not for its own intrinsic quality, but with the unverbalized intention of denying, devaluating, and denigrating B. A is ‘played off’ against B. ….[T]here is a particularly violent tension when revenge, hatred, envy, and their effects are coupled with impotence. Under the impact of that tension, these affects assume the form of ressentiment.[28]
All this becomes the tiresome bantering and toxicity of politics, to be sure; a kind of “hot potato” of resentment accusation; the “will to persecute” all the way down. Yet attempting to make “ressentiment” vogue against colleges or the activist left only unveils the entire resentment project that constituted middle-class, Enlightenment liberality, and the anti-Biblical Deism of both the US and French revolutions. Classical Liberals today, such as Peterson and Shapiro, cannot appeal to Enlightenment reason and liberality in addition to Judeo-Christian moral values without attempting to refute Paine’s The Age Of Reason arguments. This is because Paine’s popular book explicitly antagonizes Judeo-Christian morals as derived uncritically from the Bible. 18th century Deists believed in empiricism as well as God but as merely the “Unmoved Mover”, revealed in nature. On the other hand, Non-Deist Christians believe in the Bible’s history, Divine Revelation, established religion, and miracles occurring contra nature. Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Bentham all believed in Natural Religion. It is also said that these revolutionary Deists contrived to keep religion on the basis of social control[29], not based on actual spirituality.
Paine’s Age Of Reason generated something of a movement on both sides of the Atlantic and to such an extent it spawned churches of reason whose festivals worshipped Socrates, Washington, and Rousseau. Deism also settled itself in university campuses in the US, such as Yale and Harvard and, as absurd as the US Christian right is today towards campuses, campuses were subjected to resentment, book burning, and persecution back then. As a student of Yale in 1793, Lyman Beecher wrote that “college was in a most ungodly state. The college church was almost extinct. Most of the students were skeptical…. That was the day of the infidelity of the Tom Paine school…. Most of the class before me were infidels, and called each other Voltaire, Rousseau, D’Alembert” (Revolutionary Deists, 20). Further still, Harvard’s overseers burned Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall Of The Roman Empire in 1791 for its uncomplimentary take on early Christianity, according to Walters. Given their historical contexts, Enlightenment Reason and Judeo-Christian values don’t actually synthesize. Possibly for that reason, Kierkegaard took his Revealed Christian beliefs inward and understood its absurdity – neither its reasonableness nor its performative/worldly traditions – as true faith.
But the middle-class was actual-historically resentful of the conservative, noble, ruling, or higher class whom they served. The middle-class was resentful of corporations, monopoly, hierarchy, and inequality of property. Smith accounts for himself:
In the produce of arts, manufactures, and commerce, the clergy [of the greater part of Europe], like the great barons, found something for which they could exchange their rude produce, and thereby discovered the means of spending their whole revenues upon their own persons, without giving any considerable share of them to other people. Their charity became gradually less extensive, their hospitality less liberal or less profuse…. The clergy too, like the great barons, wished to get a better rent from their landed estates, in order to spend it, in the same manner, upon the gratification of their own private vanity and folly.
– Wealth Of Nations, 1071-2.
The middle-class serving under these higher orders, great barons and clergy, subsequently developed their own distinctly empirical, mechanical, neo-classical, and utility[30]-oriented morality, as a slave morality, to subvert the master morality of the metaphysical, mercantile, the gothic and rococo styles, and the ecclesiastic. Scheler, himself a practicing Christian responding to Nietzsche’s accusations towards Christian morality, explained that,
We believe that the Christian values can very easily be perverted into ressentiment values and have often been thus conceived. But the core of Christian ethics has not grown on the soil of ressentiment. On the other hand, the core of bourgeois morality, which gradually replaced Christian morality ever since the 13th century and culminated in the French Revolution, is rooted in ressentiment.
– Ressentiment, 61.
Scheler explained this psychologically regarding ressentiment envy, “When we cannot obtain a thing, we comfort ourselves with the reassuring thought that it is not worth nearly as much as we believed”, yet, “To its very core, the mind of ressentiment man is filled with envy, the impulse to detract, malice, and secret vindictiveness” (54). This might be the case regarding the middle-class right-wing’s resentment today towards Hollywood’s prevailing “liberal” or “woke” agenda, so-called, in addition to Hollywood’s aristocratic displays and ceremonies! Historically, resentment could also explain the middle-class development of suburbs as smaller and “modest” parcels of landed nobility to experience in a “state of nature” and a commons that, in our age of climate inaction, proves to be the least beneficial to nature. This is documented in the profoundly titled book Bourgeois Utopia. Of course, now in the context of Madam Roland praising the “sober decency of our apparel” against Versailles’ nobles, Scheler explained that,
Thus our vital energy and feeling of power rises by several degrees, though on an illusory basis. There is a tendency to modify not only our public statements, but also our own judgment. Who can fail to detect this tendency when he is told that this “inexpensive” ring or meal is much “better” than the expensive one, or to feel that it underlies the praise of “contentment,” “simplicity,” and “economy” in the moral sphere of the petty bourgeoisie?
– Ressentiment, 54.
Yet one can now understand the performative simplicity, frugality, austerity, or thriftiness of the ultra-rich today by understanding that the middle-class morality of the slaves has triumphed across the world. Thus, “The thrifty manager becomes the ideal even of the rich to the degree they had become ‘bourgeois’” (129), Scheler concluded.
One can say the middle-class, originally burghers or the bourgeoisie confined in city boroughs, had its own “cottage-core” movement as a consequential alienation from their own urban manufacturing. “There was indeed a large portion of envy of the “country gentleman” in these weekend villas, an envy that was perhaps inevitable in view of the rural elite’s tight hold on power and prestige within eighteenth century English society”, Robert Fishman explains (41). As a movement of ascetic Evangelicals, the middle-class development of suburbs as smaller and “modest” parcels of landed nobility to experience in a “state of nature” is utopic. What’s also utopic is the confinement of and middle-class anxieties towards addicts, criminals, the unruly, the young, and workers in city centers, i.e, today’s boroughs. Ironically, this happened to produce a largescale denaturing of the Earth because the bourgeoisie knew only how to do manufacturing and how to imitate the landed gentry. They didn’t know how to actually do agriculture, or care for the commons, as the landed peasants or Indigenous communities did. They only knew how to operate human beings as they operate their machinery. And yet suburban plots imitate the nobility’s retreats, and Versailles gardens, as mere aesthetic pleasure, as escapism, rather than the bourgeois’ own utility or “usefulness” value.
Suburbs in our age of climate inaction prove to be a desertification of the Earth, in the literal and metaphorical sense, as it contributes to the globalization, not localization, of our agriculture as well as our lives. Imitation nobility could be why all ecological rewilding movements – or else the revitalization of the commons – face such stiff, bureaucratic opposition in the suburbs. But the psychotherapist John Weakland actually pointed out that the family itself doesn’t live well in absurdly fearful and conformist suburbs – or what he actually called “compulsory utopias”. In “What is happening to the family in suburbia?”, a 1961 conference in California, he spoke of the schizophrenia that arises from it:
“How can difficulties of the sort we see in schizophrenic patients occur in such nice settings as we often see them in pleasant families and suburbia?” Maybe it’s a lead into that question to suggest that maybe things can be too nice…. You see, one problem these families have is not just certain things are nice, but that things have to be nice. They’re supposed to be nice and they’re supposed so strongly, you might even say forcefully, that they darned well better be; so if someone indicates that they’re not, you’re in trouble.
– As quoted in The Pathological Family, 158.
Yet when society is conditioned to the stoical frugality of the middle-class over many centuries, as positivity, it doesn’t notice its unnecessary and coercive moralization, its negativity, especially when material conditions are actually in such abundance that we could make life easier for all. Possibility still isn’t explored that could make society better – that could make individual lives better – than what Arendt and Gertz term the “desert” aspect of ascetic priests blaming only oneself in negative asceticism, as in Peterson writing in Beyond Order with unknown irony, “It is much safer morally to look to yourself for the errors of the world, at least to the degree to which someone honest and free of willful blindness might consider. You are likely to be much more clear minded about what is what and who is who and where blame lies once you contemplate the log in your own eye, rather than the speck in your brother’s” (176). Nietzsche himself paraphrases a conversation between a sufferer and an ascetic priest:
‘I suffer: someone or other must be guilty’ – and every sick sheep thinks the same. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest, says to him, ‘Quite right, my sheep! Somebody must be to blame: but you yourself are this somebody, you yourself alone are to blame for it, you yourself alone are to blame for yourself’ . . . That is bold enough, wrong enough: but at least one thing has been achieved by it, the direction of ressentiment is, as I said – changed.[31]
And it’s precisely this “personal responsibility” psychology that can lead to nihilism, as Gertz argues.
To learn to adapt to the desert, to be “resilient”, can reduce our suffering, but Arendt warns that it is good that we are still capable of suffering, that our suffering is the canary in the coal mine, the alarm that tells us that we do not belong in the world in which we find ourselves. When this feeling of not belonging leads us to look inward, to blame ourselves, to try to fix ourselves, we become so focused on ourselves, that we only make the desert between ourselves and others worse. If being driven away from each other and being driven into ourselves is what creates nihilism, then individualistic responses to nihilism will never overcome nihilism but will instead only help to perpetuate nihilism.
– Nolan Gertz, Nihilism, 158.
This view is not exclusively philosophical in perspective since we can refer to the US psychiatrist Thomas Szasz’s radical critiques of psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy as medicalized priestliness. They appear in his works written in the latter half of the 20thcentury, starting with The Myth Of Mental Illness and continuing on to The Myth Of Psychotherapy, The Medicalization Of Everyday Life, Psychiatry: The Science Of Lies, and other books. Yet in two added appendixes to The Myth Of Mental Illness, while he condemns the medical practice of coercion and involuntary confinement by force of the state, in favour of the classical liberal ideal of the freedom and responsibility of the individual, he doesn’t credit classical liberalism itself with the long-winded pretext to coerce and involuntarily confine, by force of the state. He certainly quotes Benjamin Rush, a Founding Father and the father of US psychiatry, negatively in Coercion As Cure as saying “Perhaps hereafter it may be as much the business of a physician as it is now of a divine to reclaim man from vice” (72). But this modern physician’s task, according to Szasz, had to represent “badness as madness, and madness as a bona fide medical malady, a disease of the body. He had to demonstrate by his language and his actions that his object of study was not the immaterial soul, but a material object, a bodily disease”; also, that in Rush’s own words as quoted in Coercion As Cure by Szasz, “I have endeavored to…show that the mind and the body are moved by the same cause and subject to the same laws” (72). This is plainly in the direction of psychology’s physicalist reduction, which is naturalistic as Husserl described.
More importantly regarding the loaded term “the passions”, Rush wrote of the US as having an “excess of the passion for liberty inflamed by the successful issue of the [revolutionary] war”, and that “The extensive influence which these opinions had upon the understandings, passions, and morals of many of the citizens of the United States, constituted a form of insanity, which I shall take the liberty of distinguishing by the name of anarchia” (140). As such, a Founding Father could have been quick on the draw to gaslight his own nation as a whole as “insane” for even expressing their passionate liberty. Rather than lay aside superstitions characteristic of the dark ages, he wrote that, “Were we to live our lives over again and engage in the same benevolent enterprise, our means should not be reasoning but bleeding, purging, low diet, and the tranquilizing chair.”[32] He also wrote: “Sanity–aptitude to judge things like other men, and regular habits, etc. Insanity a departure from this.”[33] But that christens judgemental and habitual conformity as “sanity” – and individual deviance as “insanity” – in the very contextual framework of the new US being born out of classical liberalism. Labelling freedom itself as “insanity” is the seedbed for absurdity in a free nation. And yet this impetus to credit “insanity” to merely deviant behaviour – also physicalist explanations to mental explanations, flourished and was normalized by physicians as the new divines, as the new ascetic priests, as Ignatieff’s own A Just Measure Of Pain also documents of Rush in the US, demythologizing Rush just as Foucault’s Madness And Civilization helped demythologize Pinel’s “moral treatment” and asylums in Europe.
The points where Peterson actually broaches social relations in Beyond Order is mostly on conformist and even gaslighting grounds, not really co-operative or cordial ones. Regarding conformity, in the Beyond Order segment, “Sanity As A Social Institution”, he says “Compliance with [social] indications and reminders is, in large measure, sanity itself–and is something required from every one of us right from the early stages of life” (6). But that is not far off from Rush at all. Regarding his gaslighting, Peterson abuses the notion of “sanity” in petty squabbles about sprucing up office corners. Of the four responses that ran through his head of a female administrator he was having a disagreement with, two of them abused the word “sane” to court conformity in the world as he likes. The two being “I thought we were sane adults, having a productive conversation about improving something important in a university, but we are actually children squabbling in a kindergarten playground” and “I thought I was speaking with someone sane and reasonable, but I was clearly wrong” (222). His Rule VIII (or XX): “Try To Make One Room In Your Home As Beautiful As Possible”, and doubt the sanity of your department administrator about altering rooms at the office. His gaslighting is pretty shameless and not only limited to his bottled-up resentment put to paper years later, as will be discussed later in section “8 Political Economy and Natural Law”. But a concluding comment here from Nietzsche might take the cake regarding the militant hatred also evident in ascetics.
He must be sick himself, he must really be a close relative of the sick and the destitute in order to understand them, – in order to come to an understanding with them; but he has to be strong, too, more master of himself than of others, actually unscathed in his will to power, so that he has the trust and fear of the sick and can be their support, defence, prop, compulsion, disciplinarian, tyrant, God…. If forced by necessity, he would probably even step among the other kind of beast of prey themselves, in all likelihood with bearish solemnity, venerable, clever, cold, deceptively superior, as the herald and mouthpiece of more mysterious powers, determined to sow suffering, division and self-contradiction on this ground wherever he can, and only too certain of his skill at being master of the suffering at any time.[34]
Further and concrete historicism of ascetic priests in the medical profession could begin with Foucault’s Madness And Civilization in Europe, and continue on in the US with Anne Harrington’s Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness and Deborah Weinstein’s The Pathological Family, as will be discussed in section “10 The Objective Observer”. But then the Canadian Residential School system was organized on the basis of more ascetic priestliness too, as is discussed in section “11 Ideology”.
[1] Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 41.
[2] Ignatieff, Michael. A Just Measure Of Pain, 47-52.
[3] Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Part 1, Chapter Two: Bad Faith”, Being and Nothingness. For a brief introduction, see the video, “SARTE On: Bad Faith” on the YouTube channel, The School of Life.
[4] Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, 197.
[5] Peterson, Jordan. “Equity: When the Left Goes Too Far”,
https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/political-correctness/equity-when-the-left-goes-too-far/
[6] Peterson, Jordan, Forward to The Gulag Archipelago: 50th Anniversary.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid, 107.
[9] https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/great-books/
[10] Two Ages.
[11] Ibid, 92.
[12] The War On The West, 206.
[13] Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks: Volume 10, Journals nb31-36, 444.
[14] Either/Or Part 1.
[15] The Crisis Of The European Sciences, 196.
[16] The Rebel, 11.
[17] quoted by Beauvoir in Ethics of Ambiguity, 11.
[18] Even Husserl himself, originally a mathematician, has to remind us in The Crisis of the European Sciences that mathematics is constructed out of idealization and symbols. That is, idealizations and symbols could be reality itself but they’re probably only representations until then.
[19] Ricks, Thomas E., First Principles, 8.
[20] The Concept of Irony, 25.
[21] Ibid, 16.
[22] The Socratic Method, 11.
[23] The Concept of Irony, 6.
[24] Ibid, 16.
[25] Ibid, 16.
[26] Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism.
[27] See Helen Lewis’ GQ interview of him and his subsequent resentment towards her.
[28] Ressentiment, 49.
[29] Walters, Revolutionary Deists, 18.
[30] Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, 156. Also, Scheler, “The Elevation Of The Value Of Utility Above The Value Of Life”, Ressentiment.
[31] “Third essay: what do ascetic ideals mean?”, On The Genealogy of Morality, 96.
[32] As quoted in Thomas Szasz’s Coercion As Cure, 72
[33] As quoted in Thomas Szasz’s The Manufacture of Madness, 141
[34] “Third essay: what do ascetic ideals mean?”, On The Genealogy of Morality, 92-3.