Are there politics, world views, social movements that are free from resentment? Practically everyone will say that about themselves. Of course, everyone gives good reasons for their opposition to their competitors, so that this is not based on affective rejection.

The philosopher Jürgen Grosse denies this claim and demonstrates in his new book that all political-social trends since the Enlightenment have been based on resentment. Even though he does not explicitly mention contemporary political scientism, but en passant The ecological worldview: These too use affectively exclusionary terminology when they describe their opponents as deniers of their scientific or ecological truths.

Is there no exception at all? Yes, the hippie movement of the sixties. But didn't the hippies get out of middle class life? Did they not develop any resentment towards him? Grosse attests to the alternative movement of the eighties, but not to the hippies. They left the meritocracy, but nonchalantly, not aggressively like the bohemia of the late 19th century or even political protest movements.

On the one hand, the hippies developed their own values, on the other hand, their own life practice with their own contexts of meaning. Grosse writes:

Here, too, the scene sees its refusal as merely a forced position, not as an original negation: originally, the wealth of meaningless expression, such as Bob Dylan, or meaning-twisting expression, such as Jefferson Airplane cultivated, was repressive-derived, however, the construction of rigid forms that deny meaning. (P. 289)

The hippies also do not live in a primary opposition to capitalism, as they embody a hedonism that does not want to produce but still consumes. Grosse also attests something similar to the youth scene in the GDR, which managed without emancipatory claims and had simply disappeared from politics.

But as far as the counterculture in the western world in the second half of the 20th century is concerned, Grosse sees significant differences between the US and the Western European counterculture. The American one focuses on a nature that also refers to the indigenous people; the European is primarily nihilistic, which combines great things with resentment and thus with cynicism and envy.

At the center of the Great Book is Nietzsche, about whom he remarks: “Up to Nietzsche, resentment had been described psychologically and morally neutrally or critically in European literature; according to Nietzsche, it was considered contemptuous or even in need of therapy.” (p. 74) The French enlighteners, for example, had a neutral attitude towards resentment and did not fundamentally judge it negatively.

w Nietzsches On the genealogy of morality The resentment of the Jewish priests becomes structurally negative hatred of the ruling classes, as an affective rejection of the strong, rich and beautiful, who embody the good in “master morality,” while the poor, weak and ugly represent the bad in it. According to Nietzsche, Christians transform this negative feeling into a positive revaluation of values, so that now the weak become the good, while the strong are devalued as “bad guys.” For Nietzsche, after Grosse, resentment has thus become creative, as it had already been for Charles Baudelaire.

A large book can therefore also be read from two different perspectives. It contains a history of the concept of resentment, which begins with Montaigne, maintains its momentum in the second half of the 18th century, when literature and art become socially critical, i.e. they reject absolutist society, similar to how they sharply criticize the bourgeoisie in the 19th century, which continues in the 20th century in virtually all political social movements, each fed by different forms of rejection. Nietzsche plays a key role in this.

The second reading of Großes Buch explains resentment as the basic motif of political and social movements since the 18th century. In the case of Marx, which have economic foundations and therefore a thoroughly rational character, there are affectively accelerated aversions, emotionally triggered hatred of people and ideologies, of the other thing par excellence, which go hand in hand with the hubris of living and believing the right thing yourself. The same seems to apply to all relevant political and social movements — the hippies and the youth movement in the GDR are irrelevant. This almost becomes a basic historical and philosophical motif: History is driven by resentment, but not from the very beginning — who would dare to claim such nonsense that they know the basic principle of all history!

Unlike Nietzsche, who describes it as a motive of emerging Christianity, for Grosse it is more related to the widespread claim of egalitarianism since the Enlightenment. The nobles did not need to develop resentment towards their subjects and, conversely, there was no reason for the latter to do so. Only with the claim to equality does hatred of others arise who do not appear equal enough but should be. The fact that Big Book suggests this reading is primarily due to the fact that it deals with many political and social trends in the Western world and shows their structure of resentment.

Max Scheler, who criticizes Nietzsche's concept of resentment, attests the resentment of bourgeois morality and abdicates Christianity from it. For Scheler, Enlightenment morality is based on resentment towards the Christian order of love, which is itself free from all resentment or even a “will to power.”

Ludwig Klages follows up with a biocentric way of thinking. The soul is vital to distinguish from the ego. Klages thus reinterprets Nietzsche and expands the concept of resentment. Grosse writes: “Through his hatred of the life-destroying spirit, Klages was able to become a companion of conservative revolutionaries as well as a forerunner of ecological world saving utopias.” (p. 72)

E.M. Cioran takes this to the extreme. For him, affects can only be combated by affects; if you can only free yourself from evil through evil, resentment must be exhausted. For Cioran, thinking requires insidiousness. Grosse comments on Cioran: “Envy, hate, anger are not distant states, art, philosophy, science are not affect-free pure states.” (p. 81)

While the bourgeois revolutionaries live out their hatred of absolutism and Christianity, the reaction of Joseph de Maistre or Juan Donoso Cortés reacts with revenge fantasies that are embedded theologically:

The liberal does not understand the fact of God or the self-evidence of order nor the primacy of Voluntas before intellectus. Praising and cultivating one's own impulsivity towards liberal pallor will henceforth be an elementary exercise of all reactionary theorists and writers. (P. 155)

The Catholic Léon Bloy in particular stands out, who declares himself an “anti-pig” and thus all opponents become pigs:

In view of the personal and material superiority of the bourgeois principle, which is not terror (as for the older reaction) but indifference, fanaticism on a spiritual and moral duty. When Bloy describes the beauty that has bloodbaths for him among citizens, Englishmen, emancipated, unbelievers of all kinds, it is reminiscent of de Maistre's literary eccentricity. (P. 159)

But Grosse also discovers similar resentment among anarchists, leftists and feminism, which he primarily qualifies as a bourgeois movement, as well as among his male advocates. “Women understand women become legions after 1800” (p. 183), writes Grosse. Neither in feudal-aristocratic society nor in proletarian movements has there been feminism after Grosse: “[A] ll the bourgeois woman has become conspicuous in terms of resentment.” (181)

Men are devalued and women are glorified. Feminism owes female depravity to men. The revenge motive is aimed at a revaluation of values, which, as with Nietzsche, is due to one's own weakness and to envy of the strength of men. Grosse writes:

The resentment structure typical of resentment, but also underlying bourgeois emancipation logic — private suffering as a symptom of a world situation — is already evident in the early women's movement; “open hatred of men” and ideas of female “saving the world” through hitherto exclusively female small-world virtues such as “warmth and dedication” are already detectable shortly after 1800. (P. 185)

Resentment is therefore by no means limited to right-wing or conservative tendencies such as the yuppies of the eighties or current right-wing populism, which impute an attitude of envy on the left and declare disadvantage as self-inflicted: Claims formulated by these are evoked by troublemakers. Minorities and disadvantaged people cannot, of course, present themselves as victims and pass off their way of life as ethical. This is how Grosse notes:

In advanced modernity, the reference to the Christian “chivalric” motif of renunciation of revenge has weakened. A sense of resentment and the concept of resentment are increasingly connoted with questions of social justice, in particular with a frustrated desire for equality. (P. 327)

Grosse also attributes something similar to the various anti-bourgeois artistic movements, from Sturm-und-Drang to Bohème and Surrealism to the present day. This still applies to the new semi-elites from left-wing, green or digital camps, about which Grosse remarks: “Political, media and cultural bobos [bourgeois bohemians; SM] act as primary victims as well as representatives from historical-traditional, currently ongoing injustice.” (p. 311)

Resentment for big people seems to be driving and driving politics and society for around three centuries and thus determining history. Of course, it barely achieves the creative quality of the revaluation of values. But you can argue about that. Because it is precisely ecologically ethical values that have spread in modern societies today. And perhaps also the hedonism of the hippies with sex & drugs & rock'n'roll — the latter describes Grosse as “noise” (292), a connection to Adorno's aversion to pop culture. But as you call out to the world, it echoes back.

‍

Photo credit Item image

Edmund Adler: The flower wreath (1950) (link)