Ressentiment by max scheler

Author:max scheler [scheler, max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, General, History & Surveys, Modern, Ethics, Ethics & Moral Philosophy, Values, Resentment, Anger, Worth
ISBN: 9780874626025
Publisher: Marquette University Press
Published: 1994-12-15T06:27:49+00:00

circle -- without any reference to such questions as value and "nearness to God." Thus patriotism is supposed to deprive "mankind," etc. 3

The difference between Christian love and modern humanitarianism lies not only in their objects, but also in the subjective side of the process of loving. Christian love is essentially a spiritual action and movement, as independent of our body and senses as the acts and laws of thinking. Humanitarian love is a feeling, and a passive one, which arises primarily by means of psychical contagion when we perceive the outward expression of pain and joy. We suffer when we see pain and rejoice when we see pleasant sensations. In other words, we do not even suffer in sympathy with the other person's suffering as such, but only with our sense perception of his pain. It is no coincidence that the philosophical and psychological theoreticians of the 17th and 18th centuries, who gradually elaborated the theoretical formulation of the new ethos, define the essence of love with reference to the phenomena of sympathy, compassion, and shared joy, which in turn they reduce to psychical contagion. 4 This goes particularly for the great English thinkers from Hutcheson, Adam Smith, David Hume to Bain, and also for Rousseau. 5 The pathos of modern humanitarianism, its clamor for greater sensuous happiness, its subterraneously smoldering passion, its revolutionary protest against all institutions, traditions, and customs which it considers as obstacles to the increase of sensuous happiness, its whole revolutionary spirit -- all this is in characteristic contrast to the luminous, almost cool spiritual enthusiasm of Christian love. It should not surprise us that psychological theory, following this historical change in experiencing love, increasingly dissolves the very phenomenon of love into a mechanism of necessary delusions. Sometimes sympathy is reduced to the act of artificially putting oneself in another's place -- according to the question: "What would you feel if this happened to you?" -- and of reproducing the feelings we ourselves experienced at analogous occasions. Some-

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