Nietzschean Conception of Ressentiment

The term "ressentiment" has been made into a technical term by Nietzsche, but it is first of all the French word for "resentment," though as Manfred S. Frings notes, the French word possesses a sense of lingering hatred that the English word does not. Nietzsche expropriated the French term because the German language does not have a word for "ressentiment" (Frings 5).

In the opening chapter of On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche examines the history of the central concepts of morality and addresses the development of the concepts of good and evil. He sees good as having developed as the result of ressentiment, or resentment. One of the consequences was the "slave revolt" in the battle between Rome and Judea, a revolt which Nietzsche sees as key in the development of our moral sense in Western society. The references to Rome and Judea are to be taken not only as references to the kingdoms so named but to the dominant power in society and the lesser element, the oppressed, who ultimately prevail. Rome represents the higher type of human being, those who create their own values from their own inner strength and impose those values on o

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n if his view of Christianity is wrong. Scheler notes how Nietzsche treats the idea of ressentiment in terms of Christian love: He believes that through this idea the ressentiment accumulated by an oppressed and at the same time vindictive nation, whose God was the "God of revenge" even when it was still politically and socially independent, is justified before this nation's consciousness (Scheler 63). What is interesting about Scheler's praise for Nietzsche's discovery is that Scheler still believes Nietzsche to be completely wrong. Scheler finds that the Christian conception of love differs from the Greek and might be called "a reversal in the movement of love": The Christian view boldly denies the Greek axiom that love is an aspiration of the lower towards the higher. On the contrary, now the criterion of love is that the nobler stoops to the vulgar, the healthy to the sick, the rich to the poor, the handsome to the ugly, the good and saintly to the bad and common, the Messiah to the sinners and publicans. The Christian is not afraid, like the ancient, that he might lose something by doing so, that he might impair his own nobility. He acts in the peculiarly pious conviction that through this "condescension,." through t
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1535
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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