resentment

I've been reading about ressentiment, as described by Nietzsche and Scheler, in a class I'm auditing this term. It's hard to describe what they're talking about succinctly, but ressentiment (which sort of matches up with the English 'resentment') is a persistent mood that poisons a person, causing him or her to detract most everything in the world (including other people) out of a sort of weakness. They're always feeling wronged, but they're unable to do anything about it (impotent, weak, etc.), so the bitterness stews and starts to make everything they see and experience seem negative. They always want to lash out. They find reasons to detest everything and everyone.

I think both N. and S. would say that you probably know someone like this. They'd also say that ressentiment is part of the modern condition--that modern culture has been poisoned by it, and that has led to what Scheler would call an inversion of values. The noble, the saint, the Great Person, is devalued; and the superficial, the merely pleasurable, the Average Person, is lauded.

Okay, okay, so I bring this up because I can see flashes of this mood in myself from time to time. Sometimes, sometimes, I walk around campus and I just don't like anybody I see--I criticize everything and everyone in my head. And I know it's because I want something that they don't have. I mock them but it's only because I (deep down) want to be like them, because I'm unhappy with myself. I see two people who seem pretty happy in a relationship, and I want to poke holes in their happiness--oh that's going to end soon, oh they're not actually happy, whatever. Again, it's because I want what they have. I'm jealous, I can't do anything about it, so rather than try to better myself (or be happy with what I am), I lash out...

...but I have felt different in the past couple of weeks. I haven't felt so resentful. This isn't due to any conscious effort, really. I think it's due, instead, to the fact that I have actually felt content with my own life, my own "self," these past couple of weeks. I don't want to be these other people, I don't want what they have--I am valuing my life. This doesn't mean things are perfect, of course. But I think that, after essentially being torn down last semester, I am now sifting through the rubble and realizing that who I am was always there. I am recovering something. And for now I feel quite content.