The Enlightened Virtuoso: Nietzsche on Negatively Oriented Reactive Emotions

Thursday, September 8, 2016

Nietzsche on Negatively Oriented Reactive Emotions

"According to Nietzsche, the anger and other negative emotions we feel toward wrongdoers are expressions of ressentiment - a complex attitude that includes both our fear of those who are strong and strong-willed and our envy of their success at flouting moral prohibitions that we dare not violate. On Nietzsche's account, the ultimate source of the retributive emotions is not our allegiance to morality but rather our sense of our own weakness and inadequacy."

George Sher, "What Blame Is", In Praise of Blame (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 107. Citing: Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1969); and Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1954).

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Welcome! This blog started off as a personal project meant more for myself than anyone else. In that regard, it has served as a catalog for the resources I tend to enjoy. However, recent circumstances have changed the way I have utilized this medium. For a while I began using it as a public journal, following the example of my personal journal. While it may seem strange, I use my journals as a record of intellectual exposure and growth rather than mediums of creative outpouring. I often post quotes that I have found particularly meaningful. For me, this is a way of documenting what I have been exposed to and how my own thinking has developed. In that sense, my journaling is perhaps a bit unusual. It works for me though and I hope that it may be of interest to you as well.

To some extent, this journal is an experiment with Siegfried Kracauer's note that, "We must rid ourselves of the delusion that it is the major events which have the most decisive influence on us. We are much more deeply and continuously influenced by the tiny catastrophes that make up daily life" (Die Angestellten, in Schriften, vol. 1, 252). This blog is obviously public, yet it's not really created for anyone other than myself. If you find something that's of use or value, all the better! It does, after all, serve as one of my research resources and it may serve that purpose for you as well.

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