Ressentiment in Percy

Question 9: The Envious Self (envy meaning "to look at with malice")

I've just been thinking about this chapter, because I remember when I was reading it that I was really wondering what the heck is wrong with people (plus myself). It's really weird because when I hear about an earthquake, or a hurricane, etc, it's almost upsetting to hear that the earthquake didn't reach the full-blown 9.0 on the Richter scale, or the hurricane winds are quickly diminishing to 'tropical storm' level. And I'm sure, almost certain, that this happens with everyone (less the people whose homes are being destroyed and family being wiped off the face of the earth). And I never really thought about why I or anybody else felt this way until I was reading Percy. Everything, when being honest, seemed to be either ‘putatively good’ or ‘putatively bad’ news.

Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche talk about this, calling it ressentiment. Kierkegaard talks about the passionless age as being an age of Reflection, and for him the "idea of reflection is envy," causing selfishness in the individual and in the society he's in. He goes on to say that "the imprisonment of reflection develops a blamable ressentiment if it is not ventilated by action or event of some kind." And both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche agree on the point that the masses feel ressentiment toward the distinguished & superior, resulting in an attempt to drag them down: K - "In reflection the condition of strain...results in the annulment of all the higher powers, and all that is low and contemptible comes forward, its very impudence given the spurious effect of strength, while shielded by its very lowness it avoids attracting the attention of ressentiment." N - "[T]he good one as conceived by the man of ressentiment...: [T]he lambs say among themselves 'these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is as little as possible a bird of prey but rather its opposite, a lamb, - isn't he good?'..."

I think Percy especially engages with Kierkegaard's idea that ressentiment must be ventilated by an event or action of some kind, and since a passionless age does not act or do anything, it relishes presidential scandals, the "dropping dead [of acquaintances] in the street," and it hates any good fortune of others. Although I don't think Percy would go so far as to say that ressentiment was introduced by slave-morality, he does use Nietzsche's 'if one isn't a lamb, he's evil' when suggesting an answer to why an 8.3 earthquake in San Francisco is "putatively bad news": "it is Gomorrah getting its due, what with the gays, creeps, and deviates who must comprise at least half the casualties."

The "immanent self" in Percy's book, with a loss of sovereignty to scientists and experts of society, falls into an "endless round of work, diversion, and consumption of goods and services." The only thing that can break the self out of the "iron grip of immanence" is catastrophe, or scandal, etc. It is interesting because it's like all these alienated selves are running around constantly distracting themselves, yearning for some sort of real feeling that reminds them that they are indeed human beings, but they can't connect with each other when anything good or outstanding happens to their neighbour (as the "telephone wires do not hum" and the "housewives watch more soap operas than ever" after Mr. L----'s lawsuit victory) because by the very fact that they are a mirror reflection of the masses, ressentiment levels and is only happy when others are levelled, and so these selves cannot reduce their alienation by discussing good fortune, only disaster. Immanence brings about alienation and ressentiment, and alienation can be reduced by connecting with other people, but ressentiment limits all connection to discussion of horrible events. So perhaps the envy in people is a desire to level the distinguished, and so they secretly desire catastrophe, but I think too that the desire of catostrophe is not just to drag down superior people but is the desire to actually break out of the distraction for just a few days or hours or minutes at different times of the day so their can be some sort of relational connection with other people.

When I think about myself in this situation - wishing that some or other earthquake would have reached 9.0 - I don't think it's some sort of ressentiment within me, ceaselessly craving the destruction of the superior, or any desire to break out of immanence. I almost want to simplify the whole thing and say that like many guys my age in the west, I grew up playing video games, watching movies and tv, am totally desensitized to death, have never truly suffered or even known many people who have, and all catastrophe in other places is a matter of record-breaking. All earthquakes should be 9.0, all hurricanes Category Five. The Tsunami of Boxing Day 2004 was tragic, but almost more interesting than tragic. Pictures of the destruction light people up. The pain felt there is totally alien to life here; while hundreds of thousands died and countless people are probably still without homes there, we rush to the store at 5:59pm to make sure we can buy a tube of Sensodyne-F so as to prepare our teeth for the pain of biting into the iced shrimp platter served to our dinner party at the Keg. What can ever change this? Distraction in immanence lets us not deal with thinking about ourselves this way—as completely and utterly non-caring people. But once I focus on this, once I know that I don't care yet I should care, where do I go? I know Kierkegaard, and a host of others, would say to a relationship with God, but oh!—"It is easier to become a Christian when I am not a Christian than to become a Christian when I am one"—could not fit me any better.

despair and bad faith

This will be more of an I'm-trying-to-put-things-together entry; almost like a dialogue between me and myself for the sake of eventually understanding some of these concepts yet knowing that it won't happen by the end of this one "session".

I've been really trying to focus on Kierkegaard lately because what I have read throughout the class is so interesting and a lot of the time quite profound. And I think that I've got some of his stuff understood (through reading the Sickness Unto Death) in terms of the self and despair. In class today we were talking about Sartre, and some of his ideas reminded me of Kierkegaard and I saw a lot of similarities, and I think some differences too (as they are bound to come up since God is so fundamental to Kierkegaard's thinking).

Kierkegaard said that "Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis." And the human self is a "relation which relates itself to its own self," but also is a "relation relating itself to that which constituted the whole relation." The "that which constituted the whole relation" is God, and a self can only "attain and remain in equilibrium and rest" by "relating itself to that Power which constituted the whole relation [God]." Thus despair is a disrelationship in the self, and if there is disrelationship in the self that disrelationship "reflects itself infinitely in the relation to [God]." So despair, if I can understand this, is a disrelationship between the infinite and the finite, and/or a disrelationship between freedom and necessity, etc.

The thing with Sartre is that I'm finding it hard to reconcile some of the statements he makes. He says that there is no human nature, that man is first of all nothing and will be what he makes of himself. Since existence proceeds essence, humans have complete freedom, and cannot excuse themselves with the "determinism" of a given human nature. This all made me think about Kierkegaard's despair in the sense that there is all possibility for man, no necessity. But then in class and in "support" group, we talked about the being-in-itself and for-itself, and using an example of a homosexual, it was said that a gay person who says "i'm gay and will never be but gay" is in bad faith because he conceives of himself only as his being-in-itself, and loses the possibility of transcending the in-itself. And also the gay man who says "I'm not gay and I can be whatever I want to" is in bad faith because he has denied his in-itself. But isn't being-in-itself the being of a table or road sign, just "extended stuff"? And if it is and humans have being-in-itself in which they cannot simply deny or be without doing so in bad faith, but have no human nature, then is the being-in-itself of a human the sum of past actions? Because if that is being-in-itself then bad faith and kierkegaardian despair coincide insofar as the being-in-itself is analogous to necessity and being-for-itself is analagous to possibility (or freedom). But then when the person is born, and he is nothing, it is all possibility, all freedom, and so right from the start there is no necessity and thus despair...Unless being-in-itself is an actual necessity, but that would seem to be human nature, and so the problem of reconciliation.

I also think there is a problem with his statement about the determinism of human nature. He says, "For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one's action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism." But even within his framework I think somebody who says "Human nature is sinful so I can't help myself" lives in bad faith because that person doesn't recognize the possibility of striving to righteousness. And if Sartre understood Christianity, or even Kierkegaard, he would recognize this (especially with Kierkegaard's tension between the competing factors of the synthesis). I think it's just a very weak statement to make...

Obviously the biggest difference between K's despair and S's bad faith is the emphasis on the self's relation to God in K's, and the emphasis on the non-existence of God in S's. This brings about the difference of necessity/possibility, and so for K, S would definitely be in despair simply because he is not relating to God, but I think also because he lacks necessity, even though the denial of being-in-itself is a mode of bad faith.

A meandering thinking

Every man alive was privileged; there was only one class of men, the privileged class.

What a way to put it. What a reminder to the vast amount of people who forget. I am very much in disagreement with a lot of Camus's writing, but this was just a sheet of light shooting out from the page. Now if only each man felt privileged to be alive, was constantly aware of this privilege. What a different life he would lead.


In class we were talking about the immense amount of possibilities of worldviews in the world that we're all exposed to. How is it possible for us, as Christians, to think that we can tell others that they are wrong in their beliefs? Many people seem as happy as we do, and they're Buddhist, or Hindu, or whatever else. With this amazing amount of differing beliefs out there, that seem just as self-evident to others as Christianity may seem for us, how can we actually believe that there is anything TO Christianity, how do we know if there is actually only ONE way to God? or even one god?

This turned into quite a large discussion and I had been thinking similar things a few weeks beforehand. Basically, how can one ever know which religion is true? Does reason take us to a certain point and then it seems that only THIS ONE can be true from there? or is there a fundamental condition of humanity that is addressed in ONE religion and we know this because we feel ourselves in this condition?

Well, during class I was reminded of Cooper's discussion of our 'directives,' which he classifies as our "beliefs, values and interpretations which serve to lend shape to a person's life." What I think we were doing a lot of in class was removing the 'gravity' from our directives. Although Cooper mostly states that this 'levelling down' of our directives takes form in us not taking seriously the beliefs and values of other people, I think it is the same to speak of "levelling up" all directives. In the case of levelling down, directives aren't taken seriously and are just a "predictable symptom" of one's character, class, etc, and so everybody's beliefs are just expression, really having no meaning or weight; in the case of levelling up directives, we make everybody's beliefs very meaningful, but to the point where they're all so meaningful and they all have so much 'gravity' that in the end we begin to think of them all as meaningless. If my belief in one God is shaping my life, and someone else's belief in three thousand gods is shaping his or her life, then each belief is obviously very meaningful to each of us. But which one is true? for they are at odds. But once we start to think about truth, both belief's lose their strength of meaning; either one is true or niether is true, but both cannot be true. And then we realize that there are not only 2 beliefs, but millions, each self-evident and meaninful for each individual that embraces that belief, and this fact exhausts us, and all of a sudden none of them are true, each is a product of location or of a reaction to or against some event. My belief has just as much 'gravity' as anybody else's, thus it has no 'gravity' at all.

The problem is that I don't know if I have any solution to this. I don't think we should look at all the metanarratives of the world and think ours to be meaningless though. When I think about myself, and how I act, and when I look at history and see mankind's actions, and then I read Jesus' words about man...he really knew man, he really knew the heart of man. There are standards that we know of that we can't achieve, we always are screwing up and all feel the need for forgiveness. Can we now think about a world without forgiveness. This is where again the As Cities Burn lyrics jump out, "I don't want to know what I'd be without forgiveness." What would we be without forgiveness? If nobody, not one person, forgave his trespassers, if every time we "sinned" against somebody else - our parents, siblings, friends - and they never forgave us, if every time we asked for forgiveness from them they said "No!", what would we be like? How would we not feel estranged from everybody? There could be no relationships. Everyone would just be depressed, forevermore.

But all we have to do is ask for forgiveness from God. Just ask. Not because forgiveness is free, but because it was an impossible price that was paid. And this Love that God has for us, this Grace he has - we are made in the image of that, and thus have the capacity to forgive other people so that there can be a relationship between us.

But now let us think of a world not without forgiveness, but without the asking of it, or more precisely, without the wanting of it. If I sinned against another person constantly, if I backstabbed him and he found out, created false rumors about him and he found out, contributed to any gossip about him, at times made a comment to his face against him - for all of this is what we do to our friends, if only inadvertantly - but I never, not once, asked for foregiveness, never said sorry, how could we actually have a relationship? He would have nothing to do with me. Why? Because I don't say sorry, I don't want forgiveness. Thus, everybody would be hostile to the next person, and again, feel estranged from everyone else.

This is the heart of Christianity. Love, Grace, Forgiveness. Man cannot live without these things, even in a non-transcendent sense. Christianity addresses humanity's condition to the T, and this I think is a monumental factor in discovering it's overall truth. I"ll be studying religions next year, and it will be interesting to see how each one speaks about the human condition...

Percy + Jaspers connections, Rilke + childhood

While reading Karl Jaspers I couldn't help but constantly think of ideas in Percy's book, and I really wish that I would have read these excerpts before writing my paper.

"The known world is the alien world, I am detached from it. What my intellect can know and what I can experience empirically repulses me as such, and I am irrelevant to it. Subject to overpowering causality in the realm of reality and to logical compulsion in the realm of validity, I am not sheltered in either. I hear no kindred langauge, and the more determined I am to comprehend the world, the more homeless will it make me feel; as the Other, as nothing but the world, it holds no comfort. Unfeeling, neither merciful nor unmerciful, subject to laws or foundering in coincidence, it is unaware of itself. I cannot grasp it, for it faces me impersonally, explicable in particulars but never intelligible as a whole." - Jaspers

Percy almost takes the words right out of the mouth of Jaspers many times throughout his book when addressing of the modern stance of scientific objectivism.

"Every advance in an objective understanding of the Cosmos...further distances the self from the Cosmos precisely in the degree of the advance - so that in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams the very Cosmos it understands perfectly" (12-3).
"The self...[is] a mind which professes to understand bodies and galaxies but is by the very act of understanding marooned in the Cosmos, with which it has no connection" (44).
"The earth-self seeks to understand the Cosmos overtly according to scientific principles while covertly exempting itself from the same understanding. The end of this enterprise is that the self understands the mechanism of the Cosmos but by the same motion places itself outside the Cosmos, an alien, a ghost, outside a vast machinery to which it is denied entry" (254).

I've really connected with these aspects of the existentialists' thoughts, and I think it's because I never really thought about the objective scientific stance as problematic for the self. Although I've never believed that everything can be explained through reason, I've spent lots of time trying to "reason" my faith, especially in terms of finding hard, rational arguments for the existence of God and the historical-critical accuracy of the resurrection of Jesus. I honestly think that I have a complete loss of appreciation for "mystery" and "wonder." But this atleast is making me aware of this fact, and I don't know how I can regain this appreciation but sometime I hope it will click within me.

There was a passage in the Rilke poetry that was quite stirring and made me think about this lack of wonder within me.

"Oh hours of childhood,
when behind each shape more than the past appeared
and what streamed out before us was not the future.
We felt our bodies growing and were at times
impatient to be grown up, half for the sake
of those with nothing left but their grownupness.
Yet were, when playing by ourselves, enchanted
with what alone endures; and we would stand there
in the infinite, blissful space between world and toy,
at a point which, from the earliest beginning,
had been established for a pure event."

This just made me stop for a bit and think about childhood, mine and that of others (mostly my young cousins). It's amazing to think about what one is like during childhood. Everything is new and full of wonder, nothing is monotonous. I can throw my cousin up into the air and upon returning to my arms she'll say "Again!" and I'll do it once more and "Again!" and this can repeat everlastingly for her, relentlessly for me. As we grow up it's obvious that we lose this sense of wonder with the world, and I think all of this rationalizing about ourselves and about God that we grow up constantly doing swallows up every drop of wonder within us, so that marvelling at God and his works is a past action fleeting ever further away from my being at this point in time. I remember listening to mp3's of Ravi Zacharias speaking about meaning in life, and how wonder is a huge part of it, but I'd skip these full messages in search for more arguments about objective morality and the kalaam cosmological argument. It's not that I now think these arguments don't mean anything, because they can be powerful in speaking to minds like mine, but I never balanced between these arguments and ones that praise the mystery and awe of God.

Percy, Heidegger, and Being-towards-death

I'm not sure of the name of the girl in class who related Percy's discussion of suicide to being-towards-death, but I'm glad she brought it up because I hadn't really connected the two ideas, I think mostly because I have been so focused on both Percy's and Heidegger's critique of modern philisophical thought and its making human beings' being like that of any other being, as does the "objectifying" stance of science.

Percy suggests suicide as a cure for the depressed self, and I think know that, if you connect it to Heidegger, it's like the serious entertaining of suicide as an option to cure depression makes death "objectively present" for ME, rather than something that befalls some other person, as is indicated by the they's "one dies." When death can be a real choice, when "to be or not to be becomes a true choice," "this one" dies; I die; death is no longer tranquillized. By contemplating suicide, I've already faced the fact that at some point I will cease to be, and any serious entertaining of suicide will probably not result in my fleeing the possibility of death or "covering it over." Therefore, the ex-suicide is "face to face with the possibility to be itself," and can live authentically. However, Percy knows that death is not the complete end, being-towards-death is more like being-towards-eternity. In light of the knowledge that I will die, and in light of the knowledge that my death could take place at any moment, I should make choices with the understanding that I am developing a self which when it becomes "whole" will be before God. So the ex-suicide, for Percy, chooses to live but also is now free to consider the "preposterous eventuality that news did come from the God of the Cosmos, who took pity on your rediculous plight and entered the space and time of your insignificant planet to tell you something."

life is actually amazing, just nobody knows it

A REVOLUTION!! WHAT THE SELF NEEDS!

"Thus, the they makes sure of a constant tranquillization about death."

It is extremely hard to understand what the heck Heidegger is saying in lots of his writings, but when he was talking about the idle talk relating to death, I could completely see what he was saying (or I think so anyways. Likely that is impossible). For most people, and that includes me, death is expressed in "one dies," but that one is not myself because I am "no one." Death "must show up from somewhere, but...right now is not yet objectively present for oneself, and is thus no threat." This is entirely true about the way I think about death, and when somebody else dies. Death happens, but it happens to the other.

I haven't read anything else from Heidegger about idle talk, but I'm sure idle talk is not just to do with death. It is almost as if we exist in idle talk. Everything exists but relates to the other. The extreme hunger problems in Africa are talked about here as terrible, "something must be done about it," but not objectively present for oneself and thus even the other must be the one to do something about it. The they makes sure of a constant tranquillization about everything! Nothing must disturb the "carefreeness" that the publicness has "made sure of." And how true this is. Carefreeness IS the they. And it's masked by "emotion." If one talks with emotion about an issue, he automatically has concern for it. So all these people talk with emotion about how terrible Katrina was, and how awful the AIDS epidemic of Africa is, and how brutal the LRA disaster is in Uganda, and so they "care" about these things. And the they thinks that these emotionals care, and by agreeing with the emotionals, the agree-ers "care" also. But nobody cares. They're all void of care, void of love.

For me, I know that care requires an action. It has to. And by me doing nothing to help these people, I do not care about them. There is no way I can say that I care for them, I truly do not. And this is a terrible realization and a terrible thing for people to read, but 99% of people do not care alongside with me. And thus I have no love. I can't say that my sympathy for people is love. We are all mindlessly talking about bad things happening, and those who think they care don't care, and they are the they. People outside of the they do not necessarily care, but they know that they don't care and have to deal with that. The they refuse to acknowledge their carefreeness, and don't even know of their carefreeness, and suppose that like the rest of the they, not doing anything about it is still a form of caring; for they all wipe the dramatic tears from one another's eyes.

So for people who now realize they don't truly care, how is it possible to gain concern? It must have something to do with knowing God. Knowing God is the ultimate, the WAY for life. It would help with actually loving PEOPLE. But this is so hard because the person who actually loves people is bound to just not want to exist! Millions of people are dying, not just far away but right here in our own city and province and country and truly loving these people is an endless term of weeping for them! And one cannot help all! I feel completely overwhelmed even thinking about actually caring for people and their lives. Each single individual who as a matter of life and death needs my help but won't get it because I can't help everybody. But do I therefore choose to help no one? I can't help but see myself described almost completely in Kierkegaard's discussion of despair of necessity. I am the Philistine, spiritless and "devoid of imagination," lacking "sufficient possibility to take notice of God." I long for imagination, for appreciation of mystery, for possibility. That is where I am, I have lost myself and God.

What does it mean to become yourself "transparently before God?" That is going to be the greatest acquisition of knowledge I ever apprehend, when it happens.

21 dots of pigment

A year goes by, and I wonder about what I did in that year. What did I let my life be for this one year? I decided to go to school, but it seems more like a change from working than adding direction to my life. It's funny how the things I remember the most, or that seem the most important part of last year are the "recreational" events; all in the summer, the prime season of every year.
Vividly I remember games of volleyball, times at the beach, just hanging out with people, and going to california with Juice and Jordan. Everything else, even last semester at school, and all the working days before that, aren't even there. Work especially just seems like nothing; nobody sits in an office for 8 hours a day 5 days a week and remembers anything about it. But that is what millions of people spend their lives doing. But maybe some like it...I saw a guy the other day in front of me while I was driving, and he was working in his car, and at a red light he got out, opened his trunk, pulled some files out of a box, got back in his car and started searching them. I looked at his reflection off of his rear-view mirror, and it was just the "working" face. But not a "i hate this" or "this is so meaningless" face, just a working face, and it reminded me of how I would feel in highschool while doing a project, wanting to do it well and working hard at it and not thinking that it was meaningless, but that working hard and doing what I could had some meaning in itself. And seeing this guy did somethng to me, it made me think about how I usually think about and see other people. I usually look at these guys' lives and say 'how utterly meaningless, business is.'
And maybe that's true, maybe in the back of their minds, they feel that everything in the end is meaningless, and maybe they feel this angst or despair or alienation, those in the "they," but there was something in this one guy that didn't say any of that. When a person works, and works hard and puts his self into his work, work is like an expression of him, its the outpouring of his energy and time, and I don't think this endless hours of work is always a distraction from anxiety and so forth. I think, stemming from how we are to worship God, with our lives, with everything we do, all of our exertions and expressions are legitimate worship to God and that makes life meaningful, and those who may not believe in God, they must still get some similar feeling through their expressions as someone who believes in God.
Why do so many people love playing sports, or playing music, or weight training, or any other sort of recreation? There must be something in doing these things, they're all expressions, the "pressing out" ourselves in these things, and in each different sport or activity there is a different expression, and this is what people need to do. What's happened is that I've begun to think of all of it as distraction for people who are in the "iron grip" of immanence; everything as a distraction, especially work. For most people work is a "must-do" in order to live a good life, living comfortably in a nice house and having the ability to support a family, and it's true, if you want or have a family, you have to work. But work, just like for that guy in his car, can be an expression of self just like a sport, and when a person is working, putting his self into his work, life
just feels real.

And one can look back and say, "What did I do this year?" and look at all these things and think about how meaningless everything seems to be in the end, how all of those days playing a game of soccer or volleyball or riding a roller coaster seem so distant and not even part of one's life, but these are the times remembered, and thinking about them conjures up a good feeling, a smile, a want to do it again some time, a relishing of those experiences, and I think I can say I'm happy about my 20th year.
Life doesn't pass by, time does.

the news

if there's any profession out there where people become the profession, like the waiter in Being and Nothingness playing at being a waiter, it is News Reporting!

Since i've been sick the past 5 days, I've had the unfortunate chance to watch lots of TV (your eyes really can burn after a while), and I've grown quite a resentment to these news reporters, who all speak the exact same. Is there anyone out there who is a real person AND a news reporter? Or are all news reporters "news reporters"?