Download - NIETZSCHE ON RESSENTIMENT AND VALUATION

International Phenomenological Society

Nietzsche on Ressentiment and ValuationAuthor(s): Bernard ReginsterSource: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Jun., 1997), pp. 281-305Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2953719 .Accessed: 25/01/2011 17:01

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ips. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

International Phenomenological Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ips

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2953719?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ips

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LVII, No. 2, June 1997

Nietzsche on Ressentiment and Valuation

BERNARD REGINSTER

Brown University

The paper examines Nietzsche's claim that valuations born out of a psychological condition he calls "ressentiment" are objectionable. It argues for a philosophically sound construal of this type of criticism, according to which the criticism is directed at the agent who holds values out of ressentiment, rather than at those values themselves. After presenting an analysis of ressentiment, the paper examines its impact on valuation and concludes with an inquiry into Nietzsche's reasons for claiming that ressentiment valuation is "corrupt." Specifically, the paper proposes that ressentiment valuation involves a form of self-deception, that such self-deception is objectionable because it undermines the integrity of the self, and that the lack of such integrity ensnares the agent in a peculiar kind of practical inconsistency. The paper ends with a brief review of the problems and prospects of this interpretation.

I. INTRODUCTION

In a well-known passage of the Preface to On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes that the book aims to answer two questions: "under what conditions did man devise these value judgments good and evil? and what value do they themselves possess?" (GM, Preface, 3).1 He also insists that determining the origin of moral values is only a "means" to address his "real concern," namely, "the value of morality" (GM, Preface, 5; cf. 6). In other

1 I will use the following standard abbreviations to refer to Nietzsche's works:

A = The Antichrist BGE = Beyond Good and Evil D = Daybreak EH = Ecce Homo GM = On the Genealogy of Morals GS = The Gay Science HTH = Human, All Too Human WP = The Will to Power Z = Thus Spoke Zarathustra

All the translations are Walter Kaufmann's, except The Antichrist and Daybreak trans- lated by R. J. Hollingdale.

NIETZSCHE ON RESSENTIMENT AND VALUATION 281

words, the genealogy is primarily a critique: it seeks to assess the value of moral value judgments by determining their origin.

At first sight, the origins in which Nietzsche is interested are essentially historical. The Genealogy insistently calls for historical accuracy (see GM, Preface, 7), and castigates other historians of morality for their lack of "historical spirit" (see GM, I, 2, 17n) or for major flaws in their historical methodology (see GM, II, 11-12); it makes bold, sweeping claims about the history of Western culture, and produces documents and etymological analy- ses to support them (see GM, I, 4-5, 15; II, 4-5). Nietzsche himself suggests, however, that this emphasis on history is somewhat misleading: the Genealogy's three essays are "studies by a psychologist for a revaluation of all values.-This book contains the first psychology of the priest." (EH, III, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'; my emphasis) A genealogy of moral value judgments thus consists of an inquiry into their psychological origin.2

Nietzsche's central claim is that moral values are born out of a peculiar condition he calls "ressentiment." It is hard to overestimate the importance of this notion in the Genealogy as a whole: although Nietzsche does not always develop his views with the required clarity, he unequivocally maintains that the three central phenomena that constitute, in his view, modern morality- the distinction between good and evil, the feeling of moral guilt, and the as- cetic ideal-all have their origin in ressentiment (see, respectively, GM, I, passim; II, 11; III, 11). The present study will focus on the impact of ressentiment on valuation, to which the book's first essay is devoted.

Curiously enough, given its centrality, Nietzsche's psychological critique of morality, his claim that it originates in ressentiment, has been almost en- tirely neglected by his interpreters.3 I believe this negligence might be ex-

It is hard to believe that Nietzsche's insistence on historical scholarship in the Preface reflects his actual intentions, as there is such a great discrepancy between the historical documentation he calls for 'and the one he actually produces. I agree with Peter Berkowitz that he must have had other objectives, though I remain uncertain about Berkowitz's own proposal that Nietzsche "poeticizes" history in order to present essentially ethical views (Nietzsche. The Ethics of an Immoralist [Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachussets/London, England, 1995], pp. 27-28 ). My own tentative view is that, though the actual history Nietzsche does in the Genealogy is of questionable value, the fact that a genealogical critique has a historical character is of considerable significance. We will see that the diagnosis of a condition like ressentiment would simply be impossible without a history of the psychological development of the agent and of his/her value judgments. This is not to say that the notion of ressentiment itself has been completely overlooked in the literature. Nevertheless, most of the (still few) studies of the notion of ressentiment fail to address adequately, if at all, the normative difficulties of a critique in terms of psychological origins in general, and of ressentiment in particular. The most notable contri- butions are Max Scheler, Ressentiment, W. W. Holdheim trans. (Schocken Books: New York, 1961) and Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la Philosophie (PUF: Paris, 1961), C IV. In more recent literature, we find Henry Staten, Nietzsche's Voice (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1990), C II; Rudiger Bittner, "Ressentiment" in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, R. Schacht ed. (U. of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1994), pp. 127-

282 BERNARD REGINSTER

plained by the fact that the very idea of a psychological critique of morality has caused commentators considerable philosophical embarrassment. Niet- zsche's attack on morality is customarily seen as taking place at one or both of two levels. At the level of value theory, Nietzsche challenges some of our most deeply held beliefs about what is valuable.4 For example, he questions the value of pity and of the democratic ideal of justice. At the metaethical level, he opposes widespread views concerning the nature and the scope of validity of moral judgments.5 Thus he argues that they have no legitimate claim to universal validity.

The view that morality is objectionable because it originates in ressentiment does not fit well with either of these two familiar forms of criticism. Indeed, seen as an instance of either one of them, it is downright fallacious. The psychological origin of a judgment permits no inference concerning the truth of its content or the scope of its validity. Even if a psychological inquiry could establish that the belief in the value of pity originates in ressentiment, that would still say nothing about whether or not pity is valuable, and whether or not it is a value for all people irrespective of their particular circumstances.

Thus, if it is concerned with the value judgments themselves, their truth or the scope of their validity, Nietzsche's psychological critique is deplorably wrongheaded. But if it does not pertain either to value theory or to metaethics, then at what level does it operate? I will argue that Nietzsche's psychological critique of value judgments is ultimately not fallacious because it concerns not the value judgments themselves but the psychological state of the agent whose value judgments are born out of ressentiment. Specifically, such an agent-whom Nietzsche calls "the man of ressentiment"-is "corrupted": he lacks integrity of self, a trait Nietzsche regards as essential to "nobility" of character.

Admittedly, my diagnosis of the philosophical difficulty caused by Niet- zsche's psychological critique as well as my proposed solution to it presuppose that he espouses a kind of cognitivism about moral judgments. And this is, at least, questionable, as there is significant (though not unambiguous) evidence that he rather leaned towards non-cognitivism on this matter (see,

38; Robert Solomon, "One Hundred Years of Ressentiment: Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals" in Ibid., pp. 95-126.

4 Philippa Foot, for instance, emphasizes this aspect of Nietzsche's critique of morality in "Nietzsche: The Revaluation of Values" in Nietzsche. A collection of critical essays, R.C. Solomon ed. (Anchor Books: New York, 1973), pp. 156-68, and more recently in "Nietzsche's Immoralism" in The New York Review of Books (Vol. XXXVIII, Number 11, 1991).

5 This line of interpretation is predominant in the literature. See, for example, John Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche (University Press of America: Washington D.C., 1974), C I; Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (U. Of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, 1981), C 9; Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche. Life as Literature (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts/London, England, 1985), C VII.


e.g., TI, VI, 1). Nevertheless, this would not, I think, affect the interpretation I propose.

Even if moral judgments are nothing more than the expression of psychological attitudes, which would constitute, in a sense, the "origin" of these judgments, merely exposing what attitude a given judgment expresses will not amount to a critique of it. One must show what is wrong with this attitude, and that amounts to showing that there is something wrong with the agent's psyche. Furthermore, Nietzsche certainly does not believe that any given value judgment is wedded to one, and only one, psychological attitude which it is meant to express.6 Hence, showing that the origin of a given value judgment is objectionable will not necessarily result in its wholesale rejection. This, again, suggests precisely the interpretation I propose: Nietzsche's psychological critique of value judgments is directed towards the agents who hold these judgments rather than towards the judgments themselves.

This line of interpretation, however, immediately generates another difficulty. Nietzsche reminds us, in the third essay of the Genealogy, that the validity of any judgment, including presumably any value judgment, is relative to the perspective formed by the "affects," "needs," "desires" and "interests" of the agent who endorses it (GM, III, 12; see also WP, 481). Ac- cording to perspectivism, there are no external norms or values, that is, norms or values that transcend the perspective of the agent who espouses them. But the view that ressentiment is objectionable because it undermines the integrity of the self (the interpretation I propose) seems to presuppose just such an external norm or value. To dispel this worry, I will suggest that integrity is not an external value, but, on the contrary, a value to which any- one who seeks to satisfy needs, desires or interests is committed necessarily, if only implicitly. It is therefore always internal to the perspective of the agent who pursues his needs, desires or interests.

Before I begin, I should mention some of the limitations of the present study. In this paper, I lay the groundwork for an understanding of Nietzsche's

psychological critique of morality. I limit myself to an examination of the nature of this critique as it is directed against valuations motivated by ressentiment in general. I do not attempt to answer the further and difficult questions of whether and why specifically moral valuations are inspired by ressentiment. The questions addressed in this paper logically precede these further ones, and they are difficult enough.

Furthermore, I will also limit myself to an analysis of the phenomenon of ressentiment and an examination of its impact on valuation. I will say very

6 This is notably true, for example, of the judgment that compassion is good: it might express genuine "nobility" (GM, I, 10) or "richness of personality" (WP, 388) or, on the contrary, "ressentiment" (GM, III, 18; WP, 373), self-contempt (Z, II, 16) or the self-in- terest of the weak (BGE, 260). For a general statement of this ambiguity, see BGE, 293.


little about the problems posed by the diagnosis of concrete cases of ressentiment. I will therefore not attempt to assess the empirical correctness of Nietzsche's claim that Christian values actually are born out of ressentiment. Although the task of diagnosis can often be difficult, I do not believe it is impossible. But it demands, as a necessary propaedeutic, what I endeavour to provide here, namely a detailed analysis of the phenomenon to be diagnosed.

The paper comprises three main parts. I will first propose an analysis of ressentiment, then turn to the impact of ressentiment on valuation. In the final section, I present the reasons why ressentiment valuation is essentially corrupt, and I examine the peculiar nature of Nietzsche's psychological criticism, as well as the sources of its normative force.

I. RESSENTIMENT

1. Masters and Slaves

Nietzsche starts his analysis of ressentiment by refining a distinction between the types of the "master," or "noble," and the "slave" which he introduced and developed in works prior to the Genealogy (HTH, 45; BGE, 260). We know from these early descriptions that the good life as the noble masters conceive of it includes "political superiority": "the noble felt themselves to be men of a higher rank" (GM, I, 5; cf. also 6; BGE, 257-58). Nietzsche's use of the notions of "(noble) master" and "slave" is ambiguous. They are now socio- political categories, and now character types. The noble masters value political supremacy qua noble in the socio-political sense, but we will see that their valuing political power is not essential to their possessing a noble character. Nietzsche makes clear that nobility as a type of character is "the case that concerns us here" (GM, I, 5; cf. 6).7 Accordingly, I will consider the categories of "noble" and "slave" in their socio-political sense as elements in the illustration of an essentially psychological view which makes use of the same notions to denote specific character types.

To the fundamental distinction between noble and slaves, the Genealogy adds a new crucial refinement: it suggests that, within the noble class, two subgroups compete for political superiority, namely the "knights" and the "priests." Leaving aside the question of the historical plausibility of this example (Nietzsche alludes to the war between the Romans ("knights") and the Jewish ("priestly") people [GM, I, 16]), I want to draw out some of its psychological lessons. The important fact is that the priests, who are physically "weak" and "unhealthy," are defeated by the "powerful physicality" and "overflowing health" of the knights, and consequently develop a pervasive

7 One consequence of this fact is worth noting. The socio-political predicament of the agent who exemplifies a character-type might (but need not) contribute to his developing a character of that type. A slave from the socio-political standpoint might well develop a noble character.


sense of "impotence" (GM, I, 6-7). Some features of the example need to be emphasized.

First, the salience of physical strength and weakness is a purely contin- gent aspect of Nietzsche's example. The weakness of the priests creates their feeling of impotence only because they hold it responsible for the loss of their political supremacy. The noble knights seem to be generally intellectu- ally deficient, in any case inferior in that respect to their rivals, the priests (GM, I, 7). But this does not spawn a feeling of impotence because they do not see this deficiency as the incapacity to realize their values-indeed they do not seem to regard it as a weakness at all. But there is no reason to think that, in different circumstances, the feeling of impotence would not be created by intellectual, rather than physical, weakness.8

Second, the feeling of impotence is not a temporary state of mind caused by an accidental reversal of fortune. It must rather have become an essential feature of one's self-assessment: the agent sees himself as irremediably weak, instead of temporarily lacking the strength he customarily has. Though Niet- zsche is unclear on this issue, his analysis of ressentiment (as I understand it here) presupposes that the priest believes he has tried everything he could think of to regain power and failed. Accordingly, he does not see his defeat as a fluke, but as evidence of his constitutional impotence (GM, I, 6), which appears to be, for that very reason, "incurable" (see GS, 359). It therefore in- hibits any further attempt to recover political power.

Finally, the priest evidently refuses to accept, or resign himself to, his impotence. The priest's sickliness does not eradicate his "lust to rule," but only makes it "more dangerous" (GM, I, 6). Furthermore, rather than subsid- ing, as it would in the case of resignation, the hatred the priest harbors towards his victorious rivals, the knights, "grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions" (GM, I, 7).

From this overview of Nietzsche' s example, we can derive the fundamental features of ressentiment. It is a state of "repressed vengefulness" (GM, ibid.) which arises out of the combination of the following elements. First, the "man of ressentiment" desires to lead a certain kind of life, which he deems valuable: thus the priest, a member of the nobility, values a life that includes political supremacy. Second, he comes to recognize his

8 Nietzsche explicitly suggests that certain forms of Christianity (presumably fideism), which involve the condemnation of certain intellectual virtues, precisely result from intellectual impotence (see A, 52 ff.; GS, 359; WP, 154). This observation will have important implications for our understanding of Nietzsche's psychological critique. Philippa Foot assimilates it to older, common forms of moral criticism (see Op. Cit., p. 22). She remarks that philosophers such as Kant and Augustine are well-aware of the possibility of discrepancy between professed and actual motivations. What troubles them in cases where such a discrepancy occurs, however, is not the discrepancy itself, but the presence of immoral motives. I will argue that, on the contrary, Nietzsche is fundamentally concerned with the discrepancy.


complete inability to fulfill this aspiration: he becomes "inhibited" by his "weakness" or "impotence." Yet, and this is the third element, his retains his "arrogance" or his "lust to rule" (GM, I, 6), and his "will to power" remains "intact" (GM, III, 15; cf. GS, 359), whereby Nietzsche suggests that he maintains his commitment to his original values, or retains his original pre- tensions, and refuses to accept his inability to realize them.

It is this third feature which distinguishes ressentiment from other related attitudes. The soul of the "man of ressentiment" is torn by a tremendous tension between his desire to live the life he values and his belief that he is unable to satisfy it. But this tension may spawn a variety of different attitudes. At first blush, I can think of two obvious ways of alleviating such a tension, neither of which is chosen by the "man of ressentiment."

2. Resignation, reflective revaluation and ressentiment

First of all, the agent who is convinced of his impotence could simply resign himself to it. Such a resignation would have to be quite radical: it would not simply consist in relinquishing one way of life he values but feels incapable of living to adopt another which he finds just as valuable. It is rather the renunciation of the kind of life he values most and the acceptance of the unredeemable shame which goes with global failure. This alone would offer a formidable incentive to resist resignation.

Nietzsche suggests that, in addition, an important feature of the priest's predicament makes resignation to political inferiority all but impossible. As a member of the nobility, the priest expects to enjoy political superiority. Expectations, as I understand the notion in this context, are essentially relative to the agent's estimation of himself. An agent might believe that a certain sort of life is worth living and yet not expect to be able to live it because he has a very low estimation of himself, of his abilities and standing. Such is the attitude of the slave: "not at all used to positing values himself, he also attached no other value to himself than his masters attached to him" (BGE, 261). Thus the slave accepts his masters' high estimation of the noble life and their low estimation of himself, and therefore never even forms the expectation to live the life his masters value. The attitude characteristic of the slave is his resignation to a worthless way of life.

The situation is quite different with the priests who belong-and we must underline this fact-to the nobility (GM, I, 6-7). The noble, it should be re- membered feel "themselves to be of a higher rank" (GM, I, 5). Like other noble, but unlike the slaves, the priests fundamentally expect to live the sort of life they find valuable, which is, in Nietzsche's example, a life that includes political superiority. Accepting their impotence and inferiority is all but im-


possible for the priests precisely because it clashes with their most fundamental expectation.9

Another obvious way to resolve the tension would be to abandon the values which we are unable to realize through a process I will call 'reflective revaluation.' We reflectively abandon a certain end when we realize, upon reflection, that it does not have the value we hitherto attributed to it. For example, we might think that alleviating or, if possible, eliminating the pain of those who suffer, is a valuable end because we assume that suffering in all its forms is bad. But our reflection soon turns out cases where suffering is actually good insofar as, for example, it spurs growth and maturation. This observation, along with other similar ones, might eventually lead us to conclude that alleviating the sufferings of others is not always good.

Yet, the "man of ressentiment," the priest of the Genealogy, does not reflectively abandon the values of the nobility. The explanation for this might simply be that no better way of life can present itself to his reflection. Reflective revaluation could be seen as starting with the discovery of an inconsistency in our system of values. Presumably, the resolution of this inconsistency is ultimately guided by those values that are most central to the system and therefore most costly to give up. We might assume that, in Nietzsche's own example, political superiority is so central a value of noble morality (again, the distinctive mark of nobility is to feel oneself "of a higher rank"[GM, I, 5]) that the likelihood of its reflective rejection is very small: after all, it will usually be the standard for the revision of other values found to be incompatible with it.

The "man of ressentiment," the priest of Nietzsche's example, cannot alle- viate the tension between his desire for political supremacy and his felt inability to fulfill it in any of the two obvious ways I just described. What, then, is left to the individual in the throes of ressentiment? The priests, Niet- zsche writes,

in opposing their enemies and conquerors were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies' values, that is to say, an act of the most spiritual revenge. For this alone was appropriate to a priestly people, the people embodying the most deeply repressed priestly vengefulness. (GM, I, 7)

9 The notion of expectation is introduced to explain why the priest and the slave react differently to their inability to satisfy a desire they nonetheless share. The agent's estimation of himself, which fosters or undermines expectations, must be understood in terms of a feeling of entitlement which is related to a general conception of an "order of things." The priest expects to share in the attributes of nobility because it is somehow in the "order of things" that he should. The slave does not develop such an expectation precisely for the same reason, since he accepts the noble conception of the "order of things." Unfortunately, Nietzsche offers no account of the origin of this feeling of entitlement: he only distinguishes psychological types in terms of its presence or absence.


So, the "man of ressentiment" has recourse to a quite peculiar form of revaluation which I will call 'ressentiment revaluation.'

Before I turn to the analysis of ressentiment revaluation, I should offer some support for my claim that Nietzsche's "priest" is the personification of the "man of ressentiment." This is controversial because, on more than one occasion, Nietzsche appears to maintain that ressentiment revaluation is a "slave revolt" (e.g., GM, I, 10). Nevertheless, I believe that Nietzsche saw a profound affinity between the "priestly type" and ressentiment for a number of reasons of which I will mention only the most important ones.

First, in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche had already offered an account of master and slave moralities from which both the notion of ressentiment and the type of the priest are conspicuously absent (BGE, 260). These two notions are introduced together in the account of the Genealogy, which suggests that Nietzsche sees an intimate connection between them. 10

Ressentiment revaluation cannot be the work of the slaves, for, as Niet- zsche repeatedly insists, the slave does not create values, a privilege which belongs exclusively to the masters (cf. BGE, 261). The slave, Nietzsche suggests, blindly accepts his masters' values-and this is, arguably, what makes him a "slave" (in the psychological sense) in the first place. The so-called "slave morality" is not the system of values which the slave does create, but which he would create, on the mere "supposition" he were capable to do so (BGE, 260).

Ressentiment revaluation is a "slave revolt" not because it was fomented by the slaves, but because it consists in negating "noble values" (see GM, I, 7-8), and so presumably favors the "slave" or the "common man." But there is abundant evidence that the revolt was in fact lead by the (Jewish) priests, whom Nietzsche describes as a segment of nobility, albeit an essentially "unhealthy" one (GM, I, 6-7).11

II. RESSENTIMENT AND EVALUATION

Someone who values political power above all but loses it through defeat will naturally seek revenge as a way to restore his challenged superiority. But in the "man of ressentiment" vengefulness is "repressed" (GM, I, 7), or "submerged" (GM, I, 10). The source of this repression is the feeling of impotence: ressentiment, Nietzsche writes, is "the self-deception of impotence"

10 Nietzsche describes the account of master and slave moralities he offers in Beyond Good and Evil as a "typology" (BGE, 186), and not a "genealogy": it merely records the dif- ferences between the two moralities, but does not explain their origin, in particular the origin of slave morality. It is thus very tempting to consider that both the notion of ressentiment and the type of the priest are introduced precisely to provide such an explanation. The choice of the Jewish people as a paradigmatic instance of a "priestly people" makes the connection between priestliness and nobility particularly evident. The Jewish people share the noble feeling "to be of a higher rank" since, after all, they regard themselves as the "chosen people."


(GM, I, 13). The repression of vengefulness is in effect, in the example we have been considering, a repression of the desire for superiority.

Repression must be carefully distinguished from the control of this desire as it is commanded by its reflective revaluation, and from the renunciation in which the acceptance of one's inability to satisfy it consists. Repression, as Nietzsche appears to understand it, is the ultimate compromise of the person who values a desire, believes he is unable to satisfy it, but neither (reflectively) abandons its value nor resigns himself to his impotence. The consequence of this repression, or perhaps rather its manifestation, is the "revaluation" by the "man of ressentiment" of the values he feels unable to realize.

As the notion of ressentiment revaluation is quite complex, it might be illuminating to contrast it with a variety of phenomena that are closely related to it but from which it must carefully be distinguished. These are, respectively, 'sour grapes' revaluation, reflective revaluation, and finally psychological inertia and weakness of will. I will conclude this section with a brief examination of a salient feature of ressentiment evaluation, the primacy of negation, and a word on the distinction between ressentiment and the moral notion of resentment.

1. Ressentiment and 'sour grapes'

At first glance, ressentiment revaluation might seem akin to the revaluation illustrated by Aesop's famous fable of the fox and the sour grapes.12 Unable to reach the grapes it covets, the fox attempts to get rid of its feeling of frustration by persuading itself that the grapes were sour and so were not what it wanted anyway. Nietzsche's emphasis on the spiritual character of the priest's revenge might suggest that he imitates the fox. He might tell himself that the military superiority of the knights and their physical power do not constitute genuine power. "I do not wage war," we might imagine him proclaim- ing, "because the physical power which sustains military superiority is not a mark of real power: real power lies exclusively in spiritual achievements."

In this case, the priest would not change his values, nor would he believe he cannot, ultimately, realize them. His revaluation would only concern what will bring about that realization: as not all grapes are sweet, so not every form of power is 'real' power. Though he is not deceived about what desire he wants to satisfy, he is deceived about what will and will not satisfy it.

But in fact the priest's revaluation is far more radical than the fox's. As a result of his defeat at the hands of the warriors, he denies the value of political supremacy altogether. And by the same token he condemns all the attitudes that help to secure and sustain it, namely the lust to rule, arrogance, hatred, envy, revengefulness, and the like. In other words, the values themselves

12 I am indebted to Scheler for this comparison. See op. cit., C I.


are changed. If the fox were to emulate this revaluation, it would have to say not that the grapes are sour but rather that sweetness itself is evil.

The priest, on this view of his revaluation, need no longer be deceived about what kind of power will satisfy his craving for superiority, for he now persuades himself that his failure to gain it does not matter to him anymore. He now judges power, and the domination of his fellow humans, an unwor- thy goal. He instead begins to preach the value of neighborly love and political equality.

Though he is not deceived about how to satisfy his desires, the priest, Ni- etzsche insists, is nevertheless still deceived: he is deceived about which desires he wants to satisfy. Nietzsche goes even further: the priest is not just deceived in failing to recognize the importance he places on political power, he also fails to recognize that his devaluation of power is still motivated by his repressed but enduring desire for it. Thus, on the Christian valuation of love, Nietzsche writes: "One should not imagine it grew up as a denial of that thirst for revenge, as the opposite of Jewish hatred! No, the reverse is true! That love grew out of it as its crown" (GM, I, 8). The priests who so vehemently condemn the thirst for "spoil and victory" of the noble "blond beast" (GM, I, 11) are in fact pursuing the very same "goals ... -victory, spoil, and seduction" (GM, I, 8).

The devaluation of power motivated by ressentiment thus turns out to be a last-ditch effort to gain it. The priest professes to embrace values and ideals he deems incompatible with power and political superiority, which he now regards as evil. But his unacknowledged wish is that his altruistic "good deeds," for example, will bring him at last a taste of that power he still craves: "The happiness of 'slight superiority,' involved in all doing good, being useful, helping, and rewarding, is the most effective means of consolation for the physiologically inhibited" (GM, III, 18).

Before I examine this important last claim in more detail, I must empha- size a point of some significance. I must admit that some of Nietzsche's texts are plausibly interpreted in terms of 'sour grapes' revaluation (see, e.g., GM, I 10 & 13).13 On such an interpretation, the priest apparently persuades himself that the physical superiority of the warriors is not "real" power and, accordingly, that his defeat at the hands of the warriors does not make him in any significant way inferior or "impotent." In this case, the priest deceives himself about the state of the world, not about his own values. The phrase "self-deception of impotence" (GM, I, 13) Nietzsche once uses to characterize ressentiment reflects the ambiguity of his view: on my overall interpretation, impotence is the cause of self-deception, but not its object (i.e. that about which the agent deceives himself), whereas on the reading I just sketched out, self-deception is the object of deception and, presumably, also its cause.

13 This is the view (apparently) adopted by Rudiger Bittner in op. cit.


In spite of this ambiguity, I believe that Nietzsche's considered view is that ressentiment revaluation is not simply a case of 'sour grapes' revaluation: it involves self-deception about the values themselves, and not just about the means to realize them. Ressentiment revaluation takes on this radical character for the following reason. The fox does not believe it is utterly unable to get sweet grapes altogether, only the particular ones that are out of its reach. By contrast, the priest appears convinced that he simply does not have what it takes to wrestle political power away from the knights whose superior strength he has experienced, we might imagine, often enough to recognize his own constitutional weakness. It is the belief that political power is irretrievably beyond his reach which forces him to his wholesale devaluation of it.

2. Ressentiment revaluation and reflective revaluation

Unlike reflective revaluation, ressentiment revaluation is not motivated by the recognition that certain attributes, like political supremacy, really do not have the value that was hitherto attributed to them. Ressentiment revaluation is rather driven by the way in which the "man of ressentiment" relates to the attributes whose value he ostensibly denies: he still values them, but feels unable to acquire them, and yet he refuses either to give up his desire for them or to accept his inability to acquire them. Nietzsche's central insight consists in seeing ressentiment revaluation as the eminently paradoxical attempt to accommodate this twofold refusal.

On the one hand, the revaluation accommodates the feeling of impotence of the "man of ressentiment" by exempting him from the pursuit of an ideal he regards himself unable to realize:

When the oppressed, downtrodden, outraged exhort one another with the vengeful cunning of impotence: "let us be different from the evil, namely good! And he is good who does not out- rage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, ..."-this, listened to calmly and without previ- ous bias, really amounts to no more than: "we weak ones are, after all, weak; it would be good if we did nothingfor which we are not strong enough" (GM, I, 13).

Paradoxically, on the other hand, the revaluation also accommodates the "repressed" desire of the "man of ressentiment." This desire in fact uncon- sciously motivates its own devaluation:

You preachers of equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue. Ag- grieved conceit, repressed envy ... erupts from you as a flame and as the frenzy of revenge.

(Z, II, 7)

In the last analysis, ressentiment revaluation is predicated upon the unacknowledged hope that turning away from the frustrated desires, and pursuing the very opposite values, somehow will at last bring about the satisfaction of


those desires: "these weak people-some day or other they too intend to be strong, there is no doubt of that, some day their kingdom too shall come" (GM, I, 15). Ressentiment revaluation is thus the priest's way of securing the satisfaction of his desire in spite of his conviction that he does not have what it takes to satisfy it.

Nietzsche's central insight about ressentiment valuation is perhaps best summarized in the following text: "Masterstroke: to deny and condemn the drive whose expression one is, to display continually, by word and by deed, the antithesis of this drive-" (WP, 179). The "man of ressentiment" professes to act according to some ideals but he is in fact motivated by desires he regards as incompatible with the realization of those ideals. Such a discrepancy between the values that appear to the agent to motivate him and the desires that really do need not be a manifestation of ressentiment: it could just as well be the result of psychological inertia, or of weakness of will. A brief comparative analysis of these phenomena should strengthen our grasp of the distinctive features of ressentiment.

3. Ressentiment, psychological inertia and weakness of will

Consider first the case where the agent has reflectively abandoned old values and adopted new ones. If we are to avoid overintellectualizing the process of revaluation, we must admit that the desires she has reflectively devaluated might occasionally, unbeknownst to herself, motivate her. This phenomenon is well documented, for example, in narrations of radical moral conversions.14

Remark, however, that these old desires act rather like motivational residues: they derive their force from the psychological inertia exercised by old habits, or by a deeply entrenched conditioning. Though they have been rejected by reflection, the old desires might occasionally still motivate the agent. But they no longer belong among the agent's values since she rejected them, and they played no motivating role in this rejection.

The desires whose value is ostensibly denied by ressentiment revaluation, on the contrary, remain actively and not just inertially motivational. They themselves (along with the feeling of impotence) motivate their own apparent rejection by the agent. Since the adoption of the new values is at bottom motivated by the (frustrated) desire to realize the old ones, any action

14 For example, in his Confessions (Trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin [Penguin Books, 1961]), Saint Augustine recounts his efforts to strike down his pride in order to devote himself humbly to the love of God. Acutely aware of the difficulties of any such conversion, he observes for example that "even when I reproach myself for it, the love of praise tempts me. There is temptation in the very process of self-reproach, for often, by priding himself on his contempt for vainglory, a man is guilty of even emptier pride" (Book X, 38). As I understand it, the crucial feature of Augustine's example is that the reprehensible motive of personal glory, however powerful, is only residual. It is not a case of ressentiment insofar as the very valuation of humility is not motivated by pride, though the effort to become humble always risks being recuperated by it.


performed in accordance with these new values is necessarily (really) motivated by the old ones. In the case of psychological inertia, by contrast, the old values are genuinely abandoned in favor of the new ones, so that relapsing in the old ways is a mere psychological accident, not a necessity."1

Consider now the case of weakness of will. Among the most interesting instances of weakness of will are varieties of self-destructive behaviour. In those instances, the agent knows what is good for her and even has the desire to do it, and yet, sometimes to her own bafflement, she winds up doing something that conflicts with this desire. We find again a discrepancy between 'apparent' desires, which relate to her professed values, and 'real' ones, which actually motivate her actions.

We must observe that weakness of will involves no confusion on the part of the agent about the desires she values: what is weak is her determination to pursue them. In fact, it is precisely because there is no confusion at the level of values that it makes sense to speak of weakness of will. The weak-willed agent acts against her will: weakness of will is characterized by a genuine conflict of desires, won by those desires the agent does not value.

On Nietzsche's view, the "man of ressentiment" is weak, but not weak- willed. He is weak because he does not have what it takes to realize his values, not because he lacks the will to pursue them. His will is, on the contrary, prodigiously strong, so strong indeed that it is not even altered by his conviction that he is too weak to fulfill its demands. But unlike the weak- willed individual, he becomes fundamentally confused about his values. His professed values are merely apparent and adopted as covert means to realize his repressed (real) desires. Hence, there is no real conflict between the apparent values and the real desires: pursuing the ones does not require that one renounce pursuing the others; it already is pursuing the others. Nietzsche's priests preach equality and universal love-with a vengeance.

The distinctive feature of ressentiment revaluation is therefore the fact that it is motivated by the very desires it proclaims to condemn. Nietzsche finds a confirmation of this discovery in reflecting on what he presents as a particularly salient feature of ressentiment revaluation, namely the primacy of negation.

15 The agent will also react very differently to the disclosure of his motivational deception. The reflective agent (leaving aside the special case of the agent who takes excessive pride in his moral achievements) will accept the disclosure without difficulty. It is merely a mistake or an accidental relapse which he will not see as evidence of an essential weakness, but rather as the natural resistance of old habits to new ways. The "man of ressentiment," by contrast, will refuse, "as a matter of principle"(WP, 179), to acknowledge that his actual motivation is not his professed one. I have already pointed out that this self-deception is indeed essential to the success of the implicit project of his revaluation: it still covertly aims to realize the values it denies in spite of the agent's conviction of his inability to do so.


4. The primacy of negation

Even though the priests belong to the nobility, the form of revaluation in which they engage out of ressentiment differs from a typical noble creation of values in a number of ways. Nietzsche describes a particularly salient feature of this contrast as follows. On the one hand, "every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself' (GM, I, 10; BGE, 260). The negation of what is alien, opposite to itself comes only as "a by-product, a side issue, a contrasting shade" (GM, I, 11). On the other hand, ressentiment valuation is primarily the negation of the dominant code of values: "from the outset," Nietzsche writes, it "says no to what is 'outside,' what is 'different,' what is 'not itself;' and this No is its creative deed. The inversion of the value-positing eye ... is of the essence of ressentiment" (GM, I, 10; see WP, 172, 350). Contrary to noble morality, the invention of "evil" is "the original thing, the beginning, the distinctive deed in the conception of a slave morality" (GM, I, 11). The creation of alternative values and ideals is sec- ondary and wholly subordinated to this negative task.

The distinctive feature of a morality born out of ressentiment is thus the priority given to the negation of other opposite values. It seems as if what matters most to the "man of ressentiment" is not the new values and ideals he brings into the world but the negation of those that are already there and dominant. But both noble and ressentiment valuations involve the affirmation of some values and the negation of others. So what could this difference in priority possibly mean?

The priority of negation cannot simply be temporal priority. There are all sorts of reasons other than ressentiment why an agent would want to proclaim which values he denies before divulging which values he affirms. And it cannot be priority in the order of practical reflection either: without the (at least implicit) affirmation of some new values, the rejection of old ones would be groundless. Practical reflection cannot proceed without presupposing some standard of value under the guidance of which it is conducted.

I suggest that, for Nietzsche, the primacy of negation in ressentiment valuation is a primacy in motivation: what drives the valuation is not the affirmation of new values, but only the desire to 'deny older ones. But precisely this should arouse our suspicion: if the negation of old values is not motivated by new ones, then by what? My (tentative) proposal is the following: the old values themselves underlie their own negation. We must examine this answer carefully.

At first blush, it suggests that the difference between noble and ressentiment revaluation is the following: the latter form of valuation is thoroughly driven by old values whereas the former is inspired by radically new ones whose creation owes nothing to the older values. The problem with this sug-


gestion concerns the origin of the new values affirmed by the noble. The idea that they are created ex nihilo, in complete independence from the older values is rather implausible, hardly even intelligible as a picture of the creation of values. It is more plausible to see the new values as connected in some respect with the old ones: what basis do we have, indeed, to revise older values if it is not a subset of these older values themselves?

This threatens to obscure the contrast between noble valuation and ressentiment valuation: they are now both found to rely on older values. The crucial difference lies in precisely which older values drive the revaluation. In ressentiment revaluation, the values that motivate the denial are the very values one ostensibly rejects. By contrast, other forms of revaluation, including presumably noble revaluation, retain some subset of the older values as providing the terms for rejecting the rest.

5. Ressentiment and resentment

The English 'resentment' can be used to refer to the phenomenon Nietzsche calls 'ressentiment.' However, it is also used in a more restricted moral sense. 16 Moral resentment must be distinguished from Nietzschean ressentiment since the latter is introduced to explain the origin of the morality which the former presupposes. I believe we should distinguish them as follows.

If the priests truly believed that the political superiority of the warriors is 'evil,' then the treatment inflicted on them by the warriors should provoke their indignation, or their resentment in the restricted moral sense. Political power would not be something they value so that lacking the ability to secure it would not be cause for shame. On the contrary, they might rather judge the unbridled aggressiveness of the warriors a mark of moral weakness (see GM, I, 13 & 14).

But indignation and resentment are by no means the first reactions of the man of ressentiment to his defeat: shame and self-contempt are (GS, 359). His defeat causes him shame because his fundamental aspirations include en- joying the political supremacy achieved by his victors (see GM, I, 15). It is because political power matters to them that their defeat arouses ressentiment in the priests, and not just indignation or (moral) resentment.

In other words, the fundamental difference between ressentiment and resentment is that resentment appears to presuppose the condemnation of its object and constitutes a reaction of disapproval to its occurrence, whereas ressentiment rests on the implicit endorsement of the very values embodied by those towards whom it is directed. Among the affects associated with ressentiment, Nietzsche attaches a particular importance to vengefulness

16 Notably, this is how the notion is used in the discussion of "reactive attitudes" initiated by Peter Strawson in his "Freedom and Resentment" in Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. xlviii (1962), pp. 1-25.


because it is the natural reaction to failure of those who expect success. But the purpose of revenge is not the punishment of a deed of which one dis- approves. Rather, if I have been defeated, my revenge essentially aims to restore my challenged superiority; the priest's revenge remains ultimately driven by his craving for power, not by righteous indignation.

III. RESSENTIMENT AND INTEGRITY

1. The problem of self-deception

Nietzsche's most common objection to ressentiment revaluation is that it involves "falsification," "lie," "mendaciousness" or "counterfeit" (GM, I, 10, 14, 15; II, 11; III, 19; see also, e.g., EH, Preface, 2-3; IV, 7; and more). But Nietzsche also believes that all these cases of deception are in fact cases of "self-deception" (see especially GM, I, 10, 13; see also III, 13 for the particular case of "ressentiment against life"; cf. A 55). I have already suggested that the "man of ressentiment" is self-deceived about the values he ostensibly embraces. Thus, 'deep down,' the priest really values and desires the political power which his rivals the knights monopolize, but winds up convincing himself that it is not desirable after all.

Some of Nietzsche's texts might suggest the following objection to my interpretation (e.g., GM, III, 15; A, 26). In these texts, the priest seems quite clear about what he wants, namely political power. Accordingly, the revaluation of noble values, which includes the denial of the value of political power, is but the central piece of a cunning strategy to confound his oppo- nent-a strategy which, moreover, turns out to be largely successful (GM, I, 16). There is no self-deception involved here, and no reason to reproach the priest for having recourse to deception: it is a means justified by his ultimate end, political supremacy.

The scenario underlying this objection, however, leaves out ressentiment altogether. If the revaluation is a piece of fully controlled self-conscious strategy, it is not clear that the priest ever lost confidence in his abilities, or the sense of his own power. But the feeling of impotence is an essential ingredi- ent of ressentiment. Hence, the objection fails to establish that a valuation motivated by ressentiment does not involve self-deception.

A more serious difficulty arises from Nietzsche's use of self-deception as the basis of his objection. The reader of Nietzsche who learns, first in Beyond Good and Evil, then again in the closing sections of the Genealogy, that deception is not necessarily harmful (BGE, 1; GM, III, 24-27), that it might even be a "condition of life" (BGE, 4), is bound to be profoundly perplexed by the scathing indictment of self-deception in the latter book's first essay. Two observations should overcome this difficulty.

First, a brief examination of Nietzsche's critique of the value of truth re- veals that its aim is less to show that deception is good than to question our


belief in the unconditional value of truth. Nietzsche's own conclusion is not that truth has no value at all but that it has no unconditional value (GM, III, 24 & 27). The inspection of other texts makes clear that truth remains a fundamental value for Nietzsche, though one relative to the realization of an ideal of integrity of self he associates with nobility of character. "Truthfulness" is a, if not the, distinctive feature of nobility (GM, I, 5; cf. GS, 2; A, 50). We may thus safely assume that the self-deception created by ressentiment is objectionable for Nietzsche, and proceed to ask what about it is objectionable.

Second, to believe that Nietzsche's condemnation of self-deception relates directly to the value of truth and knowledge would be misguided. Self-deception, it should be pointed out, is not just a case of deception (i.e. deception about oneself). Deception is a lack of knowledge, while self-deception is a lack of acknowledgment of what, 'deep down,' one knows, or believes, to be true. Deception cuts the agent off from reality but, unlike self-deception, it causes no split within the agent's self. What Nietzsche finds troubling about self-deception is precisely such a self-division.'7

2. Nobility and Integrity

At the beginning of the Genealogy, Nietzsche announces that he is interested in nobility not so much as a political or sociological concept, but rather insofar as it is a quality of "soul" or "character" (GM, I, 5). The early noble's ''predominance did not lie mainly in physical strength but in strength of soul-they were more whole human beings" (BGE, 257).18 "Strength of soul" and "wholeness" evoke a certain notion of integrity, which therefore stands out as a crucial feature of nobility of character.

Nietzsche appears to have both a narrow and a broad conception of integrity. In the broad sense, integrity is associated with a kind of "wholeness" (BGE, 257), "autonomy" (GM, II, 2), a sense of "responsibility" for oneself (GM, II, 2; BGE, 272). Integrity in the narrow sense is "integrity in matters of the spirit" (A, 50): it consists of the possession of qualities like "honesty" (GM, I, 10; III, 19), "truthfulness" (GM, I, 5), or "intellectual conscience"

(GS, 2).

17 Nietzsche himself draws a stark contrast between deception and self-deception when he makes it clear that he does not object to lies as such, but only to what he calls "dishonest lies," the lies of those who cannot "open their eyes to themselves"-namely, those who are self-deceived (GM, III, 19).

18 Some of Nietzsche's depictions of the "noble, powerful" men are notoriously disturbing: "triumphant monsters who perhaps emerge from a disgusting procession of murder, ar- son, rape, and torture, exhilarated and undisturbed of soul" (GM, I, 11). Even such an apparently unredeemable text, however, contains subtle important clues: what the noble, powerful men do, Nietzsche finds "disgusting"; the fundamental trait he wishes to isolate, and of which he apparently approves, is that they do what they do "undisturbed of soul." I will argue that this latter phrase does not denote a lack of conscience or reflectiveness, but rather a kind of psychic harmony.

Nietzsche tends to identify nobility with integrity in the broad sense. But he insists that the noble person is also truthful because, as I will argue shortly, truthfulness (or integrity in the narrow sense) is a necessary condition of integrity in the broad sense. By contrast, the "man of ressentiment," who is self-deceived and therefore not truthful, lacks integrity in both senses. Nietzsche says that he is fundamentally "corrupted" (EH, IV, 7).

As Nietzsche conceives of it, the integrity (in the broad sense) of the noble person is a quality of her relation to her values:

The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges, "what is harmful to me is harmful in itself'; it knows itself to be that which first'accords honor to things; it is value-creating. (BGE, 260)

Whatever else might be involved in the idea of creation of values (and much is involved indeed), it certainly designates a privileged relationship between an agent and her values: they are genuinely her own. An agent lacks integrity, therefore, if her professed values are not genuinely her own: she proclaims to embrace certain values and to act according to them while she is inspired not by the recognition of their value but by "ulterior motives" (GS, 359).

The creation of values is, in Nietzsche's words, the agent's "self- affirmation" (GM, I, 10; BGE, 260): it expresses her own view of what sort of life is worth living. Nietzsche warns against supposing that self- affirmation in the creation of values amounts to capriciously declaring good whatever desire happens to be, at the moment, the strongest. A painful and protracted training in self-control and self-knowledge is necessary "to possess the right to affirm oneself (GM, II, 3; cf. BGE, 188). To be entitled to claim her values as her own creation, in other words, an agent must meet specific exacting requirements.19

One o4 those requirements is of particular importance here. It seems clear that to value something is different than to desire it, even if, as Nietzsche believes, one must desire something to value it. The idea of valuation actually evokes a discrimination among one's desires, and therefore reflection, choice, and rejection. Valuations are thus reflective endorsements of desires. Though Nietzsche does not make this perfectly clear, he appears to believe that an agent genuinely endorses a desire only if he acknowledges the other desires which conflict with the one he chooses.

19 These ideas cut to the heart of Nietzsche's philosophical psychology. In Daybreak, published some seven years before the Genealogy, he already introduced and developed the distinction between values that are merely "adopted" and those that are truly one's "own" or "original," as well as the idea that to create and live by values that are genuinely one's own is most demanding and consequently very rare (see D, 104 ff.). The question of what makes a valuation genuinely one's own is extremely complex. I am here considering only one necessary condition of it which self-deceived agents cannot meet.


The nature of this acknowledgment is very complex. Obviously it involves the knowledge that the satisfaction of certain desires is incompatible with the realization of the chosen value. If the agent does not know that a value precludes the fulfillment of certain desires, she does not really understand the value and therefore cannot genuinely embrace it. In addition, she must naturally also remain aware that she has any of those desires herself, if she does-i.e. she must not be deceived about herself.

But this knowledge cannot be sufficient: even the most self-deceived agent might know which desires her values condemn to frustration and yet unwit- tingly pursue their satisfaction. She only "represses" these desires, Nietzsche suggests, which means that they are still active but beyond her control. In re- pressing a desire which conflicts with her values, she knows that following these values means frustrating that desire, but she fundamentally refuses, or is unable, to accept the implications of this knowledge for her own life. And in rejecting the implications of her professed values for her own life, she ultimately rejects the values themselves.

For example, she might profess to embrace the value of equality and understand that it prohibits the monopolization of power. But if the price of her continuing commitment to the value of equality is that she must repress or deceive herself about her craving for power and the significance it has in her life, legitimate questions must be raised about whether and to what extent she genuinely endorses the value of equality.20

There is no genuine endorsement of a value, therefore, without the acknowledgment of those of our desires which conflict with its realization. To acknowledge the presence of conflicting desires and to accept the fact that they have to be left unsatisfied demands unflinching honesty with ourselves. But the required honesty is precisely what the "man of ressentiment" lacks: "While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself ..., the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints"(GM, I, 10).

Remember, moreover, that the "man of ressentiment" is peculiarly self-deceived. He does not simply ignore the presence of desires incompatible with the values he proclaims to embrace, but he also ignores the fact that he is actually motivated to embrace those values by the very desires they condemn. Hence, without integrity in the narrow sense (honesty and truthfulness), a person cannot regard her values as genuinely her own creation, and conse-

20 The acceptance condition does not necessarily eliminate all conflict between values and desires, but it demands a particular attitude towards it. We have genuinely endorsed our professed values if a conflict between them and incompatible desires results in a self- conscious control of the latter, rather than in their repression. Nietzsche explicitly distinguishes between the cases where the values bring about the "control" of the desires, and the cases where the values "inhibit" or "extirpate" the desires. See, e.g., WP, 384, 870, & 928.


quently lacks integrity in the broad sense, namely nobility itself (see EH, I, 2).

3. The Value of Integrity

I remarked earlier that, although Nietzsche deplores the self-deception created by ressentiment, he also denies the absolute value of truth and truthfulness. We now see that their value depends on the integrity which they make possible. Ressentiment generates a particular relation between an agent and his values which is objectionable because it amounts to a "corruption (Verderb- en)," "unselfing (Entselbstung)" or "depersonalization (Entpersbnlichung)" of that agent (EH, IV, 7). By creating and fostering self-deception, in-other words, ressentiment corrupts or dis-integrates the self.

Nietzsche's psychological critique of value judgments thus depends on his valuation of the integrity of the self. By associating it to nobility of character, Nietzsche signals his commitment to the value of integrity. But we still need an explanation of the value of integrity, which specifies what is so valuable about it, and shows how it is compatible with Nietzsche's perspectivism about values. I will first examine what sort of constraints Nietzsche's perspectivism places on his psychological critique of value judgments.

The view that ressentiment is objectionable because it undermines the integrity of the self seems to presuppose an external norm of the very sort which perspectivism prohibits. By an external norm, I mean a norm which transcends the perspective of the agent. Perspectivism is the view that every belief, including beliefs about norms and values, is ultimately relative to the perspective formed by the affects, needs, desires and beliefs of the agent who adopts it (see GM, III, 12; WP, 481). For that reason, it has been proposed to construe Nietzsche's criticisms of other views (including his psychological criticisms) as a kind of internal critique, i.e. one that relies exclusively upon the perspective (and therefore the affects, needs, desires and beliefs which constitute it) of the agent who accepts those views.21

Nietzsche's writings initially hint at two more or less obvious versions of this attempt, both of which, I will argue, are ultimately unsatisfactory. The first version goes roughly as follows. To detect ressentiment at the root of certain valuations is to show that they are actually motivated by the very desires they condemn. On this version of his view, Nietzsche himself need not think that these desires are objectionable, but the agent whose values are in-

21 This view is articulated, for example, in Daniel Conway, "Genealogy and Critical Method" in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, R. Schacht ed. (U. of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1994), pp. 318-33. Though I believe that Nietzsche's psychological critique is 'internal,' I do not think it can be so for the reasons advanced by Conway (and, frequently, by others as well). I discuss this point in my "Review of Niet- zsche, Genealogy, Morality" in Ethics, Vol. 6, 2, January 1996, and in more detail in "Perspectivism, Criticism, and Spiritual Freedom" (forthcoming).


compatible with them must do so and, accordingly, should give up his valuations altogether.22 Nietzsche occasionally seems to espouse such a view, as when he argues, in general terms, that "the origin of moral values is the work of immoral affects and considerations" (WP, 266), or, in particular, that the valuation of equality is motivated by a desire for superiority (Z, II, 7).

Yet, this version of the critique cannot be his considered view. The motivation for adopting a certain value, however objectionable, is not a ground for rejecting it because, as he insists quite explicitly, the psychological origin of a valuation has no bearing on its truth-value: "Origin and critique of moral valuations. The two things do not coincide, as is often supposed" (WP, 69n; see also HTH, 225). Thus, even if the priest's endorsement of the value of equality is motivated by his desire for superiority, it could still be true that equality is good and that the quest for it should not be given up altogether.

The second version of internal criticism exploits in a different way the paradoxical nature of ressentiment revaluation. On this interpretation, ressentiment revaluation is motivated by the desires it condemns because it constitutes an elaborate, if unconscious, strategy to bring about their satisfaction. Here, Nietzsche's objection would be that such a strategy is ineffective, or even self-defeating. By encouraging the agent to turn away from his real desires (which he feels he could not satisfy otherwise), ressentiment revaluation makes it in effect impossible to secure their satisfaction. Thus, in preaching equality and neighbourly love, the priests would not really recover the superiority they lost to their rivals, the knights. Their "revenge" would be merely "imaginary," not real (GM, I, 10).23 This interpretation is untenable, however, as Nietzsche makes it unequivocally clear that ressentiment revaluation can, and does, succeed in bringing about the satisfaction of the desires that se- cretly motivate it. Thus, the priests' devaluation of political power did actually restore their supremacy (see GM, I, 7 & 16).

We thus need to look for another construal of Nietzsche's criticism. Unfortunately, we seem to have exhausted the most promising possibilities offered by the text. One remaining possible interpretation exploits the

22 This line of interpretation is nicely summarized by Raymond Geuss in The Idea of a Criti- cal Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 43-44. It is not clear whether Geuss argues that the agent with objectionable motivations should cease holding the belief altogether or cease holding the belief on the basis of these motivations, i.e. re- align his motivations with his values. If the latter, Geuss's view is closer to my own.

23 I must admit, as I indicated earlier, that GM, I, 10 is plausibly interpreted in terms of 'sour grapes' revaluation. The priests' revenge is "imaginary" in the sense in which the fox's conviction that he did not miss an opportunity for sweet grapes is imaginary. Thus, the priest persuades himself that the physical superiority of the warriors is not "real" power and, accordingly, that his defeat at the hands of the warriors does not make him in any significant way inferior or "impotent." Nevertheless, the objection I raise holds for this reading as much as for my own: one cannot object to the revenge motivated by ressentiment on the grounds that it is merely "imaginary" since its success turns out to be very real.


suggestion that ressentiment revaluation is a self-defeating strategy. It also admittedly involves some extrapolation, and presents problems of its own. Unlike the two interpretations just mentioned, this one considers squarely Nietzsche's insistence that ressentiment "unselfs" or "corrupts" the integrity of the self. I therefore submit that ressentiment revaluation is self-defeating in a very peculiar way which must be related to the claim that ressentiment "unselfs."

It is crucial to understand exactly what the corruption of integrity amounts to. Ressentiment does not just generate a conflict between professed values and actual motivations, but it creates a highly paradoxical state of mind in which the very adoption of new values is motivated by the desires they condemn, and the pursuit of the new values is an unconscious, last-ditch attempt to satisfy those desires. The "man of ressentiment" is thus divided between two sets of desires (and values): the apparent desires (and values) which he has as a result of his revaluation, and the real desires (and values) which are "repressed" but nonetheless covertly motivate his revaluation.

The problem, as I argued earlier, is not that the "man of ressentiment" cannot satisfy his real desires by devaluating them. Rather, I submit, the problem is that, were he to obtain this satisfaction, the "man of ressentiment" could not wholeheartedly enjoy it. Ressentiment, in other words, cuts off the conditions of satisfaction of a desire from the conditions of enjoyment of that satisfaction.24 According to the "psychological logic"25 of ressentiment, the "man of ressentiment" believes 'deep down' that he succeeded in satisfying his real desires precisely by turning away from them. Embracing those desires again, in order to enjoy their satisfaction wholeheartedly, would remove the very condition of a satisfaction he is convinced he could not obtain otherwise. The "man of ressentiment" is thus left pathetically hanging between the impossibility to enjoy the satisfaction of desires he does not really have, and the impossibility to enjoy the satisfaction of desires he has, but cannot embrace.

Consider once more Nietzsche's example. Unable to secure the superiority he desires, the priest devaluates it and devotes his energies to the pursuit of equality and neighbourly love, an enterprise he judges radically opposed in value to the struggle for power. His unacknowledged hope, however, is that helping or assisting others, for example, will at last earn him the power he craves but feels unable to secure. Suppose he does succeed in improving the well-being of others, but does not enhance his political status. This should

24 As I use the terms here, a desire is 'satisfied' when the state of affairs it intends comes to obtain. This satisfaction is, in turn, 'enjoyed' when the agent experiences pleasure at the state of affairs that has come into existence.

25 The phrase is Nietzsche's: see, e.g., WP, 135.


hardly satisfy him, since improving the lives of others is not what he really wants.26

Suppose now that his altruistic good deeds do bring him power: for example, others feel grateful or indebted, and willingly submit to his governance. He cannot wholeheartedly enjoy it, however, not just because he believes it is worthless or contemptible, but, at a deeper level, because he 'believes' it is precisely renouncing his desire for power that brought about its satisfaction. To enjoy it, he would have to embrace his desire for it, but embracing that desire, would in effect remove the very condition of its satisfaction-power would again desert him.

The normative force of integrity is internal since it wholly depends on desires which the agent actually has and seeks to satisfy. Presumably, whoever seeks to satisfy a desire wants ipso facto to enjoy that satisfaction. It makes no sense for an individual to pursue the satisfaction of his desire in a way that makes him unable to enjoy it. Hence, by his own lights, the "man of ressentiment" ought to abandon his peculiar revaluation since it compels him to pursue desires whose satisfaction he cannot enjoy, as they are desires he does not really have or can no longer embrace.

Unfortunately, this interpretation presents two significant philosophical problems. First, it is at least questionable whether an agent in the situation of the "man of ressentiment" cannot wholeheartedly enjoy the satisfaction of his 'real' desire for power: he only has to be deceived about the source of this enjoyment.27 Nietzsche himself, in describing ressentiment revaluation as a kind of "sublimation" (e.g., GM, I, 8), invites a comparison with the Freudian doctrine of vicarious satisfaction. On Freud's view, agents who sublimate their sexual impulses into artistic or intellectual pursuits can enjoy the satisfaction of those impulses vicariously, or, more precisely, under a

26 The psychological phenomenon I have in mind is, I believe, undeniable: it consists in finding ourselves unable to enjoy the satisfaction of what we believe to be our desire. Admittedly, this phenomenon can receive a variety of explanations: it might be, for example, that the costs of the satisfaction were so high as to undermine our enjoyment of it. But it might also be that this inability is evidence that the object of the desire we do satisfy is not, in fact, what we really want. Specifically, we might be, in such cases, animated by "ulterior motives" (see GS, 359)-other desires whose satisfaction we pursue, for a number of possible reasons, under the guise or disguise of the desire we ostensibly seek to, and do, satisfy. The explanation for our inability to enjoy wholeheartedly the satisfaction of the latter desire is that it fails to bring about, or be accompanied by, the fulfillment of the ulterior motives as well. A complete treatment of this issue would have to address a number of other questions. For example, is the relation between the 'real' and the 'apparent' desires purely 'instrumental' or 'conditional'? The relation is instrumental if the satisfaction of the apparent desire is only a means to satisfy the real one, so that the latter satisfaction is the source of the enjoyment of the former. The relation is conditional if the satisfaction of the apparent desire affords its own sui generis enjoyment, but where this enjoyment is nevertheless conditioned by the satisfaction of the real desire. Such questions are not addressed directly by Nietzsche, and I will not pursue them here.

27 I am indebted to Jason Kawall for this observation.


different description. Likewise, the man of ressentiment could wholeheartedly enjoy the satisfaction of desires he condemns, only under a different description.

Second, my proposal also rested on the assumption that to seek the satisfaction of a desire is ipso facto to seek the enjoyment of that satisfaction. Although this assumption is true in many cases, it is not necessarily so. Think, for example, of people who sacrifice their life out of a desire to ensure the safety of a loved one.

The shortcomings of this last line of interpretation leave us with some problems and prospects. These shortcomings do not seem to affect two main points of the interpretation: that ressentiment is to be deplored for creating a peculiar kind of self-deception; and that this self-deception itself is to be deplored for undermining the integrity of the self. But they do affect the view I have advanced of the value of such integrity. An alternative avenue of interpretation might be opened by drawing a connection between the notion of integrity of self and Nietzsche's ideal of self-creation.28 But then, we must show what relation self-creation bears to integrity, what is valuable about creating oneself, and how the appeal to this value in a critique of morality is compatible with Nietzsche's perspectivism about values. These are large issues, however, whose examination must be deferred to another occasion.29

28 Alexander Nehamas, in op. cit., ch. 6, draws that very sort of connection, and offers a detailed examination of it..

29 In writing this paper, I benefited from the comments and suggestions Alexander Nehamas, Garrett Deckel, Jay Wallace and Louke Van Wensveen Siker made on earlier drafts. I also wish to thank Lanier Anderson and Wolfgang Mann, as well as audiences at Columbia University's Barnard College and Brown University, for helpful discussions on various aspects of the paper.
