“though i wouldn’t call it ‘resentment’. that’s too naive, too easy. there is nothing here that i envy; no power, privilege or property of ‘theirs’ that i want. the feeling is more of disgust… like what one would feel toward a lower life form such as an insect.”
Yeah, no, that’s what resentment is. Envy is a different thing.
Ironically it was resentful feelings that with time have attempted to shift the meaning of the word to envy, like resentful people are just envious. They are not, they are like you describe.
“ah but nobody ‘creates’ anyone else. there is no freewill, and as such we’d have to trace everything that has become back to god. but since there is no god, there is nothing to blame.”
Don’t try to wiggle yourself out of it. Stand by the shit you said.
lol, but it was you who surmised such a thing was deserving of resentment… and i’ll tell you why. you’re still thinking in moral terms, still thinking judgments reflect anything more than one’s own measure of strength to resist what is external to it. so for example, if you were to say ‘what x did was bad for/to me’, we ask ‘is the cause of this feeling his strength, or your weakness.’
to be even able to conceive of this in terms of a problem of ‘resentment’ means that you, yourself, would be morally offended by such events… which would mean two things: you still believe there is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ objectively, and that the degree of the feeling of offense is proportionate to the strength of the offender rather that the weakness of the offended.
would a giant resent a mouse that bit his toe, or merely shake it off with a chuckle? ‘resentment’ is not some state that exists out there in the world ready to be experienced. it is a feeling generated internally by the degree of strength one has. if something hurts, one immediately seeks an external cause for that pain… one wants to blame and hold something responsible for it. if something does not hurt, there is no occasion to feel resentment… to need to feel it to excuse one’s own weakness.
No, resentment isn’t about morality either. It is eminently pre-moral.
I didn’t say what you described was deserving of resentment. What you describe IS resentment. You don’t even notice that the judge is a sidenote in your discourse, you mostly talk about yourself. You saying I’m saying you’re saying your description of yourself is deserving of resentment?
on the contrary, it’s a post-moral concept. prior to social contracts between language using people who share a community, anger amounted only to being expressed through instinctual violence. so for instance, if you came into my cave and took my favorite shiny rock, i’d try to bash you over the head with my club… but i wouldn’t think you were treating me unfairly or that you were violating some kind of agreement between us. here, i wouldn’t be able to feel resentment, because the structures of the civil contract that define such concepts as ‘fairness’ and ‘rights’ and ‘obligations’ would not exist.
so anger and resentment are qualitatively different feelings, the former involving moral presuppositions that have to be in place before it can be experienced. so when i say you are still thinking morally when you conceive of the things that happened to me as being something that would/could be ‘resented’, you’re assuming that i’d feel some moral offense at these things. but i don’t, because i cannot blame anyone or anything for being treated ‘unfairly’, for two reasons. first, there is no freewill, and second, these modes of deception and corruption are built into the legal system… something that is characteristic of human nature in general, and the criminal justice system in particular.
my objection is not about the transparency of the sham morality that is believed to be the basis of law, nor about the hipocrisy, deception, incompetence, and corruption that runs rampant throughout it. these things are to be expected (since man is an inherently despicable creature). my objection is to something a bit more subtle and profound; that the system is not strong enough to not need to hide behind this facade of morality. what disgusts me is that these insects (prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges) are not faithful to their own principles and codes of conduct. not that they are opportunistic liars - for this is human nature - but that they are still pretending not to be.
be that as it may, being subjected to this political travesty at the highest level possible within the social contract fundamentally changes my relationship to the state. and it is a change that affects and influences every facet of my philosophy. this betrayal is a cornerstone of my thought. i am not interested in fiddling with the tedious, inconsequential philosophical ‘problems’ others occupy themselves with. my problems are of a different rank.
if i were to involve myself in trying to find a solution to this problem, this effort would consists of trying to locate and isolate the source of the problem and change the circumstances that allow it to happen. incidentally, i have traced nearly every detail back to a set of systemic characteristics that are intrinsic to the capitalist system. here i am not drawing attention to the inherent nature of man as an opportunistic deceiver and exploiter (this i accept), but rather the system that greatly augments these things rather than trying to subdue them.
you could say that this is the basic thesis, the basic premise, of my anarchism. and you might misunderstand me if your only experience with self proclaimed anarchists consists of hanging out with a few rebellious pot heads in sex pistols t-shirts at the local coffee shop. this is not anarchism. these irrelevant clowns do not speak for me.
But I mean that philosophically. You said on the contrary, to a thing that is evidently true, so obviously a hefty text needed to follow. The content is irrelevant.
With the outmost respect.
If you think resentmet is about morality, you fundamentally missunderstand what morality is and, as is anyhow evident in your writings otherwise, have a supersticious belief in it.
It is a contraption, a creation. True morality is cold, it is like science, about checking balances and such. It does want to make you believe that it is not, that it is rooted to reality and has fundamental, pre-linguistic links to emotions. Although I am not even sure you can imagine what pre-linguistic means.
Resentment. A caveman beats another caveman down and comandeers his cave. Caveman 1 feels resentment. Good and Evil have not been invented. Caveman 1 does not envy caveman 2 or give a shit about the cave at this point.
Resentment. It is an instinct. It comes from sentiment, re-sentiment, in a context (remember, this word was invented in the glorious sons of Rome and not designed for English) where sentiment, feeling refers to pain, feeling pain. So resentment is wallowing in the pain, making it about that pain. And having the image of the perpetrator ever-present. No morality involved, no morality needed. Related to revenge and such, but not intrinsically.
The thing about resentment, also the reason Nietzsche said it took so much nervous energy, is that it can only work as a raison d’être, when it is indulged in life becomes about it, it is the primary reason.
There is no logic to this. No morality or ulterior explanation. It is just an instinct, far predating any such thing as logic or morality.
People really do overestimate the power, as well as correspondence with reality, of logic (never to mention morality). You have gone as far as noticing it does not live up to the claims of the logicians, but then you go into a sad Wittgensteinean loop. Just come out with it already, reality hurts, the wind is cold. But it is full of the real stuff, the riches. Say hello to the world.
no prob, and perfectly understandable. i don’t usually write to be understood. that’s one of my greatest fears, for the reader’s sake.
i’m usually not one to go bothering with etymologies, but i’ve done so as a favor to you so you can be given the opportunity to be right in at least one of your posts. so psychologists are catergorizing resentment as part of a set of basic emotions, along with fear, anger and disappointment. btw, it’s saying the word is of french origin. anyway, the subtle difference between these three basic emotions mentioned is that resentment includes an element that doesn’t need to be present in the other two emotions of fear and anger.
resentent is a kind of anger with the addition of the perception of some kind of unfairness. but there is no concept of ‘fair’ until there are more complex social arrangements in place. and these, in turn, require some comprehension of a morality… which is nothing more than an agreed upon set of social norms and consequences for violating these norms.
now what i’m trying to explain to you is that, as an immoralist, i am unable to experience resentment (because nothing is fair)… much less ressentiment, but this for other reasons too; i am incapable of envy and hatred. the former because i have enough, the latter, because hatred is too strong a word to describe a disposition toward what is inferior to me. contempt, but certainly not hatred. contempt is a kind of disgust with a dash of pity. hatred contains in it a dash of fear.
wait wuh? where did that come from? don’t say that man, because you know how it reads to me. it says “here is a guy who has very little grasp of logic and is frightened by the thought that a vast majority of what he might say could be nonsense.” don’t make me think that, man. please. we were doing so good.
of course one never claimed that logic explains anything. anybody who’s ever told you that doesn’t know what logic is. logic is just a tool for analyzing languages according to rules, some of which are conventional, others of which are ontological (these would include aristotle’s principles of formal logic, for example). it’s the language that ‘explains’ stuff, not the logic.
but that was cute. unintentionally dodging the fact that you might find logic a little unsettling, and then pretending as if i’m the one who is afraid of ‘the hurtful reality and the cold wind’. heh heh. grin
if you realized how much we aren’t able to clearly say about world, you might find it to be much colder than you originally thought. but this is a secret between wittgensteinians, not philosophers. shhhhhh.
Pshhh, I kick almost anybody ass with logic. Maybe that’s why I actually have a realistic appraisal of what it is. I’ve seen you ramble on about W, don’t play with me, foo.
Again, it is not a feeling of injustice. I guess those psychs were trying to find a good word, but it is admittedly hard to find. You describe the feeling beautifully in your first post on this thread though.
Caveman 1 has no need to have any notion of justice, and therefore injustice. But the fact remains. Ol’ 2 beat him down and took his cave. He feels SOMETHING.
This is a fundamentally moral position. And if I am not mistaken, moral as in born from a type of pathos akin to resentment.
Look at it like this, if man is in your eyes or heart an inherently despicable creature, you yourself are inherently despicable and your judgment of man and yourself is despicable too.
Im sure you have arrived at this conundrum when you were very fresh to the game and it is now childs-play to you.
But what is your solution to it, how can your judgment be relied upon, by yourself?
How do you hold yourself in enough honour to at least validate your own judgments as being worthy of being pronounced?
Is it not despicable to judge oneself and ones entire kind as being despicable? Or, how does one avoid the despicable aspects of existence once one has pronounced such a judgment?
Yes, he probably feels shitty.
When this shitty feeling recurs, becoming a kind of thing in itself, I think it is valid to call it resentment.
Morality hasn’t entered the picture here. As morality is, besides judgments, also about organizing responses. Caveman 1 has no power to come up with a response, let alone invoke a systemic one.
I suppose this is Nietzsches reason for the Eternal Recurrence. An bruteforced inversion of resentment; the recurring image of a great justice, underpinning and pervading existence, based on ones own physiological affirmation of all that ones knows.
The effects of this differ per type;
To become more selective about what one knows, to be compelled to rule, to find a niche in the whole and become a happy criminal, to collapse in dread and retrieve god, to go through ever shifting phases of identity, to be a scientist, or do this –
where the original resentment is to be compelled to avenge, to try to interfere with everything, to be an unhappy and unfair law abiding citizen, to disbelieve in any justices and divinities, and to cling on to one phase of existence, to be a hack.
you don’t fool me, jakob milikowski. i know all about you. i know you moonlight as a lead singer for a heavy metal band when you aren’t hanging out with pedro during the day.
I came in to share some thoughts, ended up getting bogged down by shit. But at least I got a straight death threat out of it. What did you get? Snide comments and Judas Priest videos.
Anyway, I dunno. I’m as susceptible to resentment as anybody. Like Nietzsche said, it is always the first instinct. All you can do is deny it and let it pass.
That’s why it’s also such a good test.
But as far as owning the resentment goes, I actually respect promethean. He’s what I consider to be a true communist, consequent and dedicated. Not like 99% of them which are weak faggots. An enmity like that is worth having, however symbolic.
Just uh. Well, that’s the amount of respect and honour I can dedicate to him. I do miss Zoot, but if he’s gonna go dark, I would rather he go full dark. It gives me hope. Balls are always more important than being right.
As long as we’re on the subject though, and to tie it all up with the Limbaugh videos I opened with.
The problem today, the task, is one of economy of nervous energy. I have come here with some very subtle and nuanced points, very intelligent shit. In some cases they have not been addressed because of simple lack of capacity for such intelligence. But in a number of cases it has simply been because their economy of nervous energy is all fucked up, they got leaks like crazy, investing a shitload in all sorts of sad places. They just don’t have enough free energy to employ on actual intelligence.
You don’t need to uplift humanity’s intelligence. And if a man is a coward, he is a coward, you can’t teach them balls either. The task is rearranging the economy of nervous energy. If they are going to succeed or fail, let them succeed or fail at the peak of their capacities.
