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.