Nicholas Birns. Ressentiment and Counter-Ressentiment: Nietzsche, Scheler, and the Reaction Against Equality NietzscheCircle.com. NietzscheCircle.

.com/ressentimentmaster Perhaps the word genre in English is roughly comparable; genre is of French origin, but it is also an English word, although again one not spoken by the man on the street; to the educated person, a genre

The problem is, in English the word, ressentiment, always italicized, is not natural the it sounds more sarcastic en franais. We have our own word, resentment, and the very closeness of the French word to ours indicates that the Nietzschean use must be something special, something different. Whereas in German (and for that matter
expresses something more particular than a kind of something. way genre is. As Robert Solomon says (118) French) Nietzsches word is the same word used ordinarily, albeit with a special use, in a special language-game, in English it is a downright exotic word used only within in Nietzschean context. Some

French words are most often learned borrowings accessible to the intellectual elite, so the Frenchness rarefies it, makes it part of elevated parlance. The German word has . . . the connotations of a word of foreign origin, (128) says Rudiger Bittner. Thus it risks sounding pretentious by using a French word which has so obvious an English equivalent. Or perhaps, since nearly all of the people who would use ressentiment in English are intellectuals, and ressentiment, as a concept, implies that intellectuals are ill-motivated and have erected their systems as a revenge against the naturally strong, as a kind of trahison des clercs, an overtone of resentment creeps into the enunciation of ressentiment because the intellectuals who use it are, inferentially, admitting, or appearing to admit, that they are up to something dirty. In even mentioning the word ressentiment, intellectuals are exposing their own false consciousness. Also, perhaps there is an unease about not pronouncing the word correctly, especially as it is so easy to leave out the extra syllable. Thus, even in the epiphenomena of ressentiment, resentment proliferates
other factors intrude here: of ressentiment Christopher Hamilton. Nietzsche on Nobility and the Affirmation of Life Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 169-193. Springer.

Nietzsche himself describes the intertwining of feelings of guilt, frustration, ressentiment and suffering in terms of the activities of a character he calls the ascetic priest. For, according to Nietzsche, this character persuades the ressentiment afflicted subject, who is inevitably looking for the agent responsible for his suffering, that he himself, the subject, is responsible. And in doing so the priest is exploiting and magnifying the fledgling sense of moralized guilt which had already got a foothold in the way noted. Correlatively, he is deepening the hold of ressentiment over, and in, his flock. Nietzsche understands this whole process of the moralization of guilt and the bad conscience, and the deepening of ressentiment, as a form of life-denial or asceticism.
Christopher Hamilton. Nietzsche on Nobility and the Affirmation of Life Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 169-193. Springer.

inward conception of nobility and affirmation of life that we have been exploring involves, I have argued, an attitude to one's life which does not depend upon the weighing up of good and ill in it to come to a balanced judgement on its worth. Hence, this affirmation is consistent with preferring that one's life have contained less suffering even as one affirms it with that suffering (Napoleon affirmed his defeat and exile but would have preferred a life in which he was ultimately victorious). Similarly, if someone affirms life in the inward sense he will not view others and their deeds on the model of weighing up what is good and bad in them in order to arrive at a balanced judgement on their value. Thus this will give him room, even as he affirms their lives, for condemning them for their behaviour or, alternatively,
The for seeking to bring about the cessation of their sufferings (or, at any rate, for thinking such a cessation would be a good thing). Staten's objection would then get no grip here, for a Kirilov can affirm the lives

this would be an affirmation of the inwardness of others ? an affirmation of the world on behalf of others? not merely an affirmation of one's own life. How are we to understand this affirmation?
of others?including that of the rapist and of the rapist's victim?in a way which has nothing to do with actually affirming the very actions that they commit or the very sufferings that they undergo. And Christopher Hamilton. Nietzsche on Nobility and the Affirmation of Life Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 169-193. Springer.

the affirmation in question will involve the thought that one shares a common lot with others. however mean, squalid, petty or even evil a person's life is, it is still a life with a meaning, even if that meaning is elusive to the person whose life it is. This differentiates it radically from an animal's life, for an animal's life has no meaning: an animal cannot, for example, betray itself or seek to be faithful to itself; it cannot despair of its life; it cannot find its work soul-destroying.58 And someone who affirms such a life thinks that the fact that it is a life with meaning gives the person in question a dignity or value independent of e.g. the vileness of his actions. For, in affirming such a life, what he is doing is expressing his sense that its meaning illuminates his own life and that therefore he is implicated in that life in a way he could not be in, say, an animal's life. He will think that he shares with the other a joint responsibility for humanity; that it is only by luck or grace that he has not committed the deeds that the other has committed; and that he is therefore in some way enmired in the guilt in which the other is enmired. It is such an understanding which is expressed by those, of whom Dostoyevsky speaks in The House of the Dead, who referred to him and his fellow convicts as "unfortunates", a way of speaking which, as
Most fundamentally, I think, We can put the point this way:57 Dostoyevsky says, is "of profound significance".59

Christopher Hamilton. Nietzsche on Nobility and the Affirmation of Life Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 169-193. Springer.

Nietzsche's notions of nobility and the affirmation of life are not plausible as they stand. For he does not and cannot provide a proper account of these ideas in a worldly sense. And his notion of affirmation
In conclusion, then, I have argued that

is broken backed, since to make plausible the idea of not merely an affirmation of one's own life but of an affirmation of life, there would have to be room in his philosophy for the idea that each individual human being has a unique worth or dignity independent of his deeds. But there is no such room.
in an inward sense