When Bad Things Happen to Other People (19 page)

Is it appropriate to sympathize with a criminal who deserves to suffer? Schopenhauer insists that even when persons can be said to deserve their punishment, we as moral beings must never enjoy their suffering. We must sympathize with sufferers and hope sincerely that their future actions will be more virtuous. For Schopenhauer, there is scarcely an inappropriate instance of sympathy with another person. Agreement on this point has been far from complete.

Scheler suggests in 
The Nature of Sympathy
 that the moral value of sympathy varies according to the appropriateness of the feelings of the person sympathized with and the value of this person him- or herself.

...the total value of an act of fellow-feeling varies according to the worth of the value-situation which is the occasion of the other person’s sorrow or joy. In other words, to sympathize with joys and sorrows which are appropriate to their circumstances is preferable to sympathizing with those which are not. By the same token, it is better to have sympathy for a person of superior worth than for someone of lesser value.26

As disturbing an idea as this last one might seem, this same thinking lies at the heart of the culture from which Aristotle’s ethics of virtue arose (Aristotle’s conception of the good is also highly elitist, centering on affluent, male citizens). In the 
Rhetoric
 Aristotle asserts that pity is pain at the vividly entertained thought of disaster for someone 
like oneself in power
 
and susceptibility
. Aristotle, like Nietzsche, holds that awareness of the pain, suffering, or general wretchedness of someone’s life does not automatically mean that it makes sense to pity that person (
Rhetoric
 2.8). If we find another person too alien, we may not sympathize with his or her suffering.

Nietzsche concurs. In 
The Will to Power
 he writes, “A great man...wants no ‘sympathetic’ heart, but servants, tools; in his intercourse with men he is always intent on making something out of them...There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame, his own justice that is beyond appeal.”27 MacIntyre quotes that passage in his 
After
 
Virtue
 in the context of an argument to the effect that the only way of rejecting Nietzsche is to embrace the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues. But Aristotle, like Nietzsche, urges us not to sympathize with the weak. Against them both we ought to hold that we sympathize above all with people, not with certain personal qualities. What MacIntyre wants to say is that there is something to value in the suffering of the downtrodden, as well as in the distress of the exalted. Similarly, it is just as worthwhile to sympathize with someone whose fears or anxieties are ill-founded as with someone whose fears or anxieties are well-founded.

We can misconstrue others’ interests. The difficulty is not so much whether we can appropriately correct others’ preferences when thinking about their interest, but to what extent we have the right to act on the basis of those corrections if the people concerned do not recognize them. For Schopenhauer, everyone has an interest in receiving the compassion of others. We must not expect compassion, however. To do so would be to exercise optimism, which Schopenhauer denounces:

For the rest, I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind. Let no one imagine that the Christian teaching is favourable to optimism; on the contrary, in the Gospels world and evil are used almost as synonymous expressions. (
WWR
 I, p. 326)

Being optimistic becomes analogous to being 
schadenfroh
. So we are to commit ourselves steadfastly to compassion without expecting to find it in others. For Schopenhauer, it is always appropriate to show compassion, but inappropriate to expect it.

A Mosaic of Suffering

The variety of ways in which people suffer defies ready classification. It is a little easier to grasp the range of our emotional responses to the bad things that happen to other people.

We cannot identify with or have respect or compassion for others without feeling a certain way when they are violated. This response is connected to the feelings of guilt we would experience were we the ones who perpetrated the violation and to our own need for sympathy, had the misfortune befallen us. This emotional state calls for compassion, but the questions of whether compassion is appropriate in situations involving trivial suffering and what the limits of a person’s sympathy might be find no satisfactory answer in Schopenhauer’s reflections.

Of course, the broad category of suffering certainly includes misery. We should not, however, limit ourselves to dark and heavy examples in the course of evaluating responses to suffering. Many light and transient ones are no less worthy of attention for their levity. Further, not all suffering is to be deplored completely: some people deserve to suffer. The defects of
Schadenfreude
as a moral category present a fundamental problem in Schopenhauer’s and Roberts’s conception of
Schadenfreude
as a moral experience. The best way to see the weakness of this theoretical conception is by looking at the everyday distinctions their accounts fail to accommodate.

In a world without suffering, there would be no 
Schadenfreude
. This is the world for which Schopenhauer longs. Schopenhauer recommends extrication from the phenomenal world to which suffering is ineluctably attached. He advises us to quicken “the will’s self-elimination” because “at every step the will of the individual is crossed and thwarted by the chance of inanimate nature, by contrary aims and intentions, even by the malice inspired by others” (
WWR
 I, p. 188). But if the price of steering clear of
Schadenfreude
is living less, then the prize seems hardly worth the fight.

FIVE:
Celebrating Suffering

INDEED, THIS IS PRECISELY what Nietzsche, the relentless yes-sayer, maintains: Schopenhauer’s prize comes at too high a cost. Without the personal separateness which
Schadenfreude
presupposes, there would be precious little personality at risk of being bruised by laughter—not so much because we are immune to pain, but because there is no particularly distinctive personality left to harm. Nietzsche holds that
Schadenfreude
is not something that should alarm us, even as he acknowledges that being the object of
Schadenfreude
can be unpleasant. Being laughed at, either silently or overtly, bothers Nietzsche quite a bit less than it does Schopenhauer.

Nietzsche’s critique of Schopenhauer captures the moral problem of 
Schadenfreude
: although both take human suffering quite seriously, they thoroughly disagree on how to respond to it. Like Wittgenstein, Nietzsche first approached the discipline of philosophy under the spell of Schopenhauer. Nietzsche read the works of his much-admired teacher avidly, and Schopenhauer’s thoughts and words cascaded through his writings throughout the 1870s. The motivation for Nietzsche’s subsequent about-face provides one of the most forceful illustrations of problems we encounter in thinking about suffering.

Nietzsche’s various works contain countless references to the problem of envy. Happy people must constantly beware of unhappy people, Nietzsche admonishes. The thinker whose Zarathustra at one point exclaims, “How could they endure my happiness, if I did not put around it accidents, and winter-privations, and bearskin caps, and enmantling snowflakes!,” believes he has identified the genesis of the moral problem of 
Schadenfreude
. In Part II, Section 27, of 
Human, All Too Human
 (from 1886) we find Nietzsche’s account of how
Schadenfreude
comes to be:

Explanation of 
Schadenfreude.
—
Schadenfreude
 originates in the fact that, in certain respects of which he is well aware, everyone feels unwell, is oppressed by care or envy or sorrow: the harm that befalls another makes him our equal, it appeases our envy.—If, on the other hand, he happens to feel perfectly well, he nonetheless gathers up his neighbor’s misfortune in his consciousness as a capital upon which to draw when he himself faces misfortune: thus he too experiences 
Schadenfreude.
 The disposition bent upon equality thus extends its demands to the domain of happiness and chance as well:
Schadenfreude
is the commonest expression of the victory and restoration of equality within the higher world-order too. It is only since man has learned to see in other men beings like and equal to himself, that is to say only since the establishment of society, that
Schadenfreude
has existed.1

Sounding a good deal like Rousseau (specifically, 
Second Discourse
 156), Nietzsche ties
Schadenfreude
to inequality and sees both everywhere. The contrast between Nietzsche’s and Schopenhauer’s moral assessment of
Schadenfreude
could hardly be more pronounced. I will examine the implications of the separateness and inequality of persons for thinking about compassion and human solidarity at the conclusion of this chapter. For now, a crucial inference from this “explanation” demands emphasis: Nietzsche takes
Schadenfreude
to be as 
universal
 a phenomenon as the civilization with which he associates it. Nietzsche believes that no society can be effective or even attain a tolerable social climate if it does not employ a belief that will bring the underprivileged man to see, if not himself, then the effect of blind chance as a cause of his condition. Otherwise, the unfortunate person may blame a neighbor for his misfortune, with potentially disastrous social effects.

Nietzsche believes that we have been socially conditioned to view the setbacks of other persons in terms of our own well-being. Ever worried that people around us may be flourishing more than we are, we view their suffering as a chance to even the score, as it were. In Nietzsche’s genealogy of 
Schadenfreude
, our pleasure comes not just from the actual suffering of others but also from the fact that they suffer. How curious that Nietzsche, a consummate philologist, uses the word
Schadenfreude
this loosely: literally,
Schadenfreude
should refer to pleasure in the suffering of others, not in the justice to which that suffering attests. I have followed Nietzsche’s broader usage of the word “
Schadenfreude
.”

For Nietzsche,
Schadenfreude
is a thoroughly social emotion, one that, like guilt, shame, love, and jealousy, connects people. The social interaction on which it depends can be real or imagined. Without the social glue of 
Schadenfreude
, we would be more distant from each other and would likely feel more alienated from a society that causes us to suffer almost daily.
Schadenfreude
disrupts the sense that the rest of the world forms some unified force: the experience of
Schadenfreude
makes the identities of separate persons more distinct, more concrete. This grounding effect makes it easier for us to relate to others as unique personalities in a social constellation, instead of as faceless members of enemy forces. In Nietzsche’s social understanding of 
Schadenfreude
, enjoying the misfortunes of others puts us in their debt, for they have given us pleasure. We repay that debt by offering up our own misfortunes to them.

Nietzsche’s use of the phrase “the disposition bent upon equality” pierces to the heart of his understanding of 
Schadenfreude
. For Nietzsche,
Schadenfreude
says more about people who feel it than about those who suffer. Equality rests on the conviction that we deserve as much as our neighbors, which means that Nietzsche understands
Schadenfreude
to include an important consideration of what we take our neighbors to deserve. Nietzsche’s cynicism about our ability to make such a determination selflessly ran quite deep. This cynicism colored Nietzsche’s view of modern ideas about corporal punishment and social justice.

Another pregnant reference to
Schadenfreude
surfaces in Nietzsche’s laconic “definition” of laughter found in 
The Gay Science
: “Laughter: being 
schadenfroh
 with a good conscience.”2 Nietzsche’s vitality, astute eye, and remarkable intuitions converge in this aphorism and deserve to be taken seriously. In this remark and throughout the second essay in 
On the
 
Genealogy of Morals
 Nietzsche indicates that taking pleasure in the sight of the suffering of others is a 
universal
 characteristic of human beings. It should not seem farfetched to infer from Nietzsche’s 
aperçu
 that even he possesses firsthand knowledge of 
Schadenfreude
, in contrast to his probably disingenuous claim in 
Ecce Homo
(“Why I Am So Wise,” Section 5) never to have experienced resentment, which is closely related to 
Schadenfreude.
My analysis of
Schadenfreude
owes much to Nietzsche’s penetrating insights into laughter.

Walter Kaufmann details in a lengthy footnote to Section 294 of 
Beyond Good and Evil
 the extent to which Nietzsche’s estimation of laughter, especially at the defects of others, borrows and diverges from Hobbes’s. For Nietzsche, laughter is a symbol of a joyous affirmation of life and of the refusal to bow before the spirit of gravity. Yet Nietzsche also refers to laughter as a vice. How can it be that he interprets a weakness, albeit an “Olympian” one, as a sign of strength? The answer must lie in his distinction between being
schadenfroh
 with a good conscience and being 
schadenfroh
 with a bad conscience. This distinction rests on the working of 
Mitleid
, which in turn depends on a certain understanding of the separateness of persons.

The aim of examining these fine points is, first, to infer from this “definition” of laughter and relevant passages in other works Nietzsche’s assessment of the moral status of
Schadenfreude
and, second, to question the pivotal distinction between enjoying 
that
 someone suffers and enjoying his or her suffering. I want to put forth Nietzsche’s understanding of
Schadenfreude
as for the most part exemplary: with Nietzsche, I conclude that we should think of
Schadenfreude
as pleasure both 
that
 someone suffers and
in
 his or her suffering. I share much of Nietzsche’s cynicism about justice, though not all of it. And so I take a softer view of
Schadenfreude
than he ultimately does: though he looks with scorn on the idea of selfless beliefs about justice, I do not.