When Bad Things Happen to Other People (20 page)

Schadenfreude
 and Conscience

Nietzsche locates the origin of bad conscience and guilt in primitive concepts of obligations to the gods, obligations which bequeath a burden of outstanding debt. He attributes to the rise of Christianity responsibility for the dissemination of the sense of indebtedness, that is, guilt. Freud took up this point in 
The Ego and the Id
 and, following Nietzsche’s lead, depicted guilt as a (frequently unconscious) means to inflicting suffering on oneself. Bad conscience and guilt accomplish the aims Nietzsche imputed to ascetic priests. Given his close association of bad conscience with Christianity, Nietzsche would seem to be saying that Christians are generally capable only of 
Schadenfreude
, not of laughter.3 The self-directed aggression at work in bad conscience, which Nietzsche certainly and Freud perhaps takes to be an enduring state, trumps the other-regarding aggression underlying laughter.

Nietzsche views Christianity as a cancer eating away at modern morality, which he calls “a veritable cult of suffering” in which “what is baptized as pity in the circles of such enthusiasts” has come to be regarded as the epitome of moral sensitivity (
BGE,
 Section 293). The very notion of a moral conscience, which plays so central a role in both Christianity and Schopenhauer’s thought, is for Nietzsche not a set of problems but a problem in itself. For Nietzsche, the morality Schopenhauer espouses amounts to a morality of pity; significantly, he regards this morality as largely compatible with Christianity. As for Christian mores, Nietzsche’s disgust is fathomless:

Who has not pondered sadly over what the German spirit could be! But this nation has deliberately made itself stupid, for practically a thousand years: nowhere else are the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, so viciously abused.4

Throughout the 
Anti-Christ
 Nietzsche denounces both the ideals of institutionalized Christianity and the failure of this religion to live up to its own perverse standards. Nietzsche’s target in 
The Anti-Christ
 is not simply institutional Christianity: he also repudiates even the purest exemplification of Christian values (namely Christ), though he acknowledges Christ’s “perverse achievement” of 
perfect
 decadence. Christians, says Nietzsche, fall short of Christ’s ideal; they preach decadence but practice 
ressentiment
. Because of 
ressentiment
, a “transvaluation of values,” the laughter of Christians involves bad, not good, conscience.

Nietzsche’s thinking is, of course, notoriously unsympathetic to Christians. It would be unwise, however, simply to discount his conclusions as 
ad hominem
 or ill-founded. Sympathy with Christian views or the idea that we should love our neighbors as ourselves should not commit one to embrace Schopenhauer’s full-blown censure of
Schadenfreude
too quickly. For it does not follow that Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy is false if Nietzsche’s is true and 
vice versa
. In a much stronger sense Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy is pitted squarely against Nietzsche’s by virtue of the position each takes on pity or fellow feeling.

For Nietzsche, the will to power of noble individuals affirms their difference from others. They do not want others to be like them any more than they want to be like others. For the rest of the world, however, the differences between individuals must become as small as possible, if the “slave morality” is to dominate.5 For Nietzsche, 
Mitgefühl
 (fellow feeling) has a conditional value: it is desirable when one sympathizes with a noble or worthy individual, but undesirable when one feels it toward an unworthy individual (
BGE,
 Section 284 and 
Will to Power,
 Sections 864 and 1020). Schopenhauer’s moral assessment of
Schadenfreude
collapses personal differences; Nietzsche’s account accentuates them.

Pity is fundamentally linked to suffering, as the German terms 
Mitleid
 and 
Leid
 indicate. In German, suffering implies community, as the word 
Mitleid
 connotes that one suffers
with
 others. But because 
Mitleid
 focuses on the negative states of others, Nietzsche regards it as life-denying and without positive value. Nietzsche’s use of 
Mitleid
 suggests that he distinguishes between compassion and pity only ambiguously. To the extent that 
Mitleid
 (presumably “compassion” in these instances) involves a genuine concern for the good of others, it is fundamentally life-affirming and positive. This means that though 
Mitleid
 is 
principally
 negative for Nietzsche, it is not wholly so. In any event there can be no doubt that Nietzsche is attacking, rather than praising, when he refers to Christianity as 
the
 religion of 
Mitleid
 (“die Religion des Mitleidens,” 
GS,
 Section 377; 
BGE,
 Section 206; 
GM,
 III, Section 25; 
A,
 Section 7).

Nietzsche maintains that a proclivity to pity or fellow feeling leads to a perverse privileging of sadness. He says, “Quite in general, pity crosses the law of development, which is the law of 
selection
” because it “conserves all that is miserable” even while lamenting its misery and consequently condemning life thereby (
A,
 Section 7). Sounding quite Nietzschean, Lawrence Blum points out that it is possible for a compassionate person to be insensitive to the pleasures of others.6 A focus on misery and suffering in the absence of regard for others’ joys and pleasures constitutes a limitation in the moral consciousness of the merely compassionate person.

I pointed out in the previous chapter that Schopenhauer advocates a passionate participation in the sufferings of others, which leads him to demonize an aversion to pity. Schopenhauer judges Kant’s declaration in the 
Critique of Practical Reason
 that a right-thinking person desires to be free from “the feelings of sympathy (
Gefühl des Mitleids
) and soft-hearted fellow feeling (
weichherzigen Teilnehmung
)”7 thoroughly repugnant. For in such a world as Kant’s, only a “slavish fear of the gods” or “frankly self-interested concerns” could move a hard heart to help a sufferer (
OBM
, p. 66). What is particularly striking here is an unusual example of agreement between Nietzsche and Kant. Though in 
The Metaphysics of Morals
 Kant takes sympathetic feeling to be a duty, he qualifies the obligation:

...when another suffers and I let myself (through my imagination) also become infected [
anstecken lasse
] by his pain, which I still cannot remedy, then two people suffer, although the evil (in nature) affects only the one. But it cannot possibly be a duty to increase the evils of the world, or therefore to do good from pity [
Mitleid
]... (p. 205)

David Cartwright has noted Nietzsche’s obvious debt to Kant’s critique of pity.8 Nietzsche objects to pity because it erodes the self by immersing us in the plight of a sufferer. Throwing ourselves into the problems of others does no good to anyone. Misery may love company, but this abject company escalates suffering. Nietzsche, like Kant, considers acting from pity an indulgence of one’s inclinations to the extent that it is oneself that really benefits. For both Kant and Nietzsche, pity transmits suffering.

Nietzsche concurs with Schopenhauer that suffering is contagious: for him, however, this happens because of, rather than despite, pity. He says: “Suffering itself becomes contagious through pity...Schopenhauer was within his rights in this: life is denied, made 
more worthy of denial
 by pity—pity is 
practical
 nihilism” (
A
, Section 7). Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests; for them easy prey—and that is what all who suffer are—is enchanting.

In 
Human, All Too Human
 we are told that we should 
manifest
 pity, but take care not to feel it, for “the unfortunate” are so stupid that the manifestation of pity constitutes the greatest good in the world (p. 38). Children weep and wail in order to make themselves pitied; they, like invalids and the mentally afflicted, display their misfortunes in order to hurt others. The pity they manage to evoke is a consolation for the weak and suffering, inasmuch as it shows them that, all their weakness notwithstanding; they possess at any rate one power: the power to hurt, to drag others down with them. In this feeling of superiority, derived from inducing others to pity, the “unfortunate man” gains a sort of pleasure: he is still of sufficient importance to cause affliction in the world. The thirst for pity is thus a thirst for self-enjoyment, and that at the expense of one’s fellow men. Pity becomes not the antidote to the
Schadenfreude
of others but, curiously, a means toward achieving
Schadenfreude
for ourselves.

For this reason it appears that Nietzsche and Schopenhauer 
agree
 that
Schadenfreude
is objectionable, though for sharply opposed reasons. Schopenhauer holds that it violates the principles of compassion and Nietzsche regards it as a correlate of 
ressentiment
. Because Nietzsche seems to have in mind a certain contrast between “
Schadenfreude
 with a good conscience” and “
Schadenfreude
 with a bad conscience,” it seems safer to conclude that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche agree only that some
Schadenfreude
is objectionable.

Pity that produces
Schadenfreude
stands as a good example of what Nietzsche describes as “being 
schadenfroh
 with a bad conscience,” because its only affirmation is of the power to hurt. This kind of hurting is indirect, like the pouting or groaning that aims to interrupt the tranquility of others. This “power” perversely imitates what Nietzsche takes to be bona fide power, which he associates with nobles. Another example of this sort is the joy that comes from 
observing
 the hurt of others. Nietzsche’s sharpest objection to this perverse imitation of power surfaces in the acerbic remarks on St. Thomas Aquinas and Tertullian in the first essay of 
On the Genealogy of Morals
. Nietzsche reacts with astonishment and revulsion to St. Thomas’s assertion (in 
Summa Theologiae
, III, Supplementum, Q. 94, Art. 1) that the joy of the saints in heaven will derive in part from a view of the suffering of the damned in hell. (In the third article of this supplement, to which Nietzsche does not refer, the saints take joy in the 
justice
 of God’s order.) The weak, finally made strong in heaven, rejoice over the power to look down on the very nobles whose various strengths tortured them on earth.

How do nobles react to the suffering of others? In 
Thus Spake
 
Zarathustra
 Nietzsche does not consider Zarathustra’s sensitivity to the misfortune of others appropriate, although he judges Zarathustra’s shame at seeing the sufferer suffer preferable to the behavior of the merciful, who feel blessed in their pity.9 Further, he says, “if I do pity, it is preferably from a distance.” Nietzsche attacks only one kind of pity and neighbor-love, the kind that entails commiseration or an indulgence of others’ weaknesses. To be sure, if a friend should suffer, one will suffer with him, though “it might be better to hide this feeling under a hard shell” (
Z
 I, Section 14). A friend succeeds morally if he helps the sufferer regain his self-mastery. Pity exemplifies the bad kind of love we might have for ourselves or others; the struggle for self-perfection represents the superior love. The irony of Nietzsche’s position is that, sneering aside, it is by far more compassionate than the judgment of Schopenhauer, who works to ensure that persons who do on occasion feel 
schadenfroh
 suffer inexorable guilt as a result.

Nietzsche’s reflections on humor, particularly the humor of the noble or the laughter of children, suggest that only the strong can experience “being 
schadenfroh
 with a good conscience.” We may take as an example of this phenomenon Julian Young’s suggestion that the early Nietzsche’s Dionysian worldview is an expression of 
Schadenfreude
.10 That view figures prominently in Nietzsche’s work 
The Birth of Tragedy
 (1872), which has religion as its fundamental concern. Art is to fill the void left by the demise of the Christian God and the role of the tragic theater in Greek life is to provide a model for the regeneration of modern culture.

Nietzsche avers that the Greek theater provides metaphysical consolation for the horrors of human life no less than a Christian church does. The Apollonian spectator rejoices in the annihilation of the tragic hero. Just as barbarians celebrated their ecstatic absorption into the primal oneness in acts of real violence performed on real individuals, the Greek audience performed the same act symbolically. The performance of a tragedy offers a symbolic sacrifice to Dionysus. The manifestly therapeutic
Schadenfreude
of the Greek spectators exuberantly endorses supra-individual identity, an affirmation aptly thought of in terms of burning money in celebration of sudden accession to great wealth. Nietzsche does recognize a salubrious strain of 
Schadenfreude
, then, one which can be indulged with a good conscience.

I too affirm a healthy kind of 
Schadenfreude
, despite my disagreement with a number of Nietzsche’s views on human interaction. His anti-Judaism and anti-Christianity, contempt for democracy, justification of slavery, misogyny, and enthusiasm for eugenics are all reasons to exercise caution in accepting Nietzsche’s aphorisms. One need not accept all of Nietzsche’s reflections on human interaction to endorse his view of 
Schadenfreude,
 though. Although Nietzschean morality undermines to some important extent the most vital sources of human love, it clarifies the ramifications and potential of human strength. In a world in which we must compete with one another for any number of scarce goods, even compassion, our very will to survive jeopardizes the chances that someone else will find happiness. Beyond this, our holding moral beliefs and principles will in some real sense exacerbate the inevitable suffering of others who do not agree with us.