When Bad Things Happen to Other People (3 page)

My exploration of demonized pleasure has been motivated in part by a desire to understand the sensibility of people who routinely seek out stories of tragedy or betrayal among public figures. If there is no such thing as morally acceptable pleasure in others’ misfortunes, then we should feel guilty when we relish the sudden reversals of good fortune we hear about on television or read about in the newspapers. We stand guilty of malice, because any pleasure in the misfortune of another is immoral.

Our culture both encourages and thwarts pleasure in the misfortunes of others. These mixed messages can generate terrible anxiety, some of which I aim to dispel.

KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS

Sigmund Freud

CD - Civilization and Its Discontents

FI - The Future of an Illusion

JR - Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious

Immanuel Kant

MM - The Metaphysics of Morals

LE - Lectures on Ethics

OFBS - Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime

Friedrich Nietzsche

A - The Anti-Christ

BGE - Beyond Good and Evil

EH - Ecce, Homo

GM -On the Genealogy of Morals

HH -Human, All Too Human

WP - The Will to Power

Z - Thus Spake Zarathustra

Arthur Schopenhauer

OBM - On the Basis of Morality

WWR - The World as Will and Representation

I: WHEN PRETTY BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO OTHER PEOPLE

THESE CHAPTERS CONSIDER THE MORALITY of taking pleasure in others’ misfortunes. The main point I try to establish is that this emotional response stands on social standards of moral appropriateness. When it does not rise from convictions about social justice, the pleasure is not necessarily malicious: low self-esteem, for example, should slow us from a hasty condemnation of those who inappropriately celebrate the woes of other people.

Beyond that, comedy complicates our intentions to treat other people well. Appreciation for the comical may signal a willingness to work out moral ambiguity by playing; in comedy we try out attitudes to other people without really knowing where those attitudes will lead. Comedy deserves moral tolerance, for an explorer’s attitude differs from an assailant’s.

Finally, we disguise this demonized pleasure for reasons that raise questions both about our sincerity and about the sophistication of the communities we inhabit.

ONE:
Much Ado about Nothing?

THE GERMANS HAVE COINED A WORD for pleasure in the misfortunes of other people:
Schadenfreude
. The idea of such pleasure horrified R.C. Trench, whom the 
Oxford English Dictionary
 identifies as the first person to use the word
Schadenfreude
in English. Trench, an English archbishop, concluded in 1852 that the very availability of a word for “the joy of another’s injury” would taint all of a culture that relied on that language. It was as though all German speakers carried an infection, just by virtue of their linguistic resources. Trench worried that the infection might spread to English speakers.

Trench succeeded in persuading at least one editor for the 
Oxford
 
English Dictionary
. Unlike the 
Oxford English Dictionary
, most American and German lexicons do not associate
Schadenfreude
with malice. Because English already included the word “malice” at the time of Trench’s writing,
Schadenfreude
stood for something even worse.

The 
Oxford English Dictionary
 also runs together
Schadenfreude
and cruelty. According to the 
OED
, cruelty is “the quality of being cruel; disposition to inflict suffering; delight in or indifference to the pain or misery of others; mercilessness, hardheartedness: 
esp
. as exhibited in action.” On this point C.D. Broad demonstrated a much deeper understanding of cruelty than the 
OED
, for he left moral evaluation of pleasure in others’ misfortunes open to the notion of appropriateness—both with respect to the just deserts of the sufferer and the degree of suffering involved.

Since Trench, scholars have disagreed about how to translate
Schadenfreude
into English. In a footnote to his translation of Nietzsche’s 
On the
 
Genealogy of Morals
,1 Walter Kaufmann claims that Arthur Danto’s 
Nietzsche as Philosopher
 2 features numerous mistranslations. Kaufmann asserts that there is no English equivalent for
Schadenfreude
and that Danto errs in rendering it as either “the wicked pleasure in the beholding of suffering” (p. 181) or “in the sheer spectacle of suffering: in fights, executions,...bullbaiting, cockfights, and the like” (p. 174). Against Danto, Kaufmann insists, “In such contexts the word is utterly out of place; it signifies the petty, mischievous delight felt in the discomfiture of another human being.” I agree with Kaufmann that English has no equivalent for 
Schadenfreude
. Though Kaufmann does well to eliminate the notion of wickedness from 
Schadenfreude
, he fails to make room for the notion of desert, or deservedness, at the heart of
Schadenfreude
. True,
Schadenfreude
does signify petty mischievousness at the shallow end of the spectrum; toward the deeper end, though,
Schadenfreude
can center on quite significant misfortunes (or so I will argue in Part Two).

Danto considers this pleasure wicked; Kaufmann does not. How should we regard the moral status of 
Schadenfreude
? To the extent that
Schadenfreude
signifies love of justice or repugnance to injustice, this emotion is a virtue. Aristotle tells us that every virtue is in the middle between two vices; the virtue represents a “golden mean.” But for Aristotle, not every vice is a matter of degree. For example, all adultery and all assault are wrong, even once in a while. Envy and spite are wrong emotions, no matter when you feel them. The very words “adultery” and “spite” indicate that they are wrong, unlike “sex” and “anger,” which are in many circumstances perfectly acceptable 
(Nichomachean Ethics
 1107a8–27). Likewise, pleasure in the misfortunes of others in various circumstances is morally acceptable. Only we ourselves can know whether we have hit the mean, that is to say, whether we feel
Schadenfreude
, as opposed to envy or malicious glee. “
Schadenfreude
,” unlike “spite” or “adultery,” is morally acceptable. It lies between the vices of envy and cruelty and easily unsettles us by its proximity to both.

Naming pleasure in the misfortunes or suffering of others underscores the extent to which language is conventional. Conventions do not undermine meaning by making it arbitrary; instead, conventions give life to meaning. This is to say that I am not arbitrarily choosing an idiosyncratic definition of
Schadenfreude
in order to validate my defense of it:
Schadenfreude
is not a word I have coined. Different kinds of English speakers already believe that
Schadenfreude
rides on the coat-tails of justice and that this is much as it should be. The account of
Schadenfreude
I develop here may surprise native German speakers, but what I seek to provide is not an etymological sketch but a moral evaluation of the emotion.

Given that the word
Schadenfreude
is German, one might well ask at the outset whether Germans hold that what it names is evil. Even though a simple glance at German dictionaries should readily confirm that they do not usually associate the emotion with the diabolical, caution is in order. There is the real danger that we will simply misunderstand the Germans or be led to think of them as far too much or far too little like us, because the ways we think about them may function to confirm our personal prejudices. I know of no German study of the moral status of 
Schadenfreude
, and it is entirely possible that a scholarly German might say that I have pressed too hard on the word, particularly in insisting on a crucial notion of desert at the heart of the emotion. If nothing else, we can use the German word to challenge and rethink our own ambivalence about the misfortunes of others.

I rely principally on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and the moral theologian Bernard Häring to think through 
Schadenfreude
. Native German speakers all, they individually take human suffering as the organizing focus of their work (this is not to say that I will provide an elaborate analysis of any of these thinkers; throughout this project I focus on the relevant claims of various philosophers, rather than attempting to do full justice to any single thinker). An unabating curiosity about suffering drives Schopenhauer’s contention that philosophical reflection derives from “the sight of the 
evil and wickedness
 in the world. Not merely that the world exists, but still more that it is such a miserable and melancholy world is the tormenting problem of metaphysics.”3 Schopenhauer faults his predecessors for distancing themselves from the prevalence and urgency of human suffering. Nietzsche, who initially thought of himself as a successor to Schopenhauer, similarly works to stomp out the raging fire of human suffering. An absorbing preoccupation with human suffering unifies the vast work of Freud, who famously claims in the early 
Studies on
 
Hysteria
 (1895) that his therapeutic goal is to replace hysterical suffering with common unhappiness. Häring, a Catholic priest who played an important role in the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), strove to eliminate the suffering caused by opposing religious groups.

There is good reason to enlist the help of a religious believer to think through 
Schadenfreude
, as religious writers have devoted much more energy to exploring human suffering than have philosophical ones. Only the Roman Catholic Church and Calvinism profess a belief in (their own respective) divinely ordained priesthood, and so caution is in order here. It would doubtless be a mistake to take what Häring has to say about either suffering or
Schadenfreude
as broadly representative of religious thinkers.

Häring’s is just one view, albeit an influential one. Häring is useful in part because he would have united Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud in contempt for himself.

People everywhere suffer in a myriad of different ways and for many different reasons. Everyone suffers at least occasionally and usually welcomes solace from suffering.
Schadenfreude
represents one form of solace in a pain-filled existence. Although it is conceivable that a person might enjoy his or her own suffering (as in grief, remorse, masochism, and guilt), I focus on extrinsic suffering (that is, the suffering of others) and the corresponding solace it offers.

I will turn now to an autobiographical confession of 
Schadenfreude
. Through it, I hope to illustrate what I consider trivial misfortune.

Kafka’s Examination of Conscience

Franz Kafka, a writer whose emotional acuity justifies the exemplification of his use of German, delights in the embarrassment of his sister in the autobiographical 
Brief an den Vater
 (
Letter to Father
). Writing it at the age of 36, with only five more years to live as a result of tuberculosis, Kafka struggles eloquently to come to terms with his oppressive father. Here Kafka describes his father’s mistreatment of a sister:

...for example Elli, at whom I was angry for years. I enjoyed a feast of malice and
Schadenfreude
when it was said of her at almost every meal, “She has to sit ten meters away from the table, the fat girl” and when you, maliciously sitting on your chair without the slightest trace of being a friend, a bitter enemy, would exaggeratedly imitate the way she sat, which you found utterly loathsome.4

Shortly thereafter, Kafka remarks that his father’s expenditure of anger and malice did not fit its object. The judgment of inappropriateness ultimately supports the blame Kafka levels at his father.

We can safely follow Kafka in thinking of Elli’s suffering as fairly trivial, despite the troubling image of “a bitter enemy” on the battlefield. Part of the great value of Kafka’s examination of conscience is that it illustrates by its ambiguity the difficulty of analyzing 
Schadenfreude
. Pivotal issues that Kafka’s passage raises but does not definitively resolve include 1) the idea that
Schadenfreude
is just another word for malice; 2) the idea that, though different from malice,
Schadenfreude
presupposes it; 3) the importance of what others think we deserve; 4) the moral import of the kind of suffering that gives rise to 
Schadenfreude
; and 5) the relationship of
Schadenfreude
to cruelty. I will turn to these points now and conclude that Kafka does not reveal himself to be malicious or evil.

1. The identification of
   Schadenfreude
   with malice
   

First of all, Kafka does not define 
Schadenfreude
. But he juxtaposes 
Bösheit
 (which can be translated as either “anger” or, more appropriately,

“malice,” given his purposeful recourse to 
Zorn
 [“anger”] to emphasize that he means malice) with
Schadenfreude
in a way that distinguishes between them. Malice, generally speaking, is (a) a disposition to injure others and/or (b) to wish that injury occurs to them. Note that malice includes both an active (a) and a passive (b) element. Malice, which I will examine in closer detail shortly, may or may not involve a determination of what others deserve.

The “
und
” of “
Bösheit und Schadenfreude
” (in the original German) unites the two terms but also emphasizes that they are distinct. Some writers, particularly those of poetic bents, might use synonyms in a way that other writers, particularly those of philosophical bents, might construe as unnecessarily repetitive. For example, we might read of someone’s “fear and trembling” or of her “sorrow and misery.” Kafka’s writing throughout the letter suggests a careful articulation of charges against his father. Recounting his father’s sins, Kafka strives more to define experience than to embellish it.