When Bad Things Happen to Other People (31 page)

That
Schadenfreude
is often disguised, qualified, or denied explains in part why it rarely shows itself. Gossip and laughter may indicate 
Schadenfreude
, but
Schadenfreude
does not always end in gossip or laughter—for people may repress their laughter out of fear that others will perceive their enjoyment as evil. In this respect
Schadenfreude
resembles envy, jealousy, malice, and hatred. Of course, such repression is not always rational; more often than not, as Nietzsche’s theory of 
ressentiment
 explains, this is a matter of instinct. For this reason we should not expect characters in novels to experience
Schadenfreude
in ways which are readily identifiable, even to themselves. Dorrit Cohn has remarked, “Modern novelists who know their Freud, therefore, would be the last to resort to direct quotation in order to express their characters’ unconscious processes.”6 We should not expect literary sources in either English or German to report on the prevalence of 
Schadenfreude
.

The reading and interpretation of a confession or a letter such as Kafka’s can develop readers’ sensitivity to problems of self-esteem and justice, so they can understand 
Schadenfreude
. In reading Kafka’s 
Brief an
 
den Vater
, some readers may infer from the expression of
Schadenfreude
a need for subterfuge. We can, then, accept Jaggar’s main point: outlaw emotions may be culturally relegated to silence and new ways of describing them may be socially discouraged.

This point should not seem controversial. Remember, the 
Oxford English Dictionary
 reports that
Schadenfreude
first appeared in the English language in 1852. The term arrived embedded in a warning:

What a fearful thing is it that any language should have a word expressive of the pleasure which men feel at the calamities of others; for the existence of the word bears testimony to the existence of the thing.

And so, the logic might go, if we can successfully keep
Schadenfreude
out of the English language, we can successfully deny the existence of the emotion it names. What is puzzling is why Trench even discussed the very word he hoped to debar from the English language. Curiously, Trench seemed to assume that people need to be taught any but the most obscure vices. It would be extreme and, in fact, erroneous to infer from Trench that the silent celebration of the accidental misfortunes of others was unknown in Europe or America before or after his study.

The 
Oxford English Dictionary
, in identifying
Schadenfreude
with malice, perpetuates Trench’s anxiety. Taboos can be prolonged 
ad infinitum
 if they are never questioned, but they certainly profit from periodic reinforcement, a good example of which is found in the writing of Nicholas Rescher:

From the standpoint of ethical legitimation, the positive vicarious affects have an altogether different ethical footing than the negative. For the negative (that is, antipathetic) vicarious affects in fact represent unworthy, morally negative attitudes: hostility, malice, envy, jealousy,
Schadenfreude,
and the like. From an ethical point of view they merit nonrecognition and dismissal as reprehensible.7

Over a century after R.C. Trench’s unambiguous advice to close the linguistic gates in the face of
Schadenfreude
, the idea that “outlaw emotions” ought to be banished from ethical thought endures. That something is prohibited, however, is hardly indication that it did or does not take place.

The disavowal of
Schadenfreude
appears ironic because if outlaw emotions achieved expression, they would be quantifiable and therefore less problematic. Free and frank discussion would be perhaps the most effective means of countering 
Schadenfreude
. Openly displayed emotions are less dangerous than concealed ones because their release can be observed by all; they are thus subject to public control.

The agenda I impute to Trench and Rescher 
inter alia
 has enjoyed some success. Unlike other German words such as “kindergarten,” “sauerkraut,” or “kitsch,”
Schadenfreude
is no more familiar to us now than it was a hundred years ago. Were it even slightly common in our vocabulary, it seems unlikely that the 1989 Vintage edition of 
The Gay Science
 would include the following footnote to Nietzsche’s use of the word 
schadenfroh
 (a cognate of
Schadenfreude
): “The word is famous for being untranslatable: it signifies taking a mischievous delight in the discomfort of another person.”8 We are left wondering just 
where
 this word is famous and 
why
 it has not been adopted if it is in fact untranslatable.

That it does not enjoy wide circulation in America should surprise us more than the knowledge that it is not used in, say, Italy, Japan, Russia, or Spain. An estimated eighty percent of the English vocabulary is derived from other languages, such as Danish, Latin, Greek, Swedish, Hebrew, Arabic, Bengali, and Native American tongues. The 
Oxford English Dictionary
 lists some 500,000 entries. By contrast, German has only 185,000 words; French a meager 100,000. It is probably English’s greedy appetite for “loan words” that makes it such a rich and yeasty language.9 The absence of a one-word equivalent of
Schadenfreude
from, say, Italian or Spanish vocabularies thus has little bearing on the claims I make here.10

Much caution needs to be exercised in assessing a linguistic deficiency, even one just within the context of American parlance. About etiology and verbal deficiency Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out,

Notice that there is no word correctly translatable by our modern word “morality” in any ancient or medieval language. And this lack of word is a symptom of the different ways in which different forms and aspects of social life were classified in the societies in which those languages were spoken and written...Ethics, in both Greek practice and Aristotelian thought, was part of politics; the understanding of the moral and intellectual virtues, in both medieval practice and Thomistic thought, was part of theology. To abstract the ethics from its place in either is already to distort.11

MacIntyre by no means wants to say that morality is a function of modernity, only that we moderns have a different way of referring to, and therefore understanding, a familiar concept. Further, this concept has evolved in such a way that a simple glance from one society or era to another will frustrate our attempt to compare the role of
Schadenfreude
in other places.

Disavowing the reality of the emotion represents one strategy for disavowing pleasure in the suffering of others. The American disavowal stems from cultural dissatisfaction with the idea that
schadenfroh
 persons dwell in their midst or that such a response figures regularly in their own emotional lives. This dissatisfaction produces 
ressentiment
 in those who feel
Schadenfreude
, because they perceive themselves as powerless or unwilling to resist the emotion and thereby to achieve a moral standard that precludes
Schadenfreude
. A moral culture that inculpates everyone by demonizing
Schadenfreude
defies us to transform common assumptions and sensibility. Transforming sensibility matters, particularly when that same moral culture discourages familiarity with 
Schadenfreude
. Now I will turn to a closely related but distinct disavowal strategy: characterizing it as culturally foreign.

Schadenfreude
 across Cultures

That the German language is uniquely qualified to express a mischievous delight in the suffering of another is not self-evident. But in his 1965 essay “Auf die Frage: ‘Was ist deutsch?,’” Theodor Adorno claims that “the German language seems to have a special elective affinity for philosophy and especially for its speculative element [
Moment
]” and that in the domain of one’s mother tongue, it is that very language which stands in for one’s fellow human beings.12 To Adorno, it might seem natural to find a word for “the largely unanticipated delight in the suffering of another which is cognized as trivial and/or appropriate” in German, not because anything in the German character might indicate unusual receptiveness to that pleasure, but because something in or about the German language is hospitable to the distinctions upon which the notion plays.

Even if the Kafka and Peter Gay cases were unique, that would not explain why
Schadenfreude
or any other German word would not move easily into another language. Adorno holds that it is precisely the extraordinary capacity for fine distinctions characteristic of German that makes exportation of native 
mots justes
 impossible:

Yet the impossibility of non-violently transposing into another language not only highly developed speculative thoughts but even particular and quite precise concepts such as those of spirit [
Geist
], the element [
Moment
], and experience [
Erfahrung
], with all the connotations with which they resonate in German—this impossibility suggests that there is a specific, objective quality to the German language. (p. 130)

Like Heidegger, who insisted to Victor Farias that any number of philosophical or etymological distinctions could not be exported from the German language,13 Adorno privileges his maternal tongue. If the upshot of Adorno’s or Heidegger’s position is that
Schadenfreude
cannot be imported, this means only that we don’t understand
Schadenfreude
exactly as Germans do, not that we don’t understand it at all. In spite of the manifest difficulty of ascertaining whether any two cultures understand exactly the same thing by joy, virtue, or melancholy, I believe that non-German cultures can comprehend the sense of
Schadenfreude
every bit as well as Heidegger or Adorno.

What does it matter, then, that
Schadenfreude
originates in German? The German language does differ fundamentally and significantly from English in the unusual ease with which it accommodates compound words. One noun is added to another and in turn to another until we are left with the comically long words for which German is ridiculed. A word like
Schadenfreude
is unremarkable in German, merely one such conglomeration among many others. But that the Germans do not have a corresponding opposite for
Schadenfreude
only draws more attention to the distinctiveness of this term. For a word like
Freudenfreude
(joy at another’s joy) simply never happened or gained currency.

The demonization of
Schadenfreude
outside of Germany is a 
cultural
 matter for the same reason that the understanding of
Schadenfreude
in any milieu is a cultural task. Anthony Kenny makes this point about emotions in general:

Wittgenstein has shown that a purely mental event, such as Descartes conceived an emotion to be, is an 
Unding
 [an inconceivable and so inexpressible thing]. Any word purporting to be the name of something observable only by introspection, and merely causally connected with publicly observable phenomena, would have to acquire its meaning by a purely private and uncheckable performance. But no word could acquire a meaning by such a performance; for a word only has meaning as part of a language; and a language is something essentially public and shareable.14

What
Schadenfreude
names must be generally recognizable, for if the experience of
Schadenfreude
acquires meaning for each of us by a ceremony from which everyone else is excluded, then none of us can have any idea what anyone else means by the word. Nor can anyone know what they themselves mean by the word, for to know the meaning of a word is to know how to use it correctly.

Not having any sociological research at hand, I can only assert that Kafka and Peter Gay are representative of Germans in their use of the word 
Schadenfreude
.15 Psychologists of emotion have pointed out that, as with most other aspects of culturally shared knowledge, there seems to be considerable agreement on the adequacy of particular emotional reactions to specific antecedent situations, without explicit criteria for such judgments.16 It is fairly easy to elicit agreement on how angry a person might properly become when he or she misses a train or loses money on the stock market. On the other hand, it would be difficult if not impossible to elicit an abstract definition of the necessary and sufficient antecedent conditions for anger in general.

Other psychologists have concluded that the validity of conclusions on the cross-cultural variations of emotions may very often be challenged because the field lacks standards of comparison.17 It is not my aim here to provide such standards for comparing the
Schadenfreude
of Germans to the
Schadenfreude
of non-Germans.

Second Denial Strategy: The Feminization of 
Schadenfreude

Max Scheler views women and Jews as prime candidates for experiencing outlaw emotions. He claims that, “the ‘witch’ has no masculine counterpart. The strong feminine tendency to indulge in detractive gossip is further evidence [that woman “is the weaker and therefore the more vindictive sex”]; it is a form of self cure” (
Ressentiment,
 pp. 127–128). Scheler views gossip as Schopenhauer does 
Schadenfreude
: both as a starting point and as a conclusive kind of evidence beyond which few questions can or need to be asked. Implicit in Scheler’s analysis of gossip is the notion of cure or consolation that runs throughout my consideration of
Schadenfreude
.

In Scheler we find a link between gossip, envy, and 
Schadenfreude
, each of which he considers feminine. According to Scheler, men do not need the consolation which gossip or
Schadenfreude
delivers. Remember that various thinkers (for example, Schopenhauer and Trench) have insisted that
Schadenfreude
exceeds envy in moral reprehensibility. How much worse for a man to be suspected of 
Schadenfreude
, then, than of envy? One could hardly wonder at any manly denunciation of gossip; the narrator of “Billy Budd,” Herman Melville’s tale of justice on a British ship during the Napoleonic Wars, sums it up: