When Bad Things Happen to Other People (36 page)

Chapter Five

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, 
Human, All Too Human
, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p 314. Hereafter, 
HH.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, 
On the Genealogy of Morals
, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 192. Compare p. 207 of the 1974 Vintage edition of 
The Gay Science
, trans. Walter Kaufmann. For the use of the phrase “with a good conscience,” compare Section 58 of 
Beyond Good and
 
Evil
: “...a genuinely religious class requires a leisure class, or half-leisure—I mean leisure with a good conscience...” (p. 69, Kaufmann translation). And for Nietzsche’s estimation of laughter, see Section 294 (“The Olympian vice”) of 
Beyond Good and Evil
, as well as Walter Kaufmann’s helpful footnote to it, in which he suggests that Nietzsche benefited from Hobbes’s conclusion in 
Leviathan
 (1651) that laughing at the infirmities of others manifests weakness on the laugher’s part.

3. Cf. William James, 
The Varieties of Religious Experience
 (New York: The Modern Library, 1958), pp. 48–49, 76. James rejects Havelock Ellis’s claim that laughter of any sort may be considered a religious exercise, because it bears witness to the soul’s emancipation. According to James, any 
persistent
 enjoyment (which would exclude
Schadenfreude
) may produce the sort of religion which consists in a grateful admiration of the gift of so happy an existence.

4. Friedrich Nietzsche, 
Twilight of the Idols/Anti-Christ
 (1888), trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 71. Hereafter, 
A.

5. I have benefited from Alexander Nehamas’s discussion of suffering in 
Nietzsche: Life as Literature
 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 123–127.

6. Lawrence Blum, “Compassion,” in 
Explaining Emotions
, ed. Amélie Rorty (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 507–517.

7. Immanuel Kant, 
Critique of Practical Reason
, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), p. 123.

8. See his “Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche on the Morality of Pity” in 
The Journal of the History of Ideas
 45 (1984): 83–98. I have benefited from his lucid discussion.

9. 
Thus Spake Zarathustra
 in 
The Portable Nietzsche
, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), Part I, “On the Pitying,” p. 200. Hereafter, 
Z.

10. Julian Young, 
Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art
 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Chapter Two.

11. George Stauth and Bryan S. Turner, 
Nietzsche’s Dance: Resentment,
 
Reciprocity and Resistance in Social Life
 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p.

69. It is puzzling, then, that the authors proceed to use the English “resentment.” R. Jay Wallace has also pointed to the advisability of retaining the French 
ressentiment
. See his
Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments
 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 246–247.

12. Max Scheler, 
Ressentiment
, trans. Lewis B. Coser and William W. Holdheim (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994), p. 25.

13. Fredric Jameson, 
The Political Unconscious
 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 201.

14.Walter Kaufmann, 
Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 371.

15. See Mary Midgley, “Brutality and Sentimentality,” 
Philosophy
 54 (1979): 385–389; Mark Jefferson, “What is Wrong with Sentimentality?,”
Mind
 92 (1983): 519–529; and John Kekes, 
Facing Evil
 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

16. See, for example, G.J. Barker-Benfield’s 
The Culture of Sensibility: Sex
 
and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain
 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Barker-Benfield discusses the ease with which sentiment became the object of consumption and the lachrymose values that meant, in Rostrig’s words, that “happiness is to experience another’s woe.” Simon Schama’s discussion of sensibility in France during this period fills out this notion nicely. In 
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
 (New York: Knopf, 1989) he remarks: “Lavish use of words like 
tendresse
 (tenderness) and 
âme
 (soul) conferred immediate membership in the community of Sensibility; and words that had been used more casually, like
amitié
(friendship), were invested with feelings of intense intimacy. Verbs like 
s’enivrer
 (to become drunk) when coupled with 
plaisir
 or 
passion
 became attributes of a noble rather than a depraved character. The key word was 
sensibilité
: the intuitive capacity for intense feeling. To possess 
un coeur sensible
 (a feeling heart) was the precondition for morality” (p. 149). See also Ann Douglas’s 
The Feminization of American Culture
 (New York: Knopf, 1977). Douglas argues that feminization means sentimentality and lies, the craven reaction of women (and some men) to a culture that has marginalized them.

Chapter Six

1. Michel Foucault, 
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 16, 101. Antony Flew has argued that punishment must be an evil or unpleasantness but need not be physically painful. See “The Justification of Punishment” in 
Philosophy
 29 (1954): 291–307.

2. W.D. Ross, 
The Right and the Good
 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), pp. 56–64.

3. C.L. Ten provides a clear and quite useful account of the various theories of punishment in 
Crime, Guilt and Punishment: A Philosophical Introduction
 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), which I follow here. Particularly interesting is the exposition and defense of the theory that punishment restores the just equilibrium of benefits and burdens which was disturbed by the wrongdoer’s act, pp. 52–65. Mark Tunick’s 
Punishment: Theory and Practice
 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) has also been helpful.

4. Joel Feinberg, “The Expressive Function of Punishment,” in 
Doing and
 
Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility
 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 100.

5. 
Jewish Social Ethics
 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 170.

6. Edmund Burke, 
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas
 
of the Sublime
, ed. James T. Boulton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 47.

7. Pieter Spierenburg, 
The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression
 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

8. David Garland, 
Punishment and Society
 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

9. Emile Durkheim, 
The Division of Labor in Society
, trans. W.D. Halls (New York: Free Press, 1984), p. 44.

Chapter Seven

1. Jack Miles, 
God: A Biography
 (New York: Knopf, 1995), p. 11.

2. David Leavitt, “The Term Paper Artist,” in 
Arkansas: Three Novellas
 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), p. 56.

3. Harold Kushner, 
When Bad Things Happen to Good People
 (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), p. 4. The popularity of Kushner’s book points up the overlap of Judaism and Christianity I have in mind here.

4. M. O’C. Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in 
Ludwig
 
Wittgenstein, Personal Recollections
, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), p. 129.

5. Norman Malcolm, 
Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?
 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 7.

6. Eugene O’Neill, 
Long Day’s Journey into Night
 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 107.

7. Arthur Danto, 
Analytical Philosophy of Action
 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 147.

8. Most of these scriptural references are from various passages in the 
New Catholic Encyclopedia,
 ed. William J. McDonald (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967).

9. Aquinas states in the 
Summa Contra Gentiles
: “There would be no everlasting punishment of the souls of the damned if they were able to change their will for a better will” (4.93.2). Aquinas views the everlasting suffering of the damned as a function of their everlasting refusal to repent. But the idea that one may change one’s mind, as it were, after the final judgment would seem to subvert the very notion of eternity, which depends upon the stability of permanence.

10. Saadya Gaon, or Saadya ben Joseph, 
The Book of Beliefs and Opinions
, trans. Samuel Rosenblatt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), pp. 351–352.

11. Dante Alighieri, 
The Divine Comedy
, trans. with a commentary by Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 
Paradiso
, 27.22–27, p. 303.

12. Richard P. McBrien, 
Catholicism: Study Edition
 (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1981), pp. 1150–1152.

13. Moses Maimonides, 
The Guide of the Perplexed
, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 469.

14. See R.T. Kendall, 
Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649
 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 52.

15. John Stachniewski, 
The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism
 
and the Literature of Religious Despair
 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 22–23. Quotations from Calvin’s 
Institution
 are taken from these pages.

16. Sherwin B. Nuland, 
How We Die
 (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 167.

17. David Novak, 
Jewish Social Ethics
 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 105.

18. Bernard Häring, 
Free and Faithful in Christ: Moral Theology for
 
Clergy and Laity
, (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 3 vols., vol. III, p. 47.

19. Bernard Häring, 
The Law of Christ
, 3 vols., trans. Edwin G. Kaiser (Westminster: Newman Press, 1966), vol. 3, p. 220. Originally, 
Das Gesetz
 
Christ,
 (1954). Hereafter, 
LC.

20. Bernard Häring, 
Christian Renewal in a Changing World,
 trans. Sr. Lucidia Häring (New York: Desclee, 1964), pp. 143–144.

21. Bernard Häring, 
The Christian Existentialist: The Philosophy and
 
Theology of Self-Fulfillment in Modern Society,
 trans. Sr. Lucidia Häring (New York: New York University Press, 1968), p. 42. Hereafter, 
CE
.

22. The question of whether pride or cruelty properly ought to dominate the pecking order of human wrongdoing has generated an interesting debate. See Judith Shklar, 
Ordinary Vices,
 p. 44, and Richard Rorty, 
Contingency,
 
Irony, and Solidarity
, p. 173. Claiming that “cruelty is not the worst vice for the Kantian, as it is for the Humean,” Annette Baier has applauded Shklar and Rorty and credited them with having “the Humean moral judgment” (“Moralism and Cruelty,” in 
Ethics
 103 [1993]: 437). For a critical response to Shklar and Rorty, see Timothy Jackson, “The Disconsolation of Theology,” in the 
Journal of Religious Ethics,
 20 (1992): 1–35, and John Kekes, 
Against Liberalism
 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 183–192.

23. John Mahoney, S.J., 
The Making of Moral Theology: A Study of the
 
Roman Catholic Tradition
 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. xiv.

24. Bernard Lewis, 
Islam and the West
 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 6.

Chapter Eight

1. Thomas Hardy, 
The Return of the Native
, (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 279.

2. Simone de Beauvoir, 
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
, trans. James Kirkup (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), p. 95.

3. Alison Jaggar, “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology,” in S.R. Bordo and A. Jaggar, eds., 
Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist
 
Reconstruction of Being and Knowing
 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), p. 145.

4. See Lionel Trilling’s 
The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and
 
Society
 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979). He argues that the aim of “adversary culture” is to perform a massive transvaluation of values, to in-sinuate that what Jews and Christians have for centuries called sin is naturally a high form of liberation. See also Michael Novak, 
The Catholic Ethic and the
 
Spirit of Capitalism
 (New York: Free Press, 1993). Novak contends that the “adversary culture” now governs the mainstream in the universities, the magazines, movies, and television. According to Novak it celebrates anti-bourgeois virtues and defines itself against the common culture which it scorns.

5. John Boswell, 
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality
 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 28n.

6. Dorrit Cohn, 
Transparent Minds
 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 88.

7. Nicholas Rescher, 
Unselfishness: The Role of the Vicarious Affects in
 
Moral Philosophy and Social Theory
 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975), p. 16.

8. Friedrich Nietzsche, 
On the Genealogy of Morals
, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 192. As I have noted, this edition includes excerpts from a number of Nietzsche’s other works, among them 
The
 
Gay Science
. Compare p. 207 of the 1974 Vintage edition of 
The Gay Science
, trans. Walter Kaufmann.

9. Dutch, another language greatly influenced by German, does have a one-word equivalent: 
leedvermaak
 (which is not, however, a “loan word”).