Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude is a form of malicious mirth that takes cruel delight in another's misfortune, failure, or humiliation. Nietzsche describes this complex emotional response as all too human, in contrast to Schopenhauer who assigns it a diabolical origin. Either way, there's no exact English term for it; I've never heard anyone use epicaricacy.

However, this isn't to say that the English, for all their talk of fair play and siding with the underdog, don't also take pleasure in seeing others - particularly successful individuals from a humble origin - lose out or be brought back down to earth with a bump, in order to remind them of who they were and who they essentially remain.

In other words, schadenfreude has an unpleasant moral component wrapped inside its apparent immorality. We laugh and jeer and sneer at others in order to teach them a lesson; schadenfreude is a form of judgement and punishment; i.e. morally corrective justice.

And it's for that reason - rather than the cruelty as such - that I don't like it: torpedo the ark means (amongst other things) to have done with judgement. Further, one's own natural indifference to how others fare means that I never really experience schadenfreude any more than its opposite, compassion or, keeping things in German, Mitgefühl.* I might not feel your pain or suffering - but I won't laugh at it either. 

So - just to be clear on this - I don't have a moral objection to schadenfreude; rather I object to it as a form of moralism. And perhaps also as a form of faint-heartedness and bourgeois compromise. For whilst observing others suffer may well have a tonic effect on the soul of man, as Nietzsche suggests, it's making others suffer which is where the true festival of cruelty begins ...  

*It might be noted that this indifference also extends towards my own welfare or fate. Partly this is punk nihilism and partly it's informed by the ethics of Stoicism. There are also elements of Sade, Masoch, Lawrence and Larry David mixed up in there too (apathy, coldness, insouciance, and the curbing of enthusiasm). None of this says anything whatsoever about my own sense of self-esteem.           

See: Tiffany Watt Smith, Schadenfreude: the Joy of Another’s Misfortune, (Profile Books / Wellcome Collection, 2018). See also her article in The Guardian entitled 'The secret joys of schadenfreude' (14 Oct 2018): click here. 

Thanks to Simon Solomon for provoking this post.

In Memory of Tara Fares (Notes on Fanaticism)

Tara Fares on Instagram / Photo by Omar Moner

Tara Fares, the Iraqi beauty queen and outspoken social media star, has been shot dead in Baghdad by unknown assailants, after receiving a series of vile threats on her life. She was 22. A spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior promises an investigation - but we all know why she was murdered and by whom.  

Her death comes just days after the murder of Suad al-Ali, an Iraqi human rights activist who was shot and killed in the southern city of Basra. Again, whilst the gunman has so far been unidentified, one doesn't have to be Columbo to crack this case.  

When men enthusiastically put their most cherished ideals and beliefs into action, the result is all too often bloody; history is nothing but this violent trajectory. As Cioran says: "Once a man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable."    

Cries of religious ecstasy and shouts of devotion are echoed in the moans of victims. And blood always flows when epileptics and ideologues - primed with explosive conviction - insist their way is the way; "firm resolve draws the dagger; fiery eyes presage slaughter".

To live peacefully and happily requires learning how to curb enthusiasm and counter all certitudes, absolutes and convictions with irony and a smiling insouciance. For if the former ideals are allowed to contaminate the soul, the result is fanaticism: that fundamental human defect which instills in us the desire for truth and terror.

To quote Cioran once more:

"Only the skeptics (or idlers or aesthetes) escape, because they propose nothing, because they [...] undermine fanaticism's purpose, analyse its frenzy. I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity. [...] What Diogenes was looking for with his lantern was an indifferent man ..."

He concludes:

"The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster."

And that's why I prefer Instagram over Islam, fashion over faith ...

See: E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard, (Penguin Books, 2018). Lines quoted are from the section entitled 'Genealogy of Fanaticism' in chapter 1, 'Directions for Decomposition'.

Dandelion: D. H. Lawrence and the Question of Care

Dandelion: photo by Greg Hume (2006)

As much as Lawrence may wish to sit like a dandelion on his own stem and concern himself exclusively with those objects existing within his immediate physical environment - refusing to care about abstract issues, faraway places, or unknown peoples - he’s conscious of the fact that such insouciance can lead to parochialism and might easily be mistaken for indifference on his part; something he’d very much regret.

For Lawrence is very keen to sharply differentiate between insouciance and indifference. The former, he says, is a refusal to be made anxious by abstractions, or swept off to into the empty desert spaces inhabited by idealists gripped by a compulsion to care about everything under the sun. The latter, however, Lawrence defines as an inability to care resulting from a certain instinctive-intuitive numbness or nihilism, which, like Nietzsche, he posits as the great malady of the modern age; a consequence of having cared too much about the wrong thing in the immediate past.

The apathetic or indifferent individual, the nihilist, is essentially an exhausted idealist; they have none of the carefree gayness of the insouciant man or woman and do not know how to live on the spot and in the nowness of the actual moment.

That said - and as indicated - insouciance can itself become problematic and serve to isolate the individual, cutting them off from the wider world and from history. We can’t be entirely self-sufficient and concerned only with our own musings and sense impressions. Nor can we only be concerned only about those with whom we have a direct relationship; our immediate family and friends, or kith and kin.

Ultimately, as Lawrence was reluctantly obliged to concede, feeling a sense of solidarity with all mankind isn’t entirely fraudulent and the love of humanity stands for something real and vital; "that feeling of being at one with the struggling soul, or spirit or whatever it is, of our fellow men". Lawrence continues:

"This caring about the wrongs of unseen people has been rather undone. Nevertheless ... still, away in some depth of us, we know that we are connected vitally, if remotely ... [and] we dimly realise that mankind is one, almost one flesh. It is an abstraction, but it is also a physical fact. In some way or other, the cotton workers of Carolina, or the rice-growers of China are connected with me and, to a faint yet real degree, part of me. The vibration of life which they give off reaches me, touches me, and affects me unknown to me. For we are all more or less connected, all more or less in touch: all humanity."

What’s interesting about this passage is that not only does it demonstrate that Lawrence was not an individualist as many critics mistakenly believe, but it also shows that his love of humanity was born not of some transcendental attempt to develop a conceited cosmic consciousness, but out of a sense of class consciousness; it’s the workers and the peasants of the world that Lawrence primarily feels connected to and sympathetic with.

Those who cultivate indifference to the point that they lose any compassion for others are mistaken. Lawrence understands their frank egoism, but refuses to share it - worried by the effect it has on the individual who refuses to care. Their intellectual honesty is fine and it’s good to cast off all spurious sympathy and false emotion, but not if this entails the death of all feeling and one becomes empty inside (believing in nothing, standing for nothing, caring for nobody).

Lawrence admits, however, that some can find perverse pleasure in precisely this becoming-void and take "real pride and satisfaction in pure negation". These he calls the perfect nihilists: those whose shallowness is mistaken for depth; whose false calm is mistaken for strength; whose indifference is mistaken for insouciance. Nietzsche termed them the last men; those who sit grinning furtively in the triumph of their own emptiness.

See: D. H. Lawrence, ‘Insouciance’, and ‘Nobody Loves Me’, in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). The lines quoted are from the latter text.

On the Three Ways to Care

Image from a KiddiKraft blog post dated 30 July 2014

http://kiddikraft.com/blog/5-ways-instill-compassion-children/

There are at least three important ways in which one might offer care to others: 

(i) with compassion -

(ii) with indifference -

(iii) with resentment -

To care with compassion, or with sympathy, is to actively share in the suffering of others whilst at the same time maintaining the integrity of one's own soul. It is not motivated by a will to merger and it is not merely a mechanical feeling of pity for those one deems deserving of such. Compassion is a noble virtue of the heart free from moral judgement. 

To care with indifference sounds, at first, somewhat paradoxical. But, for me, whilst indifference is certainly not a form compassion, it doesn't mean that one is completely uncaring. Rather, it means that one does so with an ironic perspective and a healthy degree of insouciance. Indifference is an instinctive reaction to the suffering which would otherwise overwhelm us and compel us to tears; a form of self-protection against the mortal danger of becoming over-concerned and eaten up with caring. Indifference is a noble quality of mind.

To care with resentment is to poison the very concept of care. It is a feeling against rather than with or even for others and it ultimately causes the person who experiences it to fall out of touch not only with those who have (rightly or wrongly) caused such bitterness, but with their own good nature; they become trapped inside a bubble of hostile emotion created by their own humiliated ego. When resentment is felt towards someone to whom one is closely related, such as a parent or child, then it is particularly intense and can lead to extraordinary acts of spite.

To conclude: take care - and be caring; for the former, as a practice of the self, depends on how we interact with others.  

Towards a Doctrine of Non-Necessity

Whilst I'm perfectly happy for philosophers to discuss the concept of necessity (be it logical, empirical or transcendental in nature), or spend many long hours thinking through related ideas of determinism and contingency, it increasingly seems to me that many of the malicious and often murderous stupidities that confront us in this life are, for want of another word, completely unnecessary. 

Nationalism, racism, homophobia, misogyny, sectarianism and all those forms of what Nietzsche memorably termed "scabies of the heart" [GS 377] are things that we could happily do without and the absence of which would instantly make the world less ugly and unpleasant.

Hopefully it's clear that I'm not speaking here as a liberal idealist of some description. For as Nietzsche also says, one has to be "afflicted with a Gallic excess of erotic irritability" [GS 377] to dream of embracing all humanity with fraternal affection and, despite having been born in Paris, I'm simply not French enough.

So no, I do not love mankind. If anything, it's because I'm too indifferent and ultimately too uncaring to spend time hating that I'm led towards a nihilistic doctrine of non-necessity. It's insouciance and a certain cool irony that saves us from that violent rage and ressentiment that grips those who subscribe to a puffed-up politics of identity and self-assertion.