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.
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.
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.
We don't think Schadenfreude is necessarily reducible to the resentful and/or politically recuperative complexion the blogger imputes to it - for one thing, if it were, Nietzsche would also be contradicting his entire project by affirming it. More plausibly, it can be affirmed as a dimension of the same cruelty Stephen Alexander claims to endorse (or at least not refuse). Nietzsche's break with Schopenhauer strikes us as crucially instructive here: Schadenfreude is essentially a form of cruel joy.
ReplyDeleteSome research suggests it has three components: rivalry, social justice, and aggression. As such, it could be argued that the blogger's emphasis over-privileges the second of these. Within this model, rivalry/ competitiveness/ambition (or its theatrical refusal/denial) certainly has its universal place in the human soul, and there is no one we’ve known who hasn’t been infected by it. While the rabbi Harold Kushner suggested most people don't wish their friends ill, the narcissistic former Smiths frontman Morrissey infamously went further with his 1992 single ‘We Hate it When Our Friends Become Successful', theatrically stating that ‘when my old friend Simon Topping (the frontman of Manchester band A Certain Ratio) appeared on the cover of the NME, I died a thousand deaths of sorrow and lay down in the woods to die’. However, we would argue that an irrational element also has its place beyond this triptych. For example, we once took inordinate pleasure in the loss of form of the Spanish footballer Fernando Torres - not merely because we loathe Chelsea FC for the classless, Russian-bankrolled arrivistes they are, but for the sheer pleasure of seeing a successful athlete in the doldrums.
Our argument would therefore be the opposite - experiencing and even enjoying Schadenfreude, rather than it being a form of adverse judgment (which would hardly be ‘bad’ in any case – we are discriminating, judging animals), purges people’s idealism that they are better (i.e. more compassionate) than they are, though the argument could be made at a push (to reappropriate Schopenhauer) that it's a form of diabolical/inverted compasssion. Klossowski has written of the sadistic pleasures of 'delectatio morosa' in the religio-philosophical context - the sadistic rapture of evil thoughts – in ways that perhaps also draw attention to its melanacholic/depressive (dis)temper, as explored in Robert Burton’s 17C tome ‘The Anatomy of Meaancholy’ that depicted ‘ἐπιχαιρεκακία, a compound affection of joy and hate, when we rejoice at other men's mischief, and are grieved at their prosperity’.
Interestingly, it appears to be more commonplace in children than adults, who are less socially over-coded. For example, this writer recalls the pleasure of a 16 year old tutee rejoicing in the fact that we would be drenched leaving the house by a downpour ('ha! youre going to get wet!'). The recent news of a malignant ex-girlfriend's recent exposure as a criminal fraud also gave us an enormous sense of almost cosmic rebalancing. Meanwhile, Google reports an increasing number of hits on the term, which suggests society is enjoying more and more (for reasons all of us interested in culture ought to wonder about) an upsurge in popularity.
Tellingly, English - and England - seems to disown the experience of Schadenfreude, since, unlike a host of other languages, there is no word for it in this lexicon. Thank the gods for the Germans and the practice of loan words! In the words of Richard Trench (‘On the Study of Words’, 1852), ‘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.’ We deal in damage and joy, that’s what we do. Why, then, should the two be sundered (i.e moralised)?
Thanks for this Simon.
DeleteI've written a response in the form of a new post: https://torpedotheark.blogspot.com/2019/10/benevolence.html
PS On what/whose authority, we wonder, are we compelled to accept the content of the blogger's conclusion to his footnote 1?
ReplyDelete