ABSTRACT
According to Robert Solomon, ressentiment, is a 'bitter emotion based on a sense of inferiority and frustrated vindictiveness'. Solomon claims that ressentiment involves 'an overwhelming sense of injustice'. Eruptions of ressentiment draw our attention to issues that need to be justly resolved if tensions are to be alleviated and order reestablished. The first element in Solomon's analysis of ressentiment has to do with the qualitative nature of ressentiment —namely, its characteristic unpleasant feeling, directed at others, which Friedrich Nietzsche at times calls 'hate'. The very intelligibility of punitive justice feeds on the deeply ingrained psychology of ressentiment. According to Eugen Duhring, the connection between ressentiment and the sense of justice is extremely close, for he virtually identifies the two. Duhring's view, in Nietzsche's formulation, is that justice is 'at bottom merely a further development of the feeling of being aggrieved'.
