Resentment and Apophasis

Referring to Nietzsche’s description, in the first chapter of The Geneology of Morals, of Judaeo-Christianity as ressentiment, as a ‘slave morality’ founded on resentment of the weak for the strong, Eric Gans observes in his essay ‘The Culture of Resentment’ that resentment ‘does not have what might be called a good press’. Both Nietzsche, he says, and Max Scheler (whose notion of resentment Gans calls ‘a ponderous and timid caricature of Nietzsche’s’) characterize resentment as ‘the evil cause of an evil modernity’. ¹ Nietzsche distinguished between active and reactive will to power. ‘[C]hange, and becoming’, Nietzsche says,

can be an expression of overfull, future-pregnant strength (my term for this is, as one knows, the word ‘Dionysian’), but it can also be hatred [i.e. resentment] of the undeveloped, needy, underprivileged who destroys, who must destroy, because the existing, and even all existence, all being, outrages and provokes him. ²