Ressentiment

Ressentiment (French pronunciation: ​[rəsɑ̃timɑ̃]), in philosophy and psychology, is one of the forms of resentment or hostility. It is the French word for "resentment" (from Latin intensive prefix 're', and 'sentir' "to feel"). Ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one's frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the "cause" generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration. This value system is then used as a means of justifying one's own weaknesses by identifying the source of envy as objectively inferior, serving as a defense mechanism that prevents the resentful individual from addressing and overcoming their insecurities and flaws. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.

Ressentiment was first introduced as a philosophical/psychological term by the 19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.Friedrich Nietzsche later independently expanded the concept; Walter Kaufmann ascribes Nietzsche's use of the term in part to the absence of a proper equivalent term in the German language, contending that this absence alone "would be sufficient excuse for Nietzsche," if not for a translator. The term came to form a key part of his ideas concerning the psychology of the 'master–slave' question (articulated in Beyond Good and Evil), and the resultant birth of morality. Nietzsche's chief development of ressentiment came in his book On The Genealogy of Morals; see esp §§ 10–11).[1][2]. Ressentiment was translated as envy in Hong's translation of Kierkegaard's Two Ages: A Literary Review.

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