Аннотация. Обретя в нынешний век беспрецедентные возможности изменять мир и самого себя, человек остаётся бессильным против одного из своих главных несовершенств – бремени ненависти. Этот порок не только неистребим: сегодня он продолжает разрастаться, получая моральную легализацию в социуме. Постижение этого феномена требует глубинной оптики, затрагивающей основы человеческого существа. Такой взгляд возможен благодаря ницшеанской концепции рессентимента. С одной стороны, она позволяет зафиксировать глубочайший декаданс нынешнего человека, с особой остротой ставя вопрос утраты им своего потенциального величия. С другой стороны, человек предстаёт здесь существом открытым, неустановившимся, ещё не обретшим свой окончательный облик. Это заставляет нас ощутить особую ответственность за дальнейшую эволюцию человека, задуматься о возможных усилиях по его социокультурному преобразованию.

Ключевые слова: философская антропология, психоанализ, человеческое бытие, ненависть, рессентимент, мизантропология, воля, ценностный негативизм, деструкция, мораль.

 

HATEFULNESS  AS  A  MODE  OF  HUMAN  BEING

Hatred is one of basic themes, without which comprehension of man is unthinkable. His idealised canonic image of a reasonable and moral being has long become a thing of the past, replaced by the apophatic position. In the past century and a half, a negative misanthropic interpretation has come to the foreground of reflection about man. This position was represented in postulates of psychoanalysis, according to which human life appeared to be derivative of destructive, negating origins, hidden in the unconscious layers of the psyche.

The alarming theme of the growth of malignance throughout the world and increase of the related collisions is not new. But what can we today say about the essence of hatefulness? The striking multiformity and incredible unbridledness of this madness say little about the nature of this phenomenon, offer no clues or solutions. The essential and really large-scale picture of human hatred is reflected not in external phenomenology, which is only like the tip of the iceberg, but on the contrary, in the depths of the unconscious, deep in the dark side of the soul. That is what the major psychoanalytical discoveries about passions tell.

However, F. Nietzsche approached the unconscious innermost recesses of the soul long before psychoanalytic insights. His conception of ressentiment – hidden and at the same time extensive phenomenon of new European culture – was a breakthrough in the understanding of deep foundations of human being. With the help of this comprehensive term the philosopher showed another dimension of the subject, little known and unusual for the classical view that existed in philosophy for centuries. It is an image of an ordinary man who insincerely declares virtuousness but in fact is double-faced and malicious, suffering from his own inferiority and harbouring envious intolerance to other people’s success and pre-eminence.

Asking the question about the topical character or ressentiment at present, we not only answer it in the affirmative but also attest its appalling spread and intensification. First of all, the erroneousness of its narrow understanding – as «illness» of the Western world only, resulting, according to Nietzsche, from Christian ethics. Certainly, the philosopher related the genesis of this moral ailment, first of all, to the Christian European consciousness that hypocritically put in the foreground the value of loving one’s neighbour. But ressentiment strode also to the East. Russian consciousness is charged with ressentiment, carrying its deep imprint at least since the nihilist mood of the 19th century. The Chinese mentality is not devoid of this ailment, the envious feeling is called the «red eye disease». Now the virus of ressentiment continues to still deeper penetrate into everyday consciousness of all communities around the world. Its expansion rubber-stamps one and the same ordinary man image, devoid of that human greatness, about the flouting of which Nietzsche wrote with bitterness.

The world of today’s ressentiment becomes more and more multifaceted. But its manifestations can be easily recognized by a common trait – rapacious, ruthless rivalry. The cynical politician or «complaisant» timeserver, vain career-maker or selfish egoist – these are already routine characters. But it is their typisation and consolidation that in crowd consciousness signified also their legitimation as a social norm. Mass egoistic struggle for a «place in the sun» has become a normal phenomenon, shooting up from underground. Its odiousness makes no one tremble any more, provokes no persecution: it has become conditional, relative, ephemeral.

But where is the drama of ressentiment? Why we, following Nietzsche, are willing to attach to it an extremely decisive significance for mankind? Isn’t the pathos of this idea an unavailing exaggeration of the role of that fundamental, archaic by its nature animosity that nowadays barely continues its age-old existence under the disguise of civilisation?

We cannot comprehend the whole depths of Nietzsche’s discovery, if we do not take into consideration the ontological trait of ressentiment – its demiurgic character. Having acquired the axiological strength, he constructs a special ethos of the ordinary man and a special mode of human being. Certainly, this part of the Nitzschean conception is debatable: initially the philosopher came out against humility, sympathy and kindness that make the traditional for Christianity idea of virtue. But criticism he underwent finds deep justification in the insight that these values, having become routine, alienate man from his real depth, strip him of greatness and creative spirit. Not active will or creation but passive reaction, response to other person’s will, psychological slavery become man’s new essence.

The moral of ressentiment is the moral of the slave. Envy of other people’s success and longing for unaccomplished self-realisation, intensified by abortive attempts at enhancing one’s life or social status, engender ardent hatred. Later, this idea received a new impetus in neopsychoanalysis: E. Fromm analysed human destructiveness as man’s radical attempt at compensating for his powerlessness, impotence and lack of meaning.

In the image of a modern ordinary man escaping from freedom and creative self-realisation, we have a special anthropo-type, the reverse side of which turns out nobody else but the hating man. In its pure form it is an image of a weak, conservative being, however, not without self-love and readiness for revanche. His will, although in the degenerative form, makes him rebel against the strong, the creative, the other. Envy and hurt self-esteem drive the hater onto the path of persecution of free and creative natures, often under the cover of the ideas of justice and egalitarianism.

  1. Baudrillard compared hatred with the last, extreme convulsion of will. That is why the ideology of an ordinary man, impregnated with malice, is indestructible: there is man’s active primary source behind it. Hatred actually appears as the phenomenon of will, though in a decadent, surrogate version. This fiction is a semblance of power: there is a desire to rule and win, obsessive zeal and inflexible persistence. By its nature, it is a source of energy and a resource of mobilisation. But the ressentiment persistence differs from true will in its negation of values, hatred for everything supreme in man – freedom and creativity. Ressentiment is existentially passive and conservative: it tends to suppress and restrict, and therefore it is destructive. It is the will for Nothing. While true will seeks activity and development, tries to transform and expand, and therefore it is creative.

The existence of these alternative modes is determined by the very phenomenon of man as an open being, whose outline has not been completed. Man is equally capable of reciliency and creativity, as well as of hatred and destructiveness, since initially he is neither of the two. But the anthropological situation does not demonstrate a balance of these forces: expansion of ressentiment is more like entropy, motion to chaos. And only man’s awareness and responsibility can keep him from disintegration, for a human being is first of all an effort to be human.

 

Источник: Чугунова И. О. Ненавистничество как модус человеческого бытия (на англ. яз.)  //  Философская школа. – № 5. – 2018.  – С. 159–161. DOI: 10.24411/2541-7673-2018-10535