Let me preface this by saying I'm not sure whether or not I'm supposed to blog or comment this week. I think it's A-M blogging and N-Z commenting (before the break N-Z blogged), but I'm not sure what we ended up deciding on.
Anyway, in class on Monday while discussing Nietzsche, the idea of ressentiment was presented. Dr. Johnson described it as something along the lines of "the feeling you get when you have the notion that the world is being unfair to you, and you want to fight back, but unlike a 'powerful' person, you cannot." Then we got into the idea of the "slave revolt in morality," which Nietzsche goes indepth in the his first text we were assigned to read, "Good and Evil, Good and Bad."
I think the title of that essay sums up the information in it-- the "good" were considered good, powerful, happy, noble, and as a result beloved by god(s). Everything else is considered "bad," not evil. The slave revolt in morality (due to ressentiment) is essentially being beloved by gods results in being noble, happy, powerful, and good (the opposite of before). Everything else is considered "evil," not bad.
In the text itself, this line is presented:
"although the two words “bad” and “evil” both seem opposite to the same idea of “good,” how different they are!"
When the idea of ressentiment was initially presented to us on Monday with the definition I provided earlier, I related it to something like modern-day depression. As we continued to learn about it, and after reading Nietzsche's text myself, it seems like it was spawned from a hatred rather than something along the lines of depression. The "bad" was made from the noble man referring to others (as an afterthought), whereas the "evil" was determined first and was "arised out of the stew pot of insatiable hatred," as said by Nietzsche. It pretty much makes it so that life isn't the survival of the fittest-- for the sake of the least of it.
What do you think about ressentiment and difference between "bad" and "evil?"
I would first like to point out the different way in when they are interpreted in the different modes of evaluation. In the noble mode, bad is only the after thought of "good". However, in the slavish mode of evaluation, "evil" is determined first, and good is the opposite. In addition, if we look out HOW the two are interpreted, bad is based on self affirmation and evil is based on denying the living world. Despite being almost synonymous in today's eyes, Neitche does a good job in separating the two meanings by compartmentalizing them in two different modes of evaluations.
ReplyDeleteThat seems to be true today. People seem to consider immoral actions as both "bad" and "evil," even though they are not completely synonymous. It's funny to see how things like that can be interpreted and get confused.
ReplyDeleteI think the difference between "bad" and "evil" is pretty much what you said, in terms of how Nietzche saw it. Bad is something that is essentially undesirable and an evil has malicious intent.
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