FT24005: Will and Anger

    Ressentiment for Nietzsche combines the lust for revenge that never gets satisfied. This is unhealthy and disfigures a soul that is consumed by it. He doesn't discard revenge in totality but advocates that the strong willed exact revenge in a way that satisfies an insult. He often connects this with an old world cultures that appear in pre-christianity to show how the modern man is developing into a pathetic set of thoughts.

    Yet, writings from this old world do not always agree with this. Old writers emphasize the toll anger exacts on us. Servants and slaves cause rumination on this topic. Nietzsche mandates that this period is categorized by the strong dominating the weak. These old writers would fit this category in that they are masters over people with less status fully subjected to the Nietzschian will to power. What happens is these servants perform tasks poorly and in their position they can exact any punishment that they see fit. Writers like Plutarch caution against this from the stand point of what becomes of you as you act in rage.

    All these annoyances sum up and Plutarch responds with a common motif of ethical thinking from the period. He asks us to look at people that have obvious problems with rage and how we react to them. We see these people as out of control and by their habits lose themselves to their emotions. Plutarch admits it's better to let people squander on trivial tasks like failing to remember buying bread for dinner than distort yourself in anger in punishing it. 

    Another writer of these times--Seneca--also has a similar conclusion. Instead of conjuring an instance of someone else, he has us imagine what our faces look like in the mist of rage reflected in a mirror. Our sober self would cringe at the sight. The transformation of our selves in this way is a clear indication of lack of virtue. This virtue is not some decree by the will to power as Nietzsche genealogizes morality to be but some fundamental recognition of stability. 

    Here there is a conflict. Nietzsche has morality be this code that is arbitrarily imposed by those who rule. He uses the past to justify the violence we see in this time but it is also the time which virtue ethics culminated. True, he does acknowledge Aristotle but only to undermine him and show his ethics is just a cloaked version of the will to power. These ancient thinkers had more cultural lee way in how they treated others yet they did notice that behavior--even if allowed--causes a disfigurement just as much as the ressentiment of Nietzsche.