Autor: Scheler, Max

Buch: Ressentiment

Titel: Ressentiment

Stichwort: Humanitarismus 1, Ressentiment; moderne Menschenliebe (humanitarian love): Unterschied in Objekt und Akt zu Liebe (im chr. Sinn); Bentham;

Kurzinhalt: It is characteristic that Christian terminology knows no "love of mankind." Its prime concept is "love of one's neighbor."... love descends step by step from its exalted place as token and symbol of an order which transcends the natural, indeed as the ...

Textausschnitt: IV Ressentiment and Modern Humanitarian Love

91a [79] Nietzsche ignored the fact that love in the Christian sense is always primarily directed at man's ideal spiritual self, at man as a member of the kingdom of God. Therefore he equated the Christian idea of love with a completely different idea which has quite another historical and psychological origin: the idea and movement of modern universal love of man, "humanitarianism," "love of mankind," or more plastically: "love toward every member of the human race." We agree with Nietzsche that ressentiment was the real root of this idea. (Fs)

91b If we ignore the verbal similarity of the terms "Christian love" and "universal love of mankind" and concentrate on their respective significance and spiritual atmosphere, we feel that they represent entirely different worlds. First of all, modern humanitarianism is in every respect a polemical and protesting concept. It protests against divine love, and consequently against the Christian unity and harmony of divine love, self-love, and love of one's neighbor which is the "highest commandment" of the Gospel. Love is not to be directed at the "divine" essence in man, but only at man as such, outwardly recognizable as a member of his species, at him who "is a member of the human race."1 This idea restricts love to the "human species," detaching it from all higher forces and values as well as from all other living beings and the rest of the world. "Man" is isolated not only from the "kingdom of God," but also from the non-human forms and forces of nature.2 At the same time, the community of angels and souls is replaced by "Mankind" as it exists at the moment -- mankind as a visible, limited, earthly natural being. The Christian community of souls also includes the dead, i.e., the whole of spiritually alive humanity, organized according to the aristocracy of its moral merits and personal values. Thus the real object of love extends into visible contemporary mankind insofar as divine spiritual life has germinated in it, but is much wider and greater and is always accessible in a living interchange of prayer, intercession, and veneration. "Love of mankind" is also polemical against (and devoid of piety toward) the love and veneration of the dead, the men of the past, and the tradition of their spiritual values and volitions in every form. Its object undergoes yet another change: the "neighbor" and the "individual," who alone represents humanity in its depth of personality, is replaced by "mankind" as a collective entity. All love for a part of mankind -- nation, family, individual -- now appears as an unjust deprivation of what we owe only to the totality. It is characteristic that Christian terminology knows no "love of mankind." Its prime concept is "love of one's neighbor." It is primarily directed at the person and at certain spiritually valuable acts -- and at "man" only to the degree that he is a "person" and accomplishes these acts, i.e., to the degree to which he realizes the order of the "kingdom of God." It is directed at the "neighbors," the "nearest" visible beings who are alone capable of that deeper penetration into the layer of spiritual personality which is the highest form of love. Modern humanitarian love, on the other hand, is only interested in the sum total of human individuals. Bentham's principle that each individual should count for one, and none for more than one, is only a conscious formulation of the implicit tendency of modern "humanitarianism." Therefore all love for a more restricted circle here appears a priori as a deprivation of the rights due to the wider circle -- without any reference to such questions as value and "nearness to God." Thus patriotism is supposed to deprive "mankind," etc.3 (Fs) (notabene)

93a [80] The difference between Christian love and modern humanitarianism lies not only in their objects, but also in the subjective side of the process of loving. Christian love is essentially a spiritual action and movement, as independent of our body and senses as the acts and laws of thinking. Humanitarian love is a feeling, and a passive one, which arises primarily by means of psychical contagion when we perceive the outward expression of pain and joy. We suffer when we see pain and rejoice when we see pleasant sensations. In other words, we do not even suffer in sympathy with the other person's suffering as such, but only with our sense perception of his pain. It is no coincidence that the philosophical and psychological theoreticians of the 17th and 18th centuries, who gradually elaborated the theoretical formulation of the new ethos, define the essence of love with reference to the phenomena of sympathy, compassion, and shared joy, which in turn they reduce to psychical contagion.4 This goes particularly for the great English thinkers from Hutcheson, Adam Smith, David Hume to Bain, and also for Rousseau.5 The pathos of modern humanitarianism, its clamor for greater sensuous happiness, its subterraneously smoldering passion, its revolutionary protest against all institutions, traditions, and customs which it considers as obstacles to the increase of sensuous happiness, its whole revolutionary spirit -- all this is in characteristic contrast to the luminous, almost cool spiritual enthusiasm of Christian love. It should not surprise us that psychological theory, following this historical change in experiencing love, increasingly dissolves the very phenomenon of love into a mechanism of necessary delusions. Sometimes sympathy is reduced to the act of artificially putting oneself in another's place -- according to the question: "What would you feel if this happened to you?" -- and of reproducing the feelings we ourselves experienced at analogous occasions. Sometimes (as by Bain) it is reduced to a kind of hallucination of feeling, in which we are violently drawn into the other person's state of mind, as if we momentarily underwent the sufferings we see. Then again, it is explained as an "empathy" through the reproduction of one's own previous experiences; this reproduction is supposed to be directly prompted by the imitation of the other person's expressions of emotion, so that we need not "put ourselves in his place."6 Finally, sympathy may be interpreted as the mere mental correlative of certain fixed and primary impulses to act which are useful for the species -- i.e., as a consequence of the gregarious instinct, which can be observed even in the animal kingdom.7 Thus in theory as well, love descends step by step from its exalted place as token and symbol of an order which transcends the natural, indeed as the moving force within the kingdom of God. It becomes an animal drive which continually grows in refinement and complexity through man's social evolution and intellectual development. Starting from the sexual sphere, it becomes ever more richly specialized and tends to spread over wider and wider areas. Spencer and Darwin were the thinkers who finally formulated this reduction of love's loftiest expressions to the instinct of furthering the species, existing already in animal societies. The reduction presupposes a complete misunderstanding of the nature of these phenomena, and it was possible only after the historical movement itself had evolved certain feelings -- and a concomitant idea -- whose psychological core may indeed not be essentially different from the mentality of gregarious animals.8 (Fs)