Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment as the psychological structure for Sartre’s theory of anti-Semitism

Introduction

Bernard-Henri Lévy (2003: 127) attributes to Canetti the thought that it is possible to rewrite the entire history of contemporary philosophy merely by applying a single criterion: who read Nietzsche and who did not. To say that Nietzsche influenced the thought of Sartre may perhaps be an understatement, but Christine Daigle has argued for a general influence calling Sartre an ‘unaware Nietzschean’ (2004: 195–7; see also 2005). ¹ While Daigle concentrates her study on the two authors’ notion of nihilism, which she believes to be their overarching connection, there is another area untouched by Daigle’s work that shows a permeating convergence between Nietzsche’s thought and that of Sartre. This specific area is the intersection of Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment and Sartre’s description of the anti-Semite. In this paper, I argue that Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment provides a structural framework upon which to understand Sartre’s theory of racism in general and anti-Semitism in particular. Concomitant with this analysis, I also show how remarkably similar Nietzsche’s solution to the problem of ressentiment is to Sartre’s own conception of authenticity. ²

Despite attempts to expropriate Nietzsche’s work to lend credence to anti-Semitic claims, most notably by the Nazi philosopher Alfred Bäumler (1887–1968), his dislike of anti-Semitism is well known and well documented (Bernstein, 1987: 134–7; Duffy and Mittelmann, 1998: 301–17; Scott, 2003: 53–73; Yovel, 1994: 214–36; 1998). ³ Likewise, Sartre’s discussion of the topic in Anti-Semite and Jew (1948a) is a classic psychological critique that is applicable to all forms of racism. Just as Sartre does, Nietzsche grounds his point of view in psychological terminology. As Nietzsche points out, the three essays in On the Genealogy of Morals are ‘studies by a psychologist for the revaluation of all values’ (Nietzsche, 1989b: 313). In fact, Robert Solomon (1994) argues that the genealogy of morals is a thesis about the motivation of morality, which is, by its very nature, psychological. But to understand Nietzsche’s direction we must first understand why his position is different from more normative critiques of morals and morality.

Nietzsche’s central theme is that moral values are born out of or originate from a condition he terms ressentiment. In fact, Nietzsche sees the three central phenomena that constitute modern morality – the distinction between good and evil, the feeling of moral guilt or ‘bad conscience’ and the ascetic ideal – as having their origin in ressentiment (Nietzsche 1989b: 33–4; 73–6; 108–12). ⁴ As is well known, Nietzsche offers a two-pronged attack on our customarily held moral beliefs: on the one hand, he challenges our most deeply held views as to what we consider valuable, and, on the other hand, he opposes our widespread notions concerning the universality, and indeed the very validity, of our moral judgements. In Nietzsche’s opinion, our traditional views of morality are not universal in nature and can make no claim to be so. However, the view that morality is objectionable because it originates in ressentiment does not seem to fit nicely into either of his criticisms. The reason lies, perhaps, in the difficulty in utilizing a psychological critique of morality in the first place; such a critique casts severe doubt on our ability to infer the truth of the judgement much less the validity of its content. Undoubtedly, even if psychology could establish that some belief originates in ressentiment, this fails to say whether that particular belief holds any value whatsoever, let alone whether it can claim universality.

If Nietzsche’s psychological critique does not operate on either of the levels mentioned previously, the question then becomes where does it belong? To formulate an answer, I will turn to Bernard Reginster (1997: 282–3) who argues quite convincingly that ultimately Nietzsche’s psychological critique does not concern value judgements qua value judgements; rather, such a critique is concerned with the psychological state of the individual whose value judgements are born out of ressentiment. Yet even if moral judgements are nothing more than the expression of psychological attitudes that constitute their origin, then merely exposing what attitude a given judgement expresses will not amount to a critique of that judgement. But, as Nietzsche points out, a drive,

in itself … has, like every drive, neither this moral character nor any moral character at all, nor even a definite attendant sensation of pleasure or displeasure; it acquires all this, as its second nature, only when it enters into relations with drives already baptized good or evil or is noted as a quality of beings the people has already evaluated and determined in a moral sense. (Nietzsche, 1997: 26)

Thus, it is incumbent not only to show what is wrong with the ‘man of ressentiment’s’ individual psyche, but also to illuminate why such an attitude is mistaken, and this is precisely what Nietzsche has in mind, and it is essentially what Sartre portrays in the anti-Semite. Ressentiment is, above all, an emotion based on individual power or the dearth of it, but with Nietzsche power or its lack does not cause ressentiment; rather, it comprises the content of ressentiment.

Sartre, on the other hand, sees anti-Semitism as an emotional passion and a predisposition towards hatred that is constitutive as well as primordial, and in this regard it is the culmination of psychic drives. Sartre’s anti-Semitic subjective position is, as we shall see, a psychological state much like Nietzsche’s ressentiment. Furthermore, Nietzsche’s ressentiment eventually leads to bad conscience; Sartre’s passion, in turn, leads to the bad faith of inauthenticity. At first glance, much for these two thinkers appears to be aligned not only in their shared existentialist desire for human freedom, but also in their similar attitudes towards anti-Semitism as an insidious negation of that very freedom. In order to pursue this enquiry further, it will be necessary to first examine what Nietzsche has in mind by his psychological notion of ressentiment, which will then allow us to discuss not only Sartre’s notion of the anti-Semite, but, more importantly, how Nietzsche’s ressentiment can be seen to form a structural foundation upon which Sartre constructed his polemic. Finally, this will lead to a discussion of how Nietzsche’s solution to the problem of ressentiment is strikingly similar to Sartre’s notion of authenticity.

Nietzsche’s ressentiment

Nietzsche begins his analysis of ressentiment by distinguishing between the master and slave moralities, and an equally famous theory that ‘bad conscience’, or a feeling of moral guilt, originates from an internalization of the will to power (Nietzsche, 1989b: 65–7; 81–90; 1986: 34–5; 1989b: 227–32). Nietzsche not only distinguishes between the master and the slave, he also further delineates the noble class into the (Jewish) priest and the knights. While more will be said about the members of the cast that Nietzsche presents to us, for now suffice it to say that he describes the noble masters and the slaves in terms of both their character traits and their socio-political attributes. Master morality belongs to a dominant, warrior-like life. The ‘good’ is whatever they believe belongs to them and to their conquering instincts. Because the essence of master morality is constituted by affirmation, its negatives such as ‘bad’, ‘unhappy’ and ‘base’, are only offshoots, and are always designating the opposite of its affirmation. The noble believes himself to be of a superior or higher rank, and thus the good life for the noble includes political superiority as well (Nietzsche, 1989b: 31–4; 1989c: 223–5). Yet Nietzsche is quick to point out that what concerns him most is nobility as a type of character, which, as original and therefore good, is an expression of a strong character.

As one might expect, the slave morality is seen as a reaction, an inversion, a corruption; it is dominated by the negative. The overpowered slave, who revolts ideologically against his condition, does so by inventing a series of distinctions by which to condemn his master as ‘evil’ and to affirm himself, not directly and spontaneously, but indirectly and ‘reactively’. It is clear that an ethics of ressentiment is merely an expression of bad character regardless of its principles and rationalizations. As Nietzsche states:

While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself (gennaios ‘of noble descent’ underlines the nuance ‘upright’ and probably also ‘naïve’), the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naïve nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how not to forget, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble. (Nietzsche, 1989b: 38)

Nietzsche’s ressentiment entails the act of deception, the clandestine and the opaque. Moreover, ressentiment relies on a dyadic relationship: ordinarily one cannot have ressentiment directed at oneself; rather, the slave finds himself worse off than his master and takes revenge regardless of whether the master is imagined as a single, specific person or some vague group to which that person belongs.

Ressentiment aims at other individuals, other groups or other institutions; its very essence requires that one’s view be directed outwards instead of back to oneself. In order to exist, slave morality insists upon a hostile external world, which provides the necessary external stimuli in order to act at all, yet that action is fundamentally reaction. In language that will foretell Sartre’s later argument, Nietzsche explains that ‘man seeks a principle through which he can despise men – he invents a world so as to be able to slander and bespatter this world: in reality he reaches every time for nothingness’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 253). The reverse is true for the noble whose acts are spontaneous and who affirms life though passion. Ressentiment is, on the other hand, a non-reflecting, bitter emotional state often linked to a slight or injury that is either real or imagined. Just as often it is premised on fantasies and frustrations of revenge, which further exacerbates the ressentiment. Quite unlike the slave, the unlikely appearance of ressentiment in the noble causes immediate action, an action that eventually ‘consummates and exhausts itself’; moreover, as it dissipates, it fails to ‘poison’ (Nietzsche, 1989b: 39).

It should be kept in mind, and in fact Nietzsche tells us, that a race of men of ressentiment is bound to become eventually cleverer than members of any noble race; it will also honour cleverness to a far greater degree: namely as a condition of the existence of the first ressentiment as the evil enemy, or ‘the Evil One’. And it is this description that, in turn, allows the man of ressentiment to view himself and his attitudes as righteous and himself as the ‘good one’. This evil one arouses fear in the slave, since it is the slave’s belief that ‘power and dangerousness are assumed to reside in this evil, a certain dreadfulness, subtlety and strength, which do not admit of being despised’ (Nietzsche, 1989c: 232). For Nietzsche, it is clear that the man of ressentiment must divide the world in two; in order to affirm his very existence, he must portray that existence in Manichean terms.

Even though there is no direct correlate in the German language, there is a purpose for Nietzsche’s use of the French term ressentiment. Frustration is an emotional feeling and ressentiment, which derives from the Latin ‘resentire’ and means ‘to feel’, denotes a strong and often harsh emotion balanced between vulnerability and imagined vengeance on the one hand, and an aristocratic sense of honour on the other (Danto, 1965: 164–7). In short, the resentful person has ingrained feelings, while the noble overcomes those feelings and acts. No matter what language one utilizes, ressentiment harbours a feeling of vulnerability and implies reaction to an offence that includes schemes of revenge. As has been pointed out, however, more often than not these slights are imagined and the schemes are nothing more than fantasies of the imagination.

But what is it that brings ressentiment, this emotional, psychological state of vengeance and vulnerability, to fruition? For Nietzsche, ressentiment is primarily concerned with power, but not just as a feeling of self-pity for one’s own plight in the word; rather, it is a personal vindictiveness or blame for a perceived and perhaps preconceived injustice. Moreover, ressentiment is typified by its obsessive nature, but it is not generally expressed as a specific desire other than as an amorphous yearning for revenge. This type of revenge seems to manifest itself in an abstract desire for the utter humiliation of its target followed by its total annihilation. One should not believe, however, that ressentiment is self-destructive. On the contrary, it is the ultimate emotion of self-preservation and self-affirmation at any cost.

Ressentiment is a psychological form of repressed vengeance arising out of several key factors. Initially, the man of ressentiment (in Nietzsche’s example, the Jewish priests) desires to lead a certain kind of life that he deems of importance, and is generally thought of as a life of supremacy. Nevertheless, his weakness creates a feeling of inferiority or impotence. Next, this feeling of impotence assumes the essential role of a feature of one’s own psyche. The result is the man of ressentiment sees himself as permanently and ineluctably weak. Of even greater concern is the fact that his loss of power is seen not as some aberration, but as evidence of his constitutional impotency. In the end, the man of ressentiment believes himself powerless, yet he retains his arrogance and his false sense of superiority. Thus, his will to power remains intact (Nietzsche, 1989b: 31–3; see also 1974: 359). Finally, the man of ressentiment refuses to resign himself to this ignominious impotence; his sickliness or impotence does not eliminate his desire for control, it only makes those feelings more acute. While referring to the priestly nobles as an example of ressentiment, Nietzsche states that the hatred the priest harbours toward his victorious rivals only ‘grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions’ (Nietzsche, 1989b: 33). It is this third definitional characteristic that sets ressentiment apart from other attitudes. The man of ressentiment maintains his commitment to his original goals and aspirations, and refuses to accept his inability to realize them. From a psychological point of view, the man of ressentiment is torn or alienated by the tremendous tension between the desire to live the life he values and the belief that he is powerless to attain it.

The entire notion of strength and weakness assumes special importance for the man of ressentiment. Nietzsche is especially attuned to the impotence of the priest, but what Nietzsche despises about ressentiment is not only its emotional impact and lack of energy or robustness, but above all its inability to affirm its own selfhood – and, therefore, its own self-worth – without first negating someone else. The strength or power Nietzsche refers to is not physical or military; rather, it is the spontaneous, personal confidence that remains free from self-doubt that he praises. Again, Nietzsche refers to his two moral types, the master and the slave, to illustrate his point. There are various interpretations of Nietzsche’s master and slave morality including the description alluded to previously that attributes to the master such appellations as healthy, self-assertive, self-confident and creative and, by contrast, portrays the slave as unhealthy, miserable, threatened, impoverished and cowardly. Nietzsche utilizes a powerful metaphorical image of the bird of prey and the little lamb as he describes this contrast:

That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no ground for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves: ‘these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb – would he not be good? there is no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal, except perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little ironically and say: ‘we don’t dislike them at all, these good little lambs; we even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb’. (Nietzsche, 1989b: 44–5)

While this metaphor is descriptively pertinent, other approaches, while not straying too far from the above interpretation, including that of Robert Solomon (1994: 95–126), have added a twist to this standard interpretation. In short, these interpretations see the master morality as represented by those who have the good fortune to be well born and raised with modern advantages – excellent education, superior cultural gifts and a supportive social structure, all of which presupposes a certain economic status. This, in turn, breeds bold achievement born out of an attitude of superiority with its attendant lack of inhibitions and prohibitions. Slaves, on the other hand, are group-oriented and mutually dependent. While not necessarily lacking ambition, they see their goals and desires thwarted by obstacles not of their own design. The slave possesses an ideal image of the world that is made in his own image. In other words, his personal narcissism is, unlike the master’s, more general in character and informs his outer world view. The slave, unable to accept this state of affairs, displays envy, becomes resentful and adopts a rebellious attitude. The adopted mode of action is reaction against the situation the slave has been thrown into, and not action itself. As we shall see, Sartre’s portrait of the anti-Semite can be seen to include these narcissistic character traits as well.

The confrontation between the master and the slave provides the starting point upon which ressentiment not only constitutes the psychology of the slave, but also bad conscience. ⁵ While the master draws strength from the spontaneous manifestations of power, the slave harbours a sense of hatred towards all powerful affirmers in life. The slave is the very paradigm of suppressed feelings of hatred that fails to connect to their desired outward object and, instead, manifest themselves in an intensely internalized destructive tendency. As Nietzsche reminds us, the origin of bad conscience is tantamount to an ever increasing inner world that is inhibited from any outward discharge. For Nietzsche, this tension seeks an escape, and eventually it turns back upon itself – man against man: ‘hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, [and] in destruction’: this is how bad conscience manifests itself in the man of ressentiment (Nietzsche, 1989b: 85).

When Nietzsche directly addresses the issue of anti-Semitism, he argues that what underlies and makes it possible is, in fact, ressentiment. As he explains, ressentiment ‘blooms’ among ‘anti-Semites – where it has always bloomed, in hidden places, like the violet, though with a different odour’ (Nietzsche, 1989b: 73). In order to affirm his own existence, the anti-Semite must negate the Jew whom he sees as an absolute other. It is only through negation that the anti-Semite is able to recognize himself within a community, and become ensconced as a member of the ‘club’. That club includes Nietzsche’s fellow academics of the hallowed halls of the university whom he labels ‘noble Pharisees’, or plainly anti-Semitic. In Nietzsche’s mind they are all men of ressentiment, since as members of the club they utilize ‘loud’ gestures that take the guise of ‘noble indignation’ (Nietzsche, 1989b: 123–4). ⁶

At this point, one is compelled to ask if there is a way out for the man of ressentiment. Nietzsche does provide a solution to the problem, which, as we shall see, roughly parallels that of Sartre’s. But before delving into a discussion of a solution, we must first turn to Sartre’s notion of anti-Semitism and its psychological origin.

Sartre’s anti-Semite

Sartre structures his book much like a play: there are active ‘characters’ introduced to us in a rather linear fashion. His main characters are the anti-Semite and the Jew, but for our purposes we will concern ourselves primarily with Sartre’s ‘man of ressentiment’, namely the anti-Semite. The anti-Semite chapter begins with an attempt to define what constitutes the psyche of the anti-Semite. Whatever anti-Semites may be, however, Sartre argues that they do not merely possess opinions concerning Jews. In essence, Sartre refuses ‘to characterize as opinions a doctrine that is aimed directly at particular persons and that seeks to suppress their rights or to exterminate them’ (Sartre, 1948a: 9). How then does Sartre conceive of the anti-Semite? First of all, Sartre believes that anti-Semitism is a psychological passion, and this is essential to his analysis, since the act of being an anti-Semite cannot be based on experience if it resides in the passions. In psychoanalytic terms, neurosis occurs when drives within the ego are incapable of connecting with their object and seek another avenue of expression. In this sense, Nietzsche and Sartre are talking about similar phenomena. In Sartre’s description of ‘passions’, he states that ordinary hate is associated with provocation – I hit you, you hit me – but the anti-Semite experiences no such outward insult. Rather, the hate the anti-Semite harbours ‘precedes the facts that are supposed to call it forth’ (Sartre, 1948a: 17). A predisposition towards hatred is not only fundamental to the very being of the anti-Semite, it is primordial. The anti-Semite’s passions and psychic drives necessarily manifest themselves in a subjective position that preconceives an ‘idea’ of the Jew as to the latter’s nature as well as to their societal role. And, if it is not the outgrowth of some external force, then anti-Semitism must be seen as the total free choice of oneself. But, for Sartre, the anti-Semite also exists on a universal level. By this he means not only is the anti-Semite controlled by passions, but those passions also control his world view. The anti-Semite, driven by psychologically generated drives, projects those passions onto the world and all those who inhabit it. The anti-Semite, reminiscent of Nietzsche’s slave, perceives a hostile external world and reacts to that environment with hate. Consequently, the anti-Semite adopts, in Sartre’s view, a ‘syncretic’ outlook that is always already present in all circumstances.

By syncretic Sartre means behaviour that is, for the most part, submerged in the content of behaviour itself rather than behaviour that imposes its own demands on the elements of the situation. In probing this type of behaviour, Sartre finds that the anti-Semite possesses a basic fear not only of himself but for the truth as well. This fear emanates from the form of truth itself with what Sartre describes as its ever elastic character of indefinite approximation. The anti-Semite, his certainty founded on passion alone, rules out reason and rationality in his search for impenetrability. Hate is freely chosen for the anti-Semite because hate is a faith. ⁷ The anti-Semite feels no compulsion to look within himself for his personality; his being lies entirely outside of himself, and, as a result, the anti-Semite runs away – he ‘flees himself’ – from the very awareness of himself as a person.

Sartre’s view is very similar to that of Nietzsche whose man of ressentiment also directs his view outwards instead of reflecting on to himself. For Nietzsche, as well as Sartre, this is the essence of slave morality and it is the essence of the anti-Semite. Sartre vividly displays this concerted effort of non-reflection in his short story ‘The childhood of a leader’ (1948b: 84–144), which should be read as a fictionalized account of the anti-Semite chapter of Anti-Semite, and Jew. In the story, Lucien, the youthful anti-Semite, tells his fellow travellers that the ‘First maxim … [is] not to try and see inside yourself; there is no mistake more dangerous’ (Sartre, 1948b: 142). This grounding is, Sartre believes, nothing less than irrationalism.

As I mentioned previously in the discussion of Nietzsche, even though the man of ressentiment is obsessive in nature he possesses only an amorphous yearning for revenge manifested in an abstract desire for the utter humiliation of his target. This is eloquently illustrated by Sartre when the very young Lucien declares that he does not exist, but as he matures he sees his existence couched in such descriptive terms as small, sad and vague. It is not until he encounters the rabidly anti-Semitic Lemordant that he sees a man who has found his place. At Lemordant’s urging, Lucien signs some nebulous petition protesting against the presence of Jewish students at the École Normale Supérieure, and the next day is elated to see his name printed in the right-wing ultranationalist Action Française. Lucien subsequently joins Lemordant’s group, the camelots, and is captivated by the camaraderie of his fellow anti-Semites. This camaraderie is, Lucien decides, based on strength; it is the power that Lucien feels he never before possessed. What Lucien desires is reliance or a mutual dependency upon a group of like-minded people – what Nietzsche would view as a herd mentality – and not unlike Nietzsche’s description of the man of ressentiment’s revenge that seeks to humiliate and destroy, the camelots’ adolescent pranks directed at various Jews and their establishments escalates over time into the verbal humiliation and severe beating of a helpless Jew. Lucien finds the violence to be an affirmation of a right and of a conviction so deep as to be ‘religious’; that right, that conviction is little more than the trite and prosaic slogan: ‘France for the French’. In Lucien’s narcissistically, obsessional and irrational world, being born a Jew in France somehow does not render one French.

As Nietzsche probed the origin of the man of ressentiment and found it in the masses or the herd, Sartre sees the anti-Semite as inhabiting a similar position in society. They move, Sartre says, among the anonymous crowd, they are the poor man’s snob and they belong to the lower middle classes of the towns and rural districts. They work in anonymous jobs as bureaucrats, obscure office workers and ordinary businessmen. In short, they are every bit Nietzsche’s masses and the herd. These people who lack all power can only gain power through their perverse treatment of the Jews who are viewed as taking over, or as having everything. What Sartre is describing is our natural tendency towards exclusivity, and by excluding others we affirm our superiority over those who are not part of the group. The anti-Semite joins the exclusive ‘gated community’, so to speak, by treating the Jew as inferior.

In one crucial aspect, however, Sartre recognizes the paradoxical dependence the anti-Semite has for the Jew in order to sustain the life he has chosen. Without the Jew, the anti-Semite would be forced to look to another cause or another hatred rather than be compelled to look within himself. The anti-Semite creates the Jew and as Sartre explains: ‘Far from the experience producing his idea of the Jew, it was the latter which explained his experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would have invented him’ (Sartre, 1948a: 13). In a similar vein, Nietzsche recognizes the other’s effect when he asks: ‘have you ever seen your friend asleep – and found how he looks? What is the face of your friend anyway? It is your own in a rough and imperfect mirror’ (Nietzsche, 1978: 56). While Nietzsche is not as direct as Sartre in indicating that the other always determines human subjectivity, he poses the pertinent enquiry: ‘In short, the question is always who he is, and who the other is’ (Nietzsche, 1989c: 64). In this sense, Nietzsche is certainly aware of the ‘other’ and its profound effect on human subjectivity in general, and for the man of ressentiment in particular, who can affirm his own existence only through the negation of the other. After all, the man of ressentiment, just like Sartre’s anti-Semite, is reacting to something – or more likely to someone – and that reaction, so essential to both Nietzsche and Sartre, is not a reaction to something ethereal. Accordingly, the psychological drives compelling the man of ressentiment are in his hate and vengeance and in his desire for power directed to the other, and that other is – for the anti-Semite – the Jew. In this sense, it is crucial for Sartre to formulate the ‘person’ or identity of the anti-Semite, which includes character traits, social status, thoughts and habits. As a result, anti-Semitism forms a web of intricate entanglements that envelops an entire personality; the effect of which is that one is either an anti-Semite or one is not; there is no middle ground.

No middle ground can exist for the simple reason that the anti-Semite views the Jew as evil. In order to sustain his world view, the anti-Semite renounces all expectations that the Jew will reform himself and conduct his affairs in a so-called reasonable manner (reasonable, that is, to the anti-Semite). This impossible goal gives way to a metaphysical principle that there is an inherent drive within the Jew to do evil. But in case one asks, ‘If the Jew can do evil surely he can just as easily do good?’ the anti-Semite, Sartre declares, declines our entreaty by indicating: ‘The Jew is free to do evil, not good; he has only so much free will as is necessary for him to take full responsibility for his crimes of which he is the author; he does not have enough to be able to achieve a reformation’ (Sartre, 1948a: 39). As the master fought the slave in a duel to the death, so the anti-Semite sees the Jew as one to be annihilated. Good, for the anti-Semite, can only come through the destruction of the Jew. The anti-Semite’s Manichaeism is essential to an understanding of his psychological development. At the same time, it plays a crucial role in Nietzsche’s development of the man of ressentiment and his concomitant notion of the Evil One. The man of ressentiment views his attitude as righteous and himself as good; he views the evil man, and in this case it is the Jew, with fear and trepidation. Nietzsche’s Manichaeism rests securely in the anti-Semite’s psyche.

As we have seen, Sartre paints a portrait of the anti-Semite whose character is defined by his passion and not his reason. Emotion alone rules this character’s individual as well as world view. His fear is, Sartre says, of himself, but inherent within that fear resides a fear of the other, and for the anti-Semite the other is the Jew. This fear of the other emerges for the anti-Semite in his Manichean attitude of good and evil. Our anti-Semite is, Sartre informs us, the ordinary member of the masses; he occupies the herd. The picture we gain of the anti-Semite is of a man who is afraid, not only of the Jew, but of himself, of his own bad faith and his own limitations. For this character, the Jew is a device, a means to ensure one’s own existence; an existence as implacable as stone. As we asked with Nietzsche, we must now question whether Sartre provides a solution. While the answer is simple enough – yes, they both do – the discussion is, as we shall see, more complex.

Self-overcoming and authenticity

Self-overcoming is the solution proposed by Nietzsche, and it is a concept that is essential to his philosophy. In psychological terms, Nietzsche views self-overcoming as surmounting the decadent culture into which one is born, and through praxis reshaping one’s inner most drives (Yovel, 1998: 123). This process of self-overcoming is described by Nietzsche in one word – sublimation – which means, in terms similar to Hegel’s aufheben, preserving, cancelling and lifting up. The man of ressentiment must, therefore, preserve the drive, while at the same time cancelling it out in order to rise above it. As such, sublimation is possible only because there is a basic power, namely the will to power defined in terms of an objective force that remains constant throughout all circumstances and situations. Since the will to power is the ‘essence’, not only does the energy associated with the drive remain, but its objective power also remains. Only the ‘accidental’ attributes of the basic striving are cancelled. For Nietzsche we undergo a process of sublimation in order to self-overcome our fear (Nietzsche, 1989b: 84–5; see also Kaufmann, 1974: 211–56; Nietzsche, 1997: 109–10). Thus, fear represents the negative aspect and the will to power the positive facet of our considerations for and our opinions of other human beings. In the end, fear is little more than our attitude towards power. As we shall see, Nietzsche’s concern with fear and its attendant relationship with self-overcoming, or will to power, assumes a significant position for Sartre.

While Nietzsche’s solution involves self-overcoming, he also believes that no outer or externally mandated restraints can overcome the deeply ingrained and archetypal negative figure of the Jew. Nietzsche explains that:

To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long – that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mould, to recuperate and to forget … Such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others; here alone genuine ‘love of one’s enemies’ is possible – supposing it to be possible at all on earth. (Nietzsche, 1989b: 39) ⁸

Thus, it is fair to say that no level of Jewish assimilation, so preferred by liberal democracies, will suffice for either Nietzsche or Sartre (Nietzsche, 1989c: 126–31). It is the democrat’s love of universal equality that Nietzsche disdains because it fails to recognize the individual, and it is exactly the same reason why Sartre also dislikes the democrat. In his desire to neither recognize alterity nor comprehend origin, Sartre believes that the democrat universalizes all of humanity – white, black, brown it really does not matter. Consequently, there is no Jew, no Arab and no Black; there are just physical bodies that in a collective make up human nature. In the end, Sartre sees the democrat as a ‘feeble’ protector whose policies of assimilation only save the individual person and annihilate the Jew (Sartre, 1948a: 55–7).

Nietzsche’s self-overcoming requires personal fortitude and, above all, being honest with oneself, to fully appreciate one’s circumstances, to accept the situation one is in and to ‘shrug off’ the vermin that eats into one, all in order to overcome it. Again, Sartre’s description of authenticity is quite similar to Nietzsche’s self-overcoming; in fact, both envision a sense of suffering as a foundationally critical element. In his War Diaries, Sartre explains that authenticity requires ‘that we be a bit tearful’ (1984a: 51). In fact, since human freedom creates the obstacles from which we suffer, it is no surprise that Sartre thinks ‘to suffer and to be are one and the same’ (Sartre, 1956: 562). Likewise, Nietzsche points out that:

I asses the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how much to turn to its advantage; I do not account the evil and painful character of existence a reproach to it, but hope rather that it will one day be more evil and painful than hitherto. (Nietzsche, 1968: 206)

For Nietzsche, it is the suffering in this world that causes us to imagine another more valuable world, and it is this imaginary world that is an expression of our hatred for a world that makes us suffer in the first place. In similar language, Sartre sees the path of life littered with difficulties, and the emotions as a transformative mechanism allowing us to cope with that difficulty. When life becomes overpowering and all pathways seem barred to us, we endeavour to alter the world and live ‘as if the connection between things and their potentialities were not ruled by deterministic processes, but by magic’ (Sartre, 1984b: 59, emphasis added). This process Sartre calls magic allows us to alter our behaviour and apprehend an old object in a different way such that it becomes a new object for us. The end this emotional behaviour seeks is not to act upon the object through the agency of a particular means; rather, ‘it seeks by itself to confer upon the object, and without modifying it in its actual structure, another quality, a lesser existence, or a lesser presence’ (Sartre, 1984b: 6–1). Nietzsche too sees no ‘true’ world as existing; there is only an apparent world which is, as he calls it, ‘an arranged and simplified world’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 306). This arranged and simplified world is the adapted world that we believe to be real, but in actuality this reality lies only in the continual recurrence of identical, familiar and related things in their logical character (Nietzsche, 1968: 306–7). And, as pointed out earlier, the man of ressentiment invents a world so as to be able to slander it.

Sartre’s notion of authenticity can be understood only in terms of the human condition, and that condition can be defined only in terms of the situation one is thrown into. ⁹ In Being and Nothingness, Sartre elaborates on what constitutes a situation by saying that it includes my place, my past, my environment, my fellow man and my death. But Sartre goes on to say that every situation encounters limitations or obstacles not of its own creation on account of the ‘given’ which it surpasses and annihilates (1956: 629). ¹⁰ As such, authenticity not only comes to us from the outside through the situation that we are thrown into, but at the same time it comes to us from inside through the free choices we make. One of the key points in understanding authenticity is to realize that:

To be authentic is to fully realize one’s being-in-situation, whatever this situation may happen to be: with a profound awareness that, through the authentic realization of the being-in-situation, one brings to plenary existence the situation on the one hand and human reality on the other. (Sartre, 1984a: 54) ¹¹

The situation one is thrown into is, for Sartre, not catalogued or permanently delineated; rather, the situation, just like the human condition, is forever changing. But it is the situation that relates directly to human reality and it is human reality that seeks to found itself. As Sartre points out, ‘human reality is moral because it wishes to be its own foundation’ (Sartre, 1984a: 110). Humankind’s project is not to preserve itself, but to found itself. Yet each undertaking reveals our human ‘gratuitousness’. Under the circumstances life becomes the transcendent, psychic object constructed by human reality in search of its own foundation.

Unfortunately, human reality loses its way in its attempt to found itself. The search for the absolute proves illusory, since it is also a flight before oneself. Searching for its own foundation, trying to found substantiality for the future, it struggles to tie itself down, to flee its own gratuity. In the end, it only discovers weariness, and, in order to deliver itself from the torment of freedom, it resorts to pleading its facticity: that is, it tries to conceal from itself the fact that it is condemned forever to be its own motivation by the fact that it is not its own foundation. The result is that human reality abandons itself by making itself a thing. Its possibilities are not its own; they exist only as external possibilities similar to those of any other thing. This is, for Sartre, self-motivated inauthenticity, but inauthenticity also ‘consists in seeking out a foundation in order to “lift” the absurd irrationality of facticity’ (Sartre, 1984a: 258).

Our unhappiness and misery can, however, act as a motivation for consciousness to return to an accurate view of itself and stop fleeing from itself. Thus, a self-motivating consciousness may seek to recover itself by proposing authenticity as its value. But while authenticity is a value, Sartre explicitly says that it is not a primary value; it merely gives itself as a means to arrive at substantiality, and it is substantiality that all human consciousness seeks. Since authenticity is only a proposed and not a primary value, consciousness must initiate a conversion in order to realize itself. Humankind’s search for a foundation requires that one assume that which one founds (Sartre, 1984a: 112–13). ¹² For Sartre, one assumes in order to found, to adopt a situation as one’s own and to claim responsibility. This ‘assumptive conversion’ presented to consciousness as a value for consciousness is an intuition of the will, which calls for the adopting of human reality as one’s own. It is this adoption that reveals human reality to itself by means of what Sartre terms a ‘non-thematic’ comprehension, not as it would be known through our usual concepts, but as it is willed. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre concludes that ‘whatever may be the situation in which he finds himself, the for-itself must wholly assume this situation with its peculiar coefficient of adversity, even though it be insupportable’ (Sartre, 1956: 707).

I should note here that in one of the few places Sartre mentions Nietzsche by name he chooses to castigate him, and the criticism is over the fundamental Nietzschean concept of the will to power. What Sartre says is brief and intended, I think, to indicate the originality of his own project of human freedom by distancing himself from Nietzsche’s theory of freedom through the will to power. In his short reference, Sartre declares that ‘the absurdity of the Schopenhauerian or Nietzschean ‘will to power’ is that, by conceiving of it as a force, one will never be able to understand that it expresses itself through desires or wills’ (Sartre 1984a: 113). What he means is that if the will to power is merely a force, then it can be counterbalanced by another force, thereby causing a stalemate. While Sartre is partly correct in his assertion, his statement does not present the entire Nietzschean argument. It is true that Nietzsche does understand the will to power as a force, which is one force among many. However, he also conceives of the will to power as the primary force. Nietzsche is quite clear that the ‘force’ of will to power that he talks about is psychologically premised when he states that ‘a quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect – more, it is nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting’ (Nietzsche, 1989b: 45). Each force or drive within the human psyche is continually engaged in battle such that ‘every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 267). Nietzsche accepts that the battle is joined and that life should be defined as an endurance test where the different forces engage in combat for supremacy until they grow unequal. But Nietzsche also sees will as willing its own will in a sacred ‘yes’ to life. It is the will to power that Nietzsche equates to life itself and it is through the will to power that Nietzsche extols us to self-overcome our aberrant drives. Only by overcoming can a Nietzschean authentic life be achieved. This constant battle is not unlike Sartre’s inauthenticity/authenticity dialectical engagement where, as we shall see, one moves from the authenticity of the moment to inauthenticity. Nietzsche believes the will to power to be a self-motivated desire of the mind not unlike Sartre’s desire or will to rise to authenticity. Without labouring the point, Nietzsche’s will to power is every bit as much a psychic drive within consciousness as Sartre’s state of authenticity.

Returning to the concept of authenticity, as Sartre readily points out, if assumption presents itself as a value of authenticity it is only because it always already existed. Accordingly, value can only cause human freedom to do what it has been doing all along, and the ‘law of freedom’ requires consciousness to self-motivate itself and freely make itself into what it is. As has been pointed out, if it so chooses, it can make itself akin to a thing, but it cannot be a thing. In essence, Sartre believes that all that consciousness is and all that happens to it is of its own doing and responsibility. Once Sartre formulates his law of freedom, he then points out the very serious consequences imposed by this law: the first assumption human reality must make is the assumption of its freedom, which means that ‘one never has any excuse’ (Sartre, 1984a: 113). I am the author of my choices, and in assuming my freedom I appropriate it and refuse to make excuses for the situation I am thrown into. But in my assumptive conversion I also recognize that I am condemned to be free, and it is exactly my freedom that I myself will.

Sartre’s view that authenticity involves an assumptive conversion of self-recovery by human reality can be achieved only en masse. In his Manichean framework, one is either authentic or one is not: there is, again, no middle course. Sartre is, however, keen to point out that attaining authenticity does not guarantee its constant presence. Human reality is free and because it is free it must react to every situation. Consequently, authenticity must ‘conquer new territory’, it has to consolidate, renew, revise and extend what is already there. After all, the desire to seek authenticity is, in the end, only a desire to see things more clearly, but that clarity, the calling into question on the part of human reality, is always in question, it is always out of reach, it is always not enough. As such, there neither is, nor can there ever be, anything that will preserve authenticity or prevent one from plunging into inauthenticity from the authenticity of the moment. Authenticity is true fidelity to oneself; it requires that one lives one’s freedom and that one does not deny human reality no matter what the situation, even though human reality is never complete. In stark terms, Sartre declares that:

Jewish authenticity consists in choosing oneself as Jew – that is, in realizing one’s Jewish condition. The authentic Jew abandons the myth of the universal man; he knows himself and wills himself into history as a historic and damned creature; he ceases to run away from himself and to be ashamed of his own kind. He understands that society is bad; for the naïve monism of the inauthentic Jew he substitutes a social pluralism. He knows that he is the one who stands apart, untouchable, scorned, proscribed – and it is as such that he asserts his being. (Sartre, 1948a: 136)

We have seen that despite consciousness’ congenial disposition towards alleviating its emptiness by attempting to attain a foundation, consciousness can also choose to recover itself by an assumptive conversion or a willed adoption of reality as one’s own. This is, for Sartre, consciousness’s project of authenticity as the willed adoption of an attitude that finds consciousness accepting its gratuitous freedom and claiming ownership and responsibility for all its actions regardless of the situation. In accepting freedom and adopting it as one’s own, human reality converts to a clear understanding of its self-motivation and eschews excuses. This new attitude, viewed as a conversion from consciousness’s bad-faith search for a foundation, represents human reality’s recovery from its ‘fall’ into the world. Human reality, by affirming itself as freedom, makes authenticity its value and in so doing finds the possibility of deliverance.

Conclusion

While Sartre rarely mentions Nietzsche’s writings in his analysis of anti-Semitism, those very writings provide a structural foundation for Sartre’s work. Nietzsche’s prescient portrayal of the man of ressentiment plays out in the anti-Semite chapter of Sartre’s book as well as in his fictionalized account of the burgeoning anti-Semite Lucien. Each delves into the psychological make-up of the character to understand, in Nietzsche’s case, not only what is wrong with the psyche of the man of ressentiment but why it is wrong when compared to that of the noble, and in the process provides us with a critique of the morality of modernity. While some may question the explicitness of Sartre’s moral critique, it must be kept in mind that he wrote Anti-Semite and Jew in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and was one of the first to discuss what came to be known as the ‘strange silence’ on the Jewish question. Moreover, when read in conjunction with his Notebooks for an Ethics, which was written in the same time period as Anti-Semite and Jew, his psychological portrayal must be considered a critique of morality. No less than Nietzsche, Sartre delves into the psychologically based motivation of the behaviour of the anti-Semite, and seeks to expose that character as weak, impotent, unhealthy and reactive – all words that Nietzsche would approve of. ¹³ Their solution to the man of ressentiment and the anti-Semite is, as we have seen, also similarly structured. Each views the authentic person as overcoming his situation through, in a Nietzschean sense, a will to power that means understanding oneself, and in the end making oneself ‘in the face of all, and against all’ (Sartre, 1948a: 137). Nietzsche’s desired morality is a morality of authenticity just as Sartre’s morality is that of the noble.