there is so much missing from our lives. We have been unable to get quite the career we

wanted. Our partners leave us largely unfulfilled. We have made some catastrophic mistakes that

can never be corrected. Our appearance is shameful and in decline. And there is, correspondingly,

so much that we envy. No philosopher has ever taken envy more seriously than Friedrich Nietzsche.

The 19th-century German philosopher described it as the most important emotion at work in

individual and collective life. In his writings, he referred to it with a slightly unusual

word, the French term ressentiment – which places emphasis on the humiliation we experience

in the face of what we desire but cannot have. In his book On The Genealogy of Morality,

published in 1887, Nietzsche presents us with a ground-breaking diagnosis of envy. He opens

with a speculative history of how our ideas of good and evil developed – and the crucial

role of envy therein. In ancient times, Nietzsche argued, what counted as negative or positive

was defined in a rather direct and simple way by the powerful. Those who held military,

financial and political authority

got to decide what sort of actions and behaviours would be thought

admirable. Because of the aristocrats’ attachments and tastes, ‘good’ came to be synonymous

with aristocratic values like winning, making money, being confidently sexual, knowing a

lot and securing fame. Assured of their own virtue, the powerful in ancient times slept

soundly. But the aristocracy’s reign did not go on unchallenged. There were too many

weak, powerless and downtrodden people at large, a mass of men and women whom Nietzsche

alternately and with a dark playfulness – deliberately designed to appall sensitivities – called

‘the slaves’, ‘the plebeians’ or ‘the herd’. These people increasingly wanted

to avenge themselves against the powerful. At the same time, they lacked any practical

means of doing so, having no money or political leverage. Then they hit on an idea of genius:

They would fight back against the rich and the strong

with the weapon of guilt. They couldn’t attack the powerful physically, but they could

leave them unable to sleep well at night.

They would ruin them via their consciences. A central weapon in

this revenge attack was – for Nietzsche – the ideology we know today as Christianity.

Christianity was for the philosopher a brilliant, devilish instrument of revenge dreamt up by

the weak to make the strong feel guilty for their advantages. It was Christianity’s

strategy to relabel as bad everything once associated with aristocratic values – and

to anoint with the term good everything with which the ‘herd’ was identified. So, in

the new Christian moral scheme, having no money was relabelled ‘noble poverty’,

having no education was praised as ‘sincerity’, lacking sex was hailed as ‘chastity’ – and,

as Nietzsche put it, ‘not-being-able-to-take-revenge’ turned into ‘forgiveness.’ Envious for

what they couldn’t have, Christians made the powerful feel untenably guilty – and

insisted that the kingdom of God belonged to the weak, the meek, the chaste, the poor

and the persecuted.

Nietzsche almost admired the audacity of this move but

at the same time held it to be responsible for an appalling bad faith and the degradation

of European civilisation. In a cantankerous tone, he wrote that: The man of ressentiment

is neither upright nor naïve, nor honest and straight with himself. His soul squints;

his mind loves dark corners, secret paths and back-doors. For Nietzsche, the psychological

health of a person or society depends on being able to resist denigrating what one wants

but can’t have. It involves resisting the urge to deny the gaps in one’s life for

the sake of inner convenience. It is, for Nietzsche, always better to say what one wishes

to be and have rather than to twist one’s entire personality to avoid discomfort. We

must, for the philosopher, be strong enough to face, and stay honest about, our own misfortunes.

Though Nietzsche spent a lot of time studying Christianity, he understood that the desire

to redraw values on the basis of repressed envy was a manoeuvre that could appear under

many guises. His attacks may seem harsh and potentially even an absurd defence of boorish

upper class set of values. But it’s important to remember that Nietzsche himself was no aristocrat:

he lacked money, sex, an audience, friends – but he was committed to honesty with himself

and so didn’t shirk away from admitting that, in certain moods, he would dearly have

wished to be more heroic, fulfilled and brave, yet lacked the talent to be so. Nietzsche’s

message is that one of the most mature acts we are capable of is to admit to the strength

of our envy – and the scale of our regret – without falling prey to defensive philosophies

of denial, in all their many and ingenious disguises. Our Western Philosophy cards, features

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