Are Ressentiment and slave morality the same?

Question

What is the difference between Ressentiment and slave morality according to Nietzsche or are they the same thing. Please help.

Answer 1

No. Ressentiment is a major component or result of slave morality . . . essentially as a slave, you have to regard yourself as inferior, and your enslavers as superior. So what happens is that you reassign the pain that accompanies a sense of one's own inferiority onto an external scapegoat. That is ressentiment.You feel the need to place the blame for your sorry position onto some scapegoat, but you can't do it to the actual cause of your misery. So you create something to use as a scapegoat.

Take Judea in the time of the Romans. The Jews, a proud people, were subjugated by the Romans. This made them feel inferior but to say that the Romans were at fault would be to risk severe reprisals. So in Nietzschean thought, the "Devil" was created for the repository of all the failures of the people there. This was ressentiment in action. You could make a similar case for the American Indians. In this process, an "inversion of values" takes place where the morality of the slave population is considered "good" and the morality of the oppressors is labelled as "bad."

The end result is often a situation in which a culture has outgrown the earlier sense of ressentiment itself, but continues to act under a slave morality.

Answer 2

Some answers are close, but in my opinion backwards. It is ressentiment that CREATES the slave morality. Dig this:

It probably goes without saying that few people (at least initially) ENJOY being weak. To attempt something and fail - or worse, be bested - is a blow to the ego. From this point there are only two ways to go:

A person can (according to Neitzsche) correctly identify that the weakness is in himself and develop a will to power which causes him to undergo a process of self-overcoming. He will enhance his strengths and eliminate his weaknesses until he is the conqueror of circumstance instead of a loser.

OR he can undergo a process of ressentiment. He refuses to accept his own weakness and decides instead that it was 'wrong' for whoever it was (maybe even the universe) to beat him... wrong being defined at this point as whatever makes him lose. This creates a morality with the opposite purpose of the above - ideal becomes those characteristics that make you weak and those things which make you strong are seen as evil. Thus a slave morality is born.

In a real sense, then, ressentiment is the opposite of a will to power in that it causes the creation of a slave morality in the same way a willful person causes the creation of a master morality.

That's my take anyway, for what it's worth. Peace.

Answer 3

My take on this is that Ressentiment is slightly different from slave morality in that slave morality is more concerned with the moral code by which a person in a slave capacity lives his life, whereas Ressentiment deals more with the attitudes and emotional content of the sitation.

Just my opinion.

Answer 4

Pretty much. Nietzsche wrote three books that discussed these two topics and many philosophy classes have scrutinized and debated them ad infinitum.

Re read the books, the discussions and see if you agree with the conclusions.

http://www.pioneer.net/~tkerns/religsite/lecsite/lec-nietz.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=Xeb80itrlRIC&pg=PA210&lpg=PA210&dq=resentment+according+to+nietzche&source=web&ots=RrSDtLcvLm&sig=5h80oRKgUtWnxTSAIgKfXdVybW0#PPA209,M1