When Bad Things Happen to Other People (6 page)

Because of what it can pointedly reveal about the conceptual construction of suffering,
Schadenfreude
must not be equated with envy, nor with the feeling of relief. The pleasure which Lucretius famously articulates in 
De Rerum Natura
, then, is not 
Schadenfreude
:

How sweet it is, when whirlwinds roil great ocean,

To watch, from land, the danger of another,

Not that to see some other person suffer

Brings great enjoyment, but the sweetness lies

In watching evils you yourself are free from.16

Lucretius’s pleasure is one of 
not
 suffering, at his freedom from it. It is a self-regarding emotion, unlike 
Schadenfreude
. Kant defends such a distinction in his 
Lectures on Ethics
 of 1779: “...we may enjoy in stormy weather, when comfortably seated in our warm, cosy parlour, speaking of those at sea, for it heightens our own feeling of comfort and happiness...”17 The relief derived from not suffering has given rise in the modern world to much of the popularity of the television and news media, which regularly broadcast details of sad events. People who demonstrate a taste for stories of disaster or who show morbid curiosity about the misfortunes of others should not be considered
schadenfroh
 (this is the adjective form of the German noun) too quickly, for it is entirely possible that the pleasure they find is a self-regarding one. News-watchers may find pleasure in learning of problems they don’t have.

Consider another example of self-regarding pleasure, taken from 
The
 
Black Prince,
 a novel by the British writer-philosopher Iris Murdoch:

We naturally take in the catastrophes of our friends a pleasure which genuinely does not preclude friendship. This is partly but not entirely because we enjoy being empowered as helpers. The unexpected or inappropriate catastrophe is especially piquant...18

This is not 
Schadenfreude
. The pleasure in question has nothing to do with either comedy or justice. Further, the speaker describes a kind of emotional neediness that could just as easily be satisfied in a number of other ways: being taken into confidence, asked for important advice, honored at a party. This pleasure is not in the suffering of another person, but in the idea that another person needs us.

Before leaving off with the contrast between self- and other-regarding emotions, it bears remarking that relief bespeaks luck. Lucretius and Kant both point to the contingency and vulnerability of human life in the same sea metaphor. Individually, they raise the question of whether and how luck (that another suffers, not me) might be said to bear on the moral life. It might be thought that the better our fortune, the easier it is to perfect our characters. If we were beautiful, intelligent, wealthy, and loved by others, we would not find it especially difficult to banish feelings of bitterness, envy, or resentment toward others. We would not encounter these feelings regularly, we might tell ourselves. And yet bookstores offer scores of biographies of wealthy, beautiful people who led miserable lives and whose moral characters no one would consider exemplary. Relief often produces a wonderful spirit of thankfulness for what we have; envy for the apparent luck of people who seem to have an easier time of it than we do, though, often indicates that we don’t actually know much about the people we envy.

The tediousness of boredom, to continue with a list of cognate emotional experiences, may invite interruption of any sort, but
Schadenfreude
is certainly not boredom. In Charles Dickens’s 
Great Expectations
 the protagonist Pip, who has just been saved from certain death at the hands of a villain, says of one of his unknowing rescuers:

For the present, under the circumstances, we deemed it prudent to make rather light of the matter to Trabb’s boy; who I am convinced would have been much affected by disappointment, if he had known that his intervention saved me from the limekiln. Not that Trabb’s boy was of a malignant nature, but that he had too much spare vivacity, and that it was in his constitution to want variety and excitement at anybody’s expense.19

We learn from Dickens that Trabb’s boy may well have felt a kind of joy upon hearing of Pip’s torture, but this joy would have been an antidote to the weariness of boredom—not pleasure in the fact of Pip’s suffering. The kind of thrill Dickens points to in this example of Trabb’s boy is also a kind of relief, then, not 
Schadenfreude
. This passage illustrates a nexus between boredom and pleasure. The passage is also valuable in that it raises the question of what it is to find pleasure at someone else’s expense.

Pleasure which comes at the expense of others can help to distinguish
Schadenfreude
from sadism, revenge, and malice, which share an active intention or desire to harm another and each of which requires personal expenditure of energy and time. How might
Schadenfreude
be confused with revenge and malice? When, to their mutual horror, Mr. Lammle and his new wife, Sophronia, realize in Dickens’s 
Our Mutual Friend
 that each has married the other for a fortune that does not in fact exist, the newly-weds vow to avenge themselves on the world. Says Mr. Lammle: “...we owe all other people the grudge of wishing them to be taken in, as we ourselves have been taken in.”20 This particular brand of malice, well captured by the German
Mißgunst
, is only one of several;
Schadenfreude
differs from malice in its passivity. Any glee yielded by the fruition of the Lammles’ hope (and activity) is malicious pleasure.
Schadenfreude
should not be considered malicious pleasure, for the reason that it usually does not involve expectation, much less agency.

Intentions differ from hopes, desires, and expectations. Various philosophers have remarked on the utter randomness of expectations and wants compared with the selectivity of intentions. To intend something is not at all the same as to hope for something. This fact is important for moral evaluation, for it is primarily by a person’s intentions that we judge his moral disposition. That someone has done something unintentionally bears on our estimate of his virtue. Intentions also hinge on timing. We judge more harshly lies that are crafted in advance than those which are told without forethought.

Annette Baier and others who analyze integrity have shown that expected or desired states of affairs differ from intended states of affairs in that the former are not necessarily linked to states of 
my
 affairs. I can want and expect my friend Andrew to make the Olympic swimming team without thereby wanting or expecting anything for myself. My intentions, by contrast, generally involve my own future. If I begin to work toward Andrew’s success, I 
intend
 something about Andrew. And if I intend to help Andrew, he will bear upon my future in some way. Even intentions for others imply intentions for oneself.

Schadenfreude
 could be considered intentional only if it amounted to the resolve to be happy about another’s misfortune. We might, for example, say of an arrogant person, “I’ll be glad when Camille gets her due.” This attitude is not malicious, though, for it does not automatically mean that we expect something for ourselves. We may sincerely believe that the “lesson” in question will benefit Camille, even as it supposedly attests to the invisible hand of justice (“what goes around, comes around”). Our 
hoping
, properly speaking, that
something
 would happen to “teach her a lesson” (who knows what it would take) neither necessitates nor precludes
Schadenfreude
as an eventual response.

Of course, the same might be said of passive cruelty; for this reason,
Schadenfreude
needs to be set firmly apart from cruelty. In 
Contingency,
 
Irony, and Solidarity
 Richard Rorty embraced Judith Shklar’s definition of cruelty as “the worst thing we do.”21 In 
Ordinary Vices
 Shklar understands as cruelty “the willful infliction of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear.”22 It is a wrong done entirely to 
another creature
. A parent who physically reprimands his or her son only ambiguously qualifies as cruel, and a German who refused to aid a Jew under National Socialism does not appear to qualify at all. So there is a problem with Shklar’s active definition of cruelty. Passive cruelty did not figure into her conception of
moral
 cruelty either, which she took to be “deliberate and persistent humiliation, so that the victim can eventually trust neither himself nor anyone else” (
Ordinary Vices
, p. 37). Five years later, Shklar filled out her influential account of cruelty by linking it to evil: “...evil is cruelty and the fear it inspires, and the very fear of fear itself.”23 Cruelty is intrinsically evil, despite the fact that it can be instrumentally good (as in “One must be cruel to be kind”). Even passive cruelty is intentional.
Schadenfreude
differs from passive cruelty in the role that beliefs about desert play in the different kinds of pleasure.

Spinoza called rejoicing in the loss or misfortune of other people one of the classic symptoms of envy.24 Spinoza had malicious glee in mind, not 
Schadenfreude
. Kafka may have disliked or disrespected his sister, but he didn’t envy her. Nonetheless, it remains that Spinoza joins a chorus of thinkers who raise moral doubts about taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others. This is a good time to ask whether there is any point to trying to defend this despised pleasure.

Yes, there is. We will feel better about ourselves if we recognize not only that people everywhere suffer, but also that people everywhere appreciate others’ suffering. Human beings may have any number of natural propensities (to envy, to deceit, to aggression) that we do well to change or control.
Schadenfreude
differs importantly from intrinsically bad propensities in its roots in basically harmless comedy (and in justice, which I pursue in Part Two). In comedy we flirt with all sorts of moral transgressions. We either stop short of condoning moral transgressions or challenge the seriousness of them. 
Schadenfreude
, like comedy, verges on cruelty but stops short of it. A look at the structure of the emotion illustrates the flirtatiousness underlying some
Schadenfreude
(as in Kaufmann’s understanding and in Lodge’s example). Flittering between good and evil,
Schadenfreude
tests how playful—and how complicated—we will allow ourselves to be.

TWO:
Explaining 
Schadenfreude

EMOTIONS LIKE REGRET, disappointment, and shame cause us pain. It might be thought that painful emotions are justified because we are bad people or because we have made a mistake. Wiser people, we may think, manage to avoid grief and shame. An advisor may tell us that we are wrong to dwell on the disappointment of having narrowly missed a spot on the Olympic team; we should instead focus on having become the sort of extraordinary athlete who could reasonably hope to qualify for the Olympic team. We can change our view of things, the advisor may tell us, and enjoy life more.

We can also agree that there are different kinds of pleasure—the kind that comes from winning an Olympic gold medal, the kind that comes from watching a good movie, and the kind that comes from exacting revenge, for example. Agreement on this point might lead naturally to an effort to establish a moral pecking order of pleasures: we might try to argue that some pleasures are morally superior to others, as John Stuart Mill does in 
On Liberty
. Then we might try to define a person’s moral worth in terms of the pleasure he or she feels. Especially if we believe God plays an active role in our lives, we might think that people who feel morally acceptable pleasure regularly must deserve their happy existences.

Emotions such as fulfillment, success, and pride cause us pleasure. It might be thought that pleasurable emotions are justified because we are good people or because we are living wisely. We want to take pleasurable emotions as evidence of our having done something right. Even when our pleasurable emotions arise from situations over which we have no control, such as a lottery, we rejoice.

No one will deny that we tend to seek pleasure and avoid pain. By the same token, we naturally want to give in to and prolong pleasurable emotions. Why not allow ourselves the holiday
Schadenfreude
proclaims?

Something for Nothing

We value pleasurable emotions differently. To a number of people, the thrill of winning a Nobel Prize means more than the thrill of finding a large sum of money, because they have worked very hard for many years in order to be able to win the prize. This does not mean that they will not value the money they happen upon. It also leaves open the possibility that they may take the smaller pleasure (like the larger) as evidence of living wisely, or of being good people.

John Forrester concluded a recent book on the subject of paying for consolation (through psychoanalysis) with this insight: “Perhaps that is what Freud’s discovery that infantile wishes are foreign to the logic of money—and the entire logic of debt, exchange, and reciprocity—amounted to: that our deepest wishes are for something that is as gratuitous, as full of grace, as happiness. The gift of something for nothing.”1
Schadenfreude
is itself a gift of something for nothing. If Forrester’s intuition is correct, then the appeal of
Schadenfreude
runs very deep.

Forrester’s use of the word “grace” here begs mention of an institutionalized understanding of “something for nothing.” In his comprehensive study 
Catholicism
, Richard P. McBrien states that the Catholic tradition has always insisted that the grace of God is given to us, not to make up for something lacking to us as human persons, but as a 
free gift
 that elevates us to a new and 
unmerited
 level of existence.2 The Fathers of the Church, from Irenaeus on, understood this participation in the life of God through Christ as a true divinization. The Latin Fathers, especially Augustine and Pope Leo the Great (d. 461), adopted this concept and made it the foundation of the whole theology of grace, as is particularly evident in Thomas Aquinas. Even today the notion of grace lies at the deepest center of Catholic theology.