Existential envy which is directed against the other persons very nature, is the strongest source of ressentiment. It is as if it whispers continually: I can forgive everything, but not that you are that you are what you arethat I am not what you areindeed that I am not you. This form of envy strips the opponent of his very existence, for this existence as such is felt to be a pressure, a reproach, and an unbearable humiliation. In the lives of great men there are always critical periods of instability, in which they alternately envy and try to love those whose merits they cannot but esteem. Only gradually, one of these attitudes will predominate. Here lies the meaning of Goethes reflection that against anothers great merits, there is no remedy but love. Max Scheler
envy existential

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About Max Scheler

Max Scheler was a 19th-century German philosopher. Max Ferdinand Scheler was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. Considered in his lifetime one of the most prominent German philosophers, Scheler developed the philosophical method of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Read more on Wikipedia →

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“Man is encased, as though in a shell, in the particular ranking of the simplest values and value-qualities which represent the objective side of his *ordo amoris*, values which have not yet been sh...”
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“Certainly, what Kant calls the transcendental reference, experience and object of experience are in a sense present in both opposed views of the nature of the subjective *a-priori*. In both cases t...”
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“What is gained by the transcendence of the object is the identifiability of the object in a plurality of acts and the identifiability of what is thought by several individuals. This identifiability...”
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“It is very important to note that the transcendence of the object is by no means a primitive component necessarily ingredient in all knowledge. It is missing in all ecstatic knowledge. In ecstatic ...”
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“The third preliminary problem for every theory of reality is that of the experience of transcendence. We saw in the case of Berkeley that his erroneous principle *percipi est esse*, and his asserti...”
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“It is precisely because the principle of the transcendence of the object is completely independent of the existential status of the objects themselves and, thus, independent of the question whether...”
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