Dante’s Inferno as a place “where nothing connects with nothing.” Hell is a place where people do not, cannot, console one another. Schadenfreude brings to light and reinforces distances between people, however temporarily. All this is to say that the Schaden (literally “injury” or “harm”) of Schadenfreude focuses on suffering, on the relation in which we stand to others.
Suffering Great and Small
Satisfaction in witnessing the execution of a murderer differs in several important ways from laughing at the sight of someone slipping on a banana peel, but Schadenfreude can accurately describe both instances of pleasure.
Kafka’s sister Elli has no voice in Brief an den Vater ; we know her only as someone who suffers. (And, later on, as someone who leaves home and establishes herself successfully as a wife and mother, Kafka triumphantly tells his father.) Can we quantify her suffering, and if so, why would we want to do so? In Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus , Oedipus informs the chorus that his suffering exceeds theirs. (“I know you are all sick, yet there is not one of you are, who is as sick as I myself.”) A hero and king, Oedipus believes his capacity for suffering to be deeper than that of his people. Just before Jocasta’s suicide, the line “the greatest suffering is that one brings on oneself” suggests the accuracy of Oedipus’s early statement to the chorus. Later Oedipus’s devastated daughters wonder aloud if it would be better never to have lived at all; they claim to envy the dead, because the dead, which now include their father, do not suffer. It seems unlikely that Kafka’s sister found herself envying the dead in the course of enduring her father’s mimicking, yet she might well have told us that she felt united to Oedipus’s daughters through what she endured.
Suffering is awful. It might seem that only enemies of some sort would take pleasure in each other’s suffering. This pleasure in the suffering of another must be more pervasive than that, though. La Rochefoucauld famously claimed, “In the adversities of our best friends we always find something which is not displeasing to us” ( Réflexions morales , number 99). La Rochefoucauld does not delimit the idea of “adversities” in this maxim, an unsettling omission. Dostoyevsky carries the ball a bit farther.
In Crime and Punishment he expands the category of misfortunes capable of generating Schadenfreude :
...that strange feeling of inner satisfaction which always can be observed, even in those who are near and dear, when a sudden disaster befalls their neighbor, and which is to be found in all men, without exception, however sincere their feelings of sympathy and commiseration.6
The word “disaster” signifies something beyond trivial suffering. Dostoyevsky, albeit an insightful moral psychologist, probably overstates the frequency of pleasure in the disasters of others. Learning that our quiet, law-abiding neighbor has just been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver or made a victim of ethnic cleaning would provide few of us with unfettered delight. Underneath the overstatement, if we want to call it that, we can glimpse Dostoyevsky’s sympathy with the claim that good people may enjoy even the very bad things that happen to others.
Dostoyevsky’s alarming claim in a sense ignites and begins this study, for great suffering makes Schadenfreude a much more unsettling and important topic than comedy. Hamlet doesn’t spend his energy trying to make sense of bad fortune, but rather of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Schadenfreude can accommodate great suffering because the notion of desert that lies at the heart of much Schadenfreude can expand infinitely. Note that Dostoyevsky does not state or imply that people feel pleasure in the face of their friends’ disasters out of a sense that justice has been done; like La Rochefoucauld, he acknowledges the
Suffering Great and Small
Satisfaction in witnessing the execution of a murderer differs in several important ways from laughing at the sight of someone slipping on a banana peel, but Schadenfreude can accurately describe both instances of pleasure.
Kafka’s sister Elli has no voice in Brief an den Vater ; we know her only as someone who suffers. (And, later on, as someone who leaves home and establishes herself successfully as a wife and mother, Kafka triumphantly tells his father.) Can we quantify her suffering, and if so, why would we want to do so? In Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus , Oedipus informs the chorus that his suffering exceeds theirs. (“I know you are all sick, yet there is not one of you are, who is as sick as I myself.”) A hero and king, Oedipus believes his capacity for suffering to be deeper than that of his people. Just before Jocasta’s suicide, the line “the greatest suffering is that one brings on oneself” suggests the accuracy of Oedipus’s early statement to the chorus. Later Oedipus’s devastated daughters wonder aloud if it would be better never to have lived at all; they claim to envy the dead, because the dead, which now include their father, do not suffer. It seems unlikely that Kafka’s sister found herself envying the dead in the course of enduring her father’s mimicking, yet she might well have told us that she felt united to Oedipus’s daughters through what she endured.
Suffering is awful. It might seem that only enemies of some sort would take pleasure in each other’s suffering. This pleasure in the suffering of another must be more pervasive than that, though. La Rochefoucauld famously claimed, “In the adversities of our best friends we always find something which is not displeasing to us” ( Réflexions morales , number 99). La Rochefoucauld does not delimit the idea of “adversities” in this maxim, an unsettling omission. Dostoyevsky carries the ball a bit farther.
In Crime and Punishment he expands the category of misfortunes capable of generating Schadenfreude :
...that strange feeling of inner satisfaction which always can be observed, even in those who are near and dear, when a sudden disaster befalls their neighbor, and which is to be found in all men, without exception, however sincere their feelings of sympathy and commiseration.6
The word “disaster” signifies something beyond trivial suffering. Dostoyevsky, albeit an insightful moral psychologist, probably overstates the frequency of pleasure in the disasters of others. Learning that our quiet, law-abiding neighbor has just been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver or made a victim of ethnic cleaning would provide few of us with unfettered delight. Underneath the overstatement, if we want to call it that, we can glimpse Dostoyevsky’s sympathy with the claim that good people may enjoy even the very bad things that happen to others.
Dostoyevsky’s alarming claim in a sense ignites and begins this study, for great suffering makes Schadenfreude a much more unsettling and important topic than comedy. Hamlet doesn’t spend his energy trying to make sense of bad fortune, but rather of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Schadenfreude can accommodate great suffering because the notion of desert that lies at the heart of much Schadenfreude can expand infinitely. Note that Dostoyevsky does not state or imply that people feel pleasure in the face of their friends’ disasters out of a sense that justice has been done; like La Rochefoucauld, he acknowledges the
Similar Books
