Andrew Huddleston

In his On the Genealogy of Morality Nietzsche famously discusses a psychological condition he calls ressentiment, a condition involving toxic, vengeful anger. My view takes some inspiration from Nietzsche, but this paper is not primarily a work of exegesis. I offer a free-standing theory in philosophical psychology of the familiar state aptly described with this term. In the process of developing my account, I chart the terrain around ressentiment and closely-related and sometimes overlapping states (ordinary moral resentment, envy, vengefulness, anger, and the like). Ressentiment, I shall contend in this paper, is not simply a ten dollar word substitutable for 'resentment,' though it is indeed a species of that genus. On the account I develop, the perception of being slighted, insulted, or demeaned figures centrally in cases of ressentiment. Moreover, ressentiment-like cowardice or lecherousness-is not merely an ethically neutral psychic formation, but is, I suggest, a manifestation of vice.

Aesthetics, in many ways, is at the center of Adorno's philosophical enterprise. Politics, and social critique, are in turn very much at the fore in his aesthetics. His art criticism is thereby bound up with social and political critique. That much is of course a truism about Adorno. In this essay, I shall suggest that Adorno's social criticism (in one of its main manifestations) is related to his art criticism in another interesting way as well. Specifically, their form is similar. The object of critical analysis, whether an artwork or other social phenomenon, is objectionable not simply because it promotes or fosters problematic things downstream-authoritarianism, anti-semitism, and the like-as cause to effect. Rather, it is objectionable because it contains, often in a way difficult immediately to detect, such objectionable ideologies covertly embedded in it. Critique will thus be a hermeneutic endeavor seeking to expose these ideologies. While this critical-interpretive model is of course more familiar in the aesthetic sphere, Adorno extends it to unmasking a wider range of social phenomena.

Health (particularly of the soul [Seele]) is a central concept in Nietzsche's work. Yet in the most philosophically-sophisticated secondary literature on Nietzsche, there has been fairly little sustained treatment of just what Nietzschean health consists in. In this paper, I aim to provide an account of some of the central marks of this health: resilience, discipline, vitality, a certain positive condition of the will to power, a certain tendency toward integration, and so on. This exposition and discussion will be the main task of the paper. Then in the concluding section of the paper, I consider a line taken in some related secondary literature, which would suggest that health might ultimately be understood in formal or dynamic terms, relating to one's will to power and/or the unity of one's drives. I will present the beginnings of an argument against such an account of health. In focusing on the formal and dynamic side exclusively, it cannot get the full story. In particular, it seems to me to miss the substantive dimension that is essential if we are to understand health properly. As I shall suggest, the core concept of Nietzschean health is not fully explicable except by reference to normative terms.

This paper was written for a conference celebrating the work of Alexander Nehamas. It explores whether the "inverse superessentialist" idea of the Nietzschean self (Nehamas, 1980, 1985; term from Anderson, 2005) allows for true counterfactual claims about what might have happened to one or what one might have done. I argue that there is more scope for such counterfactual claims than Nehamas allows. In conclusion, I discuss one of Nehamas's central literary examples--Proust's In Search of Lost Time—and suggest that the 'trees at Hudimesnil' scene from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is a poignant evocation of the sort of counterfactual reasoning in question.