The Anatomy of Schadenfreude; or, Montaigne’s Laughter
2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/689662
ISSN1539-7858
Autores Tópico(s)French Literature and Criticism
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeThe Anatomy of Schadenfreude; or, Montaigne's LaughterDavid Carroll SimonDavid Carroll SimonPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHad Democritus beene present at the late civill warres in France … would this, thinke you, have enforced [him] to laughter, or rather made him turne his tune, alter his tone, and weep with Heraclitus, or rather howle, roare, and teare his haire in commiseration, stand amazed; or as the Poets faigne, that Niobe was for griefe quite stupified and turned to stone?—Robert Burton, The Anatomy of MelancholyPhilosophers have often condemned schadenfreude, the pleasure someone takes in someone else's suffering, as proof of moral failure.1 Meanwhile, witnesses for the defense go as far as to deny the guilt routinely assigned to apparently malevolent enjoyment—by, for instance, identifying it with an appetite for justice that rightly takes satisfaction in the correction of vice.2 This essay cuts against both accusatory and apologetic perspectives—but not by offering a competing moral evaluation. In what follows, I rest content with a description of schadenfreude and limit my inquiry to a single case. In his Essais (1572–1592), Michel de Montaigne anticipates modern conceptions of schadenfreude (and echoes ancient ones) when he savors the exultant pleasure of safety from another's misfortune. He proposes that the ground of this experience is awareness of danger: the perception of a threat from which he finds himself spared. What distinguishes his perspective on schadenfreude from that of other philosophers is his insistence that susceptibility to harm is a fundamental premise rather than simply an attribute of certain situations. Thus even his eager withdrawal from danger retains a feeling of tense anticipation. Like the contorted face that accompanies the body's wincing retreat from near-injury, the Freude (joy) in schadenfreude (harm-joy) is distorted by an ongoing sense of vulnerability. Yet such alertness to the possibility of harm, interrupted but not suppressed by the pleasure it enables, does not necessarily generate fear.3 Instead, Montaigne directs our attention to a physiological reaction we do not ordinarily associate with existential danger. We can listen for the alarmed elation of schadenfreude, he suggests, in rumbles of laughter.Though most of this essay will attend closely to Montaigne's words, I have chosen to begin by translating his perspective into an anatomy of schadenfreude, extending and unfolding the account I just gave of the cognitive contents of the experience. In presenting a schematic description, my intention is to offer definitional clarity, not to universalize Montaigne's view. There are certainly other pleasures that have gone by the name of schadenfreude, just as there are other forms of laughter that have nothing to do with it.Let's imagine the scenario from a first-person perspective. Perhaps in spite of myself, I enjoy your misfortune. What, precisely, do I feel, and what do my feelings imply about what I think? For Montaigne, schadenfreude is a visceral response to danger: a joyful if momentary reprieve. Yet the intensity of my pleasure offers evidence of my vulnerability to whatever has befallen you. If I did not believe, in other words, that I were subject to the same threat to which you have now fallen prey, relief wouldn't be as gratifying as it is. Nonetheless, my enjoyment confirms the starkness of the difference between us. It's proof that in at least one respect (this very sensation of satisfaction), I am nothing like you. Schadenfreude, then, is an experience of reversibility without equivalence. All of a sudden, I understand both how easily we could change places and how meaningful it is that we haven't.To be sure, we are not all exposed to the same dangers. Even insofar as I believe that I'm threatened by whatever calamity has overtaken you, only rarely will it seem to me that I'm endangered to precisely the same degree. Even if I expect the worst, the very fact that you presently suffer shows that we must now speak of the certainty rather than the probability of your coming to harm. Thus schadenfreude implies insensibility to a question that will strike many of us as important: How is a given danger distributed across the population to which I belong? All schadenfreude can do, with respect to this line of inquiry, is manifest proximity to harm—irrespective of the fact that only some of us are routinely exposed to certain forms of it. The danger that animates schadenfreude is vague.Indeed, the omission of the question of the likelihood of injury is not incidental. It's one of the defining features of the experience, permitting a loose but exhilarating identification. Yet schadenfreude draws power from imprecision. Were I simply afraid of the single affliction from which you already suffer, the prospect of harm would remain safely confined to my awareness of that specific danger. Instead, schadenfreude emerges from a sense of vulnerability from which I am never safe. In this sense, it conveys the forcefulness of a threat unmitigated by the generalized form it assumes. Because my sense of the real and alarming similarity between your (actual) misfortune and my (possible) unhappiness is undiminished by real differences in circumstance, my feeling of exultant relief can only follow from the most rudimentary of premises: the liability of my present situation to change. Yet schadenfreude does not so much turn away from the specific case as hold it together in the mind with a general sense of hazard. It casts my unspecified exposure to injury as a version of the misfortune I presently observe. Thus contingency names whatever sense of danger bleeds over the edges of a determinate threat. Schadenfreude translates susceptibility to chance into a physiological fact, buckling me over or sending me staggering. It embodies the accidental.4 Even if I attribute my fate to some underlying state of affairs (systemic injustice, say, or God's decree), my perspective is partial. I tremble in anticipation of what I can't predict.Finally, schadenfreude is comic. Although it will not surprise us that comedy can be cruel, my point is less about genre than it is about what it feels like to laugh and to be caught off guard by feeling amused. When Montaigne describes his propensity for laughter, he sheds light on the experience I've outlined. Rather than the serene delectation of safety, mirthful schadenfreude is the affective recoil of the vulnerable. In someone else's misfortune, Montaigne discovers a portent, uncertain but nonetheless foreboding, of his eventual unhappiness.5 Because his own failure to uphold the moral good would be, as far as he is concerned, an especially terrible misfortune, his experience of unsympathetic laughter should itself be understood as a bitterly comedic foretaste of suffering: evidence that he can't quite trust himself to adhere to a standard of behavior to which he nonetheless remains attached.With my sketch of schadenfreude in mind, we discover a perspective on "moral sentiment" (to borrow Adam Smith's phrase)6 that differs from the one we associate with sympathy, a paradigm that has long held pride of place in moral-philosophical reflection.7 The sheer diversity and complexity of the tradition precludes any simple opposition (we will find that Montaigne depicts schadenfreude as an interruption of, rather than an alternative to, compassion), but we can nonetheless observe the consequences of my proposed change of subject: a parallax view on the same problem of moral spectatorship. One influential exponent of sympathy is Luc Boltanski, who adapts Smith's account into a searching meditation on "distant suffering": the challenge, routinized by the rise of mass media, of gazing from afar on terrible hardship and calamity. As in Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Boltanski's description of the situation depends on the clarity of the distinction between my security and your unhappiness.8 "On the one hand," he writes, "there is an unfortunate who suffers and on the other a spectator who views the suffering without undergoing the same fate and without being directly exposed to the same misfortune" (DS, p. 114). By contrast, I have been arguing for the surprising insignificance, as far as the person who feels schadenfreude is concerned, of the qualification conveyed by the word "directly."9 As the experience unfolds, I tremble with awareness of danger, and so I understand even indirect "expos[ure]" to harm as a pressing concern. Whereas Boltanski casts schadenfreude as exactly the "selfish way of looking" from which an "altruistic" alternative must be distinguished, my view (and Montaigne's) is that it collapses the position of the apparently "distant" spectator with that of the one who suffers (DS, p. 21). If we do not reject the intensity of vague identification out of hand (as a mystification of actual difference), then we come to understand sympathy, rather than schadenfreude, as the name for an experience that assures me of my difference from you. When I sympathize with you, my imaginative projection of myself into your situation spans but preserves the distance between us. Though I can hardly deny the reality of experiences of compassion so powerful that they scramble the identities of subject and object, even these extreme cases, if we follow a Smithian line, produce that result by bridging difference rather than by recognizing sameness.10 When I understand your suffering as my reprieve, I conceive of the vast affective distinction between us as the closing gap between this moment and the next—as a question of mere timing.Turning now to the sixteenth century, we should observe that Smith systematizes an ethico-political problem with a deep but fugitive history; the question of "distant suffering" had long troubled the minds of philosophers, statesmen, poets, and others without receiving the sustained attention of moral theory (see DS, p. 35). In Renaissance Europe, one familiar occasion for reflection on this theme (about which Montaigne has much to say) can be found in the De rerum natura (first century BCE) of Lucretius, where the great evangelist of Epicurean philosophy narrates a scene of disconcerting pleasure as a metaphor for the transcendence of worldly cares. Someone delightedly observes the aftermath of shipwreck, an image that lends expression to the contrast between serene wisdom and the tribulations of folly: "Pleasant it is, when on the great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze / from shore upon another's great tribulation."11 Though Lucretius specifies that "man's troubles" are not "a delectable joy" but that freedom from harm, an altogether different matter, is the source of the spectator's pleasure, it's easy to see why some interpreters doubt that distinction.12 In Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer (Shipwreck with Spectator) Hans Blumenberg discusses the wide chasm between the observer and the observed in the Lucretian image, which materializes the difference between pleasure and pain as the literal edge of a landmass. At such a remove, pleasure is likely to appear gratuitous, malevolent—no matter protestations like those of Lucretius. Blumenberg's error is to associate that emphasis on distance with Montaigne's "skeptical anthropology."13 Indeed, the essayist inhabits an altogether different situation—the very opposite of this one. What, he wonders, if the spectator isn't only a spectator? What if he too clings to the debris of shipwreck, with better success than the drowned and drowning—but only, perhaps, for the moment?1. A Propensity for LaughterBoth ancient and early modern descriptions of comic enjoyment acknowledge proximity to cruelty, but they usually stop short of admitting kinship.14 Although Aristotle's description of laughter as scorn implies hostility, for instance, he makes short work of the problem with an overfine distinction: "The laughable comprises any fault or mark of shame," he says, "which involves no pain or destruction: most obviously, the laughable mask is something ugly or twisted, but not painfully."15 It's not that I doubt the seriousness with which Aristotle intends the distinction between distortedness and suffering but rather that I question the possibility of insulating comedy from schadenfreude.16 Is there such a thing as "shame" devoid of "pain"? In the Traité du ris (Treatise on Laughter), which Montaigne seems to have known, the physician Laurent Joubert argues that actual unhappiness only entertains the reprobate: "Nor is it funny [plaisant] to mock a suffering and miserable man (unless in such a calamity he were evil [mauvais] and arrogant), but is of a great inhumanity [inhumanité] to make fun of the miserable on whom we should take pity."17 Like Castiglione before him, Joubert cordons off permissible laughter from its malevolent double with criteria ("evil" and "arrogan[ce]") it can only be difficult, if not impossible, to adjudicate—especially in the split-second between perception and affective response.18 "True enough it is," he admits, "that often we cannot easily tell if one laughs simply from gaiety or in mocking another" (TR, p. 25).In the final decades of the sixteenth century, Montaigne still belongs to a late humanist culture that takes for granted laughter's adjacency to cruelty—notwithstanding an increasing awareness of exceptions to the rule. Yet he is unusual in taking up the question of mirthful Shadenfreude—as, that is, a bona fide question, deserving of exploration.19 What enables this inquiry is an uncommon willingness to pay sustained attention to contingent feeling as an engine for action.20 Unlike, say, David Hume, who will universalize the sentiment of approbation on which morals depend, Montaigne's similarly emotion-centered moral theory explores the consequences for human behavior of sheer affective accidents—of which unsympathetic laughter is an instance.21 The great theme of the Essais is moral crisis. Writing his three-volume experiment in digression during the Wars of Religion (1562–98), he describes the horror of civil strife, returning dependably to scenes of cruelty in order to caution us against courses of action that might lead to them. His loathing for violence is matched only by his contempt for the self-authorizing zeal that makes it possible. Yet he finds a conceptual resource for moral reflection in the figure of Democritus, the laughing philosopher, who mocks the world's misery.When he plays the role of Democritus, whose apprehensive but gleeful schadenfreude conveys delirious contempt, his repulsion discloses his participation in the very scene from which he recoils. Laughter cuts through moral evaluation (the question of whether one deserves to suffer) to reveal both the starkness and the evanescence of interpersonal difference.22 Everyone has laughed guiltily at something tragic: "shipwreck with spectator." Montaigne directs our attention instead to a scene in which laughter indicates the sheer factuality of a shared situation: "universal shipwreck" ("cet universel naufrage du monde").23 Perhaps nothing expresses the moral treacherousness of Montaigne's perspective so well as the joke he adapts from François Rabelais, which he delivers in the midst of a reflection on the dangers of overcommitment to a cause: "I will follow the good side right to the fire, but not into it if I can help it" ("U," p. 601; see also p. 601 n. 2).24 What's different about Montaigne's version is his admission of incompetence: "if I can help it" suggests haplessness. Where Rabelais playfully looks out for number one, Montaigne shows himself incapable of self-protection; he's less a coward or a rogue than a klutz.25 If we're not too disgusted by gallows humor, even in the deadliest of circumstances, what's funny about the quip is Montaigne's imagined tumble into flames. As he delivers the line, he assumes a position of apparent safety, and yet his mind races ahead, trips, and falls. When Montaigne wears the mask of Democritus, he casts light on exactly this willingness, which he shows throughout the Essais, to contemplate peril.The affirmation of danger might sound like a poststructuralist piety, especially since I've translated it into the idiom of contingency. In Montaigne's moment, however, sustained attention to fortune as a key determinant of moral action is harder to come by. Across all manner of early modern discourses, unhappiness is aligned with blameworthiness. To be sure, Joubert's warning against laughter at the innocent but unhappy is one good example of an intention for clarity on this distinction, but it's fair to observe the routineness with which the concepts overlap (we've seen that Joubert has trouble holding them apart). Think, for instance, of the "slavishness" of the slave or the interpretation of disaster as divine retribution.26 The language of folly and error likewise deemphasizes suffering by assigning responsibility for it to those who suffer.27 I am wary of stepping beyond the case of Montaigne to speculate about "modernity" as a whole, but it's obvious enough that such confusions persist even as the rise of a certain secular naturalism has authorized increasing emphasis on chance as an explanation for change. Perhaps the fraying of a providential frame for interpreting events has undermined our capacity to refer unselfconsciously to the deservingness of the unfortunate; perhaps, however, what this means is that we're more likely either to argue for the justice of someone's suffering or to take knowing pleasure in the brash mischief of acting like the unhappy deserve their unhappiness (and therefore refraining from making any argument at all). We might also think here of the recently ascendant ideology of "positive thinking" that implicitly equates our misfortunes with personal failures. In contrast to both early and late modern versions of this confusion, Montaigne's account of experience as the convergence of accidents clears away imputations of guilt and innocence that obscure the bare fact of anguish. In the Essais, laughter throws us headlong into a reality that knows little of justice.28Who is Montaigne's Democritus? In "De Democritus et Heraclitus," he cites the description of laughing Democritus and weeping Heraclitus in Juvenal's Satire 10 (second century CE), drawing on a long tradition that juxtaposes the two philosophers' states of feeling as contrary but symmetrical responses to the world's folly.29 "Democritus and Heraclitus," Montaigne writes, "were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous [ridicule], never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours [cette mesme condition nostre], wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears."30 The inherited features of the scene themselves raise the question of schadenfreude. Because Democritus laughs at "this same condition of ours," the very situation that induces "pity" in Heraclitus, the image equates foolishness with genuine misfortune. Juvenal, like Desiderius Erasmus and Montaigne after him, is squarely on the side of laughter.31 As a stinging critic of social evils, he poses the same question Robert Burton will adopt centuries later as a rhapsodic refrain in the frenetic introduction to his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): What if Democritus could see us now?32 When Burton, who styles himself "Democritus Junior," diagnoses the whole world with "melancholy," which signifies nothing less than universal fallenness, he is only a late member of an ever-growing tribe of sneering "Democriti."33 No matter his derisiveness, many Renaissance humanists identify Democritus with philosophical detachment and even with properly Christian contemplativeness.34 In this respect, Montaigne's unabashed preference for laughter over tears is not unusual. The form his approval takes, on the other hand, is strange enough to merit our attention. "I prefer the first humor," he writes, "not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful [desdaigneuse], and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve [assez mesprisez selon nostre merite]" ("D," p. 221).Montaigne's account of the Democritean "humor" resonates powerfully with his habitual self-portrait as casual, unpremeditated, peaceful, and "nonchalant"; indeed, it's the proximity of these characterological descriptions that raises the question of laughter's moral consequences. Once we recognize that Democritean "disdain" can be read as a near synonym for the "nonchalance" that pervades Montaigne's most searching discussion of violence and horror, an essay entitled "De l'utile et de l'honneste" ("Of the Useful and the Honorable"), we can hardly avoid wondering about the virtues of scornful laughter, which sounds at first like sheer uncharitableness.35 Montaigne's striking interpolations to the Democritus essay (after 1588) belong to the same historical moment as the essay on honor, which helps explain their similarity. It's as if Montaigne returns to the earlier essay in order to draw it into the moral crisis recorded and lamented by the later one, giving a new emphasis to skepticism and personal weakness. In my epigraph, Burton asks what Democritus would have done if he had "beene present at the late civill warres in France."36 My answer, which might have been Burton's as well, is that Democritus was present at the Wars of Religion—in the person of Montaigne. My interpretation takes up Montaigne's invitation to integrate the perspectives on display in each essay, tacking between his explicit remarks on laughter and his more sober, but suggestively wayward, reflections on war. Reconstructing Montaigne's view by reading between these essays is an inherently speculative act, but I aim to stay close to the spirit of his moral inquiry. If we bear in mind the serious but slippery persona we meet in the essay on honor, we prepare ourselves to hear the bitterness, joy, and cruelty in Democritean laughter.As the title makes plain, "De l'utile et de l'honneste" takes up a question from Cicero's De officiis (On Duties, 44 BCE) about the competing claims of the pragmatic and the honorable. Where Cicero argues for the identity of those values, however contrary they seem (dishonorable action harms the perpetrator no less than the victim), Montaigne's interest lies elsewhere.37 Rather than deny the difference between virtue (l'honneste) and expediency (l'utile), he worries about what happens to the first under the pressure of the second. Thus the essay can be read as a critique of cynical (Machiavellian) realism. How am I to conduct myself virtuously, Montaigne asks, when the world demands that I be cruel? How can I lead a moral life when I am not my own master? Given the high stakes of Montaigne's line of inquiry, we can only be surprised by the casualness, even goofiness, of the essay's opening lines. He begins by telling us how haphazard and careless he is, acknowledging in advance how foolish his observations will be. "No one is exempt from saying silly things," he explains. "Mine escape me as nonchalantly [nonchallament] as they deserve" ("U," p. 599). As if to ensure that we wonder about the misalignment of tone and purpose, he suggests that the remainder of the essay, one of the most wrenchingly violent sequences he ever composed, is evidence of unembarrassed clumsiness: "I speak to my paper as I speak to the first man I meet," he writes. "That this is true, here is proof [Qu'il soit vray, voicy dequoy]" ("U," p. 599).The opening paragraphs compound our confusion by defending schadenfreude, even though Montaigne will do nothing so emphatically in this essay as wring his hands over cruelty. He plays the fool before he plays the villain, only to embark thereafter on a straight-faced appraisal of the moral and physical dangers of political action. Here, Montaigne unfolds a problem we recognize from the Lucretian scene of spectatorship, the first two lines of which he subsequently quotes (I will not reproduce them here):There is nothing useless in nature, not even uselessness itself…. Our being is cemented with sickly qualities: ambition, jealousy, envy, vengeance, superstition, despair, dwell in us with a possession so natural that we recognize their image also in the beasts—even cruelty, so unnatural [denaturé] a vice. For in the midst of compassion we [nous] feel within us I know not what bittersweet pricking of malicious pleasure [aigre-douce poincte de volupté maligne] in seeing others suffer; even children feel it.["U," p. 599]Soon, Montaigne laments the pervasiveness of cruelty, cautioning us against any situation that might require it of us. In particular, putting oneself in the service of another might mean doing his unbearable dirty work. Yet one of the essay's first lessons is that malevolence is "natural." "Even children" savor the terrible voluptuousness of other people's suffering. We feel it "in the midst of compassion"; as we (nous) extend our sympathy, unwholesome pleasure interrupts and confuses our seemingly virtuous response. Soon, Montaigne dilates from the psyche to the polis; he delegates cruelty to "citizens" (citoyens) of greater mettle than he happens to have. "We who are weaker," he writes, "let us take parts that are both easier and less hazardous" ("U," p. 600). Yet the case of schadenfreude disallows self-exemption; if Montaigne the citizen can affirm the necessity of cruel expediency while refraining from such behavior himself, the delectable "natural[ness]" of inner "malice" suggests primordial malevolence. Irrespective of this or that moral decision, cruelty abides.Twice over, then, the essay casts doubt on Montaigne's earnest plea for gentleness. Why "toss off" an essay on blood-curdling horror? And why, as a preface to a critique of violence, identify with cruelty itself ? I suggest that these are not separate questions. Montaigne's easygoing humor explains his readiness for moral catastrophe. A closer look at Montaigne's description of his temperament will clarify the point. He foregrounds cheerful "nonchalance" because he blames overheated zeal for the guerres civiles, offering us an affective rather than politico-theological interpretation of war.38 For the irenic author of the Essais, the absence of chaleur implied by the etymology of nonchalance promises an antidote to violence. Montaigne diagnoses his countrymen's bloodthirstiness as the barely concealed "heat" of dissimulated aggression: "Their propensity to malignity [propension vers la malignité] and violence they call zeal [zele]. It is not the cause that inflames them [ce n'est pas la cause qui les eschauffe], it is their self-interest [interest]. They kindle [attisent] war not because it is just, but because it is war" ("U," p. 602). Montaigne unmasks the justification for war as mere rationalization; "they kindle war … because it is war" construes false reasoning as tautology. The truth lies instead in intensity of passion; Montaigne speaks of mere "propensity" (propension) rather than ideology, and his verbs suggest the heat of personal "interest": eschauffer (to heat) and attiser (to kindle). Belief, he thinks, is more fuel than cause. By making a display of emotional cool, then, Montaigne withdraws from conflict. Thus we might translate his introductory remark, "I speak to my paper as I speak to the first man I meet," into a moral imperative: "I decline intensity of purpose." Montaigne's shrug is an alternative to the paradigm of Stoic self-mastery glorified and distorted by the French nobility, underwriting martial ferocity.39Since "nonchalance" describes a relaxed disposition, however, it stands little chance of protecting Montaigne from malice—his own or anyone else's. In French translations of Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528), "nonchalance" is a common rendering of sprezzatura, Castiglione's term for the quality of artlessness or effortlessness with which the courtier secures personal advantage.40 What's distinctive about Montaigne's version, however, is that he describes effortlessness as inhabitable experience rather than manufactured appearance. Equally surprising is his supposition that it offers a meaningful response to wartime violence. Recoiling from the tautology of dogmatic insistence, he embraces an ethos of pliable looseness. Like his late-modern cousin Bartleby the Scrivener, whose nonchalance likewise animates an oblique resistance that finds expression as "prefer[ence]" rather than disciplined refusal, Montaigne would rather slip easily away from his adversaries than perform an emphatic counterreaction.41 In "De la cruauté" ("Of Cruelty"), for instance, he doesn't insist on an unblemished freedom from the vice in question. "I cruelly hate cruelty,"42 he explains ("Je hay, entre autres vices, cruellement la cruauté"),43 parrying wartime violence rather than blocking it. Defeating cruelty means acknowledging his own.44Returning now to the essay on Democritus, we find that jaunty Montaigne's awareness of suffering is muted (he speaks vaguely of folly—not violence), and yet it takes almost no interpretive imagination to identify him as the very same peaceful rambler who shudders at the world's cruelty. "I take the first subject that chance [la fortune] offers," he writes, displaying the same detachment for which he soon relies on laughter,They are all equally good to me. And I never plan to develop them completely…. Scattering a word here, there another, samples separated from their context, dispersed, without a plan and without a promise, I am not boun
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