The Upside of Envy
By Gordon Marino
Mr. Marino is a professor of philosophy.
May 4, 2018
It might seem petty of me, but for some time now, I have been bellyaching about the graybeards in black tights — those sixty- and seventysomething fitness fanatics crowing about the umpteen miles they log on their high-priced specialty bikes. Riding behind my grimaces, of course, has been a moral judgment — that these upper-middle-aged exercise zealots are clear cases of modern-day self-care gone wild. My verdict is not without a basis, but honestly, I would not be so vexed about these aging supercyclists were it not for the fact that I am rabidly envious of people my age and beyond who can still experience the thrill of pushing their bodies to the red line. I’ve had so many injuries I can’t do it anymore, and the hours I used to spend in the sweat parlor were once essential to keeping my sanity.
A few decades before Freud, Nietzsche preached that those of us who are called to search ourselves need to go into the inner labyrinth and hunt down the instincts and passions that blossom into our pet theories and moral judgments. In this labyrinth, Nietzsche detected the handwriting of envy everywhere, observing, “Envy and jealousy are the private parts of the human soul.”
A therapist with some 30 years of experience recently confided to me that of all the themes his clients found difficult to delve into — sex included — there was no tougher nut to crack than envy. Aristotle described envy not as benign desire for what someone else possesses but “as the pain caused by the good fortune of others.” Not surprisingly these pangs often give way to a feeling of malice. Witness the fact that throughout history and across cultures, anyone who enjoyed a piece of good fortune feared and set up defenses against the “evil eye.” Of course, there is not much talk today about the evil eye, at least not in the West, but it surely isn’t because we are less prone to envy than our ancestors.
In his essay “On Envy,” the philosopher Francis Bacon wrote, “Of all other affections, it is the most importune and continual. For of other affections there is occasion given but now and then; and therefore it was well said, ‘Invidia festos dies non agit.’ ” That is, “Envy keeps no holidays.”
One of the reasons envy does not take a holiday is that we never give a rest to the impulse to compare ourselves to one another. I have had students respond with glee to being admitted to a graduate program and then a few days later coyly ask: “Hey, Doc. How many applicants do you think were rejected?” — as in, the more rejected the merrier I can allow myself to be.
Social media has generated new vistas for this compulsion to compare and lord it over others.
Maybe it is a subtle form of what Nietzsche describes as the “will to power,” but many advertisers promise that buying their product will not only raise your status, but also that pulling into the driveway with that shiny new sports car will give your neighbor a sour stomach.
But is there anything to be learned from envy? If Socrates was right and the unexamined life is not worth living, then surely we should examine our feelings to find what we really care about as opposed to what we would like to think we care about. And what better instrument for this kind of self-examination than envy, a feeling as honest as a punch.
For instance, I often find a reason to become angry with people I am envious of. But if I can identify the lizard of envy crawling around in my psyche, I can usually tamp down the ire. That same awareness can also help mitigate moral judgments. Recognizing the envy when my sixtysomething friend boasted that he had recently completed a marathon, I was able to restrain myself from giving rope to the indignant thought, “Instead of running miles every day, why don’t you spend some time tutoring disadvantaged kids!”
Kierkegaard, who once remarked that he could offer a course on envy, commented on this tale from ancient Greece: “The man who told Aristides that he was voting to banish him, ‘because he was tired of hearing him everywhere called the only just man,’ actually did not deny Aristides excellence but confessed something about himself, that his relationship to excellence was not the happy infatuation of admiration but the unhappy infatuation of envy.” Then Kierkegaard adds the all-important, “But he did not minimize the excellence.”
“Envy is secret admiration,” Kierkegaard said. As such, if we are honest with ourselves, envy can help us identify our vision of excellence and where need be, perhaps reshape it. The Danish firebrand bemoaned the fact that unlike Aristides, the tendency of his Copenhagen brethren was to deny that ugly feeling and disparage the person who delivers those packages of resentment and ill-will, like those cursed geezers zooming by my house on their bikes. Oh, how I wish I could join them!
Camus wrote, “Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world. … There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness, or of generosity. A universe — in other words a metaphysic and an attitude of mind.” We don’t see the world as two-dimensional representations. Our emotions imbue our perceived universe with valence and color. Unpleasant as it might be, it is good to know when we are projecting green — when most everyone seems to be making us feel smaller and less fortunate.
Today, there are people who are convinced that self-awareness is relatively useless, that self-knowledge is not going to change the feelings that we are knowledgeable about. Maybe these skeptics know something I don’t know, but experience has taught me that while I can’t choose what I feel, I do have sway over how I understand my feelings and that self-understanding can modify and sculpt those feelings, envy included.
Recently, I watched a documentary focused on some people who have committed much of their lives to keeping young people out of jail. Lying on my couch, I could have gone cynical with something like, “The system is hopeless,” but it was manifest that I envied the devotion of these loving and generous souls. And so, I started to lacerate myself with the thought that instead of writing about envy, I should harken to it and spend more time helping those kids on the brink of falling into the slammer. And maybe I will.
Gordon Marino is a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College and the author, most recently, of “The Existentialist’s Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/opinion/upside-envy.html