Resentment

This chapter introduces the concept of resentment by delineating the two most influential and significant models of it as a practice—resentment as a moral impetus to justice and resentment as a disabling spitefulness and envy. After first examining how resentment has been employed as a concept in contemporary philosophy after Strawson elucidated it as an exemplary “reactive attitude,” the chapter discerns how it has been represented in two literary works—one from the classical world, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and one from nineteenth-century Europe, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground—to show the dynamic features of resentment, which can be understood not only as an individual ailment but also as a social disease.