Against Rob Henderson on Envy
Are there two kinds of envy?
Rob Henderson recently wrote an essay on envy. I liked the piece, but he gets one thing wrong.
Henderson's error is understandable, because our entire culture tends to get this point wrong.
Henderson talks about the difference between "benign envy" and "malicious envy." Benign envy is a "longing for self-improvement in order to emulate the target of your envy... the goal is to level up."
Benign envy doesn't sound so bad.
Malicious envy, on the other hand, is the one we are more familiar with. It "refers to hostile thoughts and intentions aimed at harming the person you are envious of."
It's a clean distinction.
But Aristotle would be horrified. To say there is a good version of envy (phthonos in Greek) makes no sense to the classical mind.
For a Greek or Roman, envy (invidia in Latin) is always destructive. It destroys the envied person, the envier, or sometimes both (as in the myth of the sons of Oedipus).
Now, one qualification. A Greek or a Roman might occasionally view envy a positive social force. The envy of the weak is a check on the arrogance of the mighty.
This is what happened to Julius Caesar. After he rose to the position of Dictator, he became insensitive to the egos of men like Cassius. They grew envious, and eventually assassinated him. It was justice, in their eyes.
Envy can be a force of justice, but it's still destructive.
This emotion, however, was a very different feeling than what the young Caesar felt in a famous scene from when he was Quaestor in Spain. Caesar, being caught weeping while looking upon a statue of Alexander the Great, said to his companion:
"Do you not think it is a matter for sorrow that while Alexander, at my age, was already king of so many peoples, I have as yet achieved no brilliant success?"
Aristotle would call Cassius' emotion "envy," (phthonos); but what Caesar felt was not envy at all.
It was zeal (zēlos). Zēlos is often translated as "emulation" but our word doesn't really capture the sense of the original Greek term.
I prefer to just call it "zeal" (zēlos is where our word "zeal" comes from originally).
Aristotle defines zeal as "a type of pain, felt when a man sees present in another, who is like him by nature, things good and honorable which he himself is capable of acquiring." (The discussion is in Rhetoric book 2)
Zeal is the emotion we feel toward heroes, mentors, and people we want to be like.
If we want to recover classic greatness for our lives, our families, and our culture, we need to stop confusing this positive emotion of zeal with envy, jealousy, and other mimetic pathologies.
We need to deliberately cultivate zeal, by studying the lives of great people.
For this endeavor, the Cost of Glory is at your service.
Stay Ancient,
Alex
PS: I know I've been silent for a while. Hope you've been doing well. Meanwhile, Crassus 1: Richest Man in Rome is finally live )
This distinction reminds me also of Hesiod’s two strifes, at the opening of his Works and Days. The first strife is the source of all things evil, and seems to imply the Trojan War (since the Iliad mentions strife twice in its opening lines).
The second strife, though, is more closely related to what you pointed out as zeal (zēlos). When he gives this strife’s theistic genealogy, she strikes me as ominous at first, but his description then shows how “wholesome for men” this kind of strife really is. He writes:
> is the elder daughter of dark Night, and the son of Cronos who sits above and dwells in the aether, set her in the roots of the earth: and she is far kinder to men.
> She stirs up even the shiftless to toil; for a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbor, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good order; and neighbor vies with his neighbor as he hurries after wealth. This Strife is wholesome for men.
In another unrelated note, I’ve often been fond of Aristotle’s classification of the virtues in the Ethics, but had never really noticed that he talks about the passions in Rhetoric. Are they all covered systematically, as he attempts to do in The Ethics? Does he talk about the passions anywhere else? I’ll be teaching an Aristotle class next semester and so I’m looking particularly at his psychological insights to give the class a scope.
Thanks for the thoughts.