When Bad Things Happen to Other People (4 page)

Of course,
Schadenfreude
could be a subset of malice, in which case Kafka’s avowal would be somewhat tautologous, in the way that the statement “Elisabeth is a woman and a mother” is. Because all mothers are by definition women, it is unnecessary to specify the sex of a mother, which is built into its concept. Analogously, it would be unnecessary to include mention of malice in a reference to
Schadenfreude
if all
Schadenfreude
were malice.

Kafka does not identify
Schadenfreude
with malice. The best way to make sense of his careful use of
Schadenfreude
in this passage is to understand him as referring to his own pleasure in the trivial suffering of his sister Elli. Kafka may take part in his sister’s trivial suffering, but he does not exactly 
cause
 it—Herr Kafka does that (his father is the malicious one, Kafka seems to say). Here we run up against the question of whether those who do not cause another to suffer but take pleasure in that suffering deserve as much blame as those who cause the suffering they celebrate. Thinkers are divided on this question, as I will show in time. For now, suffice it to say that two different approaches prevent us from having to answer that question, or at least from having to answer it here. If we agreed that Elli’s suffering was trivial, we wouldn’t much care about the answer. If we believed that Elli deserved her comeuppance, then we might say that distinguishing between Kafka and his father here only distracts from Elli’s faults. Either one of these justifications for taking pleasure in the injury of another may seem unfeeling or harsh. And yet few of us will deny that we rely from time to time on these same justifications in a non-malicious way.

Even someone who agrees that
Schadenfreude
and malice are not identical may object that
Schadenfreude
presupposes malice. Let’s see what can be inferred from Kafka.

2.
      
A presupposition of malice

In her 1996 translation of Kant’s 
The Metaphysics of Morals
, Mary Gregor consistently renders the German “
Schadenfreude
” as “malice.” Though this must be considered an important error, Gregor might reasonably try to defend herself by maintaining that Kant himself seems to view 
Schadenfreude
, like the envy and ingratitude with which he associates it, as presupposing malice. A discrepancy between Kant and Kafka emerges here.

Briefly put, malice signifies the intention to harm another person or the wish that another person suffer harm. Kafka’s implicit belief that his own blameworthiness (for 
Schadenfreude
) was of a different kind than his father’s blameworthiness (for malice) only makes sense if
Schadenfreude
does not presuppose malice. The text gives no more reason to conclude that Kafka understands
Schadenfreude
to presuppose malice than to conclude that he sees no interesting difference between acting and watching. For Kafka, seeing suffering and simultaneously approving of it does not clearly indicate a moral failing.

Kafka views his father’s transgression as more significant than his own. Why should we agree with Kafka here? Because
Schadenfreude
arises from a judgment of appropriate instances of suffering,
Schadenfreude
does not clearly involve a disposition to take pleasure in all the bad things that may happen to other people. Although
Schadenfreude
may include malice, it needn’t presuppose malice.

The pleasure of
Schadenfreude
springs from a person’s beliefs about the appropriateness of suffering. Our views of appropriateness can change from situation to situation. To insist that
Schadenfreude
presupposes malice is to insist our views of appropriateness do not change.

Beyond that, it is hardly difficult to imagine other reasons for Kafka’s
Schadenfreude
which do not presuppose malice. Kafka may well have believed that Elli “had it coming to her.” Alternatively, the injury his father had inflicted on the boy’s self-esteem left him with a feeling of inferiority, and insults to Elli may well have allowed him to feel superior to
someone
, if only for a moment.

I will leave off with Kafka in what remains of this subsection in order to fill out this point. Other usages would seem to bear out the claim that
Schadenfreude
can be an episodic emotional response that does not presuppose malice. In 
Paradise News,
 by the British novelist and literary critic David Lodge, we read:

We were not encouraged by our episcopal masters to disturb the faith of the ever-dwindling number of recruits to the priesthood by exposing them to the full, cold blast of modern radical theology. The Anglicans were making all the running in that direction, and we derived a certain
Schadenfreude
from contemplating the rows and threatened schisms in the Church of England provoked by bishops and priests who denied the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and even the divinity of Christ.5

This usage depicts
Schadenfreude
as a function of mischief or playfulness, not malevolence. The careful reference “a certain 
Schadenfreude
” suggests that Lodge understands how much confusion surrounds the moral appraisal of this pleasure.

It is certainly true, however, that for many thinkers
Schadenfreude
does presuppose something morally objectionable, if not outright malice. H. Richard Niebuhr, an eloquent proponent of agape, or love of neighbor, would not condone the professions of Kafka and David Lodge. Playful spontaneity holds little appeal for many moralists, including Niebuhr. Their seriousness may well stem from reservations about what underlies much mischief, namely using others to amuse ourselves. Niebuhr exhorts us to focus on the welfare of others and forget our own needs:

Love is rejoicing over the existence of the beloved one; it is the desire that he be rather than not be; it is longing for his presence when he is absent; it is happiness in the thought of him; it is profound satisfaction over everything that makes him great and glorious.6

Other people around us are not simply neighbors for Niebuhr, but “beloved” ones. Here and in other works, Niebuhr sets out with force a theme that cascades through Christian ethics: we ought to commit ourselves fully to a neighbor’s well-being. Implied in this excerpt from Niebuhr is the view that
Schadenfreude
undermines neighbor-love and therefore signals a sin in the person who feels it.

This position does not strike me as persuasive. Though we generally require some kind of goodwill from those people about whom we care (if not from strangers), the forms we expect such goodwill to take do not necessarily exclude 
Schadenfreude
. Even our closest friends may disagree with some aspect of our lives and subsequently take our misfortunes as proof of our perceived failings. But because some people assume that benevolence must aim at the 
full
 good of another, they assume that
Schadenfreude
must presuppose malice.

Consider the matter of competition, an inevitable consequence of living in communities. As Gore Vidal once confessed, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” A century earlier Mark Twain observed in 
Following the Equator
, “It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart; the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.” To be sure, such statements play off of fashionable coquetry. Raconteurs occasionally act merely in order to do justice to maxims, but the maxims no doubt contain a certain grain of truth.

Competition pits us against one another. Wholeheartedness, which lies at the heart of integrity, might seem to rule out our ever taking pleasure in the misfortunes of friends. A focus on integrity, though, runs the risk of oversimplifying our interactions with other people. When friends are competitors, wholehearted devotion to our friends might seem to prevent us from achieving our own potential. How we treat one another in sports may resemble malice, but does not equal it. The same is true of 
Schadenfreude.

3.
      
The importance of what people think we deserve

How can beliefs shape emotions? This question underlies any number of emotional responses. Where indignation amounts to sadness at the good fortune of others who do not deserve it,
Schadenfreude
amounts to happiness at the ill fortune of others who 
do
 deserve it. In both cases an evaluation of appropriateness dictates an emotional response. Kafka states that he had been angry with Elli for years, which suggests he may have believed she 
deserved
 to suffer because of some wrong she had done.

Some notion of desert, or what people deserve, underlies judgments about moral appropriateness. This is an illuminating insight, but one of limited usefulness insofar as people tend to judge others more severely than they judge themselves. Assessing ourselves, too, will more likely distort our judgment than assessing others. A judgment about the just deserts of another person often enough involves a conflict—avowed or disavowed—between selfish desire and genuine scruples.

Take for example the advice a widely quoted literary theorist offered to American graduate students studying to become university professors. In the course of a polemical essay on the state of doctoral education in the humanities, the American intellectual Camille Paglia railed against the unfairness of the American system, which allegedly favors superficial self-promoters over highly original thinkers. (Paglia struggled for years to find employment as a professor.) Paglia assured advanced students:

If you keep the faith, the gods may give you, at midlife, the sweet pleasure of seeing the hotshots who were so fast out of the gate begin to flag and sink, just as your studies are reaching their point of maturation.7

Paglia makes it easy for us to understand that she believes many professors deserve to “flag and sink.” Although she does not say so explicitly, we can infer that she would take pleasure in a “hotshot” professor’s failure to receive academic tenure (which is a permanent contract of employment that may follow six years of hard work as a junior faculty member and at least as many years as a graduate student). It is safe to conclude on the basis of this lengthy essay that Paglia takes a harsh view of what “hotshot” professors deserve.

Anger or jealousy can lead to self-deception and complicate the work of assessing what others deserve. Self-interest generates self-deception remarkably well. Jealousy is especially likely to generate false beliefs about its objects and, consequently, to provide motives for concluding that the suffering of another is condign (such rationalizations abound in war).
Schadenfreude
, like admiration, pride, and shame, is an emotion properly thought of in terms of the apportioning of credit and debt. The most slippery component of
Schadenfreude
is the value judgment regarding the suffering of another person. 
Schadenfreude
’s moral status will not be solved simply by reference to desert, for questionable values shape what people think we deserve.

4.
      
The import of the object of 
Schadenfreude

Unlike pain, emotions have objects; we are afraid 
of
 something, angry 
with
 someone, ashamed 
that
 we have acted improperly. We can always point to 
some
 instance of suffering or misfortune as the source of 
Schadenfreude
. Reflecting on the just deserts of someone who supposedly needed to “learn a lesson,” we try to classify the kind of suffering that has beset him—not just the extent to which he suffers, but the way in which he suffers. Suffering because we failed to make the Olympic team differs from suffering because a parent has been murdered.

The psychological portrait he offers us of himself in 
Brief an den Vater
 allows us to infer that Kafka’s pleasure at Elli’s suffering would have turned to pain at the moment he judged that suffering excessive or inappropriate. His
Schadenfreude
is a reaction to what he considers minor suffering. Though any attempt to distinguish terrible from minor suffering definitively would doubtless be futile, we may reasonably expect consensus about some particular instances of suffering. An understanding of
Schadenfreude
which fails to take into account the variability of suffering will only confuse moral discourse.

A sense of lesser and greater pervades our moral deliberations. The particular belief which evaluates this greater or lesser is conceptually necessary, that is to say constitutive of, the resultant emotion. At the same time, it is construed as causally effective in the production of the emotion itself. Moral evaluation should compel us to look not only to the disposition of the person who delights in the suffering of another but also to the kind of suffering he enjoys.

The disposition of Kafka’s father, if Kafka is to be trusted here, merits blame. That said, it can hardly be denied that a good deal of comedy deserves just as much blame. Twenty years after his influential work 
Jokes
 
and Their Relation to the Unconscious
 (1905) appeared, Freud published a short essay entitled “Humor” (1927), in which he differentiated jokes from humor. The aim of jokes, he argued, was sheer gratification, a kind of mental victory. In jokes the mind manages to find or appreciate the hidden similarity among dissimilar things. The aim of humor, on the other hand, was to evade or lessen suffering. The Kafka family suffered from a lack of harmony, to put it nicely. Elli the scapegoat brought them closer together, albeit against her will. Humor in the Kafka family came at too high a price. That is not to say that all humor does, though.

We can tell a lot about a person from what he or she finds funny. Kafka did not try to hide his laughter; on the contrary, he feasted on it. Father and son alike punished Elli with their laughter. We can infer that neither father nor son was fat; had they been, it is unlikely their laughter would have been so easily, openly mean. If they had also been fat, Kafka and his father would have laughed 
with
 her, rather than 
at
 her.