The Anatomy of Schadenfreude; or, Montaigne’s Laughter

Abstract

Previous 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 is one good of an intention for clarity on this but it's to observe the with which the that Joubert has trouble for instance, of the of the or the of as The of and error suffering by for it to those who I am of the case of Montaigne to about as a but it's enough that such even as the rise of a certain has increasing emphasis on chance as an for change. 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As if to that we about the of and he suggests that the of the one of the most he is evidence of "I speak to my as I speak to the man I he this is is proof ("U," p. our by schadenfreude, even Montaigne wi

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