Resentment and its “Eigenlogik”(1)
Nothing but redemption … – Resentment and Modern Soteriology

Aspects of Modern German Soteriology
David Fr. Strauß, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber and many others
Foucault, Weber, Nietzsche, and the “theory-Islamists’
  
What one wants is a contact. The Etruscans are not a theory or a thesis. If they are anything, they are an experience.
D.H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places, 2001, p. 24
(Social theory and the road to Mekka) a critique - The ‘agency’ of “Eigenlogik”)

Introduction
When, long time ago, I came to study the various treatments of the concept of resentment in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, I found myself intrigued by the idea that Nietzsche wanted to point with this concept to a deep abyss of modern western culture, namely to a far ranging deeply curved cultural mechanism of nihilistically abstracted limitless revenge-power. Following, the reactions to this by younger contemporaries of Nietzsche, Max Weber and Carl Jaspers, mainly, I was quickly convinced that modern theory was completely shattered by the Nietzsche-imposed negative idea of the impact of Christian soteriology on Western modernity, and they completely termed to unsettle the cultural critique of Nietzsche and to enthrone again a pathos of knowledge and love as the moving elements of Western power. Hence, my interest in this theme of patterns of their circumventing the resentment complex while responding to Nietzsche and modernity. There is however, in Nietzsche himself a sort of a key to a “positive” turn of the resentment issue, where in BGE he himself pointed to resentment as a sort of ‘moderne Kulturtechnik’ (ein kulturelles Werkzeug) as a motive for change and also his ambiguous stand to “aristocratic” solutions remains to be recognized.
It would be, obviously a sort of moving on relentlessly within the “Eigenlogik” of the resentment-track, if we wish to understand the West and its contemporary war-culture, merely from this abyss of resentment, without asking for the possible potentials of the solutions of those who offer to abolish it.   (following up:)



There is WEBER:
Weber’s most striking example of “Eigenlogik” is to describe works of the idea of world rejection, i.e. how plight for poverty, decline of individual property, extra-worldly isolation of mystics and monks worked its way through to rational economy and richness of monasteries, one of the foundational aspects of modern capitalism, to puritanism and modern professional ascetics. Never really solving the problem of tension and inner contradiction, between self-denial and affirmativeness, extra worldliness and this worldly interest, the idea of world rejection in its last instance contributed to legitimate the modern drive for world conquest.
Here, Eigenlogik seems to describe a mechanism in which a “sacred” idea turns to be reversed into its opposite under certain conditions of its inner worldly operation. Most important to note are the side-effects of this operation, rationalization, maturation, institutionalization, re-purification of the idea, is part and parcel of a continuous movement of establishing new conditions, in other words, put it into a sort of banal understanding, the sacred idea creates itself the secular conditions of its continued operation: a diversity of fields of secularities in which only it becomes possible to intrinsically pursue the idea itself. (For the case of an individual study: Call it martyrdom, call it wali… this seems however also hold truth for applying it to a secular idea, e.g. friendship as a political idea of anti-state protest – which suddenly as a means of its operation institutes the “martyr” as the great, the absent, the extra-worldly friend)
It is important to note, that French theory has no meaning for the term “Eigenlogik”, it operates at large along the seemingly un-dissolvable contradiction between the “Machine” and human agency, attempting to rebalance their damaged equilibrium: the incorporation of the machine in the process of embodiment of power. A perspective which not only intents to decline the “machine” (in its reality) but also by this way abolishes any condition of human agency potential: internalizing the state order: gradual loss of state monopoly of legitimate exercising of power (RS, I, 547).
(Another idea: A short look at a further instant of “Eigenlogik”: In Goethe‘s Tasso, the plot runs as two women, the Princess and Leonore admire and love Tasso, who himself loves his Princess and keeps Leonore as friend. The women in common understanding celebrate Tasso, the poet, as the ‘real’ “Fürst”, the very aristocrat of art and thought, a sort of equality in elevated spirituality. Preferences are clear, Tasso loves Princess, Princess loves Tasso. In a moment of sentiment and expressing this equality Tasso attempts to embrace the Princess, the taboo of publicly touching, the very aristocracy of power, the ‚sacred’ body of the Princess, everything breaks down, the taboo of real “difference” is disclosed. The Princess sends Tasso away. Leonore wants to make gains on her own project of love and seems to win Tasso for a long-range “rational” project of love. Here: the “Eigenlogik” of “difference” and equality in reverse, the breakthrough condition of civil ‘bürgerlicher Liebe’ emerges and the limits of equality are shown under conditions of aristocratic rule).

And what follows is FOUCAULT:
As the post-Weberian project of the “Eigenlogik” of rationality evolved, re-instigating a genealogical, Nietzschean perspective, however barely disclosed, we might be able here to introduce Foucault’s “Technologies of the Self” and specifically his smooth opposing of emergent Christian techniques with the techniques of Stoicism which were antecedent for a period of more than 3000 years.
Foucault’s interest there seems to widen the perspective by circumventing the “Eigenlogik” by raising the issue of individual adaptation, mainly by way of human “agency” as such: knowledge of the self. It appears as a genealogy of the Descartes’ knowing to be, installing the human being as the essence of rationality.

Foucault: “Max Weber posed the question: If one wants to behave rationally and regulate one's action according to true principles, what part of one's self should one renounce? What is the ascetic price of reason? To what kind of asceticism should one submit? I posed the opposite question: How have certain kinds of interdictions required the price of certain kinds of knowledge about oneself? What must one know about oneself in order to be willing to renounce anything?” (ToS, 17)
In short: Foucault’s knowledge of the self seems to outdate Nietzches’s ‘technology’ of resentment.

Foucault’s four types of ‘technologies of the self’ hardly ever function separately, although each one of them is associated with a certain type of domination. Each implies certain modes of training and modification of individuals, not only in the obvious sense of acquiring certain skills (power) but also in the sense of acquiring certain attitudes towards the world (meaning) – as separate but entwined entities. He wanted to show both their specific nature and their constant interaction. For instance, one sees the relation between manipulating things and domination in Karl Marx's Capital, where every technique of production requires modification of individual conduct, not only skills but also attitudes. (Ibid. 16-18)

We can see that Christian asceticism, like ancient philosophy, places itself under the same sign of concern with oneself. The obligation to know oneself is one of the elements of its central pre-occupation. Between the two extremes - Socrates and Gregory of Nyssa-taking - care of oneself constituted not only a principle but also a constant practice. (21) There are several reasons why "Know yourself" has obscured "Take care of yourself." First, there has been a profound transformation in the moral principles of Western society. We find it difficult to base rigorous morality and austere principles on the precept that we should give ourselves more care than anything else in the world. We are more inclined to see taking care of ourselves as an immorality, as a means of escape from all possible rules. We inherit the tradition of Christian morality which makes self-renunciation the condition for salvation. To know oneself was paradoxically the way to self-renunciation. We also inherit a secular tradition which respects external law as the basis for morality. How then can respect for the self be the basis for morality? We are the inheritors of a social morality which seeks the rules for acceptable behavior in relations with others. Since the sixteenth century, criticism of established morality has been undertaken in the name of the importance of recognizing and knowing the self. Therefore, it is difficult to see concern with oneself as compatible with morality. "Know thyself'' has obscured "Take care of yourself" because our morality, a morality of asceticism, insists that the self is that which one can reject. The second reason is that, in theoretical philosophy from Descartes to Husserl, knowledge of the self (the thinking subject) takes on an ever-increasing importance as he first step in the theory of knowledge.

To summarize: There has been an inversion between the hierarchy of the two principles of antiquity, "Take care of yourself" and "Know thyself." In Greco-Roman culture knowledge of oneself appeared as the consequence of taking care of yourself. In the modern world, knowledge of oneself constitutes the fundamental principle.  ….(23). To my understanding, this would strongly oppose Nietzsche’s “technology” of resentment as an abstracted mechanism installed following Paulus’ God of Love, generalized abstract love leading to the modern ‘desinterssée’ and cultural decadence at large, i.e. the end of inner knowledge and elective affinities.

While Foucault juxtaposes Christian asceticism with ancient philosophy - an indirect continuation of a Nietzsche theme in his denial of Sokrates –, Max Weber from the start looks on “modernity” as a sort of a competitive condition, the struggle for the cultural higher in terms of offering a cohesive universality of world view as much as a coherent “Eigenlogik”, an inner human unity vice versa all the “natural” powers and the lower cultures. (Abolishing resentment as understood as paria-morality against the silent realm of mystical love).
This antagonistic struggle as a modern theme is phrased by Nietzsche already, although ironically:
“Erschütterung, Selbstmitleid im Angesicht der niederen Cultur ist das Zeichen der höheren Cultur; woraus sich ergibt, dass durch diese das Glück jedenfalls nicht gemehrt worden ist. Wer eben Glück und Behagen vom Leben ernten will, der mag nur immer der höheren Kultur aus dem Wege gehen (KA 1980, 2, S. 228).
This is exactly what Weber does, for him this antagonism between lower and higher (nature closeness versus god, i.e. culture closeness) deprives itself from irony, putting it as an inner program of the process of “modernity”.
In this context Weber develops the idea of the protestant puritanism and certainly Protestantism being the most resolute forms of religious refusal of any magic vision of the world and accordingly religious practices related to enchantment. The puritan methodization of live there invented the un-reconcilable paradox, namely that the deepest sentiments of religion suddenly became so strongly tied to this-worldly interests, as Weber puts it: “diese nur auf den allerersten oberflächlichen Blick seltsame, scheinbare Umkehr des ‘Natürlichen’” (RS I, 524) In the perspective of Max Weber it is the inner-worldly ascetics of puritanism , which brought forth this unique “Doppelgesicht” (double vision) (RS I,540) which searches to unite this always wider fare-reaching interest in this-world tying it to the given “Jenseitsschicksal”, the fate in the beyond, and thus the thrive for increase of everyday utility becomes entangled with blatant extra-everyday habitual behavior; for Weber it is this relentless logic of the self that makes the very power of the modern cultural achievement. An achievement, that according to Nietzsche was the subtle, the sublime, the salient interwoven technicality of modern resentment and power (and not, as so many want to make us to believe to be the exclusive resentment of the under-privileged and the poor). (To be clear, what Foucault dismisses, is the self-logical “Sachlichkeit” of resentment, its mechanisms under the modern human skin, unhampered by concrete feeling and perception at large.

The historical and modern facticity of occidental rationalism, here, has a universal effect in that it binds all world religions into a comparative parameter as to comprehend them with a sole level of degree in which this “Doppelgehirn” – as Weber uses this Nietzsche term as is related to the strive for “eine höhere Kultur” (N. ed. Schlechta I, 601 (251) - turns to be appropriated and rationalized: What follows are the stages of rationalization: a) degree of refusal of “Magie” b) systematic comprehensive unification of the forms of reflection of God and World in concepts of redeemed, new ethical relations to the world (RS I, 512), i.e. the transcendence-immanence bond.
The ramifications of the religious subject as such can paradoxically help to reconstruct in “essence” the fundamentalist religious being of the Other (name it Islam) in anthropological terms or as I have put it in an article on ‘Axial Age and Islam’: they might “reinvent the physical religion, interlocking it with strategic geopolitics over rejection or integration of Islam.” (Stauth, 2012:136). It is indeed a subject to be followed in greater detail and also in relation to Foucault’s perception of Islam. With reference to Foucault’s “spiritual corporality”, Jeremy Carrette resemble it to “a two edge sword with “the relation of power” on the one hand and the “the relation of meaning” on the other. He argues that Foucault failed to establish the interconnection of the two, nor could he suspend spirituality by prioritizing one of them, namely, “the power.” Similarly, we observe the circumvention of this ambivalence in recent anthropological works that follows Foucauldian methodology. In an emblematic example, Saba Mahmood restrains her conception of “religious agency” among pious women groups in Egypt to the relation of meaning, while leaving out the background political context of this form of self-cultivation(Chavoshian 2017, 121). This is very well reflected in her elaboration of “ethical formation” as well as “habitualization”, which Mahmood describes as the process of a specific conception of the self through which it requires a different kind of bodily capacities. These, attempts of anthropologically objectifying the modern modes of subjectification in the framework of a non-Western religion, into separated works, stand far away of identifying the overall issue of ‘resentment’, subjectification and modernity.
Yet, a closer look into what happens inside the circles and into the effects on the level of their relations to the outside conditions goes beyond Mahmood’s inter-linkage between piety and agency of religious women, It excludes any view on power and resistance which, in developing the tools of competitive self-spiritualization, searching for devices of self-elevation and concomitantly come to play leading to their submission to hierarchy and power outside that characterizes the field of interactions. These factors make the return to the “relation to power” inevitable. I see this as very specific “path” of the modern resentment issue in its “Eigenlogik”.

FOUCAULT again (Technologies of the: Self):
It is a question of the relation between asceticism and truth. Max Weber posed the question: If one wants to behave rationally and regulate one's action according to true principles, what part of one's self should one renounce? What is the ascetic price of reason? To what kind of asceticism should one submit? I posed the opposite question: How have certain kinds of interdictions required the price of certain kinds of knowledge about oneself? What must one know about oneself in order to be willing to renounce anything? Thus I arrived at the hermeneutics of technologies of the self in pagan and early Christian practice. I encountered certain difficulties in this study because these practices are not well known. First, Christianity has always been more interested in the history of its beliefs than in the history of real practices. Second, such a hermeneutics was never organized into a body of doctrine like textual hermeneutics. Third, the hermeneutics of the self has been confused with theologies of the soul -on cupiscence, sin, and the fall from grace. Fourth, a hermeneutics of the self has been diffused across Western culture through numerous channels and integrated with various types of attitudes and experience so that it is difficult to isolate and separate it from our own spontaneous experiences”. Again, Foucault perceives the problem of neutrality and mechanistic unfolding “technology” of learning: body and the soul.
According to Foucault, the development of the hermeneutics of the self in two different contexts which are historically contiguous: (1) Greco-Roman philosophy in the first two centuries A.D. of the early Roman Empire and (2) Christian spirituality and the monastic principles developed in the fourth and fifth centuries of the late Roman Empire.
He elaborates: “The well-developed and elaborated practice of the self-examination in monastic Christianity is different from the Senecan self-examination and very different from Chrysostom and from exomologesis. This new kind of practice must be understood from the point of view of two principles of Christian spirituality: obedience and contemplation. In Seneca, the relationship of the disciple with the master was important, but it was instrumental and professional. It was founded on the capacity of the master to lead the disciple to a happy and autonomous life through good advice. The relationship would end when the disciple got access to that life. For a long series of reasons, obedience has a very different character in monastic life. It differs from the Greco-Roman type of relation to the master in the sense that obedience isn't based just upon a need for self-improvement but must bear on all aspects of a monk's life. There is no element in the life of the monk which may escape from this fundamental and permanent relation of total obedience to the master. John Cassian repeats an old principle from the oriental tradition: "Everything the monk does without permission of his master constitutes a theft." (ToS 45) Here, obedience is complete control of behavior by the master, not a final autonomous state. It is a sacrifice of the self, of the subject's own will. This is the new Technology of the self. The monk must have the permission of his director to do anything, even die. Everything he does without permission is stealing. There is not a single moment when the monk can be autonomous. Even when he becomes a director himself, he must retain the spirit of obedience. He must keep the spirit of obedience as a permanent sacrifice of the complete control of behavior by the master. The self must constitute self through obedience.
The second feature of monastic life is that contemplation is considered the supreme good. It is the obligation of the monk to turn his thoughts continuously to that point which is God and to make sure that his heart is pure enough to see God. The goal is permanent contemplation of God.
The technology of the self, which developed from obedience and contemplation in the Monastery, presents some peculiar characteristics. Cassian gives a rather clear exposition of this
technology of the self, a principle of self-examination which he borrowed from the Syrian and Egyptian monastic traditions.
This technology of self-examination of Oriental origins, dominated by obedience and contemplation, is much more concerned with thought than with action. Seneca had placed his stress on action. With Cassian the object is not past actions of the day; it's the present thoughts. Since the monk must continuously turn his thoughts toward God, he must scrutinize the actual course of this thought. This scrutiny thus has as its object the permanent discrimination between thoughts which lead toward God and those which don't. This continual concern with the present is different from the Senecan memorization of deeds and their correspondence with rules. It is what the Greeks referred to with a pejorative word: logismoi ("cogitations, reasoning, calculating thought").
The scrutiny of conscience consists of trying to immobilize consciousness, to eliminate movements of the spirit that divert one from God. That means we have to examine any thought which presents itself to consciousness to see the relation between act and thought, truth and reality, to see if there is anything in this thought which will move our spirit, provoke our desire, turn our spirit away from God. The scrutiny is based on the idea of a secret concupiscence. There are three major types of self-examination: first, self-examination with respect to thoughts in correspondence to reality (Cartesian); second, self-examination with respect to the way our thoughts relate to rules (Senecan), third, the examination of self with respect to the relation between the hidden thought and an inner impurity. At this moment begins the Christian hermeneutics of the self with its deciphering of inner thoughts. It implies that there is something hidden in ourselves and that we are always in a self-illusion which hides the secret.
In order to make this kind of scrutiny, Cassian says (45/46)
There is only one way: to tell all thoughts to our director, to be obedient to our master in all things, to engage in the permanent verbalization of all our thoughts. In Cassian, self-examination is subordinated to obedience and the permanent verbalization of thoughts. Neither is true of Stoicism. By telling himself not only his thoughts but also the smallest movements of consciousness, his intentions, the monk stands in a hermeneutic relation not only to the master but to himself. This verbalization is the touchstone or the money of thought. (47)
Confession permits the master to know because of his greater experience and wisdom and therefore to give better advice. Even if the master, in his role as a discriminating power, doesn't say anything, the fact that the thought has been expressed will have an effect of discrimination.
Cassian gives an example of the monk who stole bread. At first he can't tell. The difference between good and evil thoughts is that evil thoughts can't be expressed without difficulty, for evil is hidden and unstated. Because evil thoughts cannot be expressed without difficulty and shame, the cosmological difference between light and dark, between verbalization and sin, secrecy and silence,

Where the reconciliation (ToS 48) between God and the devil, may not emerge, there then the monk prostrates himself and confesses. Only when he confesses verbally does the devil go out of him. The verbal expression is the crucial moment (Second Conference of Abbot Moses II). Confession is a mark of truth. This idea of the permanent verbal is only an ideal. It is never completely possible. But the price of the permanent verbal was to make everything that couldn't be expressed into a sin.
In conclusion, in the Christianity of the first centuries, there are two main forms of disclosing the self, of showing the truth about oneself. The first is exomologesis, or a dramatic expression of the situation of the penitent as sinner which makes manifest his status as sinner. The second is what was called in the spiritual literature exagoreusis. This is an analytical and continual verbalization of thoughts carried on in the relation of complete obedience to someone else. This relation is built on the renunciation of one's own will and of one's own self. There is a great difference between exomologesis and exagoreusis;yet we have to underscore the fact that there is one important element in common: You cannot disclose without renouncing.
Exomologesis had as its model martyrdom. In exomologeusis, the sinner had to "kill" himself through ascetic macerations. Whether through martyrdom or through obedience to a master, disclosure of self is the renunciation of one's own self. In exagoresis, on the other hand, you show that, in permanently verbalizing your thoughts and permanently obeying the master, you are renouncing your will and yourself. This practice continues from the beginning of Christianity to the seventeenth century. The inauguration of penance in the thirteenth century is an important
step in its rise.
This theme of self-renunciation is very important. Throughout Christianity there is a correlation between disclosure of the self, dramatic or verbalized, and the renunciation of self. My hypothesis from looking at these two techniques is that it's the second one, verbalization, which becomes the more important. 49 Tcchnologics of the Self, from the eighteenth century to the present, the techniques of verbalization have been reinserted in a different context by the so-called human sciences in order to use them without renunciation of the self but to constitute, positively, a new self. To use these techniques without renouncing oneself constitutes a decisive break. (48/49)

Political technologies of the individual, right, the problem is this: Which kind of political techniques, which technology of government, has been put to work and used and developed in the general framework of the reason of state in order to make of the individual a significant clement for the state?

“What I am looking for, on the contrary, are the techniques, the practices, which give a concrete form to this new political rationality and to this new kind of relationship between the social entity and the individual. And, surprisingly enough, people, at least in countries like Germany and France, where for different reasons the problem of state was considered as a major issue, recognized the necessity of defining, describing, and organizing very explicitly this new technology of power, the new techniques by which the individual could be integrated into the social entity of state governance. They recognized its necessity, and they gave it a name. This name in French is police, and in German, Polizei. (I think the meaning of the English word, police, is something very different.) We must precisely try to give better definitions of what was understood by those French and German words, police and Polizei. The meaning of these German and French words is puzzling (154) since they have been used at least from the nineteenth century until now to designate something else, a very specific institution which at least in France and Germany - 1 don't know about the United States - didn't always have a very good reputation. But, from the end of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, the words police and Polizei had a very broad and, at the same time, also a very precise meaning. When people spoke about police at this moment, they spoke about the specific techniques by which a government in the framework of the state was able to govern people as individuals significantly useful for the world.”

Perhaps there is one important observation in comparing Weber and Foucault in all this: while Weber sees the “Eigenlogik” of an idea of Christian ethics as it evolves in and through history, for Foucault the issue is fore mostly related to action… dramatizations, verbalizations, constructions of the self as a new will to power etc. This becomes clear if one follows up the language, the French uses the verb as a key to the meaning embedded in his sentences, while the German thinks predominantly in “Begriff” as it modulates and transforms itself.

As a German, I should think of Germany … - in its own measurably thinking of enhancing world power – of course as an underdog, peacefully, a German version of puritanism under permanent thread of Catholicism’s formal and religious understanding of “Amt”, rather than, as Weber had it: material truth of rules and regulations and of law.
Of course, what we do with recent conjurations of piety movements, re-positioning them into a perspective of global patterns of recognition and backdoor cultural globalization of residues of Protestantism, Puritanism and the like?

A 2020-note: Would a more careful reading and presentation of Foucault and Weber help us today? What strikes me today is, how outdated this singular theme of individual empowerment and the state now appears to be. Neo-liberal dominance has eradicated largely all interest in Weber’s genealogical foundation on the morality of the modern professional man in terms of ethics of responsibility and technical-scientific capabilities, suppressing the issue of resentment. Furthermore, could Foucault help us to understand the pure “Ego” and the pure “Money” of the “Amt” par excellence, how it has changed under domination of Neo-liberalism. It tends to abolish “office” and the “state” all together into a new broader pattern of representational masquerade. Likewise Foucault’s Cartesian genealogy knowledge of the self carefully avoiding Paulus and negativity searches some affirmative stand towards a positive image of historical traits of modern self-consciousness: a ‘humane world’ background. I think the “Eigenlogik” of resentment has an unhindered unfolding. A dear laughter after 9/11, Neo-Liberalism and the Virus: Where is it? Sitting in an enclosed pandemic exile, I follow the voices that call out: “The Virus will teach us!” 

(ca. June 2016 with few raw amendments May 2020; intention to let follow Ressentment-2 and -3 exists)

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Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, 5 Bde., Hrsg. Karl Schlechta, Ullstein, 1980. (KA = 15 Bde., Colli/Motinari eds.)
RS= Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, 3 Bde.Tübingen, Mohr 1947.
ToS= Michel Foucault, Technologien des Selbst, Frankfurt, Fischer, 1993. English: Technologies of the Self, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1988.
Stauth on Holism 2005: 537 - Academia
(Stauth on Axial Age and Islam, 2012:136). Academia
Jeremy Carrette on Foucault and Religion
Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism
Sana Chavoshian, Gender, 2017, Women’s Religious Circles