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• W4367146502 abstract "“I couldn’t stand those books,” my friend Elena said with great vehemence; “all the characters were just horrible.” It was a sunny afternoon in August and, having hiked up Izaraitz Auzoa, we were luncheoning on the grass by a small Basque chalet serving wine to weary hikers. She was talking about My Brilliant Friend, the first book of Elena Ferrante’s quartet The Neapolitan Novels. Her sister, who, unlike her, had found the strength to read all four books, concurred. She was hoping for a happy resolution, she said. There was none. Personally, I love those books for their candor about friendship. Why did my friend hate them so much? There was the Neapolitan Mafia and the brutality that is so often intermingled with poverty, of course. But what rankled more than anything was the fraught relationship between the two main characters: Lenu and Lila. Lenu and Lila love each other intensely, but their friendship is poisoned again and again by the envy each feels for the other. Lenu envies Lila’s unschooled brilliant mind, and Lila envies Lenu’s education, intelligence, and friends. Each feels excruciatingly inferior to the other at times. They go through periods of close friendship and estrangement as a result. It was this envy that so disgusted my friends.Envy is, as Sara Protasi points out in her book The Philosophy of Envy, “condemned by all religious traditions, feared in all societies, repressed by most who feel it, and often kept a secret even to oneself” (2). It is generally thought to be incompatible with love, with being a good person, or with human happiness. The envious are portrayed as languishing away in the shadows under the burden of their all-consuming passion. The first murder in the Bible—Cain slaying Abel—is usually portrayed as being the result of envy. No wonder, then, that my friends were so horrified by the centrality of this emotion in Ferrante’s quartet. What was more surprising, in fact, was that I found it liberating to read about envy so freely admitted to. It was intermingled with deep discomfort and an urge to condemn the envier, of course, but let the one who has never envied throw the first stone.In her beautifully written, fastidiously argued, and empirically informed book on envy, Protasi offers a new and more compassionate view of this maligned emotion. She argues that envy is not always bad but that it might actually be virtuous at times. Envy is an inevitable result of our quest for excellence in any field, she suggests. Excellence is not, indeed cannot be, independent of how other people are doing. Instead, it is by its very nature comparative. In our quest for it we throw a “sidelong glance” (159) at others to see how they are doing. Social comparison is inextricably linked to excelling. There being very few people who believe excellence is a vice, Protasi’s argument that envy isn’t always bad has tremendous force. Envy comes along for the ride whenever we aim to improve ourselves and hone our skills. But what about her stronger claim that envy might actually be good? After all, it is easy to accept that if we cannot help but envy (sometimes) when we are in the business of self-improvement, we cannot be blamed for it. It might be harder to see envy as a virtue.Before making headway on this question, let us first see how Protasi defines envy. According to her, “Envy is an aversive response to a perceived inferiority of disadvantage vis-à-vis a similar other, with regard to a good that is relevant to the sense of identity of the envier. Envy’s unpleasantness motivates the envier to do something about their situation” (29). Envy, incidentally, is not the same as jealousy, even though the two terms are often confounded in American English. Envy, Protasi says, wants what it does not have, but jealousy desires to protect what it has in the face of threatened loss.Because envy has two variables, we get four different kinds of envy, according to Protasi. Here she sets herself apart from earlier philosophers who have posited at most three different kinds. The two variables are focus and control, she says. The focus of envy—namely, what we pay most attention to—might either be the envied object or situation, or the person that we envy. The other variable is control, or, more precisely, perceived control. This refers to one’s assessment of one’s ability to obtain the good that the other person possesses. Combining the two poles of focus and control gives us four different possibilities for envy. First, we have inert envy, where the focus is on the good, but the good is perceived to be unobtainable. Emulative envy is similar insofar as the focus remains on the good, not the person who has the good, but it differs insofar as the envier sees herself capable of obtaining the good. When, instead, the focus is on the person who has the good, we get spiteful envy when the envier perceives the good to be unobtainable, and aggressive envy when it is thought to obtainable. Each kind of envy comes with its own action tendency, or motivation, and way of looking at the envied other. The action tendency is particularly relevant to how we evaluate the emotion overall. Inert envy leads to sulking, emulative envy to self-improvement (or attempting to self-improve at any rate), and spiteful envy to the desire to spoil the good for the other person; aggressive envy motivates stealing the good (43).Looked at this way, emulative envy doesn’t seem so bad. It appears to be bad neither for the envier herself nor for the envied. Protasi concludes that it is neither prudentially nor morally bad. Inert envy isn’t really bad for the envied, but it does seem to be bad for the envier. After all, it is a painful emotion and one that is liable to be intensified by the self-loathing and despair that tends to accompany such an unflattering comparison. One really ought not to feel inert envy, for purely self-interested reasons. Aggressive and spiteful envy are both morally problematic for reasons that need not be elaborated on, as they should be obvious to most. But, in contrast to earlier writers on envy (many of whom are mentioned in the large appendix to the book) who mostly thought envy in all its forms was prudentially (and morally) bad, Protasi acknowledges that the pain of envy is often assuaged in these cases by hope of wresting the good from the rival or of spoiling the good for them. This leads her to suggest that although aggressive envy is clearly morally bad, it is not obviously prudentially bad. Of course, having obtained another’s good by whatever shady means at one’s disposal, one might feel subsequent shame or guilt, but those feelings could quickly be overcome by the satisfaction of possessing the desired good oneself. This may not be what we would like to believe, but it seems to be psychologically realistic. We are, as many social psychologists have shown, given to self-flattering appraisals and confabulations. Someone who acquires another’s good by aggressive means will often have little difficulty persuading himself that he deserved to possess the good in the first place. One might at first wonder why Protasi does not accord the same prudential status to spiteful envy, which she claims is both morally and prudentially bad. After all, spoiling the good for the other might give one the satisfaction of no longer being in an inferior position with respect of her. Protasi, however, seems to think this satisfaction is likely to be short-lived. It also comes with dangers of its own, such as alienating the envied and frightening onlookers, thus potentially leading to social exclusion and isolation. One might point to Iago, spiteful envier par excellence, who came to a sticky end.So how can envy be virtuous, again? Because it is “the only morally and prudentially appropriate response to the comparative lack of important goods” (90). This does not mean that envying virtuously is easy. Quite the contrary. Only emulative envy counts, and only when it is fitting and acted upon in the right way. Here, as elsewhere in the book, there are echoes of Aristotle. Fitting emulative envy must be right about the envied person being in one’s own comparison class and in a superior position. The envied object or situation must be good, and one must be justified in thinking one can level up—that is, obtain the good for oneself—which is only possible, of course, if it is a good that more than one person can possess. Despite these difficulties, many people do manage to envy virtuously, Protasi maintains. As an example, she gives Lenu and Lila, whom she believes envy emulatively.Protasi argues for her view of envy with admirable clarity and attention to detail. In contrast to many works on emotions in philosophy that rely almost exclusively on arguments, anecdotes, and thought examples, Protasi masterfully uses the empirical literature to help make her points. More than once, she rejects a proposal on empirical grounds. At the same time, she shows a vast knowledge of the philosophical literature. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book; this is often rare for philosophy, which has become an increasingly specialized discipline, making for highly technical and tedious reading. Protasi can, of course, be a bit pedantic herself. By and large, however, I thought she has found an admirable balance between careful reasoning, attention to the ongoing debate and possible objections, and engaging writing and vivid examples.One of the things that shines through in this book is Protasi’s humanity. Here is no moralistic finger wagging but instead a compassionate look at the complexity of human striving, human excellence, and the ubiquitous desire for admiration and respect. This is seen no more clearly than in her tightly argued chapter on love and envy. Envy is not invariably the enemy of love, Saint Paul notwithstanding, she argues. Envy is possible, indeed may be unavoidable, in loving relationships. Not chronic envy, of course, but envy that comes and goes as a life shared changes and evolves." @default.
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• W4367146502 title "<i>The Philosophy of Envy</i>" @default.
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