Envy. Francis Bacon called it “the vilest affection, and the most depraved.” To Socrates it was “the ulcer of the soul.” It is, the critic Sianne Ngai tells us, an ugly feeling, meaning that it is non-cathartic, arising from a “situation of obstructed agency.” You can do nothing to stop it, nothing to control it, nothing to bring it to any conclusion. It will have its interminable way with you. Unlike the grander passions—rage, despair—it endures while offering “no satisfactions of virtue…nor any therapeutic or purifying release.”
Not surprisingly, both Nietzsche and Ayn Rand dismissed it as the province of petulant losers: “the vengefulness of the impotent” (Nietzsche), “the hallmark of a second rater” (Rand). According to Melanie Klein, it is “operative from the beginning of life” and “affects the earliest relation of all.” It occurs, says the Austrian sociologist Helmut Schoeck, “as soon as two individuals become capable of mutual comparison.”
Aristotle put it like this: “We envy those who are near us in time, place, age, or reputation…those whose possession of or success in a thing is a reproach to us: these are our neighbors and equals; for it is clear that it is our own fault we have missed the good thing in question.” Missed is the knife-twisting word here, so much of envy having to do with the feeling of a near miss, an almost.
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