Ludwig Klages - The Science of Character 10/25/2006 04:33 PM

causes him offence.

Supposing a Stock Exchange speculator, empty of soul and suffering boredom on
the shores of the Mediterranean, to see a person whom the spectacle of the sea evidently
transports with joy. He does not know what this person experiences, and the conclusion
he reaches about this by analogy of his own shallow pleasures will certainly be wrong.
But the fact, obvious for him too, that this person experiences pleasures denied to
himself suffices to make him the malicious rival of his disposition–a rival whose enmity
is the stronger since he has no source of experience left save in the breaking of
opposition. The opposite procedure, by which a student of character, untouched by life-
envy, succeeds in unfolding the “ressentiment”, will be touched on in the next chapter.
This explanation of the reason which allows life-envy to be discovered, although
sketchy, may perhaps suffice to remove the difficulty which seemed to stand in the way
of the principle of participation. We now turn in greater detail to the procedure which
enable us to mobilize the essential material, which we contain, for the purpose of
cognitive penetration of alien characters. This is abstracting self-reflection.

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