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A Phenomenological Analysis of
Envy

This book provides a phenomenological analysis of envy. The

author’s account takes a descriptive look at the whole experience of
envy as it pertains to the envier’s sense of self and the envied.
Philosophical work on envy has predominately focused on how
the envier perceives, thinks about, or schemes against the person
envied. This book proposes a phenomenological analysis of envy
that articulates its essentially comparative character according to
which we can further incorporate the role of the envier. This
approach offers a novel contribution in three ways. First, it develops
a notion of two predominant ways in which envy expresses itself:
one that is bad for the envied and the other that is bad for the
envier. Second, it renews the traditional defense of the view that
envy is bad or vicious. Third, it provides original phenomenological
descriptions of differences between envy and covetousness,
indignation, emulation, ressentiment, and jealousy. By drawing on
literary sources and social scientific literature, the author provides
concrete examples of the lived experience of an envier.
A Phenomenological Analysis of Envy will appeal to researchers
and advanced students working in ethics, moral psychology,
phenomenology, and philosophy of emotion.

Michael Robert Kelly is Professor of Philosophy at the University

of San Diego. He is author of Phenomenology and the Problem of
Time (2016), editor of Bergson and Phenomenology (2010), and co-
editor of Michel Henry: The Affects of Thought (2012), Early
Phenomenology (2016), and Michel Henry’s Practical Philosophy
(2022).
Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory

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Hanno Sauer

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Moral Thought Outside Moral Theory

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Virtuous and Vicious Expressions of Partiality

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Stephen Kershnar

A Phenomenological Analysis of Envy

Michael Robert Kelly

For more information about this series, please visit:

www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Ethics-and-Moral-
Theory/book-series/SE0423
A Phenomenological Analysis of
Envy

Michael Robert Kelly

First published 2024
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158

and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2024 Michael Robert Kelly

The right of Michael Robert Kelly to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
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ISBN: 978-1-032-42376-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-42377-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-36252-4 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003362524

Typeset in Sabon
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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Basic Overview of Envy and Phenomenology

Part I

1 Phenomenology of Emotion and Self-Awareness in Envy

2 An Envier Preoccupied with Himself in an Experience of Envy

3 An Envier Preoccupied with the Other in an Experience of Envy

Part II

4 Envy and Covetousness

5 Envy, Emulation, Indignation

6 Envy and Ressentiment

7 Envy and Two Types of Jealousy

Index
Acknowledgments

I’ve been writing this book for more than ten years. I have more
people to thank than I probably can remember. Apologies in advance
to anyone I may have forgotten.
Having had the privilege of presenting portions of this work at
conferences and on campuses over the years, I’ve learned from the
following good and kind colleagues: Michele Avarici, Jeff Bloechl,
Patrick Byrne, Steve Crowell, Brian Davies, Dan Dahlstrom, Nicolas
de Warren, Patrick Eldridge, John Greco, Gretchen Gusich, Burt
Hopkins, Walter Hopp, Chad Kidd, Pavlos Kontos, Len Lawlor, Arthur
Madigan, Dan McKaughn, Marina McCoy, Molly McGrath, Dermot
Moran, Eoin O’Connell, Anne Ozar, Jack Reynolds, Aaron Simmons,
Tony Steinbock, Mary Troxell, Merold Westphal, Chris Yates, and Jeff
Yoshimi. For various and generous email communications, I thank
Justin D’Arms, Allesandra Fusi, Layne Garlets, Robert Roberts, and
Caitlin Nicole Sanchez.
Many colleagues at USD have thought these matters through with
me: Harriet Baber, Malachi Black, Rico Monge, Nick Riggle, and Lori
Watson. Two colleagues in particular kindly read many portions of
the book, Brian Clack and Turner Nevitt. Thank you for your very
useful feedback, incisive examples, and conversation. And to Noelle
Norton and the College of Arts and Science Dean’s Office for
supporting my research.
Outside the academy, I’ve benefitted from conversations with
Mark Amador, Kevin and Kelly Day, David Greenfield, Chiara and
Silvio Lignarolo, Nathan Medina, and Michael Runyon.
I turn to the people who have had sustained influence on this
book. My friend and colleague, Brian Harding, read and carefully
commented on Chapters 4–6. John Drummond taught me the
phenomenology of emotions and how to develop descriptive, careful
phenomenology analyses; the reader will see the influence of John’s
teaching and writing throughout whatever strengths this book has.
John is a model thinker and a model of intellectual generosity.
Heartfelt thanks go to Jeff Hanson and Christopher Arroyo. Jeff, I
remain deeply grateful for your having had enough faith in my work
to have invited me to Melbourne to present some of these ideas in
their early stages. More than that, I am grateful for a decade’s worth
of discussion about nearly each chapter and your careful editorial
eye. Chris, you have worked with me on this project since it was
merely a wish of mine that at times I was too diffident to pursue.
You routinely disabused me of that. At each stage of almost every
chapter, your careful comments and encouragement inspired me.
Your keen eye for distinctions and clarity of expression is admirable
and something I have tried to emulate. You helped me refine my
most complicated arguments and always pushed me with the
greatest care to write as clearly as I could. Chris and Jeff, this book
doesn’t exist without your generous, serious, and entertaining
feedback and discussions, as well as your friendship. This thanks is
not enough. I hope my friendship is.
A very special thanks to a careful and bright young student,
Juliette Yoon, who generously and expertly helped turn my endnotes
into a bibliography.
Finally, I thank my family for supporting and tolerating my work
on (and yammering about) this project: My siblings, Matt Kelly and
Erin Kelly; my parents, Cecilia and Robert; and my wife, Sabrina
Volpi, a scholar in her own discipline that surely she neglected at
times when I needed to work. And my adorable son, Austin Wallace,
who sacrificed major portions of his 2023 summer while I finished
this book. I dedicate this book to you, Austin, with the hope that
your mom and I will have cultivated in you enough good axiological
sense and gratitude to avoid envying others. Envy just isn’t worth it,
buddy. For there’s always a good in our lives that we are missing
when we’re sorrowful about, and begrudging toward, another who
has something we value and desire but lack in some moment. You
make me very proud, and I hope this book makes you proud of me.
To you, with love.
The following entities permitted me to reproduce previously
published material relevant to this work. Portions of Chapter 1
originally appeared in “A Glimpse of Envy and Its Intentional
Structure.” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and
Phenomenological Philosophy 10, no. 1 (2010): 283–302. Portions of
Chapter 2 first appeared in “Phenomenological Distinctions: Two
Types of Envy and Their Difference from Covetousness.” Edited by J.
Aaron Simmons and J. Edward Hackett. Phenomenology for the
Twenty-First Century, 2016, 157–77. Portions of Chapter 5 first
appeared in “The Object and Affects of Envy and Emulation.” Journal
of Cultural and Religious Theory 14, no. 2 (2015): 386–401. Portions
of Chapter 6 first appeared in “Envy and Ressentiment, a Difference
in Kind: A Critique and Renewal of Scheler’s Phenomenological
Account.” Early Phenomenology: Metaphysics, Ethics, and the
Philosophy of Religion, 2016, 49–66.
Introduction
A Basic Overview of Envy and Phenomenology

DOI: 10.4324/9781003362524-1

Envy is bad. This essentially comparative and competitive emotion is

not as bad as jealousy. But it really is bad. Whatever one may think
of him, Gore Vidal nailed it when he’s said to have said: “Whenever
a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”1 What a sorry state
of affairs when I take the success of a “friend” (colleague, associate,
relative) as some ill for me. What a pitiable state of affairs when, in
doing so, I become preoccupied with my own unhappiness, feeling
diminished inside and (at least) begrudging my “friend” her good.
Envy always contains this initially mute moment: an unfavorable
comparison between the envious person and the envied other in
which the envier finds himself wanting while (at least) begrudging
his “friend’s” good fortune. Every experience of envy contains the
features of this initial moment. Shakespeare’s Iago set Othello
aflame, opening that work verbally attacking Cassio, who just beat
him out for the lieutenant position. But even Iago grasps this
demeaning dimension of envy. As Iago says, reflecting this initially
mute moment of envy in which the envier assesses himself and his
neighbor, “I know my price/I am worth no worse a place.”2
Envy occurs in less intense, more mundane circumstances, of
course. I recently heard two acquaintances whispering upon seeing
a mutual acquaintance emerge from her new Maserati. One man
said to the other, “That is a nice car but I’d buy a Tesla if I were
going to spend that kind of money on a car.” To which the other
replied, “Right? Mercedes holds its value better.” This banter
continued until the owner came within earshot. This begrudging, this
unwillingness to celebrate the good of our Maserati-driving
acquaintance gave way to a compliment (“That’s a beautiful car,
Suzie”) and a joke (“Somebody must have gotten a nice bonus”).
We weren’t quite in the territory of Shakespeare’s Iago or
Unamuno’s Joaquín in Able Sánchez. But my editorializing
acquaintances had gone beyond objections to taste, specious
concerns about fiscal imprudence, or expressions of longing or
coveting. Our Maserati-driving acquaintance had something that, at
least with respect to car ownership, put her above these others.
Their remarks reflected having been bothered by that unfavorable
comparison that created a disparity they found at least mildly
galling. Their grumbles expressed envy toward our Maserati-driving
neighbor: a little bit of begrudging reflected that little taste of
comparative inferiority and motivated that little psychological
mechanism to settle down the sadness over Suzie’s good. In that
moment of envy, they tried to ameliorate their sorrow and “reset”
the equality between themselves and our Maserati-driving
acquaintance by chopping her down a little.
Most of us have reckoned at some point and to some degree with
the distressing feeling of envy, having surely come upon a galling
disparity between oneself and another that reveals one’s
comparative inferiority. Galling: I think that captures the affective
tenor of envy. A person who finds a state of affairs galling may find
that state of affairs both bitterly humiliating and either annoying,
vexing, infuriating, or maddening. Envy follows from an unfavorable
comparison of oneself vis-à-vis a “neighbor.”3 When we envy
another, we feel distressed over our comparative inferiority and
begrudge (unwillingly acknowledge) the envied other’s comparative
superiority. When one experiences envy – whether Iago or my
acquaintances – a sense of self-distress accompanies the envier’s
begrudging of the envied.4 These dually-directed affects – that is,
this reaction to the galling state of affairs – disclose the envier as
inferior and his neighbor as superior (at least on some particular
score). At least with respect to some desired and valued good, the
envier takes himself as inferior precisely as he takes the envied as
superior (regardless of whether or not the envier thinks this disparity
fair or unfair, himself or the envied deserving or undeserving).
Galling indeed.
Here is envy: she has something that I value and desire but lack
and it stings (or maybe burns) me that she has something I value
and desire but lack. Like two sides of the same coin – mirror images,
perhaps – the envier takes himself vis-à-vis the envier as inferior and
the envied as superior just as (i.e., in the very moment that) he sees
the envied enjoying that new Maserati. The envier may find himself
preoccupied with lashing out at the Maserati owner or lamenting his
own comparative inferiority. In any case, either envious
preoccupation expresses the envier’s reaction to that initial moment
of unfavorable comparison in which the envier finds himself wanting
vis-à-vis the envied in wanting (at least) non-inferior status relative
to the envied.5 In a moment of envy, the envier feels good about
and relates well to neither himself nor his social equal. In that
unfavorable comparison, the envier begrudges the Maserati owner
her comparative superiority and distresses over his comparative
inferiority on this score.
In some sense, envy stems from a simple motivating condition or
mistaken evaluation: if I want a reputation as smart, then I’ll be
prone to being an envier and begrudge others who are smarter than
me or reputed to be smarter than me; if I want knowledge, I’ll
surround myself with smart people and appreciate those smart
people who make me more knowledgeable. This is because envy is
less about desire for some good itself and more about desiring some
good as a symbolic status marker – one that “The Joneses” will no
doubt recognize. As envy is about status or relative standing vis-à-
vis my neighbor (who possesses that which I value and desire but
lack) I am in a state of envy when I feel distressed because some
social equal enjoys some good thing that I value and desire but lack
(or lack as much of as she possesses). In this sense, envy
importantly amounts to feeling bad about myself and begrudging my
neighbor because I value and desire but lack some good thing that
envied person has or is.6
 Envy also concerns a couple of additional person-relevant factors.
That is, the matter envied must matter to the envier and also must
be (or be thought to be) within the envier’s reach such that one’s
neighbor has it while one does not. Concerning the latter, the
neighbor or social equal should here be specified as someone seen
in an upward comparison occupying a better situation that the envier
thinks is desirable and achievable.7 Concerning the former, I may
value and desire boats, but I do not have one and my neighbor is off
on the bay this afternoon in his Boston Whaler; let the envy begin. If
I don’t care for boats or boating culture (even if I can appreciate the
value of boats and boating culture), then I probably don’t envy my
neighbor his Boston Whaler (unless I have established an all-
encompassing envious rivalry, however imaginary, with my
neighbor). These person-relevant concerns, Sara Protasi writes,
reveal “what we care about, what we aspire to be, and what we
perceive ourselves as being.”8 Disappointment around these person-
relevant factors combined with a neighbor’s success on the same
score provide ripe conditions for envy. And contemporary social
science literature confirms that envy gets triggered along these
person-relevant lines when another has fulfilled an expectation that
for us went disappointed.9
Two interesting features characterize the philosophical and social
psychological literature on envy. First, the Western philosophical
tradition has advanced many permutations of Aristotle’s claim that
envy is pain of inferiority in response to a neighbor’s good fortune
that is a reproach to the envier.10 While the envied as regarded (at
least) begrudgingly typically has been the focus of accounts of envy,
Aristotle’s remark implies that the envier faults himself to some
extent for the disparity. The envier finds this disparity galling and
begrudges (at least) his neighbor his good. And literary types have
recognized the self-assessing dimension of envy, Chaucer most
notably remarking that envy is the emotion that flogs itself.11 Yet
treatments of envy in the history of philosophy often inadequately
account for the subjective dimension of envy (or how the envier
experiences himself vis-à-vis the envied), sometimes overlooking it
altogether.12 The experience of the envier often gets left out of the
picture in favor of what and how the envier thinks about the envied
and the harm the envier wishes to inflict upon the envied.
Second, contemporary social psychology studies of envy have
started to incorporate the subjective side of envy. But they have
done so by articulating a “benign” or “not vicious” type of envy – a
type of envy that purportedly motivates the envier to improve
himself rather than harm (in word or deed) the envied.13
My approach to the topic aims to fill the lacunae in envy
scholarship in philosophy without falling into the dubious notion of
benign envy.
Concerning the Maserati scene above, philosophical accounts of
envy in the history of philosophy would focus on the envious
person’s thoughts about the envied Maserati owner, as well as the
ways in which the envier’s envy signified an unjustifiable begrudging
of (and sometimes malice toward) the Maserati owner. I want to
complement that traditional philosophical focus by considering how
the envier apprehends himself vis-à-vis the envied. The approach I
will develop differs from the social psychological approaches just
mentioned. The latter (and the philosophical accounts of envy that
lean into the latter) turn toward the subjective side of envy by
emphasizing the envious person’s ensuing motivations and behaviors
contingent upon their belief about their control with respect to
addressing the disparity between envier and envied.14
In reviewing the psychological literature on envy, Cohen-Charash
and Larson offer the following example of benign envy from a
common measurement instrument:

… in response to a hypothetical scenario in which a coworker

received a raise but the participant did not, “benign” envy was
measured with items such as “I would start to work harder,” and
“malicious” envy was measured with items such as “I would
secretly wish that my coworker would lose clients.”15
Rather than focus on the subjective recall of, or speculation about,
the experience of envy; rather than focus downstream of the
experience of envy on some proposed means to remedying envy, I
want to analyze the experience of envy itself. I want to freeze-frame
that initial moment, that galling disparity, that unfavorable
comparison of oneself vis-à-vis another who possesses some person-
relevant good that the envier values and desires but lacks. Moreover,
my turn away from most empirical data on envy further is motivated
by what I take to be the conceptually confused stipulations about
so-called benign envy. If the concept proves incoherent, then the
data it generates provides sham evidence.
I propose a phenomenological analysis of envy that articulates
envy’s essentially comparative and competitive character according
to which we can better incorporate the envier’s experience in the
moment of envy.
Here’s the description of envy to which I shall return throughout
the book: Envy is an essentially competitive and comparative
emotion characterized by the envying person’s painful and (at least)
begrudging response to perceiving (or believing there exists) a
galling, disfavoring disparity between himself and some “neighbor”
or “rival” who possesses some person-relevant thing, trait, or
capacity that the envying person values and desires but lacks.
Envy presupposes that the envious person (1) values and desires
some person-relevant good, (2) apprehends the “neighbor” or rival
as possessing that valued and desired person-relevant good and (3)
oneself as lacking that good. In grasping that galling disparity in the
unfavorable comparison in (2) and (3) with respect to (1), the
envious person (4) experiences bidirectional feelings that disclose
the envier as comparatively diminished and inferior and the envied
begrudgingly (at least) acknowledged as superior.16 I describe (4) to
capture the pain of envy. The pain of envy is not in the begrudging
of the other her good. The pain likely motivates the begrudging. The
pain of envy concerns the disparity, the unfavorable comparison in
which the envier finds himself beneath the envied at least on some
particular score. The pain of envy is not just about comparative
inferiority but a comparative inferiority revealed in a disfavoring
disparity with his neighbor that the envier finds annoying or vexing
and chaffingly humiliating, that is, galling.
From this characterization of envy and with the aims of
complementing the philosophical tradition and correcting
contemporary envy research in social psychology and philosophy, I
develop a phenomenological approach to envy that descriptively
analyzes how the envier implicitly evaluates himself vis-à-vis the
envied in the unfavorable comparison that envy is.
*
Phenomenology is the study of the way the world appears to human
agents. What phenomenology does is look at what we often look
through or overlook in everyday experience. When feeling envious, I
do not concern myself with the structure of the experience of envy
or whether my envy is warranted or unwarranted, malicious or so-
called benign. Rather, I just live through the experience of envy –
distressed over my comparative inferiority vis-à-vis the envied other
and begrudging her her superiority. Such living-through isn’t unique
to envy or emotion episodes. In our everyday experiences, we go
right to the world that occupies our interests: there is the car to
start, the kids to get to school, the fuel to pump, the emails to
answer, some dispute to resolve, etc. Absorbed in the practical tasks
and social activities of the day, we do not look at our relation of self
with and to world. We understandably overlook such elements of our
experience when living life. But all such engagements reflect what
we value and how we value it.
There is a lot going on in our everyday experience of the world –
a lot to understand regarding what we are experiencing and how.
Some dispute to be resolved (the what) entails a cognition,
evaluation, judgment, feeling, etc. (a how). Pumping fuel (the what)
entails bodily dexterity, masterful habit, frustration, economic
evaluation, etc. (a how). Phenomenology refers to these kinds of
engagements with the world as intentionality or intentionalities. By
“intention” or “intentionality,” phenomenology does not mean
planned or purposeful action. Rather, from the Latin, intentio, it
means stretching out. And human consciousness by its nature is
intentional, that is, stretches out, goes outside itself to engagements
with the world. The well-known mantra of phenomenology is that
consciousness is always conscious of or about something. Intention
or intentionality thus means consciousness of or about X. Without
going on, the point is that phenomenology (as the study of
appearances or phenomena) aims to analyze the constitutive
components of experience – the various “intentionalities”17 – that
make possible the experiences that we live through rather than look
at.18 Such a shift in focus is a major part of what is called (in
technical terms) the phenomenological reduction. And while I think
such a shift in focus captures the central spirit of the
phenomenological reduction, phenomenologists do not wish to
replace, substitute, destroy or ridicule everyday life experience.19
Phenomenologist Robert Sokolowski notes that the
phenomenological reduction leads the phenomenological philosopher
away from her everyday absorptive world back to the elements
constitutive of those experiences.20 Phenomenological reflection and
analysis does not invoke the method of introspection or biographical
reflection (such as when I psychologically search my mind for
whatever reason seemed to motivate my overconsumption of that
plate of General Tso’s Chicken or when a social scientist prompts me
to abstractly deliberate about how I would think upon hearing of my
colleague receiving a promotion). The phenomenological reduction is
not a reduction to subjective or individual, personal experience.
Phenomenologists, instead, want to examine on the whole
intentional structure of experience – the self and the world or the
knower and the known – such that we consider the objects of our
everyday experience according to how we engage (via different
intentional acts such as perception, imagination, memory, emotion,
etc.) what we engage (e.g., the desk, the chores, the moment of
unfavorable comparison).21 In leading us away from our absorption
in the lived-through everyday world back to the structures of
experience, phenomenologists analyze both the subjective and
objective sides of the equation, both self and world in their
correlation.22
Consider a phenomenological analysis of the ordinary experience
of perceiving a desk. As a spatial, temporal, material artifact, a desk
has its way of being given or appearing that is distinctive of it such
that it (the desk) is distinguishable but inseparable from the
unmolded wood of which it is made. As an object extended in space,
the desk cannot be perceived all at once; the desk shows itself to us
incompletely, now offering this side (the front) while hiding that side
(the back or side) and then vice versa. The desk, if I lean on it, has
a feel of being stable or feeble. It has a color, a sound, and perhaps
a scent. It affords various functions for stacking, writing, or sitting. It
both reminds me of work and of my grandfather whose desk it used
to be. The phenomena we encounter in the world have their own
unique way of appearing and phenomenology aims to present the
phenomena (to give a logos of the phainomena). As the founder of
phenomenology, Edmund Husserl writes about spatial objects:

There is still more to see here, turn me so you can see all my
sides, set your gaze run through me, draw closer to me, open
me up, divide me, keep on looking me over again and again,
turning me to see all sides. You will get to know me like this, all
that I am, all my surface qualities, all my inner sensible
qualities.23

Already one may notice that much of the way the desk appears is
correlated to our human experience in which one is implicitly aware
of oneself and things in the world across time.24 Moreover, the very
same object may appear in a variety of different conscious acts or
intentionalities, that is, as perceived, as imagined, as remembered,
broken, sentimentally valued, loved or loathed, photographed,
painted, etc. The desk remains the same desk that we experience
across each of these various ways of appearing correlated to a
specific conscious act.
 Describing the subject and object side of perceiving a desk is one
part of doing a phenomenological analysis of the structure of an
experience, one way of looking at what we often look through in our
absorption in the everyday world.
We can say the same of an emotion experience such as envy.
While the desk has its spatial features, its surface features, its
features of mass, etc., an experience of envy marks an emotion
experience that entails the values, desires, feelings, etc., that the
person brings to that moment of unfavorable comparison. That
galling moment of unfavorable comparison is, further, built upon a
perception or belief that another person possesses something the
envier values and desires but lacks. Evaluating that state of affairs
that is the unfavorable comparison also is built upon a perception or
belief that clashes with one’s values and desire. Chapter 1 presents
the details of a phenomenology of emotions in relation to conscious
experience and the objects experienced. For now, I note only this:
the experience of envy contains many distinguishable but
inseparable components because it is a comparative act in which the
envious person passively grasps something about himself precisely in
begrudging his neighbor his good.
To examine such a complex state of affairs is what is meant when
phenomenologists claim that they aim to analyze the whole
intentional structure of X or Y – both the self and other, the
perceiver’s perception and the perceived, the lover’s loving and the
beloved, the envier’s envying and the envied. To put it
metaphorically, when attempting a phenomenological account, we
try to freeze-frame and descriptively analyze this kind of envy of the
Maserati-driving acquaintance – to descriptively analyze both the
envier and the envied – before social science introduces dubious
conceptual difference and our theories get too far downstream into
the potential behaviors of envy.25
A phenomenological approach to envy thus differs in important
ways from contemporary social psychological approaches upon
which certain philosophical theories of envy lean heavily.26
 The social psychological literature on envy offers one way to look
at that which we ordinarily live through or look through.
Understanding emotions as geared toward solving specific adaptive
concerns,27 much social psychology of envy concerns itself with the
types of behaviors that envy motivates. And their measurement
instruments reflect not only this presupposition but also conceptually
confused notions of envy. Cohen-Charash and Larson succinctly
summarize what I take to be the shortcomings of certain
psychological method of studying a benign envy:

For example, in response to a hypothetical scenario in which a

coworker received a raise but the participant did not, “benign”
envy was measured with items such as “I would start to work
harder,” and “malicious” envy was measured with items such as
“I would secretly wish that my coworker would lose clients” …
In a study in which participants were asked to recall past
situations, “benign” and “malicious” envy were shown to be
associated with outcomes such as “being more motivated” and
“[hoping] that [a teammate] will not make it as a professional
player” … respectively.28

Such studies aim to provide a look at the envier’s experience of envy

by asking experiment participants to reflect on prior experiences of
envy or to imagine how they would react to such a hypothetical,
envy-generating situation. Phenomenology does not work from this
type of methodological introspection or reflection generated by
prompting experimental participants who are not experiencing envy
but imagining or remembering it. Phenomenology does not work
from psychology’s empirical findings back to a conclusion regarding
the essential structures of envy. Phenomenology operates on a
parallel track to modes of inquiry thus constructed and indeed
suggests a correction to the view of envy that such social
psychological studies presuppose.
There are four important differences to note between the social
psychological approach to envy and the phenomenological approach
I shall offer.
First, phenomenology does not assume the adaptive view of
emotions employed in the psychological sciences. It does not dismiss
this evolutionary view of emotions. Rather, it notes that everyday
experiencing agents do not experience their emotions in this way (as
solving for adaptive concerns) and do not tie the meaningfulness of
their emotion to an attempt to solve specific adaptive concerns.
Phenomenology does not invalidate the everyday. Phenomenology
aims to describe the everyday.29
Second, phenomenology is not primarily interested in empirical
findings that generalize from self-reporting data motivated by a
survey instrument that can produce results only as illuminating and
accurate as its prompts. This kind of introspective, qualitative self-
reporting is first-person oriented. As Dan Zahavi effectively noted –
in a way that we might apply to qualitative research findings from
experimental subject responses – “phenomenology is not interested
… in your specific experience or my specific experience but in
invariant structures of experience in the principle questions
concerning, say, the presentational character of perception … or the
difference between empathy and sympathy” (for example).30
Phenomenology is not based on introspective, biographical first-
person reporting but on accounting for both the how and the what
of phenomena.31 As a social science team of researchers from
Harvard and the Netherlands recently rightly put the matter,
phenomenology is concerned with the intentional structures that
underlie the variety of experiences available to human consciousness
(rather than deriving a general claim from a myriad of particular self-
reports as envy studies in social psychology do).32 Participants who
can speculate about, remember, or envision moments of envy maybe
can tell us something about such speculating, remembering, or
envisioning. They do not tell us about the experience of envy itself.
Third, the phenomenologist would share Cohen-Charash and
Larson’s concern that participant responses in envy studies in social
psychology “often report not on the experience itself but rather on
their [the participant’s] beliefs about the experience,” which prevents
the ability to learn about the experience itself.33 Extending the
concern of these researchers, we should note that recall accounts
and retroactive accounts of an emotion experience mark different
intentional experiences with different intentional objects. Recalling or
reflecting on my angry outburst is quite a different experience than
my angry outburst.34 In a laboratory setting prompting recall or
retroactive accounts, one missing feature of the emotion experience
very well might be the emotion experience itself.
Fourth, recall that, “normally, … we are absorbed in worldly
events … We do not pause to examine how things can appear to us
in the way they do, and with the meaning they have.”35 We can
extend Cohen-Charash and Larson’s concern about social
psychological studies of envy that rely on self-reporting data
generated by responses to survey-instrument prompts. Such
responses may reflect poorly constructed prompts or the beliefs of a
respondent who does not grasp correctly the phenomenon being
investigated; consider, for example, the common colloquial confusion
between envy and jealousy. As phenomenologist John Drummond
has written, “Good descriptions of … intentional structures will point
toward the kind of phenomenal contents in … different types of
experience.”36 Enviers may have different preoccupations; enviers
may have different aims and pursue different behaviors, but envy
always stems from a galling, unfavorable comparison of oneself vis-
à-vis the envied who possesses some person-relevant good that the
envier values and desires but lacks. Pausing to examine how things
can appear to us in the way that they do – and with the meaning
that they have – enables us to realize that feeling envious differs
from the ensuing motivation and behaviors that may arise
downstream, as well as remembering or imagining a hypothetical
instance of envy. A phenomenological analysis of envy thus will
pause to provide good descriptions of the emotion of envy and how
the envier apprehends himself vis-à-vis the envied other.
*
My general approach aims to make three contribution to the
philosophy of envy. First, I aim to complement the traditional
conception of envy in Western philosophy by developing a notion of
two predominant preoccupations in enviers, one that expresses an
envier concerned with his comparative inferiority and the other that
expresses an envier concerned with hostility toward the envied
other. Second and correlatively, I try to develop a new defense of the
traditional view that envy is bad (vicious) by focusing on the
comparative dimension of envy and how envy may express itself in a
self-demeaning way while (at least) begrudging the neighbor; this
means that I reject notions of so-called benign envy. Third, and
following from the first two, I hope to provide helpful (at least
suggestive) accounts of the differences between envy and some of
its closest sibling emotions.
In Chapter 1, I provide a technical account of the phenomenology
of emotions and the phenomenological notion of pre-reflective self-
awareness as necessary for developing a phenomenology of envy.
(Chapter 1 will be of interest to philosophers and readers interested
in emotion studies generally. But many readers can, I think, skip the
details of Chapter 1 without losing their ability to track and assess
claims in the rest of the book.) In Chapter 2, I explore an envier
preoccupied with his deficiencies and comparative inferiority vis-à-vis
the envied other he begrudges; I draw on scenes from literature and
film, specifically the 1992 film, A League of their Own, which depicts
an envious person preoccupied with what she lacks vis-à-vis the one
she envies. In Chapter 3, I explore that traditional expression of
envy in which the envier becomes preoccupied with his hostility
toward the comparatively superior other and thus only obliquely with
himself vis-à-vis the envied; again, I draw on scenes from literature,
specifically Shakespeare’s Othello, which depicts an envier
preoccupied with undoing the envied person’s advantage.
Turning to part two, I show how my account of envy enables
readers to better grasp the differences between envy and what we
might call sibling emotions. In Chapter 4, I distinguish between envy
and covetousness. In Chapter 5, I distinguish between envy and
emulation, on the one hand, and envy and indignation, on the other
hand; this chapter also contains my most developed criticisms of so-
called benign envy. In Chapter 6, I distinguish envy from
ressentiment; in this case, I shall make the additional argument that
while envy is always but not all bad (vicious) ressentiment is always
and all bad. Finally, in Chapter 7, I distinguish envy from two types
of jealousy, namely, romantic jealousy and jealous guarding of one’s
goods. In this case, I float the claim that envy is not as bad (vicious)
as a mode of jealous guarding that is unwilling to share with others
what one already has oneself.

Notes
1. 1973 September 16, The Sunday Times, Section: The Sunday
Times Magazine, Behind the Face of the Gifted Bitch by Susan
Barnes (“A profile of Gore Vidal, whose latest novel, Burr, will be
published early next year”).
2. W. Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice, in
The Works of William Shakespeare, vol. 7 (New York: The
Hamilton Book Co, 1901), pp. 24–25.
3. Aristotle describes envy as a “disturbing pain excited by the
prosperity of others … of people who are like us or equal to us.”
Aristotle, Rhetoric, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. R.
McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 1386b19ff.
4. As Aristotle intimated concerning the place of the envier in the
experience of envy, we “… envy those whose possession of or
success in a thing is a reproach to us … ” Aristotle, Rhetoric, p.
1388a17.
5. I have been developing this view in earlier works: “A Glimpse of
Envy and its Intentional Structure,” The New Yearbook for
Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 10 (2010):
283–302; “The Object and Affects of Envy and Emulation,”
Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 14.2 (2015): 386–401;
“Phenomenological Distinctions: Two Types of Envy and Their
 Difference from Covetousness,” in Phenomenology for the
Twenty-First Century, ed. J. Aaron Simmons and J. Edward
Hackett (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), pp. 157–77.
Recently, Alessandro Salice and Alba Montes Sanchez have
advanced an account similar to the view I developed in those
essays: “Envy and Us,” European Journal of Philosophy 27.1
(2019): 227–242. See A. Fussi, “Envy and Its Object,” Humana
Mente 12.35 (2019): 124–49. Fussi identifies similarities
between my position and hers, as well as my position and that
of Salice and Montez Sanchez, “Envy and its Object,” p. 136n12.
6. Cf., K. A. Thomason, “The Moral Value of Envy,” Southern
Journal of Philosophy 53.1 (2015): 36–53, 36. “When we envy
others, we feel bad about ourselves because of something the
envied person has and we begrudge the envied person for
having it.”
7. Ibid.
8. S. Protasi, “Varieties of Envy,” Philosophical Psychology 29.4
(2016): 537.
9. R. Lin, et al., “What Triggers Envy on Social Network Sites? A
Comparison between Shared Experiential and Material
Purchase,” Computers in Human Behavior 85 (August 2018):
271–81. Cited in Hendershott, The Politics of Envy, p. 260.
Ryoyun Lin, et al. have empirically established that experiences
– such as vacations or adventures – rather than material
possessions generate more envy in social media viewers. Lin
and colleagues speculate that such experiences are “more self-
relevant” in the sense that they enhance social relations and
improve overall welfare.
10. Aristotle, Rhetoric, p. 1386b19.
11. H. Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (State College:
Liberty Fund, 1987), pp. 3ff.
12. Some possible exceptions, which I develop in Chapter 2, are
that of Aristotle’s and Kant’s. Aristotle writes, for example,
“[Envy] is a disturbing pain excited by the prosperity of others
 … Envy is pain at the sight of such good fortune as consists of
the good things already mentioned. We feel it toward our equals
not with the idea of getting something for ourselves but
because the other people have it.” Aristotle, Rhetoric, pp.
186b19 and 1387b22 ff. As Kant writes, “Envy is a propensity to
view the well-being of others with distress, even though it does
not detract from one’s own. [It is] a reluctance to see our own
well-being overshadowed by another’s because the standard we
use to see how well-off we are is not the intrinsic worth of our
own well-being but how it compares with that of others. [Envy]
aims, at least in terms of one’s wishes, at destroying others’
good fortune.” See also I. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, ed. M.
Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp.
576/458.
13. For a comprehensive review of this literature, see J. Crusius, et
al., “Envy: An Adversarial Review and Comparison of Two
Competing Theories,” Emotion Review 12.1 (2020): 3–21. R.
Smith, Envy: Theory and Research (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008), T. Perrine and K. Timpe, “Envy and Its
Discontents,” in Virtues and Their Vices, ed. K. Timpe and C.
Boyd (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), and S. Protasi,
The Philosophy of Envy (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2021).
14. Y. Cohen-Charash and E. Larson, “An Emotion Divided: Studying
Envy is Better than Studying ‘Benign’ and ‘Malicious’ Envy,”
Current Directions in Psychology 26.2 (2017): 174. One already
may notice the strong difference between such a social
psychological view of envy and the view of envy expressed by
philosophy as represented in notes 3 and 5.
15. Ibid., p. 176. The authors are quoting a study of benign envy by
van de Ven et al. See van de Ven, et al., “Appraisal Patterns of
Envy and Related Emotions,” Motivation and Emotion 36 (2012):
201.
16. M. Kelly, “A Glimpse of Envy and its Intentional Structure,” pp.
283–302. M. Kelly, “Phenomenological Distinctions: Two Types
 of Envy and Their Difference from Covetousness,” pp. 157–77.
Coauthors Salice and Montez Sanchez have developed a
conception of envy extremely similar to the one I have
developed in those essays. They write, “We conjecture that
envy has two phenomenological accents. When the accent is on
hostility, then the rival is the target of the emotion. The
subject’s thematic consciousness is about the rival, but the
peripheral or non-thematic consciousness is about the self,
which is the background object of the emotion … Envy’s second
accent is … the associated localized negative self-assessment:
Here, the emotion has the self in target position and the rival in
the focus. It is in virtue of the rival’s (perceived) superiority that
the negative evaluation of the self is made intelligible.” A. Salice
and A. Montes Sanchez, “Envy and Us,” p. 17.
17. R. Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 8.
18. Ibid., p. 50. “In the natural attitude we head directly toward the
object, we go right through the object’s appearance to the
object itself. From the philosophically reflective stance, we make
the appearances thematic. We look at what we normally look
through.”
19. Ibid., pp. 62–63.
20. Ibid., p. 49. “… the phenomenological reduction … signifies the
‘leading away’ from the natural targets of our concern, ‘back’ to
what seems to be a more restricted viewpoint, one that simply
targets the intentionalities itself. Reduction, with the Latin root
re-ducere, is a leading back, a withholding or withdrawal. When
we enter into this viewpoint, we suspend the intentionalities we
now contemplate. This suspension … is also called the epoche.”
21. Ibid. “When we enter into the phenomenological attitude, we
suspend our beliefs, and we bracket the world and all the things
in the world. We put the world and the things in it ‘into brackets’
… [We] now consider it precisely as it is intended by an
intentionality in the natural attitude. We consider it as correlated
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smoothbore, his mother a pair of the famous La Roche dueling
pistols and a prayer book. The family priest gave him a rosary and
cross and enjoined him to pray frequently. Traveling all summer, they
arrived at Lake Winnipeg in the autumn and wintered there. As soon
as the ice went out in the spring the journey was continued and one
afternoon in July, Monroe beheld Mountain Fort, a new post of the
company’s not far from the Rocky Mountains.
“Around about it were encamped thousands of Blackfeet waiting
to trade for the goods the flotilla had brought up and to obtain on
credit ammunition, fukes (trade guns), traps and tobacco. As yet the
company had no Blackfoot interpreter. The factor perceiving that
Monroe was a youth of more than ordinary intelligence at once
detailed him to live and travel with the Piegans (a Blackfoot tribe)
and learn their language, also to see that they returned to Mountain
Fort with their furs the succeeding summer. Word had been received
that, following the course of Lewis and Clarke, American traders
were yearly pushing farther and farther westward and had even
reached the mouth of the Yellowstone. The company feared their
competition. Monroe was to do his best to prevent it.
“‘At last,’ Monroe told me, ‘the day came for our departure, and I
set out with the chiefs and medicine men at the head of the long
procession. There were eight hundred lodges of the Piegans there,
about eight thousand souls. They owned thousands of horses. Oh,
but it was a grand sight to see that long column of riders and pack
animals, and loose horses trooping over the plains. We traveled on
southward all the long day, and about an hour or two before
sundown we came to the rim of a valley through which flowed a
cotton wood-bordered stream. We dismounted at the top of the hill,
and spread our robes intending to sit there until the procession
passed by into the bottom and put up the lodges. A medicine man
produced a large stone pipe, filled it and attempted to light it with flint
and steel and a bit of punk (rotten wood), but somehow he could get
no spark. I motioned him to hand it to me, and drawing my sunglass
from my pocket, I got the proper focus and set the tobacco afire,
drawing several mouthfuls of smoke through the long stem.
 “‘As one man all those round about sprang to their feet and
rushed toward me, shouting and gesticulating as if they had gone
crazy. I also jumped up, terribly frightened, for I thought they were
going to do me harm, perhaps kill me. The pipe was wrenched out of
my grasp by the chief himself, who eagerly began to smoke and
pray. He had drawn but a whiff or two when another seized it, and
from him it was taken by still another. Others turned and harangued
the passing column; men and women sprang from their horses and
joined the group, mothers pressing close and rubbing their babes
against me, praying earnestly meanwhile. I recognized a word that I
had already learned—Natos—Sun—and suddenly the meaning of
the commotion became clear; they thought that I was Great
Medicine; that I had called upon the Sun himself to light the pipe,
and that he had done so. The mere act of holding up my hand above
the pipe was a supplication to their God. They had perhaps not
noticed the glass, or if they had, had thought it some secret charm or
amulet. At all events I had suddenly become a great personage, and
from then on the utmost consideration and kindness was accorded to
me.
“‘When I entered Lone Walker’s lodge that evening—he was the
chief, and my host—I was greeted by deep growls from either side of
the doorway, and was horrified to see two nearly grown grizzly bears
acting as if about to spring upon me. I stopped and stood quite still,
but I believe that my hair was rising; I know that my flesh felt to be
shrinking. I was not kept in suspense. Lone Walker spoke to his pets,
and they immediately lay down, noses between their paws, and I
passed on to the place pointed out to me, the first couch at the
chief’s left hand. It was some time before I became accustomed to
the bears, but we finally came to a sort of understanding with one
another. They ceased growling at me as I passed in and out of the
lodge, but would never allow me to touch them, bristling up and
preparing to fight if I attempted to do so. In the following spring they
disappeared one night and were never seen again.’
“Think how the youth, Rising Wolf, must have felt as he
journeyed southward over the vast plains, and under the shadow of
the giant mountains which lie between the Saskatchewan and the
Missouri, for he knew that he was the first of his race to behold
them.” We were born a little too late!
“Monroe often referred to that first trip with the Piegans as the
happiest time of his life.”
In the moon of falling leaves they came to Pile of Rocks River,
and after three months went on to winter on Yellow River. Next
summer they wandered down the Musselshell, crossed the Big River
and thence westward by way of the Little Rockies and the Bear Paw
Mountains to the Marias. Even paradise has its geography.
“Rifle and pistol were now useless as the last rounds of powder
and ball had been fired. But what mattered that? Had they not their
bows and great sheaves of arrows? In the spring they had planted
on the banks of the Judith a large patch of their own tobacco which
they would harvest in due time.
“One by one young Rising Wolf’s garments were worn out and
cast aside. The women of the lodge tanned deerskins and bighorn
(sheep) and from them Lone Walker himself cut and sewed shirts
and leggings, which he wore in their place. It was not permitted for
women to make men’s clothing. So ere long he was dressed in full
Indian costume, even to the belt and breech-clout, and his hair grew
so that it fell in rippling waves down over his shoulders.” A warrior
never cut his hair, so white men living with Indians followed their
fashion, else they were not admitted to rank as warriors. “He began
to think of braiding it. Ap-ah’-ki, the shy young daughter of the chief,
made his footwear—thin parfleche (arrow-proof)—soled moccasins
(skin-shoes) for summer, beautifully embroidered with colored
porcupine quills; thick, soft warm ones of buffalo robe for winter.
“‘I could not help but notice her,’ he said, ‘on the first night I
stayed in her father’s lodge.... I learned the language easily, quickly,
yet I never spoke to her nor she to me, for, as you know, the
Blackfeet think it unseemly for youths and maidens to do so.
“‘One evening a man came into the lodge and began to praise a
certain youth with whom I had often hunted; spoke of his bravery, his
kindness, his wealth, and ended by saying that the young fellow
presented to Lone Walker thirty horses, and wished, with Ap-ah’-ki,
to set up a lodge of his own. I glanced at the girl and caught her
looking at me; such a look! expressing at once fear, despair and
something else which I dared not believe I interpreted aright. The
chief spoke: “Tell your friend,” he said, “that all you have spoken of
him is true; I know that he is a real man, a good, kind, brave,
generous young man, yet for all that I can not give him my daughter.”
“‘Again I looked at Ap-ah’-ki and she at me. Now she was smiling
and there was happiness in her eyes. But if she smiled I could not. I
had heard him refuse thirty head of horses. What hope had I then,
who did not even own the horse I rode? I, who received for my
services only twenty pounds a year, from which must be deducted
the various articles I bought. Surely the girl was not for me. I
suffered.
“‘It was a little later, perhaps a couple of weeks, that I met her in
the trail, bringing home a bundle of fire-wood. We stopped and
looked at each other in silence for a moment, and then I spoke her
name. Crash went the fuel on the ground, and we embraced and
kissed regardless of those who might be looking.
“‘So, forgetting the bundle of wood, we went hand in hand and
stood before Lone Walker, where he sat smoking his long pipe, out
on the shady side of the lodge.
“‘The chief smiled. “Why, think you, did I refuse the thirty
horses?” he asked, and before I could answer: “Because I wanted
you for my son-in-law, wanted a white man because he is more
cunning, much wiser than the Indian, and I need a counselor. We
have not been blind, neither I nor my women. There is nothing more
to say except this: be good to her.”
“‘That very day they set up a small lodge for us, and stored it
with robes and parfleches of dried meat and berries, gave us one of
their two brass kettles, tanned skins, pack saddles, ropes, all that a
lodge should contain. And, not least, Lone Walker told me to choose
thirty horses from his large herd. In the evening we took possession
of our house and were happy.’
 “Monroe remained in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company
a number of years, raising a large family of boys and girls, most of
whom are alive to-day. The oldest, John, is about seventy-five years
of age, but still young enough to go to the Rockies near his home
every autumn, and kill a few bighorn and elk, and trap a few beavers.
The old man never revisited his home; never saw his parents after
they parted with him at the Montreal docks. He intended to return to
them for a brief visit some time, but kept deferring it, and then came
letters two years old to say that they were both dead. Came also a
letter from an attorney, saying that they had bequeathed him a
considerable property, that he must go to Montreal and sign certain
papers in order to take possession of it. At the time the factor of
Mountain Fort was going to England on leave; to him, in his simple
trustfulness Monroe gave a power of attorney in the matter. The
factor never returned, and by virtue of the papers he had signed the
frontiersman lost his inheritance. But that was a matter of little
moment to him then. Had he not a lodge and family, good horses
and a vast domain actually teeming with game wherein to wander?
What more could one possibly want?
“Leaving the Hudson’s Bay Company, Monroe sometimes
worked for the American Fur Company, but mostly as a free trapper,
wandered from the Saskatchewan to the Yellowstone and from the
Rockies to Lake Winnipeg. The headwaters of the South
Saskatchewan were one of his favorite hunting grounds. Thither in
the early fifties he guided the noted Jesuit Father, De Smet, and at
the foot of the beautiful lakes just south of Chief Mountain they
erected a huge wooden cross and named the two bodies of water
Saint Mary’s Lakes.” Here the Canada and United States boundary
climbs the Rocky Mountains.
“One winter after his sons John and François had married they
were camping there for the season, the three lodges of the family,
when one night a large war party of Assiniboins attacked them. The
daughters Lizzie, Amelia and Mary had been taught to shoot, and
together they made a brave resistance, driving the Indians away just
before daylight, with the loss of five of their number, Lizzie killing one
of them as he was about to let down the bars of the horse corral.
 “Besides other furs, beaver, fisher, marten and wolverine, they
killed more than three hundred wolves that winter by a device so
unique, yet simple, that it is well worth recording. By the banks of the
outlet of the lakes they built a long pen twelve by sixteen feet at the
base, and sloping sharply inward and upward to a height of seven
feet. The top of the pyramid was an opening about two feet six
inches wide by eight feet in length. Whole deer, quarters of buffalo,
any kind of meat handy was thrown into the pen, and the wolves,
scenting the flesh and blood, seeing it plainly through the four to six
inch spaces between the logs would eventually climb to the top and
jump down through the opening. But they could not jump out, and
there morning would find them uneasily pacing around and around in
utter bewilderment.
“You will remember that the old man was a Catholic, yet I know
that he had much faith in the Blackfoot religion, and believed in the
efficiency of the medicine-man’s prayers and mysteries. He used
often to speak of the terrible power possessed by a man named Old
Sun. ‘There was one,’ he would say, ‘who surely talked with the
gods, and was given some of their mysterious power. Sometimes of
a dark night he would invite a few of us to his lodge, when all was
calm and still. After all were seated his wives would bank the fire with
ashes so that it was as dark within as without, and he would begin to
pray. First to the Sun-chief, then to the wind maker, the thunder and
the lightning. As he prayed, entreating them to come and do his will,
first the lodge ears would begin to quiver with the first breath of a
coming breeze, which gradually grew stronger and stronger till the
lodge bent to the blasts, and the lodge poles strained and creaked.
Then thunder began to boom, faint and far away, and lightning dimly
to blaze, and they came nearer and nearer until they seemed to be
just overhead; the crashes deafened us, the flashes blinded us, and
all were terror-stricken. Then this wonderful man would pray them to
go, and the wind would die down, and the thunder and lightning go
on rumbling and flashing into the far distance until we heard and saw
them no more.’”
 LIII
A. D. 1819
SIMON BOLIVAR

ONCE at the stilted court of Spain young Ferdinand, Prince of the

Asturias, had the condescension to play at tennis with a mere
colonial; and the bounder won.
Long afterward, when Don Ferdinand was king, the colonial
challenged him to another ball game, one played with cannon-balls.
This time the stake was the Spanish American empire, but
Ferdinand played Bolivar, and again the bounder won.
“Now tell me,” a lady said once, “what animal reminds one most
of the Señor Bolivar?”
And Bolivar thought he heard some one say “monkey,” whereat
he flew into an awful passion, until the offender claimed that the
word was “sparrow.” He stood five feet six inches, with a bird-like
quickness, and a puckered face with an odd tang of monkey. Rich,
lavish, gaudy, talking mock heroics, vain as a peacock, always on
the strut unless he was on the run, there is no more pathetically
funny figure in history than tragical Bolivar; who heard liberty, as he
thought, knocking at the door of South America, and opened—to let
in chaos.
“I don’t know,” drawled a Spaniard of that time, “to what class of
beasts these South Americans belong.”
They were dogs, these Spanish colonials, treated as dogs,
behaving as dogs. When they wanted a university Spain said they
were only provided by Providence to labor in the mines. If they had
opinions the Inquisition cured them of their errors. They were not
allowed to hold any office or learn the arts of war and government.
Spain sent officials to ease them of their surplus cash, and keep
them out of mischief. Thanks to Spain they were no more fit for
public affairs than a lot of Bengali baboos.
They were loyal as beaten dogs until Napoleon stole the Spanish
crown for brother Joseph, and French armies promenaded all over
Spain closely pursued by the British. There was no Spain left to love,
but the colonials were not Napoleon’s dogs. Napoleon’s envoys to
Venezuela were nearly torn to pieces before they escaped to sea,
where a little British frigate came and gobbled them up. The sea
belonged to the British, and so the colonials sent ambassadors,
Bolivar and another gentleman, to King George. Please would he
help them to gain their liberty? George had just chased Napoleon out
of Spain, and said he would do his best with his allies, the
Spaniards.
In London Bolivar unearthed a countryman who loved liberty and
had fought for Napoleon, a real professional soldier. General
Miranda was able and willing to lead the armies of freedom, until he
actually saw the Venezuelan troops. Then he shied hard. He really
must draw the line somewhere. Yes, he would take command of the
rabble on one condition, that he got rid of Bolivar. To get away from
Bolivar he would go anywhere and do anything. So he led his rabble
and found them stout fighters, and drove the Spaniards out of the
central provinces.
The politicians were sitting down to draft the first of many comic-
opera constitutions when an awful sound, louder than any thunder,
swept out of the eastern Andes, the earth rolled like a sea in a storm,
and the five cities of the new republic crashed down in heaps of ruin.
The barracks buried the garrisons, the marching troops were totally
destroyed, the politicians were killed, and in all one hundred twenty
thousand people perished. The only thing left standing in one church
was a pillar bearing the arms of Spain; the only districts not wrecked
were those still loyal to the Spanish government. The clergy pointed
the moral, the ruined people repented their rebellion, and the
Spanish forces took heart and closed in from every side upon the
lost republic. Simon Bolivar generously surrendered General
Miranda in chains to the victorious Spaniards.
So far one sees only, as poor Miranda did, that this man was a
sickening cad. But he was something more. He stuck to the cause
for which he had given his life, joined the rebels in what is now
Colombia, was given a small garrison command and ordered to stay
in his fort. In defiance of orders, he swept the Spaniards out of the
Magdalena Valley, raised a large force, liberated the country, then
marched into Venezuela, defeated the Spanish forces in a score of
brilliant actions, and was proclaimed liberator with absolute power in
both Colombia and Venezuela. One begins to marvel at this heroic
leader until the cad looms out. “Spaniards and Canary islanders!” he
wrote, “reckon on death even if you are neutral, unless you will work
actively for the liberty of America. Americans! count on life even if
you are culpable.”
Bolivar’s pet hobbies were three in number: Resigning his job as
liberator; writing proclamations; committing massacres. “I order you,”
he wrote to the governor of La Guayra, “to shoot all the prisoners in
those dungeons, and in the hospital, without any exception
whatever.”
So the prisoners of war were set to work building a funeral pyre.
When this was ready eight hundred of them were brought up in
batches, butchered with axes, bayonets and knives, and their bodies
thrown on the flames. Meanwhile Bolivar, in his office, refreshed
himself by writing a proclamation to denounce the atrocities of the
Spaniards.
Southward of the Orinoco River there are vast level prairies
called Llanos, a cattle country, handled by wild horsemen known as
the Llaneros. In Bolivar’s time their leader called himself Boves, and
he had as second in command Morales. Boves said that Morales
was “atrocious.” Morales said that “Boves was a man of merit, but
too blood-thirsty.” The Spaniards called their command “The Infernal
Division.” At first they fought for the Revolution, afterward for Spain,
but they were really quite impartial and spared neither age nor sex.
This was the “Spanish” army which swept away the second
Venezuelan republic, slaughtering the whole population save some
few poor starving camps of fugitives. Then Boves reported to the
Spanish general, “I have recovered the arms, ammunition, and the
honor of the Spanish flag, which your excellency lost at Carabobo.”
From this time onward the situation was rather like a dog fight,
with the republican dog somewhere underneath in the middle. At
times Bolivar ran like a rabbit, at times he was granted a triumph, but
whenever he had time to come up and breathe he fired off volleys of
proclamations. In sixteen years a painstaking Colombian counted six
hundred ninety-six battles, which makes an average of one every
ninth day, not to mention massacres; but for all his puny body and
feeble health Bolivar was always to be found in the very thick of the
scrimmage.
Europe had entered on the peace of Waterloo, but the ghouls
who stripped the dead after Napoleon’s battles had uniforms to sell
which went to clothe the fantastic mobs, republican and royalist, who
drenched all Spanish America with blood. There were soldiers, too,
whose trade of war was at an end in Europe, who gladly listened to
Bolivar’s agents, who offered gorgeous uniforms and promised
splendid wages—never paid—and who came to join in the war for
“liberty.” Three hundred Germans and nearly six thousand British
veterans joined Bolivar’s colors to fight for the freedom of America,
and nearly all of them perished in battle or by disease. Bolivar was
never without British officers, preferred British troops to all others,
and in his later years really earned the loyal love they gave him,
while they taught the liberator how to behave like a white man.
It was in 1819 that Bolivar led a force of two thousand five
hundred men across a flooded prairie. For a week they were up to
their knees, at times to their necks in water under a tropic deluge of
rain, swimming a dozen rivers beset by alligators. The climate and
starvation bore very heavily upon the British troops. Beyond the flood
they climbed the eastern Andes and crossed the Paramo at a height
of thirteen thousand feet, swept by an icy wind in blinding fog—hard
going for Venezuelans.
 An Irishman, Colonel Rook, commanded the British contingent.
“All,” he reported, “was quite well with his corps, which had had quite
a pleasant march” through the awful gorges and over the freezing
Paramo. A Venezuelan officer remarked here that one-fourth of the
men had perished.
“It was true,” said Rook, “but it really was a very good thing, for
the men who had dropped out were all the wastrels and weaklings of
the force.”
Great was the astonishment of the royalists when Bolivar
dropped on them out of the clouds, and in the battle of Boyacá they
were put to rout. Next day Colonel Rook had his arm cut off by the
surgeons, chaffing them about the beautiful limb he was losing. He
died of the operation, but the British legion went on from victory to
victory, melting away like snow until at the end negroes and Indians
filled its illustrious companies. Colombia, Venezuela and Equador,
Peru and Bolivia were freed from the Spanish yoke and, in the main,
released by Bolivar’s tireless, unfailing and undaunted courage. But
they could not stand his braggart proclamations, would not have him
or any man for master, began a series of squabbles and revolutions
that have lasted ever since, and proved themselves unfit for the
freedom Bolivar gave. He knew at the end that he had given his life
for a myth. On the eighth December, 1830, he dictated his final
proclamation and on the tenth received the last rites of the church,
being still his old braggart self. “Colombians! my last wishes are for
the welfare of the fatherland. If my death contributes to the cessation
of party strife, and to the consolidation of the Union, I shall descend
in peace to the grave.” On the seventeenth his troubled spirit
passed.
 LIV
A. D. 1812
THE ALMIRANTE COCHRANE

WHEN Lieutenant Lord Thomas Cochrane commanded the brig of

war Speedy, he used to carry about a whole broadside of her
cannon-balls in his pocket. He had fifty-four men when he laid his toy
boat alongside a Spanish frigate with thirty-two heavy guns and
three hundred nineteen men, but the Spaniard could not fire down
into his decks, whereas he blasted her with his treble-shotted pop-
guns. Leaving only the doctor on board he boarded that Spaniard,
got more than he bargained for, and would have been wiped out, but
that a detachment of his sailors dressed to resemble black demons,
charged down from the forecastle head. The Spaniards were so
shocked that they surrendered.
For thirteen months the Speedy romped about, capturing in all
fifty ships, one hundred and twenty-two guns, five hundred prisoners.
Then she gave chase to three French battle-ships by mistake, and
met with a dreadful end.
In 1809, Cochrane, being a bit of a chemist, and a first-rate
mechanic, was allowed to make fireworks hulks loaded with
explosives—with which he attacked a French fleet in the anchorage
at Aix. The fleet got into a panic and destroyed itself.
And all his battles read like fairy tales, for this long-legged, red-
haired Scot, rivaled Lord Nelson himself in genius and daring. At war
he was the hero and idol of the fleet, but in peace a demon, restless,
fractious, fiendish in humor, deadly in rage, playing schoolboy jokes
on the admiralty and the parliament. He could not be happy without
making swarms of powerful enemies, and those enemies waited
their chance.
In February, 1814, a French officer landed at Dover with tidings
that the Emperor Napoleon had been slain by Cossacks. The
messenger’s progress became a triumphal procession, and amid
public rejoicings he entered London to deliver his papers at the
admiralty. Bells pealed, cannon thundered, the stock exchange went
mad with the rise of prices, while the messenger—a Mr. Berenger—
sneaked to the lodgings of an acquaintance, Lord Cochrane, and
borrowed civilian clothes.
His news was false, his despatch a forgery, he had been hired by
Cochrane’s uncle, a stock-exchange speculator, to contrive the
whole blackguardly hoax. Cochrane knew nothing of the plot, but for
the mere lending of that suit of clothes, he was sentenced to the
pillory, a year’s imprisonment, and a fine of a thousand pounds. He
was struck from the rolls of the navy, expelled from the house of
commons, his banner as a Knight of the Bath torn down and thrown
from the doors of Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster. In the end he
was driven to disgraceful exile and hopeless ruin.
Four years later Cochrane, commanding the Chilian navy, sailed
from Valparaiso to fight the Spanish fleet. Running away from his
mother, a son of his—Tom Cochrane, junior—aged five, contrived to
sail with the admiral, and in his first engagement, was spattered with
the blood and brains of a marine.
“I’m not hurt, papa,” said the imp, “the shot didn’t touch me. Jack
says that the ball is not made that will hurt mama’s boy.” Jack proved
to be right, but it was in that engagement that Cochrane earned his
Spanish title, “The Devil.” Three times he attempted to take Callao
from the Spaniards, then in disgusted failure dispersed his useless
squadron, and went off with his flag ship to Valdivia. For lack of
officers, he kept the deck himself until he dropped. When he went
below for a nap, the lieutenant left a middy in command, but the
middy went to sleep and the ship was cast away.
Cochrane got her afloat; then, with all his gunpowder wet, went
off with his sinking wreck to attack Valdivia. The place was a Spanish
stronghold with fifteen forts and one hundred and fifteen guns.
Cochrane, preferring to depend on cold steel, left the muskets
behind, wrecked his boats in the surf, let his men swim, led them
straight at the Spaniards, stormed the batteries, and seized the city.
So he found some nice new ships, and an arsenal to equip them, for
his next attack on Callao.
He had a fancy for the frigate, Esmeralda, which lay in Callao—
thought she would suit him for a cruiser. She happened to be
protected by a Spanish fleet, and batteries mounting three hundred
guns, but Cochrane did not mind. El Diablo first eased the minds of
the Spaniards by sending away two out of his three small vessels,
but kept the bulk of their men, and all their boats, a detail not
observed by the weary enemy. His boarding party, two hundred and
forty strong, stole into the anchorage at midnight, and sorely
surprised the Esmeralda. Cochrane, first on board, was felled with
the butt end of a musket, and thrown back into his boat grievously
hurt, in addition to which he had a bullet through his thigh before he
took possession of the frigate. The fleet and batteries had opened
fire, but El Diablo noticed that two neutral ships protected
themselves with a display of lanterns arranged as a signal, “Please
don’t hit me.” “That’s good enough for me,” said Cochrane and
copied those lights which protected the neutrals. When the
bewildered Spaniards saw his lanterns also, they promptly attacked
the neutrals. So Cochrane stole away with his prize.
Although the great sailor delivered Chili and Peru from the
Spaniards, the patriots ungratefully despoiled him of all his pay and
rewards. Cochrane has been described as “a destroying angel with a
limited income and a turn for politics.” Anyway he was
misunderstood, and left Chili disgusted, to attend to the liberation of
Brazil from the Portuguese. But if the Chilians were thieves, the
Brazilians proved to be both thieves and cowards. Reporting to the
Brazilian government that all their cartridges, fuses, guns, powder,
spars and sails, were alike rotten, and all their men an encumbrance,
he dismantled a squadron to find equipment for a single ship, the
Pedro Primeiro. This he manned with British and Yankee
adventurers. He had two other small but fairly effective ships when
he commenced to threaten Bahia. There lay thirteen Portuguese
war-ships, mounting four hundred and eighteen guns, seventy
merchant ships, and a garrison of several thousand men. El Diablo’s
blockade reduced the whole to starvation, the threat of his fireworks
sent them into convulsions, and their leaders resolved on flight to
Portugal. So the troops were embarked, the rich people took ship
with their treasure, and the squadron escorted them to sea, where
Cochrane grinned in the offing. For fifteen days he hung in the rear
of that fleet, cutting off ships as they straggled. He had not a man to
spare for charge of his prizes, but when he caught a ship he staved
her water casks, disabled her rigging so that she could only run
before the wind back to Bahia, and threw every weapon overboard.
He captured seventy odd ships, half the troops, all the treasure,
fought and out-maneuvered the war fleet so that he could not be
caught, and only let thirteen wretched vessels escape to Lisbon.
Such a deed of war has never been matched in the world’s annals,
and Cochrane followed it by forcing the whole of Northern Brazil to
an abject surrender.
Like the patriots of Chili and Peru, the Brazilians gratefully
rewarded their liberator by cheating him out of his pay; so next he
turned to deliver Greece from the Turks. Very soon he found that
even the Brazilians were perfect gentlemen compared with the
Greek patriots, and the heart-sick man went home.
England was sorry for the way she had treated her hero, gave
back his naval rank and made him admiral with command-in-chief of
a British fleet at sea, restored his banner as a Knight of the Bath in
Henry VII’s chapel, granted a pension, and at the end, found him a
resting-place in the Abbey. On his father’s death, he succeeded to
the earldom of Dundonald, and down to 1860, when the old man
went to his rest, his life was devoted to untiring service. He was
among the first inventors to apply coal gas to light English streets
and homes; he designed the boilers long in use by the English navy;
made a bitumen concrete for paving; and offered plans for the
reduction of Sebastopol which would have averted all the horrors of
the siege. Yet even to his eightieth year he was apt to shock and
terrify all official persons, and when he was buried in the nave of the
Abbey, Lord Brougham pronounced his strange obituary. “What,” he
exclaimed at the grave side, “no cabinet minister, no officer of state
to grace this great man’s funeral!” Perhaps they were still scared of
the poor old hero.
 LV
A.D. 1823
THE SOUTH SEA CANNIBALS

FAR back in the long ago time New Zealand was a crowded happy
land. Big Maori fortress villages crowned the hilltops, broad farms
covered the hillsides; the chiefs kept a good table, cooking was
excellent, and especially when prisoners were in season, the people
feasted between sleeps, or, should provisions fail, sacked the next
parish for a supply of meat. So many parishes were sacked and
eaten, that in the course of time the chiefs led their tribes to quite a
distance before they could find a nice fat edible village, but still the
individual citizen felt crowded after meals, and all was well.
Then came the Pakehas, the white men, trading, with muskets
for sale, and the tribe that failed to get a trader to deal with was very
soon wiped out. A musket cost a ton of flax, and to pile up enough to
buy one a whole tribe must leave its hill fortress to camp in
unwholesome flax swamps. The people worked themselves thin to
buy guns, powder and iron tools for farming, but they cherished their
Pakeha as a priceless treasure in special charge of the chief, and if a
white man was eaten, it was clear proof that he was entirely useless
alive, or a quite detestable character. The good Pakehas became
Maori warriors, a little particular as to their meat being really pig, but
otherwise well mannered and popular.
Now of these Pakeha Maoris, one has left a book. He omitted his
name from the book of Old New Zealand, and never mentioned
dates, but tradition says he was Mr. F. C. Maning, and that he lived
as a Maori and trader for forty years, from 1823 to 1863 when the
work was published.
 In the days when Mr. Maning reached the North Island a trader
was valued at twenty times his weight in muskets, equivalent say, to
the sum total of the British National Debt. Runaway sailors however,
were quite cheap. “Two men of this description were hospitably
entertained one night by a chief, a very particular friend of mine,
who, to pay himself for his trouble and outlay, ate one of them next
morning.”
Maning came ashore on the back of a warrior by the name of
Melons, who capsized in an ebb tide running like a sluice, at which
the white man, displeased, held the native’s head under water by
way of punishment. When they got ashore Melons wanted to get
even, so challenged the Pakeha to a wrestling match. Both were in
the pink of condition, the Maori, twenty-five years of age, and a
heavy-weight, the other a boy full of animal spirits and tough as
leather. After the battle Melons sat up rather dazed, offered his hand,
and venting his entire stock of English, said “How do you do?”
But then came a powerful chief, by name Relation-eater. “Pretty
work this,” he began, “good work. I won’t stand this not at all! not at
all! not at all!” (The last sentence took three jumps, a step and a turn
round, to keep correct time.) “Who killed the Pakeha? It was Melons.
You are a nice man, killing my Pakeha ... we shall be called the
‘Pakeha killkillers’; I shall be sick with shame; the Pakeha will run
away; what if you had killed him dead, or broken his bones”.... (Here
poor Melones burst out crying like an infant). “Where is the hat?
Where the shoes? The Pakeha is robbed! he is murdered!” Here a
wild howl from Melons.
The local trader took Mr. Maning to live with him, but it was
known to the tribes that the newcomer really and truly belonged to
Relation-eater. Not long had he been settled when there occurred a
meeting between his tribe and another, a game of bluff, when the
warriors of both sides danced the splendid Haka, most blood-
curdling, hair-lifting of all ceremonials. Afterward old Relation-eater
singled out the horrible savage who had begun the war-dance, and
these two tender-hearted individuals for a full half-hour, seated on
the ground hanging on each other’s necks, gave vent to a chorus of
skilfully modulated howling. “So there was peace,” and during the
ceremonies Maning came upon a circle of what seemed to be Maori
chiefs, until drawing near he found that their nodding heads had
nobody underneath. Raw heads had been stuck on slender rods,
with cross sticks to carry the robes, “Looking at the ’eds, sir?” asked
an English sailor. “’Eds was werry scarce—they had to tattoo a slave
a bit ago, and the villain ran away, tattooin’ and all!”
“What!”
“Bolted before he was fit to kill,” said the sailor, mournful to think
how dishonest people could be.
Once the head chief, having need to punish a rebellious vassal,
sent Relation-eater, who plundered and burned the offending village.
The vassal decamped with his tribe.
“Well, about three months after this, about daylight I was
aroused by a great uproar.... Out I ran at once and perceived that M
—’s premises were being sacked by the rebellious vassal who ...
was taking this means of revenging himself for the rough handling he
had received from our chief. Men were rushing in mad haste through
the smashed windows and doors, loaded with everything they could
lay hands upon.... A large canoe was floating near to the house, and
was being rapidly filled with plunder. I saw a fat old Maori woman
who was washerwoman, being dragged along the ground by a huge
fellow who was trying to tear from her grasp one of my shirts, to
which she clung with perfect desperation. I perceived at a glance
that the faithful old creature would probably save a sleeve.
“An old man-of-war’s man defending his washing, called out, ‘Hit
out, sir! ... our mob will be here in five minutes!’
“The odds were terrible, but ... I at once floored a native who was
rushing by me.... I then perceived that he was one of our own people
... so to balance things I knocked down another! and then felt myself
seized round the waist from behind.
“The old sailor was down now but fighting three men at once,
while his striped shirt and canvas trousers still hung proudly on the
fence.
“Then came our mob to the rescue and the assailants fled.
 “Some time after this a little incident worth noting happened at
my friend M—’s place. Our chief had for some time back a sort of
dispute with another magnate.... The question was at last brought to
a fair hearing at my friend’s house. The arguments on both sides
were very forcible; so much so that in the course of the arbitration
our chief and thirty of his principal witnesses were shot dead in a
heap before my friend’s door, and sixty others badly wounded, and
my friend’s house and store blown up and burnt to ashes.
“My friend was, however, consoled by hundreds of friends who
came in large parties to condole with him, and who, as was quite
correct in such cases, shot and ate all his stock, sheep, pigs, ducks,
geese, fowls, etc., all in high compliment to himself; he felt proud....
He did not, however, survive these honors long.”
Mr. Maning took this poor gentleman’s place as trader, and
earnestly studied native etiquette, on which his comments are
always deliciously funny. Two young Australians were his guests
when there arrived one day a Maori desperado who wanted
blankets; and “to explain his views more clearly knocked both my
friends down, threatened to kill them both with his tomahawk, then
rushed into the bedroom, dragged out all the bedclothes, and burnt
them on the kitchen fire.”
A few weeks later, Mr. Maning being alone, and reading a year-
old Sydney paper, the desperado called. “‘Friend,’ said I; ‘my advice
to you is to be off.’
“He made no answer but a scowl of defiance. ‘I am thinking,
friend, that this is my house,’ said I, and springing upon him I placed
my foot to his shoulder, and gave him a shove which would have
sent most people heels over head.... But quick as lightning ... he
bounded from the ground, flung his mat away over his head, and
struck a furious blow at my head with his tomahawk. I caught the
tomahawk in full descent; the edge grazed my hand; but my arm,
stiffened like a bar of iron, arrested the blow. He made one furious,
but ineffectual attempt to wrest the tomahawk from my grasp; and
then we seized one another round the middle, and struggled like
maniacs in the endeavor to dash each other against the boarded