Is Jealousy Good?
On Agnes Callard, Heidegger, and Becoming
Agnes Callard—one of my favorite public philosophers—suggests that jealousy isn’t about wanting what someone else has, but wanting to be someone else. The reason is basically existential more than it is circumstantial. Other people remind us that we are finite—can only lead one life—only realize one irreversible path of decisions.
Her argument, which borrows from Lacan, is, to my ears, also Heideggerian. Heidegger thinks all fear is fundamentally reducible to anxiety about our finitude. it’s not about the object feared—the fearsome thing—but rather about the objectless enigma of my own limited existence—what Heidegger fancifully calls “being the null ground of a nullity.”
Through Callard’s lens, “Thou shalt not covet…” turns out to be a positive existential command: embrace who you are.
And yet, as Callard suggests, what if who we are includes a desire to imagine ourselves as others? What if our aspiration to change and grow requires us to be jealous on some level, taking our cues from others’ examples? One reason that jealousy is somewhat socially acceptable, she thinks, has to do with the fact that it expresses our positive intuition that we might change. Only beings that are capable of “becoming” can feel jealousy.
What’s your relationship to jealousy? Do you agree that it contains something positive? Do you agree that it’s a feature, not a bug, of being mortal and free?
What do you make of this existential translation of “thou shalt not covet…”: “Understand that what you covet is not the thing, but the person you think you might be if you had it.” ???
P.S. Check out my mega thread on Theodor Adorno.
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Despite the theoretical and intellectual (read as Mental or Thought Center) frame of this exploration of jealousy and coveting there is a very strong biological imperative for these impulses. I cannot here bring a dissertation level of completeness to my observations but my experience with domestic dogs, parrots and other social companion animals indicates that they all exhibit coveting and jealously that often exceeds humans and is only blunted by the fact that they do not have the intellectual ability to carry out some of their worst impulses. That said it is common experience that two dogs who love one master will often fight to the death over attention. This jealousy is imo is only tangentially related to immediate or even long term fundamental instinctive needs such as hunger but to secondary social group needs.
Following the above observation it could be surmised that there is a fundamental drive creating the emotions that produce covetousness. With this in mind we could look at the last of the 10 sayings as a repudiation of this natural element of biology and a replacement with a rule or better a practice that would if properly developed lead to a higher level of being.