When Bad Things Happen to Other People Read Online Free PDF Page A

supports the blame Kafka levels at his father.
    We can safely follow Kafka in thinking of Elli’s suffering as fairly trivial, despite the troubling image of “a bitter enemy” on the battlefield. Part of the great value of Kafka’s examination of conscience is that it illustrates by its ambiguity the difficulty of analyzing  Schadenfreude . Pivotal issues that Kafka’s passage raises but does not definitively resolve include 1) the idea that Schadenfreude is just another word for malice; 2) the idea that, though different from malice, Schadenfreude presupposes it; 3) the importance of what others think we deserve; 4) the moral import of the kind of suffering that gives rise to  Schadenfreude ; and 5) the relationship of Schadenfreude to cruelty. I will turn to these points now and conclude that Kafka does not reveal himself to be malicious or evil.
The identification of Schadenfreude with malice
    First of all, Kafka does not define  Schadenfreude . But he juxtaposes  Bösheit  (which can be translated as either “anger” or, more appropriately,
    “malice,” given his purposeful recourse to  Zorn  [“anger”] to emphasize that he means malice) with Schadenfreude in a way that distinguishes between them. Malice, generally speaking, is (a) a disposition to injure others and/or (b) to wish that injury occurs to them. Note that malice includes both an active (a) and a passive (b) element. Malice, which I will examine in closer detail shortly, may or may not involve a determination of what others deserve.
    The “ und ” of “ Bösheit und Schadenfreude ” (in the original German) unites the two terms but also emphasizes that they are distinct. Some writers, particularly those of poetic bents, might use synonyms in a way that other writers, particularly those of philosophical bents, might construe as unnecessarily repetitive. For example, we might read of someone’s “fear and trembling” or of her “sorrow and misery.” Kafka’s writing throughout the letter suggests a careful articulation of charges against his father. Recounting his father’s sins, Kafka strives more to define experience than to embellish it.
    Of course, Schadenfreude could be a subset of malice, in which case Kafka’s avowal would be somewhat tautologous, in the way that the statement “Elisabeth is a woman and a mother” is. Because all mothers are by definition women, it is unnecessary to specify the sex of a mother, which is built into its concept. Analogously, it would be unnecessary to include mention of malice in a reference to Schadenfreude if all Schadenfreude were malice.
    Kafka does not identify Schadenfreude with malice. The best way to make sense of his careful use of Schadenfreude in this passage is to understand him as referring to his own pleasure in the trivial suffering of his sister Elli. Kafka may take part in his sister’s trivial suffering, but he does not exactly  cause  it—Herr Kafka does that (his father is the malicious one, Kafka seems to say). Here we run up against the question of whether those who do not cause another to suffer but take pleasure in that suffering deserve as much blame as those who cause the suffering they celebrate. Thinkers are divided on this question, as I will show in time. For now, suffice it to say that two different approaches prevent us from having to answer that question, or at least from having to answer it here. If we agreed that Elli’s suffering was trivial, we wouldn’t much care about the answer. If we believed that Elli deserved her comeuppance, then we might say that distinguishing between Kafka and his father here only distracts from Elli’s faults. Either one of these justifications for taking pleasure in the injury of another may seem unfeeling or harsh. And yet few of us will deny that we rely from time to time on these same justifications in a non-malicious way.
    Even someone who agrees that Schadenfreude and malice are not identical may object that