Alexandre Matheron, What is Indignation?

First, let us recall what indignation is. As defined in the Ethics, imitation is a form of affective imitation: as E IIIP27C indicates, it is "the hatred we feel for those who harm a being similar to us"; and we experience it by imitation of the feelings of the victim, with an intensity that is greater to the extent that the latter resembles us moreit being understood, as P22 and its note had already shown, that indignation will be even greater if the victim is also someone we love. On this basis, we understand how, under a tyrannical regime, common fear can turn into indignation and lead to a reversal of the oppressor. A tyrant, by definition, is one who governs mostly by fear. Yet fear still implies hatred for the one who inspired it; for fear is a form of sadness, and hatred is nothing but sadness accompanied by its external cause. However, if we remained here, nothing would happen yet; if there were simply common fear, that is, if everyone in isolation feared the tyrant without addressing the plight of others, hatred of the tyrant would remain episodic, for a tyrant does not tyrannize each of his subjects at each moment; and in any case, everyone would in isolation hate him, would in isolation wish upon him every possible harm, would in isolation aspire to be avenged, but without any solution to his situation. This is what happens when the tyrants excesses are not too visible, and when he manages to ensure that each subject, folded in on himself, keeps silent about his own misfortunes for fear of being denounced and tries to get by at the expense of others: under Turkish despotism, Spinoza says in TP VI, 4, subjects live in solitude. But when the misdeeds of rulers become too great to be able to remain hidden, when everything becomes known and said, then indignation necessarily appears, and that changes everything: everyone is permanently indignant at the atrocities he sees committed around him or hears spoken about at each moment, and therefore is permanently disposed to hate the tyrant and to wish him harm; and everyone, from the moment that he knows that others beside himself are indignant at the harm that is done to him, begins to realize that he is not alone before the tyrant, that he can count on help from others, and thus a collective resistance is possible. Then one of two things can happen: either the tyrant understands the danger, backtracks by granting some concessions to his subjects, and power is restored until he feels strong enough to start oppressing them (which causes them to rise up against him again, etc.), these pendulum swings thus insuring an approximate self-regulation of the social body, or, on the contrary, he remains obstinate, and insurrection is the order of the day. (Translated by Ted Stolze from Multitudes 3, #46, 2011, pp. 24-25. Matherons essay was extracted from a longer essay that originally appeared in 1994 and was recently republished in a collection of his articles: tudes sur Spinoza et les philosophies de lge classique [Lyon: ENS ditions, 2011], pp. 222-223.)

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