“Resentment discourse” often functions as a secularized theodicy: a way of explaining suffering such that the world, the order of things, or the theory itself comes out intact.
Let me be very direct and careful here.
1. Why resentment discourse resembles like theodicy
Classical theodicy says:
Evil is necessary, meaningful, redeemable, or compensable.
Contemporary resentment discourse often says:
Your suffering persists because you are attached, reactive, insufficiently integrated, insufficiently enlightened, or insufficiently “worked through.”
The structure is the same.
In both cases:
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harm is acknowledged,
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but responsibility is subtly displaced back onto the sufferer,
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and the world (or the system) is preserved from indictment.
When resentment is framed as pathology as such, it implies:
If only you had processed better, understood better, let go better — the damage would not persist.
That is theodical logic in affective dress.
2. Why Spinoza is vulnerable here
Spinoza does not intend a theodicy in the religious sense — but structurally, his system performs one.
Because:
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Nature is necessary and rational through and through,
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there are no irreducible wrongs, only inadequate ideas and diminished power,
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every affect has a place in the causal order,
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and freedom is always, in principle, available as understanding.
This means:
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persistent suffering is always explainable as continued bondage,
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continued bondage is always corrigible in principle,
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and therefore no wound is finally allowed to indict the order of Nature itself.
That is exactly the move theodicy makes:
nothing ultimately escapes intelligibility or justification.
3. Your Bonhoeffer case now lands cleanly
This is why your resistance to calling Bonhoeffer’s hypothetical resentment “pathological” matters.
To call it pathological is to say:
Something has gone wrong in him.
But your intuition is:
Something has gone wrong in the world, and it has not been repaired.
Bonhoeffer’s bitterness, in that hypothetical, is not a failure of affective housekeeping.
It is a scar — and scars are not mistakes.
Spinoza has no category for scars.
4. The moral injury problem
What you are circling is what later thinkers call moral injury — though even that term risks psychologizing.
Moral injury is:
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not confusion,
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not excess emotion,
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not misinterpretation,
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not ressentiment-as-delusion,
but the persistence of damage after clarity.
Spinoza can only say:
The damage persists because the conatus has been constrained.
Which is true — but incomplete in the way theodicies are incomplete:
it explains without answering.
5. Why resentment discourse protects order
Resentment discourse reassures us that:
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the world is still navigable,
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justice still “works” at some level,
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freedom is still possible if properly cultivated.
That reassurance is the payoff.
But in doing so, it:
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domesticates rage,
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disciplines grief,
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medicalizes refusal,
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and pathologizes memory.
This is why it feels false in cases like genocide, betrayal, or catastrophic failure.
6. What Spinoza cannot say (and you are insisting on)
Spinoza cannot say:
There are situations where remaining wounded is not a misunderstanding but a truthful response.
To say this would fracture his system.
Your objection is not anti-reason.
It is anti-redemptive reason.
7. A careful restatement
So yes:
When resentment is treated as something that must be overcome in order for the world to make sense, the discourse becomes a secular theodicy — and resistance is a refusal to let metaphysics exonerate damage.
That refusal is not confusion.
It is fidelity.
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