Yet such alertness to the possibility of harm, interrupted but not suppressed by the pleasure it enables, does not necessarily generate fear. Like the contorted face that accompanies the body’s wincing retreat from near-injury, the Freude (joy) in schadenfreude (harm-joy) is distorted by an ongoing sense of vulnerability. Thus even his eager withdrawal from danger retains a feeling of tense anticipation. What distinguishes his perspective on schadenfreude from that of other philosophers is his insistence that susceptibility to harm is a fundamental premise rather than simply an attribute of certain situations.
He proposes that the ground of this experience is awareness of danger: the perception of a threat from which he finds himself spared. In his Essais (1572–1592), Michel de Montaigne anticipates modern conceptions of schadenfreude (and echoes ancient ones) when he savors the exultant pleasure of safety from another’s misfortune.
In what follows, I rest content with a description of schadenfreude and limit my inquiry to a single case. 2 This essay cuts against both accusatory and apologetic perspectives-but not by offering a competing moral evaluation. 1 Meanwhile, witnesses for the defense go as far as to deny the guilt routinely assigned to apparently malevolent enjoyment-by, for instance, identifying it with an appetite for justice that rightly takes satisfaction in the correction of vice. Philosophers have often condemned schadenfreude, the pleasure someone takes in someone else’s suffering, as proof of moral failure. Had Democritus beene present at the late civill warres in France … would this, thinke you, have enforced to laughter, or rather made him turne his tune, alter his tone, and weep with Heraclitus, or rather howle, roare, and teare his haire in commiseration, stand amazed or as the Poets faigne, that Niobe was for griefe quite stupified and turned to stone? - Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy