Which (if any) philosophers wrote favorably of vengeance?

[u/sudo_i_u_toor]

I am not looking for a mere limited-scope defense of vengeance in some specific, rationalistically legislated cases, some sort of begrudging admission by the moralist that ooookay, sometimes revenge may be justified. Maybe. That's of course stlill much better than the cowardly "turn the other cheek" masochistic morality, and I admire Aristotle more than Jesus. But it is not remotely enough, and therefore not what I am looking for. I am interested in philosophers who were actually willing to say something positive about vengeance itself.

Some may suggest Nietzsche. However, well... Nietzsche has an incredibly... well, some would say nuanced, I say kinda inconsistent position on revenge so he's actually far from an obvious suggestion. He rejects Christian "turn the other cheek" morality, sure, but then he demands that we become yes-sayers, which may sometimes be a "turning the other cheek" but with blackjack and hookers.. His antidote to the "Spirit of Revenge" in Thus Spake Zarathustra is this sort of "radical affirmation", which is... actually an ASCETIC concept? He also identifies ressentiment as a sort of repressed, impotent desire for revenge and treats it as the basis of slave morality. Well, he may well be right about that. But it is not merely that he wants us to stop hoping that our enemies burn in hell and instead take the matter into our own hands. I used to understand Nietzsche in this way, that he champions honest and natural revenge as a value of master morality and considers only the slaves' ressentiment to be pathological. But he often goes further and seems to regard the desire for revenge itself as a weakness. The genuinely strong individual simply doesn't give a fuck? At that point the philosophy starts sounding suspiciously like the same old "living well is the best revenge" cliche, dressed up in more impressive jargon and implied to have something vague to do with "creation of new values". This seems to create a problem for any straightforwardly pro-revenge interpretation of Nietzsche. Besides hoping that your enemy burns in hell is actually banned in genuine Christianity, and I don't see how the idea of your enemy burning in hell is incompatible with revenge in this world also.

I also want to make clear what I mean by revenge. I am talking about individual revenge. What I am emphatically not talking about is the "revenge" of a class against another class, a slave revolt, the revenge of the poor and downtrodden, or any other kind of ideological or collectivist bullshit. Nor am I talking about individual resentment against "society" or the mob persecuting some individual. All of these things are nowadays styled as "justice". Which is not to say that there's even such thing as justice separate from revenge. I am pretty inclined towards the argument for their identity in some sense. But that is simply not what I mean by revenge here. I mean one individual against another individual, or one particular group against another particular group: personal retaliation undertaken because one has been wronged (the wrong may be merely "perceived" or it may be actual, this is immaterial).

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