A Reading Recommendation: Seneca's On Anger
a great early work examining an emotion as troubling in our own time as it was in his
I’ve recommended Seneca’s works a bit before here, in this piece about his letters dealing with the topic of grief. Lately, I’ve been returning to another one of his texts quite often, as I produce additional videos on it, discuss it in Understanding Anger 2.0 online events, and prepare for teaching a class on the topic at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design next term. It is his excellent and fairly short work, On Anger.
You can find it online in a number of places providing older public domain translations:
Seneca On Anger, Aubrey Stewart translation (Wikisource)
Seneca On Anger, Aubrey Stewart translation (Project Gutenberg)
Seneca On Anger, Robert Kaster translation (Archive.org)
There is also a newer translation published by University of Chicago, by Robert Caster and Martha Nussbaum, which bundles On Anger with another related text On Clemency as well as his satirical play The Pumpkification of Claudius the God. That’s the one I use for my own work, videos, and classes, so I’d recommend getting that edition if you don’t want to use a free, but older one.
Seneca’s On Anger is an important work, well worth reading, for a number of reasons, some of which have to do with its main topic, others of which stem from its significance within Seneca’s body of work and the larger body of Stoic literature.
A number of ancient thinkers from a variety of different philosophical schools grappled with the problems that the complex emotion of anger raised. Looking at the literature that we still have left and the references to literature we no longer have, it’s clear that anger was a matter of considerable interest to Plato and the Platonists, Aristotle and his followers, Epicurus and his school, the eclectic Cicero, and particularly to the Stoics.
We can credit Aristotle as being the first person to develop a preliminary but genuinely scientific account of anger, looking at it in physical, psychological, volitional, and ethical dimensions. There may have been other writers before Seneca and after Aristotle, whose works we have lost, who produced sophisticated analyses of anger. The closest thing we do currently possess would be Cicero’s short discussions about anger in his Tusculan Disputations. Seneca’s On Anger is the earliest work in western philosophy that we do have thematically focused upon, and systematically examining, the emotion of anger.
Seneca discusses what anger is, considering several different definitions of the passion. He also sets out how anger works, you could say, uncovering its psychological mechanism. This is the work in which he articulates most fully the three-step process of how emotions work in Stoic psychology. He unfolds a number of common thought processes involved or culminating in anger, and identifies incorrect assumptions or lines of reasoning involved. There are a great number of other related topics he delves into thoughtfully as well, including the moral (dis)value of anger, and why it involves one of the most problematic of the vices.
The Stoic position on anger is a rather extreme one that I often describe as “zero-tolerance”, regarding anger as always something bad. He accordingly spends a considerable amount of time considering possible objections to this position that could be raised by what people might consider the commonsense positions popular within his culture (and our own), or by one of the main rival schools to the Stoics, the Aristotelians (who thought that some anger could be virtuous). Seneca considers whether anger can be good, useful, noble, or necessary, providing arguments against all of these.
In my view, however, the best feature of Seneca’s On Anger is that in its three books he provides a number of actual practices for cutting off and lessening anger as it arises. Again, he isn’t the only or first person to do so in antiquity, but his work provides by far the most of these philosophical practices useful for dealing with one’s anger. By studying and applying his lessons, you can - if you want to - work on your own emotional dispositions bearing on anger with the many tools he provides.
I mentioned above that this work is also important within the broader context of Seneca’s other works and the yet larger scope of Stoic literature. If you are interested in either of those, this is a text you will sooner or later want to read. We have lost all of the early and middle Stoic literature, including the works that clearly focused upon the emotions. Seneca’s On Anger doesn’t fill in all those gaps of course, but it goes some way towards that, certainly with this particular troubling emotion.
As I wrap this up, I’ll add that I don’t entirely agree with Seneca or the Stoics in viewing the emotion of anger as always being something bad and problematic. Unlike Cicero on this matter (who agreed entirely with the Stoics about anger) I’m perhaps somewhere between the Stoics on the one end and the Platonists and Aristotelians on the other. But I consider this particular work highly valuable, more so each time I read it. And so, I suspect you might perhaps also find it valuable for your own study in the field of philosophy, and perhaps your own personal development.