Anger’s Importance in the Aristotelian Tradition of Moral Theory
an unpublished paper presented at the Ciceronian Society Conference
Introduction: Charting A History of A Passion
I must begin here by placing my friend and colleague, Christopher Anandale, in the uncomfortable position of having to praise himself. It was he who brought this interesting and well-needed conference to my attention and suggested that I submit a proposal. I quickly agreed, then discovered I already had a speaking engagement (oddly enough, one in which I discuss Plato’s depictions and discussions of anger), precluding my attendance at this conference. Chris then offered to read the paper in my place, committing to an office of friendship for which I am deeply grateful. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Ciceronian Society and to the organizer for this conference, Peter Hayworth, for permitting, or more accurately, welcoming this unorthodox delivery by proxy.
The main contention of this paper, put very simply, is that an adequate understanding and practical approach to anger today requires reappropriating a broadly Aristotelian perspective on anger. Descending from this level of generality into particulars, what I advocate is a neo-Aristotelian approach to anger, one which draws upon resources of Aristotle’s own thought but also engages further developments or refinements by successors. It is also crucial, and entirely in consonance with Aristotle’s own dialectical approach, to draw into that account whatever valuable insights non-Aristotelian thinkers or approaches contribute on the matter.
Several portions of the paper are intended to provide support for this contention by outlining some key developments in the history of ideas, specifically the history of ideas about this passion, anger, and other closely associated ideas. In synopsis, this story is one in which after earlier attempts to understand, come to practical terms with, even “tame”[1] this troublesome emotion of anger, Aristotle works out, articulates, but does not unify a coherent array of philosophical perspectives bearing upon anger. One of the distinctive features of that perspective is that, in the moral sphere, anger receives a nuancedly positive value, and criteria are provided (or at least suggested) for evaluating anger in terms of moral valuations Aristotle recognizes and stresses.[2]
As the narrative continues, while no less anger occurs among the people or the powerful (or even the philosophers) in later times, rival accounts arise and are articulated, perspectives that either view anger less sanguinely or even treat it as always inherently bad, wrong, or harmful. In addition, while certain of these rival accounts will contribute several new insights or practices well worth incorporating into a fuller neo-Aristotelian perspective, for the most part by comparison to Aristotle, they will conceptualize anger in reductive ways, effectively misunderstanding anger and providing less helpful practical guidance to those who reliant upon such frameworks to manage, make sense of, and make decisions dealing with anger.
We end up in a late modern condition in which, I contend, we feel, encounter, and even act out no less anger than did our predecessors, but are often unequipped to make sense of it, placed at a loss by our own culture, its dominant institutions, and the characteristic discourses that embody and express moral theories.[3] I must note that in this presentation, constrained here by time, there exist significant gaps both in this very telescoped history of ideas and in the reconstruction of Aristotle’s own account of anger.
Aristotle’s Predecessors on Anger
In Greek culture prior to Aristotle, at least as evidenced by those texts and thinkers we possess in the present, there was no sustained or systematic moral, psychological, or metaphysical inquiry into anger as a passion. This does not mean, of course, that there were no revealing and even reflective discussions about anger, no paradigmatic depictions, no teachings. In fact, whether turning to epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, history, or even eventually philosophy, one encounters many references to anger. As thumos, orge, or kholos (rarely, menis[4]), it gets discussed as a basic motive of human and divine action, as a troublesome affect, as a concomitant of battle, as a source for strife, faction, and injustice, as a response to insult, injury, and injustice.
Consider just a few examples. From Homer, we have the rage of Achilles, unwilling to accept the limits counseled by other heroes at Troy, and we have Odysseus’ lapse,[5] fateful for him and deadly for his companions, into anger in taunting the eyeless Cyclops, bringing upon him the divine anger of Poseidon. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, anger of the dead and the living broods and bides its time, until attaining revenge. Within their characters’ speeches, Sophocles’ Ajax and Euripides’ Medea teach us about anger’s potential to generate not only fear and horror, but also anger as responses. Solon cautions his fellow citizens by drawing connections between misrule, overreaching, civil discord, and anger. In Plato’s works, we encounter for the first time, if not a full treatment of anger as such, at least reflections upon its causes, the workings of emotions and desires, and upon the thumotic part of the soul in which anger occurs.[6]
Running through these various writers’ works are several common concerns. Anger occupies an ambiguous moral space. As an affect, it is not only natural but often needed, not only to brave the battlefield, but in order for the person to respond appropriately, on their own account or on account of those who they serve or protect to injustice, injuries, insult, to transgressions. At the same time, it readily escapes limits imposed by reason and prudence, or even law and custom, inciting desire for disproportionate retribution, often arousing anger on the part of others in response. In Plato’s dialogues, there are a number of occasions where a person’s anger is pointed out, mollified, or feared.[7]
There are also several further developments, however, the one most likely to come to mind being the vital intermediary function served by the thumotic part of the soul. The energy and forcefulness of the part of the soul “with which we get angry” is needed by the rational part in order to enforce its rule over the appetites. Plato realizes that as an emotion, anger stems from the dimension of our personality concerned with honor, relationships, and a sense of justice, and thus can interpose itself against affects with lower, appetitive grounds. He also points out several common causes for anger. We disagree with other people over moral matters and values, and in that disagreement, become angry with them.[8]
Aristotle On Anger
As far as we know, Aristotle is the first thinker in the West to articulate what can be called a well-worked out theory of anger.[9] As with Plato, his treatments of the emotion, and the many other phenomena with which it connects, is spread across the corpus of his works. There is no Aristotelian treatise “On Anger” to provide a central and authoritative vantage point integrating all his other references to anger. Instead, he offers us a set of discussions, the most important of which occur in the Rhetoric, the two Ethics, and the Politics. Each of those passages provides a portion of what has the potential to be reconstructed into a full Aristotelian theory of anger, and they do so by looking at this affective state and response from a set of complementary perspectives, each oriented by a particular set of concerns.
We can speak of Aristotle as examining and staking out a complex position on anger in multiple dimensions. For instance, the Rhetoric bk. 2 discussion of anger focuses on what we can call the rhetorical-psychological dimension, motivated by concerns that an orator, among others, would set as most central in his or her practice.[10] Determining how anger arises, what the causes and dynamics of the emotion are, what the angry person wants, how to increase or diminish anger – these are the sorts of matters Aristotle treats in that portion of his theory.
There is a physical-somatic dimension to anger, in which one looks at the emotion primarily in terms of its causes and effects in terms of the body, matter, and their processes. That comes in for discussion in other works.[11]
There is an ethical-prohairetic dimension as well, in which key concerns become character, actions and emotions, virtues and vices, and moral evaluation. For that, one would need to attend to Nicomachean Ethics bk. 4 and Eudemian Ethics bk. 3, among other places.[12] Other dimensions to the phenomenon of anger, and of a theory that would aim to understand it adequately, can be distinguished as well, but I pass over them here in interests of time.[13]
My point in mentioning and distinguishing these dimensions is twofold. First, it should be evident that Aristotle does not consider anger a simple phenomenon. As a moral theorist, his attitude and approach towards it, as with many other matters, is at antipodes from any sort of reductionism. He aims to do justice to the complexity of anger, a complexity that is due in part to the many other phenomena with which it is closely connected.
Second, it suggests that, if we want to fully understand and derive some benefit (whether theoretical or practical) from Aristotle’s theory, we not only must be conversant with considerable portions of Aristotle’s corpus, but we also must be able to draw tight and knot together the loose threads connecting those passages. Or to use a different metaphor, we must learn to view the phenomenon in multiple irreducible dimensions simultaneously.
Aristotle recognizes that while anger does arise within animal life, the distinctly human emotion of anger is intrinsically connected with moral conceptions, evaluations, and even processes of reasoning. As an emotional response, a basic form of desire or affectivity,[14] and a motive for action, anger is bound up with justice and injustice, social relations and roles, general assumptions or principles, and perceptions of particulars and of values. And while Aristotle does not glorify anger, he recognizes and affirms it can be appropriate, necessary, or even noble, and he provides some general criteria for determining when anger is virtuous (or in accordance with virtue).
For Aristotle, the phronimos, the person possessed of practical wisdom, will on occasion become angry and engage in purposeful action expressing and motivated by that anger. And he or she will act rightly in doing so, or act wrongly in not doing so. Even though an emotion, indeed a powerful one is involved, it can be practically rational to become and to be angry.
Other Ancients on Anger
If we survey other schools of thought and practice developing simultaneously within Hellenistic, and then in later Roman cultures, the Aristotelian approach to anger turns out to be markedly anomalous. Counterposed to the Peripatetics’ guardedly positive evaluation of anger, two other trends stand out. On the one hand, just as in Aristotle’s own times, some people adopt an insufficiently discerning and thereby overly positive, or at least forgivingly neutral attitude towards anger in general. Some conflate anger with manliness or courage.[15] Others view it as a natural human response bound to break out in human social existence, and at the very least good fodder for comedies or satires. On the other hand, among the philosophers and their followers, and among certain other leaders and experimenters in more deliberately structured life, a much more consistently negative picture of anger emerges.
Lacking their texts except for unpromising fragments, it is difficult to say whether Cynics, the school who develop the diatribe into an instrument of philosophy, can be said to have endorsed anger in qualified ways. In the case of their much more successful offshoot, the Stoic school, however, the picture is entirely clear. The passions in general are affective results of erroneous processes of thinking, and bringing habit in, of choosing and acting. And anger is one of the worst, the most troubling, the most problematic among them.
The eclectic Cicero, astute in bringing divergent philosophical schools into productive communication and effecting a kind of synthesis, entirely takes the Stoics’ side against the Aristotelians on anger.[16] The Stoics themselves interpret it as universally bad, and equally fault Aristotle for suggesting that anger could ever be appropriate, let alone productive, or even virtuous. Seneca’s On Anger may be taken as an authoritative Stoic last word text on the matter. In it we find that anger is a kind of insanity, an affective state produced through incorrect reasoning processes that eventually short-circuits reasoning altogether. Anger wants to retaliate by harming the other, making the other suffer in return, and as such is incompatible with Stoic life.
Although the Epicurean Philodemus reserves some legitimacy for “natural anger,” a proportionate affective response,[17] he echoes Epicurus and the mainstream of that tradition in regarding most anger as “empty” or “vain,” based on incorrect inferences, unproductive, harmful, involving or leading to unnecessary pains. For Neo-Platonists, as a disturbing and desirous affect, tied very clearly to the body, to civic and social life, to offense and retribution, anger becomes something that one must leave behind in the quest for the divine. Skeptics do not appear to have been particularly interested in the emotion either, except to note the effect it can play in altering our judgments or attention.
Christian Thought On Anger
When Christianity comes onto the scene, it rapidly enters an intellectual and cultural environment marked by these rival philosophical schools. Christians too have to grapple with the meaning and moral value of anger, and bring to bear on them not only additional (and often difficult to apply) resources of sacred scriptures, but also concepts and distinctions assimilated from certain philosophical schools, as well as a growing body of Christian literature, a fruit of reflections upon Christian life and community. Assimilations and reworkings of philosophical perspectives was particularly noticeable in terms of moral theory and metaphysics of the human person. For example, a Platonic tripartite conception of the soul and its activities is explicitly used by the desert monks whose Conferences John Cassian records, and whose understanding of practical connections between thoughts, affects, actions, and habits seems at many points very close to Stoic conceptions.
Cassian’s viewpoint on anger, in particular, will prove highly influential among Greek and Latin Christians.[18] Anger’s moral position was already considerably more precarious, given what reads like clear condemnation of even the affect of anger in the Sermon on the Mount. In Cassian’s work, anger becomes one of the “eight capital vices,”[19] which in the West eventually transform into the “seven deadly sins,” leading to rich but nearly always negative reflections upon anger as the literature develops.
Cassian’s contemporaries, who do not go as far as he in entirely condemning anger, nevertheless view the affect as deeply problematic. Augustine, for example, points out the ease with which anger congeals into hatred. John Chrysostom stresses the law of the Gospel’s higher stringency in comparison to the Old Law on anger. Both of those thinkers envision some legitimate, and quite restricted, uses for anger, but both caution against its tendencies to lead the angry person into falsely rationalizing the rightness of their emotional response.
I would not like to be taken to suggest that when it comes to anger, Thomas Aquinas represents a radical departure from the multiple Christian sources whose thought he dialectically weighs and then interweaves into his own lasting synthesis. Still, in Thomas’ work we see a restoration of a robust Aristotelian perspective, bringing together the multiple texts and topics of Aristotle’s corpus, thinking matters concerning the human person through an Aristotelian anthropology. Also quite marked is that Aquinas himself, like Aristotle, examines anger along multiple irreducible and complementary dimensions. Of course, he maintains no place as Aristotle does for good temper as an independent virtue, but he does highlight the importance and distinctness of anger as an affect, and he very helpfully and explicitly articulates one of its key positive functions, the realization of the “difficult good.”
Anger In Modern Thought
To indulge in some admittedly sweeping generalizations (again employing available time as an excuse), we can assert the following points about anger, Aristotelianism, and modern thought. First, many of the thinkers whose work comes to exercise influence in modernity evince little interest in, appreciation towards, or even understanding about Aristotle’s philosophy. It is unsurprising that relatively few of them would know more about Aristotle’s complex theory of anger than unpromising isolated principles or theses gleaned from contact with Scholastics. Moderns interested in reappropriating resources from ancient philosophy tended to draw instead upon rival schools to the Peripatetics.
Second, when they do give attention to it in their works, and find some place for it in their overall theories, modern thinkers tend to produce what might be called anemic understandings of anger. There are several reasons for this. Not a few, like Bentham for instance, view the affect itself and its characteristic actions in a uniformly negative light. Others adopt more pragmatic attitudes, but determine whether and when anger is good or bad mainly on consequentialist grounds, rather than thinking about anger in more complex terms of virtues and vices, self-control or its absence, relationships and social expectations, and moral values such as justice or injustice. Those who provide systematic overviews of the emotions or passions, the will, and rationality tend to efface the distinctiveness of anger recognized by Aristotelian accounts, and simply locate it among all the other affects.
One looks in vain in modernity for any approach to anger as useful and well-worked out as the Aristotelian one. If we turn to late modern thought and conditions, it does not appear that anger is any less prevalent or problematic in our own times and culture, or any more likely to eventually go away. One might continue and elaborate this narrative of an eclipse of understanding of anger by pointing towards many seemingly new but actually rather old approaches, those embodied in common approaches used in anger management, for just one example. In order to leave room for discussion of the points I’ve raised, and my main contention that what would be particularly useful in our times is a robust reappropriation of a basically Aristotelian approach towards anger, I end the telling of this admittedly incomplete but hopefully suggestive tale here.
Notes
[1] To borrow the happy term of Kostas Kalimtzis, in his Taming Anger: The Hellenic Approach to the Limitations of Reason (Bloomsbury, 2014)
[2] The main modalities of value that Aristotle distinguishes and refers to throughout his works are the good and the bad (agathon, kakon), the useful and the harmful (sumpheron, blaberon), the pleasurable and the painful (hedon, luperon), the just and the unjust (dikaion, adikon), and the noble/beautiful and the base/ugly (kalon, aiskhron). These distinctions of value are made systematically in numerous places in the two Ethics, in Rhetoric bk.1 , where they are identified with the “times” and functions of different rhetorical genres, in Politics bk. 1, where human beings possess “perception of” (aithesis) communication about, and sharing in these values. It is worth pointing out that Plato already noted the connection between disagreement between people and gods over these values in producing anger.
[3] In some sense, I am making a point about anger specifically in late modernity, intended to be analogous to that which Alasdair MacIntyre makes about moral evaluation, development, and language more generally in his After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
[4] This is the term upon which the Illiad famously begins, referencing the “rage of Achilles”. This term is infrequently used for anger, even in Homer. On this, cf. P. Considine, “Some Homeric Terms for Anger,” Acta Classica, v. 9 (1966); Gregory D. Alles, “Wrath and Persuasion: The ‘Iliad’ and Its Contexts, Journal of Religion, v. 70, n. 2 (1990); Leonard Muellner, The Anger of Achilles: Mênis in Greek Epic (Cornell, 1996). Christian writers such as John Damascene and Gregory of Nyssa will much later employ the term menis to distinguish one type or mode of anger.
[5] As a character in epic and drama, Odysseus himself frequently counsels others against following anger’s desires, and attempts to calm it by his own words. He also, however, exhibits and acts upon anger at key junctures, sometimes (as with the Phaeacians) to good effect, sometimes (as with the Cyclops) for ill. As Seth Bernadette points out, a verb denoting anger (odussomai) is built into Odysseus’ very name, so that “Odysseus may be both the embodiment of anger and the universal object of anger,” The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), p. 44.
[6] The Republic provides one central source for Plato’s conception of thumos in general, and of various modalities of anger in particular. Discussions of the parts of the soul in the Phaedrus and Timaeus help to flesh out what we might call a thumocentric account. But anger as an emotional response also becomes an object of inquiry and discussion, albeit all too brief, at various other points, particularly in the Euthyphro, Gorgias and Philebus.
[7] Socrates braves the anger of Thrasymachus in Republic bk. 1 (and perhaps also diagnoses his defect of character in bk. 8), and discusses why his fellow Athenians might be angry with him in the Apology. Interestingly, in the Gorgias, it is Callicles who urges Socrates not to get angry.
[8] This psychological account of anger appears in outline in the Euthyphro, Gorgias, and a few passages of Republic.
[9] Anger may well have been examined from a psychological perspective by the technologoi, the “textbook writers,” Aristotle mentions in Rhetoric bk. 1, but lacking their works, anything one might say would be rather speculative. Aristotle himself dismisses their work as having focused exclusively on the rhetorical force of the pathe, the emotions, which means that they would have discussed anger. It is unlikely that their treatment would have possessed the coherence of Aristotle’s own treatment of anger as a pathos.
[10] A number of other texts also contain passages treating anger from this vantage point, including: Poetics bk. 2, On Sophistical Refutations, On the Soul bk.1, Nichomachean Ethics bk. 2, Eudemian Ethics, bks. 2 and 7, Politics, bks. 5, 7, and 8, and Topics, bk. 2, 4, 6, and 7.
[11] These include: On the Soul bk.1, Parts of Animals bk. 2, On Dreams, On Memory.
[12] Those other places include: Nichomachean Ethics bk. 1, Eudemian Ethics bk. 2, Rhetoric bk. 1, Topics bk. 4, History of Animals, bk. 8.
[13] In my current research on Aristotle and anger, I distinguish three other dimensions:
1) a volitional-practically rational dimension, focused on anger in terms of how it affects weakness of will, choice, reasoning, deliberation, prudence.
2) a political-legal dimension, focused on anger in terms of cause or factor of political events, legislation, and legal responsibility for wrongdoing.
3) a responsive-tharetic dimension, focused on Anger in terms of response to perceived threats, connection with courage, confidence, and fear, and temperament
[14] At numerous points in his work, Aristotle distinguishes orexis (often translated as “desire,” but better translated as “affectivity”) into three main modes: epithumia (i.e. appetitive desire), thumos, and boulesis (imperfectly translated as “wish,” “will,” “rational desire,” etc.). He also specifies that prohairesis (“choice” or “commitment”) is not only a juncture of affectivity and intellect (nous, dianoia), but also a type of orexis. I have argued that the emotions must also be understood as forms of orexis as well, in “Orexis Aneu Nous: Virtue Affectivity and Aristotelian Rule of Law”, Studia Neoaristotelica v. 9, n. 2 (2012) and “Value, Affectivity, and Virtue in Aristotle, Scheler, and Von Hildebrand”, in Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics, Kevin Hermberg and Paul Gyllenhammer, eds. (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
[15] This is a complaint explicitly made by Plutarch in his On Controlling Anger, but it is one that might be made in practically any era. We see Aristotle pointing out earlier that many people confuse anger and courage, and that the sharp-tempered are often euphemistically treated as “manly.”
[16] In De Officiis, bk. 1. 25, for instance, he argues that the doctrine of the mean represents a major contribution by the Peripatetics, with the exception of anger, which “in all matters is entirely to be rejected.”
[17] Philodemus, Peri orges, most recently made available in the edition by Giovanni Indelli L’ira : edizione, traduzione e comment (Bibliopolis, 1988). Philodemus will also position his Epicurean view explicitly between the Stoic and the Peripatetic views. On this treatise, cf. Julia Annas, “Epicurean Emotions,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, v. 30 (1989); Kirk Sanders, “On a Causal Notion in Philodemus’ On Anger,” The Classical Quarterly (2009); and David Armstrong, “Be Angry and Sin Not: Philodemus Versus the Stoics on Natural Bites and Natural Emotions,” in Passions and Moral Progress in Greco-Roman Thought, ed. John T. Fitzgerald (Routledge, 2007); and Voula Tsouna, “Anger and the Desire for Revenge,” in The Ethics of Philodemus (Oxford, 2007)
[18] His Institutes and Conferences will become explicitly recommended reading among the Benedictines, for example, mentioned in the Rule.
[19] These represent reworkings of and amplifications upon Evagrius Ponticus’ “eight thoughts,” discussed in his Praktikos.