Philosophical Resources for Understanding & Managing Anger (part 2)

my presentation to the American Philosophical Practitioners Association 2023 annual meeting (continued)

Jul 19, 2025

Below is the second half of the transcript from my presentation provided during the 2023 meeting of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association. If you’d like to see the full videorecording of my presentation, you can watch it here. If you’d like to read the first half, you can do so here.

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There are some key differences [between philosophical schools]. The biggest dividing point is whether anger is something good or bad. Cicero and the Stoics say it's always bad. I think that you can still draw upon them without necessarily buying into that assumption The Platonists, the Epicureans, the Aristotelians they see some legitimate role for anger.

I should mention that when it comes to the religious thinkers coming later on this split goes down them as well. So you will find John Cassian saying the only time you should ever get angry is at your own vices, and you'll find other people like Augustine or John Chrysostom saying “Oh no, you can get angry at the right time. You just got to watch it. Don't give too much scope to it because then it can turn into something like hatred. But no, you need anger some some of the time. So that there's a lot of differences about that.

With people like the Stoics there are a wealth of useful practices that they provide. Also Plutarch as well, and that's very helpful. In other cases we have to read what they've got and derive the practices ourselves. So there are what we might call Aristotelian practices that deal with anger, but they're not coming directly from Aristotle. We have to develop those.

And a few things about those different perspectives - so as I mentioned Plato, we've got this whole issue of thumos, what is its proper use, what is its direction, how do we develop it. It's a part of the soul. Plato himself in his works will tell us some of the causes for anger. He says that we get angry when we're treated wrongly, when people are viewed as responsible for their own badness, like in the Protagoras when they pretend to have knowledge or skill that they lack. Gorgias mentions that.

Very interestingly in the Euthyphro (which most people are reading because of the stuff about the Euthyphro dilemma), he's actually got a discussion in there why human beings and gods get angry at each other, when they have differences, and they are differences over moral values: over the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, the noble and the base (or however we want to translate the aiskhron), and other moral values. So not just what these are, but what the bearers of them are, who's actually noble, who's not. These are things that people get worked up over, and it's in part because they're hard to resolve.

With Aristotle, we just get an entire theory of anger, very rich, that we have to piece together from different works. He's got analyses of the causes and workings of anger, discussions of the difference between anger and other emotions like hatred, how anger works with loss of self-control and not sticking to our commitments. He's got moral evaluations of anger, or at least criteria for that. That can be extraordinarily helpful.

Epicurus himself has less to say directly about anger, at least in the few texts that we have by him, but there's a lot of implications for how we understand and deal with anger. But Philodemus, as I mentioned has a whole book on anger ,and he frames the Epicurean position as in between the Stoic zero tolerance and the Aristotelian, which in his view is a little bit too lax. He makes a really helpful distinction between natural and unnatural anger, one which we should indulge or use and then empty or vain anger, which is what most people feel. And he discusses how this arises.

Then the Stoics again we don't necessarily want to buy into the “it's always bad, get rid of anger completely” (unless you want to — I mean if you're attracted to that point of view). But the goal for them is to live a happy, free, tranquil life that allows you to experience positive emotions. They've got an interesting discussion about how it is that we get angry, where is it that we're getting angry, and they have a very heavy emphasis (as do a lot of these others) on self-knowledge, and on what they call askesis or discipline, training, weaning ourselves away from from bad responses, bad knee-jerk uh engagements with the world.

So what are some of the useful practices that they they offer? I want to give you two for each of these groups. Obviously they have way, way more than that.

So from Plato (and now this is not in Plato. This is derived from Plato), if we know that we get angry at people when they seem to not share our perception of moral qualities — what's just and what's unjust, or what's beautiful and what's ugly (or noble or base), we can get angry at them very easily. These are things that we get really, really worked up about, and get into terrible arguments, where we're talking past each other. If we know that, then we can head that off. Or if our clients need to know that, when you you go into certain groups, and they're arguing past each other about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

(This is a side note, but one of the really great skills that I think is not unique to philosophy, but perhaps gets developed more on the whole in philosophy than in other disciplines is making distinctions at the right time. We have a lot of practice with this, and you go into meetings with non-philosophers, and they get into these arguments, and you're like: “Hold on a second, let's talk this through. You're right in this respect. You're right in that respect. And you're talking about different things. They look at you like you're doing magic, because they could be doing it — it's not hard to do — but we think to do that. That's sort of our natural trained response, you could say.)

So for again, from Plato, when we see people doing that we can intervene.

From Plutarch, a middle platonist who's got an entire book on how to control anger, he's got this great observation about the tendency that human beings have to conflate their their emotion of anger with something that seems a bit better. It's often translated as “righteous indignation” but the Greek for it is better translated as “hatred of wickedness,” misokakia.

So there is genuine wickedness or evil in the world, and we probably should have a negative reaction to it And maybe it's okay even to hate really serious wickedness. But most of the time our anger is not us wearing the white hat of the western, and being the good person who's completely pure, whose motives are unimpugnable, and fighting against the the evil people. So we can say “Okay, it's understandable you get angry, but let's not confuse it with this other emotional reaction over here that seems a little bit better.” Plutarch thinks that this is a big problem in his time. I suspect it's a big problem in our time too.

From Aristotle, one of the first things I think is quite useful to bring up, he's got that passage that many of you have probably run across: “Anger is like a hasty servant”. And this is where he says anger “syllogizes”. How is it like a hasty servant? It listens to half of what's said, draws some inferences, rushes off to go do things. And so observes something, and it's like: “Oh that person just slighted me. This must not stand! I'd better go and and do something. I should retaliate against them .”

So if we know that we have a tendency to carry out rational thought processes, that are on one level rational and also irrational, once again we can be on the guard against that. We can catch it while it's going on. Or if we see somebody else starting to go down that course we can perhaps intervene, and help them out.

Another thing that that I think is really helpful from Aristotle — you know this was talked about a little bit earlier in the last presentation — the doctrine of the mean. Aristotle doesn't just think that you want something that's in the middle, all numerically right? He says there's a lot of other things that we can translate as “right,” meaning how things ought to be.

So do you get angry with the right person, as opposed to turning your anger against somebody who's more convenient, or in a lower position than you, so you can kick downward? Are you getting angry over the right things? At the right time? For the right amount of time? Displaying your anger in the right ways? These are all criteria that we can turn into practices and ask about.

Now there isn't a hard and fast rule for these. Who exactly should I get angry at when my computer doesn't work the way I want it to? should I get angry at the computer itself? That’s kind of irrational. Should I get angry at the company, in my case Apple?Should I get angry at the customer service person? The right answer to all this probably is I shouldn't get angry at anybody in this case right, unless say they targeted me with a virus, or you know bricked my phone, or something like that.

So those are some useful practices. From Epicurus there's that great passage that I think many of you are probably familiar with. ‘A person cannot live pleasantly unless they live justly, prudently, and well”. And “well” is kalōs. Translating it as "nobly” we can think about what that actually means. what is it to live justly? Can you get angry at anybody you want to and live justly? No, not really. Is it prudent to get angry over minor things? No. And what do you look like when you get angry?

You know, this is not one I was actually going to bring up, but it gets discussed in both the Platonic and the Epicurean, and if I remember right the Stoic traditions. Imagine bringing up a mirror in front of your face when you're angry. We can do this with our technology. Just take a selfie of your angry face, or even better a little movie, and you can see what a mess you look like. And you can think about that every time that you get angry.

Philodemus wants to suggest that we should think about what we're getting angry over are we getting angry over legitimate matters, like somebody bullying my child and the authorities doing nothing about it. Or are we getting angry over what the Epicureans called empty or vain opinions, kenedoxia, and desires? You know the things that we've talked about a little bit in this conference, the culture that we live in is constantly throwing images at us about what we ought to look like, what we ought to desire. The epicureans would say most of that is frankly BS, and we don't want to buy into it. So if we can strip those things away we can be less angry.

Seneca, as I mentioned, has an entire book On Anger, with lots and lots of practices. One of the ones that I particularly like is reminding ourselves when we're getting angry at somebody over something that we ourselves do, the same thing. Or if we don't do the same thing, we would do the same thing if we were in the same sort of situation. Or we desire to do the same thing, and we just don't do it. We're not as great as we pretend. We get angry because we place ourselves on a higher level than than other people, and look at them as the scumbags that are doing these awful things, when we're likely to do it too.

And if we do that we can be a lot more forgiving towards people. Marcus Aurelius has to remind himself of this at various points in the Meditations. Epictetus what he's saying, Seneca and Marcus, and many other Stoics as well — but he really stresses so this must have been an issue for him — that when we're getting angry at people for either their individual actions or being the kind of person that they are (he talks about robbers, and he did get robbed — they took his lamp at one point).

He says we can realize that people are doing the wrong things even deliberately and knowingly, because on some level they're in error. They're mixed up. They don't know what's actually good for human beings. This this helps overcome the objection of saying: '“Well what about the person who's mean to me, and they know they're being mean to me?” Well, on some level they're screwed up. They've got the conception that the best thing in life is to be a mean person to other people and if you see them that way, it doesn't mean that what they do isn't bad or wrong.

But you can be like: '“Oh you poor bastard” (you obviously don't say this to them, but you can have that in your head and be like: “Oh you screwed up hot mess of a human being, no wonder you're doing stupid things like this to me, that I don't like.” But then you won't get as angry at them. You can feel compassion, as Epictetus says, which is usually translated as “pity” (but I think passion is a better translation).

So how would we use these with with clients? Here we go. We can talk about these different practices, and there's many many more, but there's other things that are distinctive to philosophical counseling that you know, all you heard about from the training sessions very early on. Bibliotherapy is one of them. You have your clients actually, if they're willing to do it, read some passages, or perhaps even read entire books. Plutarch’s On Controlling Anger is quite short, and most of it is germane. A little bit of it is ancient culture that doesn't have much to do with our lives, but most of it is is pretty on point

You can also spend a lot of time — and this is something you do dialogically — examining and evaluating assumptions that contribute to responses of anger, or are built into thought-processes you can unpack. This is that cognitive aspect.

And what we can do, again to go back to that making distinctions. We don't have to tell our clients: Oh, your thought processes are just completely degenerate and damaged. Get rid of them altogether!” We can say: ‘Okay, so you know this idea that you've got over here, it's not completely wrong, but you're misapplying it. You've had some bad experiences, and those are bad experiences, and there are bad people who will keep doing that to you (say in the workplace), but not everybody's doing that. So maybe you need to qualify, maybe you need to make distinctions, right?”

Narrating and discussing the clients’ dynamics that are pertaining to anger, or if you're doing consulting with a group, maybe observing their their processes with each other and saying: “Aha! Somebody's starting to get hot over here. Let's figure out what's going on.” Is it an argument over moral qualities? Does somebody feel slighted, rightly or wrongly? Are there some crazy ideas, some kenai doxai, empty opinions that are floating around over here that are causing lots and lots of tension for people learning how to distinguish between legitimate feelings and responses of anger and more problematic ones. I think this is really helpful.

We can't just say things like: “Well anytime you get angry, it's a bad thing,” like the stoics think. I think we we want to be able to have some criteria to provide about when being angry makes sense. But then we also have to say: “Okay it makes sense to go this far, but not further with it.”

And then understanding how to deal with other people's anger, this is also incredibly important, because anger tends to provoke other emotions in response including anger. “Who are you to get upset with me?” But also fear. If people have a background where they've been abused, exploited, prevented from expressing their own anger, seeing other people getting angry might bring all sorts of negative feelings back up that then they have to deal with. So understanding why people are angry, and whether they're legitimately angry, or angry over things that they shouldn't be, and then determining what you want to do in response, that could be something that we deal with in philosophical counseling.

I think the last part about that is it's very important to stress to our clients that there aren't any silver bullets when it comes to anger. When people get angry and they're having problems with anger, just like any other issue, it's not going to be that they've just got one mistake in this assumption, in their head like a switch that can be flipped. There's going to be a whole complex of things that you kind of have to work at bit by bit. And this is why the ancient philosophers talked in terms of askesis or discipline, the need to rework oneself.

So I'm going to close by bringing up — I mean it wouldn't be a a good APPA presentation if we didn't do at least one short case study right? — so I'm going to bring up one that's a little bit unusual. Most of my clients that come to me to work on anger, it's because they're they're really screwing up. They've managed to alienate some people, or lose a job, or a relationship has been damaged.

I had a person who came to me when I was doing executive coaching. He was a Chief Information Officer in a really big company, and he said that he had anger problems. His anger problems were of a different order. He would go into these meetings with these other C-suite executives, and they're all kind of type-A personalities razzing each other, trying to jockey for position. He was perhaps a little less so. He seemed to be a fairly reasonable person. And t(a few people in there, not everybody) they would they would get him rattled, and he would find that he didn't perform (this is his words) as adequately as he wanted to. He wasn't presenting the information as well as he could, and he had a limited time frame in which to talk too, so he didn't want to be spending too much of it responding to these these people being jerks to him

I said: “Well you're actually doing really well, but we can work on this.” So I suggested to him a very common practice that many of you probably know about, coming from the Stoics that we sometimes call “negative visualization” or “premeditation of adversity,” where you spend a bit of time before you get into something that you find disturbing, or bothersome, or scary, and you think about it. What what would this be like?

I told him: “Okay, so spend three minutes before you go into the meeting in your office just thinking about these few people and the things they're likely to say to you. And just think about whether you can deal deal with this. It will help kind of inoculate you against it.” He found that useful. There was a success story with this, albeit this is kind of the proverbial “shooting fish in a barrel” right? It's not dealing with much more difficult things, where people are actually shouting at each other and red in the face. But it worked for this guy.

So that's that's just one example of how this could be helpful. I see that I'm getting short on time I'm already bleeding over into the Q&A so I'll just wrap up there and we can discuss. You can ask questions if you want. But I'm happy to turn it over to side conversation if you'd like to do that sort of thing.

Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.