Righteous Anger

[robinturner]

Something I see a lot of on LJ (and in the real world, for that matter) is the circular equation "I am right therefore I am angry; I am angry therefore I am right." I blame the Old Testament prophets and recommend a strong dose of Hellenistic philosophy.

Comments

[vret.livejournal.com]

I don't know much about Hellenistic philosophy, apart from Agamemnon's entry in Viz. "Murder one of your daughters every time you get on a ship to ensure that nothing bad happens on the voyage - works for me every time".

[ironed_orchid]

Nice diagnosis, even better treatment.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

When I think of Hellenism, I think of Neoplatonism, but that's not all that relevant - I suppose the Stoics and Epicureans and such were then too, though. I don't know what the Epicureans thought about strong emotions, but I have the impression that the Stoics found them a troublesome distraction, rather than a useful source of information about what's relevant and, in anger's case, of energy to address the situation.

Since anger is basically the emotion that tells us there's an "ought to be fixable" discrepancy between how things are and how things "ought to be," I suppose there's a lot of room for people to exercise their sense of what's right, or to conclude that because they're angry, something must be wrong. The question then is whether it's really "wrong" or just seems that way due to narrowness of perspectives.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I was thinking in particular of the Stoics, but most philosophers at that time had a downer on anger. (The Peripatetics, following Aristotle, had the most lenient view, claiming that moderate anger was OK.) Anger was seen as both a result and a cause of a lack of practical wisdom (phronesis) and self-control (sophrosune).

Your comment about "oughts" is perceptive. The Stoic view (and following in its footsteps, Rational Emotive Therapy) is that what ought to happen is exactly what does happen, and we are foolish to rail against it. From a linguistic point of view, I think the problem is that we habitually confuse deontic "oughts" (e.g. "You ought to study semantics") with epistemic "oughts" (e.g. "The potatoes ought to be done by now"), but that's another story ...

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

Valuing self-control is a big improvement over the much earlier attitude of following anger's impulses heedlessly, given that that led (at least in literature) to considerable violence often from misunderstandings. Suppose, though, that a close friend appears to have violated trust. If one couples the energy from anger with the restraint of self-control, one would pursue the situation to its logical end, arguing it out with the friend until it's clear that one had misunderstood the situation, or the friendship needs a new agreement on mutual norms, or (occasionally) that one has misplaced one's trust. If all that energy is defused so that the argument doesn't happen and one heads straight into Stoic acceptance that "it was meant to happen," there's no room for discovering errors or renegotiating the norms of the friendship - instead, one goes directly into withdrawing from the friendship or retaining the friendship at the price of devaluing one's own beliefs and standards.

So I wonder, is that what Stoics do? Or do they perhaps have a different name for restrained-and-rational anger vs. wild-and-impulsive anger and cautiously accept the former?

[solri.livejournal.com]

The Stoic view is that anger, like the other patheia, needs to be eradicated entirely. On the other hand, they do have a class of emotions (or at least emotion-like states) called eupatheia. There's no direct correlate of anger as far as I know, but they see anger as a kind of sub-vice of desire (epithumia - better translated as "craving" IMHO). In other words they see anger as a strong desire for something bad to happen to someone that we think has wronged us. The eupathos corresponding to epithumia is boulesis, or "wish", so presumably there is a subcategory or wish which corresponds to anger, presumably a wish that the offending person change their ways.

While Stoics are not supposed to get angry, they are sometimes allowed to act forcefully. If your friend betrays your trust, you can bang their head against the wall as many times as it takes to drive the message home, so long as you don't lose your temper while you are doing it. OK, that's a caricature, but you get the point.

Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy elaborates on the stoic model of the emotions by allowing an intermediate state between the patheia and the eupatheia which they term "negative rational emotions". This includes annoyance in place of anger, sadness instead of grief, and so forth. This is reminiscent of Aristotelean doctrine, but with the important difference that the emotions differ qualitatively as well as quantitatively. Albert Ellis said something to the effect that a ton of annoyance still doesn't equal an ounce of anger.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

Interesting - it's easy to get caught up in being chronically annoyed, though, whereas anger is more decisive and ebbs away once the situation is resolved. I think I'd rather be usually cheerful, punctuated by strong but transient bits of negativity, than chronically irritated or depressed.