Taming Anger: The Hellenic Approach to the Limitations of Reason 9781472555762, 9780715640791, 9781472504432

Citation preview

To Evan and Kostas

vii

Acknowledgements I am indebted to Professor Peter Hadreas and an anonymous scholar who reviewed an early draft of the manuscript. Most of all, I wish to express my thanks to Deborah Blake, the editor at Bloomsbury, for supporting the publication of this work.

viii

And we may state without any qualification that, contrary to the opinion of other (moralists), it is not Rational Principle (logos) which originally points the way to Virtue, but rather the passions (ta pathê). First of all, there must needs arise (as we know there actually does) an unreasoning impulse towards what is noble and good; afterwards, Principle must give its vote and verdict (on the suggested act). This is seen in the case of children and other unreasoning beings. In them there arise first unreasoning impulses (hormên alogon) of the passions towards noble aims; not till afterwards does Principle supervene, and by its approving vote bring about the performance of noble actions. On the other hand where Principle originally points to noble ends, the passions by no means (always) follow their assent; often they oppose it. Wherefore passion (to pathos), if in right condition, has more claim than Principle (logos) to be the original motive force which inclines one to Virtue. Aristotle, Magna Moralia 2.7.30.4-31.9, tr. Armstrong (Loeb) [In matters of conduct] the principle is the ‘that’ [i.e. the correctness of the action] and if this be sufficiently apparent, there will be no need in addition to search for the ‘why’ because a person [who has been nurtured well] has, or could easily acquire, these principles. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1095b7-10 [T]he irrational part of the soul is prior [in time] to the rational. And this is shown by the fact that emotion, willing, and desire occur in children immediately from the time of birth, whereas by nature reasoning and the mind mature later in life. Hence, the care of the body necessarily precedes the care of the soul and the training of appetite precedes that of reason. Aristotle, Politics 1334b21-8 In the long hours of the night I have pondered over the causes that bring ruin to the lives of mortals. And it seems that they don’t do evil because their reason by nature is faulty, for many reason rightly. Consider this: We know the good, we understand it, but we do not practise it. Some out of laziness, and others because of pleasure instead of virtue. Euripides, Hippolytus 373-83

ix

Introduction The central argument This is a book about Greek philosophical inquiries into anger. The central conclusion of the study is that the Greek philosophers who studied the subject put very little confidence in reason’s ability to achieve command over this volatile passion. Though it is true that every Greek thinker of the classical age believed that reason should rule over the passions, they emphasised reason’s limited resources to withstand the force of this emotion. Plato and Aristotle went even further to explore how anger, of all the emotions, can aggressively subvert the mind’s functioning even as it uses reason to justify itself. Rather than hiding from the weakness of reason in the face of the passions, the Greeks tried to understand how this weakness could be overcome. Ultimately they came to the conclusion that what was required was political and cultural nurturing of citizens, especially its infant citizens-to-be. Art especially was the great ally of the legislator since poetry and music could go deep into the psyche and reach into the youth’s impulses. But the story of taming anger goes beyond the anger itself. Anger was part of a larger power, the thumos, which they conceived as the source of honour, striving and motivation, and social bonding. Anger and friendship, according to Aristotle, are derived from this common source. Thus the taming of anger was positively conceived as requiring the development of a character type capable of recognising and expanding the borders of friendship so that citizens might caringly share with others, as friends, in a common destiny. Contrast to prevailing interpretations of the Greeks on anger The thesis of the book comes into sharp contrast with prevailing interpretations of the writings of the Greeks on anger on several issues. The present study rejects: (1) The view that Greeks and Aristotle especially were the forerunners

1

Introduction of the cognitive theory of the emotions that anger is controlled exclusively or even primarily by thoughts and beliefs. (2) The view that the anger studied by the Greeks of the classical period was something wholly or partially different from the anger that we experience as an emotion. (3) The view that the paradigm for understanding the problems of anger in the West is based on a Hellenic legacy. The second point rests on the claim that cultures are discontinuous. In works of this variety one finds traces of the theories of Michel Foucault; so that anger is a ‘discursive object’, a product of a ‘discourse’ about punishment and honour. This ancient Greek discourse is said to have ordered their experience, so whatever their anger was, it was peculiar to them and is discontinuous with whatever we would call anger. Since anger is ‘designated’ through such contextual discourses, one must peer into the ‘language’ that the Greek ‘actors’ used as they moved through public and private ‘spaces’, using ‘verbal formulations’ to express ‘power’, partaking in strategies, with thrusts and counterthrusts, one arguing for a punishment to restore their lost honour and another putting up a defence to prevent the loss of theirs. Anger is hardly a thing; it is a construct.1 Following in the foosteps of Foucault, Derrida and the post-modernists, who hubristically proclaimed the ‘death of man’ and the non-existence of human nature, it was only natural that their followers would see anger in this light as well. Given the purported discontinuities of cultures, bringing to light the hidden logic of the actors participating in the discourse requires that one cut into the manifold practices of the period and then reassemble the pieces into a coherent narrative. In turn, the narrative promises to reveal how the discourse exerted normative control over the conduct and actions of those engaged in it. The technique has its dangers and inherent contradictions, which have been pointed out by many critics. The person digging and cutting into the past is, necessarily, according to the premises of this method, a captive of her or his own contemporary biases and the discourses which they entail. Secondly, the data from the historical period in question will have to be interpreted in a way that will bring to light the ‘discursive formation’ of the past. But the only proof of this formation is the coherent narrative itself. The coherence of the narrative justifies itself and this necessarily makes its findings irrefutable – a sure sign of the method’s arbitrary nature. Problematic signs of this methodology are that whatever is pieced together will necessarily be prone to illicit generalisations and a propensity to connect the data in ways to suit the thesis. The interpreters become entangled in the subjectivism of their very method.

2

Introduction The present work does not share the view of classicists and scholars who examine the writings of the ancient Greek thinkers through the lenses of cultural specificity and who claim that what the Greeks experienced as anger does not correspond to the modern experience. As stated by two contemporary scholars of ancient writings on the emotions: ‘there is no reason to assume that the ... emotion that they represent and that we tend to experience as inherent in human nature are actually universal’ (Muellner 1996: 1); ‘there is reason to think that the ancient Greek concept [of anger] is in fact significantly different from the modern’ (Konstan 2006: 41). A noted scholar, Douglas Cairns, has given the following response to this school of thought: (1) cultures exhibit ‘points of overlap that make them mutually intelligible’, and (2) all cultures are formed by humans who have evolved through natural selection to a common biology that is independent of social constructs. His conclusion is that the ‘possibility for dialogue between ancient cultures and our own exists; we must attempt it in a way which avoids both the naïve assumption of shared humanity and unsuccessful strategies of alienation’. The present book accepts Cairns’ point of view while embracing, in a certain way, the ‘naïve assumption of shared humanity’. Let me explain. What Aristotle analysed in his De Anima, Ethics, Politics and Rhetoric and Plato in his Republic and elsewhere, was anger, not of the Athenian or Spartan, but anger qua human. Furthermore, the methods by which they arrived at their conclusions are not shrouded in the mystery of their culture, but are subject, even today, to critical evaluation. Once Homer placed anger in a framework that accounted for its nature and made public the societal contexts in which it took shape, he made it possible to examine his framework objectively, apart from its specific context. His descriptions of the passions became part of the human intellectual inheritance that could be shared across all cultural boundaries. The subsequent descriptions and analyses of anger by the philosophers transcend the limitations of their own culture because they fall within the category of what Aristotle calls ‘active mind’. This is reliable knowledge of the actualities of the world, with reflection occurring both with respect to the subject matter and to the tools that the mind uses in order to arrive at these conclusions. Of course, reflections on the moulding of psychological powers are always subject to the influences of their cultures, but human nous has the power to explore human nature and to arrive at conclusions about those powers that get a grasp of the truth, even if sometimes primitive or incomplete. Homeric descriptions of a hero’s thumos or cholos are the first steps to understanding human anger and not simply names for the anger of the Greeks of a bygone age.

3

Introduction Outline of the book In this book I aim to (1) elucidate the framework within which the Greeks studied anger, (2) analyse the writings of Plato and Aristotle regarding their concepts of anger and the ways in which it might be tamed; and (3) render a brief account of the framework’s transformation and destruction during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Chapter 1 explores the framework for conceptualising and dramatising anger which Homer passed on to Greek society. Chapter 2 deals with the transition from the poets to the abstract philosophical analyses that sought to uncover anger’s causes. Chapter 3 traces Plato’s writings on anger. Here the inquiry branches out from anger to a broader inquiry into the nature of the thumos. Plato, following Homer’s lead, places anger in the thumos and therefore holds that anger’s functions were necessarily correlated to its thumotic container. The proper function of anger and its aberrant expressions are elaborated. Chapter 4 focuses on a central issue, the education of anger and the thumos. If anger can indeed be trained or educated, what is the nature of this education? Plato’s proposal for pre-cognitive, aesthetic-based ethical nurturing is presented. The chapter ends with a summary of lingering problems that left many aspects of anger unresolved. Chapter 5 analyses Aristotle’s definition of anger. The thesis is that Aristotle developed a process view of anger which allowed him to account for all of anger’s phases and the role of the psychological powers that were engaged in these phases. By studying each one of anger’s phases, from arousal to retribution, Aristotle was able to give an account of anger’s association to the body, to pleasure and pain, to cognition, and to the synergies between these. Chapter 6 studies Aristotle’s definition of the ‘gentle’ character type that possesses virtuous anger. The question examined is how a person might reform their anger so as to acquire this virtue. Chapter 7 examines the outer limits of anger whereby anger is transformed into hatred. Aristotle’s thoughts on hatred are analysed with references to Sophocles’ tragedy Philoktetes, a play about overcoming hatred in a hopelessly divided society. The final chapter surveys the replacement of the Homeric framework with the paradigm of the Scriptures, the ‘wrath of God’, providing evidence for this transformation and describing the paradigm which was bequeathed to modernity. Please note that all quoted translations from the Greek, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

4

1

The Homeric Framework A logical kernel for understanding anger Every society, even those of social animals, must control the anger of its members lest it face dissolution. While anger is necessary for self-defence and no society can afford to eradicate it without eradicating itself, when it is expressed without measure, especially in public life, it presages calamitous results. The pains anger causes are not easily forgiven or forgotten. The Greeks systematically studied anger over a long period of time and one might say that its taming remained a constant cultural enterprise, from the time of Homer to the end of the Greek polis system, a period stretching from around the ninth century to the late fourth century BCE. We should recall that the opening word of Homer’s Iliad, the first book of Western civilisation that has come down to us, is mênin, ‘rage’, the rage of Achilles. Given the social role of the poet during early antiquity, as a teacher of crystallised communal wisdom, it is safe to assume that the pervasive theme of anger in poetry is evidence of a shared effort to understand it, to harness its energy, and to contain its negative eruptions. If this is so then it suggests that the illumination of anger was a cultural project embedded within the very core of their culture. The long road that led to an understanding of anger begins with Homer. In order for anger to be dramatised it requires a framework within which it can be portrayed at the time that it is being aroused or quelled; where the inner conflicts are brought to life with heroes ruminating on the causes of their anger and pondering within themselves as to how to express it in action. The psychological parts of the inner self that are engaged in the conflict or come together in harmony had to be identified, and their interactions elaborated. Anger is not something which simply waits for the will to put it into action. Its operation is intertwined with diverse psychological and bodily powers. To begin with, cholos, the most frequent word for anger in Homer, is often located in the spirit (thumos), which itself is located in the phrenes, where deliberations occur when the right choice for action is not clear; at other times anger engages the heart (kradiê) or the mind (noos) or it may involve bile. Anger is always tied to the eyes, the feet, the heart and other internal organs, and with pleasure and pain. These

5

Taming Anger elements come into a steady relationship and determine that which later thinkers will call the êthos (character) or the tropos of a hero. Achilles’ thumos and his destructive anger are not related correctly to his thinking element, his phrenes. The originality of this approach to anger is hard to convey. However, if we turn to the neighbouring civilisations of the East and to how they perceived anger then perhaps the path that the Greeks opened for the exploration of anger may become clearer. In Homer’s work the framework that dramatised anger required a rudimentary but complex psychology. In the neighbouring civilisations the exploration of anger was not possible, primarily for religious reasons. In Mesopotamia, for example, anger was elevated to a cosmic principle that restored order whenever the perennial nature of things was disturbed or violated. Among Semitic peoples, God’s wrath was associated with providence, whereby God’s anger was a manifestation of his love and care for his chosen people. God’s anger, being an extension of his will, is unknowable, beyond comprehension, and not subject to inquiry. Anger’s divine status is evidenced in the ninth-century BCE Moab stele which records the words of the Phoenician King Mesha paying homage to the wrath of Chemosh for liberating the Moab people from Israel. The Moabs suffered this oppression due to the wrath of their own god Chemosh, for ‘Chemosh was angry at his land’. For some unknown reason Chemosh’s wrath was assuaged against his people and redirected against Israel (Albright et al. 1955: 320): And Chemosh said to me, ‘Go, take Nebo against Israel. So I went by night and fought against it from the break of dawn until noon, taking and slaying all ... for I had devoted them to destruction for ... Chemosh. And I took from there [the vessels] of Yahweh, dragging them before Chemosh. And the king of Israel had built Jahaz and he dwelt there while he was fighting against me, but Chemosh drove him out.

Chemosh’s wrath, working through his servant, the Phoenician King Mesha, subdues the wrath of Yahweh. King Mesha takes the vessels of Yahweh and brings them to his victorious God, a gesture indicating that Yahweh’s wrath has been rendered impotent. The power of God is inseparable from his wrath. An irrepressible anger of such cosmic force is an anger to be obeyed. The Hebrew Bible reports that failure to obey God’s will, whatever that will may be, is a defiance that may provoke a horrible and irremediable punishment. Even when the reasons for God’s anger are whimsical and impossible to fathom, as when the Lord strikes down 70 men of Beth-shemesh because they looked into the Ark (1 Samuel 6.19), one must unquestioningly accept the inherent goodness of God’s wrath.

6

1. The Homeric Framework Homer describes Achilles’ anger from within a completely different framework. Achilles’ mênis, the word Homer uses for his awesome rage in the opening line of the Iliad, is not a mysterious impersonal cosmic force that will ultimately set matters aright in the universe or society. The view of one scholar that mênis ‘is not just a term for an emotional state’, but rather ‘a sanction meant to guarantee and maintain the integrity of the world order’, places Achilles’ wrath in the wrong cultural framework (Muellner 1996: 26). This view of anger as something divine, a taboo existing apart from human nature and its complicated psychology, conceives of Achilles’ wrath as a righteous instantiation of a divine and cosmic power.1 Such a divinely righteous anger that functions to fulfil some divine will is not to be found in any of the writings during this period and will make its first appearance around the first century BCE, and then only from Eastern intellectuals writing in Greek. In Homer the gods and heroes get angry, but never with an anger that is inherently just or providential. We are always dealing with the anger of Apollo, of Zeus, of Hera, of Poseidon, and like human anger it is usually aroused because of insults to honour. Their anger, like human anger, is often flawed and out of control. Hera is enraged at Paris because he awarded the prize for beauty to Aphrodite rather than to her. When Zeus takes Hera to task for the perversity of her craving for revenge against the Trojans there is no hint that he perceives her anger to be divine or righteous (Il. 4.31-36, tr. Fagles): Insatiable Hera! How great are the pains that Priam and Priam’s sons have heaped on you that you rage on, relentless, forever bent on razing the well-built heights of Troy? Only if you could breach their gates and their long walls and devour Priam and Priam’s sons and the Trojan armies raw – then you just might cure your rage at last.

Hera’s rage will be extinguished only when she devours the Trojans. Her unbounded anger can only be satiated in an act of cannibalism. As disturbing as these lines may be, they indicate the complete absence of any taboo regarding inquiry into anger. Zeus’ chastisement of Hera shows that the anger of the gods is not a cosmic force providentially caring for the affairs of humankind. Hera’s anger in its irrationality differs from human anger only in that hers, coming as it does from a goddess, greatly surpasses its human counterpart in intensity and scope. We see this later when Hector’s mother, Hecabe, witnessing the defilement of her son’s corpse by Achilles, prays for the same type of blood-curdling revenge (Il. 24.212-14, tr. Fagles):

7

Taming Anger ... Oh would to god that I could sink my teeth in his [Achilles’] liver, eat him raw! That would avenge what he has done to Hector

Underlying these irrational cravings for revenge is a logical kernel that makes the anger of both gods and men susceptible to analysis and evaluation. In each case anger is aroused from slights that diminish someone’s honour. Honour as a measure of worth refers to a socially recognised standard; damages to it can be evaluated so that the recompense may be proportionate to the offence. Also an apology can be made so that revenge might be averted. Anger can be publicly evaluated and like the rest of nature can reveal her secrets to human inquiry. When an angry Apollo sends a plague to punish the Achaeans, Achilles summons the army’s leaders to a public assembly asking whether the cause might lie in some failure to sacrifice. The search is for some offending action, for the gods, just like humans, are angered when slighted, and happy when honoured. We notice here another significant difference from the beliefs of their neighbouring civilisations. Unlike Job who, suffering a mysterious punishment makes offerings, wondering whether his sons committed sins in their minds against God, the Greeks will only scan deeds since it is their actions that cause offence. They will not enter into any discourse with the god, for his anger is not tied to any love or care for the Achaeans or for humankind in general. The discovery of the causes of the wrath is possible because the event that ignited it, the people towards whom it is aimed, and its purpose and punishment are all logically connected to honour (timê). Honour is a public standard that allows both the punishment being inflicted and the recompense being offered to be evaluated. The Achaeans in their public assembly survey the facts that pertain to Apollo’s dishonouring and decide to make amends to Apollo’s priest by returning his daughter whom they held captive, thus restoring honour to the god and prompting him to remove the affliction. In the emerging polis honour was the mark of a free and equal citizen whose socially recognised worth allowed him to participate in the commons. One could not be treated as a means, as a mere pawn. Citizens were endowed with worth, and it is significant that the Greek word for ‘worth’, ‘price’, ‘value’, ‘valuation’, is timê, the same word as for honour. The dissatisfaction and anger of normal people became an important factor in public deliberations. Citizens, as bearers of honour, participated in institutions through which events with far ranging impact could be deliberated upon so that the interests of all participants might be taken into consideration. That the source of one’s honour was the polis is evidenced in the fact that positions of political authority,

8

1. The Homeric Framework such as magistrates, came to be known as ‘honours’ while disenfranchisement and loss of political rights was called ‘dishonouring’ (atimia). To be without honour was to be an outcast or a slave, powerless to affect anything in one’s life. Achilles’ greatest grievance is that he was treated like a ‘foreigner without honour’ (Il. 9.648). Even the gods between themselves are angered over the misappropriation of honours. Poseidon denounces Zeus for trying to order him about, even though by birthright he has equal honour (homotimon, Il. 15.186) and an equal lot (isomoron, Il. 15.209). The heroes interact within public settings where their views on great matters are taken seriously. The only warrior in the Iliad who is given short shrift is Thersites, a person whose worth and stature are far below his puffed up pretension. The role of honour in regulating relations between citizens helps to explain why anger, of all the passions, received such special attention. If, as Aristotle was to state, anger results from a perceived slight, then it must follow that a society composed of equals had to develop norms of conduct that would inhibit systemic violations to a person’s worth. The Greeks learned that in an association of free and equal citizens poor conduct towards another was not just an offence, but an injustice. This was to be given abstract expression centuries later by Aristotle who spoke of the virtues as ‘universal justice’ (EN 1129b25-27). Diminution of a citizen’s worth was an injustice and had to be taken seriously because affronts could instigate turmoil in ways that were not possible in despotic regimes.2 Though the logical kernel for the understanding of anger is honour, this does not mean that anger is transacted through rational exchanges involving quantifiable goods that measure honour. This view, which was popularised by Adkins (1969) and repeated by others, presented the heroes as engaged in calculated strivings to secure objects or enforce principles that would enhance their stature. Conflicts over honour are explained as calculated power games between rivals, with each hero affirming or contesting social conventions ‘in which rank is under constant negotiation and in which elite warriors try to establish status in relation to one another through agonistic exchange’ (Wilson 2002: 5). Heroes indeed strive for honour but one can hardly conclude that they do so with a mercantile-like rational calculation. Their psychological world is one where reason and calculation are usually clouded because of the passions throbbing in their chests, their hearts and their thumos. The external goods being quarrelled over when honour is at stake mirror the internal turbulence of the heroes regarding their sense of identity rather than the logical operations of accountant warriors engaged in an emotional calculus of power. Let us take the example of Agamemnon. When he hears Apollo’s

9

Taming Anger priest plead for his daughter’s return, Agamemnon is not ‘happy in his thumos’ (Il. 1.24). The prospect that he, the king of the allied army, should return his war trophy causes a dark storm to brew in his thumos. He is not angry because the return of his war prize would actually diminish his power, for we can imagine other kings, such as Odysseus, readily acceding to such a demand. His anger stems from a character flaw which makes him insecure with the power he holds. During the assembly, when he rises to speak in response to the seer’s proposal, he is achnumenos, a word connoting a grievous mental pain, so that his ‘great phrenes’, ‘are filled with rage’ bringing ‘darkness on all sides’ and his eyes are ‘glowing with blazing fire’ (Il. 1.103-4). The phrenes, in which his deliberation is taking place, are shrouded in darkness: a bad condition for making a sound decision; he has been wounded by a speech which places the responsibility for the plague on his shoulders and he is too weak internally to accept blame in public. His inner worth is tied to his vision of himself as a king superior to those he commands, but he is not so secure with this vision. The less one is truly what one aspires to be, the greater the propensity to feeling slight. His anger cannot be explained by his desire to enforce social conventions or rigid rules of conduct that favour his dominance. The sorting out of what is an affront and how to respond to it are occurring in his phrenes, but these are suffering from the pains that are pushing anger in his thumos to actions which he will regret. He will later admit in public that he was under the influence of Atê, the goddess of mindlessness, an outcome that cannot be explained by theories of honour-based tit-for-tat transactions. The polis could ill afford Achilles-like angers within its citizenry. The danger lurking in every polis was that those enraged at being dishonoured might withdraw from the commons or seek revenge against it. The citizen armies of the polis fought shoulder to shoulder in phalanx formations. And in the cities themselves, the fragile legal framework rested on the cooperative disposition of its citizenry rather than on the coercion of an impersonal state. Failure to control anger’s outbreaks in the public sphere and to restrain its private eruptions in the household was taken as a sign of societal dissolution. This striving to avert anger or heal it in order to achieve a harmonious community permeates the Iliad. The wizened King Nestor, at a moment when a new eruption of anger breaks out between Diomedes and Agamemnon, one which, had it escalated further, would have dissolved the tottering army, warns the assembled Achaeans with words that will become a political ideal for the emerging polis: ‘Without clan, lawless, without a home is the person who desires horrible fratricidal war’ (Il. 9.63-4).

10

1. The Homeric Framework The preconditions to acting well A way to access the psychological framework that Homer bequeathed to the Greek world is to ask the question: how might a hero express his anger well? What are some of the internal psychological traits for the expression of anger to be considered good? In Homer’s world a pervasive condition for acting well is that one must be able to think aright. The way Homer puts it is that a person must have ‘firm phrenes’. Paris’ phrenes, states his wife Helen, are not ‘steadfast ... nor will they ever be’, ‘he will suffer the consequences’, by which she means that evil will befall him (Il. 6.352). The phrenes of young people, says Menelaos, ‘fly in the air’ and therefore cannot be trusted when it comes to oath taking (Il. 23.103-4). The noos, another seat of reasoning, also suffers from unsteady conditions; young Nestor’s son, Antilochos, will say that the noos of youth is ‘hasty’ and subject to ‘transgression’, a good explanation for his hair-raising recklessness during the chariot race. The phrenes is an organ that is used, in part, for pondering over courses of action when solutions are not clear. When Zeus thinks about how he will turn events so as to honour Achilles, he ponders this matter in his phrenes. Turmoil in one’s phrenes, a heaving about within, is disastrous. To be aphrôn, ‘without phrenes’, is to act foolishly. To say that the gods have destroyed or taken away one’s phrenes is to assert, rightly or wrongly, that someone is speaking or acting like a fool. Heroes refute their opponents in debate by claiming that their phrenes have been taken away or ruined: Achilles says of Agamemnon that Zeus ‘has taken away his phrenes’ (Il. 9.377); Paris angrily responds to Antenor charging ‘that the gods have destroyed your phrenes’ and Hector rejects Poludamas’ wise advice that the army retreat, saying that the ‘gods have brought ruin to your phrenes’ (Il. 7.360; 12.234). To have good phrenes is related to one’s character. One’s phrenes are not independent of the hero or heroine and they never serve as a pliable receptacle through which the gods or chance might suddenly make a person wise. If they are to function well they must be flexible, open to persuasion, yet resolved to remain committed to noble action. Phoenix tells Achilles to subdue his anger. Even the gods who ‘have greater virtue, honour and strength’ can change their minds; ‘the phrenes of the good person’, Iris tells Poseidon, ‘may be changed’ (Il. 15.203), but Achilles’ phrenes ‘are not just’, because his noêma, a thinking entity in his breast, ‘cannot be bent’. The problems of the thumos We should note here that Homer has a variegated vocabulary for different types of anger. The most frequent word is cholos (bile), which

11

Taming Anger occurs from humiliation and is also roused in battle against enemies; there is kotos, a sometimes enduring anger which when swallowed becomes a grudge that comes to its end in a future vengeful action; there is harsh anger (chalepainô), anger born of frustration (octheô), socially mandated anger (nemesaô) in response to contempt for community values that should have restrained a person’s conduct; there is mênis whose consequences and scope are awesome; and there are others such as skudmainô, odussomai, skuzomai. To pursue what these anger words connote is well beyond the scope of this book. In this study we are primarily concerned with the framework which made anger comprehensible and not all the shades of anger’s meanings (for this see Harris 2001). Towards this end it is more important to discern how the Homeric framework created a foundation for comprehending anger’s relationship to the other psychological powers which make anger’s functioning possible. For this reason we have to take up an analysis of the thumos, which in Homer is often the receptacle for anger. Homeric thumos is the source of life and energy and is thus often translated as ‘spirit’ to convey this power. Often the translations will state that a person or a hero ‘dies’ when in the original what is stated is that their thumos has expired. When Achilles fumes that Agamemnon will ‘soon pay for his arrogance with his life’ (tr. Fagles), what he says literally is that Agamemnon ‘will lose his thumos’.3 Loss of thumos is synonymous with death: sacrificial sheep as they die are ‘wanting in their thumos’ (Il. 3.294) and when Patroklos rams his spear into Thestor, killing him, Homer states that Thestor’s thumos ‘went away’. Plato derives thumos from thusis (Cratylus 419e1-2), which means ‘raging’, and which itself is derived from the verb thuô, meaning to ‘rage’ or ‘seethe’, usually used of the sea, of raging swollen rivers, or of persons in psychological upheaval (Caswell 1990: 51). The word is also the root for thuella, which means ‘storm’ or ‘hurricane’. The root word thuô is related to a cluster of words involving or suggesting burning, such as sacrifice (thusia), indicating that it may have been connected to ‘smoke’ or to ‘breathe’. The root of thumos is suggestive of its double-edged quality. On the one hand, it is a source of somatic and psychological energy for action; it is essential to the life of all animals. On the other hand, to the extent that its drive must be contained so that alternatives for action might be logically surveyed, the turbulence of the thumos threatens to undo the firmness of the phrenes. Caswell, in her study of Homeric thumos, puts the relationship in this way: ‘When the thumos is not contained in the phrenes, the intellectual function is impaired and the emotion is uncontrollable’ (1990: 50). The relationship between the two is ‘one of contained to container’. The problem of the Greeks will always be one of containment and harnessing. One does not find in their

12

1. The Homeric Framework writings the aim of getting rid of the thumos or any of the emotions. Such a prospect would have been viewed as unnatural and altogether impossible. The thumos predisposes a person’s conduct so that epithets such as ‘iron-like’, ‘lion-like’, ‘flighty’, ‘arrogant’ carry causal connotations that predict how a person will act. Homeric thumos etches its qualities into the person that possesses it. Thersites, a character who is treated with contempt, has a ‘brash’ thumos, a trait that will earn him universal disdain (Il. 2.276). Agamemnon’s thumos is ‘proud’ and ‘overbearing’ a quality that pushes him to act impulsively and with undue harshness to ward off threats to his stature. Achilles’ thumos is ‘savage’, ‘violent’, ‘iron-like’ and this shows up in the way he vents his anger (Il. 9.109; 9. 629; 18.262; 22.357). The qualification of thumos posits, in an incipient way, the notion of an internal suite of mental powers that have been moulded into a unity, so that a person’s conduct is an outcome of these forged traits. Since the thumos is viewed from within a cluster of relationships to other mental powers, a foundation is laid for inquiry into how these thumos-affected states come to form a character. Already it can be seen that what makes the thumos good or bad is the relationship of the thumos, and the passions that often reside within it, to the phrenes, or more generally to one’s thinking element. Whatever independence one’s thumos may have, for sometimes heroes address their thumos as if it was an independent entity within them, they are not its helpless captives. Every person can exert control over it. Its correct functioning is not due to the chance of the moment nor is it hereditary. It seems thumos can be sculpted. Hector’s thumos, for instance, puts him in the front ranks; it will not allow him to fight in the rear or behind the city’s walls because he has learned to be courageous (Il. 6.444). Achilles, on the other hand, declares that comrades who witnessed him during the period of his unrelenting rage must have thought that he was nurtured on cholos, on bile. Implied is the notion that the thumos can be nurtured to become a certain type. If the thumos and anger are indeed subject to some type of learning that can affect character formation, then the doors are open for consideration of the ways to achieve enlightened nurturing. Pleasure and pain add another factor that makes it difficult to bring the thumos and the passions under control. The pleasures and pains are present in the thumos, they operate in the phrenes, they accompany the passions and they are felt in the body. Unlike many modern theories of passions where pleasure and pain are thrown into an amorphous mix of feelings, Homer separates them out from the emotions as such. They are distributed throughout all the psychological and bodily powers that have some bearing on action. When Apollo hears the

13

Taming Anger hymns that are sung in his honour, he is glad in his phrenes; mules, when weary from the pains of hard labour, feel fatigue in their thumos (Il. 1.474; 17.744). To know anger one has to take its attendant pleasure and pain into account, especially since these occur at different phases of its unfolding. Achilles announces that he will not return to battle until the injury causing ‘pain in his thumos’ is removed, yet we also learn that his fury is fed by the anticipation of sweet revenge (Il. 18.109-10): far sweeter than the honey that spreads does [anger] swell in the chests of men.

To understand anger one must know both the pain that induces it and the pleasure that sustains it. Pleasure and pain can overwhelm and they have the power to push or pull a person into or away from action. Once these take over one’s anger, even the ‘much thinking man’ (poluphrona) can turn to savage deeds. As Homer intimates, pleasure and pain lack any intellect, for what is said of pleasure, that it ‘blinds like smoke’ is also true of pain which blackens the phrenes and chokes the thumos. The psychological naturalism of Homer continues to amaze today. Even the body’s association with the passions is singled out. When action is called for or contemplated the body is aroused in a particular way according to the emotion being activated. The body is in some state of arousal or depletion; thoughts are coloured by passion and passions colour thoughts in ways that impinge on a person’s deliberations. The coward provides an example of a dynamic interaction of these elements that has gone wrong, whereas the brave soldier displays their alignment in their best order (Il. 13.279-83, tr. Fagles): The skin of the coward changes color all the time, he can’t get a grip on himself, he can’t sit still, he squats and rocks, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his heart racing, pounding inside the fellow’s ribs, his teeth chattering – he dreads some grisly death. But the skin of the brave soldier never blanches. He’s all control. Tense, but no great fear.

The literal translation of the italicised line is that the coward’s ‘thumos in his phrenes’ doesn’t restrain him to sit still. His thumos is not in a good relationship to his phrenes because it is unrestrained and this causes physical changes. His heart races, his skin colour changes, he shuffles about and his teeth chatter. Cognitive changes follow as his fear brings him to the thought of ‘grisly death’. The lack of restraint in

14

1. The Homeric Framework his thumos immediately implies physical and mental conditions that are not good. The brave person fears too, but not much. The restraint limits his fear so that he is able to hold his ground; his colour doesn’t change. Instead of imagining death he eagerly awaits battle. There is intimation here that when the cognitive, affective, and physical elements are aligned correctly, the prevailing characteristic of one’s psychological state is delight and the result is excellence in action. A proper relationship between the various mental entities is one in which the selection of an action is made with sound judgment. A sure sign of proper alignment is the ability to act according to necessity, to do what is appropriate, to what sound judgment would mandate. When Achilles agrees to return to battle he declares that, despite all the pain that he now feels, he will subdue his thumos in his breast ‘according to necessity’.4 Up to that point Achilles acts without restraint and with no heed to consequences. Now he restrains his anger in his chest, and acts not according to it (not ‘pathetically’; not ‘affected by it’, as philosophers will later say), but according to necessity. Later, the philosophers will tie freedom to act with the freedom to act well according to what a logical survey of the circumstance necessitates. The Homeric quandary Many commentators have noted that Homer is not meticulous in making hard and fast divisions between the body, passions and thought.5 The same passions occur in the thumos as in the phrenes or the heart. Passions occur with cognitive hues and deliberations occur within the tumults of desire and passion. This blurring of the barriers between the intellect, the physical, and the passionate is generally levelled in translation and the reader is often unaware of this most intriguing aspect of his work. The Komnenou-Karkrides translation in Modern Greek would have Zeus decide ‘according to what is in his mind’, while Fagles would have Zeus decide ‘to his deathless heart’s content’ (Il. 8.430). Perhaps because the translator must place the psychological tension in a compartment that meets the modern reader’s expectations, the translations usually level out the ambiguity to make the tension occur in either one or the other, in mind or heart, in the spirit or in thought, but not in both, and usually not ambiguously where it cannot be clearly assigned to either. ‘So plan your attack’ (Il. 23.313) is how Fagles translates Nestor’s advice to his son Antilochos in a charged moment, just before the chariot race. But the passage literally reads ‘put a plan in your thumos’. And so too when Achilles at the moment of his humiliation debates in his ‘phrenes and his thumos’ whether to kill Agamemnon; one cannot

15

Taming Anger single out a cognitive or an emotional location as the sole place of the debate (Il. 1.188-92). What is rendered in translation as a logical or an emotional event is often ambivalent and more complex in the original. This blurring of the distinctions between thought and emotion occurs and reoccurs throughout the work. One of the most influential approaches to this problem was put forth by Bruno Snell, who saw this as evidence that Homer did not yet have an understanding either of the human body as a whole or the individual as a unified person. Even though Snell’s view has been soundly refuted it continues to thrive in various permutations,6 such as when the hero is conceived as a carrier of disparate powers which achieve unity in action only in respect to external social expectations, such as codes of honour, or when a hero’s actions are said to be determined by the internal secretions of their bodily parts.7 Greek philosophy took a different approach. When they turned to tackle the complex inner psychological world of human beings they took up the puzzling Homeric blur with its criss-crossing of body, intellectual powers of various types, emotions, and hedonic cravings as a starting point to be analysed and explained rather than compartmentalised and levelled. If viewed from the standpoint of the rigid dualities of modern thought, then Homer may be seen as primitive because he does not respect the divisions that would discretely compartmentalise one power from another. If, however, Homer is seen from the perspective of a holistic view of human nature, wherein the three capacities, i.e., the intellect, the affective and the bodily, are inextricably bound, then Homer’s depictions, however crude, put forward a framework for understanding the self as a structured synergy of these powers. Compare the ‘primitive’ Homer to many of our erudite theories about the emotions in modern psychology. Like the proverbial blind person who describes the elephant according to the discrete body part that he touches, modern psychology, with a few exceptions, gropes at the psyche in a likewise fashion. One school adheres to physiology or chemistry and attempts to cure psychological problems with drugs, another views problems as maladjusted thoughts that are to be treated with cognitive therapy, others see them as arising from suppressed drives that have to be vented, and there are those who stress pleasure and pain and claim that hedonically conditioned behaviour can be retrained to respond to rewards and punishments. One wonders if perhaps the primitivism ascribed to Homer is not a projection of the simplistic modern tableau, whose psychological models have been inherited from the religious thought of late antiquity and the modern reaction against it in Descartes. One thing is certain, however: had any of the contem-

16

1. The Homeric Framework porary frameworks that are used to make Homer comprehensible to the modern reader prevailed in Homer’s time, his poems could never have been written. Thumos, friendship, and the limits to anger Given that the thumos is aroused to defend and further one’s honour, one might draw the conclusion that in Homer’s world its social mission, if it can be said to have one, would be the gaining of honour and the lasting fame that ensures a hero’s memory. The problem with this view is that pursuit of honour in itself was never held to be praiseworthy. This can be discerned from the meaning of the word philotimia, the ‘loving of honour’, which came to have a pejorative meaning. Since it is excellence (aristeia) that brings fame and not ambitious fervour we cannot assume that the thumos finds its completion in ambitious pursuits. The reason for this is that the thumos is also home to another human emotion, that of loving, which in terms of primordial drive runs as deep as anger in the shaping of its purposes and its excellence. In Homer phileô (‘to love’ or ‘hold dear’) occurs only with thumos indicating that there is another dimension to thumos, an impulse to bind which is at odds with fractious anger. Paradoxically, the thumos which is the place of battle spirit and anger is also the place of friendly feeling. This has implications for comprehending the thumos’ purpose and for defining the limits of the anger within it. Upon reflection we can discern why this must be so. The thumos by nature seeks honour and this is only acquired socially. The impulse to seek honour is thus from the very outset tied to friendship; one does not seek to win honours from enemies, and even if acknowledgement is given from these quarters it is given grudgingly with the aim of taking it away at some future date. Since human associations are permeated with friendships, and because honour is acquired through social bonds, it must follow that anger must not be used to undermine the friendship ties upon which worth and honour are achieved. If anger guards over honour it will also guard over friendship and conversely it will respond ferociously against friends who betray or dishonour. Homer’s two epics show that the quest for distinction, which stirs the thumos and often is accompanied with anger, is closely associated to friendship’s bonding purpose. An obvious place to start the search for the interplay between the striving for honour and the overarching aim of friendship is in the athletic competitions which occur in Book 23 of the Iliad. Because these are occasions for the heroes to win honour and fame, each hero’s thumos is brought to a fever pitch and their anger is ready to be unleashed against every obstacle to victory. Yet, the event itself, the agôn, in

17

Taming Anger which the competition is occurring, has social bonding in friendship as its aim. How are these contradictory impulses within the thumos to be controlled so as to bring to fruition the athletic competition’s purpose? Each competition threatens to degenerate into a heated fight. Yet at every turn the shared consciousness of the purpose of their assembly keeps the acrimony in check, and it steers events to a conclusion where acts of friendship heal the bitterness that had nearly destroyed the Achaean army. The name that the Greeks gave to these athletic competitions was agôn. The word shares the same root with the word agora, a public assembly, only it is an assembly which is convened for the sake of competitions for prizes. This agonistic assembly is composed of a judge, athletes and spectators, all of whom are unified into a single body. The competing athletes are only one of the elements of the institution. Each part has its role to play and from a Many they become a One in so far as they compose a single agôn.8 As the agôn in honour of Patroklos unfolds what draws our immediate attention is the transformation in Achilles, who presides as a judge over the contests. He is quite different from the person whose thumos has heretofore been described as ‘savage’, ‘violent’, ‘lawless’ and ‘iron-like’. He is an enlightened and sensitive judge; rather than just being a rigid executor of existing rules he shows flexibility and applies the rules to fit each circumstance always in line with the ultimate purpose of the event. During the chariot race a quarrel breaks out between King Idomeneus and Ajax the younger; insults are exchanged, passions fly, and Ajax is ready to respond with harsh and bitter affronts. At the point that Achilles intervenes, blows are not far off. Achilles admonishes them to reflect that they would be the first to get angry with anyone who would argue in this unseemly way in the agôn. The word he uses to admonish them is nemesaton, a cognate verb of nemesis, which is associated with shame. The reminder that they are seated in an agôn makes them aware that their demeanour is subverting the agôn’s unwritten social purpose. Achilles’ gentle reference to the shamefulness of their conduct is more forceful than any command. Their responsibility for upholding the shared values of the agôn extinguishes their hostility and brings them to their senses. The power of institutions to raise their members above their passions for cooperative purposes was not to be lost on the philosophers. When a dispute arises over the prizes for the chariot race, Achilles’ decision is contested by one of the competitors, the young Antilochos. He forces Achilles to uphold the principle that the prizes go to those who win in the competition and not to those who the judge thinks might be the best. A principle of justice, this time asserted by a contestant,

18

1. The Homeric Framework overrules the bias of the judge and an angry response is averted. Immediately following this incident, Menelaos in a fury steps up to challenge Antilochos’ claim to the second prize. What follows is a great scene of apology in which the offender asks forgiveness to calm the anger that he has aroused, and the offended person wisely overcomes his impulse for revenge by taking into consideration the psychological forces at work in the offending youth. The youngster beseeches Menelaos to restrain his anger and to show forbearance, for it was the mindless brashness of youth that led him to break the rules of fair competition. His apology is elegant and its manner, not merely its words, brings a halt to Menelaos’ anger. To this delicately crafted apology Menelaos responds accordingly: despite his ‘mounting anger’, he yields to Antilochos and even returns the second prize to the errant youth, showing in this way that his thumos is not ‘insolent’ or ‘harsh’, not arrogantly closed to apology and not unyielding (Il. 23.611). Achilles gives the unclaimed fifth-place prize to a non-contestant, King Nestor, ostensibly because the once champion is now too old to compete. But looming in the background is our knowledge that Nestor has contributed more than anyone else to maintaining friendship in the army. It is only fitting that in the assembly where friendship is being restored he be given public recognition for his conciliatory interventions which kept the army unified in its darkest moments. Homer reserves a final surprise for us. The last event is spear-throwing, and though King Agamemnon gets up to compete, Achilles abruptly cancels the event and gives the first prize to him on the grounds that he is the best spear-thrower of the army. There is no protest from his competitor or from the assembly of spectators, even though Achilles violates the very principle that was upheld only a short time ago, namely, that the prizes go to those who actually compete. His gesture towards his erstwhile enemy shows that competitive striving is or should be subservient to friendship in the community. The athletic agôn which arouses the thumos is also the occasion for taming its brash energy and subordinating it to the purposes of cooperative friendship. The teleology of the agôn places a burden on the entire assembly, athletes, judges and spectators. The three together form a community that is greater than the sum of its parts. The élan and the passions within each striving competitor are too strong when the thumos is mobilised for victory; hence restraint depends on the virtue of the societal fabric that has convened the event. There is another agôn, described by Homer in the eighth rhapsody of the Odyssey, which becomes an occasion for an ugly incident that sows disharmony. Here, by way of a counter-example, is a reaffirmation of the friendship teleology of the thumos. The incident occurs in the

19

Taming Anger competitions that are convened by the Phaeacian King to honour Odysseus, the shipwrecked stranger who has landed on their shore. A Phaeacian youth by the name of Euryalos insults Odysseus, rudely insinuates that he is not a hero, and brashly challenges him to compete. Odysseus responds by throwing the discus to an awesome distance, after which, he angrily challenges the Phaeacians to compete against him. At this tense moment of rising anger, the wise King Alkinoos cancels the athletic portion of the agôn. He calls upon the Phaeacians to now display their prowess in dance, poetry and music. The action moves away from the toil of athletics to competition in soothing rhythms of dance and song.9 Handsome youths take to the floor and their proud, graceful dancing causes Odysseus’ thumos to be filled with wonder. Poetry sung by Demodokos, the court bard, follows. Then there is a second dance, which rouses the audience. At its finish Odysseus announces to King Alkinoos that these youths have caused ‘awe’ within him; the word he uses is sebas, the type of wonder that leads one to respect that which is the object of awe (8.385). At this point the conflict is over, the rift mended, with wonder and awe, rather than anger, filling Odysseus’ thumos. The Phaeacians recognise the stranger as their friend and extend to him the full honours of friendship and pledge to return him to Ithaca. The musical competition not only quells the aroused thumos that had spilled over into anger, but it redirects it away from anger and gives it expression in one of the crowning acts of friendship in all of ancient literature. What happens, though, when anger has transgressed and has brought pain and ruin to friendships? How are these transgressions to be mended? Is iron-like retribution to defend one’s honour the only way? Homer provides a lesson in healing anger’s wounds in the famous embassy scene in which comrades are sent to persuade Achilles to return to battle. Phoenix narrates to Achilles the work of the Litai, the goddesses of penitential supplication. As his tale makes clear, retribution in kind for pain suffered is considered to be a mindless and dangerous response when a true apology is offered. The English word ‘litany’ comes from the Greek word for ‘entreaty’ and ‘prayer’ that these lame, wrinkled and squint-eyed women personify. They follow Atê (a goddess personifying the blinding of the mind), who unlike them is strong footed, swiftly bringing madness and ruin to men. The Litai follow far behind and seek to heal the harm done by Atê. The word Homer uses to describe their function is exakeontai (9.507), a word that comes from akos which means ‘cure’ or ‘remedy’; the Litai are healers of ruined relationships caused by eruptions of anger. Apology for wrong is personified as a supplication that repairs the damage caused by mindless rage. They beseech, not on behalf of the wronged seeking

20

1. The Homeric Framework revenge, but plead for the wrongdoer who seeks to make amends. One way to heal the tangled aftermath of anger’s abuse is to open the door to forgiveness. For this to occur one has to view the offender as a victim as well, as one who loses his mind, one who dishonours himself. Phoenix urges Achilles to honour the Litai, but to no avail. Achilles’ rejection of Phoenix’s entreaties is itself not a hubristic rejection of the allegory, but rather an affirmation of its message. Achilles does not deny the wisdom of granting forgiveness when an apology is rendered. His point, however, is that no apology has been made by Agamemnon, therefore Phoenix fails to satisfy the very conditions that he has put forward for quelling his wrath. Achilles loathes the gifts, even ‘if his gifts outnumbered all the grains of sand and dust in the earth’ (tr. Fagles), no, not even then could Agamemnon bring back his warlike thumos. Achilles will stay put ‘until he pays me back’. Pay him back for what? The currency that he demands is apology for the entire outrage (the lôbê) that is causing ‘pain in his thumos’. Friendship cannot return to a thumos suffering the pains of injustice. The dramatic expression of the source of Achilles’ unyielding rage was to have enduring political influence in the polis. Political strife over issues of political equality would often fracture a polis. The example of the embassy’s failure could not but have made political leaders, who had been nurtured in this poetry, aware of the dangers of offering bribe gifts to soothe the passions born of humiliation. These measures won’t work. They won’t touch the inner source of outrage, just as Agamemnon’s gifts could not heal Achilles’ pain. The source of the pain of anger in these conditions had to be healed rather than bribed or managed. In the Iliad, the high pitch of the anger does not allow for this. The stage is dramatically set for the unfolding of the events which will result in Achilles’ return to war, but it is tragedy that will restore him to his community, not foresight that listens to the wisdom of Nestor or heeds the warnings of Phoenix. Avoiding such tragedy was the challenge that philosophy took up even as the Greek world was to devolve into fratricidal wars.

21

2

The Search to Bring Logos to Anger The three sources for the study of anger The ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry is encased within an irony. Even as the philosophers upbraided Homer for immorality, they had to do so from within the very framework they had inherited from him. Xenophanes castigates the poet for ascribing ‘to the gods all things which to humans are disgraceful and open to censure’ (Fr. 11), and Heraclitus exclaims that Homer ‘deserves to be driven out of the competitions and beaten with a stick’ (Fr. 42). Yet, when Plato famously proposes to exile the poet from his just republic, he weaves his ideas for the unity of the human soul from within a Homeric tapestry. He proposes to bring the thumos and anger under the control of reason, an approach that is a resounding affirmation of the poet’s legacy. We would go astray if we were to view Plato and Aristotle’s theories of anger as having arisen in ivory tower reflections. Standing back we can clearly see three converging processes – political, poetic, and philosophical – which were occurring during the 400 years that separated Homer from Plato and Aristotle. We find (1) a common political desire to understand the causes of anger and to cultivate it in ways that would restrain its horrors and channel its energies; (2) a continuous stream of poetical works on the theme of anger which created a body of empirically-based knowledge;1 and (3) the inquiries of the pre-Socratic physicists into nature, followed by the attention the Sophists gave to all things human, especially to ethics and social institutions. Of the three processes poetry was the one with the longest and most mature intellectual engagement with anger. The poets in their dramatic depictions of angry characters were setting the groundwork for the search for causes. We can recall Aristotle’s statement that poetry is more philosophical than history, by which he meant that the latter recounts events while the former ideally crafts them.2 The poet weaves necessary connections, universals, as it were, between the character and the action that follows. Action is no longer random; there is a plausible connection between the way a person’s passions have been moulded and their responses to fast-moving crises which leave little room for settled deliberation. The search for the ‘whys’, for the causes, was already in tragedy.

23

Taming Anger Characters soliloquise or engage in dialogue about their anger in a way that reveals their inner world.3 Their minds are at work examining the causes of their irrationality, especially at those moments when reason is no longer in control of their actions. The Homeric notion of the self as a unity of psychological elements is at work in these passages; only here the elements usually come under stresses that are causing them to come apart so that the pains, the pleasures, the passions often seize the mind and steer it. Take Medea, for example. In her great monologue she declares that her thumos is ‘in control of’ (kreissôn) her intellect and is shaping her plans. As she passes into insanity her soliloquies reveal her inner conflicts and bring the dark causes of her actions to light. The audience is witness to a passionate ‘seeing’ befitting the Homeric ambivalence;4 their thumos, and the anger residing in it, undergo an education as their phrenes, informed by her discourses, reflect with profound insight on her slide into anger’s outer reaches. The poets, though, were not scientific psychologists. Their interest was in the depiction of the psychological turmoil leading to action. They were perfectly satisfied with a receptacle, the thumos, in which passions, thoughts, desires, appetites, pleasures and pains clashed and crisscrossed in characters undergoing crises. What was important to them was to show the passions in a state of high pitched turbulence in a way that the protagonists could comment on their turmoil so that the consequent actions of the unfolding plot were believable outcomes consistent with a character of such a type. For this purpose the Homeric thumos was ideal. The thumos, which sometimes meant a receptacle for the passions, and other times was identified with anger, was adequate for their dramatic needs. This is as far as the poets could take their analysis of the psychological powers at work in anger’s explosions. Obviously taming anger, which was a political objective, could not rest on poetry’s accomplishments. No matter how pleasant and uplifting this vicarious experience might be, a polis could ill afford the existence of flaws that might lead to the dismemberment of their city. Philosophers were reaching the conclusion, one articulated clearly by Plato, that it was better to search out and understand how to nurture characters in a manner that avoided such tragedies in the first place. But such nurturing required knowledge about the passions as a basis for any competent political legislation. The political attention given to anger is a vast subject that has been documented and analysed in a variety of works, especially in Professor Harris’ work, Restraining Rage. Politically, the Greeks gave high praise to political leaders who showed restraint in their anger5 and one could go on to cite as further evidence of anger’s political dimension the many gnomic sayings6 that advocated bringing anger under the control of reason. The political

24

2. The Search to Bring Logos to Anger weight that the Greeks assigned to taming anger points to a feature of their culture that I think is quite alien to us. We are more inclined to think of public anger as the result of social or political inequities and not as a factor causing these injustices. We study problems, such as joblessness or the lack of access to social goods and believe that if we ameliorate these we can eliminate the causes that give rise to the anger. The Greeks, however, connected the destruction of their cities to the pervasive flaws in character that were responsible for producing the inequities and the hostilities. The existence of anger in public life was itself taken as a sign of faulty discriminations of worth that were giving rise to it. Rather than catering to or pacifying the anger, restraining anger for them was often a matter of reforming the character that gave vent to unbridled anger. Pre-Socratic philosophy did not have much to say about anger. Their investigations into nature came to touch upon human institutions and customs, but without the single-minded concern that the Sophists were to give to such matters. When they wrote about the soul they were interested in it as an explanation for life, motion and process in the universe. The turning point came with the Socratic revolution. Socrates was the one who grasped the soul as the essence of the human being.7 Till then psychê was something that departed from the dead body and existed as a shade or an image in the underworld. Socrates was probably the first to put forth a theoretical model for the unity of the psychological powers that had been described by Homer. The view underlying Socrates’ efforts was that human nature exists, is knowable, and can be made the object of care and improvement. This perspective allowed philosophy to venture into psychology with the ultimate aim of bringing social institutions into line with human nature. Heraclitus and the paradoxes of anger The first to state the problem of anger in a universal way, apart from any specific character or any particular plot or mythological character, was Heraclitus of Ephesus. He brought to the fore anger’s baffling complexities in less than ten words. Anger, the very power that mobilises one to fight, is itself hard to fight against. The power that preserves one’s life is the very power that can destroy it (Heraclitus, Fr. 31): Fighting against anger (thumos) is difficult. Whatever it wants, it buys at a cost to the soul.

25

Taming Anger The paradox of anger is in its mode of purchase. Anger buys what it desires, but what it receives is the destruction of the soul. The thumos, which in Homer is the source of life, now, as anger, purchases one’s death. Given that Heraclitus associates dryness with life and sobriety and wetness with death (and with wasting away, mindlessness and dreaming), it is warranted to claim that he conceives of anger’s heatedness as misleading. The connection between anger and pleasure could have been quoted by anyone from the Iliad, where anger is said to be a ‘bitter gall’ yet ‘sweeter than honey’. Wet anger floods the soul with pain and pleasure, dissolving the soul’s rationality and its strength: ‘For souls it is death to become water’ (Fr. 36); a drunk man has a wet soul and he has to be led about by a beardless child not knowing where he is going (Fr. 117), and unequivocally a ‘dry soul is wisest and the best’ (Fr. 118). The drunken man and the angry man alike surrender their wisdom at the altar of pleasure. In their common stupor they become fools and the unwise lead the way. There is another side to thumos, a noble dimension. Though we find no fragment that makes a direct connection of wisdom to thumos, it is nevertheless legitimate to draw such an inference from Heraclitus’ statement that ‘gods and men honour those who fall in battle’ (Fr. 24). There is an unbroken tradition from Homer to Aristotle which associates the thumos with courage and no one would have disagreed with Socrates’ statement that a horse, a dog or any other animal would not be brave if it were not high-spirited (Resp. 375a11). We can therefore surmise that those who fall courageously in battle are charged with a rational, dry or fiery form of thumos. The thumos of this type brings humans close to the gods while the other, in the form of wet anger, can sink a man into folly and vice. Anger’s self assertion can be noble or it can be an instrument of self-annihilation; in the latter case its sharp and focused thought, which seemingly weighs responses to threats, may just be a prelude to an uncalculating outburst. The power to protect one’s worth may turn out to be the very means for one’s debasement. This suggests another deeply inlaid twist in Heraclitus’ dense aphorism. Keeping in mind that the Greek word for honour is timê, one of whose meanings is ‘price’, then anger can be said to ‘buy’ whatever it wants, but often at the cost of a person’s humiliation and hence the lowering of his worth. The enigmas of anger as presented by Heraclitus also suggest a solution within the scheme of his overall philosophy. Heraclitus held that the opposites and their conflicts were held together by an underlying structure, a logos, which if grasped could reveal the hidden unity of a thing. The logos allows him ‘to distinguish each thing according to its nature, and to explain how it is’ (Fr. 1). The logos is in nature; it exists

26

2. The Search to Bring Logos to Anger independent of one’s thought, yet it is apprehended by mind. It can be communicated as a universal, for he says the logos is common to all, yet the many live in their private individual thoughts (Fr. 2); being ‘witless they hear as if they were deaf’ (Fr. 34). The implication for the understanding of anger seems to be that if one were to find anger’s logos then they would be able to uncover its true nature and ascertain its rightful purpose. The logos should also reveal anger’s structure, which is to say how the parts that are activated along with it are related and how in their mutual opposition they might establish their unity. The ancient philosophers and commentators who had access to Heraclitus’ entire work On Nature were never able to reconstruct a Heraclitean theory of the passions, and it would be presumptuous for any modern researcher to attempt to do so. What we can say for certain is that if the passions could be controlled it would be by bringing the ‘common’ to them; by imbuing them with universal logos. But Heraclitus never offered a solution as to how this might come about. How could a rational and hence dry logos assert itself within the wet sensuality of anger’s expression? Figuratively speaking, how could the dry phrenes ever stay unaffected when the wet anger in the thumos was deluging it with the pleasures and pains of anger? Importing Pythagorean measure One philosopher, Pythagoras (sixth century BCE) or his followers, we don’t know which, made an important advance in claiming that the problem of the emotions could be viewed as one of bringing measure to them. To see their point of view we have to briefly summarise the shades of meaning of the word logos. The original meaning, found in Homer, is derived from the verb legô, which could mean either ‘to collect’ or ‘to tell’. Achilles commands his soldiers to ‘collect’ (legômen) Patroklos’ bones from the funeral pyre (Il. 23.239). This notion of sorting, separating out, and collecting into a unity was retained in the word’s evolution. A logos, when it signifies a tale or an account, involves an enumeration of details into a coherent rendering. As the word evolved, it came to signify in Plato and Aristotle a rule or principle, a formula or ratio, a type of order, also a cause or argument. Logos, as distinct from intuition, is discursive; it involves analysis, breaking things down to their units, dividing and classifying, giving an explanation of the parts while bringing these together into a formal unity so as to define the being in question. By its very nature anger is unlimited and unordered, subject to the indeterminate impulses of pleasure and pain. The key to mastering anger or any passion, for that matter, had to involve a logos in the sense of a definite structure, something that

27

Taming Anger could be characterised as a form or a formula that would make anger’s outcomes measured, orderly and predictable. Once bringing logos to the emotions was stated as an objective it became possible for Greek thinkers to begin a systematic search into anger’s structure. Unlike Heraclitus’ logos which remained a mystery, even to most ancients, the Pythagoreans were proceeding with confidence from a broader theory of logos for unveiling the mysteries of nature. The Pythagoreans probably drew a parallel between the mathematical ratios of the musical scale, which brought harmony to music, and the cacophony that prevailed over the passions in the absence of such a metric. Their discovery of the ratios underlying the musical scale was for them evidence that mathematical formulae underlay all structure in the world. The essence of a thing, they asserted, was not its material, be it air or water or some indefinite stuff, but its form. Logos, in the sense of a mathematical order, was in their view the true being. The world was in fact an order, which they called a kosmos, an ornament, a ‘cosmetic’, a thing of beauty. Just as random sound is overcome when the ratios of the scale are imposed (1:2 octave, 3:2 fifth, and 4:3 fourth), so too the cacophony of the passions is overcome by the cultivation of measure. What is it, however, that was being ordered? The parts of anger? This is unlikely, for there is no evidence for a view that mastery of anger involved control over parts that might compose it. Anger in Homer is a whole; but its operation cannot occur without the interactions of other psychological and bodily entities. The problem of measure then becomes one of aligning these disparate powers into a kosmos that is appropriate to anger’s proper end. Parenthetically, theirs was the first theory to endow beauty with ethical value. By forming a kosmos out of the parts within oneself one could become kosmios, which is to say beautiful and noble. There is no reason why this principle could not be extended to anger as well. Unfortunately their theory cannot be reconstructed. They left no works behind and even during the sixth and fifth centuries, the period of their flourishing, they existed as a semi-secret religious society. Much of what we know about Pythagorean views on the passions come from scattered passages in biographies written in the manner of hagiography some 800 years later by the Neo-Platonic philosophers Porphyry and Iamblichus. We can partially rely on these anecdotes to the degree that they are consistent with what was attributed to the Pythagoreans by Plato and Aristotle. We can at least be fairly certain that on the problem of bringing measure to the passions they were the pioneers. From the anecdotes about the life of Pythagoras, as described by

28

2. The Search to Bring Logos to Anger Iamblichus in his biography, we can surmise that the Pythagoreans believed that the harmonies and rhythms of music could instil order in the psychological faculties. Music has the power to turn the ‘harmonisation of the soul back to its original state’. Pythagoras composed music with diatonic, chromatic and harmonic scales ‘with which he easily transformed irrational passions, which had recently}come into being, into their opposites}’ These harmonies healed pains and emotional outbreaks such as ‘jealousies and fears and outbreaks of anger’. To each one of these sufferings he applied a careful blend of melodies which functioned as ‘health-preserving medicines’ (15.64). Music is here more than a transport medium for conveying measure to one’s passions. Musical harmony is itself a kosmos. The Pythagoreans claimed that celestial bodies in their orbits give off a ‘music of the spheres’, and since music is a natural feature of the kosmos, its measure must also be natural to the soul. Poor conduct and all irrational behaviour were the result of an internal disorder which could only be corrected through the importation of right measure. The use of the phrase ‘health-giving drugs’ to describe Pythagoras’ musical therapy points to the possibility that the Pythagoreans believed that within the overarching order each passion on its own was subject to a right measure that corresponded to certain musical modes and rhythms. Measure is a concrete universal. It is the universal which in each case places a natural limit on a specific passion. By way of example we can compare the Pythagorean insight to modern methods of anger control which make use of psychotropic drugs to suppress anger but in the process suppress desire and motivation and often produce noxious psychological side-effects. The indiscriminate use of these drugs is indicative of a buckshot approach in which sexual drive, ambition, daring, can all be affected. The Pythagorean perspective appears to have rejected the idea of attributing broad therapeutic powers to any single formula; they avoided abstract formulae, and they do not seem to have promoted handbooks or potions or spells whose strictures or magic might be applied indiscriminately to all the passions. Some melodies cure ‘depression and mental pain’ and others subdue ‘angers and rages’ (25.111). They probably argued that each passion had to be studied separately in order to reveal the formulae appropriate to it, an idea that was to find its mature expression in Aristotle’s definitions of the passions 200 years later. Of note is the connection the Pythagoreans made between anger and friendship. They recognised that anger is a major cause of the destruction of friendships, and to prevent such disruptions they cultivated friendships in ways that would avoid the usual causes of outbreaks of anger. For example, they advised avoidance of competition and rivalry

29

Taming Anger in friendships between unequals, such as with one’s father, one’s elders, or one’s benefactors. Presumably the honour due to the benefactor might magnify even small indiscretions and ignite fierce anger. They held that persistence of contention or disputation among friends undermines the preservation of the relationship. Holding that as few wounds as possible should be tolerated in friendships, they taught their followers to draw back from anger (22.101). A story is recounted about an argument that broke out between two of Pythagoras’ followers. When the younger offered an apology, the older friend expressed his shame that he, being the elder, had not been the first to initiate the reconciliation (27.126). Given their emphasis on friendship it is possible that the Pythagoreans had developed a more systematic understanding of the relationship between friendship and anger which is now lost to us, but which probably lived on in the writings of Plato who was influenced by them. Also noteworthy is the small worth they attached to commands and moral exhortations once anger had been unleashed. Reason itself was not taken to be the determining factor in controlling anger. The logos in their theory was not reducible to a series of commands, but rather was the formula that brought anger into an orderly arrangement. The unlimited cannot be commanded to obey rational limits when limit has already been rejected. If a composer throws out the musical scale, one does not expect his notes to come into some harmonious composition no matter how much he is commanded or threatened. When anger is inflamed, the cacophony does away with measure and drowns out reason. They believed that music, under such circumstances, could communicate with anger to re-establish the lost order. An apocryphal story is told of how Pythagoras once subdued the rage of a love-stricken youth who, drunk and in a fit of jealousy, was threatening to burn down the house of his rival. Pythagoras unsuccessfully tried to calm him with words. Then he ordered the flute-player to stop playing lively Phrygian music and shift to a sedate harmony. The youth came to his senses and quietly returned to his home (25.112). There is evidence that the Pythagoreans attached much weight to the notion of kairos, a word denoting the ‘appropriate’, the ‘contextually fitting’. Kairos is what is temporally and contextually ‘just right’. In practical matters kairos is of the essence. To arrive a day late with battle reinforcements is obviously useless; so too the venting of one’s anger, no matter how justified, say at a dinner party. In regard to relationships with others, they taught that ‘there is both that which is appropriate (eukairon) and inappropriate (akairon)’. These are distinguished from each other ‘by difference in age, status, degree of kinship, services rendered, and whatever else differentiates the relation be-

30

2. The Search to Bring Logos to Anger tween each other’ (30.180). To be angry at an elder or a benefactor is always unfitting and more generally: ‘among those who get angry and enraged some do so fittingly (eukairôs) though others unfittingly (akairôs)’ (30.181). Later thinkers, especially Aristotle, were to show that to be angry correctly is tied to place, time, person, age, duration, intensity, all of which have to be right on the mark. Such insight could have led them to the conclusion that anger’s arousal is in each case contextual. Hence they could have recognised that limiting anger was inseparable from bringing the internal measure to bear upon the concrete events that provoked it. One might say that generally, just as knowing the ratios of a scale will not make someone a good lyre player, so too knowing that anger is susceptible to a limit will not make a person capable of restraining his anger. But how this appropriateness could be calculated and taught to others is not clear at all from the anecdotal scraps that have come down to us. There are indications that the Pythagoreans paid much attention to how the condition of the body affects a person’s disposition. Perhaps strict regulation of their diet was part of their approach, because they believed that foods caused moods changes, ‘some quickly, some slowly’, and therefore the quantity and types of food had to be carefully selected so as to control the conditions that make one susceptible to one or another passion. Sleep was not left to chance either; special odes were played before going to bed so that they might have good dreams. In the morning, other types of music were used to rouse the spirit to the day’s labours. Pythagoras himself was said to have played the lyre in the morning to ‘tune his soul’. Their regime probably included meditation exercises, given that they took vows of silence for five years, but of these we know nothing. The problems with Pythagorean teachings were both practical and theoretical. On the positive side, they established a legacy in education that continues unabated to this day. Whereas prior to them, action was in search of a theory, now Pythagorean theory searched for ways to translate its insights into action. They were probably the first in the West to challenge traditional education with a defensible philosophical theory rather than the sanctity of customs. The relationship between education and human conduct became an established part of Western culture. Their training programme, however, had serious practical flaws that made it unsuitable for most citizens. They were conducting their quest for purification from within a religious association that existed outside the polis. Their aim was to return their reincarnated souls to their divine origin, and this religious objective was governed by rules that were outside the scope of the polis’ political institutions. Their educational programme was unsuitable for citizens who had to

31

Taming Anger conduct their daily affairs without full-time dedication to an arduous and all-encompassing training regimen. Their practices were reserved for those devoted to the rigours of life within the cult. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the Pythagoreans were attacked and driven out of the Greek cities of Southern Italy in the late sixth century BCE. Plato, in his dialogue Phaedo, points out a flaw in what is probably a Pythagorean theory of the soul.8 His critique is relevant to the problem of how one might bring measure to anger. There he has Socrates argue that if the soul is an attunement of the disparate elements that compose it, i.e. if the harmony of disparate elements is itself the soul, then it can never be in conflict with its constituents: ‘a harmony cannot move or make a sound or do anything else that puts it into opposition to its parts’. Either anger, when it is at odds with reason, is not part of the soul, or if it is, then the soul cannot be a harmony. The Pythagorean theory thus could not account for the conflicts that occur within the soul of a person, especially regarding a person’s emotions. The case of anger, so often unleashed contrary to one’s rational thoughts, refutes the Pythagorean theory and shows it to be circular. The soul is presented as a harmony of powers, when it is precisely this harmony which is the problem requiring explanation. The weakness of the Pythagorean theory shows up in its inability to define what measure would in fact be in the psychological realm. There are indications that the Pythagoreans conceived of it as a numerical ratio, and if this is the case, then they would be subject to the critique that Aristotle made against their view of numbers as the origin of things: ‘Because all other things appeared in their nature to be like numbers, the numbers were for them primary in all of nature, and thus they held the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things’ (Meta. 986a1-2). One is at a loss to explain how abstract mathematical relationships might limit anger and how some number might direct anger in its daily encounters. How could one recognise the correct numbers and how could they be assimilated psychologically to control a power like anger? Their view that musical ratios and harmonies brought limit to the passions was not to be dismissed, but their theory failed to show how measure, that which was responsible for making any passion beautiful and harmonious, was responsible for the passion’s unified structure. All this remained unclear and abstract. Nor could they explain the paradox in which reason itself, the logos, was often an accomplice to anger’s disorder.

32

3

Anger: The Guardian of Justice and Protector of Injustice Justice as the measure for anger The Pythagoreans taught that the passions, like music, could be brought to a harmony, but how one could apply mathematical ratios to the indeterminate intervals of something like anger eluded them. For one thing, harmony involves parts and what parts were to be harmonised in the case of anger and according to what formula was left obscure. Though they did not provide a solution they did indicate the path that had to be explored. Plato, following in the footsteps of Socrates, sought to give a systematic account of anger’s functions from within a complete theory of the soul. The soul was now viewed as the essence of a person, the centre of human identity and the principle responsible for the unity of psychological powers. Within the soul were memory, thought (both intuitive and discursive), imagination, emotions, pleasures and pains, desires and appetites. Plato strove to determine the relationship of anger to all these other powers in the human soul and what the proper relationship should be if anger was to perform its function, a function which he was the first to stipulate and systematically analyse. What is perhaps not given sufficient emphasis in general works on Plato’s Republic is the weight he assigns to the question of how to bring measure to the thumos and to anger. Books 2, 3 and 4 of the Republic, approximately a third of the entire work, are devoted primarily to this theme. Plato’s theory of anger, which has justice as its standard, is so radical that it remains outside our cultural field of vision. Culturally we find it hard to grasp the novelty of placing such issues at the very foundation of the just republic. One will look in vain for discussions on taming anger or on anger’s function in the deliberations for instance that occurred at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia or in the Federalist Papers or in the writings of the great political theorists such as Hume and Locke, whose ideas guided the enlightenment sages in their crafting of political institutions for the modern age. We think of taming anger so that we might be temperate in our reactions to perceived affronts, whereas Plato views the thumos’ nurturing on a

33

Taming Anger grand scale, as a necessary precondition for justice. In the Republic he tells his interlocutor that he will take up the issue of anger’s nurturing because it will aid them to understand ‘in what way justice and injustice come to be in a city’ (376c7-d2). In a way it was natural progression from Homer, who began the Iliad with mênis (rage) yet whose axis for the understanding of anger was honour, whereas for Plato it was to be justice. Unlike the tragedy caused by Achilles’ wrath, the guardians of the just city are never to unleash their anger against those whom they have been assigned to defend and the citizens are never to wreak vengeance against each other. When citizens act unjustly, anger is to be used therapeutically, as a corrective. We are told that injustice stems from ignorance and one of the uses of anger will be to cure such ignorance, so that future injustices will be prevented. The question of how to bring anger under the power of reason is now raised as a psychological, moral and political issue and the three areas will be examined from within a unified approach that coalesces around education. Plato will argue that the anger that performs these functions will require the fostering of a specific type of character, which he calls the praos. He holds that the nurturing of the thumos and of anger for such character formation is to be one of the foundation stones of the just republic. Of course, for Plato there is a value higher than justice to which the human soul must aspire, the idea of the good. But if the thumos has not been trained to honour justice such an ascent is well-nigh impossible. The function of thumos The role that Socrates assigns to the thumos has been recounted innumerable times. Following the traditional account, the thumos is said to be the soul’s sword. It functions under the command of reason to keep the irrational appetites in check. The only power the intellect has over the appetites is that of persuasion, but because the appetites are driven by pleasures and pains they are not open to persuasion. Hence there is a need for a chastising sword, an executive arm, which can heed reason and carry out its commands. The thumos mobilises body and soul to this end. Here it is necessary to point out that even though this book is a study of Hellenic philosophical concepts of anger and not a treatise on the thumos, we will continuously need to make reference to Plato’s ideas concerning the latter. Because anger is so closely aligned to the purposes of the thumos, its functions have to be consistent with the more inclusive capacity to which it is subordinate. Plato explains the role of anger only in so far as anger is part of the thumos; often anger is

34

3. Anger: The Guardian of Justice and Protector of Injustice identified with it and at times even called by that name, thumos. The thumos in turn is one of the three parts of the soul. We will have to make references to his theory of the soul and the place of the thumos within it to the extent that it sheds light on anger. Hence our account begins with the famous story of one Leontius of Piraeus, where Socrates first explains the nature of anger and the thumos. At this point in the Republic Socrates has just finished proving the existence of the two parts of the soul, reason and appetite. He then asks his interlocutors if the thumos, ‘that with which we feel anger’ is a distinct part of the soul (Resp. 439e6-440a3): But, I said, I once heard a story which I believe: that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, as he was coming up from Piraeus was walking along the outer side of the northern wall, when he perceived the dead bodies that were lying beside the public executioner; on the one hand he felt the desire to go near them, and on the other indignation [at this desire] and he held himself back. While he was struggling and veiling his eyes, because he was conquered by this desire, he turned his glance towards that direction and then approaching the dead he exclaimed [to his eyes]: All right you wretches gorge yourselves on this beautiful spectacle! I heard this myself, he said. Well, these words, I said, signify that anger sometimes finds itself in conflict with the desires, as if they were two aliens waging war against each other. Yes it does signify this, he said. Therefore, I said, and in other situations do we not observe that when the desires press upon a person in opposition to reason, the person chides himself and gets angry against the thing that is coercing him, and exactly like two persons engaged in conflict, the anger of this person becomes an ally of his reason? That he might take the side of his desires while his reason is dictating that he must [obey its commands and] not go against it, I think that such a thing you cannot claim to have observed occurring either in yourself or in any other person.

The thumos, he concludes, must exist, because Leontius’ anger against himself could not have been coming from his appetites. He had already surrendered to his appetites so his appetites could not have been furious with his gazing at the dead bodies. Nor could his anger have been coming from intelligence because his mind had already decided that looking at the bodies was undignified, yet he acted against his own reasoning. The implication is that his better self, his true worth, is centred in the dignity that his thinking gives him as a person. Another reason which Socrates gives as to why anger cannot be collapsed into a cognitive entity is that anger is present in babies and animals which lack syllogistic reasoning.

35

Taming Anger Anger, explains Socrates, is an ‘assistant’ (epikouros) of reason by nature, unless it is corrupted by bad nurturing (Resp. 441a2-3). There is a naturalistic foundation to Plato’s thoughts on anger. It is not a vision of what anger ought to be as a utopian ideal but what anger naturally is and what it can become if made an object of careful nurturing. He believes that its guardian role shows up even in the very design of the body. The gods placed it closer to the head so that it could ‘listen to right reasoning’ yet near to the heart so that when anger flares because some injustice has been declared by the mind, it can feed blood to all the nooks and crannies of the mobilised body (Tim. 70b1-70d6). From the outset the question of justice is paramount for the nurturing of the thumos. The parts of the soul, if they have not come into their proper arrangement, will exert different claims as to what constitutes justice and what types of things the thumos should defend and honour. Reason’s commands in the just republic will be different from the commands issued by reason in an oligarchy or a democracy or a timocracy. The thumos of an oligarchic man will honour money and will be vexed when it witnesses intemperate indulgence that squanders wealth. Conversely democratic man, because he honours the appetites above all, will be angered when anyone tries to limit his freedom to indulge in pleasure. In a timocracy (a regime that glorifies honour) the thumos will fight for recognition, power and glory, and it will flare up when confronted with impediments to such success. Which reason is right? Which should the thumos obey when reason spurs it into action – reason that defends pleasure, recognition, success, money? The premise underlying Plato’s analysis is that the reason which rouses the thumos and anger is not indeterminate, but ‘well-crafted’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘noble’ (Resp. 401d2). Justice for Plato is a condition of well-being, where all the parts of the whole flourish as they cooperate to advance the well-being of the whole. In the human being there is justice when the mind rules over the whole, since only mind can calculate the contribution of each part to the good of the whole person. Mind is the ruler over the soul but also in humans it defines the soul’s end, making it imperative that all parts collaborate to ensure that mind comes to fruition. The appetites can stuff themselves to satiation and the passions can gratify their impulses, but neither can guide the human being to its well-being. The mind has the power to reflect upon the good and from this comes its right to direct all other psychological faculties. But it needs the thumos to ‘conquer the passions’ so that humans can ‘live a just life’, but if they fail and ‘are mastered by them, [they will live] an unjust life’ (Tim. 42a1-42b2). Signs of justice’s harmonising presence are friendship within oneself and within one’s community. Another sign is an internal communica-

36

3. Anger: The Guardian of Justice and Protector of Injustice tion between the parts so that the being can function as a unity. When there is justice words accurately represent values for discerning the choices that affect the good of the whole so that well-being can be actively assessed through a common discourse. Injustice, conversely, is a condition of decay. The meaning of words is manipulated so that destructive, but pleasant, appetites or desires contrary to mind’s calculations can be relished. The parts become incapable of communicating or cooperating; there is a progressive loss of form or identity; fragmentation sets in, and the measure that sustains the well-being of the whole is corrupted. In this condition anger becomes a cacophonous instrument, a powerful and dangerous weapon, in the service of psychological powers that have risen to a commanding position in the civil war that rages within (Resp. 351c7-352a9). Proof of the determining role of justice in the correct functioning of anger is provided by Socrates when he states that if a noble person is justly punished he will quietly submit to his suffering, but if unjustly punished he will seethe in anger (Resp.440c1-5): Well, I said, what happens when someone believes he acted unjustly? Is it not true that the nobler he is, the less he would be capable of getting angry at the hunger, the cold and other such things he suffers under the person whom he believes is justly doing these things? And, I say, is it not true that his anger is not disposed to getting aroused against such a person?

The just person’s attitude to punishment is all the more striking for its paradoxes: his anger and his proud thumos willingly acquiesce to indignities when he is chastised for a misdeed. According to this logic, his thumos, which is vital to life, would even be ready to accept a death penalty, if such a penalty were just. Plato shows that the thumos in humans is not motivated by honour per se. What should arouse anger is the dishonouring of justice; what should motivate the thumos to action is a commanding reason that has correctly discerned affronts to justice. Plato makes a distinction between a normal thumos and a deviant one. The former functions as justice’s guardian; the latter is motivated by such things as money or power or pleasure which do not correspond to the good of either the person or the city. The human predicament is such that these flaws are not felt as such. Honour is honour of something and that something, whatever it is, whether just or unjust, when it is honoured, is automatically defended. The thumos is a defender of justice, but what this justice is, is decided outside of it and is presented to it as a de facto state of affairs.

37

Taming Anger For instance, in Books 8 and 9 of the Republic Plato shows how the thumos will defend a variety of corrupt values (hamartêmata) and the regimes that protect them, even when these values bring disease, paralysis, and wasting away to the whole. He gives the example of a youth, a case we shall shortly turn to, who wishes to pursue all desires equally and democratically, without regard to consequences. The youth’s thumos is mobilised to secure the grounds for indulging indiscriminately in all pleasures. The soul’s final downward progression is characterised by the tyrant, whose thumos is now transformed into a ruthless guardian and purveyor of dark desires such as rape, incest, murder. The ‘guardian of the soul’ (prostatês tês psuchês) and the soul’s ‘bodyguard’ (doruphoros) becomes a perverse defender of everything that is alien to justice. Because there is only one true justice that befits the well-being of any composite entity, Plato consistently refers to these other standards as hamartêmata, which the lexicon renders as ‘flaws’, ‘failures’ or ‘sins’. Flawed as they may be, once honoured, they shape one’s motivations and guide the thumos as to what is to be pursued and protected as rightfully due. The natural function that Plato discerns for anger is, however, filled with problems. On the one hand anger is called upon to be at reason’s beck and call, yet it is no secret that anger itself is the most irrational of all the emotions. The very power that is commissioned to stand guard over our impulses is itself the most impulsive. Plato refers to how the thumos or anger, something innate in the soul, ‘is quarrelsome and unstoppable and overturns many things with its thoughtless violence’ (Laws 863b4). Anger is the one emotion which, when ignited, is most aggressive in flouting reason. Another paradox, given the functions Plato assigns to it, is that though anger is aroused to defend against injustice, the offence that it is responding to often proves to be illusory. To this we might add that often the right judgments are made by the mind, yet they are either ignored or forgotten at the moment of anger’s arousal; while at other times the reasoning that accompanies anger is so infused with a passionate certainty of its righteousness that it quashes any calming advice which might contribute to bringing one’s fury under control. Once in the throes of anger, our reason has little force to steer it and is usually steered by it. The difficulties show that Plato’s concept of the thumos as the enforcer of reason’s commands is a desired condition, one most difficult to achieve, rather than an initial condition. If anger is to function as a guardian of justice it must overcome the contradictory nature of the thumos itself.

38

3. Anger: The Guardian of Justice and Protector of Injustice The guardian within Other contradictions appear when we turn to the most elementary functions that Plato ascribes to the thumos. Socrates begins his discussion of the thumos with the observation that it is a power found in animals; the capacity which makes an animal or a person willing and able to fight, the power which makes it brave. No animal, he says, be it dog or horse, can be brave if it is not spirited (Resp. 375a11-b2): ‘have you not observed what an irresistible and invincible thing is the thumos, which when present in the soul makes it fearless and unconquerable towards all things?’ This assignment of thumos to animals, however, is problematic. How are we to explain its necessary relationship to reason in humans with its presence in animals which are said to lack cognitive abilities? Can we coherently speak of justice, nobility and the like, as the compass for the thumos? A lizard, for example, shows its thumos when threatened, but it does not have a cognitive faculty to deliberate over the justness or unjustness of its actions. The lizard is not expected to give an account of its actions in anger or to consider alternative ways of expressing anger that would make it better. The non-cognitive activity of thumos in animals implies that it must carry within itself some type of discriminatory capacity that can prioritise signals from the environment and distil those that pose an imminent threat. Prioritisation entails signification. From all the noise in its environment, the animal’s thumos seems to have an inherent capacity which allows it to respond automatically to threats to its existence. At its most primitive level thumos may be said to honour the self qua existence. We can only conclude that existence, as a value, is placed within the biological matter of every animal. The thumos endows animals with a power that mobilises their physical and psychological capacities to the single purpose of defending their existence as an unquestioned good. The ability to discriminate threats and fend for one’s existence is basic to survival. Without this ability there is no worth to one’s existence to the extent that survival depends on defensive action. But the thumos does more than mobilise the animal for self-preservation. It is the primitive source of worth upon which the motivation for status and recognition is founded. In human beings, however, what exactly the self is that the thumos is poised to honour is not obvious. What one respects within oneself and the respect one expects from others are open to many possibilities. The self is itself formed from a structuring of psychological powers that compete for influence. According to Plato, one’s identity at any moment can be located in the appetites, such as business, sexual conquests, pursuit of comforts and

39

Taming Anger entertainments; or it can be centred in the thumos itself, so that one is driven by ambition, fame, power, or it can be in the mind. At times these can be at war with each other, what he calls a stasis, a civil war in the soul. Plato believes that the thumos finds its natural function when it honours the mind. Anger’s enforcement duties on behalf of the mind cannot simply be reserved for policing the appetites; the passions are just as disobedient and impulsive, and they too require chastisement. It must therefore be the case that each of these passions, in order to be in alignment with the thumos in which they exist, also has to honour justice. If this were not so, then it would be possible for each passion to be at odds with that which contains it. Plato locates shame, fear, courage, emulation, grief, jealousy, friendly feeling, and probably religious feeling in the thumos. The thumos’ relationship to justice would be an empty abstraction if the mind ordered it one way while envy or greed moved in the opposite direction. The thumos, as the guardian of justice, would be at war with the instrumentalities which it carries within itself. The alignment of the passions to the thumos implies that anger, as a guardian, is poised to ensure that no emotion will be aroused or applied unjustly. If it is, anger stands ready to rebuke it, as was the case when Leontius surrendered to his desire to see the dead bodies. We can substantiate anger’s role as overseer of the passions by noting that anger is the only emotion that can be sparked by almost any other emotion, though the converse does not hold. Take the case of jealousy. Someone’s anger will not usually make us envious, but someone’s envy can arouse our anger. Anger does not provoke generosity, but generosity, if misplaced, will incite our anger. Anger will not normally arouse our pity, but someone’s pity for our enemies will certainly make us angry. We will not grieve seeing someone angry, but someone’s grief for an evil person will rile our anger. Pity, fear, joy, hatred and grief, when perceived as instances of flawed conduct are experienced as injustices and the result is anger. Anger is thus not just one of many emotions in the thumos; figuratively speaking it grows sensory tentacles that link it to all the emotions over which it stands as a potential chastiser. Perhaps due to anger’s global guardian function the same word, ‘thumos’, is sometimes used by Plato and others for both ‘spirit’ and ‘anger’. Just and unjust functions of anger Plato holds that revenge should be limited to external enemies and irremediable offenders. Anger against fellow citizens, because they are to be viewed as kinsmen and friends, is to be used for correction. When the injustices are ‘severe’ and ‘incurable’ and the wrongdoers are alto-

40

3. Anger: The Guardian of Justice and Protector of Injustice gether evil and incorrigible ‘one must give free rein to anger’, but when men commit wrongs which are remediable, it is proper to have pity for them. Plato returns to a fundamental tenet of his teacher’s philosophy: every wrongdoer is ‘a wrongdoer involuntarily’ and towards such persons one’s anger should be ‘calmed down’ (Leg. 731b4-731d5); offenders have to be educated and corrected rather than vengefully punished. For the word ‘punishment’ Plato uses the word kolazô, to ‘chastise’, ‘punish’, ‘correct’, rather than timôreô (‘to guard over honour’), the usual word for punishment which was associated with paying someone back for an offence. Theophrastus in his History of Plants refers to different methods, called kolaseis, whose purpose was to rejuvenate or improve the yield of a tree. The techniques of kolasis,1 he states, correct the ‘hubristic bent of the tree’ (Hist. Pl. 2.7.6.11-12), and in another passage he states that this technique in Arcadia was called euthunein, a word which means ‘to straighten out’, but also ‘to correct’ (Hist. Pl. 2.7.7.2). The moral and horticultural meanings blend into each other. Just as kolasmos corrects the hubris of the tree, so too anger, according to Plato, should correct the hubristic excesses in the transgressor. To retributively punish for the purposes of gaining satisfaction is a glaring misuse of anger, since it would leave the offender’s flaws intact. Anger, however, is not biologically endowed to automatically perform such discriminating work that would allow it to deploy itself with ferocity against enemies, but with gentleness towards citizen-friends. In human beings, combining these contradictory traits within such a volatile psychological power is a crafted work of culture. Bringing these two sides of the thumos harmoniously together within a single person is difficult – a paradox ‘resembling an impossibility’, states Socrates (Resp. 375c). A special nurturing programme in music and gymnastics is required for this to occur. We should note that Plato’s theory of thumotic nurturing, which will shortly preoccupy us, has deep roots in Hellenic culture. The myth of Cheiron the centaur, half man, half horse, stands as a paradigm. Unlike the other centaurs, he conquers the unbridled lusts of his animal nature; he does so with the acquisition of knowledge, a feat of character that allows him to become the teacher to many heroes and god-like benefactors. He is Achilles’ teacher, the most thumotic of all the heroes and, in the words of Pindar (Nem. 3.57-58), he nurtured him ‘to make his thumos grow to be fitting in all things’.2 Poor nurturing in either music or gymnastics can render anger a poor guardian of honour and justice. An excess of music may ‘melt’ and ‘liquefy’ the child’s thumos so that it becomes too soft or brittle, and thus easily pained and rattled. The child brought up in this way is likely to become quick and sharp-tempered; its inner fragility will make it feel shattered by mere trifles: ‘by enfeebling the thumos he makes it quick

41

Taming Anger tempered and liable to sudden mood shifts; he is stimulated to anger by small things and then is immediately pacified’. The child will not wait for reason to evaluate. Instead it follows the lead of its irritation. It will grow up to become ‘quick-tempered and irascible, rather than highspirited, and full of ingrained irritability’ (Resp. 411b2-c3). Another cause for a weakened thumos is punishment that humiliates and abuses the child. Punishment, warns Plato, should occur only when necessary and without dishonouring and without hubris, so as not to create anger in the child (Leg. 793e). Plato is ever sensitive to the dire effects of abuse; even slaves, he says, must never suffer humiliating punishments (Leg. 793e6-7). A vigorous thumos is a defender; if the self is humiliated and wounded then it will be on constant alert to defend and punish. Failure to weave anger onto a pattern of justice will make the child vulnerable to outbursts that aim to protect abnormal or perverse sides of its personality. We can turn to the experiences of life in order to ascertain how this might occur. In a school where one’s sense of worth is advanced in a competitive setting, a child’s battered self may lead it to brash self-assertion, even to bullying, or conversely to withdrawal. As the child grows older it may find it difficult to view its spouse or its children or fellow citizens as subjects of worth. How could it? What is its inner sense of worth? An abused child will not easily relate to kin or to friends if it has a strong sense of abandonment. Lacking internal worth it cannot find it in others and hence has little sense of the scars that unmeasured anger can leave behind. The child will grow up responding to the pain felt and not with sensitivity to the problems of others which might be corrected. Their inner fragility that was instilled from those who should have tended and cherished rather than abused, makes such persons react towards those closest to themselves as if they were bitter enemies, since these persons are perceived as most likely to offend and humiliate. Conversely, when the thumos has been hardened with excessive physical exercise and no music it is inclined to harshness. Such a regime gives rise to the ‘lover of honour’ and the ‘lover of victory’ (Resp. 480a). The honour-seeker strives for recognition by way of power; he breaks the laws and even subjugates the very people whom he was charged to protect. He is contentious. When frustrated, his motivation to prevail makes him belligerent and vindictive to all those who stand in the way of his ambition. He uses his anger to intimidate. He shouts others down and lashes out against those who frustrate his desire to dominate. His actions show him to be an enemy of discourse (a misologist) who is distrustful and incapable of reasoned persuasion (Resp. 411d7-e2).

42

3. Anger: The Guardian of Justice and Protector of Injustice There is a character trait of malformed anger, which Plato calls duskolia, and the person of this type duskolos, a word translated variously as ‘peevish’, ‘discontented’, ‘fretful’ and even ‘misanthrope’. In the duskolos, anger has become hardened into a permanent disposition which is at the ready to inflict harsh (chalepos) retributive punishment to protect his asocial irritability. In a very revealing passage in the Timaeus the word duskolos occurs in a discussion about disease. Plato warns against the use of drugs to combat a disease that has become ingrained (Tim. 89d1). Once a disease has become a settled condition it will respond with irritability against any direct assault that threatens to alter it. Likewise the duskolos responds with social suspicions to any incursions into his private realm of pain. Such a person, preoccupied with his wounds, cannot take into account the other and therefore can never use anger for correction or reform. He is liable to cursing and other types of abuse. Duskolia also signifies that the person of this type is ‘low-spirited’; preoccupied as he is with his petty rages he will be ‘illiberal’ or ‘slavish’ (aneleutheros). Rather than getting angry over injustice such a person will tend to become infuriated when his private and petty expectations go awry. His anger does not work for the grandeur of mind, but his mind works for the pettiness of anger. Anger: the brash defender of injustice Anger’s role as the guardian of justice has many unexpected peculiarities. Perhaps the most paradoxical feature of anger, one studied by Plato, is that anger always uses reason to justify its arousal, yet its impassioned justifications are usually wrong and unjust. Not only is it a committed defender of its own aberrant explosions, but it also mobilises to protect, with aggressive justification, the aberrations of our other emotions and appetites. Suggest to an obese person the consequences of their overeating and you are likely to rouse their anger. Try to persuade a friend who is caught up in the frenzy of a financial bubble that his greed will bring him ruin and you will most likely be shrugged off with a burst of resentful anger. A strange guardian begins to emerge, one that often becomes the custodian of our vices. What is usually emphasised about deviant anger is its role as a perpetrator of harms and injustices. But perhaps even more vicious is anger’s role as a protector of our flaws. The explanation Plato gave for anger’s power to become a fierce enemy of our better self is worthy of detailed examination, because in the view of the present author it remains unsurpassed to this day. Most people when they strive to better themselves put great hopes in the power of reason and ‘will power’ or believe that by bringing into consciousness some sup-

43

Taming Anger pressed yearnings they can be eliminated. When these beliefs are applied to anger the results are usually dismal. A reason why these cognitive approaches often fail can be abstracted from Plato’s analysis of how thumotic anger is mobilised to defend the flaws that have become part of our identity. In the Laws Plato shows that in humans the very element within the thumos which makes it so effective in responding to threats to one’s security, the love of oneself, is often a cause of one’s self-destruction (731e4; 732b3). The discussion of this trait is developed within a passage in which the Athenian Stranger discusses the correct functions of anger and the thumos. Given that the thumos is biologically poised to defend whatever threatens a person’s existence, it must follow that it will vigorously defend the self and even its destructive flaws once these have become dear to it (Leg. 731e-322a): [E]very man is by nature a lover of self, and it is right that he should be such. But the truth is that the cause of all sins in every case lies in the person’s excessive love of self. For the lover is blind when viewing the object loved, rendering him a bad judge of things just and good and noble, in that he deems himself bound always to value what is his own more than what is true ... And it is from this same flaw that every man has arrived at the belief that his own folly is wisdom; whence it comes about that though we know practically nothing, we fancy that we know everything.

As previously mentioned, friendship originates in the thumos and the first and foremost friend that the thumos is set to protect is one’s own self. But a person’s perception of their self, according to Plato, is the result of a determinate hierarchical relationship that has been forged between the parts of the soul. The thumos does not protect some microscopic person within us who might be the core of our identity. Identity is composed. Any threats to the pains and pleasures or to the beliefs that have become hardened into the structure that makes up the self are attacked as hostile and alien. Plato especially warns of the power that beliefs can have over us if these become dear to us in childhood. In later life they are nearly impossible to eradicate. His analysis of this problem occurs in Book 2 of the Republic, where Socrates proposes to excise and rewrite passages in Homer which he deems to be immoral, such as the ideas that the gods deceive, do wicked deeds and change from one shape to another. These stories will have to be removed because the opinions conveyed by these myths, especially when they charm and delight, become ingrained in the child. The passage is revealing, because it stresses the element of

44

3. Anger: The Guardian of Justice and Protector of Injustice self-love in consolidating these beliefs, something which most translators leave out in their renderings. For example, Paul Shorey translates: ... for the young are not able to distinguish what is and what is not allegory, but whatever opinions are taken into the mind at that age are wont to prove indelible and unalterable.

Or let us take Grube’s translation of the last few words of this passage, where Socrates states that the wrong beliefs about the gods are ... hard to expunge and usually remain unchanged.

What Plato literally says, however, is that that these wrong opinions about the gods become ‘hard to wash out’, ‘unchangeable’, because they are philei gignesthai, i.e. they ‘have become beloved’; they ‘have become a friend to oneself’. Unlike other opinions or beliefs that might be readily changed, these play a foundational role in the shaping of the thumos. If they were simply opinions, a few among many, they could be logically refuted and got rid of. But as ‘beloved friends’, they are cherished. Any challenges to them will be experienced as threats that will arouse guardian anger. Alazoneia: the braggart weapons of anger The gravest problem of self-love and the thumos, however, is not with the cherished ideas embedded in myths. Beloved ideas are still ideas, which, however intractable, remain open to re-examination. The pleasures and pains that have become friends to the self have a far greater power over anger’s deployment. One might have expected the opposite to be the case since pleasure and pain, having no rational content, should be easily dismissible once their destructive impulses are brought before a person’s reason. Plato explains that access to the mind, something which would allow for a careful scrutinising of any destructive pleasures that have become dear to us, can be aborted by the thumos. Arguments that might question the value of a gratification or seek out its consequences never reach the mind for processing. The instrument for what he famously called the ‘shutting down the gates of the mind’ is ironically a type of reasoning, a boastful, brash and pretentious reasoning, which he calls alazoneia. The word alazoneia may be rendered as ‘boastful arrogance’; it is a counterfeit knowledge, an intellectual posturing, that militantly and shamelessly asserts itself in order to keep a person in a state of ignorance regarding the consequences of their cherished passions or appetites.3 It is the element at

45

Taming Anger work in self love that is responsible for the phenomenon in which ‘though we know practically nothing, we fancy that we know everything’. Plato describes the entire process of how this militant ignorance comes to stand guard over our passions in Book 8 of the Republic in his account of a youngster going through an identity crisis. In these passages Plato reaches the highest levels of his literary craft. The same phenomenon of the hedonic high-jacking of the mind will be explained by Aristotle with dry technical language and with greater scientific acumen, but here, where the first steps are made to understand how anger can be the guardian of our flaws, Plato uses analogies, imagery, myth-making and gripping dramatic narration. The youth in question is part of a society which is undergoing a transformation from an oligarchy to a democracy, a crisis that is reflected within the youngster. Being the son of an oligarch, he debates whether he should follow a type of life that will allow him to freely indulge his appetites, or live a thrifty life of self-restraint like that of his father. In this drama ‘boasting words’ (alazones logoi) appear (560c2 and c7).4 The alazonic words deployed by the thumos take up their position, as guards, around the mind, the citadel (acropolis) of the soul. In the civil war that ensues within him, his desires finally prevail; they seize the fortress within and expel the guardians of reason. ‘Instead of these [rational guards] false and alazones logoi and opinions run up the heights and gain possession of this place [of the youth’s soul]’. When ideas of restraint try to gain entrance the ‘boasting words’ of shameless ignorance refuse to admit them. Sober words that are coming as envoys from older and wiser friends never make it through the gates. The result is that anger instead of being the sword of reason, becomes reason’s prison keeper. The angry sentries of the thumos don’t kill off reasoning. Instead they pursue and annihilate, with creative improvisation, any reasoning that is contrary to the pleasures that have come to prevail over the youth’s personality. These sentries differ from the security guards that one sees in everyday experience. They do not merely patrol a perimeter, but instead they rove in the manner of mobile commando units. They scour the terrain, identifying potential enemies, and then attack them pre-emptively. Anger is on the watch, ready to use ingenious means to meet any threats to pleasures that have become dear friends. Likewise they will guard against any pains that are identified, rightly or wrongly, as coming from an enemy source. Anger in its flawed mode is always armed with false and arrogant rationalisations, which keep a person attached to the gratifications that their passions crave for. We all know that the angered person at the

46

3. Anger: The Guardian of Justice and Protector of Injustice instant of arousal has an arrogant certainty as to the rightness of their anger. This is not identical to the case of intemperance where one surrenders, as Leontius did, to some pleasure that is overwhelming them at the moment of action. Deviant anger presents a peculiar case where one always knows (‘you made me do it!’ the angry person exclaims righteously), even if one knows beforehand that one’s presumption of rightness is wrong. Reason is mobilised to subvert reason itself. Like the snake eating its own tail, anger mobilised in this way feeds itself at the cost of the soul’s destruction. In the next paragraph Plato explains how this paradox is brought about as a pathological condition. He describes in detail how these ‘alazones logoi’ secure their control over reason: They first exile any sense of shame. This powerful thumotic inhibition to crass actions is driven out. They then formulate changes to the meaning of words that have moral connotations so as to affect our evaluation of actions. The new values transform the meaning of words so as to make them appropriate to the new, shameless practices that are pleasant to the occupants of the citadel. If we are fat, we will probably prefer the description ‘full figure’, if promiscuous no doubt we will prefer to be called ‘sexually active’, if we have become losers and drop outs, we would rather be envisioned as enjoying an ‘alternative life-style’. Plato gives his own examples in one of the most powerful passages of the entire corpus.5 In each case anger, deploying reason, will be at the ready to repel any logos that might try to enter through the gates (Resp. 560c5-d6). Simply to attack the rationalisations that keep us trapped in our anger, which is the goal of cognitive psychology, is virtually hopeless, since the clever guards will generate new rationalisations to protect anger’s warped condition. Like Sisyphus, no sooner will one rationalisation be subdued with great labour, than a new one will tumble down the hill. Merely practising and rehearsing cognitive techniques to gain control over the ideas that rationalise our anger are ineffectual because anger itself can command the mind to manufacture new ones. One can justifiably pose the following questions. How can anger deploy reasoning? Doesn’t this make anger a homunculus, something like a miniature angry person inside us who like an evil genie has the power to control reason? How could anger, which has no autonomous reasoning ability, cunningly deploy reason? How could the ship, so to speak, hijack its captain? But the psycho-physical powers differ from the mechanical in that each psychological power retains its impulses of desire so that the final geometry of their synergistic cooperation in the soul’s unity is not automatically fixed or programmed. The irrational parts of the soul may lack reason, but they have strong impulses for

47

Taming Anger pleasure and pain and these can issue commands to a reason that has become dear to their gratifications. The anger that is aroused in this condition, where pleasure and pain exercise a controlling influence, cannot but be vengeful. Anger’s logical core becomes afflicted with circularity, because in this condition a person claims to know that he or she has been wronged, but the internal supports of this purported knowledge are ruthlessly protected from any critical examination. The proof of the righteousness of the anger is in the pain that one is predisposed to feel. The causes of the pain, something which should be evaluated, have been prejudged with alazonic certainty and hence the angered reaction is taken to be just. What we have here is a classical example of the fallacy of circular reasoning, but because the major premise of the syllogism comes from a feeling, i.e. the pain of the affront, something which is defended by the angry guardians, the false premise cannot be located or investigated. Given anger’s relationship to justice, one might have expected Plato to speak of ‘righteous anger’ or ‘just anger’, but these terms are notably absent. It is difficult at this point in our analysis to appreciate the significance of this absence. Suffice it to say that ‘just wrath’, a term either first introduced or made common by Philo Judaeus of Alexandria in the first century CE, will become the central concept in the Christian approach to anger. It is notable that Plato does not identify justice or righteousness as a virtue either of the thumos or of anger. One’s anger never acquires the mantle of infallible excellence because one happens to be just. Actually, the opposite is the case. Anger is evaluated to be just or unjust depending upon whether it is manifested excellently, as a virtue that performs its work. It is never deemed to be virtuous because it belongs to some species of ‘just wrath’. There is no intrinsically just or infallible anger in Greek culture, not even Zeus’ anger is thus ordained. In Plato the thumos has two virtues: in the broad sense of an arousing power it is courage,6 and in the narrower sense of anger it is well-temperedness (praotês), often translated as ‘gentleness’.7 The virtue of praotês, as a state of character, is the state that anger has to be in, in order for it to be consistent with justice within one’s soul. By discerning this state and defining it Plato began the process for the scientific understanding of anger, since the next step required the identification of the psychological powers that had to be cultivated in order for such a state to emerge. The obvious question was how could anger be moulded so as to give rise to such a character type. What psychological powers have to be nurtured and how is this to occur so that anger never becomes a defender of our unjust aberrations?

48

4

Nurturing and Educating Anger The meaning of praos As we have seen, the very existence of the republic depends, according to Plato, on its ability to create a special type of character one of whose traits is gentle-temperedness (praotês). The responsibility for nurturing the city’s children for this purpose is assigned to the political leadership. For comparison, we need only note that in Europe and the United States today, nurturing, so far as the political leadership is concerned, is at best usually taken up as a matter of social policy primarily in relation to subsidising day-care costs and other social amenities of working families. Not so for Plato (Leg. 793e2): ‘this office is by far the greatest of the highest offices in the city’ and it will go to ‘the best person in the city’.1 This period between birth to the beginning of formal education, which he considers to be the most difficult phase of education, is placed in no uncertain terms at the apex of politics. In the Republic Socrates uses the verb ‘sôzesthai’, ‘to preserve’, ‘to keep safe’, to emphasise that the city’s preservation will depend on its thumotic education (Resp. 412a10). Overseeing and directing this education is to be a continuous and permanent function. The leaders are to be continuously engaged in the formulation of the nurturing programme’s broad outlines, what he calls the tupoi (Resp. 403e1). The overseer must know how to place these correct patterns into the souls of the children. Plato recognises that this calls for a unique approach because of two factors. First, the age of the child does not allow for normal teaching, because learning requires serious exertion (spoudê). Instead the programme will involve play and will have to continuously charm the child to keep its attention.2 Formal education that aims to develop the mind will come later. That this constitutes a special phase of education is emphasised by Plato’s continuous use of the word trophê, the Greek word for nurture, in contradistinction to the word paideia, which refers to education proper. The second factor which makes this education unique is that its object is the nurturing of the thumos, for nous is still but a raw power and the appetites are irrational; though they can and must be habituated, they are incapable of acquiring knowledge. One should not think that Plato’s thoughts on nurturing, as pre-

49

Taming Anger sented in the Republic were occasioned exclusively by his interest in the educational requirements of a guardian-warrior class. If this were so then his ideas on nurturing would not have much relevance to normal education. Because his views on the nurturing of the thumos and anger are stated in early and late works, we can be confident that his thoughts on this question were not transitional. They were neither discarded over time nor did they undergo subsequent revision. The aim of producing a special character type as an essential precondition for justice in the city is stated throughout his writings. In the Republic we are told that the guardian will have to be ‘gentle and high-spirited’; in the Timaeus, a late work, Socrates states that they will have to be ‘highspirited’ and ‘correctly gentle’ (Tim. 18a4-7); in the Laws, his last work, Plato states that all citizens will have to be ‘high-spirited and gentle to the highest degree’ (Leg. 731b3). He goes on to name this trait of character ‘noble thumos’, a trait that subdues anger and makes every citizen a noble defender of justice and freedom. What exactly are these two outcomes of thumotic education? Highspiritedness, I think, is plain to grasp. It energises, arouses and motivates a person to defend anything that is held to be worthy of honour and recognition. This part of the soul has a natural tendency to strive for victory, its virtue being courage. This is the part that aspires to great deeds and new frontiers and the social acclaim that comes from such accomplishments. As previously noted, even its place in the body, close to the lungs and the heart, is designed for its energising function. But what does Plato mean by praotês, a word that is usually translated as ‘gentle’? He calls it an êthos, so we know that it is a trait of character. However, we have to take a closer look at the word because when we deal with virtue terms it is a risky affair to take a lexicon meaning as the definition. Moral terms embody values that are shaped over centuries. As societies undergo transformations and one social practice is superseded by another, some of the meanings recede into the background while new ones emerge. But the original meaning of the word may remain as a cultural ideal even if it is no longer primary. By the time praos came to be used by Plato it had undergone a development of at least 400 years and its passage through time no doubt gave it many hues and nuances that went beyond its common fifth-century meaning of ‘gentleness’ in anger. In Plato’s time the word praos did not always signify a virtue because gentleness in the form of laxity, softness or corruption was considered to be a vice. We can start from these pejorative uses of the word if only to dispense with the nuances of ‘gentleness’ that Plato’s virtue excludes. Failure to get angry at injustice would no doubt be a defect; hence gentleness in the sense of softness (malakos) or weakness (malakia)

50

4. Nurturing and Educating Anger cannot be what is meant. Another meaning signifying the ability to fit in, to go with the flow without irritability, also seems to be excluded. The object of social adjustment to any external norm of conduct he considers to be an objectionable form of gentleness. We can draw this conclusion from an allegory that Socrates crafts about a young wild animal undergoing training from a trainer who, like a good behaviourist, studies the whims of the animal and manipulates it, with rewards and punishments, to make the beast ‘gentle’ (Resp. 493b2). Plato condemns such nurturing which, ignorant of the internal psychological forces at work, trains the child to comply with whatever society deems necessary for its unenlightened practices. Plato understands that one can achieve an adjustment of the child through the manipulation of its pleasures and pains and the authority that society gives to the outcomes of this manipulated adjustment, but he rejects such training as a counterfeit thumotic nurturing. The method leaves the beast within untamed and liable to aggressive behaviour once the leash is off. Other pejorative examples of gentleness include the permissive nurturing practised by the wives of the Persian rulers, which Plato labels as ‘female’ (Leg. 694e1-695b8). The women of the court spoiled their children in softness so that they never acquired the political virtues. Ultimately they were corrupted and done away with by the eunuchs who controlled their access to the pleasures of their soft life. Another negative example of misplaced gentleness is when the leaders of a democracy out of weakness submit to the desires of the mob (Resp. 562d3). Also the tyrant who ‘affects a gracious and gentle manner to all’, makes promises, declares a debt moratorium, and after winning the confidence of the people enslaves them. The gentleness in all these deviant cases either enfeebles the child thumotically or is a feigned gentleness that tries to show concern for someone’s well-being, while planning, as the tyrant does, precisely the opposite. That Aristotle, according to the usage of his time, was to define praotês as excellence in anger is evidence that as a trait of character it pertains primarily, even if not exclusively, to anger. The word, according to the late Jacqueline de Romilly, started out as a verb (praünô) with the sense of calming and soothing, indicating a peaceful condition to be regained, especially after the occurrence of violence. From the outset the verb was used to denote manners that stood opposed to any manifestation of violence. Praotês quells storms, calms excited animals, and mollifies violent tempers.3 To capture some of the richness of meaning associated with the word, Romilly recommends that we return to Homer and examine the word that he uses for gentleness, which is êpios, since most of the meanings of êpios were later transferred to the word praos. Of special interest in Homer’s uses is the phrase hôs êpios

51

Taming Anger patêr, ‘gentle as a father’. These words appear four times in Homer to indicate the gentleness associated with paternal care (Il. 24.770; Od. 2.230). Specifically, Helen uses it to describe Priam’s fatherly attitude towards her, one that was free of chastisement; Telemachos and Mentor use it in their speeches to the populace of Ithaka to emphasise that Odysseus treated his subjects with affectionate concern; and Menelaos uses it to describe how wise Nestor treated him at Troy. Elsewhere, but with the same nuance of paternal care, êpios is used to describe Zeus’ gentleness towards his daughter Athena4 and most importantly the word is used to describe the tender care of a charioteer for his horses.5 Êpios in all these instances implies that one will not harm the dependant in anger, and on a positive note it conveys a notion of attentive caring for the well-being of the dependant under one’s custody. One might ask why ‘father’ rather than mother was used with êpios, since of the two parents a mother is more likely to be gentle and caring. The reason perhaps, in part, may be that the mother’s realm is the household (oikos), but the father is the one who is concerned with the introduction of the child or the person under his care into society. Priam, for example, aside from being kind to Helen, is the person who defends Helen’s precarious position as a member of Trojan society. Whatever integration she enjoys in that society is solely due to Priam’s support for her social status. On a broader note, the use of êpios to describe the attitude of kings towards their subjects shows that the word connotes a concern for the welfare of the community and its cohesion.6 The replacement of êpios with praos indicates a political shift during the fifth century which rendered the paternalistic connotations of Homeric êpiotês unacceptable. The Homeric meanings of gentle care given by a father or a trainer to dependants also extended to political relations. A Homeric ruler is expected to be just and to attend to the welfare of his subjects.7 The subjects, in the manner of good children, are in turn expected to reciprocate for the benefits received. The nature of these relationships is brought to light in a passage in which Mentor chastises the Ithacans for not taking a stand against the suitors. He faults them for having failed to reproduce the disposition within themselves that Odysseus’ gentleness should have engendered. He tells them that the type of king they deserve is one who is ‘harsh’ and ‘evil-doing’, in contrast to Odysseus, who was to them ‘gentle as a father’.8 The attitude expected in the subject is not one of quid pro quo reciprocation since the dependants lack the ability to match the giving of the ruler. They do have an obligation though, just as offspring have an obligation to support their parents in old age. The child and the subject are beneficiaries of paternal care and not the equals of their benefactors. In republics, where citizens are free and equal, a paternal-

52

4. Nurturing and Educating Anger istic concept of caring simply would not do, so by the fifth century BCE the word êpios was replaced with the word praos. The latter does not carry the overtones of natural superiority insinuated by the former. As Romilly states, ‘naturally, this new “gentleness” then lost the paternalistic gentleness that it previously possessed; from now on the most important human relationships are no longer revealed within the family, but in the polis’ (2007:81). Another feature of this political shift was to emphasise that the care to be given by the praos, unlike that provided by the êpios, required knowledge that was not given by tradition nor was it self-evident in nature. We can see this difference by noting that the êpios trainer, for example, knows what is naturally good for the horse, but the horse is not a partner whose desires concerning its way of life might enter into the type of care that it receives, nor are children or subjects partners to those who attentively rule over them, nor is the doctor’s patient, when he receives êpia pharmaka, on an equal footing with his physician, whose treatment he must submit to if he is to recover from his wound. The praos, however, must know what to honour within a political context where alternative choices are freely available to equal partners in the association. One’s disposition must be inclined to acquiring the knowledge9 that would make oneself or others better, but even when the praos knows what is better, he must take his associate’s point of view to heart and will try to win over their cooperation. Persuasion, born of knowledge, introduced a new layer of meaning to an old concept. These elements of knowledge and care simply cannot be captured by the translation of praos as ‘mild-tempered’. They show that the education being proposed for knowledge in anger must result in a trait of character (Leg. 733e7-734a2). 10 In Plato’s reformulation of the word praos one cannot but see evidence of the Socratic search for definitions of moral words that had come into wide use. In any case, the best example we have of the praos, and the complex traits that compose such a character type, is none other than Socrates himself in his trial and death scene, as portrayed by Plato: The jail keeper bears testimony to Socrates’ ‘gentleness’, calling him the ‘noblest and gentlest’ man who ever came through the prison (Phd. 116c4). Socrates knows who is responsible for his plight and demonstrates possession of this knowledge in action. He shows no anger towards the jailer; he knows that he can suffer no harm at the hands of those who have sentenced him and hence he does not act emotionally as if some great injury has been done to him. He is master of his pleasures and pains. He says that he would only suffer injury if he himself committed an injustice. He has kind and gentle words for the jailer and expresses gratitude for his jailer’s tears. At his trial

53

Taming Anger Socrates also shows his gentleness when he applies a corrective approach towards the judges who are about to find him guilty, declaring that he is defending himself for their benefit so that they may not commit an injustice. Thus in the final act of the drama of his life Socrates shows his thumotic excellence with high-spirited philosophical courage in the face of death. His gentleness aims to improve and correct those with whom he is socially bound. In nurturing anger, reason is but number three We have now come to the nub of the problem: the thumos is to be educated, yet it is absurd to think that it is acquiring knowledge, given the child’s age and condition. At this age reason is undergoing development and cannot be a prevailing power. What then is the nature of trophê? If knowledge is not being acquired then can nurturing be reduced to habit formation? If this is so then what is the relationship of the inculcated habits to knowledge and to the mind in general? Does Plato imply that nurturing of the pleasures and the pains and their accompanying passions is a process of conditioning? If so, then it would follow that the nurturing would be arbitrary. Its hedonics could then be manipulated to produce an internal sense of honour that would make a person’s motivations consistent with society’s goals, whatever these might be. Successful nurturing in a consumer society, for example, would then be judged by how well society cultivates the drive for success, riches and greed. Anyone whose behaviour is being modified through electro-shock therapy or drugs could then claim to be acquiring a thumotic education by virtue of their conditioning. Another possibility is to claim that the purpose of thumotic nurturing is to create habits that forge a pathway to reason, so that children, by experiencing certain socially praiseworthy pleasures and refraining from others, learn to respect the commands of reason. First, they learn to obey and respect certain rules, and later as they mature, they learn to think through these rules on their own. There are many passages in Plato which might suggest that this is his point of view, but I think that this would be a mistaken interpretation. Nurturing would then not be forming an internal kosmos in the child, but at best would be preparing the child to obey reason’s commands in later life. In the interim, in the absence of either knowledge or a rational order within, the key factor in the child’s nurturing would have to be the manipulation of its passions; fear of punishment, guilt, expectation of rewards for good behaviour are techniques that immediately come to mind. The child would be manipulated by tugging at its passions in ways that would result in its conduct being in concordance with the right moral rules.

54

4. Nurturing and Educating Anger This, however, would be reprehensible for Plato, because the method relies on the manipulation of one dark passion in order to control another, something that Socrates condemns outright in the Phaedo.11 The major problem with the view of nurturing as a preparatory phase for the exercise of knowledge in conduct in later life is that it is based on the idea that reason is the primary factor for the control over our passions. ‘Reason over passion!’ are words that are repeated over and over and made to appear as if such a concept was within the bedrock foundations of our culture and one that was inherited from the Greeks in general or from Plato and Aristotle more specifically. This is an idea that I now want to refute. We have to directly take the question of the relationship between knowledge and habits and the role of reason in thumotic education. Given that the aim of trophê is to bring the thumos and anger under the control of reason, we have to ascertain the place of reason in relation to the other psychological factors (such as pleasure and pain, and the appetites) that are competing for influence over the thumos. We are fortunate that in one of Plato’s dialogues, the Philebus, the question of bringing knowledge to pleasure and pain is the central issue of the work. This is directly germane to our inquiry because thumos and anger are filled with pleasures and pains that push and pull them in various directions, so that their correct deployment is necessarily bound to the question of how one might bring truth to the pleasures and pains and to the passions, such as anger, which they accompany. If we can answer how the thumos and anger can be true and not false in their manifestations then we can also get a better grip on the nature of the thumotic education which strives to develop within the child such truth-attaining abilities from the time of its birth. Plato explains the problem of knowledge in the following way: the pleasures are felt and truly exist as felt, but their existence does not always correspond to true being. The reason why pleasures may be false is that they involve anticipations, and these may not always correspond to the object of the pleasure. Given that memory and recollected judgments, as well as imagination, are all involved, the possibility exists that these pleasures and pains may be illusory or false.12 There may, for example, exist a pre-existing false opinion, such as the belief that money is a great good, and this will lead to choices based on an unreality, even if our desire is fulfilled. Another case of error is analogous to a spatial distortion. Just as one’s judgment of an object’s size is distorted when observed from a distance or sometimes from very close up, so too the contrast of pleasures to pains near or distant may distort one’s judgment (Phlb. 41e9-42a3). As Hampton remarks in her commentary on the Philebus (1990) and in a journal

55

Taming Anger article on the same topic (1987: 258), the experience of pleasure or pain can itself be falsified by exaggerating the anticipation. For example, the intensity of a great pain is likely to diminish in one’s imagination if it lies in the future, while the experience of an immediate pleasure, if close at hand, may increase. We can readily apply this to anger, for it often happens that the immediate pleasure to be gained from an outburst is magnified relative to the more distant pain that may come from having destroyed a relationship. Another distortion of pleasure occurs not due to the presence of belief or flawed anticipations, but due to the mixing of pleasure and pain. Plato gives the example of a painful itch that is relieved by scratching so that what is called pleasure in this case is the temporary relief from the pain. To this mixed class Plato assigns most of the passions, including anger.13 One might, for example, pursue the pleasure of retribution in order to extinguish the pain suffered from an affront. When the pleasures or pains judge, as they often do in our anger, based on an internal contrast of one with the other, the anger is bound to be false. Plato is clearly not advocating a correspondence theory of pleasure whereby a pleasure would be considered false because its anticipation does not correspond to the object or the event. This may be shown with the hypothetical example of a person who might feel intense pleasure at the prospect of injuring his partner and stealing his property. Let us suppose that the plan is realised. This correspondence between the evil desire and its realisation would not for Plato validate the pleasure experienced as true. Or consider the contrary case of the pleasure that is likely to be felt by the just man who endeavours to introduce reforms to better his society. If these are not realised for some reason, should these pleasures be considered false on that account? It is not a matter of correspondence of inner desires to external events but of correspondence between desire and the good. The truth content of the pleasure that is anticipated in one’s mind requires a pre-existing canvas that is dear to the gods; otherwise the desires and the pleasures painted in one’s imaginative anticipations, whether realised or not, are summarily false. One might conclude from Plato’s analysis of false pleasures that if we possessed a logical ability to comb through our anticipations, what Plato in the Protagoras (356e3) refers to as an ‘art of measurement’ (metrêtikên technên), always keeping them aligned to what is objectively good, the problem of true pleasures would be solved. Transferring the problem to anger, the solution to feeling anger in the right way would then be to find ways to impose our rational power directly over it. Surprisingly, though, in the Philebus, Plato rejects this idea. To-

56

4. Nurturing and Educating Anger wards the end of the dialogue, Socrates proceeds to give the recipe for true pleasures and pains that would give us rational control over our passions. The ingredients for the correct mixture are given in a hierarchical order. We might well expect reason to be first. However, of the five ingredients that Plato mentions for the mixing recipe, truth or reason is but number three. First come measure and proportion; second comes beauty; and only then, in third position, comes truth.14 We should stop to wonder here, Why third place? Why after beauty? Truth, the power that we rely on to correctly determine our anger, or any other passion, is placed in a pecking order below the beautiful! The unsettling implication is that reason is a tertiary factor in the struggle to subordinate anger to reason. What Plato may be telling us here is that for human beings, tied as we are to our bodies, and given that our hedonic cravings are moulded early in life, measure and beauty are temporally, causally and hierarchically prior to truth. In the human being, if measure and desire for the beautiful have not been firmly implanted in the thumos, then truth, by itself, as a controlling factor in taming our anger is either impotent or illusory. To have knowledge of what one should do does not count for knowledge as a trait of character; wisdom lies only in the actual doing of what one knows to be correct. The possibility of sensuous ethical knowledge in anger If we take the findings of the Philebus regarding the right mixture of psychological powers that must be present for bringing truth to our anger, then nurturing must in some fashion be guided by Plato’s specified hierarchy of measure, beauty, and truth or knowledge. What is astonishing is that when we turn to his Republic, which is thought by scholars to have been a much earlier work, we find that it is precisely this hierarchy that is guiding Plato’s proposal for thumotic nurturing. The nurturing in mousikê and gymnastikê is meant to instil the very same order that is systematically expounded in the Philebus. An examination of the trophê proposed in the Republic should help us to understand how he thinks that anger can be tamed by the cultivation of non-cognitive factors that lay the foundation for rational control over anger in later life. His ideas should reveal to us the interrelationships between measure, beauty and knowledge as they apply to the taming of anger. We can begin our examination of these interrelationships by citing the famous passage in which Socrates argues that in nurturing ‘music is most sovereign’. Words, he says, at this early age cannot penetrate into the mind.15 Plato’s choice of images and vocabulary in this passage

57

Taming Anger emphasise the aesthetic nature of this education. The beautiful works ‘strike’ the eyes and ears like ‘fresh air that brings health’, and this occurs ‘without them being aware’. The aesthetic experience of beauty will ‘lead them to become like and to become friends to reason, which carries beauty within it’. Music’s harmonies and rhythms ‘plunge’ or ‘dive deeply’ into the soul’s inner depths.16 They ‘attach’ themselves there with the ‘greatest vigour’, bringing ‘gracefulness to the soul’. Conversely, ‘things ‘defective’, ‘not well-crafted’ or ‘poorly developed’ in beauty would be ‘felt sharply’ as being reprehensible. The person nurtured in music will abhor ugly things and ugly actions and ‘delight in beautiful things’ gladly receiving them into his soul ‘to be nurtured by them to become himself beautiful and good’. All this will occur before the child is able to grasp reason, but when ‘reason comes, the person so nurtured, recognising it from his kinship to it, would embrace it immediately’.17 Upon examination music’s positive effect on nurturing is not as clear as Plato’s inspiring vision makes it out to be. If he means that music on its own will make a person’s thumos gentle, or that conduct will be affected through a passive exposure to musical harmonies, then experience does not support such a claim. No amount of listening to Mozart or Baby Einstein collections, on its own, will result in praotês. The Nazis were not humanised by the musical heritage of Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart. The notion that one’s anger will be formed correctly through exposure to music or to any type of art lacks seriousness. Were this so, then children would become gentle-tempered by taking them to musical performances or by walking them through art galleries so that the sounds and images would effortlessly cultivate within them the desired trait of character. Perhaps we can get a better insight into music’s influence on character formation by returning to the original meaning of ‘character’. The main word for ‘character’ in Greek is êthos, though in Homer only the plural, êthea, appears. In the Iliad the word has not yet acquired the abstract meaning of human character. As Chamberlain explains in his article on this subject (1984a), the word êthea in Homer signifies a ‘haunt’, a social space of congregation, be it a meadowland, lair, stable or abode. It is the place the animals have become accustomed to because, among other things, it is proper to them; it is their own. Homer, in an extended simile, describes a horse which is being domesticated by feeding it in a stable (Il. 6.506-11). The owners hope to change the horse’s habits by controlling its access to food, but alas, after having had its fill, the horse races off to the meadowlands it loves.18 The pleasure and joy it feels as it gallops there is part of the habit that returns it to its haunts, keeping in mind that the word for ‘haunts’

58

4. Nurturing and Educating Anger (êthea) shares the same root and is probably derived from the word for ‘habituation’, ‘ethos’.19 The emphasis on habit, however, should not make us lose sight of the fact that the abstract singular noun êthos, ‘character’, never abandoned its original nuances of appropriateness, pleasure, and most importantly, the social character of the êthea. In a way, the concept of habit is itself inadequate to explain êthos, if one merely emphasises the acquired pattern of behaviour. The pattern is the result of an internal ordering; what the habit is inscribing into the animal is a logos, a structure. The problem with the use of the word ‘habit’ to render the constellation of ethos and êthos words is that the word implies to us patterns and routines of behaviour that can be explained as being imprinted subconsciously. What êthea emphasises is that all the powers of the animal are structurally ordered to bring it to its natural place; in human beings one would have to include thought itself, even if mind is being marshalled to lend rational support to a structure whose parts are glued together by pain and pleasure. Therefore, when Plato argues that music is inculcating a type of êthos, the origin of the word in êthea suggests that a logos is being inscribed.20 The question is what type of logos? The music in correct nurturing comes from caring persons who gracefully beautify the child’s inner world out of love and honour for a universal standard, which they want to see developed in the child. The theoretical grasp of a prior order, a logos, which is appropriate to the thumos is what adds a knowledge content to what otherwise appears to be a training grounded in sensation. The inculcation of this internal order rests on an aesthetic rather than a logical grounding. The problem with the term ‘aesthetic knowledge’ is that it leaves out one element, the socially clarified logos that is being inculcated in the child’s emotive world. The logos forming the character is not in the music per se. What is fine in the music is determined by the political leadership with regard to the type of character traits they consider to be good (by nature) and worthy of emulation on a social political scale. The music imitates character traits – character does not imitate the music. Plato adopted Damon’s principle that music can imitate character, and from this theory he drew the conclusion that music has the power to develop within us an emotional connection to the values embodied in its representations of character. Plato is quite aware that music’s unmediated charm is a great force that can easily deceive the thumos because of its inclination to be drawn to beauty; hence, as we shall shortly see, such matters are not to be left to chance or to the preferences of the artists.21 The music, without having to logically explain its values, can imprint universal character traits into the thumos of the child. The ‘truth’ in the

59

Taming Anger music is substantiated by the fact that it is socially shared as a universal ‘haunt’, as an êthea, that will make a person better. Society in this way strives for great art because it aims to produce fine people. Before learning about right and wrong judgments or before these can take a hold over its character, the child will have developed an aesthetic referent, in its literal meaning of sensation (aisthêsis), which will act in lieu of a cognitive principle. Specifically, unmeasured anger will not look or feel right. Anger will have been aesthetically cast so that aberrant anger will be seen as ugly and felt as bad, which is to say as a distress or a pain. This feeling will guide the child in its actions. One might argue that perceptions based on sensations or feelings cannot develop knowledge in the child since the realm of perception is that of indefinable and ever fluctuating particulars. Art, however, at least in the case of mousikê, can overcome the limitations of the sensible because it has the power to convey universals through its representation of human emotions. The particular gestures, intonations and so forth, represent universals that denote certain types of emotional qualities and traits of character in action. K. Dorter (1990: 38) writing on the subject of aesthetic knowledge, provides a summary of how music can be a conveyer of non-conceptual truth: We can see that the aesthetic experience of art is able to convey non-conceptual kinds of truth about our emotional life insofar as the experience with which it presents us ‘rings true’ emotionally. In literature an author can make explicit claims about the nature of our emotions and the reader can make explicit judgments about their truth, but such truth is conceptual. The distinctive capacity of art is more visible in a non-conceptual art such as music, in which it is possible to judge in an immediate (nonconceptual) way whether the sequence of emotions exhibited seems to make sense, and even whether it is profound or shallow. To be aesthetically effective the feelings expressed must reflect more than the personal idiosyncrasies of the artist: what is expressed must be shared, the feelings must be held in common, the particular must reflect the universal. In this sense art is able to disclose truth about our shared life of feeling.

The process occurring with musical nurturing of the thumos addresses both the universal and the particular. On the one hand, when it comes to emotions, universal logical truths are empty without the ability to instantiate these truths in a particular aesthetic experience, in a particular action that is truly good; on the other hand the particular aesthetic feeling, even when universal, if it is devoid of truth can be arbitrary, inappropriate and harmful. In the first case, logic is impotent if the child cannot locate what is logically correct in the particular expression of its anger, while in the second case the universal character

60

4. Nurturing and Educating Anger traits being exulted in the music might be gateways for engaging in unworthy types of conduct. This is a case where there is indeed participation in ‘a shared life of feeling’, but it is not the shared life that will form beautiful character. Various types of ecstatic or cacophonous music come to mind. These arouse emotions that are universal, but they are not the type that Plato wants to see cultivated in the child for directing its conduct. The universal of the particular representation cannot be arbitrary, which is to say that the pleasure it gives or the popularity it gains cannot be a criterion. As Plato warns, the poets know about harmony and rhythm, but not ‘whether the imitation is noble or ignoble’ (Leg. 670e). Are we permitted, though, to call such nurturing in music knowledge? If we were to answer in the affirmative we would risk being ridiculed since one could easily produce a booklet with quotations from Plato and Aristotle showing that nurturing is habituation, i.e., patterns of conduct forged through acting, through repeated practice rather than through learning. Indeed, Plato in the Republic (522a2-5) gives an indisputable negative answer to this question: music and gymnastikê bring harmony into the child’s soul through habituation (ethesi) not knowledge (ouk epistêmê). Even the myths which teach the child through words are discounted as knowledge and are called ‘habits’ that are ‘like siblings’, to those habits produced by music. But should we not here point out that the subject matter of this and other similar conversations is the hunt for true scientific knowledge, for that ‘higher dialectic’ that allows one to gaze on the true realities of the world. In this sense, no doubt thumotic nurturing contributes nothing to knowledge (epistêmê). As we eagerly rush to toss aside the notion that trophê might involve knowledge, should we not recall that for Socrates, Plato’s teacher, virtue, that is excellence in any passion, including that of anger, was knowledge? How should we understand Socrates’ contention? Should we not consider the possibility that the nurturing which is most responsible for acquiring the virtues also encompasses a type of knowledge? The view that Socrates was an intellectualist who reduced all the passions (and their virtues) to knowledge and hence to thought, is neither helpful to understand these issues nor is it a supportable view. If we take into consideration Plato’ s hierarchy of a plethora of psychological elements as put forth especially in the Philebus, the Republic, the Laws it is not possible to seriously entertain the idea that Plato would have developed his approach to the nurturing of the thumos without having marked in some way his radical departure from his teacher’s supposed intellectualism. We must note here, that the recasting of Socrates as a cognitivist was a Stoic invention. As we shall have

61

Taming Anger occasion to show in the last chapter, the Stoics needed a towering authority in order to support their jettisoning of the Homeric framework for the understanding of the passions and towards this end they crafted an intellectualist Socrates. But this reconstruction should not be taken as a valid representation. More to the point: when Socrates states that the virtues are knowledge we must not forget that his claim that one possesses truth in pleasure and pain, and hence has knowledge with respect to anger or fear, rests on a prior foundation of aesthetic beauty and measure in a person’s soul. The unity of the virtues and their truth content are the result of a prior internal order (taxis) that has been formed into a harmonious unity (kosmos). The kosmos that the thumos honours is the one of justice, a virtue that is full of beauty and measure. Without such a prior order the knowledge content of the soul would be, as Protagoras had claimed, random, contextual and relative. There could be no truth in the passions. We have brought up the issue of Socrates’ purported cognitivism so as not to make it appear that we are fallaciously adding supports to the possibility of knowledge occurring during nurturing by leaving out contrary textual evidence that would undermine our analysis. We cannot say more on the subject except to note that the internal aesthetic order that binds pleasure and pain to beauty and to measure was for Plato, and most probably for his teacher as well, the precondition for any knowledge in the realm of the passions. Perhaps more than a precondition. Is it possible that the habituation that is occurring through musical representation is a type of knowledge where ‘knowledge’ is not meant in a scientific way? Following the text, it would seem safe to claim that thumotic nurturing involves only habit but no knowledge. But there is an irony here: for the child to become a knower in the domain of anger and the emotions generally, it must acquire its knowledge non-cognitively. Proof of this is that a person will never become a knower in this field simply by logically knowing. To know and write books on the subject and not to be governed by such knowledge is, according to Plato, the greatest ignorance. Given the non-cognitive foundation of bringing truth to our anger, one might claim that this nurturing does not differ at all from the nurturing that attains obedience to reason through the use of shame and guilt and fear. No one would claim that knowledge is being transferred in these cases. There is a great difference, however, between irrationally cultivated emotional responses that rely on primitive fears and social taboos and a logos-directed structure that shapes the emotional patterns of response through musical harmonies. In the use of one passion to police the other the structure being formed in the child is repressive and arbitrary, in that it stems from either a religious code

62

4. Nurturing and Educating Anger which is beyond examination, or one that is relative and arbitrary, a convention that claims to be viable because it is useful. In both cases the child is being coerced to follow an external norm that will forever remain external to it, because it is just a norm. In the case of mousikê, as proposed by Plato, what is being formed in the thumos of the child is a musical character that imitates the traits of the praos. Plato would probably have agreed with Pindar’s characterisation of music (Pyth. 3.64) as a ‘spell on the thumos’ (philtron en thumô). The child is drawn to music’s enchantments because its aesthetic representations awaken it to its true nature of what it can become.22 The student, writes Peter Abbs, becomes ‘a spell-bound participant in something immeasurably larger’; the art reveals a common noble world to the child and kindles in it the desire to share the beauty it experiences with others (1994: 56 and 60). Plato, especially in his late works, stresses that the habituation that should be called the crux of education is correct nurturing in pleasure and pain. Play is or should be at this age, according to Plato, a mimêsis of the divine. In the Laws, though the population of the new city is to be blessed with a lot of free time, this time is not to be spent in philosophic leisure that aims to grasp the forms. Rather it is spent in festivals and religious celebrations where choral music is always present. These celebrations aim to reinforce the musical order in adults so that this order might continue to command as law throughout one’s life. Plato is in a way reminding us that with respect to our passions we shall remain to some extent children and that non-cognitive nurturing to buttress the musical order within must occur throughout one’s life. Regarding whether the aesthetic habituation is or is not knowledge let us consider the following: if we limit the meaning of the knowledge that we are seeking to the ethical domain alone and think of it as a principle that can be applied to discern the correct expression of anger, in action, then perhaps it can be called knowledge of a sort. This is a step that Plato certainly does not take. However he has shown that intellectual knowledge, in comparison to the non-cognitive logos that shapes the emotions, fails if it has not been nurtured musically. A universal, arrived at through discursive reasoning, is useless if it cannot be applied to the particular in action. Does knowing that one should not harm one’s children with abusive anger count as knowledge, if at the critical moment the father or mother ‘forgets’ and batters the child in anger? In ethical knowledge gained sensuously there is recollection in two senses. First, there is recollection on the part of those shaping the mousikê of a prior thumotic structure that is biologically cast with a natural impulse to friendship and justice. This exists as knowledge in the mind of the legislator. There also exists recollection

63

Taming Anger as a logos that is present and actual in the child or the adult at the moment of action. Let us say one can formulate the categorical imperative for right action with expert logic regarding anger, should this be considered knowledge? Socrates I think would have raised a protest against such a claim. Let us consider the opposite case where one has assimilated the aesthetic of what feels or looks to be ugly or fine in anger. Let us assume the person cannot derive his action from a defensible account, but is able, using this aesthetic (which includes a sense of measure, proportion and beauty), to arrive at the right expression of his anger. Upon interrogation the person is able to work from the action, to the feeling that led him to pick this action, and from there to figuring out the reasons. Which of the two has a greater claim to knowledge? The cognitivist or the person nurtured on mousikê? Perhaps it is best for us to think of the aesthetic habituation as a product of a socially clarified logos about what is best in each of the passions. In this way, even when we reject thumotic nurturing as involving the acquisition of knowledge, we remain aware that the logos being assimilated is continuously informing one’s anger as a type of knowledge. The habit that is operating within the child is a product of social intelligence and is the fruit of its highest intellectual phase. If one were to raise the objection that Pavlovian-like training to react to stimuli is not knowledge, a reply would be that dogs subjected to such conditioning cannot give an account of why their responses were the best with respect to other choices available to them; in fact the conditioning has deprived them of any choice. In humans, the actions which result from the musical logos are selected, they remain voluntary and are never reducible to a predetermined reflex, and an account can be given, after the fact, as to why it was the right choice. Rather than right action following from commands, Plato would have it that right action results from a character that has musical knowledge emanating from a sensuous harmony within. If the child acquires this logos then it will be able in later life to issue the right commands to itself for right action. The commands are posterior to the inner musical order from which knowledge for correct action arises. If the embedded musical harmonies that grace the child’s pleasures and pains provide a logos for its actions, then we can only conclude that this sensuous logos is truer than all the rational commandments that most often are not at hand for controlling anger at the moment of action. The aesthetic crafting of anger during its nurturing phase prepares anger to feel that which reason will later certify. If the beautiful is sensuously present, then rationalisations will follow – but the converse does not hold. A word of caution is in order so that one does not conclude that the

64

4. Nurturing and Educating Anger ‘shared gathering’ connotations of êthea might suggest a musical nurturing that would inculcate solidarity within the polis. One might support such an interpretation by referencing the musical practices of the time, whereby music was generally a shared and pervasive experience. Whether one marched in a phalanx, rowed on a trireme, performed in a chorus, harvested a crop or danced holding hands with others, music was part of the fabric of social cooperation. Plato, however, is an adamant foe of any notion of mass day-care socialised nurturing that aims to foster solidarity. He criticises the Spartans, saying that they created a nurturing suited for a barracks life similar to that given to herd animals. They did not entrust their young to an individual groom who would have given personalised nurturing (paidotrophia, Leg. 666e7). Plato rejects both a trophê which aims at the cultivation of taste for the refinement of the thumos and a trophê that seeks to mould characters whose thumos is disciplined to march to a common drumbeat. The practices of later Hellenistic culture that used music as a medium for the cultivation of an elitist culture of good taste or the use of music for instilling emotional cohesion in the masses are both alien to Plato. One other note of caution is perhaps in order so as to prevent any identification between Plato’s proposal for the training in pleasure and pain with Pavlovian conditioning. In the latter there is also training in sensation so that reactions to certain stimuli, which are deemed appropriate, are reinforced through manipulations of pleasure and pain, rewards and punishments. But modelling humans on mice in mazes has no place in thumotic nurturing. These behavioural counterfeits assume that the human self is an open-ended, malleable construct that can be habituated to respond to environmental stimuli in any way deemed necessary. The human being in these schools of psychology is viewed as an assemblage of conditioned responses that can be retooled at will. They seek to develop patterns of responses by violently intervening in existing character types to ensure that the hedonic elements, irrespective of their previous structuring, conform to the mores of their environment. The control over the behaviour pattern is external to the individual. The environment is the norm, and the controller of the environment is the supreme regulator of one’s behaviour. The electroshocks, the punishment, the anticipation causing the distress and the fear or the rewards and the comforts, all lie outside the person’s control. If there is a saving grace to these methods it is the use of aversive conditioning to break addictive behaviour. With the addition of cognitive therapy they can in some cases provide the thoughts that explain to oneself alternative, rational, non-addictive courses of action. But these techniques, even when not pernicious, are not meant to form good

65

Taming Anger character, but to contain the damage of deviant traits of character. They may have a destructive efficacy, but they cannot be used to construct or reconstruct the psychological order within. Electroshock or psychotropic medications have yet to transmit measure into the internal psyche of the sufferer. Plato’s advances towards the understanding of anger, and some unanswered questions Plato was the first to explain anger’s relationship to the other psychological faculties systematically. Anger was in the thumos and had to be aligned to the purpose of the latter, which was to defend justice within the person and within the city. To accomplish this work the thumos and anger had to be in a defining subordinate relationship to the rational faculty and work under its command, especially to keep the irrational appetites in check. The motivation for the thumos remains honour, but what anger honours above all is justice. Plato developed the Pythagorean ideal of measure by showing how it could be cultivated in the thumos through politically directed musical and gymnastic nurturing. He understood that anger is shaped during a period of imitative moulding and that abuse in childhood and failure to inculcate the right ideals through role models would result in diseased manifestations of anger in later life. Correctness in anger, he showed, follows from a trait of character, praotês. To form such a character is not a matter of conditioning, but of culture. The psychological powers that enter into anger, especially those of pleasure and pain, have to undergo nurturing so that they emerge in a structure that makes anger sensuously inclined to serve justice. Plato’s concept of anger explained the ambiguous nature of thumos as spiritedness and anger. He separated out the virtues belonging to each, courage to the former and well-temperedness (praotês) primarily to the latter. The physical evidence suggests that anger and spiritedness are closely related. When we get ready to throw ourselves into any conflict, adrenaline rushes through the body and a series of hormonal and chemical reactions occur that prepare the body for combat and injury. This competitive arousal is very similar to that which occurs when we are in the grips of anger. But there is an obvious difference between the two: spiritedness, as thumos proper, aims to rally the self with a display of courage, and thumos as anger, which is aroused by an affront, drives forward to retribution. The distinction between the two is of course already present in Homer, but Plato’s study of the relationship of anger to the thumos will clear the way for Aristotle’s finer distinction that anger is always preceded by pain, whereas in the arousal of thumos this is not the case.

66

4. Nurturing and Educating Anger As previously noted, Plato held that anger’s proper social role should be that of corrector and educator of offenders, rather than an avenger of past injuries. Anger’s use as a retributive instrument, he taught, should be reserved for enemies and hopeless cases whose vices were beyond reform. His theory of penal reform and corrective justice called for society to view anger as a therapeutic that heals and binds rather than a power that quells by spreading fear and division. He went beyond all other predecessors in identifying the thumos as the receptacle for anger and friendship and prepared the way for further inquiry into the implications of the affinity between the two. Plato explained with broad strokes what makes deviant anger hard to rectify once established in childhood. He tied its perversity to the thumos’ experience of false pleasure and pain and in part to an improper valorisation of honour. The thumos inherently lacks the power to evaluate the pleasures and pains that arouse it. If their impulses are in command, the thumos will be motivated to strive for their satisfaction. By not honouring justice the thumos can never align itself properly to the rational faculty. Plato explained how the thumos, because of self-love, can shut down access to the mind and become a vigorous defender of its own malformed condition. He thus explained the paradox of anger, wherein its irrational explosions are accompanied by rational conviction; the very rationalisations that spew forth to defend anger’s irrational outbursts are deployed by anger itself and these rationalisations in turn make the mind incapable of reflecting upon the anger or on any other character flaw. He described how this shutting down occurs and he identified the type of militant reasonings (alazones logoi) that give anger its righteousness. He showed how these were connected to shamelessness and to appetitive and thumotic cravings and how this condition can become permanent and resistant to alteration. There are, however, problems with Plato’s explanation of anger. These are very difficult to isolate because of Plato’s unsurpassed use of dramatic imagery to describe the workings of psychological powers. He speaks of an artist inside the mind who paints images with hedonic coatings that inflame our anticipations; he describes the thumos as a guardian standing over the appetites; he portrays anger defending the appetitive seizing of the acropolis of the soul and how it makes use of logical tools to shut down the gates that lead to it. Yet one must determine whether the images and the dramatic accounts, to the degree that they stand for descriptions of psychological powers, stand up, in each case, to verifiable evidence. One of the greatest difficulties has to do with his claim that the thumos and anger stand in opposition to the appetites. But is anger

67

Taming Anger essentially non-appetitive in its nature? If intense pain and pleasure are measures of appetite, then anger would have to be placed at the very top of the appetitive list. Both lust and greed, which stem from what Plato calls the irrational appetitive part of the soul, seem to respond better to calculation than anger. It is rarely that someone, out of greed, will grab someone’s wallet if they know that they will be caught in the act. Also, in the case of lust, people don’t generally act on their sexual arousal in public. Not so with anger. We often arm ourselves to resist our anger, be it in a discussion with our children, with our spouse, with co-workers, but before we know it we find ourselves exclaiming in anger precisely those things that we had sworn to avoid. Anger pushes us with an immediacy and intensity that greed or lust do not have. The description of thumos as a guardian that is opposed to appetite does not stand up to scrutiny. The model fails if we allow for the possibility that anger is itself appetitive, for then the very guard that is standing over appetite would itself be appetitive. If so, then we have the classic problem of the wolf tending the sheep. Anger would be a carrier of the very appetites that it is charged with suppressing. The dangers of Plato’s position, if indeed his view is selectively edited (which is what actually occurred centuries later) so as to emphasise and magnify a separation between appetite and the thumos, might be noted by looking ahead to the Christian doctrines which spoke of a ‘passionless anger’ modelled on God’s wrath. Another difficulty lies with Plato’s condemnation of retributive anger in the Republic. The facts of everyday life make it difficult to support Plato’s argument for doing away with retributive anger at all times without further qualification. The dichotomy is not really between revenge driven by personal pain and correction that aims to cure the deviant internal condition of the offender. There is a middle ground as well. There is retribution that rationally punishes and inflicts pain rationally according to an estimation of damage incurred. In a free society reciprocation always involves the possibility of suffering an offence in inter-personal transactions. When it comes to one’s own things, people have the luxury of giving and not expecting anything in return, such as when they give to their children and tolerate their ingratitude. But when it comes to others, we expect a return in kind, and when we do not get it we demand restitution or retribution. In practical life an impartial judge is not present, especially for the trite occasions of normal social transactions. When we are slighted in the course of these transactions, we have the sense that if the offence is not punished or if the offender is not made aware of the displeasure they have caused, then the offence will be repeated. These situations require a response. But in impersonal contacts one often doesn’t know the

68

4. Nurturing and Educating Anger offending person. The contact is too short and too shallow for correction. But what does one do if correction is out of the question and the offence is obstructing and causing harm? Is there room for retribution in anger that is not a vice? If not, then what does the citizen do with his accumulated bile? Plato has not provided a model that might explain how the measure might be distributed, however imperfectly, to allow for retribution, without it becoming destructive or fractious. What would the criteria for such anger in everyday life be, so that one might judge its correctness in the infinite range of occasions and contexts that might incite our anger? How would we know in each case whether such anger, so common in the daily affairs of men, was right or wrong? Yet such a theory must be advanced if retribution is not to be condemned as an evil, incapable of non-destructive use. As significant as these problems are, they are less devastating than the problem that arises from Plato’s explanation of the role of phantasia, what we translate as ‘imagination’. We have not brought up this problem, because Plato never raises it in the context of anger. He brings up the question of imagination to explain the possibility of deception and error in information coming to us from our sense perceptions. In the Philebus he explains how we are deceived with respect to our pleasures and pains because of our anticipations, which are like painted pleasurable or painful images retained in memory. Anticipations he says are beliefs held in memory and these are vivid and desirous because they have been painted with alluring images by an artist within us (Phlb. 40a). In this way our ‘imagination’, what Plato was the first to call phantasia, is generated.23 This important advance marked the introduction of ‘imagination’ as a new factor affecting human action. But for our study what we have to note is that Plato does not consider ‘imagination’ to be a separate psychological faculty. Instead, he says, it is a combination of existing powers, those of opinion and sensation (Soph. 161e8). That X ‘appears’ as such implies that a judgment has been made regarding X. Plato gives the example of a man who sees an object in the distance near a rock under a tree and poses the question to himself: ‘What is this object?’ Some process of analysis occurs which results in an image (the product of imagination) that contains within itself a judgment. What has all this to do with anger? If images of our anticipations are a combination of sensation and opinion, then it must follow that whatever ‘apparently’ makes a person angry must be armed with an opinion. When an affront ‘appears’ to have been made, according to Plato, there must be an opinion-forming process that has led the person to conclude that an affront ‘appears’ to have occurred. Now this is a devastating paradox for Plato’s thesis about the central importance of non-cognitive

69

Taming Anger thumotic nurturing of children. If one presses the point, Plato’s entire theory of nurturing is stripped of its very foundation. Anger, in order to be aroused, would require opinion, yet he has insisted that children must undergo non-cognitive nurturing, precisely because they are unable to form defensible opinions for the control of their passions at this early age. Furthermore, what of the anger of animals? What can one say about their opinions? Thus many paradoxes ensue: if a non-rational arousal of anger is possible, something that Plato assents to, then his explanation simultaneously asserts the possibility of non-cognitive arousal of anger, yet an arousal that requires an opinion. The stakes are very high. On the one hand, the conclusions of his theory demand a non-cognitive nurturing, yet the premises regarding the ‘apparent’, which rouses anger, entail that if anger is to be ignited it must be equipped with belief and thought. Related to this problem is how the musical logos, which is cultivated non-cognitively, can come to issue rational-like commands to anger. The claim seems to be true in that this logos does function in lieu of syllogistic reasoning, yet the thorny issue of how something that is acquired non-cognitively can command anger, especially if we consider all the conditions that have to be evaluated correctly if the anger is to be on the mark, is left unexplained. The notion that music, as a representation of traits of character and emotions, performs its cultural function based on the principle of ‘like to like’ is not satisfying. The idea of ‘like to like’ is dangerously endearing in its simplicity. It assumes the assimilation of the desired result, in this case assimilation to beauty, without having to explain how the assimilation is occurring. This is not to say that Plato is wrong in his theory of music’s role in nurturing the thumos. The process by which the inner psychological powers are being shaped is not fully clarified, because the inner order is attributed to the assimilation of a kindred external model which one wants to replicate within. I think a good analogy for pointing out the flaw in this train of reasoning would be for one to say that the human being reproduces a human being and this of course is correct, but someone could also argue on the principle of ‘like to like’ that what is reproduced upon conception is a homunculus. Another question that one might pose is the practicality of Plato’s nurturing programme in light of human weaknesses. Plato excludes the poets as cultural leaders since they have no way of accounting for the fineness of their works and therefore are unreliable guides for nurturing. In the Republic and the Laws the burden of such cultural leadership falls on the political leadership of the city. One wonders whether such a theoretically sound conclusion is practical politically. What of regimes in which such an enlightened leadership is not in

70

4. Nurturing and Educating Anger power? What of the democratic constitutions where the people rule? Is it still possible for such a people who are not fully committed to living the noble life to be capable of producing the mild-tempered character type? Another aspect of anger in public life is its role in political conflict. The problems that Plato’s view of anger poses for understanding the outcomes of political transformations (what are often called ‘revolutionary’ changes) are difficult to summarise but, for the purposes of completeness, require mention here. Plato perpetually sought to analyse, for preventive purposes, the political disease of stasis. A question was how to intervene in these eruptions constructively once they started and how to forecast the future course of an emerging conflict. Plato, despite his psychological acumen, was unable to account systematically for the unpredictability of these conflicts. He argued that revolutionaries have a rational end in mind that directs their actions to a final purpose. This end, whether democracy or oligarchy or some other constitution, he thought was the compass guiding their political choices. This idea lives on and was adopted most notably in modern times, albeit in altogether different contexts, by Marx and others. Yet time after time these turbulent confrontations had outcomes that were completely different from the beliefs that were supposedly directing the revolutionary process. The role of anger, orgê, in clouding the mind of all those caught up in the turmoil of these conflicts had already been noted by Thucydides. How was it possible that anger at apparent injustice could be so righteous that its claims could be rationally articulated in rhetorical argument, yet so irrational and so independent of any rational trajectory? In 403 BCE when the 30 Tyrants came to power, the class to be victimised was none other than the aristocrats of Athens who were systematically executed. The result was completely contrary to what Plato’s theory would have predicted. A solution to this complicated problem required insight into the appetitive reactions to injustice; people crave for justice but, as Aristotle was to show, what they strive for when they turn against their constitution is power, and power is appetitive. The thumos and anger, rather than being mobilised by a rational, even if flawed objective, can become instruments of appetite in its craving for power. When this occurs anger can become subordinate to appetite’s gratifications. The way is then open for indeterminate possibilities whose outcomes are highly contextual and whose prognosis requires attention to the psychological dynamics pushing the process forward, because volatile anger itself has become part of the political process. The deterministic model that relied on knowledge of the ends-in-view of the revolutionaries had exiled anger from the

71

Taming Anger equation, and anger arising from appetite, be it craving for power to correct injustice and the like, was a more potent factor than the ideas and ideals which revolutionaries were only too prone to jettison. We see here the far-ranging implications that Plato’s separation of appetite from anger had even on crucial parts of his political theory. The inconsistencies and unresolved issues in Plato’s approach to anger, and the passions in general, were to be studied by Plato’s foremost student, Aristotle, the father of scientific psychology.

72

5

Aristotle on the Causes of Anger Anger is in response to ‘apparent’ injustice Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1135b28-9

A dramatically new approach to the passions Many theories on anger fail to give attention to the entirety of its phases and the powers, both bodily and psychological, which are activated in the course of each phase of its unfolding. These accounts remind one of Empedocles’ poem where he writes of those who ‘having seen only a small portion’ brag ‘that they have found the whole’ (Fr. 2). Aristotle was able to bring all aspects of anger, its physiology, its biological nature, its social habituation, and the contexts that can inflame or dampen it, under one unified theory. The immediate evidence for his unified approach is his new nomenclature. Nowhere prior to Aristotle do we find an explicit classification of such things as anger as passions. He was the first to systematically refer to the emotions as a distinct class of psychological powers, which he called the pathê. His use of the word pathos is evidence of a scientific advance whereby anger was analysed for the first time as a physically-based psychological power undergoing process. Anger is something being acted on, an affection, in the original sense of the verb paschô, from which pathos is derived. This verb, which we find in Homer, meant to ‘have something done or happen to one’, ‘to suffer’. The reformulation of this ancient word to designate what we call the emotions allowed Aristotle to subject the entire process of anger to analysis. If anger undergoes a process then one should be able to describe all its phases and the relationships between the psychological powers that are active in each phase, from the instant of anger’s arousal to its craving for retribution and its eventual quiescence. Aristotle uses the word pathos, as does Plato, in the broad sense of something that has the power to undergo alteration and in a narrow sense to denote the emotions. In our study we are interested in its narrow sense of ‘emotion’ since this is the class to which anger belongs. A distinguishing feature of the pathê in this sense is that they occur in the appetitive part of the human soul. The orektikon, the ‘appetitive’ faculty and orexis ‘appetite’ (usually translated as ‘desire’) are charac-

73

Taming Anger terised by pleasure and pain; under appetite are all the psychological capacities that have to do with action, with attainment of pleasurable goods and avoidance of the painful.1 From the outset we see an important differentiation from the views of Plato in which anger, as a guardian, was pitted against the appetites. Aristotle starts out with the facts at hand. He observes that anger is ignited by pain and that it yearns for the pleasure of retaliation. In other words, anger is itself appetitive. In the Nicomachean Ethics he writes that anger has an inborn impetus (horma) to effect a punishment (EN 1149a31) and in the De Anima he defines anger as an appetite to inflict ‘anti-pain’ (403a30). The ingrained impulse to inflict a pleasure-giving punishment is in part what makes anger so hard to control. The word orexis is familiar to most English speakers as anorexia, which is a loss of appetite. The original Homeric meaning of the verb oregô, from which the noun orexis was later derived, was that of ‘reaching out’, ‘beseeching’. When the Achaeans are facing the spectre of defeat, their backs against their ships, Nestor ‘stretched his hands to the starry skies and prayed’ (Il. 15.371) and Odysseus’ shipmates, as they are being lifted to be devoured by Scylla, desperately stretch out their hands for help (Od. 12.257). The image of reaching out for something vividly captures the essence of orexis. Appetite always drives us forward to grasp an object or it turns us away to avert the harm. These preliminaries assist us in placing the problem of anger in its proper setting. Whatever anger is, its classification, as ‘appetitive’ informs us from the outset that pleasure and pain will be at the very core of its mysteries. We now have to proceed systematically, and this requires that we start by giving a brief account of the class to which anger belongs, the pathê in general. Whatever knowledge we gain regarding the traits that are generic to the entire class of the pathê will also be transferable to anger. Going from the universal to the particular, the next step will be to proceed directly to examine the nature and the causes of the specific pathos of anger. Aristotle provides the following definitions of the pathê in the narrow sense: I call the pathê the following: anger, fear, shame, desire and generally all those things which are usually followed by sensory pleasure or pain. Regarding these, they have no qualitative traits, but they undergo (EE 1220b12-15; similarly, EN 1105b19-1106a13). The pathê are those things which, because of some reason, when they undergo alteration, bring change to one’s judgments, and they are accompanied by pleasure and pain, such as anger, pity, fear, and other similar things and their contraries (Rh. 1378a20).

74

5. Aristotle on the Causes of Anger The above definitions allow us to draw the conclusion that anger, pity, envy, as pathê share a number of common traits. All of these are said to: (1) lack quality, (2) be accompanied by pleasure and pain, (3) cause alterations in our judgments, and (by implication) they (4) affect our conduct. A most revealing feature of the pathê, in the narrow sense, is that they have no quality.2 Lacking quality, biological anger is neither good nor bad, neither noble nor ignoble. Aristotle thus starts his analysis from generic anger which is independent of any social conditioning. Whether one was born in Athens of the fifth century BCE or in modern day India the biological nature of ‘quality-less’ anger will be identical. At the same time, his approach allows him to draw a distinction between the generic, biological anger and anger that acquires a socially nurtured trait. In the course of life what starts out as quality-less anger becomes qualified along an ascending scale of ever more permanent connections so that it attains a permanent character. No doubt the types of qualities which are available for the shaping of biological anger are affected by the culture in which the shaping occurs. When Aristotle speaks of the pathê in the narrow sense, he is interested in those ‘undergoings’ that are susceptible to increasing degrees of habituation for the shaping of conduct. Blushing, feeling hot or cold are passions in the broad sense that they too undergo alterations, for one can be pale one moment and flushed the next. But these do not influence the ethical domain. No amount of training to exert control over blushing will make a person better in their conduct. Nor is conduct affected by the (quality-less) passions as such; as Aristotle will say these are neither good nor bad (EN 1105b30-1106a4). Anger for instance is just anger; how we choose to express our anger is what makes it good or bad, and this choosing, as it turns out, is itself affected by anger’s quality, by how it has come to be structured. The moulding of anger is what makes anger’s expression predictable. For instance, we can predict that a certain person when faced with a slight irritation is likely to blow up. The pathê in the narrow sense are those affections that can be moulded into a pattern that will affect how the passion is likely to be manifested. The second definition cited above states that when the pathê undergo alteration they cause changes in our judgments. Aristotle does not state that pathê are those things that when our judgments undergo alteration cause us to have a change in our psychological condition. If our

75

Taming Anger judgments directly caused alterations in our passions, then mankind would have subdued the passions long ago. Human beings would simply generate the right judgment and the right passion would be energised. Our anger would be subject to our judgments, so that changes in our judgments or beliefs would change our anger. That our judgment can change as a result of undergoing a passion is one of the remarkable powers of the pathê, one which is especially pronounced in the case of anger. It also reveals their diachronic importance to rulers, both secular and religious, who have historically sought to affect the judgments of their subjects through the manipulation of their emotions. We need only cite the existence of a gargantuan opinion-making industry, which makes use of crafted sounds and images, to affect the judgments of people through the manipulation of their emotions. The difference between emotion and passion The revolution that Aristotle brought about can perhaps be grasped better by pointing out the differences between emotion and pathos. Up to this point, in deference to contemporary usage, we have been using the words ‘passion’ and ‘emotion’ as synonyms. Aristotle’s theory however demands that we become rigorous and draw out the significant differences between these two words. According to the Oxford English Dictionary ‘emotion’ originally meant a ‘moving out’, from e = ‘out’ and movere = ‘to move’, hence it meant a ‘transference’, such as a migration from one place to another. It also connoted a physical perturbation; thunder, for example, could cause an ‘emotion of the air’. Figuratively, it could denote any ‘agitation or disturbance of mind’. Emotion thus emphasises movement and turmoil, either internal or external, while pathos is a passive condition of being acted upon. A pathos, such as anger, may cause movement, but the movement is subsequent to the prior passive condition. A pathos first has to be aroused in order for it to be put into operation. ‘Emotion’ puts the movement of an already activated passion in the forefront of its meaning, whereas Aristotle starts his analysis of anger from its affective origin, rather than its e-motive results. This permitted him to study anger as it unfolds across its entire continuum. Aristotle understood that the passion first has to be ignited, and this arousal phase, as we shall soon see, is quite a complicated and controversial affair which cannot be taken for granted. The words emotion and thumos, despite their differences, share a common trait in that they both presume turbulence or perturbation. In this way their use is an impediment to a scientific understanding of anger to the degree that the presumption of turbulence assumes that the anger has already been activated. We are now in a better position

76

5. Aristotle on the Causes of Anger to grasp why the poets’ use of a seething thumos, a seat of turbulence, could never evolve into a scientific concept for explaining the inner workings of anger. Another problem with ‘emotion’ arises from its definition as a ‘feeling’. In stating that emotion is a ‘mental feeling or affection (e.g. of pleasure or pain)’ the Oxford English Dictionary, wrongly assumes that emotions are reducible to the pleasures and pains that accompany them. A ‘feeling’, without further qualification, is so expansive that its assignment to the emotions has little scientific merit. For example, emotions and sensations involve feeling, but Aristotle points out an important difference between their respective cognitive contents. When we feel anger, we cannot presume that it corresponds to a correct evaluation of an external reality, but sensation, when it feels, tends to register its objects correctly. The senses have a built-in discriminatory power, the kritikon, which grasps the form of the object being sensed. The passions, however, having no such discriminatory device, do not illuminate themselves. In fact, if there were such a critical faculty within them we would conclude that on average it registers situations incorrectly – and when it comes to anger, often disastrously so. We usually end up apologising for our anger. Anger has no capacity within itself to correctly perceive the external stimulus. Thus, both sensation and passion feel, but the discriminatory content of the feeling in the two cases is markedly different. The causes of anger Aristotle’s definition attempts to summarise, in a compact way, the causes of anger. The word ‘cause’, which in Greek is aitia, had a legal dimension. In its legal setting, aitia signified ‘guilt’ or ‘blame’, or ‘to be accused’. Aristotle’s causal analysis treats anger as if it were the accused testifying before a judge. To give a full account of itself anger would have to explain its material composition, what arouses it, what it aims for, and how its form differs from that of the other passions. Anger would reply to the prosecutor: ‘I am this because ...’ and its explanation would give a full account of what it is. Aristotle’s method of the Four Causes is evident in his definition of anger. The four questions that are being posed are: (1) Out of what materials is anger made? (2) What triggers it? (3) What is its work or function and its aim? (4) What is its unique form that makes it what it is and distinguishes it from all other passions? In his De Anima Aristotle provides an example of what a definition of anger would have to include if it were to give an account of its causes: ‘Anger is an arousal in a [1] specific body or some part or faculty of it, [2] produced by a specific cause and [3] for

77

Taming Anger a specific end’ (De An. 403a26-7). Any definition of anger must give an account of (1) its bodily constituents, (2) its distinguishing form, (3) what triggers it, and (4) its end or aim. We can now turn to the actual definition of anger that Aristotle provides in Book 2 of the Rhetoric. Let us consider anger to be an appetite, which occurs after a painful event, for an apparent punishment because of an apparent slight against oneself or one’s affairs, where the slighting is impermissible. If this then is anger then it is necessary that the angry person be angered always, in each case, against an individual person, like Kleon, but not against man in general and, in addition, because he did or intended to do something against him or his affairs. And it is necessary that each instance of anger be followed by a pleasure, whose impulse comes from the hope of inflicting a punishment. For it is pleasurable for someone to believe that he will succeed in the things he longs for. No person, though, longs for things that appear to be impossible for him. Hence, the angry person desires things that are possible for him. For this reason, it has correctly been said in reference to anger, that: ‘far sweeter than the honey that spreads does it increase in the chests of men’ (Il. 18.109-10) Some type of pleasure then follows for this reason, and furthermore because one spends time in the thought of inflicting revenge. The image which then comes into being produces a pleasure, just like what occurs in those who dream (Rh. 1378a30-1378b10).

A surprising feature of this definition is that it omits completely the physiology of anger, i.e. the materials out of which it is made. Nothing is said about the body. This, however, is natural given that the relatively lengthy treatment of anger and its opposite, gentle-temperedness, in the Rhetoric aims to provide public speakers with the knowledge required for arousing or quelling anger in an audience. For this reason Aristotle is not interested in describing the bodily causes of anger in these passages, since the physiology of anger is irrelevant to an orator. Nor is he interested in explaining the abnormalities of anger and how these might be caused by poor nurturing or how they might be cured. Nor is he interested in giving a detailed theoretical account of what activates it. We do not expect an author writing a manual on how to operate an automobile to include in his work a theoretical discussion of an engine’s internal combustion and the second law of thermodynamics. Because of these limitations, our analysis of the above definition of anger will have to make use of other writings in which Aristotle gives more information about anger’s causes or where his remarks on some

78

5. Aristotle on the Causes of Anger aspect of the passions in general can legitimately be transferred to explain some aspect of anger. With this in mind, we shall start our analysis of the causes of anger with the body which, according to Aristotle, is where anger is inscribed. A. Material cause of anger Aristotle had no brain scanning instruments and no neuroscience to guide him. Rudimentary knowledge of the brain’s role was not developed until after his lifetime at the Museum in Alexandria, and Aristotle himself held the mistaken view that thinking occurs in the region of the heart. Nevertheless, his thesis on the connection of anger to the body remains relevant today. In the still primitive physiology of his day, Aristotle hypothesised that the body when ‘in ferment’ causes a boiling of the blood around the heart, which then causes anger. The word that Aristotle uses for ‘ferment,’ orgaô, is etymologically connected to the word for anger, orgê. Orgaô is a ‘bursting forth’, a ‘swelling’, like that of ripened fruit; it can also mean being filled with moisture or fluids, such as the fluids that, as the ancients believed, drive one to sexual intercourse. All of these connotations, which imply a physical drive that seeks a release, are transferred onto the nuances of anger. Anger has a compelling physical impulse. It is waiting to burst, but unlike thumos it is not in a continuous state of energised arousal. When the body is in a condition that corresponds to the physical initiation of anger, when the body is in ferment, then anger can be aroused with the slightest stimulus. Anger’s relationship to the body is a two-way process: bodily arousal can activate anger and thought can prevent bodily arousal, even when there is sufficient cause for the person and their body to be in an angry or fearful condition. This leads Aristotle to draw the conclusion that if reasoning (logos) can affect the body, and in turn if the body can affect anger’s logos-dependent disposition, then it must follow that anger is a logos, a formula of some sort, embedded in the matter of the body. It seems that all the pathê of the soul are directly related to the body: anger, mild-temperedness, fear, pity, courage, and in addition joy and love and hatred. Because when these exist something happens to the body. Proof of this is the fact that though sometimes there are strong and clear incidents [that should arouse the body] one does not experience irritation or fear, while at other times, when the body is in ferment, it is aroused by small and insignificant happenings, as is the case when it is in an angry condition. Even more so this is evident by the following: without anything having happened that is fearful the passion is aroused just like that which occurs in the frightened person. If matters are thus,

79

Taming Anger then it is clear that the passions are formulae inscribed in the matter of the body (enuloi). Hence the definitions of things of this type will be such as ‘anger is an arousal of a particular body or part or power produced by such a cause for such an end’ (De An. 403a16-27).

The notion that anger is a ‘form’ in the matter of the body may appear to be strangely worded, but we can readily grasp that Aristotle’s view is in line with modern biology. Today of course we know that there exist many types of codes or formulae in the body. We are told by scientists that the information stored in the microscopic nucleus of each cell surpasses that which is contained in the collected volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The form or the code for anger is different from the code for pity or greed or jealousy or grief. A sudden loud clap is unlikely to produce pity or greed or anger, but it might stir up fear and bodily reactions that are consistent with fear. The pain that accompanies fear will be different from the pain that one feels when suffering a slight or from the pain of pity or jealousy, and the state of the body will be unmistakably different in each case. The reason for these differences between the passions is that each is the result of a different formula inscribed in the body. We should also pause to note the novelty of the compound word enuloi (in + matter), that Aristotle uses to convey this concept of psychological powers, as formulae, inscribed into the body’s matter. Probably Aristotle felt that there was no word in the Greek language that would have allowed him to state this concept clearly. We do not find this word anywhere else prior to its appearance in this passage and Aristotle used it only this one time as far as we can tell from the surviving corpus. The evidence suggests that this word, so rich and promising as a starting point for understanding each passion, never entered the working vocabulary of the scholars and researchers of the Imperial Age. It appears henceforth mostly in commentaries and does not seem to have undergone any further evolution. The scientific implications of the word may have been too far in advance of Aristotle’s time and thus may not have found a place in the theories of the passions that came after him. The modern discovery of DNA’s inscribed codes is an affirmation of Aristotle’s thesis that powers of the soul such as anger, are ‘forms’ in matter, and have given his theory new significance which is still unfolding in biology, neuroscience and psychology.3 We now know far more than Aristotle could possibly have known about the physiological alterations that anger causes. We know that when anger is aroused the kidneys pump out more adrenaline and cortisol, a steroid, into the bloodstream. The heart beats faster. More blood is sent to the lungs and to the muscles; less blood is made

80

5. Aristotle on the Causes of Anger available for routine functions such as digestion. Pupils dilate, palms become sweaty, sphincter valves lock and the immune system is dampened with the onrush of cortisol. Aristotle’s point nevertheless still stands: whether it is heat around the heart or whether it is adrenaline and cortisol rushing through the body, the body can incite anger without the aid of a person’s conscious intervention. A formula imprinted into the matter once stimulated physically can automatically propel our anger towards retribution. If we imbibe caffeine, deprive ourselves of sleep and skip our meals, we are likely to blow a fuse when someone inadvertently bumps against us on the bus.4 The material cause already provides us with a clue as to how, at least in the cases cited above, anger might be incited without the benefit of thought. The form within responds to the bodily condition appropriate to its initialisation, something which should be taken into account in order to understand the body’s role in inclining a person to anger. We see further evidence of the body inciting anger in persons who take such drugs as cocaine, which physiologically act to put the body in an irritable disposition, even after the addict has undergone a withdrawal; anger, to the person’s surprise, suddenly jumps out often without any ostensible provocation. B. Formal and final causes The formal cause of anger should explain what anger is and in what ways anger differs from other passions. Aristotle refers to this cause simply as ‘the what is it?’ Often an explanation of the essence of a thing is disclosed by its end. The acorn, for example, has an ingrained impulse (hormê) to become an oak tree and is in a way definable by what it is structured to become. Likewise anger has an inherent craving for retaliation and an impetus to consummate itself in a punishment. Scholars have generally taken Aristotle’s statement, cited above, that ‘anger [as defined by the dialectician] is a craving for retaliation, or something of the sort’ to mean that anger’s essential trait or formal cause is the desire for retaliation. This, though true, does not adequately take into consideration all the information Aristotle has assembled for clarifying anger’s essence. Just taking the end, without systematically analysing the beginning of anger, leaves out essential traits that bear upon anger’s taming. Even though in the quotation cited above Aristotle identifies anger’s essence with its culminating phase, in other works he explains that both the initiating cause and the final cause together give the essence of a thing. Both ends of the spectrum together capture the entirety of the process that anger is biologically structured to undergo. Anger

81

Taming Anger starts with the pain of unjustified insult and ends in the pleasurable desire for retaliation. If all Aristotle wished was to distinguish anger from all the other passions, then the beginning cause, the pain caused by apparent underserved slight, would have been adequate. There is no other passion that is aroused by the pain of unjust slight. But Aristotle chose to define anger according to its final cause, probably because it reveals its ultimate function. If he had chosen the arousal of anger for characterising anger’s form, the definition would have been flawed, because we can easily imagine events that could have impeded the aroused anger from reaching its end. The angry person might have fainted or had a stroke or been under the influence of some medication that dampened his or her anger. Or perhaps the person suffering the insult was satisfied with the offender’s apology so that retaliation was unnecessary. Retribution, however, entails the existence of all other phases of anger that lead up to it. Parenthetically, this does not mean that anger must culminate in revenge. That an acorn’s end is to become an oak tree does not entail that it will necessarily become one, and more so in the case of anger whose outcomes are determined by the vagaries of human choice. In the gentle person the actualisation of anger’s end, retribution, cannot automatically be presumed at all.5 Aristotle, like Plato, makes a distinction between inflicting revenge (timôreô) and punishing for the purpose of correction (kolazô). The latter, he writes, is in order to reform the person, while revenge is for the satisfaction of the revenge-seeker. To administer corrective punishment one has to check the natural impulse that drives anger to its end. The distinction Aristotle makes between quality-less anger and its socially cultivated expressions allows us to view corrective anger as something that is not a property of raw (‘quality-less’) anger as such. Correction cannot be part of the definition of anger, nor can the use of anger to reform an offender be attributed to anger’s biological nature. Aristotle in a way corrects Plato, who held that correction of kin and friends is the normal end of anger. The nature-implanted role of anger is not to reform or to correct the transgressions of others, since anger’s impulse is to seek retribution. Correction goes against anger’s biological drive. From this one might conclude that the ability to check anger’s impulse must be based solely on human reason. One might argue that it is because humans understand the harms that anger can cause that they use judgment to alter anger’s natural course. But this cannot be the case since many other animals restrain their anger within their social groups. Primates, dogs and wolves do not normally tear apart their young or their rivals in anger. This ability to forego retribution in favour of correction cannot simply be a human logic-based trait. Logically arriving at alternatives to retribution may be a human trait in its

82

5. Aristotle on the Causes of Anger excellence, but the impulse not to harm children and kin retributively for their infractions is widely distributed in nature. If the impulse to forego retribution is not part of anger, then this impulse must arise from a different passion altogether. As a first approximation to this problem we can hypothesise that the impulse for correction arises from friendship because friendship is the feeling by which we take the good of the other person into consideration and if this is so then it will also follow that the taming of anger, in some fashion, will involve the cultivation of friendship. Even though the Greeks made great strides in analysing how to avert retribution, the surviving literature shows that they emphasised the ugly realities of the pleasure-driven impulse for revenge. Medea, for instance, begs the herald to give her the details of her victims’ deaths, proclaiming that it will give her double pleasure to know that they died in the most horrible way (1134-5). Aristotle, after remarking that anger is aroused from a pain, is quick to note that ‘being angry is pleasant’ (Rh. 1370b10-11). In the contemporary world the pleasure of anger seems to be something that people would prefer not to admit to. Those with anger problems prefer to point to the pains of belittlement from which they say they chronically suffer. What they often suppress is the memory of their revelling in the sweet feeling of having inflicting the ‘anti-pain’, as Aristotle called it. Few mothers or fathers will admit the pleasure they feel at the time of their violent outbursts. Instead what they emphasise is the pain that aroused their anger and the pain of their subsequent remorse. When they reflect on the root causes of their anger they may refer to the past abuses they themselves may have suffered. These confessions, even though painful, are also not devoid of pleasure, since they invite the listener to pity the offender and not the victim. What is worse is that such accounts dishonestly mask the shameful pleasure that sustains the aberrantly angry person during their outburst. C. Efficient cause Controlling anger obviously requires gaining control over the stimuli that arouse it. Psychologists discuss this as a problem of ‘triggers’ to anger: frustration, perceived harm and injury, stress and danger, threat to self esteem, violation of one’s rules of conduct are just a few of the triggers that have been identified. The problem with this empirical approach is that it delineates a great variety of triggers, but it fails to tell us what a trigger is. This is a fallacy of exemplification; it assumes that by enumerating examples of triggers we know what a trigger is universally. Aristotle goes the other way around. He searches for the

83

Taming Anger universal with the understanding that infinity of particulars is in theory indefinable. The key to identifying anger’s trigger lies in coming to grips with the fact that anger is not caused by slight per se, but by phainomenên oligôrian, which has been translated as ‘apparent’, ‘perceived’, ‘conspicuous’ or ‘imagined’ ‘slight’. The paradox of anger centres about the verb phainomai (to appear) and the cluster of cognate words such as phantasia (imagination), phantasma (image), phainomenon (that which appears). The difficulty of translating phainomenên does not lie only with the language, but more with the difficulties that arise if one were to literally translate phainomenên as ‘appearance’. In a nutshell here is the difficulty: anger has a conceptual content, it is aroused by ‘slight’; yet it can be ignited non-cognitively. On the one hand anger requires a belief or judgment that some insult has occurred, yet there are times when anger is aroused without thought. Behind Aristotle’s use of the word apparent lies an advance in human psychology, one of which Aristotle no doubt was clearly aware. The importance that he gave to this word ‘apparent’ can be shown by the fact that the word appears repeatedly whenever he defines the cause of most passions.6 The logical structure of any passion, is usually qualified with various cognates of words that are derived from the verb phainomai, ‘to appear’. Anger arises from phainomenên slighting (1378a31); fear is caused by the ‘impression’ (phantasias) of an imminent evil (1282a21); confidence by an ‘impression’ (phantasias) of salvation near at hand (1383a17); shame by a phantasia about dishonour (1383b13); pity is aroused by the ‘imagination’ (phainomenô) of a destructive evil that will occur (1385b13) } and the list goes on. 7 Given the importance of the apparent we have to uncover why Aristotle chose to phrase his formula for explaining the onset of anger with this technical word. The problem would be straightforward if anger’s trigger were held to be ‘apparent’ slight in the sense that the initiating cause of anger is one’s belief that one has been slighted. This indeed is the standard interpretation. Those who hold that all the passions are aroused by thoughts interpret the ‘apparent’ slight to mean that a person’s anger must be preceded by a judgment that they have been slighted. The word ‘apparent’ in their view shows that the slight only refers to what ‘appears’ to be the case. In this way, Aristotle ‘is calling attention to the fact that human emotions are caused by beliefs which may or may not be true’ (Fortenbaugh 2002: 97). Another noted scholar writes along the same lines that phantasia is just what appears to be, and hence there is ‘no technical distinction between phantasia and believing ... it is the way things are seen by the agent, not the fact of the matter, that is instrumental in getting emotions going’ (Nussbaum1994: 85-6). They

84

5. Aristotle on the Causes of Anger claim that whether the thought is a figment of one’s imagination or whether what it reflects are actual events is of no importance. Errors could conceivably happen in a myriad of ways, but the crux of the argument is that anger is aroused by a belief which is encased in one’s perception that such and such insult has ‘apparently’ occurred. The problem then for anger control, according to this interpretation, is one of becoming ever more aware of the beliefs that we hold, so that we learn to give our assent only to those appearances that are actually real or true. If people apply themselves to unlearn the false beliefs which cause them irritation, then they would no longer be disturbed by imagined affronts. The view that belief or thought is the trigger of anger has become so standard that Aristotle is routinely proclaimed to be the founding father of cognitive psychology. He is paid high tribute as the theoretician upon whose principles modern cognitive therapy has purportedly been established. In the words of one noted psychologist (R. Lazarus 1998: 361) ‘Aristotle ... might be called the first cognitive theorist of the emotions’.8 But is this so? Is it belief that moves anger? From Aristotle’s definition it would certainly seem so, given the formidable logical conditions that have to be satisfied before the anger is triggered. In order for anger to be ignited a number of conditions have to be met: There must be (1) a perception of apparent slight, but one which (2) is aimed at the person himself or friends and (3) the slight must be undeserved. It is as if a stimulus provoking anger must pass through not one, but three successive sieves, each one requiring cognitive appraisal. One would conclude, on these grounds, that a logical processing which confirms each of these conditions always occurs in order for anger to be aroused. The problem with this view is that we can point to cases of anger that don’t seem to involve any logical processing. If anger is triggered by beliefs how are we to explain anger in a dog or an ape or a lizard, for clearly these animals do not hold beliefs or defensible judgments for their actions.9 How can we explain the presence of anger in infants who also don’t hold beliefs? Or the anger that comes as in a flash, sometimes from a look or a gesture? The possibility of non-cognitive arousal of anger leaves us with the following absurdity: on the one hand, according to Aristotle’s definition of anger, logical discriminations must be made for its arousal, while on the other hand, logical deduction, opinion and belief may not be necessary for anger’s onset. The cognitive interpretation of the ‘apparent’ is not satisfactory, because Aristotle rejects the claim that ‘imagination’ (phantasia) is opinion or opinion plus sensation or opinion through sensation, or a mixture of opinion and sensation. Aristotle no doubt had his teacher’s views in mind and emphasised his differences with him in order to

85

Taming Anger underscore his own findings. He shows, with a simple but elegant example, that imagination does not entail belief at all. He points out that we can have a false image (phantasia) and at the same time hold a correct opinion: ‘For example, the sun appears to have a diameter of one foot, yet [at the same time] we believe that it is greater in size than the earth’ (De An. 428b3-4). That we are content with an image that belies the true condition of that which is being imaged proves that opinion is distinct from imagination and not a constituent of it. Aristotle here and elsewhere takes great pains to explain that thought requires images,10 but these images of themselves are not thoughts: ‘Imagination, in fact, is something different both from sensation and from thought’.11 We should note that Aristotle identifies phantasia as a faculty or power to make discriminations,12 but to discriminate does not entail thought; animals do very well processing discriminations (kriseis) and even in making complex decisions based on them, but these are not raised to the level of thoughts.13 That an image implies a discrimination (a krisis) is granted; that it is belief is denied. The pain of anger: three types of slighting Before we proceed to analyse the meaning of the ‘apparent’ we must first say a few words about anger’s pain, on two counts. First it is proper at this point to remind the reader that because anger is appetitive, it itself cannot be the cause of the pain, but rather pain must be the cause of anger. Aristotle is explicit on this point: ‘For when the angry person feels pain, the pain occurs within him before [the anger]. For anger does not produce the pain, but pain is the cause of anger so that anger is not pain’ (Top. 125b32-4). Anger’s arousal thus must involve the onset of pain. Aristotle identified three types of pain-causing slight which we shall shortly identify and discuss. Second, a brief digression about pain is necessary because the roots of our culture are set against such an acknowledgement of pain’s role in our passions. Until recently, the recognition of pain, let alone its treatment or palliation in medical and psychiatric practice, was largely ignored. In vain will one search the works of Freud to find insights into anger’s pain. A difference between our civilisation and that of the Greeks with respect to pain is that they studied all its manifestations, medical, psychological and political. Probably it was their view of human nature that led them in that direction. They believed that living well is the final end of human life and that this is not possible if one lives in chronic pain. Aristotle states: ‘pain makes us beside ourselves: it destroys the nature of the person who suffers it’ (EN 1119a23-4). A life lived in pain

86

5. Aristotle on the Causes of Anger undermines the promise of happiness and changes the person for the worse. Perhaps for this reason their culture was sensitive to recognising pain and pursued its treatment, even when there was little chance of curing a patient. The Hippocratic corpus is filled with illnesses which though incurable at the time were attended to with a sensitivity to easing the pain of the patient. Evidence of their sensitivity to the understanding of pain is the plethora of words that they had at their disposal for discussing its different physical and psychological manifestations. These words included algos, odunê, pêma, achos, penthos, kêdos, lupê, to name but the most frequent. This should be compared to the word ‘pain’ which is used in English. ‘Pain’, as its origin shows, bears testimony to a different view of human nature. It is derived from the Greek word poinê (in Latin poena), which means ‘penalty’. The person undergoing pain was thought of as having sinned and therefore had to bear punishment or make some payment.14 When Christianity prevailed so too did its view of suffering punishment in pain as a way to salvation, hence it was natural that the incentive to its recognition, let alone treatment, beyond popular remedies, was all but lost. We now turn to the three different types of belittlement that cause such pain. The Greek word for ‘slighting’ is oligôria and the oligôros is literally the person who acts in a way that shows little (oligos) regard (ôra = care or concern) for someone. The belittled person is treated as someone of little or no worth, hence slighting is a type of dishonouring; the actualisation of a low assessment of one’s worthiness causes pain. As Aristotle explains (Rh. 1378b11-16): Slighting is an actualised opinion regarding something that appears to have no value (for things that are truly bad and good, and the things that contribute to these, we think are worthy of serious attention; those that are of little or no importance we do not consider worthy of any attention). There are three kinds of slight: contempt, spitefulness and insult.

According to this definition, slighting is not reducible to easily discernible events. To understand its complexities requires an account of its different types: (1) contempt, (2) spite, and (3) hubris. Each one of these in turn has many variations so that each type can be expressed in innumerable ways. By reducing the different types of slighting to these three patterns, Aristotle makes anger more intelligible. He is able to place a limit on the potential types of conduct that cause anger’s pain, while at the same time each type of belittlement is sufficiently broad and variegated so as to remain contextual and true to the actual events. The three types encompass most of the incidents that are likely to be perceived as offensive. Aristotle then goes on to define each of the three types of belittling:

87

Taming Anger Contempt. The word kataphronêsis means to look down in thought towards someone or something (kata + phronêsis). The contemptuous person proceeds from the view that their victims are powerless to protect themselves from ill-treatment. To have contempt need not entail a show of hostility. Hostility implies that someone is taking you seriously and is threatening you with harm, whereas contempt indicates that the offender thinks that you are too impotent to retaliate. In English we use the word ‘put down’. The range for display of contempt is obviously vast and highly subjective. The more certain persons are of their worth, the less prone will they be to react to someone’s contempt. The intensity of our anger will be in proportion to our sense of worthiness (Rh. 1379a34-b2): They get angry against those that speak badly and show contempt for those things that they give special importance to, such as those who take pride in philosophy, if someone attacks philosophy, and those who take pride in their outward appearance if someone attacks it, and similarly regarding other things. This occurs more so if they suspect that they do not possess, either completely or only to a small degree, those things [about which they are proud], or if they are thought not to posses them. For when they strongly think that they exceed in those things that they are being mocked for they ignore the affront.

The person who perceives slight at the smallest hint of criticism is one who has a diminished sense of worthiness. Insult is often seen where none was intended. In numerous fragments and writings of ancient writers we find the conclusion that the aberrantly angry persons are internally small and weak. Plutarch, for example, writes (Moralia [De cohibenda ira] 456F9-457b1): ‘Just as the flesh swells up after being hit hard, so too the weak souls have a tendency to be provoked to great rages due to great weakness.’ Internal weakness explains, in a general way, how trivial annoyances can be occasions for imagining slight. At the moment of a child’s noisy eating, for example, the scars of internal smallness in the mother may be quick to register the noises in a way that suggests to her the child’s disregard. Spite. Unlike contempt, spite (epêreasmos) does have a nuance of hostility. The word epêreasmos may be etymologically related to the same word from which Arês, the belligerent god of war, is derived. Aristotle defines spite as ‘a thwarting of another man’s wishes, not to get something yourself but to prevent his getting it’. Underlying spiteful behaviour is the view that the person can be thwarted and obstructed because he or she is of little or no account.

88

5. Aristotle on the Causes of Anger Hubris. Often translated as ‘insult’, hubris is a type of slighting which is done for pleasure rather than for profit or self-interest. It consists of (Rh. 1378b23-5): doing and saying something that dishonours the victim not so that something [of benefit] can come to oneself or because something has happened to oneself, but so that one might feel pleasure.

The pleasure comes from the feeling of superiority which is gained from the humiliation of another person. Much of what we call abusive behaviour today would fall under Aristotle’s definition of hubris. Persons who delight in demeaning their spouses and their children verbally, physically or sexually fit into this category. Cursing, a form of humiliation, which gives a momentary pleasure of power, is another type of hubris. Many types of modern incivility can be traced back to hubris, for in our times it seems that the anonymity of urban life and electronic communication provide many opportunities to the driver, the blogger, the phone-caller to indulge in the fleeting pleasure of hubristic insult. Though we started this subsection as a digression to classify the types of pain-causing slights that can arouse anger, in order to buttress the case for anger’s ability to be aroused non-cognitively, it seems that on the contrary we have provided much evidence to further support the cognitivist position. Given all the cognitive conditions built into anger’s definition and given the logical deductions that are required to register any one of these three types of belittlement, one has to ask again how is it possible for anger to be aroused without such logical deductions occurring? The triggers of anger: ‘appetitive imagination’ or ‘appetitive reason’ The origin of any ‘image’ in sense perception provides the clue as to why images themselves have the power to act as movers of anger, with or without thought. Where there is sensation, Aristotle states, there one will also find appetite and appetite is a cause of motion. But even in the physical absence of a desired sense object animals are able to be moved by them because of the faculty of imagination. Imagination, according to Aristotle, is a power, a psychological faculty, by which images that originate in sensation are retained in the soul. Phantasia begins and arises from sense perception: ‘And imagination is thought to be a type of motion and does not occur without sensation, but occurs in beings that have [the faculty of] sense in relation to things capable of being

89

Taming Anger sensed’ (De An. 428b11-13). First an object acts on one of the sense faculties, which then assimilates the object’s form without its matter. In De Memoria Aristotle speaks of the phantasma as an affection of the common sense, the power that combines the separate sense qualities into a unit (450a10-11). Thus rather than being bombarded with inchoate sense impressions, such as ‘red’ ‘flat’ ‘stationary’ ‘soft’, imagination can retain a unified perception of, say, a soft red sweater. Images are stored in this form. Whereas sense requires the presence of the sense object, imagination retains the image even when the object is no longer present. When the object stops acting on the sense faculty its form is internally retained as an image. As to the nature of these images, even though phantasia, as Aristotle notes, is derived from light (phaos) he is careful to point out that they are not just visual. All retained sense impressions, tactile, visual, auditory, olfactory, or taste sensations are stored as images. Phantasia is the power of representing something ‘before our eyes’.15 It is a representation that one can ‘see’ even though the object is not present and may not even exist. When we say ‘see it’, we could just as well say ‘feel it’, since a phantasma, the retained sense image, is synthesised from any one of the senses or any possible combination of the senses. The sensory origin of images implies that the images also retain the pleasure or pain sensation which has been assimilated along with the form of the sense object. Obviously not every image strikes us as being pleasurable or painful. The image of a wall or a table or a walkway may be neutral in terms of its pleasure or pain. Nevertheless, images do have the power to act on us hedonically, causing us to sense pleasure or pain and thus impelling us towards or away from the object that is being imaged. We may be indifferent to the image of the wall that is internally represented, but the image in memory of having placed our hand on a red hot stove is not pleasant at all. We may be indifferent to a desk, but all the smells, the noises, the total ambience of the day we may have suffered a humiliation on some desk or under a desk, can cause the deeply etched pain to resurface as a phantasia in the most improbable ways. Anyone can demonstrate from their own experience that their retained images can be laden with feeling. Imagination can cause movement because the cause of movement in animals is appetite.16 Animals with the power of imagination, argues Aristotle, move in order to pursue a good or to flee from some evil; they seek pleasure and avoidance of pain. If neither, then they remain at rest. An important conclusion follows, which reveals how anger can be aroused without thought: when something is registered sensuously as either painful or pleasant, ‘the pursuit or avoidance of it by the soul is

90

5. Aristotle on the Causes of Anger a sort of affirmation or negation’.17 To the thinking soul ‘images serve as present sensations: and when it affirms or denies good or evil, it avoids or pursues’ (tr. Hicks). The visualisation is both an image and a feeling. The latter gives imagination the power to cause movement, as if it contained an evaluation of good or evil consequences, based on its anticipation of pleasure or pain. Because our internalised images retain the original hedonic qualities of the sensation, they can function to issue commands that result in flight or pursuit. Loosely translated, such an image Aristotle calls a ‘sense-induced image’ (aisthêtikê phantasia). Aristotle argues that sense-induced images, by themselves, are sufficient to cause motion in animals, including humans. One would not be absolutely correct to call the appetitive element of sensation or imagination irrational, for when something is sensed as pleasant or painful it ‘is as if it is an assertion or denial’ made by thought (De An. 431a9). The image is a carrier of discrimination that something should be pursued or avoided. The hedonic associations of the image can ‘assert’ or ‘deny’. Important conclusions follow that distinguish Aristotle’s defence of aesthetic nurturing from Plato’s. Aristotle’s theory shows that with respect to nurturing what is of vital significance is not the literal beliefs that are being transmitted to the child, as such, but the hedonics of the images that are shaping the child’s proclivities for ‘affirming’ or ‘denying’ in the realm of pleasure and pain. Once the proclivities are formed, then the imagination, i.e. the sense-induced image, can arouse the passions on its own, even contrary to the orders of one’s rational evaluations for action. The problem of explaining how an internal order that is formed non-cognitively, from habituation, can command as if it were an act of reason – a problem that was put forth in Plato’s view of music’s role in nurturing – finds its answer in Aristotle’s theory of phantasia. The ambiguous ‘like to like’ hypothesis is no longer needed. Sense-induced imagination can command the onset of anger without any prior cognitive evaluation. In a passage in the Politics where Aristotle is explaining why anger is more volatile than hatred, he warns that anger often does not calculate ‘for anger occurs with pain, making it difficult to reason’ (Pol. 1312b32-3). The pain itself is sufficient to declare that an ‘apparent’ evil has occurred and anger then follows. Someone may protest and argue that it is only because I interpret the event as being painful that I am pained. For example, if I believe that my physical appearance is important, I will get angry if someone makes fun of it. But if I divest my physical appearance of all value, I won’t give remarks that disparage my looks any attention. Hence, my evaluative interpretation, how I invest things with value, is a necessary condition for experiencing the pain. If I modify the belief, I will modify the

91

Taming Anger interpretation, and I will not feel the pain. Such evidence is cited as proof positive that a cognitive machine is at work in controlling the onset of our anger. The problem with this view is that it ascribes to reason necessary powers over pain and pleasure that neither Plato nor Aristotle ever ascribed to it. No doubt with training one might be able to do precisely what the above claim asserts. It is possible but not probable. Pain and pleasure have been engraved deeply into the soul from the time of birth, well before cognition and conscious powers have matured. Pleasure, states Aristotle, ‘colours the entirety of our life’. Ideas come and go, but the dyes of pleasure and pain have coloured the fabric of our lives from the time of birth, if not earlier. In the case of anger, in the rapid give and take of social interchanges, it is unlikely that cognitive evaluation will trump a person’s deeply rooted hedonic predilections. Mere images can arouse pain well before the stimuli are ever sent off for cognitive evaluation. Most often, despite our cognitive training, our interpretation of the stimulus is what it is because since childhood we have a moulded proclivity to feel pain regarding our self-esteem in a certain way. Anger has been aligned to pain in such a way that it prejudges events; the mere appearance, which can come even from a smell or a gesture that memory may trace back to a past humiliation, sends a message that is consistent with the hedonic anticipation of the anger. Is this to say that logical processing and judgments are never triggers to anger’s arousal? Certainly not. Thought and belief can determine what is or is not perceived to be a slight, but it is not the single or the most powerful factor at work. Cognition can be a trigger (and it can act to repress the triggers of our hedonic arousal), but even in these cases thought makes use of hedonic imagination. Imagination may be rational – Aristotle calls this calculative (logistikê) imagination – or it may be sense-induced (aisthêtikê) (De An. 433b27-9). In the first case, thought is in control of the evaluative process. It makes use of what Aristotle calls ‘deliberative imagination’ (bouleutikê phantasia). This is the type of imagination that is characteristic of human action. Deliberative imagination is distinguished from the mere sense-induced in that the images being processed, even though they are tinged with pain and pleasure, nevertheless are subordinate to reason and wait upon reason’s deliberation (De An. 434a7-11). The deliberation itself is appetitive and hence even during the course of what should be a logical evaluation of alternatives for the expression of one’s anger, the possibility is left open for the images to commandeer the entire evaluative sequence of operations. There exists the possibility of bringing anger under deliberative control so that the images are used rationally to explore alternatives for action, while at the same time there exists the

92

5. Aristotle on the Causes of Anger danger that pleasure and pain, through the images being processed, might impress themselves upon the deliberation. More will be said about this problem in the next chapter. The logos in the matter Even if we admit that a sensuous image can arouse our anger, the nagging question remains: how can mere appearance ignite anger, given that its ignition involves a plethora of logical assessments? Aristotle provides an answer to this question in the opening sections of De Anima which we quoted previously, only now we must follow the text more closely. A literal reading shows how anger, because it itself is a formula in matter, can be triggered by a mere image (De An. 403a24-5): If matters are thus, then it is clear that the passions are formulae inscribed in the matter of the body. Hence the definitions of things of this type will be such as ‘anger is an arousal of a particular body or part or power produced by such a cause for such an end’.

Anger is a logos in matter, which is to say that anger’s form is built into the biological matter of the body so that its physiologicallybased structure is not an arbitrary epistemological or sociological construct that can be fashioned at will. Anger’s biological formula is prior to experience and is what makes variegated cultural expressions of anger possible. The pain of slight, the pleasure of retribution, these are not sociological constructs that society has foisted on us and which we can alter or get rid of at will. What types of slights will rile us are sociologically constructed, but not the biological capacity to suffer them. We can readily see the wisdom of Aristotle’s view by noting, with the benefit of our knowledge of species evolution, that survival of animals and of our hunter-gatherer ancestors required a quick-response capacity to appearances, to the images that arise from an animal’s environment as tactile, visual, auditory, olfactory, or taste sensations. Our species could never have survived if these hunters had to cognitively process each shadowy threat lurking in their environment: ‘Is this moving shadow in the grasses caused by the action of the breeze or is it the movement of a stalking lion? Let me cognitively process the stimuli before making a hasty decision!’ Anger is part of our primordial animal biology, which we now know predated the power of logical processing, though it is continuous with it. Intelligence’s slow response time is a definite disadvantage to sen-

93

Taming Anger sual imagination which can arouse anger with a rapid rush to action. Given how vital anger is to an animal’s physical survival it seems natural that the impetus and speed of sensual phantasia far outpaces the deliberative variety. Phantasiai, when present in a form that suggests a desirable or an undesirable object, can be a cause of rapid movement born of anticipation. Thus lizards and humankind are by nature so designed that their arousal to danger and the complex physiological responses that set the animal into a flight or fight mode can be moved by mere hedonic appearances. When the appearance suggests the condition, then the formula of anger, which is inscribed in the matter of the body, puts anger into operation in a determinate way. From arousal to revenge-seeking the operation of anger is inscribed in the matter of the body, though the particular types of things that are considered to be demeaning and the types of responses considered to be acceptable as retribution are socially constructed. According to Aristotle the latter are susceptible to being crafted for taming anger, but not primarily because humans are cognitive by nature, but because the sensuous imagination is open to rationally directed non-cognitive nurturing. Counterargument: where there is anger there is reason Numerous objections can be raised by those who claim that ultimately it is our thoughts that are the cause of anger. Our challengers could turn the tables on us and say: ‘Are you not aware of passages in Aristotle where he attributes thought to the very definition of anger, so that thought must necessarily be anger’s cause of arousal?’ These arguments cannot be ignored. After all, they are based on the texts and some of the passages that might be cited do seem to be incontrovertible. We must address these legitimate objections, hoping that in so doing we will further clarify the problems related to anger’s arousal. In the Topics, a work on logic, there is one passage which is often quoted to show that Aristotle includes a cognitive condition, a ‘conception (hupolêpsis) of contempt’, as being necessary to anger’s arousal. This passage states (127b26-32, tr. Forster): Again, if what is more generally or equally generally held to be the genus is not the genus, obviously neither is the term assigned the genus. This commonplace is useful especially when several things are clearly predicable of the species in the category of essence and no distinction has been made between them and we cannot say which of them is genus. For example, both ‘pain’ and the ‘conception of contempt’ are generally re-

94

5. Aristotle on the Causes of Anger garded as predicates of ‘anger’ in the category of essence; for the angry man both feels pain and conceives that he is contemned.

Keeping in mind that anger is a process, it is clear that the above passage is not at all concerned with the arousal phase of anger. All Aristotle wishes to do in this passage is to support a point that he is making about logic (which need not concern us here), namely, that both pain and the conception that one has been slighted can be predicated of anger. Simply put, if one is angry one will find that the angered person (a) feels pain and (b) has an idea that he has been slighted. This tells us nothing, absolutely nothing, about the moving cause of anger; all it reveals are two of anger’s traits once anger has already been aroused. Once activated, anger’s biological structure pushes it to express itself with a reason, but this does not mean that reason is what necessarily pushes anger into motion. A second cluster of passages on intemperance in the Nicomachean Ethics seems to give stronger grounds to show that anger is preceded with thoughts and syllogistically arrived-at beliefs. Aristotle here argues that intemperate anger is less ignoble than profligacy, in that the former at least is cognitive, whereas the latter is a case of surrendering oneself to desire for pleasure. Let us turn to this passage (EN 1149a241149b3, emphasis added): It appears that anger gives some attention to reason, but misunderstands, as occurs with hasty messengers who before they hear everything which is announced to them, rush to leave and afterwards convey the wrong message. The same occurs with dogs which, before they consider if someone is a friend, bark at someone knocking at the door. Similarly anger, because of its heatedness and the quickness of its nature, does have the property of listening, but it does not pay attention to the command, and for this reason impulsively moves to execute a punishment. When reason or imagination indicates an insult or a slight, anger immediately occurs, as if someone logically concluded that he must attack such a thing. On the contrary, desire, if reason or sensation says that something is pleasant, moves impulsively towards the pleasure. Consequently, anger follows reason in a manner, but desire does not. Therefore it is more disgraceful because he who is intemperate in anger gives way to reason, though the intemperate person in his desires does not.

The meaning of the passage seems to be that anger is always initiated by some type of syllogism whereas desire is prompted solely by pleasure. The cognitive content of intemperate anger makes it less reprehensible than surrender to the pleasure of irrational appetite. However,

95

Taming Anger one must have second thoughts about such a reading for three reasons. First, it is not reason unqualified that initiates anger but ‘reason or imagination’. The cause of anger’s arousal is not reducible to only one of the terms, i.e. exclusively to reason or imagination. It is possible for reason to be such a cause, but it could just as well be a sensual image. If Aristotle meant only reason could declare that an insult had occurred, he would not have put the ‘or’ in the sentence. Parenthetically, we can see the absurdity of the view that the imagination is identical to thought simply by substituting in this sentence the word ‘reason’ for ‘imagination’. The sentence would then read: ‘Anger can be aroused when ‘reason or reason’ declares a slight to have occurred.’ This redundancy would have been such a gross logical error that we must discount its very possibility. Secondly, the passage is usually mistranslated so that it would seem that anger occurs only after syllogistic evaluation has occurred. This indeed is how Rackham in the Loeb edition translates the sentence: ‘When reason or imagination suggests that an insult or slight has been received, anger flares up at once, but after reasoning as it were that you ought to make war on anybody who insults you.’ But the passage states something slightly, but importantly, different. When a sense-induced image or thought arouses anger ‘it’s as if’ (hôsper = ‘just as if’) discursive reasoning had occurred. Exactly. Aristotle has already shown that pleasure or pain can issue commands, and when these are executed it’s as if they were the result of reasoning. They might be products of reason, but then again they often are not. Thirdly, the difference between intemperance in desire and intemperance in anger is that the latter is always accompanied by a reason of some sort. Angry persons, as a matter of hardwired biology, always know that they are right; a knowing righteousness always accompanies anger once it is activated due to the hardwired logos of anger. No such mechanism is in force in the case of the glutton. Profligates know they are wrong, but they surrender to their appetite. If a person is indulging in a third serving of ice cream he or she is not impelled by some innate biological drive to say: ‘I have to eat this third plate because it will make me better looking or more intelligent.’ Profligates know that it is pleasure and not a reasoned conclusion that is driving them to gluttony. Biology, however, has so made humans that the angry person is burdened with a presumption of knowledge once anger is activated. The anger, once aroused, will be accompanied by a reason, but as the text indicates, the activation can occur without reason at all.

96

5. Aristotle on the Causes of Anger Can one be angry at the powerful? It’s a matter of appearance Before we bring this chapter to a close we have to address the claims of the cultural specificity proponents because if their views are correct then Aristotle’s causes of anger are not causes of human anger as such, but rather explanations of the Hellenic anger of Aristotle’s times. According to this view, studying Aristotle’s causal account is in a way an archaeological excavation that reveals the emotional artefacts of a bygone age. This clarion call of post-modernism has been challenged by numerous writers, so we need not indulge in a tedious critique of the theoretical foundations of this view. With respect to anger, which is our sole interest, we could put their claim to a test if we could devise a crucial experiment around their central premise. We can turn to the issue of whether one’s anger can be aroused against persons who are weaker or persons that are more powerful since this has been brought up by the proponents of the cultural specificity doctrine to show that Aristotle’s causal analysis of anger is culturally determined. One scholar, David Konstan, for example, writes that Aristotle’s views on this matter show that he is addressing an anger that is quite different from the anger that we experience: ‘Aristotle’s analysis of anger is, as we see, focused on relations of status and power ...’ (2010: 25). The anger of Aristotle’s time, we are told, unlike that of our times, was status driven. Here we have the opportunity to put these claims to a test. Aristotle’s comments on anger reactions toward the weak and the powerful are either culturally specific or universally human. As we have previously noted, Aristotle accepts the cultural crafting of anger’s norms, but his causal explanation of anger’s nature is comparable to an anatomical description of a hand or foot, which is independent of the different styles of gloves or shoes people happen to be wearing in different societies in different periods. Let us proceed to Aristotle’s views and then subject these to analysis (Rh. 1370b13-15): ... no one gets angry against those who ‘appear’ (phainomenô) to be too weak to get revenge, though against those who are more powerful, they either don’t get angry or are much less angry.

This passage is interpreted to mean that, according to Aristotle, no one gets angry at the weak because they are too feeble to inflict revenge and conversely no one gets angry at those more powerful because revenge against them would be futile. If this is what Aristotle is saying then we could not but conclude that his view of anger does not carry over to our time. In our modern world we do in fact get angry against people who

97

Taming Anger are more powerful than we are. People whose livelihood depends on the good graces of their employers get angry at their bosses all the time; citizens in despotic regimes get angry at their dictators; students belittle their teachers even when these teachers have the power to fail them and send them back a year. As far as not getting angry at the weak, people have been known to get angry at their children, or to have cursed in anger at their offending puppy, and sweatshop tyrants have been known to have railed against their serf-like employees who are their virtual slaves. These examples can easily be multiplied by anyone. If indeed this is the meaning of the passage above, then Aristotle would also have been laughed at in the Greek world of his time as well, because the chronicles of antiquity contradict such assertions. Here is but one example taken from Plutarch. The passage castigates people who show their venomous anger against the weak and helpless, something that, supposedly, Aristotle’s position would have precluded (Moralia 457b-c): The deeds and the motions and the conduct of the angered point to their weakness, not only when they beat little children, but also when they fume against women and when they think that it is right to punish dogs, horses and mules, like Ktesiphon the pankratiast who thought it right to return a kick to his mule ... [T]hey act in ways that show their affliction, in ways that resemble the bite of reptiles, which when enraged and in great pain direct their venom against those who have pained them. Just as the flesh swells when it suffers a blow, so too the weak-souled persons are more inclined to feel pain and hence their anger is greater because their [inner] weakness is greater ... That is why women get angrier than men, the sick more than the healthy, the old more than those in their prime, and failed people more than successful people ... the pain that they carry is evident ... Likewise, from the pain and suffering of the soul, which arises generally from frailty, comes anger, which does not resemble, as someone had said [Plato, Resp. 411b] the nerve of the soul, but rather the stretching and the spasms in the defensive impulses of a soul that has been intensely aroused.

How could Aristotle, the empirical collector of data, have missed such incidents of anger against the weak? Here we have angry people beating women and children and even kicking mules! And how could he have missed the retribution of angry persons against their powerful abusers? Was he unaware of the many all-powerful tyrants who were attacked and even murdered by their seemingly helpless, yet angry, victims? A careful reading of the passage quoted would show that it is the commentators who have missed an important qualification in Aris-

98

5. Aristotle on the Causes of Anger totle’s statement, which once noted and its significance acknowledged makes his claim sound and diachronic. What Aristotle says is that we do not get angry at those who are ‘imagined’ or who ‘appear’ to be too weak. As anyone can attest from their own life experience, there exist people whose internal weaknesses are such that they attribute the power of conscious insult to children, animals and even machines. Such people do in fact interpret actions such as the child playing music too loudly, the puppy urinating on the rug or the machine that has malfunctioned as purposive slights. Furthermore, even normal people without such problems on a bad day and within a contextual setting of frustration or pain can also act in such a way. The anger of those who rage against the defenceless as described by Plutarch is not normal; it is, he says, an affliction caused by an internal weakness. In the soul of these weak people there are ‘spasms’ and ‘defensive impulses’ that cause turmoil within. Their inner fragility places them in a defensive posture. The mere arousal of sense-induced images that bring to the fore painful experiences from the past are sufficient to mobilise anger qua guardian. As Plato had shown, a thumos that is ‘melted’ and ‘liquefied’ will no longer be a warrior soul. Rather, such a person’s anger will become ‘quick turning’; it ‘will be incited by trifles’ ‘so that instead of being spirited, the person will become sharp-tempered and quick to anger and full of difficulties’ (Resp. 411b). Aristotle follows Plato, but he makes an important advance in that he showed that the ‘seeming’ of an affront could arise from the pain itself, independently of the mind’s beliefs or its evaluative processing. The second case is anger as a response to belittlement coming from the powerful. Aristotle seems to either preclude this case or if he does allow for it, only to a minimal extent. The word ‘apparent’ is not repeated in this sentence for stylistic purposes, but it is implied by syntax. Aristotle in the passage is noting that one cannot feel anger against someone who is imagined or who appears to be more powerful. It follows therefore, that if the victim of an affront can imagine himself capable of inflicting retribution, even against someone of far greater stature or power, then the door is left open for anger. The student who belittles his teacher, the employee who fumes openly against his employer, or the citizen who challenges the powers-that-be in anger – these are all instances of ‘seeming’ revenge. The person showing rage at the powerful imagines that revenge is possible, but if the same person no longer imagines that such revenge is possible then the anger would most likely be replaced with fear. As an example of this phenomenon, let us consider the plight of the person who has suffered an insult from a powerful person. Let us take

99

Taming Anger the example to the extreme, such as the case of a rapist who has complete control over his victim. This is what the Greeks would have called sexual hubris. It is highly unlikely that the victim in this predicament would get angry, or if she or he did, their anger, as long as they were in the grip of the rapist, would certainly be short-lived. As long as the rapist is in complete command, resistance and retribution are futile. The controlling factor is the elimination of even a semblance of hope from the victim’s captivity. Under these conditions retaliation is thought to be out of the question. The phenomenon has been noted in what is called the Stockholm syndrome, when hostages or kidnap victims, whose lives depend on the good will of their volatile captors, rather than expressing anger, come to identify with their abductors. On the other hand, political prisoners held under brutal conditions are able to keep their anger alive as long as their plight is not imagined to be out of their control. A victim held hostage does not show anger against their captor, not because their anger has been socially constructed to respond in this way, but because, as Aristotle has observed, anger will not be manifested if retribution appears to be impossible – this is a biological feature that arises from the nature of human anger. Finally, a word must be said about one of the more egregious mistranslations of the word phainomenês, the one that renders it as ‘conspicuous’. The mistranslation has been used to state in various ways that according to Aristotle anger is only aroused if the insult is conspicuous, in the sense of publicly manifest, ‘evident to everybody’. Hence the conclusion is drawn that Greek anger, due to the intense competitions for honour in public life, was ignited only if the insult was publicly visible, whereas the anger of our days can occur in response to non-public slights. These interpretations all rely on the rendering of phainomenês as ‘conspicuous’, a rendering that has been shown to have no support in Greek usage or even in Aristotle’s uses of the word.18 In the Rhetoric the word usually means ‘apparent’ or ‘perceived’. If Aristotle wished to emphasise that the insult had to be public and noticeable, there were other words in Greek which he could have used unambiguously. Aristotle, for instance, in his Rhetoric, uses the word phaneros (‘evident’) 67 times for this purpose. He would hardly have used the word phainomai (‘to appear’) if he wished to stress that some event has to be ‘clear’ or ‘conspicuous’ or ‘in plain view’. However, aside from the philological evidence, one might ask those who hold this view, what emotion did a frustrated Hellene experience, as Plutarch describes him, when he beat his donkey or kicked his dog or battered his child away from the eyes of other people? Or, when an offended person, still in the throes of anger, refrained from a retributive act in the face of an apology (like Menelaos at the chariot race), with no

100

5. Aristotle on the Causes of Anger conspicuous action following from his inner turmoil, what would the tumultuous emotion that he felt be called? Certainly not orgê (anger), since according to their claim, anger, being a sociological construct, could only be certified as such if it culminated in a ‘public’, ‘conspicuous’ act of revenge, within a societal striving for honour – something hardly to be gained from beating one’s donkey. What our study has shown, without any claim to originality, is that the anger analysed by Aristotle was human anger, and that the view that Aristotle’s writings on anger refer to anger that is different from that which is experienced today has no foundation.

101

6

Making Anger into a Virtue Praotês: a Hellenic ideal Virtue in anger, what Aristotle calls praotês, is not coextensive with restraint or gentleness as such. Perhaps we can get a better grasp of the breadth of the virtue by citing the example of the Spartan statesman Lycurgus, whom Plutarch describes as praos. In his biography Plutarch reports that when Lycurgus introduced his reforms he was physically attacked by his enemies in a temple, with one youth striking him and blinding him in one eye. The youngster was later handed over to him, but instead of choosing retribution Lycurgus elected to reform the youth by taking him into his own home and educating him. When the populace showed its amazement at the youth’s transformation, Lycurgus said: ‘I took this fellow brash and violent, and I return him to you noble and social.’ He did not seek an eye for an eye as was the custom of the times. He showed mastery in knowing the object of anger, which in this case was not the youngster but the citizens of Sparta, who did not train their youth properly. Lycurgus expressed his anger creatively, by re-educating the young man in order to effect a correction to the injustice, in this case a global change in education. Instead of fractiously dividing the people, his anger became a powerful force for reforming the educational system of his city.1 In this example we get a glimpse of this virtue’s full grandeur in public life. What this virtue is, even in its more mundane expressions, and how we might reform our anger so as to acquire it or approximate it are the themes explored in this chapter. The virtue of anger Aristotle defines excellence in anger as a mean between the two extremes of excess and defect, between constant irascibility and extreme gentleness. The former is the person who is in a continuous state of rage while the latter is the spiritless person who feels no anger in the face of contemptuous treatment. Between the two extremes there exist infinite and indeterminate possibilities for display of anger. There are no biologically fixed gradations in response to a perceived slight. Yet there exists regularity in one’s pattern of responses to perceived affronts. These well-defined types of anger, however, do not refer to raw biological anger, but to anger that

103

Taming Anger has been forged into a character. Anger is like clay from which many moulds can be cast. The clay remains clay in all types of pottery manufactured from it; what can be qualified and altered are the casts. Let us turn to some of anger’s deviant character moulds, to types of anger that have been cast in a poor way, such as ‘quick-tempered’, ‘bitter-tempered’, and ‘harsh-tempered’, so we can find the common element in each that has to be reformed if one’s anger is to become excellent. All the deviations predispose a person to err with respect to their anger. The ‘error’ hamartia, which the Christians were to use as the term for sin, is in its original meaning a marksman’s term for ‘missing the target’. Irascibility, for example, disposes one to get angry ‘quickly and against those with whom they should not, and more than they should’ (EN 1126a14). Generally, the irascible and the quick-tempered are not well disposed to deliberating about the perceived slight or the means available to rectify it. They feel intense pain and seek quick remedy. We can surmise that these hot-blooded individuals are capable of violent acts under conditions where there is resistance to their outburst, for resistance intensifies their perception of having been humiliated and hence fuels their desire to be relieved of their insufferable pain and resentment. The only advantage of this form of excess, states Aristotle, is that their anger ‘ceases quickly’ (EN 1126a15). The bitter-tempered person will hold his wrath within himself for prolonged periods with deeply held resentment (EN 1126a20-25). Because anger, once activated, is a powerful impulse, if it is simply repressed, then one risks the danger of turning its pain inward where it will fester. These individuals in their silent brooding become obsessed and by re-enacting the occasion that provoked their anger they privately suffer ever greater pain in silence. The redress owed to them grows with each passing day so that the retaliation they seek is out of all proportion to the originally perceived slight. The reasons for their brooding are generally unknown to those around them; hence the lack of socialisation keeps them trapped in their predicament, which often may be an illusory one. Perhaps because of the asocial nature of this disposition, Aristotle finds it to be the worst of the excess forms of anger: ‘[The bitter-tempered] is the most troublesome both to himself as well as to his closest friends’ (EN 1126a26). Another form of excess is that of the harsh-tempered persons who ‘refuse to be reconciled without punishment or chastisement’ (EN 1126a27-8). The harsh-tempered crave to inflict pain on others as a way of removing their own pain. Whereas the bitter-tempered broods, the harsh-tempered is bent on hurting. The irascible and the passionate explode and gain relief, but the harsh-tempered will only be pacified by another person’s suffering.

104

6. Making Anger into a Virtue Aristotle draws a distinction between excellence and effectiveness. Flawed anger may be extremely effective, but Aristotle rejects effectiveness as a criterion for excellence. For example, an executive with low tolerance for error, who imbues his staff with fear of the consequences they will suffer should they fail him, may be precisely the type of person a business organisation would prize as decisive. Such cases represent a limited mastery of excellence, in the sense that the person’s flaw is conducive to getting a particular job done. Aristotle gives the example of a harsh-tempered military officer who is praised for his manliness (EN 1126b1), but we can surmise that if the same person were to be transferred to a day-care centre his brusque methods and harsh anger would not accomplish the same praiseworthy results. Efficiency or success in limited contexts is not proof that the anger is a virtue. The two common traits which these deviant forms share are: (1) a bad relationship to pain and pleasure which results in (2) a subversion of the rational faculty’s ability to exert control over anger. Even though in each of the deviations the flaw is predictable, the anger is necessarily filled with turbulence, because there is no logical control over its consequences. Once the heat cools off one is usually filled with doubts and regrets. The praos on the other hand is said to be ‘imperturbable’ (atarachos), ‘not disturbed’, ‘steady’ and this is because the external stimulus arousing his anger is rationally evaluated. As Aristotle puts it: ‘the praos is not led by passion’, but [is angered] ‘in such a way, for such causes, and for as much time as reason would command’ (EN 1125b33-35). The praos can express his anger in this way because he can endure feeling the pain of slight. The anger-causing event is never prejudged by a habituated anticipation. Since anger’s ability to discern the ‘mean’ requires intelligence, we have to examine how anger can come under the sway of such a commanding type of reason. The conditions that anger satisfies as a virtue Whatever the virtue of anger is, it must be consistent with Aristotle’s generic definition of ethical excellence. ‘Moral virtue’, êthikê aretê in Greek, means excellence in habits. If we ask habits of what, the answer would be the habits of the passions. Virtue does not refer to the quality-less passion, but to passion that has gained a definite structure which is deemed to be excellent. Anything we state about virtuous anger will have to satisfy the conditions of ethical excellence in general (EN 1106b36-1107a2): Ethical excellence [virtue] is a habit [hexis] concerned with forechoice, lying in a mean, which is relative to us, this being determined by reason

105

Taming Anger (logos), [i.e. the logos] which would be laid down by the man of practical wisdom (phronimos).

Virtuous anger is anger that has been habituated to await the outcome of a deliberation which selects the correct choice for its expression. The anger chosen is in a mean, a contextual mean, which surveys the occasion and settles upon the best choice. This choice will be based on a principle that anchors the choosing to a good purpose. This logos is the account that one would give regarding their anger. Just as if one were in a public assembly speaking on some specific proposal that is said to be good, one would have to show that their anger was for the right reason, at the right time, in the right place, against the right person, with the right duration and intensity. The goodness of the purpose is indicated by the person whom Aristotle posits as the standard for the right principle. This person, the ‘prudent person’ (the phronimos), he writes elsewhere, possesses a ‘truth-attaining’ ability with respect to what is good or bad for human beings.2 His virtues are those that one finds in the truly great statesmen who know what is good for man. Excellence in anger thus involves a habit that finds the mean because a definite relationship has been moulded between the anger, forechoice, and a special type of logos. Let us take each of these elements in turn in order to get a complete comprehension of what it means to be virtuous in anger. A. The mean Aristotle stipulates that the mean state of the passion is one that is ‘relative to us’. This is not a mean that can be calculated mathematically by averaging anger’s intensity or duration. The mean amount of anger includes, as we have noted, contextual factors, such as place, purpose, disposition, and person, each of which can be hard to establish within the complexities of practical life.3 Determining the mean involves seeing through the fog of our surroundings that affect our condition. First of all, one must determine if indeed a slight has occurred and the extent and consequences of the injustice. Given that there are three different types of slight, i.e. contempt, spite and hubris, each of which is multi-faceted and varies over a wide range, it will not be easy to verify its occurrence or the right response to it. In addition, Aristotle in the Rhetoric specifies three subjective conditions that can affect not only the onset of anger but also one’s ability to determine anger’s mean. These are: (1) how one is inclined, (2) the contextual reasons for getting angry, and (3) the people with whom one gets angry. These conditions are not causes, and they do not tell us

106

6. Making Anger into a Virtue anything about the habituated structure of one’s anger, but they do reveal to us the likelihood or unlikelihood of anger being ignited under certain conditions. Aristotle calls the inclination pôs echontes how one is inclined. To be ‘bitter’, ‘quick’, or ‘mild-tempered’ is a trait that is stamped into one’s character and exists whether one is hungry or tired, relaxed or stressed. The habituated traits dispose a person permanently towards anger in a predetermined way. The inclination, however, is context dependent. The invariant that inclines one towards anger is pain, physical or psychological. Aristotle’s reasoning is that since anger is caused by a pain, we are more prone to anger when we are in pain. Hence, if our desires have been frustrated, if we are ill, if someone is interfering with our work, if we are hungry, at war, or lovesick – examples given by Aristotle – chances are that we will be more prone to anger (Rh. 1379a11-13).4 If any of these conditions are altered, such as having a successful day at work or gaining something we longed for, or if we are cooled off rather than sweating and hot, then the inclination to be angry is less and our toleration of slight is greater. Regarding context, we can easily imagine how the same words uttered in public or in private might provoke us to completely different reactions. Finally, anger’s arousal is influenced by the person with whom one gets angry. We might be more prone to getting angry at friends who do not treat us well, or at someone who we think owes us a favour, or at those who rejoice at our misfortunes or are indifferent to our pain. If we take into account the many permutations of slight and then consider the many different anger-arousing contexts that are likely to occur, we can readily see that there are countless variations that can affect our propensity to get angry. What confidence should we place on any book or management strategy that promises to prepare us for all the occasions that might spark our anger? The mean relative to us is thus not anything like the various psychoanalytical hydraulic theories, which, building upon Freud’s theory of catharsis (1957), have been used to explain anger as water or steam escaping from a pressure cooker, where one might try to regulate the valve so that neither too much nor too little escapes into the air. Rather locating the ‘mean’ in one’s anger takes into deliberative account all the contextual elements referred to above. B. Prohairesis: making the right choice The word Aristotle uses for what is often translated as ‘choice’, ‘forechoice’, ‘purposive choice’, ‘intention’, ‘will’, is prohairesis. Choice or forechoice is a very poor rendering of this word because, even though it is true that the expression of our anger is chosen, the choice comes at

107

Taming Anger the tail end of a complicated process. From the various approaches to the word’s meaning, Chamberlain’s advice is promising: he suggests that the word be viewed as a ‘process by which the orders of reason are brought upon desire so as to change it’ (1984b, 151). His approach underscores that reason is intertwined with desire throughout the process of choosing, a fact which is also indicated by the etymology of prohairesis. In Homer the verb haireô, in the active voice, is ‘to take, grasp, seize, capture, seize booty, or overtake in running’. In the middle voice the word means ‘choice’, ‘election’ ‘course of action’. Aristotle considers forechoice to be a type of appetite or desire, which suggests that its semantic range always carried with it this Homeric sense of ‘getting’ something. Aristotle calls forechoice ‘deliberative appetite under our control’.5 Chamberlain recommends that prohairesis be translated as ‘commitment’. In other words, the deliberation occurs with considerations that involve pain and pleasure so that when it does finally settle upon a choice, the choice is not a bland logical conclusion. It is a commitment regarding action or inaction. Precisely because the deliberation is appetitive, which is to say drenched in desire, there is no guarantee that what is selected, before (pro) other scanned choices, is indeed rational. Deliberation in and of itself is not inherently good. Medea deliberates, for instance, and makes plans, but for vile deeds. She says to herself as she plots to kill her children: ‘Forward Medea! All you know execute without pity. Think and apply your skill. Like a serpent head onward to the evil deed’ (401-2). The cognitive words she uses do not make her deliberations sane. Her plans are commanded by her anger rather than her anger being commanded by rational deliberation. She declares that her anger is kreissôn – i.e. ‘in control of her plans’.6 Medea’s mind is razor-sharp in plotting her revenge. She kills her antagonists, kills her children to destroy her husband’s happiness and to revenge him for her humiliation. She deliberates with spectacular success but for a wicked purpose. When anger is a virtue the deliberation must settle upon a choice that contributes to an end that is good. If prohairesis is functioning well it makes use of deliberative imagination. This type of imagination uses hedonic images which have undergone cognitive processing. These phantasiai supply the sensual materials which allow a person to see and feel each component of the evaluative process that enters into a practical decision. As Aristotle states, one scans the spectrum of alternatives deliberating about the future in light of the present. These deliberative images of our anticipation can be improved and refined to best ensure that the images being selected for appetitive deliberations, even though they are associated with memories of pleasures and pains, are appropriate to anger’s assessment of future consequences. These images may include pleasur-

108

6. Making Anger into a Virtue able cravings for retribution counterbalanced with other images borne of fear of painful consequences, such as losing one’s dignity, suffering harm from a counter-reaction, or the shattering of relations with loved ones. All these alternatives involve syllogisms and universals which can be articulated to oneself and communicated to others as to why the expression of anger that is chosen is the best for the circumstance. If anger has been hedonically cast in a way that prejudges the stimuli related to a perceived affront, then the prohairetic will malfunction. The images that normally should supply the sensual materials for deliberation will be thrust aside by ingrained hedonic images. The result is that the ‘apparent’ slight that ignites the anger may bear little connection to the actual realities of the situation. We have already discussed how the pleasure and pain aspects of a sense-induced image can trigger anger. When this occurs the supremacy of the deliberative process that leads to a choice is usurped. The person is condemned to make choices that, though under his control, elude him because his reason, which has been synergistically activated in the course of anger’s unfolding, is being led by an ingrained hedonic structure that waits upon the imagination to gratify it. Imagination spurs anger into action, issues commands to anger, and thought in turn will arm the aroused anger with justification. Deliberation occurs, but its rationality has been subverted by the prevalence of sense-induced phantasiai. C. The logos that finds the mean The deliberation that selects the mean between anger’s two extremes must be according to a logos: ‘such as that which would be laid down by the man of practical wisdom (phronimos)’. One might be tempted to interpret this logos as a purely logical calculative power. But here again practical reasoning is not just a logical process. Unlike mathematics where the outcomes of reasoning have no immediate impulse to action, the logos being used in the selection of the mean is of a ‘commanding’ sort (epitaktikê); it states what should or should not be done (EN 1143a8). Perhaps the nature of this logos can be better understood if we examine the logos that is issuing commands to the child during its nurturing phase. During this period the child’s anger is not directed by discursive reasoning. The child has no mature logical powers for ascertaining the good as a principle for its anger. As we have previously stated, the logos commanding its passions paradoxically involves no logos as a prevailing power active within the child. This paradox is brilliantly explained in a remarkable passage that appears in one of Aristotle’s disputed works (Mag. Mor. 2.7.30.4-31.9, tr. Armstrong):

109

Taming Anger And we may state without any qualification that, contrary to the opinion of other (moralists), it is not Rational Principle (logos) which originally points the way to Virtue, but rather the passions (ta pathê). First of all, there must needs arise (as we know there actually does) an unreasoning impulse towards what is noble and good; afterwards, Principle must give its vote and verdict (on the suggested act). This is seen in the case of children and other unreasoning beings. In them there arise first unreasoning impulses (hormên alogon) of the passions towards noble aims; not till afterwards does Principle supervene, and by its approving vote bring about the performance of noble actions. On the other hand where Principle originally points to noble ends, the passions by no means (always) follow their assent; often they oppose it. Wherefore passion (to pathos), if in right condition, has more claim than Principle (logos) to be the original motive force which inclines one to Virtue.

There must first be developed in the child a non-cognitive impulse towards the good. The nurturing in mousikê cultivates an internal order non-rationally, and this aesthetically cultivated order issues commands. If, on the contrary, the impulse (hormê) receives its principle from reason, then it would not follow that the good deed would be performed, because the passions prevail at this age. Nurturing aims to create an alogos hormê – a non-cognitive impulse to the good – within the child. The principle that will determine the mean is cultivated in the child’s non-rational impulses so that this principle, whose source is external to the child, acquires the commanding force of impulse within the child. The external logos seeps into the child’s non-rational impulses and over time moulds anger’s hedonic structure. Here it is useful to point out that, as in English, the Greek word for ‘order’ (taxis) shares the same root as the verb ‘to order’ (epitassô) in the sense of giving a command. By bringing order and right structure to the passion, reason in later life can issue orders to it. Some may dispute the above citation by pointing out that the Magna Moralia according to most Aristotelian scholars was not written by Aristotle. This is not the place to defend this work as coming from Aristotle’s hand.7 In any case, the same view, in a more condensed, mature form, with familiar technical language, is presented in his Nicomachean Ethics. In this passage Aristotle states that children must first have been properly nurtured if they are to benefit later in life from moral teaching. Nurturing instils within the child a non-cognitive impetus for acting correctly and without such nurturing lectures would be of little use to the student (EN 1095b7-10): Because the principle in all [these matters of conduct] is the ‘that’ [i.e. the correctness of the particular action] and if this be sufficiently apparent,

110

6. Making Anger into a Virtue there will be no need in addition to search for the ‘why’ [the right principle], because such a person [who has been nurtured in good habits] has or could easily acquire these principles.

The ‘that’ (to hoti) is contrasted to the ‘why’ (to dioti). The former is selection of the right particular action, while the latter is to know the reasons (the causes) on account of which the ‘that’ is the right action. Regarding the passions, the truth is always a particular ‘that’ which is chosen in action. An abstract principle, a categorical imperative or a rule will not do. The principle has to be in the particular ‘that’. In scientific types of inquiries, such as understanding an eclipse, the ‘fact that’ it has occurred is the mere prelude to positing the question of ‘why’ (to dioti) such and such occurred (Post. Anal. 89b29-31). The elucidation of causes with demonstration is paramount in scientific knowledge. But in practical matters of action, knowing the reasons ‘why’, i.e. the causes, and discursive explanations for discerning the right action, will be the mark of ignorance if the ‘that’ is not in the action. In fact the accumulation of knowledge may have the reverse effect, since reason may have acquired a sophisticated cunning to rationalise a person’s flaws. We often find this in intelligent people whose character flaws are immune to criticism because they can concoct brilliant and persuasive rationalisations to justify their conduct to others as well as to themselves. The right action is apparent to the child that has been nurtured properly, because it can be perceived or felt to be so. If this exists sensuously in the child, then it can act correctly; but if the child knows all the ‘whys’, there is no certainty at all that the correct ‘that’, in action, will occur. With the right ‘that’ it can acquire the reasons, but all the correct reasons in the world will not lead the child to act according to reason. Anger, as a virtue, is determined by a logos that is of such a commanding type. D. Practical wisdom in the praos Anger, once aroused, has an impulse to culminate in revenge, because revenge is ‘more human’ – meaning ‘more natural’ according to Aristotle’s viewpoint; it has a biological impetus for the pleasure that will relieve it of its pain (EN 1126a30). Accordingly, when the praos accepts an apology, he seems to be going against nature. How this feat is accomplished, as a virtue, is not spelled out in Aristotle’s description of gentle-temperedness. He is only interested in showing that this virtue is a mean, which after all is the topic under discussion in Book 4 of the Nicomachean Ethics. But elsewhere he does clarify the intellectual traits that give rise to tolerance, leniency, and forgiveness which are so

111

Taming Anger necessary for virtuous anger. It is of great importance that these traits, which are assigned to the virtue of the phronimos, the person of complete practical wisdom, also belong to the gentle-tempered person. There is an overlap here between the person of complete practical virtue and the praos. Aristotle lists four such traits which incline one’s anger towards forgiveness and acceptance of apology. They are: (1) ‘sagacity’ (sunesis), (2) ‘judgment’ (gnômê), (3) ‘equity’ (epieikeia) and (4) ‘forgiveness’ (suggnômê). Briefly put, equity remedies the rigidity of the law by judging an infraction in light of particular, mitigating circumstances. Sunesis, often translated as ‘understanding’, takes into account what the ‘other person says’ and judges correctly in this respect.8 Aristotle compares it to learning, presumably because learning involves listening to the other who is teaching. Gnômê (‘judgment’) judges with sympathy because it makes use of equity. The fourth trait, suggnômê, a word often translated as ‘forgiveness’ or ‘forbearance’, is the most important of all regarding anger, since the praos person is ‘more inclined to deficiency; he is not revengeful but more inclined to forgive’ (EN 1126a3).9 The question for us is to establish the common thread that links these four intellectual qualities to virtuous anger. In this matter, we take our cue from Aristotle who says that they are all ‘concerned with the same thing’ (EN 1143a26). Each involves consideration of the views or the predicament of ‘another person’ (pros allon) and a sympathetic engagement with what others say. Aristotle stresses the significance of the inclination to forgive upon receipt of an apology, especially when the transgressor shows remorse. But this does not get to the heart of what suggnômê is because in the case of remorse, the inflicting of pain on the offender is halted due to the fact that the offender shows signs of suffering in pain; it is this that makes men cease in their anger.10 This inclination to withhold punishment in lieu of a transgressor’s suffering in remorse seems to be natural to all human beings and therefore doesn’t tell us anything about the intellectual properties of suggnômê. To understand these we have to turn to Aristotle’s laconic definition of suggnômê which is given in terms of equity (EN 1143a21-4): the equitable person is more inclined to ‘forgiveness’. And equity is to give ‘forgiveness’ in some things. ‘Forgiveness’ is a judgment that correctly discerns the equitable.

If we could understand the relationship between ‘equity’ and ‘forgiveness’ we should then be able to elucidate the meaning of suggnômê as it applies to anger. Aristotle does not proceed to develop this train of thought, perhaps taking it for granted that the relationship can be

112

6. Making Anger into a Virtue drawn from what he has previously said about these two intellectual qualities. We cannot take this course because the passages in which these virtues are explained are simply too dense and would be too tedious to take up here. We are fortunate though that Plato, in the Laws, also uses the two same words, ‘equity’ and ‘forgiveness’, together in a passage whose meaning is unambiguous and hence can be safely used for establishing the connection between these two words for the purposes of analyzing suggnômê. In this passage the Athenian Stranger is explaining to his interlocutors the principle of equality that should apply if the regime is to be just. The Athenian states that a greater share of power should go to those who have knowledge. But he warns that to apply the standard of wisdom and virtue without dilution would lead to civil war, because it would be offensive to the mass of people who would be excluded from the governing institutions of their city. Thus, he concludes, one must allow for violations to the absolute principle of justice: ‘For equity and forgiveness, when they are applied, violate the absolute and precise rules of correct justice’ (Leg. 757e1). Nevertheless to avoid dissension, government positions must be available to all according to the flawed democratic practice of drawing lots. Two points stand out here: first the idea that one must modify justice in light of human weakness and deep-felt human desires. Suggnômê, as used by Plato here, obviously does not mean ‘forgiveness’. Rather it suggests that we have to take the sensibilities and the viewpoint of others into consideration without insisting on strict adherence to absolute justice. Aristotle will make a similar point when he discusses practical wisdom. He states there that whereas scientific truth is inflexible and must be so if it is to be a reliable means of knowing the world, such is not the case when it comes to truth in matters of action. In Euclidian geometry, for example, when it comes to the formula a2 + b2 = c2 (the Pythagorean theorem), the equation cannot be modified to suit the sensibilities of those who might be irritated by such a mathematical truth or by the instabilities such an equation might cause to mathematical institutions. In practical affairs however, the person who goes around everywhere and in all cases trying to implement a principle is thought to be a passion-driven zealot. Unyielding righteousness in anger is part of the deviation of anger and not a sign of its intellectual mastery. Inflexibly applying a right principle, without taking into account the desires of those being affected, and without considering possible alternatives, even if they are not absolutely just, will itself incite anger. Suggnômê, as we can surmise from Plato’s example, is not mere acquiescence. It does not stop with blanket acceptance of a flaw in order

113

Taming Anger to avert anger. Prudence would mandate that one remedy the predictable harmful impacts of the flaw that one is tolerating. To accept appointment by lot, for instance, is to invite disaster if one does not take countermeasures (such as checks and balances) to limit the harm such a procedure might cause such as when unsuitable types gain positions of power under the flawed principle. The anger that will be caused by incompetents or rogues in power may lead to the very civil war which their access to office sought to avoid. One takes the other’s view into consideration, but with the thought of counteracting the flaws that one has acceded to. The word suggnômê means to share someone’s opinion or judgment. The combination of sun (with) and gignôskô (to know) shows that the word is tied to cognition. The praos will evaluate the offending act by taking into account the internal forces and the external conditions that are affecting the mind of the offending person. For instance one would consider whether the person was under stress, or if they had had a bad day, or if they are old and tend to be irascible, or if young then proud and brash, or worse still, if going through puberty perhaps headstrong and impulsive. In all these cases responses to offending actions invite forbearance in different ways. To judge the offending event apart from such considerations shows the absence of the intellectual quality of suggnômê. Romilly explains that by the fifth century Greek society had broadened the notion of actions done under compulsion or out of ignorance; hence the spectrum of mitigating circumstances was significantly enlarged. People who expect right conduct from their children after they have spent a day cooped up in a day-care centre show a lack of the ‘forgiving’ trait. One might add that old men, according to Aristotle, are naturally cowardly; and poverty understandably pressures some to fall short in generosity. Such natural inclinations bid us to treat the resultant offending conduct with suggnômê. These intellectual properties, as we have mentioned, belong to the virtue of the person of complete practical virtue, the phronimos and they exist in the praos as well. The difference is that their presence in the gentle-tempered person is more limited in range. In the practically wise person they extend to all aspects of human conduct including the science of legislation, which aims to make human beings better. Now we have one more reason why mastering anger is so difficult. The bar, as they say, has been set quite high. Parenthetically, the emphasis that Aristotle and other philosophers of the classical period placed on the cultivation of these practical intellectual virtues perhaps helps to explain why they did not promote cognitive exercises as a method of anger control. They did not preoccupy

114

6. Making Anger into a Virtue themselves as did the Stoics with exercises that presumably would allow persons to forego anger by rehearsing the most likely irritating events and reactions to these events. Instead, they preferred to cultivate the excellence which arms mature men with the capacity to judge correctly under any circumstances. Without phronêsis and its constellation of supporting habits, one indeed would need a manual, a self-help book of some sort, to prepare oneself for the multitude of circumstances that are likely to provoke one’s anger. Phronêsis (and the virtue of praotês to the degree that it overlaps with it) does not rely on rehearsing and recalling well-practised scripts for x, y, or z situation. Aristotle’s standard for the mean is not a doctrine of repeated intellectual exercises. It is a theory of culture. Given that society can never produce a myriad of ‘prudent’ persons to serve as omnipresent guides for correctness in one’s anger and given the fact that there will be many who cannot find the mean on their own, society distributes the commanding logos throughout its institutions and its myths for our assistance. With the help of wise legislators the logos of this ideal person is threaded into the marrow of cooperative life. Changing the habit What then has to be altered in order to acquire the virtue of praotês? Is it anger that has to be modified? This Aristotle precludes. Anger cannot be altered except perhaps through surgery or psychotropic drugs. Anger is biologically formed in the matter of the body. Nor can we reconfigure anger to make it better, for this would imply that anger is composed of parts, but this is not the case, for we do not detect any parts which have to be assembled or reassembled within anger. Perhaps one way to approach the subject, if this were possible, would be to examine anger-in-itself in its bad and good conditions. But here too we would not discern any alteration in the anger. To look at anger-in-itself would be like trying to discern what makes a great sculptor great by comparing his hands to the hands of one who knows nothing of the art. The success of the sculptor does not lie in his hands as such nor does anger’s virtue reside in anger itself. As we have shown, anger as a state of character has to do not with anger as such, but with how anger has formed permanent relationships with pleasure and pain and the deliberative capacity. If this is so, then this is where any alteration for improvements in our anger must occur. Excellence in anger primarily involves an alteration in how, to what degree, and towards what objects anger feels pleasure and pain. As we have seen, anger’s hedonic nexus is what has the greatest influence on a person’s ability to deliberate well over any anger-provoking event.

115

Taming Anger Training in logic, or in beliefs, or in a special art that would allow one to find the mean between the extremes will not bring about the alteration in anger’s structure. If that were so then one could attend a logic class or, even better, purchase a computer program to select alternatives based on optimising criteria. Without this alteration the subsequent improvements to one’s deliberations, something which must occur if we are to bring truth to our anger, will have little or no practical effect. Aristotle states the problem in a generic manner which can readily be applied to anger (Ph. 247a5-8): Thus these [i.e. the virtues or vices] are not alterations. Nor is the loss or the acquisition of them. Necessarily, their coming into being involves an alteration in the sensitive part of the soul. The alteration can only be due to the objects of sensation. All of ethical excellence therefore has to do with bodily pleasures and pains, either in [present] action, or in memory or in hope.

No change occurs to one’s anger. However, the coming into being of the habit involves an alteration in how anger is related to the pleasures and pains that accompany it. These are redirected by training in order ‘to experience pleasure and pain in the correct way, [for] this is what good education means’.11 The term that Aristotle uses to define this structured relation is pros ti pôs echein, which can be rendered as ‘a relation that is possessed in a certain way’(Ph 246b3 and ff). Anger’s entrenched relationship to pleasure and pain will determine how one’s anger is related to the deliberative faculty. Anger becomes well disposed when it can endure the pain of a perceived offence, thus allowing the deliberative process to exercise its control over anger. The fact that the relationship is a possession places a very demanding condition on anyone’s claim to excellence. Having virtuous anger means that it is exercised as if it has become part of one’s nature. Most people can find the mean under the commonplace circumstances that they are daily confronted with. Mastering anger, however, will not occur until the individual faces tests that go beyond routine challenges. Under trying circumstances the limits of one’s habituated character responses are reached, and the individual may either crack and lose control, bend the rules to self-righteously justify the outburst, or not be able to find the response that would truly have been just. Only when anger’s hedonic structure is well disposed to deliberation can the anger-arousing context be estimated correctly. Just as survival of the organism requires a sensory apparatus that perceives the external world without distortion, so too having excellence in anger demands that anger’s rooted disposition be poised to be stimulated without

116

6. Making Anger into a Virtue prejudgment of the external condition. The objection can be raised that pleasures are subjective and indeterminate, as evidenced by the fact that the same activity or object will give pleasure to some and not to others. Aristotle’s reply is that the pleasures which are not pleasures for the man of practical wisdom, the healthy standard for human action, are only experienced as perversions. One might object that this argument is circular because it judges the correctness of the pleasure according to a character type that is said to experience the pleasure correctly. But the logos that the ‘prudent’ person has acquired for judging pleasures and pains is one that is not arbitrary, but rests on a prior understanding of human nature. Furthermore this logos is socially tested. It is one that directs a person to find the truths regarding the good of man, something that is inseparable from the flourishing of the human mind, and the proof of this logos is in the reproduction of good citizens. An approximation method for taming anger Given the difficulties of making anger into a virtue, in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle proposes a second method that chances upon the mean. This auxiliary method relies on certain practical rules in order to avoid the excess that can cause the most harm. The rule of thumb is to choose the extreme that is closest to the mean. Aristotle gives two reasons for this preference: (1) excessive anger is more distant from the mean than gentleness; and (2) the practical results of excess, in the case of anger, are more harmful than the defective form, which is gentleness. The mild state brings one closer to the prospect of applying reason to anger. After all, persons in a mild state will forego the pleasure of retribution when offered an apology. The advice seems simple enough: We should resist whatever gives us greater pleasure, in this case the pleasure of retribution, so we might come closer to the virtue of the praos person. If we suppress our craving for retribution, we are far less likely to err in our anger. Furthermore, through such repeated acts of restraint we would slowly be strengthening our power of rational choosing since it will be gaining the time it needs to evaluate alternatives rationally. There is, however, one serious difficulty with this advice. Revising our bent towards pleasure is precisely the domain in which we have by far the lowest chance of success in reforming ourselves. If Aristotle is proposing that we shy away from the pleasure that satiates our anger, then he is going against his own findings. He has shown that the relationship to pleasure and pain is the crux of anger’s habituation. The relationship can be altered, but it is such a rare feat that it would be foolhardy to recommend changing our pleasure preferences as a prac-

117

Taming Anger tical device for mass application. Let us recall that the relationship is ‘had’; it is entrenched. Either Aristotle has forgotten everything he has argued regarding the force of pleasure or there exist other unstated ideas that he is relying on which would make his approximation technique practical. The ideas that support his practical approach to anger control do exist in his political theory. There he develops the idea of the importance of the social intelligence embedded in institutions and its effect on the elevation of the conduct of the people who participate in them. Social intelligence acts with commanding force to affect conduct. It elevates an external logos to a venerable position and gives it a coercive-like authority that assists a person to overcome the fixed patterns of his flaws. An example that might shed light on Aristotle’s approximation approach perhaps can be found in Plato’s description of the closing of the gates to the mind. We shall recall that there Plato describes how appetitive cravings gain control over the mind, and how they then mobilise anger, using brash guards that make use of reason to shut down the mind. The result is that these pleasures remain free of any criticism that might lead to conscious efforts to work against them. If we could reverse the process so as to weaken the grip that pleasure has over our anger then we might better understand how Aristotle’s proposed technique might be applied to anger control. What made the pleasures secure in their control over the mind was a destructive phase that removed any inhibitions to shameless conduct. Internal thumotic guards were deployed to remove any remnants of shame that prevented the new pleasures from being enjoyed in open daylight. The second phase was one of construction, whereby the sentries were deployed to defend the new status quo. A new internal system of communication was created all along the walls of the youth’s inner citadel so that the transformations in the meanings of traditional words suit the gratifications which his anger is defending. Finally, the guards within perform rites that honour shamelessness and hubris. The celebration establishes the new values and actions that are to be defended by anger. Reversal of the results of this two-phased process must seek to restore anger’s proper relationship to reason – that would be the ideal; but since we are looking only for an approximate solution we would want the reversal to reach a point where the person would once again feel shame and be open to the resolve of combating these ensconced cravings. The first task is to dismantle the grip of the hubristic shamelessness in order to re-establish normal communication with outsiders. The youth’s conduct is determined by a logos (an internal order) characterised by a shamelessness which has become intractable given that it

118

6. Making Anger into a Virtue has been consecrated by rites of social approval. Shamelessness has to be attacked in every which way. Anyone who has lived in a country undergoing rapid moral decline and anyone who has experienced at first hand the moral degeneration that results from participating in an evil political or religious organisation, can testify to the importance of the social toleration of shamelessness. In such societies, one comes to feel at ease with the shamelessness that is fostered within the group. Each one commends the other for their shared corruption. Slowly one begins to seek out opportunities for acting with shameless arrogance in ever more daring and ever more foul ways. The pleasure is orgiastic and addictive. Shamelessness in fact is experienced as a mark of distinction and the pleasure it gives and the applause it gains as a praiseworthy good make its practice a daily objective. In such a society, association, or cult of any type, the braggart arrogance of the ignorant emerges as a shared trait. The occurrence of shamelessness on a broad interactive scale is in a way the ‘process writ large’ for understanding the working of alazoneia in a single person. In these associations everyone becomes an alazonic boaster whereby everyone pretends to know even though each and all wallow in ignorance. They all applaud one another for the next shameless deed that outdoes the previous one. Usually boasting to persons knowledgeable about one’s true circumstances would open one up to ridicule; hence the arch-enemies to alazoneia are knowledge, which may expose the fraud, fear of exposure, and shame, the consequence of exposure. But when a common delusional celebration of militant and shameless ignorance becomes a social trait, such fear is expunged. Figuratively speaking, one can claim to have fought beside one’s good friend Alexander the Great to one’s neighbour without fear, since the neighbour is sure to respond with an even greater feat. And when the day comes that the delusion begins to deflate, because brash ignorance and its delusions can never sustain a society, the same impostors are incensed and feel betrayed by their leaders who promised them never-ending appetitive conquests to the far corners of their dreams. Regarding anger, the same can happen within a single person, especially when a person’s shamelessness can be hidden in the privacy of his home. There is a certainty that no one will know. In the house there are pacts of secrecy; neither the children nor the spouse will talk. Persons in front of whom one would be ashamed, if such persons knew of one’s conduct, are absent. And the same happens on the road or in situations where people are strangers to each other or where anonymity allows for shameless conduct without any loss of honour. If there were a way to bring shame to such ugly public and private outbursts, and to raise the spectre of disgrace, then the arrogant rationalisations

119

Taming Anger might be shaken. But if the rites of shamelessness, which give anger its respectability, find support in external acceptance, then shame cannot be reinstated into the privacy of one’s life. The excuses for tolerance of anger in public life are a grave danger because they remove the lid of shame that protects society from the evils that nest in the breast of every human being. Next, the self-rationalising vocabulary of anger and its internal lines of communication have to be assaulted. Such typical phrases as ‘you made me do that’ or ‘if only you had not’, allow one to rationalise the triggering of anger. The outer fringes of this phenomenon, as described in the Laws, are marked by cursing, in which a person ‘feasts his anger on vile banquets so that whatever culture tamed him in the past [is lost], and his soul is once again made savage, and living in this permanently irritable condition he becomes a wild beast, which is the return he receives from anger’s bitterness’ (Leg. 935a3-7). The curse words, apparently light, have heavy consequences. Plato points out that those who indulge their anger in this way become the victims of their own indulgence. Becoming addicted to cursing, they lose their self-esteem and the serious part of their character is either weakened or utterly destroyed. It would seem that the possibility of changing one’s anger after such a self-inflicted annihilation of one’s dignity is rather bleak. We can readily see why the approaches to anger control that recommend venting one’s anger – a recommendation that followed from Freud’s hydraulic theory of anger – can be so destructive. Acting out one’s deviant anger, supposedly in order to relieve it, simply strengthens its hedonic rivets. It is as if one were watering weeds and applying fertiliser to them in order to contain their spread and block their growth. Plato shows that once anger has moved on to this consolidation phase, the sentries guarding the citadel will create ever new rationalisations so that even reason is marshalled into service against reason. Assaulting the rationalisations for one’s anger may on its own prove ineffective, because the mind will manufacture reasons to be in accord with the pleasures that anger has been summoned to defend. Any explanations showing why these words contribute to our impotent rages would have to be accompanied with a weakening of their value. The words are defending something deemed worthy, and according to Plato’s analysis one has become a captive to the corrosive pleasures that are underlying these beliefs. Again, the authority of an external logos and the restoration of a vocabulary that denotes tested social values could serve as a powerful antidote. Beyond approximation, one might envision going even further, to a final phase, the opening of the mind to persuasion. Regarding this final step, it seems that the Greeks did not have illusions that this step was

120

6. Making Anger into a Virtue easy or ever complete. The aberrant impulses, imprinted from childhood, probably remain in some form. There is an apocryphal story that is recounted by Cicero about Socrates, which can perhaps illustrate this point. A famous character reader named Zopyrus arrives at Athens and is urged by Socrates’ students to interpret Socrates’ character from his physical appearance. Zopyrus does not know that the person he is analysing is Socrates. He states that the person before him is lustful and intemperate, a womaniser.12 The students ridicule the man, but Socrates intervenes, telling them that what they have heard is all true, except for the fact that he has learned to master his desires. The message of this tale is in agreement with Aristotle’s findings, that what is subject to alteration is the relational aspect of anger. Even when this occurs successfully, the pattern of anger, sculpted since childhood, will leave its imprint. Yet the pattern in the example of Socrates has been modified so that the relation of cognition to how pleasure and pain are felt has brought the former into a ruling position. For most, however, such a thoroughgoing alteration that leads to a mastery over anger may not be practical. Perhaps the conditions of life, the deep wounds of an abusive upbringing, the time and effort one has to expend, make such a feat beyond reach. Hence the mind may never gain full control over the elusive sentries that are always prowling about. Aristotle’s approximation approach must be taken together with the stress he places on role models, so that in this struggle to tame anger there will be powerful allies distributed throughout the nooks and crannies of society. These reserve forces would give our weak powers of reason a fighting chance against the continuous onslaught of our impulses. Role models are the instantiations of the êthea that should have been internally formed. They too have commanding force because they are tangible manifestations of the logos that has been endowed with social authority. We should note, regarding the reforming of our inner selves, that Plato and Aristotle do not limit nurturing (trophê) to childhood. Plato argues that the nurturing of our hedonic nature should continue throughout life in order to repair whatever corruption the wear and tear of life causes to the alignment between reason and pleasure. Nurturing, therefore, has a broader role of realignment; the word Plato uses is epanorthôsis, which means ‘setting right again’, i.e. restoring the relationship to its original nurtured form (Leg. 653d4). The gods, he says, have provided festivals in compassion for man’s struggle with pleasure and pain. Public ceremonies, perhaps what might fall under forms of entertainment in our age, thus come to fulfil an important adult nurturing role in that its rhythms and harmonies repair the damage to the inner structure. These civic celebrations involve the

121

Taming Anger active participation of citizens and are not to be confused with passive spectator events. Aristotle, in his Politics, takes a similar stance, arguing that ‘the habit of feeling pleasure or pain at mere representations is not far removed from the same feeling about realities’, so that delight in the representation will cause delight in an original action. These delightful activities are also celebrations of the common logos that ascertains our good. They also reinforce the barriers of shame that will give us the strength to keep the pleasure-driven inclinations of anger in check. Friendship and the standard that determines anger’s mean We have quoted Aristotle that excellent anger will be determined by logos. But here too the logos, the rightness of the account, must depend on the standard being used to judge the work of the anger. In general one can say the standard is the good of man, but ‘good’ is an ambivalent term. If one believes that the good is equivalent to wealth, power, or glory, then the right choice will correspond to one of these ends. Anger is always guided by a prevailing public logos, but it is rarely the right logos. A striking instance of why a logos per se is no guarantee of the correctness of anger can be seen in Pericles’ speech to the Athenians, as recorded by Thucydides, in which he urges them to wage war against Sparta (1.140-4; 2.60-4). Rational control over anger is the very essence of Pericles’ war strategy. He warns his fellow citizens that victory over Sparta will hinge on their ability to restrain their anger. The Spartans, he says, will invade and will lay waste to Attica outside the walls, but if the Athenians keep in mind that they have more money and greater sea-power they will know that in the long run they will prevail. He exhorts the Athenians to act with gnômê (‘understanding’) and refrain from orgê (anger) when they suffer temporary hardships from Spartan incursions into their territory. At first reading this sounds like sound advice. The problem though is that the logos directing the restraint is flawed and unjust. Pericles’ entire argument for rational control over anger is premised on the principle of domination over unwilling subjects. Restraining anger will bring the rewards of empire. In urging war and promising an empire Pericles was ministering to the Athenians’ appetite for plunder. Despite his famed sagacity, Pericles did not grasp that from these premises anger would become a constituent of Athenian politics. Henceforth, any challenge to Athenian rule would be certain to incite the anger of the populace, because disobedience was felt as frustration

122

6. Making Anger into a Virtue of their desires. Pericles’ espousal of domination put the Athenians into a permanent state of appetitive arousal that would make anger an essential part of the politics of the city. The shifting tides of war and civil war were to generate new enemies and new friends and on each occasion the orators were to use the sanctified logos of power to legitimise the anger being aroused. In the downward spiral the politics of anger prevailed. As Thucydides notes, gnômê was replaced with orgê. The temperance that Pericles preached for successful imperial domination became the source for the recklessness of the leaders who came after him. Aristotle’s political theory puts forth a radically new standard for calculating anger’s mean. The logos directing anger to the human good was unequivocally stated in terms of friendship. Such a conclusion was embedded in the Greek ideals from the time of Homer, but in Aristotle it acquired a theoretical formulation. His thoughts on the matter may be abstracted from his criticism of Plato’s Socrates who states in the Republic that the guardians will have to be trained to be cruel towards strangers. Aristotle responds that it is not right for the guardians to be ‘cruel towards strangers; for one must not be cruel towards anyone, nor are the “great-souled” in nature savage except towards those who are unjust’ (Pol. 1328a8-10). We expect Aristotle to conclude his critique with a restatement of his teacher’s association of anger to justice, but Aristotle instead goes on to emphasise that the thumos is the source of the feeling of affection out of which friendship is produced and it is the source of the anger that occurs when friendship is violated (Pol. 1327b39-1328a16): ... it is thumos that produces the feeling of affection. Thumos is the capacity of the soul whereby we feel affection. A sign of this is the following: when we think ourselves slighted, anger (thumos) is aroused more towards those familiar to us and towards friends than towards strangers. That is why Archilochos when censuring his friends, appropriately addresses his Spirit: ‘for it is by your friends that you are choked’... Hence it is said: ‘harsh are the wars between brothers’, and ‘those who loved in excess, also hate without measure’.

His linking of thumos to both friendship and anger is not left dangling and inconclusive. From this relationship he goes on to draw one of the most daring conclusions ever put forth in political theory. He states that: ‘It appears that poleis are held together by friendship and that the lawgivers study [how to bring this about] more than they do justice’ (EN 1155a23-4). The radical nature of Aristotle’s finding can be better grasped if we recall that for Plato friendship is the result of justice. In

123

Taming Anger Plato’s theory, if there is justice, then friendship automatically follows. Friendship, as he puts it, is the product of justice.13 Wherever there is justice there one will find concord and friendship.14 Aristotle corrects this formulation. He argues that if there is friendship, there will be no need of justice, for no one harms a friend, whereas if there is justice alone, there is still need of friendship. By pointing out the common origin of anger and friendly feeling in the thumos he was also stipulating anger’s proper end; if friendship has to be trained to avoid anger, then anger has to be trained to preserve and defend friendship. Aristotle thus singled out the psychological power of friendliness as that which acts to naturally incline one to restrain anger and to pull against its impetuous drive to retaliation. Aristotle’s formulation that friendship is superior to justice makes friendship the centrepiece of politics. Political friendship if it is to replace justice cannot be a shared sentiment, unanimity, a common like-mindedness, or a convergence of beliefs. All of these are open to manipulation and abuse. Instead Aristotle calls it homonoia (‘togethermindedness’) which he desribes as a settled condition within the citizenry, which inclines them to act towards each other as friends for their common good, where the common good is synonymous with human completion. The question of taming the thumos and anger now becomes one of bringing into being character types that are imbued with a desire to cultivate friendship in all domains of shared life and to feel distress, anger and even rage, as appropriate, in response to unjust practices that undermine it. One can only imagine what such a society would be like in which anger derives its standard from the gentle bonds of friendship.

124

7

From Anger to Hatred The emergence of hatred from anger Aristotle, referring to attacks against tyrants, states that ‘anger is a part of the hatred’ felt against them (Pol. 1312b26). Not only is anger often found occurring with hatred, but Aristotle held that it can evolve from anger. This is not to say that hatred was thought of as an advanced stage of anger; the two passions are different, with different hedonics, and with different aims. However, it is important to emphasise that Aristotle and Plato were not drawn to the study of hatred between natural enemies (‘between lions and humans’, who can never have a ‘together minded spirit’, Il. 22.262-4) or hatred between populations. In these cases hatred, as a prejudice based on evident heterogeneities, can probably occur without any progression from anger. The hatred that captured their attention was the one that emerged from anger born of injustice in which anger functioned as a bridge, of sorts, over which citizen-friends crossed over to enmity. Hatred was viewed by both these thinkers as what we would call an auto-immune disorder in which the body attacks its own cells, as if they were alien pathogens, and the passion most responsible for the process leading to an irremediable dissolution of the political body was none other than unbounded anger. Let us start our analysis with a passage from the Rhetoric in which the differences between anger and hatred are explained (1382a3-17): The things that produce enmity are anger, contemptuous treatment, and slander. Anger then is produced from actions committed against us, while enmity even from acts not committed against us. If we believe that someone is of such [a reprehensible] character we express hatred against him. Anger always involves particulars, for example, Kallias or Socrates, whereas hatred refers to classes; thus everyone hates a thief or a sycophant. Anger is curable with time, hatred is incurable. Anger aims at pain, but hatred aims at producing an evil, because the person who is angry wants to feel [the pleasure of retribution] while the person who hates is not concerned [to feel anything]. All things that cause pain are perceptible, but the biggest evils, such as folly and injustice, are least perceptible because evil causes no pain. Anger is accompanied by pain, yet hatred is not, because the person who gets angry feels pain, though the one who hates does not. The angry person could feel pity due to many

125

Taming Anger things, but the person who hates never, because the angry person first wants the person against whom he is angry to suffer, while the second wants him to perish.

As Aristotle states, anger is specific to the offence; it is directed against individuals with a desire to pain them, whereas hatred is against classes of people and wishes to do them harm. In anger there is always a concrete ‘this person here’ to be punished who is connected to the insult or slight received. Anger is curable in time; hatred, though, is incurable. Hatred is independent of any specific context of injustice and its operation need not refer back to any perceptible particular event. The injustice that gives rise to hatred is considered to be on a scale that is pervasive and overwhelming in its range of occurrence. Great evil is the least perceived, because the injustice is as global, systemic and omnipresent as oxygen, and just as imperceptible. The entire system and all those associated with it must go. Furthermore, because the pain that sparks anger is personal, most acts of violence that occur in the heat of anger are between relatives and friends or hot-tempered outbreaks against a particular person causing the offence. The victims of hatred, however, are often unknown to the perpetrator, and any connection to a personal injury is generally tenuous and distant. Hatred knows no pain; it is pitiless, cold and implacable and can be quenched only with the destruction of one’s enemies. Several commentators have taken Aristotle’s statement that ‘anger is accompanied by pain, but hatred not’ to mean that hatred does not qualify as an emotion.1 Aristotle’s concept of hatred is interpreted to be an intellectual passion of sorts without the feeling that drives anger; as one scholar has put it, hatred is perhaps an emotion ‘of the reason itself, and not of the other parts of the soul as Aristotle conceives them’ (Cooper, 1999: 418). Now it would be quite strange if a passion existed with no connection whatsoever to pleasure or pain, since pleasure or pain are the quintessential traits of any pathos.2 The ‘or’ is of the essence. Though hatred does not feel pain, it does feast on the anticipation of the hated person’s annihilation. Greek poetry and tragedy are filled with such anticipations, and it is unlikely that Aristotle was rejecting or amending this commonplace view of hatred. That he would have been ignoring without comment what were perhaps the greatest representations of hatred ever written, in which the pleasure of annihilation is violently proclaimed, is improbable. We can cite two such passages just to support the point. The first is from Euripides’ Hippolytos, where Theseus, upon being informed that his son has been fatally injured, declares (1257-8):

126

7. From Anger to Hatred Because of the hatred for the man who has suffered [these calamities], your words brought me pleasure.

Or when Medea, who has just been told of the horrible deaths she has caused, responds (Euripides, Medea 1135-6): Speak then. How did they die? Double will be the pleasure we will feel if they died in the most horrible way.

Annihilation of one’s enemies is desirable and addictively sweet. This was something that the Greeks knew only too well as their polis societies became engulfed in fratricidal civil wars. The pleasure of hatred and its consequences: the case of Philoktetes Since so much of tragedy deals with anger and hatred, we can enlist its help to elucidate Aristotle’s concept of the latter. Otherwise we would have to begin our analysis with the causes of civil wars as analysed in Book 5 of his Politics and this belongs to another study altogether. Perhaps one might argue that turning to tragedy for analysing hatred is better suited to literary criticism than to philosophy, but I think this is not a valid objection, since much of philosophy’s clarity regarding these passions was derived from the poets. So much of what Aristotle took for granted, such as the hedonics of hatred, a commonplace in tragedy, is the subject of intense debate in our times. We simply lack the common framework that the Greek poets had created for all disciplines, be it history, medicine, or philosophy that took up the passions for study. What we especially want to make use of are any depictions of hatred that might elucidate how it proceeds from anger, so that we might better understand hatred’s unique logic and its distinct hedonic structure. Hatred differs from anger, yet, because of its origin, it often exhibits common elements with its source, even as it goes beyond it. I have chosen Sophocles’ tragedy Philoktetes, written during a period when the Athenians were themselves rapidly sinking into fratricidal war, as a work whose dramatic depictions of anger and hatred may be most helpful in shedding light on Aristotle’s thesis. As a first step to distinguishing the differences between anger and hatred we can compare Philoktetes’ hatred in Sophocles’ play to the wrath of Achilles. Philoktetes, who was abandoned on an uninhabited island by his comrades because of the stench of his wound and his pain-filled cries, is filled with hatred for the injustice he has suffered.

127

Taming Anger He wishes that the entire Achaean army be utterly destroyed. He cares not a whit about apologies or equivalent punishment of those responsible for his abandonment, nor will he be calmed by the god’s oracular promise of a cure if he were to come to terms with his former comrades who abandoned him to suffer alone. Achilles’ wrath, on the other hand, though unrestrained in intensity, is limited to a specific insult suffered. Achilles’ withdrawal will cause great harm to the army, but he is always open to returning to the company of his warrior friends if and when his honour is restored. He calls upon his mother Thetis to punish, not to destroy, the Achaean forces so that they will come begging for his return. In contrast, Philoktetes will never return; there is nothing to return to, for the Achaeans have become enemies whom he wants to see destroyed to a man, and it is only this pleasure-filled thought that eases his pain (1040-4, tr. Grene): Land of my fathers, Gods that look on men’s deeds, take vengeance on these men, in your own good time, upon them all, if you have pity on me! Wretchedly as I live, if I saw them dead, I could dream that I was free of my sickness.

Philoktetes’ hatred is sustained by the thought of seeing his enemies all dead. His implacable stance, when viewed as a process, originated in pain and anger, which finding no single person to punish or any common bond for making amends, hardened into hatred. Achilles’ anger and Philoktetes’ hatred are separated by an abyss, because in hatred there is no common framework of values to bridge the chasm of discontent. The punishment that Achilles seeks promises to be effective because it assumes allegiance to the common values of honour and virtue, so that when Agamemnon and the army suffer from Achilles’ withdrawal, they feel remorse and try to make amends for the injury to Achilles’ honour. But in Philoktetes, Odysseus and the Achaean army move in a moral world that shares no point of intersection with that of Philoktetes. The army speaks the language of guile and power, while Philoktetes is still beholden to the epic values of honour and manly virtue. There would be no purpose served for Philoktetes to be angry, for he could never hope to affect his former comrades. His anger would either be impotent or burn within him to no effect, or if he chose to vent it he would offer a comical sight of someone hurling recriminations against persons who would have only contempt for the emotional displays of the weak.

128

7. From Anger to Hatred Overcoming the logos of hatred with friendship What happens when anger has turned into hatred? The first casualty is friendship, whose erosion causes a marked psychological deterioration. Usually, the proof of friendship in the Hellenic world was associated with strict criteria that referred to codes of reciprocation. These included knowledge of the prospective friend’s character gained over time, reciprocal benefits as tangible evidence of mutual affection, and the pleasure of sharing each other’s company. But under conditions of enmity, a mutual commitment to harm comes to form the basis for ties of affection. As Philoktetes yells out to Neoptolemos when the latter pretends to hate the Achaeans (320-8, tr. Grene): Are you, as well as I, a sufferer and angry? Have you grounds against the Atridae? ... Well said, boy! You come to me with a great hatred against them.

Under conditions of hatred the traditional criteria for friendship recognition vanish. As we see from the above, the unstated argument for friendship jettisons centuries of careful distinctions that the Greeks had developed in this matter. The argument resonates through the ages: Anyone who hates X is my friend. This fellow (or group) hates X. This fellow (or group) is my friend.

The flaw of the argument lies in the fact that the emotion ‘I hate’ plays the role of the major premise. Normally, as the word for political friendship, ‘together-mindedness’ (homonoia) denotes, the expectation of just and noble deeds forms the content of the premise, while here it is a common hatred that fleetingly binds persons for the deed at hand. Political soul-mates, of the right or the left, or groupings in between, united by common hatred give rise to a new type of friendship whose trademark is a shared commitment to inflict harm. When anger hardens so that society has arrived at this condition, there is dichonoia, ‘split’ or ‘apart-mindedness’.3 This state of separate-mindedness is more dangerous than the impetuous anger that preceded it. If hatred were indeed a passion of reason it would be the least destructive of the passions. Hatred would then be cold and calculating and most rational. Those in such a condition would calculate the powers at hand, estimate the balance of forces, and act with calm resolution to gain their harmful

129

Taming Anger objectives. But we know that this is not usually the case. Those who hate revel in the anticipated destruction of their foes. Thus, certain hateful events are wished for even when there is no logical basis for such events to unfold; avenues of action are accepted as desirable often because they conform to hatred’s anticipated pleasure of annihilation. One’s powers of evaluation are proportionately diminished in relation to the excess of the passion. This tendency is well understood by demagogues who thrive on the opportunities that this psychological deterioration in the populace presents for manipulation. Thus, when ‘us’ versus ‘them’ manifests itself, the opportunities for irrational manipulations are unlimited. When Philoktetes appeals to the gods to sanctify his desire for vengeance, he confers a mantle of divine authority onto it. In his eyes, his hatred and all actions flowing from it have the blessing of the gods (1040-3). This step psychologically removes all previous restraints and opens the door to open-ended justification of even criminal acts. Criminal acts, once given a divine authority, even though they may be the work of passion, flow from a type of mind that is militantly self-righteous. The militant righteousness of hatred, usually dressed up in the rhetorical garments of justice, is easily seduced by any plan that promises to result in the pleasure of inflicting harm on one’s enemies. On the other side of the chasm, the enemies posit the righteousness of their cause. In the civil wars that occurred during and after the Peloponnesian War the contending claims to (alazonic) righteousness were to interact so that the injustice of the powerful encountered the self-righteous hatred of the poor and the weak. Most often this led to a labyrinth of paradoxes wherein the players in these conflicts became lost in their passion-driven machinations, and ultimately all parties found themselves closed off from any path to reconciliation. The Athenians who watched this play in 409 had lived through the oligarchic coup of 411 which was successful only because one of the demagogues, Pisander, promised the people that such a transformation would be rewarded with Persian gold (Thuc. 8.53). Within the space of a year four successive revolutions occurred as the factions vied for power. And in 410 came the democratic uprising of the fleet at Samos which threatened to sail against the oligarchs at home. In a display of the irrationality that now commanded politics, the democratic uprising chose Alcibiades as its leader, the same person who had betrayed their city to the Spartans in the previous three years. As this tragedy comes to its end it reaches an ethical and psychological deadlock. Tragedy calls for catharsis, for resolution, and none is logically or dramatically possible from the moral and psychological plights of the major characters. The plot is at an impasse, because

130

7. From Anger to Hatred self-annihilation or withdrawal would be depressing and pathetic, but not tragic. As Neoptolemos tells Philoktetes (1320): ‘those who like you suffer ills wilfully – well, for such people, it is not just for anyone to “forgive” (suggnômên) or to pity them’. Philoktetes in his hatred cannot be budged, nor can any of the other characters be reformed in manners that might affect him. Hence, like a polis hopelessly divided, a corrector, a mediator, a healer, who stands outside of the factions, must come forward with a solution that transcends the limitations of the characters and their hatreds, just as Solon did when the Athenians called upon him to act as mediator to avert civil war. In Sophocles’ play, Herakles suddenly makes his appearance, announcing, to the heretofore intransigent Philoktetes, that the road ahead is one of friendship. Together with Neoptolemos the two will lead the Achaeans to conquer Troy. Philoktetes gives his assent, declaring that he will conform to Herakles’ words. What is it though that actually persuades Philoktetes? Up to this point he was set on rejecting any alternatives that involved cooperation with his hated enemies. Does Herakles cause him to change his beliefs? Does he make him cognitively aware of his self-interests, such as the cure that awaits him and the glory of victory? None of these. Philoktetes is in no position to be swayed by reason. His mind is closed to all persuasion. It is not the words of Herakles but the mythos of Herakles that pierces through his self-righteousness to reach his passions with the full authority of reverence. This is what reconnects him to the hero that he once was. Mythos, in the sense that Plato and Aristotle gave to it, is a kind of non-scientific knowledge that couches itself in an imaginative language of wonderment that can reach the passions. Underlying the mythos is a type of knowledge, the grasping of which presupposes that it has been granted a common reverence and exists as social intelligence. The ennobling values resident in myths of this sort have a binding social force. The models they present for shame and veneration acquire authority and their widespread distribution throughout society makes them actual, in the sense of being readily available as practical guides for human action. This aspect of mythos helps to explain the inadequacy of prosaic logos to help humans towards right conduct in contexts that involve a collision of intense passions. Philoktetes, as we have seen, cannot at this juncture listen to reason, even though the logos for his salvation has come as a commandment from the gods. Logos, as Aristotle and Plato showed, is a mere power that is available to other psychological powers for common use. It cannot enforce itself through acts of will unilaterally over all the other psychological forces that operate within a person and it is quite weak

131

Taming Anger and ineffectual once the passions have been given free rein. The passions must be brought to an order that will make them right. But how can this be done, in the case of anger, which is high-pitched and self righteous in its very expression? The mythos rekindles Philoktetes’ passions along a different noetic trajectory that will move Philoktetes away from enmity to reconciliation. He arrives at logos by way of a value-laden mythos. He remembers through the imagery of the mythos who he truly is rather than who he has become. Herakles recasts the oracle in terms of friendship. He first announces that he has come for Philoktetes’ own good; he does not view Philoktetes as an instrument to be disposed of in the name of the mission’s greater good. Next, he addresses the restoration of friendship within Philoktetes’ own tormented soul. He reminds Philoktetes that he, Herakles, suffered greatly to reach immortal aretê. His sufferings did not reduce him to savagery; instead, they became the materials out of which his restraint and his self-knowledge developed, making possible his ascent. By invoking his own suffering he opens the way for Philoktetes to be cleansed of his hatred and cured. Philoktetes, his mind opened by the mythos, begins to see his heroic self through Herakles who did not succumb to debasement. He is now capable of friendship, something which can occur given that his future partner in virtuous action, Neoptolemos, has recognised Philoktetes’ pain and has responded to his agony with affection, actions which constitute the first step on their path to friendship.4 That this friendship between the two is what the Greeks came to call ‘political friendship’ is clearly indicated. Unlike personal friends whose relationship is one of sharing goods and basking in the pleasure of each other’s society, this friendship is to be formed about a great undertaking, what Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, following Socrates, calls the en megethei, the ‘great matters’ of the polis.5 The great matter in the play is represented by the conquest of Troy where the divided self is to be conquered as a personal and cooperative enterprise. That Sophocles had to call upon a god to descend from Olympus to deliver this mythos was a sign that Sophocles viewed his polis in 409 as one that was losing its moral strength for self-preservation. It was tired and weak and its cacophonous hatreds were fast consuming its powers. Worst of all, it had failed to select from the mythoi and the values available to it a way of life that would have restrained its citizens from the impieties of illicit gain and savage excesses. Instead, it had moved far along in the opposite direction. But in Philoktetes, Sophocles has let all future citizens know that Apollo’s bow shall be granted to those who aspire to conquer their divided selves and return themselves and their polis to their sacred course. As for the consequences of failure, Sopho-

132

7. From Anger to Hatred cles has come to the same conclusion as that drawn years later by Plato and Aristotle, that man, bereft of virtue (aretê), an enemy to himself and to others, is the worst of even the most savage animals. And man’s fate in that condition, as calamitous as it may be, is never worthy of tragedy. Aristotle in his unsurpassed wisdom advised that this phase of hatred must never be allowed to emerge between friends. Divine mediators like Solon or Herakles are rare and the occasion for their arbitration or mediation even rarer. Once hatred works its way into public life the chasm may become unbridgeable. Society must take heed during the early phases of political decay when pervasive and unrequited anger, hatred’s early source, rears its head. He recommends that political leaders intervene in these emerging conflicts with reforms that instil friendship. They should seek to make restitution that takes into consideration the good of those offended so that they will make the victims friends. From an alienated part, they become, through participation, a friend to the whole to which they now belong. Anger is tamed by continuously expanding the borders of friendship so that all those who share a common destiny are treated as persons of worth. Aristotle’s politics of friendship aim to shape a political world whose institutions nurture the best in humans so that they learn to become friends to their well-being and from this accomplishment cooperate as friends with others. Here we have reached the end of our inquiry into the contributions of Greek thinkers into anger. Though our study ends here, we shall turn to the period that follows the demise of the Greek polis, as a footnote, as it were, only to establish that the Western traditions for understanding anger owe little to the ideas that have been examined in this study. With regards to our anger and our ability to reflect upon it, it is as if the insights that culminated in the theories of Plato and Aristotle either never existed or if they did they are but subject matters to be studied in the dusty chambers of scholarly research. This brings us to our tradition, the ‘wrath of God’ and the sin of anger.

133

8

The Wrath of God: Onward to the Past The backward march to a ‘new’ framework for anger When Alexander the Great died in 323 and Aristotle in 322, a new imperial era was being born. Some 600 years later when the Christian Imperium was being founded in Constantinople, the citizen, as a bearer of honour and worth, had been swept aside. The political and cultural attention given to anger for understanding and treating injustices had long come to an end; the efforts to tame anger politically had no foundation and therefore the Homeric framework for understanding its complexity became irrelevant. The nurturing of the thumos for cooperative friendship was over and the Greek paideia that had been assigned the task of bringing this about was relegated to specialised elitist education. However, the process that led to this was anything but evolutionary. The new attitude towards anger arose from the depths of the old cultures of the conquered populations of the East. The religious traditions of the theocracies, with their view of anger as a sovereign power of God, now acquired the intellectual tools which could be used to rationally articulate beliefs about anger that were essentially bereft of any rational content. God’s providential and unfathomable will, the ultimate source of righteous wrath, was declared the rational model for human conduct. Philo Judaeus, explaining how anger is to be tamed, writes of a ‘judicious logos’ that God ‘placed on the breast of Aaron, that is to say, upon his thumos, so that it may be ... harnessed’, and then he says of Moses that he ‘completely extirpates the whole of the passions, root and branch’, getting rid of his anger completely ‘as a gift from God without any labour or difficulty’. Gregory Nazianzus, a Church Father, will exhort the flock to ‘straightaway embrace God’ when moved to anger, warning that anger is an ‘alienation from God’. And the Apostle Paul will condemn the unfaithful with the prospect of a vengeful ‘day of anger’, the day of their ‘annihilation’, which will come inexplicably as a ‘thief in the night’. The destruction of the Homeric framework for the understanding of anger and its replacement by the ‘wrath of God’ paradigm is recounted in broad strokes with the aim of establishing that such a transformation did indeed occur and highlighting its features, since this is the

135

Taming Anger paradigm that has been bequeathed to us. The replacement should not be thought of as a natural progression representing a critical advance over the failures or inadequacies of the Hellenic paradigm that it was thrusting aside. The new framework was a forward driving process – it was militantly building a new culture – which, with respect to anger’s purposes and its methods of control, harked back to a theocratic past. The Stoic transformation of the Hellenic framework A most important stride in the transformation of the framework for understanding anger was made by the Stoic philosophers who established themselves in Athens towards the end of the fourth century. Stoicism preached an inner salvation that depended on one’s personal ability to make choices that would be in harmony with the iron-clad Logos of the universe. Anger was reduced quintessentially to a ‘judgment’, to a failure to reason well. The Stoics denounced anger and the passions as types of ‘excessive impulse’. Seneca, the teacher and advisor to the Emperor Nero, wrote a book on anger, De Ira, in the first century CE based almost exclusively on Stoic texts on the passions. From the first sentence Seneca calls anger ‘the most hideous and frenzied of all the emotions’; it is ‘wholly violent’, and rightfully wise men ‘have claimed that anger is temporary madness’. What then is anger? Anger is a judgment. The Homeric interplay of psychological powers is set aside. Anger originates in an impulse that is responding to some impression (phantasia), but then goes astray because of assent to a faulty judgment. First, there is an involuntary impulse to an external event. A presentation (phantasia) is made to one’s mind. Because of some faulty belief in the perceiver, the presentation is interpreted to suggest that some injury is impending or has occurred. Next follows assent to this judgment. The impression that injury has occurred is then conjoined to the conclusion that it is right to seek revenge. The judgment, a thought, thus evolves into an excitable impression, which is to say a passion, which in turn is pushed along by the original energy of the involuntary impulse – only now it is also armed with the force of a runaway conviction: ‘These processes are impossible unless the mind has given assent to the impressions that moved it’ (2.1.4-5, tr. Basore). The Stoic aim is to control one’s judgments that interpret the appearances. The perception of the event is reduced to a flattened-out image stripped of any hedonic component. Pleasure and pain are conceived as the after-effects of a judgment, not the products of a habituated casting of inner psychological powers. If a person judges that having been struck without provocation is not an evil, then no pain will be experi-

136

8. The Wrath of God: Onward to the Past enced and anger will not be aroused. If, however, a person judges this to be insulting or demeaning, this being an errant judgment, then the impulse will gather the steam of a runaway idea. For example, if someone were spat upon and they could say to themselves that ‘this is nothing to me’, that it is no more of an insult than shower water and hence of no consequence, the impression of the affront would not be interpreted as abusive; there would be no contraction, no pain, and no anger. Anger control is thus reduced to controlling judgments regarding one’s impressions. The new dogma calls for a reformation of one’s judgments to banish anger altogether. What one must practise is bringing one’s judgments into alignment with a pre-existing dogma about the nature of the world. All that is truly good is human will, i.e. an individual’s prohairesis, the power of making rational choice. The complexity of ‘forechoice’ is reduced to its end phase, that of commitment to a choice, what we would call the will. This phase of choice, interpreted as a pure exercise of reason, is taken to be the essence of one’s true being. This power of rational choice (shorn of all appetite) is what the Stoics claim no external event can ever impinge upon. The Stoics claim that the difficulty for the eradication of false belief is that judgments regarding one’s honour have been cultivated since childhood and are hard to expunge. But, argues Seneca, just as people can learn to become tightrope-walkers, so too, with persistence, they can get rid of the judgments that lead to anger (2.12.3-4). This sounds reasonable until one reflects on how many tightrope-walkers one has encountered in one’s lifetime. Certainly it is possible to learn how to walk a tightrope twenty or thirty metres in the air, but this feat is indeed rare. Anyone who has tried to change their anger habits knows just how difficult are these so-called acts of will. Seneca was not writing for the masses of the Roman Empire, nor was he propounding a methodology that could find a mass following. The internal ethical world of Rome’s subjects was of no interest to him. His reflections on anger were not meant to exhort citizens to a daily practice of complicated meditations to reform their judgments. His special concern was for Rome’s autocratic strongmen, whose uncontrolled rages had inflicted irreparable public harm. Rome was anything but an association of free and equal citizens. The conditions for the institutional restraints that Cicero had argued for in his Res Publica were no longer structurally possible. The autocratic empire destroyed the viability of republican checks and balances. Seneca describes destructive acts of anger committed by Roman political leaders and military commanders. He denounces this mindless ravaging of cities and the egregious butchery of entire populations: ‘No plague has cost the human race more dear ... Behold the most glorious cities whose

137

Taming Anger foundations can scarcely be traced – anger cast them down’ (1.2.2, tr. Basore). Neither the Stoics nor the Christians who came after them were arguing for a passive meekness when they called for the banishment of anger. Every society needs anger and must mobilise it for its purposes. The Stoics, who were welcomed by the Roman elite to the extent that it suited them, taught that punishment was a duty. The Roman leaders found the Stoic concept of duty (kathêkonta) especially attractive to their way of life.1 The Stoics held that only inner rational choice was truly good. Some externals, such as health, wealth, family, education, were found to be intrinsically good, others intrinsically bad, and still others indifferent (neither beneficial nor injurious). The class of indifferents and other goods could be ranked and classed according to their kinship with their dogma about nature: duty to one’s country and public service were among the highest duties, and within this hierarchy of duties the statesman was called upon to eradicate his anger so that he might act for the empire’s common good. Cicero writes in his work On Duties: ‘In administering punishment it is above all necessary to allow no trace of anger ... anger is in every circumstance to be eradicated’, and those who govern should ‘inflict punishment not by wrath but by justice’ (1.89, tr. Miller). One should not get angry at the misconduct of others. Instead one should act out of duty with clear-headed judgment on behalf of the common good, whatever that may be. Punish as if in a court, where sentences are handed down as a passionless judgment for sins and crimes committed. Since injustice is an illness, the wise man will treat people’s wickedness the way a doctor tries to heal disease (2.10.6-8). The imperative of punishment comes from an enlightened despot who attends to the needs of the empire and the threads that hold the social order together. He never acts in anger but rather makes use of punishment as one might discipline animals to keep them from the wolves that might otherwise devour them. Retooling honour to achieve indifference How does one turn a slight into something to be treated with indifference? Obviously, a retooling of one’s sense of honour is here called for so that one’s social worth, which comes from participation between equals, is removed as a factor for evaluation of an external provocation. Insults are relegated to external causes towards which one must remain indifferent. The crudities of human behaviour in the Empire, where people’s emotions were trained in the Coliseum, could be tolerated after all. Seneca put it aptly in his famous phrase that society is a

138

8. The Wrath of God: Onward to the Past community of wild beasts (Ferarum iste conventus est) where threats, abuse, and belittlement abound.2 These were endemic conditions, outside one’s control. What can be controlled are not the events but how the events are perceived.3 If one’s honour and dignity are of little or no importance, then one is unlikely to get angered if these are assaulted. The normal process is reversed. The perception of a provocation, which is something to be evaluated, is now inverted so that one’s perceptions are in conformity with the rules and commandments of a religiously held dogma about one’s value. The belief reveals how things necessarily must be, not how they appear, and secondly the belief prescribes a necessary attitude, an iron clad framework that dictates formulaically how one should respond to the provocative event being experienced. ‘Remind yourself’, states Epictetus in his Manual, that ‘it is not the one person who abuses or hits you that insults you, but it is the belief (‘dogma’) you hold regarding these that insults you. Therefore, when someone irritates you, know that it is your judgment that has irritated you’ (20.1-3). When one reads the late Stoics, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, one cannot but be struck by the onrushing stream of imperatives in their writings. A new command ethic was being forged; one must have the dogmatic rules for right choices firmly in place and ready to use. In the first four paragraphs of Epictetus’ Manual, for example, one finds fifteen imperative commands, such as Recall! Study! Examine! Test! Keep at hand! Withdraw! Transfer! Remove! Employ! Remember! Remind yourself! Put before yourself! And Emperor Marcus Aurelius, writing in the same vein, in the first paragraphs of his Meditations, exhorts himself to: Observe! Leave the books! Think! Let this suffice! Keep to the dogmas! Toss away your thirst! Recall! Understand! Attend! The introduction of a command ethic was a conscious, deliberate enterprise. Striking evidence of this is the alteration that Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, made to the order of two lines from Hesiod’s Works and Days (293-4). The original lines extol, as the most excellent man, the person who, due to inner excellence, can find the rule for right action within himself: He is the most excellent, the one who can himself think out everything Good also is he who listens to whomever speaks rightly (293-4).

Zeno changed these lines to commend, as best, the man who can follow orders (Diogenes Laertius 7.25.12): He is most excellent who listens to whomever speaks rightly Good also is he who can think out everything by himself.

139

Taming Anger What is open to one’s control is assent to the impressions. We have to judge the impressions our imagination presents to us, and these must be grasped and interpreted with the right judgments that follow from our set of duties. The measuring stick is the dogma.4 The canon and its commandments must be at hand, and part of the exercise is to develop vivid imagery that will retrieve the command from memory and activate it for the occasion.5 The conclusion to be drawn is that the ethics of imperatives, a secular form of divine commandments which was common to the East, was thus introduced into the West by the Stoics through the medium of the Greek language. The problem with this method, however, was that only a select few could ever be successfully trained to unfailingly have the right command at hand during the charged events of daily life. The system required learning Stoic physics and a logic whose premises were derived from a dogma about the nature of the world, and finally a system of ethics in which commands were derived from an ordering of one’s duties such that one could live according to the nature envisioned by their physics. Mastery of these subject areas was impossible without dedicated learning, personal philosopher-therapists as trainers, and an abundance of leisure. Such requirements did not lend themselves to widespread application. Hence the elitist Stoics could not gain followers outside a narrow elitist circle. The Christians, however, were able to make use of the same principles for mass application. The drama of salvation as we shall see was to provide the images for keeping anger in check while at the same time unleashing its frenzy in the service of righteousness as a duty. A little note is perhaps in order to record here a faint protest against the sweeping overthrow of the Homeric framework for understanding the passions. One of the great minds of the Roman Age, the physician Galen, wrote a book, the Opinions of Plato and Hippocrates, in which he argues that the Stoics, beginning with the systematiser of their doctrines, Chrysippus, had transformed the traditional Greek framework and that the Greek language itself was being abused in order to make this transformation possible. Throughout this fascinating document is an undertone of ridicule insinuating that Chrysippus was translating ideas into Greek from a foreign reference frame (2.5.62.3).6 He argues with evident frustration that the view of passions, such as anger, as judgments gone awry, was alien to all Hellenic intellectual traditions. Chrysippus, he reiterates over and over, reduces a myriad of powers in the soul, including the passions, to one, that of reason: ‘the powers by which we desire and are angry and reason are more than one’. The doctrines of the Stoics fly in the face of facts: ‘Such shamelessness in the face of facts obvious to all mankind is the work of sophists’. Galen states, perhaps to the tedium of contemporary scholars, that

140

8. The Wrath of God: Onward to the Past what was being transformed and overturned was the Hellenic view of the passions and not merely the thoughts of Plato.7 To grasp the full consequences of this transformation for concepts and practices regarding anger we now have to turn away from the Stoics and reference the creative writers of the East who eclectically brought Stoic and other philosophical doctrines under the aegis of their ancestral religions. Philo and the wrath of God The imagery of salvation and its exercises for anger control that were developed by the Church Fathers owed an immense debt to the genius of Philo Judaeus, an Alexandrian philosopher who wrote around the early part of the first century CE. His writings on the passions preoccupied the Church Fathers and he was their most seminal source. On the question of anger Philo made the all-important step of blending Stoic doctrines with disparate selections from Plato’s writings, and then tying these to allegorical interpretations of Scripture. Steeped in the Hellenised culture of Alexandria, he made use of whatever Greek philosophical writings were in vogue to assert the primacy of the Law (Torah) as a guide to belief and praxis. One of the enduring accomplishments of this undertaking is that his writings introduced into Hellenised philosophical literature the Hebrew Bible as the model for understanding and controlling anger. Following the Stoics, Philo also thinks of anger as a ‘pernicious disease of the soul’ (Alleg. Interpr. III,124.6), but in a departure from them he holds that this evil passion is to be removed by God’s grace. Exercises, no matter how refined, are secondary to belief and will not work without the aid of God’s providential will. Using Plato’s concept of a tripartite soul, Philo argues that anger, which exists in the thumos, is controlled only when it submits to the reins of a deified logos. This enlightenment comes to humans in one of two ways: (1) complete removal of anger or (2) a second-best condition whereby anger continues to subsist though controlled by logos. Both moderation and elimination are realised through God. The model for complete elimination by the grace of God is Moses, as interpreted by Philo. The second best, the person who moderates anger through effort and exercises, is personified by Moses’ brother, Aaron, whom Philo describes as one of the prokoptôn (132.2 and 3.140.2), a Stoic word for the person who is making progress towards virtue. Aaron has the Holy Word of the Law placed over his thumos. God places the logos ‘on the breast of Aaron ... so that it may be ... in the first place harnessed ...’ but Moses’ anger is ‘completely extirpated ... root and branch’, an excising that was ‘re-

141

Taming Anger ceived ... as a gift from God without any labour or difficulty’. Indeed, God says Philo ‘distributed to the wise man the best [quality of all], the power to cut out all his passions’ (131). Anger is subdued by God’s Law either incompletely, where anger continues to exist but is subject to the restraint of his Law, or completely eradicated, effortlessly, as a gift coming from His grace.8 In both cases, though, the cause of the mastery over anger is God. Whereas the Stoics reduced anger to a faulty judgment that could be corrected by reforming one’s judgments, Philo moved the entire problem of subduing the passions to the realm of religion. God is the source of the Law. Once this step was made two results followed: (1) taming wrath was possible by submitting oneself to the word of God, and (2) God’s providential wrath, as interpreted by humans, could become the reference point for the righteous deployment of anger. There exists a divine anger that is unlike normal human anger. This anger is by definition intrinsically just; and Philo is perhaps the first to call this species of wrath ‘just wrath’, i.e. orgês dikaias and dikaian orgên (de Vita Mosis 1.302.6 and 2.279.2). This alone would be sufficient to make Philo a pivotal figure in the cultural transformation that was occurring. Even if he was not the first, his work appears to be the source of this concept for later Christian writers. This distinct species of ‘just anger’ is not to be inquired into; it is God’s will in the form of a corrective that ensures the viability of the Covenant. Those who betray the covenant are smitten by it. Accordingly, Moses will order the Levites to slaughter the idol worshippers: ‘Yea, slay them, though they be kinsmen and friends ...’ This deed comes as a command; it is executed as a duty and is pleasing to God. Others feel pity, but Moses honours the Levites for carrying out the bloody order. The Church Fathers will make Philo’s treatment of this passage from Exodus into the exemplar of ‘just anger’, and it will become a commonplace reference for how human anger, once recast, can serve righteousness. Also of lasting importance will be Philo’s assertion that God’s wrath in the Hebrew Bible should not be taken literally, for in truth God is free of passion.9 Staying close to Stoic doctrine, he argues that God is free of all passion. His wrath in the Scriptures is for causing fear among non-believers and immature minds.10 Philo is not always consistent with this doctrine. He is more than willing to jettison this view when confronted with sin against God. Anger then is portrayed as a mighty destructive force and Moses himself becomes swept away with it when he orders the Levites to slaughter the idol worshippers. This contradiction is one the Church Fathers will have to work on, but Philo is too close to the sources of his own religious belief to offer a consistent solution to this anomaly.

142

8. The Wrath of God: Onward to the Past From the perspective that anger should come from an infallible judgment in the form of a corrective to sinners, Philo revised the Stoic doctrine of duties so as to sever it even further from any social or political context. The Stoics’ rational ordering of duties is replaced by duty to God. An impenetrable divine will, one that is by nature inscrutable, is now made the source and the model for correct expressions of anger.11 The measure for righteousness in anger, something that entails social relationships between men, was now placed outside society. The Church Fathers and the new anger culture The fourth-century CE writings of St Basil the Great and St John Chrysostom on anger are especially important. These two Fathers of the Church were high officials charged with the practical mission of forging a new ethic for an official Christian culture. Their work is unoriginal and all their ideas are borrowed from Stoics, Neo-Platonists, and previous Church Fathers who had digested these traditions. They were not interested in systematic analysis of ideas, let alone the finer points of any philosophical doctrine of ethics. Basil, who had studied philosophy and rhetoric in Athens, had renounced the worldly concerns of these disciplines. Instead, he sought to make use of whatever he saw fit to electrify Christians with a vision of salvation and to lay down the codes of conduct appropriate to this end. Overall, his writings and sermons on anger elucidate a new framework that establishes a set of techniques for keeping anger within a mould consistent with the ethic that the Church was then fashioning for the ecumenical Roman Empire. Salvation in the afterlife, living free of sin in this life, and executing the will of God against sinners, whoever these might be, defined the perimeter within which their doctrines were shaped. The teachings of Basil and Chrysostom on anger are scattered throughout their works, but for our narrative it will suffice to limit ourselves to Basil’s homily Against the Wrathful, Chrysostom’s Homily on the Fourth Psalm and portions of his Homilies On the Statues. Also of interest are the writings of another Father, Gregory Nazianzus, Archbishop of Constantinople and close friend of Basil’s, especially his poem Against Anger. All three Fathers ignore the Hellenic writings on anger. Basil, from the opening sentences of his work Against the Wrathful to its very end, takes his models for anger from the Scriptures. Anger is denounced as a form of insanity12 that often culminates in violence and mutual destruction.13 More importantly, since the aim of anger is to punish an offender, its very presence is taken to be evidence of sinful pride. In acts of anger man usurps the power to punish a sinner which rightfully belongs only to God.14 Their condemnation of anger

143

Taming Anger was thus unconditional and all-encompassing, and extended even to cases where an enraged person might be the victim of heinous injustice: ‘Do not speak to me’, says Chrysostom, ‘of the magnitude of the injustice against you’, for even if one imagines the most horrendous outrage that may be committed against oneself, even then, he stresses, one must not retaliate but pray for the forgiveness of the sinner.15 When Basil moves ahead to the method of anger control, it appears, at least on the surface, that he is doing nothing more than repeating the standard Stoic methodology. Like Epictetus, he stresses that it is not the abusive words that cause the anger but the assent to a false judgment about what has transpired. However, the Stoic cognitive method of control over one’s impressions is systematically reworked within a Christian framework. Instead of practising judgments that have to be at hand, what the Christian must practise is his or her faith. The Christian method moves intemperate anger even further away from the possibility of deliberative control. The Christian drama of salvation contains within itself all the necessary and sufficient conditions for achieving control over anger. The drama of Christ’s suffering, His love and His promise of redemption, are what must be at hand to restrain anger. The two aspects of the Christian drama that must always be present in one’s psychological world are (1) meekness and (2) the grandeur of submission. Christianity’s imaginative drama places the values for thumotic gratification in the hereafter. One’s individual sense of honour is realigned so as to be in concordance with the transcendental priorities of salvation. Central to the method was a reformulation of human nature in a manner that diminishes one’s sense of social worth, relative to the worth that one gains in the eyes of God. Or to put it differently, one’s social worth is increased through the prism of other-worldly piety. To the extent that one views oneself as the lowest of the low, the last of the last, to that extent one gains the highest commendation from God, who watches providentially from above. Let us quote Basil: How then is it possible for this passion [anger] not to be mobilised towards those things against which it should not be aroused? How? If beforehand you perform exercises in humble-mindedness, just as the Lord did ... If you habituate yourself to being last of all, according to the command of the Lord, when will you fume that you were abused without desert? When a small child insults you, take the insults as an occasion for laughter ... Naturally it is not the words that provoke the pain, but the contempt for the person who curses us and the conceit that each one of us has of himself. So if you remove each one of these from your mind, all of those things that come to you are but hollow noises echoing in the void.16

144

8. The Wrath of God: Onward to the Past Instead of arguments that reform one’s faulty judgments, as the Stoics would have it, he gives the hearer the article of faith to be practised: be humble, you are a cipher, no one can insult you because you are the lowliest of the low. At the same time, the humbling exercise brings one closer to the elevated community that is dear to God. One must have before one’s eyes God. It is through God that David controlled his anger when Shimei cursed him and threw stones at him (2 Samuel 16:5-14). David did not have to study Epictetus or be trained in Stoic logic. David ‘did not give anger a chance to be revealed, because he turned his mind towards God’ (31.364.31-3). The true feat, or, as the Stoics might have said, the katorthôma, was to surrender one’s mind to God, raising humility in this way to the pedestal of the highest honour. The doctrine of surrender to God is the Christian antidote to the phenomenon of the shutting down the gates to the mind which Plato had identified.17 This is quite a paradoxical cure because it uses one type of shutting down (i.e., surrender to God), which is deemed commendable, in order to put a brake on another devilish type, all-absorbing anger, which is deemed reprehensible. Gregory warns that the mind, if left to its own devices, is defenceless against anger’s power; anger blocks the gates that lead us to God and hence the only cure is to invoke God’s name and revitalise his presence in one’s mind so that the gates will again reopen, not to rational thought as it were, but to God: But anger first blocks the doors to God once it overwhelms. [Then] the calling upon God [i.e., the blasphemous words of the angry person] is horrible. He connects God with curse words.

Gregory reconstructs Plato’s concept to show that anger will make use of the name of God, invoking him with curse words, in order to close the mind off to God. The cure for anger, the drama of Salvation, is not available, because the door to God has been gated and shut. One combats this alazoneia against God with meekness and humility, but the purpose of the humility is not to open the mind to persuasion, but to keep the mind enclosed in a hermetically sealed religious pattern. One need not respond to any affront originating in this world. One can remain calm by invoking the presence of God with humility. Thus, with respect to anger, the closing of the mind becomes an unstated virtue. We might ask, what is the pleasure that anger gains for its humility? Despite a puritanical condemnation of pleasure, and especially the reprehensible pleasure of retribution, the Christians paradoxically could revel in the anticipated revenge of the future ‘day of wrath’ and in the righteously condoned wrath against heretics and sinners in the here and now.

145

Taming Anger Though the word used for the meek is praos, the concept underlying its use, according to scholars of this history, has no roots in Hellenic or Hellenistic intellectual traditions.18 The model as formulated by Philo is Moses, who is gentle yet savage against sinners and unbelievers. Moses, who is free of anger, possesses at the same time an anger that is in the service of God. In the Christian version, the idea of the praos is altered to denote the person who at once strips himself of honour, gains ultimate revenge in the coming Day of Judgment, and exercises an anger that flows, in imitation of God’s wrath, from a judgment that righteously corrects sin. The idea that the praos is an outcome of a long politically directed nurturing process was put to rest. The paradox that had plagued Philo, how to excise anger yet praise its ferocious applications as a duty was finally resolved by these Fathers. A dogma is put forth which, as an act of faith, not of reason, resolves the paradox. The dogma is summed up in the saying: ‘Be Angry, But Sin Not’ (368, 13). There is sinful anger and there is anger that is a duty, only in St. Basil’s hands the criteria for the application of this duty have changed from social, as developed by the Stoics, to religious. Wrath is to be used as a weapon to further God’s works. This dark and unexamined anger enters the social stage as something intrinsically just, at least when the trustees of righteousness deem it to be so. Because there are no psychological criteria for noble thumos and its zeal is not easily distinguishable from plain anger (orgê), St. Basil and the other Fathers fall into contradictions and confusion as to how one might be able to distinguish between the two types. We have to again stress the novelty of this designation of God’s anger and its human representations as ‘just anger’. As previously noted, this designation is notably absent from the works of the ancient writers, and this for at least two reasons. First, there is no inherently divine wrath in their religion, and secondly, the qualification of ‘just’ to distinguish a noble variety of anger would have been fallacious because of its logical redundancy. A virtue, such as mastery over anger, does not need the designation ‘just’; it is already the most perfect disposition towards another. Aristotle had argued that the virtues, because they are expressions of conduct towards another, as public transactions, are part of the whole of justice. A virtue which is excellent is just, but it is never excellent on the grounds that it is intrinsically just. What is required for a passion or a certain form of conduct to be considered just is that it be excellent; to presume that anger is just prior to its excellence is false, at least from the Hellenic point of view. The adverbial designation of ‘justly angered’ does exist in the literature, but the adjectival designation ‘righteous’ that yields a new substantive ‘righteous wrath’, as a separate species of wrath, which is self-justifying, is not to be found in classical writings.

146

8. The Wrath of God: Onward to the Past A problem that will come to haunt the ages, including our own times, is that this anger, once endowed with the trappings of righteousness precludes scrutiny. At best anger’s rightness might be judged with respect to the terms of some Covenant, but this too is a questionable enterprise given the range of its possible interpretations. Whereas Achilles’ anger had to yield to the necessity of the political community, in the new paradigm the community has to be sacrificed to the exigencies of faith. The inversion is shown clearly in a passage where St. Basil cites the example that originated with Philo, wherein Moses is ordered by God to slaughter the idol-worshippers. Measure, limit, polis, friends and even family cannot stand in the way of God’s wrath (Against the Wrathful 31.368.25-8): That is why the Psalmist admonishes us to ‘Be angry but sin not’. And the Lord threatens with damnation the person who is angered without any reason (Matthew 5.22). He does not fail to make use of anger wherever it is needed as a type of medicine ... That is why Moses, that man who was the gentlest of men, in order to punish the idol worshippers, armed the Levites so that they could kill their brothers (Exodus 32.26-9). ‘Let each man put his sword by his side and go in and out from the gate throughout the camp and each man shall kill his brother, and every man his comrade, and every man his neighbour.’ And after these words the Psalmist continues: ‘And then’, said Moses, ‘let this day be consecrated as holy, because each one of you turned against his son and his kinfolk.’

The words ‘and each man shall kill his brother, and every man his comrade, and every man his neighbour’, could never have been uttered by any Hellenic thinker. To my knowledge no such passage exists in the surviving Hellenic writings. Consecration of the murder of kinsmen is unthinkable in the Hellenic world, even if in times of civil war such outrages did occur. The Church Fathers presented obedience to the inscrutable wrath of God as a universal code for directing anger in its social interactions here on earth. Basil refers to this anger as a curative drug (pharmakon) which should be used to incite enmity against sinners the way Moses used it against idolatry. Just wrath against the sinners for protection of the faith is a duty in the same way that a doctor is duty-bound to heal the sick. Just as the physician amputates in order to save the patient, despite the patient’s protestations, the faithful must be poised to act with wrath against the sinners. Basil cites Phinehas’ murders of Zavri and Madia as an instance of just anger, remarking that he ‘did not hold himself back. He made use of his anger as was necessary’. Necessity (to deon) is attached to just anger. ‘Just anger’ henceforth carries with it a moral imperative. Not to make use of anger in these cases is itself an offence. In another work (Ascet.

147

Taming Anger Magnum) Basil uses the term ‘noble zeal’ (zêlon agathon) to distinguish it from orgê in the normal retributive sense: ‘Many of us commit this [mistake] ... when we attribute orgên to the person displaying noble zeal ...’ (Question 273).19 Of course, we today would tend to treat these passages and their interpretations as allegorical, and would deny that they set the pattern for anything in our world, since we hold that our attitudes are secular. Yet, Hiroshima and the collateral damages of our days barely raise an eyebrow. Why so? Clearly, these unfortunate events must be just, as determined by the wrath of the powerful. And on the other side, suicide bombers, who kill indiscriminately on their way to heaven, they too think of themselves as the just instruments of God’s vengeance. There is not much that is novel in any of this. If we go back to the Christian empire of Byzantium, which was being shaped during the time these Fathers were writing, we will note that the practices of righteous wrath were giving birth to a puzzling trait of Byzantine civilisation, one that combined massacres and institutionalised torture with images of contrite, humble forbearance and charity.20 The existence of both modes of conduct side by side may be understood, once again, in terms of the psalm so often cited by the Fathers: ‘Be angry, but sin not’. If an act of retribution could be presented as an expression of just wrath, then violence, as a merciful cure, was justified and imperative. This pattern for anger’s expression, which was put into place at the dawn of the Middle Ages, appears to have survived into the age of enlightenment and modernity. The past as present One of Basil’s and Chrysostom’s accomplishments was their creative recasting of Stoic technologies for anger control. They put the Stoic principles into a form that made them appropriate for widespread use. The Stoics aimed to cognitively manage an offending event; it could be coolly evaluated according to a set dogma, at least by one ceaselessly trained for these exigencies. The Fathers took a different direction, developing methods that relied less on judgments and more on the hedonic power of the image. For all talk about righteous anger coming as a judgment, the method for anger’s restraint lay elsewhere. Far more important than the idea of salvation or faith in it were the emotionally charged images of this drama. This too has been passed down to us in a secular form as we can garner from the power of crafted images for affecting our emotions in our days. Fear especially was pressed into service.21 The Fathers worked with a knowledge that fear and anger cannot occur at the same time within

148

8. The Wrath of God: Onward to the Past the same person. Fear paralyses while anger arouses. As Aristotle notes, fear does not permit one to contemplate revenge. Basil and Chrysostom emphasise that fear will suppress anger, and it will inspire the faithful to practise the exercises that will keep them in a humble frame of mind. Rather than trusting that judgments will be practised in the privacy of the homes of the faithful, the Fathers call upon fear (and love), to control anger. The nightly examination and castigation of the soul for its sins will make the soul fear these nightly courtroom punishments so that it will become more hesitant to sin again. And ‘if we do this continuously for one month, we will habituate ourselves to virtue’ (Homily on the Fourth Psalm, 55.52.27-36). Another dimension of anger control was the introduction of otherworldly models. In Aristotle’s definition of the virtues the role-model is made part of the definition of excellence, in that the person of practical virtue is the standard for determining the mean. The man of practical wisdom, even if ideal, is not transcendental. He can be pointed to in the polis or his traits can be discerned intellectually, or approximations of such men may exist in the retained memories or institutions of the city. The problem with revering Jesus and other biblical figures as models for restraining anger is that these exist as a matter of faith and are beyond social experience. As prototypes they are cast without regard to the necessities of social cooperation. The modes of conduct that they stand for are meant to guide the faithful towards otherworldly goals. The Stoics had as their model the non-existent wise-man of perfect virtue and the Church Fathers had equally extra-social models for veneration. The difference is that the Stoic wise man was an elitist construct, a dogma, while Christian eschatology inspired the imagination to live in a cosmic drama that could be subjectively experienced in the here and now.22 A further consequence of this method is that the imagination was burdened with the task of policing anger, and other passions as well, so that the faculty of imagination itself had to be policed. The images could not be tampered with and art was commissioned to supply the images which, when accompanied with sacred stories, would suppress or summon wrath as deemed appropriate. This new role for the imagination was to take centre-stage in future iconoclastic battles over images. The power of using one passion to control another had long been known and widely discussed in classical antiquity. The Greeks had taken advantage of this to cultivate noble shame as a way of controlling vicious behaviour. They also were open to using fear as a constituent of social policy. But even in these cases the imagination is used for the rational surveying of alternatives. The punishment or the sense of reverence is brought before one’s eyes, where it is seen and felt, and this

149

Taming Anger is compared to the potential satisfaction that might be gained from the free venting of one’s anger. Imagination becomes a subordinate tool of the deliberative process, as it should be. In the Christian methodology the passions are imaginatively aroused to a non-deliberative end. It is God who deliberates, who judges, and who punishes according to an evaluation of the nature and the extent of the sin (St. Chrysostom, Exegesis to Psalm 4 55.72.51-9): God does not just punish according to external criteria where each type of sin would have a certain invariant weight or value. No! God looks into the nature of the sin, the conditions, the internal disposition, the attitude of the sinner to the sin that has been committed, to their repentance or lack thereof, whether the sin was intentional with malice aforethought.

The use of fear for reinforcing the power of commandments against wrath was so great that it led the Church Fathers to place inordinate trust in fear’s curative powers. Basil and Chrysostom believed that fear could not only cure anger but could also instil all of virtue, not slowly over time, but instantaneously. Accordingly, St. Chrysostom, chastising the Antiocheans in 387 CE for the rampage in which they destroyed statues of the emperor and empress in a fit of rage, declares to them that the way to rid themselves of their wrath is immediately at hand (Homily on the Statues 49.208.53-209.50): } if any of God’s commands requires being put into practice, there is no need of time, nor a multitude of days, nor an interval of years, but only fear and reverence } [Regarding the sinful Ninevites] three days were enough to transform them to complete virtue. For, wherever there is fear of God, there is no need of days, nor any interval of time; just as wherever there is no such fear, time is of no use } If the soul were thrust into the furnace of the Fear of God, in a short time it would be cleansed of all [sin].

From within this cultural construct a nurturing of the thumos is viewed with contempt. Gregory Nazianzus calls Cheiron, the wise Centaur who brings culture to the thumos through musical nurturing, an alazôn. The word alazôn in this passage is used to mean not only a brash conceit of knowledge but also to emphasise another nuance of the word, that of an ‘impostor’, i.e. of a person who claims to be something that he is not or who claims a knowledge that he lacks. Cheiron, as a symbol of Hellenic nurturing, is banished as an impostor of education; instead, the true model is theosebeia, nurturing in reverence to God.23 So successful was the contempt and ridicule of the idea of nurturing the thumos that the concept, as a matter of social practice, was buried, perhaps for good. If I could summarise in one sentence the most striking

150

8. The Wrath of God: Onward to the Past difference between the ancient Greeks’ and the Christian Fathers’ views of how to control anger I would say that whereas the ancient ideal was to bring internal order within the self, so that the passions through habit formation and citizen-directed education might come under reason, what the Greeks called homonoia (‘together-mindedness’), the Christian ideal, as put forward by the Church Fathers, was a private, subjective condition of ‘metanoia’ or ‘repentance’. Rather than politically guided nurturing one needed only to be reborn to God to reclaim the virtues through his grace. This religious paradigm lives on in secular form. One surrenders to a drug, to a psychotherapist, to commands, to political and religious saviours, which are many and everchanging. To escape the wrath of God humankind was tossed back to the emotive controls of a dynastic past. Given the train of historical influences, this is more or less where matters stand today.

151

Afterword: The Forward-going, Backward-turning Path In Parmenides’ poem, the goddess warns the youth against taking the deceitful ‘[forward] path’ of inquiry where ‘everything is backward turning’. Perhaps we should keep her warning in mind as humankind races into a future burdened, at least in the West, with a backwardturning paradigm for understanding and regulating its anger. One of the consequences of the bequeathed paradigm is that it greatly shrinks the range of understanding of anger’s causes which might otherwise be available to the West from its abandoned heritage. God’s wrath is tied to His judgment, His krisis, often in the sense of His verdict. When God says to Isaiah that he will ‘make a judgment’ against his enemies (Isaiah 1.24.1-1.25.4) He is saying that He will issue a verdict against them and exact punishment for their offences. The legacy of this approach is that the objective criterion for evaluating just anger is the Covenant. In our world such covenants are ever-shifting and many, but still the criterion for the scope and intensity of wrath is determined by the terms of whatever covenants, formal and informal, govern our conduct. When the terms of the contract are broken, whether it is the American Dream or the European Welfare State, anger is the expected outcome. Attention is naturally drawn to these eruptions, because the causes of such anger fall within the range of society’s expectations. But these contracts, since they are of a utilitarian nature, leave much of the psychological needs of the human being out of the equation. The causes of perverse expressions of anger, such as the rising tide of juvenile crime, often cannot be located because these require a theory that would bring to light the effects of neglecting thumotic powers whose existence is hardly acknowledged. We study abuse of whatever falls within the range of the contract, but the powers within us that crave to be formed in beautiful ways have been driven out of the arena of public concern. The spectrum required for understanding anger remains exiled from intellectual and social experience, which does not bode well for humankind’s capacity to bring to light the true sources of its ever increasing rages. Since the thumos is the source of reactions to injustice, in the broadest sense of the term, its wounds will lead it to seek out soothing

153

Taming Anger balms for its ills. Religion of course can provide a crafted blend of love, retribution and understanding, especially when it promises salvation as a cure for the pains suffered in this life. In Byzantium political issues were rarely at the centre of public dispute. The public’s fervour was reserved for issues regarding the icons or the status of the Son in relation to the Father and the Holy Spirit. History shows that it is possible for the thumos to abandon the quest for social conditions that affect honour and instead to actualise its cravings in fantastical dramas, which once given recognition become more real than anything in this world. The thumotic culture wars in the United States which are waged in anger are perhaps a warning signal of things to come. Anger can be viewed as a social barometer that captures the health of society. Because anger is a reaction to perceived humiliation, it can reveal what people truly think about their self-worth. Concepts of self-worth are susceptible to manipulation. The standards and values for worth can be refashioned in ways that are at odds with well-being. Anger though is the rain that spoils the idyllic parade of self-deception. A society can engineer its environment so as to pretend that it is happy; it can give new meanings to words to relieve people of the discomforts of their predicament; it can even drug itself to ease the pain of its misery or be mollified by satiating itself with consumer binges, submerging itself in fear, or in the voyeuristic pleasures of the electronic age. But none of these techniques will ever retool human nature to do away with the pain of a fractured and unrealised self. If, as the ancients believed, perverse anger is a sign of political decay and disintegration, then it would follow that signs of discontent in our time of refined techniques for mass control will not only be evidenced in mass marches, riots and demonstrations. Should we not ask ourselves what illness lies beneath the rage that leads children to kill other children; the rage of parents who batter their children and children who bully other children? How do we explain the withdrawal of millions of children from society before they have even entered it? How do we account for the anger that has hardened into hatred which leads teenagers to shoot down their classmates and teachers? What do these symptoms portend? If we follow Hellenic thinkers, we will take these and other symptoms seriously, for they taught that once anger enters into the public texture of life, understanding (gnomê) is eroded, and Atê, the goddess of mindlessness, is never far away.

154

Notes Introduction 1. See, for example, Allen 2000: 17. 1. The Homeric Framework 1. Kirk in his commentary on the Iliad warns against the tendency to impart divine and teleological moral meanings to Achilles’ mênis. ‘The view that mÁnij, mhn8w itself connotes a ‘lasting morally justified anger’... is questionable ... and should not be allowed to colour the understanding of the Iliad. The poet is happy to replace it from time to time with terms that have no moral connotation, such as cèomai or cÒloj. mÁnij is an archaism, used only for the anger of the gods and of Akhilleus, and doubtless implies an awe-inspiring and implacable passion’ (The Iliad: A Commentary, vol. 3, 118). 2. The Athenian ambassadors, in a speech reported by Thucydides (1.77.4.2) state that men are angered more when they suffer injustice than when they are coerced. 3. Andromache’s thumos abandons her when she sees Hector’s corpse being defiled. She faints and then recovers when her thumos returns (Il. 22.475). 4. Il. 18.113. In 18.113 and 19.66 the same line occurs: ‘let us master the thumos in our breast, according to necessity’ despite ‘all the distress’ [that pains him]. Anger, even though it increases in the breasts of men, can be forced to comply with necessity of what reason demands. 5. Harrison (1960: 67) makes the point that there are no sharp dividing lines between emotion and thought in Homeric usage. ‘One element may be dominant, and we can speak of it as “primary”, but the dividing lines are blurred.’ 6. Bruno Snell (1953): ‘Not until the classical art of the fifth century do we find attempts to depict the body as an organic unit whose parts are mutually correlated. In the preceding period the body is a mere construct of independent parts variously put together’ (6). And further down: ‘To return now to the intellect and the soul, we find there too the same perspective’ (8). Refutations of Snell’s methodology and thesis have been given by many scholars. R. Renehan (1981) has written a devastating critique of Snell’s assumptions regarding the non-existence of the concept of a unified physical body in Homer. For a critique of Snell’s view of the lack of a unified self the reader is referred to Bernard Williams (1993) especially ch. 2 (Centres of Agency) in which he writes: ‘It may seem extraordinary that this should need to be said, but there is a theory, proposed by Bruno Snell and others still very influential, to the effect that even this fundamental capacity to understand people as being

155

Notes to pages 16-24 agents is beyond the Homeric reach. “Homer’s man does not yet regard himself as the source of his decisions”, Snell wrote. He was not alone in this view; Christian Voigt said that in Homer “man still possesses no concept of ... deciding for himself”. To anyone who has read Homer and not the scholars these remarks must seem surprising’ (22). 7. The same view has been presented in a different way by Ruth Padel (1992). Padel argues that the Homeric inner self (‘innards’ she calls them) reveals ‘a unified vision of an inconsistent thing’ (46). The unity lapses into a mélange of disunities. These ‘innards’ such as blood, the liver, the heart, erupt and affect the actions of the hero with their juices. Hector, for example, shows ‘emotional movements in contradictory, inconsistent impulses ... someone experiencing disorientation, self conflict’. Other scholars, such as Adkins, posit an inner life that is driven by external opinion; the unity is not psychological but one imposed by adaptations to an external heroic code. 8. Regarding the meaning of agôn, Homer speaks of an agôna of the gods, an ‘assembly’ of the gods, perhaps a gathering that has been convened to view the Achaeans and Trojans as they engage in battle (Il. 7.298). Another use of the word occurs in reference to the ‘assembled ships’ of the Achaeans, the neôn en agôni (Il. 15.429, 500), where the ‘assembly’ refers to massed ships that are being fought over. An agorê where public deliberation occurs and an agôn where the assembled compete are clearly different. Nevertheless, there is a common thread: as assemblies their essence lies in their organic unity which supersedes the identities and functions of its parts. In Homer these assemblies do not exist as standing institutions that are in continuous operation. They are convened to perform their function for an appropriate occasion, and then are disbanded. 9. The competitions in dance and music are not the end of the agôn but the start of a new musical competition which will help to realise the agôn’s social purposes: the judges mark out the place of the musical agôn (Od. 8.259); the youth stand around the agôn (8.380); and the herald (8.471) brings the bard Demodokos into the agôn. 2. The Search to Bring Logos to Anger 1. A glance at the extant tragedies reveals the centrality of anger as an enduring theme. Of Aeschylus’ surviving works, anger is the dominant passion in the Seven Against Thebes, Suppliant Women, Prometheus Bound, Agamemnon, Choephoroi, Eumenides; similarly with Sophocles’ Ajax, Trachinae, Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannos, Electra, Philoktetes and Oedipus at Colonus. In Euripides’ Medea, Heraclidae, Hippolytos, Hekabe, Herakles Furens, Trojan Women, Iphigenia at Tauris, Helen, Phoenician Women, Iphigenia at Aulis, Bacchae and Rhesos, anger and hatred are either dominant or important as subordinate themes of the drama. 2. Aristotle, Poet. 1451b5-6: ‘Thus poetry is more philosophical and of greater importance than history. For poetry is more concerned with the universal while history speaks of the particular’. 3. Aristotle in his Poetics (1449b38-1450a-3) was to single out character

156

Notes to page 24 (êthos) and thought (dianoia) as important elements of tragedy and it is these that are used to portray anger: ‘Because the action is a representation that is done by certain agents, it necessarily follows that the type of persons these are will be determined by their character and thought’. 4. The verb for seeing in the sense of ‘gazing’ and ‘beholding’ is theaomai, which shares the same root as the word theatron. The audience in the theatron could ‘see’ in the experience of their emotions and their reasoning the entirety of the factors and the mix of character flaws that were leading to the tragic events. 5. When Themistocles argued before the allied command that they engage the Persians in a naval battle at Salamis, Eurybiades, the commanding admiral, lost his patience and lifted his staff to strike Themistocles. The latter calmly responded with the words: ‘Hit me then, listen to me yet.’ Plutarch reports that ‘Eurybiades, admiring Themistocles’ mild-temperedness, allowed him to speak’ (Plutarch, Themistocles 11.3.6). One can only wonder what the history of the Western world would have been had Themistocles lost his temper at that moment when the fate of Western civilisation was hanging by a thread. Many other such examples can be cited, the most famous of which perhaps is that of Pericles who being publicly harangued all day by a person, calmly attended to the city’s affairs. Turning to go home the fellow kept after him, cursing at him all the way. When he arrived it was dark and he ordered a servant to escort his detractor with a torch safely to his house (Plutarch, Pericles 5.2.1-5.3.1). 6. Stobaeus’ Anthologium, in a chapter entitled ‘Concerning Anger’ (3.20) provides an example of what such collections on anger must have included. Most of the entries are from lost tragedies, comedies and poetry. A common trait of these sayings, which probably shaped the selection criteria of the anthologists, is the desire to see the rule of mind over anger. This aim is not asserted as the means nor are the inspirational exhortations meant to unveil anger’s mysteries. The selections underscore that the rule of mind, the desired outcome, faces many obstacles and if ever accomplished is indeed a great feat: 1. Nothing ... is more unjust than anger, for it damages the soul, providing it with terrible joys. 2. Anger often uncovers the thought of a man which lies hidden; it shows it to be equal to insanity. 4. We act like the insane when we are angered, for painful effort is required to tame it. 5. All that a person does in anger, you will later find was in error. 7. Whoever straightaway surrenders to their anger will have a bad end, for anger leads humans to many errors. 8. Don’t show yourself to be sharp-tempered over small matters. 9. Anger should not have the upper hand, but mind should instead. 10. No one thinks properly when angry. 11. Many men has great anger destroyed. 12. There is much disgrace in thoughtless anger. 12b. Many evils come from uncultured anger.

157

Notes to pages 25-32 17. Just as the body is by nature mortal, so it is appropriate that one’s anger should not be eternal, as is the case for the person who knows to be temperate. 19. How much labour it is to bring anger under control. 20. There does not exist, it seems, another medicine for anger than the serious words of a dear friend. 43. There is nothing that an angry person can judge aright, for his very plans destroy his thought. 48. The fruit of sharp anger is madness. 50. Whoever responds with formidable anger at small infractions does not permit the person who is at fault to understand when the injustice was small or great. 53. Instead of feeling anger, to the wise men Heraclitus came tears and to Democritus laughter. 54. Just as strong ships are not those that travel only during good weather, but are those that can withstand storms safely, so men are grand and courageous when they can withstand anger and turmoil. 55. Just as smoke smarts the eyes and does not allow us to see whatever is in front of our feet, so too anger, when it is excited, obscures the mind and does not let the mind preempt the bad things that are about to follow. 56. To fight against anger is hard; but the prudent man masters it. Though sharply pained, do not in rage precipitously act, for the temperate man, especially in times of turmoil, must control his anger. 63. Aristippos the Cyrenaic philosopher, when he saw a person getting angered and embittered over his words said to him: ‘Let us not drag our words with anger, but let us instead stop our anger with words.’ 64. Naucrates the wise man used to say that the sharp-tempered are like oil lamps, because they too burn bright with more oil. 66. ... Whoever thinks that he can do wrong to his neighbour without being harmed does not think prudently. Hopes are not always a good thing, because, to many, these have brought incurable ills, and those things that they thought they would do against their neighbours they themselves suffered. The soundness of a man’s mind could not be more correctly judged than by the person who protects himself from anger and its immediate pleasures and who can master and be victorious over himself. 7. See Burnet (1916: 12): Socrates’ exhortations in the Apology that his fellow citizens should take care of their souls seems commonplace to us today. ‘We assume without examination that a similar vague orthodoxy on the subject existed in the days of Socrates too and that there was nothing very remarkable in his reiteration of it’. But as Burnet documents, such use of the word ‘soul’ as the essence of human identity is not to be found prior to Socrates. 8. Simmias, a student of the Pythagorean Philolaus, presents the view that the soul is some type of ‘blending and harmony’ of its constituents to which Socrates replies (Phd. 93a8ff.): ‘[A] harmony cannot move or make a sound or do anything else that puts it into opposition to its parts’. He goes on to argue that if each soul is an attunement it would not be possible to account for (a) bad

158

Notes to pages 41-49 souls since every living creature would be, as an attunement, equally good, and (b) the conflicts that occur within the soul of a person. 3. Anger: The Guardian of Justice and Protector of Injustice 1. On the etymology and meanings of kolazô see D. Allen (2000: 69-70). 2. Homer (Il. 11.832) calls Cheiron, Achilles’ teacher, the ‘the most just of all the Centaurs’. Plato in his discussion of the principles for guiding thumotic nurturing (Republic Book 2) calls Cheiron ‘the wisest’ and cites Achilles’ nurturing under him as proof that Homer lied about Achilles’ conduct at Troy. 3. The term ‘braggart discourses’ (alazones logoi) which ‘shut down the gates of the royal citadel within him’ occurs in Republic Book 8, 560b7-10 and 560c7-8. 4. Aristotle defines the alazôn as a ‘boaster’ who ‘exaggerates his abilities’ (EE 1234a2); ‘let us call the pretence [of truth] in the form of exaggeration alazoneia and its possessor an alazôn’ (EN 1108a22). The alazôn ‘pretends to know that which he does not know’ (Magna Moralia 32.1-3). Similarly, Theophrastus in his Characters (23.1) defines alazoneia as ‘pretence for non-existent goods’. The alazôn describes an impostor, a quack, a person of pretence. According to D. MacDowell’s study of the word, he states that the root of alazôn may be alê which means ‘wandering or roaming without a home or hope of rest’. This derivation is disputed, but if it is the case, then it would explain how the alazôn from being thought of as a ‘wanderer about country’ came to have the moral connotation of a ‘charlatan’. 5. See Republic 8, 560c5-d6: ‘And temperance they call cowardice and insulting it they drive it out. Moderation and proper expenditure they call being a bumpkin and cheap, and with the help of many useless desires they chase them beyond the borders.’ And further down (560e) they call ‘abusive behaviour (hubris) “good upbringing”, anarchy “liberty”, dissoluteness “magnificence”, and shamelessness “bravery” ’. 6. Resp. 410d6-7. The thumoeides says Socrates can become ‘savage’ (agrion) but if ‘correctly nurtured’, ‘brave’. 7. The two Platonic virtues of the thumos, courage and gentleness, are to become a commonplace. For example, in the Peripatetic text that has come down to us as On Virtues and Vices, thought to have been written in the first century CE, the author states (1249b27-31) that for Plato the virtues of the thumoeidous are praotês (gentleness) and andreia (courage) while badness in this part of the soul is orgilotês (bad temper) and deilia (cowardice). 4. Nurturing and Educating Anger 1. Leg. 766a4. The superintendent of education (epimelêtês paideias) is the most important government official in the polis (see 765e1-766a8). Plato’s use of superlatives to underscore this point is unmistakeable. ‘Both the person who is deemed qualified and the person who judges him to be so must keep in mind that of the highest offices in the polis this is by far the highest. For truly in every

159

Notes to pages 49-52 plant, if the first shoots are developed well, this will have a prevailing influence that will perfect the plant’s nature so that it grows to become excellent and fruitful } This is why the lawgiver must not permit the nurturing (trophên) of children to be treated as a secondary matter } The primary need is to pay attention to ensure that the superintendent [of nurturing and education] is chosen in the right way, so that he would be in all ways the best person in the city }’ And again at 793e3 Plato stresses that the city’s nurturing programme is not to be treated as a secondary, peripheral matter (mê parergôs). 2. In the Republic (450c4) Glaucon refers to the phase of trophê as epiponôtatê, a superlative meaning the ‘most toilsome’, ‘most painful’, ‘hardest’ task of education; certainly not hard for the child, since it is to be spending its time in play, but for the educator. In the Laws the difficulty is clearly stated by Kleinias (791e1-3): ‘How can the city in its entirety nurture those who cannot yet understand and who are unable to get a taste of [formal] education?’ 3. Romilly, in her book La Douceur dans la Pensée Grecque (Greek edition, 2007: 75) provides the following information on early history of the word praos: ‘The first authentic examples pertain to the verb, which means to “assuage” [to pacify, to soothe, to calm] (such as the seastorm, animals, and violence). It is these meanings that we find in Hesiod twice (Theogony, 254, Works and Days, 797) and once in Solon (3D, 37). Also, we come across compounds in lyrical poetry. Pindar ascribes to Eiluthuia the adjective praümêtin with the knowledge that she helps at childbirth without harshness. These first authenticated uses offer evidence regarding the general nature of praotês which the word will always retain: it has to do with the gentleness of manners, which are opposed to displays of violence ... praotês must be regained every time there exists a danger of excessive violence. In the first Homeric Hymn To Hermes (417), Apollo, who has been furious up to that point, allows himself to be pacified (eprêünen) by the sounds of the lyre. In Aeschylus’ Persians, Xerxes tries to calm the disturbed animals drawing his carriage (190) and Darius advises Atossa to mollify her son’s despair with tender words (837: prunon logois). In Herodotus (2.121.d.15), we see a man who is angry and exchanges insults, though later, under the influence of good words, pretends to be mollified (prêünesthai ).’ ‘Praotês then is the opposite of anger’. 4. Il. 8.40, 22.184; Od. 2.47, 2.234, 5.12, 14.139, 15.152. These passages on the paternal uses of êpios in Homer are discussed in Romilly (2007: 38). 5. Il. 23.281: The charioteer was êpios, in the sense that he showed a caring attention for the well-being of his horses like a father would for his children. 6. See S. Edmunds (1976): ‘The word êpios in Homeric diction always, when used of persons, describes someone who, like a father, or a king, is concerned with promoting the social cohesion of the group of which he is head, or with reintegrating the particular person toward whom he is called êpios into the social group. When used of things the word êpios appears most often as an epithet of pharmaka. There is evidence that the epithet has been transferred to the drugs from the physician who has the special knowledge needed to apply the drugs. The function of the physician is to reconnect the wounded man with life itself. The word êpios, then, is not so much an adjective of manner as a description of a particular social function’.

160

Notes to pages 52-58 7. A negative corroboration of the êpiotês expected from a ruler can be gleaned from Achilles’ complaint that things would have been different if Agamemnon had treated him with ‘gentleness’, whose meaning here can be extended to signify ‘with justice’ (Il. 16.73: êpia eideiê). The use of êpios in association with justice occurs in Hesiod (Theog. 235-6), where the Old Man of the Sea, Nereus, is said to be ‘without deceit and true ... he is faultless and êpios and never forgets what is right, but whose counsels are always just and êpia’. 8. Il. 2.230-3. Conversely, a person who has inflicted harm should not expect treatment that is êpios. Odysseus tells Circe that she should not demand of him to be êpios towards her after she turned his men into swine (Od. 10.337). 9. Resp. 376c1-2: The praos guard dog, says Socrates, is by nature a lover of wisdom and learning and a few lines down he states that the guardian will have to be high-spirited and a philosopher, indicating its praotês as a virtue comes from knowledge. 10. Leg. 733e7-734a2: ‘The temperate person is a knower (gignôskôn) who, with respect to all things, will lay down what is praon; he experiences moderate pains, moderate pleasures, mild desires and loves that do not cause madness.’ 11. Phd. 69a6-10: ‘I am afraid that this is not the correct method for acquiring virtue, namely, to exchange pleasures for pleasures and pains for pains and fear for fear and the greater for the lesser as one does with coins; for there is only one correct standard for which all these things are to be exchanged, namely wisdom (phronêsis).’ 12. Socrates does not wish to contend that pleasant things are not experienced as pleasant (Philb.13a8-9). The pleasures felt exist as felt, but their existence does not always correspond to true being. Just as the truth or falsity of opinion is always judged in relation to the object about which the assertion is made, it should therefore also be the case that a pleasure should be true or false relative to its object (Phlb. 37e7-8). 13. Phlb. 47e1-48a2: ‘Anger, fear, yearning, lamentation, love, emulation, and envy and all such things, do you not set these down to be pains of the soul itself ... and accordingly, will we not find these [passions] to be filled with immense pleasures?’ Also 50b7-c3. 14. Phlb. 66a4-b6: ‘You will declare to all, Protarchus, by sending out messengers and by stating to those present that pleasure is not the first of possessions, nor even the second, but first the eternal chosen is in the region of measure, and the moderate and the appropriate ... The second is in the region of the symmetrical and the beautiful and the perfect and the befitting ... And if you select mind and reason as third, I divine that you would not be far from the truth.’ 15. Trophê, according to Plato, should actually begin before the child is born. The Athenian Stranger surprises his interlocutors when he declares that exercises should start when the embryo is being nurtured (trephomenois) inside their mother (Laws 789a8-9). 16. Resp. 401d6. The word Plato uses is kataduô, which means ‘to dive’, ‘to plunge into water’. 17. The entire passage (Resp. 401b1-402a4) is given here for reference: Will it be necessary for us to oversee just the poets and to compel them

161

Notes to pages 58-59 to represent the image of the good character in their poems or else not be allowed to practise their art in our city, or must we also oversee the other artists as well and prohibit them to represent this bad character – the licentious, the petty minded, the ugly – in their paintings, their buildings, and in any other work. Thus, if anyone is not of this [good] sort, he will not be allowed to practise his art amongst us, lest our guardians be bred on representations of evil, as if from an unwholesome pasture, culling and grazing little by little being unaware that they are accumulating great evil in their souls. We must seek out artists who are naturally capable of pursuing the trail of the beautiful and the graceful, so that the youngsters will benefit as if they lived in a health-giving place, so that when anything from the beautiful works strike their eyes or ears, it would influence them, as if it were a breeze, which coming from wholesome places brings health, and straight from childhood and without being aware, will lead them to a likeness, to a friendship, to a harmony with beautiful reason ... So I said, is it not for these reasons that nurturing in music is supreme? Harmony and rhythm more than anything else dive deeply into the innermost reaches of the soul and latching on to it with great strength bring gracefulness and they make it graceful if one is nurtured properly, though the opposite if this does not occur; furthermore, whoever has been nurtured properly would acutely feel the deformities of anything not crafted beautifully or which had not developed beautifully and would rightly be put off by such things. But the beautiful things he would praise. Rejoicing in them, he would accept them into his soul and would be nurtured by them so as to become beautiful and good, though the ugly he would rightly condemn and hate even while still young, before it is possible for the child to understand the reason why this occurs. And when reason does come to the person nurtured in this way he will welcome it, recognising it from the kinship he has with it. 18. Chamberlain explains (1984a: 98) that ‘Homer emphasises the horse’s joy – kroainôn, kydioôn, aglaiêphi – in order to show the power of habituation.’ The horse when it runs away from its stable, ‘longs to be in his êthea, feels pain at being locked at the manger and joy upon breaking free’. 19. In a similar way in English, the word habit (from the verb habere = to have, to possess) evolved into a ‘habitat’, with the notion that the location of a haunt is something that is ‘had’ and not easily changed. 20. S. Halloran (1982: 60) has stated the social character of êthea and êthos: ‘In contrast to modern notions of the person or self, êthos emphasises the conventional rather than the idiosyncratic, the public rather than the private. The most concrete meaning given for the term in the Greek lexicon is “a habitual gathering place”, and I suspect that it is upon this image of people gathering together in a public place, sharing experiences and ideas, that its meaning as character rests. To have êthos is to manifest the virtues most valued by the culture ....’ 21. The concept of ‘enchantments of the soul’ (epôdai tais psuchais), a vital part of Plato’s theory of trophê, is especially developed in Laws Book 2

162

Notes to pages 63-80 (659e1ff.). Morrow comments: ‘It is the duty of the whole state ... to charm itself unceasingly with the chants that have been prescribed, constantly changing them by ingenious devices ... so that the singers may have an insatiable thirst for the hymns and the pleasure in them’ (309). 22. Rod Taylor (1992: 7), writing on the role of visual arts in what he calls aesthetic education describes the ‘inarticulateness’ (i.e. the non-cognitive nature) of the aesthetic effect of art on the student: ‘Another key element is arousal of appetite. One simply wants the experience to continue or be repeated, and this can be felt with considerable urgency. Arousal of appetite can be highly motivating, meaning that commitment and the desire for further exploration are two important outcomes of the illuminating experience.’ 23. The word phantasia (usually translated as ‘imagination’) makes its first appearance in the Republic 382e10 where Socrates states that the gods do not send ‘images’ that might deceive a person. For Plato phantasia is a belief, a judgment (Sophist 264a4-6), which is accompanied with sensation so as to form an image. 5. Aristotle on the Causes of Anger 1. Animals possess sensation ‘and if [they have] sensation, then [they also have] appetite (to orektikon) and appetite (orexis) includes [irrational] desire, anger [or passion in general] and rational desire’ (De An. 414b1-2). Anger and all the passions are thus placed within the orektikon. The passage goes on to make the connection between sensation and pleasure and pain: because anger and all the passions are in the orektic part of the soul they will all be accompanied either with pain or pleasure or both. Without appetency there is no anger. 2. Joachim (1951: 83): If ‘what you say of a thing merely indicates that something is happening to it, that it paschei (is passive), you are predicating under the category of paschein (passivity), not of poiotês (quality). In other words pathos, in the sense of a modification in which the modified thing is purely passive, falls below the lower limit of our scale altogether – is not indicative of the quality or character in the thing at all.’ 3. On Aristotle’s contribution to the understanding of form within the matter of the body, the following comments from Jeremy Campbell in his book Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life are useful (1982: 272-3): ‘Max Delbrück, a professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology, and a Nobel Prize winner, has argued, with a mixture of playfulness and serious intent, that if the Nobel committee were able to award the prize for biology posthumously, they should consider giving it to Aristotle for the discovery of the principle of DNA. Delbrück notes that Aristotle thinks it remarkable, and a fundamental aspect of nature, that life unfolds according to certain rules. What is planted in the mother is not a miniature man, a homunculus, but a form principle ... If Aristotle was a philosopher pre-eminently able to look at all nature and human affairs as an undivided process full of beauty, which is above all intelligible to human beings, can it be a coincidence that he was also, alone among

163

Notes to pages 81-85 classical thinkers, a man who arrived at the first glimmerings of a theory of information?’ 4. Honoré de Balzac, the French novelist, who reportedly drank about 50 cups of coffee a day, had this to say on this beverage’s ability to rile anger without any cause from social interactions: ‘The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of animation that looks like anger: one’s voice rises, one’s gestures suggest unhealthy impatience: one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing’ (emphasis added, tr. R. Onopa, from Traité des Excitants Modernes). 5. Some commentators have drawn the conclusion that since Aristotle defines anger as a yearning for retribution then it must follow that the anger so defined was unique to his times. Anger, it is said, only counted as anger if it culminated in a retributive action: ‘the only recourse [to slight] is a compensatory act that restores your social position. Anger is precisely the desire to adjust the record in this way’ (Konstan 2006: 74-5). But from anger’s natural drive to retribution one cannot conclude that Aristotle held that revenge was the only recourse to anger’s satisfaction. The recourses were many, but these devices are a product of culture and are not part of anger’s generic traits which are rooted in human biology. 6. J. Cooper states regarding these passages: ‘Aristotle is quite firm and explicit that the emotion arises from one’s having the impression or appearance (phantasia) that something good or bad has happened, is happening, or is about to happen’ (1999: 416). 7. In the cases where a passion is aroused and shaped over time, such as friendship and hatred, the verb forms of ‘appearing’ either are absent or are used rarely. Friendship sometimes ‘appears’ (phainetai and phainôntai, 1381a10, 25) but only for limited conditions, because generally people think (oiontai) (even if their judgment is wrong) that so and so is of such a type. It is unlikely that one will become a friend, and act towards another as a friend (e.g. share one’s possessions) based on a non-cognitive image of another person. Similarly in the case of benevolence (charis) the word ‘appear’ is absent from the definition, perhaps because the good that one receives is something that is logically processed and evaluated, even if a person were wrong in their evaluation of the giver’s intentions. 8. The appropriation of Aristotle by cognitive psychology is so pervasive that this claim is no longer questioned in the mainstream literature. We would overwhelm the reader by citing one instance after another where he is heralded as the father of cognitive psychology. A number of examples are given here, taken almost at random, as evidence of the pervasiveness of this claim: ‘Aristotle, who lived in the fourth century BCE, might be called the first cognitive theorist of the emotions’ (R.S. Lazarus (1998) Fifty Years of the Research and Theory of R.S. Lazarus: An Analysis of Historical and Perennial Issues, Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 361); ‘For Aristotle, and cognitive theories in general, the primary cause of the feeling and physiological aspects of emotion is belief’ (W.E. Lyons (1980) Emotion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 34); ‘Anger is defined [by Aristotle] in the cognitive

164

Notes to pages 85-87 terms of the knowledge a person has, and the way in which this knowledge is used ...’ (K. Oatley, D. Keltner and J.M. Jenkins (2006) Understanding Emotions, Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 12); ‘Aristotle construed thought and belief as the efficient cause of emotion and showed that emotional response is intelligent behaviour open to reasoned persuasion’ (H. Gottweis (2006) ‘Rhetoric in Policy Making: Between Logos, Ethos and Pathos’, in F. Fischer et al. (eds) Handbook of Public Policy Analysis, New York: Taylor and Francis, 239); ‘But it was really with the ancient Greek philosophers that cognition would firmly impose its long-lasting dominance over the emotions ... And so the rule of reason over the emotions was established, for centuries to come ...’ (K. Sergerie and J. Armony (2006) ‘Interactions Between Emotion and Cognition: A Neurological Perspective’, in M. Mancia (ed.) Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, Berlin: Springer, 129). 9. A solution to this problem is to say that according to Aristotle animals don’t experience ‘emotions’, since they don’t have syllogistic reasoning, but this is truly an argument based on a play on words. The argument relies on the following strategy: ‘Emotion’, a word that is not to be found in ancient Greek, is defined as ‘cognitive’, and since all emotions are said to be cognitive, it must be the case that animals do not possess it. Animals, they conclude, have something else, pathê, but not emotions, and not anger. Along such lines W. Fortenbaugh (2002: 94) first defines emotions as the ability to have ‘cognitive awareness’ and then concludes that since animals ‘lack this cognitive capacity’ they ‘cannot experience emotions as analysed by Aristotle’. What do they then experience? They ‘can be said to experience pathê’. 10. See De An. 432a2-14, tr. Hicks: ‘For mental images are like present sensations, except that they are immaterial. Imagination, however, is distinct from affirmation and negation, for it needs a combination of notions to constitute truth or falsehood. But, it may be asked, how will the simplest notions differ in character from mental images? I reply that neither these nor the rest of our notions are images, but that they cannot dispense with images.’ The ‘combination of notions’(sumplokê noêmatôn) that compose discursive reasoning are built on the edifice of phantasmata. They are not reducible to mere images but they make use of them. ‘Now imagination can be rational (logistikê) or it may be imagination of sense (aisthêtikê)’ (De An. 433b29-30). 11. De An. 427b14-15, tr. Hicks: ‘Imagination, in fact, is something different both from perception and from thought, and is never found by itself apart from perception, any more than is belief apart from imagination.’ 12. De An. 428a1-4, tr. Hicks: ‘If, then, imagination is the faculty in virtue of which we say that an image presents itself to us, and if we exclude the metaphorical use of the term, it is some one of the faculties or habits in virtue of which we judge (krinomen, ‘discriminate’), and judge truly or falsely.’ 13. De An. 429a4-9, tr. Hicks: ‘Again, because imaginations remain in us and resemble the corresponding sensations, animals perform many actions under their influence; some, that is, the brutes, though not having intellect, and others, that is, men, because intellect is sometimes obscured by passion or disease or sleep.’ 14. The view of pain as the work of demons or as something resulting from a hidden religious drama of causation, which required secret knowledge to cure, had long roots. In the Secret Book of John, one of the Gnostic bibles, the author

165

Notes to pages 90-108 writes that pain comes from the demon Nenentophni, who presumably works in tandem with other demons that control parts of the body, such as Abron who controls the head, Meniggesstroeth the brain ... Asterechme the right eye. In ancient Babylonia and Egypt treatment of pain required knowing the secret names of these demons and one had to be privy to theurgic rituals, such as coprophagia, to drive them away (Longrigg 1993: 6-9). 15. De An. 427b17-20, tr. Hicks: ‘for we can represent an object before our eyes.’ 16. De An. 413b22-4, tr. Hicks: Aristotle states of animals in general: ‘if it has sensation, it has also imagination and appetency. For where there is sensation, there is also pleasure and pain and, where these are, desire also must of necessity be present.’ 17. De An. 431a8-10, tr. Hicks: ‘Sensation, then, is analogous to simple assertion or simple apprehension by thought and, when the sensible thing is pleasant or painful, the pursuit or avoidance of it by the soul is a sort of affirmation or negation.’ The same idea is restated in the Nicomachean Ethics (1139a21-2): ‘That which is affirmation and denial in the intellect is pursuit and avoidance in appetite.’ 18. A systematic refutation of the mistranslation phainomenês as ‘conspicuous’, ‘manifest’ is to be found in Harris (1997). For an example of the contrary view see Allen (2000: 53-4) where anger is said to desire ‘visible punishment’, requiring ‘some sort of observable response’, such that anger leads to ‘a public agon or competition where claims of honor’ are contested. 6. Making Anger into a Virtue 1. The story of Lycurgus’ praotês recounted by Stobaeus (Anthologium 3.19.13) was such a commonplace in antiquity that it could still be cited by the Emperor Julian in his fourth-century CE anti-Christian tract Against the Galileans (192.1). 2. EN 1140b6-7. The intellectual virtue of the phronimos is phronêsis which Aristotle defines as ‘a habit that establishes the truth in practical matters in relation to good and bad things for humans’. 3. EN 1109a25: ‘In likewise manner it is easy for anyone to get angry, just as it is to give away and spend money. But to do these things to the person one ought, and for the right reason, and in the right way is not easy for everyone. Thus to do these things well is rare and praiseworthy and noble’. 4. Rh. 1379a11-13: ‘People are angry when pained, for the pained person desires something’. 5. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle defines forechoice as ‘deliberative appetite’ (bouleutikê orexis, 1113a9-12): ‘Given that what is chosen is for things within our power, which are appetitively deliberated upon, then forechoice is deliberative appetite for things under our power’. 6. For a defence of this rendering of line 1079 of Medea see G. Stanton (1987: 97-106). Stanton argues that 1079 proclaims that the thumos is in command of the mind and he thus translates the line to read: ‘I realise what I am about to do, but drive [thumos], which is the cause of the most terrible evils for mortals, is master of my plans.’

166

Notes to pages 110-124 7. See Cooper 1972. 8. Sunesis is derived from the verb sunienai, one of whose meanings is ‘to bring or set together’. 9. The praos does not allow his anger to push towards its natural terminus of vengeful satiation. He is not ‘timôrêtikos’ (a punishing type), but suggnômonikos, ‘more inclined to forgive’. The word ‘forgiving type’ is Aristotle’s own; it does not appear anywhere else before him. Perhaps his introduction of this new word was meant to emphasise that the inclination to ‘forgiveness’, with the full intellectual spectrum of meanings that he assigns to it, was part of the virtue of gentle-temperedness. 10. See Romilly (2007: 122): ‘Its first meaning, as revealed by etymology, is truly cognitive. It reports either a participation in knowledge or a rational decision. This meaning will be retained into the classical period’. ‘[U]nderstanding gives birth to clemency and insight to forgiveness. On the contrary, for the Romans, forgiveness results from a negation by which we “ignore” the indiscretion (ignosco)’. Dover (1991: 174) provides the following insight into the word’s meaning: ‘Unlike “forgive” and its equivalents in modern European languages, suggignôskein declares itself by its composition a verb of cognition ... The sense “forgive” arises from a recognition that people very commonly regard their own actions as justified or at least, even if they feel some shame and regret, as not deserving punishment. Suggnôthi moi is an appeal for empathy, “Share my view of the matter”.’ 11. The entire passage unambiguously identifies the way one experiences pleasure and pain as the subject matter for modifying the bad condition of any of our passions: (EN 1104b8-16): ‘Ethical excellence has to do with pleasures and pains. On account of pleasure we do base acts, and on account of pain we abstain from doing noble things. That is why it is necessary, as Plato says, to receive the right training straightaway from childhood, so that one will experience pleasure and pain in the right way. This is what correct education is. Furthermore, given that the virtues have to do with actions and passions, and given that every passion is accompanied with pleasure and pain then this too shows that [ethical] virtue has to do with pleasures and pains.’ 12. Cicero, On Fate 5.12-23; Tusculan Disputations 4.37.80. 13. See Republic 351c7-352a9: ‘For factions (staseis) ... are the result of injustice, and hatreds and internal conflicts, but justice brings about togethermindedness (homonoia) and friendship’. 14. EN 1155a23-24: ‘It appears that poleis are held together by friendship, and that the lawgivers study [how to bring this about] more than they do justice’. If it were the case, as Plato had argued, that justice automatically creates friendship, then it would have followed that lawmakers would do better in paying attention to justice – a position that Aristotle challenges. In this passage I have rendered Aristotle’s term for political friendship, homonoia, as ‘concord’, but its literal meaning is ‘together-mindedness’, from the compound noos (mind) + homou (together). The word is usually mistranslated and misinterpreted to mean ‘like-mindedness’ or ‘unanimity’. On the meaning of homonoia see Kalimtzis (2000: ch. 4).

167

Notes to pages 126-139 7. From Anger to Hatred 1. W. Fortenbaugh (2002: 107) writes that hate ‘fails to qualify as an emotion’. 2. EN 1105b22-3: ‘By the emotions, I mean desire, anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy, friendship, hatred, longing, jealousy, pity; and generally those states of consciousness which are accompanied by pleasure or pain’. The text reads hêdonê ê [‘or’] lupê (also EE 1220b12). In the Rhetoric (1378a20) Aristotle does use ‘and’ (kai) but this is a passage whose intent is to make a general point for the orator. The point made in this passage, that pleasure and pain are the hedonic contents of the passions, does not overthrow the more careful definition which state that all passions are associated with pain or pleasure. 3. Sophocles’ Philoktetes was produced in 409 BCE. The dominant theme that reveals itself in the play’s imagery is Philoktetes’ incurable illness, his nosos. The audience that gathered in the theatre of Dionysus, below the Acropolis, could not have failed to associate the nosos of their polis, which had recently undergone a number of violent conflicts, with the agony being enacted in the drama. 4. In the beginning of the tragedy the plot centres on Odysseus’ machinations to steal Philoktetes’ weapons. No one (not even the audience) is focusing on Philoktetes’ suffering. At lines 751-4 Neoptolemos refuses to recognise Philoktetes’ pain. As if he were blind and deaf to the glaring facts before him he asks three times what it is that is causing him to cry out. After the third response, Neoptolemos acquiesces to the suffering before his eyes and is moved to empathy. He utters the words of compassion that Philoktetes has been waiting to hear: ‘How terrible the burden of your sickness’, he says, ‘Do you want me to hold you and to relieve your pain?’ The subject of the play suddenly changes from a plot to snatch weapons, to Philoktetes’ illness. The audience, by witnessing Philoktetes’ excruciating pain, enters his psychic world where it can examine the legitimacy of his hatred, from his standpoint. This is the attitude that thumotic education strives to inculcate from childhood. 5. EN 1267a28-9: ‘They are together-minded over practical affairs, and of these, those of great importance’ (ta en megethei). These are the matters that pertain to participation in the commons and the shaping of issues of far ranging consequence over which the quality of citizens’ lives depend. It is by participation in these matters that citizens come to be friends. 8. The Wrath of God: Onward to the Past 1. Cicero’s De Officiis (On Duties) was based on the work of the Stoic Panaetius of Rhodes, who lived in the second century BCE. Cicero warns that (18 and 19, tr. Miller): ‘to be drawn by study away from the active life is contrary to moral duty. For the whole glory of virtue is in activity.’ The dearest ties that beckon one to duty are those to one’s country and to public service (57). 2. Seneca. De Ira (2.8.1-3 tr. Basore): ‘Whenever you see the forum with its

168

Notes to pages 139-140 thronging multitude, and the polling places filled with all the gathered concourse, and the great Circus where the largest part of the people displays itself, you may be sure that just as many vices are gathered there as men. Among those whom you see in civilian garb there is no peace; for a slight reward any one of them can be led to compass the destruction of another ... they desire for the sake of some little pleasure or plunder to see the whole world lost. They live as though they were in a gladiatorial school – those with whom they eat, they likewise fight. It is a community of wild beasts, and only that beasts are gentle toward each other and refrain from tearing their own kind, while men glut themselves with rending one another. They differ from the dumb animals in this alone – that animals grow gentle toward those who feed them, while men in their madness prey upon the very persons by whom they are nurtured.’ The view of human nature in the Imperial Age had undergone a drastic transformation from that posited by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. 3. Epictetus, Enchiridion 5.1.1-6: ‘People are not agitated by the events but by the judgments they hold about these events. When therefore we are hindered or agitated or pained let us not blame anyone but ourselves, which is to say our own judgments’. 4. Had Medea not been deceived with a wrong judgment she would not have killed her children: ‘Show her clearly that she has been deceived and she will not do it; until you do show it what else does she have to follow but her impression?’ (Epictetus, Discourses 1.28.8.1-9.1) 5. Seneca, Epictetus and Emperor Marcus Aurelius provide a display of the techniques. Marcus Aurelius’ exercises give us a sense of the discipline and dedication required. These are not just memorised but ‘rehearsed’ (meletan) so that the imagery can bring to life the scene that is to be encountered in real life, which in turn allows one to practise having the right judgment about the anticipated event ‘at hand’. See Newman (1989). 6. Galen goes to some pains to emphasise that Chrysippus was introducing an alien intellectual framework and that in doing so he was violating the Greek language. At one point he charges Chrysippus with a solecism (soloikizein) and goes so far as to translate one of Chrysippus’ sentences into the ‘dialect of the Greeks’ (eis tên tôn Hellênôn dialekton), insinuating that Chrysippus was translating ideas into Greek from a foreign reference frame (2.5.62.3). Elsewhere he charges that the words used to establish this new theory are contrary to Greek usage and are used in ways that are intended to mask contradictions in the arguments put forward. Chrysippus, he says, ‘tosses continually as on a stormy sea’ calling the passions irrational yet caused by judgments. ‘He could have avoided all these ambiguities, fabricated so ineptly and so contrary to Greek usage (para to tôn Hellênôn ethos, 4.4.8.8), and made his argument exact and articulate by using words correctly and clearly. They ‘pervert’ or ‘violate’ Greek usage (biazontai) ‘whose speech they claim to be expounding’ (4.4.15.5). He refers four times to the ‘ancient view’ (tên palaian doxan, 4.7.44.2) and seven times to the ‘ancient doctrine’ (tou palaiou dogmatos) that the Greeks had all proceeded from, namely the common standpoint that powers other than reason were at work in the operation of the passions, and he praises the Stoic Posidonius, who in contradistinction to Chrysippus ‘accepts the account of the ancients’ (4.7.20.1).

169

Notes to pages 141-143 7. For example, he argues against Chrysippus that the passions are at times not under the control of reason and that this happens without any cognitive processing. Sometimes, he says, people cry when they don’t want to and sometimes stop before they wish ‘because of the causes stated by the ancients’ (4.7.38.3). This he states was not only the opinion of Aristotle or Plato, but was developed earlier by Pythagoras ‘while Plato worked it out and made it more complete’. 8. In Philo, Plato’s ‘metrical art’, which brings internal order, is replaced by the Law, the word of God, which is placed over Aaron’s thumos. Henceforth whatever riles Aaron’s anger will be in accord, not with the events and the like, but with the ‘word’ and the ‘Law’. 9. The question of God’s impassibility was to engage many religious writers over the next few centuries. Lactantius (fourth century CE), in his influential De Ira Dei, would claim that wrath is ‘the sum and turning-point on which the whole of piety and religion depend’. Marcion of Sinope taught an opposing doctrine that there were two gods, the one of the Old Testament, who was wrathful, and the True God, who was free of all passion. He campaigned within the Church against the notion of a wrathful god and did away with the Old Testament as Scripture for this reason (see Micka 1943: 23-5). An interesting permutation was that put forth by Tertullian who wrote a polemic against Marcion in which he argued that God the father was impassible, but that his son, Jesus, being partially human, was unavoidably afflicted with wrath (Adversus Marcionem 2.27.355). Others, such as Clement and Origen of Alexandria, both of whom were successive directors of the catechetical school of Alexandria around the third century CE, rejected passion in God. Ultimately, in the official doctrines, it was the position of Philo and the Alexandrian school that was to hold sway, as can be discerned from the position taken by the Church Fathers Basil, Chrysostom, and Augustine of Hippo. Nevertheless, it should not be thought that in terms of practice the divide between these two views was unbridgeable in its practical results. Both doctrines agree on the existence of God’s wrath. The major difference is that the followers of the impassibility doctrine had to explain how God could punish with wrath but without any passion. The grounds for this sleight of hand had already been formulated by the Stoics in their contention that correct anger follows as a rational duty from a passionless judgment. 10. Quod deus sit immutabilis, 14.63-5: ‘Let, therefore, all such men learn false terrors, by which they may be benefited if they cannot be led into the right way by truth’. 11. De sacrificiis Abelis et Cain (169): ‘to pursue investigations into the essence or distinctive qualities of God, is an absolute piece of folly; for God did not grant this even to the all-wise Moses ’. 12. St Basil, Against the Angered (31.356.19-20): ‘Anger is a form of temporary insanity (mania)’. 13. St Basil, Against the Angered (31.357.50-360.3): ‘Anger starts an argument, an argument gives rise to insults, insults to blows, blows to injuries, and from injuries death’. 14. John Chrysostom, Homily on the Statues (49.202.43-49): ‘If you punish

170

Notes to pages 144-148 in anger God will demand retribution, as an insulted party, just as when we strike the household slave of another, the master becomes furious, and calls the act an insult (one of hubris) ... if then, even in the case of human beings it is not safe for us to take revenge, how much more so when God is the one who avenges!’ In the same homily he calls anger the ‘most unpardonable (asugggnôstos) of all sins’ (49.202.28). 15. John Chrysostom, Homily on the Statues (49.201.27-8): ‘And do not tell me of the magnitude of the injustices [you have suffered]. For this is not what makes your anger persist; instead you do not recall your own trespasses nor do you have geenan [‘hell’, the place of future punishment] before your eyes and the fear of God!’ God punishes injustice and men, by restraining their anger, gain eternal salvation (see 49.206.18-28). 16. St Basil, Against the Angered (31.360.17-23). Basil gives more rhetorical exhortations to instil the method of meekness and humility for anger control: ‘He calls you insignificant, a cipher, contemptible? You [should] describe yourself as “earth and ashes” ... He called you a bumpkin, a pauper, a total zero? You should call yourself a worm and that you came from dung. You were beaten? So was the Lord; you were spat upon? So was He’ (31.364.10-12). ‘You should carve each one of these instances of how Jesus humbled himself into your mind so as to bring down the swelling of your rage’ (31.364.22). 17. In Basil’s Asceticon Magnum, question 29, it is asked: ‘How is it possible to avoid becoming angry?’ Basil responds: ‘If one believes that they always see with their thought God the overseer ... because what person before their lord would ever dare do something that would cause their master displeasure?’ 18. Romilly informs us (2007: 556): ‘the word praos in the Judaic world denoted the good poor person, the defenceless person, who obediently submits and whom God rewards or revenges. Yet, it must be stated that this is not the meaning of the word in Greek. Never in the Greek world was this word used to denote a special class of people. It was never related to the poor or to pain. The Greeks, after all, who recommended self-control, would never have proposed humility in the ethical domain, let alone effacement’. 19. The distinction between the two wraths, one being by nature ‘good’ (agathon) and the other a sin, is made iron clad. The former ‘is the servant of good deeds’, ‘well calculated and temperate’. The wrath of Elias the zealot, who slaughters 450 men, is of this type (31.368.46). On the other hand there is common anger which is ‘pathetic’ and is likened to: ‘a dog that bites the rocks, but not the rock thrower ... transfer your wrath to the man-killing Satan’ (31.368.49-369.5). 20. Medieval kings, as God’s emissaries, were expected to cure transgressors and punish sedition with the harshest of punishments, but not in the spirit of heated anger. Even institutionalised torture, such as the blinding of political opponents, when conducted in the mode of God’s wrath could be viewed as a merciful act. Instead of killing purported seditionaries, which was the responsibility of a just king, the monarch could show mercy by administering painful cures, such as mutilation, as applications of noble wrath. These acts were institutionalised and hence not deemed to be the result of vindictive fury. See Buhrer-Thierry (1998); Althoff (1998).

171

Notes to pages 148-150 21. To critics who might respond that such fear may cause turbulence in the soul, Chrysostom responds that God’s wrath effects a therapeutic quietude; for this fear is what spurs one to seek repentance which is the ultimate cure for wrath (55.77.34-5) This sort of turbulence (tarachê) he says is ‘the mother of quietude’ (55.77.55-6). The fear of God’s wrath is the guarantor of peace in the soul and is what will quiet the passions (55.78.8). It is the ultimate cure. 22. John Chrysostom, Homily on John 59.332.21-31: ‘Let us now imitate Him. For not only did He now hold His peace, but even came among them again ... for to be a disciple of Christ, is the being gentle and kind. But whence can this gentleness come to us? If we continually reckon up our sins, if we mourn, if we weep ... Since wherever there is mourning, it is impossible that there should be anger; where grief is, all anger is out of the way; where there is brokenness of spirit, there is no provocation’. 23. Gregory Nazianzus (Funebris oratio 12.2.10-13) states that Basil was not nurtured by some ‘Kentauron alazona’, where Cheiron the Centaur, Achilles’ teacher, is now reviled as a brash quack and an impostor of knowledge in the sphere of nurturing. Instead he received his education from his pious father who nurtured him in ‘reverence to God’.

172

Bibliography 1. Primary sources (texts, translations and commentaries) Armstrong,C. (1947) Oeconomica and Magna Moralia (Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Basore, J.W. (1932) Seneca: Moral Essays II (Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Burnet, J. (ed.) (1900-1907) Platonis Opera (Oxford: The Clarendon Press). Dawe, R.D. (1996) Sophoclis Philoctetes (Stutgardiae: B.G. Teubneri; Lipsiae). Forster, E.S. (1960; rpt. 1989) Topica (Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Fowler, H.N. (1925; repr. 1975) Philebus (Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Freese, J.H. (1924) Aristotle: The Art of Rhetoric (Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Gummere, R.M. (1932) Seneca: Epistulae Morales I Books I-LXV (Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Hackforth, R.(1958) Plato’s Examination of Pleasure: A Translation of the Philebus, with Introduction and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hicks, R.D. (1907; repr. 1965) Aristotle: De Anima (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Adolph M. Hakkert). Joachim, H.H. (1951) Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, A Commentary, ed. D.A. Rees (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press). Kahn, C.H. (1979) The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Kirk, G.S. (1985-1993) The Iliad: A Commentary [vol. 1-2; vol. 3, Bryan Hainsworth; vol. 4, R. Janko; vol. 5, M.W. Edwards, vol. 6, N. Richardson] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Komnenou-Kakride, O. Homeros: Iliada (Athens: Zacharopoulos) Makres, K. (2001) Porphuriou: Puthagorou Bios [Porphyry: Life of Pythagoras] (Athens: Katarti). Meretake, E. (1982) Ioannou Chrysostomou: Apanta ta Erga [John Chrysostom Collected Works] (Thessaloniki: Paterikes Ekdoeseis Gregorios ho Palamas). Miller, W. (1913) Cicero: De Officiis (Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Petrou, A. (2001) Iamblichos: Peri tou Puthagorikou Biou [Iamblichus: On the Pythagorean Way of Life] (Thessaloniki: Zitros Publications). Philo Judaeus (2000) Philôn Apanta [The Works of Philo] (Athens: Kaktos).

173

Bibliography Plutarch (1996) Êthika [Moralia] (Athens: Kaktos). Rackham, H. (1927) Aristotle’s Politics (Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Rackham, H. (1932) Nicomachean Ethics (Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Rackham, H. (1935) The Eudemian Ethics (Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Roberts, A. and Donaldson, J. (1886) Lactantius: A Treatise on the Anger of God, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7. Sakale I. (1985) Gregoriou tou Theologou Apanta ta Erga [Gregory Nazianzus, Collected Works] (Thessaloniki: Paterikes Ekdoeseis Gregorios ho Palamas). Sideres, Z. (1939) Homeros: Odusseia [Homer’s Odyssey] (Athens: Zacharopoulos). Stobaeus, Ioannes (1995) Ioannes Stobaios Eklogai, Apophthegmata, Hupothekai [Stobaeus Anthologium] (Athens: Kaktos). Zeses, T. et al. (1973) Basileiou Kaisareias tou Megalou: Apanta ta Erga [St. Basil Collected Works] (Thessaloniki: Paterikes Ekdoeseis Gregorios ho Palamas). 2. Secondary literature Abbs, P. (1994) The Educational Imperative: A Defence of Socratic and Aesthetic Learning (Oxon: Routledge). Adkins, A.W.H. (1969) ‘Threatening, Abusing, and Feeling Angry in Homeric Poems’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 89: 7-21. Albright, W.F. et al. (1955) Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Allen, D. (2000) The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Aloysia, Sister M. (1946) ‘The God of Wrath’, The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 8: 407-15. Althoff, G. (1998) ‘Ira Regis: Prolegomena to a History of Royal Anger’, in Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. B.H. Rosenwein. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press): 59-74. Annas, J. (1989) ‘Epicurean Emotions’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 30: 145-64. Aubenque, P. (1957) ‘La Définition Aristotélicienne de la Colère’, Revue Philosophique de France et de l’Étranger: 300-17 Baloian, B.E. (1992) Anger in the Old Testament (New York: Peter Lang). Beck, A.T. (1976) Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders (New York: International Universities Press). Blundell, M.W. (1989) Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Braund, S. and Most, G.W. (eds) (2003) Ancient Anger: Perspectives from Homer to Galen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Brinton, A. (1988) ‘Pathos and the Appeal to Emotion: An Aristotelian Analysis’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 5: 207-19.

174

Bibliography Buhrer-Thierry, G. (1998) ‘ “Just Anger” or “Vengeful Anger”? The Punishment of Blinding in the Early Medieval West’, in Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. B.H. Rosenwein (Ithaca: Cornell University Press): 75-91. Burnet, J. (1916) ‘The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul’, Second Annual Philosophical Lecture, The British Academy (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Cairns, D.L. (1993) Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Cairns, D.L. (2001) ‘Anger and the Veil in Ancient Greek Culture’, Greece and Rome 48.1: 18-32. Campbell, J. (1982) Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life (New York: Simon and Schuster). Cannon, W.B. (1920) Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage (New York: D. Appleton and Co.). Caston, V. (1996) ‘Why Aristotle Needs Imagination’, Phronesis 41: 20-55. Caswell, C.P. (1990) A Study of Thumos in Early Greek Epic (Leiden: E.J. Brill). Chamberlain, C. (1984a) ‘From “Haunts” to “Character”: The Meaning of Ethos and Its Relation to Ethics’, Helios 11: 97-108. Chamberlain, C. (1984b) ‘The Meaning of Prohairesis in Aristotle’s Ethics’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 114: 147-57. Charney, A.P. (1988) ‘Spiritedness and Piety in Aristotle’, in Understanding the Political Spirit: Philosophical Investigations from Socrates to Nietzsche, ed. C.H. Zuckert (New Haven: Yale University Press): 67-87. Chesney, M.A. and Rosenman, R.H. (1985) Anger and Hostility in Cardiovascular and Behavioural Disorders (Washington: Hemisphere Pub. Corp.). Considine, P. (1966) ‘Some Homeric Terms of Anger’, Acta Classica 9: 15-25. Considine, P. (1969) ‘The Theme of Divine Wrath in Ancient East Mediterranean Literature’, Studi Miceni ed Egeo Anatolici 8: 85-189. Considine, P. (1985) ‘The Indo-European Origin of Greek MHNIS’, Transactions of the Philological Society 83: 144-70. Considine, P. (1986-88) ‘The Etymology of MHNIS’, in Studies in Honour of T.B.L. Webster, ed. J.H. Betts, J.T. Hooker and J.R. Green (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press): 53-64. Cooper, J.M. (1973) ‘The Magna Moralia and Aristotle’s Moral Philosophy’, American Journal of Philology 94: 327-49. Cooper, J.M. (1999) Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press). Crisp, R. and Saunders, T. (1999) ‘Aristotle Ethics and Politics’, in From Aristotle to Augustine, ed. David J. Furley (London: Routledge): 109-46. Darcus, S.M. (1977) ‘-phren Epithets of Thumos’, Glotta: 178-82. Darcus, S.M. (1979) ‘A Person’s Relation to yucˇ in Homer, Hesiod and the Greek Lyric Poets’, Glotta 57: 30-9. Darcus, S.M. (1980) ‘How a Person Relates to nÒoj in Homer, Hesiod, and the Greek Lyric Poets,’ Glotta 58: 33-44. Darcus, S.M. (1996) ‘Disturbances of the Mind and Heart in Early Greek Poetry’, L’Antiquité Classique, 656: 31-51.

175

Bibliography Dawson, J.D. (1992) Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press). Orter, K. (1990) ‘Conceptual Truth and Aesthetic Truth’, The Journal of Aesthetics 48: 37-51. Dover, K. (1991) ‘Fathers, Sons and Forgiveness’, Illinois Classical Studies 16: 173-82. Edmunds, S. (1976) ‘Homeric NHPIOS’, in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 81: 299. Eenigenburg, E.M. (1949; repr. 2008) The Experience of Divine Anger in Greek Tragedy (Kessinger Publishing, LLC). Fagles, R. (tr.) (1991) The Iliad, Introduction and Notes by B. Knox (New York: Penguin Books). Fisher, N.R.E. (1992) Hybris: A Study in the Values of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greece (Warminster: Aris and Phillips). Flory, S. (1978) ‘Medea’s Right Hand: Promises and Revenge’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 108: 69-74. Fortenbaugh, W.W. (1969) ‘Aristotle, Virtue and Emotion’, Arethusa 2: 163-85. Fortenbaugh, W.W. (1978) ‘Aristotle’s Rhetoric on Emotions’, Articles on Aristotle, vol. 4: Psychology and Aesthetics, ed. J. Barnes, M. Schofield and R. Sorabji (New York: St. Martin’s Press). Fortenbaugh, W.W. (2002) Aristotle on Emotion , 2nd edn (London: Duckworth). Francis, E.D. (1983) Virtue, Folly, and Greek Etymology, in Approaches to Homer, ed. C.A. Rubino and C.W. Shelmerdine (Austin: University of Texas Press): 74-121. Frede, D. (1985) ‘Rumpelstiltskin’s Pleasures: True and False Pleasures in Plato’s Philebus’, Phronesis 30: 151-80. Frede, D. (1992) ‘The Cognitive Role of Phantasia in Aristotle’, in Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Amélie Rorty (Oxford: Clarendon Press): 279-95. Freud, S. and Josef Breuer (1957, reprint) Studies on Hysteria (New York: Basic Books). Gilbert, K. (1934) ‘The Relation of the Moral to the Aesthetic Standard in Plato’, Philosophical Review 43: 279-94. Glucker, J. (1980) ‘Review of Dillon: “The Middle Platonists. A Study of Platonism 80 BC to AD 200”’, Classical Review 30: 56-8. Gosling, J. (1959) ‘False Pleasures: Philebus 35C-41B’, Phronesis 4: 44-53. Greengard, C. (1987) Theatre in Crisis: Sophocles’ Reconstruction of Genre and Politics in Philoctetes (Amsterdam: Hakkert). Grene, D and Lattimore, R. (eds) (1957) The Complete Greek Tragedies, Volume IV: Sophocles II, Ajax, The Women of Trachis, Electra, Philoctetes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Grene, D and Lattimore, R. (eds) (1960) The Complete Greek Tragedies, Volume I: Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound, Oedipus the King, Antigone, Hippolytus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Gruen, E.S. (1998) Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press).

176

Bibliography Halliwell, J. (2008) ‘Epinician Precepts: A Study of Chiron and the Wise Adviser in Pindar’, unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Classics, University of Birmingham. Halloran., S.M. (1982) ‘Aristotle’s Concept of Ethos, or If Not His Somebody Else’s’, Rhetoric Review 1: 58-63. Hampton, C. (1987) ‘Pleasure, Truth and Being in Plato’s Philebus: A Reply to Professor Frede’, Phronesis 32: 252-62. Hampton, C. (1990) Pleasure, Knowledge and Being (Albany, New York: SUNY Press). Haney, H.M. (1960) The Wrath of God in the Former Prophets (New York: Vantage Press). Hanson, A.T. (1957) The Wrath of the Lamb (London: SPCK). Harris, W.V. (2001) Restraining Rage (Harvard: Harvard University Press). Harris, W.V. (1997) ‘Saving the Fainomena: A Note on Aristotle’s Definition of Anger’, Classical Quarterly 47: 452-4 Harrison, E.L. (1960) ‘Notes on Homeric Psychology’, Phoenix 14: 63-80. Haynes, R. (1962) ‘The Theory of Pleasure in the Old Stoa’, American Journal of Philology 83: 412-19. Hijmans, B.L.(1959) Askesis, Notes on Epictetus’ Educational System (Assen: Van Gorcum). Ireland, S, and Steel, F.L.D. (1975) ‘Fr2nej as an Anatomical Organ in the Works of Homer’, Glotta 53: 183-95. Jaeger, W. (1946) ‘A New Greek Word in Plato’s Republic. The Medical Origin of the Theory of the qumoeid2j’, Eranos 44: 123-30. Janaway, C. (1995) Images of Excellence: Plato’s Critique of the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Kalimtzis, K. (2000) Aristotle on Political Enmity and Disease: An Inquiry into Stasis (Albany: State University of New York Press). Kenny, A. (1960) ‘False Pleasures in the Philebus: A Reply to Mr. Gosling’, Phronesis 5: 45-52. Knuuttila, S. (2004) Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Konstan, D. (2006) The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Konstan, D. (2010) Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Konstan, D. and Rutter, K. (eds) (2003) Envy, Spite and Jealousy: The Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Kosman, L.A. (1980) ‘Being Properly Affected: Virtues and Feelings in Aristotle’s Ethics’, in Essays in Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. A.O. Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press): 103-18. Koziak, B. (2000) Retrieving Political Emotion: Thumos, Aristotle and Gender (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press). Kleinknecht, H. et al. (1964) ‘orge’, in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament V, ed. Gerhard Kittel (Grand Rapids: Erdmans): 382-418. Lazarus, R. (1998) Fifty Years of the Research and Theory of R.S. Lazarus (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers.

177

Bibliography Lear, G.R. (2006a) ‘Aristotle on Moral Virtue and the Fine’, in The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ed. R. Kraut (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers): 116-36. Lear, G.R. (2006b) ‘Plato on Learning to Love Beauty,’ in The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic, ed. G. Santas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers): 104-24. Leighton, S. (1982) ‘Aristotle on the Emotions’, Phronesis 27: 144-72. Lorenz, H. (2006) The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Lynch, J.P. and Miles, G.B. (1980) ‘In Search of Thymos: Toward an Understanding of a Greek Psychological Term’, Prudentia 12: 3-9. MacDowell, D. (1990) ‘The Meaning of alazôn’, in Owls to Athens: Essays on Classical Subjects Presented to Sir Kenneth Dover, ed. E. Craik (Oxford: Clarendon Press): 287-92. Macurdy, G.H. (1940) The Quality of Mercy: the Gentler Virtues in Greek Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press). Manning, C.E. (1974) ‘The Consolatory Tradition and Seneca’s Attitude to the Emotions’, Greece and Rome 21: 71-81. Mansfield, H.C. (2006) Manliness (New Haven: Yale University Press). Micka, E.F. (1943) ‘The Problem of Divine Anger in Arnobius and Lactantius’, Studies in Christian Antiquity Series, ed. Johannes Quasten, no. 4. Doctoral Dissertation. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America. Mozley, J.K. (1926) The Impassibility of God: A Survey of Christian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Muellner, L. (1996) The Anger of Achilles: Menin in Greek Epic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Newman, R.J. (1989) ‘Theory and Practice of the Meditatio’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.36.3: 1473-1517. Nichols, M.P. (1988) ‘Spiritedness and Philosophy in Plato’s Republic’, in Understanding the Political Spirit: Philosophical Investigations from Socrates to Nietzsche, ed. C.H. Zuckert (New Haven: Yale University Press): 48-66. Nussbaum, M.C. (1986a) The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Nussbaum, M.C. (1986b) ‘Therapeutic Arguments: Epicurus and Aristotle’, in The Norms of Nature, ed. M. Schofield and G. Striker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 31-74. Nussbaum, M.C. (1994) The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Padel, R. (1992) In and out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Pangle, T.L. (1976) ‘The Political Psychology of Religion in Plato’s Laws’, American Political Science Review 70: 1059-77. Renehan, R. (1981) ‘The Meaning of SWMA in Homer: A Study in Methodology’, in California Studies in Classical Antiquity 12, ed. W. Anderson and J. Puhvel (Berkeley: University of California Press): 260-81. Rentiphes, D. E. (1978) ‘H Orgˇ sthn Ellhnikˇ Tragwd8a’ [‘Anger in Greek Tragedy’] unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Ioannina. Robinson D. (1990) ‘Homeric f8loj: Love of Life and Limbs, and Friendship with

178

Bibliography One’s QumÒj’, in Owls to Athens: Essays on Classical Subjects Presented to Sir Kenneth Dover, ed. E.M. Craik (Oxford: Clarendon Press): 97-108. Robinson, T.M. (1970) Plato’s Psychology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Romilly, J. de. (1979; Greek edn 2007) La Douceur dans la Pensée Grecque [Greek edition tr. Katerina Kalantzopoulou (Athens: Livanis)]. Rorty, A. (1984) ‘Aristotle on the Metaphysical Status of the Pathê’, Review of Metaphysics 37: 521-46. Rosenwein, B.H. (ed.) (1998) Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Rossitto, C. (1995) ‘I PAQH THS YUCHS nel De Anima di Aristotele’, Elenchos 16: 155-78. Sanders, R.V. (1965) A Study of the Greek Words THUMOS and ORGE (Dallas Theological Seminary). Schlesinger, E. (1968) ‘On Euripides’ Medea’, in Euripides: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. E. Segal (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc): 20-89. Schofield, M. (1992) ‘Aristotle on the Imagination’, in Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, ed. M. Nussbaum and A. Rorty (Oxford: Clarendon Press): 249-77. Sihvola, J. (1999) ‘Emotional Animals: Do Aristotelian Emotions Require Beliefs?’ in Aristotle: Critical Assessments, vol. 3: Psychology and Ethics, ed. L.P. Gerson (London and New York: Routledge): 50-82. Sihvola, J. and Engberg-Pedersen, T. (eds) (1998) The Emotions in Hellenistic Philosophy (Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers). Simpson, W.H. (1968) ‘Divine Wrath in the Eighth Century Prophets’, Boston University Graduate School, unpublished Dissertation. Snell, B. (1953) The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, tr. T.G. Rosenmeyer (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers). Sorabji, R. (2000) Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Stanton, G.R. (1987) ‘The End of Medea’s Monologue’, Rheinisches Museum 130: 97-106. Stearns, C.Z. and Stearns, P.N. (eds) (1988) Emotion and Social Change: Toward a New Psychohistory (New York: Holmes & Meier). Stevens, G.L. (1981) ‘The Literary Background and Theological Significance of Orge Theou in the Pauline Epistles’, unpublished Dissertation. Striker, G. (1996) ‘Emotions in Context. Aristotle’s Treatment of the Passions in the Rhetoric and his Moral Psychology’, in Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ed. A.O. Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press): 286-302. Sullivan, S.D. (1981) ‘The Function of Thumos in Hesiod and the Greek Lyric Poets’, Glotta 59: 147-155. Sullivan, S.D. (1995) Psychological and Ethical Ideas. What Early Greeks Say (Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, Mnemosyne Supplement, 144. Sullivan, S.D. (2000) Euripides’ Use of Psychological Terminology (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press). Tasker, R.V.G. (1951) The Biblical Doctrine of the Wrath of God (London: Tyndale Press). Taylor, R. (1992) The Visual Arts in Education (London: The Falmer Press).

179

Bibliography Turnbull, K. (1999) ‘Aristotle on Imagination: De Anima iii.3’, in Aristotle: Critical Assessments, vol. 3, ed. L.P. Gerson (London: Routledge): 82-100. Vasiliou, I. (1996) ‘The Role of Good Upbringing in Aristotle’s Ethics’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56: 771-97. Walsh, T.R. (1990) (2005) Fighting Words and Feuding Words: Anger and the Homeric Poems (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield). Watson, G. (1988) Phantasia in Classical Thought (Galway: Galway University Press). Wilson, A. (1991) ‘Centaurs and SÚgkrishj in Gregory Nazianzen’, in Papers presented at the Eleventh International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford 1991, ed. E.A. Livingstone. Wilson, D.F. (2002) Ransom, Revenge and Heroic Identity in the Iliad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Wilson, J.R.S. (1995) ‘Thrasymachus and the Thumos: A Further Case of Prolepsis in Republic I’, Classical Quarterly 45: 55-67. Woerther, F. (2008) ‘Music and the Education of the Soul in Plato and Aristotle: Homoeopathy and the Formation of Character’, Classical Quarterly 58: 89-103. Zaborowski, R. (2002) La Crainte et le Courage dans l’Iliade et l’Odyssee: Contribution Lexicographique à la Psychologie Homérique des Sentiments (Warsaw: Stakroos). Zuckert, C.H. (1988) Understanding the Political Spirit: Philosophical Investigations From Socrates to Nietzsche (New Haven: Yale University Press).

180

General Index

approximation technique for restraining anger, 117-22; causes of anger, 77-94 (see also causes and phantasia); conditions for virtue in anger, 105-14; friendship and the logos of anger, 122-4; hatred as a process evolving from anger, 125&ff. (see also hatred); intellectual virtues for excellence in anger, 111-15; phantasia as a trigger to anger, 84-6, 89-94; reason or imagination as triggers to anger, 94-6; role models for anger restraint, 149; virtue of anger vs effectiveness, 105 in Homer: limitations to anger, 17-18; the Homeric framework, 5-11; thumos as receptacle for anger, 12-15; in Philo: Aaron and Moses as models for the taming of anger, 142; importance for Christian Fathers on anger, 141; ‘just anger’, 142 in Plato: anger and self-love, 44-5; anger as assistant to reason, 35; guardian of injustice, 43-8; importance in Republic, 33-4; nurturing of anger, 54-66; problems with Plato’s explanation of anger, 67-72; protector of justice, 36-8 in the Stoics: differences with Christian methods, 144, 145,

Abbs, P., 63 Achilles and Cheiron, 41, 159nn.2&3, 172n.23 and his thumos, 6, 13-15 and the embassy, 20-1 dishonouring of, 9, 12 his anger vs that of Philoktetes,127-8 his mênis, 7, 155 in the agôn, 17-19 Adkins, A., 9, 156 aesthetic education, 58&ff. aesthetic knowledge 59-60, 63-4 Agamemnon, 21; and his thumos, 9-10, 13, 15; his phrenes, 11, 19, 21, 128, 161n.7 agôn (‘competitions’): and the thumos, 18-20; meaning of, 156n.8; musical agôn, 156n.9 aisthêsis (‘sensation’), 60 alazoneia (‘boastful arrogance’), 45-8, 67, 119, 130, 145, 150, 159nn.2&4, 172n.23 Albright, W., 6 Allen, D., 155, 159n.1, 166 anger apothegms in Stobaeus’ Anthologium, 157-8n6 in Aristotle: absence of notion of ‘righteous anger’, 146-7; alteration of anger’s relation to pleasure and pain, 115-17; anger against the powerful and the weak, 97-101; anger as a pathos, 74, 76;

181

Index 146, 148-9; duty and anger control, 138; transformation of the Hellenic framework, 136-41 see also Seneca, Epictetus, Cicero, praos, righteous wrath, Wrath of God aphrôn (‘without phrenes’), 11 appetite and anger, 74, 75, 86 and control over mind, 118 and forechoice, 108 and Periclean policy, 122 and Stoics, 137 and thumos in Plato 34&ff., 49, 67-8, 71-2 and triggers to anger, 89-93 deliberative, 166n.5 see also orexis Aristotle, see anger, appetite, causes of anger, cognitive psychology, dishonouring, friendship, hormê, nurturing, pain, pleasure, pathos, phainetai, phaneros, phantasia, phronimos, pôs echontes, praos, pros ti pôs echein, qualified anger, quality-less anger, quick-tempered, righteous wrath, slighting, suggnômê, suggnômonikos, sunesis, virtue Atê, 10, 20, 154 Balzac, H. de, 164n.4 Basil, St Against the Angered, 143, 170nn.12&13, 171n.16 and anger control, 144 and the impassibility of God, 170n.9 Asceticon Magnum, 171n.17 sinful versus virtuous anger, 146-8 bitter- tempered, 104

Buhrer-Thierry, G., 171n.20 Burnet, J., 158n.7 Cairns, D., 3 Campbell, J., 163n.3 Caswell, C., 12 causes (of anger) efficient cause, 83-7, 89-94 formal cause, 81-3 four causes, 77-9 material cause, 79-81 Chamberlain, C., 108, 162n.18 cholos (‘anger’), 5, 11, 13 Chrysippus, 140, 169n.6, 170n.7 Chrysostom, John St Homily on the Fourth Psalm, 143 Homily to John, 172n.22 On the Statues, 143, 144, 170n.14, 171n.15, 172n.21 use of fear for anger control, 149-50 Cicero, 121, 137, 138, 168n.1 Clement of Alexandria, 170n.9 cognition, and emotion in Homer, 15-17, 155n.5 cognitive psychology and Aristotle, 85, 164-5n.8 and Plato, 47 approaches to anger control, 43, 47, 92-3, 108 Cooper, J., 164n.6, 167n7 Damon, 59 Delbrück, M., 163n.3 dishonouring, as a slighting in Aristotle, 87; atimia (‘disenfranchising’), 9; warnings against in Plato, 42 Dorter, K., 60 Dover, K., 167n.10 duskolos (‘peevish’), 42-3 emotion: difference with pathos 76-7; representation in art, 61-2, 70; in animals, 165n.9

182

Index epanorthôsis (‘setting right again’), 121-2 epêreasmos (‘spite’), 88 Epictetus and imperatives, 139 anger and belief, 139, 144, 169n.3 on Medea,169n.4 êpios (‘gentle’), 51-2, 160nn.4,5&6, 161nn.7&8, replaced by praos, 52-3 êthos (‘character’), etymology (êthea), 58-9, 162n.20, Poetics, 156n.3 fear and anger 54, 62, 65, 99-100 and control of alazoneia, 119 and phantasia 84 as a Christian curative for anger, 149-50 its form, 80 located in the thumos, 40 Fortenbaugh, W., 84, 165n.9, 168n.1 Foucault, M., 2 friendship (philia) and Homeric thumos, 17-21 in Aristotle: as contrary to hatred, 125; correction of friends, 82-3; finding the mean in anger, 122-3; for overcoming hatred, 128-33; higher than justice, 124, 167n.14 in Plato, 36, 40-1, 67 Galen, 140-1, 169n.6, 170n.7 gnomê (‘judgment’), 112, 122-3, 154 Halloran, S., 162 hamartia (‘moral error’), 37-8, 104 Hampton, C., 56 Harris, W., 12, 24, 166n.18 Harrison, E., 155n.5 harsh-tempered, 104-5 hatred and pleasure and pain, 126-8

evolving from anger, 125 overcoming hatred, 128-33 the logos of hatred and its difference from anger, 127-8 Heraclitus: Fr. 42, 23; Fr. 31, 25-7 Herakles, in Philoktetes, 131-3 homonoia (‘together-mindedness’), 129, 151, 167nn.13&14 honour (timê) and defence of shamelessness, 118, 120 and defence of the self, 39 and Homeric friendship, 17 and justice in Plato, 34, 36-8, 66-7 as the logical kernel of Homeric anger, 8-10 Christian humility and, 144, 146 disruption of common values of, 128 love of (philotimia), 17, 42, 50 Stoics, 138-41 termination of citizen ideal, 135 hormê (‘impulse’): alogon (‘irrational’), ix, 110; anger’s inborn impulse, 74, 81 hubris (‘insult’), 89; and correction (kolasmos), 41-2; and shamelessness, 118-19, 159n.5 human nature and anger, 3, 7 and honour in Christian Fathers, 144 and pain, 86-7 and self-love, 44 and the prudent person, 117 claim of its non-existence, 2 holistic view of, 16 in the Imperial Age, 139, 168-9n.2 retooling of, 154 justice: and friendship, 123-4, 167n.14; and the praos, 49-50; and the thumos, 36-8, 62, 64, 66; and the virtue of anger in Plato, 48; forgiveness and

183

Index absolute justice, 113; whole of justice, 146 kairos (‘appropriateness’), 30-1 Kalimtzis, K., 167n.14 kataphronêsis (‘contempt’), 88 kolazô (‘chastise’), 41, 82, 159n.1 Konstan, D., 3, 97, 164n.5 kosmos, 28-9, 54, 62 Lactantius, 170n.9 Lazarus, R., 164 Leontius, proof of thumos in Plato, 35 Litai, 20-1 lôbê (‘outrage’), 21 logos alazones logoi, 47 and êthea, 59 and music in nurturing, 59, 63-4, 70 and Philoktetes, 131 and shamelessness, 119 and the good for man, 122 and the mean, 106, 109-11 bringing logos to the passions, 28 etymology, 27 in Heraclitus, 26-7 in Stoics, 136 institutional distribution of, 115, 117-18, 120-2 issuing commands (epitaktikê), 109-10 of anger and friendship, 123-4 of hatred, 128-30 non-cognitive, 63-4 passions as logoi in matter, 79-80, 93-4, 96 placed by God on the thumos, 135, 141-2 socially clarified, 64 Lycurgus, 103, 166 MacDowell, D., 159n.4 Marcion, 170n.9

Marcus Aurelius, 139, 169n.5 mean, in anger, 106-7, 109-11 Medea: Epictetus on Medea, 169n.4; pleasure in hatred, 83, 127; thumos in control of her intellect 24, 108, 166n.6 Menelaos, 11, 19, 52, 101 Mentor, 52 Moab stele, 6 Muellner, L., 3, 26 music, in thumotic nurturing, 57-66 Nazianzus, St Gregory, 135, 143, 150, 172n.23 Neoptolemos, 129-32; recognition of Philoktetes’ pain, 168n.4 Nestor, 10, 19 Newman, R., 169n.5 nurturing (trophê), 75 Christian rejection of, 135, 146, 150-1 in Aristotle: non-cognitive training, 91-3, 109-11; qualified anger, 75 in Plato: as life-long enterprise, 121; as special phase of paideia, 49, 160n.2, 161n.15; conditioning, 65; enchantments, 162n.21; in music, 58&ff.; legislation, 49, 159n.1; paradoxes in Plato’s theory of nurturing, 70; solidarity, 65; the problem of knowledge, 61-6; the thumos, 33-4, 49, 55, 159n.6 Nussbaum, M., 85 oregô (‘reach out’), in Homer, 74 orexis (‘appetite’) and pathos, 73,163n.1 bouleutikê orexis (‘deliberative appetite’), 166n.5 meaning of, 74, 163n.1 orgê (‘anger’), 71, 79, 122-3

184

Index orgês dikaias (‘righteous wrath’), 142, 146 Origen, 170n.9 Padel, R., 156 pain and alazoneia, 45, 46, 48 and anger in Homer, 5, 10, 13, 14 and appetite in Plato, 34 and Aristotle: appetite and pain, 74-5; being inclined to anger, 107; in anger, 80, 82-3, 86-9, 95, 98-9; in deviant traits of anger, 104-5; issuing of commands to reason, 91-2, 96; pain and imagination in triggering anger, 90-3; pain and inclination towards anger, 107 bringing knowledge to, 55-7 etymology, 86-7 in Achilles, 21 in anger in Plato, 41-3, 45, 47 Pythagorean healing of, 29 paschô (‘suffer’), 73, 163n.2 pathos in Aristotle, 73-6 difference from ‘emotion’, 76-7 qualified, 75, 104 quality-less, 75, 82, 105 Pericles, 122-3, 157n.6 phainetai (‘appear’), 164n.7 phainomenês (‘apparent’) mistranslation, 100 phaneros (‘evident’), 101 phantasia (‘imagination’) aisthêtikê (‘sense-induced’), 90-1 as efficient cause of anger, 84-6, 94-6 bouleutikê (‘deliberative imagination’), 92 in animals, 86, 89-94, 165n.13, 166n.16 in Plato, 69

logistikê (‘calculative imagination’), 92-3 sense perception and appetite, 89-91 phileô (‘hold dear’), 17 Philo Judaeus, 141-3, 146, 147, 170nn.8&9 phrenes, 3, Achilles’, 6, Agamemnon’s phrenes 10 and pleasure and pain 13-14 and the Homeric quandary 15, 24 and the thumos 12-13 firm phrenes 11 phronimos (‘man of practical wisdom’) and the mean, 106 and the praos, 112-15 definition of, 166n.2 Pindar, 41, 63, 160n.3 Plato, see anger, appetite, cognitive psychology, dishonouring, friendship, honour, nurturing (trophê), phantasia, play, praos, quick-tempered, righteous wrath, soul, thumos play, in thumotic education, 49, 63, 160n.2 pleasure (see also ‘pain’), in anger, 13-14, 83 Plutarch, 88, 98-9, 103, 157n.5 pôs echontes (‘inclination’), 107 praos (‘gentle-tempered’) and praotês (‘gentleness’) and knowledge, 53, 161 and pain, 53 and punishment in Aristotle, 167n.9 as a Hellenic ideal, 103 as a type of character in Plato, 34, 48, 66 as Christian meekness, 146 as the virtue of anger in Aristotle, 105 etymology of, 160n.3 Judaic meaning, 171n.18

185

Index Pythagorean concept of, 32, 158n.8 Stanton, G., 166n.6 Stobaeus, 166n.1, 157-8n.6 suggnômê (‘forgiveness’), 112-14, 167n.10 suggnômonikos, 170n.9 sunesis (‘sagacity’), 112

meaning of, 49&ff. relationship to phronimos, 111-15 pros ti pôs echein (‘relation had in a certain way’), 116 psuchê (‘soul’), 25 Pythagoras 170n.7 abjured commands, 30 effect of food on psychological moods, 31 kairos and anger 30-1 measure, 27-32, 66 use of music to quell anger 29

Taylor, R., 163n.22 Tertullian, 170n.9 Thersites, 9, 13 thumos and friendly feeling in Homer, 17 and honour in Homer, 8-10 and its teleology, 18-20 etymology, 12 Homeric, 11-15 in animals, 35, 39, 51, (as anger) 70, 82, 85 in Plato, 38-40; as defender of justice, 40-1; of injustice, 41-5; shutting down of the mind, 46 thumotic education bringing knowledge to pleasure and pain, 55-6, 63 difference from conditioning, 65 during nurturing, 49 for cultivation of the praos, 50 the place of reason in, 54-7 through music 57-66 timôreô (‘punish’), 41

qualified anger, 75, 104 quality-less anger, 75, 82, 105 quick-tempered: in Plato, 41; as trait of character in Aristotle, 104 reason, as tertiary factor in controlling anger, 55-7 Renehan, R., 155n.6 righteous wrath (dikaian orgên): absence of concept in Plato, 48; absence of term in Aristotle, 146-7; as a moral imperative, 148; first appearance in Philo,142; importance in Christian thought, 135, 140; relationship to Christian Wrath of God, 142, 146-8 Romilly, J. de on êpios, 51-2, 160n.4 on praos 51, 53, 160n.3, 171n.18 on suggnômê, 114, 167n.10 Seneca, De Ira, 136-9, 168n.2, 169n.5 slighting, 87-9 Snell, B., 16, 155n.6 Socrates: and Zopyrus, 121; as ‘intellectualist’, 61-2, 64; as the model for the praos, 53-4; on the soul, 25, 33, 158n.7 soul, 25; Plato’s critique of the

virtue and alteration of how pleasure and pain are felt, 116 and commanding logos, 110-11 and prohairesis (‘forechoice’), 107-9 and ‘unreasoning impulse’, 110 as knowledge in Socrates, 61-4 intellectual virtues and anger, 112-15 of praotês, 48, 50-4, 103-7

186

Index Williams, B., 155n.6 Wilson, D., 9 Wrath of God, 68, 133, 135-6 as a corrector of sin, 146-7 day of wrath, 146 different from wrath of Greek gods, 6-8

drama of salvation and anger control, 140, 143-4 in Philo, 142-3 shutting down the mind, 145 zêlon agathon (‘noble zeal’), 148 Zopyrus, 121

187