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Why Anger Is Always Bad (Episode 53)
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They say that if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.
The Stoics don’t agree with that. In their view, anger is always bad. If you’re angry, you’re not seeing things as they are.
Caleb and Michael discuss why you’d think that in this conversation. It’s grounded in Seneca’s On Anger. Enjoy.
(02:09) Introduction
(06:57) What Is Emotion
(12:55) What Is Anger
(24:13) Why Defenses For Anger Do Not Work
(24:47) But Vengeance Is Justified
(34:16) But Anger Is Useful
(43:20) My Anger Is Controllable
(46:31) If You're Not Angry, Something Is Wrong With You
***
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Transcript
Seneca on Control and Anger
00:00:00
Speaker
I have a quote here from Seneca. They said, certain things are within our control at first, whereas the subsequent stages carry us along with a force all the route and leave us no way back.
00:00:11
Speaker
People who have jumped off a cliff retain no independent judgment and cannot offer resistance or slow the descent of their bodies in free will. That irrevocable leap strips away all deliberation and regret. Just so, once the mind has submitted to anger, love, and the other passions, its own weight must carry it along and drive it down to the depths.
Introduction to Stoic Conversations
00:00:33
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert. Sometimes you hear the slogan, if you're not angry, you're not paying attention. The Stoics did not agree.
00:00:59
Speaker
The Stoic view is explicitly anti-anger. Anger is always bad. If you are angry, you're not seeing things as they are. In this conversation, that's what Michael and I talk about.
The Harm of Anger in Stoicism
00:01:12
Speaker
Michael put together a clear and engaging presentation on the Stoic philosophy of anger, its harm, and grounds it in Seneca's work to era on anger.
00:01:24
Speaker
We start with that and then we move to discuss reasons people give to justify anger. Some say that anger is helpful, necessary, or justified in and of itself. Seneca addressed all of these points we hear today, hundreds of years ago. We talk about what he said in response to these pro-anger cases and our takes on his answers.
00:01:49
Speaker
Here is our conversation. Welcome to Stoicism and Anger.
Four Key Points on Anger
00:02:02
Speaker
Michael put in some preparatory notes, so I'll hand it off to him.
00:02:09
Speaker
Yeah, so talking today, we want to cover four points today that I put some research into and hit on this topic of stoicism and anger in general. First is, really, what is anger? What do the stoics think anger is? Why it comes up? Why it occurs? What it means to be an angry person or to feel anger?
00:02:29
Speaker
Second is this argument about why it is always bad. Stoic position on anger is that as a passion, it's never a good thing. There's some contemporary arguments that maybe anger is motivational. Maybe it's good to be angry because it shows you care about something. You know, it's very.
00:02:46
Speaker
wrong to not be angry in the face of injustice. We hear these arguments today just as those arguments were made in ancient Rome. So you go over the stoic objections to those arguments, the stoic counters to those arguments. So the stoic thinking about why anger is always wrong.
00:03:01
Speaker
Then depending on how long that discussion happens, Kale, we'll go into some practical ways to eliminate anger. Depending on the discussion, we might save that for a part two, but we'll look at that. And then finally, comments and criticisms, kind of our reflection on this stoic position on anger.
Complexity of Anger
00:03:18
Speaker
And I like anger because it's an interesting emotion for the reasons I was just talking about is that in one hand, we can think of this stereotype or this paradigm of the angry individual in a negative way.
00:03:32
Speaker
I would say, wow, look, that's that person who gets frustrated in traffic. Maybe they get frustrated over trivial things, or maybe their anger is aggressive, or maybe they're very addictive. And we have that kind of model of anger, but there's also this model of anger, righteous anger, um, indignance in the face of injustice. There's also this model of anger being a good thing in some senses. So it's a complicated emotion. It's also a very intense emotion.
00:03:57
Speaker
It's an emotion that has a real distorting effect on your entire life or the moment that you're in it at the very least. And so therapeutic approaches to it, eliminating anger is very important if you want to not succumb to those effects, but then also
00:04:13
Speaker
how should we live in responsibility? Should we succumb under its effects if it's righteous, if it's appropriate, or should we strive to never be angry no matter what? And these are the questions Stoics took really seriously, both the therapy and the philosophical approach to anger. So I wanted to, I wanted to dig into it. And it's not an abstract thing. It's not a remote thing. We all experience this every day, or we all confront this experience every day. It's not abstract, like justice or something. It's, it's, it's this
00:04:38
Speaker
part of our living. So that's the reason that I wanted to dig into it.
Physiological Impacts of Anger
00:04:42
Speaker
I should say the main text I'm working from is Seneca's on anger. When we talk about Seneca, we talk a lot about his letters on ethics, his letters to Achilles. This is a different work by Seneca. This is a short, this is a short work that he did specifically on anger as an emotion. So that's the one we'll be focusing on.
00:05:00
Speaker
I'm going to be using Robert Castor and Martha Nussbaum's recent translation for Chicago University Press. That is, I think, a great translation. And if you're looking for one to dig into more after this show, that's the one that I would recommend. And I'm going to be synthesizing a lot of their work and their commentary that's coming from this book. So some of it's going to be my own perspective from what I bring in knowing about the Stoics. Some of this is going to be what Seneca says, and some of it will be presenting Nussbaum and Castor's interpretation of Seneca.
00:05:30
Speaker
So with that out of the way, anything you want to add before we jump into it?
00:05:35
Speaker
Yeah, I'm excited to cover this. So I think anger is a good emotion to cover because it's something everyone encounters. Of course, the Stoics were ahead of the game in terms of theorizing and providing practical resources for people to avoid anger. And one aspect that makes it different from some other negative emotions we cover is that
00:06:02
Speaker
many people will come to the Stoics because they experienced a personal crisis of some sort. Perhaps they are experiencing a period of anxiety or grief or a general set of setbacks.
00:06:19
Speaker
But we hear less about people coming to stoicism because they have anger issues. There are some counter examples that come to mind, but it's not something that people experience often go out looking for help or aid, in part because there are reasons or justifications people often give
00:06:44
Speaker
for the emotion, but the stoic view on it is hardcore in the sense that they truly believe anger is never good. So that's something we should cover and think through. Yeah, great. I think that's a good point. There's a complicated relationship with anger, as you said, because people often feel it's justified, or at least, as I was saying, justified in some cases, and then there becomes a confusion. Does that case apply? Is this one of those cases where it's okay to be angry?
00:07:14
Speaker
But I think anybody who's really held anger on in their personal life knows the distorting effects, the unpleasant effect of kind of carrying that with you and the benefit of eliminating it. But in this, we'll see, I'll jump into it now, but the stoic argument is going to be, you know, we're not just eliminating it because we'll feel better. We're also eliminating it because it turns out those reasons you thought for it being justified or not actually the case will be the stoic position.
00:07:37
Speaker
So let's start off with what is anger. We have a earlier episode on, it's actually our first episode, episode one on what the Stoics thought on emotions. That's a flashback, but I'll cover it really quickly here. So emotions for the Stoic, there's this cognitive view of emotions,
Stoic Cognitive View on Emotions
00:07:56
Speaker
right? Which is this view that emotions.
00:07:58
Speaker
or some debate in the earlier Stoke school either are or are the direct results of value judgments. I think that fills out the debate. I'm not really sure how important it is whether we say emotions and passions are value judgments or there's the direct result of them. But either way, there's this necessary conduction.
00:08:17
Speaker
between value judgments and emotional responses. And that's important for two reasons. One is that it's a direct pushback to people like Plato, who would say we have a divided soul and that emotions can be generated maybe irrationally or by the part of our soul that isn't reason. And then reason combats them or tries to control them. The folks say, no, no, this is not at all the case.
00:08:40
Speaker
What you do is you make a value judgment through your reason, you judge a situation to be a certain way, and then you experience an emotion because of that. I use the tool emotion pretty interchangeably with passions, but the Stoics have this differentiation between passions, pathé, and then good feelings, you pathé. I think I call both of those emotions roughly. Passions, pathé are always bad. That's because they're false value judgments.
00:09:09
Speaker
They're feelings you experience when you represent the world incorrectly, or you think the world is a way that it's not. You path a good, they're value judgments you make that are accurate, that create feelings that correspond with the way the world is. So that's a really quick cognitive view of emotions. If you want more of that, you can go back to episode one. Physiologically too here,
00:09:35
Speaker
The Stoics were materialists, so they believed that everything was matter. And so emotions are movements, literal movements of the soul. So they describe passions, passions like anger as kind of the expansion of the soul towards some objective and then something like sadness or grief is the constriction of the soul. So there are these kind of movements of the soul, the soul being
00:10:02
Speaker
matter that imbues your body it's the the the breath that goes through your body and then when you experience that contraction or expansion that has certain physiological effects so that's why you see you know your face would flush you might start shaking if you're angry for example your heart rate might go up that's because when you're experiencing a passion experiencing anger you're experiencing an actual physiological response so they were they were really
00:10:27
Speaker
You know, earlier psychologists in this sense by saying, by tying the passions really closely with our physiological responses and changes in our bodies, not just changes in our mind or our soul or spirit or wherever anyone else might call it at the time.
Reason vs. Passion in Anger
00:10:44
Speaker
So an important thing, another important thing to note about passions and part of the reason why the Stoics were so against them is while passions begin with reason, so I make a judgment. Let's say, you know, we're talking about anger today. So I'll do an example. Somebody insults you. They call you, you know, they say you got a silly, you're wearing a silly hat. You know, you look really dumb today.
00:11:09
Speaker
And you think, well, that's a bad thing. Somebody's harmed me. That person deserves retribution. They deserve punishment for harming me. That's the right thing to do. And that's a value judgment, right? This person deserves to be harmed because they've harmed me. And that caused an expansion of your soul.
00:11:26
Speaker
And the really dangerous part of passions on the stoic account is because your, even the reason began that process, because passions are a physical response, they're an expansion of your soul. There's a kind of momentum that comes with them. And that momentum of that expansion has a distorting effect on your ability to reason later on. So if you succumb to anger, you get in this mode of anger, even though this is a thing that's, even though it is
00:11:55
Speaker
your reason that caused it to begin, you now lose control of reason because the momentum of this expansion has to kind of run its course. And the metaphor the Stokes would use for this, if they give us the example of running downhill or beginning to run, and they say, look, you decide to start running, but once you start running, you can't just stop in the moment. The momentum carries you along. So even if you're saying, well, I gotta stop running, I shouldn't be angry, this is a silly reason to be angry,
00:12:25
Speaker
The passion carries you along. It continues along. And that was really dangerous for the Stokes because even though everything came down to value judgements, everything comes down to reason, there's no irrational part of yourself. The momentum of reason and the pulling of the passions can, can distort that reason and prevent it from acting appropriately. So that's, that's a Stokesism 101 really quickly. Anything for you to add before I carry on?
00:12:52
Speaker
No, I don't have anything to add on that front. Yeah, that was what the world put. Cool. So that's an overview of emotions and the danger of passions. So now what is anger? Anger is a type of emotion. It's different than sadness. It's different than, you know, I would say grief, fear, jealousy, because it comes from a different kind of judgment. So the emotions are different because they're based on different kinds of judgments.
00:13:16
Speaker
Anger specifically, to quote Seneca, here is to say, the desire to take vengeance for a wrong or the desire to punish a person by whom you reckon you were unjustly harmed. I would say you probably would want to expand that out to you being unjustly harmed or someone else you care about being unjustly harmed. That might fall into that first definition, the desire to take vengeance for a wrong.
00:13:40
Speaker
So anger is the judgment that you were harmed. It's appropriate or good to take vengeance on someone for that harm as well. So how does anger work then, if that's what anger is? What's the process?
00:13:56
Speaker
The process here, oh, one thing I should add before I move forward. Excuse me. I've been talking about passions and you path a good feelings. There's also another distinction here for the stoics, which is proto passions. So proto passions are kind of preemotions. So the preemotions you feel you experience.
00:14:16
Speaker
They're biologically necessary as rational animals, but they're comparatively weaker. So a proto-passion would be the example of you flinch from lightning versus your friend who is genuinely afraid from the storm.
00:14:32
Speaker
You might be going through a storm with a friend, lightning strikes. You're going to flinch every time lightning strikes, but that's different than your friend who's having an anxiety attack or being
Anger's Progression to Madness
00:14:41
Speaker
very concerned. That person's experiencing a passion. You're experiencing proto-passions every time the lightning goes off, but then those reside.
00:14:50
Speaker
I wanted to go through here what Seneca says on the, with that conceptual framework in place, I want to go through what Seneca said about how anger works bit by bit, and I think you'll be able to make sense of it, or anybody listening will be able to make sense of it with that conceptual background in place. So how does anger work? This is to quote Seneca. He says, first, there's an involuntary movement, a preparation for the passion as it were, and a kind of threatening signal. That's that proto-passion we were just talking about.
00:15:19
Speaker
Then there's a second movement accompanied by an expression of will not yet stubbornly resolved to the effect that I should be avenged since I've been harmed or this man should be punished since he's committed a crime. So there's that proto-passion first. Then the second movement is you experience the
00:15:41
Speaker
You're reflecting upon the kind of judgment that would lead itself fully to anger if you agreed upon it. You experience the expression or the cognition of, I should be avenged since I've been harmed. And then Seneca goes on, the third movement's already out of control. It desires vengeance, not if it's appropriate, but come what may, having overthrown reason.
00:16:04
Speaker
So to go over that again, three movements, proto-passion we all receive in similar kinds of situations. Second is an assent to a judgment, so cognition that I should be avenged since I've been harmed. And then we ascend to it, we experience that second movement. And then third, that assent results in a passion, that's the third movement, which then seeks revenge regardless of how we reason moving forward.
00:16:27
Speaker
So I think that's cool. That's the conceptual framework of how anger occurs. That's the three-step process. It can seem complicated, but when we lay it out like that, again, proto-passion, assent to a judgment. And then once you're in the throne of that judgment, the movement is just carrying you along. The anger is taking you along in that process.
00:16:46
Speaker
So at a really high level is what is anger? It's nothing, it's nothing irrational. It's nothing to do with kind of the spirit or the soul in a non-rational way. It is, it is an ascent to a judgment that we've been harmed and it's, it's appropriate to get revenge or some injustice has happened and it's appropriate to get revenge. And then it's also the experiencing of that, of that passion moving forward.
00:17:12
Speaker
So that's very clearly laid out. We have these three steps. There's the stimulus and our initial involuntary reaction, and then an agreement or decision, a judgment, which then will result in the passion of anger. I think it's a few notes on that that might be useful to keep in mind are the thought that
00:17:39
Speaker
Anger for the Stoics really is a kind of madness. One loses a sense of self-control. One becomes, in Seneca's words, unmindful of personal ties. Unrelentingly intent on anger's goal shut off from rational deliberation.
00:18:02
Speaker
And that's the thought that once you're in this last stage, anger has overleaped or overcome reason. You have agreed to release your rational grip on the world. So the madness metaphor, I think is a really good one, right? Because
00:18:25
Speaker
When somebody's mad, they can't be reasoned with is the idea. They're not receptive to reason. As you said, Senate Connections, they're not clued into their family relationships, their other roles, their other obligations. They've set themselves off in their own separate reality, right? That's not responsive to reasons. I mean, that's what I would say. That's how I would define madness, as I would say, you know, somebody who's mad is not.
00:18:46
Speaker
is not kind of receptive to reasons in the way other people are. They're not experiencing them or seeing them in the same way. That's different than someone who just disagrees with you. This is a person who can't be reasoned with because they're not responsive or interpreting things in the same way. So madness takes you up in that.
00:19:04
Speaker
So because the stoic goal is to be rational, right? Virtue is to act in accordance. The reason it's to do what you should do because you think it's the right thing to do, because you've reasoned it's the correct thing to do.
00:19:19
Speaker
because of that passion or madness because of anger is antithetical to any sort of good behavior because then you're not doing it out of reason anymore you're doing it because the momentum is pulling you along you're doing it because the madness is compelling you and that we will see that in Seneca later on but this idea of
00:19:43
Speaker
If you can't do it for the right reasons, you didn't really understand what was good about it. And if you need to be angry to do it, your
00:19:53
Speaker
You're kind of missing the point. And that's in kind of the righteous anger perspectives. And then obviously people who are angry that don't want to be angry, they're just like, they're just in a sense where they're very sensitive. They're like, I don't want to be in the grips of this thing anymore, right? When I'm not angry, I realize how ridiculous it is that this triggers me, that this sets me off, that this ticks me off, but I can't help it when it happens, right? It grabs me, it pulls me along.
00:20:17
Speaker
and people that are suffering from anger in that way just want to be free from the madness and people that are righteous about their anger saying things are really missing the point. So that's why it would be a bad thing, which I didn't hit on. I hit scriptively on what it's on and that's a bit of why it would be a bad thing. Yeah, it's a bad thing because
00:20:38
Speaker
I suppose you are releasing your ability or you're losing your ability to reason, to come to correct judgments for the right reasons. You might, just like any kind of madness, have the right beliefs.
00:20:56
Speaker
But when you're truly mad, you're a loose cannon. You can come up with some correct beliefs, but maybe also some kinds of delusions, which often is what you see in states of anger. Of course, the person's not completely delusional, but they'll blow things out of proportion or be relentlessly intent on getting revenge, even when doing so makes no sense at all.
00:21:23
Speaker
Another reason that Seneca gives for thinking anger is bad, which is not the central stoic reason, but he does hammer on in the essay on anger, is just that it results in so many terrible effects. He says, no pestilence has been more costly for the human race.
00:21:47
Speaker
butchery and poisoning, suits and countersuits, cities destroyed, entire nations wiped out, leading citizens sold on the auction block, dwellings put to torch, then the blaze, unchecked by the city walls, turning vast tracts of land, bright with the attacking flame. Which does seem like the, you know, this is just what we often what we will see, the results of anger are terrible and tragic.
00:22:15
Speaker
Yeah. And I think what's being important, what's interesting here when you hear Seneca talk about like that is that he's wrapping up cold calculation into this, right?
Immediate Reactions vs. Long-term Grudges
00:22:26
Speaker
Revenge, vengeance. Like anger does not just have to be the spur of the moment. Like I'm in a, I'm in a tussle. I'm in a fight. Somebody, you know, somebody insulted me and now I'm yelling at them. It can be this thing that you carry with you, you hold onto.
00:22:40
Speaker
suit and countersuit right lawsuit and then I'm well screw them I'm gonna sue them back because they tried to get at me and that's the thing you can be holding on to over a period of years right so it's not just this flash in the pan it is also that and he also you know provides advice for how we avoid those kinds of situations but it's not just the flash in the pan it's that kind of
00:23:01
Speaker
that belief that you carry with you that somebody else deserves to be harmed because they did harm to you or to somebody else and that you hold on over time. Which I think is interesting. I think when we think of anger, nowadays it's often that immediate reaction, not that long-term revenge or vengeance.
00:23:22
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose you have some thematic depictions of it. If you think about the Revenant, there's one reading of that. I don't know if you've seen that. This is Leonardo DiCaprio, right? Yeah, with Leonardo DiCaprio. There's one depiction of holding on to revenge. One might even argue for a justified revenge through time. Yeah, and ultimately, what the Stoics are going to argue is that
00:23:50
Speaker
Anytime you're holding on to that revenge over time, you're harming yourself, right? You're really doing bad by yourself. I suppose if it's motivated by anger as opposed to being motivated by the right thing to do, which I think is maybe difficult to differentiate sometimes, but we're talking about fringe cases now. Yeah.
00:24:09
Speaker
So I wanted to get into the second part.
Counterarguments to Anger
00:24:12
Speaker
So that was what anger is. The second part I wanted to get into is why is it always bad? And I think another way to frame this is we're talking about why it's bad. And now what Seneca is going to counter here in his work on anger is people are going to provide counter arguments for saying, well, you know.
00:24:31
Speaker
I know anger sometimes bad, but it's sometimes good too. And Seneca goes through and really knocks down these counter-arguments one by one. And I think they're really fun. I think they're really good. And so I wanted to go through each of them one by one.
00:24:46
Speaker
So the first counter argument, I would say is the first objection to anger being bad is the objection from, I would say the objection from justice. So the claim that sometimes people need to be scolded or punished, sometimes justice demands vengeance. And so Seneca's response to this, his counter to the argument from justice is that you can scold or punish without allowing yourself to feel angry.
00:25:13
Speaker
And the argument that he makes here, he says, think of a parent with a child. Sometimes you might feign intensity, but that doesn't mean becoming internally angry. So if somebody deserves to be punished, you can punish them without being angry at them. If it is the right thing to do to throw somebody in jail, you can throw them in jail without hurling insults, without hating them, without wishing they were dead.
00:25:36
Speaker
If you're a parent and a child does something wrong, you can punish that child without becoming angry. And so in each of these cases, you can do what justice demands of you.
00:25:48
Speaker
without necessarily succumbing without succumbing to anger anger isn't necessary to To get to that to get to that other state and to do what is best for either your relationships or for the other person. So that's That's the first objection for why anger might be good. It's an objection from justice and then his counter arguments so if anger is the desire to take vengeance for a wrong
00:26:17
Speaker
And one question is, is it ever just to desire vengeance for wrong? Is it ever just to punish someone for doing something wrong? If so, isn't anger justified?
00:26:31
Speaker
Yeah, I wrote this, I wrote these notes, Gail, but as soon as I said that, I went back to the definition. I was like, huh, I guess, I guess off the top here, I would think about looking at this definition he persuaded. The desire to take vengeance for a wrong or the desire to punish a person by whom you reckon you were unjustly harmed. And so both of those two, vengeance depends on what we mean by vengeance and depends on what we mean by punishment.
00:26:56
Speaker
And so I think in those cases, if you interpret both of those as I want to hurt that person because that person deserves to be hurt. I think in both those cases, we can say, we can say justice never demands that. And I think that would be Seneca's line, but in some cases they may deserve to be punished legally. They might deserve to be punished in terms of the social obligations of the group, but I guess not.
00:27:24
Speaker
I would say that seems to me the argument would be something along the lines of to harm them for the sake of harming them, to get pleasure from their pain, to think that the wrong is righted by seeing them suffer just for the sake of them suffering would never be the case. I would guess is the argument here.
00:27:44
Speaker
So the definition that it's a desire to take vengeance because you believe you were unjustly harmed. And that latter part is especially important because ultimately what makes anger rest or either rest or be identical with a false judgment is that you believe you've been harmed by doing so you're placing value on indifference.
00:28:12
Speaker
and assuming that indifference are what will ultimately make your life go better or worse. So perhaps it's justified to desire to punish someone because that is what your role demands. That's what the city demands. That's what is needed for justice.
00:28:35
Speaker
But it cannot rest on this idea that your means for happiness has been removed by the other person. You have not been harmed in that sense. Yeah, that makes sense to me. And that's a really good distinction, Caleb. I think that makes sense to me. It also highlights the kind of personal nature of anger.
00:28:57
Speaker
So, you know, I'm trying to think of a metaphor from art, but I'm thinking of like Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator or something. Imagine there was someone who came and they said like, I'm going to find you because it's my job. You know, like I've been paid to bring you to jail or I've been prayed to hunt you down and get revenge. It's kind of an action movie. That's not, that person is not motivated by anger, right? It's not, it's not this, it's not this soul consuming thing because even if they're, even if they're a hit man and they're being motivated by money,
00:29:26
Speaker
It's not the conception that I've been harmed. I'm going to get revenge for that or someone I love has been harmed. It's taking out that personal aspect of it. So maybe like, you know, not saying the hitman had it right, but it's not this, it's not this character piece of anger in those kinds of scenarios. It's not that personal aspect of vengeance. It's just, I'm coming for you. I'm coming to get you. And so that anger and vengeance have that personal aspect. I think you're dead on this mistaken view.
00:29:53
Speaker
that I'm harmed, I've had my capacity to be happy, taken away from myself by this other person and what they've done. And now I've got to come for them to make it right.
00:30:04
Speaker
Right, right. It brings to mind the story from Diogenes Lyertus about Zeno, Zeno of Sidium, the founder of Stoicism. There's a story where one of his servants, I think, stole his shoe or something of this sort, and Zeno catches him and prepares to punish him, and the servant says, I was fated to do this, it's not my fault. With, of course, referencing the idea that
00:30:29
Speaker
Stoics believe in determinism that everything is going to unfold, not as a matter of chance or any form of contingency, but unfold as they must. Everything will happen because of the past states of the universe. Everything is necessitated by past states of the universe, to be more precise.
00:30:52
Speaker
And Zeno replies that, well, I'll punish you because that is my fate as well. And the thought there would be if punishment was the right thing to do in that circumstance, well, ought to be motivating Zeno, wouldn't it be anger that he has faced some personal slight, whether this is the correct thing to do in the circumstances.
00:31:15
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's dead on. That's a great story. It's a funny story, kind of dark, but a funny one. It does show exactly what the stoics are getting at here. It's like, I think this is my appropriate role in this position. It's not like I'm coming for you because I think you harmed me, right? And you can see that kind of distortion, that personal aspect and really silly instances of anger, right? Like something like road rage. I always think back to road rage, one, because it's the type of anger that I succumb to, not in like an extreme way. I wasn't like a,
00:31:43
Speaker
I wasn't threatening anybody or flipping anybody off. But like when I used to have to drive in traffic, I would get angry. I would get frustrated. And I would also be like, this is so silly. Why am I frustrated? I'm just like, I'm doing my commute.
00:31:56
Speaker
But you attribute this kind of personal, like that person cut me off or that person, you know, slowed down my driver was inconsiderate to me. And it's these kinds of personal attributions that get blown out of proportion is a way on one end of things. Anger kind of kind of happened. It's also kind of persecute. I think it speaks to a kind of persecution complex because there's one thing about like, okay, well, how can you be less angry if you're angry sometimes? But when you look at angry people,
00:32:21
Speaker
What are angry people like? And I think they're often the kinds of people that think their happiness is rather fragile, think that it's pretty dependent on other people, or have a kind of persecution complex, or that can sometimes manifest in a blaming complex. Like, wow, you did this terrible thing. How could you do that? And it's this really kind of hyperobsession on themselves and how they're being harmed.
00:32:46
Speaker
That's anecdotal, you know, I don't have a advanced psychology background, but that's kind of my anecdotal reading of angry people. No, I think that's exactly right. I think that's why Marcus Aurelius reminds himself, you know, in the morning I will face people who are rude, boorish, inconsiderate, and selfish, and so on. And he does that because to expect
00:33:11
Speaker
anything else would be to succumb to a rational form of optimism that can certainly lead to entitlement. The thought that you expect people to have certain forms of behavior when that's frustrated can easily lead to these feelings of frustration and then explode into an all-out passion or wrath.
00:33:38
Speaker
Yeah, totally. And again, building on that, it's not like when you kind of say, I like that, I like the, another Marcus Aurelius quote about expecting a fig tree to produce figs. And it's the same kind of thing of like today I'll meet, you know, selfish people that, that quote that he has, but also to say, this is just the way
Mitigating Anger through Perspective
00:33:59
Speaker
that they are. And so they're not going out of their way to harm me. They're not intentionally, you know,
00:34:05
Speaker
focusing on me and ruining my day, they're just being themselves and I'm just kind of bumping into them while they be themselves. And that helps remove the kind of personal aspect of it. And I find that very calming for myself. I wanted to jump into the second argument people in favor, the pro-anger people would argue for.
00:34:24
Speaker
So the second argument that's pro-anger is, I say it's the argument from utilities. The first is the argument of justice. They say, look, sometimes anger is the right thing. Sometimes it's right to get vengeance or punish people. And I think we agreed Seneca would say, yes, but never because they harmed you. That's the wrong way of focusing on it. And so it doesn't need anger to do it.
00:34:45
Speaker
The second pro-anger argument is the one from utility. So this is to say we can use anger as an ally because it's useful. It's very motivationally intense. So when we need to get something important done, it's good to be angry about it because it gets things done.
00:35:00
Speaker
I see this a lot in the contemporary political scene, this idea of we need to rally people up, we need to get the emotions going, we need to get people in a passionate state so that they can get out there and they can do work. Anger is a tool that you want to tap into. Seneca's response to this is, look, when we're angry, we lose control of reason.
00:35:24
Speaker
And so reason cannot harness a passion because passion overpowers reason and makes us do things we would not agree to do or to want to do when we're not angry. So you can't use a tool if the tool takes control of you.
00:35:40
Speaker
So this whole metaphor of passion is a tool that'll harness or anger is a tool that are harnessed. Well, the tool controls the harnesser, takes over the harnesser, makes them do things they wouldn't have agreed to beforehand. And in that case, it's not a very effective tool, is it? Right. Like you have a.
00:35:57
Speaker
I'm trying to think of all these silly metaphors as I go, but bear with me. It's like you got a rocket attached to your car and they go, well, it's great. It's going to make me go faster. And you turn the rocket on and you spin out and you crash or you go off in the other direction. It's like, well, let's say, you know, some help that was right. That's kind of, that's his position on anger.
00:36:14
Speaker
And so Aristotle, Seneca, I love this. I love when Seneca references Aristotle because he's engaging in the same kind of conversation the same way we're talking about Seneca today. Seneca was referencing Aristotle and going back to it. So Seneca actually quotes Aristotle here and says, Aristotle takes this argument for utility. He says, anger is necessary and nor can any struggle be carried to victory without it. It must fill the mind and kindle the spirit, but it must be employed as a foot soldier, not the general.
00:36:42
Speaker
So Aristotle's quote here from Seneca is that Plato idea that it's a tool to be harnessed, harnessed. You can't do anything good without it. But it's got to be the foot soldier, can't be the general. Reason has to be in control. Seneca says, look, this is wrong. What Seneca says is, consider barbarians who are better fighters than the Romans, but lose because they're angry. They're not cold and impassionate, Seneca says, like the Roman army. Or we think of gladiators.
00:37:10
Speaker
who win because of their skill but lose when they get enraged. So he says look this this idea that you do better when you're angry this is not there's no evidence for this empirically. When we look at empirical examples we go out and we look into the world we say look look you know you want to use this example of battle Aristotle well look at look at the Romans against
00:37:33
Speaker
The barbarians, the Romans win because they're not angry, even though they would lose in hand-to-hand combat. Look at gladiators, the ones that win are the ones that stay cool, calm, and collected. So your argument, it doesn't bear out in reality. That's Seneca's response to the argument from utility. Right, right. An explicit strategy in sports and competitive sports is to try and raise your opponent so that they make a mistake. It's not to try, you know, put them in a state where they're reasoning calmly.
00:38:04
Speaker
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With Stoa, you can really get a sense of how to take yourself out of your thoughts and get a sense of how to handle different, difficult situations. Find it available for a free download in the Play Store and App Store. Something else he says that is very insightful here, which is a thought that if one listens to reasons and follows where it leads, it's no longer anger, which has defiance as it's defining trait.
00:39:06
Speaker
So that suggests that people who sometimes make this argument are not referring to anger, but they're referring to a kind of motivation they've received that they can rationally control.
00:39:26
Speaker
Because if they couldn't, then it would be anger, but if they can in fact rationally control it or continue to reason, then they are not in fact angry. Which brings to mind the conversation I had with Donald Robertson, where he mentioned a common mistake people make when talking about
00:39:47
Speaker
emotions is that they have this lump theory of emotions. They justify things by their anxiety or anger, but if you really drill down into what's going on before you get specific, often there's many different ingredients that make up what we call anxiety, what we call anger. So perhaps in some cases where someone's objecting along these lines, they've, in fact, will be better described not as having
00:40:17
Speaker
anger, but being motivated for some other reason. Whether or not that reason provides adequate justification is a different discussion, and probably sometimes it does and other times it does not. I thought that was a compelling point from Seneca.
00:40:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's super really smart. And go back to that sport analogy, you know, the NBA playoffs just finished, I mean, hockey playoffs did too, but I'm more of a basketball guy. And you say, you think of trash talk, which happens all the time in the NBA, you're trying to get people angry, trying to get people off their game, because you're insulting them, you're getting in their head. That's anger.
00:40:55
Speaker
People having a little pump-up talk before the game, people getting motivated, getting hyped up, that's not anger, that's something else. The way I was understanding your point, Caleb, was look, as you develop your emotional intelligence, you're not always able to parse these out or really separate them.
00:41:11
Speaker
So sometimes you feel this intense feeling and you do things really well. And sometimes you feel this intense feeling and things don't go the way you wanted. And you're not able to parse out the difference. Well, one time was motivation, intensity, focus. Another time was anger. And so you lump them together and say, well, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But I think that's really a nuanced point that, look, if it's working, it's not anger. Because the thing that anger does is distort
00:41:41
Speaker
control, defiant to reason. So if it's working as a tool for reason, it's not anger, it's something else. And part of the progression is to be able to, emotional progression and progress is to be able to differentiate those feelings, not lump them, as you were saying.
00:41:56
Speaker
which I think is right to make that more concrete. I suppose keep on using a sports analogy, which is always always useful if someone is trash talking you and saying you cannot win. You will lose. You know, you are worse than me. The one way to respond to those remarks is to sort of is to lose it and think.
00:42:13
Speaker
you know, there's no way that who is this person? This person is not only athletically terrible, they're also a bad person, you know, they deserve to suffer in all sorts of ways. And that sounds a lot like anger, but there's another response to that which is that
00:42:29
Speaker
No, I will win. I am not worse than this person. And objectively, those statements can be made true, but it takes some amount of emotional intelligence to distinguish between that first reaction, which is closer to a blow up, and the second one, which is a different form of motivation.
00:42:52
Speaker
Yeah, great. I think one kind of focuses on the harm, right? What is this person saying? How can this person be lying? What right do they have to say these things to me? And then the other is just a kind of way of refocusing yourself and being like, well, I am better. I will win. I will prove this person wrong. None of those statements really have harm in them. I think that's probably a key differentiator.
00:43:16
Speaker
So moving on, because I have two more of these, I think they're quite fun. So the third objection or the third pro-anger argument is one that Seneca knocks down. I would say the argument from harmlessness. So this would be we don't need to abstain from anger entirely because people can control themselves by anger. So it's kind of say, hey,
00:43:37
Speaker
Why are you blowing this up into such a big deal, calling anger a temporary madness, calling it so defiant? You know, the anger is not that big of a deal. Sometimes I'm angry and that's just part of life. That's okay. It's not a thing I need to never feel. It's not a thing I need to always avoid, right? Kind of downplaying the significance.
00:43:58
Speaker
And so Seneca's response here is, look, if reason is dictating your behavior, then you didn't need anger in the first place. So if reason is dictating, if you're still in control,
00:44:11
Speaker
then there was no benefit to having anger. You could have gone without it and things would have been the exact same. If you're not in control, then anger is actually harmful. So, Seneca's point here would be, is to rephrase that I would say something along the lines of, why risk it?
00:44:31
Speaker
If it's there, but harmless, I would say it's not really anger, but also there's no point in it being there at all because you're just being rational. And if it's there and is adding harm, well, then there's a problem. I have a quote here from Seneca that I thought was a really good one. He said, certain things are within our control at first, whereas the subsequent stages carry us along with a force all the route and leave us no way back.
00:45:00
Speaker
People who have jumped off a cliff retain no independent judgment and cannot offer resistance or slow the descent of their bodies in free will. That irrevocable leap strips away all deliberation and regret. Just so, once the mind has submitted to anger, love, and the other passions, its own weight must carry it along and drive it down to the depths. So, the point here is that, look,
00:45:27
Speaker
we can, something can feel harmless and then become very dangerous very quickly too.
00:45:35
Speaker
So the metaphor here of, look, you're in control as you're walking towards the cliff, but once you step off, you're not in control anymore and you have no choice. So the flirtation with anger can feel very harmless, can feel like there's no big deal until you step off the cliff.
The Cliff Metaphor of Anger
00:45:50
Speaker
You're walking along the edge, then once you step off, you can't come back, you're falling. And your body's just, again, that physical metaphor, your body's momentum has to go where the body's momentum is going. The emotional momentum of the anger has to take you where it's going.
00:46:03
Speaker
So, so his point here, again, using the metaphor would be, look, don't walk next to the edge of the cliff and say, look how harmless this cliff is. Walk a mile inland. Don't ever have the risk of stepping off because if you're walking on that edge there, it can be harmless in the moment. And then one wrong step can, it can be really, really bad. That's my way of framing it. What do you think? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, I think that's a great line. It's a great line for Seneca.
00:46:29
Speaker
Do you want to touch on the last objection? Yeah, let's do it. So last one, and this one I think is really philosophically interesting. So the last objection pro anger is that is the one from moral goodness. So this is the idea that good people need to get angry when something unjust happens, or they aren't good. You see this a lot.
00:46:48
Speaker
I see this a lot, where I did my PhD as a school of contemporary political philosophy, it's very heavy in that, and there's this view of some political philosophy and also just in politics in general that if you're not outraged by something, there's something very wrong with you. A lot of that has to do, I think, correctly with the cognitive view of emotions as people are plugging in and saying, look, I care about this.
00:47:12
Speaker
I care about, I don't know, animal rights. I care about justice in this court case. So when that justice doesn't arrive, I'm upset. And the fact that you're not upset shows me that you don't care. That's the folk psychology understanding. That's kind of the reasoning that I think is going on, whether that's explicit or not explicit. But Seneca's response to this, again, similar to what we've heard before, he says, look, good people will be motivated by a sense of duty, not by anger.
00:47:39
Speaker
And his quote here, what I really like, he says, why are you afraid that a proper sense of devotion won't goad him sufficiently, even without anger, goading someone like yourself?
00:47:49
Speaker
If my father is being killed, I will defend him. If he has been killed, I will see the matter to its proper conclusion. But I know that's right. Not because I feel a grievance. I will take it to its proper conclusion because I know it's the right thing to do. Not because I feel I've been harmed. Right? That point we were hitting on earlier.
00:48:10
Speaker
And so Seneca's point is that you do not need to be angry to do good things. You just need to be motivated by a sense of duty, motivated by a sense of knowing that is the right thing to do. And that can motivate you. Anger is not required. And it can show that you care about the thing, right? You know, if my father is being killed, I will defend him.
00:48:34
Speaker
because I care about the life of my father, but I don't require anger to motivate that and I'm not a bad person or a worse person if when I do go about
00:48:52
Speaker
You know, following the course of whatever's required after my father's been killed. I don't do that with a lot of emotion or a lot of, a lot of anger specifically. That doesn't make me a bad person. It doesn't mean I'm missing something important in the situation.
00:49:05
Speaker
I think a lot of that connects back to our first idea where we really got down to this idea of harm. It's an idea when you obsess about the harm, when you focus on the harm, that is when it leads into anger. But you can motivate, you can obsess or focus or be motivated by the good. This is the right thing to do. This is what should be done. This is what my duty to my father requires of me. This is what my duty to another human being I see being harmed requires of me.
00:49:31
Speaker
You can be motivated by that, not by this negative conception of harm. And so you can be a good person without being an angry person. You can be a politically effective person, an interpersonally helpful person, somebody who goes around correcting wrongs, goes around caring about other people without having to be an angry person. And I think that's a really beautiful
00:49:54
Speaker
emotional picture to aspire to. Again, just going back to that line, if my father is being killed, I will defend him. If he has been killed, I'll see the matter to a proper conclusion. But I'll do it because I know that it's right, not because I feel a grievance. I really love that image. It's something that I try to focus on myself.
00:50:13
Speaker
I think what it does is it calls and makes a demand for Stoics to communicate, to show that they care about people, the people they're surrounded with. This objection is similar to objections people have to the Stoic attitude about grief. I think there's a common view that you ought to bind your welfare to the welfare of other people.
00:50:43
Speaker
And when they are grieving, you should grieve as well. When they have been unjustly treated and are angry, you should share in that anger. And the way you communicate your love, your care for the other person is in part because you've bound up your welfare to experience these negative emotions when the other person is experiencing them as well.
00:51:08
Speaker
And if the stoic's not going to do that, the onus on them is to show that love or care in their actions and commitments otherwise. So that's what I take away from this objection, which is for me the deepest objection to the stoic attitude towards anger and their other negative emotions like grief as well.
00:51:35
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, just the, just the copy of what you said, but just it really hit home to me. Yeah, Caleb, one of the things I love about this, doing this podcast with you is it's not just, it's not just, it's not just sharing things we already know. I find these discussions really help kind of push my understanding forward. I mean, this is one of those cases. I really love that picture of what you just said about, you know, you got to show you're a good person through your actions.
00:51:59
Speaker
You got to show you're correctly oriented, you care about the right things through your actions. So it's one thing, it's fine to not get angry, but you have to not get angry and then see the matter to its proper conclusion. It's fine maybe to not grieve or to share that grief, but you should still take care of the person that's grieving. Maybe use your lack of grief to an advantage, which is help out with things they're not really able to do right now.
00:52:27
Speaker
take on extra responsibility, this idea of, look, anger and grief are not necessities, but the stoic ideal is not detachment and say, well, I'm not going to be angry or grief, but I'm also not going to help you. That's wrong too. You don't need anger and grief to be a good person or to be relating to the situation properly, but you do need to live up to the kind of those, you do need to act in a way that's proper in those kinds of situations.
00:52:58
Speaker
Absolutely. Excellent. Well, is there anything else you want to touch on?
00:53:02
Speaker
So for those listening, I guess a little teaser for what's coming up next. Stay tuned for part two, because we have Seneca's advice on how to eliminate anger. So it's kind of therapeutic advice. And then more comments, criticisms, perspectives from Caleb and I. So Caleb will do that in another episode, because we try to keep these to around 45 minutes to an hour. But that'll be part two, the therapeutic recommendations of Seneca in relation to anger.
00:53:31
Speaker
Today was what it was, how it works, and, you know, counter arguments from the stoic perspective for people that are pro-anger or think anger has some sort of benefit in support of Seneca's position that anger is always bad. That's it. Awesome. Thanks for putting this together. Yeah. Thanks for listening, everyone.
00:53:52
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoic Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use, and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast so every bit of help goes a long way.
00:54:07
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.