Some Thoughts about Anger

What is anger and why were philosophers so concerned by it?

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I think our society has a fundamental problem with anger, which is perpetuated by our way of talking and thinking about it. One of the most obvious issues is the way that we all, especially the most angry among us, tend to appeal to the assumption that anger is necessary as a form of motivation. Typically the claim is that we sometimes need anger in order to motivate ourselves to address injustice.

The first thing that should strike us about this claim is that it’s an implicit generalization — it’s the claim that only anger can ever solve these problems. There’s never any alternative. However, generalizations of that sort are very difficult to defend. As soon as we accept that it’s possible another emotion could replace anger and achieve the same or better results, the case for justifying anger begins to collapse, particularly because anger has obvious disadvantages or costs, which other emotions may avoid.

It’s worth detailing the disadvantages of anger at length, of course, because people often overlook or downplay them. However, there are so many that it would be something of a digression here so I’ll just mention one example. It’s well-established from research in cognitive psychology that angry people tend to underestimate risks. Angry people therefore tend to place themselves and others in danger. The consequences of that are very serious for individuals and society. Sometimes, in extreme cases, your anger can get you and even your loved ones killed.

That’s the tip of the iceberg, though. I think most people will intuitively recognize, when they think about the role of anger in history or the anger of others they’ve personally observed, that anger can lead to many other problems. It comes at a high price. So if there’s an alternative, which could motivate us to address injustice, without running those risks, it should be viewed as highly preferable.

The main point I want to address here, though, relates to another specific argument about the nature of anger. People who defend the concept of righteous anger often (but not always) argue that it benefits society by addressing injustice. However, often our actions appear to aim at one goal but, in reality, aim at another. So we have to be careful not to be misled in that regard when evaluating the costs and benefits of anger. Can we define anger, for instance, as an emotion that aims primarily at genuine social justice? Most obviously, anger is associated with the desire to punish another for their perceived transgressions — because they have done something wrong or unjust. Throughout history, therefore, many philosophers have defined anger in terms of a desire for revenge.

Justice punishes those who commit wrongdoing in order to improve them, by deterring them from doing it again. Revenge punishes others for pleasure — the personal gratification we experience from seeing our enemies suffer. Both justice and revenge may employ punishment but for different reasons, and therefore in different ways. Can we honestly say that the primary motivation in anger is to serve justice by improving the person with whom we’re angry? Do angry people mainly want to help others or to harm them?

Let’s turn the question around. Suppose someone primarily wants to improve another person by educating them, or at least using punishment to deter them from future wrongdoing. Could they be described as motivated primarily by anger? The same goes, of course, for our feelings toward groups or society as a whole. Could someone who wants only to help society, or to do it good, be described as motivated only by anger toward society? Or does anger, by its very nature, entail a desire to do harm?

In Plato's Crito, Socrates asks his oldest friend, after whom the dialogue is named, whether or not one should ever inflict evil, or harm, on other people. Of course not, says Crito. Socrates therefore asks whether it is right, as the whole world says, to repay evil with evil? Crito, who’s surely heard Socrates' argument before, says no. That would be the traditional "Law of Retaliation" (lex talionis) or "an eye for an eye", which stems from a primitive desire for revenge against our enemies.

Doing evil, or harm, to others, continues Socrates, is the same thing as doing them an injustice, which would be wrong. He follows this with a very brief but very striking monologue, worth quoting in full.

“Then we ought to neither return wrong for wrong nor do evil to anyone, no matter what he may have done to us. Be careful though, Crito, that by agreeing with this you do not agree to something you do not believe. For I know that there are few who believe this or ever will. Now those who believe it, and those who do not, have no common ground of discussion, but they must necessarily disdain one another because of their opinions. You should therefore consider very carefully whether you agree and share in this opinion. Let us take as the starting point of our discussion the assumption that it is never right to do wrong or to repay wrong with wrong, or when we suffer evil to defend ourselves by doing evil in return.” — Crito, 49c

Socrates clearly acknowledges this is a paradox — by which the Greeks meant something contrary to popular opinion or contrary to what most people would consider common sense. Nevertheless, Socrates believes that, in a sense, this conclusion should be obvious to us: when we seek primarily to harm others we inevitably make them worse when, in fact, we should be trying to make them better.

Indeed, the Greeks had a popular saying that justice consists in helping our friends and harming our enemies, discussed at length in Book 1 of Plato’s Republic. In that text, the conclusion, though perhaps implied, is never clearly stated. According to the philosopher Plutarch, though, writing centuries later, Socrates was known for saying that rather than seeking to help our friends and harm our enemies a wise, and just, man seeks to do good to his friends and to make friends of his enemies (Plutarch, Spartan Sayings).