The Most Profound Saying About Anger?

This line of elegiac poetry contains three great paradoxes

In a collection of fragments from ancient philosophers and poets, known as the Anthology of Joannes Stobaeus, there’s a section titled On Anger. It opens with a quote attributed to the poet Theognis, which may be one of the most profound sayings I’ve ever come across on this topic.

Nothing, Cyrnus, is more unjust than anger, which harms the one who possesses it, yielding to cowardly things through indignation.

For reference, here is the original Greek:

Οὐδέν, Κύρν᾽, ὀργῆς ἀδικώτερον, ἣ τὸν ἔχοντα πημαίνει, θυμῷ δειλὰ χαριζομένη.

[More literally: “Nothing, O Cyrnus, (is) more unjust than anger, (which) harms the (one) possessing (it), (anger itself) granting cowardly/wretched things as a favor/indulgence to (its) spirit/preceding passion.”]

Cyrnus is thought to have been the lover of Theognis, to whom his verses are addressed. (Some Greek manuscripts substituted the phrase “O stranger”.) This single line of elegiac verse contains three paradoxes regarding anger, which I’ll analyze in turn.

Photo by Khashayar Kouchpeydeh on Unsplash

1. Nothing is More Unjust than Anger

This means that anger is inherently hypocritical. Anger toward other people, especially in ancient thought, was typically understood as a desire for revenge in response to a perceived injustice. If anger itself is always more unjust than the perceived injustices which anger us, that is a moral contradiction. How is it possible, though, that anger could be so unjust?

Anger clouds our judgment. Nobody would expect a fair trial from a judge and jury who are enraged. Indeed, numerous modern studies provide evidence that even low intensity anger is associated with a battery of cognitive biases. In particular, angry people tend to exhibit various forms of selective thinking and confirmation bias. For instance, anger is associated with hostile attribution bias, which reduces the motivation of others to mere hostility or malice, and ignores other plausible explanations for their actions. Angry people show a negative interpretation bias, immediately construing ambiguous behaviour in the worst possible light. Angry people also tend to exhibit dichotomous (black-and-white) thinking, which leads them to divide people sharply into friends and enemies. This creates a form of extreme thinking because different expectations are applied to friends and enemies. Worse, anger almost invariably leads to the sort of rigid thinking that is convinced its actions are righteous and justified, even when they seem clearly unjust to observers.

In other words, anger, by its very nature, tends to lead to a pronounced double standard in our moral thinking. Most obviously, though we tend to apply rigid demands (“People must respect me”) to others we usually bend the rules, and make an exception to our strictness, by applying a more flexible standard that excuses our own behaviour or that of people with whom we choose to side. “Well”, we say, “people mean different things by ‘respect’ and, anyway, what one person sees as disrespectful might not have been intended that way by the person with whom they’re angry.” That’s special pleading — we act as though different rules apply when it feels as if it’s in our interests to do so. As Seneca puts it, “The sword of justice is ill-placed in the hands of an angry man” (On Anger, 1.19).

2. Anger Harms its Possessor

When we are angry, we typically feel a wish to harm the person with whom we’re angry. We may lash out physically or try to humiliate them verbally. We do this either to defend ourselves against a perceived threat or to punish the other for their perceived wrongdoing. However, it’s actually more common in our society for us to internalize our anger, and try to suppress our feelings, or ruminate about fantasies of revenge. Anger causes our blood pressure to increase more quickly and powerfully than anxiety and, as a result, chronic anger has consistently been found to correlate with health problems such as hypertension and heart disease. Anger can also lead to interpersonal problems. For instance, it may damage or destroy relationships in the workplace, or at home, between family members.

The Stoics actually go slightly further than this line of poetry and assert not only that anger harms its possessor but that it always does us more harm than the thing about which we’re angry. Other people may harm our property or reputation but they cannot injure our character unless we allow them to do so. By contrast, anger penetrates to the very core of our being, by clouding our judgment, and directly harming our ability to reason. For that reason, anger actually does us more harm, and therefore poses a greater threat to us, than anything about which we may be angry.

3. Anger Yields to Cowardly Indignation

This part of the saying requires a little more effort to unpack. The first thing to note is that a different aspect of anger has been introduced, not orge, the typical word, but thumos, which usually refers to a more primitive and instinctual feeling. I have used the word “indignation” to express this notion. In Platonism, thumos was an important term, defined as a:

forceful impulse of the non-rational part of the soul, without being ordered by reasoning and thought. — Pseudo-Plato, Definitions

In Stoic philosophy, thumos is defined as the first spark or precursor of true anger, although the Stoics did believe it was already cognitive in nature, or “ordered by thought”, to some extent. In either case, it’s a primitive emotional reaction. So it would make perfect sense here to describe full-blown anger (orge) as arising when reason yields to incipient anger (thumos).

The word translated here as “yielding” literally means doing favours for someone or, if you like, indulging them. Full-blown anger develops when we allow ourselves to indulge in our initial automatic flash of anger, and go along with the feeling, without questioning it. This initial reaction is described as “cowardly” or “wretched”. That language implies that the precursor of anger is actually a form of fear or anxiety, based on the perception that one faces a threat or has already been harmed.

This would be consistent with modern psychological research on anger, which suggests that it is often a response to a preceding feeling of hurt or anxiety. Anger consists in going along with the impression that you have been hurt or that someone threatens to harm you, or your interests. The Stoics believe that this is an error, however, on the part of the angry person. Our anger is based on a false premise because nobody, according to the Stoics, can truly harm you unless you allow them to do so. Many people in the ancient world believed that anger was a sign of strength or courage, and some people share this assumption even today. However, ironically, if anger derives from an earlier irrational fear or sense of hurt then it is, in a sense, evidence not of strength but of weakness. Anger is a form of “magical thinking”, or self-deception, that attempts to cover up our initial sense of helplessness and vulnerability. The angry person not only feels hurt but indulges in that feeling whereas a wise and temperate individual would consider the initial impression that they have been hurt to be misleading, an illusion of sorts. As the Stoics like to say, we should withhold our assent from the initial troubling impression.

Conclusion

I think that Stobaeus chose to open his collection of quotes on anger with this line because it manages to condense three very powerful philosophical observations:

Nothing, Cyrnus,
is more unjust than anger,
which harms the one who possesses it,
yielding to cowardly things through indignation.

Anger, which rages at the injustice of others, is itself profoundly unjust by nature, and a poor judge and jury. Though anger may desire payback, to return pain for pain, it often inflicts far more harm upon its own bearer than the things about which they’re enraged. And though it may make us feel temporarily powerful, anger is not strength, but weakness, because it only gains intensity by building upon our underlying sense of fear and vulnerability.