On Anger Introduction
ROBERT A. KASTER
The Treatise
Sometime near the middle of the first century CE, Senecaâs brother Annaeus Novatus asked him to âprescribe a way of soothing angerâ (1.1.1). That, at any rate, is Senecaâs claim in the first sentence of On Anger.1 Writingâor purporting to writeâin response to such a request was a long-established convention of polite letters, and it would be understood that the âyouâ whom Seneca addresses throughout the treatise represents a broad group of people beyond Novatus himself. Also conventional is the form that Seneca gave his response, a combination of theory and therapy in which the latter presupposes the former. Within the Stoic tradition that Seneca followed, the great philosopher Chrysippus (ca. 280â207 BCE) had written on the passions in four books that similarly presented his understanding of what the passions were before giving advice on how to cure them; and not quite one hundred years before Seneca took up the topic of anger, Cicero had done the like in the Tusculan Disputationsâthe only discussion of the passions in classical Latin more extensive than Senecaâsâwhen he explained and assuaged grief in particular (Book 3) and the passions more generally (Book 4).2
The idea that our affective responses to life might require âtherapyâ will not seem odd in our own therapy-conscious culture, nor was it unique to the Stoics in antiquity: for example, the Epicurean Philodemus, in the first century BCE, included a therapeutic section in his own On Anger, and Plutarch, an adherent of Plato, wrote On Controlling Anger two generations after Seneca. But the Stoics took up the topic with special urgency, because alone among all ancient philosophical sects they believed (for reasons we will consider below) that the passions as we commonly know them are an evil per se. For the Stoics, the only sure therapy for the passions is their eradication. Following this doctrine, and focusing on anger because of its especially dreadful effects, Seneca divides his three books almost exactly in half: in Book 1 and the first half of Book 2 he defines anger in orthodox Stoic terms, defends that conception of anger against objections, and analyzes the sequence of perceptions and judgments that constitute the passion; he then turns to angerâs therapy in the rest of Book 2 and all of Book 3.3 We can take a similar line, addressing first the theory and then the therapy in the two sections following. At the end we can briefly consider Senecaâs conception of his audience and the way he speaks in trying to heal them.
The Theory
Stoicism treats the passions as central to ethics in a way and to a degree unparalleled in other ancient philosophical systems: one would not go too far to say that thoroughly understanding Stoic views on the passions requires thoroughly understanding Stoic views on being human. Fortunately, we do not need to attempt that thorough understanding for the purposes at hand, because Senecaâs On Anger is itself far from being a thorough Stoic account of the passions.4 Because Seneca is concerned less with the theory for its own sake than with the therapy based upon it, he gives only as much of the former as he considers necessary for the latter.5 We can follow suit, first sketching some general principles in fairly broad strokes before concentrating on the points that Seneca treats as essential.
To start, letâs consider the normative human beings who represent the Stoic ideal, the people understood to live the best human life: the wise. If such people happened to exist (and they are, at best, extraordinarily rare), they would live exactly as natureâwhich is to say, the providential god who orders the universeâequipped them to live: hence the Stoic doctrine that the best human life is the life âaccording to nature.â Two elements of that natural equipment are especially important in themselves and in their bearing on the passions. The first is an innate impulse that we would probably call the âsurvival instinctâ and that the Stoics called âappropriationâ (oikeiosis): from earliest childhood we naturally regard ourselves as proper objects of our own concern, and that concern impels us to seek what promotes our health and well-being.6 Second, and most important of all natureâs endowments, there is the capacity for reason that mature human beings, alone of all animals, have in common with the gods. To a significant degree, the best human life simply consists in combining these two elements of our natural makeup, using our reason to seek what is good for ourselves.
But the matter is not as simple as that formulation makes it seem, becauseâhere the brushstrokes must be especially broadâmost of us have great difficulty recognizing that what is good for us is not just what is good for us as living creatures (the âcreature comfortsâ), but what is good for us specifically as human beings with the special capacities humans have. Just because of those capacities, the only thing that is truly good and choiceworthy in itself is virtue, and virtue is nothing other than the mindâs sure and consistent exercise of reason (conversely, the only thing that is truly evil in itself is vice, which is nothing other than the failure of reason). If our minds always conformed to this good, all our judgments would be valid and all our beliefs would be true, consistent, and mutually supporting: we would have not merely beliefs but knowledge. A rational mind of that sort, consistently making its sure judgments and right choices, acts âaccording to nature,â and that action just is the final good, which just is virtue: traits like courage or temperance or loyalty that are called virtues are just the capacities of the rational mind to make right choices in particular circumstances. And because these are the actions of our own minds, they are always under our own control. As the Stoics put it, they are always âup to usââin fact, they are the only things that are always âup to us.â Hence, the only thing that is truly and always good in itself is also the only thing that is truly and always up to us; and the same is true of the only thing that is truly evil in itself. All other things external to our mindsâ movementsâhealth and sickness, wealth and poverty, love and lossâare, strictly speaking, indifferent: they have no necessary bearing on the best human life. To be sure, we can appropriately prefer health to sickness and do what we reasonably can to acquire what we prefer. But we must never mistake what we prefer for what is good in itself, or seek what we prefer as though it were an end in itself.
That the unique good is also uniquely in our control is fundamentally good news, and in that respect Stoicism is fundamentally optimistic. But for virtually all of us there is, as I have noted, a difficulty: because our intellectual development is incomplete, and because that development tends to be debased or misdirected by our upbringing and by broader cultural influences, we almost certainly will misidentify external objects as genuine goods or evils, and we will therefore make choicesâat least very regularly, and in most cases almost alwaysâunmindful of what is truly good. In that respect Stoicism is fundamentally pessimistic.
To put the matter in more specific terms that also bring us directly to the subject of the passions, we can consider the following syllogism:
A: When a good for me is present, it is appropriate for my mind to expand (Stoic terminology for what we call âelationâ or âdelightâ).
B: A thing of the sort n is a good for me.
C: A thing of the sort n is now present.
Conclusion: It is now appropriate for my mind to expand.7
In the Stoic view, this conclusion is false when any thing other than virtue is present, because premise B is true only when the predicate âis a good for meâ has âvirtueâ as its subject. We, however, very likely take that premise to be valid for any number of thingsâmoney, sex, power, prestige, and the likeâthat are commonly but falsely accounted as goods. As a consequence, we assent to conclusions that are false,8 and our minds expand irrationally and excessively in the presence of false goods. Such is our common experience of vibrant happiness, and in Stoic terms that experience is simply founded on error: it is nothing but the action of a mind modified in the direction of unreason.9 And what is true of delight is also true of all other common passions that we experience in response to the presence or prospect of false goods or false evils: they are all the consequence of assenting to impressions from which we should instead withhold our assent.10 Further, because properly giving or withholding assent is âup to usâ as rational creatures, our passions are not just deformations of reason; they are voluntary deformations. In short, we are morally responsible for our common passions and any actions we perform when in their grip, and our common passions testify to how often we fail to measure up to that responsibility.11 That is why Stoicism famously seeks to rid us of all the passions that shape our daily lives: the shape is warped, the passions themselves nothing but wrong judgments made one after the other.
This brings us to anger, which Senecaâfollowing Stoic traditionâdefined as a strong desire for revenge when you judge that you have been unjustly harmed (âwrongedâ).12 Here is Senecaâs most complete statement of how the passion works (2.4.1):
Thereâs [an] initial involuntary movementâa preparation for the passion, as it were, and a kind of threatening signal; thereâs a second movement accompanied by an expression of will not yet stubbornly resolved, to the effect that âI should be avenged, since Iâve been harmedâ or âthis man should be punished, since heâs committed a crimeâ; the third movementâs already out of control, it desires vengeance not if itâs appropriate but come what may, having overthrown reason.
The âmovementsâ that Seneca speaks of are movements of the mind, and it is important to note that only one of them is under our control. As Seneca has explained just previously (2.2.1â3.5), the initial movementâa mental âblowâ or âjoltâ (ictus)âprovides the first intimation that something has happened to cause a change in our psychic and physical state. We experience it involuntarilyâSeneca compares it, for example, to shivering when splashed with cold water, or to blushingâand it is in fact both involuntary and an ineradicable part of our natural makeup; it is therefore experienced even by someone of perfect reason, the wise man.13 The second movement then attaches an apparent cause to the initial, involuntary âblow,â perceiving it as âa wrongâ (rather than, say, âa splash of cold waterâ), and conceives an action appropriate to that cause (taking revenge, rather than grabbing a towel): it is at this stage that the crucial granting or withholding of assent occurs. If we grant assent, we experience the third movementâanger properâwhich has âoverthrown reasonâ: at this stage, our mind has been wholly modified in the direction of vice, and its movement is no more under our control than was the first âjolt.â Indeed, at one point Seneca, again following a long Stoic tradition, compares the movement to hurling oneself off a cliff.14
Clearly, then, it is crucial to get right that second, voluntary movement, when âsomeone has reckoned he was harmed [and] wants to take revengeâ but is still capable of withholding assent because his âmind [is] still...