Barbara H. Rosenwein - Anger: The Conflicted History of an Emotion (Vices and Virtues)

ANGER

VICES AND VIRTUES

Series editors Richard G. Newhauser and John Jeffries Martin

Copyright 2020 Barbara H. Rosenwein

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019951719

ISBN 978-0-300-22142-8

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Riccardo

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATES

FIGURE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish first of all to thank Richard Newhauser and John Jeffries Martin, editors of the series in which this appears, for their unflagging encouragement, useful suggestions, and practical help with this book at every stage of its development. When it was in its near-final draft, it received many thoughtful and welcome comments from an anonymous outside reader chosen by the Press. I owe much to Andrew Beatty, Julia Bray, Douglas Cairns, Jessica Callicoat, Erez DeGolan, Robert Dentan, Jan Dumolyn, Luke Fernandez, Zouhair Ghazzal, Alex Golub, Jamie Graves, Lynn Hunt, Michael Lieb, Susan Matt, Damien Patrick Nelis, Jan Plamper, Rose Spijkerman, Dionysios Stathakopoulos, Faith Wallis, and Graham Williams for their generous advice and assistance. I dedicate the work to Riccardo Cristiani, who participated in its every phase. I thank my sister, Naomi Honeth, for her unfailingly encouraging emails, and I thank my wonderful husband, Tom, for his comments on a draft of this book and, above all, for his unwavering love and support.

NOTE TO THE READER

When citing primary sources I have, when necessary, used English translations, whether by myself or others. I have tended to favor online source materialsas long as the translations are acceptablebecause they will be fairly easy for readers to access. All dates are ce / ad unless otherwise noted. When quoting from early modern sources in English, I have silently modernized spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. Primary sources have been omitted from the bibliography.

FOREWORD

RICHARD G. NEWHAUSER AND JOHN JEFFRIES MARTIN

What made you angry today? There had to be something, because lately anger has become our default viceand sometimes our virtue. Was it abortion? Brexit? Climate change? Democracys demise? Environmental degradation? Fascists on the march? There are more causes of anger than the alphabet can contain in this season of our wrath, in this time when outrage lurks around every corner, ready to stoke and celebrate our quick resentment or valorize our deepest convictions. Though other periods of history might be thought of as characterized by wrath, it is particularly important in the present moment to step back and look deeply at what anger has meant to our lives, and continues to mean.

The study of vices and virtues (and anger can be both of them) lies adjacent to many fields: from ethics, law, philosophy, and theology to anthropology, behavioral sociology, and psychology, but also, as Barbara Rosenweins volume demonstrates, the study of emotions. One of her key insights is that we have simplified a very complicated matter by labelling so many different feelings and behaviors anger. Moreover, different groups will respond with what they call anger to very different stimuli. These emotional communities value or devalue certain emotions and adhere to the same norms of emotional expression.

Anger is most often thought of as an excess or deficiency of some emotional substratum. The Basic Emotion analysts thought of anger as a natural element of human beings that could be detected and measured in facial expressions. Psychological Constructionists think of anger as part of a process of feelings. Enactivists speak of hard-wired circuits that can be called anger depending on the society in which they are expressed. For social constructionists, anger is created mutually by individuals acting in society and the tools (language, social settings, etc.) that society offers.

Different emotional communities will evaluate the moral valences of anger differently. Is anger morally negative? Buddhists seek to avoid anger altogether as a step towards avoiding suffering and stress; Stoics (like Seneca) counseled that anger should be actively resisted when it arises; some Neostoics, such as Descartes, thought it best to acknowledge anger, subject it to reasoned analysis, and turn it into the basis for a moral attitude that scorns anger. And all of these reflections on harmful anger have attracted therapies designed to alleviate the effects of this dangerous emotion, from a Buddhist therapist like C. Peter Bankart to the Neostoic echoes in anger-management therapy. But what, then, not only of the righteous wrath of God, but of humans who claim their wrath is a virtue? Christian communities justify anger when it serves to correct morals; Saint Augustine said anger should be directed at the sin, not the sinner. For Autonomists, like Hume, anger can be a source of morality when it is exercised as the disapproval of someone elses vice. Rousseau turned anger at social injustice into a virtue.

Is it still possible in our lifetime to avoid, control, redirect, or manage anger? Have we entered a new phase of angers history in which the threatened loss of our identitypolitical, national, ethnic, religiousdemands universal resentment? And must the expression of resentment always be outbursts of anger, unreflective, self-justifying? Perhaps. But Barbara Rosenweins book holds out the promise that knowing more about our emotional and ethical past will make it possible for us to navigate our emotional, ethical, and political lives in the present with greater insight andwe can hopewith better outcomes.

INTRODUCTION

Homers Iliad begins with an order to the muse: Anger, O goddess; sing the anger of Achilles! In a way, then, anger is the first word in the written literature of the West. Is the Iliad the place to start a book on the topic? Many modern commentators think so. Indeed, Emily Katz Anhalt asserts that we need to read Greek myths like the Iliad precisely to overcome our own angry predilections: Homers depiction of the horrors that flowed from the anger of Achilles will teach us to resist the violent times in which we live.

But Achilles anger, however useful to study, was not the same as ours. It was not even the same as all ancient Greek anger, for which there were at least two words, two meanings, and thus, presumably, two sensations. Our own anger is a product of history. Potentially, it does include the sort of anger Homer sang about, but it embraces as well numerous other traditions of feeling, some of the most important of which are covered in this book.

That is why I prefer not to start with the Iliad. Id rather begin with my own story and then look back.

When I was about three years old, I had a beloved rubber baby doll. It could swallow water, then dribble and peeendlessly fascinating. I loved that doll fiercely. But I would also hide behind the living room sofa and beat it soundly, pummeling it with my fists. I clearly remember the turning point: I heard my mother say to a visitor, That girl has a lot of anger in her. I knew she was talking about me. I stopped; I was ashamed. What was this anger that I had a lot of?