How Does Anger Seduce Practical Rationality?

Back in the Spring, I gave a talk down at Columbia University, "Sweeter Than Honey" - An Aristotelian Account of Anger's Seduction of Practical Rationality during which I ranged over a number of related topics in Aristotle's moral theory, all of them connected with anger as an emotional response.

Anger is a matter about which Aristotle does have a lot of useful and insightful things to tell us, and I've been researching and writing on Aristotle's theory of anger for about eight years, working on a book-length study of his views and their present applicability.

One of my YouTube subscribers emailed me, raising an interesting question about the talk, to which I've decided to respond here in this blog:  What did you mean by “anger seducing practical reason”?  That anger, through its sweetness, seduces practical reason into giving assent to our doing things that it wouldn’t otherwise assent to?   When you think about it that way, anger can be a terribly destructive force, because it’s a drug – literally; it’s partly chemical --- that clouds our reason.

Aristotle on Anger, Virtue and Vice.

I was recently invited up to Green Mountain College, just across the border in Vermont, to provide a faculty development workshop and also to give a talk about Aristotle, anger, and virtue ethics.  The latter talk was intended primarily for undergraduate students taking an Ethics course in the Environmental Liberal Arts core program at Green Mountain, and it provided me with a useful occasion to do a bit more thinking about some of the topics corralled together in a book I'm writing, focused specifically on Aristotle and his theory of anger.

As I remarked early on in the talk -- which you can hear here, or watch here -- one of the most distinctive features of Aristotle's approach to anger is that, unlike so many other ancient, medieval, and modern thinkers, he doesn't consider anger uniformly or even generally bad.  In fact, he comes right out in saying that there are times when we ought to get angry -- to feel the emotion and to act upon it.  It's not just a question of whether it's psychologically good for us to express our anger sometimes, nor is it simply an issue of prudently maintaining boundaries or responding to bullying -- for Aristotle, anger is at its very core a moral issue, a matter of character.

Seven Deadly Sins at the Library Book Sale

Accompanied by my wife, who is at least as great a bibliophile as I, last weekend, I ventured into the venerable, low-linteled cellar of the Kingston library, where one of the periodic book sales was in full swing.  Two full rooms, with shelves of all materials and construction laid out, and filled with books. The organization was decent enough, at least as far as categorization of the books -- to be sure, I found a bit more interesting philosophy works in the foreign language section than in the actual spot officially dedicated to that subject.  You see quite an assortment of human beings, of "interesting types," you might say euphemistically, at these sorts of events, just as you do, really, at any affair or establishment centered around the printed -- and bound -- page.  I will say this about that particular occasion: I've never been in a place -- and I've been in quite a few unusual and intense spots of this sort  -- where such a high proportion of the people seemed either oblivious to, or entirely and egoistically careless of, the space and intentions of other people.

I would suppose that for some the lack of body consciousness, the closedness to other people, except insofar as they intersected with one's desires and its objects, is actually their normal mode of being.  This was not, at least some of them, what you would call a "well-socialized" lot.  For others of them, I suspect, that is not their ordinary condition, but a state they somehow lapsed into, prompted by their desires, at the book sale.  Being a tall, wide-shouldered, fairly bulky man -- and one who doesn't hesitate long to break a stranger's concentration, whether real or feigned, to impose one of the formula of social politeness and movement -- I could get, eventually, to the books I wanted to look at.  My wife, in some corners and passages, garnered less regard, and found herself having to be more insistent with certain of the patrons.  I've been thinking off and on for quite some time about the traditional Seven Deadly Sins (a subject on which I gather material and images when they cross my paths) -- and this got me thinking about our experiences at the book sale.

What is the Emotivist Person Like?

I'm back in full swing once again teaching an Ethics course at Marist College (actually, just coming off of teaching a very intensive 4-week online Ethics course, before launching right back into Spring face-to-face courses), and we just finished discussing Alasdair MacIntyre's diagnosis of Emotivism (in After Virtue) as the moral theory that has become embedded and embodied in our late modern culture.  Last year, around this point in the semester, I wrote two blog posts focusing on that diagnosis (here and here). There's three particularly important features to MacIntyre's account -- precisely why I have my students read chapters 2 and 3 of After Virtue at the start of the semester.

First, MacIntyre does not think that many people in our contemporary culture explicitly endorse one of the academic forms of emotivism (derived from Ayer or Stevenson, Nietzsche or Sartre) -- rather their behavior, actions, expressions betray an implicit reliance on that moral theory as their default, the horizon within which they act and move and work out their being. Second, MacIntyre also does not think emotivism is remotely close to being correct or adequate as a moral theory.  But, if there are many people who on some gut-level do seem to think it the right theory, and act, judge, and communicate as if it was, that has some real implications for our moral environment.  Third, MacIntyre does not see these developments as particularly good ones -- even for the emotivist.  And, that is what I'm going to discuss here -- starting from the question: what kind of person does a lived-out commitment to Emotivism make one into?

What Do Students and Teachers Deserve?

Down the years, and more recently than in my earlier career, I've had the happy experience of being thanked and acknowledged in various ways by the students who I've taught in my classes.  When you consider the alternatives -- and they are most definitely live, often-experienced and -witnessed alternatives, ranging from being entirely ignored until a student wants something (a grade, an explanation, an exception, what's going to be on the exam), through suspicious arms-length-maintenance, or wariness of instructional idiosyncrasy, unpredictability, even malevolence, all the way to the outright contempt displayed in some settings -- the exhibition by students of a grateful and gracious attitude becomes deeply gratifying to any instructor who understands the value and process of education in which they are involved.

I have to admit at times feeling a bit bewildered by my students' responses to and admissions about my teaching and how it affects them -- and that, I suppose, is due to a remnant of the pedant still within me -- the part of myself which far more attentive to all that has been left out by a student's robust but still rudimentary presentation or reflections upon some item or idea of study than gladdened by just how much distance has been traversed, how much potential has been brought to actuality and consolidated within the mind, the soul, the memory, even the heart, of the young man or woman charged to learn with me for the space of a semester.  That competent but sterile, and in some sense dense or tone-deaf, part of myself responds all too easily by raising all sorts of other related matters, at risk of contextualizing away whatever spark of excitement, whatever haven for learning, whatever inertia newly-directed along a path of ongoing reflection that the way I structure and run my classes has afforded my students.

Blogging About Anger Past and Future

One topic -- or rather, when you start looking into it, sprawling network of nodes and notes -- I've long been interested in. . . and by "long" I mean most of my life. . . is Anger.  I'll admit that my interest was much more of a predominantly practical rather than detachedly speculative nature from the very start.  As far back as I can remember, I've struggled with and been puzzled by, suffered from others' and indulged in my own states or spells of anger.  I've held grudges, been righteously indignant, choked anger down, attempted to dispel or quell it with reasoning, by acts of forgiveness -- sometimes even did feel it less-than-expectedly ebb away or immediately dissolve.  I've fought with my fists and feet -- though thankfully not for a long time -- nursed and nourished silent resentments until the moment to strike back, shouted vile things, ran off in a rage, sometimes even -- as I got to understand anger's contours and lines of force both in general and in myself -- removed myself from situations.

To employ a distinction made first (as far as I know), by the great Christian Existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel, for me the topic of anger as such is not a problem, but rather a mystery.

Hate and Anger in Aristotle

When we come to what are often called "negative emotions" -- things like fear, jealousy, anger, hatred -- feelings, affective responses, moods -- there seems to be a strong tendency in our contemporary society, particularly when it's a matter of politics or culture -- to do three different but connected things.  One of these is to easily, even automatically, project these onto others, typically others against whom we sense ourselves as being opposed.  Another is to deny or rename them on our own parts, or failing that, to excuse them in ourselves by displacing responsibility to those other people who "started it," i.e. who provoked the reactive emotion on our own parts.  The third is to employ and invoke language or concepts of emotions and morality in careless, uncritical, simplistic ways.

A prime example of this is the indiscriminate use of the term "hate."  As of late, the Left has proven itself more effective than the Right in misusing this term and notion, extending it to their opponents, whether real, assumed, or only imagined -- but they certainly don't have a monopoly upon it.  With a few exceptions -- typically those glorying in it -- it seems most people are willing to take for granted that "hate" or "hatred" is always bad, so accusing another of it, or being accused oneself, takes on a status almost of a logical deduction.  Hate is bad.  So-and-so hates.  Thus, So-and-so is bad (and we're justified in hating them, or maybe just expressing our outrage, or disapproval, or pity, or. . . )  Aristotle said several useful things about hate -- and about the closely associated emotional dynamic of anger -- which would well be worth considering in our current cultural situation.

Cultivating Virtues: Snapshots of Students

One of the shorter assignments my students tackled this semester required them to carry out some reflection on virtues and vices in their own lives and characters, aided by study of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics (as well as many other discussions of virtue, vice, and dispositions earlier in the semester), building on some of our in-class lectures and discussions (for example, this one, this one, and this one).  I asked them to consider three questions:

• Which of the virtues which Aristotle discusses do you think you most fully possess?  Explain why Aristotle would say you do possess that virtue.  
• Which of the virtues Aristotle discusses do you think you most need to work on at the present time?  Why?
• Do you fit the descriptions of any of the vices?  Which ones? 

As I read through the responses of 41 students, I started to see some interesting patterns developing, and I was struck by the self-disclosure, reflective insight, and honest appraisals many of the students put down on paper.

Yves Simon on Moral Virtue (part 1 of 2)

Recently, I had the opportunity to indulge myself in a bit of reading of an author I'd long ago enjoyed, the 20th century French Aristotelian-Thomist philosopher, Yves Simon, whose course on "Virtues," taught at the University of Chicago, was later edited into the book, The Definition of Moral Virtue, by Vukan Huic. Simon is a competent and quietly imaginative interpreter of the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition in philosophy, and his reexamination of the very notion of virtue, digging out its contours from within, scraping off the varnish-turned-plaque of certain modern reinterpretations or reductions, while at the same time connecting it unnostalgically just as much with the flows, courses, and preoccupations of modern life as with ancient or medieval modes of existence -- his work is eminently worth the hours it requires.

In addition to pointing out three typically modern responses which effectively attempt to substitute for the virtue that we human beings need in order to do well, act well, live well, Simon also introduces, or perhaps much better and more accurately put, briefly elaborates, several distinctions very useful for thinking out more fully what virtue actually is, what it does, how it works within and without it, what it calls forth from us.  Two of those in particular -- ideas admittedly stock in trade for virtue ethicists, but which, like any other inventory, lie unexamined upon the shelf -- the relationship between nature and use as dimensions of the goodness or badness of things, and the difference between mere habits and the difficult-to-translate habitus, are key for any practical, not merely academic understanding of virtue and vice. This post will discuss the first distinction, and the followup post will dig into the second, more complexly developed distinction.

Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, and Politics of Anger

A lot has been written and said recently comparing the two mass political movements essentially based in the politics of anger -- Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.  In fact, so much is currently out there that practically any site I could arbitrarily select to link to here would fit the bill -- so long as it mentions the two movements in some comparative manner.

James Sinclair, in Occupy Wall Street vs The Tea Party (where he also sets out one of the more interesting Venn diagrams overlapping the two groups) sets out, summarizes, and links up an excellently balanced set of comparisons.

HBR: The Secret to Dealing with Difficult People

Tony Schwartz, among other things a blogger on the Harvard Business Review network, recently offered advice about a common issue both in the workplace and in one’s non-work life: the need to deal with difficult people, those who fit this description:

Do you have someone at work who consistently triggers you? Doesn’t listen? Takes credit for work you’ve done? Wastes your time with trivial issues? Acts like a know-it-all? Can only talk about himself? Constantly criticizes?

Such people, of course, are not a new or unique feature of modern society.  In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle discussed such people, as did Plato, Epictetus, Augustine and a number of ancient philosophers in their turn.  Aristotle is particularly interesting to point to, though, because he analyses the emotional response of — and virtues and vices associated with — anger.  I've written about this in greater depth elsewhere on the web (here, here, and here), so I'm just going to mention a few features of Aristotle's theory relevant to Schwartz's advice.

The Myth of Closure: How is Emotional Closure Good?

Does the oft-invoked idea of attaining emotional closure really correspond to something genuinely good?  It is something necessary, something desirable, something towards which to counsel people, to move them by whatever appropriate means suggest themselves?  A recent Boston Globe interview with sociologist Nancy Burns raised a strong challenge to the all-too-common call for closure.
Burns’ view is that strictly speaking there really is no such thing as closure:

The idea of closure [is seen] as a new emotional state for explaining what we need and how we’re supposed to respond to trauma and loss. But closure is a rhetorical concept, a made-up term  … .Closure is not something that we can simply find or something we need. It’s a frame used to explain how we should respond to loss.