It’s rarely a good idea to take advice from a philosopher. (And yes, I’m a philosopher offering you that advice.) But when your brother is a leading public intellectual at the heart of the biggest empire the world has ever seen, perhaps it’s OK to make an exception. Or so Lucius Annaeus Novatus might have thought when, sometime after 41 CE, he writes to his brother Seneca the Younger to ask for a spot of philosophical guidance.
Novatus is a public official whose duties include judging those who break the laws of Rome. (Under his adopted name Gallio he later pops up in the New Testament, dismissing a religious charge against Saint Paul). But lately, the stream of wrongdoers he has to deal with is making him excessively angry. Wrath, he thinks, is all part of the job – without it, he might be too lenient or merciful, and not punish miscreants the way they deserve – but things seem to be getting out of hand. How, he asks his brother, can he learn to keep his anger under control?
That question assumes anger itself isn’t a problem, just too much or too little of it. It’s the sort of view we associate with Aristotle, who thinks that all vice is a matter of excess or deficiency. Both the Greeks and the Romans understood anger as a desire to take revenge on someone else for some injury or insult we believe they’ve inflicted on us. Too much of that desire, and you become a dangerous hothead; too little, and you’re a doormat.
The trick, then, is to only get angry about the right things, at the right time, to the right degree, and for the right duration. Seek moderation in all things, even – or perhaps especially – emotion.
Seneca, however, isn’t that sort of philosopher. Where Aristotle thinks the passions should be moderated, Stoics like Seneca are suspicious of emotions per se. They’re violent disturbances of thought that can only get in the way of clear-headed, reasoned action. The goal is not to get your emotions under control, but to subdue or even get rid of them.
Anger in particular is “foul and frenzied”, an inherently uncomfortable and destructive emotion that is practically indistinguishable from madness. It “turns everything from what is best and most righteous to the opposite”, and wreaks carnage from households to whole empires: “No pestilence,” Seneca tells us, “has been more costly for the human race.”
Seneca knows all too well just how shocking such views are to a non-Stoic. How, after all, could we live without anger? Isn’t rage just a natural response to injustice and harm, one we share with nonhuman animals? Yet for Seneca, anger is not natural – animals might be briefly aroused to fight, but by reflex rather than wrath – as human nature aims to heal and correct rather than harm. Novatus is in fact hindered rather than assisted in his work by anger, for fury makes it harder for us to judge properly which punishment will have the best effect. Seneca cites the tale of Socrates being upset with his slave: “I would beat you, if I weren’t angry.” (The unfortunate slave is ordered to come back later, so Socrates can thrash him with a calm, clear mind.)
We might reply, Seneca notes, that we need anger to rouse ourselves to defend the people and places we love from insult and injury. Aristotle, for instance, thinks anger is necessary for this reason. We might think of anger as an ‘ally’, one that will spur us on to fight for what matters and take great risks to defend those we love. Or as punk icon John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon would one day put it: “Anger is an energy.”
Yet Seneca says even in these cases, we don’t in fact need anger to motivate us to do the right thing. If I see someone I love being harmed, I will avenge the wrong – “because I know that is right, not because I feel a grievance”. If we know we ought to avenge our loved ones or fight to defend our community, why should we need anger to make us do what needs to be done? “Virtue,” says Seneca, “should never be assisted by vice, but is sufficient in itself.” Anger is surplus to requirements.
Besides, we’re far too quick to assume we can harness our anger without it getting the better of us, compromising our reason and misusing our strength. Experience shows that once anger rears its head, it tends to wield its user rather than the other way around. Far from making us better fighters, it drags us into making worse decisions. This is one ‘ally’ we’re better off without.
The good news, according to Seneca, is that anger is in fact something we can learn to dispense with. We can’t do much about the initial impulse of anger, that first flush of spontaneous indignation, but there’s always a moment where we can choose either to indulge it or let it go. Through thoughtful practice and Stoic meditation, we can gradually learn to stop anger before it takes root.
Novatus must have been quite bemused at his brother’s reply. Yet it’s hard to shake off the sense that Seneca is onto something. Surely no other emotion is responsible for more death, destruction, and mayhem than anger. When we speak of a crime committed ‘in a fit of passion’, the passion in question is always rage. Some might kill out of fear or jealousy (which itself is arguably a kind of anger), but few kill out of misery, joy, or hopefulness.
Feeling anger is also, frankly, quite unpleasant. It’s a form of irritation, an itch that can only be scratched by vengeance. Scratching an itch may briefly feel nice, but we’d probably be better off not feeling the itch in the first place. We’d all be a lot happier without anger. (You might think that this is belied by the fact our media environment is full of eagerly-consumed ‘rage bait’ designed to provoke anger. Recall, though, that sexual arousal is also a form of irritation, and there’s quite a solid market for producing that, too.)
Yet it’s even harder to shake the feeling that Seneca is missing something fundamental. Seneca inherits the Greek assumption that passions and reason are different things, with the problem then being how reason should manage these unruly beasts of the mind. But the line between reason and emotion is much blurrier than this. Very often it seems that emotion, far from clouding our judgement, is essential to it. My anger does not just motivate me to do something about the injustice of the world – my anger just is what it is to see things as unjust. Emotions do not merely cloud; they also reveal.
Roman politics is an ugly business, and just a few years later both Seneca and Novatus were compelled by Seneca’s former student, the emperor Nero, to take their own lives. Perhaps Novatus went to his death with the same Stoic calm as his brother. But I like to think that perhaps, just at the end, he allowed himself a little bit of rage at the dying of the light.
