Aristotle's (Developing) Definition of Anger

In my last blog entry, I lauded Aristotle for having developed a sophisticated, phenomenologically attentive, and non-reductive treatment of anger which examined the matter from  several different perspectives.  Aristotle himself did not bring together his many different references to anger, many of them mere asides, sketches pregnantly outlined but not elaborated, some of them longer and more systematic but still incomplete analyses and descriptions, but I aim to do so, to set out the Treatise on Anger Aristotle could have written should he have chosen to do so,  in one of the books I am currently writing.  I'd like to follow up with one very important part, a linchpin if you will -- or perhaps better put, a clef de voute -- to all of his thinking on anger:  Aristotle's definition of anger as an emotion (pathos), a passion of the soul.

I'd mentioned in that last entry that Aristotle distinguished between ways anger would be looked at, varying according to the concerns associated with that perspective or methodological stance.  The passage (from the De Anima) I'd cited in part runs (my translation):

In each of these cases, the natural philosopher and the dialectical philosopher would define [the thing] in different ways, e.g. what anger is.  The one [will define it] as a desire for causing pain in return (antilupēseōs), or something like that (ē  ti toiouton), the other as  a surge or boiling (zesin) of blood and heat around the heart (peri kardian).  Of these two, the latter provides its material basis (tēn hulēn), the other its form (eidos) and its account (logon).

The person who approaches anger along its physical-somatic dimension will view it as a biological, perhaps medical, phenomenon, looking to its physical or bodily basis (and for some, reducing psychology to that basis as well).  They will not grasp the essence of anger, however, what it is, what it means.  Knowing the biological portion does not even mean knowing all of the how in how anger works. 

How to Look at Anger: Aristotle's Example

Among the many philosophers, theologians, and psychologists who discuss anger, Aristotle exemplifies a particularly well-worked out and fruitful approach to that ubiquitous human phenomenon.  Three overarching features of his account are worth pointing out both as essential to it and as reasons for its enduring strength and value.

The first of these, which I will only note but not explore in depth here, is that Aristotle notices that, as an emotion, anger possesses a certain uniqueness.  His teacher, Plato points out something related, even perhaps analogous in distinguishing a thumotic portion of the soul (in which anger presumably exercises its sway), a part concerned with honor and more amenable to the guidance of rationality, from a lower, baser, merely desirous or appetitive part of the soul.  But Aristotle goes further.  Anger has its residence and rule in the intersection of desire and (partial) rationality, involving conceptions of justice and self-worth violated by another.  Anger, as an emotion and as its characteristic response, is inextricably bound up with our moral manifolds.  Other emotions involve moral notions and values as well, even those of justice and injustice, but none are quite so closely connected with them as is anger.  Nor are any other emotions in Aristotle's treatment so closely aligned with rationality (logos) that he can compare anger to a hasty servant who, listening to only half the instructions, reasons to an erroneous conclusion.

Online Communication and the Morality of (counter-)Violence

Today, I finally started making good on yet another scholarly obligation I incurred some time ago.  A colleague with whom I share a common interest in Aristotle's Rhetoric and in the interconnections between politics, rhetoric, and ethics more generally, had asked me about a year ago to look over a paper he'd written some time ago on flaming in online chatroom discussions.

[A side note (or perhaps a diatribe!) on Aristotle's works and disciplinary boundaries:  Far too many "Aristotle specialists" -- but none of the good ones -- read Aristotle far too selectively.  I've been surprised and dismayed to find that for the most part, my fellow philosophers tend to carefully read either the Metaphysics, or some of the logical treatises, or the Nichomachean Ethics, and then ignore the other works.  Political scientists predictably enough focus on the Politics.  Communications people focus on the Rhetoric, Lit-Crit and Rhet-Comp on the Rhetoric and Poetics.  The better scholars in all of these fields cross the disciplinary boundaries, and read the rest of the Aristotelian corpus, discovering that interpretation of the individual works greatly benefits from that, each work informing the others. A plug for one recent example of this sort of Aristotle-interpretation: Marlene Sokolon's Political Emotions: Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and Emotion.]

The basic thrust of the paper was sound.  Whereas some interpret flaming as simply a symptom and contributing cause of incivility in online communication -- here, chat rooms, but the paper has implications for most other online forums as well --flaming can also perform a rhetorical and even ethical function.  That stance ties in with some topics I've been mulling over since childhood and occasionally writing about since grad school.