Aristotle, Anger, and Akrasia

A man gets angry at lunch with several colleagues or coworkers -- a response to a perceived insult or put-down -- and before realizing it, launches into a profanity-laden diatribe.  He regrets it soon afterwards, since he crossed a line, though he didn't realize it at the time.  A couple arguing with each other find themselves unwilling to listen to the partner each of them does actually still love (though respect?  perhaps not), giving in to the temptation to construe the other person's claims in as bad a light as possible, taking digs and cheap shots -- the argument escalates into a full-blown fight, not what either of them really wanted, but what, on some level they both chose.  These are just two examples.  Just by mining one's own memories, or attentively watching other people, one could multiply these sort of cases indefinitely.  They represent a phenomenon which in moral theory we often call by its Greek term, akrasia.

Last November, I delivered a talk at Felician College specifically on akrasia -- commonly translated into English as "weakness of will," "incontinence," or "lack of self-control" -- specifically about the interconnections between akrasia and anger as Aristotle explores them in his texts -- the most important discussions appearing in his Nicomachean Ethics, but illuminating passages also popping up here and there in the Eudemian Ethics, the De Anima, and a few other texts.  For a number of years, I've been nursing, nurturing, and indulging an interest in Aristotle's views on anger, working towards eventually publishing a book on the topic (currently about 1/4 written, though such snapshot figures of progress tend to change, ironically always towards diminution, as the study progresses).  Aristotle's treatment of akrasia's connection with anger is sufficiently interesting to merit its own chapter.  But why?

What IS the Problem of Akrasia?

A little less than a month back, I delivered a talk, Aristotle, Anger, and Akrasia, down at Felician College -- discussing some material, and outlining certain issues, appearing in a book I'm currently writing, reconstructing Aristotle's theory of anger across the corpus of his texts.  I'd intended my next entry in this blog to use that as a starting point, continuing my on-again-off-again series on philosophical and theological treatments of anger (the last two, on Plato, are here and here).  Recently, a student from the University of Edinburgh -- who watched the video of the talk -- wrote me:

I came across your online lecture, which was very helpful, offering a very in depth description of the problem but you did not seem to offer a judgement on the problem itself.  Would you say that Aristotle effectively overcomes the problem of Akrasia?

So, that offers an excellent occasion for engaging in a bit of a digression in this post -- what precisely is the "problem of akrasia"?  -- that's what has to be asked, examined, and answered, before we can say whether Aristotle does or doesn't effectively formulate it, mainly in Nicomachean Ethics book 7, let alone overcome it.

Streamlining Life, Thinking, and Writing

If you're a long-term reader of this blog -- or of my other main philosophy blog, Virtue Ethics Digest -- you may have noticed a relative paucity of posts over the last year or so, a lower degree of productivity (or at least prolixity) than previously.  If you're a new reader to this blog, of course, you need only look to the sidebar post archive list, where you can see the numbers.  In either case, you might wonder why that has been the case, and whether or not this is the "new normal," as they say.

You might also have noticed a rather startling change to the look and even feel and function of the blog.  It started out as something like a playground or preserve for philosophical musings and rants, and for about two years I've done more or less what I liked with aesthetics, content,  even eventually scheduling.  Really a decision -- or at least a dissatisfaction -- coming down the pike for a long time, matters finally came to a head this Thanksgiving break, as I reflected on what else I've wanted to do with Orexis Dianoētikē, what I wanted to make of it.  I wanted something considerably more disciplined, focused, well-integrated with my other projects and purposes . . .  streamlined, you might say.  That's reflective of a broader resolve, one extending to (and through) numerous aspects of my own life, incorporating Orexis Dianoētikē within that larger reorientation.

Happy Birthday, Albert Camus

Very early on in my philosophical formation -- long before I had any idea that I might study, let alone go on to become a professor in that field -- I first encountered the work of Albert Camus, in the form of a paperback, The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays.  I had just started high school, and we were on one of our many visits from Wisconsin, where my mother and father had settled in the family's exodus out of Chicago, gone down I-65 into rural Indiana, where my grandparents and great-aunts and -uncles had built the complex of little pre-fab Wausau  houses, facing each other on a common driveway, two of them connected in their basements by a cinderblock garage -- a time and place of sand and sun, snow and wood-burning stoves, oaks and sandburrs, trails, freedom, work, card games and quiet affection that to me, in my childhood was perhaps an image of what paradise could be.  My uncle Aime lived there, in a room partitioned off from the rest of his parents' basement, and I would visit with him in that room where he slept, listened to and reflected on radio programs, and read the books stacked in neat piles, but at casual angles and locations. 

Camus' volume held the top place that day on one of the stacks.  I recognized the name Sisyphus from my readings in Greek mythology, so I picked it up to page through it.  Seeing my interest in it, Aime told me it was worth reading, and asked me if I wanted to take it, so I did, and tried to puzzle my way through the not-entirely-for-beginners prose in the main essay.  Trying to remember back to that time, I can't be sure I really understood much of what now, nearly thirty years later, seems clear enough that I've recently shot several video lectures (one, two, and three) discussing the work.  What I recall is being struck by the boldness of Camus' formulations, an enjoyment arising from turning over the paradoxical phrases, and the feeling that if I just dug at it tenaciously enough, I'd come away from reading equipped with something novel, exciting, something I could integrate within my own life and developing thought.  For me, its fitting that, in celebration of his birthday, I focus mainly on that early work in which I first encountered his intransigent thought, his resolve to live "without appeal."

Plato's Treatment of Anger

In my last post, I brought up the emotional response of anger as a topic tangentially touched on -- but never worked out in systematic detail by Plato.  Not surprisingly, given the master dialogue-writer's skill  not only in leading the reader through complexities of dialectic, but in bringing before our eyes living characters, believable situations -- the sorts of encounters and exchanges in which moral discussion so often does take place -- anger does get mentioned in a variety of contexts within many of his dialogues.  I dedicated the last post mainly to enumerating instances of anger, to classifying those instances, and then to examining two sides of the same coin: who gets angry (or could get angry) in the dialogues, and who does not get angry (even though they could have)?

This follow-up post intends to dig deeper into the Plato's texts and thought, determining just how much of a systematic theoretical perspective on anger could actually be derived from those scattered passages.  It's certainly nothing as well-developed or complex as, say, Aristotle's treatment, nor for that matter even one comparable to Epictetus' Stoic perspective -- but it's nevertheless of interest.  Plato only briefly discusses what we might call the "somatic mechanics" of the passion. But he does devote some thought to the psychological workings of anger -- how it arises, what part of our soul or personality it arises within, why people become and stay angry -- and he does consider moral dimensions of it as well -- including questions such as: Is anger a bad or good thing? When should or shouldn't we be angry? -- but also extending to the very connection between anger and moral values.

Anger Arising in Plato's Dialogues

In this series -- started some time back, and now restarted -- of blog posts about philosophers and theologians discussing the topic of anger (whose latest installment addresses the Stoic philosopher, Epictetus), I've been eagerly looking forward to carving out the time needed to talk about the views and insights expressed by one critically important early philosopher, Plato -- poised right between his great teacher, the gadfly Socrates, and his greatest student, the systematic philosopher Aristotle.  There's one place in particular where Plato writes most about anger, or at least the part of our personalities by which we feel that emotion -- book 4 of his dialogue, the Republic, where Socrates analyses the human soul into three main parts, anger falling within the province of the intermediate, third, spirited part, which goes by the name of thumos, or the thumoeides part.

Anger does come up fairly frequently in Platonic dialogues, but not so much as a theme specifically focused on by the interlocutors, let alone subjected to the analysis of dialectic.  Instead, we see references made to different people getting or being angry in various situations, anger brought in as part of an explanation for human actions, anger being aroused (or sometimes significantly not) or at least feared as a threat within the interlocutors during the discussions.  What I've wanted to do for a long time is to assemble these instances, like pieces of a mosaic, and see if by shuffling and sifting, then selecting them, it might not be possible to assemble a composite picture of anger complementary to the tantalizingly short Platonic discussion of anger.

Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy: Euripides and Socrates

A few weeks ago, spurred to do a bit of writing about Friedrich Nietzsche's early work -- The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music -- while rereading and readying myself for producing new portions of an ongoing video series on Existentialism (lectures one, two, and three on the Birth of Tragedy currently available), I started exploring two of the central concepts of that work -- the Apollonian and the Dionysiac.  I've often been struck by how often readers have reduced that book to merely those two concepts -- or, more accurately, those two responses to the problem of existence.

There is, however much more to The Birth of Tragedy than just the distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac.  First off, while both of these are primordial -- the Dionysiac arguably more so (at least originally) -- they also do develop, articulate themselves, assume new forms historically, through the processes of culture.  This takes on particular importance in the case of the Greeks, in whose culture these two express themselves particularly through the arts -- epic and lyric poetry, music, dance, sculpture, and drama.  The unstable but productive fusion of Dionysiac and Apollonian in tragedy -- the masterworks of Aeschylus and Sophocles -- is, in Nietzsche view, something novel, unique, and needed.  But, there is yet another response -- one which in the story he tells, supplants both the other two -- one which he identifies first with Euripides, but which he consistently terms the "Socratic-Alexandrian".