Thinking about "The Rationality of Rage"

Can you control your angel well enough to make it work for you?!

A recent “Gray Matter” column by Matthew Hutson in The New York Times titled “The Rationality of Rage(link is external)” highlights a number of recent academic papers examining the potential benefits of expressing anger in certain interpersonal situations. It’s a useful summary of cutting-edge experimental research on the role of emotions in dealing with other people and achieving our ends, whether those be self-oriented (such as improving your terms in a contract negotiation) or collective (such as social protest).

Hutson ends the piece with this summary:

We tend to associate anger with the loss of control, but anger has clear applications and obeys distinct rules. It may be blunt, but it has its own particular logic. And used judiciously, it can get us better deals, galvanize coalitions and improve all our lives.

Whether Hutson intended it or not, this passage suggests several problems with this “judicious” use of anger—especially if, as he notes earlier in the piece, anger is more effective if it is sincere.

While they might not have had as much to say about the benefits of anger, philosophers since antiquity wrote a lot about how the nature of anger and how it can, should—and should not—be used. Aristotle, the best known of the philosophers in the school of virtue ethics, wrote that “the man who is angry at the right things and with the right people, and, further, as he ought, when he ought, and as long as he ought, is praised” (Nicomachean Ethics(link is external), IV.5). As with all things, Aristotle felt that anger is good insofar as it is appropriate and moderate, neither too weak nor too strong, and applied at the right time. It is questionable whether he would have regarded the strategic use of anger in a business meeting to be appropriate, but certainly he would have approved of outrage expressed at social injustice.

Aristotle did, however, caution against anger rooted in passion, which almost always goes to excess because it is less easily controlled. Others agreed, taking the position that anger is rarely a useful emotion. Seneca, a Stoic philosopher, felt that anger is dangerous because, by its nature, it is never easily controlled. In general, the Stoics held an extreme view of emotions, especially compared to Aristotle’s more nuanced view, maintaining instead that emotions are an impediment to reason. Even though they are a natural part of our lives, emotions interfere with our best selves, which is to say, our rational selves, and lead us to do things that the ideal “we” would not sanction—a popular view today, among non-philosophers as well as many philosophers.

In his book On Anger(link is external), Seneca advised the older brother (and government official) that, in particular, anger was too dangerous an emotion to indulge in. Most relevant to the conclusion of Hutson’s piece, Seneca writes, in a section of his book titled “Can anger be useful, or controlled?”:

It is easier to exclude the forces of ruin than to govern them, to deny them admission than to moderate them afterwards. For once they have established possession, they prove to be more powerful than their governor, refusing to be cut back or reduced. (Book I, 7, 2)

Later in the same section, Seneca wrote that “once [anger] has begun to carry us off course, the return to safety is difficult” (Book I, 8, 1). Centuries later, in The Metaphysics of Morals(link is external), Immanuel Kant would echo this sentiment, arguing that passions (such as anger) compromise our reason, worming their way into our moral deliberations and corrupting them, which makes them much more dangerous than mere temporary impulses. (See also Nancy Sherman's bookStoic Warriors: The Anicent Philosophy Behind the Military Mind(link is external) for Seneca's view on anger applied to war.)

As if anticipating the work surveyed by Hutson, Seneca confronts the objection, “but some people stay true to themselves and control themselves in their anger,” to which he responds, “When? As their anger evaporates and departs of its own accord, not at is boiling point—it is too strong then” (Book I, 8, 6). He argues that if anger is stronger than reason, then the person cannot control it, but if anger is the weaker, than it is unnecessary—reason can do perfectly well without it. The studies Hutson cites would argue otherwise, citing the benefits of expressing, if not feeling or embracing, anger in some interpersonal situations. However, these studies alsostress that the expression of anger is most effective when it is sincere, not a bluff. However, the more sincere the anger, the more difficult it is to control. It follows that the only way to access the strategic benefits of anger is to give yourself into it—and risk losing the control you need to make the best use of it.

Today, many philosophers hold a more integrated view of the roles that both emotion and morality play in our ethical lives, more in tune with Aristotle than the Stoics but drawing heavily from both; see, for instance, Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions(link is external). Even if we recognize the value of emotions to both practical and moral reasoning, however, we must also acknowledge the limitations on how well we can harness and control what, at bottom, are parts of our base animal nature. Most of us are all too aware of how easily we can lose our tempers, and we should keep that in mind when we consider trying to put those tempers to use.