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Stoics in Need of Anger Management

David Ashton finds that the Stoic view of anger needs updating.

Stoics have a well-known aversion to strong emotions, but anger seems to fill them with a particular dread. Seneca, one of the best-remembered Stoics of ancient Rome famously described anger as ‘a form of madness’. Hence Stoics’ best response to anger is always couched in terms of control: they talk of ‘taming’, ‘domesticating’, or ‘modulating’ anger. Seneca went further:

“We shouldn't control anger, but destroy it entirely – for what ‘control’ is there for a thing that’s fundamentally wicked?”

Stoics are not alone in their aversion to anger. Society in general takes a dim view of it, which is why anger management has become such a thriving industry. In some countries, courts send offenders on anger management programmes as part of their rehabilitation. In the UK there is even a British Association of Anger Management (appropriately abbreviated to BAAM!). Their website, with an ambiguity which is presumably intentional, claims anger management to be “the fastest growing field in psycho-education today.” What’s interesting about BAAM’s website, though, is that it baldly assumes anger is always bad. No argument is offered for this assumption, which is clearly regarded as self-evident.

Anger can be destructive and toxic, clearly. We also know anger is not always the right basis on which to act, which is why the advice is often to ‘sleep on it’, recognising that the morning often brings a different perspective. But for the Stoic, anger is never an appropriate response to anything, even in extreme circumstances.

I recently asked a contemporary Stoic philosopher to comment on harrowing TV news footage of the war in Ukraine, showing a Ukrainian father pulling the body of his dead child from the rubble after a Russian missile attack. The father was incandescent with anger at the perpetrators of such a terrible event. My question for the Stoic was “Could rage be regarded as a natural, reasonable, even rational response to such a terrible event”? The Stoic scholar wrote back: “When you began that anecdote it didn’t even cross my mind at first that the father would feel rage – that didn’t, at first glance seem to me to be the natural response, let alone the best response.” It never occurred to him that anger or rage could be a natural response to his child’s murder! At one level I found this astonishing, but at another unsurprising, given the standard Stoic account of the emotions.

Painting © Venantius J Pinto 2024. To see more of his art, please visit behance.net/venantiuspinto

Anger as Irrational and Unnatural

For the Stoic, the world is divided in two: my inner world of actions, attitudes, choices etc, entirely under my control; and everything else – externals – not under my control. The way in which I relate to the externals depends upon my level of virtue. I am virtuous to the extent that my judgements are informed by the four cardinal Stoic virtues of courage, wisdom, justice, and moderation. Practising Stoicism is about crafting a lens through which I see and respond to the world in terms of as perfect a composite of these virtues as I can, so that whatever external situation presents itself, I can make the right judgement and act or react virtuously. Virtue alone is good, and vice is bad, and I am good only to the extent that I judge externals virtuously, and that depends on reason – the ‘ruling faculty’.

Here’s the decisive Stoic move: whilst I can choose to be virtuous in my relation to externals, the externals themselves are ‘indifferent’. They are neither good nor bad. No external can make the difference between virtue and vice; only I can do that; and I do it in the way in which I think and act in relation to these externals. For the Stoic losing a wallet, missing a train, failing a job interview, or the death of a child, are all the same, in the sense that they’re neither good nor bad in themselves: what matters is only my reaction to these events, which I control. What is important is my own moral character, and no external can affect that.

What about the passions, then? For the Stoic, the virtuous life is free from all passionate emotions, which are intrinsically harmful to the soul. A passion, that is, any strong emotion, is a disturbing and misleading force in the mind, and it occurs because of a failure to reason correctly. Anyone experiencing such an emotion has incorrectly valued an indifferent thing.

This brief account reveals why the Stoics view anger purely negatively, as irrational, destructive and ultimately immoral – because it impedes the path to virtue. As we shall see, there are good reasons to doubt this account.

Anger as a Natural Response

Stoicism has had quite a widespread revival in popularity in recent years, in response to the many pressures of modern life. Modern Stoics claim that when we become angry our rational faculty is overwhelmed, and we become, in some sense, less human. They seem to envisage strong emotions such as anger as a sort of vestigial remnant of a primitive period in human development which we now need to dispense with. Anger is not necessary anymore. But this is like arguing that since digestion is an ancient evolutionary fact, digestion is not necessary anymore.

In a comprehensive and perceptive review of the neuroscience of anger, Riccardo Williams shows that anger, along with other emotional responses, is an evolutionary endowment with essential adaptive functions. He writes: “Recent developmental as well as clinical accounts highlighted the importance of anger and rage for normal and abnormal aspects of personality growth” and “Anger and rage are thus considered as necessary instruments to re-establish a feeling of personal consistency and autonomy or to endure in a goal pursuit when a failure is experienced” (Frontiers in Psychology, 2017).

Thus, contrary to Stoic claims, anger is an entirely natural response – precisely because (like it or not) it is part of our evolutionary heritage. We did not choose to have anger available. Note also that anger is not only natural, but also important for personality growth. This is a point conveniently and consistently ignored by modern Stoics, who want to insist that anger is always a negative, destructive emotion. It is not.

Thinking Straight While Seeing Red

Stoics argue not only that anger is itself irrational (or ‘madness’, as Seneca calls it), but that it blots out rational thought and impedes virtue. In other words, it is just not possible to be fully rational and angry at the same time, so a cool head is always a good thing. Indeed, the Stoic’s main concern is that anger always impedes our rational responses to the world: it always makes things worse. Angry people make worse decisions than calm and ‘stoic’ individuals. But where’s the evidence for this claim?

There is, on the contrary, a significant scientific literature suggesting that anger, far from impeding good decision-making, can actually enhance it. For example, in a three-part study of undergraduates at the University of California, Santa Barbara, researchers W.G. Moons and D.M. Mackie found that anger can boost analytic thinking, because angry subjects more often ignore less useful information in decision-making. Interestingly, they also showed that subjects who were not initially angry, but who became angry, improved their reasoning capacity (Thinking Straight While Seeing Red, 2007). Other studies have demonstrated similar findings.

In a New York Times article, ‘The Rationality of Rage’ (2015), Matthew Hutson provides a useful summary of the academic literature on this subject, and concludes: “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.” Thus anger may result in behaviour and thoughts that are more or even perfectly rational, in the sense that one may articulate or channel the emotion into constructive action. Despite 2,500 years of Stoic assertions to the contrary, anger can in fact be both rational and useful.

Anger as Morally Virtuous

For the Stoics, anger is a mistaken attitude, since it is infected with a hostile, backward-looking ‘payback wish’ that is vengeful and destructive. The orthodox Stoic view is that there is always a retributive element to anger which desires to inflict harm or cruelty on another, and which is therefore morally wrong.

Other philosophers however maintain that there is a moral dimension to anger. A long tradition can be discerned from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, through Eighteenth Century empiricists such as Adam Smith, to many contemporary philosophers, for whom anger is a way to hold one another morally responsible. Perhaps the best modern exemplar of this view is Peter Strawson. In his influential paper ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (1960), he argued that negative emotions such as anger are expressions of moral assessment, and that our being moral creatures rests on the fact that at an emotional level we care what we think of one another’s behaviour. Strawson observed that since people display emotions such as resentment, anger, gratitude and so on in response to the actions of others, holding another morally responsible for an act is nothing more than feeling a ‘reactive attitude’. If I feel angry at you, it’s because I am responding on a moral level to something you did or said to me. So my anger is the means by which I hold you morally accountable. Emotions are, on these accounts, instrumental. Indeed, they are the fundamental mechanism of moral accountability – the way in which humans do morality. Moreover, and again contrary to the Stoic view, this means that people are justified in having such emotional responses.

Adam Smith too sees anger as a moral judgement; as more concerned with issuing demands for respect and recognition than with punishing its targets. He writes that anger’s aim is not so much to cause its target to feel pain as to “make him sensible, that the person whom he injured did not deserve to be treated in that manner” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Section III, 1759). So anger need not be retributive. This view is echoed by Laura Silva, who believes that anger need not be hostile. Like Strawson and Smith, she sees anger as aiming at recognition of harms done, rather than at punishing those who have committed them. She says: “I will argue that we should take seriously the view that the orthodox account of anger is not only guilty of oversimplifying anger, but that it gets the emotion’s nature seriously wrong” (Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2021).

The philosopher Agnes Callard adds another dimension to the discussion: that failing to be angry can itself sometimes be morally reprehensible, or in other words, a vice. In her book On Anger (2020), she writes, “While we do not want to let our anger get away from us… if we quash it with too heavy a hand, we lose self-respect and, more generally, our moral footing. Inhibiting any and all anger in the face of genuine wrongdoing is acquiescing in evil.” Here she’s echoing St Thomas Aquinas, who wrote, “He who is not angry, whereas he has cause to be, sins “ Thus whilst for the Stoic anger is a failure of judgement, for Callard and Aquinas a failure to be angry when anger is justified is a vice.

Zac Cogley reaches the same conclusion in ‘A Study of Virtuous and Vicious Anger’ in the book Virtues And Their Vices (2014). He cites Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr as examples of virtuous men who were ‘properly angry’, and who believed that anger could be a useful, positive force when channelled correctly. Douglass, an ex-slave, was (understandably) incensed by slavery, and worked to destroy it through oratory and political and social action, while King used nonviolent action to fight against racial injustice. In his essay ‘Showdown for Nonviolence’, King wrote of the racial injustice in America: “There has to be an outlet, and I see this campaign as a way to transmute the inchoate rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative channel.” There is nothing ‘modulated’ or ‘domesticated’ about this. It is rage, pure and simple – but a directed and channelled rage. This shows that anger need not be an uncontrollable, vengeful, all-or-nothing phenomenon, as many Stoics claim.

Having introduced the idea of appropriate anger, Cogley goes on to say, “But even if anger is fittingly felt, there are still important ways in which someone might fail to be fully virtuous. For example, a person who feels fitting anger but who is not moved to act against or protest the situation is too passive….” In other words, being appropriately angry is not enough for virtue: one must be willing to act. So anger can be rational, reasonable, and morally justifiable, but for it to be useful, it must be the basis for action.

Of course, Stoics may claim that what King and Douglass were feeling wasn’t really anger, but instead was the domesticated Stoic version of it. But that would be symptomatic of the Procrustean process by which Stoics pack inconvenient facts into their dogma: since anger for the Stoic is always bad, whatever King and Douglass achieved through their moral actions, their basis, by definition, couldn’t possible have been anger. But the Stoics are wrong.

Creative Anger

Could anger have yet another positive dimension – creativity?

The notion that artistic creativity and emotional states, including anger, are somehow related, goes as far back as Aristotle, and there are many examples. On a Sunday morning in September 1963, members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed a Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls. The singer Nina Simone was overcome with rage. The song she wrote in response in less than an hour, Mississippi Goddamn, was an expression of the anger she felt, and it became one of the Twentieth Century’s most powerful and moving protest songs.

Beethoven provides one of the greatest examples of extreme emotions put to creative work. It's clear from the travails and triumphs of his life that he used emotions, including anger, to guide and make manifest his creative power: just listen to the violent opening bars of his Ninth Symphony, or the storm movement of his Sixth Symphony. The Stoic would say Beethoven’s extreme emotional reactions were ‘unhealthy’. I would say they were enabling and creative, and that we are all the richer because of it.

Perhaps the most famous contemporary example of anger and rage employed as a motivator for creativity, is Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica, widely regarded as the greatest anti-war painting in history. Early in the Spanish Civil War, on 26 April 1937, the German and Italian airforces bombed the Basque town of Guernica, killing around 1,700 men, women and children. The artist was so outraged that he immediately turned his skills to this painting, completing the vast masterpiece in only 35 days. It was the direct expression of his anger. In fact, the painting has been called a ‘rage in oil’.

Viewing this canvas today, it is clear that Guernica was a visceral experience for Picasso, and he wanted to portray his anger. For him, art became an instrument of war, motivating spectators to political action. As he said, “Painting is not done to decorate apartments… It’s an instrument of war for attack and defence against the enemy.”

Several years later, living in Paris during the German occupation, a Gestapo officer barged into his apartment one day, pointed to a photo of the painting, and demanded of him, “Did you do that?” “No,” Picasso replied, “you did.” It’s not difficult to sense the venom in that response.

Last Word: Anger as a Gift

I have argued that the Stoic account of emotions is much too narrowly construed. The Stoic exhortation to ‘live according to nature’ in fact means to apply one’s reason to social living. Anger is unreasonable, they say, and it damages society; hence it is unnatural, and can never be good, rational, or morally legitimate. In taking this position, the Stoics distanced themselves from other philosophical schools, such as the Aristotelians, who took a more nuanced view.

So Stoics have an entirely one-dimensional view of anger which wilfully ignores other possibilities – including that anger may sometimes be rational, creative, or morally righteous. In dismissing anger in their peremptory fashion, the Stoics are themselves guilty of behaving irrationally – of impeding their own pursuit of virtue. Moreover, this can lead to offensive absurdities, such as the view that, in his distress and anger, the Ukrainian father pulling the body of his child out of a flattened building is not merely being irrational, but immoral. But this view follows perfectly logically from the fundamentals of Stoic ethics.

I’ve argued here that anger is sometimes a virtue – an appropriate response to something we deem to be wrong, reflecting a judgment about the way things ought to be and what we value. This moral judgment is a movement of the will. The proper emotional response to injustice is anger. When our reason and our passions are rightly ordered, we recognise injustice for what it is and feel angry about it. A person who does not feel anger when witnessing injustice has been morally malformed.

To be clear: I do not say that the Stoic account of anger is totally wrong. Indeed, I would be happy to concede that it may be largely right. Neither do I say that we should strive to be angry. We are all different in the extent to which we experience emotions, including anger: as William James said, “We all boil at different temperatures.” I say rather that the standard Stoic story is not the whole story, since, aside from its obvious potential for harm, anger can also have important positive effects.

The conclusion is that Stoics need to improve their anger management: not because they’re suffering from its negative effects, but because they’re blinded to its positive potential for good, including its moral dimension. Anger is an essential part of the rich emotional repertoire with which we humans are endowed. It is a gift.

David Ashton, formerly a physician and clinical epidemiologist, is now an independent scholar with a particular interest in Hume, Heidegger and the poetry of T.S. Eliot.