Anger and Forgiveness

by Martha C. Nussbaum

  “ego- identity.”14 Like Smith’s account and mine, Lazarus’s treatment

  emphasizes that causes and principles can be objects of emotions— but

  only when and if a person has ascribed personal importance to them.

  Anger is typically accompanied by a wide range of bodily changes

  and subjective feeling- states. Bodily changes of some type are always

  present when people are angry, and, after all, the thoughts involved in

  anger are themselves bodily changes.15 Subjective feelings of some type

  are typically present as well, but they are likely to be highly varied (both

  within a person at different times and across people), and they may be

  entirely absent if anger is not conscious. Just as the fear of death can lurk beneath the threshold of consciousness and yet influence conduct, so too

  with anger, in at least some cases. It is a familiar experience to become

  aware that one has been angry at someone for some time, and that this

  hidden anger has influenced one’s behavior.

  The bodily changes and subjective feelings often associated with

  anger, though important in their way, have too little constancy for them

  to be included in the definition of anger, as necessary conditions of that

  emotion.16 For some people, anger feels like boiling in the neighborhood

  of the heart (as Aristotle says). For others, it may feel like a throbbing

  Anger

  17

  in the temples or a pain at the back of the neck. And in some cases it

  simply is not felt, like a lurking fear of death. One job of therapy is to

  discover hidden anger. Although at times the therapeutic process (badly

  managed) manufactures anger where it was not present before, there are

  surely many cases of genuine discovery.

  III. Elements of Anger

  What is anger’s distinctive content? A good starting point is Aristotle’s

  definition. Although it will turn out to be too narrow to cover all cases of

  anger, it helps us dissect its elements.17

  Anger, Aristotle holds, is “a desire accompanied by pain for an imag-

  ined retribution on account of an imagined slighting inflicted by people

  who have no legitimate reason to slight oneself or one’s own” ( Rhetoric

  1378a31– 33). Anger, then, involves

  1. Slighting or down- ranking ( oligōria)

  2. Of the self or people close to the self

  3. Wrongfully or inappropriately done ( mē prosēkontōn)

  4. Accompanied by pain

  5. Involving a desire for retribution

  By twice repeating “imagined” ( phainomenēs), Aristotle emphasizes that what is relevant to the emotion is the way the situation is seen from the

  angry person’s viewpoint, not the way it really is, which might, of course,

  be different.

  Anger is an unusually complex emotion, since it involves both pain

  and pleasure: Aristotle shortly says that the prospect of retribution is

  pleasant. He does not clarify the causal relationships involved, but we

  can easily see that the pain is supposed to be produced by the injury,

  and the desire for retribution somehow responds to the injury. Moreover,

  anger also involves a double reference— to a person or people and to

  an act. Using non- Aristotelian terminology to make this issue explicit:

  the target of anger is typically a person, the one who is seen as having inflicted damage— and as having done so wrongfully or illegitimately. “I

  am angry at so- and- so.” And the focus of anger is an act imputed to the target, which is taken to be a wrongful damage.18

  Injuries may be the focus in grief as well. But whereas grief focuses

  on the loss or damage itself, and lacks a target (unless it is the lost person, as in “I am grieving for so- and- so”), anger starts with the act that inflicted the damage, seeing it as intentionally inflicted by the target— and then, as

  a result, one becomes angry, and one’s anger is aimed at the target. Anger,

  then, requires causal thinking, and some grasp of right and wrong.19

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  The damage may be inflicted on the person who, as a result, feels anger,

  or it may be inflicted on some other person or thing within that person’s

  circle of concern.

  The least puzzling parts of Aristotle’s definition, from the vantage

  point of contemporary intuitions, are its emphasis on pain and its empha-

  sis on wrongful damage. How exactly does the wrongful act of another

  cause pain to the self? Well, presumably, the person sees (or believes) that

  something about which she cares deeply has been damaged. The item

  damaged must, indeed, be seen as significant and not trivial, or pain will

  not be a consequence. This pain is, up to a point, not dissimilar to the pain felt in grief. It tracks the perceived size of the damage. Nonetheless, the

  pain of anger typically makes internal reference, as well, to the (believed)

  wrongful act of another person: the pain of seeing one’s child mur-

  dered just feels different from that of losing a child to accidental death.

  (Aristotle often emphasizes that pleasure and pain themselves have an

  intentional content: the pain, then, is pain at the injury that has [as the person believes] been inflicted. It’s that specific sort of pain.)

  As for wrongful injury: even though we experience frustration when

  someone inadvertently damages us, we only become angry when we

  believe (rightly or wrongly) that the damage was inflicted by a person

  or persons, and in a manner that was illegitimate or wrongful. Lazarus

  gives the example of a store clerk who ignores a customer because he

  is busy talking on the phone. The customer will feel wrongly slighted,

  but if she learns that the reason for the phone call was a medical emer-

  gency involving the clerk’s child, she will no longer be angry, because she

  will see that it was legitimate to give the phone call priority.20 We aren’t

  always so reasonable, of course, but what matters is how we see the situ-

  ation: we are angry only if we see the damage as illegitimate. (This need not be a notion of moral wrong: just some type of wrongfulness.)

  Notoriously, however, people sometimes get angry when they are

  frustrated by inanimate objects, which presumably cannot act wrong-

  fully. This sort of behavior was reported already by the Stoic philoso-

  pher Chrysippus, who spoke of people biting their keys and kicking

  their door when it doesn’t open right away, and hurling a stone against

  which one has stubbed one’s toe, all the while “saying the most inap-

  propriate things.”21 In 1988, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article on “vending machine rage”: fifteen injuries, three of

  them fatal, as a result of angry men22 kicking or rocking machines that

  had taken their money without dispensing the drink. (The fatal injuries

  were caused by machines falling over on the men and crushing them.)23

  Do such familiar reactions show that anger does not require the idea of

  wrongful damage? I see no reason to think this. We tend to think that

  we have a right to expect “respect” and cooperation from the inanimate

  Anger

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  objects that serve our ends, and in the moment we react as if they were

  bad people, since they clearly are not doing “their job” for us. We quickly

  reali
ze that this doesn’t make sense— most of the time.

  Butler suggests that there can be a species of anger, “sudden anger,”

  when something thwarts or opposes us, and that this type does not require

  the thought of a wrong.24 I doubt, however, that Butler has actually iden-

  tified a distinct species of anger. Suddenness by itself will not do that: for once judgments of value become deeply internalized, we will become

  angry very quickly at a wrongful attack on what we love. When someone

  pulls a gun on your child, you don’t stop to think. Nor is it obvious that

  angry people are aware that a “thwarting” is not a real wrong: consider

  those vending machines. At most, we should concede to Butler that there

  may be a type of anger that is inchoate, prior to full- fledged causal think-

  ing and thus prior to a real judgment of wrong. Infants, for example, fly

  into a rage when their needs are not met. And yet our increasing knowl-

  edge of the cognitive sophistication of young infants makes it plausible to

  ascribe a vague inchoate judgment of the form, “I ought to have this, and

  my parent is withholding it.”25 On the whole then, with some borderline

  cases in early infancy, Aristotle’s insistence on wrong holds up.26

  More problematic, at least initially, is Aristotle’s restriction to

  “oneself or one’s own”: for surely we may have anger when a cause

  or principle one cares about has been wrongfully assailed, or when a

  stranger is the victim of an unjust aggression. Yes indeed, but that (claims

  the Aristotelian) is because in that case it has become part of one’s circle

  of concern. In other words, “oneself or one’s own” is just a way of allud-

  ing to the eudaimonistic structure that anger shares with other emotions.

  This response seems correct: just as we grieve not about every death in

  the world, but only the death of those who are dear to us, so we get angry

  not at any and every instance of wrongdoing in the world, but only those

  that touch on core values of the self. As with other emotions, a vivid epi-

  sode may jump- start the response by moving a distant object into the

  circle of concern. If, instead of Adam Smith’s tale of an earthquake in

  China (which jump- starts compassion), we hear a vivid tale of a genocide

  in a distant country, then we may be aroused to anger on behalf of the

  slaughtered people, even if they were not antecedently of concern to us.

  But Smith’s point holds: so long as the emotion lasts, so long those people

  have to be of concern to us. If the concern ceases (because, for example,

  we become diverted by pressing concerns closer to ourselves), so does

  the emotion.

  More problematic still is Aristotle’s reference to a “slighting” or

  “down- ranking.” We immediately associate this with the values of an

  honor culture, where people are always ranking themselves against

  one another, and where the central case of wrongdoing is indeed a

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  down- ranking. Surely, we are inclined to say, many damages involve cher-

  ished projects without being seen as diminutions of status. Subsequent

  Greco-

  Roman philosophy modifies Aristotle’s condition, as I have

  already done. Seneca defines anger in terms of a “wrongful harm,” rather

  than a “slighting.”27 The canonical Stoic definition speaks of a belief that

  one has been wronged.28

  Has Aristotle simply made a mistake? I shall argue that he has, but

  not as large a mistake as one might think: he has captured a style of think-

  ing that is very common in anger, though not omnipresent.

  First, the mistake. Defenders of Aristotle try to defend his definition

  by referring, once again, to eudaimonism. Thus Lazarus, attempting to

  give a general definition, and not one pertaining only to honor cultures,

  applauds Aristotle’s definition, because it captures this very general idea

  of an injury to the self’s cherished projects.

  Lazarus’s defense, however, is clumsy. Not every eudaimonistic

  injury (meaning injury to something seen by the agent as important)

  involves a personal down- ranking. Injuries to causes or principles are

  typically eudaimonistic without involving the thought of a low ranking

  of the self. Even when anger’s focus is an injury to a beloved person, the

  angry person usually does not think that the damager is trying to belittle

  her. She has a sense of eudaimonistic injury (the injury looms large from

  the viewpoint of her values and concerns), without a sense of personal

  diminution. So Aristotle’s account is too narrow.

  The idea of down- ranking proves more explanatorily fertile, how-

  ever, than we might at first suppose. There is something comical in the

  self- congratulatory idea that honor cultures are in another time or at least another place (such as, putatively, the Middle East), given the obsessive

  attention paid by Americans to competitive ranking in terms of status,

  money, and other qualities. Even the idea that “honor killings” are an arti-

  fact of specific (Middle Eastern? Muslim?) cultures needs rethinking. The

  rate of intimate partner violence is slightly higher in Italy than in Jordan,29

  and we may safely say that a sense of manly honor and competitive injury

  is involved in many killings of women in many countries.30 Empirical

  psychologist Carol Tavris’s wide- ranging study of anger in America

  finds ubiquitous reference to “insults,” “slights,” “condescension,”

  “being treated as if I were of no account.”31 People remain intensely con-

  cerned about their standing, now as then, and they find endless occasions

  for anger in acts that seem to threaten it.

  From now on I shall call this sort of perceived down- ranking a

  status- injury. The very idea of a status- injury already includes the idea of wrongfulness, for, as Aristotle notes, diminution of status is usually voluntary: if someone acted accidentally, I won’t perceive that as diminish-

  ing my status. (Remember the store clerk who had an urgent phone call.)

  Anger

  21

  We should, however, broaden the scope of Aristotle’s account to include

  the many cases in which people behave in a denigrating or insulting way

  without being consciously aware that this is what they are doing. When

  the target of such behavior (status- related denigration in the workplace,

  for example) reacts with status anger, he need not think that his boss con-

  sciously intended the insult. But he probably does need to think some-

  thing else: that the remark is part of a pattern of belief and conduct, a

  policy regarding the status of employees, that the boss has adopted and

  for which he is accountable.

  Anger is not always, but very often, about status- injury. And status-

  injury has a narcissistic flavor: rather than focusing on the wrongful-

  ness of the act as such, a focus that might lead to concern for wrongful

  acts of the same type more generally, the status- angry person focuses

  obsessively on herself and her standing vis- à- vis others.

  In connection with such injuries, both Aristotle and Lazarus empha-

  size the relevance of personal insecurity or vulnerability: we are prone to

>   anger to the extent that we feel insecure or lacking control with respect

  to the aspect of our goals that has been assailed— and to the extent that

  we expect or desire control. Anger aims at restoring lost control and often

  achieves at least an illusion of it.32 To the extent that a culture encourages people to feel vulnerable to affront and down- ranking in a wide variety

  of situations, it encourages the roots of status- focused anger.

  IV. Anger and Payback

  What is anger’s aim? The philosophical tradition concurs in holding that

  there is a double movement in the emotion; this double movement, from

  pain inflicted to striking back, is so prominent that ancient taxonomies

  classify anger as an emotion that looks forward to a future good, rather

  than as one that responds to a present bad— although, once they say more,

  they acknowledge that it has both aspects. Aristotle emphasizes that the

  forward movement characteristic of anger is pleasant, and that anger is in

  that sense constructive and linked to hope. The imagined payback is seen

  as somehow assuaging the pain or making good the damage.33

  But how exactly does this work? How does pain lead to the sort of

  lashing out, or striking back, that we associate with anger in at least many

  cases? And why would someone who has been gravely wounded look

  forward with hope to doing something unwelcome to the offender? If

  we had a non- cognitive account of anger, there would be nothing further

  to say: that is just the way hardwired mechanisms work. But ours is not

  that type of account, so we must try to understand this puzzle. For it is

  a puzzle. Doing something to the offender does not bring dead people

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  back to life, heal a broken limb, or undo a sexual violation. So why do

  people somehow believe that it does? Or what, exactly, do they believe

  that makes even a little sense of their retaliatory project?

  First, however, we had better make sure that the philosophical tra-

  dition is correct in holding that a wish for payback is a conceptual part

  of anger. It is pretty impressive that so many first- rate thinkers, from

  Aristotle and the Stoics to Butler and Smith to recent empirical psycholo-