Anger and Forgiveness

by Martha C. Nussbaum

  but a deed done intentionally by me, albeit in the worst of circumstances

  and under duress; and then, a strategy to move beyond the horror, of

  which Hegel gives us a useful idea.

  X. Law in Family Relationships

  The Eumenides relieved families of the never- ending burden of aveng-

  ing long- ago crimes: that burden henceforth was assigned to impartial

  courts of law. Aeschylus’ insight remains important. According to my

  account, intimate relationships are intrinsically important. So law cannot

  fully take over the grief and loss appropriately involved when serious

  wrongdoing takes place in such a relationship. But it can take over the

  burden of securing accountability for the wrongful acts that have taken

  place. A large proportion of serious offenses (rape, murder, child abuse or

  neglect, assault, theft, and many others) occur in intimate relationships,

  and when they occur, the law must get involved. If Aeschylus means to

  suggest that law fully deals with the wronged person’s legitimate emo-

  tions, leaving no remainder, then he is mistaken. Unlike the irrational and

  rude people of the Middle Realm, those we love or have loved remain,

  properly, of deep emotional concern to us. But the involvement of law

  should surely diminish the temptation to prolonged anger and should

  assist agents in arriving at the Transition.

  Often in the past, law has evaded this job, through the pernicious

  idea of a “private realm” in which the law has no legitimate business.

  Laws against crimes in the family remain seriously underenforced today.

  When the law is not doing its job, people who have been wronged in the

  intimate realm should protest and try to get the law to do its job better.

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  Liz Murray is misleading when she suggests that people should react

  to parental wrongdoing with will and effort alone, rather than by also

  demanding legal accountability.

  This important job for law, however, does not entail that law should

  be a vehicle for victims’ anger or deal with offenders in a retributive

  spirit. Accountability expresses society’s commitment to important

  values; it does not require the magical thinking of payback. Better alter-

  natives are discussed in chapter 6. Moreover, in the pre- law world, a lot

  of victim anger was not really about damage within an ongoing inti-

  mate relationship: it was about a hereditary burden of retribution that

  involved, often, people the current generation had never known and to

  whom it had no meaningful bond but the bond of retribution itself. This

  type of futile payback thinking can and should be completely eliminated.

  What Atreus did several generations back need not concern Orestes at

  all: it is not the type of deep emotional tie that warrants even love and

  grief. In such cases, the fact that the family is involved does not make the

  offense part of an intimate relationship: it may as well be, and it is, part of the Middle Realm, where law completely assumes the emotional burden

  of the wrong.

  We are vulnerable in major ways because we love and trust oth-

  ers. Vulnerability often brings grief. And it often also brings great

  anger. This anger is sometimes well- grounded, but, unlike grief, it is

  never fully justified: either it contains an excessive focus on status or it

  embodies a payback fantasy that makes no sense. In both cases, while

  acknowledging truthfully the bad actions that have occurred, people

  ought to focus on the well- being of others and creating a future. Anger

  does not assist in this task. Forgiveness might sometimes assist, if the

  person is fighting a difficult internal struggle against anger, but it is

  likely that claims on its behalf have been exaggerated by those pro-

  fessionals (religious or clinical) whose trade it is to help people fight

  these struggles— so they need to represent the struggle as necessary

  and valuable. The way anger goes away in the Transition seems much

  more promising: one stops thinking about one’s own inner states and

  starts thinking about how to do something useful, and perhaps even

  generous, for others.

  5

  The Middle Realm

  Stoicism Qualified

  Polonius: My lord, I will use them according to their desert.

  Hamlet: God’s bodykins, man, much better! Use every man after

  his desert, and who should ’scape whipping? Use them after

  your own honor and dignity.

  — Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2

  I. Anger Every Day

  Seneca pays a visit to his suburban estate. The house is in very bad

  condition. He complains to the steward, but the steward says it’s not his

  fault, it’s just an old house. Since both he and Seneca know that the house

  was built by Seneca in his youth, Seneca takes this as a personal remark,

  whether careless or intentional. “Angry at him, I seize the first occasion

  to vent my irritation.” It seems, he says, that you have neglected those

  plane- trees: they have no leaves, their branches are knotted and twisted,

  their trunks bare. They would never be in that condition if you had irri-

  gated the roots and mulched the soil around them. But again the steward

  is too sharp for him: he swears— by Seneca’s tutelary divinity, indeed—

  that he has done everything in his power. They are just old. Narrating the

  story, Seneca confesses to his correspondent Lucilius, intra nos, that he had planted those trees himself as a young man. So the steward’s remark

  sounds like a reference to himself. Anger ascending, Seneca turns and

  stares at the nearby doorman. “And who is this decrepit old guy? The

  door is the right place for him: he’s on his way out. Where did you hire

  him? Do you enjoy having a corpse around the house?” This time the

  steward doesn’t need to say a word: the doorman does it for him. “Don’t

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  you recognize me? I’m Felicio, the son of the old steward Philositus. You

  and I used to play together, and you used to call me your little buddy.”1

  Everywhere Seneca turns, people allude to his age (or he thinks they

  do), insulting him (or he thinks they do). And Seneca, as luck would have

  it, is approximately sixty- seven, a very good age to write moral philoso-

  phy, if only it were not so easy to be provoked into inappropriate anger.2

  Seneca’s behavior is, of course, absurd. He overreacts to everything,

  and allows anger to dominate his day. In the process he insults others and

  makes a spectacle of himself, when he might have been gracious and gen-

  erous, ignoring references to his age (if indeed they were that), and per-

  haps even really ignoring them within, and just going about his business.

  That’s the point of the little comedy he has constructed out of his own

  silly behavior, and Lucilius (in this letter early in the collection) is sup-

  posed to understand the comedy as an advertisement for getting more

  deeply involved with Stoic philosophy, at his own similar age.3 Maybe he

  shouldn’t, since Seneca represents himself as prone to similar outbursts

  of inappropriate anger in the De Ira, written appro
ximately twenty- five years earlier: so the practice of nightly self- examination depicted there

  has apparently achieved little. But we should not read either of these pas-

  sages as literal biography; Seneca is using a fiction of himself to instruct, in both cases. (In what follows I take Seneca as a literary model, using

  a similar representation of myself to illustrate failings, at the same time

  illustrating, one hopes, a type of self- detachment and even self- teasing

  that are helpful in addressing these problems.)4

  This chapter is about the domain of life that can be called the “Middle

  Realm,” a realm in which much of our daily life is spent: in dealings with

  strangers, business associates, employers and employees, casual acquain-

  tances, in short people with whom we are not involved in relations of

  intimacy and deep trust, but who are also people and not legal and gov-

  ernmental institutions. A great deal of anger is generated in this realm,

  over slights to reputation and honor, insults or fantasized insults, and

  some genuinely harmful and awful behavior. Seneca’s On Anger depicts

  a typical Roman’s day as a minefield. Go to a neighbor’s house and you

  are greeted by a surly doorman who speaks rudely to you. Go to a dinner

  party and you discover that the host has seated you at a place at the table

  that others will view as insulting. And on it goes.5

  It’s not difficult to update, especially when most contemporary cul-

  tures, similarly, contain so many cues for outrage over diminished respect

  and, in addition, so much really rude and inconsiderate behavior. Just to

  choose a non- random example, flying anywhere is a minefield of Roman

  proportions. You are almost certain to encounter rude agents or flight

  attendants, sloppy procedures that inflict delay and hardship, fellow pas-

  sengers who are too loud, too smelly, or given to irritating impositions.

  The Middle Realm

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  My own pet peeve is large men, usually very out of shape, who grab

  one’s suitcase without asking permission first and try to hoist it into the

  overhead rack— thus giving a Senecan prompt for outraged feelings of

  gender or age stigmatization. Many of the same things can be said about

  driving, although at least in that case the offending parties are not right

  next to one’s own body, and are often rendered helpfully invisible by the

  circumambient armor of their badly driven SUVs. When one’s loved ones

  do something bad, they have this mitigating aspect: they are our loved

  ones, and we like and choose them. Much of one’s day, unfortunately, is

  spent with people whose company we do not choose. Anger is waiting

  just around the corner.

  My own temptations to anger lie primarily in this domain, and I am

  far from non- angry, as subsequent examples will show. In fact I am often

  ridiculous, in much the way that Seneca is ridiculous. With people I love,

  I luckily find it pretty easy to move quickly to the Transition. Anxiety

  often, grief sometimes, but anger, fortunately, rarely and briefly. With irritating strangers, however, I find non- anger hard. Indeed, as with Seneca,

  mental effort helps little, although it must be said that, given the triviality of these interactions, I don’t work on it very hard. Clearly, I should work

  harder.

  The Middle Realm is a mixture of heterogeneous elements. It con-

  tains irritants and apparent insults that exist largely in the eye of the

  angry recipient; it contains real slights to honor and reputation; it also

  contains behavior that is by any reasonable standard rude or inconsider-

  ate or hostile. And it contains, as well, some very serious wrongs, which

  affect one’s own well- being or that of one’s loved ones: improper termi-

  nation of employment, negligent medical treatment, harassment on the

  job, theft, sexual assault, even homicide. It is not to be expected or desired that all these offenses would receive the same analysis. Nonetheless,

  some initial points can be made.

  In general, I shall argue that in this domain the Stoics are basically

  correct: most of these things (though not the last group) are not worth get-

  ting upset about, and it’s a mistake to make them the object of any serious

  emotional concern. Even grief about the bad relationship is not appropri-

  ate: here the analysis differs from my view about intimate relationships,

  in a way already mapped out by Adam Smith, who thought that the

  Stoics were right about lots of things, only not about the intimate realm.

  Sometimes the mistake is one of false construal: people think some-

  thing an insult because they are anxious or hypersensitive, and there is

  actually no reason to regard the situation in that light. Sometimes the

  mistake is a more serious one involving false social (or personal) val-

  ues: people impute to a reputational or other slight a significance that

  is inappropriate. While false social values play some role in intimate

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  personal relationships, as I’ve said, here they virtually dominate the

  scene. As my analysis of down- ranking concludes, people in most cul-

  tures are commonly obsessed with relative social status, and this focus

  is inappropriate. I shall argue that to the extent that any emotion at all is appropriate (apart from the cases of serious damage to well- being, which

  we’ll treat separately), it is at best a Transition emotion. If the behavior is outrageous enough, then it’s right to have the forward- looking emotional

  attitude, which I’ve called Transition- Anger, whose content is “How out-

  rageous. Something should be done about this.” But to have full- fledged

  anger, even briefly, seems quite inappropriate. Moreover, as Seneca likes

  to point out, not correcting that tendency will virtually guarantee that

  one’s whole day is filled with anger, because there is so much behav-

  ior everywhere that is rude, inconsiderate, or in some other way subpar.

  Detachment is urgently needed if life is to go well.

  But my position is not Stoic, even here, because I hold that important

  constituents of one’s own well- being are vulnerable to damage by others

  who are not our friends and loved ones: health, bodily integrity, work,

  and the health, safety, integrity, and work of people whom one loves.

  It’s appropriate, I hold, to care a lot about these things. But these things

  can be damaged by strangers and other non- intimates, so anger could

  be, if not justified, still well- grounded. In such cases, what I shall say is much more complicated. First, I shall argue that in these cases a sense of

  loss or grief is often appropriate, and indeed inevitable given a person’s

  (appropriately) high evaluation of the damaged aspect of her well- being.

  But the (appropriate) grief has a different object from its object in inti-

  mate relationships. When one loves a friend or a child or a spouse, that

  relationship has intrinsic value, and one rightly grieves when it ends,

  whether by death or rupture. Relationships with strangers are not of

  intense importance, so one should not focus emotional attention on that

  person (the annoying sales agent on the phone, the rude seatmate, even

  the thief or assailant). If one’s own health or l
ivelihood has been damaged

  by such a person, that damage is a legitimate object of grief and upset,

  but the person is incidental— much though we tend to obsess about such

  people. So grief and upset, when appropriate, still have a different focus.

  As in the intimate cases, full- fledged anger, including the payback wish,

  is not appropriate, and for similar reasons— so one had better head for

  the Transition as rapidly as possible.

  These cases, however, are not exactly like the intimate personal

  cases, because here there is a productive road to take: turn matters

  over to the law. We don’t have to engage, even briefly, in pointless

  anger and fantasies of retribution against non- intimates who seriously

  harm us, because what they have done is either illegal or ought to be,

  if it is serious enough to be the appropriate object of strong emotion.

  The Middle Realm

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  Law can’t fully deal with the grief of such cases— that, as in the inti-

  mate cases, remains for the person herself. But law can deal with the

  idea that something must be done about the offender, thus rendering

  garden- variety anger redundant. The Transition is right in front of

  us, and Transition- Anger (or a Transition after a brief episode of real

  anger) has an immediate direction: That’s outrageous, let’s call in the

  law. There’s no point in getting further embroiled, mentally and emo-

  tionally, with the unsavory stranger who has done the damage. Let the

  impartial agencies of law figure out how to do this in a socially pro-

  ductive way. In intimate cases too, one may sometimes need to call in

  the law, and violence in the intimate realm, like violence in the Middle

  Realm, should be and is illegal. But I have argued that the importance

  of an intimate relationship, in emotional terms, greatly outstrips any

  amelioration that law can offer. Such is not the case with the Middle

  Realm. We can forget about those offending strangers, and we need

  have no further dealings with them.

  Indeed, it is above all in the Middle Realm that people need the

  Eumenides. Aeschylus makes things too simple by suggesting that these

  kindly goddesses solve the problem of having a homicidal mother or