Seneca on anger

Statue of Seneca in Córdoba, Spain

“Their eyes blaze and sparkle, their whole face is a deep red with the blood which boils up from the bottom of their heart, their lips quiver, their teeth are set, their hair bristles and stands on end, their breath is laboured and hissing, their joints crack as they twist them about, they groan, bellow, and burst into scarcely intelligible talk, they often clap their hands together and stamp on the ground with their feet, and their whole body is highly-strung and plays those tricks which mark a distraught mind, so as to furnish an ugly and shocking picture of self-perversion and excitement.”
This is how Lucius Annaeus Seneca describes anger people in the first section of his treatise “On Anger”, which actually is a letter to his brother Novatus. For Seneca, anger is a passion that he rejects: “You cannot tell whether this vice is more execrable or more disgusting.” His treatise is about the nasty effects of this passion and about how to suppress it if not to prevent it. However, I think that there is a weak point in Seneca’s treatment of anger: He sees it only as a sudden outburst, not as a passion that can determine your behaviour during a longer time or at least be for a longer time in the background in your mind. Maybe this has to do with the fact that neither the Latin language, nor the ancient Greek language had a special word for long-term or long-lasting anger; for what we nowadays call resentment. For Seneca anger (ira in Latin) is apparently a short-term, sudden passion. Nevertheless, the Romans and certainly the Greek must have known what we call resentment today. Didn’t Homer start his Iliad with the sentence: “Goddess, sing the anger [μῆνις; mènis] of Achilles, the son of Peleus”? But “μῆνις”, which I have translated here with “anger”, can also mean resentment, and that’s what it apparently means here, for the Iliad doesn’t just describe Achilles’s sudden outburst of anger on the Greek army leader Agamemnon but his long-term resentment against him and the effects of this resentment. Seneca must have known that and he should have realized that anger (ira) can also be a long-term passion with a different expression and different consequences.
In his approach of anger, Seneca differs from Aristotle. Aristotle rejects the destructive outburst of anger with all its nasty effects, but he sees a place for moderate anger. A tempered anger can be a force for change and growth, and it can show others where you stand and that they must reckon with you. According to Aristotle “Anybody can become angry; that is easy. But to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.” (Nicomachean Ethics bk. 2, 1108b) Here, I have italicized what anger can make a “good”, creative anger, leading it in the right direction with positive results. I’ll not explain here how (see Psychology Today), but the essence of Aristotle’s view is that once you temper your anger, when you are furious, it can become a driving force within you. Then it can become a motivating force to help you to fix a problem, or to right a wrong, or to make that things become better. Anger shows others where you stand, and it helps to prevent that others walk over you. When you restrain yourself too much, it can give others the impression that they can do with you what they like. Of course, this doesn’t involve that you need to use strong words for expressing your anger. Most important is that your view is clear.
Aristotle shows that anger is more than a sudden fit of rage and implicitly that anger is not only a one-time passion but that it can also be long-term. Just as a long-term passion it can be a positive force. Here Gandhi comes to my mind. Once, during his stay in South Africa, Gandhi travelled first class by train. He didn’t know that this was not allowed for “non-whites”, even if they had bought a first-class ticket. Because Gandhi refused to travel third class with his first-class ticket, he was thrown off the train by the conductor. This made Gandhi so furious that the incident became the start of his lifelong struggle against injustice and oppression. What this case shows is that it is too simple to reject anger, as Seneca does. I don’t know how Gandi felt inside, when he was kicked off the train. Maybe – following Seneca’s description of anger – his blood boiled up from the bottom of his heart. I think that he’ll have behaved himself towards the conductor. However, Gandhi kept his anger in his heart, but at the same time he turned it into a creative force, a furious but positive force that led him for life, in a controlled way. Isn’t that another, not “execrable” and not “disgusting” side of Seneca’s fury?