Anger.

The Stoics abhorred it. The Buddha warned against it. Plutarch described it as the only emotion devoid of all reason. Yet anger is a familiar, even daily visitor in our lives. The Disney Inside Out movies feature a squishy, red personified “Anger” as one of the five mainstay emotions alongside Joy, Sadness, Fear, and Disgust. Anger may not be warm and fuzzy, but it sure is relatable.

So is anger bad? Aristotle, the ever-practical of philosophers, would tell you, not always. He suggests that the great-souled person is one who “gets angry at the things and with whom he ought.” But Aristotle then quickly follows up with this caveat:

“[I]t is not easy to determine how, with whom, at what sorts of things, and for how much time one ought to be angry, as well as up to what point this is correctly or erroneously done.” ¹

That’s a lot of territory. Is it justifiable to get angry with your cousin for the smug reply he made on your latest Facebook post? What about your local leadership for not doing enough in a natural disaster? Can we be angry at friends who don’t call us often enough, or people who drive too slowly in the left lane? 

All of this depends, first of all, on what we mean by anger.

Anger: a combination of belief and helplessness

Some definitions of anger are more technical, some more poetic. Here’s mine: A sense of outrage or unfairness that something that should have happened didn’t. Or that something that should not have happened, did. As Aristotle puts it, “We are angered when we happen to be expecting a contrary result.” ²

Your cousin should not have written that snarky comment, but he had to get his digs in. The person who drives too slowly should know better, but they puttered along just the same. Your local leaders should have been more prepared to handle the out-of-control typhoon that destroyed your best friend’s home.

Anger assumes knowledge. You know better than the person who did wrong. If only they saw the truth like you do. If only they did their job (as you understand it). And since we can’t control other people to make them do what they should, or see the truth that we see, it creates a feeling of helplessness. This helplessness has nowhere to go so it lights a fire in our bellies – or our temples, ears, cheeks, wherever anger happens to surface in your body. Anger is belief and helplessness together: a miserable combination.

There’s a further, darker aspect to anger: the desire for payback. Anger, Aristotle notes, “must always be attended by a certain pleasure – that which arises from the expectation of revenge…the thoughts dwell upon the act of vengeance, and then the images called up cause pleasure, like the images called up in dreams.” ³

I’m a mild-mannered person who doesn’t use the word “revenge” in her day-to-day lexicon but there are few things I enjoy more than seeing a despicable villain in a Hollywood movie die a satisfying and humiliating death – even though it does nothing to bring the villain’s victims back from the dead. ⁴ I would also be lying if I said I never had daydreams of people who offend or annoy me experiencing the cosmic payback equivalent of slipping on a banana peel and landing face first.

So are we any closer to answering Aristotle’s question of, “how, when, with whom and for how long” can we be angry? If we could trust ourselves to always be angry for the right reason it would be a lot easier. But having an opinion and feeling we’re right doesn’t always mean we are right, and therefore justified by getting angry.

According to the Stoics, in fact, anger is never justified. 

Anger: Feelings versus behavior

Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius had a zero-tolerance policy for anger. So did their Platonist colleague Plutarch. They describe it in no uncertain terms as toxic, poisonous, and destructive. “Yet the other passions, even at their height, do in some sort yield and admit reason…but [anger] does not,” writes Plutarch, “but on the contrary it shuts out sense completely and locks it out, and just like those who burn themselves up in their own homes, it means everything within full of confusion and smoke and noise, so that the soul can neither see nor hear anything that might help it.” ⁵

I came close to this description a few years ago after making the mistake of engaging with a stranger on social media during a political hot take. I pulled myself away from the screen and stumbled into my hot yoga class, grumbling some sort of explanation when my poor teacher saw the black clouds over my head. By the end of the grueling workout, I could again see and think (and breathe!) clearly. Since then, I’ve done my best to take Seneca’s lesson to heart: “The great cure for anger is delay.” ⁶ In the process of delay, I realize that few things are worth the trouble so I don’t bother.

But is all anger as unhelpful and counter-productive as my silly time-suck on social media? What about true grievances and injustices – things like starving children and wasteful policies? Surely the Stoics, the Buddha, and the other ancient sages would not have advocated standing by idly while innocent people, animals, and institutions suffer.

There’s a critical distinction we need to make for any of this to make sense. It’s the distinction between the brief visceral angry feelings we get in the first moments of being outraged and the thoughts and actions we pursue as a result of those feelings. For Seneca, anger is not just a feeling, it’s a type of behavior, and that’s what makes it reprehensible:

“[Anger] is a kind of pursuit, and no pursuit ever occurs without the mind’s assent, nor can one act to gain vengeance and compensation with the mind all unaware. Suppose that someone had reckoned he was harmed, wants to take revenge, and then immediately calms down when some reason urges against it. I don’t call this anger, I call it the movement of a mind still obedient to reason; anger’s something that leaps clear of reason, that snatches reason up and carries it along.” ⁷

The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum has come up with a shorthand for these involuntary angry feelings: “transition-anger.” If they were given subtitles these feelings would say: “How outrageous. Something ought to be done about this.” ⁸

This initial spark sets us into motion. But everything we think and do after that should be thoughtful and reflect a desire to understand the whole situation – including, when necessary, the person who did wrong and their motivations for doing so. Instead of focusing on payback (“I hope that idiot burns in hell for letting his cat go hungry”), we ought to focus on the future and what we can do to help prevent future suffering (“I’ll donate money to the Humane Society and educate people on what they can do to help starving kitties”). 

Are these “angry feelings” still anger? I’m not sure that it matters, to be honest. What matters is that we separate our initial involuntary reaction – which may or may not be justified – from what we continue to think and what we decide to do as a result of those “angry feelings.”

Empathy Is the Antidote to Anger

Some things are a true cause for outrage but most are not. Anger rears its ugly head not only when we allow valid emotional responses (starving children and kittens) to overrule reason, but also invalid emotional responses (people driving slowly in the left lane). 

This is what the Stoics and other ancient sages were so concerned about, for good reason. Getting angry is easy. Dreams of payback, as Aristotle points out, feel good. How do we tame our anger and hand the reins over to reason? 

To return to our earlier definition: anger is a sense of knowledge or certainty that someone is wrong and you are right, along with an inability to control that other person (or group of people). There is nothing we can do about our inability to control others. But we can question our certainty of being right – our version of the story. To do this requires a skill most of us aren’t born with: empathy.

Realizing we don’t understand everything about our “opponent’s” point of view gives us a task we can retreat to work on.

“When people injure you,” Marcus Aurelius writes:

“..ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it. If you understand that, you’ll feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger. Your sense of good and evil may be the same as theirs, or near it, in which case you have to excuse them. Or your sense of good and evil may differ from theirs. In which case they’re misguided and deserve your compassion. Is that so hard?” ⁹

It can feel like an inhuman task to put yourself in the shoes of your snarky cousin or the slow driver in the left lane. Trying to understand the reasons behind others’ annoying behavior may or may not excuse them, but in either case, it relieves some of the burden from our shoulders of needing to be right. How miserable would it be if we actually were correct about everything we thought and believed, and everyone else was either thwarting us, hurting us, or letting us down? There would be nothing for us to learn, nothing for us to do. Focusing on our flaws gives us the only control we have: that of ourselves. Realizing we don’t understand everything about our “opponent’s” point of view gives us a task we can retreat to work on.

You might be thinking, “Oh, I agree completely, it’s just that there are fifteen people I know who need to hear this message far more than I do.” This is the paradox of anger. We may believe our feelings are justified, that someone else has wronged us, but even if we are, the only person we can change is us. Are we willing to? Injustice and carelessness in this world will only end if every single person takes up that challenge. It will never happen, but it doesn’t need to for us to find inner peace. 

“An angry person is ugly and sleeps poorly,” reads a line from the Buddhist canon. “He doesn’t realize that his danger is born from within.” ¹⁰ No amount of anger I feel will rid the world of its evils and annoyances. But if I choose to react rationally, I may be able to do some good and make a difference. And in the meantime, I can get a good night’s sleep.

1. Nichomachean Ethics, Book 4, Chapter 5.
2. Rhetoric, Book 2, Chapter 2.
3. Ibid.
4. More enjoyable yet are the payback endings of Bollywood films, thanks to the Hindu preoccupation with karma.
5. From “On the Control of Anger,” the Moralia.
6. From “On Anger.”
7. Ibid.
8. Nussbaum, Martha C. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. Oxford University Press, 2018.
9. From The Meditations.
10. From Anguttara Nikaya 7.60