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, maybe even daily visitor in our lives. The Disney Inside Out movies feature a squishy, red personified “Anger” as one of the five main characters alongside Joy, Sadness, Fear, and Disgust. Anger may not be warm and fuzzy, but it (he?) sure is relatable.

Aristotle, that ever-pragmatic of ancient philosophers, would tell you that anger is not always bad. He suggests that the great-souled person is one who “gets angry at the things and with whom he ought.” But in true Aristotle fashion he 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

There we go, clear as mud. Is it justifiable to get angry with your cousin for the smug reply he made on your latest Facebook post? What about your local leaders for not doing enough in response to the typhoon that destroyed your aunt’s home? Can we be angry at friends who don’t reply to our texts, or people who drive too slowly in the left lane?

A combination of belief and helplessness

It depends, first of all, on our definition of anger. Here’s mine:

A sense of outrage or unfairness that something happened that shouldn’t have. Most commonly, something another person did — or failed to do. As Aristotle puts it, “We are angered when we happen to be expecting a contrary result.” ²

Your cousin should not have written that comment, but he just had to show off his fluent sarcasm. The person who drives too slowly should know to use the right lane, but they didn’t care. Your local leaders should have been more prepared to handle the Category 5 hurricane, but they were too busy running for reelection.

Anger assumes knowledge. You know just as well or better than the person who committed or allowed the wrong. If only they could comprehend just how hurtful, annoying, or immoral their actions are. If only they did what they were supposed to. And this sense of greater knowledge and unfairness creates in us 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 likes to manifest in your body. Anger is certainty and helplessness shackled together, and that’s what makes it such a miserable emotion.

Nor is that all. There’s a darker, perversely enjoyable aspect to anger: the desire for payback.

Anger, says Aristotle: “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 my favorite movie scenes tend to involve villains dying a painful death — even though it does nothing to bring their victims back from the dead. I would also be lying if I said I never had daydreams of people who offend or annoy me being shamed in front of a large crowd (there is a wonderful scene in the movie Annie Hall where this exact thing happens).

If we could trust ourselves to always be angry for the right reason then anger wouldn’t be a problem to solve. But believing that we’re right doesn’t always mean we are right, and therefore justified in getting angry. Is there a way to be certain?

Or, are the Stoics correct when they claim — rather controversially — that anger is never justified?

Anger: What we feel versus what we do

Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius had a famously zero-tolerance policy for anger. So did their Platonist colleague Plutarch. They describe it in no uncertain terms as toxic, poisonous, and destructive.

Here’s Plutarch at his most graphic:

Yet the other passions, even at their height, do in some sort yield and admit reason…but [anger] does not, 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.⁴

I admittedly came close to this description a few years ago after making the mistake of engaging with a stranger on social media during the aftermath of a particularly fraught political event. I pulled myself away from my phone and stumbled into my hot yoga class, growling some sort of explanation when the poor teacher saw the black clouds over my head. By the end of the workout, I could see and think (and breathe!) clearly again. Since then, I’ve done my best to take Seneca’s lesson to heart: “The great cure for anger is delay.” In the process of delay, I’ve learned that few things are worth the trouble.

But wait, you say: what about true grievances and injustices — things like starving children in war zones and terrible policies by selfish politicians? Or the ever-increasing wealth gap that no one seems to want to take responsibility for? Surely the Stoics, the Buddha, and other sages would not have advocated standing by idly in the face of these things.

I believe 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 emotions we get in the first moments of being outraged and the behavior we pursue as a result of those emotions. This seems to be where a lot of the confusion happens, because feeling anger as an involuntary result of seeing or hearing something horrible and unfair is one thing; looking at life through a lens of anger is another.

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.” ⁵

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has a shorthand for these involuntary angry feelings: “transition-anger.” These are the feelings that say: “How outrageous. Something ought to be done about this.” ⁶ (The Stoics, by the way, would have approved of this distinction).

Transition-anger is the spark that sets us into motion. It may be valid, depending on the nature of the situation that we’re upset about. We can acknowledge the spark and make a controlled response, or we can let the spark start a wildfire that engulfs everything in its path.

Is “transition-anger” still anger? Perhaps it’s a spectrum. What I think matters most is the distinction between our initial angry feelings and how we react to them — not just in the moment, but for the days and years afterward.

Curiosity is the antidote

I suspect that the hardest thing about anger is that it requires us to acknowledge things beyond our control.

Of course, this isn’t the case for everything. We can divorce the spouse we caught cheating. We can honk at the driver who cut us off (it may or may not teach them a lesson). But the systemic, existential things that cause us anger and often anxiety are those things beyond our personal and immediate control.

To return to our earlier definition: anger is a sense of knowledge or certainty that someone or something is wrong, 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 surprisingly difficult skill: empathy. ⁷ And at the root of empathy is curiosity.

“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?” ⁸

It can feel like a Herculean task for me to put myself in the shoes of the person who left a nasty, patronizing comment in the online forum. 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 of always needing to be right. Even when it comes to terribly unfair things, I’ve learned that taking the time to understand why I’m bothered gives me a detached perspective that restores my sanity and makes me more productive (and sometimes, I turn out to be pleasantly surprised that the issue is not as dire as I thought). If certainty is one of the culprits of anger, curiosity is its counterbalance.

Anger, or rather “transition-anger”, I’ve learned, is a limited resource: like lighter fluid, it burns and drains quickly. It’s hard on my whole body. I appreciate its role in helping me notice things that are either important, or seem important, but I don’t want to open it more often than I need to. (And of course, it would be unwise to open it less than necessary, too.)

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.” And you’re probably right. This is the paradox of anger. We may be convinced our transition-anger is justified, that someone else has wronged us, but even if we are, the only person we can control is us. That does not mean that we can’t hope to address problems on both a personal and collective level — only that our actions will be most potent if we’re guided by reason rather than impulse.

“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.” ⁹ I want to use my “transition-anger” fuel reserves wisely — when I do, I’m hopeful that I can think more clearly, do more good, and leave the world slightly better than I found it.

And in the meantime, I can get a good night’s sleep.

***

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1. Nichomachean Ethics, Book 4, Chapter 5.
2. Rhetoric, Book 2, Chapter 2.
3. Ibid.
4. From “On the Control of Anger,” the Moralia.
5. Ibid.
6. Nussbaum, Martha C. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. Oxford University Press, 2018.
7. “Cognitive empathy” or “theory of mind” are more precise terms.
8. From The Meditations.
9. From Anguttara Nikaya 7.60