In a paper titled 'The reason to be angry forever' Agnes Callard writes-
We get angry for reasons—or, at any rate, for what we take to be reasons.
There may be a reason why we can be angry for no reason- e.g. we are drunk or have a brain tumour or something of that sort.
If asked “why are you angry?” you will
head-butt the person asking you, at least you would if you lived on the Council Estate down the road.
cite something (that you think) someone did or failed to do. That action or omission is what you are angry about. Getting angry is easy to understand:
for some people at some times but not for some others. Why get angry when what you really need to do is to get even?
I wrong you, by, for example, betraying your trust; you find out and that makes you angry,
or you predicted I would do so and have a sanction already in place
and now you are angry, at me, for having betrayed you. What is harder to understand is why you might cease to be angry.
Emotions are 'Darwinian algorithms of the mind'. They exist because they have survival value. By their nature, they are transitory though, no doubt, a particular person may be dysfunctional in this respect and thus be perpetually sad or perpetually angry or perpetually suspicious.
Consider what I will call “the eternal anger argument”: P1: My betrayal of you at t1 is your reason for being angry with me at t2. P2: If it is true at t2 that I betrayed you at t1, then it will also be true at t3, t4, t5, and so on that I betrayed you at t1. Conclusion: If you have a reason to be angry with me, you will have a reason to be angry with me forever.
Consider the following- P1 My slapping you at t1 is your reason for feeling pain at t2. P2 If it is true at t2 that I slapped you at t1 and you felt pain at t2 then it will also be true that you will feel that pain at t3, t4 and even thirty years later. Emotions are like physical sensations of pain or pleasure. You feel the pain of a slap for an hour or two. You feel the pleasant feeling of satiation for an hour or two after a meal. You don't feel them forever.
What is wrong with P2? The answer is that the efficient cause of pain, or the feeling of pain, is internal to the body of the person in question. Callard is confusing the cause of a thing with a 'reason' people may give for what triggered that particular cause. I may say, x slapping you is the reason you to feel pain. Someone else might say the reason you feel pain is because you don't stand up for yourself. That is why your students keep slapping and punching you. A court of law, on the other hand, may come to the conclusion that the reason you suffered pain was because you pinched the bottom of a student who has a black belt in karate. You have only yourself to blame.
The argument says that if I have generated a reason for you to be angry with me, then there is nothing I can now do to address that reason.
It is a stupid argument. You may apply a balm, real or metaphorical, to rid the other person of their anger or pain.
For suppose that I offer compensation, apologize profusely, promise never to do it again, radically and convincingly transform my character. None of that seems to touch the thing you are angry about, which is that, at t1, I wronged you.
And at time t2 that wrong was righted. Consider what happens when a penis has a reason to become erect because entry into a nice vagina has become available to it. Will it remain perpetually erect because that reason continues to operate? In my case, sadly not. Similarly, if you say something I have reason to find funny and thus cause me to laugh aloud, it is not the case that I will keep laughing for all time even if my reason to find your remark funny continues to operate.
It is still true that I did that, and it is still true that I shouldn’t have. Your reason for anger is eternal because I can’t change what you are angry about.
The reason may be eternal but the cause is ephemeral. Moreover, different people, or the same person at different times, may give a different reason for a physical or mental or emotional element. You slap me and say the reason is because I pinched your bum. I say the reason is coz you are a fucking Lesbian tramp. You remind me that you are the Headmaster of the school where I teach and, being of the male gender, could not possibly be Lesbian. I remind you that you supplied the drugs we have both been taking. We then agree that the true reason I got slapped was because of Neo-Liberalism.
On one popular account of anger, the eternal anger argument is unsound because P1 is false.
It is false. Anger is an emotion which, by its nature, is ephemeral. What Callard is talking about is a grievance. One may be angry and yet have no grievance and vice versa. We may say that a grievance is unextinguished save by some act of forgiveness or equitable reparation.
I will call this account the “problem-solving account.” The problem-solving account maintains that your reason for being angry with me is not simply the betrayal. Rather, your reason is constituted by some continuing problem generated by the betrayal, a problem your anger motivates you to resolve.
Callard is no longer talking about anger- which is an emotion. She is talking about 'being angry with'- which is an attitude- a hostile one- towards a particular person. That hostility may arise out of something the other person did or a problem they created which continues to vex you. But, for purely strategic reasons, one may choose to act in a hostile manner, or feign great anger towards, a class of people you have never interacted with. Equally, a schoolmaster who affects an irascible disposition and who perpetually appears about to blow this top may terrify his pupils into desisting from seeking to amend his ignorance concerning Pythagoras's theorem or other such shite.
On the problem-solving account, anger is desirelike:
Anger is more like sexual arousal. A sense of grievance is like the sense of desire. True, your grievance may end for the same reason that your desire may end- viz. that which provoked it is dying horribly of a disfiguring disease.
It responds to reasons to make (what the agent perceives as) a positive change in the world.
What responds to such reasons is the desire to make positive changes in the world. Anger or grievance has nothing to do with it.
If the reasons to be angry are reasons to, for example, take measures that prevent future violations of the relevant kind, then they will not be eternal.
No. They will still be reasons to be angry. It's just that there will be no further occasion for those reasons to come into operation. Thus if you find other people make you angry and you take steps to kill everybody, then the reason for your anger won't be other people. It may be something else- e.g. birds. Fuck you birds! Fuck you very much!
Martha Nussbaum presents this as the correct account not of anger as such but of a species of anger she calls “transition anger.”
All emotions are transitory. A brief flare up of anger may leave one with a permanent sense of grievance and a persistent attitude of hostility. But anger is not the same thing as grievance or hostility. Both can arise without any experience of anger.
Others have argued that anger is an attempt to protest a threatening message, to the effect that the victim is deserving of bad treatment; reverse the ongoing misbehavior of a wrongdoer who, in failing to apologize, acts as though the wrong were acceptable; get the wrongdoer to understand what he or she has done; be restored to the status from which the wrongdoing demoted one; and secure the wrongdoer’s commitment to the norm he or she violated.
Anger may certainly have these instrumental effects but so may shitting into your palms and flinging your faeces about. The problem with stupid shitheads seeking to philosophize anger is that anything proposition they advance can, salva veritate, also be applied to farting in a derisive and contemptuous manner or masturbating wistfully while gazing at a bowl of pomergranates.
No doubt, Callard & Nussbaum's students are even now writing and publishing peer-reviewed papers on 'the reason to be forever farting noisily' or 'the reason to keep shitting into your palms and flinging your feces about'.
On closer examination, Callard doesn't really has an argument. She is commenting on the fact that something which happened which didn't much matter and which doesn't much matter, nevertheless is something which happened. Thus, if a reason for something was given at time t and it was stupid and had no consequences whatsoever, then even fourteen thousand years later, it would still be the case that reason had been given.
But, this really isn't a very interesting observation.
The argument doesn’t purport to establish that anger is eternal or even that it would be rational to be angry forever. Long-term anger is unpleasant, unattractive, and exhausting; one has many reasons for bringing it about that one’s anger cease. What the argument does try to show is that these reasons must leave the original reason to be angry in place.
Just as it must leave the fact that a chipmunk in Canada farted in 1922 or, if that is not the case, then I made a claim to that effect. Moreover, if you think the reason I did so was because I am Jennifer Aniston then that reason would also be 'left in place' by the entire destruction of the multiverse which I have a very foolish reason to believe occurred in 2013. Even if that isn't true, my foolish reason is left in place.
If the argument works, it follows that a person gives up his or her anger
which is like giving up on peeing because there is nothing left in your bladder
not because the issue has been resolved or even addressed in any way but merely because,
anger is ephemeral though a grievance may not be
for example, he or she sees that he or she will be better off in a nonangry condition. Pragmatic reasons for ceasing to be angry have positive counterparts:
reasons aren't causes. You may have a very good reason for go to work but you may end up taking taking drugs and watching TV because you are a lazy sod.
pragmatic reasons to get angry. (For example, I work myself into an angry state before entering the car dealership, in the belief that a menacing appearance will put me in an improved negotiating position.)
The cause of your doing this is the fact that you are as stupid as shit. No doubt stupid reasons to not shit yourself at the car dealership- e.g. thinking your Bank Manager will feel offended because you did not favour him in this way- have equally stupid positive counterparts- e.g. shitting yourself in the hope that the salesman mistakes you for Joe Biden and gives you a car for free.
If the eternal anger argument is correct,
then, a reason, however stupid, is a cause. Thus if you can give the Andromeda Galaxy a reason- e.g. better feng shui- to move a few thousand light years to the right- this would cause it to do precisely that.
The fact is we don't know the cause of anything or the reason for anything. We merely have reliable correlations and hypothesis which as yet have not been refuted. Callard is making a category mistake. She is confusing something epistemic- viz. reasons- with things which subsist in the material world- viz. causes.
proper (i.e., nonpragmatic) reasons for anger—reasons akin to those cited in P1—have no negative counterparts.
Sure they do. One can just as easily say 'x was angry because y betrayed her' or 'x was sad because y betrayed her. That's why she showed no anger.'
Callard invokes Aristotle-
Anger may be defined as an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification towards what concerns oneself or towards what concerns one’s friends. . . .
Aristotle is wrong. Anger is an emotion, not an impulse. There is a separate impulse towards revenge but it may involve hilarity or boredom. True, the connotations of the word he used for anger “orgy” (ὀργή) were different and related to thymos as a specific type of orexis (ὄρεξις) which is the type of desire we regard as motivating action.
It must always be attended by a certain pleasure—that which arises from the expectation of revenge.
Aristotle had shit for brains. But, in his line of work, that was an advantage. Still, I suppose his most famous pupil had a very bad temper. Perhaps this was because he was young and drank way too much.
For since nobody aims at what he thinks he cannot attain, the angry man is aiming at what he can attain, and the belief that you will attain your aim is pleasant. Hence it has been well said about wrath, Sweeter it is by far than the honeycomb dripping with sweetness, And spreads through the hearts of men.
The Indians considered anger 'a small pleasure'. Still, as we get older we derive this small pleasure from reading the sort of shite Professors of useless subjects produce so as to bring further disgrace upon their disciplines.
Anger, like other emotions, serve a signalling function. Mum has to pretend to be very angry you failed your Math exam when, secretly, she is pleased you didn't shit yourself the way you did in Remedial English.
Angry people are, of course, motivated to seek revenge or apology or restitution, and they are sometimes moved to prevent future infractions.
I think anger is a signal that the course of action taken towards a specific person is not to be to be seen as a routine modus operandi. The gangster takes pains to differentiate between murders he commits because he has been dis-respected from those which are 'only business'.
But anger does not, in the first instance, seem to be a response to the fact that some wrong action hasn’t yet been avenged, apologized for, or disavowed, or that it may recur in the future. Rather, it seems to be a way of concerning oneself with the (unchangeable) fact that some wrong was done.
That would be the case if anger persisted after revenge had been taken. Alexander killed Cleitus in a fit of anger. He then felt remorse. He did not continue to brood on the things Cleitus had said which offended him. His anger had abated and so had his sense of injury or grievance. What took its place was grief and regret.
Simulated anger or indignation can serve a signalling function of the sort Callard mentions. Thus a person who had relatives who perished in the Shoah might say to his son, 'never stop being angry about what happened. Be ever vigilant to ensure it does not happen again. You may forgive. You must never forget.'
However, in this case, we are no longer speaking of an emotion. We are speaking of having a reason to cultivate an emotion in a specific context. The problem is that it is strategic. If you cultivate a grievance, others may cultivate an equal and opposite grievance. The thing is like a 'threat point' and there can be an arms-race between threat points. But, this is 'wasteful competition'. One can outsource anger or grievance. Some other sap may be accorded the onerous duty of anger, grievance and hostility. If wrongs exist and are immutable, they concern only those who fall below the threshold of recompense. I suppose this is Callard's argument for eternal anger. Since those who teach philosophy are thralls to the most sub-human of the Humanities, let them perpetually seethe in their own impotent fury.
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