There is no upside to anger
How many readers are going to get angry after reading this?
Anger is a big deal for the Stoics. Seneca wrote a whole book about it, and it is still just as good — if not better — than the advice you find on the anger management site of the American Psychological Association.
The basic idea is that anger is one of the pathē, or unhealthy emotions, as distinct from the eupatheiai, their healthy counterpart, an example of which would be love for the proper objects or people (like virtue, or your children). In Stoic psychology, what makes an emotion unhealthy is the fact that it overrides reason, and nothing does that to the degree of anger.
I have written about anger rom a Stoic perspective before, and my experience is that a good number of people get really angry when they read something like what you are about to read. So, be forewarned!
The occasion to revisit this always controversial topic is an article published in the New York Times by Christina Caron, entitled “Don’t Shut Down Your Anger. Channel It.” It begins with what is now becoming a standard line in certain quarters: “There is an upside to feeling angry.” I doubt it, but let’s see.
Caron’s first volley is rather unconvincing. She tells us that recent research, published in the Journal of…
