I would bet that in Socrates’ old age he sometimes got angry. He did, after all, begin to fear death—at least in his dreams.
Hobbes’ definition of anger is charming (and he lived into his nineties); anger was the passion one felt “breaking through a sudden stop.” Weakness makes us vulnerable to anger. Rather than admit that it is our weakness that is making us angry, we tend to distort the world or our understanding of ourselves. Ways to overcome the distorting effects of anger are varied, but perhaps they can be grouped into two categories: tyranny and philosophy.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Socrates narrowly avoided the tyrannical path. Intelligent and ambitious men are typically angry men, especially because the society they live in does not meet their expectations or doesn’t care about them.
Anger and Others, Anger and Speech
Have you ever tried to write something down and found that it doesn’t come out right, that you can think of a thousand ways other people will misinterpret it. You realize that they can write off what you’re trying to say easily because the words you’re using might be misconstrued. -- Another example: Have you ever been in a romance where you just couldn’t get the other person to see things correctly?
Since average American citizens aren’t allowed to physically wreck people for bad behavior, they often console themselves that living well is the best revenge.
To tell people on either side of the Covid debate that the other will never agree and never apologize, that nothing is going to make them see things your way—that experience drove a lot of people (even some Straussians) to tyranny. The inability of some men to see clearly during the government lockdowns also persuaded many that the time for tyranny had arrived.
Antidote to Anger
The way to get over your anger is to get people to act right, and this can even include inanimate things when their misbehavior can be extended to humans. I have seen men fly into a rage at a cabinet. If you’re really serious and you think things through, sometimes you’ll see that completely natural events might have been otherwise if someone had acted differently. Maybe the boulder fell to punish, to right a wrong. Maybe it fell cruelly. Man can extend his ordering spirit from other men, to “nature,” to the gods.
I think we men of today are habituated to draw the line at cabinets, i.e., to draw the line at being angry at other men. I submit that this is just us being unserious. We are artificially closed off from what is possible, from the divine. We are closed off from what is possible because we have accepted a puny view of man. Since (we think) there are no angels or demons interested in man, no gods or God, it makes no sense to get angry when capricious wind and stupid rock make sport of the dignity of man.
Be that as it may—extend to where you will—the antidote to anger is to put all this to rights and forcefully extinguish whatever refuses to be so put. Politics is the antidote to anger.
Through politics we cultivate men—breed and educate them—so that they can live righteously. Living with just men is an antidote to anger. Righteous men will cultivate other upright men who can set things to rights. Through politics, righteous men overcome unrighteous men and other obstacles.
The Problem of Politics
A righteous man, prone to anger—great anger—will most likely not find what he needs. Instead of virtuous men, he’s likely to find himself in the midst of vicious men. Cowardice is the most normal vice he will encounter.
Sometimes, he finds that he has the resources to condescend—he finds that enough men will act well enough, if only he lets them believe some stupid things about themselves, lets them think they are better or more important than they really are.
When Plato or Aristotle wrote on politics, it was as if laying down rules for a lunatic asylum; and if they presented the appearance of speaking of a great matter, it was because they knew that the madmen, to whom they spoke, thought they were kings and emperors. They entered into their principles in order to make their madness as little harmful as possible.
There are times when “men need to do tough things”—they can often be brought to do these things if these things are made into something they are not.
Take something as simple as possessing property or wealth of some kind. You might think men would see the necessity of this, but Locke must go on at length in chapter 5 of the Second Treatise to persuade his readers that the Earth, though given to man in common, must necessarily be broken up into distinct commonwealths, each claiming a part of the earth for its own.
Or take Nietzsche’s admonition to become master:
[You must become a] man who says: "I like that, I take it for my own, and mean to guard and protect it from every one"; a man who can conduct a case, carry out a resolution, remain true to an opinion, keep hold of a woman, punish and overthrow insolence; a man who has his indignation and his sword, and to whom the weak, the suffering, the oppressed, and even the animals willingly submit and naturally belong.
Locke had to make-pretend that property was justified because property is “good for mankind.” That is, when you and yours take property you are really doing something that is good for mankind and in accord with the law of nature. Nietzsche on the other hand made-pretend that mankind is genuinely double, and that some men are slaves and others masters. In both cases, the philosopher seeks to make the difficult task of Establishing Propriety palatable to their readers and this action, while useful to themselves, is also a philanthropic act for the reason that their readers, in any event, would have to try to establish propriety.
Tyranny as an Antidote to Anger
A tyrant dislikes this philosophic condescension. There is something to be said for the dislike.
Take America’s civil religion: for decades Anglo-Americans condescended to newcomers and retained their own status in society by paying lip-service to the equality of the newcomers. That did not end so well in the end. Consider also the USSR make-believing its client states were allies free states: the USSR held onto its rule by claiming to not be a genuine ruler. For both the Anglo-Americans and the Communists, their rhetoric backfired on them when their “equals” and their “free allies” decided they really ought to be treated like equals and allies.
Consider how a very serious man might hear interpret the failure of the USSR and the rapid decline in the USA. He knows the people of his time are too vicious to participate in politics. Even philosophers as moderate as Locke admit some times are worse than others, that men in some times are more vicious than the men in other better times. Even statesmen as humane and liberal as Jefferson admitted that conditions in society can get so bad that “the many” have no business sharing in rule. Now consider an honest and good man in such a moment, who is not only honest but is also conscious of possessing military superiority. This man might think to himself it is best for him to just tell the people straight out that he is going to rule because there is nothing better to be done and that he has no thought of inviting others into his councils. He might say that he is ruling for his benefit and that the people will have to bear up under this.
And what goes for the tyrant goes also for the civilization. Would you rather America, Europe and everything that is Western be beaten down under the moral bromides of racial communists and college professors or would it be better for a Pericles to say to us we have the wolf by the ears as he did to the Athenians long ago,
Your country has a right to your services in sustaining the glories of her position. … to recede is no longer possible … For what you hold is, to speak somewhat plainly, a tyranny; to take it perhaps was wrong, but to let it go is unsafe. And men of these retiring views, making converts of others, would quickly ruin a state; indeed the result would be the same if they could live independent by themselves; for the retiring and unambitious are never secure without vigorous protectors at their side; in fine, such qualities are useless to an imperial city, though they may help a dependency to an unmolested servitude.
The tyrant decides he has neither the luxury nor the inclination to condescend to the vicious men of his time. He thinks effective rule will justify itself plainly, without any need to pretend it is for the good of the many. He does not want to get trapped by insolent men, forced by them to give up his prerogative because he was too squeamish to say that they really did not deserve to participate in politics.
Once his rule is established, and for as long as it is established well and he is in good health and spirits, then for that long he will be cured of anger because he will not suffer the things weak men suffer. When other men act out he can humble them. He can set his boundary stones, and do what all men desire within his kingdom. He will give his name to a stamp that gets pressed on money, stone, and souls. In his old age he can reflect upon these things with pleasure and marvel at his great luck at being a man so different than the other men who go down into the dust in droves day after day.
Philosophy as an Antidote to Anger
Let me begin by stating what philosophy isn’t. Philosophy isn’t sitting on the hill watching it all transpire below à la Lucretius.
It is also sweet to watch great armies,
opposing forces in a war, drawn up
in the field, when you are in no danger.
While that may be nice, it’s too often a mere cope for being unimportant and uninvited to the great table of events. If a philosopher does enjoy the Lucretian Sweetness, it isn’t what makes him a philosopher.
The philosopher has been approximated by many so let’s take a quick look at a famous approximation to see what it is he strives at. The holy fool or saint has a sort of maximum freedom. He did not acquire this freedom by understanding “that he knows of nothing noble and good” as Socrates did. Instead, he acquired his freedom by renouncing the honor of society and all that goes with it. He can say whatever he wants, and do whatever he lists, and people tolerate him because he is the holy fool.
Another example of this is the town drunk in To Kill a Mockingbird. This white fellow wants to have a black wife and especially likes hanging out with blacks, but to get away with doing this he has to pretend to be a drunk and a man who has given up his self-respect. The white folks of Maycomb leave him alone since he lets them look down on him. This American version of the holy fool therefore gets to say what he wants and do as he lists.
Look at the monk: he gets to retire from society and devote himself to study, but to do so he has to renounce many things and dress queerly. The Brahmin class is famous for securing its prerogatives by treating themselves in ghastly ways.
Socrates accomplishes what these accomplish and more through his knowledge. The holy fool is only the image of the philosopher; he is less free because, while he is allowed to say what he wants, he is not always able to say what he wants. Sometimes his attempts to express himself in speech turns to nothing. What he writes and says has no life, for himself or his listener. He is free but it’s a diminished freedom. He will have to become simple or he will fall back into anger. It might be anger that finally crushes his nervous system and makes him simple. Sometimes anger can solve its own problem…
What you can see in a Platonic dialogue or other work of philosophy is the working of the mind’s inner necessity. Sometimes that inner necessity picks up interesting and unique expressions, as in the case of this or that philosopher; but at bottom, it is always the same reveling and pleasure, as the philosopher explores his own mind, one necessitous step after another.
Plato read and reread his dialogues every day because doing so made him feel alive. He liked seeing his mind at work. It’s almost like exercise, which pulls the muscles out of lethargy. When man is alive he is not angry; it’s when lethargy sets in and life recedes that something in him rebels. He grows angry and wants to cut down his own weakness… but eventually he is too weak to do so.
Could enjoying one’s own thought leave a man wanting more? I say “no!” The man who so enjoys the necessary movements of his mind knows the limits of the possible. The man who is dissatisfied doesn’t know the limits.
Pascal says that the end of reason is reason’s realization of its limits. Once you know the limits, there is no feeling of loss at not exceeding those limits. You wouldn’t want to exceed the limit even if you could because then you wouldn’t be you, but you are happy with what you are because you know what you are. A neat package.
“All our dignity consists, then, in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavor, then, to think well; this is the principle of morality.” - Pascal
Politics & Socrates is a face-off that COULD BE an antidote to anger.
Socratic questioning is a fast track to making someone angry because they don’t understand their own programmed opinions.
However, the philosopher & the artist, the jester & the actor, the advisor & the fool...
Philosophers cease to be; that once they operate according to the standards of their society without fail, they will take on water. They will take on & thus, ever for the purposes of being allowed in a debate, there is no clear path to discussion. Philosopher-kings were always scoffed at by those who look upon Joseph Biden & know his time is up .
I’m not even saying anything is wrong with him. I’m speaking in PR, elective terms.
A philosopher is- at the most high level- just a prophet. A servant of the Most High God & The One finding a way to tell people they & their loved ones are BOTH capable of speaking with his voice & mouth.
If every human believed the mouth of God opened each time another spoke, the most effective Way & the Only would be clear for all- speak exactly what is on your heart.