|
October 27, 2003
I mentioned in an earlier post on anger in public life that Seneca argued against the usefulness of anger to a position in which reason is the opposite of the passions. He holds that community and individual well-being means that we cannot allow reason to mingle with, and be contaminated by, the destructive passions.
This is the standard Stoic view of the extirpation of the passions (eg., fear love, grief, anger, envy, jealously etc). Stoic therapy of self-confrontation and self-scrutiny aims to ensure that the passions are eliminated from human life.
How do we make sense of this elimination? Stoics such as Seneca, start from what we can call the commonsense position. And that is?
Well the passions are seen to be a form of false judgement. They are violent upheavals in our subjectivity to be contrasted with the calmness of reason. What we noticed about the Bali bombings is that the grief was a form of emotional upheaval involving grieving for loved ones who had been killed by the bomb.
Judgement implies that the passions have a cognitive element as they involve ways of interpreting the world: eg., citizens being angry with John Howard's actions on refugees; or Australian journalists beign angry the Green Senators disrupting the US Presidency when Bush addressed the Australian Parliament; ior the Australian people with the Islamic bombers in Bali. Hence these judgements can be evaluated in terms of them being true or false.
That pretty much accords with our commonsense position today.
Evaluative here means good/bad, worthwhile/worthless, helpful/noxious etc. It presupposes a complex web of connections between self and community and a sense of fortune, or of things being outside our control. We fear being blown by a terrorist bomb, and we grieve or mourn when we hear that a friend or lover has had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time eg. Bali.
So why hold that passions should be extirpated rather than moderated? Why is a flourishing life one lived free from anger (and fear, jealously, passionate love, intense joy etc)?
From what I can make out it is necessary because the judgments are false. Why so? There are several arguments. Externals, such as grief over the death of loved one,do not have great value given the fillness of time. I will let that argument go.
Secondly, the passions are held to be not that important in motivating ethical action. Insead of anger toward the Bali bombers we could act out of duty to defend the nation from attack. Thus in On Anger Seneca says:
'"What then?" you ask; "will the good man not be angry if his father is murdered, his mother outraged before his eyes?" No, he will not be angry, but he will avenge them, will protect them. Why, moreover, are you afraid that filial affection, even without anger, may not prove a sufficiently strong incentive for him? Or you might as well say: "What then? if a good man should see his father or his son under the knife, will he not weep, will he not faint?" ... The good man will perform his duties undisturbed and unafraid; and he will in such a way do all that is worthy of a good man as to do nothing that is unworthy of a man. My father is being murdered-I will defend him; he is slain-I will avenge him, not because I grieve, but because it is my duty.'
I've got problems with this argument. Anger and grief seems to be a more morally valuable response to terrorist murder than duty since it indicates the cares and commitments to loved ones and friends. The care and the commitment to others is what was so remarkable about the aftermath of the Bali bombings; it indicates the importance of family life and personal relationships to our conception of a good human life well lived. it is the police tracking down the terrorists who are doing their duty for the nation state.
The third argument is one that holds the passions are bad. They rae experienced as a form of emotional upheaval that cause disorder, agony and torment. Consider the way Seneca sets this image of the passions as a torrent that overwhelms us and leads to ruin:
"But you have only to behold the aspect of those possessed by anger to know that they are insane. For as the marks of a madman are unmistakable-a bold and threatening mien, a gloomy brow, a fierce expression, a hurried step, restless hands, an altered color, a quick and more violent breathing-so likewise are the marks of the angry man; his eyes blaze and sparkle, his whole face is crimson with the blood that surges from the lowest depths of the heart, his lips quiver, his teeth are clenched his hair bristles and stands on end, his breathing is forced and harsh, his joints crack from writhing, he groans and bellows, bursts out into speech with scarcely intelligible words, strikes his hands together continually, and stamps the ground with his feet; his whole body is excited and "performs great angry threats"; it is an ugly and horrible picture of distorted and swollen frenzy-you cannot tell whether this vice is more execrable or more hideous."
The passions are pathological by their very nature. They leave us weak and diseased and in need of therapy. It is over the top but can be redescribed in terms of psychoanalysis and the unconscious. Suddenly we have an argument that bites.
to be continued.
|
