Anger is a broad term. Being angry means different things for different persons. The stoic idea is not about feeling the emotion of anger, but to quickly control it, and to not react destructively from anger towards the object of the anger, mainly because that rarely solves the problem but can often make it worse by impairing rationality.

Anger is a broad term. — Frotunes

How so? It's just an emotional response, I think.

Being angry means different things for different persons. The stoic idea is not about feeling the emotion of anger, but to quickly control it, and to not react destructively from anger towards the object of the anger, mainly because that rarely solves the problem but can often make it worse by impairing rationality. — Frotunes

I understand that. But, don't emotions contain their own set of logic? That's what I'm trying to imply here.

What do you think, @unenlightened?

I'm having a lot of feels recently.

To a moderator:

Please delete this topic. I started a more general one about the logic of emotions recently, which I was hoping on addressing here; but, think in a separate thread would be more useful.

The other one had a terrible OP Wallows, this one is better.

:up:

I'm in favour of maintaining the capacity for anger when it is needed.

The emotions are not all or nothing, and they are often alloyed--anger and fear, for instance. We might feel a slight flicker of anger on one end of the spectrum, murderous rage at the other end. We learn how to manage our emotions, if we are raised half-ways properly, whatever our philosophical bent. If we don't -- we end up with big problems.

Anger is an indispensable emotion. Anger is a motivator when it comes to righting wrongs; when we need to defend our individual and collective rights; when we need to prevent a continuing annoyance. Most of the time, normal people are able to manage anger productively. When they can't, problems result.

I have had "anger issues" in the past. Petty annoyances would trigger very disproportionate feelings of anger which, when expressed, might be socially inconvenient or trigger disproportionate displays of anger from other people who were also walking around with a tank full of simmering rage.

I don't know whether we can have too much joy--probably we can--but we can certainly have too much sadness, disgust, contempt, fear, and anger.

From The Bhagavad Gita (Translated by Vladimir Antonov):

2:62. But if one comes back in the mind to the earthly objects, then inevitably an attachment to them arises. This attachment leads to the desire to possess these objects, and the impossibility to satisfy this desire produces anger.
2:63. Because of anger the perception gets completely distorted. The distortion of perception causes the loss of memory (the memory about one’s own achievements). And the loss of memory leads to the loss of the energy of the consciousness. By losing the energy of the consciousness, man degrades.

So, basically, anger is a reaction to our own shortcomings misguidedly directed at others. By loss of memory of one's own achievements is meant that we forget our status (as humane, compassionate, reasonable beings). Man degrades means that he/she acts without due integrity, out of countenance, child-like, maybe even animal like (with little reason, compassion, humane-ness).

Personal experience has taught me that anger is what we do when we're blaming ourselves for not being good enough, for not being vigilant enough, for trusting when we should have known better, for not being disciplined enough, for seeking undue shortcuts, etc. It's never about other people, it's always about our misguided expectations. There are always limitations (weaknesses) and failed expectations in anger.

The Stoics thought of it as madness — Wallows

When someone has wronged you, then, I suggest that the appropriate response is to be angry — Wallows

But, don't emotions contain their own set of logic? — Wallows

Let me try this out and see if it floats anyone's boat. Let's say that emotions are the substance of subjectivity. So if someone steals your rattle or whatever insult is substantial to your subjectivity, then you are going to be angry. Angry as a matter of fact, before any question of sanity or madness of virtue or vice.

I'm having a lot of feels recently. — Wallows

Shit happens, and one gives a damn; this is called 'being alive'.

Elsewhere, I have claimed that anger is secondary; that is it is a response to a previous feeling. Someone steals my rattle and my first feeling is of loss - I am bereft, I am indeed diminished because I identify with my rattle. You have deprived me of the fullness of my being and hurt me by amputating my rattle and my anger is an attempt to escape that hurt, and motivates me to try and get the rattle back from you. Thus you will have the feeling of deprivation that I find hurtful, and i will have the fullness of my enrattled being again.

So them stoics, they were just like this in their youth, but they noticed that as long as everyone is angry about their rattle, and fighting each other, everyone is spreading misery and things go from bad to worse. And a few other folks noticed too, and so they all started to make judgements about their own feelings, and wonder whether their feelings were good feelings or bad feelings, and then they wondered who to blame for the bad feelings, and how to have good feelings all the time.

Which leads to - 'I Must not feel how I feel.'

And that is madness, because it is a denial of internal reality.

Anger is part of a sympathetic nervous response. It's the "fight" part.

People can trigger that response in themselves just by imagining an approaching predator.

I've often wondered why we have horrifying and fearful dreams. Maybe just to give the system a test run pending the real thing where you actually have to punch that lion in the nose in order to survive.

Nope, it’s a broad term. Being angry that the bus arrived late, being angry that your team lost, being angry at your wife cheating on you, being angry at not being able to remember a song. Jim being angry at his boss. John being angry at his boss. Natasha being angry at her boss. Angry tiger when it can’t get any food. Angry birds. The subtle anger in anonymous Internet forums. Feeling hangry before lunch. Being hangry before dinner. Raging. Punching the wall. Grinding your teeth. A slight roll of eyes. See? Very broad. Its not a spectrum, no human emotion is.

Yes, I think emotions too are regulated by the brain in a logical manner. The clue here is that every brain is different, coming to its current state after years or decades of experience, and every situation is also different. Hence the variety in anger.

Not to mention things like culture, religion, upbringing, gender, age and genetics.

Coming back to this thread...

I see anger as detrimental to personal growth and enlightenment. The Stoics knew very well about the issue of anger and how it affects the psyche.

But, let me give a new spin on the issue. Namely, anger is detrimental to a healthy and sound psyche in how it negates the possibility to overcome issues and wrong held beliefs. To frame this another way, anger presents to the psyche a lure of feeling righteous and justified in their sentiment held towards some issue or thing. When someone is angry with another person, that resentment or prejudice against them supersedes their entire mental picture of that person.

I have too long been guided by anger. It is a bad feeling that is all consuming. It detracts from the ruler within and is like a festering sore that prevents a person from feeling calm and relaxed.

We all know that anger breeds hatred.

A question. Why are so many people angry? What's so comforting about anger and hatred?

Anger is no emotion, it's the absence of it; the result of living with stored up repressed emotion. The sum total of repressed emotion=anger. People who get angry believe their emotions can't be trusted and hence deny them...invariably leading to the boomerang return of emotion in neurotic acting out. The psyche is led by instinct. Too much neurotic blocking of instinct only gives it more power over us. Instinct itself isn't violent as most believe...it's the process of denying it which pisses it off. Really, then, ego, self, and all attempts to subdue instinct and constrain it, result in frustration and acting out.

What can you do to tame the childish temper in you? Allow some peaceful psychosis. Only psychosis can combat neurosis. Personally, I believe the nature of psychosis (also primary process) to be fundamentally peaceful and neurosis (secondary process), violent. When the instinct or primary process is given some control, it is the blooming of all emotion at once, rather antipodal to anger (according to above definition). Probably most high functioning "professionals" in the market society have anger issues. Their schemata waxing neurotic, bordering on "algorithmic."

Not sure why says anger and hatred are comforting. They are very uncomfortable. They could only be seen as comfortable through a sadomasochistic lens, where sadomasochism is the highest level of mental disorder. I get angry less than most. In part, this is because it feels disgusting and perverted. By the by, it feels like losing your mind. If you'd thought you lost your mind, but then experience several episodes of violence/anger/hatred, you realize you hadn't lost your mind before the way you'd thought; getting angry shows you what it means to lose your mind, it being the king of all hysterias. As long as you don't have problems with yellow bile, there's always a chance of getting to your highest self...in other words, you still have a kind of philosophical guide to follow (manas). The secular rational ethos unquestionably rewards angry, aggressive types of people who stop at nothing to get what they want (conquer, achieve, win). For me, then, successful people in the market society aren't really successful if they have issues with losing their mind in fits of rage. Alpha males are rewarded for remaining like undeveloped children..

Hi Anthony. What do you mean by saying that psychosis abates neurosis and anger?

Probably most high functioning "professionals" in the market society have anger issues. — Anthony

This is an ambiguous sentence, but I’ll address it anyway. In my experience ‘professionals’ (whoever they are) show or display less anger than I see in others. If you’re correct about suppressed emotional issues leading to outbursts of anger then surely they would be displaying acts of anger all the time. How could they not?

Anger is a physiological response that prioritises the values of the ‘self’. But anger as an active response to anything is unhealthy because as humans we are capable of interacting on a more complex level than stimulus-response. I understand that there is more to the universe than what is valuable and meaningful to me and mine, even as my physiological systems might ‘naturally’ respond otherwise.

It’s a common mistake to assume that the Stoics had ‘control over their emotions’, or over their world, more than most. But it was more about perspective. The Stoics appeared to advocate a ‘view from above’ approach to each moment of experience.

The appropriate response to someone who has ‘wronged’ you, then, is to firstly consider (or ask for) the reasons they may have for their actions, rather than assume intended malice. Most people, outcomes and situations can’t realistically be expected to consider your feelings to be a top priority - it isn’t logical to be angry with them for that.

I have too long been guided by anger. It is a bad feeling that is all consuming. It detracts from the ruler within and is like a festering sore that prevents a person from feeling calm and relaxed.

We all know that anger breeds hatred.

A question. Why are so many people angry? What's so comforting about anger and hatred? — Wallows

I would suggest that anger and hatred can be comforting in that they reassure us we still have a handle on our world. This sounds counter-intuitive, but consider this: most people interact in a world that is comfortable because everything is more or less manageable. We set our own challenges, we’ve established relationships and arranged things just so, and we’re pretty confident that we can handle anything that might arise and quickly restore our pocket of the universe to this apparent equilibrium. There’s a sense of freedom in this state of mind - a belief that I control my universe.

Then someone does something that makes me painfully aware that there is more to this universe than I’ve been telling myself, and I am not in control. Anger and hatred, rather than acknowledging a position of negotiation, allows me to separate the universe into the world I still control and the one that is working against me. Anger arises when a part of the world I thought I controlled turns against me.

To let go of anger and hatred, I need to accept that I am not expected to have control over my world, but that I must continually be aware of, understand and nurture my ever-changing relationships with everything in the unfolding universe.

i think its great when people choose not to get married and i believe the best people in the world tend to not get married. That being said if you don't want to get angry and don't want to yell at people then don't get married.

Nope, it’s a broad term. Being angry that the bus arrived late, being angry that your team lost, being angry at your wife cheating on you, being angry at not being able to remember a song. Jim being angry at his boss. John being angry at his boss. Natasha being angry at her boss. Angry tiger when it can’t get any food. Angry birds. The subtle anger in anonymous Internet forums. Feeling hangry before lunch. Being hangry before dinner. Raging. Punching the wall. Grinding your teeth. A slight roll of eyes. See? Very broad. Its not a spectrum, no human emotion is. — Frotunes

A bit of sleight if hand going on there. It looks very broad by your definition of each of those responses being anger. But in fact those situations have many different responses, not just anger. How do you know the birds are angry? ‘A slight roll of the eyes’ is hardly anger. Being angry at not being able to remember a song?

These are triggers for anger, not anger itself.

Anger is part of a sympathetic nervous response. It's the "fight" part. — frank

I agree, but the ‘fight’ for what?

It looks very broad by your definition of each of those responses being anger — Brett

Actually, on second thoughts I’ll take that back and say that anger might be one of the most complicated of our emotions.

Edit: Studies by Hochschild and Sutton have shown that the show of anger is likely to be an effective manipulation strategy in order to change and design attitudes. Anger is a distinct strategy of social influence and its use (i.e. belligerent behaviors) as a goal achievement mechanism proves to be a successful strategy.[22][23] Wikipedia

Why are so many people angry? What's so comforting about anger and hatred? — Wallows

It’s possible that anger serves a purpose, it may be an action that actually stops us from taking the next step which is physical violence. Though it does seem that one does lead to the other. Possibly the problem is in the other ignoring the signals.

It's how I interpret psychoanalysis. Ego/neurosis/secondary process is made of instinct/psychosis/primary process, it has no well of substance of its own separately from which to draw. Ego, high functioning neurosis, or secondary process, is the effort to control and shape the primary process as though it - the secondary process - had its own source. The primary and secondary process are opposed to each other, even though they are impossible to tease apart. Hence, there's a possibility of chasing after will-o-wisps at this point. When one believes in and espouses a illusory nature of mental processes...violence is likely to surface.

In order to eliminate a false, because impossible, sense of order and get one's psyche working together instead of at odds with itself...what ought be done with these processes in the psychic apparatus? Ought he continue damming back the primary process, like trying to ride an elephant with tenuous, sewing string of some sort for reins? The thin strings are going to break, it is a given. So what to do? The elephant is symbolic of metaphysical pathos, or the totality of emotions within, it is psychosis and the primary process, impossible to vanquish. What to do? It's clear the more you try to push it around and control it, deny it, the more violent and uncontrollable it becomes. Perhaps if the concept of control is dismissed it could be noticed the primary process has inenarrable elements. Pieces we can't fit into our narrative of our self, the neurotic and violent, secondary process.

To call it psychosis is going out on a limb for the hermeneutic of most people's understanding of mental health, to be sure. And this is where I diverge: neurosis is more ill than psychosis in modernity, because it has been so naively accepted as part and parcel to functioning in a profoundly sick system. How sick would the milieu of our psychic information need to be before considering whether or not some or most of our anger is arising because it's impossible to adapt without yellow bile accumulation? I've thought ego/neurosis and algorithms are nearly exactly homologous in function. The automated world is perfect derangement of tranquility of psychosis (with its plenum of emotional beatitude); violent, Procrustean, controlling neurosis (where everything must be in its place ever increasingly) dovetails seamlessly into pseudo contacts with people and the environment, forming the virtual "reality" in which we move and have our being. How much pseudo order are we dependent on nowadays for our feeling of well being? It's the pinnacle of neurosis with the secondary process dominion of the primary. Anger ensues to extraordinary degrees, instinct is looking to squelch its rider. And it has a huge, column- like leg to crush heads like melons.

To sit and do nothing but open up to the elephant and let go of the reins and prods, let it take you wherever it wants and to see the world the way it sees it is enlightening inasmuch as it reveals the common spring where all the animals go to drink without violence. A metaphor for a complex mental apparatus. Anger, though, isn't an emotion as most think, but a reflection of fully repressed emotion.

his is an ambiguous sentence, but I’ll address it anyway. In my experience ‘professionals’ (whoever they are) show or display less anger than I see in others. If you’re correct about suppressed emotional issues leading to outbursts of anger then surely they would be displaying acts of anger all the time. How could they not? — Brett

Not what I said, this was the chosen term (have to be careful): repressed emotion. Suppression retains conscious control, repression becomes automatic, taking on an agency of its own; this automaticity is associated with impulse control illness. The difference (between suppression and repression) is crucial in understanding those with this illness. We all inhibit emotions somewhat, and are as such neurotic, but not all of us choose a path that requires feeding protracted repressional automatisms growing to the point of being their own psychic apparatus and a cut-off agency.

My sentence includes the locution "market society" which I do use a lot as it's important in understanding what, as I see it, is irritating many people - as they conform to it - to the point of anger. It connotes people who are okay with chasing profit as the end of life, upward mobility, relationships filtered through transactional values (principle of exchange), themselves and others being commercialized and commodified objects same as the car they drive to work, and perfunctory, mechanical values replacing the need for liberation, etc.

They wouldn't be "displaying acts of anger" all the time because they'd be repressing the prismatic ensemble of full emotion all the time. Then the impulsive break with temperance occurs; usually whatever elicits the break being completely out of proportion to the magnitude of the acting out event. I've been on the receiving end of this many times, possibly owing to an easygoing disposition: people who don't have problems with anger are often the recipients of emotional precipitations of those who act out. Also, people who think it is right to repress emotion, seeing as they believe they won't reason correctly if they include feeling or whatever, wind up being more controlled by their repressed emotion, which as was said, takes the form of pure anger and hysteria...in other words, an eclipse of reason (which includes the totality of emotion).

Therefore, what are your thoughts about anger? Isn't it a healthy response towards another person, when they wrong you? — Wallows

I think so. One can be confused and think one has been wronged when this is not the case. One can focus on anger because one thinks that gives one power, and through this avoid feeling other emotions, and this can be problematic. One's anger can be based on all sorts of erroneous beliefs (just like love and fear can be). But then the problem is more with the beliefs and thoughts. Anger is a part of the range of our responses, as social mammals, to things that happen. It's a bit like asking about noses or skin. Are these healthy organs? It's almost a category error.

Not what I said, this was the chosen term (have to be careful): repressed emotion. — Anthony

Whether it’s suppression of repression, your thoughts are still that ‘Probably most high functioning "professionals" in the market society have anger issues.‘

You also said:

Anger is no emotion, it's the absence of it; the result of living with stored up repressed emotion. The sum total of repressed emotion=anger. People who get angry believe their emotions can't be trusted and hence deny them.. — Anthony

What do you mean by anger when you say ‘People who get angry’?

“My sentence includes the locution "market society" which I do use a lot as it's important in understanding what, as I see it, is irritating many people - as they conform to it - to the point of anger.”

Again, what is this anger?

Anger, though, isn't an emotion as most think, but fully repressed emotion. — Anthony

Puzzling. I always thought anger was a primary emotion. Children get angry all the time if things don't go their way. I suspect anger to be an infantile response to some lack or desire unfulfilled.

Puzzling alright. And what’s a fully repressed emotion?

According to Anthony, a neurosis. There is some merit to this idea, that repressed emotions gives rise to neurotic behavior or thoughts. Though I think it's a bit of overgeneralizing here; but, the gist seems alright.

Anger is a part of the range of our responses, as social mammals, to things that happen. It's a bit like asking about noses or skin. Are these healthy organs? It's almost a category error. — Coben

What do you mean by 'category error'? Maybe more 'redundant' or 'irrelevant'?