Anger Against Nature

Anger is the most outrageous, brutal, dangerous, and intractable of all passions — the most loathsome, the most unmannerly, and, Seneca adds with characteristic wit, the most ridiculous. It disfigures the face, distorts the body, and destroys the reason that distinguishes human beings from beasts. To subdue it is not merely a personal achievement but a contribution to the establishment of human peace.

Seneca surveys several philosophical definitions of anger — the Stoic account of it as a desire to punish injury, Aristotle's account as a desire to repay sorrow for sorrow — and finds each wanting. His own position is more subtle: anger is the firm conviction of being wronged, combined with a desire for revenge, even when the "injury" is only imagined. This psychological precision allows him to explain why people are angry at those who have not yet harmed them, and at those too powerful to reach.

Seneca explicitly rejects the Aristotelian position that anger, properly moderated, can serve virtue — that it is legitimate to be angry with genuine injustice and that anger provides the energy needed to address wrongs. For Seneca, this concession opens a door that cannot be controlled: any anger, however apparently justified, quickly metastasises into something excessive and destructive.

Of Anger (De Ira) is the earliest of Seneca's major moral essays, probably written c. 41 AD. It is addressed to his brother Novatus and is the most sustained ancient treatment of anger as a philosophical problem.