Anger Management

Abstract

Anger Management Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborne (bio) Danielle S. Allen, The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003 (paperback), 449pp., $22.95, 0-691-09489-6 In Book IV of the Republic, Socrates tells this story: “Once upon a time I heard and believe the following: that Leontios son of Aglaion when he was on his way up from the Piraeus along the outside of the north wall perceived corpses lying beside the executioner. At one and the same time he desired to look at them and was disgusted and repulsed at himself. He struggled over this and covered his head, but was nonetheless overcome by desire and, opening his eyes, he ran to the corpses, as he said, ‘Look then, you evil-spirits, and fill yourselves with the noble spectacle’” (439e–40a). What Socrates makes of this story, suggests Danielle Allen, offers a key to Plato’s rejection of the conventional practices of punishing in ancient Athens. The inner turmoil of Leontios is a consequence of a battle within his soul between desire and anger, between a wish to feast his eyes on this spectacle and the self-loathing he feels in response to this craving. That conflict, Socrates explains to Glaucon, indicates that in addition to reason the soul must include two additional parts: that which provokes Leontios’ anger and that which animates his desire. This distinction is the premise of Plato’s contention that anger, the spirited element of the soul that defines the Republic’sclass of guardians, should not be regarded as a raging force that overpowers those who experience it, driving them to action without reflection. Instead, anger should be based on a reasoned judgment about whether one has been treated justly or unjustly. “In other words,” writes Allen, “anger arises afterjudgment. It is not the warning sign that it is time to judge” (p. 255). By prying apart the forces of desire and anger, by subjecting the latter to the claims of reason, and, finally, by contending that a just system of punishment should seek to reform the offender so that the soul’s deliberative capacity may once again assert its rightful sway, Plato calls into question certain bedrock presuppositions informing the penal practices of ancient Athens. Those practices, argues Allen, are best understood as so many ways of containing and regulating the power of anger ( orge). The prototypical prosecutor in Athens was an adult male citizen who was personally involved in the issue under dispute, acting as the aggrieved defender of his honor and, in some cases, that of his family as well. The successful litigant was he who, via the power of persuasive speech, was able to appropriate and massage customary norms governing desert and justice and, in doing so, secure from a jury the determination that the wrong he had suffered and for which he should rightly be pitied merited expression in the form of punishment imposed by the city. What renders this conceptualization of punishment unfamiliar to us, and what vexed Plato, is the fact that orgewas not neatly distinguished from the desire for pleasure, including the gratification that accompanies the act of seeing the guilty suffer, but also from a certain sort of sexual pleasure ( eros). This conjunction of iretic and erotic elements is intimated by Achilles’ declaration, in the Iliad, that rage is “sweeter than dripping honey”; and traces of the eroticism of orgepersist in the English words “orgy” and “orgasm,” each of which is derived from this common root. Furthermore, when this term was employed in reference to specifically female sexual desire ( orgao), it typically connoted procreative fecundity. So construed, argues Allen, “o rgewas a complicated phenomenon encapsulating an emotion that could lead to destructive quarrels and competitions and also an emotional and cognitive experience associated with fertility, sweetness, and the ‘melting moods’ of sexual desire. As anger orgeconcerned penal prosecution and the breakdown of human relationships; in its relation to fertility, orgeconcerned the creation of human relationships” (p. 59). The task of ancient Athenian political institutions, and, more specifically, its institutions of public punishment was not to vanquish or...