Aristotle on Anger
Ancient Greek Ethics and Practices of the Self
S. Joel Garver
Augustine once proposed that the virtues of the ancients ought to be reckoned as vices,1 indicating therein a fundamental transvaluation of values that had emerged within the cultures of the Roman empire through the influence of Christianity. In the following essay I trace out the implications of Augustine's proposal, examining one such "vice" in some detail--the Aristotelian virtue of good temper, a mean which pertains to anger. I do so in order to re-situate that state of character in such a way that, at least from the perspective the Christian narrative, it can be seen to implicate within its own structure the "ontology of violence" that John Milbank attributes to Greek ethics.2 If such a phenomenon can be found even within "good temper," is it likely that the other virtues would nevertheless escape such an analysis?
Ethical judgments and descriptions necessarily emerge within some form of life, though all ethics involve and perhaps are ultimately preoccupied with "a relation to oneself," even if the self, in some sense, only exists within community.3 In his later work on the genesis and genealogy of western ethics, sexuality, and subjectivities, Michel Foucault analyzes these concerns in four aspects: [1] the determination of ethical substance, [2] the mode of subjection, [3] the elaboration of ethical work (or practices of the self), and [4] the ethical telos.4 Prior to examining Aristotle's remarks on anger and good-temper, we shall find it helpful to map how Foucault understands and applies these four aspects to Greek ethics.5
Foucault argues that the Greek ethical substance (the part of oneself or one's behavior that is the central locus of moral concern) focused primarily on aphrodisia, various acts linked to pleasure and desire. The mode of subjection (the way in which people are invited to recognize their moral obligation) was seen by the Greeks in the production of the most beautiful form of life possible, a self characterized by peace and harmony--an aesthetics of existence. Obligations are not laid out as rules, but if one wants to have a beautiful existence, a good reputation, and be able to rule, one must act in certain ways. The elaboration of ethical work (the means by which one changes oneself into an ethical subject) was a set of ways by which one could exercise moderation or continence (enkrateia). Finally, the telos of Greek ethics (the kind of being to which one aspired by behaving morally) was self-mastery and self-sufficiency. Thus, according to the Greeks, "to form oneself as a virtuous and moderate subject in the use he makes of pleasures, the individual has to construct a relationship with the self that is of the 'domination-submission,' 'command-obedience,' 'master-docility' type."6 What is mastered, however, is always an aspect of the self, whether the body or a less rational part of the soul.7
Aristotle's discussions of anger, I think, fit this paradigm. He defines anger as a
We can, I think, take this conception of anger to be normative for Aristotle, as stating the rule that describes the "man who is angry at the right things and with the right people, and, further, as he ought, when he ought, and as long as he ought" (Nicomachean Ethics IV.5 1125b28; hereafter NE). While anger is a passion (NE IV.5 1125b27), the virtuous man is not passive in respect to it, but actively masters his desire for revenge directing it only to its proper objects and in the proper manner with the attendant pleasure. This economy of desire and pleasure that functions in anger is consonant with the ethical substance that Foucault attributes to the Greeks.desire accompanied by pain, for a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight at the hands of men who have no call to slight oneself or one's friends...It must always be attended by a certain pleasure--that which arises from the expectation of revenge. (Rhetoric II.2 1377b31).
Aristotle fills in the details of proper anger in the following ways. The right objects of anger are particular individuals who have conspicuously slighted oneself or one's friends and have no call to do so. Slighting can be either contempt, spite, or insolence (Rhetoric II.2 1378b10ff.). Those showing contempt consider one unimportant or inferior; those showing spite prevent one from attaining something that is wanted; and those showing insolence do and say things to cause one shame in order to derive pleasure and a sense of superiority. Being the object of justifiable revenge cannot be an occasion for anger even though revenge involves some form of slight (cf. 1378b25-6). Nor can anger be appropriate when an action is done because it is profitable (1378a31).
The right manner in which a person is angry is by having a desire for conspicuous revenge (against the proper objects of that anger). Revenge involves some form of retaliation which (at least in some cases), if performed merely for pleasure would count as insolence (Rhetoric II.2 1378b25, 1379a31). Thus revenge can be taken by doing or saying things to shame another such as laughing, mocking, jeering, or otherwise injuring (1379a29-31). By implication, revenge might be manifest in punishment, having another humble himself and admit his inferiority, or causing someone to pray and beg for mercy (II.3 1380a15-16, 22-24, 28).
Foucault suggests that moderation is the key means by which ethical behavior is practiced in the Greek system. This certainly comports with Aristotle's elaboration of the good-tempered man in the Nicomachean Ethics. One exhibits a deficiency ("unirascibility") if he fails to be angered at the proper objects in the right way or at the right time since "to endure being insulted and put up with insult to one's friends is slavish" (IV.5 1126a4ff). On the other hand, a number of types of people exhibit an excess in respect to anger: the hot-tempered are quick to anger at wrong objects but not for a long time, the choleric are easily angered by anything, the sulky are slow to calm, and the bad-tempered are angry at wrong objects and won't be appeased but by vengeance (1126a12ff). Says Aristotle,
This explains why it is the desire for revenge that is privileged over the acts of vengeance themselves, since it is through the mastery of pleasurable desires (their coerced regulation, production, maintenance, not their suppression or eradication) that moderation of action is achieved.8the middle state is praiseworthy--that in virtue of which we are angry with the right people, at the right things, in the right way, and so on, while the excesses and defects are blameworthy...we must cling to the middle state. (1126b3ff)
Despite Aristotle's emphasis on moderation, it still seems to many that the anger he describes is odd, perhaps excessive.9 For Aristotle, after all, anger seems to always involve a desire for revenge and that desire is to be pleasurable. And isn't this petty? What is even more remarkable perhaps is Aristotle's bypassing of any notions of forgiveness (they are noticeably absent from his remarks on "growing calm"; Rhetoric II.3) and his ignorance of either moral indignation or hatred unaccompanied by a desire for revenge. The difficulty is how to account for this depiction of anger within the Greek economy of desire and techniques of self, an analysis that would pave the way for seeing what it is about the Christian virtues related to anger--virtues that have shaped our outlook--that is different.
To begin, let us consider several of the more peculiar and particular features of Aristotle's angry men. By implication, you are not to be angered if another takes vengeance upon you for wrongdoing (1378a32, 1378b26). Thus, there are cases in which you deserve to be mocked, humbled, or injured. Furthermore, depending upon your own status and the status of others, various behaviors and forms of honor and respect are expected either from them or towards them (1378b35, 1379a1ff). Both of these conflict with certain modern egalitarian ideas. Aristotle's angry men are quite angered by friends "if they do not perceive our needs" (1379b14) and such a want of perception will give rise to a desire to be revenged upon one's friends.10 Finally, Aristotle's angry men appear dependent upon others for assurance that they possess the qualities of morality. He writes:
These features of Aristotle's account are closely paralleled in Jean Hampton's account of what she calls "resentment."11 Let us consider that account briefly.We feel particularly angry on this account if we suspect that we are in fact, or that people think we are, lacking completely or to any effective extent in the qualities in question. For when we are convinced that we excel in the qualities for which we are jeered at, we can ignore the jeering. (1379a36ff)
Hampton gives the following analysis, that resentment consists in:
According to Hampton resentment is not a defense of value, but a reaffirmation of it. The parallels between her analysis of resentment and Aristotle's of anger are striking. Both involve a reaction to being treated in some way as inferior and the valuation that must lie behind such treatment. Both give rise to a suspicion that such a valuation might be accurate. Moreover, both give rise to an "act of defiance", which is specified by Aristotle as a desire for revenge. Hampton, too, elaborates this "act of defiance" as possibly giving rise to deeds that would fall under Aristotle's notion of revenge, which she specifies as malice or spite.13 Malice, she says, attempts to bring or reveal as lower the one who has insulted you, thus asserting mastery and affirming value. Spite, on the other hand, is an attempt to bring others down to your own (perceived) level. Aristotle's suggestions regarding forms of revenge are certainly along these lines (Rhetoric II.2 1378b26, 1379a29-31; II.3 1380a15ff).14 Hampton's analysis of resentment, then, provides us with a useful structure for further examination of Aristotle's notions of anger.[1] A fear that the insulter has acted permissibly in according you treatment that would be appropriate only for one who is low in rank and value. Your fear can be analyzed as involving:
[a] some degree of belief that the insulter is right to treat you as low in rank and value[2] An act of defiance: you "would have it" that the belief in item [1a] is false12
[b] a wish that the belief described in item [1a] is not true
Neither Aristotle's examination of anger nor his more general ethics exist in isolation. They are, rather, enmeshed within a hierarchical and patriarchal system of power relations. This is a system that both arises out of, deploys, and produces the central telos of Greek ethics: an aesthetics of self given form through self-mastery. It is within this larger economy of pleasure and desire that Aristotle's angry men are best understood.
The Nicomachean Ethics is preparation for and a prelude to Aristotle's Politics (cf. NE X.9 1180b28ff) in which he writes,
Thus the "individual's attitude towards himself...and the form of supremacy he maintained over himself were a contributing element to the well-being and good order of the city."15 The relations of power in ethics (the relation to self) was also "in its full, positive form...a power that one brought to bear on oneself in the power that one exercised over others."16 This relation is all the more underscored by Aristotles persistent analogizing between the structure of the self and the structures of the polis.17 Thus, the concept of power used here should not be thought of entirely in terms of control, setting limits, and constraint. On the contrary, it can be a creative, productive, and active force. Nor is it reducible to manifestations of one individual's agency affecting another. It is both self-directed and dispersed throughout a field of social relations and norms.18 All the same, this power, for all its creativity and dispersion, cannot fully mask its own violence in establishing individual peace (through the coercion of desire) and that of the polis (through the coercion of the lower classes and the manipulation of inferiors by superiors).A state is good in virtue of the goodness of the citizens who have a share in the government. In our state all the citizens have a share in the government. We have therefore to consider how a man can become a good man. True, it is possible for all to be good collectively, without each being good individually, But the better thing is that each individual citizen should be good. The goodness of all is necessarily in the goodness of each. (VII.13 1132a)
In this light, then, we can begin to comprehend the shifts within ethical structures (of the relation to self) that an attack or slight--whether it be contempt, spite, or insolence--would effect. In Aristotle's picture the various forms of slight all involve a valuation of the self by the other that is lower than one's prior self-valuation and these forms of slight lead to a self-revalaution. Such self-revaluation, the disruption of the self-valuation through slight, should not, however, be theorized in terms of feelings of inadequacy, loss, or emptiness. Nevertheless, such an account of Aristotle's angry men can be given and we would do well to examine that sort of account briefly.
Where Hampton speaks of resentment, others might see wounds to self that the angry men experience by not receiving due respect. Michael Stocker, in his Valuing Emotions, suggests that "one key to understanding these wounds, and thus Aristotle's men, is that the wounds are narcissistic wounds, and Aristotle's men are shown by the wounds to be narcissistic."19 But what is meant here by narcissism? Following the psychoanalytic tradition, Stocker analyzes narcissism in terms of "a deep lack, an emptiness, in the self, a profound feeling of unalterably not being good, of not being adequate, and certainly not being lovable."20 It involves an inability to sustain a belief in one's own goodness, not due to lack of evidence, but due to a lack of encouragement and support. Thus narcissism does not involve belief lacks the evidential grounds necessary for its formation and justification. Rather, the narcissist is unable to appropriate these evidential grounds subjectively in order to hold the belief with confidence, liveliness, and effectiveness unless bolstered by outside encouragement.
In support of the idea that Aristotle's angry men are narcissists, we can submit the following evidence.21 The men are vulnerable to others and depend on others to establish and confirm their status and value. They are overly concerned with recognition and fame. They easily and naturally move "from 'I am better than others' to 'I am good', or from 'I am not better than others' to 'I am not good.'"22 For them such comparative evaluation bears centrally on self-valuation. In general, then, Aristotle's angry men seem to exhibit, in their behavior and attitudes, an underlying sense--perhaps, deep feeling--of inadequacy and an inability to sustain a belief in their own good.
While there is a good case for this interpretation and while this view is not an unprofitable analysis, I do not believe the case is cinched. Although the general behavior of the angry men may comport well with a modern psychoanalytic notion of narcissism, when their symptoms are examined within the overall structure of Greek ethics, I think we will have to alter the diagnosis. As I noted above, I do not believe an analysis that is concerned with an essentially interiorized psychology (involving, e.g., feelings, belief-sustaining abilities and emotions, subjectivized self-valuations) will be representative of Greek society, culture, subjectivity, and moral psychology. That is to say, narcissism as conceived and uncovered (if not constituted) within modern psychoanalytic techniques is not the problem.23
The degree of respect and honor accorded or not accorded to one of Aristotle's angry men is not utilized by them primarily to sustain or destabilize beliefs and feelings regarding their own adequacy or value. Rather, it seems that such valuation by the other, in fact, can possibly effect a real reorganization of the social hierarchy. Inferiorizing or devaluing treatment demonstrates a failure in the mastery of others and that in turn is a strike against one's own self-mastery. It is, in short, a violent disruption within the established heirarchy of value. Foucault states that,
Slighting--by which another considers one inferior or himself superior--is a disruption of the dissymmetrical relation with the other and thus disrupts the ability to be "master of yourself in a sense of activity, dissymmetry, and nonreciprocity."25 It does not so much produce a feeling of lack of virtue, but rather it is a manifestation of that lack.to be master of oneself meant, first, taking account only of oneself and not the other, because to be master of oneself meant that you were able to rule others. So, the mastery of oneself was directly related to a dissymmetrical relation to others.24
While Aristotle allows that such jeering can be ignored if "we are convinced that we excel in the qualities for which we are jeered at", the difficulty lies in how one could be convinced given the counter-evidence of the jeering itself (Rhetoric II.2 1379b1f). Jeering, to Aristotle's angry men, would seem audibly and effectively to pronounce one's failure to produce the beautiful life of self-mastery since, by jeering, the other fails to recognize and appreciate the production of a certain aesthetics. Since such recognition is brought about by the mastery of the other by means of self-mastery, jeering envinces a failure to master the self. The move from "I am not better than others" to "I am not good" is thus a natural and logical move since to be good, for Aristotle's men, is to master oneself, and the self-master, masters others. And so the one who endures being insulted in the end becomes slavish, mastered by others and thus a victim of the violence that is endemic to the lower classes (NE IV.5 1126a5).
We must grant, however, that such a manifestation is said to give rise to some degree of belief, or more precisely, the suspicion that what has been manifest is essentially correct. Hampton suggests, I think persuasively, that such a suspicion can only be predicated upon the presupposition that the egalitarian view of human worth is false.26 It is clear that Aristotle, and Greek ethics in general, did not accept that view of humanity worth (as opposed to, say, Augustine who taught that all things are good insofar as they exist). In rejecting such a view, however, an important difference is drawn between narcissism and what is apparent among Aristotle's men. While narcissism involves an inability to sustain a belief in one's own goodness or adequacy, the Greek social structure fostered something more radical, and, at the same time, revelatory. Inasmuch as the society was hierarchical, valued an aesthetics of existence, and valorized moderation as a condition for rule or mastery (of self and others), the society also created a practice by which being slighted could serve as grounds for the belief that one is unvirtuous or otherwise inadequate. It is not, then, that Aristotle's men could not sustain a belief in their own goodness or could not make use of the evidence for that belief. Instead they possessed evidence--undeniably good evidence, given their society and ethics--of the very opposite: that they were lacking in some necessary value. And so arose their suspicion.
Modern social forms, while self-contradictory and paradoxical, do not share the same commitment to hierarchies nor do they so readily reject all egalitarian views of human worth.27 Psychoanalytic concepts that arise in the modern situation embody some allegiance to a secularized egalitarianism, presupposing that we each have equal intrinsic worth or that our intrinsic worth is not to be determined comparatively, or, at the very least, that a rejection of egalitarianism or a use comparative evaluation is psychologically unhealthy. In this way psychoanalysis employs highly normative, modernist, and essentialist assumptions that arise from and contribute to our social milieu. Furthermore, these presuppositions serve as a backdrop to the production, diagnosis, and experience of narcissism as conceived within modern psychoanalysis. It was not so for Aristotle and his angry men. Thus we must historicize some of the notions we use in analyzing Aristotle or ourselves rather than to suppose these categories as universal. There are, I would maintain, no ahistorical manifestations of narcissism or the process of ego formation across varying cultural contexts and thus such notions cannot used be unproblematically.28 At the very least, as I have indicated, there is some gulf between Aristotle's situation and ours.
Only within the hierarchical relations of Greek society could self-mastery, virtue, and anger so intimately figure into forms of subjectivity that are so exteriorized--focussing on mastery over the other, forms of evidence for this, and the regulation and moderation of pleasurable activity. Contrast this with modern preoccupations: the examination of feelings ("I feel so empty inside"), an introspective hermeneutics of self ("I feel this way because when I was five..."), scientific pronouncements of what is best or most healthy ("You should accept yourself the way you are"), along with the various disciplinary practices and technologies of self that have arisen to facilitate, regulate, and reproduce these preoccupations.29 Thus a diagnosis of Aristotle's angry men as narcissists could be seen as profoundly anachronistic.
The kind of critical analysis that I find most helpful in this regard is not a backward projection of modern values as providing a neutral and general measure by which to evaluate Aristotle. Rather, I prefer this present kind of re-narration of Aristotle in which various aspects of his overall "system" are repeated in such a way so as to show how one aspect takes notice of another in ways which might not have been fully apparent to Aristotle himself. In doing this however, I also recognize this narrative repetiton to emerge within a cultural context, one that is influenced by the Christian story of reconciliation, embodies a praxis of forgiveness and forgoing revenge, and carries with it certain ontological assumptions about the articulation of difference apart from hierarchicalized coercion. But this is not so much to project those distinctives upon the corpus of Greek ethics as it is to propose an alternative way of being an ethical person, one which, if found attractive, casts Aristotle and his angry men into its shadows.
Finally, then, let us consider the desire for revenge that Aristotle sees as central to anger and the deed that Hampton referred to as an "act of defiance" possibly leading to spiteful or malicious actions. Hampton (as noted above) analyzes the "act of defiance" in terms of a reaffirmation of value, in the case of malice, by gaining mastery over the one who has done the slighting. If Hampton is right, then the centrality of revenge in Aristotle's account of anger gives further evidence that slighting is thought to be an indication, manifestation, or effecting of lowered value and a strike at one's own self-mastery. Through the admission of wrong by the one who has done the slighting--or, if that is not forthcoming, a desire for the mocking, humiliation, or physical punishment of the other--mastery can be regained and the integrity of one's virtue is reaffirmed (in some cases the actual carrying out of these might be permissible, though the good tempered man is not usually vengeful; cf. Rhetoric II.3; NE IV.5 1126a3ff). Thus it is through a carefully moderated self-mastery of the desire for revenge and its pleasures that self-mastery and through that, value, is reaffirmed. Failure to engage in such moderated reaffirmation is slavishness.30
Part of the picture throughout this account that so far has been relegated to the background concerns the issue of conspicuousness--the desired revenge is desired to be seen even as the slight must have been seen. This, I think, ties together the telos of self-mastery with the general Greek aesthetics of existence. If success had been gained in self-mastery, one's life would have obtained a certain harmonious form of beauty, eliciting a good reputation and submission from inferiors. Slighting is attack on the beautiful life, a marring of that beauty, and, if tolerated, a confession of ugliness. Aristotle writes that a desire for vengeance is sweet and pleasant, at least insofar as it is attended by its own expectation and thoughts that dwell upon images of its act (Rhetoric 1378b2-9). Might it be that such sweetness and pleasure arise because a moderated desire for vengeance participates in the reestablishment of the aesthetic balance of the beautiful life? If so, again violence re-asserts itself as intrinsic to Aristotelian virtue, not merely now in the regulation of desire but in its own positivity as well, the designs of vengeful imagining.
For Aristotle, then, appropriate and moderate forms of resentful anger and fantasies of vengeance (with the right objects at the right times to the right degree) can be beautiful and that is why "sometimes we call angry people manly, as being capable of ruling" (NE IV.5 1126b1). The beautiful life, then, is continually reaffirmed, established, and maintained through perfect self-mastery, the virtuously ordered economy of pleasure and desire, even in the moderation of anger, and in this Aristotle's angry men become capable of rule.
In regard to the Aristotelian virtue of "good temper," I have shown that it presupposes a model of anger as "resentment," a resentment that persists even in its moderation. Furthermore, I have detailed the ways in which the exercise of good temper paradoxically exerts violence and coercion, especially insofar as it is designed to manipulate one's position and value within a social hierarchy and an externalized psychology. Finally, I have indicated the ways in which even good temper contains a particular and necessary vengefulness in the reassertion of ethical value conceived as aesthetic harmony. Though far from a defense of Christian virtue, it is clear from this analysis why Augustine would interpret antique virtue as vice. In revealing the arbitrary and underlying violence of even the Aristotelian virtue of "good temper," we suggest thereby that another Way is possible.31
Notes
1. Augustine, Civitatis Dei (City of God) XIX.25.
2. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (New York: Blackwell, 1993), see especially chapters 10-12.
3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1 (New York: Vintage Press, 1983), p. 240. Foucault also speaks of "technologies of the self" which he defines as practices "which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality", Foucault, "Technologies of the Self," in Luther M. Martin, Gutman, and Hutton, eds. Technologies of the Self (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 18.
4. These and following points are drawn from Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, pp. 238ff. and Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, The History of Sexuality, Volume 2. (New York: Vintage Press, 1985), p. 24ff.
5. What I am using from Foucault's work concerns only the fourth and third centuries B.C.E.; his analyses of later Greek ethics, particularly late Stoicism, diverge from our present interests.
6. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 70.
7. While Foucault's later work shows a marked shift away from his earlier tendency to see the subject as wholly socially constituted, his theorization of ethical history in individualistic terms should not be interpreted as endorsing an essentialist, Enlightenment concept of the autonomous individual. He writes, "if I am now interested...in the way in which the subject constitutes himself in an active fashion, by the practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something that the individual invents by himself. They are patterns that he finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested, and imposed on him by his culture, his society and his social group", Michel Foucault, "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom," in James Bernauer and David Rasmussen, eds., The Final Foucault (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p. 11.
8. In a similar way Socrates proves himself virtuous in Plato's Symposium (196c) not through the suppression or eradication of desire for the beautiful Alcibiades, but by the moderation of that desire. Enjoy the pleasure of looking, but don't touch.
9. Michael Stocker, for instance, has diagnosed "Aristotle's angry men" as narcissists, Valuing Emotions (New York: Cambridge, 1996), p. 265ff. By modern, post-Freudian standards this may very well be the case, though we shall have opportunity to examine that claim below.
10. Elsewhere Aristotle urges that only friendships of utility are visited by complaint to any great degree (NE VIII.13 1162b14). If he has such friendships chiefly in mind here (thus explaining the focus on meeting of needs), then his comments may be more understandable.
11. Jean Hampton, "Forgiveness, resentment and hatred," in Jeffrie G. Murphy and Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 54ff.
12. Ibid., p. 57.
13. Ibid., pp. 61ff.
14. The main discontinuity between Aristotle's and Hampton's accounts is that Aristotle seems to think himself to be giving the whole picture, which is a normative one at that; Hampton brings up resentment only to contrast it with moral indignation and the possibility of forgiveness.
15. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 79.
16. Ibid., p. 80.
17. See, e.g., his Politics, I.5 (1254a24-b21). Also, Elizabeth V. Spelman, "Aristotle and the Politicization of the Soul" in Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka, Discovering Reality (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983) pp. 17-30.
18. As it operates in Greek ethics in the moderation of pleasure and desire certain parallels and contrasts could be drawn with and against, e.g., Lyotard's theorizations of modern desire and power (Libidinal Economy. Bloomington: Indiana, 1993). It is also to be noted that my comments do not suppose that every aspect of Greek ethics is related to power in quite so hierachicalized ways. Much less do I intend to reduce Greek ethics simply to power relations.
19. Stocker, Valuing Emotions, p. 268. On narcissism in Greek culture, see also Philip Slater, The Glory of Hera (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).
20. Stocker, Valuing Emotions, p. 268. Stocker responds in some detail to my objections here regarding analyzing Aristotle in terms of narcissism, pp. 270-72. He sums up,
Stocker's response is quite right, given his purposes....since our concerns in this work are mainly with people like us, we will not pursue these questions...We will simply acknowledge the possibility that what we will show in this chapter is not what Aristotle's angry men are like, but what we would be like if (though still living here and now) we were like them.
21. These points follow suggestions by Stocker in ibid., pp. 269-86.
22. Ibid., p. 274.
23. Of course, the idea that there is any one common notion of narcissism in modern psychoanalysis is not quite right: for instance, the very different notions found in (later) Freud as contrasted with Lacan. See Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV ("Mourning and Melancholia") and Volume XIX ("On narcissism: an introduction"), trans. by J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1935-1974) and Jacques Lacan, "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I," in Ecrits: A Selection (London: Tavistock Press, 1977), pp. 1ff.
24. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 241.
25. Ibid., p. 241.
26. Hampton, "Forgiveness, resentment and hatred," pp. 71f.
27. Egalitarianism is arguably not prevalent in practice, but the ideal is very much a part of our culture. That the very social forms that claim to forge liberty and equality in our society so often use such rhetoric to mask technologies of power only demonstrates how insidious our situation is in some ways.
28. See, for instance, the problematizations of this by Adorno or Laclau and Mouffe in which they observe how these processes, practices, and ideas have shifted from the days of industrialism to our post-industrial, technological, and communications-oriented society of "late capitalism". See Theodor Adorno, "Sociology and Psychology" and "Freudian theory and the pattern of Fascist Propaganda," in A. Arato and Gebhart, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1985) and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics (London: Verson, 1985). The historicization of psychology was also the burden of Foucault's arguments in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. by R. Howard (New York: Vintage, 1973).
29. See Foucault, Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Press, 1979). 30. Failure to have resentment is a slave mentality...? Somewhere Nietzsche's bones shift and turn.
31. I wish to express my gratitude to Laurel Garver, Rich Bledsoe, Michael Stocker, Michael Thrush, Barbara Stock, and Joel Kidder for helpful discussion and input.