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Elie Wiesel, justice, Martha Nussbaum, Nazism, Śāntideva, Seneca
It has taken me far too long to read Martha Nussbaum’s Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice – long enough that, in characteristic Nussbaum fashion, she has already authored or coauthored at least three more books since it came out. I say this is too long because Nussbaum’s views on anger were a topic important to my dissertation, which Nussbaum read and thought highly of while she was at Harvard. (The footnotes of Anger and Forgiveness make a couple offhand references to Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, and I strongly suspect that it was through my diss that she learned about the text.) And what is most striking to me when I read the book now is that Nussbaum’s views on anger have taken a startling turn in this book – one that brings them much closer to Śāntideva’s.
Nussbaum’s previous discussions of anger took greatest length in The Therapy of Desire, twenty-five years old now. There, she considered the arguments against anger that the Roman Stoic Seneca makes in his De Ira, a letter to Seneca’s son Novatus, and rejected them. I summed up her response in my dissertation:
She wonders whether a Stoic could really respond to serious wrongdoing, like that of the Nazis. She recounts how a young Elie Wiesel, in a Nazi death camp, saw the first Allied liberator enter the camp, a large American officer who cursed and shouted in anger at what he saw. “And the child Wiesel thought, watching him, now humanity has come back. Now, with that anger, humanity has come back.” (Therapy 403) But how, she asks, would a Stoic soldier respond? “If a true Stoic, he will think that none of this matters very much anyhow, that such evils are bound to come about in human life, that it’s all what one should expect. This being the case, it’s not worth his while to get very upset about it and cry out.” (Therapy 416; dissertation pp252-3)
Seneca, like Śāntideva, says that one should strive to prevent wrongdoing at least in part for the wrongdoer’s sake: his analogy is to a doctor, curing wrongdoers as one cures a patient. That desire to heal, and not anger, is the appropriate response to wrongdoing, even of the most serious kind. The Nussbaum of Therapy says in response:
Are these, however, the motives we, with Novatus, would wish in a person whose father has been murdered, whose mother has been raped? Don’t we want a response that acknowledges the importance of their death and suffering, that wants the punishment of the offender just because it has caused that pain and suffering? Don’t we want, in Wiesel’s case, the response the American soldier actually had, when he burst out against the horrors he saw, without for a moment thinking of how or whether Hitler’s life might be improved, without allowing any thought for the reform of Germans to deflect him from the suffering of their victims? (Therapy 417)
I noted that Śāntideva would say in response to these rhetorical questions: yes, that angry response is indeed what we want, we human beings, and we are wrong. That desire for an angry response is one more of the kinds of desires that ends us in suffering.
And the Nussbaum of Anger seems to have come around in many ways to Śāntideva’s view. She now poses new rhetorical questions that she answers quite differently, with respect to a character in a Philip Roth novel:
we like him better because he becomes briefly angry. Had he preserved his cool, we might have thought the less of hm. Mightn’t a totally non-angry response have been not quite fully human—as if the pose of being a WASP, penetrating to his very core at last, had deprived him of some part of his humanity? So is it better, given that we are all human, that we do become briefly angry, when seriously provoked, before heading for the Transition? The payback wish is futile and senseless, and isn’t there something weird and not quite human about rising entirely above it, in intimate realtionships? I find this question troubling. On the whole, I think the answer is “no.” Grief and love are enough vulnerability to establish one’s human credentials. (Anger 105)
What has changed, that Nussbaum no longer thinks anger is needed to say “humanity has come back”, but grief and love are enough? Many things, I think, but a key part of it is the nuance that she develops in the just-mentioned concept of “the Transition” – a concept, and a nuance, that I think Śāntideva doesn’t have. She explains the Transition as follows:
Most average people get angry. But often, noting the normative irrationality of anger, particularly in its payback mode, a reasonable person shifts off the terrain of anger toward more productive forward-looking thoughts, asking what can actually be done to increase either personal or social welfare. (Anger 6)
The Transition can be accompanied by “Transition-Anger”, “whose entire content is: ‘How outrageous. Something should be done about that.'” Nussbaum finds this Transition-Anger beneficial, but laments that it is rarely found “in that pure form”, far too often contaminated by the more common wish for payback, the wish to wrong the wrongdoer.
I think Nussbaum is really on to something with this idea of the Transition and Transition-Anger – enough that I suspect her new position in this new book is superior, not only to her old position, but to Śāntideva’s as well. Because I think this idea preserves that which is valuable in anger. I have been angry an immeasurable number of times in my own life. When I look back on them, just about the only times I feel confidently glad I got angry where those times when that anger expressed a new realization: when I had been mistreated or putting up with an unjust situation, and only in that angry moment realizing what was wrong with the situation. Anger can tell us that something is wrong here, and that is a valuable function it serves. Śāntideva doesn’t acknowledge this function that anger can serve – in large part, I think, because justice just isn’t something he’s concerned with, and I do disagree with him on that. But even in those situations where anger told me something was wrong, my anger often lasted far longer than was necessary to tell me that, and continued in ways that either lashed out at targets or ate away at me inside. Anger is a dangerous tiger to ride, a snake it is easy to grasp wrongly, in ways that Śāntideva – and now, it appears, Nussbaum – is rightly aware of.
Amod: Something may be missing from your discussion of anger, something that I have noticed before in your writings on anger but have not mentioned. What is missing is a breakdown analysis of anger into constituents or components, and an examination of what each constituent or component contributes in a given case, with corresponding points of intervention and change. If one does not do such a breakdown analysis, all one has is a single rather coarse concept labeled “anger”, which can lead to rather coarse interpretations such as “with that anger, humanity has come back” (Nussbaum in The Therapy of Desire, quoted above) or “politics [necessarily] leads our minds to an anger that hurts them” (your interpretation of a key Buddhist premise in “The psychological case for disengaged Buddhism”) or can lead to similarly coarse alternative labels such as Nussbaum’s “garden-variety anger” and “transition-anger” that still lack a breakdown analysis of constituents or components.
Modern psychology offers at least several different breakdown analyses of emotions such as anger. I will mention one, from: Tanja Wranik & Klaus R. Scherer (2010), “Why do I get angry?: a componential appraisal approach”, in: Michael Potegal, Gerhard Stemmler, & Charles Donald Spielberger (eds.), International handbook of anger: constituent and concomitant biological, psychological, and social processes (pp. 243–266), New York: Springer. I don’t claim that this source has the best breakdown analysis (I suspect that it doesn’t), but I chose it because its abstract has an especially clear and succinct description of the problems that can accompany any discussion of anger that does not do such a breakdown analysis; the abstract states:
“Anger is one of the most frequent emotional experiences in normal, everyday life. Surprisingly, however, anger as an emotion still tends to be narrowly defined and poorly understood. In particular, concepts such as anger, hostility, aggression, and frustration are used interchangeably, making scientific research and practical knowledge difficult to integrate. Moreover, even when anger is explicitly defined, often implicit and untested assumptions are made, for example, (1) that anger is directed at another person with the intention to harm him or her, (2) that aggression and hostility are natural consequences (or sometimes precursors) of anger, and (3) that this emotion is associated with poor social integration, health, and well-being. In this chapter, we propose an integrative model for anger. In particular, we will show that a componential appraisal approach to anger is useful for both systematic research and concrete applications. Using this framework, we will argue that anger does not emerge from specific situations or particular environmental or biological factors, but from the way that individuals subjectively give meaning to and evaluate situations or events. Moreover, and contrary to popular conceptions presuming that anger is uncontrollable and/or harmful, we will show that the occurrence and utility of anger can be explained by cognitive processes and individual differences. Finally, we will demonstrate how a componential appraisal approach to emotions allows us to synthesize research on anger as well as the different functional and dysfunctional manifestations of this emotion in everyday life.”
The change that you describe above in Nussbaum’s view of anger does indeed bring her closer to Buddhism, not only to Śāntideva but also to modern Mahāyāna-derived ethical precepts. In the ten essential bodhisattva precepts derived from the Brahmajāla Sūtra and used in East Asian traditions such as Sōtō Zen, and in Thich Nhat Hanh’s fourteen precepts of engaged Buddhism, the only precept that is about an emotion is about anger. In these sets of precepts, anger is the only emotion considered problematic enough to be explicitly named and addressed. But why anger is so problematic can best be understood through a breakdown analysis of the constituents or components of anger and how they manifest differently in certain cases, and how they relate in each case to a whole network of ethical reasoning.
Tibetan Buddhism does not reject conflicted emotions (kleshas) — but has three methods for relating to them. If emotions are very strong, the approach is to cultivate equanimity — no–reaction. To experience the anger, but not to speak or act. This corresponds, with Nusbaum’s admonition not to seek revenge. The second method is to transform the conflicted emotion into compassion. This is done by feeling the emotion and allowing it to break our hearts a little — to see that we are not perfect and are still bound by habit and dualistic view. We experience the same emotion as murderers committing crimes of passion. It is humbling to recognize this. The third method is to see the essence of the conflicted emotion directly. The essence of anger is “mirror-like wisdom”. Anger has a precise quality — an awareness of the details and sharp edges in a situation. It takes cultivation of merit (overcoming habit) and cultivation of wisdom (seeing clearly) to use this third method.
Jim: It has been a long while since I studied the varieties of Tibetan approaches that you just described, and I hadn’t thought much about how they relate to the kinds of modern breakdown analysis of anger that I referenced in the previous comment, but now that I think about it, the Tibetan approach is easily comprehensible in the terms of, e.g., Wranik & Scherer (2010) cited above. The Tibetan approach seems to involve practicing perceiving and changing the cascade of appraisals early in the appraisal process (to use Wranik & Scherer’s terms). The Tibetan approach also seems to use what in modern psychology is called techniques of suggestion to modify appraisals and consequent experiencing (as described in, e.g., Michael D. Yapko (2011), Mindfulness and hypnosis: the power of suggestion to transform experience, New York: W.W. Norton). Perhaps “Tibetan” is the wrong label, since this general approach seems to be common among various Buddhist traditions: e.g., Thich Nhat Hanh describes a closely related process in the sixth chapter of his 1998 book, The heart of the Buddha’s teaching, Berkeley: Parallax Press.
I remember a text by the Tibetan scholar-monk Longchenpa (and therefore dating to the 14th century CE) where everything that I’ve just described seems quite explicit (Kennard Lipman, & Merrill Peterson (trans.) (1987/2000), You are the eyes of the world, Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, pp. 41–42):
“Though attachment, aversion, dullness, pride, and envy may arise, fully understand their inner energy; recognize them in the very first moment, before karma has been accumulated. In the second moment look nakedly at this state and relax in its presence. Then whichever of the five passions arise becomes a pure presence, freed in its own place, without being eliminated. It emerges as the pristine awareness that is clear, pleasurable, and not conditioned by thought. Thus, desire becomes discriminating awareness, the unity of bliss and openness. Aversion becomes the mirror-like awareness, the unity of clarity and openness. Stupidity becomes the reality-field’s awareness, the unity of appearance and openness. Pride becomes the awareness of utter sameness, the unity of pure presence and openness. Envy becomes the all-accomplishing awareness, also the unity of pure presence and openness. So then, you do not eliminate passions, as do those who are content with listening and preaching or being independent; you do not refine away passions, as do bodhisattvas; and you do not transform them, as tantrics do—these judgmentally-conditioned passions are pure and transparent in their own place. This is called the spontaneously perfect, universally creative, self-generating majestic pure presence.”
As Wranik & Scherer wrote on page 248: “Given the infinite number of appraisal combinations, there are potentially as many different emotions as there are appraisal outcomes”, which is why the experiencing (e.g., the “mirror-like awareness”) that occurs after successfully changing the cascade of appraisals is so different from the experiencing in “garden-variety anger” (to use Nussbaum’s term, although she should have said “garden varieties of anger” to indicate the infinity of possible variations). And in the 14th century Longchenpa clearly indicated that there are many ways to change (what we now call) emotion processes, ways which he schematically categorized as “eliminating passions”, “refining away passions”, “transforming passions”, and “self-liberation” of passions (I use the term “self-liberation” for the last one because it is mentioned in a footnote immediately after the last quoted sentence).
Elsewhere Longchenpa associated the change of (what we now call) emotion processes with the paramitas and also with a more gradual transformation corresponding to the bodhisattva levels or bhumis (Herbert V. Guenther (trans.) (1975/2004), “The natural freedom of mind”, in: Tarthang Tulku (ed.), Bringing the teachings alive: the Buddhist heritage of Tibet (pp. 113–146), Crystal mirror series, vol. 4, Berkeley: Dharma Publishing):
“Miserliness, hypocrisy, anger, laziness, restlessness, fickleness of mind, stupidity, faintheartedness, lack of interest, and infatuation—these ten facets of Being become perfect as the ten transcending functions [pha-rol-phyin] of generosity, good manners, patience, energy, concentration, appreciation, appropriate means, power, interest, and pristine awareness. When through the Guru’s grace true understanding arises, the superb joy and pleasure that is born in us is the first spiritual level… when the emotions have lost their hold in freedom there is the second level… when there is happiness, lucidity, and non-dividedness there is the third level… when the concepts that rush forward have lost their hold in freedom there is the fourth level… when actions have no longer an objective reference there is the fifth level… when true understanding is distinctly present there is the sixth level… when there is freedom from samsāra there is the seventh level… when true understanding is unshakable like Mount Sumeru there is the eighth level… when everything is in its best state there is the ninth level… when the individual mind is as all-encompassing as the sky there is the tenth level…”
Thanks. Yes, this is what I was referring to — with citations to a reliable source.