“Anybody can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.” – Aristotle
Some of the wisest words from Aristotle. It is easy to just feel anger, or anything, and embrace it and run with it, but with all our emotional reactions – especially love and anger – one should constantly evaluate the degree of their own emotional reactions, who/what they are directed at, and their cause. Contrast this with other popular philosophical positions, e.g. the Christian insistence that anger should not be felt at all (even toward true injustices) or the emotional intrinsicist’s position that just because you feel something it is automatically true and accurate – be it cold indifference to the death of a loved one or furious anger when your roommate puts the toilet paper roll on ‘backwards’. Emotional reactions are not magical tools to divine truth and they should only be trusted as such to the degree one checks and integrates them against rational standards.
Without the constant honest effort of grounding your emotional reactions to rational standards you run the risk of your emotions flying off into a whim worshipping frenzy. Similarly, don’t accept the emotional evaluations of you by other people unless they’ve demonstrated to you their ability to form rational evaluations. If a close friend whose regularly demonstrated rational and honest evaluations gives you constructive criticism, take it seriously, but if a stranger on the street calls you worthless, it’s as irrelevant as that same stranger screaming that you suck at chess.
All this emphasizes as well that there is no conflict between reason and emotion, both are invaluable tools required to live a fulfilling life. While reason guides what facts and knowledge we integrate, emotions provide lightning quick evaluations of what we experience based on our integrated values and facts. It is just as inappropriate to strive to be an emotionless Spock like character as it is to reject reason entirely and live an emotional whim worshiping life.
eternitas 