It’s easy to be angry, but what’s difficult is to be angry for the right reason, to the right degree, at the right cause…

“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.

“If” by Rudyard Kipling

Periodic repost of one of my favorite poems. An excellent integration of the ancient Greek virtue of the Aristotlean golden mean.

“If” by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!