Deliberative spaces are often idealized as affectless meta-topical spaces that are considered public precisely when speakers refrain from appealing to hearers’ emotions (Habermas, Reference Habermas1990, pp. 43–115). There are exceptions in the literature on deliberation (e.g., Young, Reference Young2000; Krause, Reference Krause2008, pp. 152–165; Sokolon, Reference Sokolon2006) and on dialogue (e.g., Blondell, Reference Blondell2002), and compelling reasons for thinking that rhetoric and reason are not opposed (Garsten, Reference Garsten2011, pp. 167–174). Despite these efforts, it remains tempting for many theorists to think that an emotion like anger threatens persuasion, and that modern representative politics avoids rather than solves this problem. Thus, a large, populous country represents ‘opposite and rival interests’ but remains stable and secure by providing almost no forum for public deliberation (Hamilton, Jay, Madison, pp. 67, 78, 319–322 & 380–385). A mass democracy offers a multitude of online fora for impassioned speech, but no guarantee that they will balance each other. Hillary Clinton, for example, describes her failures to deal with popular rage as a weak point of her presidential campaign (Clinton, Reference Clinton2017, pp. 10, 270–79), and the point holds more generally in the more and less ‘democratic’ populism of the present, whether we consider the outrage of January 6th insurrectionaries or Black rage in the era of the Movement for Black Lives, or various ‘days of rage’ in the MENA region.
The distrust of rhetoric is a familiar theme in the classical world. Democratic Athens’ iniquities are sometimes attributed to the anger of the people, whose overreactions distort party politics and result in the domination of vulnerable ‘others’ (see Nippel, Reference Nippel2015, pp. 232–238).Footnote 1 In classically informed scholarship on emotions, anger is evaluated as backwards-looking and focused on revenge (Nussbaum, Reference Nussbaum2016). It is a ‘negative’ emotion (Allen, Reference Allen2004, p. 149), and a threat to the communal ends of the polis (Yack, Reference Yack1993, p. 42). In a particularly memorable formulation of the problem, Stoics and neo-Stoics use the memorable image of a cliff to argue that anger is a ‘short madness’ (Seneca, De Ira 1.1, 1.5). Just as if one were falling off a cliff, one cannot stop falling after anger’s onset (Seneca, De Ira 1.7; Graver, Reference Graver2007, p. 128).
While not all the above critics of anger would disagree with what follows, the suspicion that anger is corrosive of political life deserves challenge and re-articulation, especially when thinking about political contexts where anger emerges from grossly non-ideal circumstances of structural injustice (Bell, Reference Bell and Tessman2009). Anger is well described as a response to being blocked or constrained (Bell, Reference Bell and Tessman2009). Can it also serve to unblock constraints on speaking up and being heard while drawing attention to structural injustice? Following Fortenbaugh (Reference Fortenbaugh1975), we can argue that ‘emotional response is intelligent behaviour open to reasoned persuasion’ (p. 17). And, following Lugones (Reference Lugones2003) and other feminist scholars, ‘our anger strategies, the ways we train our anger, need to correspond’ with specific situations (p. 117). This is especially true when considering conditions that are highly unfavourable to the speaker or listener who feels silenced, marginalized or gaslit. In other words, intelligent emotional responses to unjust behaviour may, in some cases, come out as poorly delivered angry speech up to and including shouts and shrieks, and strategies for dealing with anger should acknowledge this. Speaking more generally, emotional expressions of outrage at injustice convey a message, although not one expressed within the ‘official’ ‘world of sense’, and not originating from an in-control ‘official self’ (Lugones, Reference Lugones2003, pp. 103 & 107), and persons in privileged position should work proactively to receive, digest, and translate angry speech that, on first look, appears inadmissible in political discourse. Active listening is required, not only to extract a proposition from the angry shout or substitute the listener’s rationality, but as a means of reflecting upon injustice, and it may be necessary to risk the discomfort that comes from being yelled at as a step towards more fully acknowledging and understanding why someone in a dominant position is being yelled at.
As noted above, there is a large literature on Aristotelian rhetorical theory that does much work to counter interpretations of public reason that systematically exclude considerations of character and emotion from deliberation.Footnote 2 The stakes of emotional misfires are addressed in another recent feminist literature on anger. Spelman (Reference Spelman, Garry and Pearsall1989), for example, argues that requiring anger to be communicated in a clear, restrained manner is, in Lugones’s gloss, to ‘internalize the dominator’s point of view’ (Lugones, Reference Lugones2003, p. 111).Footnote 3 To deal with this crucial concern, this paper suggests that the art of rhetoric provides the building-blocks for an account of angry politics. Aristotle’s Rhetoric is the first systematic treatment of anger in the history of political thought (Grimaldi, Reference Grimaldi1988, p. 12). The Rhetoric is the ‘first systematic hermeneutic’ of human everyday attitudes (Gross, Reference Gross2007, p. 11). For Kennedy (Reference Kennedy1999), the Rhetoric is the ‘earliest surviving systematic account of human psychology’ (p. 89), while, for Fortenbaugh (Reference Fortenbaugh1975), Aristotle brought a ‘new dignity’ to emotional appeal (pp. 9 & 12). Aristotle helps political theorists to understand the ‘special and legitimate role’ that anger plays in public deliberation (Garsten, Reference Garsten2011, p. 170). If all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, our own concern about the use of emotions in politics is (somewhat surprisingly) a footnote to Aristotle.
Reading Aristotle’s Rhetoric helps us to understand oratory, but it is rarely the case that oratory stands alone, without smaller group conversation, challenges, replies, and, in short, without the art of dialogue. Thus, how anger is expressed and received in dialogue is important for understanding how we talk in non-ideal circumstances. With this complication in mind, this paper uses the example of Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War project and its revival of Sophocles’ Philoctetes to illustrate the effects of creating fora for speaking about contemporary democratic-republican politics. Seeing and listening to Philoctetes’s cries of pain as they become shouted threats and angry invective provides an affective context for the painful-to-hear complaints of those who feel abandoned and systematically oppressed, gaslit and deceived. The audience-participant dialogues about the plays, staged after the performance and as an integral part of it, call into question the whole ideological system of military hierarchy, service, and honour. But, rather than being destructive or mere ‘venting’, these dialogues help processes of mutual understanding in non-ideal circumstances (rigid social hierarchy, trauma), providing additional support for the suggestion that angry speech can play an important role in persuasion.
To anticipate the argument and summarize the preceding, Achilles’s speech against Agamemnon (Agamemnon has a ‘dog-face’, he is ‘heavy with wine’, and he is a ‘people-devouring king’) is transgressive in its attack on traditional hierarchies that prioritize legitimate political power (pherteros) (Iliad 1.224–225, 231) over martial power (karteros) (Iliad 1.280–281; Hammer, Reference Hammer1997; Muellner, Reference Muellner1996, pp. 107–109). Philoctetes’ speeches are (at the limit) alienating and off-putting. Like Edvard Munch’s figure, Philoctetes is isolated by his own screams, and it is hard to encounter a figure such as Philoctetes, whose outrage is a key, destabilizing component of their own tragedy, without falling into victim-blaming. Teaching ourselves how to hear about real, unresolved injustices expressed in distorted, initially unpersuasive form is a long step towards real rather than superficial and merely formal reconciliation of conflicting parties. But the work is hard and intellectually demanding. In the messiness of ‘real politics’ (Allen, Reference Allen2004, p. 157), there are no simple dyads such as dominant speaker/captive audience, or unwilling audience/heroically persuasive speaker: gender, race, social position and profession, and many other elements contribute to empowerment and disempowerment of speakers and hearers. Recognizing anger’s connection to disempowerment in all these cases is a long step towards understanding the fairness of anger.Footnote 4
1. Feminist Angry Speech
In her reassessment of feminist affective politics, Tessman (Reference Tessman2005) importantly foregrounds concern for angry persons who are stuck feeling endless rage in grossly non-ideal circumstances. For Tessman, the solution is that this rage, although not obviously contributing to (and perhaps undermining) individual flourishing, contributes to human flourishing by correctly appraising unjust circumstances. Bell (Reference Bell and Tessman2009, p. 167) responds that this interpretation of anger’s value is too instrumental: the righteous, ‘virtue appropriate anger’ anger of a figure like Frederick Douglass is actually good in itself. It is about the right thing, in the right measure – Douglass is very angry about slavery – and expressed at the right time. The appropriateness of Douglass’s anger should thus be recognized independent of its connection to eventual flourishing.
Cogley (Reference Cogley, Timpe and Boyd2014) develops Bell (Reference Bell and Tessman2009) further by suggesting that we take three elements of anger into consideration: its ‘fitting’ appraisal of wrongdoing; anger’s role as a motivational force bringing the angry person to seek to alter unjust conditions; and its communicative function, where the person feeling angry successfully communicates to others about the causes and conditions of their anger. For Cogley (Reference Cogley, Timpe and Boyd2014), who focuses on ‘the considerations that a person must track and act on in order to display excellence with respect to anger’s discrete functions’, excellently hitting these three elements offers a description of ‘how to be properly angry’ like Martin Luther King and other paradigmatic fittingly angry persons (pp. 200, 200, n. 1 & 213–215).
The aim of identifying the ideal is in part to explain practical departures from it, and Cogley reminds us that a ‘variety of types of angry communication are compatible with virtue’ (p. 217). This paper proposes to take this suggestion further than Cogley does. Thus, Cogley’s approach allows him to give clearer definitions of terms such as resentment in terms of the resentful person’s ‘unique vice’, that is, their failure to be excellently angry (p. 219). ‘Someone who is resentful is someone whose anger tracks, to some degree, wrongs or injustices, but who is then deficient with respect to motivation and communication’. They fail to be motivated to act in the right (for Cogley, ‘assertively resistant’) way, and they fail to share their appraisal of injustice ‘in a way that would be received well by suitably virtuous interlocutors’ (pp. 211, 213–214, 216 & 220).
Non-ideal anger is still anger, for all these authors, and their accounts avoid victim-blaming and refuse to impose a politics of respectability on structurally disadvantaged subjects, but it is possible that something has been elided from the analysis of anger in non-ideal circumstances in the Tessman-Bell-Cogley line of thinking about virtue appropriate anger. In situations where the speaker is blocked by longstanding circumstances from communicating in a persuasive way, whether through gaslighting, structural marginalization or other epistemic injustices, they cannot communicate their anger successfully, and, in some cases, no longer appraise the cause of their anger correctly. Few of us are Martin Luther King, and to call speakers who do not meet this standard resentful misstates their deficiency, which is closer to the average or ‘mean’ – or even a virtue – than to deficiency and vice. There is, in other words, anger that is the product not only of failing to be (on one occasion or another) excellently angry, but anger about the apparent impossibility of ever being recognized as bearing valid concerns which should be heard and accepted by others. This speech is often coded as resentful but should be seen within an iterative process of persuasion rather than as a standalone moment of unpersuasive speech. In the limit-case, multiple failures to be heard produces screams and inchoate shouts, the sharp retort, or even, in the decolonizing world, violence by those ‘locked’ into oppression (Coulthard, Reference Coulthard2014, pp. 110–115).Footnote 5 This is not to say that this anger always or even often works: in one of the most famous examples of successful rhetorical uptake in US history, a speaker, expressing tiredness and exhausted patience, questions the character and decency of an unruly speaker, a criticism capped (and strengthened) by the polite form of address, ‘sir’.Footnote 6 But it should not be immediately democratically (or morally) disqualifying to speak angrily, and theory should recognize this.
The ancients were keenly aware that anger was both unsettling (in a good sense), and destructive. For Polybius, outrage can topple tyrants and civic anger can win wars (quoted in Harris, Reference Harris2001, p. 197). As Anhalt (Reference Anhalt2017, pp. 3–4 & 7) reminds us, ancient myths show the costs of rage, and ancient thought serves both to ‘arm us against the tyrants we serve and the tyrants we might become’. Aristotle’s Rhetoric and its account of anger can help address our concern that democratic theory tends to misrecognize angry subjects, and that it is important not to unduly narrow the range of meanings of being ‘fairly angry’, which include a range of meanings of the modifier ‘fairly’: appropriately, equally, partially, merely acceptably, and beautifully. Analysing persuasion is relatively easy when an exemplary figure has hit on the right emphases, the right style of speaking and listening, and the right reasons, so that we might say, with Cogley, that they are ‘excellently angry’. But what of the harder cases?
2. Anger and Aristotle’s Rhetoric
Scholars point out a preliminary concern that deserves a brief summary in this paper: do character and emotions actually play an important role in Aristotle’s account of political persuasion? At the beginning of Rhetoric I, and in contrast to the implication of Rhetoric II, Aristotle appears to devalue character and emotion. Persuasion by the epistemic qualities (logos) of politicians’ speeches is given pride of place in Rhetoric I, where Aristotle says that this sort of persuasion is the ‘most effective’ sort of proof (1355a4–10). Thus, Aristotle (surprisingly) says that ‘slander and pity and anger and such emotions of the soul have no bearing’ on reasonable persuasion (1354a16–18).
This seems like a poor start, if at least we are to use Aristotle to make sense of churning, unruly political anger. However, according to George Kennedy, Aristotle emphasizes speech and reason at the beginning of the Rhetoric to de-emphasize the importance of ‘external’ components of persuasion, such as good birth (the rhetoric of eugeneia and autochthony) or physical appearance (Rhetoric for Alexander 35; Kennedy, Reference Kennedy2007, p. 38n42; Kennedy, Reference Kennedy1999, p. 82). Dow (Reference Dow2015, pp. 107–30) adds that the tension between Rhetoric I and II is more apparent than real, and that Aristotle is merely speaking against the rhetorical handbook user’s manipulation of hearers, and not against the place of emotions and character in persuasion.
In Grimaldi’s view, Rhetoric II recognizes that the successful speaker must do two things. First, he must ‘establish his own ēthos’ (project a certain type of persuasive character). Second, he must ‘attend to the psychological attitude of the auditor’, which includes both ‘his pathē [emotions] and his ēthos [character]’ (Grimaldi, Reference Grimaldi1988, p. 5). For Garsten (Reference Garsten2011, p. 172), summarizing the contributions of Abizadeh (Reference Abizadeh2007) and other authors, the ‘validity’ of substantive reasoning is often ‘important mainly because it offers evidence of a speaker’s trustworthiness and judgment’. In short, Aristotle theorizes about the complicated interplay between speaker and audience and whether and how anger adds to or subtracts from someone’s good character, both for speakers and for hearers.Footnote 7
As noted above, this paper does not intend to cover all contexts of persuasion. The aim is to consider tough circumstances where there is no Martin Luther King or Socrates on hand, or circumstances where dysfunction makes it likely that even speakers like them, albeit less perfect than they are, scream and shout. A rare speaker exhibiting fair-mindedness (epieikeia) such as Joseph Welch, above, can make citizens ‘mild’ (praōs), and the presence of an unusually persuasive speaker can make good on the promise that good democratic politics can emerge from elite opinion-leadership (Horn, Reference Horn and Reis2006). Pericles stands out as an orator by being willing to risk speaking pros orgēn (so as to provoke anger) and not merely to settle for speaking pros hēdonēn (so as to please) (Thucydides 2.65.9; Gomme, Reference Gomme1955, Vol. 2, p. 193).Footnote 8 This is a promising direction for an account of angry politics, and dovetails with Bell (Reference Bell and Tessman2009), who champions one of the nineteenth century’s great orators, Frederick Douglass, and his angry polemics against slavery. As Salkever (Reference Salkever2007, p. 35) observes, Aristotle considers decency (epieikeia) to be a ‘summary term for the quality of the good human being’. Indeed, to circle back around to the tension between persuasion through character versus emotions alluded to above, now it seems that ‘character is almost, so to speak, the controlling factor [‘most authoritative’, kuriōtatēn] in persuasion’ (Rh. 1.2, 1356a12–15).Footnote 9
While we could use more Pericleses and Abraham Lincolns and Martin Luther Kings in the world, our emphasis is on cases where there are either no fair-minded orators willing to speak pros orgēn, at personal risk of retaliation and harm, or who are so struck with outrage at outrageous conditions that they cannot do anything but speak and listen pros orgēn. In the limit-case, such a person feels completely isolated and unable to communicate, and, as Srinivasan (Reference Srinivasan2018) suggests, they feel unjustly required to forego apt (or fair) anger. And so, as in the cases at the centre of this paper, the processes of properly digesting anger through intercourse are stifled.
In cases where part of the problem with angry appraisals of injustice is the second-order concern that one’s peers will refuse to acknowledge this injustice, some help is available in the form of a neo-Aristotelian account of persuasion as trust-generation.Footnote 10 Allen (Reference Allen2004), for example, argues that audiences and listeners occupying privileged positions should choose to sacrifice some of their immunity and invulnerability to listen productively for evidence of the justice, or fairness, of a speaker’s comments. In situations of structural injustice, the hearers who are in a safer, dominant position of invulnerability and authority must do more work for rhetorical uptake to occur. Central to Allen’s account is that the burden of persuasion rests on both the speaker and the hearer.
To make her point, Allen generates twelve rules of thumb governing how speakers should speak when trying to generate trust, and six rules of thumb for listeners (2004, pp. 157–158). While one of these rules of thumb acknowledges the importance of identifying the emotion in speech, these rules (discussed below) are very epistemically demanding, leaving little place for angry appraisals of injustice. The brief treatment of anger in Allen’s book, where anger is repeatedly identified as a ‘negative’ emotion (pp. 143 & 149–151), conflicts with her advice about taking turns in sacrificing relative position and power to generate trust. Allen’s list of the burdens on a speaker correctly suggests that a speaker may sometimes need to show a ‘willingness to make sacrifices’, a ‘habit of making sacrifices for strangers’, and even an initial ‘great’ sacrifice in cases where there is no trust between speaker and hearer (p. 157). Allen gives the hearer less work – there are only six rules on their list – and asserts that the listener should judge the impassioned speaker on principle and on fact, and do so by reviewing the speaker’s history of decisions and their degree of reciprocity, their friendliness, and whether they have opened a space for the listener to listen (p. 158).
The problem with these lists is that they implicitly give the speaker the dominant position, asking them to make sacrifices, and they assign to the listener the more passive position of judging sacrifices, decisions, and evidence of goodwill. It is instead preferable to consider the power relations between dominant parties and their subordinates, whether speakers or hearers, and to relax some of Allen’s rules, as for example the speakers’ aim to ‘convince 100 percent of her audience’ and the rule that speakers should speak in such a way as to give opportunities to the (dominant) majority to judge her words (pp. 157–158).Footnote 11 In the context of ‘real politics’ it makes sense to reduce the burden on the person in a weaker position, especially when analysing the first occasions of dialogue after long periods of silence or misrecognition.
I return to this concern below when thinking about Aristotle’s account of political anger, but, to summarize and anticipate, Allen’s discourse ethics strikes the right notes on the crucial subjects of sacrifice, trust, and persuasion. Nevertheless, her emphasis on consensus-oriented transformation of negative emotions into goodwill risks silencing speakers who are at the edge of giving up on being heard, and overburdens some listeners who are getting heated because they are asked to meet speakers in dominant positions more than halfway, especially in contexts where the rules of rhetoric tend to reinforce the social position of the dominant part.
3. Aristotle’s Account of Political Anger
According to Aristotle’s central ethical work, the Nicomachean Ethics, becoming virtuously angry involves five elements: having the right object of anger, the correct degree of anger, the right time to experience it, the right purpose behind experiencing it, and the right way of acting upon it (Eth. Nic. 2.9, 1109a26–30), where ‘right’ refers to correctness, or ‘fit’ to circumstances according to an emotion’s ‘size’ and ‘shape’ (D’Arms and Jacobson, Reference D’Arms and Jacobson2000, pp. 72–75).
In Rhetoric II, Aristotle defines the nature of anger as follows:
Let us then define anger as a desire (orexis), accompanied by pain (lupē), for vengeance that is visible [to observers, including the aggressor], due to an apparent slight (oligōria), directed either against ourselves, or any of our friends, when the slight is not thought to be deserved [literally, does not properly belong to us] … and lastly, every angry emotion is accompanied by a feeling of pleasure (hēdonē) that arises from a hope of being revenged [upon the person who has slighted us].Footnote 12
Restated in more formal Aristotelian terms by Grimaldi, ‘the definition of the Rhetoric is a good working definition with a genus (orexis meta lupēs [desire accompanied by pain]), a differentia (timōrias [rectification]), and a cause (oligōria [slight])’ (Grimaldi, Reference Grimaldi1988, p. 21).Footnote 13
The central element that Aristotle highlights in the definition of anger in Rhetoric II is the apparent slight, which concerns the emotive subject’s reaction to a perception of injustice. Glossing Aristotle, Yack (Reference Yack1993, p. 40, n. 38) briefly but crucially discusses this point. Anger ‘is the passion that arises in us when individuals fail to meet the obligations we believe are entailed by their sharing with us communal ends and activities’. There are important considerations at stake here. Status-conscious anger at slights may systematically misfire: lower-status individuals may get pushed around by higher-status persons, and audiences (and the speakers themselves) might naturalize bullying as wholly appropriate, and deserved, as seems to occur in Odysseus’s treatment of Thersites in the Iliad (Sokolon, Reference Sokolon2008, p. 55). So, recalling that what may seem like unduly negative, unnecessarily defensive, or ‘aggressive’ speech may seem very different to the originator of that speech, an account of fair anger should consider the distortions in appraisal (‘You’re always doing that!’) and communication (‘that’s what I’ve been saying all this time!’) of those who feel systematically silenced.
In Danielle Allen’s account, introduced above, the Rhetoric provides a theory of how to overcome political distrust by converting emotions such as anger into goodwill in a reliable and trust-generating manner (Reference Allen2004, pp. 46–47, 143 & 149). But democratic theorists should not wish the conversion of too much angry speech, too quickly. An account of democratic persuasion that acknowledges the persuasive intent in angry speeches, glares, and the pain of stunned incomprehension, perhaps even resulting in a slap or a thrown shoe, is, according to the present paper, the more democratic theory, and even the more Aristotelian theory, given the norms implicit in Aristotle’s politics and the Rhetoric’s close attention to unruly anger prompted by status-oriented slights. In a formulation more suited to this paper’s argument, Allen (Reference Allen2000) describes anger as being ‘at the heart of the Athenian polis’ (p. 51), legitimizing the punishment of citizens, and allowing for the recalibration of status and honour (pp. 35, 50). It does this work through a ‘public conversation’ that all citizens can access (p. 52), although women and other non-citizens are typically excluded from participating. This is the type of epistemic background, public and yet also exclusionary, that we are interested in exploring further below.
4. Institutionalized Anger: The Theater of War
Since even angry status misrecognition is a vast topic, it is useful to consider a narrower context than that of entire democracies and their angry speeches. The Theater of War project is a good place to start. The project, inaugurated by Bryan Doerries in 2004, seeks to produce the accessible ‘public conversation’ desired by Allen, above, by staging Greek tragedies for present-day audiences. The logic of the project is precisely to provide a missing discursive space for fairly angry people, in contexts where the disciplinary power of social hierarchy stifles speech, for example, in the military or in other professional jobs with a tight esprit de corps. In the context of this project, white majority anger or populist resentment that is backed by the power of large groups is not given an additional platform. The focus is instead on hearing speech that would either not be heard, or that would otherwise be expressed as a desperate shout or scream.
Doerries and his theatre group have presented ancient tragedies in hundreds of performances to a variety of service-oriented or marginalized audiences – combat veterans, nurses, cancer patients, recovering addicts, homeless men and women, doctors, social workers, disaster victims, and corrections officers (Doerries, Reference Doerries2015, p. 8). As Doerries explains, producing plays like Sophocles’s Philoctetes is risky. Given the topic of the play – an injured soldier who is abandoned by his comrades – a performance may stoke anger and undermine military order. Performances of this ancient yet still incendiary play, followed by a public question and answer session in a mixed audience of victims and perpetrators, soldiers and generals, might actually undermine the ‘civic art’ of persuasion (Garver, Reference Garver1994, pp. 45, 51, 139–205; Garsten, Reference Garsten2011, p. 172). On the other hand, ancient Athenians clearly thought that even or especially in wartime, the centripetal forces of civic cohesion and identity-formation can survive (and might even be improved by) criticisms of superiors that are raised in plays such as Sophocles’ Ajax or Philoctetes.
In general terms, there are two reasons for accepting a place for angry speeches in public discussion: the good work that can be done by vocalizing angry opinions, and the good work that can be done by discussing these opinions. Firstly, and most importantly, it is appropriate to feel angry about some things (Eth. Nic. 3.1, 1111a30–31). That is, one ought to feel the right amount of anger, at the right time, about the right things, or, as Aristotle also says, not ‘with the wrong people, for the wrong things, at the wrong time’ (4.5, 1126a7–11).
In the first of the two passages from the Ethics cited above, Aristotle tests the idea that one ought to be angered by some things, and that this anger is voluntary and even choiceworthy, whereas in the Rhetoric he more casually observes that it is shameful not to be angry about the protection of parents, children, wives and dependents, who are noble objects of a (very possibly patriarchal and paternalistic) experience of anger (Rhetoric 2.2, 1379b27–28). Illustrating the latter point, in the 1988 presidential campaign, Michael Dukakis was asked whether he would support the death penalty for someone who raped his wife, Kitty Dukakis. Kitty Dukakis later responded angrily that the reporter had asked an ‘outrageous question’, calling into question the reporter’s impartial and trustworthy character and implying that she thought that her husband owed her and the voters a stronger reaction. Aristotle helps to explain that an audience can recognize that a moderate amount of anger – say, a sharp comment or challenge to the reporter – would be appropriate in this circumstance, and that the reporter’s question was not just impertinent, but unfair, given the conflict between the expected discursive role played by a husband and by a publicly-elected official; and, in short, that there is a rhetorical kairos, or an appropriate time, for Dukakis’s anger (immediately after the reporter’s question).
On this point concerning the appropriateness of stoking the anger of crowds and the good work that can be done by discussion and debate, it is worth acknowledging the long-standing judgement, noted above, that large groups make poor judges when provoked by anger. ‘Only fury plagues whole communities at once’, according to Seneca (On Anger 3.2). As one historian observes, ‘[e]xcesses and illegalities are all too common in the history of peoples and governments roused to anger by sorrow, tension, and passion’ (Kagan, Reference Donald1987, p. 374). A short list of democratic Athens’s ‘iniquities’ was given above. Perhaps the most famous example is the orgē of Socrates’ jurors at his trial (Apology 34c). On the other hand, Aristotle himself mentions (in the midst of a famous and controversial discussion of the multitude, kings, and the rule of law) that it is hard for citizens to ‘go wrong together’ (Pol. 3.10, 1286a34–6; Dow, Reference Dow2015, p. 60; Harris, Reference Harris2001, p. 155, n. 105). Whichever way one comes down on the topic of the deliberative capacities of democratic audiences, Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the Theater of War’s revivals of ancient tragedies are premised on the importance of persuasion.
5. Listening to the Angers of Flawed Individuals
Aristotle’s paradigmatic example of anger is the angry individual, Achilles. Achilles’s anger is sometimes read as a model of protest anger (Sokolon, Reference Sokolon2008), and as a warning about destructive anger (Hammer, Reference Hammer1997). The elevation of this anger to a paradigmatic status conceals some aspects of angry responses to structural oppression, and these elements – and thus how to ‘listen’ to non-ideal anger expressed in non-ideal circumstances – are better seen by complicating the paradigm, which I do by briefly reviewing Homer’s account of Achilles’s anger before complementing it with Sophocles’ portrayal of Philoctetes in Philoctetes and the Theater of War’s presentation of the play.
5.1. Achilles in the Iliad
The elements of the Aristotelian definition of anger are all present in Achilles’ angry interaction with Agamemnon. Achilles’ lasting anger (mēnis) at the taking of his prize, Briseis, calls attention to an unjust distribution of offices and honours among the Greeks.Footnote 14 Achilles’ ‘prize’ Briseis is taken ‘from him by force against his will’ (Kirk, 1985, p. 98). Moreover, she is taken from him alone (Iliad 9.335–337). In response, Achilles anticipates acting violently against Agamemnon (1.205), achieving pleasure in revenge.
By using Achilles’ anger as a paradigm, Aristotle appears to explain angry persons as hyper-status-conscious persons in public competition for honour.Footnote 15 Crucially, this sort of angry person looks forward to a status-elevating payback even if they harm themselves in seeking revenge. In everyday terms, they are the ones who kick the chair that they trip over, and they often fail to see how and why they can – indeed, must – translate their anger into speech, leading to repair.
The Iliad’s angry politics are complicated. As Cairns observes, one can find instances of anger in the Iliad where men are angered by non-prototypical matters such as losing games, losing face where there is either no ‘slight’ or when the status-degradation is deserved (Cairns, Reference Cairns, Braund and Most2003, p. 26). Priam feels anger, and appropriately so (Walsh, Reference Walsh2005, pp. 238–244). As noted above, Bell’s ‘virtue appropriate anger’ is experienced by lower-status men such as Thersites, but it is violently cancelled to the approval of the assembled Greeks (Iliad 2.264–277). Status-oriented anger is not necessarily fair or democratic. It justifies socially punishing the ‘uppity’ person who angrily speaks up against injustice, just as it licenses clapping back against elites.
In the Rhetoric, Aristotle provides a complicated and interesting overview of how anger ends.Footnote 16 When Achilles ends his anger, though, he simply announces that he ends it (Iliad 19.66–68). Achilles rejects Agamemnon’s gifts (9.378–379), confirming that he does not feel fully recognized by the attempts at appeasement. And, although Achilles claims that he is ‘beating down his anger [thumos] by force’ (19.66; 18.113; cf. 1.192), it is more correct to say that his anger is merely redirected or distracted. He was angry with Agamemnon; he is now angry with the Trojans who killed Patroclus.Footnote 17
In sum, Achilles’ anger is a dangerous wrath (kholos) that is like the anger of a feud (kotos) (Walsh, Reference Walsh2005, p. 234).Footnote 18 Still, even this anger does not provoke an endless blood-feud. Although Achilles’ anger points toward far deeper, structural issues in contemporary Greek society, it was also a quarrel over a girl (Iliad I. 298; 19.58). And, as Hammer (Reference Hammer1997) notes, it is telling that Achilles admits that he is more deserving of recognition, but not simply the most deserving Greek. Presumably, Greek society can include Achilles’ claim to great honours, and Achilles should be able to see that he does not deserve to monopolize honour.Footnote 19
5.2 Philoctetes and Hecuba and the Trojan Women
Achilles has the privilege to withdraw to the shores of Ilium and wait for the Greeks to beg him for his help and to satisfy his anger with spectacular violence.Footnote 20 What, in contrast, if the outcast and exile would love nothing more than to speak with others and to be listened to, but has been cast aside, betrayed, marginalized, and left for years to stew in his own anger, which now presents itself (in a form of ancient gaslighting) as the cause of his isolation, rather than its consequence? This combination of the feeling of hopelessness, and the accompanying terrible anger of the person silenced, is captured in Sophocles’ Philoctetes.
In Sophocles’ Philoctetes, Philoctetes (‘acquirer of friends’) is abandoned on the isle of Lemnos after being snake-bitten en route to the siege of Troy. The Greeks discover that they cannot win the war against Troy without Philoctetes’ skill in archery, and they return to fetch him, offering as pretext the following story: the orphaned Neoptolemus (‘new to war’), feigning anger, claims that he has been cheated out of his father’s armour by Odysseus, Philoctetes’s enemy. The young man ingratiates himself with Philoctetes, who identifies with the anger (kholos) of the young man (Philoctetes 327). However, Neoptolemus eventually reveals that he is acting in concert with Odysseus to steal Philoctetes’s bow and force his return to battle. For Philoctetes, this is a devastating second betrayal.
Sophocles’ Philoctetes draws attention to the suffering which can get in the way of successful communication and appraisal. Unlike the semi-divine Achilles, Philoctetes’s anger and powerlessness humanize him as a figure of pity (Konstan, Reference Konstan2015, pp. 3–4), bringing anger down from its monumental agon and dragging it through the mud of pathetic, tortured, un-heroic physicality. Philoctetes’s physical injury is off-putting; his wound smells bad, and he cannot stop screaming about his disability (Gagnon, Reference Gagnon2016). Philoctetes’s ‘moral injury’ is off-putting: he is willing to shoot any visitor and to blame one and all for his exile (Shay, Reference Shay1994). This is ‘wrong’ and imperfect, but also understandable: the plan of ‘the generals’ is to take even his bow from Philoctetes, leaving him with the barest of bare lives.Footnote 21
Philoctetes also calls attention to its maleness as a possible blockage to communication. Carl Phillips (Reference Phillips and Phillips2003, p. 28) calls Philoctetes an ‘absolute male’ play: it is the only extant classical Greek tragedy without any female presence. In contrast, Euripides’ Trojan Women brings anger down from the heights of androcentric shame culture and ‘forces’ the Athenian audience to see trauma from the perspective of the aggrieved victims (Trojan Women 745–781). Trojan Women was first staged in 415 BCE at the midpoint of the long Greek inter-state war (431 BCE–404 BCE), just four months after the Athenians’ destruction of Melos in 416 BCE. Even if the performance date does not leave sufficient time for the play to have been written and produced as a direct comment on the Melians’ collective punishment (Goff, Reference Goff2013, pp. 29–34), it is undeniably located within a context of mass trauma. Similarly, Euripides’ Hecuba (ca. 424 BCE) represents appropriate anger at the deaths of a mother’s murdered children, albeit expressed in a grossly inappropriate way.
On the account developed above, Philoctetes, Andromache, Hecuba, and the other Trojan Women are fairly angry. They feel constrained, they speak up angrily in a variety of not-exactly-fitting ways, and about the not-quite-perfectly-identified circumstances of injustice, but their basic aim and their basic appraisals are intelligible amid the communicative noise. For Allen (Reference Allen2000, pp. 115–116), the dramatic straitjacketing of Hecuba into the role of the deceitfully vengeful woman indicates women’s gendered lack of permission to take part in civic repair. However, as Hall (Reference Hall and Easterling1997, p. 93) notes, women and other excluded groups are permitted to ‘address the public in the theatre as they never could in reality’, suggesting that the performance of these plays provides a new context for thinking about which speakers (and audiences) are permitted to be angry.
For Doerries, the Theater of War project also creates a new opportunity for aggrieved parties to practice judging persuasive and unpersuasive speech. The project is a place for ‘speaking out’ and ‘sharing stories’ from the audience (Doerries, Reference Doerries2015, pp. 119–120, 193, 261, 264 & 267). The need for this space is captured in an unrelated interview by retired Army Captain Drew Pham, who stunningly and worryingly noted in an interview with NPR: ‘Here in the States, I don’t even know how to talk to people. I don’t think anything that anyone says anymore is important, or what they think or what they feel. Sometimes I want to take everyone that I know to Afghanistan and force them to see it’. Lugones (Reference Lugones2003) insightfully observes that this version of the angry speaker loses ‘any concern with fitting in anywhere’ as a response to structural blockages in communication, leaving us once again with our original question, What is appropriate to do with inescapable anger in grossly non-ideal circumstances?
Modifying Cogley (Reference Cogley, Timpe and Boyd2014), it does not seem apt to identify the non-ideal anger of a Philoctetes as a vice of resentment. Fairly angry persons may miss the mark of correct appraisal. However, in these cases, the fairly angry person who sees (colonial) dispossession or racialized insult or structural oppression everywhere, even where they do not exist, needs iterative opportunities to work out their anger in dialogue with others rather than condemnation. Adapting Allen (Reference Allen2004), those in dominant positions need to sacrifice some elements of their own invulnerability to hear others in a more vulnerable position.
Allen’s (Reference Allen2004) politics of repair requires sacrifice (the ‘preeminent’ democratic ‘ritual’, at p. 28) and even a ‘habit of making sacrifices’ from those in the stronger position (p. 157). It requires giving up one’s invulnerability to communicate equally with others (pp. 149–153), but – now moving beyond Allen, and even reading her politics somewhat against the grain – sacrifice requires hearing and recognizing the justice in resentment even when it is not communicated well, or, in the radical register of Walker (Reference Walker2006, p. 118), ‘even when it is not well founded’. This is not a sacrifice of reason or a paternalistic gesture to accommodate the ‘poor’ victim of injustice. It is instead a way of viewing what is called ‘resentment’ charitably; to see resentful anger in terms of its structural blockages and misfiring appraisals. In taking such a stance towards angry speech, we learn something about our own fallibility and vulnerability, which is akin to the basic teaching of tragedy: ‘Telling me your troubles, you teach me to know my own’ (Trojan Women 789–790). Stuck in these circumstances, the angrily disempowered have employed the shock of interruption rather than the fluid continuities of clear, restrained speech, whether to shock the hearer who will not hear, or to shock themselves or their allies into doing something about the perceived slight of misrecognition.
Practically speaking, the US Army generals present at the Theater of War performance of Philoctetes may have been aware of the injuries done to soldiers, and they may have cared deeply about these injuries or even worked to end them. They may have sacrificed their time and well-being to do so. With the luxury of information available to higher ranks, they may be aware that there are truer causes of these injuries than those raised by the soldiers; that the mission was necessary; that the cause was good. The generals may be tempted to respond to misguided criticisms of their decisions with clarifications or promises of financial aid, recognition, and public honours. These could be considered material or symbolic sacrifices made by the dominant party. But if Spelman (Reference Spelman, Garry and Pearsall1989) is right that respectability is often demanded by the dominant, the generals may have to sacrifice their own habits of decisiveness and immediate action to listen to the angry criticisms of the enlisted men and their families, and in doing so produce trust precisely by giving up the institutionally prescribed privilege of acting with the expert efficiency and character expected of high-ranking officers, even when their expert character is not the direct cause of the injustice. In other words, the path towards rectifying past injustices may involve sacrificing one’s rank, role, and activity to listen, pause, and think.
While the politics of dialogue between named individuals is associated more closely with Socratic dialogue than with the Aristotelian treatise, a Neo-Aristotelian theory of civic repair can thicken itself from its concern with monological oration and democratic deliberation in the direction of rhetoric and dialogue (see Garsten, Reference Garsten2011; Chambers, Reference Chambers2009).Footnote 22 Neo-Aristotelians can borrow from Socratic discursive norms, including the recognition of one’s ignorance; sincerity; a commitment to achieving friendly agreement (philia) through argument; the acceptance of aporia as a key stage of the discovery process; dialogical role-neutrality (that is, reversibility of subject-positions across power relations); and the ability to play devil’s advocate (Blondell, Reference Blondell2002, pp. 114–116). In keeping with this paper’s argument, these norms would not be imposed; flexibility in norms is crucial. The sacrifice needed to generate trust may require those in epistemic authority to enter a longer and deeper stage of uncertainty and risky vulnerability than they themselves judge to be appropriate, and even to learn how to feel epistemic helplessness – rather than choosing to use their power to dissolve problems immediately – alongside the angry speakers. This vulnerability and sacrifice of authority and initiative can and should be described as a democratic responsibility. Thus, in the case of Philoctetes, it is affective misrecognition to dismiss him as a shouting madman. What seems like unreasonable behaviour to the potentially friendly, trusting speaker who approaches Philoctetes as if he were an ideally reasonable interlocutor, or even a merely somewhat flawed one, overlooks the history of the injustice done to him. This history is explained by turning to Aristotle’s account of anger, seeing how Philoctetes’s anger has been stoked by years of perceived slights (abandonment, betrayal, and second betrayal), how his screams and cries are evidence of longstanding injustice, how desiring him to stifle these statements or convert them into goodwill would misrepresent these longstanding injustices, and how there is thus a place for screaming and shrieking alongside more typical modes of persuasion. Since, in the real world, there are both injustices to be pointed out, and reasons to think that one cannot do so safely, the Theater of War offers a venue for after-performance conversation where those in dominant and subordinate positions can ‘hide’ behind the discussion of a work of art while directly addressing their perceived slights, and their own anger about them.
6. Conclusion
An account of rhetoric that accepts that some anger is appropriate to feel may pluralize and democratize the affective economy of democracies. As the long processes of trust-creation grind on, there is a place for (sometimes improperly founded) accusations of those with power and the equivalents gestures communicating these accusations and concerns, such as the side-eye and glares of audiences who need further support and space to talk through their anger. Feminists and other scholars have drawn attention to the partial appropriateness of this anger, which I am calling the politics of fairly angry persons, playing on the several meanings of ‘fair’ and ‘fairly’, which include appropriate, equal, partial, merely acceptable, and beautiful.
The Theater of War project assumes that some silences are structural, and that they are created by social institutions such as military ranks and honour codes, hospitals and schools and police departments. Ancient dramatic performance may help to ‘embolden’ angry speech within these bonds and social ties (Pearlman, Reference Pearlman2013). In turn, the discussion fora after Theater of War performances provides a ‘safe’ space for those in dominant positions to practice sacrificing some of the power not to hear the complaints of those who are fairly angry. Democratic theory can learn from this example. Democratic theory may hope to outline the conditions and rules of discourse leading to democratic consensus, but to avoid assimilating historically subordinated groups, democratic theorists may need to sacrifice some of their own insistence on norms and rules to account for anger in grossly non-ideal circumstances. This sacrifice may require ‘hearing’ and interpreting shouts and yells rather than chiding those shouting for their imperfections, and this sacrifice of epistemic authority may involve repeated, charitable experiments in speaking with and listening to those who have been asked, for many years, and often in demeaning ways, to bottle and contain great feelings.
