A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

by William B. Irvine

On Overcoming Anti-Joy ANGER IS ANOTHER negative emotion that, if we let it, can destroy our tranquility. Indeed, anger can be thought of as anti-joy. The Stoics therefore devised strategies to minimize the amount of anger we experience. The best single source for Stoic advice on preventing and dealing with anger is Seneca’s essay “On Anger.” Anger, says Seneca, is “brief insanity,” and the damage done by anger is enormous: “No plague has cost the human race more.” Because of anger, he says, we see all around us people being killed, poisoned, and sued; we see cities and nations ruined. And besides destroying cities and nations, anger can destroy us individually. We live in a world, after all, in which there is much to be angry about, meaning that unless we can learn to control our anger, we will be perpetually angry. Being angry, Seneca concludes, is a waste of precious time.1 SOME MAINTAIN that anger has its uses. They point out that when we are angry, we are motivated. Seneca rejects this claim. It is true, he says, that people sometimes benefit from being angry, but it hardly follows from this that we should welcome anger into our life. Notice, after all, that people also sometimes benefit from being in a shipwreck, yet who in their right mind would therefore take steps to increase their chances of being shipwrecked? What worries Seneca about employing anger as a motivational tool is that after we turn it on, we will be unable to turn it off, and that whatever good it i...