 Now let's start by talking about the problem. So anger, the universal problem, appears to exist at all times and in every culture. This isn't a culturally relative thing and it's not a temporally relative thing. So is there anybody here that has no idea what I think, you know, anger is some complicated philosophical concept that they have no idea what I'm talking about, never experienced anything to do with it, never felt it, never seen anybody else experience it? Right, of course not. It's the most common thing in the world. As Seneca says, it is the most hideous and frenzied of all the emotions. He frequently uses superlative terms when describing the greatest virtues and the greatest vices, but this one he really goes over the top in condemning. And that's because it is such an enormous problem. It's the first problem mentioned in the most ancient literature. So in the first line of Homer's Iliad, the oldest work of Greek literature, reads, Sin goddess the anger of Pellius, Pellius' son Achilles, and its devastation which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaeans. And in fact the initial cause of the entire Trojan War is Menelaus' anger over his wife Helen being taken by Paris to Troy, and so he basically causes a world war in order to cope with this anger. Just noticing a couple of articles popping up in my news feed from last week, like one from Time Magazine, Want to stay healthy as you age? Let go of anger. Or three ways to get rid of anger according to neuro-science. So every day there are articles coming out that will tell you how to manage anger, how to reduce anger, the importance of reducing anger, the problems associated with anger. So it's an ancient and a modern problem. I told you that story about how a former student of mine was ordered by a court to take anger management courses, and she was astonished to find that all of the recommendations in the workbook that she was given in connection with that course could be traced exactly to recommendations made by Seneca in his work on anger. And she read an entire paper essentially documenting that fact. The term anger management would not be acceptable to Seneca, because Seneca doesn't think that anger can be managed. It has to be rooted out and destroyed completely, completely extirpated. Any bit of anger is, by his definition, out of control, unmanageable, and the only way to avoid it and all of the bad things in connection with it are to prevent it from happening in the first place. And that takes a lot of preparation, basically a lifetime of preparation of getting used to and anticipating things that could make you angry and removing yourself from situations that could make you angry and hundreds of other individual pieces of advice that he gives in here, which I'll try to summarize for you. Now, first of all, the structure of the work, it's addressed to Seneca's older brother, and so it has a bit of a epistolary or letter-like feel to it. It also has kind of a dialogue-like feel, because as usual there's this anonymous voice that comes in and offers considerations or comments or objections every once in a while, although these aren't named characters and there isn't a specific dramatic setting and so forth. So in a way it's a kind of innovative work, kind of more like a manual or a handbook. But it follows some conventions about practical works, and the clearest of these is being divided into roughly two parts. First, a theoretical examination of questions and problems and definitions of what anger is, and that part spans book one through the 17th chapter of book two. And then a second part, which is really the heart of the thing, which is to give practical remedies and a therapeutic cure against anger and its ills, and that takes us from the 18th chapter of book two through the end of book three. So theory and practice, a comprehensive account of the phenomenon, but since it's a work of practical philosophy, a merely theoretical exposition would be worthless. We don't want to just know about anger, we want to know how to avoid becoming angry. But we can't come up with a theory about how to avoid becoming angry until we know what anger is and what causes it, hence the need for a theoretical investigation. Now here's a more detailed outline of the work and so I'll just walk you through that in case you didn't get a chance to read the first two books and we're dependent only on the third book available in our textbook. So he opens up with a really remarkable passage describing the horrors of anger. Then he addresses a number of questions. What counts as anger? Is anger a natural thing? Like do other animals experience it? Do children experience it? And so forth. Can anger ever be useful or controlled? Short answer to that question, as I've already said, is no. A comment on the use of anger in war and in peacetime discussion of anger in punishment and anger and magnanimity or greatness of soul. And then some answers to direct questions. Is anger voluntary? How does anger relate to savagery? Is it virtuous to be angry at evil or bad people? Will anger fend off contempt? Again, answer that no. Can you be rid of anger completely? Answer to that yes, surprisingly. Discussion of anger and noble character. The role of anger in oratory. A lot of oratory has to do with inspiring emotions in order to get the audience to go along with something. As somebody's writing about in this class. And is anger a spur to virtue? Answer that question no. So in the next section, so part two, we have a discussion of therapy or remedies for anger. He begins by dividing the subject and then he talks about how to avoid getting angry. And he has two large sets of advice. First, what we should do in the education of children in order to raise them in ways that will make them not have habits of becoming angry. And the second advice for adults. Because giving advice about how I should raise or treat children who are angry is one thing. But it might be too late by then. My parents might not have raised me correctly or yours might not have. In which case we need remedies for adult anger. And a lot of this has to do with inculcating various maxims or proverbs that you can reflect on. Like don't believe the worst about people. Don't be soft and over sensitive. Like a time I was driving on I5 and one of the most irritating things that tends to make me angry happens. Somebody cuts me off not using a blinker in front of me and caused me to slam on the brakes. Tempted to be angry but instead I replace that with thinking don't think the worst of this. What if this is a single mother with hungry crying children in her car who's late to pick up her child from elementary school and she's running late to get to work and so forth and she just didn't think to put her blinker on because she was already getting too close to the exit and was too consumed with that. I don't want to be angry with someone who's like that. I want to help someone. I should have slowed down and been driving more carefully anyway. So these kind of reflections that if you meditate on them in advance then they will be easily available to you in a moment where you might become angry. Again further reflections to counter the onset of anger They cannot have wronged you or intended to wrong you. None of us are blameless. They should get the benefit of the doubt. Was it really unfair what they did or was it merely that it was unexpected to me? Also anger is an inhuman small-minded and useless emotion and reflect on the ugliness and the dangers of anger. Then in book three we have sort of a fresh start but where Seneca amps up the rhetoric even further and explains why anger has simply to be cured, totally eliminated, and not managed as it were. So he discusses, number one, how to avoid anger from coming on, the onset. So taking steps by modifying your environment and practices so that you won't get into situations that become angry. But then how to check one's anger when it's happening. By giving prescriptions, by giving examples. The way that anger can be suppressed in subordinates in people that are rising in power and many examples of where it was admirably controlled that you could try to imitate. And then again, further maxim or proverb-like reflections. Error is universal. Don't be small-minded. Be big-minded. Make allowances for people. Also, you're attaching great value to small things. That kind of false accounting is leading you into anger. And one of the most touching pieces, examine your conscience every day. At the end of the day, think back and remember your emotional reactions to things and think, was that proper? Was that the right way to handle it? And if it was not, then think about how you might modify your behavior. Finally, life is too short to waste it being angry. And that's going to relate to an entire treatise we're going to read on the shortness of life. So I'll comment on that in due course. Now anger is an emotion or what we call a pathway in Greek. If you remember back to my general introduction to stoic theories of pathway and emotions, the word pathway means something like disturbance, reaction, suffering, even disease. And so the very Greek, you know, the term emotion or even passion in English tends to come across sounding neutral or sometimes in the context of this crazy idea of like passionate love, even something that you might want to do. You might even think of it as a positive thing. That's almost impossible in Greek where the term itself means a bad thing that you want to get rid of. Like instead of talking about impassioned love, let's talk about diseased love, right? Disturbed love. That's how the stoics would look at it. Now remember that they're, because they have a cognitive theory of the emotions, they think that these emotions are cases where reasoning has failed and reasoning may have failed because one has the wrong value system. One's value system becomes corrupted and you think that things that are good are actually bad or you think that things that are bad are actually good and you think that you either have these things or you don't have these things. And so we can set up a grid of general definitions of emotions related to this. So when I falsely think that some good thing is present to me, like, oh, I'm a really rich guy and that's a good thing, then I might have delight in that, but that would actually be a disturbed, false emotion. Or if I think something present to me that's bad, like, oh, I have this chronic disease and that's a really bad thing, woe is me, I'm really sad about that, that's a wrong, that's a bad thing to think. Having a disease is just a dispreferred indifferent, cope with it, everybody has problems. If I think that something bad is absent but might be going to affect me, I would have fear or dread, like fear that this wave is going to crash over the ship and we're going to sink, that's really a matter of indifference. Just like life and death is, but if I value my life too much and think that that would actually be a bad thing, then I will experience an emotion of fear or dread. And finally, the category where I think that there's some good thing I don't have but it would be good if I did have, when in fact it isn't, is the category of desire or lust or appetite. Now it turns out that is the, which category does anger belong to? There's many ways possible that you can see of it, thinking of it being a bad thing that's present to you or something. But what's interesting is that the ancients tend to think of anger as being a kind of desire or an appetite. So if you really reflect on what anger is, you'll realize that when you're experiencing it, you have a burning desire to repay pain for pain that's been inflicted on you. It's actually a desire you have. You want the person who caused you pain to suffer pain. You want revenge for it. You want retribution for it. And what the feeling is, is feeling this intense, intense desire that's extremely difficult to control and can in fact get out of hand. And so let's look for a second at the whole category of desire. Desire in general is an irrational kind of striving. Again a false judgment that something that's good is absent to me but that thing is not actually a good. And so, for example, it might be more typical to think of things like want and sexual love to be more obvious members of this category. In the Stoic definition, sexual love is an effort to gain love resulting from the appearance of physical beauty and so forth. Dylan should take note of that because you were telling us that they're fine with sexual love and so forth. But there's this definition of eros as being actually a form of desire and a form of emotion or vice. But coralsomeness, thus unique vice and emotion which afflicts philosophers a desire concerned with one's philosophical school and defending it even when it might be wrong. Spiritedness, just a kind of incipient anger. An anger itself, a desire for revenge on one who seems to have done a wrong or an injustice inappropriately. And then we can define and distinguish several different kinds of anger. For example indignation, condemnation, retribution, realization and so forth. And the Greek Stoics have subdivisions of each of these classes which are themselves subdivisions of the more general kinds of emotion. Now notice that it's possible to distinguish anger from things like hatred and wrath. Don't just think of all of these things as being similar. Hatred is a progressive and increasing desire for things to go wrong for someone. It is actually quite a bit worse than anger. Wrath, long-standing and spiteful anger. So a lot of concern with definitions for each of these and that is because, again, they have a cognitive theory of the emotions. What's happening and what's causing emotions is a breakdown in reasoning. A false kind of reasoning. And so the basic strategy is going to be to replace the false reasoning with the correct form of reasoning which will allow us to avoid the emotion being produced in the first place. Now let's look in some more detail at Seneca's definitions of anger. They're pretty standard and relate to earlier views as he himself says. This is from a passage early in book one. Anger is the desire to take vengeance for a wrong. Or as Posidonius in earlier Stoics says, it's the desire to punish the person by whom you reckon you are unjustly harmed. Or he says, some others have defined it this way. Anger is the arousal of the mind to harm the person who has either harmed oneself or who wished to do so. That's actually a fragment of Seneca's on anger from a piece of the work that was mutilated and not transmitted, but it was described by an early church father named Lactantius in a book called On the Anger of God talking about how anger is a great thing. Actually, God's really angry. You ever read the Bible? He's a pretty angry guy and it's justified according to him. So this is a case of a justification of anger and Lactantius refutes these ridiculous Stoics who say anger's a bad thing, but in so doing preserves these attempts by Seneca to define it. Again, in book one, the clearest statement he makes is perhaps this one, Aristotle's definition is not very different from ours. He says that anger is the strong desire, or a burning desire would be another way to translate it, to return pain for pain. And there are other elements of Aristotle's definition that he doesn't comment on here, and I won't comment on here, although I will say some more about Aristotle's definition in due course. Now, just as the Romans have a scary number of words for how to kill people, so they have a scary number of words for species of anger, and Seneca goes on and on about this. So there's bitterness, harshness, testiness, being frenzied, ranting, difficult, prickly, and so forth. And each one of these being peevish, one of my favorites. And he goes on, he defines each of these, and he says, look, there are kinds of anger that simmer down short of shouting, some of that are frequent and difficult to shake, some that are savagely physical, not very verbal, some that are let loose in a torrent of abuse and curses, some forms don't go beyond complaining and sulking, some are deep and wavy and inward turning. There are a thousand other varieties of this polymorphous evil. Okay, but he thinks they all stem from one kind of cause. And since he accepts Aristotle's definition on anger, let's look a bit at Aristotle's theory. Now, as you will remember from reading the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics, specifically the 13th chapter, Aristotle divides the human soul into two parts, a rational and an irrational part. The irrational part is divided into a vegetative, reproductive, growth-oriented part over which we have no rational control or influence, but also a part, and this is the part in which we experience desires, appetites, emotions, and so forth, which can be modulated and subjected and controlled by reason. Now, I mention that because that psychology and that theory of the human psyche is very different than the Stoics, who do not think that there are two parts of the soul, there's only one part of the soul, the rational part of the soul. So Aristotle's theory of anger is going to be different because he has a different assumption about the structure of the mind and of psychology. According to Aristotle, it's a virtue related to anger, and as a virtue, it's a mean state that stands between a deficiency of anger and an excess of anger. So it's possible, of course, to feel an excessive amount of anger. You could feel too much anger or feel it too often or feel it too strongly. And the vice associated with this habit is something like irascibility or bad temper or something. Okay, so that's the name of a vice where you experience too much anger in excess of anger. You have a habit of tending towards anger. And there's a mean, which the mean he calls gentleness, which suggests that one is gentle and that they don't become too angry or they are not angry for too long or too often, but somehow you experience the gentle person experiences anger to the right degree. For example, they see something unjust happen that will make them angry, but they won't go completely out of control and they won't do anything that hurts their own interests and so on. And then because, according to Aristotle's theory, every virtue is a mean state between an excess and a deficiency, there must be some state where people feel a deficient amount of anger, according to the theory. Now, it doesn't actually seem that there are such people ever met somebody that you thought, they just don't get angry enough. But Aristotle says we don't really perceive it because it's not a social problem like the excess is. People getting too angry is a big problem, but people not getting angry enough really doesn't bug us so we don't talk about it. In fact, we don't even have a name for it, so Aristotle invents a name for it. Yeah. That would be a radical deficiency of anger. That would be a horrible inhuman vice, according to Aristotle. So in fact, he might say it's not possible to feel none. But if one did, then that would be a vice just as much as the excess is a vice. It might not be as big of a problem for people, but it still is a vice. Meaning there's something morally wrong with you if you don't feel the right amount of anger. There's obviously something morally wrong with you if you feel too much anger, but there's also something morally wrong with you if you don't feel enough anger, according to Aristotle. And this is encapsulated in what Seneca calls theophrasis' objection that a good person can't help but being angered by bad things or evils. So if I hear about somebody doing something evil, harming some innocent children or using chemical weapons on somebody, then I should become angry at that. And a good person will be angry at that. And there's something wrong with someone who's just kind of like, oh, yes, there's these horrible crimes going on, but that's how it goes, we live in an unjust world or something. Something like that seems wrong. But Seneca's answer to that is that if that were true, that the wise and good people were angered by evils, then the wise person would be the most inclined to anger and would have the most reason to constantly be angry. They would see and appreciate all the bad things that are happening and see this sort of ocean of vice that we're surrounded by, and then they could do nothing but be angry about that. And then so the person, the sage, the wise person who we think of as being the calmest person, the one freest of passions, the one who's acting most rationally, would be just the one that's actually flying off the handle and completely angry and upset all the time. So Seneca's view is actually going to be that we should extirpate, that is root out and destroy anger. Again, they don't accept that there's an irrational part of the soul in which it is natural for anger to be produced. The entire soul is rational and anger is produced by some irrational movement within it. And he argues that it cannot be contained or controlled or in any way used for good. It never has good outcomes. That's just another way of saying it is a vice. Vices are the flip side of virtues. Virtues always produce good things. Wisdom always produces good things, for example. Anger always produces bad things, so lack of self-control or cowardice always produces bad things. Anger is a vice, so it always produces bad things. Anything that supposedly could be accomplished in anger, and you can mention all sorts of stuff like people fight better or wage war better or punish others better if they're angry, Seneca goes case by case and denies that and shows how that could all be much more effectively done by using calm, calculated reason. And this actually gets a little bit scary because he's like, OK, if you're upset with somebody doing wrong, flying off the handle and being angry is going to cause you basically to harm yourself and look bad and look out of control. But what you should do is just slowly, calmly calculate how you're going to undermine and destroy that person for doing that. That would be way more effective. And he says, gladiators win by using reason. They get destroyed when they become angry and can't think through what they're trying to do. And then he gives all these examples in history of generals and so forth who made the wrong moves because of anger and the ones that were defeated by people who maintained this calm, rational outlook on it. OK, so like all other emotions, what we want to do here is totally eliminate or extra pay it. But the question is how can it be eliminated? Because it seems to be a process that doesn't admit of much revision. There's an appearance to me that somebody has done something wrong to me. OK, somebody didn't turn on their blinker or somebody flicked their fingers in my face or something like that. That seems to immediately give rise to a sort of impulse, a desire to return pain for that pain inflicted on me. And that's the state of anger. So we can't eliminate every appearance that something wrong has been done to us because that's constantly happening wherever we go. And the desire to repay pain for pain is just a kind of organic desire that we feel. So how, in fact, can we eliminate it? Well, the first thing we do is we analyze all emotional reactions in general, but anger in particular, to three different states. First, a preemotional state where the initial stimulus happens and the appearance of what's going on occurs. And this may also be accompanied by an involuntary reaction. So in the case, in the example of fear, which we've already talked about, I see a wave crashing over the ship. And so I start cowering or something. I mean, not that going like this is going to protect me from a giant wave coming over a ship, but there's this kind of involuntary reaction that initially happens. Or if somebody just walks up to me on the street and slaps me or assaults me, some kind of outrageous thing like that flicks their fingers in my face, I might blink. That's an involuntary reaction. Nobody can train themselves not to blink when you stick fingers in their eyes. But that's not an emotion to blink or to cower like that. Again, see an attractive body and become aroused. You get an erection or something. That isn't an emotion. That's just this kind of initial involuntary reaction. There's another stage that happens after the appearance is in the mind. And that's the judgment stage where you actually have a cognitive reaction. You think, oh my god, a wave is crashing over the ship and this is a bad thing because it's going to sink to the bottom of the ocean and I'm going to drown. Or somebody outrageously slapping me on the street is a bad thing because I will have been slighted by an inferior. Or you think, hey, it'd be a really great thing to seduce that person and sleep with them. Now reason is able to operate here at this stage and could avoid, in a sense, to such an appearance that leads to that full-blown emotion. So we could replace those judgments about a wave crashing over a ship being a bad thing with realizing it's an indifferent thing. What's the worst that could happen? I could die drowning at the bottom of the ocean. So what? That's not twice. Or counteracting these other cognitive processes, thoughts, judgments that lead to the third and final stage which is technically what the emotion is an out-of-control form of suffering or experience like fear in the first case, anger in the second case, or lust in the third place. And this is where it is beyond the power of reason to have any effective influence. So we have no control over the first or the third stages. The first stage because we can't control what happens to us. That's a matter of, well, fate to put it metaphysically but what other people and what external things happen to us. And we have no control over the third stage because by the time it's gotten to that stage it's growing, it's out of control and it's going to last its course. So most of these other emotions go away on their own so fear ends up dissipating at some point. Lust ends up dissipating at some point. But anger is really dangerous because it doesn't actually seem to have some natural course that it just runs. It's like fire. It just keeps growing and growing and growing. And there seems to be no way to contain it once you've made a judgment that I've got to get revenge. I've got to make that person feel pain for that pain. Then by then you're out of control. But again, we can affect the judgment and the cognition so our entire strategy is going to be basically to intervene at that phase and make sure that those judgments that lead to the third stage aren't enacted. So he goes into detail. Here's a passage from book two in which he describes the three stages. It's beyond doubt that anger is stirred and we have the impression that we've been wronged. The question is whether anger follows directly upon that very appearance launching its attack without the mind's collaboration or whether it's stirred with the mind's ascent. We hold that anger ventures nothing on its own but acts only with the mind's approval for having the impression that one has been done wrong, desiring to take vengeance for it, and then combining both in the judgment that one ought not to have been harmed and that one ought to be avenged. None of this is proper to a mere impulse set in motion independent of our will. So again, we have an impression that wrong has been done to us. Then we make a judgment and here he describes this as actually two judgments that get conjoined. I ought not to have suffered harm and one ought to avenge harms that are done to one. And if you combine those two judgments with the impression that wrong has been done to you, then you are led by a kind of practical syllogism to an inevitable conclusion that I must avenge and I must cause pain, I must return pain for pain and one has a burning desire to avenge that for a perceived wrong. Okay, so let me pause there in case you have any comments or questions. I can get into some more detail about Seneca's doctrine, but I think this is the basic idea. So apathy would be the ideal, historic state, right? Not in our sense of it, but in the past. Yes, so I would rather that you use the Latinate expression like apothea and apathy because although people are really love it when I say, hey, the whole point of this philosophy is apathy. It doesn't mean sitting there doing nothing. It means apothea means not suffering emotional distress, not suffering from the disease of an out of control mental state that you can't influence and reign in. Okay, so that's right. When I talk about extirpation and that means rooting out and destroying completely, then the ideal for it is apothea. That is lack or negation of a pathetic pathological state, a state of experiencing apathy. So yes, the ideal is apathy. Other questions? Yeah. So I say like pressure is defined as something that is present, but it is not actually good. So it is the false judgment. So that's a cynical, so historic philosophy, but it's so key for the end of like the life that people should achieve like pressure. Well, there are these positive emotional states like joy that correspond to correct cognitive judgments. So that there is something good that's present to me and it actually is good. So give me an example of something good. No, health is a preferred indifferent. It's not good. What are you crazy? Health? Health? Sickness? Who cares about that? Give me an example of something actually good. What? Like what? Wisdom. Wisdom is a good and it's always good. So suppose that I was a wise person, quite a stretch, but imagine that I was. Okay? And I was conscious of being wise. Then I would think there's a good thing present to me and I would be right. It actually is a good thing. And so the resulting emotion would be a kind of joy about that. But it would be easy to control and just experiencing, to experience that joy without it being this out of control state of indulging and enjoyment or pleasure that's actually a confused belief that these luxuries or whatever that are present to me are good things. Okay? So this is one of the problems with the term apothea that's confusing because there's actually these so-called you-pathia that is good pathologies, good diseases to have as it were, good experiences or good emotional states to be in. And so it isn't pure apothea in the sense of no experiences, no emotion whatsoever. It's that the only emotions you would have would be these good ones that are the result of true judgments and a true value system. But the term apothea describes the state of the Stoic Sage because they're not suffering from the bad and painful emotions that are regularly what we think of emotions, fear, pain, anger and so on. Yeah? On the last part of the paragraph, I think that he put the whole issue on the will to anger. So if everything is really on the will related to anger, then what's the point of the let's say instant vicinity that you know there is for example in some, there is an argument that for example in some countries that they say capital punishment is not humane punishment. They say why? They say even if somebody who just out of the instant vicinity killed somebody, he has not done it based on his own will to anger, but he just instantly became insane and they threw out the gun or hit somebody. I'm glad you're not my attorney because that's a really lame case you just made out. He just instantly became angry and it's not his fault. I mean according to this theory, you become angry it is your fault because you're making certain judgments and there's no such thing as just being instantaneously angry. There's a thing about blushing when you're embarrassed and blinking when something comes out your eyes and maybe cowering when something's about to hit you. There's reactions like that and we don't have control over those. Actually some people actually do gain control even over those things and Seneca points that out but he says it's actually they're going too far, that's inhuman. There's no point in never blinking. I mean this is why the Stoics would basically disagree with every element of everything you said including the capital punishment is not justified. They certainly think it is. But they would not accept a defense that says look he did it out of anger and it wasn't his fault because anger is your fault because you have control over what you are sent to and the judgments that you make and those are what produces anger. In the process of controlling anger are you essentially like evading or like getting rid of anger itself or are you using it in a more strategic manner? You're getting rid of it. There is no way to use it in a strategic manner because once it gets to the stage of full blown anger you'll find you can't control it or contain it you can't reason with it or anything it's just a driving irrational force a burning desire that you can't overcome. So the two things again that we need to do therapeutically are one educate children so that they have habits not to ever experience it but then for adults that haven't got a good enough education on that front then we have two strategies one prevention coming up with the means of avoiding the initial impressions even happening and two coping with when the onset is happening when somebody inevitably doesn't use a blinker and gets in front of you then what kind of strategies and techniques do you employ? And on this slide which has a lot of detail so you can look at it later after I post it here's a bunch of the practical advice you'll notice that all of it is aimed at never experiencing anger So unlike Aristotle who wants you to feel a certain amount of anger and use it to your advantage and warfare and punishing and just having righteous indignation about our political situation who's not angry about what the hell is going on in Washington and that sort of thing and you ought to be angry that's Aristotle's view but that's rejected completely by this Stoic view Yeah? For Seneca so there's not is there a way for him to say you could use like the cold calculated reason to get revenge like would that be okay? like if you're not thinking I have to get revenge but if you don't experience anger just use cold calculated reason Yes, the problem doesn't seem to be with revenge which you might think that's the problem if you're not angry then you can still get revenge and be okay on his view and you can actually get it much more effectively by reasoning through it and that's what you really want it's just anger is a really ineffective means towards getting what you want which is doing this now we could reflect on whether it always makes sense to repay pain for pain and in fact his theory of punishment is not that kind of crude just retribution alright so actually his view about punishment is that punishment should be about rehabilitating people changing them so that they don't in the future inflict pain unduly on other people but in this work he does not problematize as it were the notion of revenge or even repaying pain for pain it's the problem with the emotion of anger and you might think I mean there is a theory of revenge that makes it an extension of justice makes it a kind of justice and again although he disagrees with that theory of justice that's not the point of this treatise is not to talk about what justice is but this particular emotion so he doesn't have to fight that battle too to make this point