The Philosophy of Anger

No, there isn't.

>Give this a read. The science is solid:

https://righteousmind.com/

"The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion?". Hmm...

So, from your comment, I'm guessing that the answer in the book to the question in the subtitle is that there is some baked in "morality" in us, that evolution gave us? If so, that's extremely misguided.

If there was such a thing, it would be at least somewhat similar across all human tribes and cultures. That's not the case at all. It's vastly different throughout history and across cultures because these things have everything to do with power dynamics and resource distribution.

>https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg

And? Monkeys have hierarchies. If they repeated this experiment but swappped the monkeys, it would turn out differently. The experiment is designed and orchestrated to show some sort of "equal pay" nonsense. What is happening is that the monkey on the left is socially higher than the one on the right... and hence it is used to claiming better food for itself first. When it sees the other one gets it, it gets pissed off. When these higher ups get injured, get sick or get old, someone else claims the status. It's all power dynamics and fight over resources. It has nothing to do with "morality".

> What kind of unhinged philosophy are you smoking? Objectivism? Marxism? Freebasing Solipsism?

I don't know what your western intellectuals call it but if I were to translate it to English, it would roughly translate to "reality".

> Revenge allows you to turn the principle of my action into a rule for your conduct toward me: you make my bad your good. This is the opposite of trying to undo or reverse my action. You hold me accountable by holding onto my theft, refusing to forget it, turning its one-off opposition between our interests into a rule to which I am now subject. [...] Angry people sometimes describe their vengeance as "teaching someone a lesson," and this is quite literally true: you make my wronging of you into a general principle and then "educate" me by imposing it on me.

This is an important lesson for those more naturally inclined toward forgiveness (though I would say it's important because it says something about what successful rehabilitation or education more often look like, or at least involve, in real life).

Speaking personally, it's a principle that it took me quite a lot of experience to understand.

> Educating me in this way is not easy on you: making my evil your good has psychological costs, among them the fact that you divert yourself away from what would otherwise be good for you. You must remodel your psychological landscape into one devoted to regulating mine. [...] I've colonized your fantasy life.

FWIW, my personal way forward is something like determinism + moral psychology + Rawls theory of justice if that makes any sense.

Based on this thread plus your bio Spinoza quote I'm guessing we likely align on a good deal :)

For example, in the case of #1, I usually separate 'frustration' from 'anger', but I could see someone else bundling them together. They share a lot of physiological effects, but I generally think of anger as a more focused and directed feeling. I could be frustrated while failing to debug something, but not meaningfully angry, because the bug is not an agent with malicious intent (or other common target of anger).

And for #2, I've known people who get mad and have an extremely hard time controlling it. Someone or something slights them, it ruins their mood, and then sustains. And they're aware of it the whole time, wishing they weren't mad, because they hate feeling that way. But they're still mad.

In comparison, I seem to be lucky. I have gotten genuinely mad before, but exceedingly rarely- maybe a few times in my entire life, and only then mostly in response to years of sustained bad behavior, and only when I was much younger. I wasn't trying to be a paragon of stoicism, I just don't get angry very often by default.

Stack a little bit of effort on top of a baseline like that, and it's pretty easy to go beyond merely not acting on anger to smoothing away even the subjective experience of it. Maybe a short and mild response, here and there, but it almost always immediately fades.

I strongly doubt I'm the most placid person in the world, so there are probably people out there who are even less angry by default. I bet others have put more effort into controlling their anger, too. It seems likely that "eradication" of anger is within the realm of possible for some.