Anger and Forgiveness Read online

  ANGER AND FORGIVENESS

  Anger and Forgiveness

  Resentment, Generosity, Justice

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  1

  1

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries.

  Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

  198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

  © Martha C. Nussbaum 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the

  prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction

  rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

  You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Nussbaum, Martha Craven, 1947–

  Title: Anger and forgiveness: resentment, generosity, justice /

  Martha C. Nussbaum.

  Description: New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. | Includes

  bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015038395| ISBN 978–0–19–933587–9 (hardcover: alk. paper) |

  ISBN 978–0–19–933588–6 (ebook (updf)) | ISBN 978–0–19–933589–3 (ebook (epub)) Subjects: LCSH: Anger. | Forgiveness.

  Classification: LCC BJ1535.A6 N87 2016 | DDC 179/.9—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038395

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed by Sheridan, USA

  To the memory of Bernard Williams (1929– 2003)

  I agree to share a home with Pallas Athena . . .

  For the city I make my prayer,

  prophesying with a gentle- temper,

  that the sun’s radiant beam may cause

  blessings that make life flourish

  to spring up in plenty from the earth.

  — Aeschylus, Eumenides 916– 261

  The gentle- tempered person is not vengeful, but inclined to

  sympathetic understanding.

  — Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1126a1– 3

  We must look the world in the face with calm and clear eyes

  even though the eyes of the world are bloodshot today.

  — Mohandas Gandhi, August 8, 1942, reported in Jawaharlal Nehru,

  The Discovery of India, ch. 1, p. 38

  Contents

  Acknowledgments xi

  1. Introduction: Furies into Eumenides 1

  2. Anger: Weakness, Payback, Down- Ranking 14

  3. Forgiveness: A Genealogy 57

  Appendix: Dies Irae 89

  4. Intimate Relationships: The Trap of Anger 91

  5. The Middle Realm: Stoicism Qualified 137

  6. The Political Realm: Everyday Justice 169

  7. The Political Realm: Revolutionary Justice 211

  8. Conclusion: The Eyes of the World 247

  Appendix A: Emotions and Upheavals of Thought 251

  Appendix B: Anger and Blame 256

  Appendix C: Anger and Its Species 261

  Notes 265

  Bibliography 293

  Index 303

  Acknowledgments

  My first thanks are to the Sub- Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University,

  for the invitation to present the John Locke Lectures in the spring of 2014.

  I am very grateful, too, to the Indian Express for an invitation to write on the theme of forgiveness apropos of Narendra Modi and the 2012 Naroda

  Patiya convictions, which turned my attention to this topic and led me to

  choose it as the theme of the Locke lectures— although I totally changed

  my view of the topic once I began working on it. For conversations that

  shaped my thinking early in the process of working on the topic, I am

  grateful to Justin Coates, Saul Levmore, and Saikrishna Prakash, and for

  comments on drafts of the various chapters I am grateful to Kelli Alces,

  Marcia Baron, Corey Brettschneider, Thom Brooks, Daniel Brudney,

  Emily Buss, David Charles, Justin Coates, Rachel Condry, Sarah Conly,

  Roger Crisp, Julian Culp, John Deigh, Rosalind Dixon, David Estlund,

  Jeremy Goodman, Paul Guyer, Richard Helmholz, Todd Henderson,

  Aziz Huq, Terence Irwin, Will Jefferson, Sharon Krause, Alison LaCroix,

  Charles Larmore, Brian Leiter, Katerina Linos, Alex Long, Jonathan

  Masur, Richard McAdams, Panos Paris, Eduardo Penalver, Ariel Porat,

  Eric Posner, Sara Protasi, Richard Sorabji, Nick Stephanopoulos, David

  Strauss, Kevin Tobia, Jeremy Waldron, Gabrielle Watson, Laura Weinrib,

  and David Weisbach. I am especially grateful to Saul Levmore for several

  rounds of patient and illuminating comments. Three work- in- progress

  xi

  xii Acknowledgments

  workshops at the University of Chicago Law School and a series of semi-

  nars at Brown University were wonderful ways of getting critical com-

  ments on drafts. I am grateful to Albie Sachs for illuminating discussions

  about South Africa. For extremely valuable research assistance I owe

  thanks to Emily Dupree, Nethanel Lipshitz, and Dasha Polzik. I would

  also like to thank Emily Dupree and Nethanel Lipshitz for their help in

  creating the index.

  It is fitting that I dedicate this book to the memory of my teacher and

  friend Bernard Williams, whose example of a life lived with daring and

  integrity in philosophy matters to me more than I can say. It is perhaps

  not surprising, given the nature of teacher- student relations, that I have

  spent a good part of my recent career rebelling against many of the ideas

  Williams conveyed in his later work. Here I find myself, somewhat sur-

  prisingly to myself, drawn inexorably in a Williamsesque direction, so

  to speak, recovering some of the sense of fellow feeling that I had long

  ago— although I am sure Williams would find much to disagree with. It

  is tragic that I cannot express those discoveries to him today.

  ANGER AND FORGIVENESS

  1

  Introduction

  Furies into Eumenides

  At the end of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, two transformations take place in the archaic world of the characters, transformations that the fifth century BCE

  Athenian audience would recognize as fundamentally structuring their

  own world. One transformation is famous, the other often neglected.

  In the famous transformation, Athena introduces legal institutions to

  replace and terminate the seemingly endless cycle of blood vengeance.

  Setting up a court with established procedures of reasoned argument and

  the weighing of evidence, an independent third- party judge, and a jury

  selected from the citizen body of Athens, she announces that blood guilt

  will now be settled by law, rather than by the Furies, ancient goddesses of

  revenge. But— and this is part and parcel of her famous transformation of

 
the Athenian community— the Furies are not simply dismissed. Instead,

  Athena persuades them to join the city, giving them a place of honor

  beneath the earth, in recognition of their importance for those same legal

  institutions and the future health of the city.

  Typically this move of Athena’s is understood to be a recognition

  that the legal system must incorporate the dark vindictive passions

  and honor them. Thus the great Hellenist Hugh Lloyd- Jones concludes,

  “Far from wishing to abolish the prerogatives of the Erinyes, Athena is

  anxious to conserve them.”1 The suggestion is that the retributive pas-

  sions themselves remain unaltered; they simply have a new house built

  1

  2

  Anger and Forgiveness

  around them. They agree to accept the constraints of law, but they retain

  an unchanged nature, dark and vindictive.

  That reading, however, ignores the second transformation, a transfor-

  mation in the nature and demeanor of the Furies themselves. At the out-

  set of the trilogy’s third drama, the Furies are repulsive and horrifying.

  Apollo’s Priestess, catching a glimpse of them, runs in such haste that, an

  elderly woman, she falls and “runs” on all fours ( Eumenides 34– 38). They are not women but Gorgons, she exclaims. No, not even Gorgons, since

  these have no wings.2 They are black, disgusting; their eyes drip a hid-

  eous liquid, and they snore a fearsome blast. Their attire is totally unfit-

  ting for civilized gatherings (51– 56). Shortly afterwards, Apollo depicts

  them as vomiting up clots of blood that they have ingested from their

  prey (183– 84). They exist, he says, only for the sake of evil (72). They

  belong in some barbarian tyranny where it is customary to kill people

  arbitrarily, to mutilate and torture them (185– 90).3

  Nor, when they awaken, do the Furies give the lie to these grim

  descriptions. As Clytemnestra’s ghost calls them, they do not speak, but

  simply moan and whine: the text mentions mugmos and oigmos, noises characteristic of dogs. Their only words, as they awaken, are “get him get

  him get him get him” ( labe labe etc.), as close to a doggy hunting cry as the genre allows. As Clytemnestra says: “In your dream you pursue your

  prey, and you bark like a hunting dog hot on the trail of blood” (131– 32).

  If the Furies are later given articulate speech, as the genre demands, we

  are never to forget this initial characterization.

  What Aeschylus has done here is to depict unbridled anger.4 It is

  obsessive, destructive, existing only to inflict pain and ill. In its zeal for blood it is subhuman, doglike. The Greeks were far enough removed from

  fancy domesticated dog breeds and close enough to raw scenes of canine

  killing to associate the dog, consistently, with hideous disregard for the

  victim’s pain. Even the idea of vomiting up the blood of victims is a quite

  literal depiction of doggy behavior.5 The smell on the Furies’ breath is

  the smell of half- digested blood, the same smell from which one might

  turn in revulsion today after witnessing unbridled canine behavior.6

  Apollo’s idea is that this rabid breed belongs somewhere else, in some

  society that does not try to moderate cruelty or limit the arbitrary inflic-

  tion of torture— surely not in a society that claims to be civilized.

  Unchanged, these Furies could not be part and parcel of a working

  legal system in a society committed to the rule of law.7 You don’t put wild

  dogs in a cage and come out with justice. But the Furies do not make the

  transition to democracy unchanged. Until quite late in the drama, they are

  still their doggy selves, threatening to disgorge their venom (812), blight-

  ing the land and producing infertility (812). Then, however, Athena— who

  has already set up her legal institutions without them— persuades them

  Introduction

  3

  to alter themselves so as to join her enterprise.8 “Lull to repose the bitter force of your black wave of anger,” she tells them (832– 33).9 But of course

  that means a very profound transformation, indeed a virtual change of

  identity, so bound up are they with anger’s obsessive force. She offers

  them incentives to join the city: a place of honor beneath the earth, rever-

  ence from the citizens. But the condition of this honor is that they abandon

  their focus on retribution and adopt a new range of sentiments. In par-

  ticular, they must adopt benevolent sentiments toward the entire city and

  refrain from stirring up any trouble within it— especially not civil war,

  but also not premature death or any intoxicating angry passion (850– 63).10

  Indeed, they are required to invoke blessings upon the land (903 ff.). The

  deal is that if they do good and have and express kindly sentiments, they

  will receive good treatment and be honored. Perhaps most fundamentally

  transformative of all, they must listen to the voice of persuasion (885, 970).

  All of this, needless to say, is not just external containment: it is a profound inner reorientation, going to the very roots of their personality.

  They accept her offer and express themselves “with a gentle- temper”

  ( preumenōs, 922).11 They prohibit all untimely killing (956). Each, they declare, should give love ( charmata) to each, in a “mindset of common love” ( koinophilei dianoiai, 984– 85). Once again: these sentiments are utterly foreign to their previous doggy identity. Not surprisingly,

  they seem to be transformed physically in related ways. They appar-

  ently assume an erect posture for the procession that concludes the

  drama, and they receive crimson robes from a group of female escorts

  (1028– 29)— the crimson robes that resident aliens wear in the city festival

  of the Panathenaia. They have become women, rather than beasts, and

  “resident aliens” in the city. Their very name is changed: they are now

  The Kindly Ones (Eumenides), not The Furies.12

  This second transformation is just as significant as the first, indeed

  crucial to the success of the first. Aeschylus suggests that political jus-

  tice does not just put a cage around anger, it fundamentally transforms

  it, from something hardly human, obsessive, bloodthirsty, to something

  human, accepting of reasons, calm, deliberate, and measured. Moreover,

  justice focuses not on a past that can never be altered but on the creation

  of future welfare and prosperity. The sense of accountability that inhabits

  just institutions is, in fact, not a retributive sentiment at all, it is measured judgment in defense of current and future life. The Furies are still needed,

  because this is an imperfect world and there will always be crimes to deal

  with. But they are not wanted or needed in their original shape and form.

  Indeed, they are not their old selves at all: they have become instruments

  of justice and welfare. The city is liberated from the scourge of vindictive

  anger, which produces civil strife and premature death. In the place of

  anger, the city gets political justice.

  4

  Anger and Forgiveness

  There is still room for awe: for would- be criminals and fomenters

  of civil strife are on notice that bad deeds will not go unpunished. Thus,

  the faces of the Eumenides are still described by Athena as fearful (99
0).

  But legal accountability is not mayhem; indeed, being precisely tar-

  geted, measured, and proportional, it is mayhem’s opposite. Moreover,

  accountability for past acts is focused on the future: on deterrence rather

  than payback.

  Aeschylus is not a philosophical theorist of punishment, and he

  leaves a lot of questions for later exploration. For example, is there a type of retributivism that can meet his constraints? Punishment must forgo

  the lex talionis, but is there a type of retributivism that is compatible with rejecting that idea? Or must society, as Socrates and Plato believed, and

  much of popular Greek thought with them, embrace an altogether differ-

  ent theory of punishment, one based upon deterrence and general util-

  ity?13 There are hints of the latter approach, but no clear statement.

  Another liberation goes unexplored, but invites our imaginations: it

  is the liberation of the private realm. In the old world of the Furies, the

  family and love, familial and friendly, were burdened by the continual

  need to avenge something for someone. The need for retaliation was

  unending, and it shadowed all relationships, including those fundamen-

  tally benign, such as Orestes’ relationship with Elektra. Revenge made

  it impossible for anyone to love anyone. (The hideous musical world of

  Richard Strauss’s opera Elektra is perhaps the most indelible realization of this Aeschylean/ Sophoclean insight. There’s not one note, one phrase,

  that is not bent and twisted by the distorting weight of revenge.)14 But

  now law takes over the task of dealing with crime, leaving the fam-

  ily free to be a place of philia, of reciprocal good will. It’s not that there are no more occasions on which people are likely to feel anger: but if

  they are serious, they are turned over to law, and if they are not serious,

  why should they long trouble reciprocal concern? (As we shall see, that