Seneca On Anger Summary

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Seneca who was a Roman philosopher between 4 B.C and 65 B.C has given his opinion about anger in his essay 'On Anger '. This essay will illustrate his views on anger by looking at his definition on anger, the discordances of anger with nature, the decision and causes to start anger, his argument on anger and the remedies of it. Seneca defined anger as "a burning desire to avenge a wrong" or "a burning desire to punish him by whom you think yourself to have been unfairly harmed" (Seneca On Anger Extracts I.2). When we feel we have been unjustly treated, an agitated feeling arises which is called “anger” (Cooper, J& Procope, J 1995 p.6). Seneca then talked about the accordance of anger with nature. He said "Man was created for mutual assistance, anger for mutual destruction..."and "anger is greedy for punishment…" (Seneca On Anger Extracts I.5). This suggest that anger opposite the common …show more content…

He then states that the second thing that arouses anger was a sense of “unfairness” things done to us (Seneca On Anger extract 2.31), as an agitated feelings arise when we have been unjustly treated. In addition, Seneca argued that “prosperity fosters bad tempers” as he observed that prosperous people are more prone to anger (De Botton, A 2000 p.84). “Vedius Pollio was angry for identifiable reason… ” (De Botton, A 2000 p.84). Seneca states that wealthier people are far too optimistic as they hope too much and tend to have more expectations and therefore anger arises due to their unreasonable ideas when they foster the wrong expectation. Rich people tend to believe that their money will insulate them from disappointments which is simply untrue and therefore, Seneca’s advice to deal with anger is to be more pessimistic, as he felt that if people are more pessimistic about daily life that they will be less surprised by disappointments and thus less angered by

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