Notes on Good Temper

This post examines the virtue of good temper. It is meant mostly as an exploration of what other people have learned about this virtue, rather than as me expressing my own opinions about it, though I’ve been selective about what I found interesting or credible, according to my own inclinations. I wrote this not as an expert on the topic, but as someone who wants to learn more about it. I hope it will be helpful to people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.

What is good temper?

“To bear trials with a calm mind
robs misfortune of its strength and burden.”
—Seneca^[1]

Good temper is the proper regulation of anger in particular. It may be best described by contrasting it with its opposite, which goes under names like “volatility,” “fury,” “wrath,” “hot-headedness,” “seething,” “flying off the handle,” and such. If you suffer from any of that, then even if you are generally level-headed, when you are provoked to anger you no longer make wise and sensible decisions but instead act rashly in ways that you would otherwise avoid.

If you have good temper, you keep your wits about you even when you are angry or have cause to be angry, and the quality of your decisions does not suffer as a result.

(Something about on-line interactions seems to easily provoke “flame wars” and other counterproductive displays of anger. Internet trolls play social media like a video game in which they score points by provoking other people into pointless displays of rage. So we would be wise to be especially on our guard about letting our anger interfere with the wisdom of how we behave on-line.)

Related virtues

Good temper is related to poise, in the sense of being unflappable. Someone with good temper is well-composed, stays cool, rolls with the punches, and doesn’t get thrown off their game.

Sometimes good temper is subsumed under temperance and self control—in such a scheme the temperate person is not prone to extremes of anger, and the person with self control does not let anger run away with them even if it does rise to extremes.

Zac Cogley calls the virtue concerned with anger “patience.”^[2] (My own page on the virtue of patience gives it a wider subject matter, including for example boredom, wait, or pain.)

Good temper is in tension with righteous indignation (or it may be that ultimately they resolve to the same thing: being angry in the right amount, toward the right targets, at the right time, to the right extent, and demonstrated in the right way).

The pros and cons of anger

“Rightly to be great
is not to stir without great argument
but greatly to find quarrel in a straw
when honour’s at the stake.”
―Hamlet^[3]

There are disagreements over whether anger itself is a useful thing or whether it should be suppressed. Some philosophers recommend cultivating a stance of equanimity and serenity, and treating others’ faults with charity and forbearance, and so they see anger as a pathology. On the other hand, righteous anger or indignation can help prompt your concern for justice, and so a lack of anger might indicate that you are unhealthily indifferent to injustice, or perhaps a push-over who is vulnerable to being taken advantage of. Anger can also be a motivator that leads to “greater goal attainment” in challenging circumstances.^[4]

Edwin Abbott (of Flatland fame) wrote: “There is an anger that is always right, such as one feels at the sight of cruelty, injustice, and oppression, a moral recoil of sentiment from evil… Resentment then is a Virtue, and a man who feels no resentment at the sight of injustice is destitute of a true sense of sin. There is almost as great a deficiency of resentment in the world as there is an excess of vindictiveness.”^[5]

However, Seneca, who wrote a book on anger (De Ira),^[6] thought anger didn’t have a place in justice: “It is not for the dignity of a judge, when he comes to pronounce the fatal sentence, to express any emotions of anger… for he condemns the vice, not the man… nor is there any need of an angry magistrate for the punishment of foolish and wicked men.”^[7] He thought that philosophers had tried anger and found it useless: “Democritus laughed, and Heraclitus wept, at the folly and wickedness of the world, but we never read of an angry philosopher.”^[8]

Aristotle went for the middle ground (of course), finding a golden mean of good temper in between the opposite extremes of wrathfulness and indifference, though he believed that people more often err on the wrathful side and that this is the more harmful of the two extremes.^[9]

These days I can imagine a good argument for the other side: that a “deficiency of resentment” (as Abbott put it) is more common and more corrosive. There is a lot of stupid belligerence around, to be sure, but on the other hand, I’m amazed at the variety and severity of insults to dignity that people routinely put up with without complaint. The commonplace mendacity of politicians or advertisers is such a variety of insult—accepting it without complaint has become so typical that it looks eccentric to behave as though one took offense at being lied to or treated like an idiot.

Zac Cogley points out that in assessing the way one works with anger, it is important to consider all of anger’s functions. Anger helps us recognize and assess wrongdoing, it motivates us to do something about it, and it communicates to others about our assessment and our inclinations. Anger can work more or less well at each of those functions.^[2]

He defends anger at injustice as an alternative to either sadness or fear. Sadness provokes a resigned acceptance of the injustice; fear, an avoidance of it. Anger, by contrast, provokes confrontation with the injustice in the hopes of relieving it, and thereby “has more beneficial motivational effects in that it moves angry people to engage with perceived wrongdoers.”^[2]

He also points out what a lot of authors on the subject neglect: anger’s efficient communicative function. When you see someone else get angry, there are characteristic physiological changes in that person that can communicate this to you fairly unambiguously. You quickly get the message that someone has perceived an unacceptable violation, and can prepare yourself to judge the case. If that other person were to evaluate the same situation unemotionally (that is, without anger), it would be more difficult for you and others to learn about it. Anger can be a way of convening an impromptu jury: “back me up on this, y’all: that shit’s unacceptable, am I right?” In this way it helps to reinforce group ethical standards. Cogley says that there are contextually- and culturally-specific nuances to communicating anger effectively, and that learning proficiency in this sort of communication is part of having the virtue associated with anger.

The Stoic approach: do not get angry

“How much more harmful are the consequences of anger and grief than the circumstances that aroused them in us!” —Marcus Aurelius^[10]
“Aristotle says that anger sometimes serves as a weapon for virtue and valor. That is
quite likely; yet those who deny it answer humorously that it is a weapon whose use
is novel. For we move other weapons, this one moves us; our hand does not guide it,
it guides our hand; it holds us, we do not hold it.” —Montaigne^[11]

The Stoics believed that anger was unpleasant, unhealthy, undignified, uncivil, unhelpful, and unnecessary, and that with training in philosophy you could rid yourself of it. Anger, according to the Stoics, is caused when you condition your peace of mind on something that is not in your control turning out a certain way, and it doesn’t cooperate in turning out that way.^[12] For instance, you get angry because someone else divulged a secret or parked in your parking place, or because the store was out of your favorite brand of coffee or the weather spoiled your picnic.

The solution is to stop conditioning your peace of mind on things that are out of your control. Those things are just the background against which you live your life; let them do what they will, and concentrate instead on the things that are in your control (for instance your attitudes and choices).

If you go along with this prescription, the Stoic philosophers have some sensible advice to go along with it. For example, this from Epictetus: “Start with small things. For example, you have spilled something on the carpet or something small is stolen from you. [Instead of getting angry] Say to yourself, ‘This is such a small price to pay for tranquility and peace of mind.’ ”

Or this, from Marcus Aurelius: “Say to yourself in the early morning: today I shall meet meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and uncharitable men.”^[13] (That way you will be prepared to meet them gracefully, and when you do meet them, you won’t get bent out of shape, but you’ll just say “aha, there you are; I was expecting you.”)

Seneca spends much of his De Ira recounting the disadvantages of anger and refuting arguments for the usefulness of anger. This is in part a philosophical exercise, but he also sees it as the first step in combating anger. “We shall succeed in avoiding anger, if from time to time we lay before our minds all the vices connected with anger, and estimate it at its real value: it must be prosecuted before us and convicted: its evils must be thoroughly investigated and exposed.”^[14] Once you become convinced by argument that anger is unlikely to be of any help to you, you will be less likely to give it free rein when it arises. You will properly see it as part of the injury rather than part of the remedy.

Some of his other advice on how to avoid or dampen anger:

Avoid taking on too many (or too ambitious) responsibilities that will make you stressed.^[15]
Hang out with good-natured people who model good behavior.^[16]
Avoid conflict. It’s easier than trying to get out once you’re in.^[16]
Calm down with a soothing environment and pastimes.^[17]
Avoid fatigue, hunger, thirst, and other promoters of impatience.^[17]
Become aware of the symptoms of arising anger so you can act quickly to remedy the situation and so you can better identify the environmental cues that give rise to anger (which differ from person to person).^[18]
Don’t be too curious about things you probably don’t really want to know (e.g. what people say about you behind your back).^[19]
Suppress the symptoms of anger (“Our inward thoughts gradually become influenced by our outward demeanor”).^[20]
Ask your friends to counteract your anger when they see it, and in general “prepare obstacles beforehand for vices [such as anger] which are known.”^[20]

But “the greatest remedy for anger is delay,” says Seneca. “Beg anger to grant you this at the first, not in order that it may pardon the offense, but that it may form a right judgment about it:—if it delays, it will come to an end.”^[21]

Sometimes people get angry in a rush to judgment; if they took time to look at the case more carefully they would find less to be angry about. For instance, people are usually less likely to get angry at someone for what that person did involuntarily, or unintentionally, or unavoidably, or from ignorance that it would cause offense, or regretfully and apologetically, or (sometimes) justly, or at someone who is incapable of comprehending their anger.^[22] It may be worth your while to take time to gather more evidence when you feel anger rising in you to see if some condition like this might remove the reason to blow your top.

Seneca suggests that anger be approached in two ways: by trying to avoid becoming angry in the first place, and by avoiding doing wrong if one nonetheless becomes angry. The second of these ways is the modern discipline of “anger management.”

The anger management approach: be angry skillfully

I am encouraged to see that for this virtue at least there is a scientific discipline devoted to it. Anger management is more of a psychological than philosophical discipline. Because anger is at the root of a lot of violent crime, professional anger management counselors are now deployed in the service of criminal rehabilitation and crime prevention. Because of this, the main focus of anger management is on helping people who have excessive anger and/or who behave unwisely under its influence (not, in other words, people who have insufficient anger or who suffer quietly while nursing a grudge).

The anger management discipline typically disagrees with the Stoics about whether anger is something that can be or should be entirely avoided. It sees anger as a natural and unavoidable emotion, and tries to teach ways to react to the arising of that emotion that are relatively harmless.

Some would go further than merely being tolerant of anger, saying that anger is the name for the emotional component of making a moral assessment of wrongdoing. Anger is not our secondary reaction to having decided that something reprehensible has happened, rather it is what making that decision feels like.^[23] So to try to uproot anger entirely risks mutilating our entire mechanism for making moral judgements. Instead we should try to ensure that our anger is accurate in the assessments it participates in: that we are angry about the right things, toward the right actor(s), and to the right extent.

Anger management is a complex subject: There are a variety of possible causes for why people react to anger poorly, a variety of ways in which such people misfire when angry, and a variety of techniques deployed by anger management counselors to try to improve matters. I don’t have any particular expertise here, so I’ll just link to Wikipedia and be done with it.

A web search for the term “anger management” will lead you to a multitude of sites with tips for the layman. Seneca’s advice of delay seems to still be very popular: count to ten, take a deep breath, etc. Dispelling the adrenaline of anger by means of innocuous physical activity like exercise is another popular gambit.

Anger is apparently physiologically similar to anxiety and fear.^[24] These share at their root a feeling of being out of control and an urge to regain control, and the physiological promptings are those that make you more alert and eager to take physical action. Displays of rage can be ways of trying to manage an out-of-control situation: You make everyone else freeze in place as your histrionics take center stage, and in this way you exert some temporary control. This suggests that the more chaotic a situation appears to you, the more likely you will go into rage mode to try to confine it. Noise, crowds, and the presence of other stressors can exacerbate this. So there may be some environmental changes that you can make that will make it easier for you to avoid extremes of anger.

Zac Cogley’s model for how to respond to anger well (assuming that the anger is well-targeted and well-calibrated to begin with) is what he calls being “assertively resistant,” and takes this form (lightly paraphrased):^[25]

Confront the target of your anger in an attempt to bring the target’s attention to your cause for anger.
Ask after or demand an explanation or justification.
If the justification is insufficient, act to change the situation.

(This is, he says, the usual order but there may be occasions in which you need to act first and confront the wrongdoer later.) Cogley stresses that part of what makes this variety of response skillful is that “The end is not simply to change the unjust or wrong situation, but to gain the other party’s allegiance to the idea that the situation should be changed by convincing the other party to share the angry person’s appraisal of the situation, rather than cow him into submitting to a request.”^[2] This strikes me as requiring a cool head and rhetorical prowess.

Holding grudges

Most of what I’ve found about anger and about responding to anger skillfully has to do with acute anger: the immediate insult, the sudden rush of blood to the face, the struggle to resist the urge to flail out without thinking. But there is also the phenomenon of the simmering grudge, the gnawing complaint, the all-consuming vindictive crusade. If you have been treated unjustly and you never feel like this was addressed properly—you never got justice, or revenge, or vindication—you may have a hard time letting go. It may feel like unfinished business and may continue to bother you long after there is practically anything to be done about it.

If you’ve ever dragged around the rotting carcass of a grievance like this, you’ll know how unpleasant it is and how little good it does. Over time the harm caused by the original insult can be dwarfed by the harm caused by how rotten you feel every time you return to dwell on it. But in spite of this it can be frustratingly difficult to just drop it and move on.

The Stoics would argue that you are making the classic mistake: conditioning your peace of mind on things outside of your control. You cannot force the person who wronged you to become contrite and offer restitution, or for the insult to be undone, or for the world to admit that you were wronged. You feel terrible because you are out of control; you have no influence over these things that you are allowing to tug your emotions this way and that. What you can control are your own attitudes and choices, and if you want to feel better, you need to exercise that control.

Well, thank you Stoics, but all that is more easily said than done. Once you have developed the habit of chewing on the bone of an old complaint, it can take a lot of persistent effort to break that habit.

For an approach that is less philosophical and more methodical, rumination-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) looks promising. That approach involves carefully investigating the triggers that reevoke the grudge, and deliberately working to replace your grudge-reinforcing responses to those triggers with more consciously-chosen and rational ones until this becomes habitual. There are therapists who specialize in CBT who can help walk you through the process.

The classic cure for holding a grudge is forgiveness, though this can also be easier said than done, and may not always be appropriate.

Some free Stoic ebooks:

Cicero, Tusculan Disputations
Epictetus, The Enchiridion and Discourses
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Seneca, Dialogues (includes De Ira)

^
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (the Younger), Hercules Oetaeus
^
Zac Cogley “A Study of Virtuous and Vicious Anger” Virtues and Their Vices Oxford University Press (2014) pp. 199–224
^
William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (~1600), act Ⅳ, scene 4
^
H.C. Leach, N.T. Reed, T. George, K.A. Kaiser, & S.G. North “Anger Has Benefits for Attaining Goals” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition (2023)
^
Edwin Abbott, Bible Lessons (1870)
^
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (the Younger), De Ira
^
De Ira Ⅰ.16
^
De Ira Ⅱ.10
^
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Ⅳ.5
^
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Ⅺ
^
Michel de Montaigne “On Anger” Essays (c. 1595)
^
See also: Duncan A Sabien, “Anger as evidence” Jan 18, 2020
^
Meditations Ⅱ; De Ira Ⅱ.10 has a similar sentiment: “The wise man… being tranquil, and dealing candidly with mistakes, not an enemy to but an improver of sinners, will go abroad every day in the following frame of mind:⁠—‘Many men will meet me who are drunkards, lustful, ungrateful, greedy, and excited by the frenzy of ambition.’ He will view all these as benignly as a physician does his patients.”
^
De Ira Ⅲ.5
^
De Ira Ⅲ.7
^
De Ira Ⅲ.8
^
De Ira Ⅲ.9
^
De Ira Ⅲ.10
^
De Ira Ⅲ.11
^
De Ira Ⅲ.13
^
De Ira Ⅱ.29, Ⅲ.12
^
Aristotle Rhetoric Ⅱ.3
^
Cogley 2014: “[A]nger need not be caused by an appraisal; rather, anger is an appraisal.” (Cogley here references Brian Parkinson “Untangling the Appraisal-emotion Connection” Personality and Social Psychology Review 1997)
^
David Hanscom, “The Connection Between Anxiety, Anger, and Adrenaline” Psychology Today (15 December 2019)
^
Cogley (2014): “[T]he virtuously angry person… first confronts the target of her anger in an attempt to bring the target’s attention to her cause for anger. She then asks after or demands an explanation or justification; if the justification is insufficient, she acts to change the situation. Of course, there will be situations in which this ordering should be inverted: if someone is attacking your child, it will be more excellent to try to stop the attack first, rather than demand an explanation of what is occurring.”
^
Zac Cogley “A Study of Virtuous and Vicious Anger” Virtues and Their Vices Oxford University Press (2014) pp. 199–224
^
De Ira Ⅰ.6