[This is an invited guest post by Amy Olberding.--ES]
Eric’s recent post about anger and corpse display left me unsatisfied with how anger is typically and traditionally addressed. There’s no tidy way to trace out the concatenation of ideas Eric’s post inspired – it starts with Xunzi talking about how to treat a corpse respectfully, turns then toward Plato considering Leontius’ viewing of a desecrated corpse and, more broadly, what looking at a desecrated corpse is meant to inspire, and then ends up at Agnes Callard on anger. Maybe the simple explanation is this: display of desecrated corpses is an especially vivid case of human anger, and it often does interlock with moral sensibilities in curious ways. As Eric notes, the display of the corpse summons the eye and then a response to what is seen. Anger would standardly inform the reasoning to display the corpse in the first place, and some of that anger is likely meant to transmute and become the witness’ own. So display of the desecrated corpse is clearly a case that invites consideration of anger.
But maybe it’s also useful as a way to think about the limitations of our philosophical discussions of anger. That, at least, is what occurs to me.
Callard’s recent article divides philosophical accounts of anger into two broad types: pro-anger or anti-anger. Both sides inevitably need more nuance than this. Recognizing the moral perils of anger unchecked, the pro-anger advocates are left to argue for management and regulation, lest anger run away with us. Likewise, recognizing anger’s motivating power where moral ills are concerned, the anti-anger advocates are left to argue that we still need (the far more bloodless) indignation to respond to injustices. The “sides” here, Callard argues, inadvertently converge because both are trying to recognize a morally palatable anger (or anger-ish?) response when injustices demand some moral-emotive response. They’re both engaging in moral reasoning that aims to tame and domesticate the wild in us – to encourage measured or regulated abhorrence at wrong without licensing the brute unreasoning stuff that inspires revenge and grudges. Callard’s argument then pivots to considering the simpler, less attractive conclusion that efforts to purify anger overlook that anger’s impulses – revenge and grudges – are rationally justified. We are left then, with the conclusion that “anger implicates all of us in moral corruption.” The purified forms of anger moral philosophers are ready to endorse are “a philosopher’s fiction” that work to “distract us from the crisis at the heart of anger, which is that affective response to injustice clings to the taste of blood.”
My concern, I suppose, is that it’s all a philosopher’s fiction – that the way philosophy’s methods typically oblige us to speak of anger clarify (if they do) because the phenomenon of anger is severed from other elements with which it may interlock. This was Eric’s reservation too – if I can put what he said in my own idiom. He is effectively arguing that we won’t get a satisfying account of anger if we neglect to register its social aspects. State violence and social norms may have anger embedded in them and, indeed, it may be an important function in some norms that they transmit or summon anger in citizens. This is why displaying a desecrated corpse to raise the “spirited” in witnesses can be important, in Eric’s example. So, we might end up with philosophers’ fictions every time we analyze anger as a phenomenon of individual agents. This was, I take it, Eric’s point. Mine is similar: Insofar as our accounts of anger conceptually isolate it from other emotions, they isolate our analyses from the world and from at least some of the people who exhibit anger.
Because Eric was discussing corpse display, my thoughts turned to the corpse of Emmett Till, a young boy of 14 beaten, mutilated, and shot to death in 1955 by white men who justified their brutality by accusing him of flirting with a white woman. When Emmett’s corpse was sent home from Mississippi, where he was murdered, to his mother in Chicago, she gave him an open coffin service so that his beaten, distorted, unrecognizable face was visible to all who came to mourn. Mamie Till-Mobley deliberately displayed what had been done to her boy, displayed his battered dead body and, as Plato’s analysis might suggest, commanded the eyes of all upon him in a way that would summon in them emotional reactions kindred to her own.[1]
Whatever a philosophical moral account of anger can do, I want it to explain Mamie Till-Mobley. I am tempted even to say that Till-Mobley is my pre-theoretical constraint for an adequate account of moral anger, such that I take an analysis of anger that I cannot apply to Emmett Till’s mother to be missing something important. And I don’t think most of our classical accounts or Callard’s can explain her well. The trouble here, I think, is that we philosophically talk of anger in isolation.
Mamie Till-Mobley is not only angered, she is grieved. Her action – displaying her son’s corpse – cannot be understood apart from both anger and grief, to an emotive response in which these are profoundly, inseparably joined. To separate her anger from her grief, to analyze one without the other or lay claim to understanding one without the other would be, to borrow phrasing from Dostoyevsky, false to the fact. Till-Mobley’s anger and grief are one body and they unite in the display of her son’s body. Because of this, accounts of anger that seek calibrated, domesticated forms of anger or that would “dark side” our nature in anger just sit ill here. There is nothing tame in Till-Mobley’s display of her son’s body – it is an action primevally wild and raw – but neither, I think, is there the moral corruption of which Callard speaks. Contra Callard’s analysis, at least, I think Till-Mobley is exactly “responding rightly to being treated wrongly.”
Some angers are not unmixed but still fully, even emphatically, need to count as forms of anger morally necessary to consider. Mamie Till-Mobley’s emotive range and reach, evident in the symbolic aching grief and anger in her son’s display, is richer than I think philosophical analysis gets. It is undeniably and potently anger but it’s not only anger, and that seems to me not only what we’re missing in such analyses, but thereby also what we risk missing in our moral-emotional civic cultivation. To speak of what we ought do with and about anger, we have to speak about the rest with which it often comes – the grief. What morally angers us can also and often grieve us. Perhaps, even, what morally angers us ought to grieve us. But highlighting that alignment changes the kinds of things we ought be saying about anger and, more particularly, anger at injustices. The thing we call anger is a thing more complicated than “anger” captures.
The methodological claims I suppose are implicit in what I’m stumbling after here are three. First, I often counterfactually wonder about how different our philosophical work would be were it not lodged too deeply in the traces of its past. Western philosophical accounts of anger were inaugurated by men who took as their exemplars and standard-bearers for understanding the concept other men, typically men involved in martial contexts. There is a lot of anger in the world that plainly is not this. The world is also full of angry, heartbroken mothers. Were they the original exemplars, I can’t help thinking the philosophical history of anger would look different.
Second, when we seek to isolate discrete concepts in order to philosophically clarify a phenomenon, we often pre-emptively set aside too much of how the phenomenon operates in the world. We end up with conceptually cleaner concepts, but lose the moral world we’re trying to track with them. In short, it’s not obvious that the tidy concepts that make for good, focused, and clarifying philosophy map the messy world. Anger treated apart from grief will only capture some of anger, and perhaps only the simplest, least experientially vexed kind.
Finally, where moral improvement of the world is concerned, concepts that don’t answer to the mixed nature of human experience won’t be effective at steering that experience. Presumably, the motivation for talking about anger at all is figuring out what to do about it and with it. What to do about it, I hazard tentatively, might require talking about the stuff with which it mixes, all the stuff we’ve left aside to focus on anger alone – not just grief, but perhaps also disappointment. I can’t defend this – here or even in my own head yet – but if it turned out that some moral anger inextricably involves a richer capacity for grief, we are unlikely to see that and thus to say it and make use of it. I am quite tempted by the thought that were we more attuned to grief, our understandings of anger would be richer, better, and more useful. But while anger and grief can be inseparably wedded in a person like Mamie Till-Mobley, our philosophical analyses of both anger and grief live in different conceptual worlds. So we can’t explain her or direct well toward a world where responses like hers are understood, much less cultivated.
[1] This would naturally elaborate on Eric’s point – Till-Mobley can here be understood to be summoning up emotions in others designed to reach over the norms of society and state, to a sense of justice not prevailing in the state.
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