Too Big to Punish

Around 1606, on a stage in London, an old man stands in a courtyard and cannot finish his sentence.

He has handed his kingdom to two of his daughters. They have taken it, cut down his household, and started closing doors on him. He is eighty years old, he has no soldiers and no house, and all he has left is his mouth. Even that won’t work:

No, you unnatural hags, I will have such revenges on you both That all the world shall—I will do such things— What they are yet I know not, but they shall be The terrors of the Earth! You think I’ll weep. No, I’ll not weep. I have full cause of weeping, but this heart Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws Or ere I’ll weep.—O Fool, I shall go mad!

The machine seizes up in public. He promises revenge and then can’t name one. He says the whole world will see, and breaks off before he says what it will see. He insists he won’t cry, which is how you know he is about to. And then, in the same breath, he says the thing the speech has been circling the whole time: I shall go mad.

Four centuries of audiences have watched that and read it the same way. Here is a mind coming apart. The king is gone and the animal underneath has the controls.

That reading is almost exactly backwards. And the people who could have told us so were writing three hundred years before Shakespeare picked up the story.

What everybody knows about anger

Before we get to them, let me say the ordinary view out loud, because I hold it too most days without noticing.

Anger is the basement. It is the oldest thing in us and the rawest. Every other feeling has some thought mixed into it, some judgment, some story. Not anger. Anger is what’s left when the thinking stops.

Our language is built out of this idea. I lost it. I saw red. I snapped. I wasn’t myself. Something came over me. Every one of them says the same thing, which is that a lower system took the wheel from a higher one. We keep a spare set of phrases for the aftermath, for describing the angry person as briefly not a person: he went off, he flew into a rage, he was an animal about it.

Popular brain science handed this picture a diagram. You have heard some version of it. The brain is three layers, like a geological cross-section. On top sits the new human part, the thin cortex that does language and planning and restraint. Underneath is the mammal layer, where feeling lives. And at the very bottom, the oldest floor, sits the lizard: the reptile brain, ancient and stupid and strong, wanting to bite. Reason is a rider on that animal. Anger is the animal getting loose. There is even a tidy phrase for the moment it happens — the amygdala hijack — which tells you the higher office has been overrun by something from downstairs.

The idea has a serious pedigree, too. This is not only a thing people say at parties. Charles Darwin devoted a whole book to the continuity between animal expression and ours, and he read our angry faces as leftovers from equipment we no longer have. William James, summarizing him, wrote that the sneer — “the onesided uncovering of the upper teeth” — is “accounted for by Darwin as a survival from the time when our ancestors had large canines, and unfleshed them (as dogs now do) for attack.” James went further and made the link general: “The actions we call instinctive,” he wrote, “are expressions or manifestations of the emotions.” If instinct and emotion are the same machinery seen from two sides, then rage is about as close to bare instinct as a feeling gets.

And there is something appealing in believing it. The story is humbling in a way that flatters us for being able to face it. It also quietly excuses us. If anger is the floor, then losing your temper isn’t really something you did. It is something that happened when your civilization got thin.

So take the story seriously, because if it is true, then Lear in that courtyard is a demonstration. Strip a man of his crown, his house, and his daughters, and you get the floor showing through. Rage is the default state that surfaces when everything built on top of it fails.

Where anger actually sits

Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, does something that looks strange for a theologian. He sits down and works out the order in which the passions produce each other. Not which ones are good. Not how to control them. Which ones have to exist before which other ones can exist at all.

He writes the sequence out:

And if we wish to know the order of all the passions in the way of generation, love and hatred are first; desire and aversion, second; hope and despair, third; fear and daring, fourth; anger, fifth; sixth and last, joy and sadness, which follow from all the passions.

Eleven passions, six stages, one direction. Anger is fifth.

Not fifth in importance. Fifth in generation, meaning four other things have to already be running before anger is even available. Aquinas is blunt about the ranking: “of all the irascible passions,” he says, “anger is the last in the order of generation.” And he lists the entry requirements:

the movement of anger does not arise except on account of some pain inflicted, and unless there be the desire and hope of revenge; for, as the Philosopher says, “the angry man hopes to punish; for he desires for revenge as being possible.”

Three conditions. Something has hurt you. You want it paid back. And you believe payment is possible.

Let me be careful about what that does and doesn’t claim, because there’s a version of this that overreaches and I don’t want to sell it to you. It is not a claim about anger being late in human development, or absent in animals, or somehow more advanced than fear. Anger is old. Paul Ekman’s cross-cultural work put anger among a small set of emotions whose facial expression gets recognized in very different societies — a result with its own serious critics, but nobody thinks anger is a modern invention. Very young infants make angry faces. Anyone who has watched two dogs over one bone has seen the ancestor at work. Aquinas thought animals had passions too; he wrote about “a sheep, esteeming the wolf as an enemy” and being afraid. None of that is in dispute.

The claim is narrower and odder. Anger has a door it has to come through. The door has a condition on it. And the condition can fail.

That narrower claim has a serious modern opponent, and I would rather hand it to you now than let it ambush you at the end. Leonard Berkowitz spent decades arguing something close to the folk view: that unpleasant stimulation produces anger fairly directly, with no judgment required about who is to blame or whether anything can be done. Heat makes people angrier. So do pain and bad smells. It is genuinely hard to say what appraisal is supposed to be happening inside a man who gets short with his wife because the room is ninety degrees. Berkowitz and Eddie Harmon-Jones laid that case out in a 2004 issue of the journal Emotion; the appraisal theorists answered in the same issue; the argument is still going. So what follows is the better-supported side of a live fight, not a settled result. If Berkowitz has it right, the ordinary view has a respectable defender and everything below describes a strong tendency instead of a rule. The tendency is strange enough.

Aquinas even anticipates the objection that anger must be primary because it feels primary. He knows the whole faculty is named after it, and he explains why that naming is a trap:

The irascible power takes its name from ira (anger), not because every movement of that power is one of anger, but because all its movements terminate in anger, and because, of all these movements, anger is the most manifest.

The loudest passenger got the bus named after him. That is the entire error in one sentence, written in the 1270s.

He is also not alone in shoving anger downstream, which matters, because one man’s system is easy to dismiss. Hobbes, working from completely different premises, builds a chain in the sixth chapter of Leviathan and ends up in the same place: “Aversion, with opinion of hurt from the object, fear. The same, with hope of avoiding that hurt by resistence, courage. Sudden courage, anger.” For Hobbes, anger is courage sped up, and courage is fear plus a hope of coming out on top. Spinoza runs it differently again. His primaries are desire, joy, and sorrow, and anger is one of the compounds built out of those. Three thinkers, three incompatible derivations, no agreement on the details. Not one of them starts with anger.

Two appetites, not one

Why would a feeling need a door at all? Feelings are supposed to just arrive.

Because in this picture you do not have one appetite. You have two, and they are built for different jobs.

Aquinas sets them out in the first part of the Summa:

there must be two appetitive powers in the sensitive part—one through which the soul is inclined absolutely to seek what is suitable according to the senses, and to fly from what is hurtful, and this is called the concupiscible; and another by which an animal resists these attacks that hinder what is suitable and inflict harm, and this is called the irascible. And so we say that its object is something arduous, because its tendency is to overcome and rise above obstacles.

Strip the Latin off and it’s simple. The first power wants things and avoids things. That’s it: good, come here; bad, go away. The second power handles the case where the good thing is blocked. And its object is the strange part. Not good, not evil. Difficulty.

Aquinas describes the relationship between them with a picture:

the irascible is, as it were, the champion and defender of the concupiscible

Gregory of Nyssa, whom he is borrowing from, put it harder: anger is “as it were the sword-bearer of desire.”

A sword-bearer needs two things before he can do anything. He needs somebody to guard, and he needs something in the way. Which means that second power can’t fire on its own, out of nothing. It fires downstream of a judgment that has already been made: something I want is being blocked, and the block can be shifted. Anger isn’t the sound of thinking stopping. It’s the sound of a verdict having been reached.

You can feel the two powers trade places, and Aquinas noticed that too: “concupiscence, on being roused, diminishes anger, and anger being roused, diminishes concupiscence in many cases.” Wanting something badly softens your fury. Fury makes you forget you wanted anything.

Modern psychology arrived near this by a completely different road, and the overlap is worth seeing. In 1985 Craig Smith and Phoebe Ellsworth had people recall real emotional episodes and rate the situations along a set of dimensions, then looked at how the emotions sorted. Anger came apart from sadness and fear along two axes in particular: who was responsible, and how much the person felt able to do about it. Anger clustered with somebody else did this and I can handle this. Sadness clustered with nobody to blame and nothing to be done. Those are Aquinas’s two coordinates with the labels changed: an agent, and an obstacle that is hard but passable.

Which flips the folk picture in a specific way. Anger is not underneath judgment. It has a judgment inside it. And Aquinas pushes the consequence far enough to ask a question that sounds like a joke until you test it on yourself: he devotes an entire article to “whether anger is only towards those with whom we have a relation of justice.” That is not a question you would ever think to ask unless anger needed a target capable of owing you something. Nobody gets angry at a falling rock. You need someone who could have done otherwise.

Everything starts in love

If anger is fifth, what is first?

Aquinas’s answer, and Augustine’s before him, is one line:

There is no other passion of the soul that does not presuppose love of some kind.

Augustine had already compressed the whole tree into a sentence, which Aquinas quotes:

Love, yearning for the object beloved, is desire; having and enjoying it, is joy; fleeing what is contrary to it, is fear; and feeling what is contrary to it, is sadness.

One root, four branches. Desire is love reaching for something. Joy is love arriving. Fear is love ducking. Sadness is love taking the hit.

The hard case is hate, and this is where the claim gets its teeth. You would expect hate to be love’s equal and opposite, the other pole of a magnet. Aquinas says no. Hate is downstream of love:

Consequently love must precede hatred, and nothing is hated save through being contrary to a suitable thing which is loved. And hence it is that every hatred is caused by love.

You cannot hate a thing unless it threatens something you were already attached to. Hate is not love’s opposite number. Hate is what love does when something comes at it. He extends the same logic to fear and quotes Augustine to close it: “There can be no doubt that there is no cause for fear save the loss of what we love, when we possess it, or the failure to obtain what we hope for.”

The tradition has a famous modern rival here, and it is worth putting the two side by side. In The Phantom Menace, Yoda hands young Anakin Skywalker a chain of exactly this kind: fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering. It is a real theory of the order of the passions, delivered in one line, and structurally it is the same kind of object as Aquinas’s list. It just starts one station too late. Fear cannot be a root, because fear is already a product — fear is love with something coming at it. And the films themselves know this better than Yoda does. Anakin’s fear is never free-floating; it is always fear of losing someone, first his mother and then his wife. The chain begins where Augustine said it begins. Which is also why the Jedi prescription, form no attachments, reads less like wisdom than like an attempt to cut the root because nobody can manage the branches.

So anger is not love’s enemy. Anger is one of love’s products, five steps down a chain that starts in attachment. Which makes anger readable. It is a pointer. Find the anger and you can walk the chain backwards to whatever was loved.

There is still something that doesn’t add up, though. If love is the root and the most powerful thing in the system, why is it the quietest? Anger arrives like a fire alarm. Love, most of the time, is barely detectable. Aquinas takes up this exact objection, whether hatred is stronger than love, and answers no on principle, since an effect cannot outrun its cause. But then he explains the illusion, and the explanation is the best thing in this part of the map:

since the sensitive perception is accompanied by a certain change, when once the change has been received it is not felt so keenly as in the moment of being changed. Hence the heat of a hectic fever, though greater, is nevertheless not felt so much as the heat of a tertian fever, because the heat of the hectic fever is, as it were, habitual and like a second nature.

A fever that comes in waves feels hotter than a fever that never leaves, even when the constant one is actually hotter. You register the change, not the level. Love, once it has settled in, is the fever that never leaves. Anger is the spike. That is why a person who has loved you steadily for thirty years reads as background hum, and the same person’s twenty minutes of fury reads as the main event of the week. Augustine’s version of this is shorter and sadder: “love is felt more keenly when we lack what we love.”

A passion is a motion, not a mood

Here is the reason any of this is a chain rather than a list.

In this tradition a passion is not a state you are in. It is a motion. That word is doing real work, in Aristotle’s sense, where a motion is a potential getting worked off. Aquinas applies it straight to love:

the first change wrought in the appetite by the appetible thing is called love

Love is not a thing you have. It is the first change something makes in you. And he gives it a physics, which is startling when you first see it:

the connaturalness of a heavy body for the centre is by reason of its weight and may be called natural love

A rock’s tendency to fall is the same shape of fact as your tendency toward whatever suits you. Weight is a stone’s love. Then the whole appetite turns out to run a loop:

the appetitive movement is circular… the appetible thing moves the appetite, introducing itself, as it were, to its intention, while the appetite moves towards the realization of the appetible thing, so that the movement ends where it began.

Three things follow, and they stack.

The first is that a motion has to end somewhere. Motions cross distances and then they are done. So the passions do too: “all the passions of the irascible appetite rise from the passions of the concupiscible appetite and terminate in them; for instance, anger rises from sadness, and having wrought vengeance, terminates in joy.” Anger is not a weather system you are living under. It is a trip with a destination, and the destination is either satisfaction or the other thing.

The second is that the one real oddity in the whole map suddenly makes sense. Every passion in the list pairs off with a contrary: joy against sadness, hope against despair, fear against daring. Except one. Anger doesn’t get a partner.

That is a ruling rather than a plain fact, and it is worth saying whose ruling. Aristotle had given anger a counterpart in the Rhetoric and spent a chapter on it, mildness, the settling of anger. Aquinas overrules him and says mildness is no contrary at all, only anger stopping. Modern psychology would overrule Aquinas straight back, since on the dimensional maps that sort feelings by pleasantness and arousal, anger lands opposite something calm and contented, the same as every other feeling does. So the interesting thing here is not the verdict. It is the reason Aquinas gives for it:

From the very fact that anger is caused by contrary passions, that is, by hope, which is of good, and by sorrow, which is of evil, it includes in itself contrariety; and consequently it has no contrary outside itself. Thus also in mixed colours there is no contrariety except that of the simple colours from which they are made.

Anger has no opposite because it is already made of opposites. Green has no opposite the way blue and yellow do. The fight is already inside it. Anger is sorrow about what happened, married to hope about what can be done, and you cannot put one feeling on the other side of that, because there is no one feeling over there. There are two, and they are both already inside.

Plato had noticed the mixture long before anyone built the ladder. In the Philebus, Socrates is hunting for feelings that are pleasure and pain at once, and he reaches for the line from Homer about the anger

Which stirs even a wise man to violence, And is sweeter than honey and the honeycomb

Sweeter than honey. Not pleasant afterward. Sweet while it is happening, in the middle of a pain. Nobody says that about fear.

The third consequence is that motions don’t queue politely. Montaigne, in the essay on crying and laughing at the same thing, watched this long enough to draw the conclusion: “for this reason we are wrong to try to compose a continuous body out of all this succession of feelings.” His examples do the work. Xerxes reviews his own enormous army at the Hellespont and “at first he quivered with joy to see so many thousands of men in his service,” and then, “at the same instant, as his thought suggested to him how all those lives would give out within a century at the latest, he knit his brows and was saddened even to tears.” Timoleon kills his own brother to free his city, and then weeps: “he is not weeping for the liberty restored to his country, he is not weeping for the tyrant; he is weeping for his brother.” And Montaigne on his own household: “When I scold my valet, I scold him with all my heart; my imprecations are real, not feigned. But when the smoke has blown away, let him need my help, and I am glad to do him a service.”

George Eliot put the same observation into one sentence in Middlemarch: “Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.”

So the order is not a filing cabinet. It is a set of dependencies running in a crowded room. Which means a dependency can fail.

When anger doesn’t come

Aquinas states the failure condition in one sentence, and I think it is the most useful thing in the entire map:

Consequently if the person who inflicted the injury excel very much, anger does not ensue, but only sorrow.

If whoever hurt you is far enough above you that payback is unthinkable, anger does not arrive. Grief arrives instead. The injury is identical. The wrong is just as real. What’s missing is the third condition, and without it the door stays shut. He says the same thing about the rung just below: “Hurt does not give rise to anger unless there be some kind of hope… Consequently if the danger be so great as to banish all hope of victory, anger does not follow.”

Read strictly, that is too strong, and the honest version needs two repairs. People plainly do get angry at governments, diseases, storms, and God. The first repair is that “possible” is cheap. A redress can be a lawsuit, a letter, a complaint, a post, a curse, a hope that someone somewhere is keeping a ledger. Anger needs a payback it can picture, not one it can collect. The second repair is that what survives is a direction, not a switch, and the direction is one of the better-supported findings in the field. Jennifer Lerner and Dacher Keltner found in 2001 that anger and fear pull risk judgments in opposite directions: angry people give more optimistic estimates and accept more risk, frightened people do the reverse. That is exactly what you would predict if anger already had a favorable verdict about your own power baked into it. And the appraisal work points the same way: low control and no identifiable agent move people toward sadness, not fury.

Meanwhile the brain science that everyone borrows for the lizard story turned out to say the opposite. The three-layer brain with the reptile at the bottom — the “triune brain” — is not how brains are built or how they evolved. Joseph Cesario, David Johnson and Heather Eisthen laid the comparative evidence out in 2020 under the least ambiguous title in the history of psychology: “Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside.” Fish and reptiles have the same basic brain divisions we do. There is no crocodile in the basement for reason to sit on top of. The layer cake was an idea about evolution that evolution declined to confirm.

What the animal work does show is stranger, and closer to Aquinas than to the lizard. Steven Maier and Martin Seligman spent fifty years on what happens to an animal given shocks it cannot escape. It stops trying. Then it goes on not trying later, when escape has become available and easy. In their 2016 review in Psychological Review they revised the original reading of their own experiments in a way that lands right on top of this essay. Passivity is not the thing that gets learned. Passivity is the default response to prolonged bad treatment. What gets learned is control, and detecting control is what switches the passivity off.

Which makes the fight the achievement, and the flatness the resting state.

Now set the order back down and read it in the direction the mechanism actually runs. Love and hatred. Desire and aversion. Hope and despair. Fear and daring. Anger. Then, last, joy or sadness.

Anger is fifth of six. It is the final station before the line ends. It sits directly on top of the exit.

And that gives the map a consequence nobody inside it quite spells out. Underneath anger is not calm. Calm isn’t one of the eleven; calm is what you get when a motion finishes, and a motion finishing means it either got where it was going or it didn’t. Sequence the thing honestly and what lies just under anger is the place where the hope ran out. Nothing else in the map can take that seat. Sorrow is what anger collapses into when the hope goes, and despair is underneath the sorrow.

Which means the shouting is not the worst sign. It is the second-to-worst.

Back to the storm

Take Lear’s courtyard speech again with the sequence in hand.

This is a reading, and the play has carried plenty of others. Four hundred years of critics have put his collapse down to his age, to the storm, to the logic of handing a kingdom away, to something already wrong with him in the opening scene. The sequence rules none of that out. It explains one thing the other readings leave lying on the floor.

He can’t finish the sentence because he has no revenge available. He gave the kingdom away in the first scene; there is nothing left to punish anybody with. But he does not do the thing the animal story predicts. He does not discharge. He keeps the anger and lets its object go blank: “I will do such things— / What they are yet I know not.” That is a man holding the third condition open with both hands. The hope of redress is what the words are protecting. The sentence breaks in the middle because the hope has nothing left to attach to, and the whole speech is Lear declining to notice.

Which is why “O Fool, I shall go mad!” belongs in the same breath and not two scenes later. He has just watched the thing he needs run low.

Out on the heath he catches the mechanism himself, for about two seconds. He starts to think about his daughters and pulls back: “O, that way madness lies. Let me shun that; / No more of that.”

Then the last act, where Shakespeare wrote the rule into the shape of the play. Cordelia is dead. Lear does get one final piece of anger, and it lands exactly where the map says anger can land: “I killed the slave that was a-hanging thee.” There was a man. He was reachable. Lear reached him. Against the thing that actually took her, there is no man to kill, and what Lear has instead is this:

And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life? Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou ‘lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never.

Five flat words, and not one of them angry. Whether “my poor fool” means Cordelia or the Fool has been argued over for two centuries, and it makes no difference here; the line is not angry either way. He came onto the stage in that scene howling — “Howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!” — and he arrives here. The loudest man in English drama runs out of rage in the presence of the one injury in the play that nobody can be made to pay for. Death excels very much.

And whatever that is, at the end, it is not peace. It is a man counting.

The old reading has Lear breaking down into the animal. Run the sequence and something else happened to him. He spent four acts gripping the fifth passion, because it was the last thing standing between him and the end of the list. When it finally went, what was on the other side of it was not the beast.

Anger is fifth of six. What comes after it is quieter, and it isn’t peace.