Abstract

Anger can be described from a cognitive side as a desire to retaliate for a perceived injustice and from a physiological side as certain bodily processes. But how do they go together? Both the belief, being in the soul, and the physiological conditions and changes, being in the body, seem to play a role for anger which poses a problem for body-soul dualism – a Platonic core theory.

Plotinus addresses this issue in Enn. 4.4.28 presenting us a complex theory of anger which has been widely neglected by scholars. In my presentation, I am going to provide the first analysis of anger in Plotinus. Emotions involve the soul and the body in a way that raises important questions about how they interact, and those questions shed light on his analysis of soul and body more generally.  I will argue for three main points:

1) The soul as well as the disposition of the body play a role in anger with some kind of appearances, the role and nature of which is a difficult issue, as an intermediary element,

2) Plotinus makes a sharp distinction between two notions, referring to one more strictly as anger and the other one as the spirited element that allows us to get angry. This distinction has been overlooked or misunderstood in translations as well as in the secondary literature. And

3) the analysis of the processes involved in anger has consequences on how we should understand the complex relation between the different levels of the soul, from thinking to sense-perception as well as from the vegetative soul to the soul-trace and the so-qualified body.