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Irae fluctus4/9/2023 ![]() The violent anger which is at stake in ancient discussions has an element of pain and an element of desire the agent feels unjustly harmed and desires revenge. However, in spite of the particular attention that is devoted to anger, it seems that, of all emotions, anger is surprisingly difficult to understand within the Stoic framework. 1 Seneca's concern with anger is not only in line with the general Stoic conviction that emotions are irrational, but also with a more widespread ancient interest in anger as a particularly violent emotion. De ira stands within a Stoic tradition of discussing the therapy of the emotions. The idea that we should aim at getting rid of anger is tied to the theoretical discussion of anger: once we understand what we actively do when we experience anger, we can stop short of getting angry. * While other emotions may still have something calm about them, anger, according to Seneca, is all excitement, raging towards vengeance (1.1.1). Senecan tragedy enacts Aristotle's conception of the genre as a vivid image of the truth and treats tragedy as a natural venue in which to explore the human soul.ĭe ira is, as Seneca states in the beginning, a treatise on how to alleviate anger. Through Sidney, Seneca's plays came to exemplify an idea of tragedy that was at its core Aristotelian. When Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) composed An Apology for Poetry, he borrowed from Seneca the word idea to designate what we would now label as a "theory" of tragedy. This book argues that Aristotle's definition of tragedy actually had its greatest impact not on Greek tragedy itself but on the later history of the idea of tragedy, beginning with the tragedies of the Roman poet and Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 bc-ad 65), whose Latin plays were known and read in the Renaissance for centuries before the now more famous Greek tragedies were rediscovered. Aristotle set out to answer Plato's objections by arguing that fiction offers a faithful image of the truth and promotes emotional health through the mechanism of catharsis. ![]() Plato wanted to ban tragedians from his ideal community because he believed that they dabbled in the philosopher's business but had no "idea" what they were doing. I will end by pointing at the difficulty of reconciling both sets of strategies, and I will suggest a possible way to account for that difficulty.Īs both a literary genre and a view of life, tragedy has from the very beginning spurred a dialogue between poetry and philosophy. I will organize such strategies in two groups: the first one corresponds to the strategies that target the idea that an injustice has been committed the second one corresponds to the ones that aim to show that there are more convenient attitudes towards injustice than the demand for punishment or the desire for revenge. The aim of the paper will be to analyze the different strategies that the Stoics of the Imperial times designed in order to put our sense of justice on hold, due to the fact that it is deemed responsible for certain attitudes which do not contribute to our search for eudaimonía. Finalizaré enfatizando la dificultad de conciliar los dos conjuntos de estrategias y sugeriré una posible forma de explicar las razones de dicha dificultad. ![]() Organizaré las estrategias de acuerdo a dos grandes grupos: aquellas que atacan la idea de que una injusticia ha sido cometida, y aquellas que apuntan a la idea de que, aun cuando una injusticia haya sido cometida, existen actitudes más convenientes para exhibir ante la misma que la demanda de castigo o el deseo de venganza. El objetivo del artículo consistirá en analizar las distintas estrategias que encontramos en las fuentes del estoicismo imperial destinadas a poner en suspenso nuestro sentido de justicia, el cual es considerado implícitamente por los estoicos del período como responsable de algunas actitudes no deseables en nuestra búsqueda de la eudaimonía.
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