C. D. C. Reeve Quotes

Honour, like insult, comes from others. It is their recognition of our worth. It is the intrusion of the social into the psychological, the public into the private. After all, others honour us for what they find of worth in us. ‘To pursue [honour],’ wrote Baruch Spinoza in Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (1677), ‘we must direct our lives according to other men’s powers of understanding, fleeing what they commonly flee and seeking what they commonly seek.’ So what we come to think of as worthwhile in ourselves is bound to have as a large component what others think to be worthwhile in us.

Anger is triggered by insult, then, and so is connected to worth (aretê) and to honour (timê). A person is insulted when the treatment he receives is worse than the treatment his worth entitles him to receive. He is honoured when he is given treatment proportional to his worth, and his worth is above or well-above average. When we speak of honour, therefore, we are in a way speaking of worth, since honour measures worth. Honour and insult are thus close to being polar opposites, and an insult is a harm to worth or honour.

Anger is intimately involved with both military prowess and loyalty: it provides the kind of psychic energy necessary to perform brutal acts, and so is bound up with success on the battlefield. But it also involves a socially constructed notion of worth, which is a focus for honour. When Plato argues in Republic Book IV that the characteristic emotion of an honour-lover is anger (thumos), he is recognising how central to the world of honour anger really is.

Anger or rage (mênis, thumos, orgê) is an emotion, a mixture of belief and desire. It is not a somatic feeling, as nausea and giddiness are, though it is usually accompanied by such feelings – trembling and blushing, for example, and the sense of seeing red. It is, in Aristotle’s definition, ‘a desire, accompanied by pain, to take apparent revenge for apparent insult’.