Quotation
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“The greatest remedy for anger is delay.”
Seneca · Stoicism · Ancient · c. 41 CE
Part of:Stoicism in 5 steps →
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading is that anger's first rush is the dangerous part, so time is the main remedy, because the heat drops if you do not act inside it. A competing reading, closer to Aristotle, says some anger is a useful signal and that delay can become avoidance of a wrong that needed a prompt answer. Seneca's essay rejects useful anger. The remedy sits in Book II, among practical instructions after he has defined anger as a desire to punish.
Did Seneca really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. A standard English of On Anger II.29. John W. Basore translated De Ira for the Loeb Classical Library; Richard M. Gummere's Loeb is the Moral Letters, not this essay.
Where it comes from
On Anger II.29.1
Approximate date: c. 41 CE.
How to use it
The email you want to send while your hands are still shaking is the case. Wait until the next morning before you answer the complaint, the slight, or the parents' group message. Delay is not forgiveness and not a decision that nothing happened, and it is a gap in which you can tell retaliation from a proportionate reply, and some dangers, a child in the road, do not fall under the remedy.
A mindset reading
The habit is to buy time before you call a hot reaction a judgement. Ask what you would still think when the first pulse has gone. Seneca thinks the later view is likelier to be reason, and he does not think every postponed wrong becomes smaller, and he thinks the anger does.
Understand the philosophy
Seneca is answering how to treat an emotion he regards as a brief madness. Anger, ira, is not for him a mean to be hit but a movement to be refused. Delay, mora, works because the first assault does the damage and the later hour can examine the facts. He is arguing against the Peripatetic claim that anger, in moderation, helps soldiers and orators, and reason, he says, can do whatever anger claims to do, without the wreckage.
- ethics
- mind
FAQ
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading is that anger's first rush is the dangerous part, so time is the main remedy, because the heat drops if you do not act inside it. A competing reading, closer to Aristotle, says some anger is a useful signal and that delay can become avoidance of a wrong that needed a prompt answer. Seneca's essay rejects useful anger. The remedy sits in Book II, among practical instructions after he has defined anger as a desire to punish.
Did Seneca really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. A standard English of On Anger II.29. John W. Basore translated De Ira for the Loeb Classical Library; Richard M. Gummere's Loeb is the Moral Letters, not this essay.
Which work is it in?
On Anger II.29.1 Approximate date: c. 41 CE.