How to Look at Anger: Aristotle’s Example
“There are present day psychologists (as well as philosophers enamored of such approaches) who in their theorizing and experimenting substitute a much-better-worked-out science armed with brain scans and various mind-affecting drugs, for the early moderns’ imaginary mechanism, but the positions they assume remain reductionist — a term one might define like this:
a reductionist is one who, when confronted with real phenomena of an order different from, irreducible to, and yet interacting with the order of being he or she is most conversant with, instead of widening their purview of reality constricts it to only what they choose to imagine can be.
As far as anger goes, I would say that certain other viewpoints which definitely do not reduce it to an epiphenomenon of a physical-somatic order nevertheless risk lapsing into a reductivism of the other extreme. Some of the moralists and theologians who discuss anger do so solely on the level of moral evaluation. …”
