Fairly Angry: Accepting Outrage in Non-Ideal Circumstances

Abstract Many scholars think that anger is an unruly emotion – or worse. However, anger can contribute to political life and affirmative social change. I call politics consistent with this interpretation of anger a fairly angry politics. A fairly angry person raises a valid but incomplete point about the injustice of their circumstance, in an unpersuasive, incomplete, or flawed way. The fairly angry person should not be dismissed as resentful insofar as there are often structural reasons for their inability to be heard. To explore this interpretation of anger, the paper briefly examines Aristotle’s definition of anger in the Rhetoric and then contrasts the paradigmatic anger of the relatively privileged figure of Homer’s Achilles with the non-ideal anger of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. The paper then offers a further analysis of fairly angry politics by considering Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War project’s revival of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. Hearing angry speeches may help to remind hearers who occupy a dominant role to sacrifice some of their own comfort, invulnerability, and epistemic privilege; indeed, as perpetrators of (or persons complicit in) injustice, they have a responsibility to hear and respond to unruly anger.