I Didn’t Know What to Do with My Anger — Philosophy Helped

How Philosophy can improve our lives and redirect the ego

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People often imagine that in philosophy departments, we spend half our days trying to elevate ourselves above human passions, and the other half standing in the rain at protests, struggling to roll our cigarettes.

The reality is just as inglorious. Student activism is fueled by a palpable anger that is hard to escape. Caught between precarity and the threshold of adulthood, managing this anger often becomes a matter of emotional survival. Thus, paradoxically, the more I studied human thought, the less I knew what to do with my own sudden outbursts of rage, aside from recognizing their immediate political utility.

I could stare at Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment in art history class all I wanted, telling myself that if even the divine allowed itself terrible fits of rage toward the damned, I could surely justify my own. But the truth is, I am no divine being. My eruptions possessed nothing majestic. Without a celestial excuse to absolve me, how was I supposed to manage them?

The Myth of “Good” Anger and How I Wallowed in It

When I lost my temper during student political protests, my first almost academic reflex was to rationalize it. I told myself that my anger was philosophical and political. The Greeks had a word for it: orgè. This was righteous anger, the fury of a strong soul rising up against injustice, outrage, or hubris.

But if I am completely honest, my true confrontation with anger did not happen through the noble prism of orgè; it took place on the asphalt. Take the French student struggles during the 2019 climate marches, for example. Historically, a student occupying an administrative space creates an “unprofitable place,” a nuisance within a neoliberal framework. The State’s response is often of clinical uniformity: police cordons, physical violence, and political deafness.

One day, facing a line of riot police blocking our peaceful rally, I heard two officers hurl racist insults at my friends, racialized students. In that context, I could not simply summon a pure, philosophical orgè. This was thumos: a visceral tumult. Faced with this physical wall of institutional bodies denying marginalized people the right to exist politically, I wanted to scream. I wanted to destroy. To paraphrase Kant: a dam had broken, a thought had drowned. Disaster strikes so fast.

And what if I stripped anger of the passions of the soul, of morals, and of religion, exactly as René Descartes proposed? My anger would then be nothing more than a purely physiological heating of the “bile.” Consequently, if I lost my temper, it was not because the other person was objectively evil, but because their action harmed me, triggering a defensive reaction to protect my ego.

Were my anger and my desire for revenge merely desperate attempts to reassert my own power in the face of a narcissistic wound? Faced with that officer’s insult, was my anger, whether loud and sudden or muffled and gnawing, nothing more than a vulgar ego crisis, entirely enslaved to the actions of others?

Toward Transition-Anger

Had Elisabeth of Bohemia not precisely reproached Descartes for ignoring the extent to which our emotions are anchored in our flesh? If I lost my temper facing that police officer, it was not a simple ego crisis. My anger was born of a violent rupture: the intolerable gulf between the world as it is (marked by racism) and the world as it should be. In that precise instant, there was objective reason to feel outraged.

As the Hellenist Suzanne Saïd underlines, indignation is not merely a blind passion. In this situation of absolute powerlessness before the police forces, my anger, an extension of the anger directly experienced by my friends, acted like a radar, a vital source of information pointing toward injustice. Was it not a legitimate weapon? A tool of surgical clarity to pierce through violence, both the blatant kind and the sinuous kind woven into the discourses that attempt to justify or whisper it away?

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum provided me with the final concept I was missing: “transition-anger” (which echoes this notion of geographic and emotional displacement). Nussbaum recognizes that anger is essential for signaling injustice, but she firmly warns against the trap of pure vengeance. She maintains that we must use the spark of anger to illuminate a situation, then immediately transform it into a momentum toward justice and repair, avoiding the quagmire of sterile resentment.

Facing those police officers that day, the desire to scream, to brawl, or to spit the insult back burned my lips. But what good would that do? I could not initiate a “dialogue” with an armed agent, nor could I lower myself to a war of egos that would inevitably end in police custody. Philosophy did not calm me; it rewired me.

Transition-anger taught me to use this burning spark to illuminate the reality of the situation, and then instantly convert it into a pragmatic will. Instead of letting myself be consumed by destructive hatred against an individual in uniform, I redirected this rage toward what truly mattered: protecting my friends, documenting the abuses, and committing politically for the long haul, participating collectively in the dismantling of the structures that permit such violence. Anger was no longer solely a burden; it had become fuel.

The Alchemy of Anger

In the end, the study of philosophy played its role well: not to extinguish our passions, but to refine them. We do not need a celestial excuse to feel anger, nor should we let our egos divert our political struggles.

When stripped of resentment and redirected toward systemic repair, anger can build.