The upside of anger: can fury be one of the deepest forms of human compassion? | Making sense of it

Imagine anger as a sign not of moral failure or justified outrage but the desire to care for another Making sense of it is a column about spirituality and how it can be used to navigate everyday life Anger is an emotion we are taught to manage, control and suppress. But what if anger is, as poet David Whyte says, one of the deepest possible forms of compassion available to humankind? Philosophers and theologians have long distinguished between virtuous and non-virtuous anger.

Aristotle defined anger as “a desire, accompanied by pain, for apparent retribution, aroused by an apparent, undeserved slighting against oneself or those connected to oneself”. Anger appears to combine a physical sensation of torment with a desire to act. The English word “anger” has its etymological roots in the Old Norse angr, meaning grief and sorrow, and the Latin angere, to strangle, referring to the sensation of chest tightening, fists clenching,