Abstract

Aristotle defines anger as a desire for revenge aroused by an intentional and undeserved slight. His remarks on revenge are scattered throughout his corpus causing many commentators to overlook or oversimplify his account of revenge. Stocker and Hegeman, for example, claim that for Aristotle the purpose of revenge is to make the offender suffer and take pleasure in his suffering. David Konstan claims that the purpose of revenge is to restore one’s sense of honour and social status. Both these claims are correct, but the main purpose of revenge for Aristotle, I argue, is to restore justice and ensure that we are not mistreated by the offender in the future. I begin by showing that for Aristotle revenge entails three things. First, we desire to cause the offender pain; second, we want the offender to know that we are the cause of his pain; and third, we want him to know that we are causing him pain because he mistreated us. If the purpose of revenge was merely to take pleasure in the offender’s suffering, these last two criteria would be unnecessary. I further show that the desire for revenge is not a desire to destroy or ruin the offender. Killing another person or ruining their reputation would be an act of hatred, according to Aristotle, not revenge. This is an important point and one that many contemporary philosophers writing on revenge have failed to make. For Aristotle, revenge is analogous to punishment. We punish people for stealing so that they will refrain from stealing in the future. Similarly, we seek revenge because we believe the offender wronged us; we want to cause him pain so that he will not wrong us in the future.