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Why the answer is more complicated than it seems.

Some emotions are so ancient that we share them with lizards.

One day, while holidaying in Mauritius, I opened a kitchen drawer to find a large lizard staring back at me. Before I had time to think, I jumped back and slammed the drawer shut. Only afterwards did I notice that my heart was racing and my body primed for action. But as soon as reason reasserted itself, the fear evaporated, leaving me with nothing more than a mildly inconvenient lizard problem—which, if memory serves, I chose to ignore.

The lizard’s reaction, of course, was just as swift, if not swifter. It darted for cover before either of us had had time to think. In that split second, human and reptile behaved in remarkably similar ways.

This encounter raises an intriguing question. Are some emotions so ancient and basic that they are shared across much of the animal kingdom?

An Ancient Idea

The idea that some emotions are more fundamental than others is an old one. The Book of Rites, one of the Confucian classics, identifies seven basic ‘feelings of men’: joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, liking, and disliking.

In the twentieth century, psychologists sought a more scientific answer. Paul Ekman proposed six universal emotions—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise—while Robert Plutchik proposed eight, arranged in opposing pairs.

The theory was simple and elegant. These emotions evolved because they solved recurring problems faced by our remote ancestors. Fear helped us escape danger. Disgust kept us away from disease. Anger enabled us to defend ourselves and our resources. Being evolutionarily ancient, these basic emotions are thought to be ‘hard-wired’: fast, automatic, and largely unconscious.

It’s an appealing idea—and Plutchik’s Wheel does look striking. But is it true?

Plutchik's WHeel
Plutchik’s Wheel

Is Fear the Most Basic Emotion?

The difficulty is that psychologists cannot even agree on the list. Some propose six basic emotions, others seven or eight, still others many more.

But there is one emotion on which almost everyone agrees: fear. Fear is found almost everywhere in the animal kingdom. A gazelle bolts before a lion. A cat startles at a loud noise. A lizard darts for cover. Before any of these creatures has had time to think, its body has already kicked in.

Fear, more than any other, may be the prototype of a basic emotion.

Beyond Fear

Other emotions are less straightforward. Take anger. We often become angry not simply because something unpleasant has happened, but because we believe we have been insulted, cheated, or treated unfairly. Those judgements involve much more than an unthinking reflex.

Someone pushes past you in a queue. If you assume they simply failed to notice you, you may feel only mild irritation. But if you conclude that they deliberately ignored you because they think they’re more important than you, you are much more likely to become angry. Same event. Different interpretation.

Even fear, perhaps the most basic of all emotions, can be triggered by beliefs and values that are themselves shaped by culture. Imagine waking up in a cold sweat, believing that you have slept through an important exam. Your panic has little to do with the examination itself, and everything to do with what the examination represents: success or failure, opportunity or disappointment, status, perhaps even self-worth. A lizard can fear a predator, but not an examination. The emotional machinery may be ancient, but what sets it in motion is often anything but.

With fear, culture often shapes the object of the emotion. With more complex emotions, it can shape the emotion itself. Schadenfreude (German, ‘harm-joy’)—the pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune—is not common to all peoples in all times.

Neither is romantic love, which seems to have emerged in tandem with the novel. In Madame Bovary, itself a novel, Gustave Flaubert tells us that Emma Bovary only found out about romantic love through ‘the refuse of old lending libraries’.

The Emotional Animal

The search for the basic emotions has taught us something important, even if it has failed to produce a definitive list.

Some emotions are so ancient that we share them even with birds, lizards, and fish, although what triggers them may be entirely different and shaped by our beliefs and values. Others depend increasingly upon language, memory, imagination, and culture.

Perhaps, then, the question is not Which emotions are basic?

It is How much of every emotion is basic?

The startle reflex, the racing heart, and the impulse to flee belong to our evolutionary inheritance. But what those responses are directed towards—and, in more complex emotions, even the emotions themselves—are increasingly shaped by language, culture, and the stories we tell ourselves.

Our emotions are at once among the oldest things about us—and among the newest.

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I explore the basic emotions and much more in Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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After his brother Novatus asked him “how anger may be soothed,” the Stoic philosopher Seneca penned his famous treatise, On Anger (c. 45 CE).

Anger, says Seneca, is a bad habit that people tend to pick up from their parents. When a child who was raised at Plato’s house was returned to his parents and witnessed his father shouting, he said, “I never saw this at Plato’s house.”

Anger is like a communicable disease. If we are around angry people, it is hard not to lose our temper, however temperate we may normally be. For this reason alone, we ought to prefer the company of mild, level-headed people. For those who don’t know, even wild animals become gentle in the company of the calm.

We should also resist our egocentric tendency to believe the worst about others. Often, the people at whom we are most liable to get angry are those who are in fact trying to help us—although, of course, not as much as we would like. In their minds, they are only trying to do what they think is best for them, and we, by our anger, are trying to thwart them—which is why they tend to return our anger. If what they are doing is not in their best interests, then we should calmly explain this to them, rather than losing our temper and, with it, their ear.

As for the things that anger us, they are often mere slights or annoyances that do not do us any real harm. Luxury debilitates the mind and undermines our sense of perspective, so that pampered people (like us) are more prone to anger over trivial things.

Even if someone murders our father or child, anger is not required to honour their memory, obtain justice, and, more generally, do the right and honourable thing. Many people think that anger is a show of virtue or, at least, a spur to virtue; at most, it can substitute for virtue in those who are lacking it.

Anger and grief only add to our existing pain, and often do more harm than the things out of which they arise. It is out of anger that Alexander the Great killed the friend who had saved his life—that great conqueror of kings, himself brought down by anger. And it is also out of anger that Medea slaughtered her innocent children.

For Seneca, “anger is a short-lived madness” (in the original Latin, ira furor brevis est) and differs from other vices in that “whereas other vices impel the mind, anger overthrows it.” The angry person, he adds, is “like a collapsing building that’s reduced to rubble even as it crushes what it falls upon.”

Being social animals, like ants, bees, and wolves, human beings are born to provide and receive assistance. Anger, which, on the contrary, seeks to arrogate and annihilate, is so inimical to our nature that some angry people have benefited simply from looking in a mirror. Those who are unwilling to check their anger and work with others for the common good are like wasps in a beehive, gorging on the honey of others without contributing any of their own.

For all these reasons, the Stoic should never get angry. She might feel the beginnings of anger, but then reject this passionate impression that threatens to overthrow her reason and the tranquillity and dignity that follows in its train.

To regain perspective when angry, to reclaim our sanity, we might ask ourselves:

  • “Am I expecting too much out of the world?”
  • “How is getting angry going to help me?”
  • “Who will remember this in a day or in a year, or in a hundred years?

But the surest cure for anger is delay, because it gives us a much better chance of rejecting our passionate impression.

Before rising into the first emperor of Rome, Augustus—then Octavian—was taught by the Stoic philosopher Athenodorus Cananites at Apollonia, in modern-day Albania, where he received the news of Julius Caesar’s demise. Athenodorus followed Octavian back to Rome and remained by his side as he deftly achieved that which his great uncle Caesar could or did not. When, on account of his old age, Athenodorus begged to be dismissed and was at last taking leave of Augustus, he reminded him, “Whenever you get angry, Caesar, do not say or do anything before repeating to yourself the twenty-four letters of the alphabet.”

At this, the emperor seized Athenodorus by the hand and said, “I still have need of your presence here.”

Read more in Stoic Stories.

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What the Stoics understood about offence.

The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787).
The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787). Others may scatter the words. Only we can turn them into an insult.

A playwright once mocked the Stoic philosopher Cleanthes before a packed theatre in Athens.

‘Driven by Cleanthes’ folly like dumb herds,’ he declaimed.

Everyone waited for the old philosopher’s response. But Cleanthes neither protested nor replied. He did not even alter his expression. Faced with such composure, the audience turned against the playwright, heckling him off the stage. Later, the playwright came to apologise, but Cleanthes brushed off the incident as too trivial to dwell upon.

What did Cleanthes understand that the rest of us so often forget?

Insults can sting. They can undermine our confidence, poison our relationships, and linger in the mind—sometimes, for years. A cutting remark from a colleague, a sarcastic comment from a friend, a stranger’s contemptuous glance, being left out, ignored, or spoken over—these small slights can accumulate into resentment, anxiety, and self-doubt.

The Stoics did not deny the pain of such experiences. But they did make a remarkable claim: an insult does not exist independently of our response to it. Words are only sounds, gestures only movements. They become insults only when we accept them as such.

This is not to deny that people can be malicious or cruel, or, at best, thoughtless. They can. The question is whether we are prepared to hand them authority over our peace of mind.

First, ask whether it is really an insult

Whenever someone appears to insult us, we should consider three questions.

Is what they are saying true, or partly true?

Do they know us well enough to judge?

And why are they saying it?

If the criticism is fair and comes from someone whose judgement we respect, then it is not really an insult but valuable information. Parents, teachers, trusted friends, and respected colleagues often tell us things that we would rather not hear. Their intention is not to diminish us, but to help us grow.

If, on the other hand, the criticism comes from someone who is ill-informed, malicious, or simply foolish, why should we grant it any weight? We do not feel wounded if a dog growls at us, a naughty child calls us names, or someone beside themselves raves against us. Why should an unreasonable person have any greater power over us?

Either way, offence begins to lose its grip.

Often, an ‘insult’ is not really an insult. It is admonition, advice, or just noise.

Anger is the weakest response

True insult or not, our instinct is to get angry.

But anger is the weakest possible response.

It tells the other person that they have succeeded in disturbing us. It suggests that there may be some truth in what they have said. And it unsettles our judgement, making us liable to say or do things that we later regret. As Seneca observed, ‘Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.’

People who habitually insult others are often struggling with frustrations of their own. Their words reveal more about their character than ours. If anything, they deserve our pity rather than our anger.

Should we answer back?

The perfect put-down is one of life’s great fantasies.

Unfortunately, it usually occurs too late. The French have a delightful expression for this: l’esprit de l’escalier—’staircase wit’—because the burning reply only enters our mind when we’re on the way home.

But even when a clever retort is perfectly timed, it is rarely the strongest response. By exchanging insults, we allow the encounter to become a contest on the insulter’s terms. We bring ourselves down to their level while raising them to ours.

Humour, however, is different.

When used lightly, it exposes the absurdity of the situation without escalating it. The Roman statesman Cato the Younger was once spat upon by an opponent in court. Wiping his face, he remarked, “I will swear to anyone that people are wrong to say you cannot use your mouth.”

Another strategy is to embrace the criticism. “If you knew me better,” we might reply, “you would find much greater faults than that.”

Such responses undermine the insult by depriving it of its oxygen.

The strongest response

But humour, too, demands wit, timing, and presence of mind.

The strongest response is often the simplest: to ignore the insult altogether.

One day, a boor accidentally struck Cato at the public baths. Upon recognising the senator, the horrified man hurried to apologise.

“I don’t remember being struck,” Cato replied.

The point was not to humiliate the man, but to show that the incident had not disturbed his tranquillity—that, though his body had been struck, his mind had not been touched.

This was also Cleanthes’ secret.

He did not suppress his anger. He had no need to. The playwright’s words had remained just that—words—because he had not collaborated in turning them into an insult.

Of course, there are occasions when we should speak up. If someone repeatedly insults us at work, at home, or in any unavoidable relationship, calmly and firmly asserting our boundaries may be the wisest course.

The crucial distinction is between defending our dignity and defending our ego. The first may sometimes be necessary. The second seldom is.

The insult we create

An insult begins with another person’s words, but it ends with our judgement.

We cannot control whether people are careless, cruel, arrogant, or simply foolish. Nor should we pretend that hurtful words do not hurt. They can wound, and some wounds take a long time to heal.

But we need not add a second injury to the first: the injury of allowing another person’s behaviour to disturb our peace of mind.

The Stoics understood that our freedom lies not in preventing every insult, but in refusing to become its accomplice. We may examine criticism, learn from what is useful, laugh at what is absurd, ignore what is beneath us, and challenge what genuinely crosses a boundary. But we need not hand over our tranquillity to the person who would disturb it.

A barking dog, a naughty child, or someone raving beside themselves may all make noise. But noise is not the same as an insult. It becomes an insult only when we assent to it.

That was Cleanthes’ achievement.

The playwright thought he was insulting a philosopher.

In reality, he was only scattering words into the air.

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Neel Burton is author of Stoic Stories: Stoicism by Its Best Stories. Through the lives of Zeno, Cleanthes, Cato, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and many others, Stoic Stories introduces the philosophy not through abstract theory, but through the memorable stories that have kept it alive for more than two thousand years.

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