From the first publications of Charles Darwin to the most recent cutting-edge work in neuroscience, the study of the emotions has represented one such intersection between the sciences and the humanities; today it is an increasingly popular area of investigation. Emotions that manifest in the human body—whether on the face, through behavior, or in neurons—allow us to collect empirical data for the construction of theories. The most radical scientists promote a biological determinism that minimizes or excludes the role of culture and society in the construction of emotions.[26] On the other hand, there are also extreme positions within social and cultural studies—particularly in the field of cultural anthropology—that focus exclusively on contextual factors in emotional expression.
But these extreme schools of thought have been losing followers as new scientific and cultural studies have verified the interaction between biological factors and social context. For many disciplines, emotions are seen as a constitutive biological element of the human person, while their way of operating—their social uses and meanings—are what vary according to context and are shaped by linguistic variations in different historical periods and cultural spaces. Keith Oatley describes the biological and social characteristics of emotions like this:
For emotions, history has three meanings. The first is evolutionary. Aspects of our emotions derive from millions of years ago when our pre-human ancestors became more successful than members of other pre-human species who did not survive because those others were less well equipped in their emotional and practical repertoires than were our ancestors. The repertoire that was successful in the past has been passed by human genes on to us in the present. The second meaning is the personal history of each of us: how our emotions develop from birth, through the relationships of childhood and across the life span. The third sense is the ordinary one: a history of ideas and social movements.[27]
Emotions have been studied since classical antiquity and by different disciplines, making it impossible to find an exact or comprehensive definition. According to the Royal Spanish Academy, the word emotion comes from the Latin emotio, and evokes an intense and transient mood alteration, pleasant or painful, which is accompanied by some somatic commotion. In a similar vein, one of the earliest recorded definitions is that of Aristotle, who uses the Greek term pathos: “The emotions are all those affections which cause men to change their opinion in regard to their judgments, and are accompanied by pleasure and pain; such are anger, pity, fear, and all similar emotions and their contraries.”[28]
Hundreds of authors have offered their own definitions since. Some common features are the reaction of the body and the mood of human beings before an external or imaginary stimulus, which affects the judgment and promotes a certain action. Some ascribe a moral or ethical dimension to human feelings, and others, like the ancient and medieval authors, believe in the possibility of educating them. However, due to each emotion’s basic complexity, perhaps the best way to approach them is to focus on one in particular.
One of the epithets Toribio de Ortiguera assigns to Aguirre, in one of the first relaciones about the marañón rebellion, is “the Wrath of God.”[29] This phrase captures the conquistador’s personality as it is evoked in the colonial texts, which describe him as an angry man who is easily exasperated and who resorts to vengeful and bloodthirsty violence as a way of life. Subsequent fictional adaptations highlight this dimension of Aguirre; for instance, the name of Werner Herzog’s film, the most popular depiction of the conqueror, is Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
Aguirre is not only “Prince of Freedom” and “Tyrant,” but also the “Wrath of God.” This wrath stands as an invitation to analyze the anti-imperial/colonizing and liberating/oppressive dimensions of Aguirre from the standpoint of the study of the emotions. Anger can be a lens for the study of Aguirre and his future appropriations, as well as of the constitution of the first modern anti-imperial project as a founding archetype. Anger functions as a sort of tunnel that connects both binaries and allows one to pass, back and forth, from the anti-imperial liberator to the oppressive tyrant.
Aristotle defines anger (orge) as the feeling that someone has hurt me, or hurt someone or something that matters to me, and that this person must therefore pay the consequences.
Let us then define anger as a longing, accompanied by pain, for a real or apparent revenge for a real or apparent light, affecting a man himself or one of his friends, when such a slight is undeserved. If this definition is correct, the angry man must always be angry with a particular individual (for instance, with Cleon, but not with men generally), and because this individual has done, or was on the point of doing, something against him or one of his friends; and lastly, anger is always accompanied by a certain pleasure, due to the hope of revenge to come. For it is pleasant to think that one will obtain what one aims at; now, no one aims at what is obviously impossible of attainment by him, and the angry man aims at what is possible for himself. Wherefore it has been well said of anger, that “Far sweeter than dripping honey down the throat it spreads in men’s hearts” for it is accompanied by a certain pleasure, for this reason first, and also because men dwell upon the thought of revenge, and the vision that rises before us produces the same pleasure as one seen in dreams.[30]
Aristotle’s rhetorical goal was to persuade and edify the leaders of the polis,[31] and his discussion of anger therefore unfolded against the backdrop of certain political concerns. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum adopts the public dimension of this Aristotelian definition for her own investigation of the role of what she calls, precisely, “political emotions.” Her analysis of anger focuses, as does my own, on its political dimension.
Nussbaum explains that anger is often the engine of change, rebellion, and revolution, as it pushes populations or social groups to rise against oppressive and unjust political structures.[32] As such, anger is a necessary means of achieving justice. The authors of the colonial relaciones—and indeed Aguirre himself, in his letter to Philip II—are of a similar mind as they connect the marañones’ revolt against the king of Spain to their exclusion from the distribution of the New World’s riches. Even having served the crown with all of the sacrifices that it entailed, these soldiers were not unable to identify their own right to recompense—and their right to claim their due from the sovereign they had previously served. This seems an apt example of anger as it is theorized by Aristotle and Nussbaum.
Nussbaum warns of the dangers of anger, as it involves not only the pain of being hurt but also the pleasure of thoughts of revenge. She recognizes that anger relies, most of the time, on a kind of magical thinking; for however much the person who has hurt me may suffer the consequences, this is almost never enough to undo an irreparable damage or regain an irrecoverable loss.[33] The satisfaction of anger depends upon an imaginary equilibrium—often dependent on a quasi-divine or metaphysical perfection of cosmic justice—and not a realistic one.
In theory, one might propose that anger is essentially a reaction to the loss of honor, and that retaliation can, in fact, restore the avenger’s social standing or integrity. Yet for Nussbaum, this possibility is also dangerous, since it is based on a scarcity mentality and a distributive, egocentric, and limited vision of our relationships with others; it is capable of unleashing an endless chain of resentments, bubbling over into a cycle of violence, battles, and civil wars.[34] According to the relaciones, Aguirre was determined to return to Peru to recover the loot that was supposedly owed to his men, and to make everyone there pay for the conquistadors’ suffering. In fact, one of Aguirre’s biggest differences with Fernando de Guzmán, named new king by the marañones, was that Guzmán wanted to continue searching for El Dorado, and was not determined to conquer Peru. It is Aguirre who is remembered as a vengeful man ready to turn to torture and death in response to having been hung out to dry, himself.
In 1998, a book called Anger’s Past[35] caused a boom in the study of the history of emotions. Abandoning the attempt to