by Ken MacVey
There are many things about who we are that we take for granted yet can still find mysterious. Why do we sleep? Why do we dream? Why do we sing and dance? Why do we laugh? Another, perhaps, is why do we get angry at inanimate objects? You might pinch your finger on a closing door and pound the door in payback. Your car won’t start in the morning and you slap the steering wheel. Your laptop crashes and you swear at it.
We all know better. Doors don’t act on their own. Cars don’t have minds. Laptops don’t have feelings. Yet we still behave, at least in the moment, as if they do. The Stoic philosopher Seneca in his essay “On Anger,” written two thousand years ago, observed how irrational it is to get angry at inanimate objects. He commented we can be angry at “inanimate things, such as the manuscript which we often hurl from us because it is written in too small script or tear up because it is full of mistakes, or the article of clothing which we pull to pieces because we do not like them.” He went on: “But how foolish it is to get angry at these things, which neither deserve our wrath nor feel it! . . . it is the act of a madman to get angry at things without life …” (Trans. John W. Basose; Loeb Classical Library.)
Even Jesus is not spared from this apparent madness. One morning Jesus was hungry and “he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward ever, And presently the fig tree withered away.” (KJ V Matthew 21:18-19.) Yes, even Jesus could get “hangry,” and getting angry at a tree makes no more sense than getting mad at a rock. (Maybe for that reason some take the story as an allegory about the spiritual barrenness of the times.)
Stoics had a term for immediate, involuntary, automatic reactions, such as blushing, or yelping when jostled: “propatheia,” which roughly means “pre-emotion.” These reactions are treated as essentially forgivable human physiological and psychological reactions of the moment. Immediately hitting back at a door that pinched your finger might fall in this category. But according to Stoics letting such a reaction grow into sustained anger means surrendering to unnecessary and unhelpful passion. And to allow the reaction to blossom into full-fledged destructive acts like tearing up manuscripts or clothes, as Seneca suggested, is irrational and unacceptable.
Nevertheless, there is a long history of taking formal and deliberative actions against objects where the concept of “propatheia” seems not to apply. The writings of Plato and Aristotle refer to putting inanimate objects on trial. For example, the Laws of Plato decreed that if an inanimate object killed someone, a neighbor of the dead could be appointed to judge the object. Upon being found guilty the object would be banished outside Athens’ borders. The Acropolis in ancient Greece also contained a facility that had jurisdiction to conduct trials over inanimate objects. In one case a boy was killed at a gymnasium by a thrown javelin. The question was who was at fault, the boy, the thrower, or the javelin? There was a jurisdictional squabble because the court in Acropolis had jurisdiction only over the javelin, but not over the boy or the thrower.
The historian Puasanias also recounted how the legendary ancient Greek athlete Theagenes was honored by a bronze statue in his image erected on the island Thasos. An enemy of Theagenes took out his grievances against Theagenes by flogging the statue. In the course of flogging, the statue fell upon the flogger and killed him. The statue was put on trial, found guilty and cast into the sea. (Apparently there was no statutory right of self-defense.)
This notion that inanimate objects could be subject to legal liability posed a puzzle to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. before he became a Supreme Court justice. When he was a professor at Harvard Law School, Holmes wrote his classic, The Common Law, published in 1881, where he traced the origin and evolution of legal concepts developed under Anglo and American common law. In the first chapter of his book, Holmes asserted the premise that “liability for harm inflicted by another person” originally “had its root in the passion of revenge.” But how does this premise fit in with legal actions against inanimate objects? Holmes observed that rules of law may survive for centuries while their original rationales may be long forgotten. As an example he traced the Roman legal principle of noxae dedito, also called noxal surrender, where an animal or object causing harm could be surrendered to the injured persons, their kin or to the state. He noted how in England formal criminal charges for murder still required placing a monetary value on the murder weapon (a requirement since repealed). Instruments of injury and death under the law were “deodands”—to be considered “gifts to God,” which would be given to the king as God’s representative on earth. Holmes further discussed how in modern admiralty law when ships collide, cargos lost and people injured or killed, legal actions would be taken against the vessel.
Holmes rejected as an alternative to his theory of revenge the theory these legal principles were designed to compensate injured parties while also designed to limit the owner’s liability to only forfeiting the instrument causing injury. After describing how Roman law could apply to instruments of injury, he addressed a perplexing issue: “But it may be asked how inanimate objects came to be pursued in this way, if the object of the procedure was to gratify the passion for revenge? Learned men have been ready to find a reason in the personification of inanimate nature common to children and savages, and there is much to confirm this view. Without this personification, anger toward lifeless things would have been transitory.” Holmes presented the example of non- transitory, sustained anger when the law goes after a fallen tree that kills someone. Holmes noted the “peculiarity” that “the liability seems to have been regarded as attached to the body doing the damage in an almost physical sense.” He concluded: “The hatred for anything giving us pain, which wreaks itself on the manifest cause, and which leads even a civilized man to kick a door when it pinches his finger, is embodied in . . .doctrines of early Roman law.” Thus Holmes does take it back to the Stoic idea of “propatheia” where a burst of anger is a matter of automatic reflex. But the reflex hardens into a fixity that almost feels physical and is infused into the inanimate object causing injury.
This practice of judging the legal culpability of inanimate objects continues to this day in the law of forfeitures. In 1996 in Bennis v. Michigan the Supreme Court addressed the constitutionality of Michigan’s forfeiture laws. A husband who jointly owned an automobile with his wife was arrested for having sex with a prostitute in the car. The car was seized and forfeited under a statute that allowed for seizures of property used in furthering a public nuisance. The wife as joint owner argued that the seizure of her property for an illegal act she had nothing to do with (and in this instance one she most certainly would have abhorred) was an unconstitutional taking of her property in violation of the due process and just compensation clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Chief Justice Rehnquist in a 5 to 4 decision, wrote the Court’s opinion, joined by Justices O’Connor, Scalia, Thomas, and Ginsburg, and found the forfeiture constitutional. This was a surprising mix of conservative and liberal justices taking a stand against property rights. Justice Thomas wrote a concurring opinion which opined that the forfeiture of an innocent party’s property due to someone else’s crime might seem “unfair,” but he noted this has been a practice going on for centuries before and after the ratification of the Fifth Amendment and therefore was consonant with historical practice. In 2024, the Supreme Court rejected the contention there was a constitutional requirement to have a full independent hearing before property was to be forfeited as illegal goods. Justice Gorsuch in his concurring opinion suggested forfeitures might be in the tradition of the ancient law of “deodands.”
To say we can personify or emotionally infuse things with culpability still doesn’t answer the question why we sometimes get mad at inanimate objects. The Stoics may be correct in saying that as human animals we have immediate, non-deliberative physiological reactions to jarring events. That only describes the situation, not explain it. We can speculate how such reactions, like an animal in the wild striking back by tooth or claw, could have some survival value. In some situations it is just better from a survival perspective to think fast without deliberating than think slow with deliberation. Then psychotherapists may also see how getting angry at objects demonstrates the defense mechanism of displacement. We can’t kick the boss (or at least get away with it) but we can kick a hapless tin can sitting on a sidewalk to release pent up anger. This theory assumes that we are like vessels of stored psychic energy. Behaviorists might say that sometimes hitting an object out of frustration and anger, like a stuck door, actually works– the door gets unstuck. Random positive reinforcement rewards our aggression enough for the pattern never to extinguish. And then there are evolutionary psychologists who speculate that survival among humans is promoted by having a hyper-agent detection bias. By projecting agency unto mindless objects and entities, not just sticks and stones, but also tribes, groups, nations and institutions may enhance our survivability by allowing us to protect against threats we might otherwise miss.
Such explanations seem meager. Why we do such things remains to a degree mysterious. We know it is irrational to yell at a stuck door or a blown tire but we do it anyway. And if we can react that way just to a door or a tire, imagine how we will be reacting when we deal more and more with non-feeling AI agents in our everyday lives.
Perhaps we should listen to the Stoics when they suggest it may not be helpful to vent anger at objects and that when it comes to such anger it might be best to contain, constrain, or refrain. I have tried to follow this advice with some slight success. I resolved when facing an unexpected unwanted event, like a car not starting or a carried bag of groceries “deciding” to disintegrate, that instead of saying out loud words that begin with “f” or “d” or “s” I will say “Physics!” and accept these events as just events in physics taking a natural course. I did, however, say “slight success.” The breach may be more common than the practice. But I can cite an incident that occurred when I was writing this piece. I went to get something to eat in the kitchen. As I opened a kitchen cabinet door, a container of oatmeal suddenly fell out, with the entire contents depositing themselves all over the floor. I exclaimed “Physics!” and calmly reached for the nearby broom and dustpan to sweep up the mess. Progress.