Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Wickedness, ferocity, and sadism, in the form of devastating wars, ferocious tyrannies, racism, persecution, and massacres, have swept through history like horsemen of the apocalypse, tormenting peoples in an often incomprehensible but always evil recurrence. Just as we study and seek to understand history, so too we examine those behaviours, emotions, and feelings whose undifferentiated aggregate is called aggression. However, aggression is by no means a single, uniform phenomenon, but a structured one, originating in the primal instincts of anger-aggression and fear-flight, whose emotionality permeates the ideas the mind derives from real objects assimilated as forces, energies, and powers. Thus, from the robustness, resistance, sharp and cutting of a sword or knife, the Ego derives vigorousity, austerity, courage, and rudeness; from the softness, flexibility, smoothness, and damage that certain objects can suffer, come meekness, clemency, prudence, and abnegation as feelings. Whether a person directs their strength—psychic, physical, and with artificial weapons—toward things, animals, and people, they nevertheless express their feelings in physical ways. As with the dimensions of space and time, so too with energy, everything comes back to the structure of its elementary unit: strength. This grows from instincts to many feelings, both moderate and excessive, culminating in the virtue that gives stability to the entire psychic structure of aggression: Fortitude.
Author: roberto bani
Institution: University of Florence
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225619929
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