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Aggression: Some Definition and Some Physiology1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

James Chowning Davies
James Chowning Davies*
Affiliation:
1560 Prospect Drive, Eugene, Oregon 97403
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Abstract

Definitions being critical to systematic analysis, aggression is here defined as intentional injury to person or damage to property. The issue of consciousness of intent is considered. No claim is made that either conscious or unconscious aggression is necessarily wrongful, but that it is elicited with respect to the frustration of a variety of organically based physical and mental needs. Physiology has made progress toward understanding the two-way interaction between vertebrates and their environment, so that we have good hunches that aggressive behavior varies as a function of the level of several endocrines and of electrical charge in several parts of the brain. Suggestions are made for improving the utility of some basic political theory to physiological research and vice versa, so that social science can move beyond the speculations of the 18th century philosophers and can use some very relevant physiological findings.

Type
Articles and Commentaries
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , August 1987 , pp. 27 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

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References

Notes

2. Indeed, autocratic and authoritarian governments of whatever ideological persuasion appear to regard their citizens as potential generators of storms that must be suppressed and as generally incompentent to make any decisions in public policy, competent only to do what their leaders tell them to do.Google Scholar

3. According to the McNaghten Rule, established by an English court in 1843, a defense against criminal insanity required the showing of either of two things: that the accused did not know the nature of the act when it was committed or did not know that the act was wrongful. In 1954, an American court announced what became known as the Durham Rule, stating that “an accused is not criminally responsible if his unlawful act was the product of mental disease or mental defect.” This latter rule has been applied in cases where it was established that the defendant did know that what he was doing was wrong but had an irresistible impulse to do it. These different criteria do more to show the difficulty of establishing consciousness of one's own intent than to eliminate the relevance of consciousness. To know that one is doing something does not establish why one is doing it, and even knowing why does not definitively justify. The indefinite boundary between the conscious and the unconscious and between the intended and the unintended remains inadequately defined.Google Scholar

4. In a careful reading of Lorenz's work On Aggression, I was unable to find anywhere a definition of the term. This omission by the writer left the reader, or at least one reader, with the task of inferring Lorenz's definition of the term from reading the book as a whole. Any such inference can be a perpetual matter of dispute among those who agree and those who disagree with Lorenz's basic themes.Google Scholar

5. A British physiologist, Paul Brain, after noting the vast range of definitions of agression, includes four factors in his definition: 1(“actual or potential noxious stimuli… directed towards some object”; 2)(“the act is intentional”; 3) the aggressor is “emotionally aroused”; and 4) the intended victim “is motivated to remove itself or avoid such exposure” to noxious stimuli. The fourth factor seems to relate to the aggressor's state of mind and not necessarily to the victim's. The intended victim, as I see it, may either flee or fight. If the victim succeeds in escaping, the aggressor may have to find a substitute object on which to displace his or her aggression. If the victim stays and fights, both become aggressors, each intending to harm the other. SeeBrain, . (1985: 10–11). An American psychologist, David Adams (1979:202) who has done physiological research in aggression describes “three motivational systems, offense, defense, and submission.” What he calls submission is akin to what I call subordination here.Google Scholar

6. Some writers have solved the conceptual problem by saying that carnivorous animals and human beings in the hunting stage of development are not aggressing against their prey: they are just hunting food. This may be the case, but from the standpoint of the prey, some harm has been done to them. This way of defining the intent of action is reminiscent of the political assassin who said, as he held the gun to his victim's chest, that he had nothing personal against his target.Google Scholar

7. Somit, and Peterson, (1986: 12) note that Social Darwinism, which included far too much that is learned in its consideration of innate characteristics, produced a repudiation of genetic determinants. “The net effect of Social Darwinism was to discredit for almost a half century (from approximately 1900 to the mid-1950s) the notion that human social and political behavior is in any way influenced by biological makeup.”Google Scholar

8. An interesting fairly recent case in point is the intense controversy that emerged after the first theoretical assertion that electrons spin counterclockwise rather than clockwise around the atomic nucleus. The controversy did indeed end rather abruptly when experimental evidence supported the assertion of the original theorists.Google ScholarAnother interesting case involved one of Freud's favorite anecdotes: the vigorous denial that there could be male hysterics, because the word hysteria was derived from hystera, the Greek word for womb, and everyone knew that hysteria was caused by a disturbance in the womb.Google ScholarAnd then there is the case of Galileo, who was compelled to retract his absurd belief that the earth is not the center of the universe.Google Scholar