If you do, all is lost. You cannot act for yourself if you are not yourself, and passion always drives out reason. In such cases interpose a prudent go-between who can only be prudent if he keeps cool... As soon as you notice that you are losing your temper beat a wise retreat...
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Nothing decided in the heat of passion can be trusted, because passion drives out reason and you cannot act in your own interest when you are not yourself. Anger, in particular, produces action that is almost always misdirected and almost always regretted, spilling blood in a moment that takes many days to answer for. The counsel offers two defences. The first is to interpose a go-between, a cooler head, whether another person or a deliberate pause, who can act with the prudence you have temporarily lost, since the onlooker sees the game more clearly precisely because he is calm. The second is retreat: the moment you notice your temper rising, withdraw before you act, because the action not taken in passion is the one you will not spend days repenting. Never let the hot moment hold the pen.
Practice
- Take no consequential action while passion is up; you cannot act for yourself when you are not yourself, and anger drives out reason (maxim 207 keeps the reins, this one bans the hot action outright).
- Interpose a go-between or a deliberate pause; a cool head, your own once it settles or someone else's, acts with the prudence the hot moment has lost.
- Retreat the moment you feel your temper rise; the action withdrawn from in heat is the one you will not spend days repenting.
Use this when
- Use this whenever anger or strong passion is up and a decision, message, or action is in front of you; delay it until you are yourself again.
- Use the go-between when you cannot cool down fast enough; a calm third party sees the game you cannot.
Ignore this when
- Don't confuse this with never feeling or never acting firmly; the ban is on acting while the passion rules, not on appropriate resolve once calm (maxim 155 uses anger deliberately).
- Don't use "wait until calm" to avoid every hard action indefinitely; the retreat is until you are yourself, not forever.
A picture of it
Furious at an email that lands just before he leaves for the day, a manager feels the reply forming, the one that would feel magnificent to send and would detonate a working relationship. He recognises the state for what it is: not himself, reason driven out by heat, in no condition to act for his own interest. He interposes a go-between, in this case a single night's delay, and rereads the message in the morning as a calm onlooker who sees the game clearly. The reply he sends then is nothing like the one he almost sent. The hot version would have cost him days of repair; the cool one costs him nothing.
Action taken in passion is mail sent to the wrong address. When the temper rises, retreat, and never let the hot moment hold the pen.