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The Anatomy of Courage in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2018

Lorraine Smith Pangle
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Abstract

This paper analyzes Aristotle's discussion of courage, the first and paradigmatic virtue in his account of moral virtue, as the perfection of human beings’ natures as both political and rational. It identifies unrecognized complexities in his definition of courage as “a mean with respect to fear and confidence,” in his subtle analysis of political courage, and especially in what he reveals to be the conflict-riddled reasons people find courage noble and good. While working to moderate the excessive fieriness of traditional heroism and to render citizens’ courage more sober and moderate, Aristotle shows why political courage can in fact never be made perfectly rational, pointing to a key limit to human rationality altogether.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 80 , Issue 4 , Fall 2018 , pp. 569 - 590
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2018 

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References

1 All translations from the ancient Greek texts are my own.

2 The dialectical character of the discussion has been helpfully observed by Burger, Ronna, Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates: On the “Nicomachean Ethics” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Collins, Susan, Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; and Bartlett, Robert and Collins, Susan, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, translated with interpretive essay and notes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)Google Scholar. However, all of these contain only brief discussions of Aristotle's analysis of courage.

3 Aspasius and St. Thomas identify these as the epithumētikon and thumoeides or the appetitive and irascible parts, respectively. See Aspasius, , On Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1–4, 7–8, trans. Konstan, David (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 89Google Scholar; Aquinas, Thomas, Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Litzinger, C. I. (Chicago: Regnery, 1964), 1:234Google Scholar and 240. They are followed among modern commentators by Brady, Michelle, “The Fearlessness of Courage,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 43 (2005): 189CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The division of the soul into desiring and spirited parts is not Aristotle's own, however, and perhaps what is most important about this line is its pointer to what Aristotle does not say: that courage is the perfection of thumos.

4 Many commentators view the order of the virtues in NE 3.6–5 as largely haphazard: see, e.g., Ross, David, Aristotle, 5th ed. (London: Methuen, 1949), 209–11Google Scholar. By contrast, Collins explains both the primacy and the great detail of Aristotle's treatment of courage as reflections of his project of beginning with but also critically revising common opinion. “In the end, his attention to courage turns out to have been in an important respect in the service of its demotion” (Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship, 50). Likewise, Stephen Salkever gives a good account of the critique of manliness and the demotion of courage that run through Aristotle's political thought. “On the whole, the Aristotelian position is that sophrosune, like justice, is a higher virtue than courage or virility to the same degree that leisure is of greater worth than business, and peace than war”: “Women, Soldiers, Citizens: Plato and Aristotle on the Politics of Virility,” Polity 19 (1986): 243.

5 Burger goes so far as to call it a “caricature” but goes on to acknowledge the power of Aristotle's challenge here to Socrates (Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates, 78).

6 And so Plato's Socrates defines it. At Laches 191c7–e2, for example, he attributes courage not only to those who are steadfast in the face of dangers other than war but even to those who steadfastly resist pleasures. This extension of courage to pleasures seems very strange until we consider the importance for Socratic courage not only of keeping one's head in the face of evils but of resisting the pull of irrational hopes: see Rabieh, Linda, Plato and the Virtue of Courage (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 87–88Google Scholar.

7 While modern democratic readers almost invariably wish to extend courage beyond the battlefield, two recent articles make a good case that if courage is to be preserved as a distinct quality worthy of the deepest respect, its connection with serious risk and with voluntary action must be maintained. See Zavaliy, Andrei and Aristidou, Michael, “Courage: A Modern Look at an Ancient Virtue,” Journal of Military Ethics 13 (2014): 174CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 180; and Sanford, J. J., “Are You Man Enough? Aristotle and Courage,” International Philosophical Quarterly 50 (2010): 442–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 This question has been much discussed by the commentators. Ross and H. H. Joachim both ultimately reduce courage to self-control, and John Heil comes close, calling it a form of endurance or karteria. See Ross, Aristotle, 206; Joachim, H. H., Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics, A Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1951), 118Google Scholar; and Heil, John, “Why Is Aristotle's Brave Man So Frightened? The Paradox of Courage in the Eudemian Ethics,” Apeiron 29 (1996): 65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Their case might be strengthened by noting that in NE 7.4 where Aristotle discusses forms of self-control that resemble on a lower plane all the other important moral virtues, he gives no such analogue for courage. David Pears at the other extreme insists that courage for Aristotle involves a struggle-free harmony, and Michelle Brady denies that the courageous really desire to escape death at all. See Pears, David, “The Anatomy of Courage,” Social Research 71 (2004): 1–12Google Scholar; and Brady, Michelle, “The Fearlessness of Courage,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 43 (2005): 189–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In between are W. F. R. Hardie, who says that in courage pain and fear must be overcome but not any base desire as in the case of self-control, and Howard Curzer, Stephen Leighton, Michael Pakaluk, and Charles Young, who all offer sensible distinctions between the fear that causes panic and the fear that functions well to rivet one's attention on the danger and make one fight well. See Hardie, W. F. R., Aristotle's Ethical Theory, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 403CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Curzer, Howard, Aristotle and the Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 55–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leighton, Stephen, “Aristotle's Courageous Passions,” Phronesis 33 (1988): 88–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pakaluk, Michael, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 160CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Young, Charles, “Courage,” in The Blackwell Companion to Aristotle, ed. Anagnostopoulos, Georgios (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 442–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is a question, however, whether any of them quite escapes the problem that fear as such entails a painful expectation of death as the ultimate evil and requires an inner struggle to overcome the powerful natural desire to escape it.

9 Curzer (Aristotle and the Virtues, 26), Pakaluk (Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, 153), and Young (“Courage”) all observe the problem.

10 The temptation to read this thought into this section is enormous, especially in light of Aristotle's statement in book 1 that securing the good of the political community is “nobler and more divine” than securing it for one individual (NE 1094b10; cf. Bartlett and Collins, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, 211, 258), and also Aristotle's statement in book 9 that the noble man will give up many things and even die for his friends and his fatherland (1169a18–20; see also Rhetoric 1366b–67a). But these passages only make it all the more significant that, unlike such commentators as Brady, Pears, Gabriel Lear, Ross, St. Thomas, and Young, Aristotle never speaks of justice or the common good or the safety of the fatherland as ends in his thematic statement on courage in the NE. See Brady, “Fearlessness of Courage,” 199–202; Pears, David, “Courage as a Mean,” in Essays on Aristotle's Ethics, ed. Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Lear, Gabriel Richardson, Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 147–62Google Scholar; Ross, Aristotle, 207; Thomas Aquinas, Commentary, 1:236 ff.; and Young, “Courage.” Cicero, Contrast, De officiis, trans. Miller, Walter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975)Google Scholar, 1.62–63, p. 65: “The Stoics correctly define courage as “that which champions the cause of right.” Cicero then quotes a saying attributed to Plato, that “even the courage that is prompt to face danger, if it is inspired not by public spirit but by its own selfish purposes, should have the name of effrontery rather than of courage.”

11 Thus Aristotle strikingly refrains from offering the sort of clarification that Rogers, Kelly does in “Aristotle on the Motive of Courage,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 32 (1994): 305CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “if we determine that a particular campaign will most certainly end in defeat, it is clearly not the ‘right time’ to forge ahead. This does not imply that our motive in being courageous is to win … but rather that courageous people weigh the risks before acting and are not rash fools.” Young (“Courage”), and Zavaliy and Aristidou (“Courage,” 181–87) distinguish courage from recklessness in the same way. This is a test, however, that Leonidas and the defenders of the Alamo could scarcely be said to pass.

12 Commentators have complained about Aristotle's lack of specificity both on how confidence differs from the absence of fear and on its grounds. Curzer suggests that confidence reflects an assessment not just of the threat but of one's own good ability to meet it (Aristotle and the Virtues, 30). This seems sensible, but it may be significant that Aristotle never says this, for it moves far in the direction of reducing courage to knowledge.

13 The parallel discussion in EE 1229a12 ff. speaks of five almost identical things that are courage only “by analogy,” but in the NE, where Aristotle defers more respectfully to the citizen's perspective, he presents these rather as imperfect forms of courage.

14 Lee Ward suggests that “the potential disjunction between the external appearance of an action and the disposition of the actor,” common to all the virtues but especially acute in the case of courage, is behind this unique procedure (“Nobility and Necessity: The Problem of Courage in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics,” American Political Science Review 95 [2001]: 75).

15 Ann Charney notes the tactical errors that shame induces both Hector and Diomedes to make in the examples Aristotle gives, observing that Hector in particular is too dependent on both opinions and omens: “Spiritedness and Piety in Aristotle,” in Understanding the Political Spirit: Philosophic Investigations from Socrates to Nietzsche, ed. Zuckert, Catherine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 70–71Google Scholar.

16 Burger (Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates, 77) argues that Aristotle's willingness in these chapters and especially at 1116a27 to treat the sense of shame as a virtue is a concession to the civic outlook on courage that is corrected later at 1128b10 ff., but the sense of shame Aristotle there criticizes is not quite the same as the hypothetical shame discussed here—the shame a man who is not defective would feel if he were to act basely.

17 Ward (“Nobility and Necessity,” 77–78) and Collins (Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship, 55–56) also note the complex character of citizen virtue, if not its essentially shifting character.

18 But cf. Plato, Laches 179a and Cicero, De officiis 1.50 on the courage of animals.

19 Focusing on this passage, Heil insists that passion provides none of the motivation for virtuous action. The courageous man while feeling fear is not motivated to act upon that fear, he argues, and likewise his motive to be courageous comes not from thumos but only from the noble (“Why Is Aristotle's Brave Man So Frightened?,” 51–52).

20 This is essentially the reading of Joachim, who calls thumos “the physical basis of true courage” (Aristotle, 121).

21 As Burger asks, “Is it possible to be driven by the passion of spiritedness and motivated at the same time by either logos or the beautiful?” (Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates, 79).

22 Cicero observes the terrific pride characteristic of courageous men at De officiis 1.64. Ward comments on the same pride with its illusory belief that “we are capable of rising above necessity” (“Nobility and Necessity,” 78).

23 Cf. NE 1145a18–27; consider also the way that the entire involvement of the gods in human affairs in the Iliad is precipitated by human thumos, in a cascading series of affronts, angry responses, and pleas for divine aid.

24 Pulling these threads together, Charney ties Aristotle's critique of the Homeric heroes Hector and Diomedes in this section to his demotion of both spiritedness and piety in their tendency to oppose rational self-reliance (“Spiritedness and Piety in Aristotle,” 69–73).

25 Young (“Courage”) suggests that a courageous soldier has confidence in the victory of his side even if he himself does not survive, while Heil (“Why Is Aristotle's Brave Man So Frightened?,” 69–71) and Sanford (“Are You Man Enough?,” 440) both identify the soldiers’ own virtue as the thing they place their confidence in. Cicero goes further than either: “The soul that is altogether courageous and great … cherishes the conviction that nothing but moral goodness and propriety deserves to be either admired or wished for or striven after, and that he ought not to be subject to any man or any passion or any accident of fortune” (De officiis 1.66). But in this he also goes further than Aristotle.

26 As St. Thomas points out, Aristotle here opposes the Stoics’ claim that there is no human good except virtue and hence that the courageous man loses nothing when he suffers wounds and death (Commentary, 1:259–60).

27 Collins makes this point forcefully: “To the courageous man, it is the deed itself … that is noble, and those who act for the sake of any other end possess a courage that is a mere appearance of the true thing” (Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship, 54; cf. Bartlett and Collins, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, 256–57).

28 John Cooper makes a revealingly unsuccessful attempt to describe an act of courage as complete in itself and choiceworthy wholly for its own sake as a constituent part of the happy virtuous life (Reason and Human Good in Aristotle [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975], 84–88Google Scholar). He shows how difficult it is even to talk coherently about courage without speaking of such things as the value of what is to be defended and one's chances of success.

29 It is this whole level of the problem that Ward misses in his otherwise helpful analysis of NE 3.6–9. He sees that the noble “lacks specific content” (“Nobility and Necessity,” 79), but he does not explore the deepest reasons for its resistance to being pinned down. Bartlett and Collins present the problem as “a certain circularity: he who acts courageously must forsake his true or greatest good, his virtuous and happy life, and choose instead to do what is noblest in war; but it is in choosing to do this very noble deed that the courageous human being seeks his own true or greatest good” (Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, 258.) Rogers tries to resolve the circle by implicitly denying that the act of courage is sought for itself as something splendid and arguing instead that it is merely accepted as necessary by one who sees clearly that acting shamefully would deprive one of the most basic requisite of happiness (“Aristotle on the Motive of Courage,” 306–11). In this way she makes Aristotle more consistent, but she fails to do justice to the felt nobility precisely of sacrifice, thereby demoting courage from a great positive good to an unfortunate necessity.