Courage and Morals

Perhaps once in a generation, as if from nowhere, an individual appears and performs an act of such daring courage as to make the whole world catch its breath. The young Chinese man who stood alone before a tank in Tiananmen Square demonstrated courage so stunning as to become a universal icon of the valor possible in the human soul. We onlookers could only gasp, proud to be members of a species capable of such moral majesty.

Recently, we have once more been dazed with awe upon learning of the remarkable courage of Wesley Autrey, the fifty-year-old Harlem construction worker who leaped into the path of an oncoming subway train to save the life of a stranger. He was explicit that for him it had nothing to do with being a hero. "It was," he said, "just being there and helping the next person. That's all I did."

Such courage has also arisen within psychoanalytic ranks, exemplified by Muriel Gardiner, the model for Lillian Hellman's Julia, who risked her life in the anti-Nazi underground in Austria, and by Edith Jacobson, who even while imprisoned by the Nazis refused to reveal the identities of patients.

In today's world at war, we hear anew the tales of very young soldiers who risk their lives to protect their comrades. From where comes that capacity for such valor? Any act of manifest behavior has multiple forces behind it—forces combined from all aspects of the mind, its experiences, and its meanings. Yet what is the source of these special qualities of inner strength?

The Courage of Everyday Life

To speak of courage is to refer to more than the mere quotidian overcoming of fear. Still, without diluting the uniqueness of truly courageous acts, there is value in looking at the lesser levels of transcending fear out of which great valor may grow. What is dramatically courageous not seldom arises from a fortitude called into play by what Camus (1942) calls the biological habit of living, the courage of everyday life.

Our language reveals the bodily substrate of words for both courage and fear. Courage, the very word having "heart" as its basis, is also called "having guts," carrying on despite being "scared shitless." Anita Bell (1961; 1965) makes clear the testicular developmental roots behind "having balls" and its opposite, being "hung up."

Budding courage is demanded for normal growth. Biology leads a child to learn to walk, yet persistence in the serial falling down and getting up again that becomes walking demands proto-courage of the individual even if it is inscribed in the species. Most children need courage to put their faces under water when first learning to swim. Despite the power of sexual imperatives in adolescence, courage is required to open oneself to another. And growing old is part of growing up. Fortitude is essential to keep self-respect and dignity in the face of loss of power, friends, and life itself as one ages.

Biologically driven though it be, growth to each new stage of life requires movement into a dangerous new territory, each step exacting its own ration of courage. As there is an existential guilt that comes from not fulfilling one's potential, so an existential courage is needed to do so.

Life brings tragedies as well as growth, and the response to loss reveals wide individual variation. Such courage was expressed perhaps most eloquently in a letter I recall that Anne Morrow Lindbergh sent to her mother after her infant baby had been kidnapped and killed. "I am trying," she wrote, "to protect my vulnerability." At times it takes courage to submit to reality unbroken by bitterness.

Courage is also essential to creativity, the daring to venture where others have never gone, into the unknown. Before Abraham was tested with the sacrifice of Isaac, he faced a more basic test when told simply, "Go forth," commanded to leave his father's house without any indication in what direction, to what strange people and what unknown languages he should go.

The same willingness to step into the dark that is crucial...