Plato and the Virtue of Courage

Notes

introduction. the problem of courage 1. See Doyle 1983; Owen 1997, 17–22; Orwin and Pangle 1982, 28–32. 2. Above and beyond, that is, even what justice demands. We expect and demand that people act justly; we honor those whose courage rises to heroic proportions. 3. Ringle 1997. 4. Giuliani 2001. 5. Bush 2001. 6. Senator John McCain argues that this kind of courage ought to be the standard for identifying an act as courageous (McCain and Salter 2004, 13–15). 7. This further shows how important courage is to us: the worst epithet that could be used against the terrorists was coward. 8. Sontag 2001, emphasis added. 9. Fish 2001. It is noteworthy that Fish does not quite accurately reproduce Sontag’s statement. Whereas Sontag calls courage a “morally neutral virtue” (emphasis added), Fish describes it as a “quality.” Did Fish mean to distance himself from Sontag’s claim by replacing “virtue” with “quality”? 10. Marks 2002 (quoting Bill Maher). 11. Ibid. 12. For an argument that emphasizes the importance of risk and rashness to courage, see Miller 2000, 151–71. 13. All quotations from the Ethics are from Martin Ostwald’s translation, modified where appropriate. The word translated here as “noble” is kalon, an important word in Greek philosophy and an important word for understanding courage. It has several meanings in addition to “noble,” including “beautiful” and “fine.” In the Platonic passages discussed in this book, “noble” is usually the most appropriate translation. For a brief but excellent summary of the range of meanings of kalon in Plato’s dialogues, see Thomas L. Pangle’s translator’s note at Plato 1980, 512–13. Pangle calls particular attention to the way in which kalon overlaps with but is distinct from agathon, or “good”: “the kalon is used to refer to those things which bring honor, which are splendid, di;cult to obtain, requiring some sacrifice but also, good as ends in themselves. The ‘good’ (agathon) is used to refer to a much wider range of things, including . . . ugly necessities or things good only as means, and . . . good things whose attainment is not rare.” Notes 14. MacIntyre follows Aristotle in identifying the benefit to the courageous man himself as a crucial part of virtue (see especially 1984, 148–50). As we have seen above, however , this criterion is particularly di;cult for courage to meet, and MacIntyre, unlike Aristotle , is either not alive to or else not troubled by the implication of this for the status of courage as a virtue. 15. It is Aristotle, of course, not Plato, who is MacIntyre’s ancient inspiration. But a signi ficant part of what he dismisses in Aristotle is what he takes Aristotle to have inherited from Plato, especially the notion of the unity of virtue (AV 163–64). For an excellent critique of MacIntyre’s rejection of this Platonic/Aristotelian notion, see Tessitore 2003, 141–58. 16. Post–9/11, there has been renewed interest in courage among classicists. The edited collection by Rosen and Sluiter (2003) on courage in antiquity, for example, contains some illuminating studies, from a linguistic and cultural perspective, of the importance and use of manly courage (andreia) in classical Greek and Roman life. Also in the wake of 9/11, Senator John McCain has written a beautiful and deeply thoughtful meditation on courage and the men and women he thinks most perfectly exhibit it (McCain and Salter 2004). 17. Tierney 2001; Brown 2001. 18. Rather than being a central cause of this decline in esteem, it is, indeed, far from clear that the feminists under discussion here were widely read. 19. Critics argue, for example, that because military personnel—in war simulations as well as in actual combat—demean their enemies by labeling them “women” and speak of their military objective as “overwhelming and penetrating” the enemy, military culture creates a climate in which men, in speech and therefore in thought, degrade women in the same way they degrade the enemy (McBride 1995, 40, 55, 67–70; see also Held 1993, 144–48). 20. To the objection that the U.S. Marines were in Lebanon to serve the national interest rather than for “empty” honor, Brown could respond that a desire for honor distorted American leaders’ understanding of the national interest. 21. The characterization of heroic courage as a primarily male phenomenon is not con- fined to its contemporary critics. The best translation of the Greek word andreia, which is normally translated...