Plato and the Virtue of Courage

Conclusion: The Promise of Courage

Despite the di=erences in their treatments of courage, the Laches and the Republic together yield a single teaching about courage: courage properly understood is both the cause and consequence of wisdom. It is the consequence of wisdom because , as the Laches shows, the tensions that Socrates exposes at the heart of heroic or noble courage establish a coherent standard for courage that is genuinely a virtue. Only once one acquires wisdom about the proper standards for guiding courageous action can one determine and exercise genuine courage. At the same time, the Laches and the Republic also raise the paradoxical possibility that it is the cause of wisdom—that is, that acquiring the wisdom needed for courage itself requires courage. By facilitating the pursuit of wisdom, courage as traditionally understood enables one to acquire the wisdom that makes genuine courage possible. Of course, this means that the ordinary courage exhibited by unwise human beings—a sort of precursor version of genuine courage—is deficient. The character of its deficiency is brought to light in the course of Socrates’ education of the guardians in the Republic. The regime of the Republic teaches its guardians that their courage is noblest when it is wholly concerned with the city’s good. But Socrates’ conversations in the Laches and the Republic show that this self-understanding is confused: upon critical examination, it reveals a wish that virtue can consist both in self-forgetting or self-sacrifice and in the greatest good for a human being. Plato’s representations of this human problem—Laches, Nicias, and Glaucon—all manifest this confusion. But perhaps even more revealing and troubling is their equally human unwillingness to look their notions of courage squarely in the face to learn whether or not they are sensible. The Promise of Courage conclusion Although these characters can be made to recognize that their arguments are deficient, they are unwilling and hence unable to get to the bottom of those deficiencies . Indeed, they all appear to lack the ordinary courage needed to take on risky intellectual endeavors. They thus fail to learn that courage is genuinely a virtue and hence genuinely noble only when exercised by those who see clearly that human beings cannot consistently view courage as a virtue unless it is part of an individual’s own human flourishing. Averting their eyes from this leads them to hope ignobly that self-forgetting action (insofar as this is possible) will somehow redound to their benefit, which hope, as we have seen, has both theoretical and practical consequences. In lacking the courage to clarify their arguments , moreover, we have also seen that they lack a natural hardiness or toughness of soul that makes it possible for them to scrutinize their own views of courage. They are unwilling to reflect on how much they hope to gain from courage. Were they able to do so, they might learn that to the extent that courage is a certain wisdom, the courageous individual knows that the best he can do when faced with unavoidable evils is to make the least of them rather than to fight to overcome them in vain. Such wisdom gives rise to an impressive bearing in the face of adversity, a bearing that excites and deserves admiration. If, however, the Laches and the Republic suggest that courage is a genuine virtue only to the extent that it is exercised as part of one’s own truest good, the truth of this teaching is open to question. Investigating whether or not it is true would require us to address more fully than we have objections to this teaching, especially those voiced by individuals who might claim that it is ignoble, and perhaps even sinful, to be oriented primarily by one’s own true good. The inability, however, of any of Socrates’ interlocutors to maintain consistently that it is noble to forget the concern with what is truly good for a human being is a powerful, though by no means decisive, piece of evidence against such objections. Glaucon ’s inability to set aside such concerns is evident in his initial request that Socrates show that justice, understood as complete devotion to the good of others , is choiceworthy for the just man; Laches’ similar inability is evident in his refusal wholeheartedly to endorse the view that courage is foolish steadfastness. Insofar, then, as we have seen that Plato’s treatment of courage points to a great di;culty...