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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.

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

Courage is a quality that every political community needs, but not one that modern liberalism, with its rationalist principles of self-interest rightly understood, is well equipped to promote or even fully to understand. In times of grave national crisis, citizens and leaders of advanced liberal democracies have shown a great capacity for dedication and sacrifice. But increasingly our aim is to have peaceful societies in which all problems are resolved by reasoned discussion, both domestically and internationally. Most European nations today show little appetite for military spending or engagements, even to defend the freedom of their nearest neighbors. In the United States a gulf has opened between the spirit of society at large and that of the military, with its fierceness and its code of honor that both seem like throwbacks to an earlier, less liberal and less rational form of civil society.

American military recruits now come disproportionately from a few states and from a segment of the population that is at once more violence prone, more patriotic, and more religious than society at large and especially than the educated elites. The choice to serve in the military scarcely fits into social scientists’ paradigms of rational behavior and is often understood mainly as a response to limited job opportunities. Americans have a similarly uncomfortable relationship to our policemen, occasionally revering them as heroes, always needing their willingness to put their lives on the line, but often still hating and fearing them. We lack a shared understanding of what the calling of these citizens is and why and how it can be good both for them and for us. Yet political scientists seldom study the choices that these citizens make or the courage that they embody.

To remedy this deficiency of understanding, Aristotelian political science has important insights to offer. In contrast to modern political theorists, Aristotle makes a bold claim to defend a panoply of traditional moral virtues, beginning with courage, as the full realization of a human nature that is both fundamentally political and fundamentally rational. While the Politics begins with an affirmation that human beings come together for the sake of life but remain for the sake of the good life, the Nicomachean Ethics lays the groundwork for the Politics by elaborating the content of the human good that it is the work of political science to promote (Politics 1252b27–29; NE 1.2). That good is happiness, which Aristotle defines as “an activity of soul in accord with reason” or “an activity of soul in accord with virtue” (NE 1098a8 and 17)Footnote 1 in which well-habituated desires and well-developed reason act in harmony to generate and sustain those activities that are both intrinsically worthwhile and naturally satisfying. This, at any rate, is the audacious core claim of Aristotelian virtue ethics, outlined in the first two books of the Nicomachean Ethics and put to the test in Aristotle's detailed accounts of his eleven moral virtues in the remainder of the first five books, beginning with the key political virtue of courage.

The article will proceed by means of a close textual analysis of Aristotle's treatment of courage in NE 3.6–9. Only through such a step-by-step analysis is it possible to unpack the richness and subtlety of an account that is at once a phenomenologically accurate depiction of lived moral-political experience and a dialectical engagement with the self-understanding of the morally serious citizen, showing its strengths and inner tensions and pointing only indirectly to possible resolutions of those tensions on a plane that transcends that of citizen life as such. Most commentators who have discussed Aristotle's treatment of courage have not understood the dialectical character of the discussion, and none have examined this passage as a key test of and response to the Socratic claim that virtue is knowledge. They have thus failed to do justice either to the strangeness of Aristotle's account, to the depth and full significance of the tensions he is uncovering, or to the opening he provides to a reconception of courage that might resolve these tensions.Footnote 2

The Stuff of Courage (3.6)

“And first,” Aristotle says, calling attention to his ordering of the virtues without explaining it, “let us speak about courage” (1115a6). Does he begin with courage because it is traditionally the core meaning of virtue or aretē? Because it is the most necessary of virtues, inasmuch as the community's survival depends upon it? Because it, with moderation, is most rudimentary, inasmuch as these two “seem to be the virtues of the irrational parts” of the soul, as Aristotle says not here but in introducing the less splendid virtue of moderation at 1117b23–24?Footnote 3 Or is it, to the contrary, because courage is the noblest and most splendid of all, as he does not say but certainly implies with his unusually dense references to the noble in 3.6–9? In beginning with courage, Aristotle begins where the traditional gentleman does without imposing more clarity on his priorities than he finds there, but with a gentle persistence in querying those priorities (cf. Plato Laws 630a ff.).Footnote 4

While courage is the most immediately impressive and traditionally the most deeply admired of virtues, it poses a special challenge to Aristotle's claims about the goodness of virtue and the happiness of the virtuous life. For as he says at the outset in 3.6, courage is concerned with fear, fear is the expectation of evils, the most frightening of all things is death, and yet the courageous man is “someone who is fearless” and in particular “fearless when it comes to a noble death” (1115a16 and 33). How is such fearlessness possible?

Whatever the explanation may be, Aristotle insists that noble fearlessness is not blindness. The courageous man who dies on the battlefield “is deprived of the greatest goods knowingly” (1117b12–13), and in doing so he follows or at least acts in conformity to the dictates of reason: “The courageous man suffers and acts in accord with what is worthy and as reason would command” (1115b19–20). Yet Aristotle equally rejects the Socratic view that courage is knowledge. In delineating a number of qualities that resemble courage but fall short of it in 3.8, Aristotle says, “And experience regarding particular things seems to be courage; hence even Socrates supposed courage to be knowledge” (1116b3–5). But, he continues, the coolness in battle that comes from experience, such as is often seen in mercenaries, is far from true courage. Aristotle's insinuation that the Socratic doctrine arose out of a false inference from observing mercenaries is unfair, but perhaps not quite so unfair as might first appear.Footnote 5 For Socrates does argue that courage is nothing other than knowledge about what is terrible and what is not, and it is indeed such knowledge that allows seasoned mercenaries to remain calm when raw citizen recruits are prone to take fright. As Socrates presents his reasoning to an assembled gathering of distinguished Athenians and sophists in Plato's Protagoras,

“Isn't it the case,” I said, “that no one voluntarily approaches the bad or what he supposes to be bad, nor does this, it seems, belong to human nature, to go voluntarily towards what one supposes to be bad instead of the good things; but when one is compelled to choose one of two bad things, no one chooses the greater one if it is possible to choose the lesser?” All of us agreed to all of these things. (Prot. 358c6–d4)

Then, defining fear as the expectation of something bad, Socrates concludes that no one voluntarily advances towards what he fears most, but that in every courageous deed one is in fact pursuing the lesser of two evils or risking harm for the sake of a greater good one hopes to achieve. The difference between the cowardly and the courageous thus comes down to the fact that cowards are ignorant of what is truly terrible, foolishly judging death to be the worst of all evils, whereas the courageous possess “wisdom about what is terrible and what is not terrible” (Prot. 360d4–5; cf. Laches 194d7–95a1). To be complete, such wisdom would require an accurate assessment not only of one's immediate situation, but also of what risks are worth running for what gains, grounded in a knowledge of one's own nature, one's capacities and limits and needs, and how all one's important concerns rank and fit together. Such wisdom, if available, would allow one to judge each thing at its true worth with a clarity undistorted by irrational hopes and fears and to keep these judgments steadily in view. If the wise determine that it is worth waging war against an enemy to preserve freedom for themselves and their loved ones, they will fight hard and intelligently, taking sensible risks; if suddenly ambushed they will not lose their heads; if overwhelmed by the enemy they will withdraw in good order in hopes of living to fight another day. Such a soldier perhaps was Socrates himself, who was famous not for fiery exploits but for a calm, slow, deliberate retreat that saved his life and that of Laches at the battle of Delium. To act as he did he doubtless needed not only theoretical knowledge but also a strong constitution and a level head; yet in calling courage wisdom, he suggests that courage may be nothing other than the ability to keep one's wits about one and conduct oneself intelligently in the face of the most frightening dangers.

Now Aristotle's entire treatment of courage in NE 3.6–9 may be said to be an experiment in resolutely resisting just this Socratic reduction of courage to knowledge or wisdom. To be sure, the ordinary, decent man in the street, to whose opinions Aristotle listens with exquisitely close attention, is of two minds on Socrates's claims about courage, as about all the virtues. Such a person can be brought to agree that if courage is good it must be good for something, such as safety, freedom, or glory; that courage is not recklessness and that life should not be risked to no purpose; that courage may indeed be an ability to keep one's head. But something else in him—in us—is not satisfied by this line of analysis, sensing that it risks turning into an instrument of lesser goods what is in fact supremely good and supremely noble in itself. Lincoln beautifully encapsulates both of these intuitions in his Gettysburg address, which in a few words gives moving expression to the high end for which the fallen soldiers fought and in a few more suggests that nothing can ever match the intrinsic value of the brave deeds they performed in pursuit of that end. Churchill does the same in rallying the British people to fight for freedom as a prize worth the ultimate price in blood, toil, tears, and sweat, even while calling their most anguished moment of struggle their finest hour. Civic oratory and national patriotism have seldom burned brighter than in the spirit these two statesmen kindled and kept alight. Yet if it ultimately does not make sense to say that what is most excellent, most intrinsically worthy of all is properly in the service to something else, how should we untangle this knot? Might Socrates in attempting to untangle it have cut the nerve and destroyed the noble essence of courage? That is the challenge Aristotle takes up as he gently draws out and isolates for us the other strand of the citizen's intuition about courage, the strand that denies that any virtue is reducible to knowledge of what is good and that uncompromisingly reveres courage in particular as a free, noncalculating choice of what is supremely noble for its own sake.

While Aristotle begins his treatment of courage with a direct challenge to the Socratic position—recalling Socrates's definition of fear as the “anticipation of something bad,” conceding that “we fear all the bad things” (1115a9), and yet still insisting on behalf of common opinion and common sense that the courageous man is “fearless” (1115a16, 26, and 33)—Aristotle devotes this first chapter on courage not to addressing the question of how such fearlessness is humanly possible, but to the seemingly unrelated question of courage's domain. Yet in delimiting true courage narrowly as fearlessness on the battlefield, Aristotle isolates the nerve of what makes courage, in the eyes of hero and common citizen and Protagoras alike, so resistant to being reduced, as Socrates would reduce it, to another form of wisdom. Aristotle thereby begins to limn the unique concern that may somehow make it possible to be unafraid precisely of what is most frightening: the love of the noble. Now if the essence of courage were simply bearing up calmly under necessary evils and keeping one's head in difficult straits, courage would be a kind of reasonableness or wisdom that might indeed be exercised in meeting evils of every kind.Footnote 6 But if we are to do justice to the decent citizen's intuition that courage is a virtue worthy of the very highest honors, we must consider what is so impressive and so moving about the fallen hero. Aristotle indicates the answer: he faces not only the greatest but the “noblest danger”; he faces it willingly; he is “fearless when it comes to a noble death”; he shows what he is above all “in circumstances where prowess is possible or dying is noble” (1115a30–31, 33, and b4–5). Steadfastness in the face of such unavoidable evils as illness and shipwreck, by contrast, is perhaps too much like the suffering of a mute mule to be a true virtue and even the peak of virtue: Aristotle calls it courage only in a partial and analogous sense.Footnote 7

If the hero's death is noble in large part because it is willingly chosen, it is also chosen because it is noble, simply in itself. And, this chapter clearly brings out, that nobility has everything to do with the grave risk or sacrifice the hero willingly accepts. Aristotle does not attribute to the man of courage the calm calculation of Socrates in Plato's Apology, who purports to be unafraid of death because it is, after all, nothing bad. Nor does he depict him as one who scorns death and cares only for the virtue that is his and cannot be taken from him, just as a good Stoic refuses to trouble himself over rude men's insults. If death were something beneath his concern, then facing it staunchly in battle would hardly be anything remarkable (cf. EE 1228b9–11), whereas in fact the brave man cherishes his bravery as something supremely difficult and noble. Somehow the brave man is fearless in battle not despite but precisely because of the very great and hence very noble sacrifice he is prepared to make. But if this is courage, is it rational?

Courage, Cowardice, Rashness (3.7)

In 3.7 Aristotle makes a new beginning, defending now the rationality of true courage as a proper mean between defective extremes, and at the same time offering a correction. The courageous man is not after all completely fearless, but is “intrepid as a human being” (1115b10–11). Some things, he says, everyone who “has sense” will fear, and “a person would be mad or insensitive to pain if he should fear nothing” (1115b8–9 and 26–27). Rather, in fearing things that are terrible, the man of courage will “endure them as he should and as reason commands, for the sake of the noble” (1115b11–13). Does he differ from the ordinary man not in his emotions but in his actions, then? No, his virtue shapes both: “He, then, who endures and fears what he ought and for the sake of what he ought, and as he ought and when, and who is similarly confident as well, is courageous” (1115b17–19). Finding the right mean in courage thus involves a complex problem of getting the object, end, manner, and time right, regarding both acts and emotions. Moreover, while Aristotle defines courage as “a mean with respect to fear and confidence” (1115a6–7; cf. 1116a10–11), this is not quite the same as saying that it is a simple mean between fear and confidence. In both the Rhetoric and the Eudemian Ethics he treats fear and confidence as simple opposites (Rhetoric 1383a15 ff.; EE 1228a27–b3), but in his subtler discussion in the Nicomachean Ethics he suggests that fear and confidence stand in a more complex relationship, both being subject to excess and deficiency and potentially moving independently. For neither of them is the right mean simply an intermediate amount: in some circumstances it seems that both fear and confidence should be high. Aristotle says that “the courageous man suffers and acts in accord with what is worthy and as reason would command,” but how exactly does reason determine the right mean in each circumstance in all these respects? Aristotle gives few details, and in some cases more than one standard seems to apply. Are the objects one should not fear the ones that are not even bad, such as thunder and black cats, or are they the things it is not noble to fear, such as the enemy charging at a run upon one's phalanx? Will the brave man after all fear the enemy to just the extent that the enemy is dangerous, as Aristotle does not quite say in the Nicomachean but does say in Eudemian Ethics (1229b26), but endure that fear anyway? But then, if he is not after all fearless but must endure painful fear, is his courage a true virtue, exercised with pleasure or at least without pain as Aristotle has claimed virtue always is (1104b7–9), rather than a painful case of self-control (enkrateia)?Footnote 8 Or will he somehow, without becoming reckless, fear a noble danger less than the threat alone would seem to dictate? It is tempting to identify the rational purpose or end of courageous endurance as a well-chosen military objective, but Aristotle insists that the end for the sake of which the courageous man acts is nothing but the noble itself (1115b12–13, 21–22, and 23; 1116a11–12, b3, and b31; 1117a17, b9, and b14–15), without further specifying its contents.Footnote 9 What Aristotle most strikingly does not say is what every eulogist over fallen soldiers invariably does say, that the noble death is one in which one dies for one's fatherland. Precisely this we must not say if we are most resolutely to resist allowing virtue to become a means to other goods.Footnote 10 Neither wealth nor empire nor freedom nor safety can be the most important end of war, but instead war must be the stage on which virtue is tested and honed and given scope for action. “As he ought” would seem to be “as reason commands” (1115b12 and 19) but this criterion remains formulaic since Aristotle does not specify what kind of fear, endurance, and confidence reason dictates. Finally, is the wrong time to fear the enemy the time when it no longer poses a danger, or precisely when it is most dangerous but it is also most noble not to be afraid?

Rather than explain how the courageous man determines what, why, how, and when he should endure, Aristotle goes on to contrast courage as a proper mean with its improper extremes. In keeping with his complex analysis of courage as a mean with respect to both fear and confidence, he identifies a nameless and, among sane people, evidently nonexistent extreme of utter fearlessness and a separate extreme of confidence that he calls recklessness. Opposite both of these is the single vice of cowardice, entailing both too much fear and too little confidence. Now if every sane person has a realistic fear of what is dangerous, it would seem that the courageous are distinguished after all not by fearlessness but by their high levels of confidence. But how does courage differ in this from recklessness? Is recklessness taking risks that are too great in relation to what one stands to gain from them? This Aristotle does not say, presumably because to do so would again be to define courageous acts as instruments of lesser goods. Instead, he gives a definition of recklessness that is incomplete. The majority of reckless men, he explains, are reckless cowards who make a show of fearlessness but flee in the face of real danger. What, then, of those who remain steadfast? How does recklessness that never quavers differ from true courage? Or is this distinction impossible to draw, and is the right reason that governs courage impossible to specify, without resorting to prudential considerations that are alien to the noble core of courage Aristotle is trying to isolate?Footnote 11 Aristotle's definition of cowardice is incomplete as well: the coward has too little confidence, he tells us, in contrast to the courageous man who is “of good hope” (1116a3), but exactly what the courageous man's hope rests on he does not say.Footnote 12 By insisting that courage is a mean on two different scales, respecting both fear and confidence, by contradicting himself on the courageous man's fearlessness, and by leaving the source of the courageous man's confidence unstated, chapters 3.6 and 3.7 have the effect of highlighting the puzzle of how courage can combine a rational assessment of real danger with fearlessness or at least great confidence.

Defective Forms of Courage (3.8)

In 3.8 Aristotle sheds additional light on his theme by contrasting true or complete courage with five defective forms of it.Footnote 13 This is a procedure he follows with none of the other virtues: somehow it is especially hard to get courage right, and the defective forms all involve acting correctly (at least initially) but for incorrect reasons.Footnote 14

Political Courage

First and least defective is political courage, which is virtuous insofar as it takes its sights by what is noble and shameful but defective in doing so in the partial and somewhat misguided form of loving honor and fearing dishonor (cf. 1116a10–12 with 27–29). True virtue according to Aristotle is rooted in a love of what is noble for its own sake and a disgust at what is shameful quite apart from any consequences (cf. 1117a17 and b9), and it recognizes virtue and vice as themselves the most important parts of the noble and shameful, but it is characteristic of the citizen soldier that he is moved especially by honor and dishonor. Moreover, it belongs to the citizen's perspective that he thinks nobility needs such a reward and baseness such a penalty. Aristotle's examples are startling, however. He says that those peoples who especially dishonor cowards and honor the courageous—a category that would surely include the Spartans—appear to be most courageous but actually have only the defective form of political courage; then he quotes speeches of the great Homeric heroes Hector and Diomedes expressing their fear of reproach (Iliad 22.100 and 8.148) to illustrate the concern with honor and shame that rules men of such defective courage. If the Spartans and Homeric heroes fall short of true courage, who possesses it? Aristotle gives no examples, leaving us to wonder whether his “true” form of courage actually exists.

The picture Aristotle paints with his quotations from Homer is complicated, however. Hector is indeed afraid of reproach from his friend Polydamas, but what Hector anticipates Polydamas will reproach him for—what he is now so ashamed of that he would rather face death at Achilles's hands than return to the city—is the fact that he has been imprudently risking Troy's safety by fighting far beyond the city walls in search of personal glory (Iliad 22.99–107). In other words, Hector is ashamed of himself for acting almost as if noble fighting were an end in itself and forgetting that his first duty is to protect his city. Thus while he agrees with Aristotle that there is something defective about his own courage, he and Aristotle understand that failure differently. In a similar way, the preeminent warrior Achilles fights and acts in single-minded pursuit of his own glory until that pursuit results in the death of his friend Patroclus, at which point he, too, regrets what he has done. Might it be that flesh-and-blood human heroes in fact always feel a duty to put the good of friends and fatherland above their pursuit of their own honor and even above their own honorable deeds, in a way that presents a problem for Aristotle's effort to make noble action an end in itself?

As a member of the attacking Greek army, Diomedes is not fighting for his fatherland as Hector is, but neither is he moved chiefly by shame as the words Aristotle quotes might suggest: piety works more powerfully than honor and shame both to inspire and to limit his daring. Diomedes makes his greatest exploits under the conviction that Athena herself has breathed “strength untremulous” into his limbs, and on that basis he scorns to seek safety at Sthenelos's urging, calling it “not noble” (Iliad 5:125–26, 252–56). Later, when Nestor echoes Sthenelos's call to retreat and points out that Zeus has now turned against him, Diomedes does briefly resist with the thought of Hector's imagined reproaches, but his fear of shame is soon overcome by his greater fear of Zeus's thunderbolts (Iliad 8.138–144 and 161–71).Footnote 15

Curiously, it is precisely fear of a greater power or a greater evil that constitutes the other and lower side of political courage as Aristotle presents it. In his third quote from Homer he cites Agamemnon's threatening words to the cowards among the Achaians as an example of what is needed to move such men, but he also cites the use of rear guards to punish deserters, which every army needs to maintain order. Is it only a few bad apples who fight out of fear of something worse, and without whose infectious example no one would flee? And what about those who fight well in hopes of booty or new lands? Political courage seems in fact to draw upon all these fears and hopes.

Experience

Second after political courage Aristotle treats the defective form of courage that arises from experience in battle. He cites especially the example of professional soldiers, but of course experience was also a crucial reason for the outstanding courage of the highly trained citizen soldiers of Sparta. Aristotle brings out professional soldiers’ immunity to the panics that plague amateurs but also the limits of their courage when the odds are against them, for their courage rests on calculation about their chances of facing either death or gain. But then Aristotle draws a contrast with the citizen soldier that subtly revises what he said before about its basis. For to citizen soldiers “it is shameful to flee and death is more choiceworthy than such preservation, while those who from the beginning were taking risks on the assumption that they were stronger flee when they recognize how things are, fearing death more than what is shameful. But the courageous man is not of this sort” (1116b19–23). Is the citizen soldier guided after all not by honor and reproach but by what is noble and shameful simply?Footnote 16 And in shifting his point of contrast from political courage at the beginning of this comparison to courage simply at the end of it, is Aristotle now suggesting that civic and true courage are after all the same? But perhaps, putting this passage together with Aristotle's earlier characterization of political courage and his quotations from Homer, we should say rather that Aristotle is giving a subtle and accurate account of political courage as being essentially complex and shifting in its foundation. The citizen's cluster of reasons for fighting well center especially on honor and disgrace but include also devotion to the fatherland, hopes of gains and fears of losses of a mundane sort, piety (which is suggested again with the mention of citizen soldiers fighting steadfastly before a temple of Hermes at 1116b19), and not least but never exclusively, an intrinsic love of what is noble and scorn for what is shameful.Footnote 17

Spiritedness

After this discussion of calculation as a defective form of courage, Aristotle turns third to an opposite quality that seems even more crucial to the phenomenon: spiritedness or anger (thumos). Clearly spiritedness alone does not constitute the virtue of courage: it is shared by animals; it is an elemental passion that may support what is noble or base; it can be wholly without reason.Footnote 18 Animals are spirited out of fear or frustrated desire and often rush impulsively and blindly into danger; human adulterers, Aristotle observes, are often daring out of desire, and people driven by the pain of anger or the pleasure of anticipated revenge often fight fiercely, but none of this is courage. With these examples Aristotle sketches the outlines of spiritedness as a fundamental psychological force. It is the passion that flares up in defense of our own or in pursuit of what we need or want when our desires encounter obstacles. It is a love of victory so intense that it easily becomes heedless of death. It is the anger that in humans always involves judgments, however hasty or prejudiced, about wrongs for which it seeks revenge (cf. 7.6). And, as the allusions to the Homeric heroes remind us, it is felt in human beings as an intense concern for dignity. How, then, is the passion of thumos related to true courage?

At 1116b31 Aristotle calls spiritedness a “fellow worker” with or within the courageous; then in a complex passage we have already alluded to he adds,

That which arises through spiritedness seems to be most natural, and with the addition of choice and the end [“that for the sake of which”], to be courage. And when human beings are angry they are pained, but when they get revenge they feel pleasure; and those who make war on account of these things are warlike but not courageous, for they do not do so on account of the noble or according to reason but through passion; yet they have something closely resembling courage. (1117a4–9)Footnote 19

Spiritedness seems by turns to be an ally to courage, the natural foundation of courage to which reason and choice must be added to give it proper direction, and a mere simulacrum of true courage. The thought that spiritedness is the natural foundation of courage is of a piece with the thought that courage is the perfection of the spirited part of the soul and with the civic perspective according to which courage is the disciplined expression of the natural inclination to fight in defense of one's own. Reason then would function as a supplement, allowing human beings to be fully aware of the danger they face and so to act fully by choice, and putting limits on anger to prevent indiscriminate slaughter.Footnote 20 But while repeatedly reminding us of this essentially civic perspective on courage, Aristotle never endorses it. Is spiritedness, then, just reason's ally, as Socrates claims in the Republic? But if it is, what motivates reason, and how are these two disparate motivations related?Footnote 21 Does reason make an independent assessment of what is noble and enlist the energy of spiritedness whenever it aligns with reason's judgment? Or is even that picture granting too much to spiritedness, since Aristotle says those who fight on account of anger are not courageous, evidently because they seek not the noble but revenge? But since “thought alone moves nothing,” what is the desire within the “deliberate desire” that fuels true courage, and what ensures that it will outweigh the blind love of one's own or desire for vengeance?

Pondering the relation between spiritedness and the core motivation of genuine courage, we are forced to wonder whether reason does introduce a separate motive that gives to the animal energy of spiritedness a new, noble purpose, like a rider directing the strength of a great horse—or whether reason just gives voice to the passionate love of one's own or yearning for freedom or honor or revenge, affirming that it is noble to defend these things at all costs and that one's own dignity should never have to bow to any considerations of mere advantage but is the highest thing in the world. There is, at any rate, a curious resemblance between spiritedness's tendency to leave behind all prudent calculations in pursuit of dignity and the spirit of high courage as Aristotle captures it, with its insistence on doing what is noble for its own sake. Might it be precisely spiritedness that resists the Socratic reduction of virtue to knowledge and of courage to an unshakeable knowledge of what truly is and is not terrible and what is worth risking for the sake of what? In our belief that in virtue we have found a higher purpose than all of the mundane goods that we and our communities need to be happy, perhaps we are still being carried away by spiritedness.Footnote 22

That spiritedness has an uncanny power to inspire us is undeniable. Aristotle's quotes from Homer all point to the way people in the grip of spiritedness can feel themselves infused with divine wrath or with superhuman strength. The heroes in the scenes from which Aristotle quotes here believe the gods are breathing might into them or fighting alongside them. Some, like Diomedes and Achilles, become so spirited that they even challenge the gods, while others such as Hector come to seem to others, if not to themselves, to be in fact divine.Footnote 23 In their moments of greatest fear, human beings most long for and pray for divine protection, although to need it is no reason to believe we deserve such help. But if we can be very brave without flinching, perhaps we do deserve it. Perhaps we can even somehow rise above needing that help and become invulnerable to death itself. Such, at least, seem to be the hopes of the men who admired and cultivated courage most single-mindedly and brought it to its highest glory, the heroes Homer depicts.Footnote 24 Aristotle opposes their angry demands for glory and works throughout his account to build a calmer, more rational and autonomous spirit in the warrior; but he cannot dispense with their nonetheless inspiring examples.

Hope

So deeply is spiritedness entwined with hope that hope is the next topic Aristotle turns to. Those who are of good hope because they have often been victorious before—again we are reminded of the Spartans—resemble the courageous, Aristotle says, but the truly courageous are confident not for this reason but “for the reasons already mentioned” (1117a12). Aristotle has indeed said that the courageous are confident, but what they place their confidence in beyond knowledge and experience is never entirely clear. Can it be that the courageous not only endure but are positively confident or hopeful simply because it is noble to feel this way (cf. 1117a16–17)? The confidence that is noblest seems at any rate to rest on something other than calculation. For it is most evident, Aristotle says, in sudden dangers where one cannot have recourse to “calculation and reason” and must rely instead on character (1117a17–22). Despite the importance Aristotle places on choice in virtue, we see that in the splendid, paradigmatic virtue of courage, reasoned choice is much less important than is deeply ingrained habit or character. Such character is perhaps also more evident in the soldier who simply obeys hard orders than in the commander who must calculate with a view to the practical task of winning while suffering the fewest casualties.

Ignorance

Reflecting on these questions, we are not wholly unprepared when Aristotle turns fifth and last to the ignorant as a group who bear a misleading resemblance to the truly courageous. He attributes to those who are fearless only because they do not know what they are up against the same failing he has attributed to recklessness and even to the defective form of courage that is based on knowledge or experience: insufficient staying power in the face of great danger once that danger becomes manifest. But is a determination to be confident, merely because confidence is noble, itself altogether immune to collapse when it becomes clear that one's side cannot after all overcome the enemy?

Perhaps, however, we have not yet identified correctly the object of courageous soldiers’ confidence. Perhaps what they count upon is not safety but ultimate victory for their side, or the rightness of their cause. Surely they often do, but this does not yet explain how confidence works to counteract fear. Or perhaps the object of the confidence that matters most is simply their own courage that they value more than either life or victory and that they know will prevent them from panicking in extreme danger or behaving shamefully to save their lives.Footnote 25 In courage we seem to have a purpose that is its own purpose and a confidence that is its own ground. But perhaps in many such heroic souls there is something else at work that Aristotle is alluding to in his reference to the heroes’ sense of divine inspiration. Aristotle by no means presents courage as dependent on piety, but he quietly indicates why piety may be such a helpful support to it. Mustering a confident frame of mind in the conviction that it is noble to do so, courageous soldiers are likely to see themselves as deserving protection or victory on account of their nobility, and to be confident that one deserves divine favor is perhaps reason enough to hope for it. Of course to be certain of divine aid would again mean being brave only out of knowledge that one has the advantage on one's side, and this again seems less than sublimely noble. Courage cannot be folly, but if its promise of great nobility is to be sustained, it may have to be grounded in something other than solid knowledge.

Courage and Happiness (3.9)

This thought would seem to be behind Aristotle's opening sentence in his fourth and final chapter on courage, 3.9. Although courage is indeed concerned with confidence as well as fear, he reminds us, it is especially concerned with fear: courage is by no means a sensible assurance that all will be well. But Aristotle pushes so hard to uphold courage's nobility that he risks toppling the claim he has also been building in the Nicomachean Ethics about the happiness of the virtuous life. If happiness is the final end of life and of all action, if happiness requires a “compete life” (1098a18), if the courageous man is not running a calculated risk to win some great gain for himself or his loved ones but instead is fighting and facing death bravely just for its own sake, how is that not folly? This is a serious challenge, but Aristotle faces it squarely. Yes, the courageous man suffers fear and pain and often death, and no, the exercise of courage in itself is not pleasant, and yes, in possessing a noble soul he even gives up a happier life than does the worthless man when he dies.Footnote 26 But no, he is not enduring all this and gaining nothing in return.

Aristotle compares the courageous man to the boxer, who also voluntarily endures terrible things, but for the sake of a goal that is sweet, though easily obscured by pain and suffering: the crown and the honors that accompany victory. Like the boxer, the courageous man endures great evils for the sake of a goal that is in fact pleasant. But what is the goal in his case? The brave man, Aristotle says,

to the extent that he has all virtues and is more happy, will be more pained by death. For such a man life is most worth living, and he will be deprived of the greatest goods knowingly, and that is painful. But he is no less courageous, and perhaps even more so, because in war he chooses what is noble in exchange for these. For pleasant activity is not available in all the virtues, except insofar as they attain their end [telos]. (1117b9–16)

Precisely what, we must ask yet again, is this end for which the courageous man fights? Is it the same as the boxer's, the crown and the honors that the champion wins? Especially in the last line above Aristotle invites us to wonder whether a courageous life can be happy if it is not pleasant, or pleasant if no such rewards are forthcoming, but he does not identify the courageous man's end as being honor as the boxer's is, and he has given good reasons not to do so. Not only is honor not available for those who die, since death is “a limit or end [telos], and there seems to be nothing else for the dead, either good or bad” (1115a26–27; cf. 111b23), but more importantly, honor is the end only for a defective form of courage Aristotle took up in 3.8, political courage. Even if we interpret 3.8 to mean that true courage in its pure form is vanishingly rare and that political courage with its mixed motives is the best of the existing forms of courage, still the love of honor is not the highest strand within that courage.

It seems that we must say that what courage at its purest and highest moments attains is rather just the great, completed act of heroism itself, or the nobility of this act and nothing subsequent or extrinsic to it.Footnote 27 Not every courageous warrior who enters the fray is able to do anything splendid; one may be wounded by grapeshot in the first moments of the battle and never manage to engage the enemy. But to fight well, steadfastly standing one's ground in the face of a terrible onslaught, overcoming fear to use strength and skill and wits to fight superbly, or dying without flinching as Leonidas and his men did—perhaps this is an end so noble and splendid that it is itself worth everything one might lose.Footnote 28 Aristotle suggests as much in a passage in 9.8 that echoes this one, and that introduces a motive he has scrupulously avoided attributing to courage in book 3.

It is true of the morally serious man that he will do many things for the sake of his friends and his fatherland, and if necessary he will give up his life for them. He will give money and honors and all the contested goods, seeking above all the noble for himself. He would choose to feel pleasure intensely for a short time rather than mildly for a long time, and to live nobly for one year rather than indifferently for many, and to perform one great noble act rather than many small ones. Those who give up their lives perhaps achieve this, and they choose great nobility for themselves. He will give away money so that his friends may have more, for they thus get money, but he gets the noble: he assigns the greater good to himself. (1169a18–29)

In book 3, where the stress is on the idea that true virtue must be embraced for itself, Aristotle is silent on the idea of dying for friends or country. In book 9, where the theme is love and friendship, he does introduce this idea, but still in the context of insisting that the morally serious man loves and seeks the noble for himself most of all.

So once again and for the last time, what exactly is this thing, the noble, which inheres in the courageous act and is so fine and splendid that it is worth even the “greatest goods” that the courageous man sacrifices to attain it? Here is where everything becomes strange. For if it is of the essence of nobility that one choose the noble just for itself, what is most noble in courage seems to be just this hard overcoming of fear, this risking of death, and above all the actual sacrifice of life in battle, especially when a life is rich and satisfying and full of good things. We have then something deeply paradoxical at the heart of the courageous man's self-understanding. He sees his activity as hard and bad for himself and thinks it is above all this that makes it noble; but he sees this very same activity in its nobility as something good for him, best for him, indeed the greatest prize of all, and it is this that makes it choiceworthy. He is somehow hopeful, despite or even precisely because of his sacrifice, but what he puts his hope in refuses to come clearly into focus. It is perhaps simply that he will fight well, but this Aristotle does not say. It is perhaps also, then, that he will win divine aid, as do the Homeric heroes Aristotle alluded to in the last chapter, for surely he must deserve it if he is very brave. The aid he hopes for, in turn, is perhaps simply help in being supremely brave, but perhaps also help in winning and enjoying the fruits of victory, for surely one who sets his sights only on being brave deserves victory if anyone does. Or perhaps it is a hope that in dying he will enjoy a reward for his courage, a reward that seems less conceivable if death is the end or if gloomy Hades is all that awaits the dead, but a reward that seems nonetheless all the better deserved by one who faces this grim prospect squarely, and in being better deserved it is more inspiring of hope, if only the dimmest of hopes against hope.

The deepest problem in all this is not that the courageous man is secretly mercenary; rewards may be far indeed from his thoughts. The deepest problem, rather, is the self-contradictory understanding of what the nobility in virtue consists in. Glaucon in Plato's Republic insists on a simple question that the noble man cannot satisfactorily answer: Is the noble on balance and in the final analysis good for the noble person or bad for him, and why? Aristotle asks it less obtrusively but lays out for anyone who looks closely the ambivalence in the noble soul that makes him so resistant to giving a clear answer. This ambivalence is present to some degree in all of moral virtue but is especially visible in courage, inasmuch as courage seems especially to embody the nobility of self-sacrifice, with its extraordinary power to stir us to admiration and to tears.Footnote 29

For a different but related reason, courage understood as an end in itself is open to a further difficulty: the hero not only suffers but inflicts terrible things. Aristotle is strikingly silent on this fact here, where he is making the best case for the activity of moral virtue as an end in itself, but he does bring it up in book 10 when he turns to a defense of the philosophic life as one more intrinsically choiceworthy than the life of practical activity. While we engage in work in order to live and recreation in order to rest from our labors, Aristotle says, we choose the activities of leisure for their own sake, and preeminent among these is philosophy. “The activities of the practical virtues in political life and war and the actions concerned with these seem to be unleisured, and the warlike ones wholly so. For no one would choose to make war for its own sake, nor to foment war. For one would seem to be totally bloodthirsty if one should make war on one's friends so that there could be battle and killing” (1177b6–12). Political courage is in fact better than the pure courage that would entail a choice of courageous acts solely for themselves, even if such purity were possible.

Conclusion

If, then, our original, untutored admiration for courage is incoherent, regarding acts of courage as noble precisely because they are so bad or unchoiceworthy and as good and choiceworthy because they are so noble; if in our admiration for virtue we intuit that the highest things in life must be ends in themselves and yet we see that choosing courageous acts just for their own sake would be bloodthirsty, are the tensions in courage impossible to resolve? Aristotle by no means argues that they are. But he puts us in a position to see that to bring perfect consistency to courage, we would have to reconceive it in terms of ends either lower or higher than those of the serious citizen. One way to do so would be to treat courage as a simple means to security or gain, but this would be to coarsen our collective life and to crush the part of us that aspires to self-transcendence. Another would be to subsume courage within the highest and most rational life as Aristotle presents it, the life of philosophy. Such a life certainly needs courage of a kind: the courage of facing difficult truths, holding firmly to what one knows in the face of temptations to despondency or unreasonable hopes, and persevering in running risks that one has correctly calculated are worth running. But courage so understood would be only a foundation for the best life and by no means its chief substance; it would have little in it that is heroic; it would indeed, as Aristotle acknowledges, belong to a life so austere as to include little of what makes ordinary lives rich and serious.

Political courage, by contrast, is a more inspiring but for the same reason necessarily more tangled phenomenon. It can by no means be simply an end in itself: Aristotle's experiment in resisting the thrust of the Socratic analysis and defending courage as a choice of the noble solely for itself shows us the necessity of restoring to our account what he refused to grant to that analysis for the purposes of this experiment. Political courage needs to be directed to achieving concrete objectives beyond the act of courage itself if it is to be distinguishable from rashness or bloodthirstiness. But still less can it be simply instrumental if its seriousness is to be preserved. The citizen soldier must love and seek to serve his country and cherish the honor it gives him; he must consider that honor only an acknowledgment of excellence and not his chief end; yet it still matters enormously to him that he is honored, at home as well as in the military, for what he aspires to be as much as for what he is, for his courage that inescapably both is and is not an end in itself. Political courage needs to be in the service of a community's life of peace, but to be worth fighting and sacrificing for, that life must embody at its core just such a dedication to excellence and self-overcoming as courage itself so beautifully exemplifies. In a democracy, soldiers who return home have much to contribute in fostering this spirit, and it is a measure of the decency of a democracy that it deploy well the energies of these intense citizens, with their keen need both for respect and for worthy objects of dedication.

Aristotle has shown that in political courage, the question of what is for the sake of what, and what should look up to what, represents a knot that cannot be untied. Rather than offer a simplified resolution that is untrue to the phenomenon, as most of his modern commentators do, he carefully reproduces the tensions within this first and paradigmatic virtue, tensions that to varying degrees pervade all of moral virtue. He allows them to show up more clearly than they usually do in the heat and dust of active life, pointing only obliquely to the different plane on which alone they are capable of a wholly satisfactory resolution. The limited rationality of most of us is due to the ways in which we aspire to lives of good activity that is choiceworthy just for its own sake, even though we succeed at this so incompletely. Aristotle resolutely supports these aspirations that bring to our common life such dignity and seriousness. And this is only just, for in honoring the courage of citizens who fight for their fatherlands, for freedom, and for virtue itself, Aristotle also honors those without whose protection his own way of life could not be sustained. If the political and rational aspects of our natures are in tension, they are also interdependent.

Footnotes

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); Collins, Susan, Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Bartlett, Robert and Collins, Susan, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, translated with interpretive essay and notes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 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), 89; Aquinas, Thomas, Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Litzinger, C. I. (Chicago: Regnery, 1964), 1:234 and 240. They are followed among modern commentators by Brady, Michelle, “The Fearlessness of Courage,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 43 (2005): 189. 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), 209–11. 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), 87–88.

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): 174 and 180; and Sanford, J. J., “Are You Man Enough? Aristotle and Courage,” International Philosophical Quarterly 50 (2010): 442–45.

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), 118; and Heil, John, “Why Is Aristotle's Brave Man So Frightened? The Paradox of Courage in the Eudemian Ethics,” Apeiron 29 (1996): 65. 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): 1–12; and Brady, Michelle, “The Fearlessness of Courage,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 43 (2005): 189–211. 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), 403; Curzer, Howard, Aristotle and the Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 55–62; Leighton, Stephen, “Aristotle's Courageous Passions,” Phronesis 33 (1988): 88–92; Pakaluk, Michael, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 160; and Young, Charles, “Courage,” in The Blackwell Companion to Aristotle, ed. Anagnostopoulos, Georgios (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 442–56. 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); Lear, Gabriel Richardson, Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 147–62; 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), 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): 305: “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), 70–71.

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], 84–88). 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.