Plato 8.4 What Is Courage?
One way of distinguishing between courage and other virtues is to note that the possessor of the virtue must overcome fear. Those who have other virtues may yet fall victim to fear when placed in positions of great danger. Here Socrates offers a model for consideration. It is said that people act viciously in many cases when they are overcome by pleasure. Let us grant for the sake of argument that pleasure is the good, a value theory known as Hedonism.[8] Even then we need to recognize, Socrates points out, that if we wish to achieve happiness, we cannot simply indulge in whatever pleasures are at hand. For instance, if we should spend our days drinking alcohol, or, to use a modern situation, drugs, we would soon find our life not worth living.
What we need to do is to calculate which pleasures are the most valuable, and to act so as to realize those, even if that means delaying present gratifications. But if that is so, then our happiness is determined not by pleasure itself, but by our ability to determine the relative value of different experiences. In other words, what is most important to us is knowledge, not pleasure. On this account, “What would bring salvation to our lives?” asks Socrates. “Wouldn’t it be the art of measurement, the control over appearances?”[9] Consequently, “Since then [this art] is a measuring, it is no doubt an art and a kind of knowledge.”[10] Thus it appears that the art that saves us from ruin is knowledge.
Socrates gives us a kind of sketch of virtue. But he now needs to address Protagoras’ claim that courage is very different from the other virtues. What is virtue, and in particular, what is courage? Everyone seeks what is most pleasant to himself. “Now no one willingly goes after the bad nor after what he thinks is bad, nor is it, it appears, in human nature to go after what one thinks is bad rather than the good.”[11]
Here Socrates produces a principle of human motivation, one that seems paradoxical in light of human propensities to do bad things. Surely people don’t really want what is bad, he argues; they want only what is good. In terms of the hedonistic psychology, people pursue pleasures and shun pains. When they err it is not through the moral failure of wanting what is bad, but through the cognitive failure of mistaking the bad for the good.
Socrates asks what fear is. It is “an expectation of something bad.”[12] So do brave and the cowardly people engage in different actions? Not really, for both of them seek the same thing; both go toward the thing they are confident about and flee from what they fear. But what they feel confidence and fear about are different things. The courageous go into battle because it is noble and honorable to do so, whereas the cowards flee from it, even though it is shameful to do so. “Do the cowards trust in shameful and bad actions for any other reason than ignorance and lack of knowledge? . . . Hence cowardice must be ignorance of what is and is not to be feared?”
Socrates is now in a position to define courage: “So courage is wisdom about what is and is not to be feared, which is opposite to ignorance of these things?”[13]
Now it appears that courage, presumably like virtue in general, is a kind of wisdom or knowledge. Socrates does not here or elsewhere draw any fine distinctions between wisdom and knowledge or prudence.[14] Courage may be the kind of knowledge that deals with objects of fear and confidence, as, for instance, temperance is a knowledge of pleasures and pains. But crucially it is a kind of knowledge of what is good and bad, what is to be pursued and what is to be avoided.
This is the only place in the corpus of Plato’s Socratic dialogues where Socrates seems to give his own account of virtue, as opposed to exploring other people’s definitions.[15] But here Socrates does seem to espouse the theory of virtue as knowledge, a view ascribed to him by Aristotle and others.[16] He even goes so far as to recommend this to the sophists at the gathering.
Not only is virtue knowledge, but there is no such thing as being defeated by pleasures. “This is what ‘being overcome by pleasure’ turns out to be: the supreme ignorance — which Protagoras here professes to cure, as well as Prodicus and Hippias.”[17] Socrates famously rejects what philosophers call Weakness of Will, the possibility of being overcome by pleasure or passion. Giving in to passion does not result from a weak will but from ignorance, pure and simple — not knowing what is valuable and what is not. Socrates obligingly points out that this doctrine provides a selling point for the astute sophist.
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[8].There is a debate among scholars over whether Socrates here (and the historical Socrates) espouses hedonism; I shall assume that he adopts it for the sake of argument. See Plato Protagoras 351e-355e; the argument shows that only the ability to assess pleasures and pains produces the good life, 355e-357b, so that knowledge trumps pleasure. Plato’s Socrates certainly repudiates the theory of hedonism in the Gorgias, 497a-500a.
[9].Plato Protagoras 356d.
[10].Plato Protagoras 357b.
[11].Plato Protagoras 358c-d.
[12].Plato Protagoras 358d.
[13].Plato Protagoras 360b-d. (The preceding three paragraphs are drawn from my Socrates and Athens, ch. 6.2.)
[14].See Euthydemus 281–282, where epistēmē, phronēsis, and sophia are used interchangeably and linked to philosophein.
[15].In the Laches, 194c-d, Nicias gives a Socratic-sounding definition of courage, which he claims to have borrowed from Socrates. Socrates tests the definition and points out that it seems to entail that courage is not a part of virtue, but effectively the whole of it, 199b-e. Yet this is precisely the thesis that Socrates is defending in the Protagoras. Is Nicias defeated because he cannot swallow the implications of the true theory? In the Charmides Socrates seems to call into question the view that virtue is knowledge (see 171d ff.), at one point questioning the agent’s ability to know past, present, and future, as in the Laches (Charmides 174a), and ends up casting a brief glance at the view that temperance is a knowledge of good and evil (174b-c). Both the Laches and the Charmides are inconclusive in their searches for definitions.
[16].Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 7.2, 1145b21–27; Eudemian Ethics 1.5, 1216b1–10.
[17].Plato Protagoras 357e.
