Plato & Courage (“Laches”)
I have been reading some of Plato’s writing and I wanted to take the time to briefly analyze Plato’s dialogue Laches here on Medium. I will first outline two essential or necessary components to courage (the theme of the dialogue), look at some examples of courage in real-life professions, and then use Socrates’ method of inquiry to provide further clarifications on whether not feeling fear discredits a person from having courage.
What is Courage?
Before I start my analysis of Laches, I would like to define courage and look at what we think of when we say someone acts in a courageous way. The first necessary component of courage is feeling fear when in a threatening situation. In other words, courage is staying in a position that provokes feelings of fear despite having serious considerations to flee. Courage is not the absence of feeling fear when threatened. That is the first misconception about courage. We can extend this definition a bit further to prevent misunderstanding and suggest that courageous individuals are not the ones that are not aware of any risks of staying in a threatening situation.
