Abstract

Beginning from the finding that contemporary liberalism offers little in response to the probing but ultimately flawed critique of traditional courage that feminist political theorists advance, I argue that there exists an urgent need today to reexamine courage. For despite its undeniably dangerous excesses, I show that courage is critical to both the survival and health even of peaceable liberal democracies and that we therefore need to explore both its risks and its rewards. I turn to Plato because he provides a balanced but richly complex treatment of courage. While it is alive and sympathetic to the multidimensional phenomenon of courage as ordinarily understood, i.e., as the virtue that enables one to act well in the face of dangers, Plato's treatment yields the paradoxical thesis that courage is both the cause and the consequence of wisdom. The Laches and the Republic together illuminate what courage is and why courage is needed to understand what it is. Carefully following the development of Socrates' conversation in the Laches with two Athenian generals who disagree with each other and even with themselves about courage, I argue that the generals' confusion stems from their deep-seated hopes about it, namely, that courage be both noble in itself and also good for the courageous individual. Their unwillingness or inability to examine these hopes is evidence, I argue, of a certain cowardice. Socrates' exploration in the Republic of spiritedness, which he characterizes as the psychological substratum of courage, shows why it takes courage to examine the opinions that underlie its ordinary manifestations. By comparing the courage of the Republic's guardians with that of its future philosophers, I argue that a failure to confront such opinions produces a courage that is confused and hence deficient; genuine courage requires at the very least knowledge of why it is worth possessing and exercising. But however much the refined spiritedness that underlies the guardians' courage falls short of the highest kind of courage, I argue that it still deserves respect as both politically reliable and suited for acquiring the wisdom that is the source of genuine courage