Abstract

Some Grace Under Pressure investigates the nature of courage and its role in the good life. It poses several questions. First is the role that risk plays in courage and whether courage is only possible where the actor risks death. Second, what role do gender issues play in the development of courage? Third, what sort of environment is best suited for the cultivation of courage? Finally, in what sense is courage a religious virtue? The dissertation presents two very different accounts of heroism: an explicit account from Aristotle and an implicit account drawn by Henry Thoreau. ;The first chapter, "Courage and the Art of Living," discusses general issues pertinent to any modern discussion of courage. It asks whether or not courage, traditionally the virtue of standing firm and fighting on a battlefield, is in some sense antiquated. Modern society no longer needs nor values warlike virtues in the sense that Homer or Aristotle did. Has the role of courage in the good life therefore changed? After deciding that courage is still a vital virtue today, I turn to questions of particular interest to those doing feminist ethics, and I ask whether and how Aristotle's theory of virtue and courage ought to be read by women. Lastly, I introduce the concept of courage as a religious virtue and the notion of natural vs culturally constructed horizons as a tool for understanding this sort of courage. ;The second chapter, "Aristotle's Tragic Vision," looks at Aristotle's beliefs about courage and his account of its semblances and associated vices in Book 3 of the Nicomachean Ethics. There is an introductory section introducing his language and the bare outlines of his theory of virtue. I attend carefully to how Aristotle responded to Homer's portrait of courage in the Iliad. ;With the third chapter, "Reading Walden," I turn to Henry Thoreau. I ask in what sense Walden can be compared to classical ethics and why I consider it to be a piece a virtue ethics. I show how Thoreau was deeply interested in the classical issues of the cultivation of character an pursuit of personal excellence, and I investigate the influence that Emerson's notions of self-reliance and heroism may have had on Thoreau's thinking. And while Walden itself mentions heroism or bravely only infrequently, it is a prime subtext in the work. ;Chapter 4, "Thoreau's Heroic Enterprise" teases out the requirements for bravery as they are suggested in Walden. Spending much time with "Economy" and the "Conclusion," I look at how Thoreau used metaphors of voyage, discovery, and warfare in Walden . I show that he believed the deliberate life to also be a heroic life. Thoreau believed that these virtues were capped by certain transcendent experiences at Walden that both transformed and defined his time there. These elements in Thoreau's thought bear little relation to any thing in Aristotle and suggest a set of horizons defining human life far broader than those conceived by Aristotle, but that Thoreau's problematic account of risk in courage leaves us with as many questions as it has answers