Courage as a virtue

George Kateb

COURAGE IS AN IMPOSSIBLE SUBJECT. NO MATTER WHAT ANYONE SAYS, people (including myself) will always respect, even admire, courage regardless of the purpose or the cause in which it is displayed. One of the worst reproaches in the world is to be called a coward, accused of lacking in courage--again, almost no matter what the purpose or cause. It is merely clumsy propaganda (though clever in intention) to label as cowards the suicide hijackers who destroyed the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It is, I suppose, the shocking element of surprise in the attack that unconsciously helps to spare such propaganda the derision it deserves. Cowardly was the one terrible thing the suicide hijackers were not. If their religion cast an invincible spell on them, it nonetheless remains true that they needed courage to carry out their plot--a sort of courage that is closer to that shown by martyrs than by battlefield soldiers. And if we want to condemn their courage we have to say more than that they acted on behalf of a cause we abhor. In any case, bad causes do not usually stand in the way of admitting, despite Bush's propaganda, that courage is often shown in them. To come to terms with our impulse really means that we should try to hold fast to the thought that the virtue of courage cannot be shown in a bad cause. We have to suggest furthermore that virtuous action should alone receive unperplexed and self-consistent admiration. Only in virtuous action can the virtue of courage be shown. In a bad cause, another kind of courage is shown, which we should learn to censure: it is an unvirtuous courage because it does not intend a moral effect and it works with the force and effect of a vice.

In "Civil Disobedience" (2001 [1848]), Thoreau says, "The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue." He maintains that those who despite their disapproval of state policy nonetheless fall in behind it are "undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters" (210). The issue for Thoreau is the institution of slavery and how people who know better sustain it with their patriotic allegiance. He is thus grappling with the peculiar way in which virtues (or ostensible virtues) can do the work of vices by lending their excellence to a system of wrongdoing. We should notice the inversion of Thoreau's view: Machiavelli's claim that when rulers practice ordinary virtues in political life (virtues like generosity, compassion, and trustworthiness), their virtues do more harm than the corresponding vices. But only a theorist who is enthralled by the project of imperialist greatness rather than devoted to limited politics would devise such an argument. He knows that ordinary virtues impede active greatness. (Luther gives a differently motivated but even more ruthless inversion than Machiavelli: acts of punishment and war are actually acts of altruistic love toward criminals and enemies.) My assertion that the virtue of courage works preponderantly with the effects of a vice does undeniably bear a formal resemblance to Machiavelli's claim, but I argue from within a moral framework, and Machiavelli does not. That makes a difference. There must be continuity between private and political morality if politics is not to be as virulent as many of its practitioners want it to be.

No, the real ancestor of Thoreau's observation is the contention of Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic that if to be just is to be law-abiding, then one takes part in systematic injustice when one obeys the laws, which are always unjust. The virtue of justice does the work and has the effect of the vice of injustice. Underlying such law-abidingness is the will to believe what one is told and the disposition to do what people expect. Whatever the merits of Thrasymachus's claim in any particular society, the capacity of courage, specifically, to lend itself to wrongdoing is a ubiquitous fact. More than any other human trait, courage seems to be quite at home when it serves wrongdoing. It is actually the indispensable and most potent instrument of the major vices and the other psychic sources of what is most reprehensible. (This is not to say that the vice of cowardice--courage's opposite--normally functions as a virtue. Cowardice is a vice that sometimes may, for unpraiseworthy reasons, work with the effect of a virtue.) In contrast to courage, most of what are properly called virtues strain to achieve moral consequences and do so deliberately.

The rude truth is that courage is most praised in war. War, in its nature, is constituted by the worst wrongdoing, devoted to projects that usually have nothing to do with defending or promoting political morality, the essence of which is a commitment to human rights. Typically, all sides in a war do more harm or wrong or evil than is necessary to defend or promote human rights even when that is the purpose. The principal traditional manifestation of courage is and has been preponderantly immoral in its effects. War and its wrongdoing are unthinkable without the readiness of multitudes to show courage, or at least what people admiringly call courage, and what we should call instead unvirtuous courage. The vices and inflamed imagination of leaders are powerless without the unvirtuous courage of followers. I wish to do what Thoreau does not do: withhold the word virtue from any trait that serves wrongdoing, while not denying that these traits mimic the virtues. They show dispositions that if morally directed would be virtuous; but for a variety of reasons, can be misdirected. Much more than any other trait, courage can be misdirected and do the work of the worst vices, of vice at its worst.

What can we say to suggest that the prestige of courage be severed from wrongdoing, that courage is not a virtue but an unvirtuous trait when wrongdoers and the multitudes who follow and assist them manifest it? We know, to begin with, that whatever we say, the effect of our words will be minuscule. The idea that we could succeed in associating the prestige or honor of courage only with deeds and policies that are either morally right or, at the least, compatible with morality, is naively utopian. Only a radical revision of the ideal of masculinity or manliness--a revision that is qualitatively different from that induced by radical feminism, and far more radical--could confine the honor of courage to moral deeds or those compatible with morality. Nonetheless, it is perhaps better to be naive than idle. Let us try to see how far we can get in formulating a few thoughts about courage when it is truly a virtue--that is, when courageous deeds are performed at the behest of a moral or morally irrelevant motive, when a traditionally praiseworthy trait of character serves only morality or a purpose that is compatible with morality.

RIGHT AT THE START OF OUR EXPLORATION WE HAVE TO ACKNOWLEDGE that Plato and Aristotle, the two philosophers who provide the foundation for later thinking about courage as a virtue, find in war the natural and ideal locus of courage. Their donnee is that the virtue of courage is necessary for war and that war, to begin with, is both inevitable and, at least implicitly, desirable in itself. Against such intellectual authority it may seem futile to contend. But we should try to see what they are maintaining. Despite the tendency of their arguments, the discussion by both philosophers is valuably instructive for any student of courage and hence for any attempt to weaken the tie between courage and war. We should also remember that their discussion is framed by reflection on the best or substantially better city. Yet in many respects, the application of what they say extends into unreformed life.

In the Republic, Socrates defines courage as the "preservation of the belief [doxa] inculcated by the law through education about what things are to be feared" (IV:429c: 104). This definition works with the assumption that courage can be made into a virtue, and that only when it is cultivated and trained does it become a virtue. No virtue is spontaneous, even though its perfection requires a favorable innate endowment that only a small minority of people in a given population possesses. Courage is one of four principal virtues. (The other three are wisdom, moderation, and justice.) As a major virtue, courage helps to define the excellent person and is no mere optional trait. Courage is above all battlefield courage. Those who are entrusted with making war must be unafraid of death, "preferring it to defeat in battle or slavery" (III:386b: 61), "fearing slavery more than death" (III:387b: 62). In the good society, the whole society's institutions, practices, beliefs, and mores conduce to the cultivation of and training in courage in the class that must have it; namely, the warriors. The most salient point is that courage must be defined by reference to fear. Courage is therefore the overcoming of fear. It is not brainless or foolhardy. It is permeated by some--even if unusually inhibited--desire to be a coward. It also turns out that courage is itself fear, but not fear of what everyone fears naturally: death, pain, loss. The fear that is courage must be nurtured by the arrangements of the good society--or, indeed, any society. Such fear can grow only out of instilled right opinion.

Courage is fear. Fear of what? Most directly in the Laws, Plato's answer is shame (I:647a: 27). What is the proper cause of shame? Shame at being thought a coward. That means that social arrangements must cooperate in inducing indelible horror at the thought of being a physical coward, whatever the temptations or miseries that the soldier may be subjected to. The right fear triumphs over the wrong fear. Every warrior "must be at the same time fearless and fearful" (I:647b: 28). Right opinion triumphs over bodily fear. Through the Athenian stranger, Plato says, "A man becomes perfect in courage by fighting against and conquering the cowardice within him" (I:647d: 28); from childhood on, courage consists in "triumphing over the terrors and fears that come upon us" (VII:791c: 179). What does the reproach of cowardice come down to? Plato makes it clear without very much explicitness that the essence of shame is to be thought by one's peers to be a child or a sissy or a (conventional) woman (although the Republic allows women into the fighting and ruling class). Thus, to practice courage as a virtue is to be a man in the best sense, and the best sense is emphatically (if not exclusively) martial.

Of course, social arrangements develop a positive desire to be martial. One of the speakers in the Laws, Kleinias, a Cretan, says proudly that "all these practices of ours exist with a view to war ... our lawgiver had this in view in everything he did" (I:625d-e: 4). The many, the people, in their mindlessness "do not realize that for everyone throughout the whole of life an endless war exists against all cities.... For what most humans call peace he [the Cretan Lawgiver] held to be only a name; in fact for everyone there always exists by nature an undeclared war among all cities" (I:625e: 4; I:626a: 4). The Athenian Stranger does rebuke Kleinias for distorting the aim of Cretan laws by making every feature conduce to prowess in foreign war (I:630c: 9) rather than "trustworthiness in the midst of dangers" in civil war; but the ideal city retains a large place for the virtue of courage in waging foreign war. Indeed, Plato builds up in both the Republic and the Laws a tightly interwoven way of life in which the self-interested ego is effaced and ties of camaraderie, loyalty, and devotion to the city are strengthened. The ultimate resource of the city is the citizen's dread of being thought a coward in war: that much of the ego is retained. Personal honor (or vanity) is narrow but intense. Why war? There are many advantages, but chief among them are these: enslaving inhabitants of defeated cities and seizing some of their wealth, while repelling the similar designs of others. In a world of cities (or nations), the city (or nation) is an absolute good to the philosophical observer as well as to the citizens of each. If the city is an absolute good, it must follow that organization for war abroad and the avoidance of civil war at home will be the principal determinant of the whole society. Courage will be primarily battlefield courage and courage will be the most readily taxed virtue, the most difficult virtue, if one may put it that way.

We may say schematically that Plato teaches that if courage is to be a virtue, it must be inextricably joined to a person's most deeply held beliefs about shame and, hence, social honor. For Plato shame should be felt when one looks like a coward in the eyes of others. The primary scene of courage is the battlefield. To make courage into a virtue, society's arrangements will work to instill both the proper beliefs about courage and the disposition to act courageously. Yet bodily fear may well be a constant residual accompaniment to courage. In contrast, to revise ideas of courage in the direction I propose would mean, in part, taking issue with Plato's teaching on these points.

Aristotle adds subtlety and detail to Plato's discussion. For our purposes, what stands out is the characterization of the positive features of courage. Like Plato, Aristotle is concerned above all with battlefield courage. But though he is attentive to the part played by bodily fear as well as the fear of being thought a coward, he proposes in the Nicomachean Ethics a somewhat more elaborate account of what we might call the noninstrumental value of courage (and of the other virtues as well). It must first be said that Aristotle echoes the Athenian Stranger's critique of the notion that a whole society should live a life that is so much like military training that in the grim words of Plutarch (in his life of Lycurgus, the legendary founder of Sparta's famous constitution), for the Spartans "uniquely among mankind war represented a respite from their military training" (Plutarch, 1988: 35). Aristotle insists in the Politics that if there is war it must be for the sake of peace (VII:14, 1333a: 309). Nonetheless, courage keeps its place among the virtues in Aristotle's analysis in the Nicomachean Ethics, and the truest courage is steadfastness in the face of death on the battlefield (III:6, 1115a: 69). Virtue is not complete without physical courage, and physical courage is not complete without participation in war against other cities.

What specifically does Aristotle add to Plato? At least some of the time, he considers the value of courage seemingly apart from its contribution to the well-being of society. Plato had already taught in the Republic that the virtues, including courage, were both instrumentally valuable and, more important, valuable "for their own sake" (that is, noble in themselves) (II:c-d: 42). For being doubly valuable, the virtues belong to the category of best things. Aristotle develops this theme interestingly. In the Politics, he says of the Spartans that, "Although they truly think that the goods for which men contend are to be acquired by virtue rather than by vice, they err in supposing that these goods are to be preferred to the virtue that gains them" (II:9, 1271b: 113). A supplementary idea appears in the Nicomachean Ethics: "Activities desirable in themselves are those from which we seek to derive nothing beyond the actual exercise of the activity" (X:6, 1176b: 286). These formulations raise the question, Does courage exist for the sake of war, or war for the sake of courage? To be sure, at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle reverts to the more mundane view that all the practical virtues manifested in military and political actions are "unleisurely, aim at an end, and are not chosen for their own sake" (X:7, 1177b: 290). In comparison to the exercise of the intellectual virtues in philosophical contemplation, the moral and practical virtues seem almost servile. To be merely useful is often close to being servile. In contrast, the individual's contemplative life is of no practical use; it can and does exist in many imperfect societies; and the moral and practical virtues are not a preparation or an outlet for the highest intellectual virtues. Contemplation is an imitation of and participation in the divine, in the more than human. Despite this apparent inconsistency on the nature of the practical virtues, courage, like the other ones, often seems prized by Aristotle as intrinsically valuable.

What, then, does it mean to suggest that war exists for the sake of courage? Aristotle's repeated view is that acting honorably or doing honorable (or fine) deeds is an end in itself. The implication is that being noble or acting nobly requires no further defense, any more than being happy in the proper sense does. In fact, being happy over a whole life is, precisely, to exercise the virtues in the appropriate activities; the moral and political activities are a central part of a whole life. To be happy is to be fulfilled as a virtuous human being. Of course, the benefits to society from the virtues are not incidental; much less are they only pretexts for the display of the virtues. Rather, the benefits cannot be dissociated from the virtues that have gone into their attainment. Just as the virtues would not be virtues unless they showed themselves in valuable and praiseworthy activities, so the benefits would not be worth having if they were attained without the virtues. The trouble with the Spartans is that though they wanted benefits by means of the virtues, they would not be interested in the virtues if the virtues produced no practical benefits. They were not interested in the idea of happiness as the life of virtue; they compromised the noble virtues by a single-minded practicality. (It is no accident that in the Republic, Plato makes love of wealth the secret passion of ambitious warriors.) In the Politics, Aristotle is clear that the honorable is distinct from both the necessary and the useful (I:7, 1255b: 63; VII:14, 1333a: 309). If action is to be honorable and not just necessary or useful, it must come from the virtues, not from courage only, but surely also from courage. Only action can be honorable. To be honorable is not properly understood when seen as a useful condition. He says in the Politics, "there must be war for the sake of peace, business for the sake of leisure, things useful and necessary for the sake of things

honorable" (VII: 14, 1333a: 309). Unlike Plato in the Republic, Aristotle does not found the good society on a constitutive act of injustice to neighbors. He thus seems to welcome war, a little less than Plato does, as an opportunity for the display of courage. Yet perhaps more than Plato, he appreciates displays of courage for their own sake.

Is Aristotle saying that society exists for the purpose of the virtuous fulfillment of each individual? Is the good society simply a theatrical stage on which the (moral and practical) virtues can be acted out? I do not think the matter can be expressed in quite this way. In the good society, the virtue of individuals will perforce contribute to the maintenance and prosperity of society. But a properly happy society would not be happy unless its citizens were individually happy. They are happy because they are virtuous; they are virtuous because they are noble. There are, however, other advantages to the virtues. It may not be too farfetched to think that Aristotle is pointing the way to a certain outlook, which is that observers--philosophers, poets, and historians--are also great beneficiaries of the record of noble or honorable deeds. Observers, especially future ones, benefit from being allowed to be, if only in a highly mediated manner, witnesses to courage. Deeds of courage help to show what humanity is capable of. They help to show that not all of human life is submissive to the necessary and useful. There is nobility, after all. Why else is Greece so attached to Homer?

What can we take from Aristotle? Above all, the notion that the honor of courage is--at least some of the time--found in deeds that are not subject to necessity or utility. In more modern language, courage gives evidence of a hard-won freedom of action. There is something transcendent about courage as a virtue. Later, I will say more about the reconception of honor that is called for, if courage is truly to be a virtue.

But must physical courage be battlefield courage to be a virtue? The question nags because Plato and especially Aristotle do not give much attention to the moral nature of the wars that elicit courage from citizens of the good city. Plato does say in the Republic that ideally, when Greek cities make war on one another, if they must do so, they should look on such conflicts as civil war, not as war between peoples. The Greeks are one people. If they fight, "their attitude of mind should be that of people who'll one day be reconciled and who won't always be at war" (V: 470d-e: 145). Their mutual depredations should be limited to carrying off the harvest of the vanquished (V: 470d: 145), and no Greek city should make slaves of defeated Greeks (V: 469c: 144). Toward the barbarians, however, Plato permits the Greeks any act of severity or exploitation. Wars against barbarians make it likelier that Greeks will keep their hands off one another. Barbarians thus exist in order to be enemies. Plato reinstates toward barbarians the very mode of behavior that earlier in the Republic is condemned by Socrates. When one of the interlocutors, Polemarchus, defines justice as acting so as "to benefit one's friends and harm one's enemies" (I:334b: 9), Socrates rejects the definition with the simple assertion that "it is never just to harm anyone" (I:335e: 11).

Of course Socrates never says that cities should follow the same morality that private individuals, who are just, follow. I suppose the implicit thought is that when citizens act politically, they are not acting personally, acting out of their own motives. Their virtues are their own; but they use their virtues to fill their roles; they act impersonally. As disciplined members of a formal group, they may therefore do anything their role calls for. In political life, they are accountable for being good citizens, not good persons. At the same time, Socrates never explains why political morality (acts of state, whether in ruling a city or acting with or against other cities) has different rules from private morality. As Plato's mouthpiece, he just takes it for granted that a city is an absolute entity whose right to endure as a city, in a world of cities and other kinds of political entity, is to go unquestioned. Hence the just city cannot treat other cities as a just individual would treat other individuals.

Aristotle in the Politics offers an apparently novel racialist justification of slavery: wrong by nature for Greeks to be enslaved, right by nature for the Greeks to enslave everyone else. He intimates as well a racialist geopolitics in which greater Greece conquers and rules many non-Greek peoples.

We are therefore left with an indigestible fact: Plato and Aristotle produced two of the most respected analyses of courage as a virtue, yet neither of them hesitated to make courage central to morally unexamined wars. It is as if when wars are fought by a putatively virtuous citizenry, there is no room left to raise further moral questions about their organized actions. But how can courage be a virtue if its characteristic works are instrumental to the wrongdoing necessarily implicated in all wars? More strongly put, how can courage be a virtue if without it, wrongdoing on a large scale could rarely if ever take place? For what other virtue do we make such allowance? If I am accused of being anachronistic when I expect Plato and Aristotle to be more interested than they are in the moral nature of the wars they contemplate, I would direct my reproaches to those who live in our world and still think that Plato and Aristotle speak the last word, not just the first word, about courage as a virtue. A further question is whether courage, to be a virtue, has to result from cultivation and training. Can it be spontaneous?

IS IT DEFENSIBLE TO SAY THAT BATTLEFIELD COURAGE DESERVES admiration, even though it has worked preponderantly with the effects of vice? Does such courage though not, even loosely speaking, a virtue most of the time--deserve nonetheless the admiration that is ordinarily bestowed on any virtue? Some may grant the point that a true virtue cannot be routinely efficacious in the production of evil or oppression or injustice, but go on to say that battlefield courage, despite all its terrible effects, is still praiseworthy as a human trait or inclination. For this thought to be defensible, the advocate must be prepared to hold that unvirtuous battlefield courage is so admirable that it is worth its undeniably enormous moral cost. Bravery is always difficult for the whole person--more difficult than anything else. Confronting difficulty is always admirable. Then, too, when the difficulty is acquitting oneself honorably in battle, there is almost no human exertion as rich in experience. The beneficiaries are thus the combatants, not just the cause they happen to serve. This defense of battlefield courage is helped along by a thought that may appease the morally anxious: such courage is usually displayed by combatants who are inwardly innocent. They do not typically intend wickedness, even though most of the time wickedness is what results from their deeds. It is not clear that most of them intend anything at all. They may be wicked to the observer, but they are sincerely not wicked to themselves. There is something about war that as it were helplessly denies to all but a few combatants (and only occasionally) a sense that what they are doing is properly subject even to moral scrutiny, much less moral condemnation. Only those who are not involved in the action can hope to judge. But then their judgment is untested; it does not rest on first-hand knowledge. In the position of combatants, judges would do what combatants do, and think of themselves as innocent, just as combatants do. A lack of self-awareness may not be compatible with manifesting a virtue, any more than doing the work of vice is. So be it. Battlefield courage, irrespective of the moral quality of the cause for which it is shown, and despite the lack of moral consciousness inherent in its display, must still merit praise and admiration from the observer.

A second defense of battlefield courage as praiseworthy, closely related to the first, is that its moral cost is beside the point. The self-sacrifice that war manages to elicit from countless combatants consecrates their cause, even the worst one, not only those causes that are better. Combat is difficult and hence admirable. Even more, when human exertion flies in the face of the most elementary will to self-preservation, this exertion must have some kind of goodness, even if not the goodness of virtue.

Both defenses are initially or ultimately existential. Existential considerations take over the apologetic burden hitherto carried by aristocratic virtue. The underlying premise of the first defense is the belief that there are certain values--for example, richness of experience--that often outweigh moral ones. The second defense has a more radical premise. It is that some nonmoral values have an independent standing and may legitimately disallow the relevance of moral concerns altogether. These nonmoral values have as great a claim on human respect as any moral ones. Common to the two defenses is the claim that there are supreme existential values of expression--expression of human capacities that would remain latent if moral claims were allowed to veto all others. To be sure, war is action, and action is in many spheres of life subject to moral judgment. But war's action is so distinct and also so existentially significant that moral judgment may either be outweighed or not allowed any say at all.

What matters for both positions is not moral goodness, but human traits, bonds, and efforts of a special sort. The first position exonerates the inwardness of combatants in the spirit of the saying of Jesus: forgive them for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34). They are so caught up in experience they are ecstatic, they are innocent. The second position does more than exonerate; it sanctifies the inwardness of combatants by concentrating on their readiness to give up everything in a spirit of selflessness.

These themes and many besides are explored with a high intelligence by the late J. Glenn Gray in his book The Warriors, first published in 1959. It is one of the few books that aim at holding up battlefield courage as praiseworthy while still paying full attention to the moral issues involved. Gray does not unequivocally give the last word to moral considerations, but he certainly presents the moral case with power. Trained in German philosophy and then a combatant in World War II, he provides a subtle, often tormented phenomenological account of his experiences. In the course of his book, he accepts both of the just named defenses of unvirtuous battlefield courage as praiseworthy, but his overall achievement is not reducible to any particular position. He manages to reveal to skeptics why war attracts combatants and compels the imagination of many observers. He also reminds those who love the experience of war why they should not do so with a whole heart. Gray himself would not have done without the experience of war, but the insights he accumulates make it clear that war is ruinously expensive--to the character of those who fight as well as to the most simple moral precepts. Yet in the rapid flow of the book's contending sentiments, battlefield courage remains worthy of his admiration: he does not call it a virtue but he does find it most praiseworthy. Perhaps, on balance, the world is better for having war: on that note the book ends. In any case, only in utopian speculation--which Gray attempts in the last chapter--can war ever disappear. Its occurrence is inevitable. The situation is lamentable, but not only lamentable.

I will concentrate on the two defenses of battlefield courage as Gray presents them: praiseworthy and admirable courage, even if the word virtue must be withheld from it. It would not be uncharitable to remember as we read Gray's book that he knew as a scholar about the scale of horrors of World War I and knew as a scholar and participant about the scale of horrors of World War II.

Let us begin with the first defense: by calling forth battlefield courage, war makes possible experience that no other human activity affords. It is a matter of intensity: war is the highest intensifier of valuable experience. The standard is not Aristotelian happiness, but a kind of exhilaration that is perhaps not far from Dionysian intoxication; but as Gray renders it, it is available without religious feeling. Anyone--any young man, for Gray--is likely to find in war an exhilaration that surpasses any other. From within the exhilaration, battlefield courage is born. A man is swept away, carried out of himself and enabled to perform courageous deeds that he had never dreamed of or only fantasized about. Especially if one is not a professional soldier, and has had only basic training, and comes from a society that does not organize all its institutions and habits and sentiments around the practice of war, one's battlefield courage will be what I call spontaneous. Spontaneous courage will not be courage as a virtue, as Plato and Aristotle conceptualize virtue, because they tend to see virtue as that which can be attained only as the result of cultivation and training from the earliest age and in a setting that favors it. But spontaneous courage will be, in Gray's analysis, praiseworthy, as praiseworthy as the virtue of courage in Plato and Aristotle. (They both pay only a little grudging attention to the courage of ordinary democratic citizens, ignoring Pericles' pride in the spontaneous courage of the people: "courage not of art but of nature.") (Thucydides, II:38: 109)

On the first defense of battlefield courage, then, the question is, Why does war's exhilaration call forth spontaneous courage? For the purpose of distilling the benefits of Gray's work for our discussion, I will add that this question can be seen from two perspectives. The exhilaration, the intensification of experience that combat arouses, as Gray describes it, is of course what the soldier feels and may or may not put into words during or right after the action. There is another perspective, that of the observer (which Gray himself sustains throughout his book). But Gray's readers are also observers and their views may not always agree with his. I distinguish between perspectives because each emphasizes different (if related) values. (I will also discuss both perspectives when we take up the second defense of battlefield courage.) All these values figure in Gray's book.

For the combatant, the experience is intense owing to what Gray calls "the enduring appeals of battle" (the title of his second chapter). Such intensity contributes to the growth of the self-knowledge of the combatant by eliciting unsuspected courage but also in other ways. But is there a growth of selfhood? If there is, such growth would not be, I think, the same as self-realization. The experience of war may be the highest point of one's life, but it is radically discontinuous from the rest of one's life. It interrupts the arc of one's life. It need not influence the way in which one leads one's life thereafter. War may be the professional soldier's self-realization, but it is not that of the recruited soldier who, if he survives, will return to civilian life. Gray is only occasionally interested in the professional soldier. On the other hand, when Gray becomes an observer reflecting on his own experience of the intensity and exhilaration of war, he wants to get readers to share his conviction that war is indispensable because it shows what human beings are capable of: the lengths to which they will go to succeed in an enterprise, the resourcefulness they can show in the face of great risks, and, above all, the courage they can show in the face of supreme danger. The values of Gray the observer are, for much of the book, existential. The moral cost recedes or evaporates. That war is so to speak a manufactured situation, a manufactured necessity, does not signify. For the sake of his existentialism, and as part of it, Gray adopts an aesthetic perspective. His thoughts lead easily to the conclusion that life is best seen as a spectacle in which lethal conflict is the source of the greatest dramatic effect. All sides and participants are equally necessary to the spectacle. To mount the spectacle of war is a great source of the honor of the human race, of pride in human stature.

The appeals of battle call forth spontaneous courage. If you will, the pleasures of combat help to make men eager to stay in war and hence do what courage makes it possible for them to do. If the display of courage is not the end in sight, it is an exaction that many are willing to endure. War is unthinkable without it, and men may be said to want war--not only when they are bored by peace but also when they are in the thick of battle. What, then, are "the secret attractions of war" (28), as Gray recounts them? From his experience and observation, three stand out. Together they are modes of exhilaration, of experience at its most intense. The first is "the delight in seeing," the second is the "delight in comradeship," and the third is "the delight in destruction" (28-29). He attributes all three delights to combatants in general, including himself, and also hopes that readers will endorse his conclusions when he took upon himself the role of observer while still a combatant (excerpts from his wartime journals and letters are included in the book), but most profoundly when he wrote about his experience in the years afterwards.

Gray hopes that readers will understand and perhaps sympathize with two of the delights (seeing and comradeship). As for the delight in destruction, it is an evil that may nevertheless foster a stronger disposition to preservative goodness than peaceful life could ever do. Of these three passions--the satisfaction of which are all delights--Gray is most eloquent (and perhaps most convincing) on comradeship. It turns out that delight in comradeship leads Gray to the theme of admirable self-sacrifice. Thus all three delights contribute to the defense of battlefield courage as a vehicle of intense experience, but delight in comradeship moves Gray to what I have called the second defense of praiseworthy battlefield courage. I will take up the passions in Gray's sequence and connect them to the two defenses.

The delight in seeing is a concept Gray borrows from St. John's First Epistle, where he speaks of "the lust of the eyes" (2:16). The appeal of war is more to the mind's eye than to what we literally see. Still, the physical eyes are filled with pleasure by the sight of foreign lands; by the armaments of war, the explosion of bombs; by groups marching in order; by "the captured enemy in a cage" (29). Witnessing these tableaux, the mind also feeds on the spectacle of war. Ugliness itself has an aesthetic appeal (30), and scenes of battle have a "fearful beauty"--Gray alludes to Yeats's phrase "terrible beauty" about the Easter uprising in Ireland in 1916 (32). In moments of abstraction from the human cost of war's havoc, "the scene was beyond all question magnificent" (33). Gray candidly pictures the way in which the aesthetic faculties may suspend the moral ones. Most important, the aesthetic gratification of war is not the impression of beauty that these phenomena leave with the susceptible participant-observer, but rather the feeling of the sublime (33).

Gray says, "Astonishment and wonder and awe appear to be part of our deepest being, and war offers them an exercise field par excellence" (34). He takes issue with those who think that a feeling of the sublime must arise from a feeling of superiority to the "blind forces and lifeless powers of nature" (35). No, the sublimity of war is not triumph over forces, human or natural, but instead "a recognition of power and grandeur to which we are subject" (35). The experience of sublimity is an extraordinary intensification of experience. But the crucial point is that under the spell of wonder at apparently superhuman forces, soldiers are severed from a sense of self and hence subordinate themselves to the effort of war. "We are able to disregard personal danger at such moments by transcending the self, by forgetting our separateness" (35). (Is the sense of self really lost when the self is witness to its own transcendence, I wonder?) Perhaps not every soldier can lose himself in rapt contemplation in the midst of danger, but it is "a common-enough phenomenon" (36). One sees a duty to make the sublime occurrence materialize or continue. Indeed, Gray thinks that if the world ends because of some tremendous explosions, "there will be those who will watch the spectacle to the last minute, without fear, disinterestedly and with detachment" (36).

Aesthetic considerations have a sizable part in coaxing courage. Courage is needed for creation of sublimity, but the impression of sublimity in turn also increases courage. Yet, as Gray says, the delight in seeing with the mind's eye, which appears "to be a noble quality in men," has a moral cost. Does Gray think that sublimity of this sort outweighs the moral cost? He equivocates, but he is certain that "aesthetic ecstasy ... is always pressing us beyond the border of the morally permissible" (39). He does not take the way out that consists in saying that the aesthetic and the moral are both valuable, but incommensurably so, and that one's choice between them is therefore a mere preference without a reasoned basis. One simply chooses. Gray leaves the matter hanging at this point in the text, but subsequently allows morality to catch up with the aesthetic and eventually subordinate it. Yet the memory of the sublimity of war remains together with its intimate tie to spontaneous battlefield courage. It haunts morality with a sense of the existential costs of morality.

The second and most salient appeal of war is the tie of comradeship. Like the feeling of sublimity, comradeship also involves a loss of sense of self, or at least an attenuation of it. But unlike the essentially aesthetic quality of the delight in seeing, the delight in comradeship is, in Gray's view, a moral passion. Comradeship is devotion to one's fellows. The trouble is that the devotion is so exclusive that the cost to others does not register on oneself. Only one's comrades retain reality as human beings. Comradeship is therefore, in my judgment, not a moral passion but a quasi-moral one; it is really existential. Its other-regarding demands on the self can be even more strenuous than those of impersonal morality, but it effaces the moral claims of all people but one's "little platoon." Comradeship mimics morality while betraying it. Many combatants experience this devotion and the intoxication that goes with it. Gray expects disinterested readers to sympathize fully. But the quasi-moral is likely to work with the force of immorality. Moral commitments may consequently preclude sharing Gray's love of comradeship. In any event, by being the greatest reward of battlefield courage, comradeship is its greatest instigator.

It is at this point that the advantages to selfhood of intensity of experience give way to the willingness to sacrifice oneself. Delight in comradeship is so great that it transforms itself into dying for one's comrades. It rises above itself. What I have labeled the first defense of battlefield courage merges with the second.

What makes delight in comradeship the great source of battlefield courage and drives it to the extreme point of self-sacrifice? I suppose that someone at the point of dying can rarely put into words the causes of his heroism. There are, of course, famous last words, but they cover more than they reveal, and though they signify, they explain little. Gray makes a strong effort to disclose the mentality of combatants, while reserving for himself as a philosophical observer the capacity to articulate ideal reasons. To be sure, ideal reasons capture a good part of what combatants feel, but there remain considerations that only a philosophical observer can be sensitive to. Let us begin with these ideal reasons.

Gray says that many veterans who are honest with themselves will admit that "participation with others in the chances of battle had its unforgettable side." Though hard to express and to make intelligible to those without the experience, "Probably the feeling of liberation is basic" (44). Gray then goes on to distill the highest value of the experience of war in the company of comrades. "Many of us can experience freedom as a thrilling reality ... only when we are acting with others for a concrete goal that costs something absolute for its attainment" (44). But this thought with its affinities to German Idealism is underlain by a remarkable effort to speak an unpleasant truth (if truth it is). He says, "Individual freedom to do what we will with our lives and our talents, the freedom of self-determination, appears to us most of the time as frivolous or burdensome. Such freedom leaves us empty and alone, feeling undirected and insignificant. Only comparatively few of us know how to make this individual freedom productive and joyous. But communal freedom can pervade nearly everyone and carry everything before it" (45-46). He knows that he has voiced an antidemocratic sentiment. After all, the Athenian democrats had defined freedom as doing what you want and living as you like. But communalism is a tremendous delight; it is freedom from freedom. The individual self is not large enough. "With the boundaries of the self expanded, they [the combatants] sense a kinship never known before. Their 'I' passes insensibly into a 'we,' 'my becomes our,' and individual fate loses its central importance" (45). The echoes of Plato's characterization of the fate of the individual self in the ideal ruling and fighting class must be deliberate. The bond among warriors is tighter than any other in the world.

Now, the "communal ecstasy" (46) of this comradeship, Gray says, is unlike the aesthetic ecstasy of the sublime fed by the appeal of battle to the mind's eye. The whole person is caught up in comradeship, not merely his contemplative fascination. A common mortal danger and a common effort to repel that danger help to account for loyalty to the group. It is loyalty unto death. There must be a "superpersonal will" in charge (41); the military command must be in place; there must be organization; any fighting unit "must have a limited and specific objective" (42). With these preconditions met, the fighting unit will develop a passionate comradeship once in the thick of battle. All this intense experience, however, has its telos beyond itself. Under the severest pressure, comradeship becomes self-sacrificial. Is it love of comrades that makes each soldier selfless? Not quite. Gray speaks of "the assurance of immortality that makes self-sacrifice at these moments so relatively easy" (46). Perhaps there is a religious basis for this assurance. But Gray prefers to make it this-worldly. The closest he comes to a flat explanation is his remark that "death becomes in a measure unreal and unbelievable to one who is sharing his life with his companions. Immortality ... becomes a present and self-evident fact" (46). In other words, "the self that dies is little in comparison with that which survives and triumphs" (47).

In a later chapter, "The Soldier's Relation to Death," Gray speaks in a different tone about self-sacrifice. The writing is at times actually morbid. Here he is more interested in those who have a relation to death and hence to self-sacrifice that is "not so common" (121). Even though it is not so common, it is "closer to representing the essence of the fighting man" (121-22). Some who fight "can learn to regard death as an anticipated experience among other experiences" (122). Indeed, death is "a supreme kind of experience" because "They look out upon the world as adventure" (123). These combatants are dashing, light-hearted, careless of their own lives and those of others. They verge on the inhuman (124). Yet they are admirable. Their action unto death is in itself a philosophical commentary on life. The most thoughtful of them "regard death as that absolute in human existence which gives life its poignancy and intensity" (122). They are at the furthest remove from those whose exhaustion makes them welcome death on the battlefield (104) or those who find in dying atonement for the killing they have done (120). The adventurous are uninterested in morality but very much interested in the proper existential relation to death and hence to life. Gray's own existentialism is most keen when his writing becomes impassioned about courageous adventurers. But when he says that for the poetical or philosophical nature, "death is an adventure in knowledge," it is hard to see how any but a more or less religious attitude is at play, not an existential one.

When Gray writes about the soldier's relation to death, he leaves the average experience of combatants behind. He is thinking aloud philosophically. He is appealing as an observer to other observers; and they can say that the words are impressive, but have no necessary force. The words do not compel, much less persuade those for whom the moral question of the rightness of the cause in which self-sacrifice figures is paramount. The argument is at its most serious when Gray tries to render the mentality of the great mass of combatants. When they are immersed in comradeship, but not inclined to philosophize, battlefield courage comes over them and they perform feats of selflessness that they could not have planned to perform, being unprofessional soldiers temporarily removed from civilian life. Their feats are antithetical to the tenor of their civilian lives. Their courage is not virtuous in the ancient sense; it is spontaneous, an unpremeditated response to common peril. But it is a response that is unthinkable without the favoring circumstances of the battlefield.

Before finally expressing admiration for such self-sacrifice, Gray stages an argument. He attributes to unequivocal defenders of war the view that the capacity for self-sacrifice brings men to "a recognition of their true nature and their essential relationships" (48). There is a "mystical element" in war" (47). Opponents press the point that "As often as not, it [self-sacrifice in war] puts itself at the service of an evil cause" (49). Gray's exasperated judgment is that "What our moral self tells us is abhorrent, our religious self and aesthetic self yearn for as the ultimate good" (49-50). Can he break out of the dilemma? He introduces a number of suggestions. Among them are these: his favorable reference to Christian theologians who taught that "without the supra-moral act, we human beings are not able to lead even a normally moral existence" (50); and his contention that self-sacrifice, like attraction to the sublime, "makes possible the higher reaches of the spirit into the realms of poetry, philosophy, and genuine religion" (50). Extremism makes moderation dependable; the best and the worst are joined at the root. He concludes, "Are we not right in honoring the fighter's impulse to sacrifice himself for a comrade, even though it be done, as it so frequently is, in an evil cause? I think so." (50). Why exactly? There is no exactness; there probably cannot be any. There is only, at the last, a proud existential or even quasi-religious sentiment: "our species has a different destiny than is granted to other animals" (51). By the time Gray is finished, he has buried moral considerations, though with a troubled conscience.

I have no doubt that Gray has made as good an existential case as anyone for the idea that battlefield courage as such is praiseworthy, admirable. As we have seen, that case is built on two main facts: battlefield courage goes with unusual intensity of experience and it expresses itself with striking frequency in the form of self-sacrifice. The upshot is that it is praiseworthy whatever the cause that elicits it. War, the manufacturer of necessity, has more to do with human greatness of stature than almost any other activity and is indissociable from all other great activities. Against such an outlook, the moral voice insists that there must be expressions of physical courage that are in fact dissociable from war and battlefield courage, that show forth human greatness, and that also are moral or compatible with morality. In the next section, we will turn to these alternatives.

Gray's third enduring appeal of battle is delight in destruction. Intensity of experience is once again the key matter. What combatants are capable of is here shown not in self-sacrifice but in the urge to level, waste, and kill. Both combatants and observers (including Gray himself) can take pleasure in witnessing or imagining destruction. For combatants, this pleasure is a compound of two pleasures: fighting for the sake of the pleasure of fighting unto death, and fighting for the sake of the pleasure of prevailing by means of inflicting death; the pleasures of mortal contest and of victory in mortal contest. (The destruction of structures and artifacts and perhaps the desolation of nature also provide pleasure.) Both pleasures ultimately stem from a love of violence: the sheer pleasure of violence. But he says that this delight is "a radical evil" because soldiers turn into "berserkers and destroyers" (51). He is ashamed of feeling this delight, this "ecstasy without a union" (56). Nevertheless, he cannot resist trying to draw something praiseworthy from this abomination. His theme is how proximity to destruction may call up a tender preservative love. "The object of one's care is less essential than the presence of the need to take care and preserve" (85). Once again, the existential value of a human trait is prized above the benefits that may accrue from its display. I am afraid, however, that the passages on preservative love do nothing to lessen the terribleness of the urge to destroy that precedes it. It is not clear how many soldiers have this feeling. In any case, battlefield courage in itself is not at issue, although the wish to praise and admire it is rudely assaulted by its connection to baseness in human beings and to what is lower than baseness--inflamed criminality. Gray simply could not find the delight in destruction void of some compensatory grace. But the cruel destruction far outweighs the preservation, which is called forth only to palliate the destruction. In such a context, the preservative love has no moral importance; it comes close to self-indulgence; at the least it is self-serving.

Gray makes the enduring appeals of battle, the secret attractions of war, not only vivid but philosophically noteworthy. He shows conceptual delicacy in linking battlefield courage with both intensity of experience and the willingness for self-sacrifice. He mounts a complex existential defense of battlefield courage. This leads him to inhabit Aristotle's intermittent view that though fighting does not exist for the sake of the pleasures of fighting, war may exist for the sake of courage as much as courage exists for the sake of war. Gray is suggesting that the "delights" of war absolutely depend on battlefield courage to keep war as a practice intact, and that courage enhances existence--enhances even the life of the combatants who die. The enhancement of life is yoked to the necessities of war. The rejoinder to Gray (which is also an endorsement of his moral side) is that the moral costs, the costs to the lives and decent well-being of countless people, are well beyond exorbitant. Gray would not part with his experience of war, but he would, though with some ambivalence, see the world free of war.

Let us begin where he (almost) ends. Let us suggest that for all the existential benefits of battlefield courage, for all the temptation to admire it irrespective of the cause in which it is shown, we would be glad to see it disappear from the world, along with war. In its place, we would begin with an admiration of other kinds of physical courage, and then see where that response led. It would be too easy, though not necessarily false, to say that intellectual courage and moral courage are intrinsically superior to physical courage. Let us therefore stay with physical courage. When could we admire it without running into the wall of moral objections? Is it not in fact sometimes needed for the sake of acting morally or compatibly with morality?

Gray's richness of mind facilitates a much less existential defense of physical courage. He also greatly helps to rebut the tendency of Plato's and Aristotle's teaching that virtuous courage requires cultivation and training. Rather, courage can be spontaneous and is perhaps all the more remarkable for being uncultivated and only minimally trained. Not indoctrinated right opinion but common, if unreflective, sentiments provide the spur. Gray is also free of the difficulties that come from calling battlefield courage a virtue even when--perhaps especially when--courage is shown in the habitual commission of immoral deeds that contribute to a larger scheme of wrongdoing. The result of Gray's meditations is that he gives life to the thought that the courage of the world--whether on the battlefield or elsewhere--is spontaneous courage. It comes and goes, even when under military discipline. In war it occurs amid conditions of manufactured necessity--not artificial, as in sports; not urgent, as in some dangerous peaceful occupations--but manufactured by the inexhaustible irrationality of reason of state. If battlefield courage is so morally dubious, we must think again as to when spontaneous courage is properly admirable and praiseworthy, when in fact we can call it a virtue, though not as Plato and Aristotle define virtue.

There is one more lesson that emerges from Gray's book, and it is the most important one. He makes the idea plausible that strictly speaking there can be no "moral equivalent" to battlefield courage. The reason is that there is no activity that is moral or morally compatible that provides equivalent existential advantages to those of war. We can find a number of activities that come close as existential equivalents, but if we think comradeship unto death an existential advantage, we are not likely to discover any activity existentially equal to it. The existential significance of the self-sacrifice of comrades unto death is only rarely encountered in peaceful activities that are moral or morally compatible--though of course, miners, fire workers, and police, among others can lead dangerous lives. To be sure, experience off the battlefield can be as intense as war, to use the other existential criterion. (Are we sure that action where the risk of death is ever present is intense, rather than unreal?) It is not enough, however, for the moral minded to say that war is not needed for the "delight in seeing," whether the reward is beauty or sublimity; or even that there can be comradeship, or something like it, in many spheres of life, even if not typically unto death. We must concede to Gray's existential outlook what we have to: we must admit that serious losses are inflicted on certain existential values by moral claims. But then we can go on to think about peacetime physical courage within a moral framework. Within a moral framework, let it be said, existential values will find a large place, but not the dominant one, not the primacy desired by a number of thinkers, including Gray some of the time. But because we want to admire and praise physical courage, we must have examples of it as a virtue--when its traditional entanglement with wrongdoing is left behind. And the more spontaneous, the more uncultivated or untrained, that virtuous courage is, the better.

I WOULD LIKE TO OFFER SOME UTOPIAN SPECULATION ABOUT COURAGE as a virtue. Whatever the existential losses sustained in severing courage from the battlefield, the moral gains are considerable. We must look for activities in which physical courage of a high order can be displayed and individuals can reasonably expect to earn honor for that display in their own eyes as well as the observer's. We already bestow honor on most of them, but to burnish it we should try to stop bestowing honor on battlefield courage and see it as the organized criminality that it is. Thus, there are activities that have existential affinities with battlefield experience in their intensity; some of these activities may contain the element of personal risk (even unto death, though rarely), whether for the sake of comrades or only in their company. Probably the intensity and the risk are not typically as great as they are in battlefield experience. Absolute self-sacrifice does not define these activities. Once again, so be it. These moral or morally compatible activities benefit the souls of the participants and produce immense advantages for others. Another advantage is the help they give philosophical observers in shoring up human stature and establishing the honor of the human race, though not through killing.

In thinking about courage as a virtue, as I have defined it, one would think that the sensible next step would be to enlist the help of William James's celebrated essay, "The Moral Equivalent of War" (1910). The essay is undeniably rich; it is written by a fierce opponent of American imperialism and by a self-described pacifist. Yet so intent is James on seeing war as perhaps the most important revealer "of what men and women are able to bear" ("The Energies of Men" (1907): 1228) that he gives much more to unqualified defenders of war ("the war-party") than they deserve (James, 1910: 1290). James is captivated by the possibility that it is good for young people especially to be "owned" by their country (1292), disposed in their conscripted service to pay "the blood-tax" they owe it (1291), and ready to submit themselves to a collective discipline in the name of "a stable system of morals of civic honour" (1290). James fears the softening effects of peace; he is anxious for the retention of "manliness" (1290); he is afraid of relaxation in competition; he is an apostle of strenuousness. He is victimized a bit by both the Social Darwinian and the Teutonic rubbish of his period, sensitive and generous soul that he was. He therefore gives the war party too much. Furthermore, he defines the moral equivalent of war as the enlistment of all young men in the war "against Nature," the "immemorial human warfare against nature" (1291). He does not appear to confine the war against nature to the eradication of disease and the remedial anticipation of catastrophe. In a more environmentally sensitive age than his, identifying the worst enemy as nature as such, rather than humanity's irresponsibility toward nature, would hardly register as moral. The irresponsibility is as bad as war, or worse.

So we must turn to other writers for assistance, especially Tocqueville. Once again, he does better for democracy than almost all democrats. In the second volume of Democracy in America (1954 [1840]), he writes splendidly about the changes in the exercise of courage and the bestowal of honor effected by the replacement of aristocratic culture by democracy. His description of the aristocratic (essentially medieval) ethos is a succinct characterization of a world that by his time was seriously attenuated but had lingered, and that had not ever taken root in the American colonies (at least in the northern ones). To follow Tocqueville's account is to receive the best instruction on the moral equivalent of war, to the extent that moral or morally compatible activity may have important existential qualities.

In Tocqueville's telling, feudal aristocracy preferred "great crimes to small earnings" precisely on grounds of the human stature, the human greatness, of the elite (3.18: 244). That is just one indication of how bold and brilliant vices would readily be set above "quiet, unpretending virtues" (244). Among the virtues, as the aristocracy understood them, especially honorable were those virtues "which are conspicuous for their dignity and splendor and which may be easily combined with pride and the love of power" (244). The feudal nobility went so far as to place military courage "foremost among virtues and in lieu of many of them" (245). Tocqueville does not hesitate to call the aristocratic notion of the highest virtues an inversion of "the natural order of conscience" (244). Indeed, running throughout Tocqueville's chapter is a systematic contrast between "notions of right and wrong diffused all over the world" (242) and the "special rules" that make up the aristocratic "code of honor" (251). As elsewhere in the book, he says that the clash between aristocracy and democracy is not only a clash of worlds, but also a clash between the peculiar but partial aristocratic abandonment of ordinary morality and democracy's full acceptance of ordinary morality as its organizing principle.

What we have been seeing as a conflict between existential values and moral ones, Tocqueville renders as a conflict between upper-class warrior values and moral ones. Reading him is an ideal preparation for thinking about the revision of courage as a virtue. He familiarizes us with the idea that democracy changes all values in a democratic direction, even courage and honor. He is most instructive on the sources of honor in a democracy. They include practice of the "quiet virtues that tend to give a regular movement to the community and to encourage business" (248). Honor is to some extent displaced away from physical courage and on to success in business. Love of wealth, which is censured in other cultures (even if hypocritically), is praised when associated with boldness of enterprise (248). But democracy shares some of the sources of honor with aristocracy. Indeed, both cultures look upon physical courage as the highest virtue.

Then Tocqueville unexpectedly says that in America "martial valor is little prized" (249). Whether or not democracy can love war and still be consistent with its commitment to human rights, American democracy has always loved warriors and even war itself: so much of its history involves initiated armed conflict. Be that as it may, the fact remains that American democracy has made a specialty of according honor to risky physical activities that have nothing to do with war, and Tocqueville notices that fact. He says that "the most esteemed courage is what emboldens men to brave the dangers of the ocean; privations of the wilderness" (249). The motive maybe money, but the virtue involved in getting it seems to exceed the gain; the gain could not possibly be the sufficient psychological explanation (or the main source of our admiration).

Our theme is physical courage. We do not have to say that any activity that requires some kind of boldness or strenuousness, or some kind of competitive zest, or that manages to attain fame and with it honor, but that does not hold great physical risk, can be seen as analogous to physical courage on the battlefield. Battlefield courage undoubtedly shares attributes and advantages with other activities that carry no physical risk. But let us stay with physical courage in the face of supreme risk to life and limb. If we do, we easily see that Tocqueville's examples of braving the dangers of the ocean and enduring the privations of the wilderness are often morally compatible exercises of physical courage; they provide intensity of experience and bring the prospect of death more near. There may be no selflessness in such exercises and usually no certainty that some comrades will die and that those who survive will nevertheless have been willing to die for comrades and comradeship. We can add such activities as dangerous sports and other athletic activities, and the exploration of space. With or without expensive technology, these and other activities can be individual or collaborative undertakings, but they all surely give physical courage ample scope for its display. They provide tests of character under trying circumstances and allow a person to measure himself or herself without harming others. They help to make courage a virtue and they emphasize that if courage in some of its expressions may require basic training, it cannot emanate from cultivation or indoctrination. If it did, it would most likely be criminal. If not purely spontaneous, physical courage as a virtue is comparatively spontaneous.

And then what of the unspeakable courage of women who bear children when they live in a place where, as they know, more than a few die giving birth? Not to mention the pain of childbirth in the best of circumstances. In a political vein we can add the practices of nonviolent politics when dissenting or rebellious participants confront those willing to use violence against them or threaten them with the awful prospect of a prison term. A more dangerous nonviolent political act is to rescue or give refuge to the persecuted at grave risk to oneself. Nonviolent politics is politics at its moral best, sometimes collaborative but always individualistic because conscientious; and it becomes admirable and honorable when, but of course not only when, it requires the physical courage that peaceful resistance without retaliation often depends on. (1)

In sum, humanity will always need physical courage. William James, for one, has a marvelous description of people's pluck during and after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which he experienced (James, 1906). The struggle to preserve oneself and others or the passion to sacrifice oneself for others can continue without war. Courage is not only a practical necessity, it is also an enlargement of humanity. The task is to confine it morally.

The unfortunate general judgment is that democracy has not yet adequately revised physical courage and the honor that is accorded to it. Democracy still regularly implicates courage in terrible wrongdoing by its appeals to both gullible patriotism and gullible masculinity. Unvirtuous courage thrives on the mindlessness of "right opinion." But at least democracy gives impetus to private, often individualistic physical deeds of enormous risk and lavishes honor on them. Courage can be and is shown without stain. Comradeship unto death should cease being the paradigm of courage and the apex of honor. How great, really, are the existential losses we countenance when we try hard to deny praise and admiration to comradeship unto death?

NOTES

(1.) There is a large area of inquiry that we cannot address in this paper: how individual suicide can be an act of virtuous physical courage when the person takes his or her own life to avoid the possibility of degradation in one's status as a human being, or acts before the degradation is complete and the thought of suicide vanishes along with all other thoughts. Suicide is often seen as cowardly on the questionable but plausible assumption that fear of death is a smaller fear than that of pains. Whatever one's opinion of suicide as such, it seems to me that to take one's life because one knows that one is or soon will be degraded by one's suffering--the degradation caused by suffering but conceptually distinct from it--is an admirable act of virtuous physical courage. It is certainly at least compatible with morality; as a self-regarding act, it may not be a moral or immoral act in itself. The act is a defense of one's personal honor, and it adds to human stature by defending the honor of the human race in one's own person.

In private life, a degenerative disease like Alzheimer's in its earliest stages can rightly be judged by the patient as an inevitable degradation to be avoided by a timely suicide. But apart from disease, there is the fate of inmates in concentration camps and death camps. Bruno Bettelheim in his remarkably perceptive book, The Informed Heart (1971 [1960]), and Primo Levi in four magnificent and endlessly instructive nonfiction books (three on the camps and one on the journey home), contemplate this awful subject memorably (Levi, 1989 [1986], 1995a [1963], 1995b [1981], 1996 [1947]). (I do not say these writers are the only ones.) I take from them a twofold meaning of degradation. First, becoming completely the plaything of others, utterly incapable of free agency or even a passive personhood; and second, becoming unable to think of anyone but oneself, of anything but one's literal survival, and becoming as a consequence unable to be moral, even in a minimal, negative sense. The effect of systematically, unrelentingly, and minutely inflicted suffering is degradation; but degradation may not be felt as its own kind of suffering. The accumulation of pains is likely to monopolize one's consciousness. Degradation requires, however, some awareness, as from a distance, of one's situation. One must still be able to ask oneself, What have they made (or do they mean to make) of me?

I believe, after reading Bettelheim and Levi (both of them suicides but years after their camp experience), and less equivocally than they, that suicide to avoid degradation in camps is an honorable act of physical courage. It is all the more honorable because degradation is not one's fault; the experiences that cause it are far more than human nature should ever be asked to bear. The act of suicide would be in no sense punishing oneself for failure or dishonor, much less wickedness. On the way to degradation, it is not possible to achieve recognition of one's human status as a rights-bearing person. The injury to it is mortal. But it is possible, by a leap into a last freedom, to die rather than to persist for a while, and thus bravely to sacrifice oneself for one's honor as a human being and, by that, exemplify the stature of the human race. Is there a better existential affirmation?

Those who avoided or freely ended their degradation in the camps were, according to the testimony of these two writers, very few. In praising suicide in the camps, I am not deterred either by the fact that sometimes suicide by one prisoner would cause others to be punished or by the contention of Bettelheim that most prisoners eventually became suicidal, so that "Psychologically speaking, most prisoners in the extermination camps committed suicide by submitting to death without resistance" (245). A passive longing for death is not the same as a virtuous act of physical courage. To be sure, both writers chose to survive. Bettelheim converted his imprisonment into an occasion for objective inquiry, by splitting himself into two: sufferer and observer; and thus escaped some of the degradation. Levi, on the other hand, did not take his own life because he wanted to survive in order to give witness. Perhaps their intellectual mission spared both of them some of the worst ravages, but Levi especially is merciless about his own awful adaptation. How could I possibly take issue with either of them? But about others, I can only say that in their place, though I do not know what I would have actually done, I hope that I would have had enough courage to take my life for the right reason. Yes, there were some who survived and then went on to lead normal lives; a few, perhaps, as if nothing had happened. Neither my fortunate lack of experience nor the example of survivors, however, stops me from admiring those who took their own lives out of a sense of personal honor and maybe a sense of the honor of the human race. Not that I wish to say that those who went on living for as long as they could were dishonored by a degradation they did not bring on themselves. Can I have it both ways?

Plato says, as we have seen, that death in combat is better than the literal slavery that awaits those who surrender. But imprisonment in camps, at its worst, is worse degradation than slavery, and it is honorable to avoid or end degradation, especially where the motivation is not so much to end suffering as it is to abort the degradation that various physical pains and psychological humiliations can cause. Degradation consists in becoming incapable of acting either freely or morally. It is worse than death, and physical courage, and doubtless other kinds, too, are needed to choose to die by one's own hand before one's time, totally innocent.

REFERENCES

Aristotle. Politics. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. New York: Modern Library, 1943.

--. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Martin Ostwald. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962.

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