Philosophy 191 at Syracuse University

 

Thanks to Ms. Clive Tucceri, Philosophy 191 has gotten off to a quite excellent start.  She suggested that courage can be essentially understood as overcoming fear.  This makes courage a morally neutral concept.  Thus, Adolf Hitler and Martin Luther King can both have courage.  Or, to put the point another way and more generally, there is nothing about being an evil person that makes it the case that courage is less within her or his reach. 

Now, it has been pointed out by various individuals that, as a matter of fact, Hitler not all that courageous at all.  That is, although he himself did some rather mean talking, his behavior did not in reality match his words.  This point has been made in writing by, for example, Mr. Gavin Jones.  However,  Tucceri can acknowledge this point without supposing the the substance of her claim is diminished.  For though it may be true of Hitler that he was actually a coward, this does not mean that he could not have been courageous in the way that Ms. Tucceri is understanding the term. 

Ms. Clare Rutz does not reject the importance of overcoming fear, but she adds a most important qualification, namely that the act must be selfless in terms of its motivation.  Messieurs Bach and Meisel are of the mind that courage need not be all that selfless; and they both both offer a similar type of example: the underdog who is told to go away, but who hangs in there nonetheless and who ultimately proves to be rather successful. 

Kyle Maynard is undoubtedly a case in point.  Born with a birth defect that left him essentially without fully-formed limbs, he went on to become a very successful wrestler.  What is surely the case, however, is that at the outset many people did not take him seriously, supposing that he was merely joking or that he had a most ludicrous wish.  But he prevailed and went on to gain the admiration of all around him. 

But does Kyle Maynard really fail to exemplify the selflessness of which Rutz speaks?  Well, yes and no.  On the one hand, it is clear that he was working to help himself and not others.  On the other, though, Maynard was not about acquiring material goods or having more fame than others.  Rather, he was about not letting the obvious impediment of being without well-formed limbs get in the way of his becoming a wrestler.  That is, Maynard's behavior was self-regarding but not egotistical. 

As an aside, it is true that whether a person acts courageously can turn upon the individual's talents or skills with regard to the circumstances.  Obviously, I have no fear talking in front of hundreds whereas this might be rather like a nightmare for another.  This does not turn courage into a purely subjective notion like tastes.  Ms. Tucceri is right to point out that overcoming fear is a most aspect of courage.  And your fear is hardly anything but real just because I do not have fear under like circumstances. 

Now, there is a reason why we do not normally think of overcoming overwhelming odds in order to achieve an excellence as egotistical.  Not wallowing in self-pity and not being discouraged or dismayed by all those who doubt that one can achieve the excellence in question hardly counts as being egotistical.  Indeed, there is in truth something remarkably selfless about doing so.  Why?  Because a person who presses on though she or he had every excuse not to and though no one would have blamed her or him for not trying (or for immediately giving up upon trying) and though in the first place everyone thought her or him to be foolish for trying is a person who gives of herself or himself for the sake of excellence.  What is more, although the success of such individuals of typically occasions much public recognition or even fame, all of that pales in face of the most important of all triumphs, namely that a moral victory of the human spirit was snatched from the very jaws of despair.  It is a testimony to the will of the human spirit to triumph, and to do so mightily, over the vicissitudes of life.  That is precisely why such individuals invariably serve as an example of what we can do if only we should be willing to press on in the face of the multitude of ever-excuses of which we could so readily avail ourselves.  

This, to be sure, is not the selflessness of laying down one's life for another.  Yet, it is nothing at all like the selfishness that makes having more than others the most important thing, if not the only thing, worth striving for.