I was pondering what courage is over lunch today. I have a few thoughts and observations, that should likely be taken as data points.
It comes from the old French for “heart”.
Continuum formation: do we call people brave who get up and drive to work every day? Not normally. But we do if they have never worked, or have a fear of driving. We might call an agorophobic who goes outside brave, but for most of us it wouldn’t warrant a second thought.
Do we call courageous people who are in danger, but don’t know it? For example, someone swimming in the ocean, menaced by sharks they never see and which never attack? They didn’t know to be afraid, so they weren’t.
Do we award soldiers medals for doing their job in combat? We lost something like 250,000 dead in WW2, and most never got medals. We only award them for conspicuous courage, beyond that normally expected.
Soldiers are trained in many ways to focus on their jobs, first and foremost, and to think as little as possible. This is so they can operate even in conditions of fear, on autopilot, to the extent possible.
It seems to me that courage is what is needed where fear is present. It implies fear. It implies pursuing a course which provokes fear, and staying the course regardless. It is a claustrophobic getting in an elevator, and it is also someone jumping out of an airplane at night who finds it very nerve wracking.
Courage is the WILL to stay the course in spite of what amount to attacks by one part of your self–the self preserving instinct–against another–your sovereign consciousness. Will, in turn, is a type of attention, where you focus on some things–what you want–to the exclusion of alternatives, such as the possibility of flight and failure.
Courage, then, is an exertion of energy in the pursuit of a chosen objective, even though not all parts of you agree with that objective.
Some people love rock climbing. They love the excitement, and they do it voluntarily all the time. Does this take courage? No, not by my definition. All parts of them agree with the objective, even though danger is present. They feel–in most cases with ample cause–that actual danger can be well managed through a focus on the task, on doing it right, and not making mistakes.
Interestingly, this leads to the conclusion that a life well lived needs progressively LESS courage, and more engagement without fear.