Ancient Greece · 350 BC to Present · Aristotle's First Virtue
Courage is the first of human virtues, because it makes all others possible.Aristotle — Nicomachean Ethics, 350 BC
Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the presence of judgment — the decision to act rightly even when the cost of acting is real and the outcome is uncertain. Aristotle placed it first among the virtues not because it is the most important, but because without it none of the others can be practiced. A just person who lacks the courage to act justly when justice is costly accomplishes nothing. A generous person who fears the judgment of others will give nothing that costs anything.
The Stoics refined this further. Courage, for Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, was not primarily physical bravery. It was the courage to think clearly when everything around you insisted on confusion. The courage to say true things when lies were easier. The courage to govern well when governing well was unpopular.
Napoleon Hill, 2,000 years later, called it something simpler: the willingness to act. He observed that most people possess the knowledge of what should be done but lack the courage to do it. Knowledge without action is not knowledge — it is comfortable incompetence.
The concept of courage as a philosophically defined virtue originates with Plato, who discusses it in several dialogues including Laches, which is entirely devoted to the question of what courage is. But it is Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics who gives the most complete treatment: courage as the mean between cowardice and recklessness, the disposition to feel and respond to fear appropriately rather than either fleeing it always or ignoring it always.
In Chinese philosophy, the closest parallel is yǒng — valor or bravery — which Confucius discusses as necessary to the superior person but always in service of righteousness. Courage without righteousness, he argued, produces disorder. In the Bhagavad Gita, the warrior Arjuna must find the courage to fulfill his duty on the battlefield, and Krishna's counsel to him forms the philosophical heart of the text.
In the 20th century, Churchill made courage the master virtue — the quality he admired above all others, the one that all others depended on. He said it is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.Franklin D. Roosevelt — First Inaugural Address, 1933