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What is Courage?

coberst

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What is Courage?

Courage has two components; the ontological (body in action) and the conceptual (mind in action).

Paul Tillich, “Apostle to the intellectuals”, attempts to provide a new theological vocabulary by which modern wo/man might deal with the human situation. Tillich informs us that “Few concepts are as useful for the analysis of the human situation” as the concept of courage.

In his acclaimed book The Courage to Be Tillich sees courage as an “ethical reality”, i.e. courage is foremost a conceptual reality, which is rooted in the whole gestalt of human existence and “ultimately in the structure of being itself. It must be considered ontologically [body-mind in action] in order to be understood ethically”.

When one speaks of mind almost everyone thinks of a stand alone entity functioning in a logical manner in which the body is merely a house for its place of habitation until death, at which time it, sometimes called the soul, floats away to a spiritual kingdom. I wish to correct that erroneous idea.

I have coined the word body-mind, which I first discovered by reading Mark Johnson’s book The Meaning of the Body, because I wish the reader to think not of the mind as a separate entity residing in the body but because I want the reader to think of a body-mind gestalt. That is to say that the mind is an embodied mind, which cannot stand alone just as the heart cannot stand alone with the body bracketed.

Quickie from Wiki: “The psychologist, Carl Jung, who studied archetypes, proposed an alternative definition of symbol, distinguishing it from the term "sign". In Jung's view, a sign stands for something known, as a word stands for its referent. He contrasted this with symbol, which he used to stand for something that is unknown and that cannot be made clear or precise.”

In accordance with Carl Jung I would say that the term “body-mind” is a symbol.

Humans, when they became conscious of their mortality, became overly anxious upon discovering their forthcoming death and they conceptualized the soul, which over millions of years morphed into monotheism and religion. Religion became the promise of life everlasting and thus assuaged the anxiety of death.

This anxiety over mortality caused a self-critical humanity to develop the mind/body dichotomy. This dichotomy leads to the idea that there is an essential difference between body and mind. But SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) informs us that we have a body-mind, that is to say that we are a gestalt, not two parts working separately but an integrated functioning whole. The body and mind works as a single unit. The body in action and the mind in action make the human being in action with a constant interrelationship between these two aspects of the gestalt.

Tillich informs us that the human act of courage is fundamentally a body-mind action driven by an ethical concept. “The courage to be is the ethical act in which man affirms his own being in spite of those elements of his existence which conflict with his essential self-affirmation.”
 

The_Liquid_Laser

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This is my favorite definition of courage:

"Courage is being afraid and yet still doing what you know is right."
 

Mole

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Moral Courage

What is Courage?

Every fireman has physical courage. And every policeman has physical courage. And every soldier has physical courage. And every mother will defend their children with the courage of a tiger. But moral courage is rare.

And moral courage is rare to non-existent among teenagers, for nature has seen to it that teenagers prefer to conform rather than be free. And of course they prefer other teenagers conform rather than be free - and they see to it that they do by continual teasing and bullying.

But moral courage only requires we breathe our own breath, and think our own thoughts, and follow our own tastes.
 

coberst

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Personal heroism by means of individualism is a task requiring courage and self-confidence. Courage and self-confidence are characteristics of few sapiens, young or old. It is a path less traveled because it imposes terrifying burdens; these burdens display themselves by isolation from the common herd. “This move exposes the person to the sense of being completely crushed and annihilated because he sticks out so much, has to carry so much in himself.”

Personal heroism demands that one exposes her self, i.e. s/he sticks out dramatically from the herd. Those creative types who expose themselves so must create their own justification. Herein we find something that may seem illogical “the more you develop as a distinctive free and critical human being, the more guilt you have. Your very work accuses you; it makes you feel inferior. What right do you have to play God?” By what authority do you presume to introduce new meaning into the world?

Otto Rank was a colleague of Freud and, like Jung, carried theories far beyond those which Freud created. “Freud’s reality psychology emphasized essentially the influence of outer factor, of the outer milieu, upon the development of the individual and the formation of character,…I [was] opposed to this biological principle, the spiritual principle which alone is meaningful in the development of the essentially human.”

For Freud the id is the nucleus of being and it, the id, is subject to the natural laws. In such a frame the personality consists of layers of identification that “form the basis of the parental super-ego.” This might be properly considered to be the spiritual structure of the average individual, i.e. the average personality results from the natural influences developed against the naturally evolved super-ego.

Such a theory accounts for the average but does not account for the two creative extremes: the creative type and the so-called “neurotic” type. I would label the average personality to be a reactive individual; an individual who goes with the flow.

There are two personality types that make up the proactive personality: one creative type squeezes him or her self into a tight ball in reaction to the inner and outer milieu, i.e. the so-called “neurotic” and the second creative type who creates a personality wherein the ego “is strong just in the degree to which it is the representative of this primal force and the strength of this force represented in the individual we call will.”

This second creative type, which Rank identifies as the creative type while he identifies the other creative type as the “neurotic”, creates “voluntarily from the impulsive elements and moreover to develop his standards beyond the identifications of the super-ego morality to an ideal formation which consciously guides and rules this creative will in terms of the personality.”

“The essential point in this process is the fact that he evolves his ego ideal from himself, not merely on the ground of the given but also of self-chosen factors which he strives after consciously.”


Quotes from Will Therapy and Truth and Reality by Otto Rank
 

sculpting

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Every fireman has physical courage. And every policeman has physical courage. And every soldier has physical courage. And every mother will defend their children with the courage of a tiger. But moral courage is rare.

And moral courage is rare to non-existent among teenagers, for nature has seen to it that teenagers prefer to conform rather than be free. And of course they prefer other teenagers conform rather than be free - and they see to it that they do by continual teasing and bullying.

But moral courage only requires we breathe our own breath, and think our own thoughts, and follow our own tastes.

excellent point.
 

Timeless

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Courage is blowing up a battleship with a knife and a paperclip.

... :rofl1:
 

sLiPpY

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"Courage is having more balls, than brains." - sLiPpY
 

gromit

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Here's what I have realized: there's no such thing as feeling brave. If you felt brave, you wouldn't be scared and you wouldn't need courage in the first place. It's when you're doing something difficult, terrifying, that you are actually being brave.

You can't feel brave, but you can be brave, in the moment where you are completely alone inside of yourself and realize what you're made of.
 

miss fortune

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I always kind of liked the definition from To Kill a Mockingbird :)

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 11, spoken by the character Atticus
 

Venom

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I always kind of liked the definition from To Kill a Mockingbird :)

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 11, spoken by the character Atticus

meh...sounds more honorable suicide ^^^

I've heard people try and differentiate it as:

Bravado: a swaggering show of courage
Courage: a quality of spirit that enables you to face danger or pain without showing fear
Bravery - audacious: invulnerable to fear or intimidation; "audacious explorers"; "fearless reporters and photographers"; "intrepid pioneers"

Bravery: face danger because you are above being scared...but you arent being necissarily stupid about it
Bravado: face danger because you are above being scared...but you are being kind of stupid/overconfident
Courage: You're scared, but you do it anyways, knowing everything will work itself out before all is said n done.
 

Lark

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Did you know that according to Dawkin's selfish gene effectively bravery, courage and no number of other social or cultural constructs are effectively impossible or in one way or another in the service of biologically determined drives to ensure your individual genes survive into the next generation?

How reductivist is that shit? The argument? Well, by analogy with birds sacrificing themselves to defend their young, yeah, I know, analogy, with a lower order of life too, WTF?

And the conceptualisation of courage could well be a "virus", a meme, which has infected minds long enough to be reproduced like such commonplace "mental illnesses" as religion, ideology and, I dont know, disagreeing with Dawkins. Bloudy hell, no matter how tempting it would be to label everything I didnt agree with simply "mad" I'd never be so arrogant as to do so. The whole thing smacks of the soviet "psychiatry".

OK, I was ranting. I know.
 

Katsuni

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Courage is the ability to ignore all warning signs, all physical restraints, and all mental blocks which prevent yeu from doing something stupid, and then going and doing it anyway, no matter how bad an idea it is, simply because yeu have some 'ideal' that must be realized, at any cost.






For example: Going to war. Running into a burning building to save someone. Being a martyr. These take courage. Yeu have to manually retract everything yeur mind and body are telling yeu that it's a REALLY BAD IDEA, just so yeu can uphold something yeu believe in.
 
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