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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.”

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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

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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?

 

Quotes from Will Therapy and Truth and Reality by Otto Rank

 

Well, I did find a slight disagreement with my personal philosophy and the text quoted above in bold, i.e., I agree that in the above text we find "something...illogical."

 

I re-composed the text with more or less the opposite meaning, just to see what would happen. This is what emerged:

 

 

Herein we find something that may seem logical 'the more you develop as a ordinary restrained and uncritical human being, the
less guilt
you have. Your very work praises you; it makes you feel superior. What right do you have not to play God?' By what freedom do you have the right to disbelieve the worshipful [old, sacred, August] meaning the world?

 

 

Answer: all the freedom in the world. That takes courage; to develop as a distinctive free-thinker, critical human being. There is no guilt involved at all, no inferiority complex (at least not anything out of the ordinary, no supplement). Au contraire. You don't even have to play God, or not play God, since the concept of god need not figure into the equation.

 

 

 

A great example of the argument that it takes courage to separate ones self from religious dogma, from god, can be extracted from Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche. Certainly Otto was familiar with that work.

 

 

 

Here's another quote by Otto Rank:

 

"For this very essence of man, his soul, which the artist puts into his work and which is represented by it, is found again in the work by the enjoyer, just as the believer finds his soul in religion or in God, with whom he feels himself to be one. It is on this identity of the spiritual ... and not on a psychological identification with the artist that [aesthetic pleasure] ultimately depends... But both of them, in the simultaneous dissolution of their individuality in a greater whole, enjoy, as a high pleasure, the personal enrichment of that individuality through this feeling of oneness. They have yielded up their mortal ego for a moment, fearlessly and even joyfully, to receive it back in the next, the richer for this universal feeling (Rank, 1932/1989, pp.*109-110). Source

 

 

My interpretation what he is saying is that whether you are an artist [an atheist artist even] or a believer in God, the identity of the spiritual is responsible for the pleasure found in aesthetics. Or something like that, which is logically not true. For the free-thinking atheist, for example, spirituality of any form need not be essential. In fact spirituality of any form may be absent all together. As it is in my case.

 

Otto seems to make synonymous the spiritual and universal feeling, consciousness and soul.

 

Though it may be true that spirituality caries with it that universal wholeness or feeling, it is not evident that the feelings artists experience in their work (which might be a universal feeling of wholeness, or not) is at all spiritual in nature. I argue it is not at all spiritual.

 

 

"What is courage? This courage will not be the opposite of despair. We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades in this country. Hence Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair."

(Rollo May)

 

 

"Courage is more than standing for a firm conviction. It includes the risk of questioning that conviction."

(Julian Weber Gordon)

 

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of fear."

(Mark Twain)

 

 

"We ought to face our destiny with courage."

(Friedrich Nietzsche)

 

 

"Courage is knowing what not to fear."

(Plato)

 

 

"Nothing but courage can guide life."

(Vauvenargues)

 

 

"Courage is its own reward."

(Plautus)

 

 

Courage is a virtue

 

 

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“Repay to the living that it is they find themselves owing the dead”

 

Failure to stand up to our moral obligations is, I think, the cause of much of our sense of guilt. Guilt results here from a lack of courage.

 

This phrase is part of an article “Coming to Terms with Vietnam” documented in Harpers by Peter Marin, Dec. 1980. Coming to terms with Vietnam: Settling our moral debts, By Peter Marin (Harper's Magazine)

 

"All men, like all nations, are tested twice in the moral realm: first by what they do, then by what they make of what they do. The condition of guilt, a sense of one's own guilt, denotes a kind of second chance. Men are, as if by a kind of grace, given a chance to repay to the living that it is they find themselves owing the dead.""

 

This quotation rang my bell on the first time that I read it and it has continued to resonate for me each time that it comes to mind.

 

Morality is, I am convinced, one of the most important concepts in human existence. It is vitally important and, I suspect, almost completely mystifying to the average Joe and Jane. It certainly is mystifying to me.

 

Understanding the meaning of this concept is vital for our welfare as a species and I am convinced that we must do a better job of comprehending its meaning.

 

I think it would be worth while to analyze the above quotation in an effort to develop a meaningful comprehension of aspects that make up morality. But there are many important moral aspects within this quotation and I think we must focus upon only one at a time. I would like to examine, in particular, the phrase “repay to the living that it is they find themselves owing the dead”

 

Cognitive science, often in the form of cognitive semantics, provides us with a means for comprehending the nature of morality.

 

Cognitive science has discovered that “the source domains of our [linguistic] metaphors for morality are typically based on what people over history and across cultures have seen as contributing to their well being”.

 

Morality is primarily seen as a concept that focuses upon enhancing the well-being of others. Cognitive analysis revels that we comprehend morality “based on this simple list of elementary aspects of human well-being—health, wealth, strength, balance, protection, nurturance, and so on”.

 

“Well-Being is Wealth is not our only metaphorical conception of well-being, but it is a component of one of the most important moral concepts we have. It is the basis for a massive metaphor system by which we understand our moral interactions, obligations, and responsibilities. That system, which we call the Moral Accounting metaphor, combines Well-Being is Wealth with other metaphors and with various accounting schemas.”

 

Our moral understanding is often manifested in commonly used metaphors. To do bad to someone is like taking something of value from that person. To do good to someone is like giving something of value to that person. “Increasing others’ well-being gives you a moral credit; doing them harm creates a moral debt to them; that is, you owe them an increase in their well-being-as-wealth.”

 

We are dealing with moral considerations much as we do with financial matters. We maintain a mental balance sheet upon which we record debits and credits of moral dimensions.

 

Morality is about many things and one thing morality is about is reciprocation, which means paying back to others what we owe to them because of something good they did for us. On the flip-side of that is something we call revenge. Revenge is about our feelings that if Mary Ann does something mean to me then I owe her something mean back.

 

Morality is partly about our moral accounting system. We seem to have a moral balance sheet in our head and we are often careful to pay back ‘good with good’ and ‘bad with bad’.

 

Ideas and quotes from Philosophy in the Flesh—Lakoff and Johnson

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[...]

 

Failure to stand up to our moral obligations is, I think, the cause of much of our sense of guilt. Guilt results here from a lack of courage.

 

This phrase is part of an article “Coming to Terms with Vietnam” documented in Harpers by Peter Marin, Dec. 1980. Coming to terms with Vietnam: Settling our moral debts, By Peter Marin (Harper's Magazine)

 

"All men, like all nations, are tested twice in the moral realm [...]"

 

Morality is, I am convinced, one of the most important concepts in human existence. [...]

 

I think it would be worth while to analyze the above quotation in an effort to develop a meaningful comprehension of aspects that make up morality. But there are many important moral aspects [...]

 

Cognitive science, often in the form of cognitive semantics, provides us with a means for comprehending the nature of morality[/b].

 

Cognitive science has discovered that “the source domains of our [linguistic] metaphors for morality are typically based on [...]”.

 

Morality is primarily seen as a concept that focuses upon enhancing the well-being of others. Cognitive analysis revels that we comprehend morality “based on [...]”.

 

“Well-Being is Wealth is not our only metaphorical conception of well-being, but it is a component of one of the most important moral concepts we have. It is the basis for a massive metaphor system by which we understand our moral interactions, obligations, and responsibilities. That system, which we call the Moral Accounting metaphor, combines Well-Being [...].”

 

Our moral understanding is often manifested in commonly used metaphors. [...] “Increasing others’ well-being gives you a moral credit; doing them harm creates a moral debt to them [...]”

 

We are dealing with moral considerations much as we do with financial matters. We maintain a mental balance sheet upon which we record debits and credits of moral dimensions.

 

Morality is about many things and one thing morality is about is reciprocation [...]

 

Morality is partly about our moral accounting system. We seem to have a moral balance sheet in our head [...]

 

 

 

 

Hmm, I thought for a moment I clicked on the wrong thread. This thread used to be about courage. Now, all of a sudden, it's about morality. Courage was not mentioned once in your last post. Though moral and morality were mentioned 23 times.

 

Why, then, the question obviously begs, does someone begin a thread asking what is courage, and suddenly change the topic (usually called highjacking, though here you're highjacking your own thread), to what is morality?

 

Courage and morality are two words that have strictly nothing to do with one another (except that they can sometimes be found in the same sentence: albeit not above).

 

If morality is what you intended to discuss, why didn't you just title your thread What is Morality?

 

 

 

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