Welcome back to the new Thinkery. I'm David Barr. With me as always is Alex Prego. Hello David.
Hey and Greg McBrayer. Hi guys how's it going? Good. So today we're talking about Aristotle on Courage.
So specifically book 3, chapter 6 through 9. Sounds stupid and straightforward to me. So I don't know I don't encourage this very straightforward concept to man like me. I know people like Greg and Alex have to think long and hard about it but Greg you know what's going on in the ethics.
I know you were gonna write your dissertation. You wrote your dissertation. I think on the ethics and then claimed that Rana Bird or Scoop to you. Her interpretation on the ethics.
Yeah yeah yeah and then Greg said well I can't I can't publish my dissertation. Rana beat me to it. Much better clearly by the way. It's a great book.
Her book is as she says the product of 10 years. That's why I was 10 weeks. So I think hers came out a little better. It was more than 10 years.
I think it was like 20. All jokes aside Greg a little bit kind of. Yeah also the great thing. Say things like he was scooped by Plano and so on.
Yeah that's right. Total garbage. But Greg what's going I mean what's the lead up to this section on courage. What comes after just give us your situational awareness.
And Alex maybe kicks it off. So at some point maybe we'll do an episode on the ethics as a whole. And but I'll just give a brief overview to lead us into what's going on. So I tell students I think the ethics is the greatest book ever written on the question of human happiness.
Because the book begins with a sort of opening query into what happiness might be or what what is it that human being's long for when they're trying to sort of achieve happiness. Then it quickly gets to an idea of I'm moving very quickly but from there it sort of says well to be happy. We seem to by eliminating sort of some rivals. We seem to agree that virtue is essential to living a happy life.
Very quickly aerosol divides the virtues in the two. Intellectual and moral virtue. There's been a very long digression into sort of moral volition and choice because that seems to be essential to if we're going to say people are morally virtuous it seems to must seem to be the result of something they've freely done. And so after that five chapter or so digression aerosol then turns to the moral virtues in book three chapter six and the first virtue he turns to his courage.
He returns to the intellectual virtues at the end. There's questions of friendship and then finally the red version of the very last book. But today we're going beginning with aerosols first moral virtue. Courage.
Yeah and I think obviously you know we haven't done an episode on the end as a whole and so the question is why this. And I think there's I mean it is the first moral virtue he chooses after talking about virtue for quite some time you know setting for all his stuff about the meaning and all that. He finally gets out to brass to talk about specific virtues he chooses courage. And that immediately raises the question well what is the philosophic importance of courage.
And well for Aristotle it does rest on an awareness of what things are bad. And I would say even of the greatest of bad things which it seems like he's saying is death. So that I think you can say that courage is in a way the obverse of the love of the good which seems to be at least in for you know a socratic philosophy equivalent to to philosophy right. Yeah can I ask you a question before you jump in there and I'll have some given to you in a minute.
Why do you think he begins with that courage. Why is that first? Well I hope to show that I mean so if moral virtue is to be an end in itself courage is in a way the hardest part right. You can make people health conscious with a sense of their own good.
Not all people. Am I right now? Not all people. Yeah I mean this is coming.
You can convince that well you know Aristotle says it's anybody who has sense right so if somebody doesn't have sense like David you know there's no hope he's too far gone. But there's a sense that if virtue is to be an end in itself if the noble is to be an end in itself then courage I think would be the hardest case. And I think that's essentially he's trying to show that. I also think that you know Socrates comes up briefly here in the discussion of courage in a way that's looking forward to book six where he finally turns to the intellectual virtues and therefore is in a way showing an affinity for the socratic thesis that knowledge is virtue right.
So I think that's that's part of the reason he's going to begin here is it's the hardest case and it has the furthest reaching implications. So it's the hardest case. I think it's more of a hypothesis. I'm throwing this on as a hypothesis something that I hope that going through the book will bear out or these chapters will bear out.
It's the hardest case just to make sure I'm clear on this. It's the hardest case because it's the hardest to understand how courage is good for the virtue of the courageously virtuous man. Is that right? Yeah and you see this especially in chapter nine where he has to admit that that it's not really pleasant is it?
You know it's supposed to be good. It's supposed to be pleasant to you enjoy your virtue but he has a really hard time with that in when it comes to courage. And there's some interesting textual details that I think support that that he's struggling to give an account of courage specifically courage and battle is kind of moral very political understanding of courage. That's that's worth choosing for its own sake or for the significance of nobility.
Does that make sense? Yeah. So let's get into it Alex. What is kind of what's a way into into this section?
So he devotes four chapters to courage. I think you can easily read chapters six and nine as the introduction and conclusion respectively. I think six begins with a kind of perplexity right? Courage he says is a mean with respect to fear and confidence and fear has to do with bad things.
It's especially fear that courage is concerned with but because there are tons of different bad things there are a lot of semblances or things that look like courage. This is a theme that comes up in chapter six that he then returns to in chapter eight when he discusses the five or maybe six semblances of courage. But here he's starting with a kind of perplexity and he talks about courage in a metaphorical sense like this has occurred similarities etc etc. He starts from common opinion and he needs to sort of settle what that is.
In chapter six again as in the way of an introduction then tries to determine what courage is through a kind of dialectical or conversational investigation and then finally ends with a comment on nobility and courage. And it's not only in chapter seven that he actually goes into how courage is actually a mean what the courageous man looks like and what the defect and the the excess of each fear and confidence looks like. So it's only in seven and eight that he really starts giving is the meat of it. So I think it's fair to look at chapter six as a kind of introduction.
So I just a general question maybe as an incision point what's complex about the concept of courage. I made a joke at the start of our recording that this seems straightforward to me and I was joking but I think for many people they understand or at least intuit courage in a relatively straightforward manner right it's like basing your fears courage on a battlefield like it feels like a very I think for many people very short list of what courage is and the opposite of courage the obverse. And so what is philosophically complex or interesting about this concept Greg you want to jump in here you have any thoughts? Sure I actually was thinking a nice segue to answering David's question might be your mark regarding the dialectical character is writing because I think this is something that we should probably you mentioned that maybe you should go into a little bit more but I think David Aristotle begins from your position and I think that's what he's trying to think through.
It seems to me that he's trying to take this common sense opinion what is courage while it's a certain kind of toughness that's certain kind of toughness in the face of things that are frightening and I think that what you all we all know right when we go to the movies and we watch characters who have been victorious on the battlefield right so a Greek person this you're right this would not have been a question the courageous man is obvious it's Achilles right remember of course for Aristotle and I guess I'm sure Alts is going to get to this in just a moment but the Greek word for courage is cognate with the Greek word for a man so it's even more obvious when you hear it that way because it's like what's a man what's a man's man that's kind of you know people know what that means and so what's why is it perplexed I was trying to get Alts to tease this out just a moment ago there's some perplexity regarding the goodness of courage so it seems as though the courageous person we admire courageous people I think that's fair to say and I would say the flip side that seems even more true right we sort of despise cowards I think and so we must believe I think we believe that courage is good for the courageous man but on the other hand acting courage at least sometimes requires great risk in the greatest case of its own risk of your life and so therefore the prospect is something very bad happening and so there's this how can it be good for me if it could lead to my ultimate end yeah something else specifically says so maybe the best way to start thinking about David's question is to look at the at least in the Bartlett translations the second paragraph of chapter six say that again is the Robert Bartlett's translation of the office for universal national press excellent translation yeah so the second paragraph which I think is extremely dialectable even for Aristotle because it has questions what does that mean dialectical Alex you know weighing positions back and forth posing questions and trying to come up with answers and this is kind of a favorite stylistic approach to writing that Aristotle and please I think I think so I mean he's sometimes more obviously that way when he's when he's really staking positions against each other sometimes he seems to be explicating things I mean it's a deeper question you can ask these whether any treatise is really a treatise or whether they're all kind of lately dialectical trying to answer questions and he's going to making statements right when a author takes a digression it's because they anticipate a question and so there's a they're imagining a kind of interlocutor I think when they write but sometimes that's more obvious than others it's very obvious when you're reading telly's for example right let's say it's more obvious than Aristotle's political writings too because he's sort of recognized as kind of arguments as appropriate in politics may not be this kind of argument that's appropriate in natural scientific or mathematical right that's right yeah yeah and he's often dialectical and he's trying to lay out the problems which is another interesting part but anyways in the second paragraph he's actually asking questions which is not that common in Aristotle he says with what sort of frightening things then is the courageous man concerned or is he concerned with those that are such to the greatest degree instead of a little later he asks in what circumstances that or is it not the noblis so he says the most frightening thing is death and so he says such deaths are those that occur in war so they happen to make the greatest and noblis danger now these are all answers offered without justification right I mean he offers some justification while in war it's the greatest and noblis danger we didn't say why that's the greatest and noblis danger the flip side does I'm sorry I just finished the point. The one point he offers in support is he says in agreement with these considerations are also the honors given in cities and by monarchs so when we notice him asking questions and then answering him we say well who's really answering here or on who's the half is he answering what sort of opinions is he offering here and it's very clear he's offering the common opinion of the city right a very sort of average citizen's opinion about courage is that it shows up most of all in war sorry right that's okay I just had a question you know when rereading this to prepare for today I was struck by something you just read actually so I'd like to get your take on this and maybe you just answered this by saying he's still beginning from common opinions but he says the most frightening thing is death I was struck by that just because that sounds like he could take him straight out of town so I was just alive and so as I thought about that I thought you know to some citizens they might say no there are worse things than death better better dead than red for example right or something like this in other words there are worse faiths than death but aerosol seems to grant that death is the most frightening thing for us is that something that we should be interested in there or no I would go so far as to say he contradicts this later okay he says he's just finds it it's at the end of chapter seven I believe he says dying in order to flee poverty erotic love or something painful is not the mark of a courageous man but rather of a coward so there's some people who will kill themselves because they're in such extreme debt and there's some who kill themselves I suppose what he means by ironic love is somebody who has unrequited love right or somebody who's or you know makes you wonder about Socrates a little bit but I do think there are examples of people who will be afraid of things but I think he would say no properly speaking death is the most frightening thing of all wouldn't you say I'm another is going to talk to you and I talked about it when you say for a certain type person believer for example and divine justice might think that dying is not the most frightening thing yeah I think that would be fair to say and I do think especially when he's talking about the semblances of courage in chapter eight when he starts quoting Homer we do get a little bit of the gods and I see and what and what courage in the face of death and battle the sort of a killing encourage you could say something like that I think we get a sense of what its limits might be with respect to its assumptions about the gods now that might be another another possibility that's why not entertained here or overtly entertained at least should we move on or yeah yeah yeah I have a quick question I have an answer to it's not an official help but my point of the Greek is helpful at all I was wondering what your response might be to the idea that courage seemed to be a male virtue my initial thought was that the word courage Andrea is actually feminine he's in Greek and I think actually somewhere in Plato courage is referred to as a goddess I'm not sure what to make about that but it's certainly tied to men above all in Greek thinking as a whole I think there's one exception I can think of in the books seven I believe in the sourdough idea what characters what's the education sorry the education sires thank you at the end there's this Armenian prince who's been campaigning with Cyrus all along and Cyrus we go through any rewards all the leaders of his army and he passes over the Armenian prince his name is agronis and instead rewards his wife because she has campaigned manfully or courageously so there's at least one Greek I think we're the rights about a woman who's able to have this virtue for his worth it also seems that in the Iliad you do have examples of courageous women in the Odyssey as well in the person of Penelope but the goddesses in the Iliad events a kind of courage that the male gods don't the scheming of Athena let's say though even that's tricky because you really wonder how courageous the the male gods even are since they can't die this happens in book five two where you know it's said that Ares almost died the DNA is telling the story and you're just sort of like he almost died but he's immortal at the end of that same book it's used heels Ares and says it is not you're it's not fated for you to die you're one of the immortals so it's this and people often look at Greek gods and they lead his kind of petulant children it's like well yeah they're playing you know cops and robbers basically you know they're not actually fighting for real because the biggest thing is in that state right but Homer sorry you know it's Greg said something Homer's brought up in this section he cited so what's going on there with these citations well let's let's get there because I think to understand the citations we have to sort of work I you know in keeping with the dialectical character of aerosols writing so you have to kind of go through the steps and then see how you get to that point that's right so one thing I'll can use that for me in reminding where we are so yes so we're in chapter six and one thing I'll say is when he starts the discussion of courage it has to do with bad things by the end of the second paragraph here he starts talking about the noble and then the nobles really prominent in the third and final paragraph and so one of the questions and this is related to what you're saying before Greg is how does love the noble relate to the bad right and then also how does love of the noble relate to the love of the good this is a question that's lurking in the background that's a sort of theoretical you know piece that's missing from his is is a count of courage right you're overcoming the bad things for the sake of the noble but when you're talking about bad things you're also talking about the good right and trying to understand it seems like the obvious of the love of the good and yet he doesn't really talk about it and so we have to try to fill that in that's going to be related incidentally to the discussion of pleasure in chapter nine we finally gets back to the good so let's go to chapter seven which is the more thorough going discussion of courage proper and one thing i'll note about chapter seven and this is i think to point out i think how he's struggling with justifying courage he does not mention death until the very end that's i think a really crucial thing he uses a lot of circumlocutions right you know alternative phrases for death i'll just i have a list of them i'll just read them out he talks about what is frightening this is especially funny says a certain frightening thing that is too much for a human being to bear it's kind of a lot of words when you could just say death he says that this is frightening to everyone then at least to everyone who has since things of this sort them these things for the sake of the noble therefore the courageous man endures and does what accords with courage i mean it's strange when you know he he raises death so explicitly in six for the whole discussion uh in chapter seven it's not until the last paragraph right that he really starts about starts talking about death and it's then it's in comparison to people who are you know the passage i just read people fleeing on behalf of love or something it's kind of laughable figures and so i think we have to ask well why does he feel the need to suppress death in this chapter why does he need to to kind of make you forget about it a little bit so that he can discuss courage that's the way you phrase it that he's suppressing that building up to or is it's not suppressing yeah i mean if it's about death primarily he's giving you could say he's giving an abstract account of courage apart from death which obviously means that you can expand it beyond fear of death to fear of other things but i think i think he's still i think he's still not i think if you put death in for some of these phrases his arguments start to sound a little odd right um because he has to you know he reflects a kind of forgetting or suppression on the part of the courageous person as well that they're um i mean it's weird because i mean this paradox will then they have to be aware that death is a potential risk otherwise it's not courageous but i mean if they were full i guess what i'm driving i see is most the courageous person have some hope that their courageous act was somehow i don't know if i can do this well but um when i'm charging that hill which i would never do but you know when a courageous person charges the hill they must have moved to the back of their mind to death thing that's right that's what i'm asking yes i see right yeah so when when uh you know a few weeks ago Floyd my dog got pulled into the water oh this will be good he's okay no you guys are going to go out with your dog is great this is great to speak yeah sorry this is you don't know i'm in detail so this is it's actually interesting because so i jumped into the water i got i'll beat up roose and bloody because your dog your dog had been was getting swept away yeah my dog was getting swept away he got a little too uh what you're not you know ahead of himself fluid and uh so i jumped in i get him everything bloody i come back my wife was taking an app i just walked in soaking wet and bloody and just oh my god and then just yesterday i was talking to my mom she was talking about courage and she was talking about i didn't tell her because i don't want her to you know you know worry about her little boy but uh she brings out the story that she heard about somebody jumping into save their dog and they both died and of course you know i was just like oh but you know that's i was not thinking about that at the time it was it was completely irrational and it was a real suppression in the moment whether because it was so instinctual or what it was a real suppression in the moment of what was really my i should have let Floyd die is what i'm saying wow i think no but that's the thing is you know but doesn't that's something you just said a moment ago that the courageous man has noose intelligence i mean you're saying he just threw noose to the backseat and went full on and that's the problem yeah so in the beginning of chapter seven he has this really interesting uh sentence he says every minute this is referring to everyone then at least to everyone who has since and the word for sense there is noose which is a huge word in Aristotle noose is intellectual intuition right it allows you to understand like the intelligibility the character of things right um and so at the same time he's talking about sense and another word comes in here prominently reason logos comes in quite a bit as these words come in death goes away um and i think that's a telling move that all of a sudden when he's talking about mind right rationally considering you're good the rational love of the good that's based on a sort of intellectual intuition an understanding of the character of things and specifically the character of your good once that's brought in with the noble you can't really talk about death that much and i think that's the challenge is if for Aristotle right that you know the the principal thing that a human being is is going to be their mind and that's how we understand the world if courage is somehow senseless or to be blunt stupid um or irrational um then it seems like it can't be a virtue right and science backs this up too because the the way the prefrontal cortex cortex operates the fight or flight response it's literally that your reason does leave you in these situations yeah i think this is one of the there's many ways i think developmental psychology is interesting if you read about how children's brains develop and how you learn things it's very Aristotelian right you learn it becomes a habit and all that sort of stuff actually the way your brain works so i think it's it's a very kind of common sense thing that's ended up being backed up by science but yeah for sure i think this is the the big difficulty but and this wouldn't be a difficulty for a simply moral individual but for Aristotel he's a philosopher right and and if he's going to try to give moral virtue its credit and try to incorporate it into the philosophic life this is going to be a real problem for him it would be a problem for any individual and so far as you know the every individual according to Socrates has a rational over their good they would be making a mistake but i think especially for Aristotelian who's who's made this thematic in his life it would be very difficult that he can't reconcile this problem Alex are there any courageous philosophers Socrates is courageous i think no i think there's no text documents here what no because he uh i think that once you start if if Socrates saved philosophy right if you accept that that his that he he drank the hemlock knowingly and with a view toward saving philosophy in some sense uh and also by the way gaining immortality i don't know if it's why would it be courage and not overweening ambition or some other it's not unalloyed courage it seems well this is why i think we have to look at the text of it because i'm not it's not clear to me that for erosol courage and ambition are somehow at odds right i do think that courage is tied to honor right there in chapter six right he says oh well the one piece of evidence he offers is the honors of the cities he tries to move away from that in chapter eight but it's not clear that it's very successful um but the and you know and just on Socrates you know there's that death which is so hard to to understand but you should definitely know mr's life in dattle right well uh but there's this chapter i mean erosol talks about being compelled to do these things right so it's not clear that Socrates could have avoided i mean uh you're you're you're mentioning this is why i don't know how much about sidetrack you want to get off here but when you mention having your new siboutji versus it's sort of going back fight or flight you know the the account of Socrates and war as reported by us about his own play was supposed to be at least doesn't give me a vision of a man who's couragely running off into battle it's a picture of a man who's prudently calculating dangers and risks and trying to minimize this ain't just throw a spear or something i know no he has a he has a careful withdrawal like he's he's backing up and they actually it's actually kind of interesting because he's this is such a tangent so where is this he's what text is this in this isn't this isn't the symposium that we get the fullest economist it's alluded to in the uh carbides but um so alsobodies in the speech and symposium says oh Socrates was retreating but he retreated slower than everybody else so he was out in front but this actually made the enemy more scared of him so they went after the people who retreated faster so it's almost looks prudent that he uh that he retreated at that rate right anyway yeah that's fair uh so but i think i think look if Socrates has news i think he would fear death rightly and he might even try to escape it or avoid it that's one of the difficulties that that comes up here and and Socrates is explicitly named in the when he goes through the semesters of courage he is explicitly named in the um in the third one which is about experience or knowledge yeah for having him yeah so maybe we should go into these semesters i might let's go into chapter eight and see how this works out because i think there's uh some interesting stuff comes out of this um yeah so here he so in chapter six right in the introduction he says sorry we're gonna talk about courage um but there's a lot of you know things that resemble it it's ambiguous because the good in the bad or ambiguous and so you know uh let me just i think it's about death and fighting in battle and you know risking your life in battle hold on what can we just that should be stated a little more loudly and because i think that's the common i think that's the what i take care of what i'm doing here is having a dialectal conversation like you said between let's say the morally virtuous man and him the philosopher uh and i think that what he's doing is he's at in one of the reasons he's been read i think it's not simply by philosophers in the church he'll read the ethics apparently is because he actually might give us sometimes the best explication of the common sense understanding of a thing absolutely so very simply i mean doesn't that i mean courage is uh a kind of steadfastness in war that's that's kind of i think that's the that's what commonsense tells us it is now he doesn't stop there right but i think that's what he builds us to at least before we start doing this dialect we'll tear down is that right Alex yeah i think so again i mean the the view of courage he's arrived at the soul that of evidence is is honoring the city so he's starting from a very political commonsense standpoint while also subtly raising these philosophical questions all right good so i think in in so seven he's given us a kind of definition of courage or an account of courage suppressing death again but you know trying to give an explication of what it looks like um and in eight now he can finally clarify all these ambiguous cases that seem to look like courage um some of them are familiar from before he talks about experience and good hope those are the third and fourth i believe uh examples that he gives or semblance is that he gives um but he's now going to jump in first of all into political courage nothing's been said about the good so we have to keep our eye open for that as we read but we're going to go into political courage uh first i think what's most note we're not really about this is that he calls it courage um i think that's that's a big marker that this is uh probably of all the semisis closest to courage itself um i think there's two ways to support that first uh yeah he only calls it courage right he calls it political courage um sorry hold on what does that mean uh the courage of the the politician the courage of a man who's acting like uh like uh the courage that you uh exhibited when you when you voted for Ralph nader all this time so i think politic a andrea politic a there is meant to be the courage that is related to our pertains to the city or those in the city so i'm not risking typically i'm not risking death in the city right when i think i'm wrong my right or whatever battle battle okay i think it is involved in battle because the examples he uses are from the ilian and they're in the situations of battle so i do think we want to think about it as political in the sense of related to the polis and the polis when it's at war yeah i guess i was struck by when he begins the example there's this first part about what you seem to be risking his penalties or speaking up or legal penalties and then he turns to this uh you're saying that's the same one when he turns to the sort of warrior let's just but seeing that soccer team said political courage i'm gonna do this definition i think so but i i think that's right let's go into the political courage uh i don't think political courage differs from courage proper i think that's one of the difficulties here gotcha because he the way he distinguishes them is in terms of honor again the only the only evidence he offered for the nobility of courage proper was honor in the cities the polis right so it's it's related to the polis much as political courage the first semblance is and they're both have something to do with honor so i think there's a it's a big question of whether or not this actually differs from courage proper concerning death that would be my my my first question about this uh reading this um so can you here's what i we talked about this ahead of time here's something that i really was hoping you would hit on for me so he we're talking about political courage and talk about courage in the city and he immediately talks about two examples from home i hope that's where you're going next yeah i think that's the next uh step we want to think about okay so he gives two examples uh two quotes the first one is pauludamas will be the first to layer of approach upon ooh the second one is for hector will one day declare among the trojan speaking in the assembly the son of two ds by me and then he cuts off oh i think the first really hard to speak i know okay i just love this book you know our so uh i think obviously the thing that's common to both of these on the face it's people worried about the reputation all right what people are going to say about them who are the speakers in both those instances so the first one is hector you know and the funny thing about this is these look like just and this is where you really start to get a sense of how a subtle aerosol is being though they are removed in the book the first one's from book 22 the second one from book eight they're actually both related to the same plot points um so let me go through this i'm going to take it but i think it's worth it so the first uh the first is hector speaking now at the beginning of the elia we're nine years into the war right and that whole time the trojan's have largely stayed behind their city's walls um with Achilles kind of driving up to there that's one of the things we learned in the elia but Achilles has withdrawn at the beginning of the elia from battle um and so the trojan's have brought the fight all the way to the key in ships but then eventually Achilles after patch was has been killed by hector decides i'm going to go back into battle and so all the retroys the trojan's are going to return to troy and they're going to go back inside except for hector and hector stays out because he's afraid of his reputation and this is the speech that he gives okay so he's concerned specifically with what polydemas will say and then you have to what we might probably do is we don't usually hear about polydemas yeah why not his wife and kids right because there's that scene that touching scene between the three of them yeah well they wanted to come back inside right into the oh yeah yeah yeah sorry yeah yeah and he's uh and he's uh not inclined to listen to them so polydemas is an important figure a guess but he's not like a he's not one of the memorable figures well if you look back in the plot polydemas had suggested that they go back the night before when the fighting had ended um actually Achilles had after patch was a die to come out and he had screamed and i think five people impaled himself some of their spheres and he's assigned that he's going to return so polydemas wise he says we should go back home tonight hector says no no we're going to sleep in the fields for better between the key and ships in troy and we're going to fight them tomorrow and we're going to defeat them um so he seems to be afraid to reverse courses quickly at this moment right everybody's withdrawing because saying i'm the one who said we should stay out i ought to stay out right but then that's just really answer the question of what hector's motivation is because now we have to wonder why did he decide to sleep in the field right we're wondering why he stayed outside the gates but that just says well why did he that just makes us want to write something in the field and the answer i think is that he has recently just put on Achilles armor after killing patchicles and this is he had initially sent to back lockers said oh you know you suggested you should wear it in battle and so hector is kind of convinced he can take Achilles that he is Achilles equal and i think that's one of his central delusions in the ilean is he twice he gets at one point thrown off but twice he's convinced that he can take Achilles and that's a central delusion that's necessary to him being courageous in battle in fighting so it's not something that he's letting his i don't know his lover down he's losing estimation in the eyes of polydamus no it's not he was not a lover he's a great man let's be all right all right yeah you never know what a church is right so one thing that's occurred to me reading this and maybe this this will provide a nice one contrast as we get down to the first reference of Socrates here i mean i i you know heur's loving such a careful writer it almost seems like political courage requires the reputation within the commuter the pressure of the community it's very much other directed yeah that it's sustained the courage seems to be sustained by opinion is that i think so if honor is necessary to courage and you know heur's all suggested it is back in chapter six even though he's trying to push away from it now it does seem like you have to be concerned with the opinions of others so sorry sorry sorry i wouldn't use this one step one step deeper because he's not only he's deluded about himself being equals it goes deeper than that all of this whole machination is necessary to fulfill his plans right that he announces at the beginning of book two so Achilles is fated to die before troy falls but he also has to kill hector right that's his fate so he's gonna kill hector die and then troy will fall so only if hector stays outside of troy can zeus actually bring his plan to fulfill it so hector has no chance right and it's not really because Achilles is greater than he is Achilles is actually aided by the gods i think athena with zeus's endorsement helps Achilles in defeating hector and killing him hector actually has no chance because the gods are against him hectors courage i think you could say rests on this mistaken belief that there's divine support for his action and that the gods would actually allow him to kill Achilles he doesn't have a choice here in whether he's courageous or cowardice his hand is already played for him even though he flees he's even denied a chance to fairly kill Achilles so i think that that's one important point to bring out of this this first quote i'm going to say second or do you want to say second or do you want to hear your restate that simply from the first time so because hector knows that the gods are against him yeah the gods have essentially manipulated things so that hector is concerned with his honor it's not it's not actually his concern with his honor he's actually for nine years been perfectly content to high-line joys wall that's right that's right because it's only because the gods have manipulated and we can go through the plot in greater detail but the gods have manipulated hector into thinking that he can take on the most amazing point of this is at the end of book 11 when hector is finally broken through the gates he's his armor is gleaming and his eyes look like fire underneath um it's this really striking moment where because Zeus has aided him he believes he can destroy the Achaeans and he does that again with the armor he manipulates him to feel like he has to face Achilles so that he can bring to completion his will is let's let's move on to the second one and then i want to hear why you think Aristotle shows these passages to illustrate his principle so the second quote is actually Deomides speaking and this is actually shortly after he almost gets into battle with hector so Deomides has just killed the driver of Hector's chariot hector finds another and goes back to fight him and then Homer says in his own voice i'll just read this and now there would have been fighting beyond control and destruction now they that is hector and his new driver would have been driven and penned like sheep against Ilion had not the father of gods that is Zeus and of men sharply perceived that he thundered horribly and let loose the shimmering lightning and dashed into the ground in front of the horses of Deomides so nester then tells the homies uses against you Deomides replies with the line that Aristotle quotes you know that people are going to say i ran away from hector and then hector is going to be able to boast and and nester consoles and i believe i didn't look this up but i believe hector actually does boast after having a Deomides starts withdrawing so Deomides withdraw is not because of hector but because of Zeus and so i think what's interesting here is both quotes have to do with the plan of Zeus in the passage with Deomides zechter's Zeus saves hector right his valor is stolen in the second one Zeus kills hector and and Achilles valor is stolen right so Zeus saves hector just to kill him later right so that he can kill him later and i think this ends up kind of negating or nullifying the virtue right it's the will of the gods that's on display here hector has to die at the the hands of Achilles hectors boast Deomides fear of disrepute hector shame before Pauli dennis all of that lose their meaning i think in light of Zeus's control of things which i think would suggest that political courage or courage and battle rests on a kind of assumption about human freedom in relation to the gods you mentioned this earlier when you talked about choice Greg at the beginning of book three i think this is in a way that the freedom or the choice that's brought up early that allows virtue to be praiseworthy precisely because you chose it the gods i think undermine that so this is not something that this is a deeper reading than what you're explicating right now Alex right like this would be this isn't something you would want the best in the brightest Athenian youth necessarily inculcating is that fair yeah i think for instance nobody listens to our podcast i can speak open right here yeah right this is a little bit darker when you start bringing the gods in and then when you take the gods away what happens yeah so is there something saying hold on what is erosmall saying then about this that i mean i got my own thoughts about what he says to say about the lition of choice earlier but is he here saying that these guys were in fact unfreeing on what they did i think what he's saying is that virtue it's not that he's saying that god you know Zeus exists and all that but i think he's saying that virtue probably he's uh excuse me political courage relies on a prior understanding or assumption about the will of the gods i was struck in thinking about this about how different the ilead reads the battles in the ilead reads from the battles of the bible sure you know you brought up judges earlier but judges is is conspicuous for its naming of individual acts of of heroism right and for the bloodiness of it um it's the exception that proves the rule and i think that's a good sign that well you know the battles in the bible they're there to be done through human beings and human beings are are to act but it's primarily through god's will i see yeah i think that's that's the assumption that's there yeah it's like an exodus you want to think more about that no well just god intervening with pharaoh yeah it complicates the the even the courage of Moses i think so for the courageous the courageous people must believe that god allows for human volition or human choice yeah such that they can have they are deserving of honor sure because i'm not serving if i was compelled to do it yeah that makes their death worthwhile but then you want to ask is the honor kind of compulsion i think semblance too also is at some level of difficulty removed from semblance one right um well someone who was compelled by the rulers yeah the compulsion by rulers that's what you're referring to right yeah well or compulsion by gods but yeah yeah i'll just say more about that i'd like to hear that well i was just thinking that the i mean i was just thinking this would be laid out in the two quotes from the ilead that you brought to our attention it seems like they're what seems to be necessary is the denial that the gods are compelling humans to act in certain ways uh that otherwise there's not this room for deserving honor and so there's there's it seems that the quotes at least alludes of the role of zeus's ruler over human beings and then in the second semblance we get to the political rulers sort of images i guess of the heavenly rulers yeah i think that's right so compulsion by rulers can be understood as the gods and uh but you brought up political rulers i think that so it's easy to look at semblance too as compulsion by rulers he talks about being threatened with death right um he says it's he's such a teacher here but it's actually uh a gabemnon right um but i think when you think about well what does rule look like in the city because he's talking about you know uh how it's perceived in the city well it's it's people ruling and being ruled in turn right yeah so once rulers are actually once fellow citizens um and one of the ways i think your fellow citizens exercise that rule is to praise and blame so i do wonder whether that's not whether semblance to ourselves not pointing to a how brazen blame is a kind of cellular form of the lash right yes um that's actually discharges but then you could also be thrown in jail for desert yeah yeah so yeah we're we're getting close to the end here alice take us um we still have some time but yeah let's push forward we gotta talk about Socrates yes i just i i i am interested in i guess understanding maybe matching different kinds of courage up with one another if that's fair but so i think we want to talk about adulterous yeah sorry no no uh i don't know if anything i would like to talk for a long time about it but what philosophic courage looks like well i was just talking about his uh the philisonic courage might take us a little bit straight i'd be happy to entertain if you want but just this third semblance i guess experience or knowledge uh as a seat which seems to be courage um and he says Socrates is the one who sort of put forward this thesis of courage is knowledge which seems counterintuitive if not paradoxical but i'm wondering if that paradox doesn't expose attention to the heart of courage itself so uh i'll go through the example of the analogy feel free to jump if you want but um i'll use my own examples that are sort of drawn from aerosols examples uh so we admire soldiers for their courage uh but what soldiers do we admire more the soldiers who've trained a lot or sort of uh the guy who's been drafted i think that with the professional soldiers on the one hand we do admire them more much more pressed by them but i think if we thought about it we think well what's all that training doing it's minimizing the risk uh and so therefore it's ostensibly making the the thing to which courage attaches less likely so if courage is about facing the fear of death precisely being well trained to minimize that possibility so in the extreme case right imagine you've had some armor that made it impossible for you to be killed in battle and then you went into battle we said that person was i think we would say no so there's this weird counterintuitive way in which if courage i mean the more expert military people the more expert firefighters the more expert pilots the more expert gone on down the list policeman uh i got by the way that students get really angry with me when i say this you know the the most well trained scene to exhibit in some in some ways at least into a less courage um i don't know if this is why he praises citizen soldiers for example but i don't know if you want to jump in there but yeah i think that that's that's right and i you know when you when you you know when you look at how people talk about like drone warfare no yeah there's no decorated like are you actually not true right they do have those right but do we have public parades and do we have a race and those who died in drone warfare nobody dies in drone warfare exactly so i think you know you move that risk because it's so calculated and you've you've figured out a way around the inherent risk yeah that it's just it's not the same as you know you're never gonna see our saving private ryan like that opening scene yeah you're never gonna see that for drone warfare like you know he you press that keyboard the carpal tunnel was aching him and nobody i think that it kept going this is not gonna happen the argument is it takes courage to it's extremely gruesome job yeah i don't think it's from what i've understood it's right crushing your soul drone warfare technicians they see extremely graphic things Alex the power of uh our technology is they can read the headline off a newspaper from the satellites they see exactly what they have to do let me take a less gruesome example than one that i use my since this is my least favorite superhero is superman i mean anybody from krypton could do what superman did right you don't have to be courageous to be superman you know if we gave uh david bar superman's powers he'd be off saving the world right i mean there's no real risk and so that i mean that's a comic idea but the idea here is if you're invulnerable to these things uh what's the risk i mean you're pointing with the these sort of these guys there's there's i think that's correct probably a deep psychological risk for those guys um but you know i think it's actually just pointed to the fact that there's a pair maybe this is i'll just circle back to what i said at the beginning uh there's a paradox at the heart of courage that we admire these men for their abilities in war but if those abilities include something like a skill or some kind of a training that ought to cut against the precise of the thing we admire them for at the risk of their life so i think that's right yeah um so and i'll just i'll just counter bar your claim about about the gruesome things they see i'm pretty sure that people on the front line see some horrific yeah no to be sure yeah right yeah so one thing i'll point out here that i think is important is that eristol attributes this to Socrates um but uh run a burger my advisor in her book on the ethics eristol's dialogue with Socrates uh she points out that this is not actually Socrates saying this this is uh nikias in the dialogue the luckiest the famous coward nikias yeah and it might be that that in the best case scenario you could reduce uh warfare to a science science right he does make this thesis in the protagonist though by the way yeah he brings your suckies one word comes up yeah where he tries to collapse the two yeah but i think but we have to also keep in mind you know what's pervasive about sucratic philosophy is not is an aspiration towards knowledge but a confession of ignorance and and i think that's an important thing to keep in mind because he goes through five semblances but then at the end as a kind of sixth ignorance pops up out of nowhere um and it sort of puzzles like to figure out it's kind of similar to good hope but it's it's not exactly there's something different i think uh going on there so i think this will you know to return to our theme of philosophical courage i think we're actually eristol is leading us there uh step by step so about spiritiness i mean i think this is it's interesting after we talk about nikias his view this seems closest to lakis because it's a kind of it's compared to brood animals those are two characters uh in play-doh dialogue on courage called the lakis right the two main actors yeah one of them is it's sort of a rationalist and one's a kind of irrationalist to grossly over summarize it um oversimplify it um and so i mean he makes the point that you know virtue has to have logos right because it's uh sorry courage has to have logos because it's a virtue um so there's a kind of problem here that i think is quite simple there but he has this interesting line about adulterous which um do you know or want to talk about that yeah yeah he should have a lot of personal experience no two guys but the audience is not truth i mean to be fair being a couple isn't the same thing is because of adultery it's new creation that's just a distinction that's important to make i think um but maybe your wife could step in and read this so at the end of this uh one of the paragraphs he says uh adulterous too on account of their desire do many daring things um saying that spiritiness uh is necessary for this uh this sort of uh illicit activity but i think this is interesting that that spiritness with the most is necessary to this sort of illicit or forbidden erotic longing right um and so you i think insofar as morality or law inspires fear um and i don't think anybody's been jusselly punished with death for adultery but i think other erotic uh illicit longings might be punished with with death i'm thinking of Socrates of course no you're wrong about this uh the i mean you're just mentioning judges i mean deuron because of the call for death of the dulter's that's true yeah yeah i'm corrupted by contemporary morals yeah but i think that's an interesting comment is there something uh this is a question i generally have generally is there something thematic about philosophy god oh what are you gonna say about love oh well there's certainly something thematic about love okay flush on my flesh you know this one it lost his mind there's definitely a love of one so he's a mission just like that i've talked to you that's easy yeah yeah shout out to an old professor um i uh see that again i think in so far as law in so far as law and shame inspire fear and this might be related to the gods again um might philosophy require a kind of spirited um inclination to go against that to face that fear and so i wonder whether there isn't now you can have a kind of purely thematic rejection of the law we could also have a kind of careful rational courageous uh inquiry that's the law and i wonder whether the adulterers whether Socrates is somewhat promiscuous right um it is thinking about things i i wonder if this is an illusion illusion to Socrates that's like the adultery i think the adultery illusion is desopretized it's an it's an immoral illicit erotic machine okay i think there's the you know if we if you want to be playful with it that might be one way to go we should always point about whether or not Socrates was erotic i think we'd have really fruitful discussion there um so if you're not gonna be fruitless so fair enough so here's my uh so here's i'll maybe i'll serve one up for you if there's something at risk for the courageous man and maybe we can talk a little bit about philosophic courage this might be aerosol doesn't really bring it up here but there's a solution at least one illusion maybe two what is it what's at risk when you're doing philosophy i mean you know it's clear to me what the soldier is risking his life but i mean when i sit around contemplating the eternal beings i do uh there's no risk i'm i'm sitting in a nice um cush uh Chesterfield overstuffed leather chair and i'm sipping cognac or wine spritsers there's nothing what's the risk well i i mean my question is are you actually philosophizing first of all no i'm probably not but usually i'm usually i'm reading you know uh dad wood comics or but nice thank you okay but what i mean imagine i weren't doing that imagine i were actually reading say um uh becoming Socrates for example do you want i can tell you what the risk is for what i think about is uh is that a kind of madness can overtake can overtake you where if you really sit down think about the project of philosophy a ceaseless uncovering right in um a ceaseless striving to understand the whole you will never capture that that can lead one to madness i think to the kind of desperation so the risk the risk is you lose your soul yeah or and that you lose your footing a stable footing in life i think this is one reason this would be a point in favor of Jerusalem over Athens that the believer uh knows where he or she stands in relation to the universe because it's laid out in scripture the philosopher doesn't per se and that can be destabilizing yeah and i think i think actually i was surprised to hear you ask i correct because you earlier brought up that for a believer the most frightening thing wouldn't be death and so if you questioned the laws especially if there's a you know divine laws uh then i think you're you're going to have to face the possibility that with death in all ends right without your your own problem some larger divine plan right that zeus doesn't have this plan and so in the face of death maybe in the face of that abyss of you know meaninglessness to your life maybe then you know political courage becomes attractive but perhaps that's a kind of cowardice from a philosophic standpoint and perhaps uh it's taking an easy way out in a way yes i mean it's uh it's fearing the maybe the most frightening thing of all is that even that honor is is is itself a phantom right and david had mentioned Achilles achieving mortality but that was also a phantom sort even socceries i mean at one point the sun's gonna explode and it's all gone you know what was it yeah what what are you talking about you Alex sorry i just wanted to hear that yeah yeah yeah well what does Achilles say in the Odyssey when he's in the underworld better be a servant back on earth he said this was misguided yeah it's very good point to end on Achilles made a mistake yeah really quick um just to wrap this up Alex and after you do if you could remind our gentle listeners of our how to follow us in our twitter handle but uh so so wrap up this what the hell's going on here he's i thought we were gonna get something straightforward we've ended up in a kind of maze of courage or uh so you're your average Athenian reading this and you think what well the average Athenian reading this uh but he wouldn't be the average Athenian yeah but i think the more philosophic reading i think the best way to end is just to turn to the sixth semblance which it doesn't seem to be one of the five he tries to relate it to good hope but it seems like a sixth which is that people who are courageous um because they're ignorant um and this is actually a really interesting example so he says you know if you're ignorant you don't actually know what the risks are and then you go into battle anyways that's not true courage and he gives this example oh wow things from zenaphon right where the argives fight against the latin bonians and they they take up the the uh sycagonian shields which have these sigmas on it and uh the argives say oh good it's not it's not the Spartans i could easily we can easily defeat them this is going to confuse the audience because spartas starts with us sorry spartas sorry the lecadimonians right yeah they would have an elm they would have a lambda yeah yeah so they see a sycagonian so the argives say oh we can beat them easily and then they do so if they had known who they were if they hadn't been ignorant uh they wouldn't have fought but if they had known they might have withdrawn and so i mean what i would like to suggest so that's another example right where political courage relies on a kind of ignorance right uh their their courage of battle relies on misunderstanding of what things are and i think as ignorance pervades a lot of these examples right hector diamaties um this latter example um when we're talking about locky synicius for example i'm appointing to Socrates i think there would be a kind of courage that's akin to political courage and of which political courage is a semblance that would be most of all characterized by admitting your own ignorance and accepting or trying to understand the fact that you know your choices if they even are choices free choices are somewhat unmoored or somewhat ungrounded in any kind of larger purpose or justifying purpose and that your life as a whole doesn't necessarily have this noble redemption for the loss of it i think that would be the deeper sense of courage that's that's applied here on that heavy yes seriously hey listen to us next time folks yeah your life has no meaning yeah i bet we it's i bet you know did we stay with the uncoupling stuff as well as true if we had better make clear that you're out of the bed adultery that only happened once on your episode it wasn't a series of well uh i'll get you back when we read markey to sod well they would be okay i know can't hurt you respond uh um how can listeners listen if you guys like put you here that's a good one that's a good one uh do follow us on twitter at what Alex is at the new thinkery email is the newthinkery at gmail.com and the website is the newthinkery.com thanks as always listeners