The Virtue of Courage in Stoicism

there are more components to courage than just mastering fear

(This article was originally published in Practical Rationality)

One main way that Stoic philosophy characterizes the good for human beings is as virtue. This is a term that unfortunately has become watered down in the minds of many in our time. The Stoics didn’t mean by it just any sort of goodness, whether perceived or actual. What they had in mind in talking about virtue — and the four cardinal virtues — was something considerably more robust.

Seneca provides one representative articulation of this in Letter 71 by telling us that the highest or supreme good — the one we need to look to and understand if we want to make decisions about particular matters in our lives competently — is what is right or honorable (honestum, in Latin). He goes on immediately to clarify that this is virtue. To be sure, virtue is not the only good thing, but from his Stoic perspective, virtue is what makes all the other good things good. It is the basis.

The Stoics divided virtue into four main types, each with its own name, its own function and area, and its own way of helping to more fully develop the nature of a human being.

If you read through classic philosophical literature by and about the Stoics, you will find this conception echoed over and over again. It was a bedrock portion of Stoic teachings and practice. Take a look, for instance at Cicero’s On The Ends, book 3, or Arius Didymus’ Epitome of Stoic Ethics, for some very clear and systematic discussions of the centrality of virtue.

So for those in the present who turn to Stoic philosophy as a resource for a better life, understanding and pursuing (or as Seneca advises, even falling in love with) virtue — that will turn out to be vitally important. But what is virtue?

The Cardinal Virtues

The Stoics divided virtue into four main types, each with its own name, its own function and area, and its own way of helping to more fully develop the nature of a human being. Platonic, Epicurean, and some later Christian virtue ethicists also divided virtue along similar lines into four “cardinal virtues.” These four virtues are:

• Wisdom or Prudence

• Justice

• Courage or Bravery

• Temperance or Self-Control

These four virtues are not selected at random, and each of them has its distinctive role to play. Early on in book 1 of On Duties, drawing on the doctrine of the philosopher Panaetius, Cicero tells us that there are “four [virtues] from which moral rectitude and moral duty flow”. A bit earlier on, he asserts that:

All that is morally right rises from one of four sources. It is concerned with:

the full perception and intelligent development of the true,

or with the conservation of organized society, with rendering each person their due, and with the faithful discharge of obligations assumed,

or with the greatness and strength of a noble spirit,

or with the orderliness and moderation of everything that is done.

There are a number of other complementary discussions about this fourfold division in the literature of Stoicism, but I’m going to skip over them here, in order to dive into the main topic I intend to discuss here. That is one of these virtues in particular, that of courage.

Before that, there is one point that is important to make and stress about the virtues the Stoics identify. A misunderstanding commonly arises when people begin studying Stoicism and start thinking about the virtues. They look at the list and then say: “Wait a minute. These four virtues are good, and a person really does need them. But what about other kinds of moral goodness that are being ignored? What about kindness, or honesty, or modesty? Do the Stoics think these aren’t important? Those seem like major omissions!”

There’s a quick answer to this, and it’s one that can be found within texts presenting Stoic philosophy — those of Cicero, Diogenes Laertes, and Arius Didymus. This explanation isn’t found explicitly in the texts commonly read by the “big three” of the Late or Roman Stoics — Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius — so beginners don’t realize that Stoics already had this issue worked out. Each of the four cardinal virtues encompasses a set of other virtues, which include those that people think are “missing”.

An Expanded Concept of Courage

As the Stoics understood it, the virtue of courage encompassed more than just dealing with the emotion of fear — or even both fear and confidence (as Aristotle suggested). Again, in On Duties, Cicero tells us several important things about courage.

The first is that one of the definitions of courage the Stoics relied upon is “the virtue that champions the cause of right”. In their view (as well as that of Plato), “courage” divorced from the other virtues — particularly justice and wisdom — ceases to be virtuous and instead becomes a form of vice. Accordingly, one cannot be courageous without also being “good and straightforward, lovers of truth” and foes to deception.”

The second insight is that courage does involve dealing properly with the emotion of fear, generally by freeing ourselves from it, or at least derailing its effects so that we can do what we ought to. But courage also bears upon other emotions or affects as well. Cicero identifies excessive desire (cupiditas), pain or grief (aegritudo), excessive pleasure (voluptas) and anger (iracundia) as problematic and needing the curb of courage.

The third thing is that a soul that is “courageous and great” will exhibit two additional characteristics. One of these will be an “indifference” or “contempt” (despicientia) towards external things or circumstances. The other is that this person will seek out occasions to do actions that are “not only great and in the highest degree useful, but also very arduous and fraught with danger to life and to many things that make life worth living.”

Cicero is not setting out the list of the subvirtues encompassed by courage in any systematic way. What he is doing, however, is bringing them up in a way that shows clearly that he has them in mind. He already tends to associate courage with magnanimity or greatness of soul. We could also interpret that second characteristic as one or more of the other sub-virtues of courage, or at least connected with it.

Courage and its Constituent Virtues

Being courageous — developing, possessing, and exercising the virtue of courage — isn’t just about facing up to fears and doing the right thing habitually and volitionally. Not for the Stoics! This is where looking at Arius Didymus’ Epitome becomes particularly helpful.

He tells us:

Of the virtues, some are primary, while others are subordinate to the primary virtues. There are four which are primary: prudence, temperance, courage, and justice.. . . . Courage deals with acts of endurance [hupomonas]. . . To courage are subordinated perseverance, intrepidness, great-souledness, stout-heartedness, and industriousness.

He goes on to give us short explanations of what each of these subordinate virtues mean. Before we look at those, though, we ought to compare his listing to that of another important source for the teachings of the Stoics, book 7 of Diogenes Laertes’ Lives of the Philosophers.

He too tells us that the Stoics distinguished the virtues by their subject-matters, with courage being about “things that are to be endured” (hupomenetea). The language here is very close, but not precisely the same between Diogenes’ and Arius’ summaries. But an important difference follows.

Diogenes Laertes only speaks of two subordinate virtues falling under the heading of courage. These are “constancy” (aparallaxia) and “vigor” (eutonia). Interestingly, neither of these is included in the listing of five subordinate virtues found in Arius’ text. That doesn’t mean that the subordinate virtues Diogenes identifies could not cover some of the same ground as those which Arius lists.

Arius does tell us a bit more about the virtues that fall within courage’s scope, but just a bit, unfortunately — this is one of many places where one wishes that he had been more verbose or forthcoming! Each of these virtues is a kind of knowledge (episteme). So what are they knowledge of?

Perseverance [karteria] is a knowledge ready to persist in what has been correctly decided.

Intrepidness [tharraleotes] is a knowledge through which he know we shall not encounter any thing terrible.

Greatheartedness [megalopsukhia] is a knowledge acting above what occurs naturally in both worthwhile and worthless matters.

Stout-heartedness [eupsukhia] is a knowledge belonging to a soul as it shows itself invincible

Industriousness [philoponia] is a knowledge which is able to accomplish what is proposed, without being prevented by the toil

What Arius calls stout-heartedness seems close to what Diogenes calls constancy, whose Greek term literally means not being able to be changed or shifted. The stout-hearted soul involves another privative, not being able to be beaten or conquered. Given its explanation, perseverance also seems to cover some of the same ground as constancy, since it means sticking with what one has rightly determined. Diogenes’ sub-virtue of vigor is admittedly a bit more difficult to assimilate into Arius’ account.

Fleshing Out the Stoic Virtue of Courage

One of my reasons for writing this post is to satisfy an up-to-now unsatisfied commitment to a fellow prokopton (someone who is making some progress in studying and applying Stoicism). Some time back, I gave an online presentation to a group calling themselves “The Stoa”. It was titled Stoic Fortitude: On Failure and Failing, and I provided it because, in my view, how we respond to our own failure and failing is something we often don’t discuss enough. Understanding and exercising the virtue of fortitude (or courage) helps us better deal with these.

Shortly after that I participated in another online session, this one hosted by the Stoic Parents Facebook group. One of my colleagues raised the question about how practicing courage helps us address the challenges of parenthood, and I brought up the sub-virtues of courage and how they might prove useful for us in that important area of our common life. She asked me to provide that group a write-up about how the Stoics parse out and particularize courage, and to post it. I committed to doing so, but until now have been either too busy with other work or too ill (or both) to fulfill what I’d pledged to do!

So that is what I have done here, and once this is finished, I’ll make good on that belatedly fulfilled promise. I intend to follow this up with another post or two going into more detail and depth about these Stoic sub-virtues of courage, and perhaps some posts also bringing these topics to bear on parenting. I’ll draw this to a close by just bringing in two passages from Seneca and Cicero that add a bit more to our understanding of the topic.

In Letter 85, Seneca discusses courage, touching on several of the sub-virtues. Pointing out the person who has and exercises courage will in many cases not feel fear, because they know that what appears to be dangerous or harmful is not actually so, brings in the sub-virtue of intrepidness. Seneca fleshes this out, giving us a bit more substantial conception of this sub-virtue.

[Courage] is neither rash bravado nor thrill-seeking nor love of danger. Rather it is a knowledge of how to distinguish between what is bad and what is not. Courage is very careful of its own safety, yet it is also very well able to endure things whose bad appearance is false.

In book 2 of his Tusculan Disputations, Cicero provides some interesting clarification about the subordinate virtue of industriousness. He does get things wrong linguistically, in claiming that Greek has just the one term, ponos, for both labor and pain. But there is something useful to the distinction he draws:

[T]hey call industrious people devotees (studiosos), or rather lovers of, pain. We more aptly call them toilers (laboriosos), for toiling is one thing, feeling pain another. . . . All the same, there is a sot of resemblance between the two things, for the habit of toil renders the endurance of pain easier.

Industriousness, or diligence (another good translation) involves seeking out what needs to be done, often with difficulty of one sort or another, what might in some sense be painful — or boring, or seemingly meaningless (there are many possibilities for the “laboriousness” (ponos) involved — and actually seeing it through. It borders on perseverance, and perhaps bleeds over into it as well.

Understanding the virtue of courage along these lines, it should be clear that there is far more scope for that virtue within a life guided by Stoic philosophy than there would be if courage was restricted merely to being brave and dealing with fear. It is a set of strengths of character we rely upon in order to rise above things that otherwise might drag us down, to commit and recommit our wills to what needs to be done, to approach matters with the right sort of confidence, to distinguish between what it would be rational to fear and what would not be so, and even to willingly seek out what will be difficult and demanding by choice.

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Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.