Courage — andreia in its Greek formulation — occupies a peculiarly contested position across the depth-psychological and philosophical corpus. Its genealogy begins with Plato’s Laches, a dialogue whose title announces the subject and whose aporia encodes its difficulty: courage cannot be reduced to wise endurance, nor to mere knowledge of good and evil, nor to boldness, yet each formulation discloses something essential. Angela Hobbs’s comprehensive study traces how Plato’s reworking of andreia — moving it from martial manliness toward a psychic virtue rooted in thumos and reason together — raises enduring questions about gender, knowledge, fear, and the unity of the virtues. The depth-psychological tradition recasts the issue decisively: for Hillman and von Franz, courage migrates inward, becoming the capacity to face the destructive and criminal shadow of one’s own complexes without flight or repression. Hillman names this explicitly ‘psychological courage,’ distinguishing it from civil, moral, physical, and intellectual variants. Von Franz locates the failure of courage in the mother-bound male’s inability to endure pain. The wider classical tradition, surveyed by Sullivan and Konstan, anchors courage in arete, honour, and the city’s recognition. What unifies these otherwise disparate treatments is a shared insistence that courage involves a confrontation with what is genuinely feared — whether death on the battlefield, the philosopher’s dialectical ordeal, or the soul’s own darkness.
Feeling thus requires psychological courage. There is civil, moral, physical and intellectual courage — so, too, a courage of the soul to encounter itself.
Hillman argues that depth psychology demands a distinct species of courage — soul-courage — by which one faces the destructive and criminal contents of one’s own complexes rather than repressing or evading them.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013thesis
Plato’s thinking on courage, manliness and heroism is both profound and central to his work, but these areas of his thought remain under-explored.
Hobbs frames her study as a systematic recovery of Plato’s developing critique and redefinition of andreia in relation to his ethical, psychological, and metaphysical principles.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000thesis
the courageous person fears not being the person he or she wants to be. Furthermore, the person they want to be is the person they should be: in the courageous person, subjective and objective goods and bads coincide.
Hobbs demonstrates that Socratic courage in the Protagoras is inseparable from second-order self-image and desire: the courageous align who they wish to be with who they ought to be.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000thesis
courage of the fully-fledged philosopher will in fact be more complete than that of the more obviously military Auxiliary, since it is now based not simply on beliefs, but on knowledge.
Hobbs argues that in the Republic the philosopher’s courage supersedes the soldier’s because it is grounded in knowledge rather than trained belief, yet still requires thumos alongside reason.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000thesis
there are serious linguistic barriers preventing such an approach being readily available to Greek thinkers. No matter how conceived, the very term andreia connotes an ideal of male character and behaviour which cannot be value-neutral.
Hobbs establishes that andreia is constitutively value-laden and gendered, making any purely executive or morally neutral reading of Greek courage linguistically unavailable.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000thesis
Courage, therefore, is the knowledge of good and evil generally. But he who has the knowledge of good and evil generally, must not only have courage, but also temperance, justice, and every other virtue.
Plato’s Laches arrives at the aporia that defining courage as knowledge of good and evil generally collapses all virtues into one, dissolving the very distinction the dialogue sought to establish.
, Laches, -390thesis
the virtue of courage has everything to do with knowledge and, apparently, nothing to do with the kind of quality of character that Laches wanted to press.
Hobbs diagnoses the fundamental tension in the Laches between Nicias’s intellectualist definition of courage and Laches’s insistence on endurance as a quality of character.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000thesis
did we not agree earlier that foolish boldness and endurance were shameful and harmful, while courage was something noble? Whereas we now appear to be saying that foolish endurance is courage after all?
Hobbs traces how Socrates exposes the contradiction in Laches’s position — that courage cannot simultaneously be noble and consist in foolish endurance without technical knowledge.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
courage is a settled disposition whereas boldness may be a purely transitory mood or state.
Hobbs examines Protagoras’s distinction between courage as stable character disposition and boldness as transient state, identifying it as analytically useful despite its vagueness in context.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
you would not admit that sort of endurance to be courage — for it is not noble, but courage is noble.
Socrates establishes in the Laches that courage must be noble, ruling out ignoble endurance and beginning the move toward a virtue-theoretic rather than merely behavioural definition.
, Laches, -390supporting
If the meaning of andreia in the Republic is ambivalent, then these ambivalences will presumably also apply to the thumos, of which andreia is the particular virtue.
Hobbs connects the conceptual ambivalences of andreia as courage-and-manliness to the corresponding ambivalences of thumos, showing how both can degenerate from virtue into timocratic obsession.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
the virtue of courage should in some way be concerned with a willingness to risk or endure something unpleasant, for the sake of a good at least perceived to be greater.
Hobbs identifies the deep conceptual requirement that courage involve genuine risk or endurance toward a greater good, questioning whether Socrates’ positive revaluation of death empties the concept of its normative force.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
Arete is summed up in courage which will bring, in its expression, respect and honour from others. Death comes only when it is fated.
Sullivan documents how archaic Greek poets (Callinus, Tyrtaeus) identified courage as the summation of arete within a social economy of honour and shame, now expanding to the city as the arena of recognition.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting
The fine distinction between courage and irresponsibility also highlights the point that risk need not only involve physical danger: there is also the risk of cultural condemnation.
Hobbs broadens the concept of courageous risk beyond physical danger to include the social and moral risk of acting against misguided public pressure.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
Socrates is not necessarily denying that pursuits and techniques have a role in andreia; he could simply be suggesting that they are not the only requirements.
Hobbs argues for a partial rather than wholly ironic reading of Socrates on martial technique: technique may contribute to courage without exhausting it.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
Protagoras may have been right to claim that it is a difficult virtue to accommodate.
Hobbs notes that andreia resists assimilation into the unity-of-virtue thesis more stubbornly than the other virtues, a difficulty Plato acknowledges by leaving it structurally unresolved in the Protagoras.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
Do you think that the same things are terrible to those who had better die, and to those who had better live?
Nicias, in the Laches, introduces the relativity of fear to circumstances — what is terrible for one person may not be for another — as a move toward defining courage as knowledge of the fearful and the non-fearful.
, Laches, -390supporting
we originally considered courage to be a part of virtue … there were many other parts, all of which taken together are called virtue.
Socrates reviews the earlier agreement that courage is one part of virtue alongside justice, temperance, and the rest, establishing the framework within which Nicias’s definition will be tested.
, Laches, -390supporting
The Guardians will need to be endowed with certain natural qualities: speed, strength and courage.
Hobbs documents the Republic’s requirement that the Guardian class possess courage as a natural endowment, initiating the dialogue’s larger inquiry into how courage relates to education and the soul’s structure.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
LACHES OR COURAGE By Plato Translated by Benjamin Jowett
The Laches is subtitled ‘On Courage,’ establishing the dialogue’s explicit focus on the definition and nature of the virtue.
, Laches, -390aside
the traditional view, voiced throughout Homer and the generally conservative choruses of Greek tragedy, is that some virtues are specifically ‘male’ and others ‘female’.
Hobbs contextualizes the gender assumptions Plato inherits: the Homeric and tragic tradition treats courage as paradigmatically male, making Plato’s attempted universalization of andreia a radical departure.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000aside
to serve his prince, he showed courage.
Auerbach notes courage as a social virtue deployed in service and loyalty, illustrating its presence in early modern literary representation without theorizing it.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside