The Platonic dialogue Laches — subtitled ‘On Courage’ — occupies a pivotal position in the depth-psychology corpus as the earliest sustained philosophical interrogation of andreia (courage) and its relationship to knowledge, endurance, wisdom, and virtue as a unified whole. The dialogue stages a productive aporetic encounter between the soldier-general Laches, whose intuitive, behaviorally grounded conception of courage proves philosophically unstable under Socratic questioning, and the strategist Nicias, whose intellectualist definition — courage as the knowledge of what is and is not to be feared — anticipates the unity-of-virtue thesis. Angela Hobbs’s close reading illuminates how the dialogue’s irresolutions are philosophically productive rather than merely inconclusive: Laches’ insistence that words and deeds must accord, his equation of courageous endurance with noble (rather than merely useful) action, and his resistance to reducing andreia to technical competence all surface deep tensions between performative, masculine, and epistemic conceptions of virtue. Adkins situates the dialogue within the broader problem of Greek ethical vocabulary, showing how phronēsis functions as the operative qualifier through which courage is distinguished from mere boldness or foolish endurance. The Laches thus serves as the site where Greek popular ethics, heroic ideals of manliness, and nascent philosophical psychology converge and strain against one another.
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.
The dialogue’s culminating aporia — that defining courage as universal knowledge of good and evil collapses it into the whole of virtue — encapsulates the Laches’ central philosophical paradox.
, Laches, -390thesis
Then, according to you, only the wise endurance is courage? LACHES: True. SOCRATES: But as to the epithet ‘wise,’—wise in what? In all things small as well as great?
Socrates presses Laches’ concession that courage requires phronēsis (wise endurance) to its breaking point, exposing that no single domain of wisdom sufficiently delimits the virtue.
, Laches, -390thesis
Laches remains firm that in each instance the man who endures without technical knowledge is both more courageous and more foolish than the man who endures with the assistance of such knowledge.
Hobbs shows that Laches’ paradoxical insistence on the identity of courageous and foolish endurance drives the dialogue’s central contradiction between nobility and irrationality in courage.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000thesis
His scornful dismissal of its teachers because they have shown themselves inadequate in actual combat is a good illustration of his later requirement that one’s words should harmonize with one’s deeds.
Hobbs identifies Laches’ performative criterion — the harmony of word and deed — as the coherent ethical principle underlying his rejection of technical training as constitutive of andreia.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000thesis
in the Laches, Laches readily agrees that courage, andreia, is endurance accompanied by phronesis; and in the Protagoras, Protagoras assents to a similar position.
Adkins demonstrates that the qualification of andreia by phronēsis in the Laches reflects a broader Greek ethical tendency to define virtue through practical intelligence, linking the dialogue to the Protagoras.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
the physician knows whether health or disease is the more terrible to a man? Had not many a man better never get up from a sick bed? I should like to know whether you think that life is always better than death.
Nicias challenges Laches by arguing that the knowledge of what is truly fearsome cannot be reduced to professional expertise, pressing the case that genuine courage requires a deeper evaluative wisdom.
, Laches, -390supporting
the very term andreia connotes an ideal of male character and behaviour which cannot be value-neutral.
Hobbs argues that the Greek term andreia structurally resists value-neutral, executive interpretations of courage, tying the Laches’ inquiry to irreducibly normative and gendered cultural presuppositions.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
must we not then first of all ask, whether there is any one of us who has knowledge of that about which we are deliberating? If there is, let us take his advice, though he be one only, and not mind the rest.
Socrates establishes the epistemological precondition of the dialogue’s inquiry: authoritative knowledge, not majority opinion, must guide decisions about the cultivation of virtue.
, Laches, -390supporting
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 cautions against reading Socrates’ irony as a wholesale dismissal of technique, suggesting instead a more nuanced position on the relationship between skill-acquisition and the development of courage.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
I think that the view which is implied in Nicias’ definition of courage is worthy of examination. LACHES: Then examine for yourself, Socrates. SOCRATES: That is what I am going to do, my dear friend.
The transition from Laches’ behavioral account to Nicias’ intellectualist definition marks the dialogue’s structural pivot, with Socrates taking on the role of rigorous examiner of both positions.
, Laches, -390supporting
if andreia here denotes a specifically masculine ideal, and war is seen as male terrain (whether essentially or contingently), then learning a new martial skill could be seen as enhancing one’s masculinity.
Hobbs unpacks the semantic layering of andreia, showing how the interrelation of masculinity, military effectiveness, and moral courage determines the plausibility of Nicias’ opening claim about fighting in armour.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
we blame our fathers for letting us be spoiled in the days of our youth, while they were occupied with the concerns of others; and we urge all this upon the lads
The dramatic prelude establishes the intergenerational context for the inquiry into courage: anxious fathers seek to transmit virtue their own upbringing failed to instil, framing the dialogue’s educational stakes.
, Laches, -390supporting
a good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers? MELESIAS: To be sure. SOCRATES: Must we not then first of all ask, whether there is any one of us who has knowledge
The early exchange on expertise versus majority opinion establishes the epistemological framework that will govern the subsequent definitions of courage: knowledge, not convention or consensus, is the proper criterion.
, Laches, -390supporting
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 traces how the Protagoras extends the Laches’ account of courage by introducing fear of dishonour and second-order desires, suggesting that courage involves the alignment of self-image with objective moral worth.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000aside
Lacheis, one of the Fates, 95 and n., 145, 239
An index entry in the Hesiodic volume noting Lachesis as one of the three Moirai, providing the mythological background to the name Laches though unrelated to the philosophical dialogue.
, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700aside