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[1229b]
[1]
Hence some people who are even very soft
about certain things are brave, and some who are hard and enduring are
also cowardly. Moreover
it is thought to be almost a special property of courage to be of a
certain disposition in regard to death and the pain of death; for if a
man were such as to be capable of rational endurance in respect of
heat and cold and pains of that sort that are not dangerous, but at
the same time soft and excessively timid about death, not because of
any other feeling but just because it brings destruction, while
another man was soft in regard to those pains but impassive as regards
death, the former would be thought a coward and the latter brave.
For we speak of
danger only in the case of such formidable things as bring near to us
what causes destruction of that sort, and when this appears near it
appears to be danger.The formidable
things, therefore, in relation to which we speak of a man as brave
are, we have said, those that appear likely to cause pain of the
destructive kind—provided that these appear close at hand
and not far off, and are or appear to be of a magnitude proportionate
to a human being; for
some things must necessarily appear fearful to every human being and
throw everybody into alarm, since it is quite possible that,
[20]
just as heat and cold and some
of the other forces are above us and above the conditions of the human
body, so also are some mental sufferings.Therefore whereas the cowardly and the daring are mistaken owing to
their characters, since the coward thinks things not formidable
formidable and things slightly formidable extremely formidable, and
the daring man on the contrary thinks formidable things perfectly safe
and extremely formidable things only slightly formidable, to the brave
man on the other hand things seem exactly what they are. Hence a man is not brave if
he endures formidable things through ignorance (for instance, if owing
to madness he were to endure a flight of thunderbolts), nor if he does
so owing to passion when knowing the greatness of the danger, as the
Celts 'take arms and march against the waves'1; and in general, the
courage of barbarians has an element of passion. And some men endure terrors
for the sake of other pleasures also—for even passion
contains pleasure of a sort, since it is combined with hope of
revenge. But nevertheless neither if a man endures death for the sake
of this pleasure nor for another, nor for the sake of avoiding greater
pains, would any of these persons justly be termed brave. For if dying were pleasant,
profligates would be dying constantly, owing to lack of self-control,
just as even as it is, when, although death itself is not pleasant,
things that cause it are, many men through lack of self control
knowingly encounter it; none of whom would be thought brave, even
though he were thought to die quite readily. Nor yet are any of those
brave who, as many men do, commit suicide to escape from trouble, as
Agathon2 says:
1 This appears to be loosely quoted from a verse passage: cf. Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1115b 25. An echo of the story survives in Shakespeare's metaphor, 'to take arms against a sea of troubles.'
2 Athenian tragic poet, friend of Plato.
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