The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer | Page 3

an overgreat
apprehension about one's own person.
Courage, however, may also be explained as a readiness to meet ills
that threaten at the moment, in order to avoid greater ills that lie in the
future; whereas cowardice does the contrary. But this readiness is of the
same quality as _patience_, for patience consists in the clear
consciousness that greater evils than those which are present, and that
any violent attempt to flee from or guard against the ills we have may
bring the others upon us. Courage, then, would be a kind of patience;
and since it is patience that enables us to practise forbearance and self

control, Courage is, through the medium of patience, at least akin to
virtue.
But perhaps Courage admits of being considered from a higher point of
view. The fear of death may in every case be traced to a deficiency in
that natural philosophy--natural, and therefore resting on mere
feeling--which gives a man the assurance that he exists in everything
outside him just as much as in his own person; so that the death of his
person can do him little harm. But it is just this very assurance that
would give a man heroic Courage; and therefore, as the reader will
recollect from my _Ethics_, Courage comes from the same source as
the virtues of Justice and Humanity. This is, I admit, to take a very high
view of the matter; but apart from it I cannot well explain why
cowardice seems contemptible, and personal courage a noble and
sublime thing; for no lower point of view enables me to see why a
finite individual who is everything to himself--nay, who is himself even
the very fundamental condition of the existence of the rest of the
world--should not put his own preservation above every other aim. It is,
then, an insufficient explanation of Courage to make it rest only on
utility, to give it an empirical and not a transcendental character. It may
have been for some such reason that Calderon once uttered a sceptical
but remarkable opinion in regard to Courage, nay, actually denied its
reality; and put his denial into the mouth of a wise old minister,
addressing his young sovereign. "Although," he observed, "natural fear
is operative in all alike, a man may be brave in not letting it be seen;
and it is this that constitutes Courage":
_Que aunque el natural temor En todos obra igualmente, No mostrarle
es ser valiente Y esto es lo que hace el valor_.[1]
[Footnote 1: _La Hija del Aire_, ii., 2.]
In regard to the difference which I have mentioned between the
ancients and the moderns in their estimate of Courage as a virtue, it
must be remembered that by Virtue, _virtus_, [Greek: aretae], the
ancients understood every excellence or quality that was praiseworthy
in itself, it might be moral or intellectual, or possibly only physical. But
when Christianity demonstrated that the fundamental tendency of life
was moral, it was moral superiority alone than henceforth attached to
the notion of Virtue. Meanwhile the earlier usage still survived in the
elder Latinists, and also in Italian writers, as is proved by the

well-known meaning of the word virtuoso. The special attention of
students should be drawn to this wider range of the idea of Virtue
amongst the ancients, as otherwise it might easily be a source of secret
perplexity. I may recommend two passages preserved for us by
Stobaeus, which will serve this purpose. One of them is apparently
from the Pythagorean philosopher Metopos, in which the fitness of
every bodily member is declared to be a virtue. The other pronounces
that the virtue of a shoemaker is to make good shoes. This may also
serve to explain why it is that in the ancient scheme of ethics virtues
and vices are mentioned which find no place in ours.
As the place of Courage amongst the virtues is a matter of doubt, so is
that of Avarice amongst the vices. It must not, however, be confounded
with greed, which is the most immediate meaning of the Latin word
avaritia. Let us then draw up and examine the arguments pro et contra
in regard to Avarice, and leave the final judgment to be formed by
every man for himself.
On the one hand it is argued that it is not Avarice which is a vice, but
extravagance, its opposite. Extravagance springs from a brutish
limitation to the present moment, in comparison with which the future,
existing as it does only in thought, is as nothing. It rests upon the
illusion that sensual pleasures possess a positive or real value.
Accordingly, future need and misery is the price at which the
spendthrift purchases pleasures that are empty, fleeting, and often no
more than imaginary; or else feeds his