Philosophy Case

Marcel France once said, “The secret of life is this: When you hear the sound of cannons, walk toward them.” (Dean, Ph. D.) Courage, as defined by Dictionary.com, is “The ability to do something that frightens someone, or strength in the face of pain or grief.” Courage has always been achieved by overcoming obstacles in your life that hold you down by fear. These obstacles can be mental or physical, and overcoming them gives oneself a feeling of accomplishment or pride. Given a choice in ones actions, does courage truly exist with fear, or can one have courage with the absence of fear? I believe that being fearless means you lack courage and have no motives for any courageous actions, and that fear will always be apart of courage or exist with it in some form or fashion.

Aristotle stated in his book, Nichomachean Ethics, said, “Courage must exist with fear, because to perform a courageous act one must overcome some kind of fear...” (W.D. Ross) Take for example a person, let us call her Abigail, who is afraid of spiders, also called Arachnophobia. Abigail has always been terrified by them, whether by a past event or has always just been weary of them. She walks into her baby brothers room one night just to check in on him, when she notices a venomous Black Widow spider on her brothers arm. She is now frozen in fear. Fear involving the sight of the spider, and fear seeing it as a harm to her younger brother. She can possibly do one of two things: she can either run away and hope for the best, or swipe the spider off her brother, possibly saving him. Something inside her tells her to run, but something greater inside tells her to save him, so Abigail decides to grab a napkin, pick up and kill the spider, flushing him down the toilet. What was that greater feeling she had you may ask? A simple answer would be courage. Abigail overcame her fear to save her younger brother from being bitten. She performed a courageous act to help another life in possible danger. This a prime example of courage is, facing ones fears to help yourself or to help others. Someone could also argue that fear was not present in her actions. She could have completely forgotten her fear at that moment of seeing the spider, and could have been replaced with another emotion, such as love. Her love for her brothers life promoted her to save him. That is a very plausible reason for her action, but one must take into account of her past involving Arachnophobia. She may have not had fear in that situation, but she did have fear at one time involving spiders. That fear was still there, though may or may have been present at that moment. The fear was a catalyst in her love and that fleeting moment when she forgot all of fears of spiders and saved her little brother. Fear will always be present in ones courageous actions, whether directly causing the act or being a catalyst in the act of being courageous. It is always there, and if it is not, then the act itself was