Polytropy

Below is my essay on courage, first drafted in April of last year (2024). A reason to think of it now is a recent pair of essays, coming from the United States:

• Holly MathNerd, “The Fist Went Up: a reflection on courage” (July 30, 2025);
• Jessica Wildfire, “Something Stronger Than Hope” (August 4, 2025).

The latter takes up all of the virtues that Socrates does.

Plato didn’t get everything right, but he remains one of the most widely studied philosophers in western history for a reason. In Book IV of The Republic, he discusses the four cardinal virtues. Hope didn’t make the list.

Here they are:

• Wisdom (or prudence)
• Self-control (or temperance)
• Fairness (or justice)
• Fortitude (or courage)

These four virtues feed a healthy society. We’re supposed to teach them to our young and practice them every day. Hope stems from an insufficient knowledge about the world, but fortitude grows out of wisdom.

We’re long on hope, but short on fortitude.

It would be good if we had more fortitude. As Wildfire writes more recently, in “Fighting Fascism at The End of The World: What nobody wants to say” (August 20, 2025),

It’s gotten popular to tell people to physically throw themselves in front of ICE agents to stop arrests. Allow me to pose a rude question: If someone won’t even wear a piece of cloth on their face for a few hours a day, are they going to get thrown in jail to protect someone they don’t even know?

For Aristotle at least, there is a distinction between the two qualities that could be meant by fortitude and courage respectively. The distinction is a theme of my own essay below.

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