TO begin with, what is courage?
For Rollo May, author of The Courage to Create, courage should not be the opposite of despair saying "we shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades."
Kierkegaard and Nietszche and Camus and Sarte have proclaimed that "courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair."
According to May, courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values.
"Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism," Mayo explains.
HEART
The word courage, he says, comes from the same stem as the French word coeur, meaning "heart." Thus just as one's heart, by pumping blood to one's arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes possible all the psychological virtues.
Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.
Mayo further explains that in human beings, courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible. An assertion of the self, a commitment, is essential if the self is to have any reality.
This is the distinction between human beings and the rest of nature.
The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary, Mayo stresses. "The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them."
"People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage. This is why Paul Tillich speaks of courage as ontological--it is essential to our being," he narrates.
OBVIOUS
PHYSICAL COURAGE. This is the simplest and most obvious kind of courage. In our culture, physical courage takes its form chiefly from the myths of the frontier. Our prototypes have been the pioneer heroes who took the law into their own hands, who survived because they could draw a gun faster than their opponent, who were, above all things, self-reliant and could endure the inevitable loneliness in homesteading with the nearest neighbor 20 miles away.
MORAL COURAGE. A second kind of courage is moral courage. Persons who have great moral courage have generally abhorred violence. Mayo calls this as "perceptual courage" because it depends on one's capacity to perceive, to let one's self see the suffering of other people. If we let ourselves experience the evil, we will be forced to do something about it. It is the truth, recognizable in all of us, that when we don't want to become involved, when we don't want to confront even the issue of whether or not we'll come to the aid of someone who is being unjustly treated, we block off our perception, we blind ourselves to other's suffering, we cut off our empathy with the person needing help. Hence the most prevalent form of cowardice in our day hides behind the statement "I did not want to become involved."
OPPOSITE
SOCIAL COURAGE. The third kind of courage is the opposite to the just described apathy; Mayo call is social courage.
It is the courage to relate to other human beings, the capacity to risk one's self in the hope of achieving meaningful intimacy.
It is the courage to invest one's self over a period of time in a relationship that will demand an increasing openness.
"Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable," Mayo writes. "We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us? The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected."
Social courage requires the confronting of two different kinds of fear. These were beautifully described by one of the early psychoanalysts, Otto Rank. The first he calls the "life fear." This is the fear of living autonomously, the fear of being abandoned, the need for dependency on someone else.
It shows itself in the need to throw one's self so completely into a relationship that one has no self left with which to relate. One becomes, in effect, a reflection of the person he or she loves--which sooner or later becomes boring to the partner.
This is the fear of self-actualization, as Rank described it. Living some 40 years before the days of women's liberation, Rank averred that this kind of fear was most typical of women.
'DEATH FEAR'
The opposite fear Rank called the "death fear." This is the fear of being totally absorbed by the other, the fear of losing one's self and one's autonomy, the fear of having one's independence taken away. This, said Rank, is the fear most associated with men, for they seek to keep the back door open to beat a hasty retreat in case the relationship becomes too intimate.
ONE PARADOX OF COURAGE. A curious paradox characteristic of every kind of courage here confronts us, according to May. It is the seeming contradiction that we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong. This dialectic relationship between conviction and doubt is characteristic of the highest types of courage, and gives the lie to the simplistic definitions that identify courage with mere growth.
CREATIVE COURAGE. This brings us to the most important kind of courage of all. Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built. Every profession can and does require some creative courage. In our day, technology and engineering, diplomacy, business, and certainly teaching, all of these professions and scores of others are in the midst of radical change and require courageous persons to appreciate and direct this change. Mayo says the need for creative courage is in direct proportion to the degree of change the profession is undergoing.
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