“Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.” - Aristotle
Does it, though? Time has diluted the relevance of this philosophy, and in the twenty-first century, I have to disagree. In our contemporary society, I’d argue that courage is a mere supplement to greater virtues. Courage does not define a person, and certainly does not imply any other quality, positive or not.
I don’t think any trait has the ability to invoke, warrant, or create another. Human characteristics are notoriously volatile and varied. If you had a handful of traits and the task of determining connections, implications, and dependencies between them, I don’t think much could be deduced past the surface level similarities, meaning the shallow classification of “positive” or “negative”. Traits are first, very hard to even define, and second, even harder to draw links between.
Do we even define traits, past emotions, connotation and societal expectation? Any characteristic, when manifested in the complex system that is a human, takes countless forms that would be impossible to classify. A courageous act on my part could be on your everyday schedule, and in the huge network of humanity, these traits are bound to alter wildly. Even more, across geographic and cultural rifts, these definitions become jumbled and uncertain. This alone makes Aristotle’s statement hard to agree with: if courage itself can’t be defined consistently, how can it guarantee any other trait?
Even if we had an agreed upon and true definition of courage, it still has no ability to influence one’s other characteristics. Courage: emotional, mental, or physical, is independent. Just take kindness, narcissism, and curiosity as an example. Kindness comes from the heart, narcissism out of vanity, and curiosity from observance. How could courage encompass all of these traits? Nothing can, and courage is only one of the tiny, individually insignificant, building blocks of a person’s morals, personality, and beliefs.
This omnipotent virtue that Aristotle speaks of does not exist. Instead, the work of acquiring desired traits comes from practice and awareness.
You’ve probably noticed I’ve got a slight grudge against this whole idea of “courage.” I might be biased, but I feel like the whole concept of courage is slightly outdated. It’s associated with (and perhaps originally defined for) valiant battlegrounds and heroic acts, not things that the modern person usually achieves. Smaller acts of courage are not seen as such, so it becomes difficult to acknowledge and accept what’s been ingrained in our society as “courageous.”