The Role Of Fear In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

Aristotle asserts, in his book Nicomachean Ethics, that courage is a virtue existing somewhere between confidence and fear. Confidence and fear are relativity vague terms in and of them self. Yet, out author cleverly go off path, distracting us away from the primary issue to understand the secondary issues in an effort to engage the reader in a true understanding of what it mean to be courageous.
Courage is defined as a mean and to understand that mean we must first understand what two components make up the mean. Fear, the first component, can be defined as the “anticipations of a bad thing” (55). Yet, Aristotle only vaguely defines these bad things as “disrepute, poverty, sickness, friendlessness, and death” (55). Death is the end of life, …show more content…
The fearful person fears the wrong things all the time and to the wrong degree. Therefore, we observe that fear as it relates to courage is two forked. On the first fork we have the “worthy” fear, the fear that is noble, the fear that embodies and evokes courage. On the other side, we have the fake, the “fear of what one ought not”, the fear in excess (56). “He who exceeds in fearlessness is nameless, but someone would be mad or insensitive to pain if he should fear nothing” as fearing nothing represents no courage, no nobility. Whereas fearing too much is unnecessary and unbefitting of a courageous person. A person of courage should embrace the fear and welcome death. It is here that Aristotle begins to concretely assert what courage is and leave no open ends. He further more states that “the coward, the reckless, and the courageous are concern[ed] with the same things, then, but they differ in relation to them” (57). The coward fears all and does nothing. The reckless has no fear and embodies stupidity and hence has no nobility, or respect for the things of courage. Aristotle is again avoiding defining courage directly and instead quantifying its relationship to other, associated