Knowing What to Fear: Plato and Hobbes on Courage as a Kind of Knowledge

• In Event: Plato, Thucydides, and the Uses of Political Discourse

Abstract

Thomas Hobbes once boasted that he was “first of all that fled” when the English Civil War broke out. Hobbes’ choice to base his political theory on the emotion of fear has appeared to many as a central feature that distinguishes his thought from classical political philosophy. Far less attention has been given to Hobbes’ view of fear’s counterpart: courage. I demonstrate that Hobbes actually accepts a fundamental aspect of Plato’s doctrine of courage: that it is ultimately a question of knowledge. Hobbes follows Plato in accepting that knowledge about what ought to be feared is the crucial feature of the virtue of courage. Both thus eliminate the self-sacrificial element implicit in the common-sense meaning of courage, replacing it with calculation about greater and lesser harms to oneself.
Hobbes’ agreement with Plato lays the groundwork for a further divergence. Both agree that there is an objective rank order of things to be feared, but they differ about the relative position of important types of harms. I explore this divergence and its implication for Hobbes’ overall critique of classical political thought, suggesting that the case of courage complicates our view of Hobbes’ relationship to the Greeks. While Hobbes rejects an Aristotelian account of virtues as habits, he accepts Plato’s account of virtue as a species of knowledge. His critique of the latter then depends on demonstrating that Plato lacked the very kind of knowledge most important to possess.

Author

• Michael C. Hawley, Bowdoin College