What is Courage?
Courage has two components; the ontological (body in action) and the conceptual (mind in action).
Paul Tillich, “Apostle to the intellectuals”, attempts to provide a new theological vocabulary by which modern wo/man might deal with the human situation. Tillich informs us that “Few concepts are as useful for the analysis of the human situation” as the concept of courage.
In his acclaimed book The Courage to Be Tillich sees courage as an “ethical reality”, i.e. courage is foremost a conceptual reality, which is rooted in the whole gestalt of human existence and “ultimately in the structure of being itself. It must be considered ontologically [body-mind in action] in order to be understood ethically”.
When one speaks of mind almost everyone thinks of a stand alone entity functioning in a logical manner in which the body is merely a house for its place of habitation until death, at which time it, sometimes called the soul, floats away to a spiritual kingdom. I wish to correct that erroneous idea.
I have coined the word body-mind, which I first discovered by reading Mark Johnson’s book The Meaning of the Body, because I wish the reader to think not of the mind as a separate entity residing in the body but because I want the reader to think of a body-mind gestalt. That is to say that the mind is an embodied mind, which cannot stand alone just as the heart cannot stand alone with the body bracketed.
Quickie from Wiki: “The psychologist, Carl Jung, who studied archetypes, proposed an alternative definition of symbol, distinguishing it from the term "sign". In Jung's view, a sign stands for something known, as a word stands for its referent. He contrasted this with symbol, which he used to stand for something that is unknown and that cannot be made clear or precise.”
In accordance with Carl Jung I would say that the term “body-mind” is a symbol.
Humans, when they became conscious of their mortality, became overly anxious upon discovering their forthcoming death and they conceptualized the soul, which over millions of years morphed into monotheism and religion. Religion became the promise of life everlasting and thus assuaged the anxiety of death.
This anxiety over mortality caused a self-critical humanity to develop the mind/body dichotomy. This dichotomy leads to the idea that there is an essential difference between body and mind. But SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) informs us that we have a body-mind, that is to say that we are a gestalt, not two parts working separately but an integrated functioning whole. The body and mind works as a single unit. The body in action and the mind in action make the human being in action with a constant interrelationship between these two aspects of the gestalt.
Tillich informs us that the human act of courage is fundamentally a body-mind action driven by an ethical concept. “The courage to be is the ethical act in which man affirms his own being in spite of those elements of his existence which conflict with his essential self-affirmation.”
