{"id":39216,"date":"2025-04-09T13:45:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-09T13:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=39216"},"modified":"2025-04-19T15:11:07","modified_gmt":"2025-04-19T15:11:07","slug":"the-courage-to-be-in-uncertain-times-%e2%88%92-how-one-20th-century-philosopher-defined-bravery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/the-courage-to-be-in-uncertain-times-%e2%88%92-how-one-20th-century-philosopher-defined-bravery\/","title":{"rendered":"The \u2018courage to be\u2019 in uncertain times \u2212 how one 20th-century philosopher defined bravery"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Mordechai Gordon<\/a>, Quinnipiac University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the past few weeks, as negotiations for a ceasefire in Ukraine drag on<\/a>, I\u2019ve thought back to Feb. 28, 2025: the day of Volodymyr Zelenskyy\u2019s heated visit to the Oval Office<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zelenskyy has called the tone of the meeting \u201cregrettable\u201d as he tries to salvage support for Ukraine<\/a>. But in some ways, he has stood by his decision to speak up as President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated his country, calling it ungrateful for foreign assistance. \u201cIn that conversation, I was defending the dignity of Ukraine,\u201d he told Time magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Watching Zelenskyy left me thinking about political courage. Philosophers have written about bravery for thousands of years, but what is it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Plato, for instance, wrote about courage as an important virtue<\/a> that can assist political leaders. Plato scholar Linda Rabieh<\/a> argues that courage is the ability to be steadfast in the moment of truth<\/a>. Angela Hobbs<\/a>, a British scholar, says that courage might be called \u201cspiritedness\u201d: the ability to act boldly in adverse situations<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of my own recent research<\/a> in philosophy of education has also focused on courage. In particular, I have been interested in Paul Tillich\u2019s notion of the \u201ccourage to be,\u201d as well as its implications for politics and education. Tillich was a German philosopher and theologian<\/a> who left the country after the Nazis rose to power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Tillich Park in New Harmony, Ind., dedicated to the philosopher and theologian. christina rutz\/Flickr<\/a>, CC BY-SA<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

More than a mindset<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Born in a village in eastern Germany in 1886, Tillich lived in a Europe ravaged by two world wars. As such, he experienced firsthand the fundamental anxiety<\/a> that many felt during this period of prolonged violence and destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the early 1930s, Tillich wrote \u201cThe Socialist Decision<\/a>,\u201d which can be interpreted as a challenge to right-wing populist movements. The Nazis banned the book, and he soon immigrated to the United States, where he would spend the rest of his life and write his most important philosophical and theological works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tillich\u2019s book \u201cThe Courage to Be<\/a>,\u201d published in 1952, is based on a series of lectures that he delivered at Yale University. Tillich was inspired to address courage, since he viewed this concept as one that integrates theological, sociological and philosophical problems. Moreover, Tillich suggests that this concept was useful for understanding societies\u2019 challenges after World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Tillich moved to the U.S. in the 1930s, after the Nazis\u2019 rise to power. Fritz Eschen\/ullstein bild via Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At its core, the book springs from an attempt to respond to anxiety: people\u2019s anxious search for meaning and security, especially as many people lost faith in the religious traditions that once anchored their sense of purpose and reality. There is courage, Tillich writes, in affirming oneself despite that sense of emptiness<\/a>, and despite the knowledge that our lives are short and uncertain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tillich defines \u201cthe courage to be\u201d as \u201cthe ethical act in which man affirms his own being in spite of those elements of his existence which conflict with his essential self-affirmation.\u201d In other words, it is not simply an attitude or disposition. The courage to be is a deed \u2013 the ability to stay true to oneself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it comes to ethics or politics, Tillich\u2019s idea of courage entails the ability to sacrifice things such as pleasure, happiness and, in the most extreme cases, one\u2019s life for some higher cause. Such acts of courage are praiseworthy because they suggest that the most ethically essential parts \u2013 the noble aspects \u2013 of our being are prevailing over the less essential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In spite of, a part of<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

What Tillich calls \u201ccourage to be\u201d consists of two indivisible parts or aspects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first is what he refers to as \u201cthe courage to be in spite of\u201d: courageously choosing to affirm one\u2019s essential being, one\u2019s core values, despite tough and even daunting forces of resistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s struggle for civil rights during the 1960s provides a good example<\/a> of this aspect of the courage to be. Documentary evidence indicates that the FBI tried to destroy his reputation<\/a> with blackmail and wiretaps, not to mention the close to 30 times he was jailed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Martin Luther King Jr., kneeling on left, leads marchers singing and praying during a protest against segregated housing policies in Chicago in August 1966. AP Photo\/File<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The second aspect Tillich describes in his book<\/a> is \u201cthe courage to be as a part,\u201d to partake in something larger than oneself. Tillich writes that \u201cthe self is self only because it has a world, a structured universe, to which it belongs.\u201d The courage to be as a part could mean participating in a political movement, a religious community, a worker strike, or any other initiative that involves people coming together for a common purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Tillich, these types of courage should not be considered separate qualities but two interrelated aspects of the courage to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Zelenskyy\u2019s meeting in the Oval Office, I believe we witnessed a leader embodying both senses of the courage to be. As a president, Zelenskyy stood up for the right of his country to defend itself in the face of Russia\u2019s assault. He remained steadfast in spite of efforts by Trump and Vance to pressure him to accept an agreement<\/a> that would not have provided security guarantees for Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet it seemed to me the plainspoken, animated Zelenskyy also displayed Tillich\u2019s notion of the courage to be as a part. He acted not only as an individual, or a politician<\/a>, but as a Ukrainian trying to defend his country from an invader \u2212 a cause that has inspired protests around the globe<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mordechai Gordon<\/a>, Professor of Education, Quinnipiac University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mordechai Gordon, Quinnipiac University Over the past few weeks, as negotiations for a ceasefire in Ukraine drag on, I\u2019ve thought back to Feb. 28, 2025: the day of Volodymyr Zelenskyy\u2019s heated visit to the Oval Office. Zelenskyy has called the tone of the meeting \u201cregrettable\u201d as he tries to salvage support for Ukraine. But in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":39217,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,8025,46,295,10,25,47,296,36,4,38],"tags":[11735,12105,479,196,10882,885,891,886,860,16245,581,1959,949,4911,11506],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39216"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39216"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39245,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39216\/revisions\/39245"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}