The Meaning of Courage in Montaigne'sEssays
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3971957 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sam Mcchesney (Northwestern University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 131-148 |
| Publication date | 2021-02-17 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The European Legacy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1084-8770 • E-ISSN: 1470-1316 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10848770.2020.1821473 |
| OpenAlex | W3085859235 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 14 |
One of the most enduring puzzles of courage is its relation to technical or instrumental reason and the power such reason brings. For Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), the conquest of the New World showed that classical, aristocratic valour was a dying paradigm: if all struggles can be settled by a test of power and skill, courage appears to be obsolete. Thus, the very meaning of courage is to be found in its opposition to instrumentalism. For Montaigne, the purely instrumental concerns of power and skill have no meaning in themselves, but aspire to an omnipotence through which an understanding of the self and its world evaporates. A god can never possess self-knowledge because self-knowledge is forged through opposition and struggle and under conditions of finitude. The attempt to transcend or avoid this struggle (and the courage that this struggle requires of us) through the application of ontic method is both cowardly and futile. The self is an inescapably finite, horizonal being embedded in a world of flux and plurality. Courage, for Montaigne, therefore relates to an awareness, as opposed to a denial, of human limitations. This is, I argue, a valuable contribution to our understanding of the virtue of courage, but it is not the last word. Montaigne’s concern to embrace our status as finite creatures often manifested in a problematic praise of poverty, suffering, and death
Aesthetics · Art · Courage · Denial · Epistemology · Literature · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Theology · French Literature and Criticism · Law · Philosophy · Psychology
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |