Courage

Homer gives the Western tradition its first and most vivid picture of courage. In the Iliad, courage is what a man shows on the battlefield when death is near and reputation is at stake. Achilles, Hector, and Ajax are brave in different ways, but all of them understand courage as standing firm when the line breaks, pressing forward when others fall back, choosing a short and glorious life over a long and obscure one.

This is not thoughtless ferocity. Hector knows he will die defending Troy, and he faces that knowledge with open eyes. His farewell to Andromache is the most human scene in the poem precisely because his courage is not the absence of fear but the decision to fight despite it. Achilles, by contrast, rages and withdraws and returns, and his courage is bound up with wounded pride and the grief of losing Patroclus. Homer does not present a single model of bravery but a spectrum.

What Homer does not attempt is a philosophical account of courage. He shows it in action: in specific decisions, made by specific men, under the pressure of specific circumstances. The question of what courage is, as distinct from what it looks like in the heat of battle, is one the philosophers will raise, beginning with Plato's Laches, which examines courage through the testimony of two generals and finds their answers wanting.

Homer's warriors establish the image of courage against which subsequent thinkers measure their accounts. Plato will intellectualize the virtue and tie it to knowledge of what is truly worth fearing; Aristotle will preserve the connection to battle while adding the requirement that fear and confidence be felt in the right measure for the right reasons. Both, in different ways, depart from the Homeric picture while remaining indebted to it.

Thucydides does not theorize courage in the manner of the philosophers, but the History of the Peloponnesian War is saturated with questions about what genuine courage is, what produces it, and how it fails. The Funeral Oration of Pericles offers what amounts to a democratic theory of military virtue. Athenians, Pericles argues, are uniquely courageous precisely because they are not trained to it. Where the Spartans submit to lifelong drilling and are kept brave by habit and compulsion, Athenians cultivate a free and varied life yet prove equally ready to face danger when the city demands it. Their courage is voluntary — an expression of love for the city and understanding of what is at stake — rather than the conditioned reflex of a military machine. This claim makes Athenian courage both a civic achievement and a fragile one: it depends on the citizens' continuing attachment to the values that the city embodies.

The fragility becomes visible in two episodes that balance the Funeral Oration. The plague of 430 BC, described in the same book, shows how rapidly civic virtue dissolves when the prospect of future reward and punishment disappears. Men who had once been brave in battle abandoned the dying; those who nursed the sick did so partly from desperation and partly because they no longer expected to survive themselves. The revolution in Corcyra extends the analysis: civil war corrupts the very vocabulary of courage, redefining boldness as virtue and caution as cowardice in the service of faction. What had been a shared standard for estimating action becomes a weapon of political rhetoric.

The Sicilian Expedition of Books VI-VII is the culmination of Thucydides' inquiry. The Athenians display enormous energy and physical daring, yet the expedition ends in annihilation. Thucydides implies that the courage expended there was misdirected — not the calm resolve of Pericles' portrait but the reckless ambition of an assembly that could no longer distinguish confidence from calculation. Homer's heroes face known enemies on a bounded battlefield; Thucydides' Athenians face an empire-wide conflict whose complexity defeats every private act of valor. The relationship between individual courage and collective political judgment, left implicit in Homer, becomes explicit and troubled in the History.

Thucydides' analysis of how institutional and civic conditions produce or erode courage feeds directly into Plato's and Aristotle's political philosophy. Plato's account in the Republic of how democracy degenerates — courage becoming recklessness, freedom becoming license — reads like a philosophical commentary on Thucydides' Corcyraean revolution. Aristotle's comparative study of constitutional courage, and his insistence that the truly courageous man acts for a noble end rather than from faction or compulsion, responds to the same historical record.

Plato transforms courage from a battlefield virtue into a question of knowledge. In the Laches, Socrates asks two generals to define courage, and their answers (endurance, knowledge of what to fear) collapse under examination. The dialogue ends in aporia: we cannot define courage without understanding virtue as a whole, and we do not yet understand virtue as a whole.

The Republic offers a more developed answer. Courage belongs to the spirited part of the soul (thumos), the part that fights, gets angry, and defends what reason declares worthy. A courageous person preserves "through pains and pleasures and desires and fears" the judgment that reason has formed about what is truly dangerous and what is not. Courage is thus a kind of preservation of right opinion, forged by education and habit.

Where Homer shows courage in the act of standing firm under pressure, Plato identifies it with an intellectual and psychological condition: knowing what genuinely deserves fear and holding fast to that knowledge through pain and pleasure alike. A brave soldier who fights for a bad cause or from mere compulsion, not from right opinion preserved by education, is not, on Plato's account, truly courageous. This connection between courage and knowledge opens the question, addressed in the chapter on Virtue and Vice, of whether the virtues are ultimately unified by their common dependence on a single kind of understanding.

Plato ties courage to knowledge and through knowledge to the whole of virtue, arguing that the virtues are not fully separable. Aristotle will accept the connection to reason while insisting that character virtue is not knowledge alone but a settled disposition of feeling and action, formed by habit rather than by instruction.

Aristotle gives the tradition its canonical account. Courage is a virtue of character, a settled disposition (hexis) to feel fear and confidence in the right measure, toward the right objects, at the right time. It is the mean between cowardice (too much fear) and rashness (too little). The courageous person faces genuine dangers, especially death in battle, for the sake of what is noble (kalon).

Aristotle catalogues five imperfect forms of courage that fall short of the genuine article. The citizen-soldier fights from fear of punishment or shame. The experienced soldier fights from skill rather than character. The spirited man fights from anger. The sanguine man from overconfidence. The ignorant man from not knowing the danger. None of these is true courage because none acts from the right motive: a settled understanding of the noble combined with the emotional capacity to endure fear for its sake.

This account preserves the connection to battle that Homer exemplifies while incorporating Plato's demand that courage involve right judgment about what is truly dangerous. Courage requires both the appropriate emotional response and the stable disposition of character that sustains that response through pleasure and pain alike. The brave person is not fearless but fears the right things; not reckless but willing to act despite warranted fear when the end is noble enough to justify it.

Aristotle's definition provides the framework within which subsequent discussions proceed, but it leaves open a question that later thinkers press: courage is defined as facing the right dangers for the sake of what is noble, yet the determination of what is noble falls to practical wisdom, which is itself a difficult virtue to characterize. Aquinas will extend the account by identifying martyrdom as the highest expression of fortitude; Kant will argue that the nobility of the cause is insufficient and that courage has moral worth only when governed by a good will.

Plutarch's Lives constitute the richest gallery of courage in ancient literature, and the gallery is deliberately varied. Lycurgus designed the Spartan constitution to make courage the supreme civic virtue: physical training from infancy, communal meals, the systematic humiliation of cowards, and the celebration of those who fell in battle. The entire city was, as Plutarch says, "a sort of camp." The result was a people who found in war the condition of their greatest repose, who sang battle hymns before combat, and who regarded returning alive from a lost engagement as a greater shame than death. Spartan courage was a total institutional achievement, the product of a state apparatus devoted to a single end.

Plutarch's other lives complicate this picture without refuting it. Pelopidas shows the courage of the battlefield commander who leads from the front out of genuine love for his companions and his city, not from Spartan drill. Coriolanus exhibits martial valor untempered by the civic virtues of justice and prudence — courage divorced from its proper ends, turning its possessor into a threat to the republic he had once defended. Caesar displays the particular courage of the statesman-general who wills victory with an almost contemptuous disregard for danger, yet whose ends are finally incompatible with the constitutional order his courage was supposed to serve. The Lives repeatedly show that raw military valor is not enough; it must be joined to the other virtues if it is to be genuinely admirable rather than merely formidable.

Plutarch's method is biographical and comparative. He pairs Greek and Roman lives to illuminate how different traditions have understood the virtues, and courage is always among the primary objects of his scrutiny. He is particularly interested in the formation of character: how early education, chosen companions, and repeated action shape the disposition from which courageous acts arise. The city is the primary school of courage, but the individual must also supply something — a genuine concern for noble ends that no institution can entirely manufacture. This balance between civic formation and personal character connects Plutarch's biographical inquiry to the philosophical discussions of Aristotle and anticipates the question of moral habituation that Aquinas will take up within a theological framework.

Plutarch's Lives become, through their Renaissance reception, the single most influential source on ancient courage for early modern writers. Montaigne reads the Lives obsessively and his essays on courage quote or allude to Plutarch on nearly every page. Shakespeare's Roman plays draw their portraits of martial virtue directly from the Lives. The question that Plutarch poses through his paired portraits — whether courage without justice and prudence is virtue or merely dangerous force — becomes one of the organizing questions of early modern moral thought.

Epictetus reformulates courage around the Stoic distinction between what is and what is not in our power. Aristotle had located courage in the appetitive and spirited parts of the soul, treating it as a mean between cowardice and rashness in the face of physical danger. Epictetus does not deny the importance of facing danger well, but he insists that the deeper question concerns the right orientation of the will rather than the management of bodily fear. The person who clings to life, health, reputation, or any external good as something indispensable to happiness will inevitably be fearful, because such goods are always at risk. The person who has learned to want only what is genuinely within reach — the correct use of one's own will and judgment — has nothing to fear from fortune.

This produces what Epictetus acknowledges looks paradoxical at first: the courageous person combines confidence with caution, yet these seem like contrary dispositions. His resolution is that they apply to different objects. Confidence belongs to all things outside the will's control — death, pain, poverty, loss of status — because these are in Fortune's hands, not ours, and no amount of anxiety changes that. Caution belongs to the things within the will's control — our judgments, intentions, and desires — because these are exactly where we can go wrong and where our choices are genuinely consequential. To be fearless about pain and anxious about one's own temptations is not a contradiction but the only coherent form of self-governance available to a rational being.

The practical result is a form of courage that differs from both Homer's battlefield valor and Aristotle's civic virtue. Epictetus does not ask whether a man can hold his post under fire; he asks whether a man can hold his principles under pressure. Facing a tyrant, standing firm against public opinion, enduring illness without complaint, maintaining justice in circumstances that make injustice easy — these are the tests that matter. The slave who maintains his dignity in the face of a master's cruelty, and the emperor who maintains his duties under the weight of an empire, require the same inner resource. The content of the courage differs; the structure is identical.

Epictetus' analysis reaches Aquinas through a complex transmission involving later Stoic writers and Augustine, who found in Stoic self-governance both an anticipation of and a challenge to Christian virtue. The key tension is whether the Stoic courage to accept all externals indifferently is genuinely a virtue or an evasion of the attachment to particular goods that moral life requires. Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus' most distinguished student in spirit if not in person, attempts to live the Epictetean ideal in circumstances of maximal external complexity, and his Meditations record what that attempt costs.

Marcus Aurelius does not define courage so much as practice it before the reader's eyes. The Meditations are private notes, written to himself over years of imperial administration and military campaigning, and they record the interior work required to face each day without retreating into complaint, fantasy, or despair. The courage Marcus requires of himself is not primarily martial, though he commanded armies on the Danube frontier for much of his reign. It is the courage of attention and return: the capacity to face the full weight of imperial responsibility, personal grief, physical pain, and philosophical uncertainty, and to come back each morning to the work of a human being.

The Stoic framework Epictetus had articulated becomes, in Marcus, a lived experiment. He cannot simply refuse to care about the things that are not in his power, because as emperor those things press on him from every direction. The death of children, the betrayal of friends, the ingratitude of those he has served, the prospect of his own death — Marcus does not pretend these are nothing to him. What he attempts is something more demanding: to acknowledge their weight while refusing to let that weight deform his judgment or corrupt his actions. This is courage as a species of self-governance, the ability to continue thinking clearly and acting justly under conditions that would disorganize a lesser mind.

He writes repeatedly of rising in the morning unwilling. The act of getting up to do the work again, without the incentive of glory or pleasure, is a small but genuine form of fortitude. It connects daily civic courage — the courage of the magistrate, the physician, the soldier who does his duty without expectation of honor — to the larger philosophical question of how a rational being inhabits a universe that is often indifferent to his good. Marcus answers that question not with a theory but with a daily practice of remembrance: what is within my power, what is my duty, what is the reasonable response to this moment. The Meditations are, among other things, a record of courage as habit.

Marcus Aurelius represents the point at which Stoic philosophy and the demands of political life meet most visibly. His Meditations are read by Aquinas, who finds in them a partial anticipation of the Christian courage that seeks to align the will with a rational providential order. Montaigne, who inherits from Plutarch and from the Stoics a rich vocabulary of courage, reads Marcus with explicit admiration. The figure of the ruler who performs his duty without the consolation of public honor or private happiness becomes a recurring touchstone in early modern reflections on civic virtue.

Aquinas adopts Aristotle's framework but expands its scope. Fortitude (his name for courage) is one of the four cardinal virtues, and its principal act is not attacking but enduring. The brave person sustains difficulty, suffering, and the threat of death for the sake of the good. Endurance, not daring, is the harder and more characteristic act because it requires standing firm over time against fear that wears down the soul.

Aquinas distinguishes two acts of fortitude: sustinere (enduring) and aggredi (attacking). Enduring is the greater because it involves a longer struggle against a present evil; attacking can be swift and fueled by anger. He also identifies the vices opposed to fortitude: cowardice, which shrinks from due danger, and foolhardiness, which rushes into undue danger. These map onto Aristotle's extremes, but Aquinas adds a theological dimension that Aristotle could not have imagined.

The highest expression of fortitude is martyrdom. The martyr endures death rather than abandon the faith, and this is the perfection of the virtue because it risks the greatest evil (death) for the greatest good (God). No pagan philosopher could have anticipated this form of courage, because it requires a good higher than any the natural world can offer.

Aquinas extends the Aristotelian account by introducing a good that no natural philosophy could supply as the highest object of fortitude. The question his treatment raises is not only what dangers a courageous person should face, but for the sake of what ultimate good such dangers are worth facing. The relation between the natural virtue of courage and the theological virtues is discussed further in the chapter on Virtue and Vice.

Machiavelli breaks with the entire tradition of moral philosophy on the question of courage by asking a different question. Where Aristotle asks what disposition of soul constitutes genuine courage, and Aquinas asks how courage serves the natural and supernatural ends of the human person, Machiavelli asks what qualities enable a prince to succeed in the real world of political action. His answer is virtù — a cluster of qualities including force, cunning, boldness, and adaptability — and the relationship between virtù and courage as the tradition understood it is deliberately oblique. A prince who possesses the traditional cardinal virtues but lacks the willingness to use force and deception when necessary will be destroyed. A prince who lacks those virtues but possesses virtù may survive and even flourish.

Fortune is Machiavelli's central concept for understanding why audacity matters. He compares Fortune to a torrential river: those who prepare with dikes and channels can resist her, but those who make no preparation are overwhelmed. The preparation Fortune demands is the willingness to move decisively when opportunity appears. Those who act cautiously, waiting for perfect conditions, are not being prudent in the classical sense; they are ceding control to Fortune, whose nature is constant change. The prince who acts boldly, even if sometimes wrong, is more likely to stay in phase with Fortune's variations than the cautious man who remains correct but static. "It is better to be adventurous than cautious," Machiavelli writes, because Fortune responds to those who are willing to impose their will on circumstances.

This argument disconnects courage from moral purpose in a way that Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant all explicitly resist. For Machiavelli, the brigand and the virtuous prince may display the same quality of boldness; what differs is the outcome, not the internal character of the act. Whether the boldness is admirable depends not on the excellence of the soul from which it springs but on whether it serves the prince's ends and, secondarily, whether those ends serve the stability of the state. The normative question about what ends are worth pursuing with courage recedes behind the practical question of what dispositions make a man effective. This is not an oversight but a deliberate reorientation of political thought, and subsequent writers — Montaigne, Hobbes, and ultimately Kant — find themselves compelled to respond to it.

Machiavelli's influence on subsequent discussions of courage runs both above and below ground. Montaigne engages him constantly, borrowing his empirical method while complicating his conclusions with a different kind of self-knowledge. Hobbes secularizes the account of courage as a passion that serves survival rather than virtue. The tradition's standard response — that courage untethered from moral purpose is merely dangerous force — gains its sharpest formulation in Kant, who insists that no talent or temperamental quality, however apparently admirable, has genuine moral worth unless it proceeds from a good will.

Montaigne brings courage down from the battlefield and the martyr's scaffold into the study and the sickroom. He has seen war (the French Wars of Religion) and found that the actual experience of danger bears little resemblance to philosophical descriptions of it. Men do strange things under pressure. Some freeze. Some weep. Some laugh. The neat categories of cowardice and bravery rarely capture what happens to a real person facing real death.

In "Of Fear," Montaigne catalogues the irrational effects of terror on the body and mind: soldiers who flee in the wrong direction, men who faint, armies routed by panic rather than force. Fear, he insists, is the emotion most worth studying because it seizes us despite our convictions. The Stoics' claim to have mastered fear through reason strikes Montaigne as pretense. He has watched men die, and he knows that the body has its own counsel.

Montaigne does not claim to be brave. His own courage, if it can be called that, takes the form of honesty about his own weakness and an unwillingness to pretend to emotions he does not feel. He suggests that facing one's cowardice squarely, without the armor of philosophical definition or military custom, may be a more genuine exercise of the virtue than either the soldier's bluster or the Stoic's professed indifference to pain.

Montaigne extends the discussion of courage beyond the battlefield and the martyr's scaffold into the study and the sickroom, insisting that the virtue, if genuine, must be tested against ordinary fear and ordinary weakness rather than against the extraordinary occasions that the classical accounts tend to favor. Whether the courage he describes is a variant of the virtue Aristotle analyzes or a different thing requiring a different account is a question his essays raise without settling.

Hobbes gives courage an account that belongs to his general mechanistic psychology rather than to the tradition of moral philosophy. In the Leviathan, courage is nothing more than "the absence of fear in the presence of any evil whatsoever." It belongs to the same mechanical psychology as desire and aversion: the body moves toward what it wants and away from what it fears, and courage names the state in which the approach impulse overcomes the avoidance impulse.

In the state of nature, courage is dangerous. Without a sovereign to impose order, bold men are a threat to everyone around them. The "war of all against all" is driven by competition, diffidence, and glory, and the brave man pursuing glory is as much a source of misery as the fearful man acting from diffidence. Hobbes has no patience for the heroic ideal. Achilles in the state of nature is not noble; he is a menace.

Inside the commonwealth, courage becomes useful only when channeled by the sovereign's command. The soldier's bravery serves the state; private daring is insubordination. Hobbes thus transforms courage from an individual virtue into a political resource, valuable when directed and dangerous when free.

Hobbes raises in sharp form the question whether courage is a virtue in its own right or whether it is a natural force, like strength or cunning, that becomes beneficial or dangerous depending on the ends it serves and the political authority under which it operates. The implications of this question for the theory of virtue are pursued in the chapter on Virtue and Vice.

Spinoza reframes courage within his general theory of the conatus, the striving of every being to persist in its own existence. Courage is not, as for Aristotle, a disposition acquired through habituation that produces a mean between cowardice and rashness; nor is it, as for Machiavelli, an effective boldness in the face of Fortune. It is a species of fortitudo, the strength of mind that arises when reason governs the passions rather than the passions governing themselves. Spinoza divides this rational self-possession into two expressions: animositas, the individual's rational desire to preserve his own being against obstacles, and generositas, the rational desire to assist others and to govern human relationships by the dictates of reason. Both are forms of what Spinoza calls courage, and both are manifestations of adequate ideas rather than confused emotions.

This framework produces one of the tradition's most striking reformulations of the problem of courage in battle. If rational self-preservation is the foundation of courage, then flight at the proper time is as genuinely courageous as fighting at the proper time. Both acts proceed from the same rational assessment of circumstances; what differs is the judgment about which action better serves one's continued existence and capacity for rational life. Rashness — attacking when retreat would serve better — is not courage but a confusion of the passions that leads to self-destruction. True strength of mind knows when to advance and when to withdraw, because it is guided by reason rather than by the imagination of what a brave person looks like to others.

Spinoza is equally concerned to distinguish rational courage from the fearlessness that certain temperaments exhibit without understanding. People of sanguine constitution, or those who have simply never encountered genuine danger, may behave fearlessly; this is not courage but the absence of a properly formed idea of the risk. Similarly, the person who is emboldened by anger, pride, or the desire for revenge may fight effectively, but the motivation undermines the claim to genuine virtue. Courage properly so called requires not merely the act but the adequate understanding of why the act is right — which is why Spinoza insists, against Hobbes, that courage cannot be reduced to a passion and, against Machiavelli, that the quality of the motivation matters for whether the outcome can be called a virtue.

Spinoza's account feeds into Kant's moral philosophy in ways both acknowledged and unacknowledged. Kant's insistence that only a good will gives genuine moral worth to any act, including courageous ones, restates in deontological terms the Spinozist point that the adequacy of the motivation is what distinguishes genuine virtue from its simulacra. Hegel takes from Spinoza the idea that true courage involves the identity of individual self-preservation with rational substance — a theme he reformulates as the soldier's identification with the state's objective freedom. The connection between rational self-governance, adequate understanding, and genuine fortitude that Spinoza articulates becomes one of the permanent threads in modern accounts of the virtue.

Kant opens the Groundwork by declaring that the only thing good without qualification is a good will. Courage, intelligence, and resolution are "undoubtedly good in many respects," but they can become "extremely bad and mischievous" if the will that directs them is not good. A brave villain is worse than a cowardly one. Courage is a talent of temperament, not a moral virtue, unless it is governed by the moral law.

This is a direct challenge to the Greek tradition. Aristotle treated courage as a virtue in its own right, a settled disposition of character that is good by definition. Kant says character traits are morally neutral until placed under the authority of duty. The courageous person who acts from duty has moral worth; the courageous person who acts from inclination, vanity, or anger does not, no matter how impressive the performance.

The practical consequence is that Kant separates moral courage from physical bravery. The person who tells the truth at personal cost, who fulfills an obligation despite fear of consequences, displays the courage that matters. The soldier who charges the enemy from love of glory may display natural bravery but not moral worth.

Kant places the discussion of courage within the broader question of what makes any quality of character genuinely good. On his account, courage cannot be morally evaluated apart from the will that directs it; the same natural disposition that makes a soldier effective in a just war makes him dangerous in an unjust one. Whether this conclusion is compatible with the classical understanding of courage as a virtue of character, rather than merely a talent of temperament, is a question Aristotle's defenders have found reason to dispute.

Hegel redefines courage as a political virtue. In the Philosophy of Right, he argues that genuine bravery is not personal daring but the citizen's willingness to risk his life for the state. The soldier who goes to war is courageous not because he defies death but because he subordinates his private existence to the ethical community (Sittlichkeit) that gives his life meaning.

This displaces both the Greek and the Kantian accounts. The Greek hero fights for personal honor; the Kantian agent acts from universal duty. Hegel's citizen fights because the state embodies a rational form of life that is more real than any individual's preferences. To die for the state is not to sacrifice something higher for something lower; it is to recognize that one's deepest identity is bound up with the community.

For Hegel, not every disposition to face danger counts as courage. Mere recklessness does not; personal feuds and private vendettas belong to an earlier, less rationally organized stage of social development. What distinguishes genuine modern courage is the disciplined willingness to serve a cause that the agent understands and endorses as an expression of rational social life. On this view, courage requires the ethical self-consciousness that only a developed political community can form in its members, a position that stands in tension with both the Aristotelian account of courage as an individual virtue and Kant's account of it as a talent of temperament needing direction by the moral will.

Hegel makes courage depend on the quality of the political order one is willing to die for. Tolstoy will test this idea against the actual experience of war.

Tolstoy spent years studying the Napoleonic wars, and War and Peace is in part a sustained argument against every neat theory of courage. His characters do not fit the categories. Prince Andrei, the bravest man at Austerlitz, behaves recklessly because he is bored and unhappy. Nikolai Rostov charges at Schoengraben out of confused excitement and can barely remember what happened afterward. Captain Tushin fights heroically while in a kind of dream, unaware that his battery is unsupported. None of these men acts from Aristotelian virtue, Kantian duty, or Hegelian civic reason.

Tolstoy's central insight is that battle dissolves the conditions under which rational courage is possible. Fear, noise, confusion, and the sheer speed of events leave soldiers acting from instinct, habit, and accident rather than deliberation. The generals who write reports after the battle impose a narrative of strategic courage on events that, as experienced, were chaos. The real bravery belongs to the common soldiers who do their jobs in the midst of horror without understanding or glory.

There is also the quiet courage of endurance that has nothing to do with war. Princess Marya bearing her father's cruelty, Pierre surviving captivity, the Russian people enduring the French invasion: Tolstoy gives as much weight to passive suffering as to active daring, and often more.

Tolstoy does not reject courage, but he casts serious doubt on the confidence with which philosophers have defined it from a distance. His account of battle suggests that the conditions under which Aristotelian virtue, Kantian duty, or Hegelian civic consciousness might be exercised are precisely the conditions that war destroys. Whether the theoretical accounts can survive this empirical challenge, or whether they require supplementation by the kind of phenomenological attention to experience that Tolstoy's novels provide, is a question the chapters on War and Peace and Virtue and Vice bear on.