Courage individualizes for a moment the existence of the courageous one and gives it a sportive ferocity. That experience of self is cultivated by the military and phraseological decorations of courage, even if this leads to an elimination of, or even: destruction of the courageous one himself. The experience of self is at its fiercest and most concentrated when it balances at the edge of self-destruction. Courage is the narcissistic culture of the ego in consultation with violence. It uses violence to cultivate the ego and this way maintains it. It serves a hypnotized and enthroned violence. So it’s not so much the king who needs to be courageous, but the vassal, the servant.The degree of courage is the degree of willingness to serve the king and to perish for him. In that courage, the individuality sacrificed to the king is restored again. Feudal courage reinforces the already alienated ‘self’ by putting it on the line. The ‘something’ that the servant still is in the shadow of the mighty master can only be saved by the willingness to give it up and by letting it contrast against the steep abyss of the nothing, in which that willingness might plunge him. The cult of bravery is the lust with which the servant resigns himself to his exploitation, the enthusiasm over the calculable ‘something’ that he’ll be left. This makes the cult the keystone that gives the system an impenetrable solidity, on which even the quasi-violence of the annoyed, debunking thought ricochets. Courage gets chained to its phraseological identity, and violence is only denied sole rulership over the world insofar it has to tolerate another violence besides and across from it. For without an enemy courage can not thrive, and therefore one must be found again and again. This is how feudal courage gets the reach and the depth of courage plain, and how the willingness of the servant to blindly die for his master is awarded with the character of a virtue.

Just like in poor communities or in poor periods frugality begets an absolute, ethical character, and by the need of circumstances sees itself evolve from a temporary adjustment to an eternal virtue, so here courage is substantiated, totalized, idealized and decorated with all the attributes that a generous ruler can dispense with. The courageous one shines amongst the servants of the king and is allowed to sit close to him at the table. Courage is nobility and nobility obliges. In the feudal hierarchy, courage therefore is the characteristic of the higher positions, those who stand closest to the king, a gauge of nobility. In its entire history the epos has been marked by this praise of courage. And as a distinctive characteristic it ought to be visible, not only in the colour of the mantle or in the signs on the shield of armour, but even into the physiognomy itself. The lower classes betray themselves by their fearfulness, as the courtier Virgil already knew.[8] Feudal society demands that the difference in classes also means difference in quality, it demands visibility of those differences and it demands at the same time that those differences are so profound and real, that they are, as it were till a ways below the skin, up to the blue blood, visible or suspect to a good, noble observer. ‘Forsooth, low fold would not produce such sons’, is then what king Menelaos says to the him as yet unknown king’s son Telemachus and his noble friend, and that word ‘kakos’ which is represented as ‘low’ here, can also be translated as ‘cowardly’. [9] Until deep into the 19th century – and perhaps still – there is a physiognomic that is inspired by the feudal preconception that the face, the posture and the amount of courage displayed ‘betray’ lineage. Or perhaps we should say that it isn’t a preconception that inspired the physiognomic, but that indeed the preconception was so powerful, that it had physical and physiognomic consequences. The phraseology of male courage, the rejection of all passivity, doesn’t just demand that the coward is of lower origin; it also builds with its own logical consequences social structures, in which this demand is met. It isn’t just the humble subjugation that has held back societal evolution towards freedom; in perhaps an even stronger degree it has been a mystique of robustness and bravery that through a paradoxical, but therefore no less intended and calculated counter effect, maintains violence and lack of freedom. It is then also curious that the social revolution rejects subjugation and resignation as resolutely as it glorifies bravery. It is only half completed, as long as the feudal courage and all of the phraseological network, in which it got caught, is not liquidated and succumbed to its own impotence.

(From ‘Against violence’, this is chapter 2 of part 3)