Will and Courage

Conspicuously absent in Schopenhauer's doctrine is any explicit attention to what for at least two of his most prominent predecessor Moralists, Aristotle and Spinoza, is a cardinal Virtue--Courage.  Underlying that neglect is the unclarity in his system of the relation between 'Will' qua 'I will', and 'Will' qua universal noumenon.  For, though that contrast seems on the face of it to constitute a sharp enough distinction, his equation of 'self-denial' and 'denial of the Will-to-Live', implies, to the contrary, that 'I will' and universal Will are identical.  Now, that identity precludes the possibility of a synthetic combination of an individual Self-Denial and an affirmation of the universal Will-to-Live.  But, Courage is one such combination.  Thus, cases, e. g. Bruno, that he entertains in #67 of WWR, that are usually classified as 'Courage' in other doctrines, he can only reduce to "sympathy or compassion", thereby trivializing the risk to individual well-being involved in those examples.  Nor is there at his disposal the simple remedy of accepting the distinction between individual Will and universal Will, for the former entails a violation of his restriction of the Principle of Individuation to the world of Representation.  Thus, it can be argued that his system's lack of capacity to accommodate an uncontroversially preeminent concept such as Courage suffices to warrant lifting that restriction, if not jettisoning entirely his noumenon-phenomenon distinction.