The content of courage as a disposition lies in the true, absolute ultimate end, the sovereignty of the state; the actuality of this ultimate end, as the work of courage, has as its means the surrender of personal actuality. This shape therefore contains the harshness of the highest oppositions: renunciation itself, yet as the existence of freedom — the highest self-sufficiency of being-for-itself, whose existence at the same time lies in the mechanism of an external order and of service — complete obedience and the setting aside of one’s own opinion and reasoning, hence the absence of one’s own spirit together with the most intense and comprehensive momentary presence of spirit and resolve — the most hostile and yet, at the same time, most personal action against individuals, combined with a completely indifferent, even benevolent disposition toward them as individuals.

To stake one’s life is, admittedly, more than merely fearing death, but it is thus the merely negative, and therefore has no determination and value in itself; it is the positive — the purpose and content — that first gives this courage its significance. Robbers, murderers, pursuing a purpose that is a crime, adventurers pursuing a purpose fashioned merely in their own opinion, and so forth, likewise possess that courage of staking their lives. The principle of the modern world — thought and the universal — has given courage the higher shape whereby its expression appears more mechanical, and not as the deed of this particular person, but only as [the deed] of a member of a whole; likewise, that it is directed not against individual persons but against a hostile whole in general, so that personal courage appears as something impersonal. It was this principle, therefore, that invented the firearm, and it was not a merely contingent invention of this weapon that transformed the merely personal shape of courage into the more abstract one.