GRAĐANSKA HRABROST IZMEĐU STRAHA I SAVJESTI
CIVIC COURAGE BETWEEN FEAR AND CONSCIENCE

Summary/Abstract: The question of civic courage as a fundamental issue of the democratization of a given society, in the original psychological sense, is aquestion the answer to which the ethically aware individual reaches with him or herself. As an act of rational self-affi rmation, guided by conscience, civic courage bestows on us the dignity of a being capable of making chioces, and thereby of saying No! to destiny. In the absence of civic courage, in an a priori adherence to the system of ideologically marketed values, the individual loses social identity and renounces his or her own natural right to doubt and to decide. True (civic) courage is possible only as self-affi rmation “despite” – despite the horrors of Nonbeing. Only those who are capable (as were Socrates, Giordano Bruno and others like them) of taking the horrors of Nonbeing upon themselves are brave. Only the one whose Conscience is more powerful than Horror is courageous. Only he who fears, not the Other, but Himself.

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