The Philosophy of Courage - Alcoholics Anonymous. AA, Meeting ...

FOREWORDby Glenn F. ChesnutPhilip Leon finished writing The Philosophy of Courage in December 1938, witha publication date in 1939. 1 So it was not a direct influence on the Big Book of AlcoholicsAnonymous, which was completed (basically anyway) slightly before thatpoint, a bit earlier in 1938. But Leon puts down in print some of the most importantof the Oxford Group ideas which had so greatly influenced the early A.A. people,and he also gives an illuminating philosophical discussion of a number of the basicideas and principles which A.A. learned from the Oxford Group. As a consequence,people in the twelve step movement will find a good deal of interesting and veryuseful material in Leon’s book.Leon was associated with one of the new British universities—University College,Leicester—which had been founded right after the First World War. The cityof Leicester is located right in the center of England, only sixty miles or so from Oxford.Three years earlier, he had written a very successful philosophical work calledThe Ethics of Power or The Problem of Evil (London : George Allen & Unwin, 1935). 2NOTES ON THE INTRODUCTIONCourageThe title of the work we are looking at here—The Philosophy of Courage—is significantin itself. It places Philip Leon, in his own way, in the context of the famousexistentialist philosophers and theologians of that period. Most of those figureswere, like Leon, reacting to the ideas of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant(1724-1804) and his nineteenth century followers. Kantianism proclaimed that ourhuman minds were imprisoned in a box of space and time, where we had no accessto the eternal, absolute, unlimited, and unconditional divine realm which layoutside the box.The atheistic existentialists said that all that lay outside that box of space andtime was an infinite abyss of Nothingness, and that even within the world whichour human minds could grasp, human existence was absurd, and the only certaintywe could state was that our lives were inexorably lived towards death. The closesthuman beings could come to living with dignity was to face the absurdity and deathwith resolution and courage. Philosophers and writers like Nietzsche (1844-1900), Sartre(1905-1980), and Camus (1913-1960), along with existentialist psychiatrists likeFritz Perls (1893-1970), all saw our basic human problem as one of fear: the fearof emptiness and death, but also the fear of change and novelty, and above all the2