When is Courage? Locating the Virtue in Lorca, Trial Law and the Enclosures of AGI
By Scott R. Herndon, PhD, JD
As plaintiff’s trial lawyers, we are sometimes called courageous. We take on massive corporations, mega-firms, and difficult cases. We are outmanned, out-resourced, and outgunned. We labor against technological, cultural and economic headwinds that fill the sails of experts, AI interfaces, judges and juries. In the face of these odds, we try our cases to verdict.
Especially today, writers may also be said to be courageous. Today, our writing is freely scraped, digested, and redistributed by AI interfaces at the moment it is uploaded. Our grammar is codified for others, our word choices modeled within stochastic patterns, our politics mapped (even if we falsely imagine ourselves to not have any at all), and our identities associated with our positions, forever held in balance with every bit of digital exhaust we have left behind as a result of living in this world. In our commitment to values, communities, histories, and styles, our tokenization appears to be the condition of the possibility of our being read by the wider public at all.
Finally, some of the founders, owners, architects, data scientists, and content mediators (to name only a few) of AI interfaces may be said to be courageous. This may come in the form of whistleblowing, calls for regulation, real-time monitoring, threat mediation, or adversarial training and deployment. Opportunities for courage here appear to be legion, and one can only wonder how many of them have been taken already, or lost.
But what exactly does courage actually mean, across each of these contexts? When can we be said to display this virtue, which seems increasingly strange when applied to life in the age of AGI? Over the course of this white paper, I want to explore Aristotle’s theory of courage alongside that of Nel Noddings in the world of the plaintiff’s lawyer. By doing this, I want to superimpose these philosophical positions on Federico Garcia Lorca and the world artists and writers currently inhabit, and only then draw a third line to the dawn of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and recent critical thinking by Byung-Hul Han and Eduardo Glissant. My suspicion is that we will see something new emerge on our moral horizon as a result.
Aristotle and Courage
In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle described courage (among many other virtues) as the ‘golden mean’. In a balancing act, he understood courage to emerge from the aspirations and choices of a person over time. Aristotle’s notion of courage is based on role modeling. To learn what is courageous, we model ourselves on those people who have somehow managed to navigate a perilous middle route between two poles, the cowardly and the rash.
For Aristotle, one event does not make a person courageous. His notion of the virtue resembles the accumulated respect that one gains from a Hall of Fame career more than an MVP trophy awarded for a single performance.
And fear is also important. For Aristotle, the person with a courageous character must experience fear, but should not succumb to it. (A person who feels no fear cannot demonstrate the virtue. This is a strange moment for Aristotle, but it will open the heavy, ornate door to Lorca soon.) This same person carefully examines, or somehow understands, what the risks are, and which risks are worth taking. Only certain risks fit this category.
(While climbing El Capitan and other great mountains may fit within the realm of Aristotle’s courageous life, it seems fair to presume that Aristotle would not say the same of a climber who scaled the selfsame heights and pitches, but composed of towers of frozen Tyson chickens, or in a virtual reality machine. For Aristotle courage is not simply in acts, but in social contexts. These are contexts informed by shared human values, which are indisputably distinct up the three different material faces of each of these ‘climbs’.)
Finally, Aristotlean courage requires a certain kind of intention. Someone who is courageous can only do so because (s)he aims to inhabit a shared, civic sense of nobility. In doing so, courage operates in the service of a flourishing individual and social life. The apex of Aristotelean courage is the soldier who sacrifices an honorable life in a just war. But Aristotle uses this as an example only. The courage of the warrior does not function as a blueprint or a script, nor is his conception of courage limited to war.
Because courage is a civic virtue, and linked to the noble life, it can take many forms which do not involve risk of literal death at all.
In this sense, a trial lawyer may be said to show Aristotelean courage by taking extreme financial and personal risks in the service of a plaintiff’s case. Though the ‘battle’ is in the courtroom, nothing about the legal battle itself must involve mortal risk to qualify as courage on Aristotle’s model. What seems to matter is the lawyer’s rational decision-making, the management of risk and fear, and the deep commitment to the service of the client and the polis on the event-horizon of the trial.
So too may a writer may risk her career in an American University today for writing inconvenient phrases such as ‘global warming’ or committing herself to causes in support of certain oppressed communities. (Other writers must thread a fine needle through the interstices of AI ethics, lest their work be moderated and filtered out of view by the selfsame AI interfaces which they have critiqued.) On Aristotle’s model, the same registry of fear, intention, and commitment to shared values would serve as the basis for evaluating the commitments of all of these writers.
Unlikely Instagram Friends: Aristotle and Lorca
Aristotle’s notion of courage feels both familiar and alien to our cultural moment, at one and the same time. How can we explain why his thought should feel so uncanny?
To provoke the uncanny in reading Aristotle today, against the backdrop of AGI, I’d like to think about one of my literary heroes, Federico Garcia Lorca. As odd as this comparison may at first seem, it should begin with the reminder that Aristotle’s project is conditioned on role modeling, and the imitation of exemplars who have demonstrated courage. Lorca’s writing, too, develops from an accumulation of examples, especially in his radioactive and beautiful aesthetics of culture, flamenco, and bullfighting, in his masterwork of provocation, “Play and Theory of the Duende.”
Neither Aristotle nor Lorca provides a blueprint for ethics. They provide loose modeling spaces, open to individualized imagination, variation and choice.
As we will see, something strange happens when Aristotelean courage is superimposed on Lorca’s field of aesthetics and communication. There will be implications which may force us to reimagine the virtue in the world of the courtroom, aesthetics, and AGI.
Lorca, Barthes and Duende
If the experience of real risk, fear and the practical possibility of failure are central to the notion of courage, where its risks are, and when they emerge.
For Lorca, there is a space between the act of writing and the act of reading, or between art and the act of experiencing art, where substance and style walk a cultural tightrope, and the risk of words and art is to dance above real failure. Lorca teases us with the thought that “We care nothing about ability, technique, skill. Here we are after something else.” But a careful reading of his essay shows this is only partially true.
In his Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes once described the skills of artistic traditions as the studium. The studium can be learned, like any craft. While Lorca playfully ignores the importance of the studium in his own craft, and in the craft of the examples he paints for us, it is clear that a mastery of the studium is the very condition of the possibility for achieving the duende which he calls, “something else.” Without a mastery of skills beneath the proverbial belt, Lorca’s duende cannot emerge from art. His point here is not that artists should avoid mastering their skills. Rather, it is that the mastery of skill and the studium is not an end in itself. The end is that rarest accomplishment when something distinct emerges from skill.
For Barthes, this distinct after-effect is the punctum, the radioactive aspect of a work of art that strikes us. The punctum is the point of light that emerges from only a very few artworks, which streaks across the sky of our experience and shakes us. While it is made possible by skill, skill alone cannot capture its effect on the viewer.
For Lorca, the punctum is experienced as duende, as expressed in his description of a flamenco singer who “rob[bed] herself of skill and security” so that her duende could arise. Lorca writes of this flamenco singer, Pastora Pavon, whom he says:
… had to tear her voice because she knew she had an exquisite audience, one which demanded not forms but the marrow of forms, pure music, with a body lean enough to stay in the air. She had to rob herself of skill and security, send away her muse and become helpless, that her duende might come and deign to fight her hand-to-hand. And how she sang! Her voice was no longer playing. I was a jet of blood worthy of her pain and her sincerity…
(Of course, it is worth noting that a flamenco dancer who lacked skill altogether would be incapable of robbing herself of it. Because there must be something to rob, a singer without skill would only be capable of robbing herself of the ability to learn a skill. But that is not happening here. This distinction is essential to understanding Lorca, and it is critical in understanding the dangers of AI adoption and the anticipated ‘deskillification’ of the public as a result of widespread, generational AI consumption, as described by the philosopher Bernard Stiegler.)
While the jet of blood, marrow of forms, and hand-to-hand fight in Pavon’s song are metaphorical, the risks here are real. There is a real risk for Pavon singer and the audience at the same time. Both may be said to risk lapsing into a choreography and judgment of skill, and miss the opportunity to sense the arrival of a miracle in the “black sounds” emerging between the two fields. Just as importantly, Pavon may fail to leave the safety of her training behind (and lapse into “fraud” and “clumsy artifice”), the audience may judge her for not sounding ‘trained enough.’ This communal experience of the courtship of failure exposes both the artist and the listeners simultaneously. Both must walk the tightrope of this experience together for duende to arise.
Lorca, Mortal Risk, and the Obliteration of Art for Art’s Sake
But Lorca is also careful to extend his essay to mortal danger for the artist. Reminiscent of Aristotle, he writes:
The bullfighter who scares the audience with his bravado is not bullfighting, but has ridiculously lowered himself to doing what anyone can do—risking his life. But the torero bitten by duende gives us a lesson in Pythagorean music and makes us forget he is always tossing his heart over the bull’s horns (emphasis mine).
Lorca’s courage is an exacting virtue and a continual flirtation with risk, and not a one-time experience with an end point. This vision is more Aristotelean than many would imagine, even if Aristotle could never have appreciated the nobility imagined by Lorca’s “black sounds” in the four corners of the Nichomachean Ethics.
For Lorca, duende is an aesthetics and ethics of surviving failure with beauty, extravagance, and grace on the margins of our skill, but its risks, like those implied by Hemingway, are only partially contained in the real death of the bullfighter. It is also courage in the face of a real death of a culture which may lose its ability to resonate with the black sounds of its past. It is courage in the face of a metaphorical death, too.
As the great French philosopher Maurice Blanchot might remind us, the courage of a writer such as Lorca is frozen in a kind of double-slit experiment so familiar to quantum physics.
In his collection of essays, The Work of Fire, Blanchot recalls Nietzsche, who wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra: “Write with blood, and you will learn that blood is mind.” Then Blanchot provides a stroke of genius by way of a carefully articulated paradox in his meditation on Kafka:
But it is the opposite that is true: One writes with the mind and one thinks one is bleeding. Kafka himself: ‘I will not give way to fatigue, I will dive completely into my story, even if I gash my face.’ The image is certainly dramatic: the writer emerges from his work, his face crisscrossed with cuts, but it is only an image. . . [H]e claims to undergo great risk in his work, but the risk he runs is perhaps no risk at all; far from succumbing, he gets himself out of it with an admirable work that enlarges his existence. Hence the alibi for so many bloody words—there is no blood. Hence, too, all the scornful words about those with pen in hand.
As if he were anticipating Blanchot, Lorca is careful to place duende outside of words themselves, or the threat of a totalizing field of art for art’s sake. Because Lorca’s vision exceeds writing (and reaches for courage across communities and cultures as well), Blanchot’s paradox is unraveled. The word and the world of art are not the only fields of evaluation at play here. There is real risk and real consequence in these words and in their reception. The word, the artist, the culture—all of these are called into play in the exemplars of duende. Lorca writes:
The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, “The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.” Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.”
It is here, with the linkage to style, culture, and struggle, that the courage of Lorca’s vision can properly swing back, in Aristotelean fashion, to modeling work. This kind of courage isn’t reserved for a literal battlefield. The battlefield is everywhere, and every day, in the survival of our black sounds, and the realization that the perfection of skill is itself a failure, nor even a goal in itself.
Here, in its own structural limitation and parasitic weakness, we may witness the moment when AGI and AI fall to earth with the melted wings of Icarus. Lorca writes:
The muse awakens the intelligence, bringing a landscape of columns and a false taste of laurel. But intelligence is often the enemy of poetry, because it limits too much, and it elevates the poet to a sharp-edged throne where he forgets that ants could eat him or that a great arsenic lobster could fall suddenly on his head—things against which the muses that live in monocles and in the lukewarm, lacquered roses of tiny salons are quite helpless.
While AGI may capture all human communication, and perhaps even reasoning, its intelligence may only ape duende in a brutal extraction and algorithmic parroting of domesticated and archived skill. It remains a question if the artworks created wholly by AI will ever, or could ever, produce duende, even if their apish algorithms produce works indistinguishable from the human cries of a flamenco singer such as Pavon. My suspicion is no.
As duende is structurally shared between the artist and the audience, new sites for human courage can be seen to emerge. The courage to create is married to the courage to receive and experience. These shared sites for human courage are everywhere. They are real, and they live in the equally important realm of metaphor, style, the courtship of failure, and the refusal to associate skill alone as the end of human striving.
‘When’ in the Worlds of Courage
Courage as an aesthetic virtue is never simply about communication. It is about the principled and tactical decision to describe and receive the world in a way that shapes and confirms our communal experience of what happened to us at all, and what we will allow to happen in the future.
Lorca’s mandate rings as true in the trial courtroom during an opening statement as it did almost 100 years ago: “I promise never to let the terrible boredom into this room, stringing you together on the fine thread of sleep and putting tiny pins and needles in your eyes. As simply as possible, in the register of my poetic voice that has neither the glow of woodwinds nor bends of hemlocks, nor sheep who suddenly turn into knives of irony, I shall try to give you a simple lesson in the hidden, aching spirit of Spain.”
Of course, Lorca’s sheep and knives are not real, but the boredom he describes avoiding is as real as the hidden, aching spirit of Spain. The world of communication and the world of things are inextricably paired, broken down, and repaired through the magic of style, ethics, and language.
Lawyers, philosophers, and writers live and breathe in two worlds at once. Of course, they breathe and eat chocolate like the little girl in Fernando Pessoa’s incredible poem about writing, “The Tobacco Shop.”
Like artists calling out histories of real sacrifices, communal loss, and proud traditions, lawyers represent clients who have really been hurt, or killed, or subjugated. Philosophers reflect on the lived horrors of war, racism, and inequity. Lorca wrote of duende between the cobbled streets of a brutal, homophobic world.
All of these thinkers live and breathe in the actual world and the world of language. Today, in the age of AGI, the courage to communicate exists inside a third world. This third realm pulses within the silicon infrastructures of augmented digital reality, where technology itself digests our communication and responds to human thought in stochastic patterns of algorithmic choices, probabilistic turns of phrase, and falsely emotive metaphors without intention.
This dispute with AI is no more about art for art’s sake as Lorca’s essay is. And it is certainly not a war over what AI can ‘mean’ when it reproduces our art and communication. It is something else entirely.
Courage as Process
In this framework, feminist philosophers such as Nel Noddings have criticized the paradigm of the soldier as the perfect exemplar of courage. Noddings’ ethics of care argued that this notion of the virtue threatened to obscure the everyday virtues of ordinary people, especially women. By her lights, the hyper-masculinist staging of real death fails to address the true character of sacrifice, which extends across entire lives.
If the noble life is constituted by our most minute responsibilities, day upon day, then Noddings’ courage is closer to a willingness to endure discomfort, lack of recognition, power imbalances, poverty, and illegibility. Her exemplars are working mothers, parents struggling to support their children, and teachers. But they would also include lawyers, teachers, and writers. These are occupations where standing in vulnerability on behalf of someone else, in dissonance with the shifting moods of the powerful, and displaying communal strength on the margins of power, is as essentially good, and more broadly applicable as an ethics, than the singular and deadly moment of war.
It is here, where the voices of trial lawyers, who labor to fight for their clients, and writers who chisel metaphors to capture a world between the printed text and bustling world, confront a our profound moment in the technological world of AGI.
Noddings gives us a glimpse of courage, not simply as an ethos of care, but as a virtue made possible at multiple, disseminated moments, as part of a process that is as artistic and communal as Lorca’s vision.
When is Courage in the Advent of AGI?
With each passing day, the fears attributed to AGI are framed in battle scenes. We are warned that AGI will destroy humanity altogether. We are reminded of Terminator. And what is striking in these apocalyptic visions is that the world appears to have already ended. These systems are given so much power, we act as if we are doomed. No one, it seems, can match the overwhelming power of these systems. Courage itself seems vestigial, quaint, and inapplicable as a virtue, as all of humanity has been subjected to the status of lab rats.
But this apocalyptic turn towards the spectacular event-horizon of AI is only the result of misunderstanding when courage actually takes shape as a virtue. It is perhaps here that Lorca’s warning, that courage is “a mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains,” may in fact be partially true.
For the other part, Noddings would counsel us that for at least one kind of philosopher, these are precisely the kinds of spectacular nightmarish scenes that discourage the processes of courage, and which serve to mystify the nodes where courage can actually emerge as tactical, human practice.
Lorca gave us duende. When coupled with Noddings, we may see that courage can arise from a style, an ethics of care, and a willingness to engage with life in the age of AGI, which privileges our shared human communities and Eduardo Glissant’s right to opacity at one and the same time. For Byung-Hul Han, this would mean exposing the psychopolitical world in which we unwittingly offer ourselves in the form of data in exchange for fleeting, curated pleasures. Han and Glissant suggest we must strongly consider whether it is a fundamentally human, individual right not to be scraped by AI, not to be rendered algorithmically transparent by interconnected systems consuming our data exhaust, and not to be quantified into a technological corner where our humanity is reduced to data within algorithmic enclosures.
On this model, opportunities for courage will be found everywhere. Courage cannot be understood as a simple reaction during a singular, decisive act. Instead, it operates over time, the way a trial, a novel, a play, or a jazz improvisation becomes an aggregation of choices. Courage is not a single, transformative event. It is a capacity to respond to situations that can morph over time, and even transform our prior actions.
Because courage is a process virtue, with neither “maps nor exercises to help us find the duende,” for Lorca and Noddings, the deeper questions rest not in just what courage is, but when and where we might find it.
Afterword: A Note on Style
It should be clear that this white paper is not designed as a technical roadmap for lawyers, nor a philosophical work designed for tenure, nor even a white paper in a technical sense, except insofar as it may exemplify its own provocations. With Lorca’s masterwork in mind, how could it be otherwise? If a human being ever reads this work, my hope is that it “has not let the terrible bot-fly of boredom into this room”, and that it did not succumb to the cowardliness of mere skill. Also, I hope it was not rash and chronicle of thoughtless bravado. As for the utility (or lack thereof) of this work, which will be digested and summarized free of charge by AI, I truly hope it is as useless as a floating piece of trash, swirling into the air like a bird above the streets of Brooklyn. Perhaps someone will catch these words before they land in the gutter, which is what this particular language is designed to do, anyway. “The Tobacco Shop” ends with a human wave, and so too does this author. In this environment, to arise and disappear as a human breath in January, or the wings of a pigeon as a floating piece of trash, is perhaps all a human being can contribute to that silicon archive of skills which has no heart. There is care in this wave, my friend: hello and goodbye.
