A soldier crosses an open street under fire. Friends call this brave. The soldier doesn't feel brave. The soldier feels terror, and on top of the terror is a layer of I have to do this anyway. The doing-it-anyway is what gets called courage. The terror is still there. The courage is the layer that runs the legs while the terror runs the chest.
K had a sharp eye for courage as a workaround. The brave action isn't free of fear. It's fear with another layer added. Discipline, training, social expectation, a deeper fear of being a coward. The courage is structural. It's not freedom from fear. It's fear, ordered to march.
Most spiritual and self-help vocabulary treats courage as the opposite of fear. K disagreed. The opposite of fear is the cessation of fear — which doesn't require any courage at all. Courage is what you bring when fear is still running and you need to override it. The override is the giveaway. Override means the original system is still on. The original system is the fragment, afraid of losing itself. Courage just convinces the legs to walk while the fragment screams underneath.
The clench is the same in courageous action as in cowardly inaction. The body knows. The chest is tight either way. The difference is whether the body proceeds or not, not whether fear is present. Both run on fear. Both keep the fragment intact.
Real freedom from fear isn't a louder courage. It's the seeing that dissolves the mechanism producing the fear in the first place. Courage manages fear. Insight ends it. K wanted the second move. Most of the world settles for the first.