Episode 68 - Heroes Transcript
David: 0:11
Hello and welcome to Overthink.
Ellie: 0:13
The podcast where two professors talk about our philosophical heroes.
David: 0:18
And sheroes.
Ellie: 0:19
You're my shero, David.
David: 0:21
And I'm happy with that. And with that, I am Dr. David Peña-Guzmán.
Ellie: 0:26
And I am Dr. Ellie Anderson.
David: 0:29
I want to start us off today, Ellie, by thinking about who counts as a hero in our society. Recently I was checking out the CNN website and I realized that there is a whole page called CNN Heroes, where they feature characters that are considered modern day heroes, and they tell you the story of what they do. So if you go to the CNN website and then find this page, you'll find a number of stories that I think are indicative of how we tend to think about heroes in our collective imaginary.
Ellie: 1:02
I've never heard of the CNN webpage before. Tell me about like, who are we talking like firemen, rescuing kittens out of trees?
David: 1:11
Yeah. So basically, yes, it's all about the average person doing modern day acts of heroism, where they go out of their way to basically help other people. So let me give you a couple of examples of the sorts of stories that they cover, and I'm just going to read a couple of the headlines.
Ellie: 1:30
Okay.
David: 1:30
So listen to this, "Hero upcycles old computers to open new worlds for young Kenyans."
Another one, "Dining with a purpose: 1:38
Restaurant serving refugees' recipes helps immigrants start new lives in the US."
Ellie: 1:47
Okay.
David: 1:48
Final one, "These friends rescued harvests headed for the trash and helped turn food waste into millions of meals."
Ellie: 1:56
These people sound awesome.
David: 1:58
Yeah, no they're, they're really cool. And you just, there's a bunch of other stories that are similar in nature, and what stands out for me is that I think our contemporary understanding of the hero has undergone a pretty radical shift because none of these stories have what I typically think of as one of the defining features of the hero which is a kind of self-sacrifice or self effacement, almost rising to the level of self annihilation that goes hand in hand with the concept of heroism. If anything, what these stories all share in common is that they are average people doing community service in one another. Which again, I think nowadays we use the term hero in a much looser sense than maybe the term has been used in the past.
Ellie: 2:50
I'm looking at the website now since you mentioned it, and I'm seeing a few other ones, and I think you're totally right. It seems to be virtually ubiquitous. "Keeping dogs and senior owners together from battlefields in Iraq to the national music scene," "How a marine veteran is using art to heal." But I think the implication is healing the community.
David: 3:08
And there, there are just so many heroes.
Ellie: 3:10
I'm so glad you draw attention to this really rich archive of everyday heroes in American culture, David, because there is some research I came across that talks about the banality of heroism or the concept of sort of small H heroism where basically, the notion is that anyone can be a hero under the right circumstances. This is a view that is articulated in this article by Zimbardo and Franco, who are two thinkers that came up constantly in my research on heroes. They seem to be the hero experts.
David: 3:41
They're my heroes on heroism.
Ellie: 3:44
Which is great because Zimbardo sounds like a, a villain name.
David: 3:48
Well, mean Franco. Franco. Depending on where you are, it also has villainous connotations historically.
Ellie: 3:53
Yes. I'm sorry, Zimbardo and Franco, if you are listening to this very much appreciate your research and we are not trying to knock your names. The banality of heroism as Zimbardo and Franco articulate it, suggests that we're all, or at least most of us, if not all of us, are going to be called upon to act heroically at a certain point in our life. And so we are all potentially heroes all the time. Being a hero is more a function of a situation than a function of an essential character attribute. And I think that's actually not the same as what you're drawing attention to, David, because what Zimbardo and Franco are talking about is more the fact that we might be called upon to sacrifice or to do those activities that we might typically associate with a hero rather than the community service in response to adversity dynamic that we see ubiquitously and seen and heroes. But I think that there's still potentially a connection there in terms of this banality of heroism or the everyday aspect of it.
David: 4:51
I also think the notion of being called upon or being on a mission or being put in a position where you have no choice but to take a certain course of action is also reflected in this CNN theory of the everyday hero that all those examples. Because I think a lot of those people who are featured there talk about finding their mission in life or finding a goal as if something happened in their life that called upon them to make some form of sacrifice that maybe normally they wouldn't have made. So there's always a conversion narrative, right? Like I traveled and then I came back and helped refugees. But beyond that, what I'm here thinking about more than anything is about our obsession, not just with heroes, but with everyday heroes. Which again, is this idea we all could individually be heroic if just the circumstances connected with us in the right way. And I think it shows our collective investment in thinking that every particular can be a universal, or that every individual can be great. And I'm just not sure that that jives super well with a more substantive understanding of heroism per se. I kind of want to retain the notion of the true hero, not an everyday person.
Ellie: 6:10
Apropo of this super American website that I found again in researching for this ep.
David: 6:16
More American than cnn.com?
Ellie: 6:18
I, okay. Okay, true. Valid, valid. It probably doesn't get more American than that. Yeah. Or apple pie, but maybe as American as apple pie and CNN is this website called The Hero Round Table. And this I'm just going to read you their website description, "Often called the TED Talks of Heroism, The Hero Roundtable teaches people how to be more than a bystander. From our humble beginnings in Michigan to our global series on three continents and counting," see how that description even mimics the hero narrative that I just plucking out of obscurity? "We've already seen attendees go on to do amazing things. Most importantly, The Hero Roundtable has created a worldwide community dedicated to practicing heroism. We've spurred academic research on what makes people do heroic things, and we help regular people act on what we've learned."
David: 7:06
So is this a group of people that trains people to be heroic, or is this a group that funds research on the concept of heroism?
Ellie: 7:16
The, their bread and butter is that they host talks on heroism. it appears, I mean, it's, it's giving, we'll come back to the masculinity component of heroism later, but it's, it's giving masculine for sure.
David: 7:26
Yes. Yes. I mean, who's listening to this? Who's like, let me Google Ted Talk, How to be a Hero, baby.
Ellie: 7:33
I know, I know. I'm a little worried about the Venn diagram of Joe Rogan podcast listeners and The Hero Roundtable watchers as being a circle. But, um, that's no, no shade The Hero Roundtable, which like, I didn't watch any of the videos, but I do think, you know, it, it seems like a perfectly legit mission to teach people how to be more than a bystander. Like that seems like an important virtue to instill. But I think part of what this speaks to David, this idea that we could train heroes, intersects with this notion that anyone could be a hero given the right circumstances that we see from Zimbardo and Franco.
David: 8:06
Well, and not only that, anybody can be a hero, but that you can have a worldwide community dedicated to practicing heroism in the same way that you have like a worldwide community of people who practice yoga every morning. Like, you done your heroic deed at 8:00 AM today? You there, there
Ellie: 8:22
Yeah.
David: 8:23
Is a sense where you, you have to force your heroism into your routine in a way that sounds really counterintuitive to me.
Ellie: 8:31
And in that sense it actually is pretty different from the Zimbardo and Franco because it's less about under the right circumstances you might be a hero and more like you can cultivate and practice being a hero.
David: 8:41
Every day worldwide, from Michigan to multiple continents.
Ellie: 8:49
Today we are talking about heroes.
David: 8:51
What does it mean to be a hero, and why are we obsessed with hero worship?
Ellie: 8:57
How is a hero different from other morally praiseworthy figures, such as the saint?
David: 9:02
And how has the concept of heroism changed over time from the time of Homer to the age of CNN?
Ellie: 9:12
I can be your hero baby. I can kiss away the pain.
David: 9:21
I don't know the lyrics.
Ellie: 9:22
I will stop. Um, I just needed to get a little Enrique in there. It's it's all I've had in my head since we started recording this episode.
David: 9:29
Some Quique Iglesias.
Ellie: 9:32
Yeah. So after we recorded our last episode on Taste, I had the, it's corn song in my head four weeks now. I have the Enrique Iglesias song in my head and probably will continue to have that for weeks.
David: 9:43
Oh my God. I should have memorized the new Taylor Swift song Anti-Hero as a commentary on this CNN obsession with the everyday hero. Because her, the point is that we're all our anti-hero. In our own story, we get in our own way.
Ellie: 9:57
Interesting. I, I'm not a swifty, I have not heard of this song, but okay. Maybe, maybe I'll check it out after this. David, when you pitch the idea for this episode, I wasn't quite sure what to think. I felt like I didn't really have anything to say about heroism. It's giving masculine, as I said earlier, and it's, it's also giving conservative. For that reason, it's been really illuminating for me to think and learn about the hero because I feel like I have a much better understanding of what a hero is now. And in particular, I came across a 2013 book on classical heroes by the contemporary political philosopher whom I mentioned a moment ago, Ari Kohen and as Kohen points out, ancient Greek moral life focused quite a lot on idea of heroes. And I want to talk to you about Kohen's research, David. But first, who's your favorite ancient hero and why?
David: 10:49
Uh, on the spot. I would say I really like Madea.
Ellie: 10:54
You consider Madea a hero?
David: 10:55
Yeah, I do.
Ellie: 10:56
Tragic heroine, I suppose.
David: 10:58
Tragic hero for sure, but also a misunderstood female hero. I think there is a sense of justice that is at work behind her actions.
Ellie: 11:09
Killing her children?
David: 11:11
Uh, yes, actually, and I, yes. Connection to our antinatalism episode. No.
Ellie: 11:17
Okay, David.
David: 11:18
No, I mean, no, but I, I do think that's what makes her really interesting as a hero, that she acts for a universal and it just so happens to be a universal that is very difficult to relate to and maybe even illegible.
Ellie: 11:32
What's the universal she acts for? Don't let your husband cheat on you?
David: 11:36
Well, not only that, I mean, she was rejected by the community, right? So she takes revenge out of a sense of justice and repairing a harm done to her. So I, I do think of her as a heroine, as a, shero, ancient shero back to the masculine versus feminine. But again, I really like that it's a very complicated heroine.
Ellie: 11:56
So just to make sure that you're, that I'm getting this right David, you are saying that your favorite ancient hero is a revenge lord who kills her children because she, she was cheated on by her husband and vilified by the community.
David: 12:13
Literally, can you think of a better one?
Ellie: 12:15
I can think of, I can think of many better ones.
David: 12:19
What? Who is your favorite hero?
Ellie: 12:21
This is super cliche, but like Hercules is the least a better candidate,
David: 12:26
That is too cliche, but, okay. Why?
Ellie: 12:27
Antigone?
David: 12:28
Okay. Antigone, also, I like, why? Why, why Hercules?
Ellie: 12:33
Because I like the Disney movie.
David: 12:36
Okay. And you're going to give me crap about my desire for feminine revenge porn from antiquity?
Ellie: 12:43
Because Go the Distance, the song has had massive impact on my personal ambition since I was an adolescent. Okay. I don't mean to dodge that question, David. I will, I will have to think about some more substantive reasons why I think Hercules is a good hero. But I do want to make sure that we talk about Kohen who gives as examples of heroes from the ancient world a few folks, but I want to focus on the Homeric heroes that he addresses, Achilles and Odysseus. Kohen points out that there's not a single figure of the hero that we get in ancient Greek culture. There are rather multiple figures of the hero, and I'm not going to, obviously taxonomize all of the different versions of the hero that he gives, but I want to focus on why Odysseus and Achilles are both heroes while being very, very different. Achilles, as Kohen says, is your classic war hero. He is the most skilled fighter in ancient Greece. And in Illiad you really see this narrative of a sort of sulking hero who refuses to go into battle for most of the epic. But then when he finally does go into battle, he takes his mortality in hand, recognizes that he is going to be killed on the battlefield and goes in guns blazing, or what should we say, like sword
David: 14:06
Swords are moving.
Ellie: 14:08
Or swords,
David: 14:09
Swords are swinging.
Ellie: 14:12
Into the battlefield and accepts his own mortality. And so according to Kohen, what is distinctive about Achilles is the fact that not only is he the most excellent of the Greek warriors whose sail to Troy and he gets eternal glory for his actions in battle. He also takes up his mortality and recognizes that his greatest attribute, which is his ability to fight so well, is also his downfall because it's going to lead to his demise.
David: 14:43
And when I think about Achilles, thinking about the element of death and the recognition that. The thing that you excel for is also the thing that will lead to the end of you, suggests that it's a hero that is not only tragic, but it is also conscious of his own tragedy. Is that how Kohen reads Achilles as a self-consciously tragic hero?
Ellie: 15:11
Yeah. I don't know if we would use the word tragic there, but as self-conscious for sure. Because the account that Kohen gives focuses on Achilles' grief. Achilles' grief, first over the forced removal of the young woman who was his concubine, and then the death of his friend slash maybe lover Patroclus.
David: 15:28
Lover, yes.
Ellie: 15:30
Yeah. And then finally we get to his return to the battlefield and And he's, yeah just like still filled with grief and aware that he's probably going to die.
David: 15:39
But I wonder how, I mean, he might be aware, but also a common theme in the Homeric literature is the uncontrollable quality of Achilles' rage. There is a very clear sense that Achilles in the moment of rage just goes red or everything goes black for that he actually loses that self-awareness of, of what he's doing.
Ellie: 16:04
I'm glad you point that out, David, because that is actually something that Kohen talks about is the rageful Achilles. And so he is careful to note that Achilles is a very vulnerable thinker. And this is also something that you see in the work of the contemporary philosopher Marina McCoy, who has a book called Wounded Heroes that's about the vulnerability of the Greek hero and this idea that we usually think of the hero as invulnerable, but it's actually their vulnerability that allows them to be heroes. And this is what makes the hero different from say a God. And Achilles is an interesting example in this case because, sorry, this is moving a little bit away from the topic of rage, which I think is a really good point, but toward the fact that Achilles is mortal, but has a bit of a touch of the immortal as well, right? His mother is a goddess or nymph, and she dips him into the river so that he's invulnerable in both of his body. Well, except just the one, the one foot, which ends up being his downfall. So we might even be able to say that Achilles as a superhero, before the superhero was a thing.
David: 17:07
No, I think that's right. And one way that we might want to differentiate between the hero and the superhero is precisely around the concept of a superpower, which the average hero doesn't have, right? The average hero, doesn't have that protection or that guarantee or safety net against their own mortality. So they rush into battle knowing that they can die. And I like that you point to this book about woundedness because I think it gives us a very different image of what it means to be a hero than the one that we get from superhero movies where, yes, when Batman or Superman rush into battle, they're not really wagering much about themselves. Whereas the Homeric heroes typically are arguably, with the exception of Achilles.
Ellie: 17:52
Yeah. But I, I think to go back to that point you made about the rage that that really removes Achilles from a sense of his own action. Kohen says of that, that it's absolutely true that Achilles does most of his heroic deeds when he is in the state of rage. And he even says that, that Achilles has an element of savagery. And when he achieves most of his impressive de– deeds, he is divorced from the norms of the community. But what makes Achilles a hero is not only that he achieves those impressive deeds, but that he then ends up returning to the norms of the community. So he says that though his most impressive deeds occur when he has divorced from these norms, Achilles is ultimately able to achieve the status of archetypical battlefield hero because he is restored to the values of the community.
David: 18:45
Yeah, and I mean you, you said that we should begin with Achilles and eventually move over to Odysseus as another Homeric hero that is heroic for other reasons, maybe than Achilles because not particularly good at battle, but he might be heroic in other ways. But one connection between the two that I'm thinking about here is that Odysseus at some point also goes into a bout of rage when he, at the end of the Odyssey, of course, murders all the suitors. And there's a very clear sense that you get in reading the Odyssey that this is a transgression part of Odysseus so I wonder whether we might want to consider the possibility that every hero at some point must also be an anti-hero in these moments of, of savagery and murder.
Ellie: 19:33
Yeah, that could be. I found Kohen's account of Odysseus to be kind of difficult to pin down, not in the sense of the content of what Kohen was saying, but the status of Odysseus as a tragic hero and whether or not he is worth morally emulating because I was getting to use sort of like masculinist to incel language, soy boy vibes from his account of Odysseus. He talks about how Odysseus doesn't actually do really any great deeds. Instead, his heroism is simply about his ability to endure great suffering. He notes that Odysseus takes all his friends on this big trip. Most of them die. They drown, they get crushed or eaten by giants and monsters. And then Odysseus finally returns home. But it's not like he's really done that much. Kohen notes that the most heroic deed that Odysseus does in the Odyssey is actually to just plug the ears of himself and his compatriots, which is a somewhat passive thing to do. And so Odysseus is a hero because he endures suffering,
David: 20:45
I, yeah.
Ellie: 20:45
But not really by virtue of much more than that.
David: 20:48
On the one hand, thinking about it in terms of suffering is kind of bizarre because it's his suffering at having sacrificed all of his friends, right? Like the suffering here really is not his as much as it is his friends. I mean, they're the ones that really pay the price.
Ellie: 21:02
Oh, but he's suffering because he, he wants to go home. He's been stuck in Troy for so many years. He misses his wife in his lovely home.
David: 21:09
Of course. But when I think about the heroism of Odysseus, I don't typically think of it in terms of his alienation from home or in terms of his suffering necessarily, I think about it in terms of his cleverness. He is an intellectual hero because he has this kind of wildly intelligence that under the most constraining, oppressive circumstances, he still manages to find a way out. So he tricks fate and necessity at every corner. Right? So think about when you were talking about the cyclops, he very cleverly escapes that situation by playing with language.
Ellie: 21:46
Oh, that's a good point.
David: 21:47
And when he puts wax in the ears of all the men on the ship, but not his own, rather tying himself to the mast, it's not because that's his only choice, it's because he wants to listen to the song of the sirens without paying the prize. So for me, his heroism really is tied to a kind of wily intelligence of getting your way.
Ellie: 22:08
Wait, but what do you mean he listens to the song of the sirens? I thought the whole point was that the the wax or is it the cotton? I forget what substance they put in their ears drowns out the song of the sirens.
David: 22:17
Yeah. But he doesn't put it in his own ears. He puts it in the ears of the people rowing the boat, and then he ties himself to the mast in order to hear the song of the sirens.
Ellie: 22:27
Okay. Okay. That is a crucial component that I totally forgot. Thanks for that.
David: 22:33
Always getting his way really heroic way.
Ellie: 22:37
Manipulative soy boy and as, as I'm using that language, I'm, I'm doing so deliberately because I, I really do associate the notion of the hero in its archetypical forms with masculinity. And to probe that a little bit, maybe a little bit now, but then also perhaps later in the episode. And I, I think it's telling, for instance, that we need a notion of the shero or the heroine in order to qualify that we're talking about women sometimes, because otherwise you could say that the notion of hero is gender neutral, but then we wouldn't need the notion of the shero or the heroine to sort of counterbalance it. I think especially the shero in this case, like the shero is the girl boss of heroism. And, and I think there's a militaristic element as well. I mean, it's. It's such a compelling myth, the myth of the hero to get people to go above and beyond and to sacrifice their own wellbeing for quote, the greater good. Right? There's something extremely seductive about that myth, I wonder what the status of the hero is today. I think in a society where a lot of folks are questioning militaristic and masculinist values, what do you think, David?
David: 23:52
Yeah, I mean, I'm obviously not going to come to the defense of militarism and masculinism in relation to the hero.
Ellie: 23:59
Well, there there could be, there could be a colonel there.
David: 24:02
I mean, I did say earlier that I don't really love this CNN theory of heroism, where everybody's a hero, you just have to find the right place to be one, because I think there is a place where recovering maybe an element of that older Homeric paradigm of heroism, which has to do with higher acts of self-sacrifice or rather acts that bring about a higher form of self-sacrifice than just community service. Right. So I, I want to just raise the bar a little bit for whom we call a hero without going all the way to requiring that that hero be a masculine military figure that rushes into battle or is readily willing to sacrifice the life of his friends just to go home.
Ellie: 24:49
Yeah, and perhaps the very examples of Achilles and Odysseus, we can press a little bit on here because Achilles, as we mentioned, is in grief for his friend slash likely lover Patroclus and so there's a homoerotic dimension and definitely a homosocial dimension to the Iliad that I think goes against the rugged individualism of masculine myths that we have in America today. Odysseus is also really sad and really missing his wife. And so there's a love of homeland and family that's maybe a little bit different.
David: 25:24
Of wounded men.
Ellie: 25:26
Yeah. Like may maybe a little bit different from the Braveheart love of homeland and, and wife.
David: 25:31
No, that's right. And I think we should keep this very closely to the center of our discussion, which is the brokenness of heroes. Right. I, I really, and this is another way of thinking about the distinction that I, I think is important between the hero and the superhero. I'm not a fan of superheroes, but I do want to retain a space for thinking about the hero in today's society. I'm just not sure that the banal hero is where I will get that. But your comments about the cultivation of heroism and the possibility of training, who knows, maybe your, your virtues or your capacities for acting heroically. I'm not opposed to that.
Ellie: 26:10
Yeah, and I think I, I mentioned Braveheart. I, I feel like the dominant notion of heroism in our culture today for me is the Mel Gibson version of heroism. But I do think that even the Mel Gibson heroes trade on a vulnerability as well, right? There's a sense in which the masculine strength that they possess comes out of weakness. And you see that too in, in Wild West heroes like the Clint Eastwood type of heroes too. They are all broken. And so maybe actually focusing on the vulnerability or the woundedness isn't in itself, resisting the masculine narrative, it might actually be a key tool of it.
David: 26:52
Interesting. So the reason that we bond or are drawn to these otherwise savage male figures is because we focus on their woundedness and the justification that the breach of their masculine integrity suddenly gives to their actions, right? Like, oh yeah, he murdered all the suitors, but remember he was really sad about leaving home, you.
Ellie: 27:14
I know, I Okay. That's basically what you did with Madea. You were like, yeah, she killed her children, but she was, she was ostracized from the community.
David: 27:21
Yeah, but remember, we're, we're criticizing militarism and masculinism.
Ellie: 27:26
Yeah. And I, I don't want to deny the seductiveness of that masculine myth, though. I mean, I, I'm just speaking as cisgender woman with a lot of privilege in other ways, but I was totally sucked in by the Mel Gibson heroism when I was a teenager. I, I definitely had my moments of enjoying Braveheart and the Patriot and finding there. There's something just like that kinda, that kinda got to my, my heart when I watched those movies as a teen. Yeah.
David: 27:54
What, what was the feeling that you got? Was it a kind of like potentially sexual, romantic, appeal?
Ellie: 28:01
I mean, in as much as Heath Ledger was in the Patriot, yes.
David: 28:05
Okay. Okay. But, okay, so I didn't quite have that. And typically when I see men that go on a violent spree, it, for me, it's a major turnoff because I just can't imagine what it would mean to go there. And even though I never quite identified or was drawn to that hero type, I really do want to believe that there is a place in, in social life and in culture and in politics for representatives of the heroic. I just don't know how to talk about it. So hopefully over the course of this episode, I'll develop better language for articulating the kind of hero that I want to envision that is somewhere in between the CNN and the Achilles and Odysseus of the world. One of the philosophers that has had the most to say about heroes in recent history is Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzche, one of our favorite thinkers here at Overthink.
Ellie: 29:23
A hero, if you will.
David: 29:24
And and we will, and one of the places where this comes out most clearly is on his essay on three types of history called "On the Uses and Liabilities of History for Life."
Ellie: 29:37
Yeah. Or "The Utility and Liability" as it's translated in the version that I usually teach. So Nietzche begins this essay by saying that life requires the service of history, but he thinks that we often focus too much on history. We have an excess of history and an excess of history is harmful to life. And so when we're studying history on Nietzche's view, we always have to A, balance it out with like an A historical impulse, which he associates with forgetting. But B, and more importantly, for our purposes here, keep in mind that history should serve life rather than sucking the life out of life.
David: 30:16
Out of you? Yes.
Ellie: 30:18
Makes sense. And he identifies a few different kinds of history, which he says are needed differently depending on the time and the context. There's one view of history that we want to focus on today, David, because this really came to mind for both of us as we were, we were thinking about this episode, and that is monumental history, which is a form of history that Nietzsche says, as one example was very popular during the Renaissance. And this is a kind of history that can inspire people to great actions and to striving. And part of the reason for this is that monumental history focuses on the actions of great people, or you know, to use the gendered term, great men in the past, that is heroes. When we focus on the history of these heroes from the past, we come to see that greatness is possible and we are inspired ourselves to create something great.
David: 31:16
Yeah, and I mean, you can think about monumental history just in terms of the root of the term monument. It's the kind of history that edifies people now by creating monuments for people from the past who have performed great deeds. And those monuments can obviously be literal statues, like the ones that you see in front of city hall, but they can also be symbolic or conceptual monuments that we build in honor of those who have fallen. And what I like about this section of the essay where Nietzche talks about monumental history is that, and this is something that he does with all the different kinds of history that he talks about, is that he walks the reader through the value and the danger of approaching history in this way. So he says, when as a community you construct these monuments and relate to the past only through the actions of great individuals. One of the values of that is that you can encourage people in the here and now to emulate the action of those past heroes.
Ellie: 32:15
Can we stick with that for a moment, David, before we talk about the dangers, like I really want to think through this with you.
David: 32:21
Yeah, yeah. Because one of the things that is important for Nietzche is really recognizing that these forms of history can aid life. So it's not just that there is a regressive kind of backwards conservative quality to thinking about people who have done great things. There is a genuine value for life in us recognizing the heights that the human spirit can reach, and that we by extension, can potentially reach in the present. And so maybe we can think about this value of emulation and inspiration that is pretty central to Nietzche's analysis.
Ellie: 32:57
Yeah, and I'm looking at the text here, and Nietzche says here that monumental history pertains to the active and powerful human being to the person who is involved in a great struggle and who needs exemplars, teachers and comforters, but is unable to find them among his contemporaries and in the present age. And so it seems to me that he thinks there's a kind of solace to be found in studying the great men of the past, which is that they were able to achieve things that the people around you in your present day aren't achieving. And so there's, something, yeah that's inspiring you, which I think is maybe kind of just, just what you said too, right? They're, they're encouraging us to create something great. And, and how is this happening? Why is this happening?
David: 33:43
I inspired you to emulate me in this context. Ellie, I am your hero.
Ellie: 33:48
You're my David.
David: 33:50
No. And it's not just that heroes from the past encourage us to be heroes now. It's actually that our relationship to heroes from the past change our relationship and our view and our belief in humanity as a concept. And some point, he uses the metaphor of a chain where he says, when you look, yes, it's a, it's a really great passage where he says, if we tell the history of the present in terms of these great individuals who have done great deeds, each of whom is a link in a trans historical chain, what you do is you establish a sense of continuity over time that reestablishes your faith in humanity because it allows you to grasp humanity as one across the ages and for Nietzche there is value in that unified perspective that brings the past and the present together in one mental act essentially.
Ellie: 34:44
Yeah. He says, for me, the highest point of such a long since past moment is still alive, bright, and great. This is the fundamental thought in the belief of humanity that expresses itself in the demand for a monumental history. So you're right, David, that monumental history has a trans historical quality, even though it's obviously a form of history, but in the sense that it is encouraging you to see your heroes as still alive and still with you. And I think this is a common way that we think about heroes today. They're characters in your imagination that we might say live rent free in your head and inspire you to do great things like Hercules did to me when I watched that Disney movie.
David: 35:26
And Madea will to me when I drown my,
Ellie: 35:28
Oh my, Oh my God. David, just, just no.
David: 35:34
It's going to continue with the Medea theme. We could say that the way in which you described it, Ellie, from from the text, is that our heroes from the past prompt us to dare in the present. But even beyond that, Nietzche says just monumental history also encourages to move into the realm of action in the present because it guarantees you an afterlife because you know that you are or can be the hero in the making for future generations, assuming that you dare. So it keeps the past alive, but it also turns you into a figure for the future.
Ellie: 36:10
Another component of Nietzche's account that I want to think about a little bit is the role of fame in it, because he says that fame is characteristic of the hero in a monumental history, but it's not fame in the sense of like a passion for glamor and popularity while you are alive. Rather, it's a transfigured fame, which involves a belief in the coherence and continuity of what is great across the ages. So it's a knowledge and faith in your own greatness that is somehow not narcissistic.
David: 36:46
Well, and that's connected to the point I made earlier about the trans historical chain, because what the hero does through their heroism is they join the ranks of those who are members of this kind of elite, trans historical group of great people. And so that's the kind of fame that you achieve. You achieve a transcendental or maybe at least trans historical fame, right? You become another link in that chain.
Ellie: 37:11
So that's right. And at the same time, I think there is something important to the idea that the hero, while they are alive, although Nietzche is kind of doing a backwards looking approach here to the monumental history, but the hero while they're alive is trying to lay the groundwork for a future. And so they do recognize their moment in history in a particular way. He states that the goal of the hero is happiness, not necessarily the hero's own happiness, but often that of a people or of all humanity. So the hero avoids resignation and really launches in to the present in order to change, change things. This is the person who takes action. It's a little unclear to me here whether Nietzche is actually talking about the hero or the person who is inspired by the hero and whether that person is a hero too. So I should maybe just qualify that. But either way, there, there is this action-oriented component in the present. And Nietzche says that, at the end of the day, the most that the hero can hope for is just the reward of fame. And it's also the case that a hero has to be famous in order to be a hero.
David: 38:26
Wait, what do you mean by that? That they have to be famous in order to be a hero.
Ellie: 38:29
I feel like there has to be some recognition of heroism in order for the hero to be a hero, even if they're just featured on the CNN every day.
David: 38:38
I see. I see. Yeah. So, I mean, we've been talking a lot about the value of monumental history and the role of the hero in this history for Nietzche. But again, Nietzche present us the values and the dangers of different kinds of history in order that we, the readers might make an educated judgment about how to relate to history in a way that is life-affirming rather than life denying. And so I want us to now switch gears a little bit, Ellie, and think about the dangers of monumental history because as we know there, there are drawbacks and, uh, shortcomings to thinking about the past through these heroic types.
Ellie: 39:19
So one danger that he identifies with focusing too much on monumental history is that it can lead you to damage the past. Because in fact, the past is not a trans historical chain of currently living in the spirit of humanity heroes the past involves also the people that those heroes wronged, the people that those heroes killed, all kinds of things beyond those people, whether it's other people beyond that, right? Or this isn't the story of the hero who never got discovered. It's like the story of all the non-famous people, and all of the environmental conditions that are part of the history, right? So monumental history can lead us to falsely think that history is just the chain of great men.
David: 40:07
Yeah, and he talks about it in terms of mythification at one point in the essay where he says, we mythify the past in, in the sense that the picture that we have of the past just doesn't correspond to the conditions on the ground at the time because we have selected only a few and highly unrepresentative types on the backs of which to erect the image of a particular era. Right? So think about the time of Homer and all we have in mind are Achilles and Odysseus, we're going to get a very biased picture of that. And a related danger that is associated with this is that if you're in the present working with this distorted and mythified image of the past, it leads you to make an epistemological mistake, and that is to overlook differences in context. You start identifying things as identical that are not really identical. So if today, Ellie, you were to say, my favorite hero is Hercules. I'm going to be just like Hercules because he inspires me. In order for you to make that claim, you actually have to overlook a lot of conditions that made possible the emergence of somebody like Hercules in a particular time and place, conditions that may no longer hold. Those can economic, those can be social, those can be political, those can be environmental, but it, it leads you to make an inference about what is possible, as if possibility didn't vary over time.
Ellie: 41:43
Yeah. Yeah. And I think an interesting counterpoint to that, although it's not necessarily a counterpoint. Yeah, maybe it is, is the example that Nietzche uses of the Renaissance, because the context of the Italian renaissance was pretty different than the context of ancient Greece and Rome, or the context we should say, because those empires lasted quite a long time. But the inspiration that folks in Italy in, you know, the 15th century got from classical art and literature and philosophy was so incredible that then in 15th and 16th centuries we get this huge movement of the Renaissance, which is playing on classical art literature philosophy, but really inventing something new. And so maybe that's a good test case of when this ignorance of context can actually work out. But then I think there's plenty of other ones, David, where the, the desire to just go back to a golden age can really come out and, and this ignorance of context is very problematic, especially when it overlooks who it's excluding.
David: 42:44
Well, that's right. And I think one way we could think about this distinction is to think about what happens when inspiration becomes imitation or mimicry. The function of heroes in the past should be to inspire us to act in the present, but not necessarily in the exact same way as those heroes did in their historical context. Right? If I were to try to be just like Achilles, by doing the same series of steps, saying the same things, and hoping thereby to achieve the same ends, I'm setting myself up for a major disappointment. And to this, I might add one final insight that I think is really central to Nietzche's analysis, and that is the political danger. When our gaze is turned backwards into the past, it can turn us against the present itself, and it can turn us against our contemporaries who are doing something original on their own terms that is not like our heroes, right? So like if we glorify people from the past, then we start looking with suspicion and doubt and cynicism at anybody in our surroundings that might actually be pursuing heroic action, just not according to the paradigm that we already hold in our mind about what heroic action needs to look like.
Ellie: 44:03
I know I, I kind of deal with this living in Los Angeles where a lot of people want to, they, I don't know if they want heroism, but they do want fame, it's so hard to separate those actually trying to accomplish great deeds from those who just like want to say they're going to accomplish great deeds and they should deserve to be famous, but not actually accomplish great deeds.
David: 44:27
Yeah, and, and not just like thinking about LA and Hollywood, but even think about the world of art when people say, well, great art was Picasso. So if you're not doing cubist paintings of naked women, then you're not doing great art any longer. And so Nietzche worries he has a, a beautiful phrase in the essay where he says, the real danger of monumental history is that its motto is let the dead bury the living. It leads you to mummify the present, and you just basically live in the past.
Ellie: 45:10
Enjoying Overthink? Please consider supporting the podcast by joining our Patreon. We are an independent, self-supporting podcast, and as a subscriber, you can help us cover key production costs as well as gaining access to an exclusive digital library of bonus content and more. One of the defining features of a hero is that they perform extraordinary acts that go above and beyond what we might expect somebody to perform in that same situation. This makes the hero almost by definition, a paragon of moral action, even though we've talked about some pretty morally dodgy figures. So how might, how might we think about the moral valences of heroic action? Are we morally obliged to be heroes or to emulate heroes or to praise heroes when they do heroic things?
David: 46:03
I think this is a really good and very tricky question, Ellie, and it turns out that there is a prolonged debate in moral theory about precisely this issue, which began in 1958 when a philosopher by the name of J.O. Urmson published an article entitled “Of Saints and Heroes,” which is an essay about moral theory and about how moral theory should relate to the figure of the hero. Now, Urmson makes the argument that all moral theories, at least the most popular ones, so think about utilitarianism, think about intuitionism, think about Kantian deontology, Urmson says, all these theories have really misunderstood and underappreciated the importance of the figure of the hero. And the reason is because they all divide our moral universe into a very simplistic taxonomy of three kinds of actions. There are the things that you cannot do, the prohibitions, the things that you can do if you want, but we don't really care. And the things that you absolutely must do, which are your moral duties. So all moral theories just have this trichotomy of moral behavior. And the problem for for Urmson is that there is absolutely no room in the schema for a higher category of moral theory that he wants to recognize. And that's what we now refer to as super derogatory action, which is action that goes over and beyond the call of moral duty. So there are some people who are just so moral that it's kind of unfair to them to say that, well, they did their moral duty. gone over and beyond that call. And so Urmson introduces two figures that fall under this category, and those are the hero and the saint.
Ellie: 48:02
So what distinguishes the hero and the saint? How can we define these figures?
David: 48:07
Yeah, the essay spends a lot of time talking about this distinction, and one thing that they both have in common, so let's begin there, is that they both exercise exceptional self-control. So a hero and a saint are in control of themselves in some way, in spite of what we said about Achilles and maybe even Odysseus.
Ellie: 48:27
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
David: 48:28
The difference is that they control slightly different parts of the self. Let me begin here with the figure of the saint. The saint does what they need to do, even when as Urmson says, inclination, desire, and self-interest get in the way. So it's almost like they battle their own inner desires and their own nature, for the sake of the good. Whereas the hero, it's not that they're battling their inclinations and their desires, they're actually battling the fear of death and the possibility of self annihilation. So they, they act heroically precisely by working through the fear?
Ellie: 49:10
And so is the author removing the notion of a hero from the notion of self-sacrifice?
David: 49:18
Well, no, uh, because there is an element of sacrifice. They're sacrificing their self-preservation. Yeah, but the important thing is, is fear in a way the, the saint acts in, in a consistent way by sacrificing themselves on the every day for a long time. Whereas the hero acts in moments where everybody else would be afraid. So another way of thinking about the difference is in terms of the temporality of saintly versus heroic action. The saint is somebody who perseveres in their suffering over long periods of time, like a martyr. Whereas a hero is somebody who acts in the moment, whatever the cost might be.
Ellie: 49:56
Okay. With a particular strength of soul, perhaps, which is one Rousseau says about the hero, that the hero has a, has a unique strength of soul.
David: 50:04
Oh yeah. And so that strength of soul is something that both of them would have the saint and the hero, just in slightly different ways, and maybe I can make this a little bit concrete, by giving the examples that Urmson gives of who counts as a hero and who counts as a saint. For the saint he gives the example of an, unwed daughter of an older man who basically sacrifices her life prospects for the sake of staying and taking care of her father by his bedside. Uh, so that would be kind of an example of saintly action, self-sacrifice.
Ellie: 50:40
When was this written?
David: 50:42
1958. Yes.
Ellie: 50:43
It's still a little late for the unwed qualification. That's hilarious to me.
David: 50:47
Yeah, no, it's unwed, uh, qualification of a widowed father because there is no other woman to take care of the ailing father. Yeah.
Ellie: 50:55
Yes, Yes. I see, I see. Yep.
David: 50:57
So that would be an example, maybe kind of like on the lower end of saintly action and on the higher end, he gives the example of somebody who does service for others to such a degree that they just sacrifice their own interests completely. So we might think of Mother Teresa, um, right? She's a saint because she effaces herself through action. On the hero side, he also gives two examples of the lower end and the higher end. On the lower end, you have the figure of a doctor who stays with his patients in a town that is ridden by plague, even if that means that he might get the sickness as well. So again, it's about fear. He works through the fear and stands by his patients. Or on the higher end of heroic action, we get a soldier who goes way beyond what any commander can ask of a soldier, and that is by throwing himself heroically on a grenade that is going to kill all his comrades.
Ellie: 52:00
I'm tempted to note that Urmson's examples of the hero are male, whereas the example of the saint is female. Not only female, but but like very gendered, unwed daughter.
David: 52:13
Female.
Ellie: 52:15
Yeah. I, although I think the heroes with the patients in a plague example, that's very CNN everyday hero's energy.
David: 52:23
But it's also slightly feminized because it's a case of care.
Ellie: 52:27
That's true. That's true. But can we really say that the daughter is not also a hero? Like, maybe I'm missing it, but yeah. The daughter is attached to her father, right? She's his daughter. But that shouldn't, that familial link shouldn't be necessary for the distinction between saint and hero. So remind me of, of what the more relevant difference might be than that.
David: 52:51
Yeah, that's a very good question. Two responses. The first one is that Urmson just says, to be a hero, there cannot be a natural relationship of care and love between the figures. And he uses another example to disqualify the hero. He says, when a mother throws herself on a grenade, for example, to save her baby, that's not heroic action. But you do it strangers, when you do it strangers, it is.
Ellie: 53:16
Can the mother still do it for stranger though, or is it suddenly like now a male figure in place of.
David: 53:20
No. If a mother does it for strangers, it is heroic. And if a father does it for their son, it is not heroic. So that's the first that he just unilaterally decides that affiliation discounts heroism. The second thing is that the difference is in the relationship to fear of death. The daughter's life is not at stake, right? Like, she she's not going to die by caring for her father. She's just going to sacrifice a lot of her own life goals. Like maybe finding a husband, he says that.
Ellie: 53:53
Which is, I mean, honestly, that that's kind of valid. Like I, I do think there are plenty of people who choose taking care of parents over finding and supporting a romantic relationship, so that's not necessarily cringe. It's just Urmson's, Urmson's a little gender cringe, I would say.
David: 54:08
Oh my gosh, yes. I mean, at the time he was already kind of like at the end of his career, so he's like a first half of the 20th century man. But the, the heroes in both cases, the doctor who stays with patients in a plague ridden town, and the soldier who throws himself in the grenade, those are people who put their life on the line in the moment, and that's the
Ellie: 54:31
Yeah.
David: 54:32
distinction.
Ellie: 54:32
This goes back, David, to how you started this, which is the notion that the hero is going over and above their duty. They're doing things that we cannot expect, whereas arguably, the mother and the daughter, by acting out of familial care, are doing things that one could conceivably think of as part of their duty. Obviously people have very different conceptions of what our duties to family members are, but maybe that's part of the idea. And so I, I think to go back to what you said, there's a sort of excess of giving, excess of generosity that the hero undertakes, it seems to me, relative to non heroic, but moral figures.
David: 55:13
Yeah, there's always an excess, and that's what defines super derogatory action of the saint and the hero. And so just to clarify for Urmson, the mother who throws herself in the way of a car to save her daughter, she's still a saint. She's just not a hero. And so it's still super derogatory, is still going over and beyond the call of duty. It's just that affiliation gets in the way of this other
Ellie: 55:39
Mm-hmm.
David: 55:39
category.
Ellie: 55:40
Okay.
David: 55:40
But what's unique about these two examples now to bring it back to moral theory, is why does this excess of morality matter in the first place? And Urmson says the reason is because there is a fundamental paradox in the figures of the saint and the hero together. And that is that even though all of us share an intuition, that they deserve a lot of praise and that they are paragons of, you know, human achievement in the realm of, of moral duty and action, we cannot expect that of anybody. So it has to be unprompted by duty, right? Like nobody will say Ellie, you must be a saint. Ellie, you must be a hero. In some ways, we have to simply hope that that desire to transcend will be born out of you.
Ellie: 56:34
So David, following this account, as we close our episode, tell us have you come around to the idea of heroes.
David: 56:42
Well, I said that I was open to it, but I didn't have the language for talking about it. And maybe Urmson's article gives me some language where I want to raise the bar a little bit from the CNN approach to heroes where it's more than just community service. And I think these two concepts of putting your life on the line and sacrificing your own interests might be central where I, I kind of want to see some level of sacrifice before I call somebody a hero, like genuine sacrifice.
Ellie: 57:14
Meanwhile, I'll lean into my identity as a little lady and accept that I can at most be a shero, not a true hero.
David: 57:24
At most, you can be a saintly shero. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Ellie: 57:38
You can subscribe to our Patreon for exclusive access to bonus videos, Live Q and As, and more.
David: 57:44
To reach out to us and find episode info go to overthinkpodcast.com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram @overthink_pod
Ellie: 57:54
We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Clare A'Hearn, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.
David: 58:01
And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.