ABSTRACT

In logical terms, the notion of hero and heroic act is a value-charged concept, the axiological validity of which is conferred only by and through society. Since the hero and the heroic act are viewed in a social context, it is appropriate to enquire into their social meaning and their bearing upon human affairs. To do this we have to probe the nature of the heroic act. Since this act takes place in a social context, it has to be differentiated from the ordinary acts of daily life. To carry on the routine business of life is not a heroic act: it is the usual behaviour of human beings constituted in social groups, conditioned by customary or established social norms, to which everybody has been trained to conform. A heroic act, to be so qualified, must transcend the ordinary level of human behaviour; it must not be repetitive as everyday behaviour is; it must be exalted in relation to common experience; it must, therefore, be as far as possible unique. This is plain enough as regards the phenomenology of the heroic act, but the transcendent character of the heroic function assumes further dimensions as soon as we view it in its sociological, even philosophical, implications. On the sociological level, the existentialist categories of being and nothingness can be translated into those conditions which come under the categories of determinism and indeterminism. All ordinary human behaviour within a constituted social group is subject to rules elaborated and established in the course of social experience. Most of human behaviour occurs within the limits of what we may define as deterministic areas of social existence. Behaviour which transgresses the limits imposed by the determining rules of social existence, which is acted outside the determining areas of society, falls into the hazardous world of indeterminacy. The one who acts does so at his own risk, and the consequences of this behaviour are unpredictable.