ABSTRACT

Research on heroism typically seems fascinating to people in everyday life: they ask insightful and interesting questions about the research, offer their personal reflections on heroes, and sometimes share details of significant life events triggered by the conversation. Heroism is an approachable topic that appears to influence individuals and groups in extraordinary ways. Indeed, heroes have been described as “support for all human life and the inspiration of philosophy, poetry, and the arts” and function as “a vehicle for the profoundest moral and metaphysical instruction” (Campbell, 1949, p. 257). Campbell further suggests that the metaphors by which heroes live have been “brooded upon, searched, and discussed for centuries: they have served whole societies, furthermore, as the mainstays of thought and life” (p. 256). Scholars convey similar ideas about the ways that heroes shape and represent culture (Hegel,

1801/1975), and act as source of social control (Klapp, 1954). Other philosophers highlight heroworship as a way to re-establish meaning and idealism (Früchtl, 2009). Not only do heroes help people to survive physical dangers, but also they can evoke eudemonistic questions of “How should I live? What do I really want?” (Früchtl, 2009). Further still, individuals may seek to achieve symbolic immortality and a meaningful existence by worshiping the lives of their heroes (Becker, 1973). In an essay entitled “What makes a life significant?” William James wrote:

What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those darkness; with heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.