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Self-Realization And Validity Surplus In Proactive Heroism, Bryan Smyth

Heroism Science

This article provides a brief outline of an approach to understanding proactive (or social) heroism in embodied terms, taking this as essential to supporting the idea of ‘the banality of heroism’. I first present an analysis of heroic action in general that shows it as involving self-realization through nonselfsacrificial existential necessity, and then show how in cases of reactive heroic action this necessity is best understood in predispositional embodied terms, such that the agent may be said to quite literally incarnate certain generally accepted norms of the intersubjective ethical context. I then briefly sketch out how this same kind of …