The Heroic Heart: Greatness Ancient and Modern

The Heroic Heart: Greatness Ancient and Modern

Tod Lindberg

Language: English

Pages: 240

ISBN: 1594038236

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


What does it mean to be a hero? In The Heroic Heart, Tod Lindberg traces the quality of heroic greatness from its most distant origin in human prehistory to the present day. The designation of “hero” once conjured mainly the prowess of conquerors and kings slaying their enemies on the battlefield. Heroes in the modern world come in many varieties, from teachers and mentors making a lasting impression on others by giving of themselves, to firefighters no less willing than their ancient counterparts to risk life and limb. They don’t do so to assert a claim of superiority over others, however. Rather, the modern heroic heart acts to serve others and save others. The spirit of modern heroism is generosity, what Lindberg calls “the caring will,” a primal human trait that has flourished alongside the spread of freedom and equality.

Through its intimate portraits of historical and literary figures and its subtle depiction of the most difficult problems of politics, The Heroic Heart offers a startlingly original account of the passage from the ancient to the modern world and the part the heroic type has played in it. Lindberg deftly combines social criticism and moral philosophy in a work that ranks with such classics as Thomas Carlyle’s nineteenth-century On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History and Joseph Campbell’s twentieth-century The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Caesar was someone whose “successes . . . begat in him plans for greater deeds and a passion for fresh glory.” Caesar was also a wit. One sometimes hears praise of the “self-deprecating wit” of prominent individuals—Henry Kissinger, for example: “The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault.” The self-deprecation is willful, of course, in that most practitioners of witticism of this sort, Kissinger not excepted, have a very large sense of self

political ambition within an existing political order is a mark of its strength and stability, now no less than then. Pompey contributed to that political order without an apparent second thought. He was prepared to risk his life not out of a superordinate inner drive to express greatness but in return for the rewards, tangible and intangible, that a prominent Roman could expect in exchange for a willingness to take on Rome’s enemies—thus for Rome. But the political order of the late Roman

its leveling effect with regard to the possibility of human achievement has no basis for halting its inquiry with praise for aristocracy and aristocratic virtue (or “master morality”). It ought to recognize aristocratic virtue as a falling away from classically heroic virtue. If the evolution of political power from the rule of “one” to that of “a few” to that of “many” or “all” really describes a rank, which I don’t think it does, then the highest is “one.” Besides, the instability of

restoration of the caliphate. In the modern world, the recrudescence of the classically heroic type inevitably entails villainy. The willingness to risk one’s life in service to an inner ambition or sense of greatness at war with the “equality of conditions” of the modern age is nowadays villainy pure and simple. CHAPTER 6 THE BACKLASH AGAINST THE SLAYING HERO World War I and the turn against the pursuit of military glory. Twentieth-century revisionism on “great” figures from the past. Birth

people voluntarily. I note, without expertise, that evolutionary biologists have become very interested in the question of where regard for others comes from. The philosophical leanings of the modern world have tended to seek the answer to this question by returning to the individual posing it and inquiring there, as if others were simply a mirror in which we are better able to see ourselves. All roads lead back to self-aggrandizement, or Nietzsche’s will to power. Caring about others is an

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