Exploration and Heroism
Friday 13 October 2023
In last week’s newsletter, in which I discussed some of the connections among the disparate projects occupying my attention, I failed to point out the obvious connection between exploration and heroism, which has long been a cultural touchstone in Western civilization, however much it is disparaged of late. Heroes of exploration demonstrate conspicuous physical courage in the face of adversity, and many have shown moral courage in pursuing exploration that had been stigmatized as impossible or misguided. Successful explorers must, by definition, demonstrate temperance and prudence. (Is justice anywhere applicable? I will leave this question for another time; I mention it here to round out the cardinal virtues.) Unsuccessful explorers pose a challenge, as their stories seem to demonstrate failures of temperance and prudence even when failed explorers demonstrate exemplary fortitude and bravery, often at the cost of their lives.
What is the demarcation criterion by which successful explorers are to be distinguished from unsuccessful explorers? Was Columbus a successful or an unsuccessful explorer? Columbus did discover the New World, but he intended to discover a new passage to Asia, and he mistakenly believed that he had landed in the Indies when he had in fact arrived in the Caribbean. Can we identify as a successful explorer someone (or a group of individuals, or an institution) who engages in exploration but who does not know what they have found, or who misidentifies that which they have found? We could plausibly argue that this is a failure of exploration, however, we have an interesting modern instance to cite. When Penzias and Wilson discovered the CMBR they did not know what they had found, but they believed that they had found something of importance and were prepared to publish a paper describing the discovery, though they initially did not understand its significance. Bernard F. Burke made Penzias and Wilson aware of a preprint paper by Jim Peebles, who, along with Robert H. Dicke and David Wilkinson at Princeton, were planning to search for the CMBR. It was Penzias and Wilson, not Dicke, Wilkinson, and Peebles, who received the Nobel Prize for this discovery, though it was the latter three who understood the discovery before the discoverers understood it.
Another example from the Age of Exploration: Was Magellan a successful or an unsuccessful explorer? Magellan himself did not live to complete the circumnavigation for which he was to become famous, but one of his ships did survive to complete the circumnavigation. Thus Magellan’s expedition was successful, but Magellan himself died along the way. He understood better what he was trying to accomplish than Columbus, but Columbus did survive his four crossings of the Atlantic.
For a fictional example, there is a Star Trek Voyager episode about a lost early space explorer (“One Small Step”) who is found by the Voyager crew. Much is made in the episode of the continued scientific data gathering by the lone astronaut after he knew he was effectively lost without hope of rescue. This data is recovered by the Voyager crew, so that, over the longue durée, this lost early space mission was successful in some scientific sense. In the fictional Star Trek universe, this early mission would have been recorded as lost for hundreds of years, but then, upon rediscovery, the history books can be set right and the scientific results of the mission added to the total corpus of human knowledge. This is a perfect illustration of Danto’s observation about the changing meaning of narrative history, as later events place earlier events in a new context, which changes the meaning of the earlier event.
I also mentioned in last week’s newsletter that my talk at the Everyday Heroism conference was preceded by Kyle Fruh who spoke on “Moral Heroism without Virtue.” Fruh addressed a question that has apparently bothered many who study heroism, in that heroic actions can be a more-or-less isolated event in the life of the heroic individual. Here is an extract from Fruh’s abstract:
“The virtues of moral heroes are what explain their extraordinary behavior, and what set them apart from the rest of us. Moral virtues are what moral heroes offer to us as we attempt to learn from them and emulate them. It is the virtues of moral heroes that make them fit and useful as components in programs in moral education. And the virtue of the hero is what attracts our admiration, what calls out for honor and commemoration.”
Fruh calls this the “virtue approach” to heroism, and was concerned to show its inadequacy. Ascribing virtues to individuals doesn’t seem to help to explain or predict their heroism. Fruh’s talk prompted some interesting discussion around this point, which is understandable, as we have all heard stories about individuals who take some heroic action but whose lives are later a mess, and some of whom go on to do notably non-heroic things. In such instances, we can think of the heroic act as a matter of a moment’s inspiration, perhaps the result of instinct (a Schopenhauerian argument could be made for this).
A darker explanation for this phenomenon could be drawn from the effect that a conspicuous act of heroism can have on the life of an ordinary individual. Another speaker at the conference, Tom Voigt, discussed his research into the lives of individuals who had received an Australian Bravery Award (which he has himself received), which offered some telling insights into the personal lives of ordinary individuals who had engaged in an extraordinary action. The sad truth is summarized in Voigt’s abstract:
“Twenty-one of the cohort of bravery award recipients reported either immediate or longer-term negative impacts with the most common including sleeplessness, nightmares, flashbacks physical injuries, health impacts, employment and financial consequences, post-traumatic stress disorder, and post-traumatic stress syndrome. Other negative impacts included hypervigilance, avoidance behaviours, anger issues, alcohol misuse, social withdrawal and isolation. Half of the key significant other family members described that their relationships had been negatively affected following their bravery award recipients’ act of heroism. Nine key significant other family members described learning to live with a different and changed person as their greatest challenge.”
The stories we have heard of individuals who engage in heroic actions but who are otherwise are troubled, then, may be a causal consequence of having engaged in heroism. One might even add that it is heroism beyond the capacity of the individual in question that can bring ruination to the life of the non-heroic individual.
For a physical parallel, one might cite an individual who summons the limits of their strength to perform some extraordinary action — which might also be heroic, such as lifting a car off a dying individual — but which action leaves that individual physically crippled. Returning to the psychology of what we may call episodic heroism, an individual may perform some heroic action that is at or beyond their limit of psychological strength, successfully performing the action, but, in the process, psychologically damaging themselves permanently through the effort.
Episodic heroism can be contrasted to everyday heroism. The theme of the conference — everyday heroism — I later realized was ambiguous, as we could construe everyday heroism as, 1) low-level heroic action that can be sustained over a lifetime so that it informs everyday actions, or 2) heroic actions by ordinary persons not otherwise regarded as heroic (which is what I have here called episodic heroism). The idea of moral heroism not driven by virtue is an example of the latter. In the former case, we are not presented with paradoxical cases of individuals who engage in some heroic action but whom in other areas of their life are non-heroic or non-virtuous. If we focus on cases of episodic heroism, we will definitely come away with the idea that even acts of conspicuous moral heroism are not a function of virtue, but rather a function of opportunity and willingness to act on opportunity.
We can also define moral heroism in terms of low-level heroic action that can be sustained over a lifetime and expressed in ordinary, everyday actions, in which case the moral heroism in question is a paradigm case of virtue that has been transformed into a habit through practice — which corresponds to the classic Aristotelian position on virtue:
“…a man becomes just by doing just actions and temperate by doing temperate actions; and no one can have the remotest chance of becoming good without doing them. But the mass of mankind, instead of doing virtuous acts, have recourse to discussing virtue, and fancy that they are pursuing philosophy and that this will make them good men. In so doing they act like invalids who listen carefully to what the doctor says, but entirely neglect to carry out his prescriptions. That sort of philosophy will no more lead to a healthy state of soul than will the mode of treatment produce health of body.” (Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, ch. 4)
One might say, in the Aristotelian spirit, that a man becomes heroic because he performs heroic actions; these actions, then, become habit, and this is the source of the familiar Aristotelian idea that virtue is a habit. If we further define heroism (or sainthood) as supererogatory virtue (as I did in my heroism conference talk, following an influential paper by J. O. Urmson), then the individual is heroic who makes a habit of supererogatory virtue. Here we can see that this excludes episodic heroism by definition.
To return to the heroism of exploration, an individual who undertakes a voyage of exploration or some similarly demanding challenge is, by definition, not engaging in episodic heroism. The heroic activity is not the result of an ephemeral opportunity coinciding with a spontaneous motivation to act. Exploration is planned, the opportunity may well be a lifelong ambition, and the motivation is settled and deliberate. Similar considerations apply to most large-scale military operations, which may (or may not) be the occasion of heroism, but are the result of conscious planning and preparation. In short, the heroic explorer makes a habit of practicing heroic virtue in exploration. This places heroic action in a larger context that distinguishes it from episodic heroic action, and it is this context of continued heroic action that distinguishes the genuinely heroic individual from the individual who performs a singular heroic action.
Just as individual heroic acts are contextualized by the life of the individual who is responsible for an heroic act, so too particular voyages of exploration must be contextualized within the history of voyages of exploration. The early modern period is (or was) often called the Age of Exploration because of the great number of exploratory voyages taken — thus Columbus must be seen in the context of Magellan, Vasco da Gama, and the many other navigators of the Age of Discovery. Similarly, the individual journeys of Robert E. Peary, Frederick A. Cook, Roald Amundsen, Robert Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Richard E. Byrd, and others in the race to reach the poles together constitute a Lakatosian scientific research program as played out in what I once called adventure science, i.e., scientific research that involves individual scientists placing themselves in harm’s way in the pursuit of knowledge.
Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914–1917) is of particular interest if we return to the problem of distinguishing successful from unsuccessful explorers. Shackleton’s expedition was not “successful” insofar as it did not go as planned, and Shackleton’s ship Endurance was trapped in ice, crushed, and sank, but Shackleton did manage to keep the members of his expedition alive through heroic feats of endurance that are now seen as great accomplishment in and of themselves, quite apart from any scientific value of the expedition.
Sir Edmund Hilary’s successful ascent of Mount Everest also must be placed in the context of a great many unsuccessful attempts to scale Everest. This context could provide moral justification for the heroism of failed efforts of exploration, insofar as all attempts to summit Mount Everest prior to Hilary’s successful ascent may be understood as part of a larger, ongoing effort to which all contributed, often at the expense of their lives. Again, this resembles large-scale military operations, which may see many individual acts of heroism, many of which are fatal to the individual who engages in the heroic action, but all of which accrue to the campaign overall. In a less flattering account of exploration, we could characterize the Race to the Poles or the many attempts to summit Mount Everest as petty competitive striving to be the first motivated less by virtue than by jealousy of fame. It is to be expected that men of great energy and ambition — the kind of men who engage in great voyages of exploration — will have their full measure of human, all-too-human qualities, and these alongside their heroic and virtuous qualities.
