Emmanuel Cuisinier

This paper presents a phenomenological account of heroism based on Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception. Through this account, I demonstrate that he provides a novel conceptual framework for understanding cases in which people perform heroic actions on the basis of a perceptual experience. To be clear, the kind of heroism I discuss is civilian, spontaneous and unprecedented. These are sacrificial and untrained altruistic acts that also include a clear lack of selfawareness. Considering that there has not been any description of civilian heroic sacrifice in phenomenology so far, I believe it would make sense to begin with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception because of its remarkable fittingness for this kind of experience as well as his own philosophical connections to heroism which can be found at the end of the Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and in later texts such as “The War Has Taken Place” (1945) and “Man, The Hero” (1948). By way of firsthand testimonials, I take up certain features of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception to demonstrate how they can apply to these kinds of heroic experiences – namely, the spontaneous and prepersonal characters of perception and his notion of the body-schema. These features, I argue, map out the fundamental conditions required for performing a heroic action in some cases such as the ones I present throughout this paper. I conclude by explaining the relevance of these features to issues of freedom and moral meaning that are especially at play in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of heroism. Freedom is the condition for all morality according to him and heroism, a moral act par excellence, is the ultimate act of sustaining other people’s freedom. Therefore, my phenomenological description also aims to unpack how this claim operates on a perceptual level.

This special issue is the result of collaborations between graduate students and professors as part of the Montreal-based Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire sur la normativité (GRIN) during the academic year 2023–2024. The aim of this research group is to explore the topic of normativity throughout three different axes: social life, affectivity, and knowledge. The title of this issue, “Looking for Lost Norms,” is not only a nod to Proust but is also indicative of a common thread through which our ideas were conceived. Indeed, as our meetings progressed, we realized that we all wanted, in one way or another, to critically reveal the different ways in which normativity could have been forgotten, ignored, or even lost. This introduction gives an overview of the eight papers featured in this issue.

This article argues that current scholarship on Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of heroism contextualizes it within his political writings and, as a result of that, it neglects his interest in the primacy of perception for describing experiences of heroic action—such as the kind of heroism depicted in Saint-Exupéry’s memoir cited at the end of Phenomenology of Perception. This article further argues that he not only addresses heroism as a key solution to what he calls “the problem of freedom” at the perceptual level, but that he is also concerned with how it translates into the paradox of expression that comes up in his later works.