Under the influence of Joseph Campbell, I have been regarding heroes and gods as personified emanations of primal urges to action. Currently, I use the work of Eric Neumann, Jung, Nietzsche and James Hillman in addition to Campbell to support my theory. I'm hoping to find some evidence of this in the neurosciences. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
I'm not sure you will get an answer from a Neuroscientist. I believe its chaps raised, cultured, and nurtured in just the right way as to express virtues through actions. Its alarming to talk to one of these persons, too. They say something surprising like "oh, I was just doing my job." As if it were their job to run into a burning building to save someone's cat. Also, saints and heroes don't live a life self-consciously. Instead, they live a life conscious off others.
A mere conditioning, theory like in behaviourism gives, wont do. What matters is how the hero or saint thinks of themselves and others. The culture they were raised in and the values it holds up to look up to matter also. I'm not sure if brainwaves will determine whether one is a hero. Action potentials and synapses aren't really the same as what one thinks of as her or her duties to others, what ones guiding principles and moral maxims are. These concepts might be on a different playing field than the neurosciences can offer. There's many ways to look at this though, and new arguments are welcome.
I am not using the term Hero or God as someone who does a virtuous act. I am using the concepts in myth which represents Heroes and Gods as the avatars of appetites. So for me, Dracula might be a hero. Zeus was not admirable. Nor was Achilles. Nor Mars. Nor Medea. All of them were Gods or heroes or demigods insofar as myth is concerned. Perhaps the word "hero" is too culturally loaded. Ernest Becker says that we all wish to be "heroes in our own lives" however the truth of heroes in myth and stories is that they are composed of both good and evil.
The concept of "hero" that Jane suggests, involves fundamental aspects of social psychology and anthropology, with a neurobiological basis. It is needed an interdisciplinary vision. To discuss it, we must give up some preconceived criteria by our training, and analyze it holistically. I think that from the historical point of view, these characters, that have been elevated to the rank of "heroes", "legends", "icons", etcétera, they could even include characters like Christ, Buddha, Paracelsus, Nostradamus, Saint Germain, Krishna, etcetera. These characters are controversial by the religious context and the time passed, and they can be as real as "demigods" and "gods" Greco-Roman. The passage of time has memorized them in collective unconscious, which has been already proposed by psychoanalysts like Freud and Jung category. If there is a neurobiological correlate predisposing to an "heroic - legendary" behavior, this should be compared directly with the neurobiology of serial or mass murderer, that include also to war criminals. These characters have behaviors that could be considered neurobiologically similar, but with a different moral orientation. This fact results complicated, because moral values are learned and remembered by the cortical regions involved in memory, learning and emotional processing, such as the amygdala, hippocampus and prefrontal cortex (limbic system). Genetic basis of these behaviours, it is also very interesting. Biocriminology studies this matters from interdisciplinary point of view.
Noe, Thank you! You have clarified it.". . .involves fundamental aspects of social psychology and anthropology, with a neurobiological basis. It is needed an interdisciplinary vision. To discuss it, we must give up some preconceived criteria by our training, and analyze it holistically." That is exactly what I am trying to do. While my research is not about criminals, I have been looking at the work in those areas by Anneliese Pontius to whom another researcher referred me.
I am proposing that the characters in a play represent behaviors, both good and evil, that are driven by neurobiological impulses that emerge due to the stressors imposed by the workings of the plot. In our daily life, we do not generally exhibit such extremes of behavior, but in conflictive situations, such responses to life break through more rational modes of behavior.
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