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.
