Moral Injury | “MY PROBLEM… OUR PROBLEM…” - FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

A Veteran’s Definition of Moral Injury | A Philosopher’s Warning for our Western Psyche.

INTERNATIONAL DEFINITION of Moral Injury, from Philosopher and Veteran, Friedrich Nietzsche. It will provide some important background of his life, works and military experience, and relevant psychoanalytic commentary. While the format of this platform is not congenial to references, please ask me for a citation list if you are interested (all citations are from the primary works from the authors mentioned).

DEFINITION (PHILOSOPHICAL MODEL) | A DISRUPTION TO THE PSYCHE FROM A WILL-TO -TRUTH THAT HAS BECOME CONSCIOUS OF ITSELF AS A PROBLEM IN US.

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“MY PROBLEM… OUR PROBLEM…” THUS SPAKEFRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE[1]

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– A Veteran’s Definition of Moral Injury | A Philosopher’s Warning for the Western Psyche –

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IN 1882, FRIEDRICH NIETSZCHE (b. 1844 – 1900) fled to Rapallo, where in a manically enlightened flourish of?just ten days,?wrote the first part of?Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None?(1883). A work that represents a?veteran’s account of moral injury, and a philosopher’s skill in describing it.?At this point in his life, aged 40,?he had already served one year of?voluntary?military service with the Prussian Army?(1867), accepted an offer to become professor of classical philology at the University of Basel (1869), conferred an honorary doctorate from Leipzig University (1869), served as a medical orderly with the rank of captain in the Franco-Prussian War (1870),?renounced state citizenship [on returning from war]?(1870), and published several works (1872-82).?????

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The works of Nietzsche in the ten-year period 1872-82 will provide the framework for a new and unifying definition of moral injury to emerge. All Nietzsche’s works were published post the authors military service,?a philosophical corpus inextricably linked to veteran concerns and experiences.?His first published work,?The Birth of Tragedy?(1872), remains a deeply personal exploration of wartime ruminations as?a medic?at the battle of the Metz (1870).[2]?More accurately described as a “Siege,” The Metz saw ‘frontline’ medical attention shift from combat wounds, to disease, sickness and malnutrition.[3]?A new and, importantly,?shared frontline that embodied the humanitarian imperatives that make up today’s moral virtues; civilian and refugee populations, food shortages and starvation, sanitation and disease.[4]

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Of crucial importance when confronted with events and deliberations such as these, according to Nietzsche, is the feeling “Who am I?”[5]?A ‘feeling’ Nietzsche describes as informed by continuously active value judgements of the “other person” in relation to ourselves.[6]?Feeling that psychological importance given the capacity terrible experiences have, according to Nietzsche, in leading us to speculate whether those?who experience them aren’t also something terrible: Maybe even without knowing it.[7]?Deeply embedded critical self-judgement that plagues current and emerging veteran cohorts, and for whom it is of the highest to know whether we are not duped by morality.[8]?Indeed,?The?Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche’s first attempt at communicating his wartime moral injury,?takes as its opening aphorism of an attempt at self-criticism:

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Whatever may lie at the bottom of this doubtful book must be a question of the first rank and attractiveness, moreover?a deeply personal question,?—in proof thereof observe the time in which it originated, in spite of which it originated, the exciting period of the Franco-German war of 1870-71.[9]

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Notes of interrogation concerning the alleged "cheerfulness" of the Greeks and of Greek virtues,?that very well may read as?the first modern, or even postmodern, account of Moral Injury.?A first lesson, according to Nietzsche, on the way the Greeks got the better of pessimism - the means whereby they were able to?overcome?it.[10]?While acclaimed critically, Nietzsche was to describe?The Birth of Tragedy?as an impossible book... badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image confused, sentimental […] and without the will to logical cleanliness.[11]?Over the 10-year period however Nietzsche’s works would morph from the trope of tragedy to the halcyon (Joyous) promise delivered in?The Gay Science?(The Joyous Wisdom) (1882). Nietzsche writes in the introduction to?The Gay Science,?

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“The whole book is really nothing but a?revel after long privation and impotence: the frolicking of returning energy, of newly awakened belief in a to-morrow and after-to-morrow; of sudden sentience and prescience of a future, …and aims once more permitted and believed in.[12]

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Published in 1882,?The Gay Science?rounded out the?decade-long inquiry of Investigations into, and reconciliations of,?the moral hubris of a “good person” that wishes to help, but only those whose?distress you understand?entirely?because they share with you one suffering and one hope… and only in the manner in which you help yourself.”[13]?Gut wrenching honest proclamations from one, in uniform, who sat beside the dead and dying for months on end.[14]?Profound psychological insight that locates?curative power even in the wounds one receives.[15]?With these thoughts in mind, at the age of 40, Nietzsche began?Zarathustra, whose opening lines read:

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“When Zarathustra was?Thirty Years old?[Nietzsche’s age at publication of?Birth of Tragedy], he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and solitude, and for?Ten Years?[Nietzsche’s age at writing?Zarathustra] did not weary of it. But at last, his heart changed, — and rising one morning with the rosy dawn, he went before the sun, and spake thus unto it…Lo! I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee that hath gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it.”[16]

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The enlightened culmination of a decade-long Stateless, Godless and in many ways friendless psychological introspection:?Thus Spake Zarathustra?delivers?a?war-veteran philosophers’ curative treatise for Moral Injury. A?work Jung regards as the?best example of an intuitive method?whereby problems can be articulated in a non-intellectual, yet still philosophical way.[17]?A roadmap for rebuilding of self and identity from the ashes left by the incendiary consequences of war on psychological effigies of religion and philosophy. For the problem we face today, according to Jung, is finding metaphysical interlocutors that orientate special psychic states-of-grace that deliver meaning to suffering.[18]

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Metaethical scaffolds that resolve the suffering psyche through coincidence of idea and reality.[19]?Jung suggests that if metaphysical lexicons no longer hold fascination for the spirit as they once did, it is not because of our inability to engage with mythology.[20]?But rather because symbols no longer express or resolve what is now welling up as the morally injured unconscious.?“Insanity” that, according to Nietzsche, historians don’t write about, but which at some point?physicians?will.[21]?For to be sure, Nietzsche would agree with Jung when he says,?"man can suffer only a certain amount of culture without injury."[22]

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Moral Injury is predicted in great style, and terrifying acridity, by Nietzsche who identifies it in the great difficulty looming for the contemporary Western psyche - where not only the?"rationality of millennia, but also its madness, break out in us - dangerous is it to be an heir."[23]?The psychological condition, emergence, and significance of what contemporary commentators’ label Moral Injury, is more accurately described as:

DEFINITION?(PHILOSOPHICAL MODEL)

“A DISRUPTION TO THE PSYCHE FROM A WILL-TO-TRUTH THAT HAS BECOME CONSCIOUS OF ITSELF AS A PROBLEM IN US.”[24]

Moral sagacity of such gravitas to define the history of Europe for the proceeding two centuries.[25]?Psychological distillates that have?weaponized the Western Psyche to anguish Nietzsche warns no other is compared.[26]?As Jung observes, until 1933 and the Second of the Great Wars, only lunatics would have been found in possession of living fragments of mythology, theodicy ensuring such fragments were a dish best served cold, dead ‘n buried [and already arisen if you will].[27]?Yet today the “Emperors-new” cradle is increasingly being viewed as empty, even originally so. The Western psyche?less and less concerned with the “Second Coming,” and more and more focused on the “First Lightening” of ego-death.?[28]?What is to become of this monstrous accumulation of force, the epitome of all our incorporated value judgements?[29]

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The search for “Greener pastures” these days yields little more than distraction to metaphysical nihilisms, a will-to-truth usually becoming conscious of itself as a problem in us when we come back from war, glance up from the AstroTurfed paradises of the überRich, or away from the Buddhist inspired festivals of the East. Despite esteemed praise for the explicative strength?Zarathustra?has for the Western psyche, such pastures, and their überMensch, remain largely unexplored.[30]?The myopic blind spot of an academic gaze that has failed to adequately bring into focus the work's stated aim of the "putting of every sorrowful-one again on firm land and firm legs."[31]?Like the Madman who proclaimed the death of God, in the face of the existential affliction wrought by Moral Injury, we too are wondering: what festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall WE have to invent? And whether the greatness of this deed is too great for us?[32]

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Those grappling with the acute manifestation of these maladies receive no social crutch, rather these are the very things that have snapped. The brunt of estrangement wholly affixed upon the poor psyche crying out to God and country. For as yet no “beyond” has emerged in the form of a moral grammar that can wrest Moral Injury away from today’s trauma ‘anthropologists,’ and deliver the fragmented field into maturity.?Its sufferers and sufferings remain largely inaudible in “social pasture,”?an ever-growing and deadly “silent disco” of existential affliction where the self becomes the battle and battlefield of virtues.[33]?One representing contemporary wars?“Signature-wound,”?from which more and more veterans do not return.[34]?A consciousness not easily recognized in the social herd, or by its ruling political elites.

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Yet there is an imperative to do so. Not only does Moral Injury inform understandings critical for the contemporary Western psyche, but the concept also has, wrapped up in it, that age-old biblical trope of rapturous?warning to apathetic societies that suddenly find themselves very much on the back moral-foot, and in very serious trouble.?A ‘brave-new’ world with lantern raised trying to catch its bearings in a new dawn: the harsh light of the first century of Humanity, and crimes against it.

[1]?Lampert, Laurence. “Nietzsche’s Challenge to Philosophy in the Thought of Leo Strauss.” The Review of Metaphysics” 58, no. 3 (2005): 585–619, 594

[2]?Nietzsche, Friedrich.?The Birth of Tragedy?(Oxford: Oxford University press, 2008), 3

[3]?The importance of which finds expression in what Czech philosopher Jan Pato?ka, terms the “Solidarity of the Shaken.” For Pato?ka, the frontline constitutes a metaphysical moment for Pato?ka where the very possibility of authentic responsibility for our time crystallizes. A place uniquely situated to derive understandings into history, that for Pato?ka, are not exclusively reserved for those doing the fighting. Instead, those who find themselves grappling with the meaning of the legacy of the moral cataclysm of the front line, whether there or not, are capable of acquiring such understandings.

[4]?The enormous developments in the field in the post-war years that commencing with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, necessarily impacts considerations of humanity and dictates of the public conscience. This development in human rights, both in their formulation and in their universal acceptance, is more substantial than developments in this field for centuries before. The conscience of the global community has in this way been greatly sensitized to considerations of humanity and dictates of public conscience, its principles tending to be invoked immediately and automatically whenever a question of humanitarian standards arise.[4]?They now constitute a peremptory norm (jus cogens; Latin for "compelling law") and is a fundamental principle of international law that is accepted by the international community of states as a norm from which no derivation is permitted.

[5]?Nietzsche, Friedrich.?Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: (Spring 1884-Winter 1884/85),?158

[6]?ibid.

[7]?Nietzsche, Friedrich.?Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (Summer 1882-Winter 1883/84),?48

[8]?Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority.?Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Texts, v. 1. The Hague; Boston: Hingham, MA: M. Nijhoff Publishers; 1979. Foreword, 21.

[9]?Birth of Tragedy, 3

[10]?Birth of Tragedy,?3

[11]?Birth of Tragedy,?3

[12]?Nietzsche, Friedrich,?The Gay Science:(New York: Vintage Books, 1974), Preface

[13]?The Gay Science, Introduction.

[14]?For context; “With blood feuds: Basic feeling like all those who represent the state: respect for the profound suffering of a kin-group and concession to this feeling.” in?Unpublished Fragments (Summer 1882-Winter 1883/84), 134.

[15]?Nietzsche, Friedrich, Twilight of the Idols, Foreword, 31.

[16]?Nietzsche, Friedrich,?Thus Spake Zarathustra?(New York: Modern Library, 1940), Prologue

[17]?Jung, Carl,?The Collected Works of C. G. Jung Volume 6?(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), Par. 540

[18]?ibid.

[19]?Jung, Carl,?The Collected Works of C. G. Jung Volume 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology?(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), Pars 40-41

[20]?ibid.

[21]?Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (Summer 1882-Winter 1883/84),?59

[22]?The Collected Works of C. G. Jung Volume 7,?Pars 40-41.

[23]?The Gay Science,?Introduction

[24]?Nietzsche, Friedrich: ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’ and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 119

[25]?Ibid.

[26]?The Gay Science,?Aphorism #161

[27]?Jung, Carl.?Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (Collected Works of C. G. Jung Volume 9 Part 2)?(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)

[28]?Zarathustra, Part 1, (21) VOLUNTARY DEATH. See also, “I love all these heavy drops, how they fall one by one from the dark cloud that conceals lightening within itself: The name of the lightening is the superhuman.”?Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Spring 1884-Winter 1884/85, 130

[29]??Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (Summer 1882-Winter 1883/84),?139

[30]?The Collected Works of C. G. Jung Volume 6, Par. 540

[31]?Zarathustra, Part X, (x) Out of Service.

[32]?The Gay Science,?Para. 125

[33]?Zarathustra, Part 1, (5) Joys and Passions.

[34]?Wood, David.,?What Have We Done: The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars?(New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2016)