Thesis Chapters by Timothy W Shaw
Talk on doctoral thesis
ABSTRACT This investigation will provide a model to make sense of why it... more Talk on doctoral thesis
ABSTRACT This investigation will provide a model to make sense of why it is so inherently traumatic to kill another human – independent of normative circumstances. It will examine the construct of moral injury, a term that has entered the diagnostic and social lexicons under the guise of an explanation of why certain acts may be psychologically deleterious, and has rapidly become the ‘signature’ war-wound of contemporary engagements. Current research agendas identify existential dissonance caused by perpetrative agency, specifically killing, as the most potent causal factor. While research into why perpetration appears so etiologically significant is available under various guises, these accounts have been unable, or unwilling, to unravel the normative assignations that surround the suffering experienced. The paucity of such approaches in providing a basis for understanding why we would feel bad for certain actions which we have normative permission to perform, is the basis for an alternative, phenomenologically driven investigation, informed by the French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. Major topics such as death and suffering of ourselves and others, will be shown to play central roles in conceiving, and justifying, a compelling alternative to existing narratives. Through a disambiguation of the origins of one’s obligations, obligations that are inadvertently lain bare by agency, an ‘ethical model’ will be proposed that proffers a framework to accurately describe the previously unexplained distress pathway that arises from our agency (or lack there-of). In articulating a model which anchors both our ethical and moral sensibilities, a tool emerges with which to make philosophical and psychological sense of suffering that is buried deeper than normative determinations of moral expediency.
Message me for a link, very favourable time if you are in the US.
Cheers
This investigation will provide a model to make sense of why it is so inherently traumatic to k... more This investigation will provide a model to make sense of why it is so inherently traumatic to kill another human – independent of normative circumstances. It will examine the construct of moral injury, a term that has entered the diagnostic and social lexicons under the guise of an explanation of why certain acts may be psychologically deleterious, and has rapidly become the ‘signature’ war-wound of contemporary engagements. Current research agendas identify existential dissonance caused by perpetrative agency, specifically killing, as the most potent causal factor. While research into why perpetration appears so etiologically significant is available under various guises, these accounts have been unable, or unwilling, to unravel the normative assignations that surround the suffering experienced. The paucity of such approaches in providing a basis for understanding why we would feel bad for certain actions which we have normative permission to perform, is the basis for an alternative, phenomenologically driven investigation, informed by the French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. Major topics such as death and suffering of ourselves and others, will be shown to play central roles in conceiving, and justifying, a compelling alternative to existing narratives. Through a disambiguation of the origins of one’s obligations, obligations that are inadvertently lain bare by agency, an ‘ethical model’ will be proposed that proffers a framework to accurately describe the previously unexplained distress pathway that arises from our agency (or lack there-of). In articulating a model which anchors both our ethical and moral sensibilities, a tool emerges with which to make philosophical and psychological sense of suffering that is buried deeper than normative determinations of moral expediency.
Masters of Arts
Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) entered the diagnostic lexicon as a response to the post-de... more Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) entered the diagnostic lexicon as a response to the post-deployment experiences of many of the veterans returning from Vietnam. Previous experimental research on the post-deployment experiences of soldiers suffering PTSD found that in six of the seven cases accepted as traumatic, the soldier was the perpetrator rather than the victim (Young, 1995, p. 125). Despite this, the vast majority of PTSD research has focused on people who have in one-way or another been victims of trauma (eg Foa and Rothbaum, 1998; Rothbaum et al., 1992; Bokszczanin, 2007 and Steinglass and Gerrity, 1990). This has effectively sidelined debate on perpetration-induced traumatic stress. While recent academic interest in this area has uncovered a significant correlation between killing and PTSD (McNair, 2002), such approaches have been unable to posit an explanatory mechanism. This paper builds upon these findings by linking the psychological consequences of killing to the normative legal and ethical frameworks the contemporary soldier is expected to operate under. Viewed through the lens of Just War theory, the psychological consequences of killing can be understood as an artifact of the arbitrary ethical distinctions inherent in the treatise. This paper identifies the decoupling of jus ad bellum and jus in bello and the resulting normative change in conceptions of innocence as a central tenant which can result in PTSD in the face of irreconcilable transgressions of deeply held moral beliefs. The findings of this paper introduce the salience of moral injury as a potential causative agent of PTSD
Talks by Timothy W Shaw
great philosophical problems
Great Philosophical Problems | Thinktank
The old man wearily raised the half-drunk glass of cheap whiskey to his lips, weak and insipid, i... more The old man wearily raised the half-drunk glass of cheap whiskey to his lips, weak and insipid, its shimmering currents of melting ice long-since dispersed. Wry, kind eyes flashed in vacant amusement at the thought that he had not drained the contents long-before those translucent rivulets of sobriety had melted into their backdrop of hard liquor. It was a feeling he secretly, and immediately, distrusted. With all equivocations of this kind, he was perversely unsure for whose benefit such glib commentary was meant. Rendered stark against a once magnificent intellect, he began to effortlessly knead the thoughts through his mind, folding them in on themselves, a temporal leaven becoming ever diluted and hypothetical. He had, truth be told, not wanted to dwell on the contents of his glass. Like all his drinks for as long as he cared to remember, he had swilled the amber liquor warm, tolerating only the briefest union with its crystalline bedfellow. A guilty sip of dissonance was all he was after. One which neatly avoided the chaser of tragic self-mockery that surely accompanied closer scrutiny. Just like icebergs long devoid of surrounding ocean, closer inspection would have revealed that his matchbox renditions had solemnly become their own to fill the void of the glass. Closing his eyes from the haze of acrid cigar smoke that hung stale and familiar in the air, he pondered the cruel fate of a man who must come up with evermore subtler ways to reassure himself he doesn't drink too quickly. A man whose identity is called into question by a puddle of water, by a daily thirst dared-not left unquenched. A vicious and spiteful rendition of itself. Gulping at the sea in a final pact with the devil, flesh hardens to scale, a snake gorging on its own tail. Until recently, there were enough people around for the cruel protuberances of this uncongealed matrix of regret and suffering to be directed outwards. Most were driven away, a few were smart enough to leave on their own accord, but not many, and none with the skill or the patience to draw him out with them. With each departure, the aperture of a malaise that had dogged him since returning from the fighting tightened. The unbearable torsion contorting him through a no-man's land far too terrible to remember, yet equally to awful to forget. Staring back down to his glass, a sad unflinching gaze looked upon something half drunk, but fully spent. The cracked laminate fan that adorned the ceiling of the pool bar was whirring with a particular ferocity. The uneasy cavitation a malignant promise of unhinged violence kept at bay by rusted fittings and its own snarling velocity. The crunching thud of a Palm weevil, usually red and the size of
Seminar: Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science Unit What ... more Seminar: Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science Unit What is the significance of killing in war, why does it occupy such a central position in postwar trauma and what is its significance for an 'ethics' of war? Killing, time and time again, has been shown to be the most potent causal factor for post deployment mental health difficulties. While there has been research into why perpetration appears so etiologically significant, these accounts have been unwilling-or unable-to unravel the normative assignations that purportedly induce psychological distress. Through sustained phenomenological investigation informed by the French-Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, the violence of killing, the finitude of death and a Talmudic notion of suffering, will be shown to play central roles in conceiving a compelling alternative to existing narratives Lévinas will be shown to provide the tools to finally show how combatants are repositories of meaning, where the unmaking and remaking of certainties extends beyond the battlefield to rework social and political relations.
Conference Presentations by Timothy W Shaw
Veterans Definition, and a Philosophers Riddle (10). 30 is usually used as a symbol of a man's de... more Veterans Definition, and a Philosophers Riddle (10). 30 is usually used as a symbol of a man's dedication to a certain task-It is believed in the past that a person is ready to start a career in the age of 30 because only then a person is ready in a mental and physical sense.
What is the significance of killing in war, why does it occupy such a central position in post-wa... more What is the significance of killing in war, why does it occupy such a central position in post-war trauma and what is its significance for an ‘ethics’ of war? Killing, time and time again, has been shown to be the most potent causal factor for post deployment mental health difficulties. While there has been research into why perpetration appears so etiologically significant, these accounts have been unwilling - or unable - to unravel the normative assignations that purportedly induce psychological distress. Through sustained phenomenological investigation informed by the French-Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas, the violence of killing, the finitude of death and a Talmudic notion of suffering, will be shown to play central roles in conceiving a compelling alternative to existing narratives. Lévinas will be shown to provide the tools to finally show how combatants are repositories of meaning, where the unmaking and remaking of certainties extends beyond the battlefield to rework social and political relations.
Papers by Timothy W Shaw
New Nobility Press, 2023
Q U Æ R I T U R
DO NOT BE DECEIVED BY THIS LITTLE BOOK’S HAVING A LEGENDARY AIR: BEHIND ALL THE ... more Q U Æ R I T U R
DO NOT BE DECEIVED BY THIS LITTLE BOOK’S HAVING A LEGENDARY AIR: BEHIND ALL THE PLAIN AND STRANGE WORDS
STANDS MY DEEPEST SERIOUSNESS AND MY WHOLE PHILOSOPHY.
2
THE QUESTION OF INTELLIGIBILITY.—ONE NOT ONLY WANTS TO BE UNDERSTOOD WHEN ONE WRITES, BUT ALSO—
QUITE AS CERTAINLY—NOT TO BE UNDERSTOOD. IT IS BY NO MEANS AN OBJECTION TO A BOOK WHEN SOMEONE FINDS
IT UNINTELLIGIBLE: PERHAPS THIS MIGHT JUST HAVE BEEN THE INTENTION OF ITS AUTHOR,—PERHAPS HE DID NOT
WANT TO BE UNDERSTOOD BY "ANYONE." A DISTINGUISHED INTELLECT AND TASTE, WHEN IT WANTS TO COMMUNICATE
ITS THOUGHTS, ALWAYS SELECTS ITS HEARERS; BY SELECTING THEM, IT AT THE SAME TIME CLOSES ITS BARRIERS
AGAINST "THE OTHERS."3
FOR AS IMMORALIST, ONE HAS TO TAKE CARE LEST ONE RUINS INNOCENCE, I MEAN THE ASSES AND OLD MAIDS OF
BOTH SEXES, WHO GET NOTHING FROM LIFE BUT THEIR INNOCENCE; MOREOVER MY WRITINGS ARE MEANT TO FILL THEM
WITH ENTHUSIASM, TO ELEVATE THEM, TO ENCOURAGE THEM IN VIRTUE. I SHOULD BE AT A LOSS TO KNOW OF
ANYTHING MORE AMUSING THAN TO SEE ENTHUSIASTIC OLD ASSES AND MAIDS MOVED BY THE SWEET FEELINGS OF
VIRTUE: AND "THAT HAVE I SEEN"—SPAKE ZARATHUSTA
Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know
what is meant by yesterday or... more Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know
what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest,
leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day,
fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus
neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see;
for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is
human, he cannot help envying them their happiness - what they
have, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely what he wants, yet
he cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal. A human
being may well ask an animal: 'Why do you not speak to me of your
happiness but only stand and gaze at me?' The animal would like to
answer, and say: 'The reason is I always forget what I was going to
60
On the uses and disadvantages of history for life
say' - but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent: so that the
human being was left wondering.
But he also wonders at himself, that he cannot learn to forget but
clings relentlessly to the past: however far and fast he may run, this
chain runs with him. And it is a matter for wonder: a moment, now
here and then gone, nothing b efore it came, again nothing after it
has gone, nonetheless returns as a ghost and disturbs the peace of a
later moment. A leafflutters from the scroll of time, floats away- and
suddenly floats back again and falls into the man's lap. Then the man
says 'I remember' and envies the animal, who at once forgets and for
whom every moment really dies, sinks back into night and fog and is
extinguished for ever. Thus the animal lives unhistorically: for it is
contained in the present, like a number without any awkward fraction left over; it does not know how to dissimulate, it conceals nothing
and at every instant appears wholly as what it is; it can therefore
never be anything but honest. Man, on the other hand, braces himself against the great and ever greater pressure of what is past: it
pushes him down or bends him sideways, it encumbers his steps as a,
dark, invisible burden which he can sometimes appear to disown
and which in traffic with his fellow men he is only too glad to disown,
so as to excite their envy. That is why it affects him like a vision of
a lost paradise to see the herds grazing or, in closer proximity to
him, a child which, having as yet nothing of the past to shake off,
plays in blissful blindness between the hedges of past and future.
Yet its play must be disturbed; all too soon it will be called out of
its state of forgetfulness. Then it will learn to understand the
phrase 'it was ': that password which gives conflict, suffering and
satiety access to man so as to remind him what his existence fundamentally is - an imperfect tense that can never become a perfect one. If death at last brings the desired forgetting, by that act it
at the same time extinguishes the present and all existence and
therewith sets the seal on the knowledge that existence is only an
uninterrupted has-been, a thing that lives by negating, consuming
and contradicting itself.
If happiness, if reaching out for new happiness, is in any sense
what fetters living creatures to life and makes them go on living, then
perhaps no philosopher is more justified than the Cynic: for the
happiness of the ariimal, as the perfect Cynic, is the living proof of
the rightness of Cynicism. The smallest happiness, if only it is present
uninterruptedly and makes happy, is incomparably more happiness
than the greatest happiness that comes only as an episode, as it were
a piece of waywardness or folly, in a continuum of joylessnes s, desire
61
Untimely Meditations
and privation. In the case of the smallest or of the greatest happiness,
however, it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness:
the ability to forget or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, the
capacity to feel unhistorically during its duration. He who cannot sink
down on the threshold of the moment. and forget all the past, who
cannot stand balanced like a goddess of victory without growing
dizzy and afraid, will never know what happiness is worse, he will
never do anything to make others happy. Imagine the extremest
possible example of a man who did not possess the power of forgetting at all and who was thus condemned to see everywhere a state of
becoming: such a man would no longer believe in his own being,
would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flowing
asunder in moving points and would lose himself in this stream of
becoming: like a true pupil of Heraclitus, he would in the end hardly
dare to raise his finger. Forgetting is essential to action of any kind,
just as not only light but darkness too is essential for the life of
everything organic. A man who wanted to feel historically through
and through would be like one forcibly deprived of sleep, or an
animal that had to live only by rumination and ever repeated
rumination. Thus: it is possible to live almost without memory, and
to live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it is
altogether impossible to live at all without forge.tting. Or, to express
my theme even more simply: there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living
thin� whether this living thing be a man or a people or a culture
This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge; the content of this thesis is my own work. T... more This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge; the content of this thesis is my own work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes. I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been acknowledged.
Academia Letters, 2021
In the aftermath of the devastating conflicts and comprehension defying moral atrocities of World... more In the aftermath of the devastating conflicts and comprehension defying moral atrocities of World War II, the world clamoured to find a way that is adequately responsive. One of the primary steps of this regard was holding those responsible to account. For the first time in world history, the principal architects of the war along with the quislings it had spawned were to be held to account, but held to account how, and for what? According to Britain's foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, in 1942, 'the guilt of such individuals,' 'is so black that they fall outside…any judicial process.' A view echoed by Churchill who believed, once identified, such individuals were to be "shot to Death … without reference to higher authority'. A blunt procedure to avoid the 'tangles of legal procedure'.[1],[i] In opposition to the British preference for summery execution was American Vice-President Harry S. Truman, a former judge and senator for Missouri. Truman was implacably opposed to any form of 'political disposition' towards the major war criminals and insisted on 'some kind of trial'. The case of the major war criminals turned out to be anything but prima facie. While the waging of aggressive war was considered illegal under international conventions, it was not regarded by international lawyers as a war crime in and of itself, even if war crimes had been committed in the prosecution of this end. Unable to rely upon traditional charges, many of which either did not encompass the crimes, or could not be applied to a governing polity of a sovereign State, the United States came under increasing pressure to formulate new charges. The basis of these charges relied heavily upon interrogations from captured Nazi elite which were to eventually form the formal indictments presented in the Nuremberg trials. Running parallel to these preparations was the desire ameliorate the approach of the newly established United Nations War Crimes Commission which was set up in 1942 for the investigation of war crimes.
Drafts by Timothy W Shaw
HOW NIETZSCHE DID IT!
Solution for Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and a few other things
For the Christian interpretation, the Original new beginning, first movement, world outcast; is E... more For the Christian interpretation, the Original new beginning, first movement, world outcast; is Eve. Originally outcast as a rib, a 'Holy Aye,' she is the original Child, mother, and moral spectator of the world. An embodiment of the feminine that encapsulates, for the game of creating, a forgetfulness that allows every spirit, from origin unknown, to willeth its own will. A new modality of responsibility, where humans are divorced from the normatively untamed nature of Beasts. To a State of Being conscious of, informed by, and demarcated from, its own nature. The meanings engendered, and the knowledge imbued, from the human language game, became powerful abstraction from which questions could emerge and which humans problematized to develop 'Ought.' With Beasts, there were no questions. With Adam, why is there 'something,' rather than 'nothing' emerged. But with Eve, the original moral spectator, the question shifted from why, to what; what to do with 'something'. With Eve came humanities' consciousness of itself, an original question, an enlightened question, one pragmatic about Divinity, and the first question of humanity, by humanity. Thrown out from the world, and along with it, communion with God, Original Sin was to follow thereafter and inform the Christian narrative that buttress the justification of theodicy. The existence of suffering in a world created by an all knowing, all loving God. A pure moment of suffering birthed, its meaning enshrined and defined by separation from original sublimity. The worlds outcast is also, therefore, the original suffering one. The one conscious of her own consciousness, the first to receive the human metric of suffering as a replacement to lost communion with original meaning. The Judaeo-Christian tradition problematizes suffering with meaning. The original ascetic ideal of a human will, turned utterly against itself, for its own sake; a sacred game that wards off existential nihilism. Suffering is the condition that all religions must attend to, and which in so doing, harness its power to provide balsams for existential and social afflictions. Yet unlike the Outcast, the Original moral spectator and sufferer, whose will now willith the spirit; one cannot willith suffering, in fact suffering is the very abrogation of willing itself.
Books by Timothy W Shaw
MORAL INJURY IN THE TIME OF HUMANITY AND CRIMES AGAINST IT | A MORAL GRAMMAR OF THE WESTERN PSYCHE , 2022
War veterans, in particular US war veterans, are the most highly studied cohort in our population... more War veterans, in particular US war veterans, are the most highly studied cohort in our population. And for good reason. The Vietnam campaign resulted in the delineation of a new psychological rubric named PTSD. The importance of PTSD was that it provided a grammar of trauma to sufferers and social lexicons. The main triumph of PTSD was to transform trauma from a abnormal reaction to an abnormal stressor, to a normal reaction, to an abnormal stressor. In normalising the experience of trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder was able to provide a lexicon that is now spread into common usage and understandings the world over. Contemporary commentators identify moral injury has the signature wound of contemporary warfare, once again such concern has arisen from the cohort of American veterans. Currently the cohort of American veterans is so traumatised, and so large, that it can sustain one death per hour, or 22 deaths per 24 hours, without shrinking. America, the protector of the world, is experiencing the suicide of its protectors at unprecedented levels.
Moral injury has been discussed for almost 2 decades now, with three imported strands emerging that align themselves to the traditions of religion, culture, and clinical. However as yet the vocabularies and understandings of these three traditions remains disparate. Moral injury may indeed be a unavoidable and ever deepening chasm for Western psychiatric impairment. While soldiers provide the coal face psychology is for moral injury, just as PTSD before, moral injury will not be restricted to such cohorts. This, the greatest of all great philosophical problems, occupies the central thrust of this site investigations. Moral injury cannot however be artificially separated from causation, indeed symptoms cannot be divorced from causes deeply embedded in the psyches of the western conscious, yeah which the flat page of enlighten modernity of skewers in the harsh square of a century coming at the end of nameless sufferings for which humanity has yet to reconcile.
TIMOTHY SHAW has undertaken original research into how laws of war and deeper considerations of ethics and justice can inform our understanding of Moral Injury, the ‘Signature Wound’ of contemporary war. Timothy has taught Bioethics at the University of Sydney and holds a Masters by Research investigating the implications of Just War Theory— the most uninterrupted, longest-continuing study of moral decision-making known in the Western World — on psychological distress models. And, a PhD on Moral Injury, and the question of why killing is traumatic, using the ethical optics of French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas.
Tims work has been used in the commissioned report Moral Injury: From Theory to Practice. Requested by and prepared for the Vice Chief of the Australian Defence Force.
...
The Western Psyche was born in a manger. At the start of our Century, the Paris Review (2015) proposed The Second Coming (1919), as the most pillaged piece of literature in the English cannon. Yet while Western civilization may resonate through its allegory, and be saturated by its metaphor; the review laments, the only thing not doing any slouching these days is the ‘Rough Beast’ from which the paradigmatic phrase originates: And what rough Beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Perhaps, however, a Beast is on the move. One missed in the morning glare by an uncertain and still blinking modernity; a ‘mourning’ sunrise at the end of a century of nameless sufferings, where the ‘Emperor’s New’ Cradle is increasingly viewed as empty, even originally so. Just like the Madman who proclaimed the death of God, in the face of existential affliction, 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?
Thus Spoke Zarathustra offers a menagerie of Beasts to describe our relationship to this birthplace some 2000 years on. Three metamorphoses of the spirit - twenty centuries of stony sleep vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle: how the spirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child. Psychological pathways a Christian psyche can utilize to ‘justify its own survival,’ in the morally nihilistic gyre left by the absence, or degradation, of metaphysical belief structures, and their moral correlates. Allegorical interlocutors upon whose shoulders we can stand. For as Nietzsche contends; in the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, proverbs should be peaks, and those spoken too should be big and tall, for he who climbeth on the highest mountains laugheth at all tragic plays and tragic realities. A lexicon of allegorical interlocutors, that will allow for the “moral grammar” of an epoch-defining determination of psychiatric impairment of Western civilization to emerge.
Teaching Documents by Timothy W Shaw
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss., 2022
In contrast to the specificity of the other epistles, this encyclical is addressed to all Christi... more In contrast to the specificity of the other epistles, this encyclical is addressed to all Christians, a summary of Paul's teaching as maturely set in the context of the relation of Christ and His Church.
MORAL INJURY DEFINITION AND TRACEWORK, 2022
The works of Nietzsche in the ten-year period 1872-82 will provide the framework for a new and un... more 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 Siege of the Metz (1870).
A DISRUPTION TO THE PSYCHE from a will to truth that has become conscious of itself as a problem in us
(GM, B3, A27)
SUFFERING FOR JUSTICE from a will to truth that has become conscious of itself as a problem in us.
SUFFERING FOR MEANING from a will to truth that has become conscious of itself as a problem in us.
By Timothy Shaw
MORAL INJURY DEFINITION , 2022
VETERAN DEFINITION | MORAL INJURY
Uploads
Thesis Chapters by Timothy W Shaw
ABSTRACT This investigation will provide a model to make sense of why it is so inherently traumatic to kill another human – independent of normative circumstances. It will examine the construct of moral injury, a term that has entered the diagnostic and social lexicons under the guise of an explanation of why certain acts may be psychologically deleterious, and has rapidly become the ‘signature’ war-wound of contemporary engagements. Current research agendas identify existential dissonance caused by perpetrative agency, specifically killing, as the most potent causal factor. While research into why perpetration appears so etiologically significant is available under various guises, these accounts have been unable, or unwilling, to unravel the normative assignations that surround the suffering experienced. The paucity of such approaches in providing a basis for understanding why we would feel bad for certain actions which we have normative permission to perform, is the basis for an alternative, phenomenologically driven investigation, informed by the French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. Major topics such as death and suffering of ourselves and others, will be shown to play central roles in conceiving, and justifying, a compelling alternative to existing narratives. Through a disambiguation of the origins of one’s obligations, obligations that are inadvertently lain bare by agency, an ‘ethical model’ will be proposed that proffers a framework to accurately describe the previously unexplained distress pathway that arises from our agency (or lack there-of). In articulating a model which anchors both our ethical and moral sensibilities, a tool emerges with which to make philosophical and psychological sense of suffering that is buried deeper than normative determinations of moral expediency.
Message me for a link, very favourable time if you are in the US.
Cheers
Talks by Timothy W Shaw
Conference Presentations by Timothy W Shaw
Papers by Timothy W Shaw
DO NOT BE DECEIVED BY THIS LITTLE BOOK’S HAVING A LEGENDARY AIR: BEHIND ALL THE PLAIN AND STRANGE WORDS
STANDS MY DEEPEST SERIOUSNESS AND MY WHOLE PHILOSOPHY.
2
THE QUESTION OF INTELLIGIBILITY.—ONE NOT ONLY WANTS TO BE UNDERSTOOD WHEN ONE WRITES, BUT ALSO—
QUITE AS CERTAINLY—NOT TO BE UNDERSTOOD. IT IS BY NO MEANS AN OBJECTION TO A BOOK WHEN SOMEONE FINDS
IT UNINTELLIGIBLE: PERHAPS THIS MIGHT JUST HAVE BEEN THE INTENTION OF ITS AUTHOR,—PERHAPS HE DID NOT
WANT TO BE UNDERSTOOD BY "ANYONE." A DISTINGUISHED INTELLECT AND TASTE, WHEN IT WANTS TO COMMUNICATE
ITS THOUGHTS, ALWAYS SELECTS ITS HEARERS; BY SELECTING THEM, IT AT THE SAME TIME CLOSES ITS BARRIERS
AGAINST "THE OTHERS."3
FOR AS IMMORALIST, ONE HAS TO TAKE CARE LEST ONE RUINS INNOCENCE, I MEAN THE ASSES AND OLD MAIDS OF
BOTH SEXES, WHO GET NOTHING FROM LIFE BUT THEIR INNOCENCE; MOREOVER MY WRITINGS ARE MEANT TO FILL THEM
WITH ENTHUSIASM, TO ELEVATE THEM, TO ENCOURAGE THEM IN VIRTUE. I SHOULD BE AT A LOSS TO KNOW OF
ANYTHING MORE AMUSING THAN TO SEE ENTHUSIASTIC OLD ASSES AND MAIDS MOVED BY THE SWEET FEELINGS OF
VIRTUE: AND "THAT HAVE I SEEN"—SPAKE ZARATHUSTA
what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest,
leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day,
fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus
neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see;
for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is
human, he cannot help envying them their happiness - what they
have, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely what he wants, yet
he cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal. A human
being may well ask an animal: 'Why do you not speak to me of your
happiness but only stand and gaze at me?' The animal would like to
answer, and say: 'The reason is I always forget what I was going to
60
On the uses and disadvantages of history for life
say' - but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent: so that the
human being was left wondering.
But he also wonders at himself, that he cannot learn to forget but
clings relentlessly to the past: however far and fast he may run, this
chain runs with him. And it is a matter for wonder: a moment, now
here and then gone, nothing b efore it came, again nothing after it
has gone, nonetheless returns as a ghost and disturbs the peace of a
later moment. A leafflutters from the scroll of time, floats away- and
suddenly floats back again and falls into the man's lap. Then the man
says 'I remember' and envies the animal, who at once forgets and for
whom every moment really dies, sinks back into night and fog and is
extinguished for ever. Thus the animal lives unhistorically: for it is
contained in the present, like a number without any awkward fraction left over; it does not know how to dissimulate, it conceals nothing
and at every instant appears wholly as what it is; it can therefore
never be anything but honest. Man, on the other hand, braces himself against the great and ever greater pressure of what is past: it
pushes him down or bends him sideways, it encumbers his steps as a,
dark, invisible burden which he can sometimes appear to disown
and which in traffic with his fellow men he is only too glad to disown,
so as to excite their envy. That is why it affects him like a vision of
a lost paradise to see the herds grazing or, in closer proximity to
him, a child which, having as yet nothing of the past to shake off,
plays in blissful blindness between the hedges of past and future.
Yet its play must be disturbed; all too soon it will be called out of
its state of forgetfulness. Then it will learn to understand the
phrase 'it was ': that password which gives conflict, suffering and
satiety access to man so as to remind him what his existence fundamentally is - an imperfect tense that can never become a perfect one. If death at last brings the desired forgetting, by that act it
at the same time extinguishes the present and all existence and
therewith sets the seal on the knowledge that existence is only an
uninterrupted has-been, a thing that lives by negating, consuming
and contradicting itself.
If happiness, if reaching out for new happiness, is in any sense
what fetters living creatures to life and makes them go on living, then
perhaps no philosopher is more justified than the Cynic: for the
happiness of the ariimal, as the perfect Cynic, is the living proof of
the rightness of Cynicism. The smallest happiness, if only it is present
uninterruptedly and makes happy, is incomparably more happiness
than the greatest happiness that comes only as an episode, as it were
a piece of waywardness or folly, in a continuum of joylessnes s, desire
61
Untimely Meditations
and privation. In the case of the smallest or of the greatest happiness,
however, it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness:
the ability to forget or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, the
capacity to feel unhistorically during its duration. He who cannot sink
down on the threshold of the moment. and forget all the past, who
cannot stand balanced like a goddess of victory without growing
dizzy and afraid, will never know what happiness is worse, he will
never do anything to make others happy. Imagine the extremest
possible example of a man who did not possess the power of forgetting at all and who was thus condemned to see everywhere a state of
becoming: such a man would no longer believe in his own being,
would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flowing
asunder in moving points and would lose himself in this stream of
becoming: like a true pupil of Heraclitus, he would in the end hardly
dare to raise his finger. Forgetting is essential to action of any kind,
just as not only light but darkness too is essential for the life of
everything organic. A man who wanted to feel historically through
and through would be like one forcibly deprived of sleep, or an
animal that had to live only by rumination and ever repeated
rumination. Thus: it is possible to live almost without memory, and
to live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it is
altogether impossible to live at all without forge.tting. Or, to express
my theme even more simply: there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living
thin� whether this living thing be a man or a people or a culture
Drafts by Timothy W Shaw
Books by Timothy W Shaw
Moral injury has been discussed for almost 2 decades now, with three imported strands emerging that align themselves to the traditions of religion, culture, and clinical. However as yet the vocabularies and understandings of these three traditions remains disparate. Moral injury may indeed be a unavoidable and ever deepening chasm for Western psychiatric impairment. While soldiers provide the coal face psychology is for moral injury, just as PTSD before, moral injury will not be restricted to such cohorts. This, the greatest of all great philosophical problems, occupies the central thrust of this site investigations. Moral injury cannot however be artificially separated from causation, indeed symptoms cannot be divorced from causes deeply embedded in the psyches of the western conscious, yeah which the flat page of enlighten modernity of skewers in the harsh square of a century coming at the end of nameless sufferings for which humanity has yet to reconcile.
TIMOTHY SHAW has undertaken original research into how laws of war and deeper considerations of ethics and justice can inform our understanding of Moral Injury, the ‘Signature Wound’ of contemporary war. Timothy has taught Bioethics at the University of Sydney and holds a Masters by Research investigating the implications of Just War Theory— the most uninterrupted, longest-continuing study of moral decision-making known in the Western World — on psychological distress models. And, a PhD on Moral Injury, and the question of why killing is traumatic, using the ethical optics of French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas.
Tims work has been used in the commissioned report Moral Injury: From Theory to Practice. Requested by and prepared for the Vice Chief of the Australian Defence Force.
...
The Western Psyche was born in a manger. At the start of our Century, the Paris Review (2015) proposed The Second Coming (1919), as the most pillaged piece of literature in the English cannon. Yet while Western civilization may resonate through its allegory, and be saturated by its metaphor; the review laments, the only thing not doing any slouching these days is the ‘Rough Beast’ from which the paradigmatic phrase originates: And what rough Beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Perhaps, however, a Beast is on the move. One missed in the morning glare by an uncertain and still blinking modernity; a ‘mourning’ sunrise at the end of a century of nameless sufferings, where the ‘Emperor’s New’ Cradle is increasingly viewed as empty, even originally so. Just like the Madman who proclaimed the death of God, in the face of existential affliction, 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?
Thus Spoke Zarathustra offers a menagerie of Beasts to describe our relationship to this birthplace some 2000 years on. Three metamorphoses of the spirit - twenty centuries of stony sleep vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle: how the spirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child. Psychological pathways a Christian psyche can utilize to ‘justify its own survival,’ in the morally nihilistic gyre left by the absence, or degradation, of metaphysical belief structures, and their moral correlates. Allegorical interlocutors upon whose shoulders we can stand. For as Nietzsche contends; in the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, proverbs should be peaks, and those spoken too should be big and tall, for he who climbeth on the highest mountains laugheth at all tragic plays and tragic realities. A lexicon of allegorical interlocutors, that will allow for the “moral grammar” of an epoch-defining determination of psychiatric impairment of Western civilization to emerge.
Teaching Documents by Timothy W Shaw
A DISRUPTION TO THE PSYCHE from a will to truth that has become conscious of itself as a problem in us
(GM, B3, A27)
SUFFERING FOR JUSTICE from a will to truth that has become conscious of itself as a problem in us.
SUFFERING FOR MEANING from a will to truth that has become conscious of itself as a problem in us.
By Timothy Shaw
ABSTRACT This investigation will provide a model to make sense of why it is so inherently traumatic to kill another human – independent of normative circumstances. It will examine the construct of moral injury, a term that has entered the diagnostic and social lexicons under the guise of an explanation of why certain acts may be psychologically deleterious, and has rapidly become the ‘signature’ war-wound of contemporary engagements. Current research agendas identify existential dissonance caused by perpetrative agency, specifically killing, as the most potent causal factor. While research into why perpetration appears so etiologically significant is available under various guises, these accounts have been unable, or unwilling, to unravel the normative assignations that surround the suffering experienced. The paucity of such approaches in providing a basis for understanding why we would feel bad for certain actions which we have normative permission to perform, is the basis for an alternative, phenomenologically driven investigation, informed by the French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. Major topics such as death and suffering of ourselves and others, will be shown to play central roles in conceiving, and justifying, a compelling alternative to existing narratives. Through a disambiguation of the origins of one’s obligations, obligations that are inadvertently lain bare by agency, an ‘ethical model’ will be proposed that proffers a framework to accurately describe the previously unexplained distress pathway that arises from our agency (or lack there-of). In articulating a model which anchors both our ethical and moral sensibilities, a tool emerges with which to make philosophical and psychological sense of suffering that is buried deeper than normative determinations of moral expediency.
Message me for a link, very favourable time if you are in the US.
Cheers
DO NOT BE DECEIVED BY THIS LITTLE BOOK’S HAVING A LEGENDARY AIR: BEHIND ALL THE PLAIN AND STRANGE WORDS
STANDS MY DEEPEST SERIOUSNESS AND MY WHOLE PHILOSOPHY.
2
THE QUESTION OF INTELLIGIBILITY.—ONE NOT ONLY WANTS TO BE UNDERSTOOD WHEN ONE WRITES, BUT ALSO—
QUITE AS CERTAINLY—NOT TO BE UNDERSTOOD. IT IS BY NO MEANS AN OBJECTION TO A BOOK WHEN SOMEONE FINDS
IT UNINTELLIGIBLE: PERHAPS THIS MIGHT JUST HAVE BEEN THE INTENTION OF ITS AUTHOR,—PERHAPS HE DID NOT
WANT TO BE UNDERSTOOD BY "ANYONE." A DISTINGUISHED INTELLECT AND TASTE, WHEN IT WANTS TO COMMUNICATE
ITS THOUGHTS, ALWAYS SELECTS ITS HEARERS; BY SELECTING THEM, IT AT THE SAME TIME CLOSES ITS BARRIERS
AGAINST "THE OTHERS."3
FOR AS IMMORALIST, ONE HAS TO TAKE CARE LEST ONE RUINS INNOCENCE, I MEAN THE ASSES AND OLD MAIDS OF
BOTH SEXES, WHO GET NOTHING FROM LIFE BUT THEIR INNOCENCE; MOREOVER MY WRITINGS ARE MEANT TO FILL THEM
WITH ENTHUSIASM, TO ELEVATE THEM, TO ENCOURAGE THEM IN VIRTUE. I SHOULD BE AT A LOSS TO KNOW OF
ANYTHING MORE AMUSING THAN TO SEE ENTHUSIASTIC OLD ASSES AND MAIDS MOVED BY THE SWEET FEELINGS OF
VIRTUE: AND "THAT HAVE I SEEN"—SPAKE ZARATHUSTA
what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest,
leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day,
fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus
neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see;
for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is
human, he cannot help envying them their happiness - what they
have, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely what he wants, yet
he cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal. A human
being may well ask an animal: 'Why do you not speak to me of your
happiness but only stand and gaze at me?' The animal would like to
answer, and say: 'The reason is I always forget what I was going to
60
On the uses and disadvantages of history for life
say' - but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent: so that the
human being was left wondering.
But he also wonders at himself, that he cannot learn to forget but
clings relentlessly to the past: however far and fast he may run, this
chain runs with him. And it is a matter for wonder: a moment, now
here and then gone, nothing b efore it came, again nothing after it
has gone, nonetheless returns as a ghost and disturbs the peace of a
later moment. A leafflutters from the scroll of time, floats away- and
suddenly floats back again and falls into the man's lap. Then the man
says 'I remember' and envies the animal, who at once forgets and for
whom every moment really dies, sinks back into night and fog and is
extinguished for ever. Thus the animal lives unhistorically: for it is
contained in the present, like a number without any awkward fraction left over; it does not know how to dissimulate, it conceals nothing
and at every instant appears wholly as what it is; it can therefore
never be anything but honest. Man, on the other hand, braces himself against the great and ever greater pressure of what is past: it
pushes him down or bends him sideways, it encumbers his steps as a,
dark, invisible burden which he can sometimes appear to disown
and which in traffic with his fellow men he is only too glad to disown,
so as to excite their envy. That is why it affects him like a vision of
a lost paradise to see the herds grazing or, in closer proximity to
him, a child which, having as yet nothing of the past to shake off,
plays in blissful blindness between the hedges of past and future.
Yet its play must be disturbed; all too soon it will be called out of
its state of forgetfulness. Then it will learn to understand the
phrase 'it was ': that password which gives conflict, suffering and
satiety access to man so as to remind him what his existence fundamentally is - an imperfect tense that can never become a perfect one. If death at last brings the desired forgetting, by that act it
at the same time extinguishes the present and all existence and
therewith sets the seal on the knowledge that existence is only an
uninterrupted has-been, a thing that lives by negating, consuming
and contradicting itself.
If happiness, if reaching out for new happiness, is in any sense
what fetters living creatures to life and makes them go on living, then
perhaps no philosopher is more justified than the Cynic: for the
happiness of the ariimal, as the perfect Cynic, is the living proof of
the rightness of Cynicism. The smallest happiness, if only it is present
uninterruptedly and makes happy, is incomparably more happiness
than the greatest happiness that comes only as an episode, as it were
a piece of waywardness or folly, in a continuum of joylessnes s, desire
61
Untimely Meditations
and privation. In the case of the smallest or of the greatest happiness,
however, it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness:
the ability to forget or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, the
capacity to feel unhistorically during its duration. He who cannot sink
down on the threshold of the moment. and forget all the past, who
cannot stand balanced like a goddess of victory without growing
dizzy and afraid, will never know what happiness is worse, he will
never do anything to make others happy. Imagine the extremest
possible example of a man who did not possess the power of forgetting at all and who was thus condemned to see everywhere a state of
becoming: such a man would no longer believe in his own being,
would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flowing
asunder in moving points and would lose himself in this stream of
becoming: like a true pupil of Heraclitus, he would in the end hardly
dare to raise his finger. Forgetting is essential to action of any kind,
just as not only light but darkness too is essential for the life of
everything organic. A man who wanted to feel historically through
and through would be like one forcibly deprived of sleep, or an
animal that had to live only by rumination and ever repeated
rumination. Thus: it is possible to live almost without memory, and
to live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it is
altogether impossible to live at all without forge.tting. Or, to express
my theme even more simply: there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living
thin� whether this living thing be a man or a people or a culture
Moral injury has been discussed for almost 2 decades now, with three imported strands emerging that align themselves to the traditions of religion, culture, and clinical. However as yet the vocabularies and understandings of these three traditions remains disparate. Moral injury may indeed be a unavoidable and ever deepening chasm for Western psychiatric impairment. While soldiers provide the coal face psychology is for moral injury, just as PTSD before, moral injury will not be restricted to such cohorts. This, the greatest of all great philosophical problems, occupies the central thrust of this site investigations. Moral injury cannot however be artificially separated from causation, indeed symptoms cannot be divorced from causes deeply embedded in the psyches of the western conscious, yeah which the flat page of enlighten modernity of skewers in the harsh square of a century coming at the end of nameless sufferings for which humanity has yet to reconcile.
TIMOTHY SHAW has undertaken original research into how laws of war and deeper considerations of ethics and justice can inform our understanding of Moral Injury, the ‘Signature Wound’ of contemporary war. Timothy has taught Bioethics at the University of Sydney and holds a Masters by Research investigating the implications of Just War Theory— the most uninterrupted, longest-continuing study of moral decision-making known in the Western World — on psychological distress models. And, a PhD on Moral Injury, and the question of why killing is traumatic, using the ethical optics of French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas.
Tims work has been used in the commissioned report Moral Injury: From Theory to Practice. Requested by and prepared for the Vice Chief of the Australian Defence Force.
...
The Western Psyche was born in a manger. At the start of our Century, the Paris Review (2015) proposed The Second Coming (1919), as the most pillaged piece of literature in the English cannon. Yet while Western civilization may resonate through its allegory, and be saturated by its metaphor; the review laments, the only thing not doing any slouching these days is the ‘Rough Beast’ from which the paradigmatic phrase originates: And what rough Beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Perhaps, however, a Beast is on the move. One missed in the morning glare by an uncertain and still blinking modernity; a ‘mourning’ sunrise at the end of a century of nameless sufferings, where the ‘Emperor’s New’ Cradle is increasingly viewed as empty, even originally so. Just like the Madman who proclaimed the death of God, in the face of existential affliction, 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?
Thus Spoke Zarathustra offers a menagerie of Beasts to describe our relationship to this birthplace some 2000 years on. Three metamorphoses of the spirit - twenty centuries of stony sleep vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle: how the spirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child. Psychological pathways a Christian psyche can utilize to ‘justify its own survival,’ in the morally nihilistic gyre left by the absence, or degradation, of metaphysical belief structures, and their moral correlates. Allegorical interlocutors upon whose shoulders we can stand. For as Nietzsche contends; in the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, proverbs should be peaks, and those spoken too should be big and tall, for he who climbeth on the highest mountains laugheth at all tragic plays and tragic realities. A lexicon of allegorical interlocutors, that will allow for the “moral grammar” of an epoch-defining determination of psychiatric impairment of Western civilization to emerge.
A DISRUPTION TO THE PSYCHE from a will to truth that has become conscious of itself as a problem in us
(GM, B3, A27)
SUFFERING FOR JUSTICE from a will to truth that has become conscious of itself as a problem in us.
SUFFERING FOR MEANING from a will to truth that has become conscious of itself as a problem in us.
By Timothy Shaw
The definitive meaning, framing and utility of Frederik Nietzsche's (1844-1900) Masterwork, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1882).