Military Professionalism and PTSD: On the Need for “Soldier-Artists”

In part one of this paper I discuss how issues of combatant misconduct and illegality have led military academies to become more focused on professionalism rather than on the tensions between military ethics and military training. In order to interrogate the relationships between training and ethics, between becoming a military professional and being a military professional, between military professionals and society, I turn to the work of Martin Cook, Anthony Hartle, and J. Glenn Gray. In part two I focus on Cook’s analysis of the conflict between the self-understanding and the expected behavior of military professionals. In part three I focus on Hartle’s analysis of how the experience of alienation by military professionals can help to create the culture of military professionals. In part four I introduce a new theory of professionalism based on the existential and phenomenological philosophy of J. Glenn Gray, which can help us to better understand the philosophical and psychological stakes of what it means to become a military professional. I conclude in part five by suggesting that the most pressing issue in the military is not a lack of professionalism, but a lack of trust

Blood/Lust: Freud and the Trauma of Killing in War

During World War I, Sigmund Freud and his followers held a special symposium in Budapest entitled Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses. Their contributions centered on the importance of trying to understand what can cause a soldier to become traumatized in war by investigating the individual factors of each case as opposed to merely the situational factors. Thus by redefining such ambiguous illnesses as shell shock and war strain into the Freudian framework of the traumatic neuroses, they were able to do what the neurologists could not — explain the meaning behind the soldiers\u27 symptoms and treat them with successful results. However, as the programmatic strategy of the symposium led the contributors to focus almost exclusively on the soldier\u27s fear of death as opposed to the anxiety over killing, this paper will explore the few places where killing is discussed in order to attempt to find a place for it within this framework. This investigation will then allow us to better understand the role that factors such as military training, discipline, and patriotism play in mediating the trauma of killing so that we can use such research to find ways to reduce the suffering of soldiers

Crime without punishment? On the legitimacy of illegal actions from the climate movement

In this paper, we address a recent case of eight climate activists being prosecuted by the Dutch government under charges of sedition. We note how this unprecedented legal action aligns with a broader trend of criminalizing the climate movement around the world. In this context, activists seem to claim legitimacy and distinguish themselves from criminals by aligning themselves with the tradition of ‘civil disobedience.’ We highlight some limitations that this traditional form of protest poses to the climate movement and ask how climate activists can claim legitimacy even when adopting tactics other than civil disobedience. We then propose a method of categorizing different tactics by positioning them in a two-dimensional spectrum according to their degree of violence and fidelity to law. Finally, we reflect on how climate activists may claim legitimacy for tactics across this spectrum by reflecting on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophies

Designing responsibility

Technology can mediate not only our nihilism, but also our responsibility. In order to achieve the latter rather than the former, we need to move away from the model of freedom we have been following from Aristotle to Marx to today, that more leisure means more freedom. Through the insights found in postphenomenology and in Nietzsche, we can see why more leisure has tended to result in only more nihilism and perhaps we can even see a way to freedom through designing responsibility instead. Examples of such designed responsibility will be explored by looking at contemporary interactive artworks and consciousness-raising video games, with the focus on how alterity relations can awaken us to responsibility