Grief

A Philosophical Guide

Michael Cholbi

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691211213
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ethik & Moralphilosophie

An engaging and illuminating exploration of grief—and why, despite its intense pain, it can also help us grow Experiencing grief at the death of a person we love or who matters to us—as universal as it is painful—is central to the human condition. Surprisingly, however, philosophers have rarely examined grief in any depth. In Grief, Michael Cholbi presents a groundbreaking philosophical exploration of this complex emotional event, offering valuable new insights about what grief is, whom we grieve, and how grief can ultimately lead us to a richer self-understanding and a fuller realization of our humanity.Drawing on psychology, social science, and literature as well as philosophy, Cholbi explains that we grieve for the loss of those in whom our identities are invested, including people we don't know personally but cherish anyway, such as public figures. Their deaths not only deprive us of worthwhile experiences; they also disrupt our commitments and values. Yet grief is something we should embrace rather than avoid, an important part of a good and meaningful life. The key to understanding this paradox, Cholbi says, is that grief offers us a unique and powerful opportunity to grow in self-knowledge by fashioning a new identity. Although grief can be tumultuous and disorienting, it also reflects our distinctly human capacity to rationally adapt as the relationships we depend on evolve.An original account of how grieving works and why it is so important, Grief shows how the pain of this experience gives us a chance to deepen our relationships with others and ourselves.

CHAPTER ONE

For Whom We Grieve

According to the US Central Intelligence Agency, about 55 million human beings die each year. That works out to about 152,000 deaths each day, 6,300 per hour, 105 each minute, and two each second.¹

I imagine that you do not grieve many of these deaths. (I readily concede that I only grieve a miniscule handful of them.) Of course, others’ deaths—even those we do not grieve—can elicit other emotional responses in us besides grief. We are outraged when we hear of a vicious killing or of the killing of an especially vulnerable person. We are horrified upon learning about acts of genocide. And we can pity the deaths of those who are close to those we know (as when we learn that a friend’s parent has died).

Many of these are deaths that we mourn. Sometimes mourning and grief are viewed as the same phenomenon. But, although they are connected, they are nevertheless distinct. Grief, as we shall understand it, is the specific and personal emotional reaction individuals have to other individuals’ deaths. At its core, it is a psychological phenomenon. Grief is what happens “inside” us as we react to a death of someone who matters to us. The ways in which we grasp and describe grief are not private, since they are the product of acculturation. But the phenomenon itself is private at its core. Mourning, in contrast, is more public and often ritualistic. Many of those who are mourning are also grieving. In fact, mourning is a common way to grieve. In those instances, mourning is the public or behavioral face of grieving. But it is possible to mourn—to participate in memorials, say, or observe a moment of silence for the deceased—without grieving. Throughout human history, there have been professional mourners. It is possible to pay someone to mourn precisely because mourning involves engaging in a set of behaviors. Paying someone to grieve, on the other hand, appears incoherent because there is no way for monetary incentives to induce the private psychological state of grief. No amount of money can motivate someone to care about the deaths of a particular person in the way that a bereaved person cares about the death of that person. Paying others to grieve is thus no more possible than paying someone else to have fun for you or to sleep for you.

Hence, while there may be something ethically deficient about a person who reacts with complete indifference to the deaths of other people, there is nothing ethically deficient about a person who grieves only rarely.² For it seems to belong to the nature of grief that it is a selective response. We neither can nor should grieve all deaths of others. Every human life matters, and so every human death matters. But not every human life matters (equally) to us as individuals, and so not every human death matters (equally) to us as individuals. Thus, unlike the reactions that others’ deaths usually elicit in us, grief is fundamentally self-focused. To be outraged at a vicious murder is to feel rage on behalf of the victim or those who cared about her. To pity another grieving person is to feel sorrow at what has befallen her. Grief, in contrast, is what happens when another’s death is meaningful directly for the bereaved.

We thus grieve when and because the death of another person is particularly or acutely significant for us. I will refer to this as the egocentric aspect of grief. Note that this term does not imply that grief is selfish. Grief, I shall argue in this book, is self-concerning, and in a broad sense of the term, self-interested. Grief can matter to how our lives go. But it is not objectionably self-interested to grieve. A person shows herself no undue favor or partiality by grieving.

We do not grieve all deaths, nor (I contend) ought we grieve all deaths. For, in order to grieve a person’s death, there must be some distinctive tie or connection we bear to the deceased. Our challenge in this chapter is therefore to identify the sort of relationship a grieving person must have with the deceased for their grief to be intelligible. We will first consider three apparently plausible accounts of how a person must be related to a deceased individual in order for grief to be intelligible. These accounts succeed in making sense of fairly typical cases of grief. However, they come up short in explaining grief in more atypical cases that are nevertheless true instances of grief. I then defend my own account of the relationship needed for grief, one that rests on identity investment. This account, I suggest, successfully explains both typical and atypical cases of grief.

1. Intimacy

A first possibility for the relationship that grief requires is that the bereaved must be intimate with the deceased. Our stereotypical cases of grief certainly are those in which intimacy exists between the bereaved and the deceased. The characteristic marks of intimacy—warmth, familiarity, knowledge of another person’s attitudes and day-to-day habits—are present in the circumstances where grief is likely to be particularly intense, for example, the deaths of a spouse, a child, or a close sibling. Such relationships may be the ones for which grief is potentially most important or valuable. This intimacy need not be reciprocal in order for grief to occur. For instance, it seems clear that prospective parents (and mothers in particular) grieve the deaths of fetuses that are miscarried. Although fetuses do not have habits, attitudes, personalities, etc., as robust as newborns, children, or adults, parents nevertheless have a kind of intimacy with these fetuses rooted in the experience of conception, gestation, and preparation for childbirth.³ Presumably, however, the fetuses lack the sophisticated mental life needed to be intimate with their parents.

While intimacy is often present in the relationships we have with those whose deaths we grieve, intimacy does not appear to be a defining feature of the relationships for which the death of another prompts grief. For individuals can grieve for deceased persons whom they hardly knew or who were effectively strangers to them. The rise of social media makes it apparent that many people experience grief at the deaths of public figures they did not know personally, such as artists, musicians, athletes, or political leaders. If these are genuine instances of grief—and there is no reason not to take them at face value—then intimacy is not required in any meaningful sense to grieve another’s death.

It is tempting to say that grief for public figures is not really grief for them because their admirers or fans do not know the public figures well enough to grieve them. In this case, those who grieve the deaths of public figures are undergoing authentic grief, but they are grieving the public figures, not the full-blooded individuals. Those who grieved John F. Kennedy’s assassination were grieving Kennedy the war hero and president, not the man whose day-to-day life they were not privy to; those who grieved the death of pop star David Bowie were grieving Bowie (or perhaps his several stage personas), not the person known to his family and friends. This suggestion is plausible. Admittedly, in today’s information- saturated media environment, it may be possible to achieve a minimal level of intimacy with public figures. A person who read Nelson Mandela’s autobiographical books, followed his activities in the news, and so on, appeared to know enough about him to grieve for something more than merely his public persona. Still, the focus of the grief felt for a deceased public figure is on their public personas—their accomplishments, observable personality traits and values, for example—such that there necessarily exists a gap between that persona and the individual for whom a public figure’s friends or family would grieve.

But this suggestion does not support the claim that grief for public figures is somehow a counterfeit or less than fully realized form of grief. It instead underscores the perils of taking what are arguably our paradigm cases of grief—grief for those with whom we share personal intimacy—as demarcating the scope of whom we can grieve for. No doubt the role played in one’s life by one’s spouse is different from the role played by one’s favorite jazz artist or a well-known human rights activist. Yet this difference merely entails that we can and should grieve our spouses differently from how we grieve jazz artists or human rights activists, not that the latter group cannot or should not be grieved by those who lacked intimacy with them. Indeed, it is striking how little intimacy is needed to trigger grief at another’s death. Consider an adult adopted as a child who was notified only of his birth mother’s name and had no contact with her throughout his life. It does not strain imagination, in my opinion, to suppose that the adult child could grieve upon learning of the birth mother’s death despite the utter lack of knowledge or intimacy he had with the birth mother. (We could even describe this as grief for the “imagined” mother.⁴) As we shall discuss later in this chapter, such an example illustrates that grief may be less about personal realities than about personal aspirations.

2. Love

A second possibility for the relationship needed to ground grief is that we grieve those whom we love. I will not make any pretense here of trying to untangle the thorny philosophical questions about love. But a philosophical account of love is not necessary to grasp why this proposal will not suffice for delineating the scope of grief. For one, some of the counterexamples offered against the claim that grief requires intimacy also apply here. It strains credulity to suppose that those who grieve public figures literally love them. Love their music, their art, their political stances, their athletic prowess? Yes. But the admiration, reverence, or envy we feel for public figures need not rise to the level of love.

Indeed, we need not even like those whose deaths we grieve. Fidel Castro was the target of forty-two assassination schemes by the Kennedy administration, but Kennedy’s death reportedly caused Castro sadness. Enemies or rivals can therefore grieve each other.

That grief presupposes love also runs headlong into the fact that grief can be prompted by the deaths of those we hate. It is often noted that grief can involve ambivalent feelings. Not every instance of ambivalent grief occurs because the bereaved individual’s relationship with the deceased was itself ambivalent. But grief can nevertheless occur when a person about whom we have conflicted, even hateful, feelings dies. A person can be a source of disappointment or indignation and yet still be grieved upon their death. Children are known to grieve parents who abused or even abandoned them. Grief is incompatible with indifference, but compatible with both love and hate. At the very least, we should not be quick to dismiss grief that is tinged with emotional ambivalence toward the deceased.

3. Attachment

A third possibility is that grief arises when a person dies to whom we stand in a relationship of attachment. For a person to be attached to an individual is to relate to them in the following ways:

i. The attached person longs to be proximate to, and to interact with, that individual.

ii. Upon separation from that individual, the attached person tends to experience distress.

iii. The attached person feels secure in the presence of the individual to whom she is attached.

iv. Only the individual to whom she is attached instantiates features i–iii in precisely the way she does.⁵

That grief requires attachment to the deceased is a promising hypothesis. It helps explain the egocentric character of grief. For if we grieve those to whom we are attached, it would not be at all surprising for us to experience their deaths as a loss due to the unique emotional dependence we have on them. Their deaths would portend a decrease in our sense of security that no other person could compensate for. Moreover, as we shall see in chapter 2, grief can include many different emotional states, including anxiety, which is to be expected if attachment is what determines who we grieve for.

Here again, though, we must be mindful of mistaking typical cases of grief for all cases of grief. Several of the examples of grief adduced thus far do not seem to involve especially rich attachment on the part of the bereaved toward the deceased. Those who grieve public figures or who grieve biological parents they never met are not attached to those deceased individuals. Similarly, parents grieve the deaths of fetuses who are electively aborted. Yet it seems unlikely that such parents are emotionally reliant upon those fetuses. Furthermore, grief can often occur when the deceased were attached to the bereaved rather than vice versa. No doubt many parents are attached to their children; they feel distress in their absence, long to be near them, view them as irreplaceable. But not every parent is emotionally dependent on their children in the way captured by the notion of attachment. They may enjoy their children’s company, for example, without its being true that the absence of their children causes them insecurity or distress.

4. Well-Being

That grief requires intimacy with, love of, or attachment to the deceased each proves inadequate. These accounts overlook certain kinds of relationships in which grief is possible or mistake the features of the most familiar or most vivid species of grief for features of grief as such. In rejecting these accounts of whom we grieve for, I do not at all intend that intimacy, love, or attachment are irrelevant to grief. As we shall see in later chapters, how we grieve—and how we ought to grieve—depends crucially on the nature of the relationship we have (or had) with the person whose death prompts our grief. We do not, and ought not to, grieve our spouses as we do our deceased siblings, our professional colleagues as we do our spiritual role models, our athletic heroes as we do our longtime neighbors. Grief should be as variegated as the kinds of relationships human beings can have to one another, which is to say, highly variegated. But that still leaves the task of identifying the features needed for one’s relationship with a deceased individual to elicit grief (as opposed to other reactions, such as sorrow, pity, and so on).

In order to progress toward identifying these features, recall the egocentric aspect of grief I mentioned earlier. Grief, unlike other reactions we have to others’ deaths, is egocentric inasmuch as their deaths are particularly or acutely significant to ourselves. One way in which another’s death can result in a significant loss to us is that we lose the various goods that the person provided us while they were alive. The death of a friend means the loss of companionship; a colleague, a source of professional support or inspiration; a spouse, romantic love and shared life goals. Grief can feel like a painful wound because it responds to a threat to our well-being. We thus grieve the deaths of those who contribute to our well-being.

This line of thought is promising, but overstated. As noted earlier, we do not only grieve for those who make our lives better. We can also grieve for those who bitterly disappoint us. We can also grieve those with whom we did not have a lengthy enough relationship for them to contribute much to our well-...