On Grief's Ethical Task (original) (raw)
Related papers
On Grief's Wandering Thought: A Philosophical Exploration
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 2021
This paper challenges an orthodoxy in recent philosophical discussions of grief, namely, that grief is essentially tied to the thought that a person of significance to oneself has died. As first-person reports make clear, one can find oneself cut off from the significant other not simply in body but also in thought. This is not, moreover, an isolated difficulty, but one that may have repercussions for one’s capacity to form an outlook on the social world, the natural world, and the world viewed from one’s own scheme of ends. Taking C.S. Lewis's diary of grief as a guide, I argue that our capacity to think of our significant others depends, surprisingly enough, on our capacity to acknowledge their independence from us even in death.
Review of 'Grief: A Philosophical Guide'
The Philosophical Quarterly, 2022
Despite being one of life's most disruptive, painful, and puzzling experiences, grief has been rather neglected within philosophical scholarship until recently. Michael Cholbi helps to plug this gap with this clearly written guide, which addresses many of the most important philosophical questions surrounding grief. Due to its approachable style, the book will be of interest to the general reader as well as those engaged in related philosophical enquiries. It presents a distinctive account of grief as a process of emotionally-driven attention directed at one's lost or changed relationship with the deceased, and through which one can acquire significant self-knowledge. The first four chapters are
European Journal of Philosophy, 2021
This paper draws attention to a neglected aspect of grief: its "sweet" sorrow. This sorrow presents us with a formidable challenge, namely, to explain how what is bitter-the misery of loss-can be found to be sweet. Those drawn into this sorrow suspect that it is somehow too sweet. Are their suspicions well founded? Why is it and it alone sweet to those who delight in it and why is it not just sweet but companion-like and even dear? Guided by the observations of St. Augustine and C. S. Lewis, I propose that this sorrow is a form of self-pity that displaces the significant other from the center of one's concern and affords an enhanced intimacy with oneself. The proposal vindicates the impression that one finds in this sorrow a companion that can take the place of the significant other and also positions us to address one of the most fundamental questions that might be raised in connection with grief, namely whether the one who has died is a proper object of concern or whether our grief is ultimately for ourselves, for a loss that is ours and ours alone.
A Grief Observed: Literary Manifesto
2013
During the only remaining audio clip from C.S. Lewis's Broadcast Talks, he ends with the thought that if you are constantly looking for yourself, you will only find "hatred, loneliness, despair, and ruin." But if you are able to give up yourself, then you will find your real self. In this instance, reality doesn't carry over from truth. To see your real self is not to glance in a mirror, but to pass through that mirror into something real, into something beyond the shadow.
On the Appropriateness of Grief to its Object
Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2022
How we understand the nature and role of grief depends on what we take its object to be and vice versa. This paper focuses on recent claims by philosophers that grief is frequently or even inherently irrational or inappropriate in one or another respect, all of which hinge on assumptions concerning the proper object of grief. By emphasizing the temporally extended structure of grief, we offer an alternative account of its object, which undermines these assumptions and dissolves the apparent problems. The principal object of grief, we suggest, is a loss of life-possibilities, which is experienced, understood, and engaged with over a prolonged period. Other descriptions of grief's object identify more specific aspects of this loss, in ways that do not respect a straightforward distinction between concrete and formal objects.
Five stages of grief in C.S. Lewis’ Novel A Grief Observed
Jurnal CULTURE (Culture, Language, and Literature Review)
Death is inevitable, inapprehensible, yet it is the most trustworthy experience by human. People have their own various ways to encounter deaths, some by witnessing the death of others, some by reading fictional stories. Death and literature has close relationship as the literary genres portray deaths in various perspectives, such as death is praised in Classics, death is tragic in Romantics, and death is a part of life in postmodern literature. However, the attitude of people towards death and grief are vary. This research aims at finding the stages of grief (death and dying) using Kübler-Ross theory in C. G. Lewis novel A Grief Observed (1961). This research is qualitative using content analysis approach. The data were gathered through words, phrases, and sentences contained in the novel. The findings shows that the main charater, Lewis, finally succeed managing the whole five stages such as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Moreover, with his acceptance of the d...
Mourning Without Loss: The Affective Life of Grief
In my thesis, I look to theorize a way in which we might grieve for strangers, whose deaths cannot touch us personally and whose losses we cannot claim to be our own: mourning without loss. To address this question, I perform two analytical gestures that inform one another throughout. The first gesture is a close reading of Sophie Calle’s 2007 installation Pas Pu Saisir La Mort (“Couldn’t Capture Death”). In this work, Calle invites the viewer to mourn for her mother Monique, who died after a treatment of palliative care. However, as I demonstrate, the viewer is to mourn for her in the absence of death and in the absence of an encounter with her. How might we envision such a work of mourning? The second gesture is a theoretical interrogation of Judith Butler’s theory of mourning and grievability. Butler thinks the experience of loss points us to a fundamental tie to others around us. She proposes to ‘tarry with grief’ in order to sustain this recognition of our mutual dependency and vulnerability. Mourning becomes a collective endeavour geared at fostering a caring political community. Yet if Butler pleads for what she calls grievability, I wonder about grieve-ability, our ability to mourn at all for strangers whose lives (or deaths) never impinged upon ours. To what extent can all life be grievable as such, by me? At stake in my thesis is thus a mode of mourning otherwise: departing from psychoanalytic models of mourning that treat grief as a private, interior work, I conceptualize grief as affect to delineate a communal mode of mourning that requires no prior attachment to those who are now lost. Moreover, I suggest reading this mode of mourning as a way of caring for the other, exposing a mesh of care relations in which the one who died was but a single node. In this sense grief is palliative: it softens the pains of loss because it helps us grasp the ties to others around us, even to others whom we have never met. Mourning without loss means gaining you.
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2019
Peskin, in his last paper (this issue), proposes a wide relational framework for understanding the roots and contexts of painful, unresolved mourning. In Freud, the work of the mourner takes place solely in the person’s inner world and reflects the mix of feelings the person had toward the loved one. Peskin describes a specific family dynamic which influences how a person is able to grieve, beyond the relationship with the lost loved one. Within the family, a “ranking of grief” emerges, which delineates who has priority in grieving, and who has to “defer” grief in accord with these implicit rules. Unearthing these dynamics, calls for an active form of therapeutic witnessing. In this discussion, a double meaning of deferring grief is explored. In Peskin’s examples, grief is held back when deferring to the demands of a dominant family member. As a result, the expression of the mourner’s grief is also deferred, postponed, to be possibly expressed at a later time. Another variety of deferred grief is described, using as an example the narrator in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Peskin asserts the right to mourn as a fundamental human right. This discussion ends with speculation about the societal conditions which may frustrate or encourage mourning. The assertion of the right to mourn ties this paper to Peskin’s earlier contributions on the effects of dehumanization following horrific trauma.
Poetry, drama and the novel present readers and viewers with emotionally significant situations that they often experience as moving, and their being so moved is one of the principal motivations for engaging with fictions. If emotions are considered as action-prompting beliefs about the environment, the appetite for sad or frightening drama and literature is difficult to explain, insofar nothing tragic or frightening is actually happening to the reader, and people do not normally enjoy being sad or frightened. The paper argues that the somewhat limited and problematic epistemological framework for dealing with the question of fiction-induced emotions has been enhanced by a better empirical understanding of the role of the emotions in social animals and in our individual hedonic economies, as well as by a more generous philosophical assessment of what counts as 'real'. Literary works can be understood further as monuments to experiences of loss that memorialize the highly pleasurable attachments associated with them. The term 'poet' in the title of this article refers to the literary artist in general, following the usual translation of the term in Freud's essay, 'The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming'. 1 Its subject matter is the 'Anna Karenina problem', the 'paradox of car-ing', which has a double aspect. 2 First, the mode of generation and ontological status of literature-generated emotions remains contentious; there is no general agreement on whether we can actually care about things that never happened and people who never existed. Second, the pleasurable nature of the aesthetic experiences of grief, fear, anxiety, and other negative emotions remains puzzling, in the absence of better elucidation of the psychological mechanisms allegedly at work in catharsis or aesthetic distancing. Grief has meanwhile been undertheorized by philosophers. This is understandable. To the philosopher, the salient phenomena are attachment, the building and maintenance of social bonds, and cooperative activities. Moral and political philosophy have much to say about care, community, responsibility to others, and related topics. Neglect, secession, and aban-donment attract less attention, for it is hard to talk about that which is not. Yet we recognize that emotional life consists of cycles of attachment and loss and that their evolutionary roots are deep and wide. 3 Friends drift away or move away, and we replace them with new friends; the children whose needs structured our lives grow up and move out so as to have children of their own; we tear up the hearts of others and get our own torn up too. Ordinary conversation testifies to the centrality of these attachments and losses in people's lives.