Commentary


Grief and Self-Knowledge


Dave Beisecker

University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA


Beisecker, Dave. 2022. “Grief and Self-Knowledge.” Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 4, no. 1: 27-33. https://doi.org/10.33497/2022.summer.5.

Abstract: In Grief: A Philosophical Guide, Michael Cholbi characterizes grief as a “questioning attitude”; it calls attention to and prompts questions about the significance of the departed specifically to the griever. Accordingly, Cholbi assigns grief a largely self-directed cognitive purpose: grief’s goodness is that it leads—when things go well—to greater self-knowledge. In this paper, I question this claim. Calling upon an ordinary episode of grief, I argue that there are at least a few cases of grief in which greater self-knowledge is neither likely nor reasonably expected.


Keywords: grief, self-knowledge, doubt, death, pets



Michael Cholbi opens up Grief: A Philosophical Guide with two illustrations. The first is that of A Grief Observed: C. S. Lewis’ account of the profound disruption and disorientation he felt at the death of his wife Joy.  Even though Lewis had expected the tears and sorrow, his suffering was apparently so devastating, the shock to his core being so extreme, that he was sadly reluctant to own up to it, opting instead to publish his account under a pseudonym.


Cholbi’s second illustration is drawn from Albert Camus’ The Stranger. In stark contrast to Lewis, the protagonist Meursault does not exhibit any evident grief at the loss of his mother. It’s as if grief is part of a game that he simply refuses to play. Others find Meursault’s insouciance to be so shocking that he is condemned—not really for the crime for which he is formally accused, but rather for the crime of failing to feel as one ought.


There is a message to be drawn from these two examples: grief may be expected of us—even normatively—and yet there is a threat in it that it might nevertheless prove so anguishing as to impede our functioning and compromise our well-being. The challenge that Cholbi takes on in the bulk of his study is that of identifying a defensible positive purpose of grief, while at the same time doing justice to its undeniably negative


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characteristics: how bad it feels, how disruptive and debilitating it can be, and how we generally do not wish such torment upon those for whom we do not otherwise despise.


Both of Cholbi’s illustrations are extraordinary—imbued with complexities befitting a good read; they invite us to ask questions. Is—as Cholbi intimates ever so slightly (5-6)—Lewis’ reluctance an unfortunate carryover from a misguided conception of grief stemming from Classical antiquity, a conception whereby grief is viewed as a weakness or sign of dependence that must be overcome?[1] There is a concern, however, that in these complexities one might begin to lose forests through trees. By way of assessing Cholbi’s account, then, I propose turning to a much simpler, more ordinary example of the phenomenon under investigation, one which recommended a straightforward (and again, prosaic) resolution. The hope is that in its very simplicity, it also exhibits a purity which allows us to zero in upon the phenomenon in question.


Please allow me to wax autobiographical; I have nothing like Lewis’ reluctance about bringing up an example from my recent past. Unlike the Stoics, and even Spinoza, I can embrace my vulnerabilities and dependence upon others. A couple of years ago, in an SPE session very much like the one here, I brought up a time in which I felt great joy witnessing the evident pleasure my ole girl Siggy took rolling around in the grass. At the same time, however, I also mentioned that that joy was justifiably tempered by a sense of foreboding apprehension and sadness that her time with me was very swiftly coming to an end. Sadly, that premonition was all too true, and shortly thereafter I was faced with the loss of a long-time beloved companion. In short, I was in just the sort of state for which Cholbi’s book purports to be a guide.


Cholbi’s account of those for whom we may grieve is deliberately and refreshingly broad, certainly broad enough to accommodate justifiable grief over a pet. Though grief must be kept distinct from mere mourning, he tells us that we may come to grieve the loss of anyone in whom our practical identities are invested: “Our practical identities are, in a diversity of ways, invested in the existence of others. We grieve a person’s death—and it is appropriate we grieve a person’s death—to the extent that our practical identities are invested in their existence” (31). Cholbi makes clear that the investment he has in mind may go beyond love (e.g., 79). As he tells us, we may grieve the loss of relative strangers and even antagonists, as long as we have structured our lives and conduct around their presence. While this expansiveness does conjure up the image of Wile-E Coyote tearfully picking his teeth with the bones of his arch-nemesis, it also nicely justifies other fringe expressions of grief, such as those voiced by researchers at NASA over the loss of the Mars rover, Opportunity. It is a strength of the account that it legitimates such expressions.  


Nevertheless, Cholbi mentions grief at the loss of a pet only once, and that is in connection with the suffering of a child (88). There is something remarkable in that, for just as the context of Cholbi’s mention suggests, that is just the kind of situation in which so many of us are provided with our very first exposure to grief. Those are the typical formative encounters with loss in which we come to learn how to grieve as best we can. As such, Cholbi might have made more use of such examples. No matter what other function grief might have, the loss of a pet during childhood can well serve the purpose of preparing one for more significant and disruptive losses to come. Still, I would insist that there is nothing childish in such a loss. I dare say that for at least a few of us, this is the type of grief that we will face more frequently than any other, and maybe even with the greatest intensity. My grief at losing Sig was genuine, no matter how less remarkable it was than Jack Lewis’, in the annals of grief stories. The great joy I had felt earlier at Sig’s pleasure, as well as the grief I felt later, were justifiable—even expected—responses to the significance that she had come to take in my life. That is why I think it might serve as an illuminating test case for Cholbi’s study.


To be sure, there is much in Cholbi’s guide that rings true. In chapter five, for instance, Cholbi points out that grief has a potentially alarming capacity to cloud our ability to make rational decisions. As one might imagine in


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a case like Sig’s, it fell to me to make the decision of just when my grief would have to commence; a decision which forced me to balance my reluctance to begin grieving with the best interests of Siggy herself. Fortunately, there were others around to help me reach such a momentous decision. While we might feel largely alone in our grief, I think it would be a mistake to think that we bear grief’s burdens all on our own. My duty to grieve might, as Cholbi suggests in chapter six, be a duty largely to myself. Nevertheless, others might bear concomitant responsibilities to assist my efforts to confront it. Once again, if grief is indeed to be expected of us, then Cholbi might have done well to spend more time looking at how others who are close to grievers take on their own responsibility to them as they grieve. That is, I would recommend in a largely friendly fashion that we also consider what might be called “second-order” duties of grief.  


Cholbi also insists that though grief need not proceed in a rigid set of distinct stages, it’s nevertheless a complex affective process that may embrace and slide between several more basic emotional states. Denial, for instance, might figure in some grief episodes, but it need not figure in them all. For example, I cannot identify a denial phase in any of my grief for Siggy; instead, that was more than made up for by anticipatory grief before her actual loss. Indeed, a grief that is dominated by denial and regret is perhaps one for which we have not adequately prepared. Cholbi stresses that we need to look at the grief process as an ongoing activity. If there is anything I might add to (or further stress in) Cholbi’s account, it is that grief is not only a complex process of its own, it is a stage of a much larger affective engagement with another, through which grief derives its purpose and justification. Again, my prior joy and anticipatory sadness should serve to underscore the point. Without such earlier affective attention, devotion, and engagement with her life, my grief at her death would simply make no sense—either descriptively or normatively.


The suggestions of the last two paragraphs are relatively minor and friendly. I do, however, have a larger concern about Cholbi’s account. Following Soloman, Cholbi characterizes grief as “a questioning attitude.” Grief calls attention to and prompts questions about the significance of the departed specifically to the griever: 


Grief affords us evidence regarding the significance of those relationships—in the form of the sadness, anxiety, anger, etc., that we find ourselves undergoing in grief episodes—while also stoking puzzlement about that significance. Grief thus becomes an occasion for asking “who were they to me?” Grief is therefore a privileged epistemic route to our past (79). 


Accordingly, Cholbi assigns grief a largely self-directed cognitive purpose: grief’s goodness is that it leads—when things go well—to greater self-knowledge (83): “Part of what puzzles and pains us in grief is how to describe, catalog, and synthesize the various ways in which a person’s existence was central to our practical identities” (76). By way of grief, then, Cholbi says we come to know ourselves better; we become more attuned to our practical identities. And so the duty to grieve is one that we primarily owe to ourselves.


Cholbi’s remarks about grief’s goodness make grief appear to be something akin to an especially severe or even brutal kind of doubt. Here it might be instructive to hark back to the famous description of doubt in section III of “The Fixation of Belief,” in which the classical American pragmatist Charles Peirce (1992) characterizes doubt as,


[A]n uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else. . . . Thus, both doubt and belief have positive effects upon us, though very different ones. Belief does not make us act at once, but puts us into a condition that we shall behave in a certain way, when the occasion arises. Doubt has not the least affect of this sort, but stimulates us to


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action until it is destroyed. This reminds us of the irritation of a nerve and the reflex action produced thereby. (Pierce 1992, 114)

 

Notice how Peirce’s notion of inquiry deftly interweaves the cognitive and the affective. If doubt were not such a negative, irritating state—that is, if it didn’t feel so damn bad—then we would not be spurred into serious inquiry at all. For Cholbi, grief appears to play a similar (perhaps even the same) cognitive role. If it didn’t hurt so much—if it didn’t “puzzle and pain”—then we mightn’t be spurred on to attain the benefits of having an accurate and stable sense of who we are.  And just as Peirce takes care to distinguish “real” doubt from Cartesian “paper” doubts, we too should distinguish genuine grief from painless pretenders, as well as condemn those who fail to doubt or grieve when they should.


Tempting as this kind of story might be, I just can’t shake a lingering sense that it goes partly astray. Granted, extraordinarily intense grief might prompt the kind of soul-searching Cholbi describes. One might not realize just how important one’s practical identity centered around the object of one’s grief (or alternately, one might take a surprising lack of grief to indicate a lack of such connection). My worry, however, is that in many of the most ordinary cases of grief, and even some extraordinary ones, there is little to nothing by way of additional knowledge to be gained. For instance, I had no illusions about how significant a role Siggy played in my life; my dread at her loss was not born of any lack of self-knowledge. Far from it! Rather, it concerned the fact that I would suddenly have to do something about it.


Cholbi recognizes that in addition to a “backward-looking” dimension, grief has what he calls a “forward-looking” dimension as well, which concerns what should be done, now that one is faced with the loss (79ff.). Cholbi’s distinction here brings to mind the distinction between theoretical and practical deliberation. As Kant so famously stressed, the former is aimed at the production of belief and knowledge, the latter with the production of intention and action. Both, however, are concerned with the operation of reason, and each comes with their associated types of syllogisms. I worry that Cholbi tries to assimilate both of these to forms of knowledge.[2] My suggestion, then, is that if there is an essential aporia of grief, it does not operate on the theoretical side, so much as it concerns the practical one. When I am faced with grief, I am struck not so much by a crisis of what I should believe, but rather what I should do. Lewis’s sense of self was disintegrating, not so much because he didn’t have an accurate sense of what that was, but rather that he lacked a coherent plan of action. Similarly, when I lost Sig, I was suddenly and irrevocably in the uncomfortable position of having to decide just what to do in order to restore my practical identity. As Cholbi puts it later on in the book, grief’s challenge is “to fashion a practical identity that reflects our altered relationship with the deceased.” Grief’s badness lies in the uncomfortableness of this position. It’s goodness, then, would seem to lie, not so much in self-knowledge, but rather in the restoration of personal integrity one has when one has stably reconciled oneself to the loss.


I submit that there was little or nothing by way of additional theoretical deliberation that would have prepared me better for the eventual loss of Sig. I knew how much it would hurt, just as I also knew what I would eventually have to do about it. I had little doubt, and yet I still grieved. The greater part of grief’s anguish surely has to do with how momentous and pressing the changed circumstances are. The formation of intention has an affective temporal dimension that isn’t so salient in the fixation of belief. Think of the paratrooper or thrill-seeker who has trained extensively for that moment in which they would have to jump out of the plane. They may know all there is to know, including that the time to take the plunge is NOW! Yet for all that theoretical and practical knowledge, the affect—the fear and excitement—is still there. And the tension only mounts as the crucial moment draws nigh. Instead of being a response to one’s epistemic position, the intense affect that surrounds such an experience largely concerns the sudden necessity of putting one’s plans into execution—to make good on previously formed intentions.[3] I suggest that my grief for Sig was more like that.


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I largely knew what I would have to do as soon as she was gone. Yet the task of restoring my life-balance was unpleasant and unwelcome, as so many life-chores are. The anguish of grief comes from actually having to get on with the onerous task of rebuilding a stable practical identity that has been disrupted by the loss of a significant other. A lack of knowledge or decisiveness might aggravate and prolong such torment, but it doesn’t seem to account for the unpleasantness altogether.


My primary query for Cholbi thus boils down to this: if grief’s goodness is to be understood in terms of its capacities to invite inquiry, resolve doubt, or to attain greater self-knowledge, what then are we to make of those cases, forming perhaps the bulk of the most ordinary episodes of grief, in which there isn’t much of anything by way of epistemic advantage to be gained?[4] Or, to flip the query around: How, on Cholbi’s account of the goodness of grief, are we to reply to the Meurseault who would defend their failure to grieve by smugly insisting that there was nothing further that they could possibly come to know about themselves?


My grief for Sig was painful, and yet I faced it with little doubt and full knowledge of who I was and how I wished to continue. Not to make light of the experience, but the task wasn’t especially mysterious or complicated. As Cholbi stresses in his final chapter, mitigating the pain through medication—or to otherwise medicalize the condition—is not an appropriate or genuine remedy for grief. Such a response doesn’t address the task at hand, so much as it avoids it. Instead, five months after her loss (a time-frame that Cholbi reports as reassuringly normal), much of my former practical identity was well on its way to restoration with the addition of Tyche to my life. I couched that last sentence in the passive voice in order to emphasize once again that it wasn’t completely my doing. Even though the grief was mine, the challenge of coping with my loss drew upon others. And yet, while much of my former practical identity has been restored by the addition of a new brindled companion, I still grieve for Sig. Current concerns might have caused my grief to fade, and future distractions will perhaps lead it to fade further. Nevertheless, it’s quite possible that it will never cease altogether. Indeed, I seem to harbor a desire that it will never go away entirely, even after all the goodness has been squeezed out of it. Yet I submit that that desire—born perhaps out of some sense of duty or fidelity toward my past self and its relationship to Sig—is not altogether perverse, and may even be commendable. It strikes me that therein lies the real heart of the paradox of grief.


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Notes


[1] All parenthetical references are to Michael Cholbi (2021).

[2] This attempt to assimilate the two is most evident on page 86ff., as well as an admission of its awkwardness.

[3] To help us overcome such challenges, we often harness our intentions to the collective intentions of some mutually reinforcing group.  

[4] Note that while this challenge has some affinity with both the first and second objections that Cholbi canvases in parts 5 and 6 of chapter three, it is not really touched by Cholbi’s replies to either. In fact, Cholbi’s response to the second objection (that of the over-intellectualization of grief) only serves to reinforce the challenge further, insofar as it doubles down on the claim that self-knowledge is grief’s ultimate purpose, even though it might not be one of its more proximate aims (94-5).


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References



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Dave Beisecker © 2022

Author email: beiseckd[at]unlv.nevada.edu