Abstract
The paper considers various ruminations on the aftermath of the death of a close one, and the processes of grieving and mourning. The conceptual examination of how grief impacts on its sufferers, from different cultural perspectives, is followed by an analytical survey of current thinking among psychologists, psychoanalysts and philosophers on the enigma of grief, and on the associated practice of mourning. Robert C. Solomon reflected deeply on the 'extreme emotion' of grief in his extensive theorizing on the emotions, particularly in his essay 'On Grief and Gratitude', commenting that grief is 'often described as a very private, personal emotion, characterized by social withdrawal and shutting oneself off from the world' (2004: 73). While dialoguing with the spirit of Solomon by way also of a tribute to his immense insights, the paper engages in critical reflections on recent thinking in this area elsewhere - notably, in Heidegger, Freud, Nussbaum, Casey, Gustafson, and Kristeva - and offers a refreshing critique toward an alternative to the received wisdom.
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Notes
C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (Bantam Books: Faber & Faber/Seabury Press, 1976), pp. 1–3.
Robert C. Solomon, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Robert C. Solomon, ‘On Grief and Gratitude’, in In Defense of Sentimentality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 75–107.
W. H. Auden, “Funeral Blues” (first published in 1936) in Stan Smith, ed., The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); read aloud in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Solomon, True to Our Feelings, p. 171. His argument "is not that there is no such thing as valence . . . but rather that there are many such polarities and oppositions.”
Op. cit., p. 62.
Solomon, “On Grief and Gratitude,” p. 85.
Ganantha Obeyesekere, ‘Depression, Buddhism, and the Work of Culture in Sri Lanka,’ in Arthur Kleinman and B. Good, eds., Culture and Depression Studies in Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder (Culture & Depression) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 144. See also Uwe P. Gielen, ‘A Death on the Roof of the World: The Perspective of Tibetan Buddhism’, in Collin Murray Parkes, Pittu Laungani and Bill Young, eds., Death and Bereavement Across Cultures (New York/London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 52–71.
Samuel C Heilman, When a Jew Dies, The Ethnography of a Bereaved Son (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 21. See also, Rebecca Alpert, ‘Grief and the Rituals Surrounding Death: A Jewish Approach’, in Lucy Bregman, ed., Religion, Death and Dying, Vol. 3: Bereavement and Death Ritual (Santa Barbara/Denver/Oxford: Praeger, 2010), pp. 25–40; Maurice Lamm, The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning (Middle Village, New York: Jonathan David Publishers, 2000), pp. 109–121. Cf. Bhagavad-Gītā 2.22, 2.27, in the Mahābhārata.
Here I have been greatly assisted (indeed guided) by very helpful and poignant responses (virtual summaries) to the read draft version from Edward S Casey, to whom I am most grateful. Some of the paragraphs in the theoretical reflections are cited verbatim, in places without quotation marks, if in a talking-paper of this nature one can assume and exercise this indiscretion.
‘Letter to Francine Loreau’, in Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning’, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 95.
Steven Wilkinson (2000), “Is ‘Normal Grief’ a Mental Disorder?” Philosophical Quarterly 50: 289–30
Solomon, True to Our Feelings, p. 75.
Cited in Lamm, op. cit., pp. 142–3.
‘On Grief and Gratitude’, p 75.
Catherine Lutz, ‘Depression and the Translation of Emotional Worlds’, in A. Kleinman and D. Good, op. cit., pp. 63–100.
Edward Casey, in response (personal communication).
Jeff Malpas and Robert C. Solomon, eds., Philosophy and Death (London/New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 17.
Not unlike the dream Gabriel Garcia Márquez narrates of organizing his own funeral, in Strange Pilgrims Twelve Stories (Trans. Edith Grossman) (New York: Alfred A. Knopf.1993)
Paul C Rosenblatt, ‘Grief in Small-scale Societies’, in Parks, Laungani, and Young eds. Death and Bereavement Across Cultures, op. cit., p. 41.
Ibid., p. 41.
Michael Stocker, ‘Some Considerations About Intellectual Desire and Emotions,’ in Robert C. Solomon, ed., Thinking About Feeling: Philosophers on the Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 144.
Solomon, ‘On Grief and Gratitude’, pp. 75 and 78.
Op. cit., p. 7.
Solomon, ‘On Grief and Gratitude’, p. 80.
Hamlet Act I, scene ii. I owe this citation in this context to Solomon, ibid., pp. 76–77.
Rosenblatt, op cit, p. 41
Casey (response, personal communication).
Donald Gustafson, ‘Grief’, Noûs, 23:4 (1989): 457–479. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215878.
Robert C. Solomon, The Passions (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976), p 186.
See self-grieving of dog Devi, and grief on the face of Rasa, baby-dog, and their carers, honored with last rites. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGBsWllRep4; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d0iN4COY78
Solomon, ‘ On Grief and Gratitude,’ p. 85.
‘Perturbations of Desire: Emotions Disarming Morality in the "Great Song" of the Mahābhārata’, in Thinking About Feeling, ed. Robert C. Solomon (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 214–232.
This essay was first published in P. Bilimoria and J. N. Mohanty, eds., Relativism, Suffering, and Beyond: Essays in Memory of Bimal K. Matilal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); it was reprinted in Solomon, ed., Thinking about Feeling; becomes chapter one in Nussbaum’s large book, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Solomon’s review of the tome in Mind, vol. 111, no. 444, Oct., 2002; pp. 897–901; poignant for his critical retraction, siding with the so-called Adversary: ‘..can you make all of the evaluative judgments that supposedly constitute the emotion and may nevertheless not have that emotion? I have come to the conclusion after many years that the Adversary (now reinforced with some powerful studies in neurobiology) must be reckoned with, and that my old, rather ruthless line between those cognitive features of emotion that are essential and those non-cognitive features of emotion that are not essential was (in the context of the time) heuristic and is no longer so. (Nussbaum insists on necessary and sufficient conditions in her study, p. 62)’, p. 900.
Emphasis is Nussbaum’s, Upheavals of Thought, p. 189.
The belief that the suffering is serious; the belief that the person does not deserve the suffering; and the belief that the possibilities of the person who experiences the emotion are similar to those of the sufferer (ibid and p. 62; see previous two notes).
Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, p. 192.
E.g. in the work of Don Gustafson and Ronald Alan Nash of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, especially in the latter’s ‘Cognitive Theories of Emotion’, in Noûs, 23:4 (1989): 481–504. The slight exception is the perspicuous underscoring of resilience and caring by Dan Moller, ‘Love and Death’, The Journal of Philosophy, 2007: 301-16.
See the work of Renuka M. Sharma, Understanding The Concept of Empathy and Its Foundations in Psychonanalysis, Lewiston: The Edwin Mellon Press, 1993; and ‘empathy – A Retrospective on its Development in Psychotherapy’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 1993, 26, 3: 377–390.
This woody poem describing Edgar Allen Poe’s melancholia at loss of his beloved Lenore, was first published in Evening Mirror (New York), 1845; in public domain in USA.
Charles Shepherdson, ‘Emotion, Affect, Drive: For Teresa Brennan', Conference in Memory of Teresa Brennan, SUNY Stony Brook Manhattan Campus, September 2003. (courtesy of author).
Jennifer Radden, ed. The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Melanie Klein, ‘The Depressive Position’, in Radden, op. cit., p. 307.
Aaron T. Beck, ‘A Cognitivist Analysis of Depression, in Radden, op. cit., pp. 317–23.
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
Virginia Demos and Samuel Kaplan, (1986). ‘Motivation and Affect Reconsidered: Affect Biographies of Two Infants’, Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 9:147–221.
See note 33 above.
An attitude well betrayed by John Searle lecturing for the umpteenth year on his Philosophy of Mind, at Berkeley, while reporting to the class on the pending MRI he is due to undergo on the neurologist's recommendation, because he's been feeling a bit dizzy and giddy of late in his brain. But he'll be back with a vengeance having sighted his own brain (mind, or no-mind)!
A Letter to the Editor The New York Times, signed by over 300 professors et al complaining about the malice in the Times’ Obituary.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/13/opinion/l13derrida.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fLetters. Attempt to correct the perception of Derrida and help with his transition yonder by Mark C Taylor (Lacanian Theologian, Williams College/Columbia)
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The essay had its genesis in a spiel I was asked to present by Bob Solomon at the launch of the volume Thinking About Feeling, in the University of Texas, Austin; I was to speak on my chapter ‘Perturbations of Desire’ in the collection. This was circa December 2002, shortly after a personal tragedy that engaged me intensely in this hermeneutic of the raw feelings I was undergoing, which also had me re-think the hitherto abstract theorizing on the emotions. I learnt a lot discussing this essay as it evolved, with Bob Solomon and Kathleen Higgins; and I am grateful to Kathleen for including it in a publication that honors Solomon’s profound legacy. Shannon Magaree, Nina Rühle, Joseph Prabhu, Chris Chapple, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the Bilimoria, Sharma, Singh and Giborees families, Jayant Bapat, Rashmi Desai, Steffie Lewis, Sri K. Chakravarthi, Rich & Denis, Peter Wong, Greg Bailey, Patrick Hutchings Esq, Joe Loizzo, Ian Weeks, Max Charlesworth, J. N. Mohanty, Jay Garfield, Hope & Stephen Phillips, (the late) Hazel Rowley, Ed Casey, Sridhars of Stony Brook and of Bangalore, David Carr, Laurie Patton, Thee Smith and friends in Emory, Ganga-Vidya, Tinara Benson, Devi-Rasa; Natassia, Serena, Amy, Sherah @ Sophia; Taaniji, (late) Selva Raj, Jay Garfield, Ann Kaplan, Hugh Silverman, Paniyota, and (presentia in absentia) Renuka M. Sharma also contributed to my understanding and coming to terms with this more challenging of creaturely emotions. Of course, there have been other interlocutors, support-givers, and carers, too numerous to name each here, whose insights, questions and wisdom, have added succor to the long journey.
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Bilimoria, P. On Grief and Mourning: Thinking a Feeling, Back to Bob Solomon. SOPHIA 50, 281–301 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0257-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0257-1