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Notes
I take mourning to include not only grief but its deliberate, often ritualized, expressions.
Emile Durkheim, The elementary forms of religious life (New York: MacMillan, 1915), p. 37
Robert Solomon “Grief and Gratitude,” in In defense of sentimentality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 78
Solomon, p. 87. Emphasis added.
Michael Cholbi, “Finding the Good in Grief: What Augustine Knew that Meursault Could Not,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 3 (2017), p. 92. Emphasis added.
Solomon, p. 79.
Ibid., 75.
Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2019), p. 7.
“Grief: A Case Study” in The mess inside : narrative, emotion, and the mind. (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 63.
Cholbi, p. 270.
See C.S. Lewis, The four loves (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), p. 58; and Hannah Arendt, The human condition (Chicago : UChicago Press, 1998), p. 51.
Arendt, p. 242.
Quoted in Solomon, p. 91.
Ibid., p. 75ff.
Quoted in Cholbi, p. 92.
Helene Deutsch, “Absence of Grief.” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 6 (1937), p. 13.
Cholbi, p. 98. At least originally, Kübler-Ross took this sequence to describe the process of coming to terms with one’s own death. Nevertheless, research on grieving has generally described a similar sequence.
Philip Fisher, “Thinking about Killing: Hamlet and the Paths among the Passions” in Susan Sontag, ed., The Best American Essays 1992. (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992), p. 104.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. R. Humphries (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1983), lines 580-85.
Ibid., lines 884-887.
King Lear, Act II, Scene 4.
In Dangerous voices : women's laments and Greek literature. (New York : Routledge, 1992), p. 61.
Idem.
In Grief and mourning in cross-cultural perspective (New Haven : HRAF Press, 1976) , p. 44.
Quoted in H. Schechter, Deviant (New York: Pocket Books, 1989), p. 132.
In “An Eye for an Eye: Fantasies of Revenge in the Aftermath of Trauma” in Danielle Knafo, ed., Living with Terror, Working with Trauma. (Lanham, Md. : Jason Aronson, 2004), p. 298.
See, for instance, Stroebe M, Stroebe W, van de Schoot R, Schut H, Abakoumkin G, et al. “Guilt in Bereavement: The Role of Self-Blame and Regret in Coping with Loss.” PLoS ONE 9(2014).
Rosenblatt, p. 30.
Ibid., p. 34&ff.
In “The Voice of Grief” in The Dominion of the Dead. (Chicago : UChicago Press , 2003), p. 56&ff.
“Mourning, Memory, and Identity: A Comparative Study of the Constitution of the Self in Grief.” International Philosophical Quarterly, 37 (1997), p. 40.
Quoted in Cholbi, p. 92.
Erica & Ryan Preston-Roedder, “Grief and Recovery” in A. Gotlib, ed., The Moral Psychology of Sadness. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), p. 93.
Ibid., p. 95&ff.
Ibid., p. 98.
Ibid., p. 105.
Ibid., p. 107&ff.
Goldie, p. 59.
Rosenblatt, p. 35.
Essays and Lectures. (New York: Viking Press, 1983), p. 473.
Preston-Roedder, p. 105&ff.
Symposium, trans. A. Nehamas & P. Woodruff. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 207a.
Ibid., 208d.
Here I part ways with philosophers like Palle Yourgrau, who treat the dead as “non-existent objects” that can legitimately stand in certain relations to the living even though he “find[s] it exceedingly difficult to give up [the] intuition that dead people simply do not exist.” (In “The Dead.” Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987), p. 87&ff) As I argue, the continuing existence of the departed is precisely what is at stake in the demand for mourning.
Miguel de Unamuno, The tragic sense of life, trans. A. Kerrigan (Princeton: Bollingen, 1990), p. 161. Cited hereafter as TSL.
Miguel de Unamuno, Cómo se hace una novela. (Madrid: Alianza, 2002), p. 96. Where no English language edition is referenced, passages are cited in this author’s translation.
Ibid., p. 97.
Miguel de Unamuno, The Agony of Christianity, trans. A. Kerrigan. (Princeton: Princeton Press, 2015), p. 6.
Ibid., p. 23&ff.
Ibid., p. 73.
Ibid., p. 16.
Unamuno doesn’t ground this view of the self in any overarching principle like Charles Peirce’s synechism, “the tendency to regard everything as continuous.” (“Immortality in the Light of Synechism” in The Essential Peirce, Vol. 2, ed. N. Houser. (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 1) Nevertheless, it is noteworthy how closely the former’s position parallels one the latter draws as a consequence of that principle:
Nor must any synechist say, “I am altogether myself, and not at all you.” If you embrace synechism, you must abjure this metaphysics of wickedness. In the first place, your neighbors are, in a measure, yourself, and in far greater measure than, without deep studies in psychology, you would believe. Really, the selfhood you like to attribute to yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of vanity. In the second place, all men who resemble you and are in analogous circumstances are, in a measure, yourself, though not quite in the same way in which your neighbors are you. (Ibid., p.2)
Miguel de Unamuno, Cómo se hace una novela. (Madrid: Alianza, 2002), p. 75. In this context, one’s readers are not only those who take in one’s words from a printed page but all those who receive and interpret one. In case the example of Socrates, who never expressed himself in writing, doesn’t make that clear, Unamuno disavows a world external to reading: “In the beginning was the Book. Or History. For History begins with the Book and not with the Word, and before the Word, before History, there was no consciousness, there wasn’t any mirror, there wasn’t anything.” (Ibid., p. 92).
Ibid., p. 94&ff.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), p. 691. A social dimension of individual existence could be the “lively spiritual consciousness” Peirce adumbrates in the following passage:
A friend of mine, in consequence of a fever, totally lost his sense of hearing. He had been very fond of music before his calamity; and, strange to say, even afterwards would love to stand by the piano when a good performer played. “So then,” I said to him, “after all you can hear a little.” “Absolutely not at all,” he replied; “but I can feel the music all over my body.” “Why,” I exclaimed, “how is it possible for a new sense to be developed in a few months!” “It is not a new sense,” he answered. “Now that my hearing is gone I can recognize that I always possessed this mode of consciousness, which I formerly, with other people, mistook for hearing.” In the same manner, when the carnal consciousness passes away in death, we shall at once perceive that we have had all along a lively spiritual consciousness which we have been confusing with something different. Peirce, p. 3
Sartre, p. 695.
Ibid., p. 696.
According to Amy Olberding, such a view of the self also underpins the Confucian understanding of mourning: “The self is disseminated among a context of ‘others’ who are never wholly other, and the ontological description of self is perhaps most appropriately a process of definition occurring continuously, throughout the subject's changing relations.” (Olberding, p. 35) She contrasts this with the ‘liminal’ self grounded in the Cartesian ego, which “fails to capture… the necessarily permeable borders of any meaningful identity.” (Ibid., 30).
For alternative arguments against such skepticism, see Jeremy Wisnewski “What We Owe the Dead.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 26 (2009).
TSL, p. 9.
Solomon, p. 101.
Sartre, p. 695.
Cómo se hace una novela, p. 140.
The agony of Christianity, p. 30.
In “Beyond Psychology” in Psychology at the Threshold, D. Slattery & L. Corbett, eds. (Carpinteria, CA : Pacifica Graduate Institute Publications, 2000), p. 99.
In addition to Loewald and Engel, discussed below, see, e.g., George Hagman “Death of a selfobject: Toward a Self Psychology of the Mourning Process.” in New models of bereavement theory and treatment. (New York : Routledge, 2016) or C. M. Parkes “Seeking and finding a lost object: Evidence from recent studies of the reaction to bereavement.” Social Science and Medicine, 4 (1970).
J. Lear, “Mourning and Moral Psychology” in Wisdom won from illness. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press, 2017), p. 196.
Ibid., p. 195.
Ibid. 193&ff. Zvyagintsev’s 2003 film “The Return” ends with a striking enactment of this scenario.
Emerson, p. 288.
Ibid., p. 302.
Lear, p. 195.
Emerson, p. 287.
Tanith Lee, Saint Fire (New York: The Overlook Press, 1999), p. 37.
He maintains other criteria less consistently. Unamuno is an agonistic thinker who openly puts forth contradictory views. In this context, the relevant tension is between his estimation at different points of this-worldly existence: “I long on the one hand for unending life, and on the other hand claim that this life is devoid of the value assigned it. A contradiction? I should say so!” (TSL, p. 17) This ambivalent estimation of everyday life underwrites contrasting, even incompatible views of what kind of immortality is worth aspiring to, one focused on transcending death and the other on exempting us from it. My focus here is on the first because that is what I argue grief can be relevant to. The second is encapsulated, for instance, in the avowal that "[w]hat we really long for after death is to go on living this life, this same mortal life, but without its ills, without its tedium—and without death" (TSL p. 252) or in the auteur Woody Allen’s wry observation that “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work… I want to achieve it through not dying.” I say these are not merely contrasting but incompatible because neither can fulfill the other’s basic demands. From the perspective of the second, death is a loss unpaid and unpayable, and “the anxiety to perpetuate our name and fame” merely “grasp[s] at… a shadow of immortality." (TSL, 59) As Marcus Aurelius observed, after fame is oblivion.
Conversely, pursuing immortality among others speaks to aspirations that would not be addressed by merely prolonging individual existence—aspirations that ultimately spring from the same drive to increase my being as the survival instinct does. "The visible Universe, the one created by the instinct of self-preservation, strikes me as too narrow... I need more air to breathe: more, more, always more! I want to be myself and, without ceasing to be myself, to be others as well, to encompass the totality of all things visible and invisible, to extend myself to the limitless in space and prolong myself to the endless in time. Not to be everything and not to be it forever is the same as not being at all." (TSL, p. 43&ff.) Prolonging life wouldn’t fulfill even the strictly temporal component of this aspiration, since one's being would still be delimited by the time before one's birth. On the other hand, being reborn as Pascal in his century through the communion between author and reader does push back that boundary, but clearly adds more than just time to existence. "Man, in his consciousness, does not resign himself to being alone in the universe... He wants to preserve his vital or passional subjectivity by making the entire universe alive, personal and animated... " (TSL, p. 161) As it turns out, what he thinks can animate the universe thus, bringing man and creation together, is the compassion born of our awareness of our finitude. (TSL, p. 152&ff.) In the end, too much of what, on Unamuno’s account, makes life worth living is bound up with the struggle against death to make exemption from it a satisfactory immortality. Nonetheless, he nurtures contradictory views to dwell in the creative tension between them, so a full appreciation of his thought requires us to take cognizance of both poles, even if I concentrate on one to pursue the topic at hand. I thank an anonymous referee for this journal for prompting me to address this.
TSL, p. 164.
Emily Dickinson arguably condenses the connections under discussion among grief, love, God and survival in the dense opening of her poem 809: “Unable are the loved to die / For love is immortality, / Nay, it is Deity.”
Miguel de Unamuno, Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo. (Madrid: Alianza, 1999), p. 32. The sentence is just as awkward in the original. Presumably the author means something like “allow or condemn each…”
Solomon, p. 91.
“Grief and grieving” in American Journal of Nursing, 64 (1964), p. 96.
A Grief Observed (San Francisco: Harper-Collins, 1994), p. 20.
Requiem for a Woman and Selected Lyric Poems, trans. Andy Gaus (Putney, VT : Threshold Books, 1981), p. 15.
The Sickness unto Death, trans. Hong & Hong (Princeton: Princeton Press, 1978), p. 8.
Works of Love, trans. Hong & Hong. (New York: Harper, 1962), p. 319.
TSL, p. 291.
Idem.
Social Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall, 1973), p. 30.
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López, R.G. The Ethical Import of Grief. J Value Inquiry 57, 149–171 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09809-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09809-x