Grief: A Philosophical Guide
Read this excerpt from Michael Cholbi's book, courtesy of Princeton University Press
Please enjoy this excerpt from Michael Cholbi’s book, Grief: A Philosophical Guide. Special thanks to Princeton University Press.
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.
"An informative, sweeping, and provocative examination of grief as a complex phenomenon when undertaken in response to the death of others."
Glenn C. Altschuler, Psychology Today
Grief: A Philosophical Guide
Grief, Wittgenstein argues, is not like a sensation or observation in being a single state with an easily decipherable beginning and ending in time.
Mood versus Process
The first complication that grief presents is that, unlike most emotional conditions, it seems to consist not in an emotion, but in a series of emotions. When invoked expressly in connection with reactions to others' deaths, "grief" is sometimes confined to the feelings of acute sadness elicited by another's death, as in the "throes of grief." The twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein hints at how such expressions may mislead us into wrongfully identifying "grief" with this sadness. Wittgenstein suggests that while uttering "For a second he felt violent pain" is unproblematic, there is something "queer" about the utterance "For a second he felt deep grief." He observes that the queerness of the latter stems from conceptualizing grief as if it were only a "sensation" or an "observation." Grief, Wittgenstein argues, is not like a sensation or observation in being a single state with an easily decipherable beginning and ending in time. Grief instead "describes a pattern which recurs, with different variations in the weave of our life."
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