Philosophy of Grief

 a prolegomenon

 

             Philosophy is like sitting in a café and sipping a hot latte. It’s something special and reassuring. It should be a triple espresso and give us a jolt of energy because it opens a window into a convoluted problem and we can finally see the genesis of an answer. It should roust us into spirited discussions.

 

            A philosophy of grief should help those who are grieving understand what is happening, guide us in learning about ourselves, and help us find meaning in our experiences. It should also enable us to see how our personal suffering, the grief of one individual, fits into the larger context of the suffering going in the world. 

 

            This is what I’m looking for—a philosophy of grief that I can understand without having to pick up a dictionary.

 

I’m a novice in philosophy, and often lose my way in the terms and systems of thought (existentialism, epistemology, phenomenology, etc.). My take is that most philosophers begin with an idea that leads to a thought, which leads to another thought, and another, until they end up with a wonderfully constructed web of thoughts that make sense to each other, and may even explain the workings of the universe, yet which don’t have direct relevance to those who are living in the situations being talked about. (Is an idea the same as a thought? There’s probably a philosophical debate about that.) 

 

Philosophy begins with stories. The ones I like, anyway, although I haven’t found a philosophy of grief that begins in the experience and builds around this, rather than starting with, and staying in, the theoretical. In previous posts I’ve included the bits and pieces I’ve been able to find that are helpful in understanding grief.

 

Elly Vintiadis is a philosopher of mind and psychiatry at the American College of Greece in Deree, and points out, in her fascinating article published in Aeon called “The View from Her,” that traditional philosophers (i.e. men) try to write from an objective point of view, “a view from nowhere,” as she puts it, as if the historical events and cultural values of the society they grew up in do not influence their thinking. They want to achieve pure reasoning by sitting up in their rooms, disconnected from everyday matters and chores, and having deep thoughts. Writing from a completely objective position is a myth because no one is completely objective. Even the words they use to describe the theoretical are weighted with the values and morals of their community. Vintiadis says the circumstances of our lives affect how we see and understand the world.

 

Traditional philosophy is a head trip, not a journey of the heart. Some philosophers, like Søren Kierkegaard, noticed this disconnect between theory and the reality of human experience, and wrote to bridge the gap. It’s fitting that a biography of him, written by Clare Carlisle, is entitled Philosopher of the Heart.

 

Vintiadis points out that we don’t know of many female philosophers because, for most of history, women philosophers have been excluded and ignored because they were female, and their writings were dismissed because they dealt with “women’s topics”—relationships, emotions, domestic matters, pregnancy, etc. Besides being concerned about these matters, they probably also wrote about them because no one else was. This might explain why I’ve found so few men writing insightfully and coherently about the experience of grief. Grief deals with emotions, relationships, and taking care of others, subjects that men tend to think are female concerns. 

            Philosopher Eva Feder Kittay states the problem clearly: “How could philosophers have missed the importance of care as a moral concept?” The closest writing I’ve found so far about the philosophy of grief that comes from direct experience is Martha Nussbaum’s words on the intelligence and importance of emotions in her Upheavals of Thought, written after her mother died. She writes, “Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.” 

I’m interested in this because it’s important for a community to provide care to its members, as well as having an obligation to do so, and not in a benevolent way but as a shared venture. Grief is about relationships—the one with the person who died, the changing dynamics of relationships with friends (who either draw closer or scurry away because of the intensity of emotions), and the griever’s relationship with, and trust of, society, which has been shaken by society’s general indifference to mourning.

 

Grief is also about our relationship with ourselves. Vintiadis says, “Grief is somewhat of a kind monster, terrible to encounter but somehow, I find, losing a part of our heart to it we find parts of ourselves through it, too.”

 

No one, not even the philosophers, understand the landscape of grief until they lose someone they love. Every philosophy of grief has to be rooted in the experience and build up from there if it’s going to have anything to offer to someone who is being pummeled by grief. If a philosophy of grief doesn’t help those who are grieving, then what good is it?        

 

Philosophy is not about rising above conflict; it’s a way to enter in and find a way through.  

 

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(Vintiadis also edited a book called Philosophy by Women, published in 2020 by Routledge. It has entries by 22 different female philosophers on a wide variety of subjects.)