Last month, I spoke at a conference in honour of Dick Moran. My topic was grief, and like much of my work, my talk was indebted to his example—a model of philosophy that is humanistic both in its attention to the form and matter of human life, and in the way that it approaches them.
Dick is unusual among philosophers in being genuinely wise, and one of my favourite moments of wisdom in his work is a rejoinder to the “proverbial injunction against crying over spilt milk”: “if we can’t cry after the milk is spilled,” Dick innocently asks, “when can we cry?” It’s an excellent question—though my talk would add two more: “When can we stop crying? And why should it seem as though we can’t?”
The conference ended with Dick expressing gratitude for our expressions of gratitude with philosophical reflections on the nature of gratitude, to which we responded in the only way we could: expressing gratitude for his thanks with an impromptu philosophical salon on gratitude and the gift.
One of the gifts of the conference—along with Dick’s presence and a reunion with friends—was Prudence Whittlesey, a painter who sketched her impressions of the talks—and the speakers—in action, producing a series of ten or twenty watercolours for each.
Prudence was generous enough to share with me a few of mine, and they give a sense of her mix of figuration and abstraction, intended to catch a thinker’s bearing towards his thoughts as much as towards his audience—and the dynamism of philosophy, as though it filled the room with clouds of colour forming into shapes.
The guiding question of my talk was why, if the reason for my grief is nothing but the fact that a loved one has died—a fact that never goes away—it doesn’t follow that I ought to grieve forever.
Maybe I should? But even if grief never wholly fades, its character may change—not because the reason for it changes, or because love dies, but because its aptness is not a function of love and reasons alone. How we should grieve is a function of grieving itself, a process that unfolds in time.
Despite this, it can seem to us as though we ought to grieve—with the same intensity—forever. In anticipation, or in grief, the prospect of grieving less can feel like a failure of love, or a betrayal. Why? The answer, I argue, turns on the “relations of transparency” Dick explored in his book about self-knowledge.
My talk closed with an argument that, if time is fundamentally a matter of before and after, not past, present, and future—if the passage of time is unreal, as so-called “B-theorists” believe—we should already grieve the deaths of those we love, just as we grieve them when they die.
The final argument was somewhat tongue-in-cheek—I don’t really believe the conclusion—and as the Q&A revealed, there was more to say…
I apologize for focusing on myself—but these are the images I have. I don’t apologize that the summary above is not enough for you to reconstruct my argument. What the paintings convey, I think, is the mood and movement of thought, including moments of self-doubt.
At the end of the conference, Prudence silently arranged the paintings of the final day around the walls and furniture of the room: an ad hoc exhibition through which one could relive the last talks instantaneously, outside the passage of time.
In the philosophical salon, Doug Lavin made a beautiful argument: gratitude is for gifts, things one appreciates but can’t demand; but gratitude is itself a gift—something one can’t demand but should appreciate; so it’s apt to respond to gratitude with gratitude, as Dick did at the conference, to which it’s apt to respond in turn with gratitude, for which one should be grateful, a virtuous spiral of gratitude on gratitude on gratitude ad infinitum.
Some in the audience took this as a problem, a threat of vicious regress; but it was an insight—and that, too, is a gift, like the gift of frozen colour, and words, and movement.
This post, in turn, is an expression of gratitude: for the transmission of creative energy into new forms of creativity, which generate new forms, the perpetual motion of art, like the infinite progress of gratitude that iterates without end.
BONUS CONTENT: Nick Thune on gratitude.
Perhaps grief and gratitude are linked... perhaps from sorrow grows gratitude for time well spent, the negative emotion flourishing into the positive.
Kieran,
who is gratitude directed to and who gives the very capacity to feel gratitude? I'm guessing that nowadays we do still in fact say "I'm grateful" but I'm not sure who we're grateful to: the "gods" or "life"' or what?
For Muslims İ think it's one of the most fundamental and important orientations.