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.
Interesting connection! Gratitude for someone's life, the fact that they exist(ed), is the flipside of grief at their ceasing to be. As grief fades, gratitude persists. But gratitude, like grief, can fade in ways that we anticipate with sadness. If we can't celebrate when the milk is filled, or the child is born, when can we celebrate? And why should we ever stop celebrating?
Sarah Broadie provided a fascinating if brief exploration of the value of celebration at the end of her book Ethics with Aristotle. Highly recommended.
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.
Fascinating question, whether we can make secular sense of impersonal gratitude. It does seem that non-believers experience gratitude for things they don't take to be the work of any intentional agent. This came up in one of my podcast interviews, I think with Hanna Pickard, who was interested, more generally, in the emotional life of people brought up religious (or in a religious community) who don't believe in God.
İt's interesting that in England if someone asks how you are people usually say, "yeah, not bad." İn America İ think it's "I'm good." Here in the land of the pure it's invariably shukar alhumdulillah.
Not saying, obviously, that it's always (deeply) felt but it's really woven into daily discourse/practices (the way İ guess it was in America 100 years ago).
Anyway, Kieran, here's one of my favourites: 'Freedom is the ability to be thankful for God's Beneficence' (Rumi).
I do think it's possible, both for others and for oneself. The argument I explore at the end of the talk/paper is that it's not only possible but obligatory, which I don't believe. If you remember the poem, let me know!
On grief: the (American) phrase I've never really understood is "closure"- because what we surely want is the continued openness of the wound? No heart is as whole, a rabbi said, as a broken heart (İ suppose we're back to, paraphrasing her a bit, Iris M's 'life is a broken circle').
Not sure about "betrayal" or "the same intensity". Maybe that holds for some people. İs that what *you* feel?
Not a fan of "closure," either. I raise doubts about the narrative model of grief (e.g. the appeal of five stages) in the chapter on grief in LIFE IS HARD.
I was quite moved this and it reminded me of a story I’ve often told before. In 2016, as Jessica Lange was getting reading to perform A Long Day’s Journey into Night on Broadway, she was interviewed in the New Yorker. She’d played the role many years before and was very much looking forward to doing it again. She said, “I have so much more loss to work with.” I burst into tears on reading that and I choke up every time I tell the story. Even now, just typing it out, the tears come. The tears are gratitude.
When I read the interview I was three and a half years past the attack of transverse myelitis that had taken from me so much of what I’d loved in my life. No more long walks, no more playing guitar, the endless pain and frustration and struggle with a body that, overnight, had been crippled from neck to toes. And from the beginning I had been astonished to find that whenever I started to dwell on those losses, the emotion that took precedence was – gratitude. How could this be? It certainly wasn’t through any effort of will on my part. But as I thought about all of those things that were lost to me, and as I came to realize that they were never coming back, that the damage in the spinal cord was permanent and that while I might find ways to accommodate my disabilities, my abilities would never be restored, I felt more than anything the soothing wonder that I had been able to have all of those experiences. And knowing that depression is one of the most common and devastating impacts of this disease, this disruption, I was grateful for the gratitude, thankful for whatever chemical imbalance in my brain pushes me toward joy and away from the dark.
What burst me into tears when I read the Lange quote was her understanding that she could use her life losses in the service of her art. That she would take to the stage and her performance would burn brighter and more true, her connection to the audience would be richer, her embrace of the play more honest. That her losses, her grief, would be, if not redeemed, and certainly not transformed, honored and enriched, that her life and her work would be enhanced, not by turning her attention away from loss, but by embracing it.
Grief is one of the ways we honor what we’ve lost. It’s one of the ways we cherish what we’ve had. It enables us, not to transcend the loss, but to use it to develop our understanding of ourselves, to enlarge our capacity for feeling. It’s a gift.
This is a gift. I got a lot out of this, Kieran, thank you, including being moved to reflect on several things. One is what it might say about me (and perhaps others, to live with some losses (mum and dad when young, bodily integrity as a child, and others) with the heavy emotional weight people tend to associated with life-changing losses that are more recent (the whole issue of emotional time and the emotional proximity of events is fascinating!) to us.
On the one hand, when looking at myself from ‘the outside’ (as I imagine others might see this aspect of me), I have struggled not to consider the emotional weight these losses still have for me to be a kind of personal failure, a sign that I may lack psychological characteristics society seems to value (adaptability, toughness, one kind of resilience).
On the other hand, when looked at from ‘the inside’ (as I would like to see the matter), there’s the fear and anxiety that to possess such psychological traits, to ‘get over’ such losses would suggest an insensitivity to suffering that, were it a response to the suffering of others and not my own, I would consider a profound moral failure.
It is as if with some kinds of grief there is both a before and after, you are changed, perhaps fundamentally, by a loss; and at the same time, the sense that the internal structure of emotional time (past, present, future) upon which this ‘before and after’ presumably depends, has collapsed.
It strikes me as I write this that such grief may suggest gratitude. You’ll no doubt know this already given your love of Murdoch and her debt to Weil, that Weil has a concept of “the void.” Very roughly, she says “catastrophe” (we can surely describe some losses as such) opens up a void within us that is necessary to receive “God”, a kind of perverse moral luck that might inspire gratitude. If this is the case, and perhaps it is, I do not exclude the possibility, it is a gratitude difficult for mere mortals like me to receive.
P.S. I need to read Dick Moran, his work sounds brilliant. Thanks for the reference. And I love the combo of words and images! Wonderful.
Don't apologize! I appreciate the personal resonance (though sorry to hear about your childhood), and the reference to Weil. The clash between how things look or feel from outside and inside, third person and first person, is one of Moran's central themes.
I would link the fading of grief to the fading of the self. We are all ships of Theseus, in our mental and emotional lives no less than in our material constitutions. On this view, there is no puzzle about why it can be appropriate for Quiop to experience grief today but not in ten years' time: Quiop_today and Quiop_ten_years_from_now are literally different people, and there is no question that grief can be an appropriate emotional response to a given fact for some people and not for others.*
This perspective would explain the partial asymmetry between grief and gratitude, since the range of facts about which it is appropriate to feel gratitude is wider, and more loosely connected to the self, than the range of facts about which it is appropriate to feel grief. (But I hesitate here: perhaps a simpler explanation for the asymmetry is just that grief is a much more powerful and debilitating emotion than gratitude. I can be grateful that people are making music that I will never hear, or that there are gorgeous beetles living in the rainforests of Borneo that I will never see, but if I feel genuine grief over the inevitable death of each and every one of those beetles, I'm going to have trouble getting on with my life.)
It also makes sense of why we often feel such a strong desire to cherish and preserve negative emotions — grief, depression, anger — just as much as positive ones. Preserving such emotions is literally a form of self-preservation, since the transition from one emotional state to another represents a partial loss of the current self (i.e. a partial death). The desire to continue in one's current emotional state thus seems to me neither more nor less rational the desire to continue living.
* (Is this too hasty? Perhaps there really is a deep puzzle here, about why the range of appropriate emotional responses to a given fact can differ for different persons.)
Interesting proposal! I don't think you literally become a different person over time, but the question of whether and why it's apt for different people to grieve so differently, and how that bears on the puzzle I was working through, are topics I haven't thought enough about. I wonder if the desire for self-preservation is too self-directed to capture the way in which we recoil from ceasing to grieve, which can seem more about what we owe the person we've lost than the part of ourselves we are losing?
Really interesting reflections! İ *think* what they point to is our deep need for temporal continuity amidst the flux of our lives, our inability to come to terms with discontinuity ("death being the point of all points"). On the other hand, İ wonder how much of that "need" is historically shaped. Perhaps other peoples/civilisations have seen the necessity of interruptions in another way. Zoloth here is fab:
Also, think grief (or some kinds of grief) is worse if 1. you think this is the only life and there's no chance of meeting the departed again or, 2. the grief is meaningless or pointless because there's no available larger framework in which it *could* make sense.
Grief, promises, regret, remorse...surely they point us to something beyond the transitory world (no matter how beautiful it often is)?
Grief and gratitude are linked.--at least in my mind. My wife of 55 years died one and a half years ago.
Every day I feel spasms of grief, by which I mean an acute sense of her absence, but every day I also feel gratitude that I was lucky enough to have such a wonderful wife for 55 years. Two poems suggest what a mix of grief and gratitude feels like: Wordsworth's "Surprised by Joy" and Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears." Grief and gratitude are forever. The notion of closure makes no sense to me.
Perhaps grief and gratitude are linked... perhaps from sorrow grows gratitude for time well spent, the negative emotion flourishing into the positive.
Interesting connection! Gratitude for someone's life, the fact that they exist(ed), is the flipside of grief at their ceasing to be. As grief fades, gratitude persists. But gratitude, like grief, can fade in ways that we anticipate with sadness. If we can't celebrate when the milk is filled, or the child is born, when can we celebrate? And why should we ever stop celebrating?
Sarah Broadie provided a fascinating if brief exploration of the value of celebration at the end of her book Ethics with Aristotle. Highly recommended.
Well, you can put it much more eloquently than I!
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.
Fascinating question, whether we can make secular sense of impersonal gratitude. It does seem that non-believers experience gratitude for things they don't take to be the work of any intentional agent. This came up in one of my podcast interviews, I think with Hanna Pickard, who was interested, more generally, in the emotional life of people brought up religious (or in a religious community) who don't believe in God.
İt's interesting that in England if someone asks how you are people usually say, "yeah, not bad." İn America İ think it's "I'm good." Here in the land of the pure it's invariably shukar alhumdulillah.
Not saying, obviously, that it's always (deeply) felt but it's really woven into daily discourse/practices (the way İ guess it was in America 100 years ago).
Anyway, Kieran, here's one of my favourites: 'Freedom is the ability to be thankful for God's Beneficence' (Rumi).
How nice! As an aside, I think sometimes one does grieve in advance. There's a Milosz poem, not finding at moment, about "tendresse," about this.
I do think it's possible, both for others and for oneself. The argument I explore at the end of the talk/paper is that it's not only possible but obligatory, which I don't believe. If you remember the poem, let me know!
On grief: the (American) phrase I've never really understood is "closure"- because what we surely want is the continued openness of the wound? No heart is as whole, a rabbi said, as a broken heart (İ suppose we're back to, paraphrasing her a bit, Iris M's 'life is a broken circle').
Not sure about "betrayal" or "the same intensity". Maybe that holds for some people. İs that what *you* feel?
Not a fan of "closure," either. I raise doubts about the narrative model of grief (e.g. the appeal of five stages) in the chapter on grief in LIFE IS HARD.
I was quite moved this and it reminded me of a story I’ve often told before. In 2016, as Jessica Lange was getting reading to perform A Long Day’s Journey into Night on Broadway, she was interviewed in the New Yorker. She’d played the role many years before and was very much looking forward to doing it again. She said, “I have so much more loss to work with.” I burst into tears on reading that and I choke up every time I tell the story. Even now, just typing it out, the tears come. The tears are gratitude.
When I read the interview I was three and a half years past the attack of transverse myelitis that had taken from me so much of what I’d loved in my life. No more long walks, no more playing guitar, the endless pain and frustration and struggle with a body that, overnight, had been crippled from neck to toes. And from the beginning I had been astonished to find that whenever I started to dwell on those losses, the emotion that took precedence was – gratitude. How could this be? It certainly wasn’t through any effort of will on my part. But as I thought about all of those things that were lost to me, and as I came to realize that they were never coming back, that the damage in the spinal cord was permanent and that while I might find ways to accommodate my disabilities, my abilities would never be restored, I felt more than anything the soothing wonder that I had been able to have all of those experiences. And knowing that depression is one of the most common and devastating impacts of this disease, this disruption, I was grateful for the gratitude, thankful for whatever chemical imbalance in my brain pushes me toward joy and away from the dark.
What burst me into tears when I read the Lange quote was her understanding that she could use her life losses in the service of her art. That she would take to the stage and her performance would burn brighter and more true, her connection to the audience would be richer, her embrace of the play more honest. That her losses, her grief, would be, if not redeemed, and certainly not transformed, honored and enriched, that her life and her work would be enhanced, not by turning her attention away from loss, but by embracing it.
Grief is one of the ways we honor what we’ve lost. It’s one of the ways we cherish what we’ve had. It enables us, not to transcend the loss, but to use it to develop our understanding of ourselves, to enlarge our capacity for feeling. It’s a gift.
Thank you for writing this.
This is a gift. I got a lot out of this, Kieran, thank you, including being moved to reflect on several things. One is what it might say about me (and perhaps others, to live with some losses (mum and dad when young, bodily integrity as a child, and others) with the heavy emotional weight people tend to associated with life-changing losses that are more recent (the whole issue of emotional time and the emotional proximity of events is fascinating!) to us.
On the one hand, when looking at myself from ‘the outside’ (as I imagine others might see this aspect of me), I have struggled not to consider the emotional weight these losses still have for me to be a kind of personal failure, a sign that I may lack psychological characteristics society seems to value (adaptability, toughness, one kind of resilience).
On the other hand, when looked at from ‘the inside’ (as I would like to see the matter), there’s the fear and anxiety that to possess such psychological traits, to ‘get over’ such losses would suggest an insensitivity to suffering that, were it a response to the suffering of others and not my own, I would consider a profound moral failure.
It is as if with some kinds of grief there is both a before and after, you are changed, perhaps fundamentally, by a loss; and at the same time, the sense that the internal structure of emotional time (past, present, future) upon which this ‘before and after’ presumably depends, has collapsed.
It strikes me as I write this that such grief may suggest gratitude. You’ll no doubt know this already given your love of Murdoch and her debt to Weil, that Weil has a concept of “the void.” Very roughly, she says “catastrophe” (we can surely describe some losses as such) opens up a void within us that is necessary to receive “God”, a kind of perverse moral luck that might inspire gratitude. If this is the case, and perhaps it is, I do not exclude the possibility, it is a gratitude difficult for mere mortals like me to receive.
P.S. I need to read Dick Moran, his work sounds brilliant. Thanks for the reference. And I love the combo of words and images! Wonderful.
And please, Kieran and all, excuse the intense focus on my own experience.
Don't apologize! I appreciate the personal resonance (though sorry to hear about your childhood), and the reference to Weil. The clash between how things look or feel from outside and inside, third person and first person, is one of Moran's central themes.
These sketches are gorgeous!
I would link the fading of grief to the fading of the self. We are all ships of Theseus, in our mental and emotional lives no less than in our material constitutions. On this view, there is no puzzle about why it can be appropriate for Quiop to experience grief today but not in ten years' time: Quiop_today and Quiop_ten_years_from_now are literally different people, and there is no question that grief can be an appropriate emotional response to a given fact for some people and not for others.*
This perspective would explain the partial asymmetry between grief and gratitude, since the range of facts about which it is appropriate to feel gratitude is wider, and more loosely connected to the self, than the range of facts about which it is appropriate to feel grief. (But I hesitate here: perhaps a simpler explanation for the asymmetry is just that grief is a much more powerful and debilitating emotion than gratitude. I can be grateful that people are making music that I will never hear, or that there are gorgeous beetles living in the rainforests of Borneo that I will never see, but if I feel genuine grief over the inevitable death of each and every one of those beetles, I'm going to have trouble getting on with my life.)
It also makes sense of why we often feel such a strong desire to cherish and preserve negative emotions — grief, depression, anger — just as much as positive ones. Preserving such emotions is literally a form of self-preservation, since the transition from one emotional state to another represents a partial loss of the current self (i.e. a partial death). The desire to continue in one's current emotional state thus seems to me neither more nor less rational the desire to continue living.
* (Is this too hasty? Perhaps there really is a deep puzzle here, about why the range of appropriate emotional responses to a given fact can differ for different persons.)
Interesting proposal! I don't think you literally become a different person over time, but the question of whether and why it's apt for different people to grieve so differently, and how that bears on the puzzle I was working through, are topics I haven't thought enough about. I wonder if the desire for self-preservation is too self-directed to capture the way in which we recoil from ceasing to grieve, which can seem more about what we owe the person we've lost than the part of ourselves we are losing?
Really interesting reflections! İ *think* what they point to is our deep need for temporal continuity amidst the flux of our lives, our inability to come to terms with discontinuity ("death being the point of all points"). On the other hand, İ wonder how much of that "need" is historically shaped. Perhaps other peoples/civilisations have seen the necessity of interruptions in another way. Zoloth here is fab:
https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/84/1/3/2572471
Also, think grief (or some kinds of grief) is worse if 1. you think this is the only life and there's no chance of meeting the departed again or, 2. the grief is meaningless or pointless because there's no available larger framework in which it *could* make sense.
Grief, promises, regret, remorse...surely they point us to something beyond the transitory world (no matter how beautiful it often is)?
Grief and gratitude are linked.--at least in my mind. My wife of 55 years died one and a half years ago.
Every day I feel spasms of grief, by which I mean an acute sense of her absence, but every day I also feel gratitude that I was lucky enough to have such a wonderful wife for 55 years. Two poems suggest what a mix of grief and gratitude feels like: Wordsworth's "Surprised by Joy" and Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears." Grief and gratitude are forever. The notion of closure makes no sense to me.
Thanks for sharing this, and for the poems. I am fond of "We Are Seven," another Wordsworth poem about loss:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52298/we-are-seven