Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-x5gtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-09T18:08:05.038Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Grieving Our Way Back to Meaningfulness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2021

Michael Cholbi
Michael Cholbi*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
*
mcholbi@ed.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The deaths of those on whom our practical identities rely generate a sense of disorientation or alienation from the world seemingly at odds with life being meaningful. In the terms put forth in Cheshire Calhoun's recent account of meaningfulness in life, because their existence serves as a metaphysical presupposition of our practical identities, their deaths threaten to upend a background frame of agency against which much of our choice and deliberation takes place. Here I argue for a dual role for grief in addressing this threat to life's meaningfulness. Inasmuch as grief's object is the loss of our relationship with the deceased as it was prior to their death, grief serves to alert us to the threat to our practical identities that their deaths pose to us and motivates us to defuse this threat by revising our practical identities to reflect the modification in our relationship necessitated by their deaths. Simultaneously, the emotional complexity and richness of grief episodes provides an abundance of normative evidence regarding our relationship with the deceased and our practical identities, evidence that can enable us to re-establish our practical identities and thereby recover a sense of our lives as meaningful.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 90: Death and Meaning , October 2021 , pp. 235 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bonnano, George, The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss (New York: Basic Books, 2009).Google Scholar
Brady, Michael, Emotional Insight: The Epistemic Role of Emotional Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Calhoun, Cheshire, Doing Valuable Time: The Present, the Future, and Meaningful Living (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Camus, Albert, The Stranger, translated by Gilbert, S. (New York: Vintage, 1946).Google Scholar
Carroll, David, Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955).Google Scholar
Cholbi, Michael, ‘Finding the good in grief: What Augustine knew but Meursault could not’, Journal of the American Philosophical Association 3 (2017), 91–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cholbi, Michael, ‘Regret, resilience, and the nature of grief’, Journal of Moral Philosophy 16 (2019), 486–508.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cholbi, Michael, Grief: A Philosophical Guide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).Google Scholar
Cholbi, Michael, ‘The rationality of suicide and the meaningfulness of life’, in Landau, I., ed., Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life (Oxford University Press, 2021).Google Scholar
Klass, D., Silverman, P.R. and Nickman, S. (eds.), Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1996).Google Scholar
Konigsberg, Ruth Davis, The Truth About Grief: The Myth of Its Five Stages and the New Science of Loss (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011).Google Scholar
Korsgaard, Christine, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kübler-Ross, Elizabeth, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan Co., 1969).Google Scholar
Maciejewski, Paul K., Zhang, Baohui, Block, Susan D., and Prigerson, Holly G., ‘An empirical examination of the stage theory of grief’, Journal of the American Medical Association 297 (2007), 716–23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ratcliffe, Matthew, ‘The phenomenological clarification of grief and its relevance for psychiatry’, in Stangheillni, G., Broome, M., Raballo, A., Fernandez, A.V., Fusar-Poli, P., and Rosfort, R., eds, Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) 538–51.Google Scholar
Shuchter, S.R. and Zisook, S., ‘The course of normal grief’, in Stroebe, M., Stroebe, W., and Hansson, R., eds., Handbook of Bereavement: Theory, Practice, and Intervention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
Wolf, Susan, The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar