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- [00:02]
A
This is Philosophy Bites with me, David.
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B
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
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A
Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybytes.com. anyone who's lost a spouse, a parent or a close friend will know the feeling that initial sense of intense grief tends to drop off over a period of months and years to something less overwhelming. Returning to Philosophy Bites, Samuel Scheffler, author most recently of One Life to Lead, says, there's something puzzling about this.
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B
Samuel Scheffler, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
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C
Thank you. I'm delighted to be here.
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B
The topic we're going to talk about is grief and time. Before we get on to the connection with time, could you just say what you understand by grief?
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C
Well, grief is a more complex notion than we sometimes take it to be. It's people. People often think of grief as a feeling of some kind, and it certainly has affective quality. But grief is actually quite complicated syndrome of feelings, dispositions to think in certain ways, to act in certain ways, characteristic patterns of thought, feeling and affect that typically occur in response to a personal loss.
- [01:15]
B
What's that got to do with time?
- [01:18]
C
Well, like many of our feelings and attitudes, grief seems to be affected by the passage of time in ways that sometimes can seem puzzling or even troubling, both puzzling to us as philosophers and sometimes troubling to people who are experiencing grief. One way to approach the question is to think about how various other feelings and emotions are affected by the passage of time. Not all of our feelings and emotions seem to be affected the same way. So. So, for example, if you think of something like gratitude, if you saved my life several years ago, I may reasonably remain grateful to you forever, and there's no reason why I should ever stop feeling grateful to you. A different kind of case. Suppose I'm terrified because a maniac is on the loose. I've just heard, and it seems I have reason to be terrified. But then I hear that the maniac has been captured by the police. There's no longer any danger. No. Now it seems I no longer have reason to be terrified. If I continue to be terrified, something seems to have gone amiss. So that's a case where I had a reason for the attitude. The reason's gone, so it seems like I should no longer feel the same thing, or if I do, there's something questionable or inappropriate about it. Now, another different kind of case. Suppose you point out to me someone call him Elmer, who seems to be extremely happy, and I suppose, what's going on? They said, well, he's quite elated about the birth of his daughter. I then make the assumption that his daughter was just born within the last couple of days. And he said, no, no, she was born 20 years ago. And at that point you might think, well, that's very odd. He's elated about the birth of his daughter, which took place 20 years ago. Even though we can assume that Elmer loves his daughter very much, we think that it's something weird or inappropriate about his still being elated 20 years later. And notice that in this case it's not, as in the case of the maniac on the loose, as if the reason for the original attitude is gone. There's nothing analogous to the maniac having been captured. His daughter was born, she's still alive. Let's assume so. It's not like that reason disappeared. All that's happened is time has passed. And it seems as if, well, why should the passage of time by itself alter his attitude if the reason for the attitude hasn't disappeared with the passage of time? Or has the passage of time affected the reason? Now, that's a philosophical question, not likely to trouble most people. But now to come back to your original question about grief. Suppose someone experience a terrible personal loss and they feel grief. Often when people do feel grief, it feels, like, unbearable and it's never going to end. But in fact, most of the time it does end. People seem remarkably resilient, and after the passage of a certain amount of time, they cease to feel the intense grief that they initially did, and they're able to get on with their lives again. Though, as in the case of Elmer, you might say, well, wait a minute, the person died. Nothing's changed on that score. And if that was a reason for the person to feel grief in the first place, what has changed other than the passage of time now, in this case, by distinction, the case of Aylmer. It's not just a philosopher's question. It seems people who undergo grief often are themselves troubled by this. They feel, why am I not feeling this anymore? Sometimes they feel it's disloyal to cease grieving. Or they wonder if they're not experiencing grief anymore. Are they somehow failing to register appropriately the value of the person they cared about or the magnitude of their loss? So the puzzle is, on the one hand, it seems appropriate that grief should stop. If somebody doesn't stop grieving after decades, we think something maybe has gone wrong. They should move on, they should get on with their lives. But if they do get on with their lives and move on, often people feel troubled by that, why am I able to get on with my life? Why have I moved on?
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B
Might the clue partly be in the intensity of the emotion? You were talking about somebody who feels elated at the birth of their daughter, and that's a very intense emotion. I was elated at the birth of my daughter 30 years ago. I'm still very pleased that she was born, but I'm not elated. At the same level, I feel grief for my grandparents deaths and my parents deaths, but not intense grief now, but at the time I did. It's not that I don't feel grief and I don't feel a positive emotion about my daughter. It's just. It's not so intense.
- [05:56]
C
It's a natural thought and a good question. I don't think it solves the problem, though. It's true that the intensity of most emotions perhaps all diminishes over time. But even if we focus on the affective components of grief that are less intense, or the affective components of other attitudes, I mean, if you were smiling and as you walk down the corridor and someone said to you, you seem to be in a good mood, what are you in such a good mood about? You say, well, my daughter was born. When was that? And you said, 20 years ago. Well, that's a little odd. I mean, it's more than just that. It would be odd if you felt the intense elation. It's that it seems odd that you feel the kind of affect that would dominate your mood at any particular moment once enough time has passed. Of course, on reflection, you would say you're very pleased that your daughter's around and all of that. But it does seem that even components of the emotions of it. And ditto for grief. And here it's relevant that we talked about grief as a syndrome of feelings and attitudes, not just the intense experience. You know, I've had very dear friends who've died some years ago. And yes, when I think about them, I miss them, but I don't think about them nearly as often. And when I do, it's tinged with a bit of sadness or a bit of fondness, but it doesn't seem to have the same character of affective dominance even. Even at a moment that it did, certainly in the immediate aftermath of the event.
- [07:29]
B
I suppose the obvious counter example is the loss of a child. That often is something which people feel every day of their lives. But in those sorts of other cases you're describing the decay of grief over time, couldn't that be a reflection of just the appropriateness of the death. In a sense, if somebody dies in their 90s, you might feel grief and then sort of, well, it wasn't such an unexpected thing that they died in their 90s. It wouldn't be appropriate to devote my whole life to mourning that somebody died in their 90s.
- [08:00]
C
Well, you're touching on a very important point. Not all grief is the same and not all manifestations of grief are the same. And obviously the character of a particular person's grief about a particular loss will be affected by lots of things. The nature of the relationship between the two people, the age of the two people, the circumstances of the death, and so on. As you rightly said, the loss of a child is often thought to be distinctively, maybe even uniquely devastating and something that we expect to have longer lasting effects, certainly than the death of an aged person who's lived a full life and was in decline for some period of time. And there is a danger when philosophers talk about grief. If you read the philosophical literature on grief, they're usually talking about a spouse or a parent. But there are many different gradations along several different dimensions that affect it. But what I'm interested in is the fact that even across a number of those different manifestations of grief, there seems to be an effect of the passage of time. So whatever the original character of the grief was, it seems to decay over time. In the case of the aged parent, one might feel it less intensely at the moment or in a different way than the loss certainly of a child or spouse. But still, over time, there seem in most cases to be changes. And these are not sort of philosophical theses that have to be sort of universally true. These can be general tendencies of human psychology. We seem more resilient in the face of loss than you might think we are, or than it feels to us as if we're going to be when we're in the throes of grief.
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B
This isn't just a psychological point though, is it? Grief decays over time. You don't think it's going to, but at some level there's a feeling that we ought to still feel grief because the loss is still the loss.
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C
That is exactly the puzzle. The loss is still the loss. If it was someone very close to you, and typically in the case of grief, it is someone who was close to you, the loss is still a loss, exactly as you say. And so on the one hand we feel it's appropriate for grief to decay. On the other hand, it seems as if. And people feeling grief often feel this. I should still feel grief. Have I just forgotten about my dear friend? This can strike people as somehow a mistake. Like, why am I not paying more attention, as this person was so important to me, and now every few months I spare them a passing thought. I mean, that just doesn't quite seem commensurate with the value of the person and with the gravity of the loss that I experienced. But how can these things both be true? That it's appropriate to stop experiencing grief after a certain amount of time and that it's in inappropriate or at any rate that one should be experiencing something in response to the loss despite the passage of time.
- [10:55]
B
So, as a philosopher, do you have a way out of this?
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C
Well, there are a number of different ways that philosophers have proposed. I'm not sure that any of them is fully satisfactory, but let me just mention a few because they're likely to occur to people. So one thought is a kind of skeptical thought, that all this talk about reasons is really out of place or appropriate. So the idea that these emotions and feelings and attitudes are governed by normative standards, on the skeptical view, look, grief is just a typical reaction to loss, but it's to be understood in causal terms. That's the way human beings react to a loss. And typically they get over it. And that's the norm. If somebody didn't feel grief in response to a loss or didn't get over it once they did feel it, they would be atypical, and it might be worse for them in various ways, but it wouldn't be inappropriate. We wouldn't be saying they had reason to grieve and they didn't, or they had reason to stop grieving and they didn't. All we would appropriately be warranted in concluding is that they were atypical. They're not like most of us, end of story.
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B
The way you describe that, it sounds like you don't accept that account of the cluster of feelings and attitudes that is grief.
- [12:19]
C
Well, one difficulty with the account is that it doesn't seem to correspond very well to what people who are actually experiencing grief feel like on the view I just described, for example, feeling bad about the fact that you no longer were experiencing grief would be a very odd thing. It would be sort of like feeling bad that a fever had gone away. The fever came on, the fever left. That's it, you know, I mean, in fact, if anything, be glad because it wasn't pleasant, presumably experiencing the grief. But that's not how people feel about it. They feel, first of all, that they had reason to Grieve. And often they feel if someone doesn't in response to a loss, they think there's something odd about that may be inappropriate, or there's more to the story, or we don't quite believe that they're not experiencing grief. Maybe they're suppressing the reaction or something. We find it very hard to believe that people aren't. We think they do have reason to. And when we ourselves grieve, we know exactly why we're grieving. We have reason to grieve, and we feel that when we stop grieving, it troubles us because we think there's some reason to continue grieving. So I think that that skeptical diagnosis has the burden of trying to explain why the gap between what it holds and what people themselves often feel.
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B
Isn't it true that in that sort of case, too rehearsing the reasons actually often intensifies the grief?
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C
Yes, that's right. Many of the attitudes that are constitutive of grief seem sensitive to reasons. You can tell people things that will make the grief worse or make it better. You know, people often ask, then there's a sudden death in an accident or through violence, did he suffer? And if the answer is yes, he suffered, they feel more grief. And if the answer is no, it was instantaneous. He never felt a thing that's meant to reassure the person and often does reassure the person. And that suggests that we're not dealing with just a causal phenomenon, but something that's reason sensitive.
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B
Are there other ways of explaining this phenomenon?
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C
Yes. Another account is the initial grief that one experiences is in part a response to a drastic change in one's life. The death of someone who played an important role in one's life. As time passes, though, your circumstances change. Maybe depending on the kind of relationship it was, some other person comes to fill an analogous role. Or maybe the role no longer looms as large in one's life as it did at the death of an aged parent. Say that one's parent is no longer playing as central a role in your life. And so the circumstances surrounding your memories of the person are altered. And so of course, your attitudes change. It's a response to these kind of circumstantial changes. That's one account. Another account is to say people have standing reasons in leading their lives to. To respond to the world around them, to try to live their lives in accordance with their values, desires and plans, and so on. The death of a dearly beloved person, it results in a kind of wrenching dislocation where suddenly you're forced out of your normal mindset. You suspend your normal sensitivity to the other reasons that you have. And focus on the person and on the loss. And that's rationally intelligible, emotionally intelligible, evaluatively appropriate. But what's appropriate is to suspend one's normal responsiveness to one's reasons temporarily. It's not a reason to stop living altogether. So eventually it's appropriate for the reasons to go on leading one's life to reassert themselves. And that's not just a causal phenomenon. It's because the reasons to grieve are themselves. Time limited from the outset. And so that's a different kind of explanation.
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B
Both of those seem to have something going for them. They do seem to be accurate characterizations of what I've seen.
- [16:25]
C
I think they do. And yet sometimes people continue to be troubled. And I think that one of the reasons why nagging doubts often persist for many people in the face of what seem like sensible enough things to say by way of explaining the decay of grief, is to return to the case of Elmer, the man who was elated about the birth of his daughter 20 years later. One thing about Elmer is that you might say, just as you did initially, that, well, elation is a very intense attitude. And we expect that over time it will fade. But we expect that it will fade and be replaced by other attitudes, less intense forms of happiness, a sort of deeper appreciation of the person that Elmer's daughter turns out to be a deeper satisfaction, and so on. So in that case, it's not just that the later forms of happiness register the changing circumstances of Elmer's life. As his daughter matures and becomes integrated into his family. And it's also that those later attitudes, or successor attitudes, as I sometimes call them, those successor attitudes also register the value of the daughter and the value of her birth in the way that the initial elation did. So even though the emotional tone of the attitude has changed, they continue to be responsive to the value of his daughter. Now, in the case of grief, the problem is often to people undergoing grief and then feeling it beginning to fade. It's not clear what the successor attitude is, so to speak, that continues to register the value of the person. Aylmer could feel deep satisfaction indefinitely about his daughter's life. But in the case of grief, people, I think, often struggle once the intense phases of grief have passed. They struggle to identify within themselves attitudes that they continue to have. That are doing comparable justice to the value and importance of the person they lost. And to the magnitude of the lost. Often, as I said, they just resume their lives and sparing an occasional thought for the person. And that seems not to be an adequate continuing response. So I think part of the residual dissatisfaction people sometimes feel about those otherwise sensible responses has to do with the difficulty of identifying suitable successor attitudes in the case of grief.
- [19:01]
B
My question then is, do we just stick with the puzzle or is there a way out?
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C
Well, I'm going to take the easy philosopher's solution and say this. I don't have a solution to the problem of grief. I'm subject to all of these attitudes that I've been describing. Like everyone else. What I'm interested in is in trying to come to a clearer understanding of the different ways in which different our emotions and attitudes are affected by the passage of time. The different, as I sometimes say, diachronic profiles of different emotions, feelings and attitudes. I think this is a rich area of investigation, and I think it's interesting in its own right. I also think it tells us something about what it is to lead a human life that is sometimes neglected. That is part of what it is to lead a human life is to navigate one's way through time, and that has many different dimensions. We pass through different stages of life. There are many different puzzles about time that we face in our own lives. But it also suggests that leading a life is in part an affective phenomenon. To lead one's life is in part to be subject to certain kinds of changes in one's emotions and attitudes over time in ways that we all sort of intuitively grasp, but whose appropriateness is sometimes elusive or puzzling. And I see the interest of the puzzle of grief, aside from its intrinsic human interest, as being partly as a way into that wider set of questions about the role of emotions and temporality in the leading of human life.
- [20:42]
B
Sam Scheffler, thank you very much.
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C
Thanks so much.
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A
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