Commentary


Grief’s Badness and the Paradox of Grief


Travis Timmerman

Seton Hall University, New Jersey, USA


Travis Timmerman. 2022. “Grief’s Badness and the Paradox of Grief.” 

Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 4, no. 1: 18-26. https://doi.org/10.33497/2022.summer.4.

Abstract: In this paper, I focus on the points of disagreement between Cholbi and myself about the nature of grief. More precisely, I am first going to provide reasons to reject Cholbi’s positive account of grief, specifically the condition that grief necessarily brings about a change in our practical identity. Then I am going to discuss the so-called Paradox of Grief, raising a few concerns I have about Cholbi’s solution and suggesting there is more to be said in favour of an existing solution (i.e., Pain as a Cost) he dismissed. My main goal is to raise these issues for discussion, rather than to prove my favoured view is true. I’m not quite sure what the correct account of grief is, though I am sure that Cholbi gets at least much of it right.


Keywords: paradox of grief, grief, practical identity, self-knowledge, intrinsic badness



Michael Cholbi’s Grief: A Philosophical Guide manages to be maximally clear without sacrificing any argumentative rigour. It covers much new ground in an area of philosophy that is (surprisingly) underexplored and, in doing so, significantly advances our collective philosophical understanding of grief. More precisely, the book (in my view) convincingly rules out existing accounts of grief, demonstrates that grief is not a narrative nor is it experienced as a narrative, shows that grief is an emotional process and not an emotion, that grief is something we do rather than something that happens to us, that it is egocentric, that the forward and backwards looking dimension of grief are really one activity, that one good typically seen in grief is the self-knowledge it produces, and that grief’s rationality is backward looking. Since grief is an emotional process almost universally experienced by humans, and some non-human animals,[1] these advancements in our understanding of the nature of grief proves important not only for those in the field, but for everyone who can read and understand the book. 


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Cholbi begins by convincingly ruling out the most salient and popular accounts of grief by way of counterexamples. Grief cannot require “that the bereaved must have a form of intimacy with the deceased,” since people grieve the deaths of public figures they don’t know, parents one never met, and so on (Cholbi 2022, 23-29).[2] Nor can love be “the relationship needed to ground grief,” since, it is supposed, people don’t literally love the public figures they grieve (26-28). More surprisingly, enemies have even apparently grieved the loss of one another. Castro was said to have grieved John F. Kennedy after he died. Grief cannot be restricted to those whom we’re attached for similar reasons (26). After ruling out these alternatives, Cholbi proceeds to give his positive view. 


The central feature of Cholbi’s positive account is that (fitting) grief is a response to one’s death disrupting our practical identities. As he puts it, the “deaths of those in whom our practical identities are invested” represents a kind of relationship crisis for us (57). Their deaths entail that they cannot play the same role in our lives which we presumed they would (ch 2, §10). 


This is not just a description of what grief is, but part of the criteria of what makes grief fitting. Cholbi writes that “our practical identities are, in a diversity of ways, invested in the existence of others. We grieve a person’s death—and it is appropriate that we grieve a person’s death—to the extent that our practical identities are invested in their existence. The more central another person is to our practical identity, the greater cause we have for grieving them upon their deaths” (31). 


There is an upshot to this grief too. As Cholbi puts it, grief is uniquely positioned to give us a kind of self-knowledge, a knowledge of “who we have been and who we seek to be” (85). This kind of self-knowledge is the “purpose” of grief and it’s what makes grief prudentially valuable. 


I find this positive account of grief intriguing and believe there is much that can be said in its favour. Cholbi, in fact, makes about as convincing a case as possible for it. Nevertheless, I want to push back on it in the same way he pushed back on the competing accounts of grief, by way of counterexample. While I am convinced that the “disruption of our practical identities” is an important part of typical and paradigmatic instances of grief, as I will argue below, it’s not a necessary condition of appropriate grieving. 


PURPORTED COUNTEREXAMPLES 


Appropriately Grieving a Death that Did Not Change One’s Practical Identity


Cholbi mentioned that the lamentations people sometimes feel when a public figure has died are indeed instances of grief, and fitting instances of grief too. That strikes me as plausible, but the problem is not all of these seeming instances of grief produced any obvious change in one’s practical identity. Sometimes a public figure has enormously influenced a culture, shaped countless people’s public identities, and then retired from their work and receded from the public eye long before they die. Legendary film actor Kirk Douglas died on February 5th 2020 at the age of 103, having not acted in a film or television production in over a decade. He blogged occasionally for the Huffington Post, but had stopped doing that a few years before he died as well. His recession from the public life may have changed his fans’ practical identities, but his death didn’t bring about an obvious change in anyone’s practical identity, except for those near and dear to him.[3] His fans’ practical identities seemingly remained intact (or largely intact), and there is no evidence of any of his grieving fans acquiring self-knowledge of who they have been and who they seek to be. Nevertheless, from his fans, there was an outpouring of love, support, and what seems to me to be fitting grief for Douglas when he died. If I am right, then grief’s formal object needn’t only be deaths that bring about a change in our practical identities. It might 


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also (or instead) be the deaths of people who have, while alive, brought a change in our practical identities. Perhaps the latter is a sufficient, but not necessary, condition for appropriate grief. 


The Kirk Douglas example is supposed to be an instance of a death that warrants grief, but does not result in a disruption of one’s practical identity. It also seems to me that there can be cases that result in a radical disruption of one’s practical identity, but do not warrant grief. In Cholbi’s words:


[W]hat unites all those for whom we grieve is what I call practical identity investment. Each of us embraces some set of commitments, values, and concerns. This set guides most all our choices and actions. It includes those things that matter to us in more than a momentary or fleeting way. In this respect, these commitments, values, and concerns help to give shape and direction to our lives; we invoke them to explain why we make pivotal life choices, to give an accounting of ourselves when others misunderstand or question what we do, and to give our lives a measure of integrity. (30) 


Death that Brings About a Change in One’s Practical Identity, but Doesn’t Warrant Grief


As Cholbi astutely observes, others “play a role in our practical identities by being objects of love, by sharing values or goals with us, and by caring for us . . . Thus, our practical identities are, in a diversity of ways, invested in the existence of others. We grieve a person’s death—and it is appropriate that we grieve a person’s death—to the extent that our practical identities are invested in their existence” (31). This seems right to me in most, but not all, cases. The cases that are exceptions to this rule are as follows. Sometimes the death that brings about a disruption in one’s practical identity makes that person realize that the values that comprised their practical identity were wrong. Having this dawn on someone could instantaneously instill some new values in the person, some values that could make them only happy their practical identity changed. Such a change doesn’t seem to warrant egocentric grief. To illustrate, consider a specific example. 


Last year, someone wrote into an advice column in Slate with a case that fit this bill. Her family was critical of her for not grieving her abusive husband’s death. In her words, he “was a miserable, vindictive man whose greatest joy was tearing me down. He cheated on me constantly and would cheerfully recount all my inadequacies compared with his mistresses. If I left, he would ‘pursue me to the ends of the earth.”[4] Once he died, she felt free, and embraced being single and autonomous for the rest of her life. 


Now, from the column, it’s not clear the extent to which her fifteen year marriage to this man shaped her practical identity, but it seems reasonable to assume it had an enormous impact on her practical identity. Even if it didn’t in actuality, let’s imagine that it did for the purposes of the thought experiment. 


Now, here’s the problem. According to Cholbi, people in fact grieve a person’s death when it changes their practical identity and it is only fitting to do so under this condition. However, the case at hand seems, to me, to be a counterexample to both claims. This woman did not grieve the death of her husband, and for the reasons given, it seems perfectly appropriate for her to have not grieved his death. While his death disrupted her practical identity, it (we may suppose) resulted in an improved practical identity, one that was not only objectively better, but one she immediately endorsed. As such, not grieving her husband’s death seems perfectly appropriate; and grieving his death, given these stipulations, actually seems inappropriate. 


If this is right, then grief is not simply appropriate insofar as our practical identities are invested in the existence of the person who dies. Sometimes our practical identities are deeply invested in people they shouldn’t be. We don’t fully appreciate that until they die, and we (if we’re lucky) acquire a new practical identity and are only happy with the change. In such cases it seems appropriate not to grieve, and even inappropriate to grieve.


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It’s worth noting that this example bears certain similarities to the example of Castro grieving the death of John F. Kennedy. I admit that I find it a bit surprising, even odd, that Castro grieved the death of Kennedy. I accept that he did, though and I even accept that it may have been appropriate for Castro to grieve Kennedy’s death. Nevertheless, it’s important to recognize that our intuitions about that case are almost certainly influenced by the fact that people in the United States generally don’t believe that Kennedy deserved to die. For all his faults, he is regarded as an overall decent person and a generally good (even great) president. Castro, on the other hand, is rightly regarded as a dictator responsible for the deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocent Cubans. Whether or not this is a completely accurate picture, Castro is seen as a bad person grieving the death of a good enemy and that may be a necessary condition for grief to be appropriate between enemies. 


The Slate case I provided is the reverse of the Castro-Kennedy case. It’s likely to be seen as a good person not grieving the death of a bad enemy. If this is right, then judgments about whether the person who died deserved to die (or whose death made the world better or worse) is likely influencing our judgments about grief. Not only that, but it’s plausible that the moral character of the grievers is also playing a role in our judgments about the appropriateness of grief. However, these considerations play no role in Cholbi’s positive account of grief. Perhaps grief should be understood as requiring some perceived negative (or, at least, not solely positive) change in one’s practical identity, where the change is (or ought to be) seen as negative in some sense by the person in question. Furthermore, I am not sure whether grief is fitting between two enemies when the deceased enemy either deserved to die or made the world a better place by dying. It does seem at least prima facie odd to say that one can appropriately grieve their enemy if their enemy was a moral monster. It wouldn’t seem appropriate for, say, one of Pinochet’s victims to have grieved his death, even though Pinochet’s actions played an enormous role in shaping their practical identity. With this in mind, I will now turn to the so-called Paradox of Grief. 


THE PARADOX OF GRIEF 


The Paradox of Grief consists of the following two claims: 

 

(i) Grief feels bad, and so should be avoided or lamented. 


(ii) Grief is valuable such that we (and others) ought not avoid it altogether and should be grateful that we grieve (70).[5]


This is supposed to seem paradoxical because each claim supposedly seems true and yet, they appear to be in tension, if not strictly inconsistent. Cholbi succinctly sums the paradox up, writing that, “grief feels bad for the bereaved but could nevertheless be beneficial to her” (71). I am first going to review Cholbi’s proposed solution to the paradox, then explain why I don’t find it satisfactory. After that, I will review an existing solution Cholbi rejected, and argue that there is more to be said in favour of this solution than Cholbi allows. 


Cholbi’s Proposed Solution to the Paradox of Grief 


In a nutshell, Cholbi argues that (i) is false. While grief certainly feels bad for the person grieving, Cholbi argues that it is, in fact, not bad for the person in the context of grief, and should not actually be avoided or lamented (122). Cholbi grants that, in another context, the exact same feeling would be bad. But, in the context of grief, Cholbi argues that the “pains of grief do not present themselves as pure costs to the bereaved,” and are seen as “desirable in their own right,” as the grieving are invested in the whole experience, and not merely the good it produces (114-116). In Cholbi’s words, 


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Investment in some good involves seeing the means to that good not just as costs to be borne, bads which one willingly suffers in the hope of attaining the good one seeks. The means are instead viewed as good because of the integral causal relationship they stand in to substantial self-knowledge. Grief’s pains thus come to be desired because they represent an investment in the goodness of grief.” (114) 


The reason for this rational investment, Cholbi argues, is a certain kind of self-knowledge. This is supposed to explain condition (ii). That self-knowledge will be the culmination of the backward and forward-looking dimension of grief. Once the grieving process begins, there will, according to Cholbi, be a gap between knowing that the person is dead and fully emotionally engaging with this fact (77). The backward-looking dimension of grief aims to, in Cholbi’s words, “bridge this gap, from the fact that the person is dead to an appreciation of who is dead and why their deaths matter to us” (78). This is “a gap that opens up largely thanks to the all-too-human tendency to ignore our reliance on others in our practical identities” and because “death transforms our relationship with the deceased, grief makes it no longer possible to take those relationships for granted” (78). Their death forces us to grapple with them head-on. 


The forward-looking dimension of grief is supposed to serve a similar, yet distinct, purpose. Specifically, Cholbi argues that it aims to “identify how, if at all, our relationship with the deceased will continue in light of the change in background realities that their death has wrought” (81). In typical cases of grief, the culmination of the backward and forward-looking dimensions allows us to “emerge from grief with a rejuvenated practical identity and a more stable sense of self” as a result of the “richer knowledge of who we have been and who we seek to be,” which we gained from our grief. Now that I have explained Cholbi’s proposed solution to the paradox, I want to raise a few concerns about it. 


Pain is Always Intrinsically Bad 


First, I have a hard time understanding how the indescribable agony of grief is not supposed to be intrinsically bad, even in the larger context of grief. I can certainly understand how it’s supposed to be extrinsically good and all-things-considered good for the reasons Cholbi gave; and I can see why, for these reasons, it would be imprudent to artificially mitigate one’s grief. I can also understand various moral reasons why one might want to suffer grief. Such feelings of grief may be morally good, even if they’re prudentially bad. But I see no reason to think that the agony of grief itself isn’t intrinsically bad.[6] 


To motivate the idea it isn’t, Cholbi offers an analogue case, citing the “intense sensations of fatigue, shortness of breath [and] muscle aches” that come with long distance running. In other contexts, these painful experiences may seem bad, but, claims Cholbi, they’re not bad in the context of running (119). I am not convinced, however. As with the grief example, I can see how these intense sensations are extrinsically good insofar as they contribute to the overall pleasurableness of the experience. But I don’t see how they could be intrinsically good if they are indeed painful, as is being assumed. It seems to me that, ceteris paribus, you really should want to feel less pain when you run. Likewise, ceteris paribus, you really should want to grieve less. For instance, someone who has grieved for months and months over a friend’s death, and will gain the same self-knowledge to the same degree whether her grief subsides today or tomorrow, should (prudentially, at least) prefer that it subsides today. 


Should You Take the Grief Eradicating Pill? 


Before I discuss my more substantive concern, it’s worth noting that Cholbi motivated (ii) above by appealing to a thought experiment. If you had a pill that would “wipe out” the “grief of a bereaved friend,” it would supposedly seem wrong to offer it to the friend in question (69). Again, the reason why, Cholbi suggests, is that


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grief is valuable for the bereaved. It’s in their prudential interest to grieve in typical cases and so, the thought goes, it would be wrong to offer to take that away from them. 


I am not sure I share the judgment that you shouldn’t offer them the pill, though I feel the intuitive pull of the claim that they shouldn’t take the pill. This judgment is, I suspect, widely shared and strongly held. What is interesting though, is that Cholbi’s positive account of grief cannot account for this judgment in a wide variety of cases. More directly, it seemingly entails that grief should often be avoided, perhaps more so than he would like to admit. To see why, consider the following case.  


Magic Pill: Imagine this grief eradicating magic pill not only preemptively eliminates any grief, but also imparts the self-knowledge one would have gained had they grieved. Perhaps the pill implants false memories of grief that are connected to the self-knowledge, or perhaps the person simply comes to have the self-knowledge independent of any memories of grief. 


On Cholbi’s view, it seems good for one to avoid grief in this case. Though, I wonder whether he still believes the potentially grief-stricken should not take the pill. If so, then why? Perhaps there are moral reasons to grieve, though in this case they would have to be other-regarding moral reasons (for the deceased, perhaps) and not the self-regarding moral reasons Cholbi identifies in chapter six. This is because the magical pill in this case provides the same self-knowledge as grief would, and so removes the self-regarding reasons Cholbi identifies to grieve. There could only be a self-regarding moral obligation to (take the pill or grieve). But, and this is the important point, even if there are such other-regarding moral reasons to grieve, they wouldn’t provide reason to believe (i) is true. 


Such considerations are not limited to magic pill cases either. Imagine a husband and wife who’ve been together over sixty years and will die within one week of each other. In most actual cases, this amount of time plausibly won’t nearly be enough for the grief episode to conclude and result in the kind of self-knowledge Cholbi talks about. Would it be best for the surviving member of the couple to live out the last week of their life grief free? 


For what it’s worth, I am inclined to hold that it is prudentially best for the person to live without grief in such cases. But I wonder whether Cholbi agrees that grief is bad and to be avoided in these cases. I also believe it would generally be morally permissible for them to avoid grief to the extent they can, though I suspect most people think otherwise. If so, then it’s not clear how much weight we should put into the conclusion drawn from Cholbi’s pill thought experiment. A large influencing factor of typical judgments in Cholbi’s pill case could be tracking this other-regarding moral ought, and not the kind of prudential ought Cholbi has in mind.  


We Should Accept (i) and (ii) 


My favoured solution to the Paradox of Grief allows us to accept (i) and (ii), rather than having to reject (i). This is referred to as the Pain as a Cost solution in the text (108-109-113). The basic idea is grief is indeed intrinsically bad for the person grieving and, ceteris paribus, should be avoided and lamented. Nevertheless, paradigmatic instances of grief are extrinsically good because they can lead to the kind of self-knowledge Cholbi identified, minimize suffering in the long run given our psychologies, and so on. As such, we can acknowledge that grief is valuable, remain grateful that we grieve, and rationally not avoid it, insofar as doing so is good for us. 


Cholbi considers this solution, but ultimately rejects it because it would supposedly imply that “it would be rational to desire that grief’s pains be minimized,” presumably assuming that the good of self-knowledge would be held fixed in such cases (109). Cholbi takes this to be an implication of the view when combined with a


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general principle he finds plausible. That principle holds that if we are incurring a cost in order to obtain a benefit, “we ought rationally prefer to minimize that cost” (108). 


There are two points worth making in response. First, I do not believe this solution actually entails that one should desire that grief’s pain be minimized for reasons already given. Rather, it only needs to acknowledge that, holding the prudential goods (e.g., self-knowledge) fixed, it would be prudentially best for one’s grief to be minimized. That strikes me as not only as an unproblematic claim, but a claim that is quite plausibly true. This isn’t even a bullet to bite, as far as I can tell. 


To see why, consider again someone who has grieved for months and months and months over a friend’s death and will gain the same self-knowledge to the same degree whether her grief subsides today or tomorrow. It seems to be clearly better for her to have her grief subside today rather than tomorrow. 


Second, in spite of these prudential considerations, one can accept this proposed solution, and deny that it would be rational to desire that grief’s pains be minimized by appealing to other-regarding moral considerations. I suspect most people would think it’s morally wrong to forgo (or try and minimize) grieving the death of, say, a loved one even if it’s prudent to do so. They presumably think we owe it to the deceased to grieve for them. I personally don’t accept that we have duties to the deceased, but that is irrelevant to the point at hand.[7] One can, and I suspect many do, consistently accept the Pain as a Cost solution to the Paradox of Grief without having to hold that one rationally ought to desire that their grief be minimized, much less completely pain free. 


This solution has the advantage of accounting for what I take to be the commonsense, and at least prima facie plausible, judgment that pain is intrinsically bad. Cholbi’s favoured solution has to reject this claim. Unless this view can be shown to be subject to some counterintuitive implications, I am inclined to accept it over a solution that requires rejecting (i), and denying that pain is intrinsically bad, as Cholbi’s solution does.  


CONCLUSION


I want to end by explicitly stating that I found much more to agree with in Cholbi’s manuscript than to disagree with, and that I learned a great deal from reading it. This book will be a welcome addition to the philosophical literature on grief, but its value will extend far beyond that to anyone who will have to deal with grief. This is, unfortunately, nearly everyone.  


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Notes


[1] For instance, refer to Carl Safina (2015, 69-74), Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, and Teja Brooks Pribac (2013, 67-90), “Animal Grief.”

[2] Unless otherwise noted, all in-text citations refer to Cholbi 2021a. 

[3] Or consider the similar case of veteran actor Norman Lloyd, who died on May 11th 2021, at the age of 106. His most recent acting work was in 2015 with no known projects on the horizon. His death didn’t seem to change his fans’ practical identities, but at least some did seem to grieve his passing, and rightly so.  

[4] Refer to Danny Lavery (2019), “Help! I’m Glad My Awful Husband is Dead.” 

[5] Also refer to Cholbi’s (2021b) brief discussion of this paradox. 

[6] Though, for a strong opposing view, refer to Nicolas Delon (forthcoming), “Strangers to Ourselves: A Nietzschean Challenge to the Badness of Suffering.”

[7] The reasons why are broadly in line with James Stacey Taylor (2012), Death, Posthumous Harm, and Bioethics. Though, for a book length argument to the contrary, refer to David Boonin (2019), Dead Wrong: The Ethics of Posthumous Harm.


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References


https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/08/awful-husband-died-ready-to-move-on-dear-prudence-advice.html 


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Travis Timmerman © 2022

Author email: travis.timmerman[at]shu.edu