On Grief’s Ethical Task

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to bring into view an ethical task that we face when grieving the loss of a loved one. That task is to see the independent reality of the lost other. I shall do so through a reading of C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. I shall try to show that Lewis’s struggle to see the independent reality of his wife, Joy, provides an important, and troubling, insight into what it means for us to grieve well. Lewis’s account forces us to reflect on a key, but largely overlooked, assumption in contemporary philosophical accounts of grief, namely, that we do indeed see the independent reality of the lost other. Lewis’s account reveals that the struggle to see the lost other is at the same time a struggle to escape deeply-rooted aspects of the self.

KEYWORDS:

• Attention
• grief
• ethical task
• C. S. Lewis
• object of grief
• reality of others

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to Dan Watts and Alexandra Popescu as well as anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. My focus is restricted to grief over the loss of a loved one.

2. This is not to suggest that grief that involves no struggle of this sort is thereby a deficient mode of grief. There may be those for whom the independent reality of the lost loved one comes into view with little difficulty.

3. Notable departures from that assumption include Atkins (2022a; 2022b) and Ratcliffe (2023).

4. I take outward approaches to grief to be other-directed. Alongside McCracken (2005), the focus here, outward approaches include Atkins (2022a), Marušić (2022), Moller (2007, 2017), and Solomon (2004). Inward approaches are self-directed. Cholbi is the key contemporary figure (Cholbi 2019, 2021a, 2021b).

5. Solomon (2004, 88) mentions narcissism and self-pity. Given McCracken’s (and Solomon’s) moral understanding of grief, these descriptions seem to be in the register of what Iris Murdoch called secondary moral judgments. I refer to forms of self-absorption to indicate that I am not suggesting that any form of self-absorption in grief should be judged in these terms.

6. In her account of ‘desolate rumination’, Carolyn Price (2010, 35) argues that the griever’s ‘attention is firmly fixed on the particular circumstances’ and the associated emotions surrounding the loved one’s death. One of the examples she gives is focusing on an argument the day the loved one died. For Price, rather than obscuring one’s view of the loved one, focusing one’s attention on these particular experiences serves the epistemic function of helping the griever to realise, to bring into view, the loss of the other and the specific ways in which their death is a terrible thing.

7. I leave aside the question of whether we ought to step back in this way. I think there is reason to think that those subjective experiences need not be obscuring and may, in fact, help bring the loss we have experienced more into view. A ‘proper’ memory of the lost other may well be arrived at by working through, rather than stepping back from, these experiences.

8. See, for example, Price’s account of ‘desolate rumination’ (2010).

9. Solomon (2004, 82) questions our ‘right to grieve’ the loss of those with whom we have no intimate relationship. Part of the thought is that grief requires that we really know, and thus have in view, the person for whom we grieve. The required intimacy, Solomon insists, depends on the nature of the relationship, not the intensity of one’s feelings. Thus those (members of the public) who took themselves to be grieving over the death of Princess Diana, were, for Solomon, mistaken (88). In such cases, there is no genuine intimacy, and thus, for Solomon, no genuine object of grief can come into view.

10. The distinction between material and formal object is a distinction between the object or state or affairs that triggers a response in me and what my response is ultimately directed toward. My fear may be triggered by the sound of a fire alarm (material object), but my fear is not fear of the sound. What I am fearful of is the threat of fire (formal object).

11. My grief must include ‘all and only the emotions that reflect the totality of the relationship’ (2021a, 138); I can fail to ‘accurately and comprehensively represent’ my relationship with the lost loved one (148). Both my emphasis.

12. Grief must ‘fit the relevant facts’, be ‘adequate to’, ‘properly reflect’, or ‘represent accurately’ the relationship with the lost other (Cholbi 2021a, 131, 125, 133, 136).

13. Cholbi, I take it, would agree: ‘one cannot interrogate this relationship without in some way interrogating the deceased’ (Cholbi 2019, 505).

14. I’m grateful to Dan Watts for help with the formulation of this point.

15. See Ratcliffe, Richardson, and Millar (2022).

16. Which is not to say that it does not appear in various places. In his brief remarks on Nussbaum on love Cholbi introduces issues surrounding ‘self-deceiving fictions’ and the resulting opaqueness of the lover’s vision and makes a suggestive connection to grief (Cholbi 2021a, 76–77). And in an earlier paper, he suggests that in grief our vision is likely to be obscured by more general epistemic difficulties, such as ‘our susceptibility to wishful thinking’, and that we may lack the ‘emotional discernment’ and ‘moral or epistemic virtues’ that would enable us to grieve well (Cholbi 2019, 506).

17. The language of stages is associated with Kübler-Ross’s ‘stage theory’. In using such language, I mean only to draw on the way in which the idea of stages has filtered into our everyday ways of thinking and talking about loss and grief.

18. The self-pity Lewis describes is, as Atkins (2022a, 5) astutely notes, a response to an earlier phase of his grief. Lewis (2001, 4) describes recoiling into self-pity ‘on the rebound’ from a period of ‘agony’. While he goes through various phases in his grief – as he observes, ‘in grief nothing “stays put.” One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs’ (56) – the consistent thread throughout his reflections is the struggle to see Joy in her independent reality.

19. The ‘H. facts’ is an odd way to describe thoughts about a loved one. That formulation seems to express the difficulty Lewis faces: to do justice to who Joy is, as opposed to what she was. Absent the independent reality of her living presence, Lewis struggles against a seemingly inevitable process of objectification. (Thanks to Dan Watts for this point.) Ratcliffe (2023, Ch. 5) provides an insightful interpretation along these lines, suggesting that the difficulty Lewis confronts here is that no matter how accurate or exhaustive his mental representations of Joy may be, they will be never be able to capture her unique style for that involves ways of being affected that are not fully anticipated. For this reason, the very attempt to capture her with such ‘facts’ is self-defeating. But there’s another aspect to this passage. The ‘facts’ Lewis mentions are not what we would typically think of as facts. What is the ‘fact’ of a look or laugh? If we think that the key term here is not ‘facts’ but ‘real’, then we might read this passage as Lewis trying to reassure himself: ‘I really am thinking of how she really did laugh in all those unique ways, of those looks that really did cross her face when she was in a mischievous mood, exasperated, nervous, etc., of how she really did use that particular expression, with that particular tone, when excited, annoyed, etc. These thoughts capture real aspects of Joy; they’re not my fabrications!’ Seen in this light, the problem would appear to be not so much objectification, as fragmentation. Joy is already dissolving into fragments and it’s increasingly left to Lewis to construct a picture.

20. Scrutton (2022) argues that Lewis’s fear of constructing false images of Joy is rooted in his theological commitments and, as such, his grief is distinctive. Lewis’s grief is undoubtedly shaped by his faith, but the fear of misrepresenting others through false internal images is not a wholly theological concern. Both Platonic and psychoanalytic conceptions of the self can generate such a concern. Iris Murdoch’s work would be one example. Consider her claim that there is a ‘continuous breeding of imagery in consciousness’ (Murdoch 1993, 329), and that if we are to see the other in their independent reality, then we must struggle to escape ‘fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centred aims and images’ (Murdoch 1997, 254).

21. I’m not suggesting that this is the only reason Lewis struggles. Atkins (2022b) argues that Lewis struggles because he doubts his capacity to love his wife in death. There is significant overlap with my concerns here and much I agree with. But I would say that we cannot fully understand Lewis’s struggle – including the doubt Atkins identifies – without understanding the particular picture of the self that is in the background.

22. In a letter Lewis explicitly points to a general structure: ‘In both cases [i.e. calling for God’s help and trying to see the independent reality of Joy] a clamorous need seems to shut one off from the thing needed’ (2008, 355). In another letter, Lewis writes of a ‘psychological law’ whereby our desperate longings and needs ‘often inhibit the very things they are intended to facilitate’ (317).

23. Or is unlikely to arrive. If one goes out into nature ‘in order to be overwhelmed … nine times out of ten nothing will happen to you’ (Lewis 2016, 27).