The Moral Psychology of Sadness

Anna Gotlib

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783488629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

What does it mean to be sad? What difference does it make whether, how, and why we experience our own, and other people’s, sadness? Is sadness always appropriate and can it be a way of seeing more clearly into ourselves and others? In this volume, a multi-disciplinary team of scholars - from fields including philosophy, women’s and gender studies, bioethics and public health, and neuroscience - addresses these and other questions related to this nearly-universal emotion that all of us experience, and that some of us dread. Somewhat surprisingly, sadness has been largely ignored by philosophers and others within the humanities, or else under-theorized as a subject worthy of serious and careful attention. This volume reverses this trend, presenting sadness as not merely a feeling or affect, but an emotion of great moral significance that in important ways underwrites how we understand ourselves and each other.

Part I

THE PHENOMENOLOGIES OF SADNESS

Chapter 1

Untold Sorrow

Andrea C. Westlund¹

The phrase “untold sorrow” evokes a sorrow that is both un-narrated (perhaps un-narratable) and of an incalculably large or unfathomable magnitude. It gestures toward experiences of loss that lie beyond the limits of ordinary comprehension. Yet there is a sense in which all loss confounds ordinary ways of responding to and interacting with objects of care, including, especially, the people we love. In this chapter, I explore connections between loss, love, and the narratability (or un-narratability) of sorrow. I argue that, while there is a sense in which loss itself is un-narratable, the narration of one’s sorrow in response to loss has an important communicative and commemorative function. A “told” sorrow is a sorrow that publicly attests to the profundity of the loss and the incomparable worth of the lost love object, constituting a “remembrance” or commemoration of the deceased. Grief narratives are first and foremost a form of testimony: they bear witness to the loss of a beloved other. In so doing, they attest to the reality and importance of the lost love object and resist the further form of loss involved in forgetting or allowing to be forgotten. My account of the role of narrative in grief thus differs from those that focus primarily on its therapeutic role, its role in finding “meaning” in death, or its role in reconstructing the identity of the bereaved. While I do not deny that grief narratives play a therapeutic role, my focus is instead on the commemorative role of narration. Narrative commemoration, I suggest, is one response to the problem of how to love the dead.

1. Loss

A small boy, twoor three years old, steps into an elevator with his mother, on the way to a routine doctor’s appointment. As he crosses the threshold, the tiny toy car he has been clutching since he left the house slips out of his grasp. It is gone in an instant, down the elevator shaft, having slipped through the crack between the floor and the elevator car. The boy is inconsolable, and must be taken to the basement of the building to verify that there really is no way of getting it back. For months, when he cannot fall asleep at night, he cries out, “I’m scared!” “Of what?” his mother asks. “I’m scared about the car falling down the elevator shaft.”

The finality of loss is frightening. What is truly lost (as opposed to merely separated from us, or misplaced) is irretrievably gone. A true loss cannot be reversed or repaired. Even if the lost object can be replaced with another similar object, the particular object that was lost is never to return. The sheer incomprehensibility of the idea that anything—anyone—can be “gone in an instant,” in the course of an otherwise ordinary day, is highlighted in many memoirs of grief, as well as by philosophers writing on loss. Joseph Keeping, for example, writes, “The notion that something could simply cease to be, irrevocably, in a moment, did not fit into my experience. I could not get a grip on it.”² And Joan Didion opens The Year of Magical Thinking with the sparse observation: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”³

The idea that a person should cease to be in this way is especially hard to grasp; indeed, it is even hard to articulate just what is so confounding about such loss. While many expressions of grief focus on uniqueness and irreplaceability of lost persons, appeals to these qualities nonetheless fall short of capturing what is lost when a person dies. True, each person is unique and a lost loved one will be irreplaceable from the point of view of the bereaved—as Bennett Helm puts it, we find those we love to have “non-fungible import”⁴ to us. But there is also the fact that this unique and non-fungibly important object had (or was) itself a point of view, a perspective on the world as real as one’s own, that has now apparently vanished altogether. Nicolas Wolterstorff laments on the loss of his son:

There’s a hole in the world now. In the place where he was, there’s now just nothing. A center, like no other, of memory and hope and knowledge and affection which once inhabited this earth is gone. Only a gap remains.⁵

Unlike other lost objects, which are lost through being rendered permanently inaccessible or damaged beyond repair, lost lives seem simply to blink out of existence, as soap bubbles burst and vanish into nothingness. A subject of a life, to which things mattered, that had plans and relationships and thoughts of its own (what Wolterstorff calls an “inscape”), has evaporated from reality. In a sense, there isn’t even so much as a gap left behind—though it would be hard to describe the absence in any other terms. Tiny cars falling down elevator shafts can only hint darkly at this far more terrifying sort of loss.

While the profundity of the disappearance of a life may be expressed third-personally, it is especially hard to grasp first-personally, from the perspective of one who has lived in relation with the deceased. Some find it helpful to describe the loss of a loved one as a loss of a part of oneself, as though that might help to communicate its magnitude. In fact, so many first-person accounts of grief include some version of this idea that it would seem perverse to reject it outright. There are, I think, several perfectly good (though nonliteral) ways of making sense of it. First, one’s social identity is in part a product of one’s relationships with others: one is a mother, a sister, a daughter, a wife, a friend. When the individuals occupying the other poles in those relationship are lost, one faces the disorienting and daunting task of figuring out “who one is now.”⁶ Second, there is the related fact that what or whom one cares about plays an organizing role in one’s practical life, bearing on what one takes oneself to have reason to do and how one has reason to respond to what happens around one. When an object of care is lost, one might, at least for a time, become disorganized and uncertain how (or in some cases, even whether) to proceed with one’s life.⁷ Third, there is the fact that, in particularly close relationships, one’s daily life is so intertwined with the deceased’s that it may be difficult to extricate oneself from the other-involving habits of mind and body that would previously have carried one through the day. One must, over time, learn new habits and find ways of living that don’t presuppose the presence and participation of the lost other.⁸ Finally, there is the fact that we come to share ends with those we love,⁹ a form of practical union that is rent apart by the death of the beloved.¹⁰

These are all important (and interrelated) points about love and loss. There is, however, a danger in taking an inexactly expressed thought—that the loss of a loved one is (or is like) the loss of a part of oneself—too literally. Some philosophers writing on love have gone beyond the ideas glossed above to the much stronger idea that our loved ones become part of us in such a way that they (and we) lose our separate identities.¹¹ The special intensity of grief’s sorrow, however, brings out an important inadequacy in such “union” views of love. The loss of that which is merely a part of oneself, though it may be an occasion for great sadness and personal upheaval, is nonetheless significantly less radical than the loss of another self to whom one has been closely connected. A self, after all, may be dramatically changed—say, by having to give up on a dream career, or end a marriage, or leave an ancestral home—without ceasing to exist. We do speak of such losses (by extension, I would say) as occasions for grief. But what we mourn in the loss of another person—and what we fear in our own deaths, if we fear them—is the unfathomable loss of a whole perspective that, to paraphrase Wolterstorff once more, inhabits and moves about in the world—and then, does not. The various experiences we are prone to want to capture, in referring to the loss of a “part of one’s self,” are experiences of living in relation with another self who is now (temporally speaking) beyond our reach.

That the apparently stubborn reality of another self should turn out to be so evanescent leaves the bereaved understandably unmoored. C. S. Lewis, upon the death of his wife, puts his perplexity like this: “If H. ‘is not,’ then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person. There aren’t, and never were, any people. Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there.”¹² The griever, it seems, must find a way to reestablish the reality of a lost love one that does not depend on their being here and now. The impossibility of reaching back across the temporal gap brings with it the fear that the loss is one that can only deepen with time. As Lewis writes of his wife, “Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman. . . . The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me.”¹³ As significant and influential as they are in our lives, in short, our loved ones (parents, children, spouses, close friends) are decidedly not parts of us. The “gap” we feel in their loss is left by the departure of a reality that is not internal to our own. If anything, the loss of a loved one underscores the distinction between one self and another, and highlights the limits of our control over the presence and absence of our loved ones in our lives (and, indeed, in the world). It is no surprise that the bereaved often report feeling distinctively and deeply alone.¹⁴

These points will matter to what I want to say below, about the narration of grief, since they will pull us in a different direction from accounts that focus exclusively or primarily on the importance to survivors of rendering loss meaningful, integrating it into their own stories, and reconstructing their own identities in the wake of loss. These reparative activities do appear to be important (even necessary) to many grievers in the aftermath of loss, since one needs to find a way of being and carrying on without the lost other. Nonetheless, such responses do not directly address or express the distinctive sorrow that arises in response to the loss itself. It is to that sorrow that I now turn.

2. Sorrow

Now suppose you had a colt, and you were own mother to that little colt. . . . And all at once that same little colt went and died. . . . You’d be sorry, wouldn’t you?

—Anton Chekhov, Misery

Many psychologists and also some philosophers have pointed out that grief includes much more than sadness or sorrow: it also characteristically involves disorientation, denial, yearning, anger, hopelessness, and (especially early on) a range of somatic symptoms such as coldness, fatigue, loss of appetite, and so forth. My aim in this section is to distinguish sorrow (at least provisionally) from related emotions, processes, and activities—and to say something about how they are related to one another.

I’ll begin with grief. It has become fairly standard to argue that grief is not a single mental state but either a complex state or a process. Whether grief is an emotion or not is a matter of some disagreement, and varies in part in accordance with different views of what emotions are. Donald Gustafson,¹⁵ for example, treats grief as an emotion involving a distinctive belief-desire pair (the belief that x has died along with the desire that x not have died). Peter Goldie,¹⁶ too, treats grief as an emotion, but does not think emotions can be identified with any specific mental state or set of states. Grief, on Goldie’s account, is instead a process or comple...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• The Topographies of Sadness
• PART I: THE PHENOMENOLOGIES OF SADNESS
• PART II: SADNESS AND OTHER EMOTIONS
• PART III: SADNESS AND NOSTALGIA
• Index
• About the Contributors