On the Appropriateness of Grief to its Object
Matthew Ratcliffe, Louise Richardson, & Becky Millar
Abstract: How we understand the nature and role of grief depends on what we take its object to be
and vice versa. This paper focuses on recent claims by philosophers that grief is frequently or even
inherently irrational or inappropriate in one or another respect, all of which hinge on assumptions
concerning the proper object of grief. By emphasizing the temporally extended structure of grief, we
offer an alternative account of its object, which undermines these assumptions and dissolves the
apparent problems. The principal object of grief, we suggest, is a loss of life-possibilities, which is
experienced, understood, and engaged with over a prolonged period. Other descriptions of grief’s
object identify more specific aspects of this loss, in ways that do not respect a straightforward
distinction between concrete and formal objects.
Keywords: concrete object; formal object; grief; life-possibilities; phenomenology; rationality;
sinking-in
Introduction
When we experience grief in the event of a death, what is our grief about?1 One could
maintain that the concrete object of grief is the death of a person whom one cares about,
either the event of the death or that person’s being dead. However, perhaps the object of grief
is not simply someone’s death, but her absence from one’s life. In other words, we grieve
over the loss of a relationship. It is also arguable that grief has an additional “formal object”,
an evaluative property attributed to its concrete object that renders grief appropriate to that
object. In the case of grief, the most plausible candidate is “loss” or a distinctive form of loss
associated with bereavement.2 Further questions then arise concerning how the relations
between an experience of grief, the formal object of grief, and the concrete object of grief
should be conceived of. These are the questions we are concerned with here. And it matters
how they are answered, given that our understanding of what grief is and what grief does will
depend on those answers.
1
Although our discussion focuses specifically on grief over a death, the account we develop can also
accommodate wider experiences of loss.
2
Types of emotions are thus distinguished from one another by their formal objects. For instance, while the
formal object of grief might be loss, the formal object of fear is threat. For further discussion of emotions and
their formal objects, see, e.g., de Sousa (1987, Chapter 5) and Teroni (2007).
1
To illustrate what is at stake, consider a cluster of contemporary philosophical
discussions, all of which conclude that grief is, in one or another respect, irrational or
incomprehensible. A notable example is Gustafson (1989), who takes grief to have
constituent beliefs and desires, including the belief that a person is dead and the desire that
they not be dead. It thus incorporates a “counter-belief desire”, rendering it “irremediably less
than fully rational” (Gustafson, 1989, pp.465-6).3 A more recent focus has been on the
intensity of grief and the time it takes people to recover. Drawing on empirical findings
concerning “resilience” among the bereaved, Moller (2007; 2017) points out that most of us
recover faster than we might anticipate and suggests that the object of grief (the loss of
someone who may have been immensely important to us) warrants a longer, more intense
period of grieving. Thus, even though swift recovery may be psychologically beneficial, there
is another way in which it remains regrettable.4 Indeed, it is arguable that any fading of grief
is irrational. The object of grief—the loss of someone who matters greatly to us—remains
“roughly the same”, rendering a merely transient emotional experience inappropriate to that
object (Moller, 2017). Following a similar line of thought, Marušić (2018), concludes that the
relationship between grief and its object is rationally incomprehensible (as distinct from
irrational), given that the pragmatic benefits of grief’s diminution over time do not render it
“responsive to my reasons” (Marušić, 2018, p. 1).
Whether or not such concerns are legitimate hinges on assumptions concerning the
object of grief. For Moller (2007; 2017), grief’s object is there having been a loss, while
Marušić (2018, p.6) maintains that the “primary object” is someone’s being dead. Both
observe that the object of grief is unchanging or, at least, does not change over time in quite
the way that grief does. Hence, we face the question of why grief, being an emotional
response that is—like other emotions—both directed at and justified by its object, diminishes
over time in the way it usually does or even at all. The plausibility of Gustafson’s analysis
equally depends on assumptions about grief’s object, which he takes to be someone’s having
died, or having been “almost certainly lost or permanently separated” from the grieving
subject (Gustafson, 1989, p. 464). This enables him to maintain that grief can have the same
Price (2010) suggests that the “yearning” of grief is instead a matter of emotional evaluation. So, it involves a
less pernicious and more familiar form of irrationality: a conflict between emotional evaluation and belief that
resembles conflicts between beliefs and certain perceptual experiences, such as optical illusions. Cholbi (2017)
is also critical of Gustafson, pointing out that grief can incorporate a range of desires, which need not include
desiring someone not to be dead.
4
Moller’s claims concerning the duration and intensity of typical grief are based on empirical findings
concerning the prevalence of resilience (see, e.g., Bonanno, 2009). These findings and their implications are not
uncontroversial (Smuts, 2016).
3
2
object as sorrow. The difference between them must therefore be found elsewhere, prompting
Gustafson to distinguish between wishing that something had not happened, in sorrow, and
desiring it not to have happened, in grief.
In what follows, we propose an alternative conception of grief’s object, which
dispenses with these apparent problems. We begin by observing that grief is not an episodic
emotion, such as being fleetingly afraid of the dog or happy to see someone. Rather, it
consists in a non-homogenous, temporally extended process. So, in contemplating the object
of grief, we should consider what that process as a whole is directed at, rather than restricting
ourselves to one or another time-slice or episode. Our discussion thus proceeds via a detailed
phenomenological consideration of grief’s temporal structure. This serves to show why grief
diminishes over time and, importantly, why its failure to do so would amount to irrationality.
In addition, it makes clear that certain tensions integral to grief are not a matter of conflict
between belief and desire.
We go on to argue that the object of a grief process—what that process as a whole
involves recognizing, comprehending, engaging with, and adapting to—is a loss of lifepossibilities. Aspects of this can also be described in other ways, including the loss of a
relationship, the loss of a person, and there having been a death. The phenomenology of grief,
we add, does not conform to a straightforward distinction between formal and concrete
objects (which need not detract from the analytic utility of the distinction). One could
maintain that the formal object of grief is a loss of life-possibilities, but this is not fully,
experientially present at any one time. Furthermore, grief does not involve a singular,
temporally consistent target or concrete object. Instead, different aspects of a wider-ranging
loss of possibilities are experienced as such at different times.
Sinking In
A common, although not always explicit, way of thinking about grief involves construing it
as an emotional experience that is elicited by a distinct and prior recognition of loss. For
instance, Moller (2007, p.313) asks us to imagine super-resilient beings who comprehend the
fact of loss but do not feel any grief, suggesting a distinction between the initial
comprehension of what has happened and an emotional reaction that may or may not follow
it. To see what is wrong here, it should first be noted that grief involves a process of some
kind (Goldie, 2012; Higgins, 2013, Ratcliffe, 2017). This can be accepted without endorsing
anything more specific, such as a stage-model of grief, a conception of grief-work, or an
account of the endpoint of grief. Furthermore, endorsing the claim that grief involves a
3
process does not require the assumption that this is all there is to grief or that the process
always unfolds in the same way. It is important to keep in mind that people’s experiences of
grief vary considerably.
Key to understanding why grief involves a process and why aspects of grief diminish
over time is an appreciation of the dynamic relationships between a person’s experience of
grief and her comprehension of its candidate objects, which we take to include (a) Person D
has died; (b) Person D no longer exists; and (c) a relationship with Person D no longer exists
or is at least radically altered. Grief is not simply a response to one or more of these facts; it
is also integral to the bereaved person’s comprehension of them over an extended period of
time.
Note, first of all, that how one grieves over a death reflects—in part—the manner and
extent to which the deceased was integrated into the structure of one’s life. A close
relationship with a particular person can be implicated in almost all of one’s activities.
Consider the many interconnected projects that one might be committed to and habitually
immersed in. In the context of a project, one might do something for oneself, for the other
person, or for both. Where a project and associated activities are “for them” or “for us”, the
other person’s death may render that project unintelligible—the relevant activities no longer
make sense. Alternatively, a project might depend on that person’s input in a contingent way,
such that disruptions are potentially navigable, perhaps by drawing on the support of others.
However, in considering the effects of bereavement on the structure of a life, it is important
not to restrict ourselves to the disruption of goal-directed projects. All manner of pastimes
can similarly depend upon being with a particular person. In cases such as a walk in the park,
a visit to a cinema, or a dinner in the restaurant that “we” especially like, how one
experiences and engages with one’s surroundings may depend in various subtle ways on
being with that person (Ratcliffe, 2020). Furthermore, their potential presence is also
anticipated in various circumstances, such as upon waking, when entering a certain room, or
when returning home from work. The various ways in which others are integrated into our
lives, habitually anticipated, and taken for granted do not comprise a long list of separate,
atomistic contributions. To the extent that our projects and commitments are coherently
organized and integrated, so are the contributions that particular people make to them.
Someone’s death can therefore imply a profound change in one’s own life-structure,
something that has to be registered and comprehended in its entirety if one is to continue
thinking and acting in ways that are appropriate to one’s actual situation. As we will show,
this requires a gradual process of comprehension.
4
Bennett Helm (e.g., 2009) draws helpful distinctions between the target (or concrete
object), formal object, and focus of an emotional experience, which we will draw on in order
to clarify what it is that we recognize, comprehend, and engage with through grief. According
to Helm, an emotional experience involves attributing an evaluative property to the target or
concrete object. For instance, an approaching tiger is experienced as frightening. Whether
one’s fear is appropriate depends on whether the properties of the target (the tiger) are
consistent with the formal object of fear (threat). And this further depends on the “focus” of
the emotion, defined as follows: “a background object having import that is related to the
target in such a way as to make intelligible the target’s having the evaluative property defined
by the formal object” (Helm, 2009, p.251). So, the focus of the emotion is something that is
valued (e.g., one’s life; one’s career; the well-being of another person), which relates to the
target in a way that is consistent with the emotion’s formal object. This renders an emotion of
that type appropriate to its circumstances: I value my life (focus) and am therefore afraid of
the tiger (target), which is a threat (formal object) to my life. Others have made
complementary points in slightly different ways. For instance, Glas (2017) observes that
emotions have a “double intentionality”; they are directed at concrete objects and also at the
self, as they involve some appreciation of how states of affairs impact upon our concerns and
thus upon “who” we are. Our emotional reactions to events therefore “say” something about
us, something that we may have varying degrees of insight into. As Cholbi (2019) puts it with
respect to grief, our emotional response to a death relates to our “practical identity”.5
We can employ these distinctions to conceptualize the course of grief over time. A
grief process involves relating the target (or concrete object) of grief to its focus and thus
recognizing the actual and potential implications of a death for the structure of one’s life.
Where the implications of a death are far-reaching and wide-ranging, as in the case of
profound grief, the match between target and focus cannot be accomplished instantaneously.
Instead of swift recognition, there is—and, we will suggest, can only be—a gradual process
of “sinking in”, where comprehension, emotional response, and adaptation are inextricable.6
Hence, contrary to what is sometimes assumed, grief is not a response to a distinct
and prior recognition of loss, and so it would be a mistake to ask whether it is an appropriate
Cholbi draws on Korsgaard’s (1996) conception of “practical identity”. Our emphasis here on losing lifepossibilities could be couched in these terms. Losing certain possibilities that are central to the structure of one’s
life involves experiencing and negotiating a disrupted sense of who one is—the roles, statuses, commitments,
and projects that render one’s life-structure distinctive.
6
For further discussion of emotional “sinking in” during grief, see also Furtak (2018, Chapter 4) and Ratcliffe
(2019).
5
5
or rational response to something already understood. Instead, what it is to grieve is—in
part—to undergo a gradual process of recognition and comprehension. This is exemplified by
numerous first-person accounts of grief experiences, all of which convey an initial
disconnection between endorsing the proposition that “D is dead” and really coming to
believe it by integrating it into the structure of one’s life. The difference between the two
does not consist in degrees of belief; the relevant proposition may be endorsed without any
doubt whatsoever. However, what remains lacking is a qualitatively different kind of
appreciation, also sometimes referred to as “belief”, which involves integrating something
into one’s life in a manner that cannot be wholly accounted for in terms of relations between
propositions. This process of reconciling target with focus involves frequent conflicts
between habitual ways of thinking, acting, and experiencing that continue to presuppose the
deceased and moments of emotional acknowledgement.7 For most of us, these diminish in
intensity and frequency over time. For example, consider the following passages from Juliet
Rosenfeld’s memoir, The State of Disbelief:
I remember waking up early one Sunday weeks later in our house in the country, and looking
out at the fields beyond our garden wall and, suddenly, catastrophically knowing he was not
there, would never ever be there again. [….] I began to know, without thinking, that he was
gone, in the same way you know that your hand is attached to your wrist or that water comes
out of the tap when you turn it on. (Rosenfeld, 2020, p.26, p.35)
Many people describe a pronounced experience of tension between somehow
knowing that a person has died and yet being unable to fully grasp the fact. This may be brief
or enduring, localized or non-localized. It might seem as though one is in a movie, that this
can’t be happening, that it doesn’t make sense. But what does the tension consist of? Writing
of her own experience, the philosopher Susan Dunston distinguishes two kinds of knowing: “I
know certainly that my brother is dead, that he killed himself, and at the same time such a
thing is inconceivable, inexplicable, and unknowable to me (in the clear and distinct way that
Descartes sought anyway)” (Dunston, 2010, p.165). A distinction might be drawn here
between explicit propositional cognition and unreflective, habitual practice. However, it
We will not address the question of whether grief involves “feelings” or how those feelings might relate to
other aspects of grief. However, it should not be assumed that we are offering a “cognitive” account of grief, of
a kind that emphasizes cognitive evaluations of events in contrast to any associated feelings. Our position is also
compatible with the view that certain feelings, including bodily feelings, contribute to the experience and
comprehension of certain things external to one’s body (see, for example, Ratcliffe, 2008, 2015; Colombetti,
2014; Furtak, 2018).
7
6
would be wrong to construe the latter as something nonconceptual and thoughtless. It is not
just patterns of practical activity but also patterns of thought that arise periodically, despite
one’s “knowing” that someone is dead. Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking
describes experiences of this nature, which arose following her husband’s death. She writes
of how her thoughts and activities were often at odds with the reality of his death:
I could not give away the rest of his shoes.
I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return.
The recognition of this thought by no means eradicated the thought. (Didion, 2006, p.37)
Although some such experiences might be accounted for in terms of forgetting
something and then remembering it, this does not capture what Didion describes, where there
is an experience of ongoing tension between certain thoughts and the reality of the death.
Such tensions can be wide-ranging, enveloping how one’s situation as a whole is experienced
and conceptualized. Thus, a consistent theme in autobiographical accounts of bereavement is
that of acknowledging the death and at the same time continuing to feel that it does not make
sense—that this is somehow impossible; it can’t be happening:
In my external world, I lived in the strangeness of a house, his house, our house, where he was
not, yet where everything that was his was still in place. The impossibility of that, I think now.
His toothbrush and socks next to mine. (Rosenfeld, 2020, p.248)
What does this sense of impossibility or inconceivability involve? We suggest that,
phenomenologically speaking, the actual and potential presence of the person who has died
remains etched into one’s experiential world, in a wide-ranging and integrated way. To
accept this, it must be acknowledged that, more generally, our immediate experiences of
things are imbued with a sense of how they are actually and potentially significant in the
context of our lives, how those things matter.8 For instance, one sees the contents of one’s
study as an integrated, meaningful whole that reflects an ongoing writing project. This might,
but need not, be understood in terms of specifically perceptual content. On a “liberal” view
of perceptual content, we can perceptually represent a wider range of features than—in the
8
That we experience our surroundings as offering various different kinds of significant possibilities is a
consistent theme in the phenomenological tradition. See Ratcliffe (2015) for a detailed discussion and defence
of the position.
7
case of vision—colour, shape, and location. For instance, and most relevantly for our
purposes, perceptual content can include what are often referred to as “affordances”:
perceptible opportunities for action.9 However, we need not take a stance on this issue here; it
suffices to allow that how we experience our surroundings before resorting to any explicit
inferences includes experiencing various ways in which things matter. And all or almost all
of the ways in which things matter have the potential to implicate a particular person. The
reason the death cannot be comprehended in an instant is that we initially have the thought
“D is dead” against the backdrop of an experiential world that continues to presuppose the
person who has died; her potential presence is still etched into our surroundings. And this is
why the target of grief cannot be instantaneously matched with the focus. The practical
meanings adhering to various things do not change immediately; we continue to experience
his toothbrush, our home, the park where we walk. During the process of grieving, these
enduring experiences of practical meanings associated with the person who has died give rise,
in turn, to experiences of conflict or tension.10
In her book Objects of the Dead, Margaret Gibson describes a variety of ways in
which relations with those who have died are embodied in objects such as personal
possessions and how the dead somehow endure through various objects associated with them:
“Most of us live with traces of the dead in the form of furniture and other objects that have
always been there or have recently entered our lives and households” (Gibson, 2008, p.1).
Certain conflicted experiences serve to illustrate—vividly—how objects can be imbued with
a significance that depends on a particular individual. Take this well-known passage from
Simone de Beauvoir’s account of her mother’s illness and death:
As we looked at her straw bag, filled with balls of wool and an unfinished piece of knitting, and
at her blotting-pad, her scissors, her thimble, emotion rose up and drowned us. Everyone knows
the power of things: life is solidified in them, more immediately present than in any one of its
instants. They lay there on my table, orphaned, useless, waiting to turn into rubbish or to find
another identity. (Beauvoir, 1964/1965, p.98)
9
See, for example, Siegel (2014) for discussion of affordances in the content of perceptual experience. See also
Rietveld and Kiverstein (2014) for a conception of affordance that seeks to accommodate the associated
phenomenology and also allows for affordances that are specific to a particular person. For an alternative
approach, which rejects the affordance-concept, see Ratcliffe and Broome (in press).
10
It would therefore be misleading to construe the tension addressed here in terms of a conflict between “belief”
and “alief” (Gendler, 2008). Whereas “alief” (if there is such a thing) is a distinctive type of affective attitude
that occasionally comes into conflict with “belief”, we are concerned with forms of experience where
propositional beliefs with specific contents come into conflict with how a person continues to experience the
world as a whole. The latter is not a discrete attitude with a circumscribed content.
8
The bag appears somehow out of context, offering practical possibilities that are
experienced as conflicting with a larger situation in which the death is acknowledged. In
other cases—where the loss has started to “sink in”—things are instead experienced as
lacking such possibilities. For example, Joyce Carol Oates (2011, p.63) describes being
“reduced to a world of things”, meaning entities that are bereft of their former practical
significance. These things, she writes, “retain but the faintest glimmer of their original
identity and meaning as in a dead and desiccated husk of something once organic there might
be discerned a glimmer of its original identity and meaning”. Another form of experience
associated with grief involves experiencing situations and activities as practically meaningful
for others, while at the same time feeling curiously cut off from them oneself: “Planes still
landed, cars still drove, people still shopped and talked and worked. None of these things
made any sense at all” (Macdonald, 2014, p.15). Hence, what we are concerned with here is
not a singular experience, but a number of different experiences that contribute to a larger
grief process. They share in common a tension between the way in which an experiential
world is or was structured and the full implications of someone’s death. Attig (2011, xxxix)
thus refers to “relearning the world”—a “multi-dimensional process of learning how to live
meaningfully again after loss”. Read (2018, p.181) similarly observes that “our very world
has to change (for us to emerge from grief)”.
It is clear, then, that grief is not simply a rational or irrational response to someone’s
death. Rather, it involves a process whereby one negotiates disturbances of an experiential
world that rational thought more usually presupposes. Someone who comes close to saying
this is Martha Nussbaum (2001). Her “cognitive” account refers to “grief propositions”,
prompting the criticism that she takes grief to consist in “cool, intellectual judgment”
(Moller, 2017). However, in reflecting on her own experience of grief, Nussbaum remarks on
how learning of her mother’s death “violently tears the fabric of hope, planning, and
expectation that I have built up around her all my life”, adding that “the experience of
mourning is in great part an experience of repeatedly encountering cognitive frustration and
reweaving one’s cognitive fabric in consequence” (2001, p.80). She further acknowledges
that the upheaval does not follow comprehension of the death. Instead, the “full recognition”
of what has happened “is the upheaval” (2001, p.45). So, Nussbaum does not in fact appeal to
“cool, intellectual judgment”. However, what is needed in order to guard against such
misinterpretations is some account of how “cognitive” propositional thought can conflict with
something that could equally be labeled as “cognitive”, but is importantly different in kind.
9
With this, we can come to appreciate why it takes time to integrate the target and focus of
grief, to reconcile what has happened with the structure of one’s life. Gustafson, too, might
be seen as reaching for the conflict we have described, with his idea that grief involves the
irrational “counter-belief desire” that the person for whom one grieves not be dead. But, as
we have shown, it cannot be adequately captured in terms of the conflict between beliefs and
desires.
In fact, we are not sure that any established terms in philosophy serve to mark the
distinction in the required way, which is perhaps why it has proved so elusive. It is not simply
a matter of propositional thought versus habit, feeling, or perception. The aspect of cognition
that we are concerned with—reflected initially in an inability to comprehend the loss—
encompasses all of the latter and has conceptual organization too. When one is not
undergoing a profoundly disruptive experience such as grief, these different facets of thought
and habitual engagement with the world are generally experienced seamlessly. What is
therefore needed is a way of distinguishing between propositional cognitions that are
alienated from the practically meaningful experiential world and other (sometimes
conflicting) patterns of thought that remain integrated into that world.
What does all of this tell us about grief’s rationality? First of all, while grief does
involve a tension between two different kinds of thought-patterns (and much else), it equally
involves the process of resolving this conflict. So, it should not be considered inherently
irrational in the way suggested by Gustafson’s account, according to which it involves a
straightforward incompatibility between a belief and a desire. Second, what we have
described here is consistent both with the idea that we are resilient in the face of loss, and—as
we will further discuss in the next section—the view that grief’s diminishment over time does
not make it irrational. On the issue of resilience, it is important to distinguish between (a)
resilience as reverting back to how things were and (b) resilience as the successful
negotiation of profound life-disruption, something that can involve substantial changes to an
experiential world once taken for granted and to a sense of who one is. If what we have said
is broadly right, then resilience in grief cannot consist of (a), at least not where the person
who died was a significant part of one’s life. Recognition of and response to loss imply a
process of adjustment. Without this, the experiential world would remain forever unchanged
in the face of propositional acceptance, amounting to a disconnection from one’s current
reality. And that would indeed qualify as irrational. So, grief is not simply a rational or
irrational response to a person’s death; it is integral and essential to the comprehension of
loss. The kinds of tensions we have described here are not a matter of “irrationality”. They
10
are inextricable from the ability to recognize and respond to significant life-changes. For
beings that think, act, and perceive against the backdrop of a practically meaningful
experiential world, the organization of which depends on relations with others, what we have
described is unavoidable. Focus and target could not be matched in any other way.
One might take the line that these facets of grief stem from the contingent architecture
of human cognition; the loss of a person takes time to sink in, but things could have been
otherwise. As Moller (2007) suggests, we can at least contemplate the possibility of superresilient beings who do not experience grief at all. Thus, what we have sketched here could
be construed as a merely psychological account of grief’s diminution, one that leaves it
unresponsive to the grieving person’s reasons. However, it is not so clear that alternatives
such as Moller’s really are conceivable. We have suggested that the actual case of human
grief does not involve reacting to something that is independently understood. Instead, a grief
process involves coming to recognize the implications of what has happened. This takes time
because the structure of a life depends on the presence of a particular person in numerous
ways that cannot be instantly revised. To conceive of a being for whom this were not the case
would be to imagine something radically cognitively and phenomenologically different from
us: a being that does not find itself immersed in a habitually organized, practically
meaningful world that its various thoughts, perceptual experiences, and activities presuppose.
Furthermore, it is important to emphasize what a change in the structure of a human
life, of the kind that is integral to grief processes, requires. Once taken-for-granted patterns of
thought, action, and experienced meanings are lost, while new ones are formed. It is wholly
unclear how this could be achieved without continued engagement with the social world over
a prolonged period of time. Thus, it is highly doubtful that we can “imagine”, from the firstperson perspective, a super-resilient being who swiftly comprehends loss and experiences no
grief. Indeed, it is debatable whether we are able to conceive of such a being in any way,
even if we take ourselves to be doing so. To avoid the kind of protracted grief process
described here, we would have to care deeply for someone who has died, but without that
person being integrated into our life in any significant way. Even if this can be spelled out in
a manner that avoids the self-contradiction of caring for someone whom one does not care
about, it certainly does not apply to the vast majority of interpersonal relationships.11 Hence,
In this way, we can account for Wittgenstein’s observation that experiencing deep grief for only a second is
somehow incoherent (Wittgenstein, 1953, p.174).
11
11
to label the relevant aspects of grief as “irrational” would be to render the very structure of
human cognition irrational, without having a “rational” alternative to contrast it with.
Given what we have argued, it is not surprising or puzzling that grief changes over
time and generally subsides. Indeed, any profound upheaval will require some form of
prolonged adjustment process for much the same reasons. It would therefore be puzzling if
grief did not. Nevertheless, one might still object that we have painted an implausibly selfish
picture of grief; it seems to be all about injury to my world, to my practical identity, and it is
transitory to the extent that adjustment is possible. What Moller, Marušić, and others
acknowledge, and what we have not so far considered, is that grief is not just about oneself; it
is also concerned with what has happened, irrevocably, to someone else. To respond to this
objection and show how grief can indeed concern the death of another person, rather than just
the impact on one’s own life, we will now address the question of what the process-structure
of grief tells us about its object.
The Object (s) of Grief
As we have seen, some maintain that the proper object of grief is not transitory; it is the loss
of a person (Moller, 2007; 2017) or that person’s being dead (Marušić, 2018). This gives rise
to a tension between grief diminishing over time and the unchanging nature of its object.
However, an alternative proposal to consider, which seems to better complement our
emphasis on grief’s dynamic, temporally extended structure, is that grief’s object consists in
the loss or significant transformation of a relationship in which one is heavily invested. In
support of this view, Michael Cholbi writes:
We grieve for the relationship we lose with the deceased person. That is, grief’s object—what
sustains a bereaved person’s attention throughout an episode of grief —is how her relationship
is necessarily transformed by the other’s death. (Cholbi, 2017, p.259)
In contemplating grief’s rationality, Cholbi suggests that we should not be
preoccupied with whatever motivations arise from grief, such as those that Gustafson
associates with the desire that someone not be dead. Rather, the rationality of grief is
“backward-looking”; it is a matter of whether and to what extent grief is an appropriate
response to something that has happened—to the loss or significant disruption of a
relationship. In this respect, it is comparable to certain other emotions, such as joy, where the
principal criterion for assessing rationality is proportionality to a preceding event that also
12
happens to be its object. Cholbi’s approach offers a solution to Moller’s problem. Although
adjusting to an altered relationship involves emotional responses that diminish over time, it
need not conclude with altogether abandoning the relationship. Instead, we might retain one
or another kind of enduring connection or “bond” with the deceased (Klass, Silverman, and
Nickman, 1996). Hence, “resilience” need not capture all there is to our “ethical engagement
with the deaths of our loved ones” (Cholbi, 2019, p.494). Furthermore, it is easier to see why
grief changes over time. Adapting to the radical alteration of a relationship involves
determining how, if at all, if can and will continue. That process takes time and follows a
“trajectory” (Cholbi, 2019, p.498).
Although we have some sympathy with this position, we think it is importantly
incomplete. Instead, we suggest that it is a mistake to contrast a death, someone’s being dead,
there having been a loss, the loss of a relationship, and so forth, as though they were rival
candidate objects of grief. One worry we have is that focusing exclusively on the loss or
transformation of a relationship fails to accommodate the nature or extent of one’s concern
for the person who has died and what that person has lost. Perhaps it is not enough to say, as
Cholbi (2019, p.496) does, that a bereavement is “a catalyst for a crisis in our relationship”,
and thus an emotional response that is geared towards sustaining the relationship in a
modified form. Responding to the worry that his account makes grief too egocentric, Cholbi
suggests that the grieving subject’s attention to the relationship encompasses the deceased as
well. This takes the form of coming to know facts that are “about the deceased and the
bereaved”, a form of knowledge in which bereaved individuals cannot “cleanly distill the
process of knowing the deceased from knowing themselves” (2019, p.505). However, for this
to be plausible as a comprehensive account of concern for the deceased, it would need to be
further shown that such concern is exhausted by a preoccupation with significant facts about
a relationship. If that were so, then sentiments along the lines of “I would give my own life to
have her back” or “I wish I could trade places with her” would be incoherent, and it is not
clear that they are.
Another problem with Cholbi’s account of grief’s object is its emphasis on what has
happened, the loss or transformation of a relationship.12 More generally, we propose that the
object of grief should not be thought of principally in terms of something concrete that is no
This is not to suggest that Cholbi regards grief as exclusively past-directed. Instead, he conceives of it as “the
unfolding of an engagement with a relationship that has been lost or transformed” (2017, p.270). Nevertheless,
the object of grief remains something that has happened: the loss of a relationship. Insofar as the rationality of
grief depends on its appropriateness to this object, Cholbi takes it to be “backward-looking”.
12
13
more, something that was once part of one’s world and has been removed from it. Our
argument has two steps. First of all, it is clear that certain other experiences of “loss” should
not be understood in those terms. Consider, for instance, the grief reported by some of those
who have been unable to have children. Regardless of whether the term “grief” is employed
here, not having had children can certainly be associated with a profound sense of loss. Often,
this is not directed primarily at specific, historical events such as miscarriages, abortions,
failed IVF treatments, or the discovery of infertility. Rather, what is most salient is the loss of
certain future possibilities. One’s projects, commitments, and expectations were oriented
towards those possibilities, one’s sense of the future shaped by them. As it becomes clear that
they cannot be actualized, there is a temporally extended process of recognition and
reorientation. Expectations in which one was heavily invested over a long period, and which
shaped one’s life, are experienced as dashed (Day, 2016).13 Although the sense of loss does
not involve something concrete that once was and now is not, what is experienced as lost can
still be quite specific in nature. For example, knowing that she does not have long left to live,
Kate Gross writes of the third child she had planned to have and now will never have:
So, Plan Josie became Josie the baby ghost. Now she is a little girl who grows older only in a
parallel world, the kind you find by accident at the back of a wardrobe, or through a crease in
time. I think about her often. She is true and real in another life I’m having, somewhere else.
(Gross, 2014, p.87)
A configuration of previously live and salient possibilities is thus experienced as extinguished
without the preceding loss of a concrete object.
At this point, one might respond by insisting that the phenomenology of grief over a
death, which is past-directed, differs from the type of loss-experience sometimes associated
with childlessness. However, even though the two may indeed differ in various important
ways, a consideration of loss experiences that do not involve first having and then ceasing to
have something concrete serves to make explicit a structure that they share with experiences
of bereavement. This brings us to the second step in the argument: There is a puzzle that
applies to all three accounts of grief’s object so far mentioned: a death; a person’s being dead;
and the loss or transformation of a relationship. These accounts need to provide a further
13
See also Gateway Women, a support network for childless women: https://gateway-women.com/
14
specification of what, exactly, is lost when someone dies. Suppose Person D dies at Time 5,
aged 50. At that moment, do we also lose D at earlier times 1, 2, 3, and 4, when D was a
baby, a young child, a teenager, and in their late 20s? That seems implausible. Assuming we
ever lose “D at Times 1, 2, 3, and 4”, it seems that we have already done so, long before they
died. On the other hand, it seems equally implausible to maintain that we grieve only for a
temporal part of D, of whatever duration. Furthermore, D may change radically over time: D
as a baby at Time 1 is quite different from D as an eight-year-old at Time 2, D as a teenager
at Time 3, and so on. The point applies similarly to relationships. Granted, relationships can
change considerably over time, while still enduring. Nevertheless, the relationship that one
had with a newborn baby is very different in nature from one’s subsequent relationship with a
teenager. Hence, much of what we regard as integral to a person whom we care about or to a
cherished relationship has already been lost between Times 1 and 5. Yet we do not, for the
most part, suffer intense grief in recognizing and contemplating such historical change, just
occasional moments of sadness and nostalgia.
What, then, is lost? Such considerations suggest that grief over a death, like grief over
childlessness, is not principally about the subtraction of something concrete from one’s
world, whether it be a person or a relationship. Rather, in both cases, we suggest that the
object of grief is a loss of life-possibilities. By this, we mean significant possibilities that are
integral to the structure of one’s life, to one’s various projects, pastimes, habitual activities,
and commitments. A loss of possibilities can be regarded as unitary and singular to the extent
that (a) one’s life-structure consists of projects, pastimes, commitments, and habitual
expectations that are interrelated and—for the most part—coherently organized, and (b) the
deceased was integrated into one’s life-structure in a coherent way. As we have argued, it is
not that one first recognizes the loss of these possibilities and then engages in a grieving
process. Instead, the process we have described is integral to the recognition and negotiation
of loss. The object of grief can also be characterized non-phenomenologically; there is a fact
of the matter concerning the implications of a death for the structure of one’s life, and this is
what a grief process engages with. However, phenomenologically speaking, this loss of
possibilities does not precede and trigger the experience of grief. Rather, it is something that
one comes to grasp over time through a grief process.
One might respond that an experienced loss of possibilities is consistent with Cholbi’s
emphasis on losing a relationship; what is lost is not a past relationship, which has already
changed and—in part—been lost already, but a potential relationship. However, that would
be too restrictive. Our proposal does not imply that grief is directed towards the future as
15
opposed to the past. In fact, the past- and future-oriented aspects of grief are inextricable.
When we remember events in our biographies, how those events matter to us and relate to
one another depends on where we are heading now—which commitments and concerns we
maintain, whether and how our values shift, whether certain projects and pastimes have
become more or less central to our lives. How we relate to our past depends on which future
possibilities currently matter to us. Sartre (1943/1989, pp.498-9) thus writes that we can and
do change our autobiographical past, insofar as we continue to pursue and actualize
significant possibilities of one or another kind: “All my past is there pressing, urgent,
imperious, but its meanings and the orders which it gives me I choose by the very project of
my end. [….] It is the future which decides whether the past is living or dead”. In the case of
grief, Peter Goldie remarks on the parallels between how we relate to our past during grief
and free indirect style in literature, where the perspectives of narrator and character are
entangled. Memories involving the deceased are transformed by the death, by situating them
in the context of what one now knows (Goldie, 2012, p.56). Importantly, what transforms
one’s memories is not simply the fact of the person’s death, but also the loss of future
possibilities involving that person. These differ from the kinds of possibilities previously
associated with remembered events, leading to tensions and conflicts that are negotiated over
time.
A key question to address is that of whose possibilities are involved in experiences of
grief: my possibilities; your possibilities; or our possibilities. In the context of a close
relationship, we are not simply preoccupied with furthering our own projects and relying
upon input from the other person in order to actualize relevant possibilities. In addition, we
care about the actualization of their possibilities and act in ways that are intelligible only
relative to that end. Our own projects and commitments involve doing certain things for
them. In other instances, the distinction between what is mine and what is theirs does not
apply. Instead, certain possibilities are experienced as ours—it is us who strive to do this, in
order to enhance a life that we share together.14 The three are typically phenomenologically
inextricable, both before and after bereavement. Typically, when Person C contemplates
Person D and concerns herself with D’s well-being, C does not begin by extricating herself
fully from all facets of the relationship with D, in order to contemplate D from a more
objective standpoint that involves selfless concern for D. Instead, C continues to encounter D
For current purposes, we remain agnostic about the phenomenological and metaphysical nature of the “we” or
“us” involved here.
14
16
within the context of a shared experiential world that is itself organized in terms of the
relationship between them and therefore continues to presuppose that relationship. We might
say that C does not have a wholly independent sense of who D is.15 Given this, the same
unitary loss of life-possibilities can encompass C’s current predicament, what has happened
to D, and the past, current, and future relationship between C and D.
Hence, in conceiving of grief in terms of the loss of possibilities, we have in mind
something that is phenomenologically singular, encompassing a “me”, a “you”, and an “us”.
The worry that this renders grief implausibly selfish is therefore misplaced; our account of
grief’s object does not make grief, or its diminution over time, all about me. The balance
between possibilities that are mine, yours, and ours, will vary from case to case. Some grief
experiences will involve greater preoccupation with one’s own loss than others. (Given this,
our approach is not limited to the context of bereavement; it could also be applied to
experiences of loss more generally.) However, common to all cases is an experience of
certain possibilities having been lost. When Person D changes markedly over time, there is
ordinarily a sense of various possibilities having been actualized and subsequently built upon,
even though others may have been set aside. But, with the death of D, there is instead a sense
that unfolding arrangements of individual and shared possibilities and expectations have been
interrupted, curtailed, negated, or extinguished.
Losses of possibilities can be conceived of in more or less abstract terms, as our
descriptions of grief’s object move towards or away from the particularities of a person’s
grief experience while also emphasizing one or another aspect of it. We can thus describe the
object of grief as the loss of a relationship, the death of a person, or that person’s being dead.
However, these are not rival candidates for the status of grief’s object. Instead, they are
compatible ways of referring to different aspects of a larger, singular disturbance of
possibilities that is experienced, understood, and negotiated over time.
An implication of our account is that the phenomenology of grief does not conform to
a straightforward distinction between the formal and concrete objects of emotion. There are
three reasons for this. First of all, if the formal object of grief is taken to be a loss of lifepossibilities, this is not something that is experienced, in its entirety, at a particular moment.
Rather, grief involves recognizing and engaging with the significance of various, more
specific aspects of loss at different times. Second, grief does not have a singular concrete
15
For instance, as pointed out by Higgins (2013, p.160) those who are married tend to share a singular lifenarrative: “one now lives out one’s story in tandem with someone else’s”.
17
object or target. At a given time, experiences that are integral to a longer-term grief process
might be directed at the death, the manner in which it occurred, the fact that someone is
irrevocably gone, one’s own resultant predicament, how one will cope, or the loss of
transformation of a present or past relationship. But these are all aspects of a wider-ranging
loss of possibilities and qualify as objects of grief only insofar as we experience and engage
with them as such. The event of a death, for instance, is the cause of grief, rather than what
the experience of grief is about—what the grief process comprehends. The object of grief is
not the death per se, but the death as a loss of possibilities. Returning to our earlier discussion
of Helm (2009), one could say that the target of a grief experience, if it is to be identified
with grief’s object, is not the event of the death, but that event insofar as it pertains to the
focus, to the structure of one’s life. A third complication is that the object of grief at any
given time can be described, thought about, and even experienced with varying degrees of
abstraction: there has been a loss; a loss to me, to the deceased and to us; a loss of projects
that are integral to a life; a loss of more specific possibilities associated with those projects.
There might well be good reasons for retaining a distinction between formal and
concrete objects that have nothing to do with the accompanying phenomenology (for
example, for the purposes of distinguishing and classifying types of emotions). However, the
experience of grief proves more complicated. It is not just a matter of distinguishing between
the contingent, concrete object of an emotional episode (e.g., a charging bull) and the type of
evaluative property it possesses (threat). In addition, we are required to distinguish the object
of a heterogenous, temporally extended process from the various interrelated objects of its
constituent experiences, where the latter can be described at different levels of abstraction.
Thus, if the formal/concrete distinction is to reflect the phenomenology of grief (with loss of
life-possibilities as the formal object), it will need to be reconceived of in terms of a partwhole relation. The process as a whole engages with a loss of life-possibilities, while
constituent experiences relate to more specific aspects of this, which have varying degrees of
concreteness.
As a process that is central to experiences of grief involves coming to comprehend
grief’s object, it is not irrational that it should diminish over time. Comprehension of lost
possibilities takes place over time and, we have argued, must do so. However, to subdue any
lingering worries over the compatibility of something that diminishes over time with an
enduring object of emotion or a person’s enduring significance, it is also important to note
that negotiating a loss of life-possibilities encompasses various, importantly different ways in
which people and things matter to us. How someone close to us matters is not exhausted by a
18
preoccupation with our pastimes and projects. Hence, although the disruption of various
practical concerns and experiences of significance may be temporary, this is compatible with
a distinct kind of concern for the person who has died, which outlasts those disruptions. For
example, some bereaved children report having “internalized the deceased’s values, goals,
personalities or behaviors as a way of remaining connected” to a parent who has died
(Normand et al, 1996, p. 93). The worry that grief’s diminution over time shows that people
matter to us less than we might think or hope they do involves a failure to distinguish these
different types of concern. Moller (2007, p.310) emphasizes practical adjustment, noting that
this can even involve a comprehensive “functional replacement” of the deceased by someone
new.16 But functional replacement of Person D (e.g., through remarriage or having another
child) is compatible with sustaining an enduring sense of connection with D. Similarly,
Marušić’s formulation of the puzzle rests on an identification between how someone matters
to us, tout court, and a more specific type of mattering that diminishes over time as we
grieve: “It is the discrepancy between the duration of grief and the extent to which the loved
one matters to us that gives rise to the puzzle—even if we acknowledge that over time the
dead do, in fact, come to matter less” (Marušić, 2018, p.5). The tension can be dissolved by
noting that there are qualitatively different kinds of “mattering” at work here. One of these
may wane while another endures.17
None of this is to suggest that grief is always appropriate to its object and more
generally rational; there are no doubt various different forms of irrationality that can and
often (but not always) do afflict us in grief. For instance, a grief reaction would not be
appropriate to its object where it involved steadfastly preserving aspects of an experiential
world that are rendered unintelligible by a death. Grief can also be excessive, as when intense
or prolonged grief reactions arise without either losses of close relationships or substantial
disturbances of life-structure. However, what we have sought to show here is that certain
puzzles that have worried others fall away with a more detailed consideration of the
phenomenology of grief and—more specifically—its temporal structure.
16
See also Preston-Roedder and Preston-Roedder (2018) for criticisms of assumptions that Moller and others
make about what it takes for someone to be both important to us and irreplaceable.
17
This distinction is also relevant to ongoing debates over whether and in what sense grief involves “letting go”
of the deceased, a view associated with Freud (1917/2005) and others. It has been argued that, for the most part,
the bereaved instead maintain “continuing bonds” with the deceased; the relationship is revised and sustained,
rather than altogether lost (Klass, Silverman, and Nickman, 1996; Klass, 2006; Higgins, 2013; Klass and
Steffen, 2018). However, by distinguishing different types of concern that are integral to negotiating losses of
possibility, we see that continuing bonds of certain kinds are compatible with letting go (construed in terms of
habitual adjustment). Grief can involve both a transient process and an enduring relationship, where the latter is
also compatible with an enduring sense of loss.
19
Acknowledgements: ****
References
Attig, T. 2011. How We Grieve: Relearning the World. (Revised Edition.) Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Beauvoir, S. de. 1964/1965. A Very Easy Death. Trans. P. O’Brian. New York: Pantheon Books.
Bonanno, G. A. 2009. The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us
about Life after Loss. New York: Basic Books.
Cholbi, M. 2017. Grief’s Rationality, Backward and Forward. Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research XCIV: 255-272.
Cholbi, M. 2019. Regret, Resilience, and the Nature of Grief. Journal of Moral Philosophy 16: 486508.
Colombetti, G. 2014. The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind. Cambridge MA:
MIT Press.
Day, J. 2016. Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future
without Children. London: Bluebird.
De Sousa, R. 1987. The Rationality of Emotion. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Didion, J. 2006. The Year of Magical Thinking. London: Harper Perennial.
Dunston, S. 2010. Philosophy and Personal Loss. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 24: 158-170.
Freud, S. 1917/2005. Mourning and Melancholia. In On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia (Trans.
S. Whiteside). London: Penguin: 201-218.
Furtak, R. A. 2018. Knowing Emotions: Truthfulness and Recognition in Affective Experience. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Gendler, T. S. 2008. Alief and Belief. Journal of Philosophy 105: 634-663.
Gibson, M. 2008. Objects of the Dead: Mourning and Memory in Everyday Life. Carlton, Victoria:
Melbourne University Press.
Gillies, J. and R. A. Neimeyer. 2006. Loss, Grief, and the Search for Significance: Toward a Model of
Meaning Reconstruction in Bereavement. Journal of Constructivist Psychology 19: 31-65.
Glas, G. 2017. Dimensions of the Self in Emotion and Psychopathology: Consequences for SelfManagement in Anxiety and Depression. Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 24: 143-155.
Goldie, P. 2012. The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Gross, K. 2014. Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You About This Magnificent Life. London:
William Collins.
Gustafson, D. 1989. Grief. Noûs 23: 457-479.
20
Helm, B. W. 2009. Emotions as Evaluative Feelings. Emotion Review 1: 248-255.
Higgins, K.M. 2013. Love and Death. In J. Deigh, ed. On Emotions: Philosophical Essays. Oxford:
Oxford University Press: 159-178.
Klass, D. 2006. Continuing Conversation about Continuing Bonds. Death Studies 30: 843-858.
Klass, D., P. R. Silverman, and S. L. Nickman. Eds. 1996. Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of
Grief. London: Routledge.
Klass, D. and E. M. Steffen. Eds. 2018. Continuing Bonds in Bereavement: New Directions for
Research and Practice. London: Routledge.
Korsgaard, C. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Macdonald, H. 2014. H is for Hawk. London: Vintage Books.
Marušić, B. 2018. Do Reasons Expire? An Essay on Grief. Philosophers’ Imprint 18/25: 1-21
Moller, D. 2007. Love and Death. Journal of Philosophy 104: 301-316
Moller, D. 2017. Love and the Rationality of Grief. In C. Grau and A. Smuts. Eds. The Oxford
Handbook of Philosophy of Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (On-line publication: Apr 2017;
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199395729.013.35).
Normand, C. L., P. R. Silverman and S. L. Nickman. 1996. Bereaved Children’s Changing
Relationships with the Deceased. In D. Klass, P .R. Silverman, and S. L. Nickman. Eds. Continuing
Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. London: Routledge.
Nussbaum, M. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Preston-Roedder, R and E. Preston-Roedder, E. 2018. Grief and Recovery. In A. Gotlib, ed. The
Moral Psychology of Sadness. London: Rowman & Littlefield International: 93-116.
Price, C. 2010. The Rationality of Grief. Inquiry 55: 20-40.
Ratcliffe, M. 2008. Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Ratcliffe, M. 2015. Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Ratcliffe, M. 2017. Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal
World. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Ratcliffe, M. 2019. Emotional Intentionality. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 85: 251-269.
Ratcliffe, M. and M. Broome. In press. Beyond “Salience” and “Affordance”: Understanding
Anomalous Experiences of Significant Possibilities. In S. Archer. Ed. Salience: A Philosophical
Inquiry. London: Routledge.
Read, R. 2018. Can There Be a Logic of Grief? Why Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty Say ‘Yes’. In
O. Kuusela, M. Ometiţă, and T. Uçan, eds. Wittgenstein and Phenomenology. London: Routledge:
176-196.
21
Rietveld, E. and J. Kiverstein. 2014. A Rich Landscape of Affordances. Ecological Psychology 26:
325-352.
Rosenfeld, J. 2020. The Sate of Disbelief: A Story of Death, Love and Forgetting. London: Short
Books Ltd.
Siegel, S. 2014. Affordances and the Contents of Perception. In B. Brogaard, ed. Does Perception
Have Content. New York: Oxford University Press: 51-75.
Smuts, A. 2016. Love and Death, The Problem of Resilience. In M. Cholbi, ed. Immortality and the
Philosophy of Death. London: Roman and Littlefield: 173-188.
Teroni, F. 2007. Emotions and Formal Objects. Dialectica 61: 395-415.
Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.
22