1. Grief's Painfulness

The case for Meursault (and against grief) largely rests on grief's painfulness. The pain in question is primarily psychological rather than ‘bodily’. Some might contest my calling this state ‘pain’. Maybe this state is better captured by calling it ‘distress’, ‘anguish’, or ‘suffering’. But ‘pain’ seems a good enough term to capture the negatively tinged emotional element of grief.

Answering Meursault, that is, showing that grief can be good or worthwhile, seems to require showing that grief is good despite its being painful. Now we must keep in mind here that when we speak of grief being good, we have in mind that grief is good for the bereaved. It could (again) be true that grief is good from a moral point of view. For instance, perhaps grief is morally valuable because it helps people bond with one another during times of sorrow. The issue at hand is more pointed: To put the matter first personally, how can my grief be good for me—valuable, worthwhile, conducive to my well-being, etc.—despite its being painful to me?

First, let us consider two ways we might try to answer this question, both of which will prove inadequate, before turning to what I contend is a third and better way to account for how grief can be good despite being painful.

Most everyone will agree that pain is usually unwelcome. But we are not necessarily averse to pain. Masochists, for example, find pleasure in otherwise painful experiences. How this combination of attitudes or sensations is possible has long puzzled philosophers. (For a recent account, see Klein Reference Klein2014.) It seems unlikely, though, that grief is a species of masochism. For one thing, masochism is rare, grief nearly ubiquitous. Moreover, masochists (and again, this is a difficult mindset for the nonmasochist to imagine) somehow take pleasure in certain painful experiences. They come to experience pleasure through and because of pain. Central to masochism, then, is that one and the same experience is both pleasurable and painful all at once, with the pleasure being somehow inseparable from the pain. But this does not seem faithful to the reality of grief. Individuals are often drawn to grieve, even in full awareness of its painfulness, but the pain of grief is not also pleasurable at the same time. Grieving is therefore not a painful pathway to pleasure, as pain is for the masochist. Thus, we cannot make sense of how grief can be worthwhile despite being painful by claiming that the pain is masochistic in character, a pain in which we nevertheless take pleasure.

A second way we might show that grief could be good for us despite being painful rests on the observation that we sometimes tolerate pain in the belief that it will result in greater good. Consider a painful inoculation: The pain itself is bad, but is a cost worth bearing for the greater good it proves (immunity from contagious disease). Perhaps the pain of grief simply is bad, but can be outweighed by greater pleasures or goods. Grief's pain, then, is the cost of bereavement.

This second answer about grief's value does not succeed either. If pain is the cost we pay for grief, what are we paying for—what, in other words, is the good we get in exchange? In the case of the painful inoculation, the answer is apparent: protection against the disease(s) for which one is immunized. Yet, it is far from evident what we might get in return for the pains of grief. As it will turn out, there is a good that grief provides us (as I will try to persuade you later). Yet, for the moment, in the absence of an explanation of the good we get in exchange for the pains of grief, this answer is incomplete at best.

This appeal to grief as the cost we bear for some larger good also has strange implications. If pain is the cost of grief, then all other things being equal, the less pain associated with an episode of grief, the better that episode is for us. But that does not seem right. Imagine two siblings whose father has died. The siblings have similar relationships and histories with their father, so we would expect them to grieve in similar ways. Is one sibling better off because she undergoes the psychological pains of grief less intensely or for a shorter time? That is far from obvious. Conversely, it is far from obvious that being pained by grief longer or more intensely is necessarily worse for a person. In cases where the bereaved and deceased were particularly close (think of spouses married for half a century), grief should be intensely painful. And if this explanation were correct, the very ‘best’ episodes of grief would be entirely painless–and those, I propose, hardly even qualify as episodes of grief. In any event, there does not seem to be any correlation between how long or how intense the pain of a grief episode and how good or bad it seems from an intuitive point of view. That is enough to cast doubt on explaining grief's value in terms of its being the cost we bear for some larger good.

This explanation also faces a third challenge. On this account, the pain of grief is bad in its own right but can nevertheless lead to a greater good overall for oneself. The mental anguish of grief, according to this account, must be tolerated in order to attain the goods grief affords us. Again, compare grief's pains to the pains of an inoculation. The pains of an inoculation are undeniably painful. We put up with them in exchange for some greater good. But some bereaved individuals do not perceive the pain of grief as a state merely to be tolerated. Rather, they seem drawn to it. The Christian philosopher Augustine relates in his Confessions his grief at the death of a close friend he had known since childhood:

Augustine is clearly haunted by his friend's death. Surprisingly though, he does not refrain from the activities that remind him of his deceased friend's death. On the contrary. Augustine was ‘restless’ in seeking out reminders of the friend. He finds ‘delight’ only in the tearful pains of grief. Put in the language made familiar by Harry Frankfurt (Reference Frankfurt1999), Augustine has a second-order desire to do what he would otherwise have a first-order desire to avoid, that is, to undergo ‘unhappiness’, ‘tears’, and ‘torment’.

Augustine therefore does not seem merely to tolerate the pains of grief. Nothing Augustine says suggests that his seeking out his friend is pleasant. The pains of grief are undoubtedly painful for him. Still, he is attracted to these pains. Augustine thus perceives them (in ways he clearly struggles to articulate) as good pains. That the pains of grief are perceived as good gives us further reason to reject the thought that those pains are the cost we pay for the larger goods made possible by grief. For if Augustine and his ilk are to be trusted, then these pains are not costs at all.

Still, that these pains might in some way be good may well strike us as mysterious. But we are in fact acquainted with good pains.

2. Good Pains

In my younger days, I ran 30 or more miles per week, 5- and 10-kilometer races, the whole bit. Veteran runners will regale you with stories of ‘runners’ high’. But running also has its lows: sensations of overwhelming fatigue are common, for instance. At times, such sensations strongly tempt a runner simply to give in and stop. Over time, however, I came to judge that these painful sensations were not in fact bad. Indeed, I began to look forward to those pains, and while I did not necessarily hope that my daily runs would be maximally painful, I nevertheless found that painless runs were somehow ungratifying.

This shift in judgment regarding such pains was not because they were not bona fide pains. The pain itself—the raw physiological sensation—had not changed, and outside the context of running, I would have avoided it. And nearly always I would attempt to counteract the pain that lingered once I had completed my runs. My attitudes toward running were not those of the masochist though. I wanted my runs to have some measure of physical pain or distress, but not because I found the state of pain to be simultaneously pleasant or desirable. When a particularly arduous run neared its conclusion, I did not take pleasure in the pain as it accumulated. It remained unalloyed pain, unmixed with any pleasant sensation. But I also did not straightforwardly view these pains as costs to be borne for some larger good. I wanted to undergo these pains despite their being pains simpliciter. I did not judge these pains to be bad despite their being painful.

How I could have been in such a state—welcoming a genuine pain that was neither admixed with pleasure nor a cost to be borne for the sake of some greater good—may seem puzzling. Pain is a more complicated condition than we often recognize. Although pain feels bad, how we feel about it—the judgments we make about whether it is good or bad, desirable or undesirable—depend on a wide array of other psychological facts about us (Swenson Reference Swenson2009). Specifically, how we feel about pain can depend on our beliefs and attitudes about the larger situation in which the pain occurs. In my own case, the positive attitudes I had toward running painted the pains of running in a warmer hue. Facts about the context within which I underwent the pains made them good—but they were still pains all the same. The positive awareness of feeling one's own fitness, of testing one's body's limits, and so on, made the pains of running good pains for me. These pains therefore did not play the role that pain usually plays in our practical thinking and decision making. Rather than the pains of running being a reason not to train, they became integrated into the positive reasons I had to train.

And it would no more have made sense to suppose that extracting the pain from those positive activities would make them better than it would make sense to suppose that removing the tragic denouement from a Shakespearean tragedy would make the play better. Removing Juliet's suicide from the conclusion of Romeo and Juliet would not make the play a better aesthetic encounter for the audience. It would simply be a different play, much in the way that running would have been a different activity without its accompanying pain. Just as the pain contributes nonadditively and organically to the positive activity of running, so too does Juliet's suicide–itself a lamentable event—contribute nonadditively and organically to the quality of watching Shakespeare's play.

Painful but positive activities, in which the pain is valued insofar as it is essential to the nature of the activity, are not uncommon in human life. I have mentioned distance running, but I suspect that a similar pattern will be found in other forms of athletic activity. Powerlifters no doubt undergo strain, even pain, in their favored activity. But some evidently welcome these unpleasant sensations. So, too, do firewalkers and aficionados of hot chilis (Rozin Reference Rozin, Green, Mason and Kare1990). No doubt some who engage in these painful endeavors are masochists or perceive the pain in question as merely a cost to be endured, but at least some firewalkers and chili aficionados look forward to the pain of such endeavors thanks to their overall attitude toward those endeavors. Many women opt for natural childbirth, free of pain medications. While their reasons no doubt vary, I would speculate that some desire the pain of labor inasmuch as it is seen as integral to the unalloyed experience of childbirth. And in each of these instances, the pain retains its painfulness but is axiologically essential to the larger good at hand.

Now one might discount these observations by proposing that the positive judgments of the painfulness in these cases are a kind of trick played on us by our biology. From the standpoint of impartial observers, the pains of distance running, powerlifting, childbirth, and the like clearly are bad. But we are biologically constituted so as to be psychologically disposed to find the pains associated with these experiences desirable. We thus recategorize these pains as good even though they are in fact bad from a more impartial perspective.

In reply, note that a biological or psychological explanation of why we find some pains good or desirable, particularly pains embedded within larger complexes of goodness, does not show that our positive attitudes toward such pains are misguided. In fact, it may only be because of such biological or psychological facts that we are in a position to have these positive attitudes in the first place. But the availability of such an explanation does not show that these attitudes are false, any more than the fact that there is a biological or psychological explanation for our ability to perceive visually geometrical shape or for our awareness of our own levels of hunger shows that our beliefs about objects’ shapes or our own levels of hunger are false. More than a biological explanation of our positive attitudes toward certain pains is therefore needed in order to show that those attitudes are systematically misleading. And in the absence of additional evidence on this front, the evidence based on our first-personal experiences of these ‘good pains’ still stands.

If this picture of how pains can contribute to worthwhile activities is plausible, then this suggests a possible model for explaining why we are drawn to grieve: Grief's pains are good insofar as they occur within and are indispensable parts of an activity which is itself good or desirable in some way. Grief's pains are genuinely painful. Yet, just as we welcome pains associated with particularly worthwhile activities, so too do many, including Augustine apparently, welcome (and even seek out or cultivate) the pains of grief. Hence, because Meursault cannot undergo the pains associated with grief, he is thereby missing out on a valuable human activity of which psychic pain is an essential part.

All the same, a good deal more would have to be said to vindicate this explanation of how grief can be both valuable and painful. For one, we do not yet have an account of the activity of grieving, of which pain is an essential part. Moreover, we lack an account of how this activity could be valuable or worthwhile. In the case of the other activities I have cited, it seems clear how the pains fit into some larger good. In the cases of running or powerlifting, chili eating or childbirth, it is not too hard to identify what may be good or valuable about those activities. But if the pain of grief is good due to its being part of some larger valuable experience, what is that larger valuable experience? To address these issues, we need to delve more deeply into the nature of grief itself.

3. Who We Grieve For

Pain is essential to grief, but there is more to grieving than just psychological pain. The work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross popularized the idea that grieving follows a five-step process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Few of those who study grief (including Kübler-Ross herself) accept this five-stage model in so simplistic a form. Many people do not experience these particular five steps, do not experience them in this particular order, and some have grief episodes that include other emotional states (for instance, joy or anxiety). Nevertheless, there is wide agreement that, overwhelmingly, grief is not a single state but a complex set of states of which emotional pain is only one part. Grief, as they say, is a structured process (Goldie Reference Goldie2011; Higgins Reference Higgins and Deigh2013), but one that varies from individual to individual and from episode to episode. For one person, grief might begin with acceptance, but for another, it might begin with anxiety. And one and the same person could have different grief reactions to different deaths (the grief she undergoes at the death of her sister may consist of a different set of states or stages than the grief she undergoes at the death of her neighbor). The variability of grief is unsurprising. Human beings vary, and so too do the relationships they have with those for whom they grieve (Cholbi Reference Cholbi2017).

In order to grieve for someone, we need to have a certain kind of relationship with that person. Not every death grieves us. When you scan a newspaper's obituaries, you may feel sorrow as you read about the lives of the deceased. But your reaction to the deaths of strangers, while doleful, lacks the personal dimension of grief. Their deaths are important because their lives, like all human lives, were important. But their lives, and hence their deaths, are not (usually) especially important to you. The deaths that generate grief, in contrast, feel like personal losses.

The most common sort of loss that prompts grief is the death of family or close friends. The advent of social media has made it clear, though, that many people also grieve for the deaths of entertainers or politicians. For instance, 2016 saw outpourings of public grief for pop stars (Prince, David Bowie), actors (Gene Wilder), athletes (Arnold Palmer), activists (Elie Wiesel), and athletes-cum-activists (Muhammad Ali). Only a handful of those who grieved for the deaths of these public figures had any first-hand familiarity or intimacy with these figures. Usually, grief occurs between individuals who are familiar or intimate with one another in a bidirectional sense: spouses grieve one another's deaths, siblings grieve the deaths of one another, and so on. In the case of public figures, the grief is unidirectional. It is no knock on David Bowie to point out that he would have grieved the deaths of very few of the fans and admirers who ultimately grieved his death.

That we primarily grieve for those with whom we have intimate relationships but also grieve for strangers we revere points to the scope of grief. What do those for whom we grieve have in common? When we think about our lives and the stories we tell about them, certain people stand out much more than others. These will likely include our parents, children, romantic partners, family members, close professional associates, long-standing friendships, and so on. But people for whom we are essentially strangers can be crucial to the stories we tell about ourselves. A musician who had no relationship with David Bowie might nevertheless have modeled her music or her aesthetic ideals on his work; an otherwise secular minded Jew might have been moved by Wiesel's Holocaust memoirs to investigate his Jewish heritage; an American Muslim may look to Ali's life for a picture of how to express his faith in a culture traditionally hostile to Islam.

Such examples illustrate that we do not have to have an especially close or mutual relationship with a person for that individual to be central to our self-understanding and to the stories we tell about our lives. We can have identity-constituting relationships with strangers and intimates alike. An identity-constituting relationship is one that figures prominently in our autobiographies and in what Christine Korsgaard calls our ‘practical identities’, the descriptions of our values, concerns, and commitments that explain why we feel and act as we do (Reference Korsgaard1996:101). Notice that an identity-constituting relationship is more than just any relationship that might have shaped what we are like. An adult who was adopted as a young child was no doubt shaped by his genetic relation to his biological parents. But he may or may not have an identity-constituting relationship with his biological parents. He may, for instance, be largely uninterested in them and see them merely as part of the causal background through which he came into existence. In that case, he lacks an identity-constituting relationship with them despite his identity being in part constituted by his genetic relationship with them. To have an identity-constituting relationship with another is to conceptualize her not merely as shaping who one is but also what one cares about. Such relationships depend on the past, but they also shape our future. Our identity-constituting relationships reveal who we want to be and to become. They are the relationships that, in Korsgaard's terms, matter to how we value ourselves.

When someone with whom we have an identity-constituting relationship dies, we thus suffer a peculiarly acute loss. On the one hand, we suffer the loss of the various goods that person may have provided. That person's death can mean the loss of our dining partner, coparent, or artistic role model. That death thus denies us the opportunity to pursue various goods we pursued in concert with the person who died. In this regard, such persons’ deaths are losses to our selves. But one distinguishing feature of grief, one that seems closely related to the anxiety or distress many bereaved people experience, is that the deaths of those with whom we have identity-constituting relationships also feel like losses of our selves. Many grieving persons report that they no longer recognize themselves—that the death of someone to whom they are attached has changed them in some fundamental way (Morey Reference Morey1995; Parkes and Prigerson Reference Parkes and Prigerson2010). Others’ deaths force us to change our relationship to them (Andersen and Chen Reference Andersen and Chen2002; Shapiro Reference Shapiro1994; Walter Reference Walter1996). After all, we cannot relate to the dead as we can to the living. Our relationships with them can continue in some guise. Keeping a picture of a deceased loved one on our desk is a way to ensure that at least our end of the relationship continues. To remember someone is, after all, a way of relating to her. Yet, we cannot participate in shared activities, communicate with the deceased in the normal way, form plans with them, and so on. That we feel changed via grief should therefore not come as a surprise. For the death of someone standing in an identity-constituting relationship with us necessitates a change in what sorts of goods are available to us and what we might hope or plan for. Grief thus disorients us inasmuch as patterns of feeling and acting with which we are familiar are no longer available to us. Our lives cannot proceed in precisely the same manner as they did before. When another's death forces us to confront the question ‘what would I do without you?’, many of us do not have a ready answer.

This sense of disorientation helps explain why grieving can be emotionally multifaceted, even tumultuous. As we noted above, emotional pain is only one element of the grieving process, a process that can vary from person to person and from grief episode to grief episode. That process may also include anxiety, bargaining, fear, anger, even joy. No doubt part of the reason grief is a stagelike emotional process is that we often harbor complex feelings toward those for whom we grieve. The death of a parent, for instance, marks a turning point in a relationship that is nearly always identity-constituting for a child. Rarely are the relationships between parents and child dominated by a single emotional dynamic. It would thus be surprising for a child's grief to exhibit a single emotional tenor either.

Grief, therefore, is a multistage emotional process that results when someone with whom we have an identity-constituting relationship dies. And because these relationships cannot continue as they did before, the others’ death feels like a loss of self, that is, the bereaved individual's practical identity seems to rupture because she can no longer orient that identity around the deceased individual. Our grief reactions may seem unruly, even chaotic, in part because we are trying to make sense of who we are and what we care about in the aftermath of the other's death. The observation that we grieve for those with whom we stand in identity-constituting relationship inches us closer to a refutation of Meursault. We now know whom we grieve for and (roughly) why. But we have not pinpointed the good that grieving can provide us, the good that can make the pains essential to grief good and worthwhile pains. For that, Augustine again comes to our aid.

4. Grief as a Motivator and Source of Self-knowledge

In the course of his evidently arduous grief, Augustine interrogates his own soul. ‘I became a great enigma to myself’, he writes, ‘and I was forever asking my soul why it was sad, and why it disquieted me sorely. And my soul knew not what to answer me’ (Reference Sheed and Foley2006: 4.4.59). Augustine's grief was disorienting too. He does not know entirely how to react or why. And upon introspecting—upon consulting his own ‘soul’—Augustine does not find the answers he seeks. His soul cannot explain what is happening to him. He wants to understand his own sadness, to grasp not only its origins but also its personal significance. Sadly, answers to his query were not forthcoming.

I want to suggest, however, that in the midst of his grief, Augustine was perhaps unknowingly asking the right kinds of question. For grief is a particularly fruitful opportunity for an important human good: self-knowledge.

How does grief enable self-knowledge? For much of our lives, our outlook on the world operates on autopilot. We go about our daily business, pursuing our goals, trying our best to live well, and so on. We develop habits that reflect what I called earlier our practical identities. These habits easily become entrenched and normalized, and when they do, we can lose sight of how our practical identities assume a stable everyday environment in which we pursue and manifest them. Of course, we know that much in our everyday environment is contingent. We ‘know’, for instance, that our homes can be felled by earthquakes or other disasters, that our professional lives depend on institutions and practice that can totter, that our bodies may betray us via injury or disease. And we also ‘know’ that others, including those with whom we have identity-constituting relationships, are (like us) mortal. But in the day-to-day shuffle, these facts, though known, are often not fully appreciated, taken for granted and placed somewhere on our mental backburners. Our practical identities—the way we understand ourselves and what is valuable in our world—tend to assume a background reality. But that reality is metaphysically contingent. Those facts can change, even disappear entirely.

And when those facts change, those changes can jolt our evaluative systems. It may no longer make sense to care about particular places, people, or things if the reality in which our caring for them makes sense undergoes a shift, particularly when that shift is abrupt. When such shifts occur, we must adapt to new material realities. But such shifts also motivate us to interrogate ourselves. After all, few things can do more to raise self-doubt than the sudden realization that your existing attitudes depend upon contingent realities, most of which are outside your control. To be reminded that the world could be different—nay, to have that fact vividly demonstrated through a profound change in the parts of the world that matter most to us—is also a reminder that we could be different. Just as the facts that make our practical identities feasible could change, so too could our practical identity change. And once that possibility arises in our consciousness, we begin to ask just who we are and what matters to us. We are thus set on a path toward self-knowledge.

The deaths of those for whom we grieve can therefore motivate a search for self-knowledge. Others’ deaths are felt as losses both to and of the self. Their deaths remind us in particular of how our self-conceptions—who we believe ourselves to be—are predicated on the existence of particular others. When those others die, we can be reminded that our practical identities, which hinge upon their continued existence, are not inevitable or preordained. The disorientation of grief will tend to put our practical identities and our very selves under scrutiny. And just as Augustine interrogated his soul, we interrogate ours in order to figure out who we are and how our lives should continue. Grief is therefore a powerful motivator of self-knowledge.

At the same time, grief is an aid to self-knowledge because its emotional richness makes it an especially robust source of self-knowledge. Grief episodes contain many emotions, all of which are focused on the relationship one has with the deceased. Different emotions disclose different aspects of our personalities and practical identities. In experiencing anger, we are given hints as to what we regard as injurious or harmful to ourselves. In experiencing fear, we are given hints as to what we regard as threatening to ourselves. In experiencing joy or peace, we are given hints as to what we regard as providing security or stability and so on for each of the emotions. Our emotional responses are revelations of different components of what matters to us.

Because grief episodes usually contain many distinct emotional stages, those episodes enable us to interrogate different elements of our selves. A grief episode that contains moments of anger, fear, and joy (say) provides us evidence about what we find valuable or worthwhile. To learn that we feel anger when we ponder how the deceased person hurt us informs us about what we care about. For example, anger at recalling an instance for which the deceased person failed to attend an important event (a wedding or college graduation, say) tells us about the importance of that event in our lives and about our yearning to share it with others. Likewise for feeling fear, joy, or other emotions people experience in the course of grief. They too inform us about what and who we are, what we care about, and the place of particular others in our network of cares. This is not to imply that this data needs no interpretation. Our emotions draw our attention to evaluatively salient facts, but they do not always immediately disclose to us the nature of those facts. Suppose that a child feels anxiety at the death of her parent. This anxiety could be the result of the child losing a relationship with the parent that was very secure. The parent's death thus elicits anxiety in the child because a source of security was lost. Conversely, that same anxiety could reflect a child's more checkered history with her parents. A child with an emotionally distant parent may experience this anxiety as a kind of traumatic memory of past situations in which the parent did not provide the desired security. This example underscores that grief sets a task of self-understanding for us. A given emotional reaction (anxiety in this case) does not wear its object on its face. To know what this anxiety signifies requires interrogation of one's own biography. Making sense of grief's emotional elements thus requires making sense of ourselves, i.e., attaining a form of biographical self-knowledge.

Grief thus looks like our psyche's way of instigating an emotional data dump. We would be wise to seize the opportunity to make sense of that data and thereby attain deeper levels of self-knowledge.

The pain of grief, I propose, is genuinely painful but one we can be attracted to through a recognition that by fully engaging with that pain and with the cavalcade of other emotions we feel in the course of grief, we can enhance our knowledge of ourselves and our practical identities. Perhaps surprisingly, although grief is prompted by the deaths of others, it can put us in a position to relate to ourselves in more profound ways. In proposing that the value of grief—the value that makes even the pains of grief worth bearing—is self-knowledge, I am not suggesting that those who grieve know this or have self-knowledge as their conscious aim. Often we can pursue a good we recognize only inchoately. For we can know that something is valuable without yet knowing how it is valuable. With respect to grieving, we can be moved to grieve (and even be moved toward experiencing the more painful aspects of grief) without knowing what is moving us. But retrospective examination of grief episodes supports the thought that we often come to see that grief can provide us self-knowledge. When people talk of ‘putting their lives together’, ‘figuring out how to go on’, or ‘reaching closure’ (note in this last phrase the suggestion of finality, of ‘closing the book’ on the past), they are engaging in activities that betoken the search for self-knowledge. Moreover, whether an episode of grief has been valuable may only be discerned after the fact, by considering whether or not it culminated in self-knowledge.

The pains of grief can thus be vindicated by the self-knowledge grief can provide. Grief can therefore be instrumentally valuable, a special opportunity to improve our lives. Of course, those whose grieving does not result in self-knowledge may not appreciate that fact and may live out their lives ignorant of this lost opportunity. Yet the thought that our pains may in effect go to waste, that is, that those pains end up being simply painful without being redeemed or made good through self-knowledge, is itself a painful thought.