Going on with my project (2) - Grief

It must have been in the autumn of 1983. My cousin Eric, one of the most likeable and loveable people you would ever meet, who had just been married the weekend before (unwisely most agree), was killed when a young man trying to kill himself crashed head-on into Eric’s vehicle. Eric was killed, but the perpetrator survived. It was traumatic for the whole family but especially his parents. I still have the image of my uncle trembling uncontrollably at the funeral. There is no anguish like the death of a beloved child. I witnessed other chilling expressions of grief from parents who had lost their children when I worked in the Emergency Room. My aunt and uncle never really recovered. Time did little to lessen the pain of their grief.

    Assume the grief disclosed something about Eric, and my aunt and uncle; about human reality, and Being as such. Assume the grief is more than a biological virtual reaction programmed into us by an Artificial-Intelligence-like  natural Matrix (referring to the movie). What does such grief disclose? What must be real for the grief to be disclosing? Let me start from the most general and end with the most culture-specific deductions.

 

1)   Grief discloses the depth of human bonds. The strength of grief corresponds to the depth of love. It reveals that relationships are not mere accidents or conveniences but essential to our being.

2)   Grief affirms the unique irreplaceability of persons. No one grieves in the same way for two different people. The person lost is not just a sum of qualities but an unrepeatable existence. This means that individuals have a reality beyond their mere attributes or functions. As Raimond Gaita put it: “Our sense of the preciousness of other people is connected with their power to affect us in ways we cannot fathom and in ways against which we can protect ourselves only at the cost of becoming shallow. There is nothing reasonable in the fact that another person’s absence can make our lives seem empty. The power of human beings to affect one another in ways beyond reason and beyond merit, has offended rationalists and moralists since the dawn of thought, but it is partly what yields to us that sense of human individuality which we express when we say that human beings are unique and irreplaceable. Such attachments and the joy and the grief which they may cause, condition our sense of the preciousness of human beings. Love is the most important of them.” – A Common Humanity

3)   Time does not dissolve true grief. While some wounds heal, deep grief does not "go away" but remains, showing that love and loss transcend time in a way that mere biological or psychological explanations struggle to account for.

4)   Grief contradicts the idea that death is merely a natural event. If death were simply a neutral biological fact, grief would not be so existentially painful. Human life has a meaning that death appears to negate.

5)   Grief implies that what is worthy of love is not merely subjective. The sorrow of loss is not merely a feeling but a response to something real. If the worth of the person lost were purely subjective, grief would not have the same weight. Imagine consoling someone with thoughts like: “It is only a subjective reaction. Don’t worry, it will dissipate over time.” Only an android like Data could say such a thing. 

6)   Grief reveals an orientation toward eternity. The desire that a loved one should still exist is irrational if everything is simply finite and passing. The very structure of grief suggests an implicit demand that love should not end, which points toward a reality where it does not. To love someone is not to believe in their death (Gabriele Marcel). I can confirm this. I went to my grandmother’s funeral a confirmed atheist materialist who considered talks of souls and afterlife superstition. This belief system did not survive her funeral. It felt like a betrayal.

7)   Grief suggests that love has ontological priority. If grief is a measure of love’s depth, and if love is the most real thing we experience, then love itself may be the most fundamental reality. This aligns with the idea that Being itself is Love (1 John 4:8).

8)   Grief might be a response to exile from our true home – In a Christian framework, suffering and loss are not the final truth, but symptoms of a fallen world awaiting redemption. The endurance of grief, rather than a meaningless torment, could be understood as a sign that we were not made for death.

. . .

    But a skeptic will point out that grief is far from universal. Some people feel no grief, or even worse, feel grief only sentimentally, to draw attention to themselves. The fact of meaning-blindness, however, is not an argument against the existence of grief and the realities it discloses. Such people may have numbed themselves to avoid suffering; the refusal to acknowledge grief could be a defense mechanism against the unbearable weight of loss. Or they may lack a developed sense of love. If one does not experience grief at all, it suggests an inability to recognize the irreplaceable worth of persons. This could imply a blindness to deeper realities, not just emotional but ontological. They might, moreover, live within an impoverished metaphysical framework. If one truly believes the universe is indifferent and people are just arrangements of atoms, then grief may appear irrational. That seems to be Socrates’ view in the Phaedo! Many Stoics seem to have believed this. But such beliefs might be symptoms of alienation from reality rather than an insight into it. These are not refutations of my point.

     A reductionist, evolutionary theory-driven philosopher might interpret grief as an evolutionary byproduct. The pain of my uncle and aunt’s grief is a result of natural selection. Strong emotional bonds increase the chances of offspring survival, so grief is merely an unintended consequence of this evolutionary mechanism. Therefore, so the argument, grief has no intrinsic meaning; it doesn’t tell us anything about reality except what the evolutionary biology already assumes a priori: the survival of the fittest. Like all emotions, grief is just the firing of neurons shaped by survival pressures. While it feels profound, it is ultimately no more meaningful than hunger or the fight-or-flight response.

   Indeed, such folk would argue that love itself is an illusion. Love is not a metaphysical reality but a biochemical trick to promote reproduction and group cohesion. The feeling of irreplaceability is a useful fiction. The persistence of grief can thus be explained away as an unfortunate quirk of brain wiring. From a strictly functional standpoint, prolonged grief is maladaptive; the most efficient survival strategy would be to "move on" quickly. The fact that grief lingers is an evolutionary "bug," not a feature.

    My aunt and uncle’s grief already acts as a lived refutation of such a reductionist stance. Their grief vastly exceeded any plausible survival function. If grief were purely about evolutionary success, we would expect it to dissipate quickly or be overridden by survival instincts – as with mother cats. But it often deepens over time, persisting far beyond any adaptive usefulness. Nor can reductionism cannot explain the irreducible particularity of grief . The evolutionary account might explain why humans grieve in general, but it cannot explain why this father grieves this son. There is something in grief that is not generic, but profoundly particular. If grief is an illusion, then so is love, yet no one lives that way – a person who did would be considered insane. A strict materialist might say love and grief are just neural phenomena, but they do not behave accordingly. No parent treats their child's death as a mere rearrangement of molecules. The refusal to do so suggests a deeper, inescapable truth. Imagine a materialist consoling my aunt and uncle with such an argument that in their experience of grief they are nothing more than instruments being played by nature.

     The whole reductivist program turns life on its head. If grief is meaningless, then moral outrage at tragic deaths is irrational. If my uncle's grief is just brain chemistry, then so is our moral horror at his suffering. But this would make all ethical judgments arbitrary. Nothing would truly be tragic or unjust. Our world, the world we experience and live in, would have no more reality than the virtual world of the Matrix. Therefore, the reductionist must either deny or trivialize human suffering. If grief is just neurons misfiring, then we are forced to say that the greatest sorrows of human existence have no more weight than an upset stomach. But this conclusion is so out of step with lived experience that it effectively collapses under its own absurdity.

       The reductionist view is also guilty of the genetic fallacy: it tries to dismiss the significance of grief by explaining its origins rather than engaging with what grief is. The genetic fallacy occurs when someone argues that because an idea or experience can be explained in terms of its origins, it is therefore discredited or reduced to those origins. Suppose someone says, “Grief is just an evolved survival mechanism; therefore, it has no deeper meaning.” This is like saying, “Mathematics evolved because it helped our ancestors survive; therefore, numbers are not real.” Or, “Religious belief evolved as a social cohesion tool; therefore, all religious claims are false.” The fallacy lies in assuming that explaining where something comes from explains what it is. But origins do not necessarily determine truth or value. Even if grief did originate through evolutionary pressures, this does not mean it lacks intrinsic meaning. In fact, the persistence and depth of grief suggest that it points to something beyond its mere origins. Thus, the attempt to reduce grief to its evolutionary history does not answer the fundamental question of what grief reveals about love, loss, and being itself.

. . .

That I consider "axiomatic" such convictions – which I cannot prove empirically – as grief reveals the meaning of the death of a loved one, which is to say, is a response to reality is thus not as an abstract logical exercise in deduction. I consider them axiomatic because to call them into question would mean to question the reality of the meaning of my uncle's grief. That would be a terrible betrayal of my uncle and cousin. It would be disgraceful to do so. So my "axioms" are grounded in moral absolutes.  Thus, my approach is not arbitrary. My axioms are not abstract assumptions. They are grounded in what we actually experience as real and undeniable.

     These thoughts exposes the moral stakes involved in these problems. To reduce grief to mere chemical processes, say, is not just an error in reasoning but a failure of moral imagination and reason. It would mean looking at something deeply human and responding with inhuman detachment. One can either acknowledge grief as revelatory of something real (about love, loss, and being) or deny it and embrace an impoverished, reductionist view of reality. But such a denial is not just intellectually dubious; it is morally suspect.

      My thinking draws on Simone Weil’s. For her, truth lights up the moral demand it shows us. If a man sees suffering and remains passive, the problem is not just an intellectual mistake but a failure of heart and a soul that has been deprived of light. I don't say that as someone who is above that, not at all.