Michael Cholbi on Grief, Identity Crisis, and What We Learn from Loss

In his 2022 book Grief: A Philosophical Guide, Michael Cholbi suggests philosophers over the millennia have paid relatively little attention to grief.

Part of this may be down to embarrassment: ancient philosophers from Greece and Rome, Cholbi tells us, generally champion reason over emotion. Grief for them is a manifestation of the latter: it’s a malady or weakness to be endured or, even better, reasoned away.

As the Stoic philosopher Epictetus sternly puts it in the Enchiridion:

You are a fool to want your children, wife, or friends to be immortal; it calls for powers beyond you, and gifts not yours to either own or give.

Grief should be approached like all other suffering: we should rationally reframe our judgements until the (irrational) suffering is dissolved. “We may weep,” Seneca graciously informs us, “but we must not wail.”

Such an attitude is not unique to classical Western thought; it’s expressed in ancient China, too. Here is how Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi reflects on the death of his wife, for example:

When she had just died, I could not help being affected. Soon, however, I examined the matter from the very beginning. At the very beginning, she was not living, having no form, nor even substance. But somehow or other there was then her substance, then her form, and then her life. Now by a further change, she has died. The whole process is like the sequence of the four seasons, spring, summer, autumn, and winter. While she is thus lying in the great mansion of the universe, for me to go about weeping and wailing would be to proclaim myself ignorant of the natural laws. Therefore I stopped!

The prevailing idea from such traditions is that grief is a personal deficiency to overcome. Once we correct our ignorance about how the universe works, once we see our situation clearly, grief will loosen its grip.

Cholbi thinks grief is much more complicated, nuanced, and interesting than this. Grief is not a sickness to be cured; it’s a universal and deeply human process that plays a distinctive role in a life well lived.

But how can something as painful and debilitating as grief be valuable? To answer this question, Cholbi thinks we first need to understand grief’s true nature. Once we do so, we’ll see why our propensity for grief is not to be regretted but welcomed.

What is grief, and what exactly are we grieving for?

Cholbi begins by distinguishing grief from mourning. Mourning consists of behaviors and rituals that publicly honor the dead, and is not necessarily bound to grief. We can participate in a minute’s silence, we can be saddened by death in a general way, we can feel pity for the deceased or their loved ones at a funeral, without strictly grieving for those who have passed.

Grief, meanwhile, is self-concerning, Cholbi tells us. While mourning is public, grief is private and inwardly experienced.

A paradigmatic case of grief is that we grieve when someone ‘close’ to us dies. We might typically frame this closeness in terms of love, intimacy, or contribution to our wellbeing: it seems the more we love someone, or the more intimate we are with someone, or the more someone contributes to our wellbeing, the more intense our grief at their passing will be.

But Cholbi thinks none of these framings is quite right: love, intimacy, and wellbeing do not account for all grief episodes. Yes, people grieve for their partners, family, friends; but they also grieve for their favorite musicians, role models, and sporting heroes. They grieve for estranged parents, rivals, and people to whom they haven’t spoken in years.

Cholbi thus thinks a better framing here is that we grieve for those in whom our practical identities have been invested.

Our practical identities consist of our conceptions of the past and future, as well as our values, commitments, and concerns — and these are always intimately bound up with other people. As Cholbi puts it:

We grieve a person’s death — and it is appropriate that we grieve a person’s death — to the extent that our practical identities are invested in their existence. The more central another person is to our practical identity, the greater cause we have for grieving them upon their deaths.

This explains why we can grieve for people we’ve never met, but whose lives are nevertheless important to our sense of self: their passing forces us to reckon with who we’ve been and who we’ll now be.

It also illuminates why we can experience grief at a bad breakup, or estrangement, or even the loss of a job. Grief is triggered by a significant disruption to our practical identities, and this accounts for its variability.

For grief is not just a temporary feeling of deep sadness; it’s a multistage process involving many different emotions, from bewilderment and confusion to anguish, guilt, anger, regret, fear, alienation, boredom, nostalgia, joy, numbness, and so on.

The psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous five-stage theory of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) is right in its general approach, Cholbi suggests, though wrong in substance. Not everyone will experience the grief process in the same way, nor will they experience the same phases or even a coherent order of phases; however, Kübler-Ross is correct to state that grief is an active process.

So, what kind of process is it? If grief is different for everyone, what’s its unifying feature?

Grief is the process by which we attend to a rip in our autobiographies

Let us return to the paradigmatic example of grief: the death of someone close to us. Cholbi thinks such grief consists of sustained, questioning attention not to the loss of the deceased but to the transformation of our relationship with the deceased.

It is this transformation — this relationship crisis — that triggers an identity crisis. The relationship cannot continue in the same way: there is now an unprecedented one-sidedness — one that reveals itself, Cholbi observes, in many jarring ways:

Conversations, rituals, and activities involving the deceased no longer occur. Some conflicts between the bereaved and the deceased can no longer be brought to light or adjudicated. Other conflicts are such that death seems to bring them out into the open. We no longer harbor hopes for what the deceased might do or become. The bereaved can forgive the deceased, but not vice versa. We cannot plan with or around the deceased as we once did…

This is why grief can be so bewildering: the world we are used to is one that contained the deceased. Without them, our basic stance towards the world, our basic understanding of what we are able to do and who we are able to be in the world, no longer matches what is actually possible.

Losing someone in whom our identities are invested thus creates a rip in our first-person, autobiographical construction of reality. Grief is the process by which we attend to this rip as it tears backwards and forwards in time. We must deal with the rawness of what we have lost while also facing, without the deceased, the remainder of our lives.

Oscillating between these backwards- and forwards-looking processes throws up all sorts of different feelings, and this variance in our emotions is connected to the variance of our prior relationship to the deceased, Cholbi suggests. We are working through what the relationship was, what we hoped it might become, and what it can now be.

This is why the process of grief, while universal, is different for everyone. Cholbi compares it to a musical improvisation: we may each be given a certain score and key, but we perform the piece differently. As Cholbi puts it:

grieving is a process wherein individuals engage with an emotional sequence not entirely of their own choosing but which they can imbue with significance that transcends the emotions that serve as the affective ingredients of grief episodes. So, although we do not orchestrate grief, we do not stand in a wholly passive, spectator-like relationship to it either. Grief is something we do, rather than something that happens to us.

Grief can be surprising because it focuses our attention on severed bonds that we ‘forgot’ were ever bonds. In day-to-day living we lose sight of the extent to which our commitments, concerns, values, and conceptions of the past and future are irrevocably rooted in and sustained by our relationships with other people.

Whether those relationships were wholly positive or not, their sudden transformation shocks us and brings the vulnerability and contingency of our practical identities into sharp relief. We become unanchored and left to drift. Groping at the raw absence of who we were, we are forced to reckon with who we can now be…

Where does the value of grief come from?

For something so destabilising and painful, we might wonder how Cholbi thinks grief can possibly be valuable. His answer is that, in the face of loss, grief is the process by which we can reformulate our identities.

By forcing us to attend to our values, commitments, and concerns, grief reveals what’s important to us. Its brutal intensity can lead us to a kind of self-knowledge that not many experiences can, Cholbi writes:

This sense of no longer fully knowing who one is, of having lost one’s way in a previously familiar emotional environment, hints at where the purpose, and the good, of grief reside: If grief represents a kind of ignorance of self—a condition of no longer recognizing oneself as oneself—then we can expect that grief’s successful resolution will involve a reconstruction of one’s knowledge of self. The good in grief, I propose, is self-knowledge.

Grief’s ultimate purpose, then, is not to vanquish the emotions we feel towards the deceased; it’s to construct from loss a reformed practical identity.

Attending to and working through grief, while excruciating, ultimately decelerates the spin of the dizzy, fractured self. The resolution of a grief episode occurs when we successfully incorporate the loss into our autobiographies.

This doesn’t mean the emotions associated with grief will necessarily cease. Waves of grief can hit us for as long as we hold the deceased in memory. The wound is still there, and might remain there forever. The goal of grief is not to move on or let go, but to incorporate and reformulate. We don’t ‘get over’ the loss; it becomes part of us.

Our propensity for grief is strength, not weakness

We don’t want our loved ones to die; but, when they do, we shouldn’t regret grieving them, Cholbi argues. Even if we rail against an untimely death, our propensity for grief should nevertheless be welcomed: it indicates a healthy response to the transformation of a relationship significant to our practical identities. If we didn’t grieve when those significant to us died, could we really be said to be better off?

While the classical thinkers with which we began suggest grief is mostly irrational, Cholbi thus suggests grief is rational so long as it is proportionate to the extent that the deceased played a role in our practical identity.

Of course, not all grief episodes will lead to self-knowledge. Sometimes grief is just bad for people. Cholbi’s argument isn’t that grief will always have a valuable resolution, it’s that grief is not a deficiency in principle: grief isn’t by default a sickness or a malady. We should think of it instead as a universal human experience that can lead us to reformulate our practical identities in ways that honor our relationships to those significant to us. As Cholbi puts it:

When we attain the self-knowledge grief affords us, our lives have a greater level of autobiographical coherence or integrity. From our standpoint in the present, our lives as a whole make greater sense. The deaths of those in whom we had our practical identities invested have been incorporated into our current practical identities, and to the extent that our current practical identities survive into the future, they are invested in our future lives as well. Grief that culminates in self-knowledge thus enables us to avoid alienation or fragmentation of our sense of self.

In Grief: A Philosophical Guide, Cholbi thus aims to demystify the role grief plays in every human life. Grief flows from a relationship crisis with the deceased, which leads to an identity crisis with oneself. Grief forces us to attend to this crisis, revealing to us what matters for our practical identities and aiding, through great suffering, the understanding and reconstitution of self.

The value of grief, then, is that it fosters a self-knowledge vital to our attempt to live well in an unavoidably impermanent world. Nietzsche’s view on suffering is pertinent here: “I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better’,” he observes; “but I know that it makes us more profound.”

Though it is unbearably painful, we owe it to ourselves to grieve the losses we will inevitably experience — for this agonizing process, Cholbi concludes, is one of our richest, starkest paths to self-understanding:

If the rich self-knowledge grief affords us—the knowledge of the values, commitments, and concerns that make up our practical identities—was easy to attain, then grief would itself be of much less value. But because we are not transparent to ourselves, we need grief to bring that self-knowledge within closer reach… Grief, I have emphasized, cannot be avoided. We can grieve smarter, but ultimately, we cannot outsmart grief. Nor should we wish to.

What do you make of Cholbi’s discussion of grief?

• Does Cholbi’s characterization of grief as an identity crisis ring true for you?
• Do you agree that there can be value in grief?
• Is our propensity for grief to be welcomed rather than regretted, even if grief can feel unbearable?
• How has grief played a role in your life?

To inform your answers, you might enjoy the following related articles:

• Nietzsche On Why Suffering is Necessary for Greatness
• James Baldwin: Suffering Can Become a Force for Good
• Amor Fati: the Stoics’ and Nietzsche’s Different Takes on Loving Fate
• Stoicism and Emotion: Don’t Repress Your Feelings, Reframe Them
• ‘Dao’ in Chinese Philosophy: Harmonizing with the Way
• Why Death is Nothing to Fear: Lucretius and Epicureanism

Get one famous philosophical idea in your inbox each Sunday

If you enjoyed this article, you might like my free Sunday breakdown. I distill one piece of wisdom from philosophy each week; you get the summary delivered straight to your email inbox, and are invited to share your view. Consider joining 22,000+ subscribers and signing up below: