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Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience
A wide-ranging philosophical exploration of what it is to experience grief and what this tells us about human emotional life.
Experiences of grief can be bewildering, disorienting, and isolating; everything seems somehow different, in ways that are difficult to comprehend and describe. Why does the world as a whole look distant, strange, and unfamiliar? How can we know that someone is dead, while at the same time find this utterly unfathomable, impossible? Grief Worlds explores a host of philosophical questions raised by grief, showing how philosophical inquiry can enhance our understanding of grief and vice versa.
Throughout the book, Matthew Ratcliffe focuses on the phenomenology of what do experiences of grief consist of, how are they structured, and what can they tell us about the nature of human experience more generally? While acknowledging the diversity of grief, Ratcliffe sets out to identify its common features. Drawing extensively on first-person accounts, he proposes that grief is a process that involves experiencing, comprehending, and navigating a pervasive disturbance of one’s experiential world. Its course over time depends on ways of experiencing and relating to other people, both the living and the dead. Along with its insights into the workings of grief, the book provides us with a broader philosophical perspective for thinking about human emotional experience.
Experiences of grief can be bewildering, disorienting, and isolating; everything seems somehow different, in ways that are difficult to comprehend and describe. Why does the world as a whole look distant, strange, and unfamiliar? How can we know that someone is dead, while at the same time find this utterly unfathomable, impossible? Grief Worlds explores a host of philosophical questions raised by grief, showing how philosophical inquiry can enhance our understanding of grief and vice versa.
Throughout the book, Matthew Ratcliffe focuses on the phenomenology of what do experiences of grief consist of, how are they structured, and what can they tell us about the nature of human experience more generally? While acknowledging the diversity of grief, Ratcliffe sets out to identify its common features. Drawing extensively on first-person accounts, he proposes that grief is a process that involves experiencing, comprehending, and navigating a pervasive disturbance of one’s experiential world. Its course over time depends on ways of experiencing and relating to other people, both the living and the dead. Along with its insights into the workings of grief, the book provides us with a broader philosophical perspective for thinking about human emotional experience.
296 pages, Paperback
Published January 24, 2023
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April 30, 2023
The book is written in a clear and direct fashion and presents interesting ideas. But these ideas feel like simple re-packaging of old and tried ideas. Ratcliffe's arguments and proposals seem like direct applications of standard interpretations of ideas in Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Husserl, to the phenomenon of grief. He does not push the frontier of our depth of understanding of the status-quo ways of "explaining" various features of experience as found in the phenomenological tradition. For example, here are three main forms of "explanation" found in that tradition, and preserved in this book: Some feature of our first-person experience is a result of either (1) "embodiment" (e.g., feeling, bodily schemata - and no further explanation is given to what these terms really amount to, or what else explains these phenomena), (2) our social embeddedness (e.g., social norms of our culture and the individuals with whom we interact provide us "narratives" or "scaffold" how we make meaning of our experiences - and no further explanation is given to what this interpersonal "scaffolding" really amounts to), or (3) we should apply a theoretical schema of "interconnectedness" or "webs" for making sense of the meaningfulness of experiences (e.g., our beliefs and values are connected up in webs, so when it looks like a single belief is put at stake in a situation, in fact all the other beliefs to which this one is connected are put at stake too - but no further explanation is given as to whether the central v. distal beliefs are affected in different ways, under different circumstances, and whether the ways by which our beliefs and values are connected up are all connected through some same, homogeneous relation, v. what other sorts of relations might be at play - and what these relations really amount to, in their effects for example, e.g., are they merely causal or explanatory, or could a deeper description be given?)
I'll now set this criticism aside and summarize the interesting points in this book. I found chapters 1, 2, and 4 worth reading, and then 3, and 5-9 can be skimmed; these just involve various empirical descriptions of specific examples of grief, applying concepts introduced in 1-4 to describe them. In chapter 1, Ratcliffe raises the questions that he will focus on. Grief, as an emotion/mood, seems to challenge our very concepts of emotion and mood. Unlike emotion, grief is long-term and doesn't seem to have a specific intentional object. Unlike mood, grief is heterogeneous in affective tone and can have specific objects towards which it's directed, at different times.
In chapter 2, Ratcliffe introduces language from a theorist named Helm that we can distinguish between the concrete object of emotion, and its formal object. The formal object can be described in terms of an overall sort or type of object, and the concrete object is the individual in the world towards which our emotion is directed. I worry that this distinction, and the way Ratcliffe/Helm presents it, misleads us in understanding emotion. It seems to me that emotion unfolds over a process, where at some stages, all that we're aware of, as that which our emotion about, is "formal"; and then sometimes we can be provoked to locate individuals which match this formal object. But they present this matter as if emotion typically is a state, at which both, or one or the other, types of objects are present. While this state can change, they do not raise the question of how exactly concrete and formal objects relate, and construing emotion as a state that changes doesn't help us in investigating this matter. Ratcliffe only talks about grief as a process in a different sense: the "grieving process" as a description we can give to uniting various moments of emotion, which are informed by a similar sort of intention, and causally trace to the same event of loss, that hold across time. This is distinct from thinking about emotion, at any particular moment, in terms of a process.
In chapter 4, Ratcliffe examines how in grief, one "oscillates between worlds" - one's sense of the world that had existed before the loss, and then one's sense of the world post-loss. This oscillation leads to what Ratcliffe calls "indeterminacy" in meaning and structure of the world. One can't have certainty in what's real; when something seems a certain way, and one remembers it's not anymore, there is not yet any concrete alternative way of seeing the world that can replace that erroneous way. One needs to forge that over time, through interpersonal narrative telling and other processes which Ratcliffe describes over the remaining chapters of the book.
As a whole, I'd recommend this book only to readers of either two backgrounds: (1) those who are unfamiliar with the phenomenological tradition, are intimidated by going straight to primary sources, or secondary sources that talk about this tradition in the abstract, and would prefer to see phenomenological ideas applied in a concrete, relatable experience, or (2) those who are suffering from grief and wants a philosophical lens for making sense of their experiences. But if you don't have either background, I don't think this book needs to be high up on your list.
I'll now set this criticism aside and summarize the interesting points in this book. I found chapters 1, 2, and 4 worth reading, and then 3, and 5-9 can be skimmed; these just involve various empirical descriptions of specific examples of grief, applying concepts introduced in 1-4 to describe them. In chapter 1, Ratcliffe raises the questions that he will focus on. Grief, as an emotion/mood, seems to challenge our very concepts of emotion and mood. Unlike emotion, grief is long-term and doesn't seem to have a specific intentional object. Unlike mood, grief is heterogeneous in affective tone and can have specific objects towards which it's directed, at different times.
In chapter 2, Ratcliffe introduces language from a theorist named Helm that we can distinguish between the concrete object of emotion, and its formal object. The formal object can be described in terms of an overall sort or type of object, and the concrete object is the individual in the world towards which our emotion is directed. I worry that this distinction, and the way Ratcliffe/Helm presents it, misleads us in understanding emotion. It seems to me that emotion unfolds over a process, where at some stages, all that we're aware of, as that which our emotion about, is "formal"; and then sometimes we can be provoked to locate individuals which match this formal object. But they present this matter as if emotion typically is a state, at which both, or one or the other, types of objects are present. While this state can change, they do not raise the question of how exactly concrete and formal objects relate, and construing emotion as a state that changes doesn't help us in investigating this matter. Ratcliffe only talks about grief as a process in a different sense: the "grieving process" as a description we can give to uniting various moments of emotion, which are informed by a similar sort of intention, and causally trace to the same event of loss, that hold across time. This is distinct from thinking about emotion, at any particular moment, in terms of a process.
In chapter 4, Ratcliffe examines how in grief, one "oscillates between worlds" - one's sense of the world that had existed before the loss, and then one's sense of the world post-loss. This oscillation leads to what Ratcliffe calls "indeterminacy" in meaning and structure of the world. One can't have certainty in what's real; when something seems a certain way, and one remembers it's not anymore, there is not yet any concrete alternative way of seeing the world that can replace that erroneous way. One needs to forge that over time, through interpersonal narrative telling and other processes which Ratcliffe describes over the remaining chapters of the book.
As a whole, I'd recommend this book only to readers of either two backgrounds: (1) those who are unfamiliar with the phenomenological tradition, are intimidated by going straight to primary sources, or secondary sources that talk about this tradition in the abstract, and would prefer to see phenomenological ideas applied in a concrete, relatable experience, or (2) those who are suffering from grief and wants a philosophical lens for making sense of their experiences. But if you don't have either background, I don't think this book needs to be high up on your list.
July 1, 2025
Aside from Ratcliffe being a brilliant lecturer and philosopher, he’s also a babe for giving me a first (thanks to this book I think)
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews