Introduction
Bereavement typically involves a massive breakdown in orientation. Werner Stegmaier observes that in such circumstances, “routines that break away can be regained in one way or another.” However, he continues, “Others with their own orientation worlds, which you oriented yourself to, cannot. They may leave a permanent gap in the orientations of those surviving.” [endnote 1] In what follows, I will consider some of the features of grief that result in disorientation and then argue that aesthetic practices and experiences can facilitate reorientation. [endnote 2]
Disorienting Features of Grief
Orientation always operates under conditions of uncertainty, but it requires taking some things for granted, albeit provisionally. As Stegmaier observes, “Familiarity (Vertrautheit), which develops when everything ‘runs as usual,’ is the basic stability of orientation.” [endnote 3] In grief, this sense of familiarity with the way things are is lost at a basic level. Management of uncertainty has also become difficult because the potential unreliability of any foothold is magnified. And this applies to the footholds that were provided by way of relating to the orientation world of the deceased. The loss that prompted grief must be assimilated into any feasible orientation, but it has reduced the significance given to clues that are already present and the holds that depend on them. Thus the holds one would normally depend upon are not trusted as reliable.
Various features of grief contribute to disorientation. First, “the assumptive world,” the structure of basic plausibilities that we use to stabilize and orient ourselves, is undermined. [endnote 4] The beloved person has vanished, even if the person’s remains are still within the material world, and this disappearance is a shock. It is as though the person has fallen through cracks in time-space continuum, even though the very notion of a continuum precludes any such ruptures. Grieving people often feel remorse that they took the deceased for granted, but expecting them to simply exist in the world does not seem to be much of an imposition — yet suddenly, even that is presuming too much. Poet and philosopher Denise Riley aptly describes the situation.
Unanticipated death does such violence to your ordinary suppositions, as if the whole inductive faculty by which you’d previously lived has faltered. Its textbook illustration was always ‘Will the sun rise tomorrow?’ But now that induction itself is no more, the sun can’t any longer be relied on to rise. [endnote 5]
Grieving people experience extreme doubts about reliability of the abbreviations of the world that have hitherto been basic to their orientation. [endnote 6] The consequence is that even the most basic grounding assumptions that one’s orientation has depended upon need to be reassessed.
A second disorienting factor in grief is the fact that one’s own body feels alien. Bereavement is not directly a bodily injury, but grief results in a wide range of corporeal symptoms, such as feelings of heaviness, shortness of breath, pressure on the chest, being literally “choked up,” shivering, numbness, weeping, vague impressions of bodily boundaries, a sense that internal organs are exposed, and generalized malaise. [endnote 7] In ordinary circumstances, the body is an almost immediate vehicle of one’s agency. In grief, by contrast, control of one’s body is compromised. Physical symptoms interfere with ease in operating as an agent. To the extent that it is conscious, the project of continual reorientation depends on a sense of personal efficacy, but this is diminished in grief. The result is that one feels limited in one’s ability to realize desirable possibilities, and any impetus toward active efforts to reorient is inhibited.
A third disorienting aspect of grief is the altered aspect of the environment that results from the loss. Matthew Ratcliffe and Thomas Fuchs both observe that grieving people encounter signs of the deceased in their surroundings, but the situation does not enable fulfillment of the aroused expectations. As Fuchs puts it, “the whole environment is permeated by affordances pointing to the lost person.” [endnote 8] The deceased loved one is often subtly involved in the significance one attributes to the objects one encounters. A pen on the loved one’s desk, for example, is experienced as connected with the loved one in a much more fundamental way than when the person was alive.
A grieving person’s activity within the environment is also unsteadied by the loss, particularly if interaction with the person previously occurred on a regular basis. People (often unconsciously) coordinate their behavior with those with whom they live, work, or play. The intercorporeal attunement of one’s behavior with that of someone else is a manifestation of the intertwinement of the other person’s orientation world with one’s own. When loss disrupts this interaction, the grieving individual’s behavioral routines are unsettled and the stability of the person’s ways of operating is undercut.
A fourth disorienting aspect of grief is the altered impression of time that many bereaved individuals experience. Temporal disturbances can vary in form, as Matthew Ratcliffe observes. Past, present, and future may be jumbled. One might simply drift through time. And very commonly, grieving people feel that time has come to a stop. [endnote 9] Riley aptly terms this condition of a-temporality as “time lived, without its flow.” [endnote 10] All of these temporal effects of grief involve a loss of directedness toward the future. Stegmaier draws attention to the future-directedness of orientation when he characterizes it as “an achievement of finding one’s way in order to find promising opportunities for action.” [endnote 11] This aim of seeing promising opportunities, which is a presupposition of orientation, is debilitated in grief. Grief saps the sense that any possibilities for action are promising. Grieving people are commonly apathetic, and this is in keeping with the lack of a temporal perspective that enables them to strive.
We should distinguish the atemporality that grieving people feel from a kind of atemporality that is a characteristic orientation. Orientation makes use of holds, basic patterns that assimilate clues to serve as provisional bases for further elaboration of the orientation. Although the process of orientation is dynamic, such holds involve a temporary atemporality, in that they are treated as unchanging so long as they are utilized in an orientation. A hold is atemporal in the sense that it is provisionally taken as fixed, and this enables one to build upon it. The atemporality experienced in grief, by contrast, does not provide any ground for building. The apathy and lack of future-directedness we have already considered make building seem beside the point.
One may even say that the atemporal character of experience for many grieving people is a temporary substitute for an orientation. Perhaps more aptly, we might describe it as an orientation toward a subjective reality that is preferred to that of the social world. It is not as though grieving people are unaware that other people are moving along with the time of social reality. They simply feel as though the flow of time that others experience is irrelevant to them. As Ratcliffe points out, while change continues, it is not meaningful to those who grieve. [endnote 12]
Grieving people may actually be relatively content with the absence of perceived temporal flow. Thomas Fuchs describes their situation as being one in which objective time no longer corresponds to the subjective time that was formerly experienced dyadically with the deceased. Because the loved one is no longer living into the future, the impression of subjective time, which is still bound up with the person, seems to have come to a standstill. The subjective benefit of this non-flowing temporal space is that one feels detached from the relentless progress of world time that “threatens to separate the bereaved person more and more from the lost object, which sinks back into the past.” By regarding oneself as separate from that flow of ongoing “world time,” one retains a sense of being in sync with the loved one. Because the loved one is not moving forward toward the future, neither is the grieving person. [endnote 13] Riley’s description of her experience of atemporality in grief accords with Fuchs’s analysis: “This experience must be the time of the dead. Or it’s as near as you can get into entering into that time, or that non-time.” [endnote 14]
The atemporality that many experience in grief is one factor that disorders interactions between the grieving person and other living individuals, a fifth aspect of grief that challenges capacities involved in orientation. Grief exacerbates the challenges of double contingency. Double contingency is a problem in any interaction with another. Both parties anticipate how the other will behave, yet expectations may not be justified, for the other person may do something that is surprising. Usually, we take this in stride and adjust our expectations in accordance with signals given by the other person. However, the grieving person’s atypical condition makes it hard for others to predict the person’s behavior.
As Michael Cholbi observes, a grieving person is undergoing an identity crisis, for the situation highlights “that our values, commitments, and concerns are not simply ‘givens’ that can be taken for granted but are dependent on relationships with other mortal beings.” [endnote 15] The death of a loved one necessitates a change in the relationship, and with that, these aspects of what Cholbi terms our “practical identities” will inevitably change, too, though we do not yet know how. If grieving people are uncertain as to how these matters stand with themselves, their ways of displaying their identities and expressing what matters to them are likely to be unsteady, making it especially hard for their partners in conversation to know how they are likely to act or how comments will settle with them.
Double contingency is also intensified from the point of view of the grieving person. Interaction rituals are unsettled by the foregrounding of uncertainties in the perceptions of the grieving person. Other people continue to rely on footholds and patterns in orienting themselves which, though perhaps previously shared, now strike the grieving person as untrustworthy. As a consequence, typical methods for mutual orientation become hard for the grieving person to utilize in relation to other living people.
Double contingency also infiltrates the grieving person’s impression of the deceased. Loved ones (at least those with whom we regularly interact) typically play an important role in our orientations, for we develop our orientations in relation to them and their orientation worlds. When a loved one dies, the lack of further interaction means that we lose the stream in input for finding clues, leads, and signs that enable us to orient toward that person. When we look to the past, our thoughts are addled by the floods of spontaneous memories related to the person that tend to arise in the wake of a person’s death. These memories are disordered and unanchored to the present, with the result that our impressions of the deceased are unstable. [endnote 16] And even when these spontaneous memories become less frequent than in the early days of grief, memories can vie for dominance and one’s interpretations of memories can vary. Thus, we cannot easily assimilate our impressions into a clear sense of the person and what the relationship has been. The combination of the person’s physical absence and continued psychological presence is also confusing and unassimilable into a single perspective.
The desire to fix our impressions can motivate obsessive attention to the last encounter with the deceased. [endnote 17] We may try to see it as a touchstone for knowing who the person was and how the relationship stood, but like all memories, those of the last encounter are subject to reinterpretation, and thus the desired stability is elusive. This means that even though the dead cannot continue to surprise us with their behavior, double contingency continues to pose challenges in relation to them, perhaps especially so because the dead are not on hand to correct faulty impressions. Awareness of double contingency comes to shape projections onto the deceased, and grieving people can torment themselves with the thought that they do not know and will never know how the deceased person ultimately regarded them. The image of the angry or hostile ghost is perhaps a reflection of this situation.
The features of grief we have considered result in profound disorientation, and neither interaction with the living nor recollections of the dead provide promising bases for reorientation. I will proceed to suggest some ways in which aesthetic phenomena are useful in this context.
The Value of Aesthetic Phenomena in Grief
The range of phenomena that can be considered aesthetic is wide. Although I think the precise scope of the category is debatable, I will assume that the following phenomena are all aesthetic: engaging in (formal or informal) rituals, appreciating objects for their individuating sensory features, appreciating objects for exhibiting properties that are commonly regarded as aesthetic (such as beauty or grace), creating or relating to artworks or handicrafts, and using material media for symbolic expression of emotion. Both overly active practices and contemplative experiences can be aesthetic. Aesthetic phenomena of all of these forms have potential benefits for reorientation in grief.
One of the most obvious ways that aesthetics plays a role in grief is through ritual. Most societies specify particular rituals to be performed after someone’s death, often with close relatives playing central roles in arranging and enacting them. Funerary rituals are commonly taken to be morally required in grief as part of what is necessary to “do right” by the dead. Typically, these rituals involve gatherings of people and are scripted in terms of the kinds of things that might be said or done. The more detailed the stipulations of the ritual, the greater the coordination of the participants’ behavior.
As a consequence of this coordination, rituals mitigate the challenges of double contingency. They shut down leeways (the room for maneuver available in any orientation) by specifying behavior in advance. Everyone involved in a ritual can largely anticipate what everyone else will do, because people attending a funeral normally aim to comply with the ritual’s demands. This provides a reprieve from a sense of being unable to synchronize behavior with other people. Temporarily, one need not attend to double contingency because all participants are intending to behave in concert. This in itself can be a great relief to a grieving person. A potentially more lasting effect is that rituals can restore a sense of social embeddedness, thereby countering the frequent feeling in grief that one is isolated in one’s loss. The presence of others at a funeral ceremony testifies to the fact that the loss is not purely private, but collective, and that regardless of the specifics of others’ orientations, they share one’s aim of orienting themselves to the loss. Thus, though one may have limited ability to orient oneself to their orientations, one can recognize that they share a common orientational concern.
A second aspect of aesthetic practices that can help one deal with disorientation in grief has to do with the special status of artworks, specifically, in relation to external reality. Although artworks are themselves part of external reality, many of them conjure distinct “worlds” that can be imaginatively explored. These worlds may be more or less similar to the actual world, but importantly, one’s orientation within them can be rather freewheeling by comparison to orientation within ordinary life. I think this is an aspect of what Stegmaier indicates when he observes that “art has special leeways.” [endnote 18]
Jonathan Lear’s discussion of mourning suggests a reason why this aspect of many artworks can be valuable when one is grieving. Mourning, as he analyzes it, involves a space of imaginative play, the ordinary distinction between the imagined and the actual is not relevant. [endnote 19] Although all orientations involve leeways, the freedom of play Lear associates with mourning is quite radical. He contends that realism and literalness should not be expected among those who mourn. [endnote 20] We might describe Lear’s point in terms of orientation by saying that no one should expect grieving people to have made decisions about basic plausibilities, for they are transitioning between orientations and are unclear on what they should take as plausible.
In practice, operating without having established at least some moderately stable holds is difficult, and this can make dealing with daily practicalities unusually difficult while grieving. However, aesthetic activities such as enjoying artworks can help provide a sense of connection with the external while still in a transitional state. The structures of artworks are designed to afford temporary holds for engaging with them, yet they do not require those who experience them to decide on whether these holds translate to orientation in ordinary life. One is free, but not obligated, to consider the relationship of the “world” of the artwork to that of ordinary actuality, but importantly, engagement with artworks does not involve social pressure to decide on plausibilities beyond the work.
Because they can provide spaces of imaginative play that have some distance from everyday reality, artworks afford possibilities for leaving one’s actual situation behind. Besides providing a reprieve from any pressure to make decisions about actuality, artworks may suggest possibilities that prompt reflection that can touch on one’s situation and “pierce through to one’s own orientation.” [endnote 21] This may result in insights that will be useful once one is sufficiently accustomed to one’s new circumstances to settle on some holds.
Another benefit of engaging with artworks is that it enables one to share the subjunctive mode of imaginative play with other people, providing another opportunity to overcome the sense of isolation in one’s grief. This sharing does not require much overlap of orientation or even basic presuppositions, but it allows for a sense of mutuality nonetheless. We can share the subjunctive mode with others in aesthetic activities, as in moments of meditative silence during rituals or listening to music together. This relieves some of the emotional burden of disorientation even though the grieving person is not yet ready to assemble an reorientation that can play a more usual role in mutual orientation.
Third, prior aesthetic experience can help grieving people cope with their lack of a steady orientation. Most of us while engaging with fictions have envisioned counterfactual conditions. The differences between the fictional world and our ordinary world can be more or less extreme. The fictionality of a world encountered in art enables a kind of ungrounded exploration and play with imagined scenarios in which one utilizes footholds that differ from those used in everyday life. Reflecting on this fact can offer some degree of comfort with the tentativeness that one may feel in relation to even very temporary footholds in grief. One can have confidence that one may find footholds valuable in the short run, even if one is quite uncertain about their long-term value. Recognizing that one has used footholds on a short-term basis in connection with artworks can also provide reassurance that one can navigate in radically different circumstances than those that one has previously taken for granted.
Another way in which previous (or new) encounters with artworks can be helpful in grief is by providing sources of guidance. Arthur Frank has drawn attention to the way that stories can provide “companionship” in demanding circumstances if one sees some connection between the characters’ circumstances and one’s own. The way characters handle their situations can suggest possibilities for approaching one’s situation. [endnote 22] Unlike actual people who offer advice, the characters will not challenge you if you do not follow their lead, so they can be seen as fully supportive. Narrative artworks can provide companion stories of this sort, but I suspect that paintings and sculptures can in some cases function this way too, as when a depicted person’s demeanor conveys a response to a situation that may similarly suggest attitudes and even actions that can be taken.
A fourth way in which aesthetic phenomena can be stabilizing and assist in reorientation draws on the fact that the aesthetic is an aspect of our experience in which we commonly engage with people who are no longer living. We enjoy artworks created by dead artists. More informal aesthetic traditions (such as styles of celebrating holidays, decorating a home, or serving dinner) are handed down through generations. Stegmaier comments that thinking of a dead person living on, for example, through their children, is reassuring. [endnote 23] I would add that we are also reassured by aesthetic phenomena that allow for “live” connection with the dead. Such a connection may be felt by handling the deceased individual’s personal effects (which acquire a new aspect by virtue of their relation the person), hearing music one has shared with the person, or even arranging household objects in a way the person would have liked. Feeling linked to the deceased through such phenomena enables one to recognize ways in which the person continues to have an impact on one’s life.
The last point is particularly important. We have observed that many of the holds one took as steady before the loss seem untrustworthy in grief. Even though we may inevitably rely on some holds in grief, if only to accomplish certain necessary practical actions, we tend not to flesh out our orientation. Grief often sap motivations, as we have observed, and we may resist reinstating any sense that forward-directed action is worthwhile. When such apathy is combined with the feeling that any future-directed action would move you farther from the deceased loved one, the aspirations that usually provide guidance for clarifying and integrating an orientations are constricted. While grieving we tend to limit our practical attention to meeting the perceived needs of one’s immediate standpoint and instead linger in a condition of insecurity, unsettled by an unusually intense awareness of uncertainty and debilitated by our failure to manage it.
Aesthetic practices can help us overcome this impasse, which interferes with reconstructing a sustainable orientation. Such practices (whether overtly creative or more contemplative) enable us to feel connected with the deceased even as we engage in activities in the present. Recognizing that relating to the deceased is compatible with activities that immerse us in the present, we may relax our resistance to future-directed activities and the related self-inflicted interference with our ability to assimilate the loss into an orientation. Aesthetic phenomena can even offer symbols that serve as footholds that are provisionally foundational in one’s new orientation.
An example is provided by art critic Laura Cumming. She describes the way an artwork helped her emerge from depths of grief after the death of her father. She had gone to Madrid to visit the Prado and its many works by her father’s favorite painter, El Greco, but on her way to the gallery with El Greco’s paintings, she passed the one that exhibits Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez. She was transfixed, so much so that she decided to write a book about Velázquez. In that very book, she describes the encounter that she had with the painting. I will close with a passage in which she summarizes the insight the painting gave her about how the dead can remain with the living and how we can think of ourselves in relation to them.
The painting I saw that day seems to hold death back from the brink even as it acknowledges our shared human fate. It shows the past in all its mortal beauty, but it also looks forward into the flowing future. Because of Velázquez, these long-lost people will always be there at the heart of the Prado, always waiting for us to arrive; they will never go away, as long as we are there to hold them in sight. Las Meninas is like a chamber of the mind, a place where the dead will never die. The gratitude I feel to Velázquez for this greatest of paintings is untold; he gave me the consolation to return to my own life. [endnote 24]
Essay by Prof. Kathleen Higgins, The University of Texas at Austin
Endnotes
1 Werner Stegmaier, What Is Orientation? A Philosophical Investigation, trans. Reinhard G. Mueller (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2019), 278.
2 Many of the features of grief and the ways in which aesthetic phenomena are valuable in bereavement discussed here are elaborated further in Kathleen Marie Higgins, Aesthetics in Grief and Mourning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024). In what follows, I will not use “aesthetic phenomena” to refer to both aesthetic practices (which I take to involve some degree of active agency) and aesthetic experiences (which may be more contemplative than overtly active).
3 Stegmaier, What Is Orientation?, 83.
4 This term originated with C. M. Parkes. See his “Determinants of Outcomes Following Bereavement,” Omega 6 (1975): 303-323. Cf. Joan Beder, “Loss of the Assumptive World – How We Deal with Death and Loss,” Omega 50:4 (2004-2005): 255-265. Beder accepts the view that relinquishment of ties with the deceased is desirable, a position I do not share, though she does not take this to preclude developing a new relationship with the deceased. See p. 261.
5 Denise Riley, Time Lived, Without Its Flow (London: Picador, 2019), 33.
6 See Stegmaier, What Is Orientation?, 75-76.
7 See Thomas Fuchs, “Presence in Absence: The Ambiguous Phenomenology of Grief,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17:1 (2018) 45; Newland, A Buddhist Grief Observed (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2016), 10; Julian Barnes, Levels of Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 84, 95; and Higgins, Aesthetics in Grief and Mourning, 74-75.
8 Fuchs, “Presence in Absence,” 52.
9 Ratcliffe, Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2022), 101.
10 Denise Riley, Time Lived, Without Its Flow (London: Picador, 2019).
11 Stegmaier, What Is Orientation?, 5.
12 Ratcliffe, Grief Worlds, 101.
13 Fuchs, “Presence in Absence,” 50.
14 Riley, Time Lived, Without its Flow, 60.
15 Michael Cholbi, Grief: A Philosophical Guide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).
16 I suspect that this is one of the reasons why sociologist Tony Walter is convinced that grieving people need to stabilize a “durable biography” of the deceased person. See his “A New Model of Grief: Bereavement and Biography,” Mortality 1 (1996): 7-25.
17 Cf. Barnes, Levels of Life, 107.
18 Stegmaier, What is Orientation?, 195.
19 Lear does not sharply distinguish grief and mourning, but he seems to take mourning as involving various ways of actively responding to a loss.
20 See Jonathan Lear, Imagining the End: Mourning and the Ethical Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2022), 12-14.
21 Stegmaier, What is Orientation?, 195.
22 See Arthur W. Frank, “Philoctetes and the Good Companion Story,” Enthymema 16 (2016): 119-127.
23 See Stegmaier, What Is Orientation?, 280.
24 Laura Cumming, The Vanishing Velázquez: A Nineteenth Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece (New York: Scribner, 2016), 4.