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This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Inquiry

53(1) on 11 January 2010, available online:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00201740903478384

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The Rationality of Grief

Abstract

Donald Gustafson has argued that grief centres on a combination of belief and desire:

(1) The belief that the subject has suffered an irreparable loss.

(2) The desire that this should not be the case.

And yet, as Gustafson points out, if the belief is true, the desire cannot be satisfied. Gustafson

takes this to show that grief inevitably implies an irrational conflict between belief and desire.

I offer a partial defence of grief against Gustafson’s charge of irrationality. My defence

rests on two elements. First, I offer an alternative model of emotion, which presents emotions as

complex episodes, initiated by emotional appraisals. Secondly, I appeal to John Bowlby’s

account of grief to argue that grief involves two forms of sadness (anguish and desolation)

which Gustafson’s analysis runs together. I concede that anguish does characteristically involve

an element of irrationality. But the irrationality of anguish does not arise from an apparently

gratuitous clash between belief and desire, but from a conflict between emotion and belief – a

form of irrationality that is both familiar and easily explained. Moreover, desolation need not

involve any irrationality.

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The Rationality of Grief

1. The case against grief

In a list of experiences characteristic of a flourishing human life, grief at the death of a

friend or relative might well come close to the top. Grief will be high on the list, because a

flourishing life will typically involve emotional commitments to others: these commitments

inevitably carry the risk of bereavement and grief. Moreover, it might be thought that grief has

some value, despite the pain that it entails. For the pain of grief not only reflects, but also calls

our attention to the importance that our commitments hold for us: through grief, as much

through joy, we perceive what matters in our lives.1

This positive assessment of grief is not universally accepted, however. Grief has

sometimes been conceptualised as an illness or disorder – a dysfunctional and painful syndrome

from which the bereaved should be helped to recover as quickly as possible.2 In grief, people

sometimes seem to be transfixed by their loss – torturing themselves, their friends might think,

to no purpose. At other times, they seem to be searching for the person who has died, or at least

expecting their return: they call out for them; they are constantly on the look out for them; they

are reluctant to discard their belongings (Parkes, 1970, cited by Bowlby, 1980, pp. 86-95). In

some sense, they seem not to have grasped that the loss has occurred. It is not hard to see how

these phenomena might be used to support a conception of grief as pointless, dysfunctional and

confused.

There are, then, three different charges that might be laid against grief:

(1) Grief is futile – an impotent response to a situation about which nothing can now be

done.

(2) Grief is painful and disrupts the normal course of life.

(3) Grief is irrational, in that it involves some internal contradiction, or some failure to

accept reality.

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In this paper, I shall focus primarily on the charge of irrationality. I shall begin by

considering a discussion by Donald Gustafson (1989) in which he presents a particularly strong

version of this charge. Indeed, some readers may find Gustafson’s claims rather too strong to be

plausible. Most theorists who have written on the topic reject Gustafson’s account. As we shall

see, though, the alternative account that they propose faces a significant difficulty of its own. As

I shall try to make clear, this debate raises some key questions about the structure of grief and

the kinds of motivation that grief implies. For this reason, I would like to use it as a springboard

from which to launch a fresh investigation into these questions, opening the way for a more

rounded and nuanced evaluation of the rationality of grief.

2. Gustafson’s argument

Gustafson characterises grief as an emotion that is characteristically experienced in

response to the death or permanent absence of someone one loves or needs.3 He suggests that

grief is composed of a combination of a belief, a desire and a set of feelings. More precisely, he

offers the following analysis of grief:

(G) Grief is a belief of the form “that P”, and attendant feelings such as feelings of loss,

pain, anger, fear, distress and unhappiness, and a desire (of the form “that not-P”), in a

whole psychological context. (1989, pp. 463-4)

According to Gustafson, the irrationality of grief becomes clear when we consider what it is that

the grieving subject believes and desires. Consider the imaginary example of Grace, who is

grieving for her partner Lee. On Gustafson’s analysis, what Grace believes is that Lee is lost to

her forever. What she desires is that this should not be the case. Given her belief, Grace is in a

position immediately to recognise that her desire cannot be satisfied. And yet, Gustafson

suggests, it is irrational to harbour a desire that is evidently impossible to satisfy. So, he

concludes, grief necessarily involves an irrational desire.

Gustafson’s claim, then, is that grief involves a specific form of practical irrationality –

an irrational conflict between desire and belief. Gustafson’s account implies that this form of

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irrationality is an inevitable feature of grief. Moreover, it seems to be irrationality of a relatively

profound and gratuitous kind: certainly Gustafson himself takes it to be puzzling enough to

merit a special explanation. It is best explained, he suggests, by the hypothesis that grief is a

hard-wired, biologically based response (1989, p. 470).

3. Desires, wishes and impossible goals

Gustafson’s argument rests on two premises:

G.1 It is irrational to harbour a desire that one believes cannot be satisfied.

G.2 The grieving subject harbours a desire that they believe cannot be satisfied (that is, the

desire that their loss should be repaired).

Both these premises are open to question.

There are two different reasons someone might have for rejecting G.1. First, it might be

denied that non-instrumental desires are subject to rational norms. Alternatively, it might be

argued that, although non-instrumental desires are subject to rational norms of some kind, it is

not irrational to harbour a desire that one believes cannot be satisfied.4 Whether non-

instrumental desires are subject to rational norms and, if so, what those norms might be is a

controversial and complex issue, and I am not going to try to settle it here. As a result, I must

leave it open that Gustafson’s argument could be rejected very quickly, on the grounds that G.1

is false.

Nevertheless, there are reasons for not ending the discussion here. The first is that, as I

shall try to show in a moment, G.1 is at least not obviously false. The second is that, regardless

of the truth of G.1, G.2 is an interesting and controversial claim. If G.2 is allowed to stand, grief

will remain open to the charge of futility, even if the charge of irrationality fails.

Is it possible to defend G.1? The issue does not seem to have attracted much attention in

the literature on desire, though Richard Brandt (1969/70) argues explicitly that it is irrational to

desire an impossible goal. 5 Nevertheless, many theorists of grief – including theorists who

reject Gustafson’s conclusion – appear to assume the truth of G.1 (or something like it).6

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Moreover, as I shall explain in a moment, this assumption plays a crucial role in shaping their

accounts.

As it happens, I think that it might be possible to mount a defence of G.1. For such a

defence to be plausible, however, it is necessary to understand the term ‘desire’ in a very narrow

sense. First, it must be taken to refer only to states that are readily influenced by the subject’s

beliefs: for if this were not the case, the conflict that Gustafson describes would not seem

gratuitous or puzzling. In this respect, then, desires will need to be distinguished from urges or

inclinations that are independent of the subject’s beliefs, such as hunger or pain. Secondly, it

must be taken to refer only to states that are supposed to motivate action. This need not imply

that a subject will act on every desire that they have: desires can conflict with each other, and

the opportunity to act on a particular desire may never arise. Rather, the claim will be that every

desire presents its object as at least a candidate for action; hence, every desire has at least the

potential to shape the subject’s deeds and plans. In this respect, desires will be need to be

distinguished from wishes, where a wish is taken to be a state that registers the value of some

state of affairs without motivating the subject to try to attain it.7

If we were to use the term ‘desire’ in this very narrow sense, it might be possible to

attempt a defence of G.1. For if every desire has the potential to be drawn into practical

reasoning, there is a powerful reason to avoid harbouring desires that cannot be satisfied: taking

account of such desires in practical reasoning would be pointless and distracting. 8 Hence, while

rational subjects might wish for the impossible, they will not desire it.

Clearly, much more work would need to be done to shore up this defence of G.1.

However, I do not think that this issue needs to be settled before we can evaluate Gustafson’s

argument about grief. This is because I think that G.2 is much more questionable than G.1.

Indeed – and this is really the point that I want to emphasise – if we understand the term ‘desire’

in the narrow sense that G.1 requires, it becomes all the more obvious that G.2 is open to

challenge. For why should we suppose that Grace’s yearning is explained by a desire, in this

narrow sense, and not by a conative state of some other kind?

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This is the precisely the line that is adopted by the theorists of grief that I mentioned

earlier. They include Lyons (1980, p. 96), Taylor (1986, p.221-3), Nussbaum (2001, p.135) and,

most recently, Roberts (2003, p.236).9 All these theorists appear to accept the assumption that it

is irrational (or perhaps even impossible) to desire something that cannot be achieved. Unlike

Gustafson, however, they take this to show, not that grief is irrational, but that grief does not

involve a desire to repair the loss. Instead, they suggest that the grieving subject merely wishes

that things were different; for there is nothing irrational or impossible about that.

Gustafson is well aware of this possible objection to his argument. He responds by

pointing to the phenomenological differences between a desire and a wish:

‘What it is like to longingly want something that is not attainable is not what it is like

… to wish that the world were other than it is. The intensity of feelings, depth of despair

over the loss of hope, the global character of the feelings and pain over the fact which

occasions the attitudes are all among the differences.’ (1989, p.473)

Robert Solomon concurs:

‘One might wish that someone had not died, and feel sorrow for the loss, but grief

involves the turmoil of an impossible desire, an inability to accept the loss, and the

persistent demand that it not be so.’ (Solomon, 204: 85) 10

On this point, I think that Gustafson and Solomon are right. Of course, there is no denying that

the grieving subject will typically wish that their loss could be repaired. Nevertheless, I do not

think that the intense yearning and turmoil characteristic of grief can have its origin in a wish. I

do not deny that a wish can be fervent or that people can feel sad or wistful about their inability

to satisfy a wish. Nevertheless, it is hard to see how a wish, no matter how fervent, could

generate the intense distress and restless searching characteristic of grief. For this reason, I do

not think that these theorists have found a plausible alternative to G.2.

Perhaps, then, the issue depends on G.1 after all. However, there remains the possibility

that the yearning of grief originates neither with a desire in the narrow sense that Gustafson

requires, nor with a wish, but with a motivational state of some other kind. As I hope to show,

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by exploring this possibility, we will be able to reach a better understanding of the nature of

grief.

4. The complexity of grief

The task is complicated by the fact that grief seems to be a rather confusing and

contradictory phenomenon. Gustafson portrays grief as centring on a desire – a restless yearning

to restore contact with the deceased. This suggestion is made plausible by things that grieving

people do – cradling a photograph of the person who has died, crying out for them, trying to

capture them, somehow, in conversations with friends. But grief is also sometimes portrayed –

for example, by Lyons (1980) – as a state of inactivity and withdrawal, in which the grieving

subject spends their time in solitude, hopelessly ruminating on their loss. These two pictures of

grief seem equally familiar and plausible. In considering Gustafson’s analysis, we will need to

bear them both in mind.

In this paper, I shall present a partial defence of grief against Gustafson’s charge of

irrationality. My defence is partial in that I accept that grief does characteristically involve a

degree of irrationality. However, I shall argue that grief can be said to be irrational only in a

relatively attenuated sense; moreover, the irrationality of grief, such as it is, is of a familiar and

explicable kind. In addition, I shall argue that grief involves two different types of sad emotion,

and that the irrationality of grief arises from just one of these.

My argument will involve rejecting two aspects of Gustafson’s account. First,

Gustafson seems to hold that grief is a simple emotion, on a par with sorrow. In contrast, I take

it that grief is a complex emotional process, involving a number of emotions. Secondly,

although Gustafson gives some role to feelings in his analysis, the central roles are played by

belief and desire. The model of emotion that I shall adopt is of a rather different kind. As I shall

explain, both these moves are required for my defence of grief.

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5. Emotional phenomena

I shall begin by giving a lightning sketch of my preferred model of emotion.11

I am not

going to present it in any detail. I am just going to pick out the points that are crucial in what

follows.

Recent theories of emotion have increasingly emphasised the complexity of emotional

phenomena. Indeed, emotional phenomena are complex in a number of ways. First, there seem

to be many different types of emotional response. For example, we might distinguish between:

1. A momentary emotional reaction to a situation: for example, a momentary stab of

fear on first seeing a snake.

2. A brief episode of emotion which lasts for minutes or hours: for example, fear

elicited by an encounter with a snake, which continues until the snake is removed.

3. An extended episode of emotion which continues for days or weeks: for example,

anxiety concerning an impending examination.

4. An emotional process – for example, falling in love – which tends to eventuate in

a particular psychological outcome or resolution. 12

Secondly, there is complexity in the relationship between emotional responses and other kinds

of psychological state, such as thoughts and desires: in some ways, emotional responses appear

to interact with, and perhaps include, thoughts and desires; yet they also seem to stand in

opposition to thoughts and desires, and indeed they can conflict. Thirdly, emotional responses

themselves seem to be complex and multi-layered, involving a range of physiological and

psychological changes.13

Consider, for example, a brief emotional episode. Suppose that you notice a snake

sliding towards you. Probably, your initial reaction will be one of fear. Immediately, your

attention is riveted on the snake; your heart races; your eyes widen and your hands clamp over

your mouth; you are urgently motivated to get away from the snake. This initial fearful reaction

helps to constrain the thoughts, desires and wishes that follow: you are more likely to notice the

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snake’s speed and size than the telephone ringing in the next room; you are more likely to want

a weapon than a refreshing Martini. The direction of your attention will also help to determine

further emotional reactions – a fresh wave of fear when the snake moves, disgust at its

glistening scales, and so on. Even a relatively brief emotional episode, then, involves a complex

pattern of feelings, thoughts, desires and emotional reactions.

Like most theorists of emotion, I take it that emotional episodes and processes are

initiated and sustained by intentional states of some kind. Borrowing from Paul Ekman (1980), I

shall refer to these intentional states as ‘emotional appraisals’. A fearful appraisal does two

things: first, it registers that the subject faces a physical threat; secondly, it motivates the subject

to deal with the threat. As a result, a fearful appraisal can be ascribed a combination of

descriptive and directive content. For example, we might express the content of the appraisal

that triggers your fearful reaction to the snake, very roughly, as follows:

(F) That snake is threatening, in that it is likely to injure me; I must make sure that it

does not injure me, by keeping away from it.

Hence, a fearful appraisal does not merely register the threat to the subject; it also represents it

as something to be avoided. It is for this reason, I would suggest, that it makes sense to describe

it as constituting an appraisal or evaluation of the situation, rather than as simply signalling that

some state of affairs has occurred. Fearful, anxious, angry, disgusted and sad appraisals are all

negative appraisals, in that they represent a certain situation as something to be avoided or

changed. Happy appraisals, in contrast, appraise the subject’s situation positively, as something

to be sustained or repeated.

The content of (F), then, is concerned with threats. But what kinds of threat, exactly?

The answer to this will depend on the theory of content that we adopt. In this discussion, I am

going to assume that the correct theory to adopt is a teleosemantic theory, of the kind I have

developed elsewhere (Price, 2001; 2006. See also Delancey, 2002). On this approach, the

content of an emotional appraisal will depend on function or purpose of the emotional response

that it prompts. The fearful response prompted by (F), for example, seems to be designed to deal

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with physical threats that are occurring here and now. Hence, the content of (F) will concern

threats of just that kind.14

Like many recent theorists of emotion, I take it that emotional appraisals constitute a

distinctive type of intentional state. Hence, although episodes of emotion can involve thoughts

and desires, an emotional appraisal is not itself a combination of belief and desire.15

There are

several reasons for taking this view, but one very simple and well-worn consideration has to do

with the nature of conflicts between emotion and belief. Suppose, for example, that I am afraid

of a snake, despite believing that it is not really dangerous. If this were a conflict between

contradictory beliefs, it should be possible to resolve the issue by investigating it further – by

looking for more evidence or by giving the matter more thought. I might suspend judgement

until I have resolved the issue. But conflicts between emotion and belief often cannot be

resolved by further thought or inquiry: they can persist long after the subject has thoroughly

investigated the matter. Many theorists of emotion take this to suggest that belief and emotion

involve distinct kinds of evaluation.16

How are emotional appraisals elicited? It seems that the subject’s beliefs, evaluations

and desires can sometimes play a role in generating emotional appraisals. To recognise a

situation as dangerous or insulting or sad can depend on knowing quite sophisticated things

about one’s physical and social environment, as well being aware of one’s own intentions and

goals. But there are two provisos here:

1. While dispassionate evaluations might sometimes help to generate emotional

appraisals, emotional appraisals and dispassionate evaluations are produced by separate

processes, which work in different ways and which may call on a different range of

information. In particular, some kinds of appraisal seem to be produced by a ‘fast and

frugal’ process, which calls on only a subset of the information available to the

subject.17

2. More tentatively, it is possible that the processes that produce emotional appraisals are

more sensitive to certain sources of information than others. Although the subject’s

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beliefs can help to generate emotional appraisals, it does at least seem plausible that

perceiving or imagining a situation often carries more emotional weight than, say,

simply being told that it has occurred.

Given these two provisos, it is easy to see why a subject’s emotional appraisals often conflict

with their dispassionate evaluation of the situation. In some cases, conflicts will arise because

the emotional appraisal is based on only a subset of the information available to the subject. In

addition, it is possible that conflicts sometimes occur because information that counts against

the appraisal has not been presented to the subject in an emotionally powerful way. Emotional

appraisals, then, are not readily influenced by the subject’s beliefs: emotional motivations are

not desires in the narrow sense described earlier.

6. Evaluating emotional appraisals

Emotional appraisals can be evaluated in several ways. First, we can ask whether an

emotional appraisal fits the subject’s situation. For example, suppose that you really are at risk

of being attacked by a snake. If so, the appraisal that triggers your fearful reaction will fit your

situation. But if the snake is not dangerous, your appraisal will be misplaced.

Secondly, even if a fearful appraisal is misplaced, we can still ask whether it is

warranted by the information on which it is based. It is possible that the standards of warrant

that apply to emotional appraisals differ from the standards that apply to evaluative judgements.

For example, if some emotional appraisals are supposed to be produced by a ‘fast and frugal’

process, this might suggest that the standards that apply to these appraisals are less demanding

than the standards that apply to dispassionate evaluations.18

Finally, we can ask whether a fearful appraisal accords with other psychological states –

for example, the subject’s factual and evaluative judgements about the situation. I have

suggested that conflict between an emotional appraisal and a belief does not imply that the

subject has contradictory beliefs. Nevertheless an emotional appraisal can conflict with a belief,

just as a perceptual experience can conflict with a belief. For even though they are

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psychological states of different kinds, they may represent the world in mutually incompatible

ways.

I am suggesting, then, that there is an analogy between the following two cases:

1. I am looking at a Müller-Lyer diagram: I see the lines as unequal in length but I

believe that they are the same length.

2. I am afraid of a snake, but I believe that it is not dangerous.

Conflict between perception and belief implies no irrationality. We might conclude, then, that

conflict between an emotional appraisal and a belief implies no irrationality either. Admittedly,

when an emotional appraisal conflicts with a judgement, people often describe the resulting

emotional response as ‘irrational’. But it might be thought that this use of the term ‘irrational’ is

mistaken and reflects a false picture of what an emotion is.

However, as a number of writers have pointed out, there are also some significant

disanalogies between the two cases.19

In the first case, my perceptual experience conflicts with a

factual belief. Moreover, once I have identified the illusion as an illusion, there is little

temptation to believe my eyes: I can sit back and contemplate my perceptual experience without

risk of being fooled. But in the second case, the conflict is an evaluative one: my belief implies

that there is no need to flee from the snake; but my fearful appraisal represents the snake as

something to be fled. Moreover, my fearful appraisal actually motivates me to flee. In this case,

then, there is a risk – a risk that I will act in a way that, if my belief is true, does not fit the

situation. In this case, then, I have a pressing reason to try to suppress my fear of the snake. In

this sense, at least, my fear might be called ‘irrational’.

Nevertheless, if this is a form of irrationality, it is irrationality of a familiar and

explicable kind. In particular, it does not arise as the result of a breakdown in a single

psychological mechanism, but from the fact that my fearful appraisal and my belief are

produced by different mechanisms, which have different jobs to do, and use information in

different ways. As a result, these mechanisms can produce conflicting results, even when they

are each functioning as they should.

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It should be clear that the model of emotion that I have sketched here is very different

from the model to which Gustafson appeals. Although I have suggested that emotional episodes

will involve thoughts and desires, I have introduced an additional element – an emotional

appraisal – which is not itself a thought or a desire. I have accepted that conflict between

emotional appraisal and a belief can be called irrational, at least in an attenuated sense; but I

have argued that this is irrationality of a familiar and explicable kind.

7. Applying the model to grief

It might be thought that a partial defence of grief could rest here. The thought would be

that, if we adopt this model of emotion, we can portray the grieving subject as subject to a

conflict, not between belief and desire, but between a belief and an emotional appraisal. So,

while grief might involve some irrationality, it will be irrationality in only an attenuated sense.

This line of thought will indeed constitute one element in my defence of grief. However, it is

not the whole story. This is because, even if we adopt this model of grief, it is possible for the

kind of incoherence identified by Gustafson to crop up in an even more disturbing form – that

is, inside the subject’s emotional appraisal of the situation.

For example, consider Grace, who is grieving for her partner Lee. Applying the model

set out in the last section, we might suppose that Grace’s grief is underpinned by an enduring

emotional appraisal of her loss. What might the intentional content of this appraisal be? A

natural thought is that it could be expressed roughly as follows:

(G*) I have suffered an irreparable loss, in that Lee has died; I should repair the loss.

If this were the correct way to express the content of Grace’s appraisal, we would have to

suppose that her appraisal is itself internally incoherent.20

Is this a serious problem? Earlier, I suggested that someone might deny that it is

irrational to harbour an evidently impossible desire. In a similar spirit, someone might deny that

there is anything problematic about (G*). In this case, however, there seems to be a much

stronger reason to resist this move. On Gustafson’s account, the irrationality of grief arises from

15

a conflict between two intentional states – a belief and a desire. Hence, the desire of the grieving

subject is not incoherent in itself, but only in the light of the subject’s belief. According to (G*),

however, the conflict arises within the grief-stricken appraisal itself. Not only does the appraisal

conflict with the subject’s beliefs, it is also intrinsically self-defeating. So replacing Gustafson’s

analysis with (G*) does not seem to be a good way to defend grief from the charge that it is an

incoherent and confused response.

How might we solve this problem? One way would be to modify the descriptive content

of Grace’s grief-stricken appraisal in order to avoid the implication that it presents Lee’s death

as an irreparable loss. On this strategy, the suggestion would be that, while Grace believes that

her loss is irreparable, she does not feel that it is. Alternatively, we might try to modify the

directive content of the appraisal, by rejecting the assumption that the appraisal motivates Grace

to try to restore contact with Lee.

I take it that neither of these strategies is wholly attractive. It seems very natural to

suppose that part of the pain of grief is one’s awareness that the loss one has suffered cannot be

reversed. If we adopted the first strategy, we would have to deny this. The second strategy

cannot explain the grieving subject’s restless yearning for the person who has died. In what

follows, I shall propose a third strategy. This third strategy rests on the claim that grief is a more

complex phenomenon than (G*) implies. More specifically, I shall suggest that grief involves

two distinct forms of sadness, which (G*) runs together.

8. What is grief?

As we have seen, Gustafson seems to characterise grief as a simple emotion. In contrast,

I would like to suggest that grief is best thought of as a complex emotion, involving a number of

component emotions. Grief is characteristically manifested in feelings of sadness concerning the

subject’s loss; but it may also involve anxiety, anger, guilt, shame and envy.21

Moreover, it has

been suggested that grief should be thought of as an emotional process, which passes through a

number of distinct phases. For example, John Bowlby (1980, p. 85) suggests that grief

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characteristically involves an initial stage of numbing or shock, followed by a phase of

searching, a phase of despair, and finally, a phase of reorganisation and recovery. Grief ends

when the subject has adapted to their loss. In this discussion, I am particularly concerned with

the idea that grief involves distinct states of searching and despair. This seems to be plausible.

Certainly, it makes sense of the apparently contradictory accounts of grief in the philosophical

literature, where, as we have seen, grief is portrayed both as a state of restless yearning and as a

state of passive withdrawal.

Drawing on Bowlby’s account, I would like to suggest that grief involves at least two

different kinds of sad emotion. I shall use the label ‘anguish’ to refer to the sad emotion that

corresponds to Bowlby’s ‘searching’ stage of grief; and I shall use the label ‘desolation’ to refer

to the sad emotion which corresponds to his ‘despairing’ stage.22

In what follows, I shall draw

on the model of emotion sketched earlier to give an account of anguished and desolate

appraisals.

9. Anguished grief

Drawing on a study conducted by Parkes (1970), Bowlby (1980, pp. 86-95) describes a number

of ways in which people characteristically behave during the ‘searching’ phase of grief: they are

restless; they think intensely about the person who has died; they call out for them; they are

constantly on the look out for them and sometimes seem to see or hear them; they treasure

personal items that remind them of the deceased.

Suppose that a week or so after Lee’s death, Grace is the ‘searching’ phase of grief. On

the face of it, she might well seem to be in the irrational state that Gustafson describes: on the

one hand, she has been confronted with conclusive evidence that she has lost Lee for ever;

clearly, though, she still longs for contact with him. Indeed, it might be suggested that Grace is

in an even more irrational state than Gustafson suggests. For Grace has every reason to believe

that Lee is gone for good; yet, in some ways, she seems to be expecting his return. Hence, it

might be suggested that Grace’s grief involves not only an evidently impossible desire, but also

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contradictory beliefs, in that she both believes that Lee is dead and believes that he may return.

Indeed, Bowlby (1980, p. 87) himself characterises the searching subject’s attitude to their loss

as one of ‘disbelief’.

Should we accept that Grace is harbouring inconsistent beliefs? A more charitable

explanation is simply that that her habits and expectations have not yet adjusted to the change.

This is plausible, as far as it goes. But it is not clear that it goes far enough: simple habit will not

explain why Grace refuses to throw away Lee’s possessions. Instead, I would like to suggest

that it is not only Grace’s habits, but also her emotions that have yet to catch up with her

situation. Although Grace believes that Lee is gone forever, she does not yet feel that this is so.

If Grace sees and hears him around the house, this is not simply because she still expects to see

him, but because, in her anguish, she is looking out for him.

To make sense of this suggestion, we must first suppose that anguished sadness is not

an emotion that is specific to grief. Rather, it is an emotion which is also experienced in

response to a loss that the subject still has some chance – however slim – of reversing. For

example, a traveller, far from home and family, might feel anguished about the separation, and

desperate to get home; a child separated from her mother might feel anguished about the

separation, and desperate to bring it to an end. The point of an anguished response is to ensure

that the subject ends the separation, by going in search of what has been lost. In these cases,

anguish may still achieve its object. But in Grace’s case, it cannot.

10. Is anguished grief irrational?

Earlier, I suggested that in assigning content to an emotional appraisal, we need to begin

by considering the function or purpose of the emotional response that it generates. The point of

anguish, I have suggested, is to ensure that the subject ends the separation by going in search of

what has been lost. This implies, then, anguish is properly experienced in response to a loss that

can be repaired in this way: for it is this kind of situation that anguished behaviour is designed

18

to resolve.23

In other words, the content of Grace’s anguished appraisal should be expressed in

something like the following way:

(A) I have suffered an important but reparable loss, in that Lee is absent; I should repair

the loss by searching for Lee now. 24

If this is right, Grace’s anguished appraisal is clearly misplaced. This is because it

represents her separation from Lee as reparable, when it is not. Moreover, her appraisal conflicts

with her belief that she has lost Lee forever. Indeed it conflicts with her belief in two ways: first

in that it represents Lee’s absence as a reparable loss, and secondly, in that it motivates her to

repair the loss – a goal that she believes she cannot satisfy. Hence Grace has a reason to try to

extinguish her feelings of anguish or, at least, to try to work through them as quickly as

possible. This conflict can be said to constitute a form of irrationality, albeit in the attenuated

sense characterised in Section 6.25

On the model of emotion that I am assuming, however, there is no reason to suppose

that Grace is harbouring inconsistent beliefs or a gratuitously irrational desire.26

Nor is her

anguished appraisal itself internally incoherent, as G* is. Hence there is no reason to posit some

special explanation for the irrationality of grief. Rather, the conflict arises from a mismatch

between her emotional appraisal and her belief. This form of irrationality (such as it is) is of a

familiar and explicable kind. Indeed, in this case, it is possible to see how Grace has arrived at

her appraisal. There is powerful evidence in its favour: Lee is, after all, absent from home. In

episodes of anguish, Grace’s attention will be firmly fixed on this fact, leaving little space for a

rational critique of her feelings.

We might wonder why Grace’s anguished yearning persists, despite the fact that she has

conclusive evidence that Lee will not return. One possibility is that Grace is guilty of some kind

of motivated irrationality: perhaps she fails to confront the mismatch between her emotion and

her belief, because to do so would be too painful. But another possibility is that the evidence

that her loss cannot be repaired has not been presented to her in an emotionally powerful form.

That Lee is irretrievably lost is not itself something that can be perceived or easily imagined,

19

but only believed. It is possible that this rather abstract belief carries little emotional weight in

comparison with the perceptual cues that favour her appraisal.

Is this form of irrationality an inevitable feature of grief? The answer will depend, first,

on what the grieving subject must believe. Certainly, it is possible to imagine cases of grief in

which the subject does not believe that they have suffered a serious and irreparable loss. For

example, the subject might believe that their loss is reparable (perhaps their religious beliefs

imply this); or they might believe that their loss is not serious enough to merit grief. However,

this possibility makes little difference overall: for these cases introduce other kinds of conflict

between emotion and belief.27

Secondly, the answer depends on whether grief always involves a

phase of anguished searching. This, I take it, is an empirical issue: there is nothing in my (or

Bowlby’s) account that implies that grief must always involve all the phases that he identifies.28

Nevertheless, I do not want to make too much of this: even if there can be cases of grief

that do not involve anguish, my account implies that conflict between anguish and belief is at

least a common feature of grief. The point I wish to emphasise is that this form of irrationality is

of a familiar and unsurprising kind: it arises in much the same way as other conflicts between

emotional appraisals and beliefs. It requires no special explanation. Moreover, as I shall explain

in the next section, there is no reason to think that desolate grief involves any kind of conflict.

11. Desolate grief

Bowlby (1980: 93-4) characterises the third stage of grief as one of despair: at this

stage, the grieving subject has accepted that the separation cannot be reversed. Bowlby presents

this stage of grief as characterised, primarily, by withdrawal and lethargy. He also touches on a

further feature of despairing grief: its reflective or ruminative character. 29

In this phase of grief,

we might expect Grace to spend much of her time in solitude, hopelessly ruminating on her loss.

In despairing grief, it seems, the subject experiences a form of sadness that differs from

anguish. I shall refer to this form of sadness as ‘desolation’. Desolation involves the recognition

that the subject’s loss cannot be repaired. What is harder to determine is what we should say

20

about the directive content of a desolate appraisal: in her desolation, Grace does not seem to be

motivated to do very much, beyond sitting and thinking sad thoughts about Lee’s death.

Indeed, it might be suggested that desolate appraisals have no directive content. If so,

the intentional states that sustain states of desolation need not be characterised as appraisals:

they simply signal the fact that the subject has suffered an irreparable loss, triggering a state of

lethargy and withdrawal. I take it that this is an unattractive result: on the face of it, desolation

implies an appraisal of the subject’s loss as something very bad – as something to be avoided or

changed. One possibility is that desolation involves something akin to a wish that the loss had

not occurred. Once again, however, it might be doubted whether this does enough to explain the

intense distress of desolation. There is reason to suspect, then, that desolation has some

motivational effect.

But what might a desolate appraisal motivate the subject to do? One possibility, of

course, is that it motivates the subject to try to repair their loss. If so, desolate appraisals will

turn out to be internally incoherent, like (G*). In what follows, however, I would like to try to

develop an account of desolate grief that does not have this implication. The account is a

speculative one: my aim is to establish only that there is room for a conception of desolate grief

as a coherent response to loss.

Some psychologists have suggested that our capacity for grief functions to ensure that

the loss of a friend or family member is experienced as profoundly painful – that is, as

something to be avoided at all costs.30

This might be taken to suggest that the motivational

effect of a desolate appraisal is not to prompt the subject to repair their loss, but to ensure that

the subject does not incur such a loss again.31

On this picture, the psychological pain of

desolation might be compared to the physical pain of a burn, which motivates the subject to stay

away from fire.

Avoiding further losses need not simply be a matter of trying to prevent further deaths.

The subject’s loss is not simply the death, but the termination of a relationship between the

subject and someone they loved or needed. Hence, the subject’s motivation to avoid further

21

losses might reveal itself in a variety of ways: in a protective attitude to friends and family; in a

reluctance to form new ties; or perhaps in a commitment to make the most of the subject’s

remaining relationships before they too run their course.

If this suggestion is correct, the motivational role of desolation will turn out to be rather

different from the motivational role of fear and anguished sadness. Both fear and anguished

sadness motivate the subject to take immediate action to remedy the situation. The effect of

desolation, in contrast, will be to inculcate – or further entrench – a set of motivations that have

a lasting and pervasive effect on the subject’s behaviour. Indeed, there is no need to suppose

that the subject is consciously aware of the change.

I am suggesting, then, that the content of the appraisal that sustains Grace’s desolate

attitude to Lee’s death might be expressed (in part and very loosely) as follows:

(D) I have suffered an important and irreparable loss, in that Lee has died; in future, I

should do whatever I can to avoid incurring such a loss.

This desolate appraisal involves no internal incoherence. Moreover, it is appropriate to Grace’s

situation. Finally, it need involve no conflict with Grace’s existing beliefs or desires. On this

account, then, the irrationality of grief, such as it is, will be found in anguish, not in desolation.

11. Desolation and rumination

Is this a plausible account of the content of a desolate appraisal? On the face of it, the

account faces several objections. In this section, I shall mention three possible objections. I shall

argue that they can be answered once we take full account of a further feature of desolate grief –

its reflective or ruminative character.

The first objection is that the account leaves the content of a desolate appraisal

unacceptably vague. What kind of event will count as ‘such a loss’? Will this include only the

loss of a partner in a traffic accident on a rainy Saturday night? Or might it include the death of

anyone Grace knows, or perhaps even the permanent loss of anything that is of any value to her?

Unless this can be settled, Grace’s desolate appraisal cannot be ascribed a determinate content.

22

Secondly, it might be objected that, on this account, the motivational effect of desolate

grief is redundant. If Grace loves someone, that by itself implies that she is strongly motivated

to do all she can to avoid losing them. Similarly, if she cares about her own well-being, she is

already motivated to avoid forming dangerous dependencies and to make the most of the

relationships that she has. She does not need the experience of grief to motivate her to do these

things.

Thirdly, it might be objected that the account is hard to square with the phenomenology

of desolate grief. In her desolate state, Grace’s attention is firmly fixed on the particular

circumstances of Lee’s death; it is this particular past event that her appraisal represents as

deplorable. And yet, on this suggestion, the motivational role of desolate grief is concerned, not

with Lee’s death, but with averting a similar loss in the future. If this were correct, should we

not expect Grace’s attention to be directed onto the future – as it might be, for example, in a

case of anxiety?

I would like to suggest that the key to answering these objections lies with the reflective

or ruminative character of desolate grief. In particular, I shall argue that desolate rumination

may play a role in determining the motivational effects of desolate grief.

To see this, it is necessary to consider what the point of desolate rumination might be.

In her desolation, I have suggested, Grace will ruminate on the dreadful nature of her loss – how

young Lee was when he died, the plans they had together, that they had quarrelled that

afternoon. It may seem that, in dwelling on these things, Grace is torturing herself to no

purpose. Arguably, however, desolate rumination has a point: it has a heuristic or epistemic

function. In other words, as she reflects on what has happened, Grace is not simply dwelling on

what she already knows; rather, she is identifying and coming to appreciate the many ways in

which Lee’s death is a terrible thing.

Still, it may seem that this has just pushed the problem back: what is the point of Grace

coming to appreciate these things? There are several (mutually compatible) possibilities here.

But one possibility is that what Grace uncovers helps to determine, perhaps unconsciously, the

23

motivational effects of her grief. For to appreciate why Lee’s death was a terrible thing just is,

in part, to recognise why it was an event worth avoiding. And to know this is to know what to

guard against in future.32

If this is right, it suggests a way of answering the three objections that I have just set

out. First, we do not need to suppose that what counts as ‘such a loss’ is fully specified in

advance: rather, desolate rumination might help to determine what constitutes ‘such a loss’.

Secondly, we do not need to suppose that desolation motivates Grace to avoid outcomes which

she already knows to be deplorable. In ruminating on her loss, Grace is not dwelling on the

badness of bereavement in general, but identifying the specific ways in which Lee’s death is a

dreadful thing. In being motivated to avoid ‘such a loss’, she is motivated to avoid outcomes

with these specific characteristics. Thirdly, we can appeal to the ruminative character of

desolate grief to explain the phenomenology of desolation – and, in particular, why episodes of

desolation characteristically involve an intense focus on the circumstances of the death that has

occurred. Indeed, we might expect this to be a much more salient feature in the subject’s

experience of desolate grief than the motivation to avoid future losses: as we have seen, the

motivational changes wrought by desolation need not be evident to the subject. Hence the

ruminative character of desolate grief can explain why the attention of the grieving subject is

characteristically focused on the past, rather than the future.

Does this account imply that we should welcome the pain of desolation? Certainly,

desolate rumination carries certain risks. There is a risk that the process will produce an

excessively idealised portrait of the person or the relationship that has been lost.33

Again, there

is a risk that the grieving subject will draw the wrong conclusions from their experience – for

example, by withdrawing from further relationships, even though this is not justified what has

happened to them. But these difficulties are not inevitable: there is scope for the desolate subject

to arrive at a balanced and insightful assessment of what has occurred.

24

12. Conclusion

I have argued that, although grief characteristically involves some form of irrationality,

this is not irrationality of the gratuitous kind implied by Gustafson’s analysis. The irrationality

of grief arises from a conflict between the subject’s belief that their loss is irreparable and their

anguish for the person who has died. I have suggested that this conflict can be labelled

‘irrational’, at least in an attenuated sense; but I have argued that this form of irrationality is of a

familiar and explicable kind. In contrast, I have argued that it is possible to develop an account

of desolate grief as wholly appropriate to the subject’s loss.

My (partial) defence of grief rests on two foundations – the claim that grief is a complex

emotional response, which involves more than one form of sadness; and the rejection of

Gustafson’s analysis of grief, with its emphasis on belief and desire. As should now be clear,

both these moves are essential to my argument. The distinction between anguish and desolation

makes it possible to explain how grief can involve both yearning and despair, without supposing

that grief implies an incoherent appraisal of the situation. But if I had tried to analyse these

emotions in terms of the subject’s beliefs and desires, this would not have been much help. For,

although it would have been possible to defend desolation against the charge of irrationality, the

charges against anguish would have multiplied.

Finally, the account reveals some of the different ways in which grief might bear

witness to the magnitude of the subject’s loss – both in the subject’s anguished recognition of

what is now missing, and in their desolate rumination on the disaster, in all its dreadful aspects.

In both cases, this realisation may be, for a time, consuming, but in the case of desolation, at

least, it need be neither misplaced nor futile.34

25

Notes

1 For some sympathetic discussions of grief, see Kopelman (1995), Nussbaum (1998, pp.19-88),

Roberts ( 2003, pp. 235-40; pp. 325-6); Solomon (2004, pp.75-101); and McCracken (2005).

2 See Wilkinson (2000).

3 I shall follow Gustafson in treating grief at the death of a loved one as a paradigm case.

4 There is room for a spectrum of views here: perhaps it is irrational to desire something one

believes to be logically impossible, but not something one believes to be causally impossible.

The goal that Gustafson attributes to the grieving subject seems to be causally but not logically

impossible.

5 For a contrary view, see Black (1955, pp.186-7).

6 I give some examples later on in this section. In contrast, Robert Solomon (2004, p.82-5)

characterises the grieving subject’s desire to repair their loss as ‘paradoxical’ rather than

irrational.

7 See Hinton (1970). For the remainder of this paper I shall continue to use the terms ‘desire’

and ‘wish’ in the senses defined here.

8 Black disagrees, citing cases in which people aim at ideals that they believe to be unattainable,

in the hope of coming as near to their ideal as they can (Black, 1955, pp.186-7). However, we

do not need to describe these subjects as desiring to attain their ideal: perhaps they desire to get

as close to it as they can, and believe that the best way to do so is to try to attain it.

9 See also de Sousa (1987, p. 169); Ben-Ze’ev (2000, p.62).

10 See also, McCracken (2005, 142).

11 For a fuller account, see Price (2006).

12For example, falling in love tends towards the formation of a loving attachment between the

subject and the beloved.

13 For some (otherwise very different) accounts of emotional phenomena as complex processes,

see Ekman (1980, pp.80-95); Goldie (2000, pp.12-14); Prinz (2004, pp.3-4).

26

14 The idea that emotions can be understood in functional terms is both long-standing and

relatively commonplace. One attraction of a teleosemantic approach to emotional appraisals is

that it fits very neatly within this broader conception. There are other possible approaches,

however, and I shall take some account of this in what follows: see notes 23 and 25.

15 There is much more that to be said about what kind of state an emotional appraisal is. For

some different accounts, see de Sousa (1987); Goldie (2000: pp.72-83) Ekman (1980, pp.84);

Robinson (2005, pp.59); Prinz (2004, pp.60-67). For a much fuller account of my own views,

see Price (2006).

16 For some examples see: Greenspan (1981); Roberts (1988: p.183); Griffiths (1990); Goldie

(2000, p.75); Helm (2001, pp. 60-75); Tappolet (2003, pp.109-10); Döring (2003, p. 223).

17 See Ekman (1980, p.84) and Griffiths (1987, p.92).

18 Compare Greenspan (1980).

19 The precise nature of these disanalogies is controversial. For a discussion, see Helm (2003,

p.41-46); Roberts (2003, p. 92); and Döring (2008). The position I adopt here is closest to

Döring’s.

20 Indeed, on the teleosemantic theory that I am assuming, it is not clear that such an ascription

of content would even be possible.

21 See Izard (1991, p.205).

22 My use of the terms ‘anguish’ and ‘desolation’ is not intended to accord with normal usage.

The term ‘anguish’, in particular, normally has a much broader meaning. Here I am

commandeering it to refer to a particular kind of anguished or restless sadness.

23 For discussion of this point, see Price (2006: 221-3). Other theories of content, though, need

not have this implication. Suppose, instead, that we took the content of an emotional appraisal

to be concerned with the kind of situation that would normally elicit such an appraisal in a

normal subject. This would imply that anguish is properly experienced in response to any

27

important loss, whether reparable or irreparable: for, after all, normal subjects do normally

experience anguish in response to a death. See note 25.

24 In ascribing this content to (A), I am not trying to describe thoughts or beliefs that Grace will

entertain, but rather to capture the circumstances under which her appraisal would properly be

elicited.

25 What of the rival view mentioned in note 23? On this rival view, (A) would not be misplaced;

nor would it involve any factual conflict with Grace’s belief. But the conflict between the

motivational aspect of (A) and Grace’s belief would remain. Even on this account, then, Grace

has a reason to try to work through her feelings of anguish as quickly as she can. Whether this

more limited form of conflict would constitute a form of irrationality is a moot point, and I shall

not attempt to adjudicate it here. (The question does not arise on my preferred theory.)

Conceivably, though, on some theories of content, Grace’s anguish should not be described as

irrational, even in the attenuated sense at issue here. It will, though, be futile.

26 Of course, Grace might form a desire to find Lee, and she might try to satisfy it – for example,

by attending a séance. But her anguished yearning will not necessarily generate such a desire –

at least, not in the narrow sense of ‘desire’ required to defend G.1. In many cases, it may

manifest itself simply as a restless yearning.

27 In the first case (as the discussion in the next section will make clear), the subject’s belief

implies that desolation is misplaced. In the second, the subject’s belief implies that anguish and

desolation are both misplaced.

28 Bowlby (1980, p.119) hints that in some cases, anticipatory mourning can eliminate the

‘searching’ phase of grief.

29 This aspect of grief is discussed in some detail by McCracken (2005). See also Bowlby (1980,

p.93) and Solomon (2004, pp.91-92).

30 For some examples, see Averill (1969); Izard (1991, p.205).

28

31 This is not intended to rule out the possibility that desolation might have other motivational

effects. For example, perhaps one effect of a desolate appraisal is to motivate the subject

withdraw from social encounters while they are in a vulnerable state. However, this would not

imply that desolation involves a negative appraisal of the subject’s loss, only of the subject’s

vulnerable state.

32 Another possibility is that Grace’s new understanding helps to prepare her for the process of

reconstruction and recovery that brings grief to an end.

33 See Bowlby (1980, pp. 203-6); Kopelman (1995, pp.216).

34 Earlier drafts of this paper were delivered at seminars held at the Open University and at

Reading University and at a conference on death organised by The Open University and York

University. I am very grateful to those present on those occasions for their many insightful and

constructive comments. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees for this journal,

together with the editors, for their comments on the paper, which has been much improved as a

result.

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