Grief and the Unity of Emotion

Grief is not a single emotional episode but a temporally extended process that nonetheless forms a unified whole. The unity of grief does not come from its narrative structure, as some have proposed, but from the way its diverse aspects all involve recognizing and responding to a wide-ranging, dynamic disturbance of life-possibilities—a disturbance held together by relationships of non-propositional implication. This recognition and response are inseparable from each other. The same approach may apply to emotions more generally, challenging the view that emotions are unified psychological states.

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Abstract

The nature of grief presents a particular challenge to the view that emotions are unified psychological states. Grief can include all manner of potential ingredients, changes markedly over time, and has temporal gaps. In this paper, I focus exclusively on the relevant phenomenology and show how an experience of grief still amounts to a unified whole. I begin by endorsing the view that grief is a temporally extended process rather than an episode or state. I go on to argue that what unifies this process and singles it out as one of grieving is not -as has been suggestedits narrative structure. Rather, various aspects of grief all involve recognizing and responding to a wide-ranging, dynamic, and singular disturbance of life-possibilities, where recognition and response are inextricable from each other. This disturbance is ‘held together’ by relationships of non-propositional implication. I suggest that the same approach can be applied to emotions more generally. 1. The Ingredients of Emotion The question of what emotions are is closely related to that of whether and how they amount to unified states. Answers to the former tend to be swiftly confronted by the latter. For instance, suppose we start from two well-known and seemingly conflicting theories of emotion: William James (1884) proposes that they are feelings of bodily changes, while Robert Solomon (1976/1993) instead insists that they are judgments. How we arbitrate between the two depends in part on what is meant by ‘judgment’, something that Solomon (e.g. 2004a) came to regard in an increasingly permissive way. If the term ‘judgment’ is applied too liberally, then the claim