As I was researching mortality and grief myself, I came across Professor Cholbi’s Grief: A Philosophical Guide as a reader. I loved the book so much that I annotated it heavily. To go from reading the book to sitting with the author feels surreal, in a really wondrous way. We covered far more than I expected to, from Stoic philosophy to grief and our identity, ambivalent grief, the duty to grieve, and the refusal to treat grief as an illness, and I am so grateful for how Professor Cholbi answered all my questions rigorously and carefully.
Most of what we are offered when we grieve either asks whether something has gone wrong with us or hands us techniques to manage the pain. A philosophical approach does not try to diagnose grief. Instead, it gives us conceptual tools to understand and think about grief in a new way. It gives us tools to make the experience feel less disorienting without pretending to solve it.
Dr. Cholbi is Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and the author of Grief: A Philosophical Guide. He came to the subject roughly a decade ago and found almost nothing written on it by contemporary philosophers, which is itself revealing.
Professor Cholbi suggests grief had long been treated as evidence that one had been too attached to things one ought to have held loosely. The recent surge of philosophical attention to grief, which Professor Cholbi has done a great deal to drive, is a correction to the lack of discussion on grief.
The first question is: whose deaths do we grieve? Intimacy does not explain it, because people grieve celebrities and public figures they have never met. Love does not explain it either, because people grieve estranged parents and difficult relationships shot through with animosity. What unites the people whose deaths move us, Professor Cholbi argues, is that we have invested our practical identity in them, the set of projects, commitments, and roles through which we understand who we are (a notion he draws from Christine Korsgaard’s work on the descriptions under which we value ourselves). A parent cannot be a parent without the child; a friendship is built into the texture of ordinary days. When such a person dies, we do not only lose them. We lose a part of the self that was constituted through them, which is why grief so often feels like disorientation, like being not quite at home in the world.
Grief is not a single emotion but something closer to a sustained condition of attention directed at the person we have lost and at our relationship with them. It can contain sorrow, anger, guilt, anxiety, and also gratitude and even joy, and the texture of those emotions tells us something true about what the relationship was. We discuss ambivalent grief in particular, touching on the relief that can sit beside sorrow when a long and burdensome relationship ends, or when a caregiver is released from a role that had quietly become their whole identity.
Professor Cholbi wants people to feel less powerless in the face of grief without pretending that grief is under our direct command, and he reaches for the image of musical improvisation: we are handed a score we did not choose, but we can slow it down, linger over some passages, move more quickly through others. The aim is a successful remapping of a life from which a landmark has been removed.
We also discuss his argument that we can have a duty to grieve those with whom we stand in mutually loving relationships, grounded in practical fidelity, and his further intuition, which he admits he cannot fully defend, that everyone is entitled to be grieved by someone.
Perhaps we should all reflect on the value and feasibility of that old philosophical, Stoic ideal of an invulnerable life, one so well-ordered that nothing outside the self can shake it. Should we accept that we become who we are through other people, and therefore stand to lose part of ourselves when we lose them? Professor Cholbi’s optimism about grief reads less as cheerfulness than as a proportionate correction to centuries of treating grief as shameful and recent decades of treating it as an illness.
Professor Cholbi’s website: https://michael.cholbi.com
Imi Lo is an independent consultant and philosophical counsellor who has dedicated her career to helping emotionally and intellectually intense people turn their depth into strength. She has written three books with Hachette: Emotional Sensitivity and Intensity, The Gift of Intensity, and The Gift of Empathy.
After over a decade of clinical practice as a psychotherapist and art therapist, including roles with Médecins Sans Frontières and the NHS (UK), Imi transitioned to philosophical counselling. She holds three master's degrees in Mental Health, Buddhist Studies, and Global Cultures.
You can contact Imi for a one-to-one session tailored to your specific needs.