Hannah Fasnacht is a visiting postdoc at the Center for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp. This summer she will come to CISA (Swiss Center for Affective Sciences) at the University of Geneva, starting a project on Grieving the Impossible. She would be really happy if there are other people interested in the topic of this blog, and if they want to chat or reach out.
A post by Hannah Fasnacht
«Wie geht’s?» fragte die Trauer die Hoffnung.
«Ich bin etwas traurig», sagte die Hoffnung.
«Hoffentlich», sagte die Trauer.
—Franz Hohler
“How are you?” Sadness asked Hope.
“I’m a little sad”, Hope said.
“I would hope so”, said Sadness.
[my translation]
Grief is typically directed at or caused by an actual loss: the death of a person, the end of a relationship, the removal of a certain form of security, for example due to a war, the deprivation of abilities and things once possessed. One could call this kind of grief “past-oriented” and “directed at actual objects”. Mostly, grief is understood as a reaction to a loss – paradigmatically, the loss of someone close to us (Cholbi 2021; Ratcliffe 2020).
Grief seems to be a complex thing. It is not just sadness; rather, it is arguably a process with different emotions which can co-exist, contradict each other, shift into one another, have “stages” (Kübler-Ross 1969) or come in waves. Grief is not neat and contained, but can be raw and unfiltered:
It was poisonous, unnatural to let the dead go with a mere whimpering, a slight murmur, a rose bouquet of good taste. Good taste was out of place in the company of death, death itself was the essence of bad taste. And there must be much rage and saliva in its presence. The body must move and throw itself about, the eyes must roll, the hands should have no peace, and the throat should release all the yearning, despair and outrage that accompany the stupidity of loss.
—Toni Morrison, “Sula”
There might be a mixture of acceptance and raw hurt:
Sometimes, when I think about it, I still feel a dark hurt from some primal part of myself, and if I’m alone in my apartment when this happens I will hear myself making sounds that I never made before I went to Mongolia. I realize that I have turned back into a wounded witch, wailing in the forest, undone. Most of the time it seems sort of O.K., though, natural. Nature. Mother Nature. She is free to do whatever she chooses.
—Ariel Levy, “Thanksgiving in Mongolia”
What seems central to grief is a form of finality or a contestation or confrontation with exactly this finality.
… it is an act of resistance and refusal, grief telling you that it is over and your heart saying that it is not …
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Notes on Grief”
Recently, the notion of grief has been expanded to include the phenomenon of anticipatory grief (Allard et al. 2020; Evans 1994)—e.g. grief in light of a relative’s terminal illness or dementia. We anticipatorily grieve what we know is inevitable, what will come to pass.
I am here interested in yet another phenomenon: grieving the impossible, a form of grief that is directed not at an actual person or object or something in the past, but rather at an imagined (im-)possible future that will never come to be. Michael Cholbi argues that grief is not only directed at those who play an important role in our daily lives, but can also be aspirational and “… directed at those who play key roles in how we see ourselves and our lives, those in whom we have invested our hopes and in whom we thereby invested our practical identities.” (Cholbi 2021, 36)
I think this is possible also for people and things which never even existed, where the imagined object never was and never will be. We can not only grieve the loss of people close to us, relationships, experiences, things that were real. We can also grieve things we imagined and formed mental imagery about, things that never were, potential futures in which we mentally (and emotionally) invested, craved and longed for. Examples include grieving biological parenthood that is unattainable due to infertility, or grieving certain rights for which one has fought in a political movement but which seem to be permanently repressed. I will call this future-directed grief, one that involves the grieving of possibilities that were never realized.
We can examine how grief can be possible and appropriate when nothing “real” has been lost, when the grief in question is instead directed at something that will never come to be. Is this form of grief as weighty and important as other kinds? In what sense is the phenomenon of grieving the impossible distinct? Does it inform other forms of grief? If we take seriously this notion—namely that we can actually grieve something we imagined and hoped for—then it seems to me that propositional imagination and mental imagery play a constitutive role for this kind of grief.
Some philosophical questions that arise when thinking about grieving an impossible imagined future are similar to those that arise when thinking about the infamous “paradox of fiction” (PoF). Stacie Friend recently gave an excellent overview of the discussion regarding the PoF (Friend 2022). She argues that the dichotomous approach, which examines whether such emotions directed toward fiction are of the same kind as other emotions we experience in our ordinary life, is not helpful.
We could ask whether they are of the same phenomenal intensity, whether they are motivational, whether we experience physiological reactions, and whether evaluative components differ. (Friend 2022, 261; Adair 2019) Instead, Friend proposes to take into account all the variations and gradations the above components can have. This allows us a more nuanced picture, where we do not need to take such emotions to be exactly the same, but also not a totally separate kind.
I think this approach is useful for thinking about a grieving process which is directed at some imagined future, too. We might wonder, what is distinct in such cases, and maybe there are some really illuminating things to be found, but it seems that variations and gradations of the above components can be found in the paradigmatic “past-directed” form of grieving, and the “future-directed” form of grieving as well. The intensity, for example, with which one might be grieving a real person (say, one’s parent) and grieving a person who never existed (say, the wished-for child) is deeply personal and dependent on one’s particular circumstances.
Another thing similar to the PoF is whether we take the grieving about an imagined thing as appropriate. My intuition is that such a future-directed grief can be a real rational form of grief. There are probably distinctions to be made, and the rationality aspect can be disputed in certain examples, but it seems to me that there are at least cases where the grief in question can be apt for the future-directed case as well as the past-directed one.
I want to mention some potential distinctions and characteristics, nevertheless.
First, between PoF and the future-directed grief: We normally spend a limited time engaging with a work of fiction. But grieving an imagined future often follows big personal dreams and hopes and imagined lifepaths in which we invest quite some time imagining how they would be, maybe orienting our lives accordingly so it is more probable that such futures will come to be.
Second, that the thing we grieve was at least in theory possible for oneself is what differentiates that kind of phenomenon from other things that we can imagine and would be extremely happy about if they were to come true, but about which we only shrug if they don’t come to be actualized (e.g. the ability to fly unassisted).
Third, depending on the specific case, we might be taken by shock and surprise (e.g. after a diagnosis) if we expected and never doubted that the imagined object will come to be, or we might gradually anticipate our dream slipping away (e.g. due to time running out and certain things becoming more improbable). And depending on the dream/hope, we might have had more or less agency to pursue and achieve it. But all these aspects also factor in to varying degrees in the paradigmatic past-directed case of grief which is directed at something real.
Fourth, what seems different at first, though, is the interpersonal mourning process. There aren’t always clear rituals, procedures, condolences, burials, and culturally practiced norms that accompany the loss of an imagined future.
And finally, another differentiation is that the object of grief that never was and never will be is constituted through imagination. But even this might not be as clear-cut a distinction. One element we grieve when the people we care about die, seems to be the potential future they would have had and the future we would have had together. So, at the very least, in further thinking about grieving an impossible future, we might learn something about the paradigmatic case of grief, too.
References
Adair, Heather V. 2019. ‘Updating Thought Theory: Emotion and the Non-Paradox of Fiction’. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (4): 1055–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/papq.12294.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2020. “Notes on Grief”. The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/notes-on-grief#rid=6212886d-fc32-47e0-8a70-34ecf4270788&q=adichie)
Allard, Emilie, Christine Genest, and Alain Legault. 2020. ‘Theoretical and Philosophical Assumptions behind the Concept of Anticipatory Grief’. International Journal of Palliative Nursing 26 (2): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.12968/ijpn.2020.26.2.56.
Cholbi, Michael. 2021. ‘Grief: A Philosophical Guide’. Princeton University Press.
Evans, A. J. 1994. ‘Anticipatory Grief: A Theoretical Challenge’. Palliative Medicine 8 (2): 159–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/026921639400800211.
Friend, Stacie. 2022. ‘Emotion in Fiction: State of the Art’. The British Journal of Aesthetics 62 (2): 257–71. https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayab060.
Hohler, Franz. Poem: https://www.karldergrosse.ch/programm/veranstaltung/winterreden-2026-franz-hohler
Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. 1969. On Death and Dying .
Levy, Ariel. 2013. “Thanksgiving in Mongolia. Adventure and heartbreak at the edge of the world.” The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/11/18/thanksgiving-in-mongolia)
Ratcliffe, Matthew. 2020. ‘Towards a Phenomenology of Grief: Insights from Merleau-Ponty’. European Journal of Philosophy 28 (3): 657–69. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12513.