how it works. Aristotle argued that the scientific method had to be adapted to the phenomenon being studied, rather than the phenomenon being forced into pre-established scientific templates. Phenomena in mathematics require different methods than those in ethics.
The idea that the phenomenon takes precedence is an essential precondition for the phenomenological project. Husserl founded modern phenomenology around 1900. Martin Heidegger refined it as an existential philosophy, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty later steered it in an existential-dialectical direction (for more detail on the history of phenomenology see Brinkmann and Kvale 2015). The goal was to describe not only the phenomena in and of themselves, but in particular the underlying experience structures that make it possible for something to have its own special character. At first, under Husserl, phenomenology’s primary focus was consciousness and life as it is experienced. This was later extended to encompass human experience as a whole, and Merleau-Ponty and Sartre also incorporated the body and human action in historical contexts into their thinking. Generally speaking, the goal of phenomenological research is to understand social and psychological phenomena from the actors’ own perspectives, and to describe the world as experienced by individuals. Put simply, it is based on the assumption that what is important about reality is how people perceive it.
In psychology, it was Amedeo Giorgi in particular who, from the 1970s onwards, developed a phenomenological method for ‘the study of the structure and the variations of structure of the consciousness to which any thing, event or person appears’ (Giorgi 1975: 83). According to Merleau-Ponty (2012), it is a matter of describing the phenomenon in question as accurately and completely as possible, rather than seeking to explain or analyse it. This entails remaining faithful to the phenomenon studied in order to reach an understanding of its essence – the phenomenon’s very being – by seeking out what is general about it. Husserl described one such method of doing so as ‘free variation in the imagination’. In other words, the phenomenologist freely envisages all of the potential variant forms of a given phenomenon, and whatever is constant in the different iterations is its being. This involves a phenomenological reduction, i.e. disregarding general views about whether a given experience exists or not. The process can be described as ‘putting in parentheses’, as it consists of setting aside both general and theoretically advanced knowledge about the phenomenon in order to reach an unbiased description of its being (see Brinkmann and Kvale 2015: 49). It is worth quoting from Merleau-Ponty’s programme for a phenomenology based on primary experiences of the world:
Everything that I know about the world, even through science, I know from a perspective that is my own or from an experience of the world without which scientific symbols would be meaningless. The entire universe of science is constructed upon the lived world, and if we wish to think science rigorously, to appreciate precisely its sense and its scope, we must first awaken that experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression. (Merleau-Ponty 2012: p. lxxii)
In geography, a map is an abstraction of the landscape in which we first directly encountered forests, towns and fields. Similarly, according to the phenomenological approach, scientific studies are abstractions based on immediate experiences in the world, to which we must find our way back in order to describe them. What does our emotional, psychological and social ‘landscape’ look like before we map it out in the form of scientific theories? Our experiences of grief, for example, precede our scientific and theoretical knowledge of it.
Since the days of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (all of whom I will refer to later in this book), phenomenology has branched out even further, to include even ‘post-phenomenology’, which not only looks at the experiential structures of the subjects involved, but also incorporates the meaning of the whole material and technological world. It might also be argued that Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, which has exerted a huge influence since the mid-twentieth century, is a kind of linguistic phenomenology that approaches philosophical questions by looking in detail at how language is used in certain contexts (Gier 1981). Wittgenstein is another starting point for this book – specifically, his contention that we can learn a great deal from scientific studies that describe the contexts in which we use linguistic concepts about emotions. Grief is not just a wordless state that we carry in our bodies, but a concept we learn to apply actively in certain situations. As such, gaining an awareness of how we acquire and use such concepts teaches us something important about the phenomenon. Viewed as an emotion, grief seems at once to be part of the human experience, an embodied state, an intersubjective form of communication and something deeply embedded in the social processes of culture. In my opinion, there is a need for a wide-ranging phenomenological approach to grief in order to understand both the depth and breadth of the phenomenon. This book presents a comprehensive proposal for such an approach.
Structure of the book
This introductory chapter concludes below with an outline of the history of grief. I then argue in Chapter 2 that grief is a phenomenon unique to human beings, as we have both a concept of death as the inevitable end point of life and the ability to love particular individuals. Love and death are both prerequisites for grief. Other species feel depressed and suffer separation anxiety, which superficially resembles grief, but I argue in this chapter that it is not actual grief – at least not in the way that humans grieve. Grief requires a reflexive awareness of finitude and emotional relationships that other species only possess on a rudimentary level. In this way, grief tells us something essential about human beings, that they can be understood as grieving animals, or at least as animals with the potential to grieve. If this is true, then humans should not just be understood as rational animals, as Aristotle believed (or Homo sapiens, the thinking person), but on a deeper level, as beings with the potential to have certain emotional relationships with the world and other people (we might call such a species Homo sentimentalis) – a potential that manifests itself, not least, in grief.
Chapter 3 follows up with a more focused phenomenological study of the being of grief. Based on Husserl’s phenomenology – specifically as applied in Thomas Fuchs (2018) and Matthew Ratcliffe’s studies of grief – it shows how grief manifests itself as the loss of a ‘system of possibilities’ (Ratcliffe 2017). In other words, the bereaved are left with a deep-rooted attachment to someone who has passed away. In poetic terms, it is a love that has become homeless. However, I also argue that this is where Husserl’s phenomenology encounters its limits, as it risks reducing the experience of loss to nothing more than the bereaved’s representations of the dead (a lost ‘system of possibilities’). As a result, I supplement this position with Emmanuel Levinas’s more radical phenomenology, which criticises the reduction of the deceased to their importance to the grieving self. According to Levinas, grief is not only about losing a ‘system of possibilities’, it is more fundamental – a loved one is no longer in this world. Grief has to be understood not only psychologically, but also ontologically.2 This also explains why it is possible to grieve the loss of a loved one or of an idealised other to whom we may never have been close (e.g. idols or celebrities). The chapter also identifies some of the psychological implications of grief that challenge psychology’s standard atomistic, functionalist (e.g. evolutionary psychology) and causal explanations. As an existential phenomenon, grief tells us something about humans as relational beings, and about psychology as a science that deals with a domain of reality that resists simple evolutionary or causal reduction.
Chapter 4 focuses specifically on grief as an embodied emotion. From ancient Greek tragedies to modern painting, the physical expression of grief has been depicted in a fairly uniform manner. The chapter shows how the experience of loss is recognised via the body of the bereaved. Grief etches itself into us and we express it physically. The basic thesis is that grief in some way takes root in our physicality – the body itself is effectively in mourning. An analysis of the embodiment of grief tells us something essential about human emotional life, and about the relationship
