Grief and the Unity of Emotion

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 suggested-its 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.that emotions are judgments turns out to be trivially true.Scarantino (2010) therefore objects to what he calls the "elastic strategy": we stretch 'judgment' as much as we need to, until it fits around emotion.When stretched that much, it also encompasses the 'feelings' that others contrast with 'judgments'.Consequently, we fail to distinguish between importantly different aspects of emotion.If we instead acknowledge their distinctness and concede that emotions incorporate both, and perhaps a lot more besides, we are left wit…