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In the culmination of the Sunday Meetings series last weekend we looked at images and shared ideas about The World. I think about the world as an image that is resistant to closure, whose meanings are always unfolding and on the way.
At the same time, I’ve often thought about The World as having to do with the attainment of a vision or the actualization of some ideal version of self, both within which a certain amount of commitment is implied. If there’s something you want, The World may be a sign to stay the course and to trust things will eventually start to make sense if you do.
The reason I read philosophy is to encounter new ways of thinking about things whose meanings I’d otherwise take as granted. That reason was affirmed this week while reading a chapter on “grief, commitment and the sense of community” by philosopher Line Ryberg Ingerslev.
Ingerslev notes that there is a world which becomes available to us in relationships when we share experiences with an other, and that when that person dies or goes away, the world that was open to us through our connection “is closed off or experienced as empty.”
Ingerslev is using the word world not to refer to a geographic location, or collection of objects, or even to connote proximity, but to refer to a “lived system of meaningful and affective relations with others and with objects and places.”
So when we lose someone we love, the loss of that person also involves “the loss of access to a certain meaningful way of living, and therefore, in this particular sense, a loss of world.” So a world is not a fixed thing, rather, worlds are webs of meaningful relations that we are always making together.
After finishing philosopher Ami Harbin’s book on disorientation a few weeks ago, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the idea of commitment and how—because there is a lot of popular discourse about the transformative potential in grieving—it can be tempting to rush through the uncertainty and messiness of it and latch onto some major life change or commit to some new lofty goal.
The loss of a relationship and thus the loss of a world can in some cases yield an instinct to make another world fast, and there are varied opinions about how constructive or appropriate it is to do that but I bet a lot depends on the situation and the people involved.
When I was grieving last year, for instance, I poured a lot of my energy into applying to divinity schools even though I was pretty uncertain about everything in my life. I quit my therapy job and planned to move to New England, only to realize the chronic pain in my hands and arms was going to make doing another degree pretty hard. I also didn’t get into the program I most wanted to go to, but I think it all worked out for the best.
While it felt good at the time to have a goal I was working toward, I was definitely far from committed. I didn’t really know who I’d be on the other side of mourning, given how much my worlds were shifting and rearranging and reformulating around all that loss put me in touch with. I also got COVID and am still not recovered, which marked another disorienting experience that made it tough to know how to go on.
Harbin’s book got me thinking about how commitment is generally considered to be morally good while being noncommittal is many times frowned on. Harbin articulates what she calls the “resolvist bias” in moral philosophy, which is the assumption that moral resolve—“a combination of knowing what to do, feeling able to do it, and successfully carrying out the required action”—is the best evidence of successful moral motivation.
As I understand what she’s saying, in traditional moral philosophy a person is considered successfully motivated when they are faced with a situation, make a judgement about the situation, are decisive about how to act, and then carry out that action.
But, as Harbin spends a lot of time arguing, it’s also possible to act morally without making a judgment about the right way to act and without a clear sense of how to move forward. For her, moral action is not dependent on a clear judgment or decisiveness about what’s right.
It feels like an important idea both personally and politically that it can be possible to take moral action even without confidence that one is doing the right thing. And that it’s possible to have confidence without having a clear judgment.
Even in times when we lack resolve or clarity or commitment, experiences of disorientation may still in some cases be morally beneficial in the sense that they can have what Harbin calls tenderizing effects.
Tenderizing effects include capacities like sensing vulnerability, living unprepared, and “living against the grain of norms.” All of which feel like worthwhile capacities in the making of worlds. Or at least the kinds of worlds I want to live in.
I finished philosopher Kathleen Higgins’ Aesthetics in Grief and Mourning this week, which was interesting especially as one of the things grief has made me acutely aware of is the need that I have to be surrounded by beauty.
There’s a great quote in the book by philosopher Immanuel Kant which says that beauty “carries with it directly a feeling of life’s being furthered,” which I think affirms the ways beauty and grief are related.
Anyway, one of my favorite passages from Higgins’ book—which, when I die, you will know by the pages with many hearts in the margins and no notes—is referencing philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear’s idea of mourning as “ongoing imaginative engagement” that “keeps the absence alive yet renews a sense of hope as one goes forward” and which “creates conditions for our own renewal.”
Ingerslev also takes up Lear’s idea in their chapter, specifically in terms of commitment which can take on a new meaning in grief.
They consider commitment not as “subjecting oneself to deliberation and rational choice,” but rather “re-commitment, something I will have to do over and over again,” and a process that “might involve several attempts to make sense of various happenings over time.”
This is language I would have loved to have in those early days when nothing made sense. For Ingerslev, the kind of commitment which may emerge out of grief “unfolds as a relearning of the world…the commitment is made to something that is not known, something that is not yet there,” and it is a kind of commitment that is “inherent to survival.”
When nothing or very little makes sense—as can be the case with disorientations and grief—commitment may mean something different than I’ve typically thought about it in the context of say, acceptance and commitment therapy which asserts that a person should clarify their values and commit to moving in alignment with them in order to be well.
For Ingerslev, the kind of commitment that might be made during grief takes uncertainty as a starting point, is oriented toward world-building, and holds within it “a promise of sense yet to come.” I find these words both beautiful and useful, and I hope you do too.
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Seems like you and I and maybe thousands of others were going through a grief-filled uprooting all around the same time. 🤔 Some of these offerings —especially this one—feel like a door to our common world (“IYKYK”); therein lies a sense of relief that the last three years weren’t lost ones indicative of failure, exacting shame because we didn’t have “moral resolve” to “steer” us through the morass. As I was reading, I thought, “wish I’d read this 3 years ago before I ditched my husband, sold my house, disastrously attempted to move to Maine, burned through a mountain of money and nearly drowned in ocean of wine…” But as my mother used to say, you can’t tell someone something until they’re ready to know it.
Life is messy. It’s fear that persuades people to believe otherwise, to believe that life can be tamed and controlled— and to a certain extent it can, but at the expense of ourselves.
"Commitment to what is not yet there" and "living unprepared" remind me of this passage from T.S. Eliot's "East Coker," which keeps coming up in my thoughts as I try to live my life and make art while dreading the election results in November.
"I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting."