On Knowing What It Is Like to Grieve

Abstract

According to Michael Cholbi, the experience of grief is opaque, in that one cannot in principle know what it is like to experience grief without grieving oneself. If grief were opaque, some philosophical and practical grief-related projects might seem doomed to fail. Thus, I set out to assess whether certain features of grief—such as its unpredictability, bewilderingness and surprisingness—support the claim that grief is opaque. I argue that relevant arguments for grief’s opacity do not succeed and that, more generally, the idea of opacity does not offer the best way to understand the sense in which it is difficult to grasp what the experience of grief is like.