How to Think About Grief
A Pyrrhonist Approach
A recent article on Ataraxia or Bust - Good Grief: The Psychopathology of the Stoic Attitude about Mourning - an article about problems with the Stoic approach to grief - has been graced with a rebuttal essay that’s about 2.5 times longer than the article it rebuts. Much of that rebuttal - including 91 mentions of “Pyrrhonism” and “Pyrrhonist” - focuses on critiquing the article’s 67 words that contrast the Pyrrhonist approach to grief with the Stoic approach.
Since those 67 words were just about pointing to one key difference between the Stoics and Pyrrhonists, describing just a bit of the Pyrrhonist approach to grief, it seems that a more thorough article on the Pyrrhonist approach and how to do it might be appreciated by readers. Hence, this article will focus on that subject (and not the rebuttal. If you’re interested in it, see Grief, Stoicism, and the Limits of Scepticism, by Andrew Robinson, a philosophy Ph.D. candidate at the University of Edinburgh who is focusing on the topic of grief and who is seeking financial support for his work.)
While the Stoics prescribe solutions for grief that are specific to addressing what they view to be an irrational and undesirable passion, we Pyrrhonists apply a solution that is universal for all disturbing emotions. This approach is grounded in what was, for the ancient Greeks, a commonly shared perspective, built into their language. It’s not built into English, and it’s not the common worldview of English speakers. Hence, it needs a bit of unpacking.
The Greeks considered truth and reality to be hidden from them. Their word for “truth,” aletheia, literally means “unhidden” or “revealed.” The ancient Greeks generally considered what we experience - what our senses tell us - to be something less than the truth. The Greeks noted that we did not have a direct experience of reality, but instead form an impression of that experience in our minds. In Greek, the term for that impression is phantasiai. This term is usually translated as “appearance” or, in Stoic texts, as “impression.” Pretty much every school of ancient Greek philosophy except the Epicureans maintained this distinction between truth/reality and the apperances. If you’re familiar with Plato’s allegory of the cave, it’s this distinction Plato is elaborating on.
These days, we tend to think of empirical observations as reflecting reality (n.b., that’s the Epicurean position) and skip over the fact that we have no direct contact with the empirical because it’s all mediated by our senses and our minds. It’s only when we are talking about neuroscience or philosophy do we start making this distinction. The Greeks, however, had this mediating point built into their language, making it more prominent in everyday conversation.
The Pyrrhonists (and Academic Skeptics and Cyrenaics) see a large number of barriers preventing one from securely deriving truth from the phantasiai. For dealing with emotions, a couple of these barriers are particularly relevant.
One is that all perception is relative to a perceiver.
We talk about objectivity, but no such thing actually exists (or if it does, it is possessed only by gods). We humans are stuck in our own bodies, subject to the limitations of time, space, and awareness. Everything we know is subjective, regardless of how we throw around the word “objective.”
Sometimes when I’m discussing Pyrrhonism with people who already think they know what Pyrrhonism is, and this prior belief is causing them to have trouble understanding Pyrrhonism, I’ll point out that Pyrrhonism is a form of relativism. This often produces a knee-jerk response, “No, it isn’t! It’s a form of skepticism!”
Eureka! This lets me know what the problem is with their understanding. It appears that many people think relativism and skepticism are mutually exclusive. This is a big barrier to understanding Pyrrhonism. In Pyrrhonism, its skepticism is in part dependent upon its relativism.
When people think of relativism, they tend to think of Protagorean relativism or one of its direct descendants. In this version of relativism, things are true relative to the person. So, X can be true for you but not for me. Aristotle thought this was preposterous, and he attacked it in his discussion of his law of non-contradiction.
Although we can only infer how Pyrrho came up with Pyrrhonism, the fact that he started out as a Democritean philosopher and that Protagoras was a student of Democritus suggests that Protagorean thinking influenced Pyrrho, and that Pyrrho may have been looking for a way to save Protagoras’ insight from Aristotle’s critique - Aristotle appears to have been the primary philosophical opponent for Pyrrho. Pyrrho overcame Aristotle’s objection by keeping Protagoas’ central insight by substituting phantasiai for truth. In other words, X may be a phantasiai for one person but not a phantasiai for another. No more contradiction. And as a phantasiai, X is not only not necessarily true, there are compelling reasons to doubt X is true.
The other Pyrrhonian insight that’s particularly relevant is that there’s widespread irresolvable disagreement on ethical matters. I assume this is obvious to readers, but if it isn’t, note that the Substacks bringing in the highest number of readers and revenue tend to be those providing political commentary. If one compares the various commentaries, one will quickly see widespread, deep, and even indignant disagreement. And while there’s some disagreement about facts, most of the disagreement is about what is good and what is bad.
Long before Socrates, Greek thinkers had noticed that with regard to good and bad, things appear to be relative in the way Protagoras thought: X is good for one person and bad for another, and these appear to be simultaneously true. For example, death is bad for the deceased and their loved ones but good for the undertaker. Even the same person could experience X as being both good and bad. We even have a word for that. It’s “ambivalence.” With respect to good and bad, the law of non-contradiction seems to have a loophole that even Aristotle could not close.
As the Pyrrhonists (and pretty much everybody) have noticed, opposites appear to be the case about the same thing. Such is the case of grief. Sometimes it seems good; sometimes it seems bad. Sometimes it incapacitates; sometimes it spurs action.
What Pyrrho noted from this is that people are not disagreeing about things they have empirical knowledge of (although such knowledge might be potentially available, but that’s a digression), they are disagreeing about something that is not empirically demonstrable. Good and bad do not exist in nature; they exist only in minds. In other words, there’s nothing about any event that is intrinsic to that event that allows us to classify the event as good or bad.
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus appears to make the same observation when he notes that people are not disturbed by events, but by their dogmas about the events. “Dogmas” here being their philosophical worldview. He goes on to say that death is nothing terrible, or else it would have appeared so to Socrates (Enchiridion 5).
Pyrrho differs from Epictetus here with respect to what to do based on this observation. Epictetus believes that one can eliminate disturbances by adopting Stoic dogmas, such as believing that we should regard our loved ones in the same way we regard hotel rooms that we stay in for just a night (Enchiridion 11); whereas Pyrrho points to holding dogmas as the source of perturbation. For example, for the committed Stoic, experiencing profound grief represents a failure to follow Stoicism. So, in addition to grieving, the Stoic can also feel bad about being a failure as a Stoic.
Of course, Stoics can console themselves that no one really can do Stoicism. Only the Stoic sage can, and they’re as scarce as a phoenix. As Epictetus says of his own students,
Why did you assume plumage not your own? Why did you call yourself a Stoic? Observe yourselves thus in your actions, and you will find of what sect you are. You will find that most of you are Epicureans; a few are Peripatetics, and those but loose ones. For by what action will you prove that you think virtue equal, and even superior, to all other things? Show me a Stoic, if you have one. Where? Or how should you? You can show, indeed, a thousand who repeat the Stoic reasonings. But do they repeat the Epicurean less well? (Discourses 2.19)
It’s kind of strange that even one of the most renowned Stoic teachers of all time should confess that he failed to make Stoics out of his students.
Pyrrhonism is much easier to have success with than Stoicism. It gives practical and achievable methods you can put into action and get results from. And in the case of grief, doing so in a way that lets you honor the meaningfulness of your relationship, unlike with respect to how the Stoic philosopher Seneca held up how the philosopher Stilpo reacted to such a loss.
…in this instance of Stilpo, who, when he had lost his country, his wife, his children, the town on fire over his head, himself escaping very hardly and naked out of the flames; "I have saved all my goods," says he, "my justice, my courage, my temperance, my prudence;" accounting nothing his own, or valuable….(Of a Happy Life)
To boil down the Pyrrhonist approach to dealing with grief (or any other disturbing emotion),
You must first realize that what’s disturbing you is in your head. That’s not to say it’s not real; it’s just to make clear what kind of reality it has and where the treatment must be targeted.
Next, you must recognize that all judgments of good and bad are disputable. To relieve your feelings of grief - which is a judgment that something is bad - you must dispute your initial judgment.
A highly useful way of disputing judgments is to consider different points of reference. For example, the death of your elderly loved one may be grievous to you, but it may be a good thing for his elderly wife for whom it was a tremendous struggle to take care of him. It may be a good thing for him, too, as he was suffering terribly from his infirmities. Death may be a good thing for his reputation because the strokes he was suffering from removed inhibitions about saying socially problematic things. And, of course, remember that everybody has to die sometime, and there’s no controlling the time. Who are you to be judging about when that time is?
By continuing to inquire about all the reasons your judgment may be faulty, you’ll come to a point where these reasons are equal in persuasive strength to the reasons you started out with for grieving. At this point, you can suspend judgment about whether the loved one’s death is a bad or good thing. To clarify, this suspension of judgment is about what is really true. It is not a rejection or suppression of our own natural feelings. Rather, it is about putting them in perspective. With this perspective, our natural feelings are felt with moderation. Grief itself is not a problem; it is immoderate grief that poses problems. Immoderate grief depends on the firm belief that something definitely bad has happened. If one is unsure that what has happened is truly bad, immoderate grief doesn’t arise.
Grief itself is not good or bad by nature (contrary to the Stoics, who make much of their aversion to grief). Good things can come from grief. My own recent experience of grief spurred me to write articles on grief for the benefit of the subscribers to Ataraxia or Bust. Grief can lead people to personal growth. It can enhance their sense of gratitude. Higher levels of gratitude are associated with and appear to cause higher levels of happiness.
Grieving appears to arise naturally in people who lose loved ones. Why shouldn’t we accept it as being informative to us, no differently from how pain is informative to us if we touch a hot stove? Sure, it may be unpleasant, but if it were not for pain, how would we know not to do things harmful to our bodies? There are people who feel no pain. They consider it a curse.
Consider your grieving to be a blessing, and that it arises because your lost loved one was such a blessing to you. Hold onto this blessing equally with the sadness and you’ll find that you can let it all go.
