Jennifer Matey (Southern Methodist University), "Meaningfulness and grief: you don’t know what you got till it’s gone"
Synthese, 2023 - Special Issue on Transformative Experience, Ram Neta (ed.)
There seems to be widespread consensus that the good-life involves living a life consisting not only of happiness, but that is also in some sense meaningful. People often choose to pursue things that make their lives meaningful even when it requires that they compromise happiness. For example, many people choose to have children. And studies reveal that having children is negatively correlated with happiness, but positively correlated with meaningfulness.
But what exactly makes a life meaningful and how do we know when our lives have meaning? Here there is lack of agreement. C.S. Lewis claimed that meaningfulness involves appropriately relating to God through belief in God. Frank Martela suggests that lives can be judged to be meaningful when they contribute to something beyond themselves. Other views take meaningfulness to depend on satisfaction of preferences and desires, accomplishment of what one deems important, or that one have pro-attitudes like love, caring, or satisfaction. Perhaps we should take this disagreement to suggest that there may be more than one way of living a meaningful life. If we take one’s subjective assessment about their own life’s meaningfulness as having any kind of epistemic authority, this would seem to be the most natural conclusion.
In my paper, “Meaningfulness and Grief: you don’t know what you got till it’s gone”, I provide an epistemological account of how facts about the meaningfulness of one’s life can come to be known retrospectively in the context of grieving certain losses. Some forms of grief, I argue, count as unique kinds of personally and epistemically transformative experiences in the sense discussed by L.A. Paul. The specific forms of grief that I refer to are those that involve a sudden sense of activities, goals, pursuits, and even the basic activities of one’s day-to-day life, as suddenly lacking in meaning. The experience of meaninglessness in grief is something that I attribute to the loss of one’s ‘evaluative stance’.
An evaluative stance is a kind of psychological disposition to find specific things to matter and have value and that also determines the specific ways of mattering and of being valued of those things. For example, a job may matter as the means of supporting one’s child. A home may have value as the location for time spent with a spouse. Grief provides a subject with new insight into what-it-is-like to experience a transformative loss of this sort. But not only does one learn what-it-is-like to lose one’s evaluative stance, in the dynamic process of grieving one often also gains retrospective access to facts about the meaningfulness and value that even the most seemingly mundane aspects of their day-to-day lives have had all along, something that often goes unrecognized until after a significant loss.
The grief experience is dynamic. The dynamic experience of grief involves shifting between the observation of a sudden lack of meaning, and by comparison, the counter-factual state in which the loss has not occurred and meaning is restored. It is this process that provides foundation for retrospective knowledge about the meaningfulness of one’s past, as it is reasonable for one to take that counterfactual state to contain a property, meaningfulness, that is now absent. Moreover, the restoration and loss of meaning in the dynamic process of grief is experienced precisely as dependent on the lost object, and this suggests a theory of meaningfulness as something grounded in relations to objects upon which our evaluative stance depends.
In the paper, I also discuss a plausible resolution for a superficial tension in this account between the fact that we often fail to appreciate meaningfulness in the moment, and the apparent fact that meaningfulness would seem to be a common feature of phenomenal experience since we discover it by virtue of comparison of the past in which it exists and the contrasting a state in which it is absent after its loss.