Michael Cholbi is Professor and Personal Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely in ethical theory, practical ethics, and the philosophy of death and dying. His books include Suicide: The Philosophical Dimensions, Understanding Kant’s Ethics, and Grief: A Philosophical Guide. Cholbi is the editor of several scholarly collections, including Immortality and the Philosophy of Death; New Directions in the Ethics of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia; and the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Suicide. He is the co-editor of Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives and his work has appeared in the scholarly journals Ethics, Mind, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics.
Zan Boag: I’d like to start with the various ways that one can grieve. I’d like to get a definition of the grieving process, if I could, from you.
Michael Cholbi: I would say that grief is our response – usually it’s fairly emotionally rich – to transformations in our relationships with other people or possibly other things, where those are the kinds of relationships that we’ve invested our identity in, that are central to how we think of ourselves, that are sources of our reasons for doing what we do day-to-day in the world. So in my view, there’s a wide range of different kinds of events that can prompt grief.
My work tends to focus on bereavement, grief related to the deaths of those we’ve invested ourselves in. But I think we can grieve breakups, divorces, retirement from the workforce, and other kinds of transformations in our relationships with other people.
It’s interesting you talk about transformations. I remember interviewing a philosopher by the name of L.A. Paul, who spoke about transformative experiences. I wonder how grief fits in, whether the grieving process itself is a transformative experience for the individual who experiences it?
Let me first say that there’s a very good article by a philosopher, Jelena Markovic, who actually argues for the claim that grief is transformative. I do think that we should approach grief with the expectation that it’s probably going to change us in some way. There can be episodes of grief where we’re grieving someone in whom our identity is invested, but maybe the investment isn’t all that great. Maybe a favourite pop star of ours died, and we feel some
