ABSTRACT
Several recent philosophical investigations of grief study how we experience absence and the lack of belonging to a shared world. The notion of a shared world is studied as something that is enabled by joint embodied habits, which are expressive of our affective interpersonal bonds. When such bonds are cut or broken, we experience derealisation and self-estrangement; not only is our shared life form shattered and distorted, but meaningfulness altogether is temporarily gone. The process of grief involves an attempt to restore the meaningfulness of our world after having lost a loved one. In this sense, experiences of grief show how a subject’s self-identity, as an inhabitant of a meaningful world, is reliant on interpersonal belonging that is implicitly tied to a certain life form.
One way to restore the meaningfulness lost is to keep a continuing bond with the deceased. This chapter presses the intuition that what we might continue to share something with our deceased. The idea of sharing something with deceased persons clearly cannot mean affective sharing of a certain content. In experiences of being with the dead and of keeping continuing bonds with them, the content is not what matters for this kind of community kept; rather, it is a way of experiencing sharing where this experience takes on the form of a commitment. Such a commitment is not made to a set of values or to a certain identity; rather, the structure of grief’s commitment is tied to how we continue to make sense of the world. A phenomenological study of grief tells us something important about worldly commitment; it reveals how we continue to enact our sense of community. Sharing is neither exclusively nor even, essentially, content-based; what enables us to share in the first place is our capacity to commit to a form of sense that is not yet given. The latter is a structural aspect of our sense of community that is revealed in grief. Survival turns on how we continue to commit to a sense that is not yet there, a sense of community.
