Grief. Svend Brinkmann. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Svend Brinkmann
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Социология
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509541256
Скачать книгу
when he writes that the death of a loved one puts us in a position of ‘radical impossibility’ (2010: 40). It is an event over which we have no control. It is impossible to will the other’s death away. There is nothing we can do. According to Critchley, the grief we feel invades and structures our subjectivity. He believes that humans can ultimately be categorised by our ability to grieve, and I concur (see especially Chapter 2). Grief tells us that we can never completely master life. We are forever doomed to fall short due to our dependency on others, who vanish from our lives. This may render us impotent, existentially speaking, but according to Critchley it is precisely this impotence, this fundamental fragility, that creates the ethical demand in our interactions with others. In that sense, grief and ethical life are interlinked.

      This book takes as its starting point the need to adopt a phenomenological approach in order to identify the nature of grief. Ever since Edmund Husserl, more than a century ago, phenomenology’s watchword has been ‘back to the things themselves!’ In other words, the aim is to shed light on how people experience the world before forming scientific theories about it (for example, about grief as an illness or about its neurological basis). The book also contends that being able to describe grief’s essential nature would help us to identify what is special about human beings, what distinguishes us from other living creatures. In this way, phenomenology is a philosophical and scientific (in this case, psychological) study of how a phenomenon manifests itself in our experience. The goal is to describe the essential structure of a phenomenon, also referred to as the invariant – in other words, that which remains constant throughout its manifestations.

      The idea that the phenomenon takes precedence is an essential precondition for the phenomenological project. Husserl founded modern phenomenology around 1900. Martin Heidegger refined it as an existential philosophy, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty later steered it in an existential-dialectical direction (for more detail on the history of phenomenology see Brinkmann and Kvale 2015). The goal was to describe not only the phenomena in and of themselves, but in particular the underlying experience structures that make it possible for something to have its own special character. At first, under Husserl, phenomenology’s primary focus was consciousness and life as it is experienced. This was later extended to encompass human experience as a whole, and Merleau-Ponty and Sartre also incorporated the body and human action in historical contexts into their thinking. Generally speaking, the goal of phenomenological research is to understand social and psychological phenomena from the actors’ own perspectives, and to describe the world as experienced by individuals. Put simply, it is based on the assumption that what is important about reality is how people perceive it.

      Everything that I know about the world, even through science, I know from a perspective that is my own or from an experience of the world without which scientific symbols would be meaningless. The entire universe of science is constructed upon the lived world, and if we wish to think science rigorously, to appreciate precisely its sense and its scope, we must first awaken that experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression. (Merleau-Ponty 2012: p. lxxii)

      This introductory chapter concludes below with an outline of the history of grief. I then argue in Chapter