You might think that there would be a very large body of philosophical thinking on loss, but if there is I haven’t found it. Perhaps somewhere along the line, we lost it? If you know of any, I’d like to know more.
There is of course a lot of writing about grief, which is a subset of loss related to the process of dealing with our collective mortality, and the particular mortality of a loved one. Related to this is a certain amount of thinking that pertains to mortality itself, why and how it grants meaning to existence, the necessity of embracing rather than fearing it. And beyond that again, a lot of philosophies – one thinks in particular of Stoicism and Buddhism – address the importance of accepting change in general, not just the kind of change which results in the death of someone near and dear.
Outside the realm of philosophy (or perhaps within it, depending on how you view the relationships between things like psychology and philosophy, or various religious tenets and philosophy) again there is a large body of thought that considers the purpose of mortality, and how best one should encounter it. Some of this, like Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s highly popular five stages of grief model, is focused on practical rather than conceptual ways to address grief, and obviously for people experiencing the kind of seismic shock that a bereavement entails, this kind of approach can be enormously helpful in a difficult time for many.
But there seems to be a shortfall of writing about loss in general. It’s not only lives which are lost after all. There are many other kinds of losses, and while some of these might in part emulate the patterns of grief and bereavement, others do not. The loss of a friendship for example, or a love affair, the alienation of a close family member, or the emigration of anyone we are close to can come very close to the grief pattern and response, though since the critical component of mortality is missing, there are inevitable differences.
When we reach Kübler-Ross’s stage of acceptance, we incorporate into our daily existence the reality that whomever has died is not coming back. But if someone has not died, and has instead for whatever reason given or ungiven simply departed from our lives, then this stage can only be partially applied. There is always the unbidden hope, the fractional reality while all still live, of some kind of reunion or rapprochement, and this perpetually delays and impedes the possibility of acceptance in the Kübler-Ross mode.
There are other things too which can be lost which are no less damaging for being more abstract or less acute than the tangible company and love of another human, or indeed animal, companion. Many people tie up entire swathes of their identities in their work, for example, treating their job as a kind of mission or purpose, and they are often cynically encouraged by employers to do so, since they can leverage this ‘labour of love’ motivation into ever greater profit motives and margins.
We have evidence that the loss of such mission-perceived employments can have pretty devastating effects on well-being. The most acute evidence is probably the death rates of people in their initial phase of retirement, where many of those who dedicated their working lives to a particular career are as bereft as the bereaved when it is removed from their daily existence, resulting in a much-increased rate of death from stress and anxiety-aggravated conditions such as cancer or cardiac arrest.
One can lose anything that one can gain in this world of course. And ultimately that’s the point. We enter life and leave it with nothing. But in the interim, “wedged as we are in between two eternities of idleness” as Anthony Burgess once wrote, we accrue all manner of things, from possessions and relationships to feelings, skills, abilities, desires, ambitions, achievements, accreditations and awards, not to mention all manner of material items, almost all of which instigate a sense of attachment when obtained and a concomitant sense of loss if removed. This kind of loss can be especially aggravated if the item somehow becomes entangled with our sense of self, or our perceived status, or simply has grown familiar to us.
Some of these losses are generally acknowledged by society. It’s socially acceptable, for example, to grieve over the loss of a home where one has lived for a long time, plastering the walls with memories and meaning and belonging. Maybe less so, it’s still understood that people can form strong attachment to certain material things which provoke significant sense of loss if removed from that person’s life. Even a favourite mug, the Stoics warn us, is a risk. Let the mug be just a mug, they advise, lest in your growing attachment to it as a fetish or totem item it becomes a risk to your mental equilibrium, one clumsy elbow away from shattering a little bit of yourself on the hardwood floor. Buddhism too tells us that attachment (upadana) is the root of all suffering (dukka), ultimately.
What intrigues me, I suppose, is the absolute ubiquity of loss compared with the relative silence of great thinkers on the matter. Every day we’re all losing something – our keys, a phone number, another thin hair or two maybe. Some days we lose something seismic, like a home, or a job, or a relationship which has been severed or destroyed. Some terrible days we lose to mortality a loved one we realise in shock we won’t ever be able to converse with again, except in our memories, or maybe these days in the pseudo-demonic facsimiles offered by “griefbot” AI technologies.
Every day, ideally, we’re all gaining things too, even if it’s just the awareness of additional loss, the experience and resignation of accepting that the inevitability of change often comes with a negative prefix attached. But life isn’t maths on that level, and perhaps we as humans suffer from a kind of positivistic fixation, wherein we delude ourselves that the things we gain will remain while the things that we lose can, in some way, be reversed or mitigated. Kübler-Ross calls this the bargaining stage of grief, but on a less conscious level it applies to all forms of loss.
So perhaps we feel more keenly the losses without necessarily accounting the gains the same weight of importance. There’s probably a familiarity bias to that phenomenon, I feel. Losses can sometimes feel like they mount up like amputations, one limb after another being lopped off, further disabling us, whereas the things we gain on any particular day don’t necessarily assume the resonance and importance they may ultimately hold for us for some time.
Also, it seems inherently inhuman or robotic to attempt to account for the gains and losses in life as if they were merely emotional analogues for P+L bookkeeping. We don’t do double ledger accounting in our hearts or souls.
And given this ubiquity of experience of loss, and its superimportance over gain in terms of lived human experience, I remain surprised that the greater topic of loss beyond the more limited realm of grief is not more frequently debated within the Western philosophical tradition. But I can’t and don’t claim to have read everything obviously. I may have missed out on good thinkers on this very matter. And if that’s the case, do please put me right and direct me towards some reading in the comments below.