On Grief

January 18, 2022 timothywstanley@me.com

One of the Metropolitan Museum’s crown jewels, 'The Death of Socrates' by Neoclassical master Jacques-Louis David is a magisterial canvas that speaks to the grandeur of noble sacrifice, with clean brush strokes and a symmetrical composition. David bathes the condemned philosopher in incandescence, left hand raised in salute as his right reaches for the cup of hemlock; his students and friends turn away, distraught, some weeping in disbelief. On the left, the painter has placed Plato, sitting grimly with brow furrowed—an artistic license, since the younger man wasn’t present. The tension between the defiant Socrates and his anguished followers infuses the scene with pathos and resolve. As Michael Cholbi observes in his clear-eyed, meticulously argued study 'Grief: A Philosophical Guide,' this emotion has long been neglected by Socrates’ heirs, relegated instead to literature and art, and later to psychoanalysis and neurobiology... David painted 'The Death of Socrates' in 1787, on the eve of the French Revolution; the canvas can be interpreted as an allegory for the twilight of monarchy and an elegy for France’s Ancien Régime. In just a few years the austerity of Neoclassicism would give way to a turbulent Romanticism. 'Grief' implicitly calls for a revolution in how philosophy understands itself: It must seek new tools to sustain us through consequential inflection points, such as the long tail of our current pandemic. This time, with feeling.

Hamilton Cain, “‘Grief’ Review: What We Learn From Loss” - wsj.com/articles/grief-review-what-we-learn-from-loss. I’ve been teaching a course on suffering that addresses this topic. It is interesting that Socrates’s example has left such little fodder for further thought on human experiences so common to us all.