Amy Olberding

Early Confucian philosophy is remarkable in its attention to everyday social interactions and their power to steer our emotional lives. Their work on the social dimensions of our moral-emotional lives is enormously promising for thinking through our own context and struggles, particularly, I argue, the ways that public rhetoric and practices may steer us away from some emotions it can be important to have, especially negative emotions. Some of our emotions are bad – unpleasant to experience, reflective of dissatisfactions or even heartbreak – but nonetheless quite important to express and, more basically, to feel. Grief is like this, for example. So, too, is disappointment. In this essay, I explore how our current social practices may fail to support expressions of disappointment and thus suppress our ability to feel it well.

Philosophers of both ancient Rome and ancient China saw in the rather prosaic human struggles with fear of death and grief the need for coherent and rigorous philosophical responses. They likewise saw in these struggles potential opportunities for the finest displays of human character and flourishing. "The Stout Heart: Philosophical Strategies for Death and Grief" adopts a similar sensibility and investigates the work of three philosophers---Lucretius, Seneca, and Confucius---in particular. The strategies offered by these philosophers are considered with a particular focus upon what they can offer a modern interlocutor who wishes to articulate her own reconciliation to death and loss. ;The dissertation begins with a brief consideration of the cultural context in which a modern interlocutor frames her understanding of death and grief with a special attention to those facets of contemporary experience, such as the medicalization of death and the professionalization of funerary practice, that function as obstacles to a reconciliation of death. The strategies for managing fear and loss offered by Lucretius, Seneca, and Confucius are then presented individually but with an attention, in each case, to what might be deemed an "ethos of feeling." In Lucretius, this ethos manifests in the determination to wed an intellectual understanding of death with a profoundly personal appreciation of death's often troubling somatic features. This union, for Lucretius, necessitates that the tranquility privileged by Epicurus be modified to better incorporate a complexity of human emotion. Seneca considers personal death and the death of others with a determination to transform both into occasions for realizing a unique species of fortitude. Seneca thereby foregoes indifference to death and loss in favor of a therapy that privileges what amounts to a defiant acceptance of both. Confucius, whose focus is primarily upon grief, seeks to frame understanding of loss with an appreciation of the value of relationships with others. He offers a strategy in which grief is valorized as the consummation of values without which human flourishing is not possible. A concluding section provides an anticipation of how these therapies can be harnessed to a modern, philosophically rigorous, consolation