Jeremiah Tillman

For many of us grief is forever. Or so goes a folk view. In this paper I present a qualified defense of this insight. We don’t feel the impact of loss maximally all the time. Rather, we continue to feel it for the rest of our lives. Grief doesn’t simply diminish but rekindles like fire. As I put it, grief is an intermittent emotion, capable of going out of existence, then existing again as the same thing. I argue that this trajectory is fitting. Intermittent emotions have a rational status; their distinct temporal pattern gets something right about their objects. This proposal dissolves a recent philosophical worry that grief diminishes over a short time despite the persistence of its eliciting loss. Moreover, it provides a sophisticated sketch of the fittingness of emotions over time: intermittence is a norm to evaluate emotional fittingness alongside character and intensity.

Lovers often disagree. We may reject the specific goals our loved ones pursue or the broad values they hold. Some philosophers suggest that such evaluative conflict makes romantic love in its ideal form deficient. I argue that this is mistaken. On the contrary, our ideal of love holds that we can love people for ‘who they are’ (as we say), even as we profoundly disagree with them. My argument draws on intuitive cases from screwball comedy about love amid conflict, love across political party lines, as well as ‘forbidden’ love across religions and cultures. At a deeper level, I sketch an ideal of love I call intimate independence and argue that this ideal is (i) fully compatible with any evaluative conflict, (ii) embedded in our ordinary attitudes towards mature love between equals, and (iii) an ideal worth achieving. As long as intimate independence is a compelling ideal, deep conflict will not seem like an obstacle to true love. The ideal reminds us that love can bring together people with radically different points of view, and that to insist on shared ends or values is thus to miss a part of the meaning and power of love.