Our emotions about the past change, but the past doesn't. What does that tell us about backward-looking emotions like grief?
Not long after his daughter died, Freud wrote a letter to a friend: “Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.”
This conversation touches on so much of this. Oded Na'aman argues that emotions about the past, like grief or regret, are appropriate. That it can even be right to feel them. Medicating them out of existence would get in the way of truly appreciating what happened. At the same time, these backward-looking emotions aren't easy to make sense of: they change and diminish over time, even though the reasons for them persist. The past, after all, cannot change.
Oded Na'aman teaches philosophy at the Hebrew University and writes about ethics, moral psychology, political philosophy, and literature. He also writes long-form essays and fiction. I recorded this conversation back in 2018.