One curious feature of human psychology is that there are emotionally painful states that we consciously seek out and believe to be worthwhile despite, and to some extent because of, their painful character. Philosophers have long puzzled, for instance, over the “paradox of tragedy”: As the Scottish philosopher David Hume observed, “spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions … in themselves disagreeable and uneasy” an “unaccountable pleasure” that grows in proportion to how much the spectators are “touched and affected” by these painful emotions. Moviegoers flocked to Old Yeller, Terms of Endearment, and The Fault in Our Stars not only knowing that these films elicit emotional states that are otherwise painful in ‘real life,’ but in part in anticipating these states. We are thus moved to experience aesthetic tragedy not merely despite the painful emotional states they evoke but because they evoke such states.

That we are drawn to aesthetic experiences involving emotional states that are otherwise painful or distressing cries out for explanation, and philosophers have proposed a number of solutions to this paradox. Yet there is another instance where we are drawn to emotionally painful experiences that has received far less philosophical attention and arguably poses even harder puzzles than the paradox of tragedy: the grief we typically feel upon the deaths of those we care about, depend upon, or admire.

On the one hand, even if some episodes of grief can be trying or even debilitating, grieving nevertheless does not seem like an experience we should wish to avoid. Grieving is popularly seen as a mark of good mental health and emotional maturity. Grieving experience should be encouraged, on this picture, and those who are drawn to grieve should be supported. We grieve, and should be glad for it, for there is something proper and desirable about grief. In contrast, a person who, in response to the deaths of those who mattered to her, met this fact with indifference, would understandably be seen either as coldhearted or ‘in denial’.

On the other hand, grieving feels bad. Stress researchers have concluded that of all of life’s traumatic events — divorce, unemployment, imprisonment, illness — the grief we feel at the deaths of those close to us is the most traumatic of all. Grief also powerfully illustrates the porousness of the boundary between body and psyche. For not only do grieving persons undergo psychological distress, that distress can manifest in the body as insomnia, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, and digestive difficulties. That grief is emotionally distressing should not be exaggerated. For one, grief is not only emotionally distressing. The process of bereavement can include many emotional states, some ‘negative’ (sadness, anger, guilt), some ‘positive’ (joyfulness, contentment). Moreover, contrary to a great deal of today’s conventional therapeutic ‘wisdom’ regarding grief, grief is rarely a permanent or indelible psychic wound and generally does not require prolonged and arduous “grief work” in order for it to abate or resolve. Still, that grief is near the pinnacle of human emotional suffering is undeniable.

Yet given that grief is so emotionally taxing, why should we suppose that there is something redemptive or worthwhile about it? Why should we not follow many of the ancient Stoics in seeing grief as a burden, an unfortunate byproduct of our sociability that should (at most) be tolerated and minimized but certainly not welcomed or valued?

We find our answer in a fictional narrative in which grief plays a central but unrecognized role: Albert Camus’ existentialist novel The Stranger. With its famous first lines — “Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure” — Camus betrays the alienation that defines his central character, Merusault. Meursault attends his mother’s funeral, but his actions merely amount to going through the motions of bereavement. He has none of the inner workings of a bereaved person: no anguish or turmoil, none of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ well-known “five stages” of grief. For Meursault, grieving is set of inconvenient public rituals from which is personally divested. It is of course not difficult to diagnose why Meursault does not grieve: Grieving presupposes the very attachments that Camus’ existential ‘protagonist’ lacks. He does not grieve maman because her death represents no loss to him. Indeed, one expects that Meursault’s response to the deaths of his neighbor Raymond or his girlfriend Marie would have been much the same, a mix of blasé irritation and puzzlement at the grief of others. (He grieves not one iota for the Arab he is later accused of murdering.) Grief requires interpersonal loyalties, where Meursault has only interpersonal entanglements. With Meursault, Camus gives us a model of someone who does not simply decline to grieve. Meursault is not ‘in denial,’ suppressing a grief that periodically wells up from the depths of his psyche. Rather, he is genuinely incapable of grieving.

As it turns out, Meursault gives an unconvincing grief performance. For ironically, the fact that he does not grieve (and not any material evidence linking him to murder of the Arab) ultimately seals his fate. At Meursault’s trial, witnesses damn him by recounting his lack of grief. They recount that Meursault was calm at his mother’s funeral, neither shedding tears nor lingering over her grave; that he later smoked and drank café au lait; that he engaged in “shameless orgies” with his girlfriend just days after maman’s death. Meursault’s lawyer is thereby compelled to ask whether he is on “trial for having buried his mother, or for killing a man.” The prosecutor makes it clear that it is the former:

then the Prosecutor sprang to his feet and, draping his gown round him, said he was amazed at his friend’s ingenuousness in failing to see that between these two elements of the case there was a vital link. They hung together psychologically, if he might put it so. “In short,” he concluded, speaking with great vehemence, “I accuse the prisoner of behaving at his mother’s funeral in a way that showed he was already a criminal at heart.”

It then dawns on Meursault that he will be found guilty, not (at heart) because of his murderous acts but because of his apparent contempt for grief.

Dismay at the judicial procedures that convict Meursault is entirely compatible with sharing the prosecution’s bafflement or unease at his lack of grief. He is immune to grief’s travails. In light of the pains and distress associated with grief, should we nevertheless think Merusault blessed to be so detached as to enjoy such immunity? Surely most of us would opt not to suffer through divorce, unemployment, or illness if we could. Why then are we more reluctant to imagine that living well could exclude grief?