My dissertation addresses alterations to identity and agency created by unchosen transformative experiences. These are experiences such as grief, illness, accident, and war that alter one’s perspective, values, and habitual expectations, and that arise due to events one did not choose. I focus on the experience of grief, theorizing grief as an unchosen transformative experience that alters the griever’s phenomenology and calls on them to reorganize their identity as an agent. My dissertation consists of three central chapters. In Chapter 2, I give a phenomenological account of unchosen transformative experiences, focusing on the problem for one’s agency that these experiences pose. In an unchosen experience, the agent’s habitual structures of thought and action become unworkable, leaving them with the question of how to reconstitute themselves as an agent. I argue that one reconstitutes oneself as an agent through a process of sense-making, in which one acts in new circumstances to redetermine their practical significance. In Chapter 3, I give a framework for situating grief amongst other unchosen transformative experiences, arguing that grief is transformative (i) cognitively, by altering the griever’s expectations, beliefs, desires, etc., (ii) phenomenologically, by altering their experience in a diffuse or global way, (iii) normatively, by altering their practical identity, (iv) and existentially, by confronting them with an existential condition of their life. In Chapter 4, I examine the problem of resilient grief. The cessation of grief presents us with a problem insofar as our reasons for grief are stable but our emotional response quickly diminishes. Formulated in terms of fittingness, the problem is about whether grief fittingly diminishes or whether it remains forever fitting to grieve. I explain the fitting diminishment of grief through a change in the griever’s patterns of attention as the griever’s projects change. I also address whether it is regrettable that we change so as to accommodate the loss, focusing on the argument that the diminishment of grief prevents us from fully grasping the significance of the loss. I argue that the diminishment of grief provides an accurate perspective on the loss, but that it is nonetheless regrettable.
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