Gratitude

 Gratitude is the most pleasant of virtues, though not the easiest. And why would it be easy? There are pleasures that are difficult or rare and that are no less pleasing, indeed are perhaps even more pleasing for being so. Still, in the case of gratitude, the surprising thing is not the pleasure so much as the difficulty. After all, who wouldn’t rather accept a gift than receive a blow? Or express thanks than show forgiveness? Gratitude is a second pleasure, one that prolongs the pleasure that precedes and occasions it, like a joyful echo of the joy we feel, a further happiness for the happiness we have been given. Gratitude: the pleasure of receiving, the joy of being joyful. What could be easier? That gratitude is a virtue, however, should suffice to indicate that it cannot be taken for granted, that it is something we can be lacking in, and that consequently, in spite of or perhaps because of the pleasure, there is merit in experiencing it. But why? Gratitude is a mystery, not because of the pleasure it affords us but because of the obstacles we must overcome to feel it. It is the most pleasant of virtues and the most virtuous of pleasures.But what about generosity and the pleasures of giving that we hear so much about? The interested nature of that argument—it has become a staple of advertising, after all—should put us on our guard. Were there really such pleasure in giving, why would we need advertisers to remind us to give? If generosity were a pleasure, or rather, if it were only a pleasure or primarily a pleasure, why would we be so lacking in it? Giving always involves loss, which is why generosity is the opposite of and counter to selfishness. But receiving? Gratitude takes nothing from us: it is a gift given in return with no loss and almost no object or objective. Gratitude has nothing to give, except this pleasure of having received. What lighter, brighter, what more Mozartian virtue, I am inclined to say, and not just because Mozart inspires it in us but because he celebrates it and incarnates it, because he carries within him this joy, this boundless gratitude for who knows what—for all and everything—this generosity of gratitude. What happier and more humble virtue, what easier and more necessary grace than that of giving thanks with a smile or a dance step, with a song or with happiness itself? The generosity of gratitude. This expression, which I owe to Mozart, I find particularly enlightening: if so often we lack gratitude, might it not be more because we cannot give than because we cannot receive, more because we are selfish than because we are insensitive? To thank is to give; to be gracious means to share. This pleasure that I owe to you is not for me alone. This joy, this happiness, they belong to both of us. The egoist enjoys receiving; but his enjoyment is his alone and he keeps it for himself. Or if he shows his pleasure, it is because he wants to make others envious, not because he wants to make them happy: he displays his pleasure, but it is his pleasure. He has already forgotten that others might have had something to do with it. But what does he care about others? The egoist is ungrateful not because he doesn’t like to receive. He is ungrateful because he doesn’t like to acknowledge his debt to others and gratitude is this acknowledgment; because he doesn’t like to give in return and gratitude is giving thanks in return; because he doesn’t like to share and he doesn’t like to give. What does gratitude give away? It gives away itself, like a joyful echo, as I said; and in this it is love, it is sharing, it is a gift. It is pleasure upon pleasure, happiness upon happiness, gratitude upon generosity. Aware only of his own satisfactions and his own happiness, hoarding them as a miser hoards his coin, watching over them as a miser watches his purse, the egoist cannot be grateful. Ingratitude is not the incapacity to receive but the inability to give back—In the form of joy or love—a little of the joy that was received or experienced. This is why ingratitude is so pervasive a vice. We absorb joy as others absorb light, for egoism is a black hole.Gratitude is a gift, gratitude is sharing, gratitude is love: it is a joy accompanied by the idea of its cause, as Spinoza would say, when the cause is another person’s generosity, or courage, or love.1 Joy in return is love in return. Strictly speaking, therefore, gratitude can be addressed only toward living persons. Nevertheless, it is worth asking ourselves whether any gotten joy, whatever its cause, might not be the object of this joy in return for which is gratitude. How could one not be grateful to the sun for existing? To life, to flowers, to birds? I could feel no joy were it not for the rest of the universe (since without the rest of the universe, I would not exist). In this respect all joy, even a purely internal or introspective one (Spinoza’s acquiescentia in se ipso), has an external cause that is the universe, God, or nature—in other words, all and everything.2 No one is the cause of himself or, in the end, of his own joy. All causal chains, of which there are an infinite number, are themselves infinite: all things are interrelated, and related to us, and flow through us. All love, taken to its logical extreme, should therefore love all things: all love should be a love of everything (the more we love individual things, Spinoza might say, the more we love God),3 a universal gratitude, then, one that, though certainly not undifferentiated (how could we have the same gratitude for birds as for snakes, for Mozart as for Hitler?), would nevertheless be comprehensive or at least thankful for everything. Excluding nothing and rejecting nothing, not even the worst of things, this gratitude would have to be a tragic gratitude, in the Nietzschean sense, since the real must be accepted or rejected as is, since the real in its totality is the only reality4Gratitude is gratuitous in that one cannot ask of it, or for it, any recompense whatsoever. Gratitude may be a duty, or in any case a virtue, but, as Rousseau notes, it cannot be demanded as a right and nothing can be demanded in its name.5 Gratitude is love, not a quid pro quo. It is responsive and inclined to act in behalf of the person who inspires it, not as an exchange of one favor for another (this would no longer be gratitude but barter)6 but because love wants to delight the person who delights us. It is in this way that gratitude almost invariably fosters generosity, which in turn fosters gratitude. Whence Spinoza’s characterization of gratitude as a “reciprocal love,” an “eagerness of love.” “Thankfulness or gratitude is a desire or eagerness of love, by which we strive to benefit one who has benefited us from a like affect of love.”7 Here is where we go from a purely affective gratitude (to use a Kantian term) to an active gratitude, from joy in return to action in return.8 To my mind, Spinoza does not so much define gratitude here as describe its consequences (we can, for example, be grateful to someone who is dead and whom we cannot benefit). But the distinction is unimportant. What is certain is that gratitude differs from ingratitude precisely in its ability to see in the other the cause of its joy (unlike self-love, which sees the cause of its joy only in the self).9 This is why ingratitude is dishonorable 10 and why gratitude is good and makes us good.“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare,” Spinoza writes.11 In the case of this excellent thing called gratitude, it is the strength of self-love that accounts for its rarity or difficulty. We all tend to see the love we have received as reason for self-congratulation rather than as cause for gratitude, which is love for the other.12 “Pride refuses to owe, self-love to pay,” writes La Rochefoucauld.13 How could pride be anything but ungrateful, if it can only love, admire, and extol the self? There is humility in gratitude, and humility is difficult. Is it a sadness? According to Spinoza it is, a point we will return to in the next chapter. What gratitude teaches us, however, is that there is also such a thing as joyful humility, or humble joy, humble because it knows it is not its own cause or its own principle and, knowing this, rejoices all the more (what a pleasure to say thank you!); because it is love, and not primarily love of self; because it knows it is indebted, or rather—since there is nothing to repay—because it knows it has all it could wish for and more, more than it had hoped for or could have expected, all thanks to the existence of the very person or thing responsible for this joy—God if you are a believer, or the world, or a friend, or a stranger, or anything at all. Gratitude is humble because it knows it is graced, graced by existence, or by life, or by all things, and gives in return, not knowing to whom or how, simply because it is good to offer thanks—to give grace—in return, to rejoice in one’s own joy and love, whose causes are always beyond our comprehension but which contain us, make us live, and carry us along. The humility of Bach, the humility of Mozart, each so different (the former gives grace with unequaled genius; the latter, we might say, is grace itself) but both overwhelming in their happy gratitude, their true simplicity, their almost superhuman power; even in anguish and suffering, they have a serenity to them that stems from the knowledge of being an effect and not a cause, an effect contained in the very thing they sing, to which they owe their existence and which carries them along. Clara Haskil, Dinu Lipatti, or Glenn Gould could express this, it seems to me, at least when they were at their best, and the joy we feel in listening to them reveals to us what gratitude essentially is, namely joy itself, in as much as it is something received and received undeservedly (yes, even for the best of us!), a state of grace that is always giving itself over to an even higher state of grace, the grace of existing, or rather of existence itself, the essence of being, the principle behind all existence, all beings, all joy, all love. Yes, what we read in Spinoza’s Ethics we can also hear in music; best of all, it seems to me, in the works of Bach and Mozart (in Haydn what we hear is more on the order of politeness and generosity, in Beethoven courage, in Schubert gentleness, in Brahms fidelity). And so we see how lofty a virtue gratitude is, a virtue more for giants than for dwarfs. Not that we are thereby exempted from it: let us be grateful for grace, and first of all to those who reveal it to us by celebrating it.No man is the cause of himself: the spirit, Claude Bruaire says, “is in debt for its being.”14 That is not quite accurate, however, for no one ever asked to come into being (it is the loan, not the gift, that results in a debt), and no one could ever repay such a debt. Life is not a debt: life is a state of grace, and being is a state of grace; therein lies gratitude’s highest lesson.

Gratitude rejoices in what has taken place or in what is. It is therefore the opposite of regret or nostalgia (which aches for a past that never was or is no more); it is also the opposite of hope or apprehension, one desiring, the other fearing (both of them desiring and fearing) a future that is yet to come and in fact may never be but that tortures by its absence. Gratitude or anxiety, the joy of what is or was, versus the dread of what could be. “The fool’s life,” says Epicurus, “is empty of gratitude and full of fears; its course lies wholly toward the future”15 Those who are incapable of gratitude live in vain; they can never be satisfied, fulfilled, or happy: they do not live, they get ready to live, as Seneca puts it.16 Or as Pascal would say, they hope to live17 and then regret the life they lived or, more often, the life they did not live. They miss the past as well as the future. The wise man, on the contrary, takes delight in living and also rejoices in having lived. Gratitude (charis) is this joy of memory, this love of the past—it neither suffers over what no longer is nor regrets what has been but joyfully recalls what was. It is time regained—the past recaptured, if you will—“the grateful recollection of what has been,” says Epicurus—by which we understand that the idea of death is made immaterial, as Proust says, for even death, take us though it will, cannot take from us what we have lived.18 These are immortal blessings, observes Epicurus, not because we do not die but because death cannot nullify what we have lived, lived fleetingly but definitively.19 Death deprives us only of the future, which does not exist. Gratitude frees us from death, through the joyous knowledge of what was. Gratitude is acknowledgment, which is to say, knowledge (whereas hope is merely imagination); this is why gratitude touches on truth, which is eternal, and inhabits it. Gratitude is the enjoyment of eternity.Yet someone will say, in answer to Epicurus, that the recollection, however grateful, of what has been will not give us back the past or return what we have lost. But what can? Gratitude does not abolish grief; it completes it. “We must heal our misfortunes by the grateful recollection of what has been and by the recognition that it is impossible to make undone what has been done.”20 Is there any more beautiful formulation of the mourning process? Mourning is about accepting what is, hence also what no longer is, and loving it as such, in its truth, in its eternity, so that we can go from the unbearable pain of loss to the sweetness of remembrance, from unfinished mourning to its completion (“the grateful recollection of what has been”), from amputation to acceptance, from suffering to joy, from love rent apart to love appeased. “Sweet is the memory of the departed friend,” says Epicurus: gratitude is this sweetness itself, when it becomes joyous. Yet suffering at first is the stronger: “How awful that he should have died!” How can we ever accept it? That is why mourning is necessary, and so difficult and so painful. But joy returns in spite of everything: “How fortunate that he should have lived!” The process of mourning is a process of gratitude.

Kant and Rousseau think gratitude a duty.21 I’m not convinced. Moreover, I don’t really believe in duties. But that gratitude is a virtue, in other words, an excellence, of this we find ample proof in the obvious baseness of those who are incapable of gratitude and in the mediocrity of all of us, who are lacking in it. How easily hatred outlasts love! How much stronger resentment is than gratitude. Gratitude sometimes even turns into resentment, so exquisitely sensitive is self-love. As Kant writes, ingratitude toward one’s benefactor “is an extremely detestable vice in the public judgment, yet man is so notorious for it, that one thinks it not unlikely to make an enemy even by rendering a benefit.”22 The greatness of gratitude, the pettiness of man.And yet for all that, gratitude itself can sometimes warrant suspicion. La Rochefoucauld sees it as mere disguised self-interest,23 and Chamfort observes, correctly, that “there is a base kind of gratitude”— a disguised servility, a disguised egoism, disguised hope.24 Sometimes we offer thanks only so that we might continue to receive (we say “thank you” but we think “more!”). This is not gratitude but flattery, obsequiousness, mendacity. It is not a virtue but a vice. In fact, even sincere gratitude cannot exempt us from any other virtue or justify any wrongdoing. It is a secondary, though not a second-rate, virtue and must be kept in its proper place: justice or honesty might warrant a breach of gratitude, but gratitude never warrants a breach of justice or good faith. Suppose someone has saved my life: am I therefore obliged to give false testimony on his behalf and cause an innocent person to be condemned? Of course not! Whatever we may owe someone, we do not become ungrateful by keeping in mind what we owe everyone else, and ourselves. He is not ungrateful, writes Spinoza, “who is not moved by the gifts of a courtesan to assist her lust, nor by those of a thief to conceal his thefts, nor by those of anyone else like that. On the contrary, he shows firmness of mind who does not allow any gifts to corrupt him, to his or to the general ruin.”25 Gratitude is not connivance; nor is it corruption.

Again, gratitude is joy; it is love. In this respect it borders on charity, which Jankélévitch has likened to “an inchoate gratitude, an unfounded, unconditional gratitude, just as gratitude is a secondary or hypothetical charity.”26 Joy upon joy; love upon love. Gratitude, then, is the secret of friendship, not because we feel indebted to our friends, since we owe them nothing, but because we share with them an overabundance of common, reciprocal joy. “Friendship goes dancing round the world,” says Epicurus, “proclaiming to us all to awake to the praises of a happy life.”27 Thank you for existing, friends say to one another, and to the world and all the universe. This kind of gratitude is certainly a virtue, for it is the happiness of loving, the only happiness there is.

GRATITUDE1

Benedict de Spinoza, The Ethics, in A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, ed. Edwin Curley, Princeton University Press, 1994, III, def. 6 of the affects, p. 189 (“Love is a joy, accompanied by the idea of an external cause”).2

Spinoza’s term means self-esteem or, literally, peace with oneself, which he defines as “a joy born of the fact that a man considers himself and his own power of acting” (Spinoza, The Ethics, III, def. 25 of the affects, p. 192).3

Spinoza, The Ethics, V, P24.4

See, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Will to Power, IV, nos. 462, 463, and 464.5

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, in The First and Second Discourses and the Foundations of Inequality among Men, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch, Harper & Row, 1985, p. 188: “Gratitude is indeed a duty that ought to be performed, but it is not a right that can be exacted.”6

Spinoza, The Ethics, IV, P71, schol.7

Ibid., III, def. 34 of the affects, p. 194; see also III, P39 and 41, as well as P41, schol. (for the expression “reciprocal love”).8

Immanuel Kant, “Concerning the Duty of Gratitude,” in The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, trans. James W. Ellington, Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill, 1964,p.119.9

Spinoza, The Ethics, III, P41, schol.10

Ibid., IV, P71, schol.11

Ibid., V, P42, schol., p. 265.12

Ibid., 111, P41, schol. This is why “men are far more ready for vengeance than for returning benefits” (p. 176).13

François La Rochefoucauld, Maxims and Reflections, trans. Leonard Tancock, Penguin, 1959, maxim 228, p. 67.14

Claude Bruaire, L’être et l‘esprit, PUF, 1983, p. 60. See also p. 198.15

Cited by Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales (The Epistles of Seneca), trans. Richard M. Gummere, William Heinemann, 1925, XV, 9, p. 101. Epicurus also says: “The ungrateful greed of the soul makes the creature everlastingly desire varieties of dainty food” (Epicurus: The Extant Remains, trans. Cyril Bailey, Clarendon Press, 1926, LXIX, p. 117). See Marcel Conche’s enlightening remarks in his edition of Epicurus, Lettres et maximes, PUF, 1987, pp. 52-53.16

Epicurus: The Extant Remains, XLV, 13, p. 299 (“non vivunt, sed victuri sunt”).17

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter, Modern Library, Random House, 1941, no. 172, pp. 60-61.18

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 122, in Epicurus: The Extant Remains, p. 183. Epicurus’s expression seems to indicate (for otherwise it would be pleonastic) that, for him as for us, gratitude can apply to the present—even if, in the writings of Epicurus that have come down to us, it seems primarily linked to memory. But what is conscience, if not memory in and of the present?19

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 135.20

Epicurus: The Extant Remains, LV, p. 115. On mourning, see also my essay “Vivre, c’est perdre,” in the journal Autrement, no. 128.21

Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, II, p. 188; Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, § 32, p. 119.22

Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, § 36, p. 124.23

At least as far as “most men” are concerned, for whom it is “but a covert desire to receive greater gifts” (maxim 298, Maxims, p. 76). See also maxims 223-26.24

B. Chamfort, Products of the Perfected Civilization: Selected Writings of Chamfort, trans. W. S. Merwin, Macmillan, 1969, p. 203.25

Spinoza, The Ethics, IV, P71, schol. See also P70, dem. and schol.26

Vladimir Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus, Champs-Flammarion, 1986, vol. 2, p. 250. See also vol. 1, pp. 112ff.27

Epicurus, Sentences vaticanes, 52, in Epicurus: The Extant Remains, p. 115.

About the Author

André Comte-Sponville is one of the most important of the new wave of young French philosophers. He teaches at the Sorbonne and is the author of five highly acclaimed scholarly books of classical philosophy as well as the hugely popular A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues, which is being translated into nineteen languages. Comte-Sponville lives in Paris.