Grateful Action

This chapter examines philosophers who have written about gratitude as either a kind of duty or a kind of debt, or both. After one feels grateful, one does something to express or demonstrate that feeling. What can be said about that action? What is the relationship between someone’s feeling grateful and someone’s acting out her gratitude? This chapter examines how philosophers through the course of the twentieth century have drawn on Kant, sometimes misunderstanding just what he said, in their efforts to avoid making it a duty to feel a particular emotion. It also discusses in what ways the idea of gratitude as “debt” can be recast in light of what Kant wrote about it.

Gratitude in the Early Eighteenth Century

This chapter explores the writings of four philosophers who were either directly or implicitly responding to the philosophers of the seventeenth century discussed in the previous chapter. The chapter looks at two philosophers who seem to adopt parts of the Hobbesian worldview—Pufendorf and Mandeville—and two who explicitly contest it: Shaftesbury and Butler. The primary questions they ask involve human motivations—whether they can be altruistic or must be acts of self-interest or self-love.

Conclusion

This chapter returns to two key questions about the ways to think about gratitude. One has to do with the question of the sense of self—can humans be independent?—and the ways that someone might approach a benefactor’s generosity with the belief that it curtails her sense of independence. The other has to do with the question of the human sense of obligations—can someone be indebted?—and the ways that someone might approach any benefit as something that oppresses her. The chapter examines how these concepts—dependence and debt—have been described, and how it is possible to construe a very different meaning of what gratitude can be than what these two concepts seem to suggest.

Cosmic Gratitude

Continuing on from the previous chapter, this chapter looks at a particular form of the disposition to be grateful in which one is grateful for the universe or cosmos, but does not posit a divine creator as the benefactor to whom one is grateful. What philosophers have called “cosmic gratitude” is a form of gratitude that is often misunderstood. This chapter attempts to clarify in what ways it is not simply a deluded form of religious gratitude, and in what ways it helps us understand better the hidden structures of religious gratitude.

Ingratitude

This chapter examines three forms that ingratitude can take: base ingratitude, indignant ingratitude, and righteous ingratitude. The chapter first of all discerns how philosophers, particularly in the later eighteenth century began to develop and denounce base ingratitude as an inhuman response to the world. The text then discusses Rousseau as an example of what is called here “indignant ingratitude,” in which someone is ungrateful from a heightened sense of independence. The chapter concludes with a discussion of what is termed “righteous ingratitude,” which is developed from what Claudia Card and Cheshire Calhoun have argued is “misplaced gratitude.”

Grateful Sentiment

This chapter explores the first form that gratitude can take—that is, as an emotion, as something we feel in response to a gift or kindness from another. It examines different theories of what emotions are, from late-nineteenth- to early-twenty-first-century thinkers, and then offers a theory in which gratitude can be considered as a sentiment, that is, a feeling that has intention and direction similar to an emotion, but also duration and intensity somewhat resembling a mood.

Gratitude in the Classical Worlds

This chapter examines four classical writers who have something to say about gratitude—Aristotle, Homer, Cicero, and Seneca. It explores what gratitude can mean in societies that operate through ritual reciprocal gift-exchange, and then examines how that idea—that one gives a gift in order to get a gift in return—evolves from the Homeric world through the first century of the Roman Empire.

Introduction

This chapter begins by identifying two different ways philosophers have conceived of gratitude—as a juridical form or as a relationship. It clarifies just what kinds of questions either approach generates, and gives examples of the sort of analyses that follow from those questions.

Gratitude in the Seventeenth Century

This chapter discusses three philosophers of the seventeenth century—Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza—to discern how they develop the idea of gratitude within their own particular philosophical system. In Descartes, it can be seen what role gratitude plays in a system that is partly religious and partly cognitive; in Hobbes, how gratitude operates in a political order in which reciprocity continues to hold sway; and in Spinoza, how gratitude becomes a suspect way of being in the world that, according to Spinoza, should be governed by entirely rational being.

Grateful Being

This chapter begins exploring what gratitude means when it is seen as a way of being in the world, not simply a feeling someone has when she receives a benefit, or an expression she makes in response to that benefit, but rather a disposition or virtue she has cultivated in herself to be thankful in advance of any benefits. This chapter looks at two spheres in which the virtue of gratefulness operates—the secular and the sacred.