Gratitude always has a giving side and a receiving side: at least two people then, their personalities, and their stories; two gifts (or one, which must then confront a crying gap); either sincere inner feeling exteriorized by physical action, or the ritual expression of regard together with the enactment of emotion not actually felt; inner freedom combined with social pressure to "behave"; either a self-induced or a socially demanded sense of obligation, or both—even though gratitude must be spontaneously felt in order to count as gratitude; an intricately structured communication of intentions, attitudes, and feelings first on one side, then on the other; thought and emotion interacting and then inspiring action; on either side a powerful narrativity and memory of the past, invoked even as a new incident occurs to ensure the continuation of the narrative—and then, in addition, the negotiation of a whole network of considerations that prescribe how an act of thanking and giving back is to be done, which every one of us has had to learn in order to make our way within our own particular social world. Gratitude is a complicated business indeed.
Interpersonal relationships in all their complexity are, after all, what engender human emotions, and very particularly gratitude. And being thankful itself can be thought of as a compound emotion. According to a recent example of cognitive analysis, gratitude combines admiration ("approving of someone else's praiseworthy action") and joy ("being pleased about a desirable event").1 The adjectives praiseworthy and desirable are wisely mentioned here, for gratitude involves moral judgment and appreciation as well; it is about what another's action means, and how it affects oneself. Gratitude, according to this study, is likely to be intensified by its double source, and therefore felt more powerfully than either of its constituent elements, so that gratitude is a stronger emotion than admiration, just as remorse is sharper than one of its components, distress. Thinking, as we have seen, is capable of heightening the emotion still further.
During any episode of receiving-and-feeling-grateful, changes and developments occur. It all begins, often, with surprise or relief resulting from the giver's action, and pleasure almost immediately follows. The receiver then turns towards the other, the benefactor. She imagines what the giver means by his action, what made him give in this way. She is moved by the thought that she herself is the object of his benevolence. Wonder at the present happy surprise can give rise to a new understanding of the relationship and a new view of this giver, or confirm an already strong admiration for the giver's goodness; in gratitude, love can be kindled or intensified, knowledge achieved or deepened. Grateful emotion finds physical expression—not perhaps as dramatic or as unique as the reactions accompanying fear, anger, or disgust, but often visible nonetheless; grateful people are, for example, sometimes moved to tears. Culturally determined words and appropriate actions—thanks and hugs, for example—must follow immediately. Then comes reflection on the future: How should she respond? What can she herself do later, to give him a pleasant surprise too and a token of her own love?
At every step, the sequence could break down. The service could be unwanted, badly timed, or done without grace. The receiver of it could fail to be either surprised or pleased. She may even feel that she deserves it and wonder why she did not receive it sooner. She could be annoyed if she wanted no intervention—or none from this particular giver. She might be pleased at the favour but ignore the giver, forgetting about him altogether in her satisfaction at getting what she needed or desired. Being aware that gifts make links, she might resent the very idea of a link being made. A failure, for whatever reason, to consider the other person would prevent the flow of kindly thoughts about him from occurring. There would be no love, no increase of understanding, and finally no possibility of wanting to make a return. The fact that emotions cannot be exacted makes it imperative that gratitude occur in freedom. Should the giver insist on a return gift, he destroys not only gratitude but the very definition of what he handed over: whatever it was, it was not a gift. Emotions must arise spontaneously. And yet Georg Simmel wrote that "gratitude is perhaps the only feeling which, under all circumstances, can be morally demanded and rendered."2 And Simmel is right.
The reason has to do with the bridges between one stage and the next, in the very summary sequence sketched out above. Why feel surprise? Why relief?Why pleasure?Why should a receiver, having got what she wanted, turn to the one who gave it, in wonder, admiration, or love? And then—to repeat Mauss's question—"Why give back?" Human beings think; and thankfulness is both deeply emotional and a form of thought. Since it is not a purely natural and automatic response, gratitude has to be taught—first that it exists and is possible, then how to recognize it and the occasions for it, and finally that one is capable of it oneself. One day a person feels it, and henceforth knows what it is, from within and not merely from observation. Being disposed to be grateful may now, if she practises it, become part of what we call her "character." Gratitude arises from a specific circumstance—being given a gift or done a favour—but depends less upon that than on the receiver's whole life, her character, upbringing, maturity, experience, relationships with others, and also on her ideals, including her idea of the sort of person she is or would like to be. One can see the mighty influences of "culture" in all this: gratitude is taught within the context of a specific culture, and is usually carried out through the medium of a manners system. We have already seen that the notion of "gratitude" is culturally delimited and named. Gratitude is not a knee-jerk reaction; it does not cause automatic withdrawal like disgust or vastly heightened physical energy like anger. It does produce a response, undetermined in its nature but very specific in its reason—which always goes beyond the gift to the giver.
A feeling of gratitude, as we noted, often begins with surprise. It might seem that surprise is something wholly involuntary: many of the seekers for the "fundamental"—that is, the automatic—emotions have included "surprise" among them, along with rage, disgust, and the rest. In one sense, being startled is a wholly physical reaction. But surprise may also be a consequence of intelligence, and this is where gratitude begins. It is possible to cultivate in oneself a capacity for surprise.3 This readiness demands attention—the sheer noticing of what is going on. Out of a habit of paying attention develops the ability to discern revealing juxtapositions and incongruities: surprise often causes people to laugh. A similar attainment is that of being able to "tell the difference." Gratitude has a great deal to do with imagining what it would be like if things were different.4 Somebody, or some institution, gives a student money that frees her to pursue knowledge that interests her rather than spend her time working on what does not. She knows perfectly well—she can picture it—what the year would have been like without this grant of money. It is precisely the comparison between what might have been and what now is that makes her grateful. Not having expected the grant, which renders the change more sudden and surprising to her, is likely to make her more grateful still.
A grateful person does not, as we put it, "take things for granted." The phrase refers to a wholly ungrateful taking of matters as "given"—and therefore uninteresting. The French say we take something "as having been acquired," pour acquis. This means that we cease to think about this thing ("I already have that," "Been there, done that")—and turn to the next. "Taking for granted" is about benefiting from advantages or riches or other people without a thought, leaning on what we have but forgetting about it and looking elsewhere; "taking for granted" is often an aspect of greed. Gratitude turns down this option. It remembers, thinks, takes an interest, compares, perceives reasons to be surprised, and agrees to be pleased with what has been given. In a further, even more thoughtful step it looks beyond the granted to the giver. All these reactions, which demand liveliness, awareness, and practice, can be taught and learned, even though they cannot be enforced.
The elderly mother of a friend of mine was eligible for a Canada Pension, and every month she received it. Every month she forgot about it, and had also ceased to remember why such a sum of money should ever arrive in an envelope with her name on it. The result was that every single month she was thrilled and amazed at the generosity of the unknown people who had sent her a cheque; she would ask her children who they could possibly be and why they had favoured her in this way. Her gratitude and her pleasure were unfailingly ignited by her surprise—and were also the result of a lifelong habit of being grateful to the giver for whatever she received.
When people, by convention, wrap presents, they are doing so in part to provoke surprise as a possible precursor to gratitude when the receiver opens the gift and discovers what is inside. Surprise is so important to the drama of opening a present that if it is not felt, the receiver out of politeness often feigns it. Such surprise need not be provoked entirely by the gift; it should derive at least as much from the action of giving and its reasons. Pleased surprise is indeed part of "giving back"; it gives pleasure to the giver. Being surprised excludes both taking for granted and the deadening effects of what some psychologists call "habituation." Experiencing a happy surprise, like gratitude itself, is an emotion that awakens thought and pleasure; in this it is the opposite of feeling bored.
Another convention is that return for a gift should normally not take place at once; it should occur only after an appropriate lapse of time. This gap helps to make the gift's return into something that might not have happened; it could therefore be a surprise, or even cause relief, when it does. In any event, the time that passes between gift and return is time for the receiver to remember and remain grateful. A gift may not be returned for many years, perhaps because there has been no opportune moment for the response to occur—and yet the receiver remains faithful to the memory of the favour. When finally the right occasion arrives, the once-receiver turns into a giver, and the happiness of the original giver is great, as he discovers the persistence of the new giver's memory and therefore the depth of his gratitude.
Marie Joseph Gilbert de La Fayette was a French nobleman who supported North American aspirations to freedom and played an active part in the American War of Independence. Nearly a century and a half later, on the Fourth of July 1917, just after the United States entered the First World War, Colonel Charles Stanton made his way to the Marquis's tomb in the cemetery of Picpus in Paris, stood before it, and cried, "La Fayette, we're here!" ("La Fayette nous voici!")—a declaration that has remained a fresh and grateful memory (gratitude, that is, for gratitude) in France ever since. Gratitude and its repeated manifestations, including the between-times during which people remember, easily weave themselves into the narrative of two lives—or of two countries.
A further reason for gratitude is often found in cases when the giver comes to believe that his gift is not going to receive any acknowledgement, when he has begun to believe that the other does not care. Should a return gift in fact materialize, he feels grateful to have not been forgotten, for a relationship not broken off, or even out of relief that he need not feel hurt anymore.
After this point, gratitude is more and more the result of the receiver's will. There is an imaginative and comprehending phase, a realization that he is the object of affection, and he allows himself to be moved and pleased at this. Here, perhaps, we might begin to be mystified. For now the receiver ceases to regard himself and the gift that corresponds (or might not correspond) to his needs and tastes, but turns to the other in love and happiness.
The way I have stated this shows joy issuing from gratitude. A well-known psychological theory puts a capacity for enjoyment first, and sees gratitude as its consequence. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882–1960), who seeks to derive most of human behaviour from the infant's experiences of breast-feeding, thinks that a baby who is satisfied in his suckling is on the way to becoming a grateful adult.5 He "internalizes the good primal object," by which she means that he accepts the breast as a secure source of satisfaction. Because—and not unless—this has been achieved, he is able in later life to overcome envy and greed and replace them with gratitude.6
Klein has some terrifying pages on the hatred of an unsatisfied infant for his mother's breasts: he feels, according to Klein, that a breast that does not give him his milk has spitefully kept gratification to itself, and he longs to spoil the breast and make his mother pay. Should the baby not get what he wants, he becomes not only insatiable when he grows up but even liable to confuse good and evil. A child that has learned enjoyment, on the other hand, will find in himself when he is an adult an ability to devote himself to other people and to social causes. Klein, in short, makes satisfaction at the breast as an infant determine the adult's ability to enjoy, and this capacity provides the likelihood of his being able to be grateful. Gratitude in turn, she says, enables the adult to lead a serene life, and also to recover relatively easily from adversity: he will remember the pleasures of the past and enjoy what the present has to give. Blaming everything on breast-feeding, or crediting everything to it, can seem nowadays to be reductive and even absurd. But Klein's insistence on the connection between first being able to enjoy and then finding thankfulness easy is worth pondering.
The further steps taken in the course of what psychologists call an "episode" of gratitude show how emotion and thought are inextricably intertwined. The social aspects of gratitude—the understanding of relationship, the seeing of oneself as part of a social matrix, the reliance on conventions learned and practised because they make life so much easier and pleasanter when the rules are kept—are folded into the emotional, inner responses "demanded and rendered," as Simmel puts it. Someone who thinks he can properly interact with other people, while feeling nothing, is quite simply mistaken. Those who have to deal with him, who themselves are "demanding and rendering," are extremely skillful and sensitive when it comes to the emotions; they can tell. They will not let going through the motions without any feeling pass without indignation and dislike. An egalitarian society is in its way more pitiless than a hierarchical one: there are more judges, for one thing, they see you closer up, and they can be extremely strict. It is actually impolite, in our culture, to be coldly correct: the casual in human relations is not only accepted but often demanded. And it is extremely difficult to pretend when there are relatively few rules behind which to hide.
Gratitude comes out of something that has already happened; and as an emotion it cannot be a calculated pretense. For both reasons it is reprehensible, in our culture where feeling thankful is gratitude, for an appearance of thankfulness to be pressed into use in order to get something out of other people in the future. We have already seen that a genuine gift—and gratitude is a gift and a response to a gift—cannot be given in order to force a return. And people are grateful almost to the exact extent that a return was not the reason for the gift.
But we can learn to control our own emotions.7 First, we should not let them get "out of hand"—the old metaphor of passions as the wild animals in us, needing to be "reined in" by our conscious selves, the "drivers" of the "chariots" of our souls.8 We can learn to replace turbulent passions with peaceful emotions. Sincerity is again key: emotions, including peaceful emotions, have to be real, not feigned. The new psychophysiologists, researching the interactions between our hearts and our emotions, have shown that emotional processes operate much faster than thoughts. But, they have discovered, human beings can deliberately—that is, mindfully—intervene and influence the turmoil in their own breasts. They can take the time needed to step back in their own minds from the stressful situation, take deep breaths, consciously focus upon their hearts, and bring to bear their capacity for impersonal appreciation. This "self-generation of positive emotions" increases heart-rhythm coherence, and the regularity rediscovered calms body and mind. It is a habit that can be taught and practised.9
The claim has been that gratitude involves thought, yet we now seem to be saying that the thought has to be of the right kind. This is because gratitude is not only thoughtful and emotional but also moral. As Simmel said, it is morally demanded and rendered. After all, even emotions can be right or wrong: I would be wrong to be sorry if my rival recovered from an illness, for instance, but right to be sorry for another's suffering, including that of my rival. Given that emotions cannot be coerced, and given also that they are so closely involved with moral action, human beings are educated, or teach themselves, to have the right emotions. They can learn at the very least to be able to tell when they are themselves at fault in their feelings. Emotions, indeed, in their directness, are useful for learning about ourselves; they can reveal to us what it is, deep down, that we value. I might, for example, feel perfectly calm when told that a planned holiday will not take place—but furious merely because I missed meeting somebody recently. I might learn to my surprise from my own reactions that I was not particularly looking forward to the journey, and that I badly wanted to see that person. I can now start asking myself why.
We all recognize gratitude as a moral matter when, as bystanders, we deplore somebody else's ingratitude to another. He has not failed in a duty, unless further factors create a duty, so he cannot be punished or even held to account for his lapse—its source lying in the emotions, after all. We might nevertheless feel free to reproach him, and try to make him reconsider all the factors in his situation. Failure to feel grateful is not a dereliction of duty but a moral flaw, and as such related to a person's character in general. A duty, in contrast, is something "due," a clear obligation, a rule that can be "broken." It refers to what is to be done more than to the person doing it. It has little to do with feelings. Gratitude does entail an obligation, which is anterior both to feeling thankful for a particular favour and to the action of returning a benefit: it consists of a responsibility to cultivate in oneself a disposition to be grateful.
So gratitude depends upon education, and specifically education of the character, as parents acknowledge when they spend so much effort teaching it to their children. There is a good deal to be learned about gratitude that goes way beyond manners. Construing a gift includes, first, understanding at least at an unconscious level what gifts are, even though their meaning and operations are complex and far from obvious. Second, it includes judging what people's motives in giving are or could be. Finally, it includes all that is involved in fathoming people and interacting with them. We can learn habitually to remember benefits we have received, and to pay attention to the narrative of our life and how it is unfolding. People are often advised by therapists and other guides to keep diaries, list their advantages in life, think of ten things from the day to be grateful for before falling asleep, and so on. The reason why such methodical disciplines can be useful is that they invite and remind people to remember the good things in their lives—memory being the indispensable precursor of gratitude. Human beings, unlike animals, can deliberately decide to recall events in the past, and they can teach themselves to do so often. This ability can cause us a great deal of suffering—or happiness. People can also "reframe" events—that is, find a good light in which to see them—and learn to emphasize what has been gained rather than what has been lost. Even though it might not be easy, people can practise precipitating feelings of gratitude in their lives. Eventually gratitude becomes "second nature": something that becomes normal, but for which we ourselves are responsible.
The expression of gratitude is, we have seen, part of the return "owed" to the giver. In busy modern lives people often forget to thank benefactors, especially for long-standing benefits they have received. After too much time has gone by, they commonly feel it is too late to say thanks. But so important is the expression of gratitude, not only to the giver of the favour but to the receiver as well, that another therapeutic scenario has been devised which deliberately reopens the way to thanking. This is done primarily for the good of the thanker. The original giver is left to feel what he may; he might squirm with embarrassment, but he is just as likely to be surprised and grateful for being thanked, even after a long delay.
Practitioners of the new Positive Psychology thoroughly understand the need to show gratitude openly, if at all possible in the presence of the giver. People who are working on being happy rather than the reverse are urged to try, early on in the process, not only to feel grateful often, but to express their gratitude directly to someone to whom it is owed. Choose one person in your life who has helped you in the past (they are told). Try not to think of the possibility of future gain—the kind of motivation that cynics and scientists have so often accused the grateful of always really harbouring. Write down on a piece of paper just what you are so grateful for. Spend time doing this: several weeks may be needed. (Gratitude requires thought, reflection, memory, time taken.)
Next, make an appointment to see this person. It must be a meeting face to face: a letter or a phone call are to such a degree a second-best option that they will not suffice. Do not tell the person why you are coming to see him or her. Laminate your sheet of paper: it will be a gift and should be something that lasts. You must, soon after your arrival, get out your laminated sheet and read it aloud "slowly, with expression, and with eye contact [my italics]." This is part of the facial movement that gratitude itself "naturally" provokes in our culture, and in our culture it both expresses and produces relatedness. Then give the other person time to react. And take further time to discuss. We are told that it is usual on these occasions, when there are often other people present as well, to see "literally not a dry eye in the room."10
Some scientists argue that by definition emotions do not last. One suggestion has been, however, that some emotions do, and that we might save the idea of sudden and short-term emotions, biologically determined for the survival of the fittest, by calling lasting feelings "sentiments." Emotions would be "organic" and sentiments "processed."11 Alternatively, we can keep the short duration of emotions and admit that people might have ongoing dispositions to feel them. Fear is easily triggered in a "fearful" person; that does not mean the person lives in unrelieved fear. I can say, "I have loved him for thirty years" and mean it, even though I have not thought only of him all my life: what I am saying is that my love has been an important background to everything I have thought or done, that it has always been there, "on the back burner," ready to be turned to and called upon. Gratitude, similarly, is easily felt by people for whom thankfulness has become part of their emotional landscape, their "repertoire." An emotion often felt in its turn reacts upon and strengthens the disposition to feel it again.
The links created by gratitude are highly specific in respect of persons, despite the freedom allowed as to feelings and as to the actions chosen to express gratitude. The fact that one is grateful to a person makes gratitude last much longer than the time taken for the simple handing over of a gift in return; giving-and-returning may be over, but true gratitude remains. Gratitude from this point of view resembles loyalty. It is also like loyalty in that a proof of its reality is that it lasts; they are both forms of faithfulness. For both, dispositions of openness to and a readiness to oblige a specific person or group are essential: the disposition may be more important even than the actions arising out of it. Gratitude, indeed, frequently makes us disposed to reciprocate even if we cannot find a way of doing so.
About two-thirds through Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1861),12 the novel's 23-year-old hero, Pip, hears a footstep on the stairs late at night, and a big man with long iron-grey locks appears, holding out both his hands and apparently pleased to see him. Pip invites him in, not without resentment because this unknown man seems to expect him to respond. After some time contemplating him—the man holds both hands out again—Pip realizes that this is none other than the escaped convict he had met among the tombs as a child, whom he had hidden and fed and whose presence he had kept secret until the man succeeded in getting away.
Pip now gives the man his hands and submits to having them kissed: "You acted noble, my boy ... And I have never forgot it!" Pip pushes the old man away to avoid an embrace, and says primly, "If you are grateful ... I hope you have shown your gratitude by mending your way of life. If you have come here to thank me, it was not necessary." The man's eyes fill with tears. He holds Pip's hand as he tells the story of his life as a sheep farmer in Australia, how he had worked hard and done "wonderful well." In deep embarrassment, and longing for the man to go away, Pip returns the two pound notes that the man, whose name is Magwitch, had given him in return, all those years ago. Magwitch burns the notes and drops the ashes into the drinks tray.
It is Pip's turn to tell how he has done. He relates how fortune has favoured him: he has been chosen to succeed to property, although he does not yet know what or by whom. Magwitch lets Pip know that he is aware of everything that has happened, down to the smallest details. Then Pip realizes that it is to Magwitch the convict, this vulgar, rough man, that he owes his fortune. Pip almost faints; the man catches him and lays him on the sofa, goes down on one knee beside him and puts his face up close to Pip's. "It's me wot has done it," declares the convict. It was he who had "made Pip a gentleman," working and saving for him, thinking of him with gratitude for sixteen years. "Do I tell it fur you to feel a obligation?" cries the man. "Not a bit."
Pip feels no gratitude whatever, only abhorrence and dread. He loathes the very idea that he has been beholden to a man like Abel Magwitch. He shrinks from the man (who keeps kissing his hands), and his blood runs cold. Pip learns next that Magwitch has risked his life to see Pip, for if caught he will be executed. He trusts Pip not to turn him in to the police. Pip hates the man. If only he loved him, he realizes, "his preservation would then have naturally and tenderly addressed my heart." He gives the man a meal and a bed: Magwitch again takes both Pip's hands in his and says "good night," leaving Pip, alone at last, to brood on his own faithlessness to Joe, on the fact that Estella was not designed for him—the rich "gentleman" Pip—by Miss Havisham, and on the convict's promise to make Estella his "if money can buy."
Pip now truly begins to learn who he is and what mistakes he has made. He tries to help Magwitch escape. But Magwitch is wounded in a fight with a man who betrays him, and is caught by the police. Pip has come far enough at this point to find his repugnance for Magwitch gone: "In the hunted, wounded, shackled creature who held my hand in his I only saw a man who had meant to be my benefactor, and who had felt affectionately, gratefully and generously towards me with great constancy through a series of years. I only saw in him a much better man than I had been to Joe." Pip refuses to pretend that he does not know Magwitch, and faithfully stands beside him in the dock, holding Magwitch's hand, when the sentence is delivered. He visits him in prison, and places both his hands on the old man's chest when Magwitch dies. He goes to thank Joe and Biddy for everything they did for him. He begs forgiveness for his ingratitude to them, and vows to work and repay all the money Joe had spent on paying off his debts. "Don't think," says Pip, "that if I could repay it a thousand times over, I suppose I could cancel a farthing of the debt I owe you, or that I would do so if I could!"
Dickens tells here a tale of redemption through the medium of gratitude, learned and lasting. He does it with gestures, chiefly the clasping of hands, the sign of commitment and connectedness—so horrifying to someone who wants no connection, but a pledge of relationship when accepted on both sides. Gratitude is like an emotional and willing hand-clasp in friendship. Truth is a mighty part of gratitude, and so is justice. Even they are not enough, however. There remains the willingness to see and understand, and the freely taken step of accepting one's own commitment for the future. Pip "gives back" and is therefore saved. He will go away and work hard for eleven years, remaining grateful all that time to Joe and Biddy, and only then will return to see them and to meet their child, to whom they will give his name, Pip.
Gratitude will have deepened and strengthened Pip's friendship with Joe and Biddy: that will be his reward. He needed—just as much as Oedipus did, or Achilles—to find out who he was and what he really cared about. For Pip, it is gratitude that reveals and underpins both discoveries. Suffering and loss will have to be undergone, but they are worth the price. The "great expectations" of the novel's title become deeply ironic, but in another sense they are very real, should the reader understand what it is that Dickens believes to be genuinely important. Pip says he expects always to remain, and wants to remain, obligated to his benefactors, even after he has repaid the last farthing. He accepts, of his own free will, the endlessness of his debt. He is indeed happy to be obliged to them. "Happy to be obliged" is friendship.