The word give implies at least a potential response from the receiver. One does not give a pot to the kitchen counter; one merely sets it down there. I might, of course, give it, or pass it, to the chef. We give to people—or to animals and plants, should we hope for a response from them: one gives food to a cat, water to "thirsty" herbs. True, we may "give" a wall a coat of paint, perhaps with the thought that it "needs" painting: at the back of our minds there is probably a hint of personalization of the wall. But generally speaking, a giver expects an active response or at least a reaction from the receiver, who similarly presumes that the giver is capable of such an expectation.1
Giving becomes meaningful through active receiving; it is the receiver's acceptance—his response—that converts a mere thing, however generously handed over, into a gift. He has, thereby, already "given back" something to his benefactor. Merely saying "yes" to a gift is already to enter into the action, where giver, gift, and receiver are parts of one performance—which could be the first in a series of such events. A small drama is enacted, complete with roles and action, motivations, intentions, and significance. The meaning, the goal, the reasoning, and the emotion of first the giver and then the receiver all attach themselves to and in that sense "ride" the favour done; where the favour is embodied in an actual present, the object in question symbolizes the rest.
What is symbolized is, of course, what is most important. Each person taking part in gifting receives more than he or she gives: this is an aspect of the "overflow" that is part of the meaning of grace. Recognition occurs for the receiver and the giver, a recognition that can widen into gratitude simply for the being of the other.2 Mutuality—a concurrence of wills—is another level of recognition, which may be expressed in the return of the gift. If a receiver, having given back if he can, goes further and gives to someone outside the "see-saw" that is reciprocity, then the gifting process begins to spiral not only upwards but outwards, avoiding many—ideally all—of partiality's limitations.
It is unkind—though it might be generous—to give to someone while making it plain that this person cannot give anything back, that she has nothing to offer that the giver wants. Such a bestowal is largesse, not a gift: it slights the possibilities of mutuality in recognition. Largesse means most literally "largeness"—that is, the magnificent "size" of the giver. It has little to do with the receiver. It is not as bad as obliging the other to make a return whether he wants to or not, but still it declares inequality and refusal of relationship, and therefore deserves no gratitude. Yet the receiver might be grateful all the same: gratitude is the receiver's to give, if she chooses.
Gratitude is a reflection of gift-giving—it is in itself a kind of gift. Feeling often issues in action: further gift-giving often arises from gratitude felt. But gratitude comes second; it is a response to what is accepted as a gift, and to the giver's goodness. "Jeder Dank ist Antwort," the Germans say: "Gratitude is always a reply." The most admirable gift, indeed, is given in such a way that the other can (if she wants) give too. The receiver is invited to "join in." Gratitude makes her want to imitate, in her own way, the giver's action. Should she wish to, she "agrees to play" and, herself, gives.
The first giver may feel, and make it clear that he feels, that the receiver's acceptance means a lot to him: just taking his gift then becomes a gift in itself. He may give simply out of love for the receiver, "because it's her";3 she need make no return (but she may nevertheless in gratitude give back). Giving, like gratitude, is primarily because and not in order that—out of what is already the case, and not out of a desire to control or steer the receiver, or to demand consequences—even non-specific ones. Some givers feel grateful themselves for a chance to help. They might want, for instance, to reduce situations of injustice. They might feel grateful for having already received so much in life that they want to share their good fortune. People to whom the spiritual is important often feel that anything they give is actually "giving back," a counter-gift in gratitude, for everything they have received. Saint Paul reminds his readers of the giftedness of human existence: "What do you possess that was not given to you?"4
The receiver should treat any gift with respect, not because the gift remains in some way part of the giver, but simply out of consideration for her and for her motives, should they be believed to be benevolent. He also recognizes that life has somehow changed for the better thanks to the giver and her benevolence. "Thanks to" (Latin gratia "by grace of") here means simply "because of." But it is the recognition of that "because of" that gives rise to the actions of gratitude: appreciating the giver's kindness, saying "thanks," using the gift well out of respect for its meaning, and, if possible, giving something in return.
But "thanks to" gifts received, people often give to others who have not given to them. Having accepted a gift, they then (after having "given back" if they can) "turn around" and give to someone else. By becoming themselves first givers they are more exactly imitating the person to whom they are grateful for a gift. "Freely give what you have freely received":5 where freedom is an essential part of the gift, an imitation of it must itself include freedom. People who feel gifted by God, as we saw and as this saying means, always think of themselves as making gifts out of already being receivers; they often feel no need to get anything back. They may be hurt if their gift is not accepted because refusal implies the rejection of the giver. And they will be delighted to receive any response that demonstrates the other's pleasure. (Respect in a giver first requires him to find out what the other wants, what will please her; giving is for the receiver's sake, to enrich the receiver, not the giver. It would be patronizing in him to give entirely because he feels she should have his gift, whether she wants it or not.)
Giving to someone else (not to the first giver) may occur out of an impossibility of return. Someone drops all her papers and parcels in the street. An unknown passerby helps her pick them up, and leaves. The receiver of this favour can do nothing but quickly thank him before he goes on his way. (Giving him money would be entirely wrong, because it would "pay for" and so nullify his gift; he acted freely and did not do what he did for money.) Her response now should be to do the equivalent, when she has the opportunity, for somebody else. Imitating his gift will have the effect of an increase and continuance of goodwill and consideration, that "cementing" of society that characterizes gifts and gratitude.
Transcendence occurs when people seek for ways to spread around the benefits they themselves have received. The last of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous—reached when the alcoholic has stopped drinking and found his serenity—is this: "Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practise these principles in all our affairs." Bringing the benefits received to others is regarded not only as a pleasurable thing to do, but as essential for further personal growth. No gratitude is expected, no "returns" demanded: the giver gives because he himself has received. Where he sees there is a need, he helps because he can. And he is now, because of what he has learned, uniquely qualified to do so. Partiality shuts nobody out from his concern. If he failed to share his gift, he would be demonstrating that he had not understood his good fortune and his own continuing need.
Delight (Greek charis) is one of the component meanings of "gratitude." It is specifically a pleasure shared between giver and receiver; mutuality is essential to it. And charis (which is also the Greek word for theological grace) overflows; it is abundant, eschews measure, and wants others to experience its own happiness. Giving, receiving, and giving back are consequently festive in nature; that is why they so often accompany holidays and celebrations. They are not about justice, or arguments, or sternness generally. Instead, they constitute together a performance that loves excess and the refusal of calculation, a ritual affirmation of mutual acceptance. For abstract arguments the giving-and-receiving process substitutes action—a demonstration of trust, despite the risks of error and the possibility of refusal, hypocrisy, or abuse. A sense of expansion and enrichment is the result when things go well, although what will flow from the expansion can be neither calculated nor foreseen. Gratitude does involve an admission of dependence on the goodwill of others and a temporary acceptance, as receiver, of the lower place, including as it does a free concession of "first place" to the giver. But the humility required by gratitude is itselfjoyful. If no joy is experienced, then the gift is a poisoned one and—or—the gift's reception has nothing to do with gratitude.
Deeply felt gratefulness is a species of awe, and as such requires humility. It implies a sense of one's littleness before the wonder of the universe, of the earth and all of nature, of one's own life—and before the goodness of others. Awe, like gratitude, is the opposite of what we call "taking things for granted," which is receiving and not seeing why one should be grateful; it pays intense attention to something beyond oneself and one's immediate self-interest. It is the proud and the self-centred, after all, who are anxious to be unimpressed, and it is the voracious who have no use for beholding without snatching up and consuming or exploiting. Gratitude, like awe, is a matter of looking, and ultimately of insight.
G.K. Chesterton was convinced that gratitude, springing from an entirely natural pleasure in nature, is a kind of irreducible mystical propensity in human beings. He writes that in his nihilistic days he was saved by the results of wonder. "I invented a rudimentary and makeshift mystical theory of my own," he explains. "It was substantially this: that even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits, was extraordinary enough to be exciting.... I hung on to the remains of religion by one thin thread of thanks. I thanked whatever gods might be, not like Swinburne, because no life lived for ever, but because any life lived at all."6 Profound thankfulness makes people happy. And the reverse is also true: gratitude arises so immediately and naturally from happiness that it becomes joy's seal and proof: "The test of all happiness is gratitude."7 In an early notebook Chesterton expresses the kind of joyful amazement that is a catalyst to gratitude:
Evening
Here dies another day,
During which I have had eyes, ears, hands
And the great world round me;
And tomorrow begins another.
Why am I allowed two?8
The cosmic awe that prompts Chesterton's question is a long way from worrying at Mauss's chestnut, the inscrutable because isolated "Why give back?" Lévi-Strauss9 feels uncomfortable about Mauss's taking seriously the Maori explanation that a hau in the gift demanded reciprocity from the receiver; he substitutes for it, as a third force, an abstract relationship between the givers that includes the requirement of a return gift. The idea in essence is that above givers and receivers stands a law, as merciless as it is abstract, which participants in gift exchanges unquestioningly obey, even though they are nearly always unconscious of its social mechanisms or the reasons for them: If you receive a gift, you must later on reciprocate with another one, different but roughly equivalent in value, whether you want to or not. This chastely structuralist picture of autonomous circularity has had many followers among searchers for the answer to the Maussian enigma.
A law of reciprocity undoubtedly exists, where people give and return out of obligation, when a society sets up for itself, for various reasons, areas in which a reciprocal exchange of goods and favours is systemic: exchange is so good for society's coherence that people should be obliged to perpetuate it. Here duty rather than sentiment is the point—something done rather than something felt. (Not giving and not thanking are "simply not done.") And the more obligatory, formal, and mannerly the offering and the return, the less the sentiment of gratitude is felt. People start to speak of the duty, the action of "giving back," as what is meant by "gratitude." But true gratitude is both feeling and action. It does not sit enthroned "over" people, as a law requiring them to give to one another. It takes place between them. There is mutual recognition between or among persons, who are unique and irreplaceable. The gift is both itself—the present, the hospitality, the favour—and also symbolic, a vehicle of meanings and feelings between the acting partners.
A gift may be given to someone who is called in the Gospels one's "neighbour." This person need not be one of those defined as the giver's "own"; she might not even be someone with whom he was previously acquainted, although this unknown person is recognized by the very fact of the favour given or done. Where there is no recognition, there can be no love and no gift. There is, invariably, at least an element of agape—of a love indifferent to "getting something back"—in any true gift. (Pure agape is rare; normally givers, like receivers, have mixed feelings, mixed motivations. This does not mean that anything less than pure agape disqualifies a gift from having been given.) Agape is without comparison and without calculation; it is personal recognition without extra ends in view. Agape is a love that declares itself rather than explains itself; it is expressed in deeds more than in words. Therefore free giving is a natural expression of it. As far as the giver in agape is concerned, there need be no return.
The anthropologist Raymond Firth, investigator of the New Zealand Maori and the Melanesian people of Tikopia, once described his journey to Tikopia as a young scientist in the early 1930s.10 He depended, as so many anthropologists do, upon the missionaries already present in the area for practical help: "On my way through the Solomon islands to Tikopia I had to rely for transport and hospitality on the Melanesian Mission, and for some weeks was the guest of the head of the Mission, Bishop Steward, on the Mission yacht Southern Cross. As we travelled together among the islands we discussed many problems of human relationship in the island communities. Malinowski had only recently published his book Crime and Custom in Savage Society in which he stressed the importance of reciprocity as a force of binding obligation in Melanesian social organization.... The Bishop borrowed the book from me, read it, and strongly disagreed. He argued vehemently that Melanesians, like other people he said, performed many acts for others freely and without thought for return. Giving, not reciprocity, was the prime motive of service, he held.... We argued amicably about this and other themes, and I think came to respect each other—partly perhaps because being more detached I could question his views more stoutly than could his clergy." Firth was convinced that he had much to teach this man who had lived among the Melanesians for many years.
"At last the time came," Firth continued, "for him to land me on the beach of Tikopia and leave me to my fate. He had shown me many kindnesses, which I could not repay. This was his last trip on the Southern Cross; he was retiring from the Mission after many years and we both knew it was unlikely we should ever meet again—and we never did. As he said goodbye, leaving me alone in this remote community he shook me firmly by the hand, said gruffly 'No reciprocity!,' turned his back and walked off down the beach to the boat. This was his way of hiding his emotions with a joke—but his words were also a reaffirmation of a moral viewpoint." At least Firth was generous enough to recount this story. In doing so, he might even have been making the bishop some return for his kindness. But the bishop clearly thought—and we might reflect upon his opinion—that the Melanesians would probably have done as much for Firth, even though there might be no return, and even should they realize that Firth, as an enlightened Westerner, was committed to "seeing through" their motives, and prone inevitably to the suspicion that they must be calculating their own advantage.
In French, gratitude is reconnaissance, which also means "recognition": French is one of the rare languages that honour in the very etymology of their word for "gratitude" the deep relationship between the two.11 Knowledge (connaissance in French), and not only feeling, is part of being grateful. Germans speak of Dank (which became English thank), derived as it is from denken, "to think." At a transcendental level, gratitude and insight were linked in the experience of the English mystic Julian of Norwich: "Thankyng is a new, inward knowing," she writes.12 "New" here is close in sense to "lively" and "vivid,"13 and hence has a feeling component, which at once turns to "gret reverens and lovely drede" ("great reverence and loving fear"): gratitude is a species of awakening in the self.14
"Thankyng,"Julian goes on, "turns us with all our powers to do whatever our good Lord indicates." She here explains why, in a context of religious faith, a feeling of gratitude rouses people to respond in kind: being aware of goodness received makes the "knowing" mind want to find out where more good is needed and to do it, in response. Love's insight turns, through the pivotal feeling of gratitude, into love's action. Later, Julian will tell us something else she knows: that God himself "takes as great pleasure and delight as if he were indebted to us for all the good we do. And yet it is he who actually does it!"15 And God's pleasure in our response will be part of his own "everlasting gratitude."16 This is the language of gratitude as grace: acceptance of the gift of grace is what a human being has in her gift; God himself cannot force her to receive grace or to respond by giving to others. Both gratitude and grace are freely given, and a joy that is shared. God being eternal, this joy is shared forever.
This "new, inward knowing" is a profound and intense version of reconnaissance, the knowing being recognition of the goodness of the other, who was the first to recognize: giving is itself a voluntary sign of recognition. And returning out of gratitude (reconnaissance) is a gift that echoes the first giver's recognition (reconnaissance). Paul Ricoeur17 speaks of recognition as having evolved in the human psyche, from the basic identification of objects—knowing what they are and are not—to a reflexive consciousness, a recognition of the self by the self. The third stage is mutuality: the recognition, in intimacy, of one person by another, and recognition in return. For there is in human beings a powerful longing to be recognized—an important move from the active to the passive voice. Recognition is not something one inherently has; it must be given.
Self-recognition involves memory of the past and, as Ricoeur points out, the capacity to make promises: it implies consistency in the future. We have noted the essential role that memory plays in gratitude. Readiness to achieve completion through returning a favour later on corresponds to Ricoeur's "promises." Whereas memory in the individual is self-bound, promises are made to others. As with promises made, where gifts and favours are concerned social pressure may be exerted too. Influence can be brought to bear, via their approval or disapproval, by others outside the performing partnership, who feel it is "only fair" for the receiver of a favour to do something for the giver, and at the very least to thank him, just as it is "only right" that promises should be kept. The health of society depends on the continuance of reliability and voluntary gratitude for favours. The keeping of ordinary promises, like gifting, cannot be controlled by law; social pressure takes up some of the slack. But mostly, decisions to "follow through" are taken in freedom by the givers of return gifts, or the makers of promises. With promising, the first, antecedent promise has already been made: always to keep one's word. Gratitude, similarly, springs from a cultivated disposition to be grateful; one is in some sense grateful in advance of any gift or favour, because one is prepared to recognize goodness and be grateful for it.
The fundamental human struggle for identity, relationship, and belonging is practised and expressed in the reiterated drama of giving, receiving, gratitude, and returning the favour, where one recognizes and is recognized at each stage of the action.18 We all learn that another person is from many points of view essentially unknowable. Yet we also realize that she is a person, a subject like myself, a centre of her own world, a being that calls forth my own recognition of her, in fraternity with her, and in love. We are given to perceive that she is like me, through her expressive looks, postures, gestures, and what she says. But the process of linking through giving, receiving, being grateful, and giving back preserves the fact that she is Another—one who also deserves the distancing effect of respect for her difference. Recognition is a positive act, not merely a negative one like tolerance. There is infinitely more respect in recognition than in tolerance.
Mutual, impartial recognition is the real root of human rights, such as those to life, liberty, and property, for all. It might one day bring us to the point where we begin to combine political rights and freedoms with a fair distribution of basic goods, for all. Recognition in our day already requires of us respect for and an attempt to understand cultures different from our own, and the humility and patience to ask other peoples to take our cultural norms into account as well: dependence on the goodwill of the other is the ancient risk inherent in both giving and receiving. It is above all the non-material favours that are commonly asked for: we ask another person to be good enough to listen to us, to help us, to forgive us; it is permissible to ask to be given consideration or another's patience. That is because such asking acknowledges need and (inter)dependence. It is important to realize that weakness and dependence are not the same as unworthiness, whether in ourselves or in anybody else; that the type of pride that is "vainglorious" is not only a source of pain, but an enemy to truthfulness. Gratitude's humility and acknowledgement of dependence are part of its strength, its "thinking heart" the secret of its ability to replace many of the causes of misery so readily grouped at the time of Shakespeare under the heading "Ingratitude." Disrespect and violence can and must yield to giving and gratitude. We have to learn to give and let give.
Gift-giving is the opposite of commodification. It has what we might call an "anti-economy," because its condition is one of surplus, not scarcity.19 But even commerce needs goodwill, and sellers often want their customers to maintain human as well as monetary relations with them. In the food markets of Barcelona, for example, parsley is never sold. It is set aside from the other produce and designated as a gift—to symbolize, when given and received, the contentment and fidelity of the customer, and everything that is not venal in the seller. After the customer's purchases of meat, fish, or vegetables have been asked for, priced, and collected in a pile, comes the question: "Parsley?" The buyer nods, and a bunch of parsley lands on top of the heap, gratis. The adding on top of everything else is characteristic of charis and of the gift; non-payment for it is the medium of attachment and recognition between partners in the sale, and of hope that the relationship will continue.
In the "anti-economy" that is the realm of the gift, people do not hang on to what they have, nor do they seek profit above all else. Instead, having recognized the extent to which they have been gifted themselves, they pay attention to the needs of others and recognize—look squarely—not only at the problems, but at those who are suffering injustice or are just plain suffering. Because there is a need, and because they have, they give. They gain thereby, although profit for themselves is not what they sought. They do not feel that what they have given away is something they have lost. Life is not for them only unrelenting physical Necessity in the form of economic scarcity, like a pizza with an unforgiving circumference, portions cut out of it and gaps left on the plate for every slice. Instead, in the gifting scenario the whole is greater than the parts.
This is, for example, the original meaning of giving presents at Christmas. The significance of the festival is that the baby Jesus is the first Christmas gift, inspiring everybody else to give to one other out of joyful gratitude. The Christmas story and its celebration demonstrate God's love and express his desire that we should now "turn around" and give to others, wherever an opportunity for giving arises, and especially where people are most in need. If we all do this, there will be enough to go round. We ourselves shall satisfy our need to give, the source of which is not merely the result of social pressure, but arises out of recognition and the desire to be recognized, out of the gratitude that unites these two, and the wish to imitate goodness we have known. We shall also be rewarded, in ways we cannot foresee. "At the end of the day," writes Saint John of the Cross, "you will be examined in love."20 And the fruits of our loving, our giving, and our gratitude will provide the evidence: "Only what you have given, be it only in the gratitude of acceptance, is salvaged from the nothing which some day will have been your life."21