Why Is Gratitude So Difficult?

“Does Gratitude to R for φ-ing Imply Gratitude that R φ-ed?” isn’t a question we often ask ourselves on Thanksgiving. Translated into plain English—it’s the title of a scholarly article by the philosopher Tony Manela—it asks whether it’s possible to be grateful to someone for doing something without being grateful that the same something has happened. The idea isn’t that complicated—at least, not at first. Imagine, Manela writes, that “Yakov and Ruth work together in a factory with dangerous machinery.” Yakov gets one of his hands stuck in a machine:

Ruth is next to him, and she realizes that if she does nothing, Yakov will lose his hand. Thinking quickly but clearly, she does the only thing she can do . . . she sticks both of her hands into the machine.

This allows Yakov to pull out his hand—but at the cost of Ruth losing both of hers. Would it make sense, Manela asks, for Yakov to be grateful to Ruth for saving his hand, while also, at the same time, not being grateful that she lost both of hers? He believes the answer is yes. Yakov can be grateful to Ruth for acting, but not grateful about the manner of her action; he might profoundly wish that Ruth had found a different way of intervening. In short, Y can be grateful to R for φ-ing—but not grateful that R φ-ed.

Gratitude isn’t obviously a concept capable of generating such perplexities. But it has hidden depths. Manela is among the philosophers who believe that the single word “gratitude” actually refers to two ideas, which may or may not be related. The first is “prepositional” gratitude—gratitude to someone for something. You might be grateful to a lifeguard for saving you from drowning, for instance, or to your friend for watching your dog while you’re away. The second is “propositional” gratitude—a more general gratitude for the fact that things are the way they are. Perhaps you’re grateful for the weather on your wedding day, or grateful to be alive after a cancer scare. When you arrive at your Airbnb to find a decorative sign that says “gratitude,” the sign is probably invoking the second type of gratitude. You’re not being reminded to be grateful to the owner of the Airbnb for bestowing upon you the boon of a tidy apartment; you’re being told to be grateful for a wondrous world filled with Airbnbs.

At Thanksgiving, when some families go around the table so that everyone can share something for which they’re grateful, the tendency is also toward propositional gratitude—the second kind. It might sound oddly concrete, and somehow out of synch with the spirit of Thanksgiving, if you thanked your mom and dad for paying your college tuition, or your aunt for giving you her old car. It seems better to express gratitude for something both good and abstract—family, friends, health, the food. Yet there can be something a little wiggly and pro forma about this kind of gratitude. By the time you’re halfway around the table, you might wonder just how “grateful” everyone really is. Perhaps what’s being practiced at such moments is “thankfulness,” not gratitude. But what is being “thankful”? We’re not thankful at other times of year.

Manela argues that, most of the time, the general sort of gratitude is actually better described as appreciation. Appreciation involves grasping the importance of something, or fully experiencing the value of it. After driving onto a patch of ice and skidding, you might appreciate anti-lock brakes; after your first trip abroad, you might appreciate the virtues of your own country. Appreciation can also have an element of enjoyment. By taking a class, you can learn to appreciate opera; after gaining weight in midlife, you might learn to appreciate exercise, in the sense of actually finally liking it. Appreciation is substantial, meaningful. But Appreciationgiving doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Suppose that, when it’s your turn to give thanks, you describe an instance of prepositional gratitude. This year, I’m grateful to my wife for everything she’s done for our new baby daughter—that seems straightforward enough. But, actually, this kind of gratitude is a little wiggly, too. Should I be the one feeling grateful for what my wife does for our daughter? Isn’t that somehow a bit proprietary? By invoking gratitude, I might seem to be holding myself out as the head of the family enterprise—the person to whom benefits flow. It could be more accurate, but less notable, to simply appreciate that my wife is a great parent. There’s also the matter of whether it makes sense to feel grateful to people for doing what they were going to do anyway. If my wife told me that she was grateful for how I treated our kids, I might find it odd. Did she expect me to treat them less well?

One theory of gratitude holds that it entails obligation on your part. You know you’re grateful for something when you feel that you need to do something in response. When you go to a restaurant, you leave a “gratuity” for the waiter, but you’re not actually grateful; you’re simply expressing an appreciation for his work, not entering into a reciprocal relationship in which you owe him great service in return. By extension, when we condemn someone as “ungrateful,” we don’t mean that he doesn’t appreciate the value of what we’ve given him. We mean that he does appreciate it, but doesn’t feel any reciprocal obligation to us. Villains often wield (unearned) gratitude as a kind of cudgel, precisely because it demands something of those whom they’ve supposedly assisted. (“You ungrateful little . . .”)

It’s often said that being grateful, or “practicing gratitude,” feels good. This isn’t just a truism—it’s backed up by psychological research. People who write down lists of things for which they’re grateful tend to feel happier. Martin Seligman, the positive psychologist, has found that writing and delivering a letter of gratitude to a specific person can result in a significant and immediate happiness boost. But it could be that the happiness we feel when we practice gratitude has to do with the sense that, at last, we’re meeting the obligations that gratitude involves. In my life, I’ve found that gratitude on the largest scale can feel not just humbling but overwhelming. There are people who have helped me so much—Hi, Pat! Hi, Karen! Hi, Ian!—that reciprocity seems painfully beyond my reach. The fact that they’re not asking for anything in return, and don’t seek to burden me, doesn’t seem to matter.

In “The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoyevsky describes a poor family who live in a shack. They wear rags and go hungry, and their son is consumptive and will soon die. Alyosha—one of the titular brothers, and a kind soul—brings the family a large sum of money, to lift them out of poverty. The father holds the bills in his hands and tells Alyosha about how the money will change their lives: they’ll use it to buy food and clothes, for medical care, and so on. Then his face twists into a horrible grimace, and he throws the bills to the ground and stomps on them. “There’s your money, sir! There’s your money, sir!” he repeats, before running off. There are many reasons why the father refuses the money at that moment, but at their center is the burden of gratitude, which we can dread shouldering.

Are there burdens or obligations involved in general, abstract, “propositional” gratitude? Feeling #blessed doesn’t usually mean owing anything to anyone in particular; that’s part of why it’s so nice. Gratitude to no one is easier than feeling gratitude to someone. But gratitude to no one might not really be gratitude.

Which raises the question: Why speak in terms of gratitude? Why doesn’t the sign in the Airbnb urge “appreciation”? In another paper, “Gratitude and Appreciation,” Manela proposes two theories. First, there’s the fact that, when we’re small, we depend acutely on the care of other people; perhaps, we internalize that idea, and persist in reading “benevolent intentions” into outcomes that benefit us. Second, we might believe, or just intuit, that the world is the way it is because something godlike has made it that way. In this view, propositional gratitude is a kind of superstitious linguistic habit—a little like saying “Bless you” when someone sneezes.

This is surely right, some of the time. When I walk outside and feel a surge of gratitude for the sun and the breeze, the feeling can be a little childlike, as if I’ve just received a present. But it also seems to me that, at other times, the flow of feelings goes the opposite way. It’s possible to look at one’s life and long for the burdens of gratitude—even the spiritual burdens implied by gratitude for the existence of the world as a whole. We want to feel connected, reciprocally, to that existence. We might wish to owe something for it in return.