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This article is part of a series on gratefulness, itself part of a bigger series of trying to live six theories of happiness within the space one year. Click on the links above to get the whole story!
Last week, we began our exploration of gratefulness by distinguishing between gratefulness and gratitude. While gratitude, we said, is the feeling of being thankful to a particular person for a particular (undeserved) benefit, gratefulness is a more general feeling of happiness and thanks towards nobody in particular; as in: “I am grateful for the glorious sunshine.”
It is interesting that in ancient times, the symmetric version of gratitude was the only one that was commonly recognised. Ancient authors write about gratitude generally as a relation between two people, and most of the time about the lack of gratitude as a vice:
the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)
Seneca, in his book “On Benefits,” writes:
This is in line with the more general Aristotelian view of human relations. Love, too, is for Aristotle a symmetric relationship, a kind of friendship, in which both partners profit in roughly equal ways by educating each other in matters of virtue and wisdom.
A Short History of Love
In this mini-series of posts, we trace the history of the concept of love from Plato and Aristotle through the Christian world to the Desert Fathers.
It was Plato who gave us, with his Symposion, the vision of a transcendent, eternal love that can be directed towards things that don’t reciprocate: mathematics, ideas, the eternal forms of perfect things, and God himself. And it was in this Platonic tradition that the later Christian philosophers tried to explore the asymmetries of love and gratitude.
“Gratia,” for St. Augustine (354-430), refers to the grace of God, not to human obligations ([1], p.25). For the Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), gratitude was the appropriate response to receiving a gift; but since the society of the Middle Ages understood itself as a hierarchy of power, from God at the top all the way down to the peasant, such giving and receiving of gifts was also one-directional and ordered according to social status and power. Therefore, gratitude was not the …
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