Gratitude

A few weeks ago, I was talking with a friend about gratitude; when I’m in a beautiful place, or looking at the starry sky, or feeling particularly appreciative of the physical processes that resulted in my presence on the planet, I feel grateful. I don’t believe in God, so I don’t know who to feel grateful to, but I still identify the feeling as gratitude. My friend thinks that gratitude has to have an object, a person to be grateful to; he thinks the fact that I label these feelings gratitude (rather than apprecation or joy) is a remnant of my Catholic childhood.

I’m not sure that’s it, though. For one thing, when I was a Catholic, I didn’t understand very much of the processes that gave rise to stars, and solar systems, and planets, and in particular to the earth and the life on it. I didn’t appreciate the web of living creatures that make up the ecosystem on which I am utterly dependent, and I didn’t have a clue about the number of conditions that had to be just right for complex and eventually intelligent life to arise here. Oddly enough, when I was told to believe that a divine creator had made us and the earth for us to live on—i.e., when I did have a person to be thankful to—it was a lot harder to feel the requisite gratitude, perhaps because God so often seemed to hedge life around with difficulties and punishments and fear. And somehow it didn’t seem all that miraculous to be here if we had been created by an intelligent being; the wonder of existence, to my mind, becomes obvious only when you realize the backdrop of an immense and mostly lifeless universe.

Coincidentally, I recently ran across an essay by Ronald Aronson in TPM Online in which he addresses the question of who atheists and agnostics feel grateful to when they feel thankful for the good things in their lives (and whether it makes sense to call it gratitude in the first place). His take on it is that the object of gratitude need not be a single individual, but can be impersonal forces:

It is a way of acknowledging one of our most intimate if impersonal relationships, with the cosmic and natural forces that make us possible.

He sees gratitude as related to dependence, and as an acknowledgement of our dependence (on previous generations, on other creatures on the planet, on those we don’t know who labor to make our lives possible, and on the natural processes that support our continued existence). I really like that idea, and the idea that gratitude doesn’t have to have a personal object. I’ve thought quite a bit about why I don’t think of my feelings as appreciation or happiness rather than gratitude, and I think the element of recognizing dependency is part of it. I also like Aronson’s efforts to be clear about what we’re talking about and not lapsing into fuzzy references to a sort of pseudo-God; he quotes a passage from Attitudes of Gratitude by M.J. Ryan that talks of the “Great Spirit”, and I remember with equal distaste the convocation prayer at the commencement ceremony when I graduated from IU, which called upon “the weaver of the web of life”.

The idea of gratitude having an impersonal object didn’t cut much ice with my friend, although it did spark some interesting discussion between him, me, and my older son Greg. Greg pointed out that although we think of “gratitude to”, the idea of “gratitude for” is at least as interesting, and that the times when a religious person would be thanking god is maybe when an atheist is feeling grateful to the universe for the universe—i.e., the object of both prepositions is the same. He also said, in email to me:

I think anyone who can feel gratitude to the intricate and boundless beauty of creation without relying on the crutch of mysticism has probably already learned most of what psychedelics have to teach.

Finding his long thoughtful email message in my inbox certainly made me feel grateful (both to and for Greg). I notice that there’s something of a continuum as far as identifying a person to be grateful to. When you’re enjoying time with people you love, you’re grateful to/for them. When you’re enjoying a good meal in a restaurant, maybe you’re thankful to the people who cooked it. Last weekend I stood in the Art Institute in Chicago admiring one of Monet’s paintings (Bordighera, one of my favorites), and I asked my friend if he thought it made sense for me to be grateful to Monet for painting it, even though he’s dead now. He said that made sense to him. Aronson discusses both gratitude toward people who are unknown, not present, or long gone, and gratitude toward the impersonal forces of nature, which makes sense to me, but I suppose there’s a dividing line there that might be a point of contention for those who disagree with him.

I’d be interested in hearing other people’s comments on this; an atheist friend has already told me that for him the question doesn’t arise because he doesn’t feel gratitude toward nature (just appreciation). I’m curious about what other people think. Meanwhile, it’s time for dinner, a meal for which I’m sure I’ll be grateful.