‘If someone gives you a present, what do you say?’ is an
oft-repeated question that parents pose to their young kids. Soon after the
third or fourth time of finding oneself in this situation and being asked the
same question yet once again, the child, with a blush covering her face and her
eyes capturing a hint of shame, replies, ‘thank you’ first to the parent and
then, turning, repeats ‘thank you’ once again to that ‘someone’ who had put
that beautiful toy in her hands. You, the generous bearer and giver of that
toy, lean down to her and smile back a reply, ‘you are welcome!’ Hearing that,
the little girl takes the cue and flees, clutching possessively her new toy and
running to her favourite corner, where she is away from those loving prying
eyes, eager to look at the gift, the beautiful doll now securely in her hands.
Watching the child run out of their horizons, everyone else, standing nearby
and witnessing this happy-ritual, turn to one another and break into small
talk. Of course the talk is not about the weather, which incidentally should
have been the focus of the conversation, even as heavy storms gather without a
sound outside the double-glazed windows, but the conversation is centred upon
the ritual that was just performed. ‘What a well-behaved, lovely girl!’
remarked an aunt. ‘Did you catch that joy on her face when she opened the
present?’ murmured another. ‘I do like how Pete and Jane bring up their kids.
Her “thank you” conveyed such genuine gratitude’, claimed the giver of the
present. These social rituals not only perform the rite of giving within modern
societies, but also function as sites of training of acceptable social norms
and mores, particularly the expression of ‘gratitude’, for the next generation.
At first blush, the vignette painted above appears flawless,
rather a model of how gratitude must be negotiated within any social space.
However, while the rite of giving taught the little girl to say ‘thank you’ it
did not in any way explore for her what ‘gratitude’ entails leave alone its
significance. Probably, if you or I were asked the significance of ‘gratitude’,
we too as well might fumble for words. ‘Of course gratitude is being thankful’
you would retort, but then that is just replacing one term with another. What
does it mean to be thankful or grateful? Albeit, there is a difference even
between these two terms and the meanings they embody. However, my interest here
is not to indulge merely in linguistic or conceptual gymnastics, rather to
interrogate the mantra of gratitude that accompanies the rite of giving within
social life.
My argument here is that the understanding of gratitude has
been reduced to a civil and moral value by a liberal ideology for which ‘thank
yous’ and ‘sorrys’ are necessary to maintain the façade of secular well-being.
Most of us are soaked within liberalism to such an extent, like a fish in water, that we are unable to even
articulate it as a form of life, one
tradition among many, leave alone critique it. These terms are used regularly
within our liberal societies often as a mantra, performing a speech-act, within
the performance of the larger rituals of giving and reparation respectively.
These terms have been commoditised and perform as objects of social transaction
through which social equilibrium is maintained. In the bargain the underlying
processes and significance of a term like gratitude is lost to a generation
that venerates the language of ‘thanks’.
‘Enough critique, come on, spill out the processes and
significance of gratitude that you mention and yet continue to shroud’, you
remark acidly. Of course you don’t believe that I have anything profound to add
to the existing common understanding of ‘gratitude’. But, it’s my turn to
retort, ‘my work is half done, if I have made you think critically about the
term gratitude, something I am sure you have not done in all your voicing of
thanks!’ I exclaim. Without giving room for derision, I start rambling about ‘gratitude’,
of course, hoping, believing, that as the rambling progresses, new
understandings will emerge, evolve, and become articulated. If there were other
ways of renewal and transformation, books would be written on them, or maybe
those books are indeed written and do exist. But even those works can hardly
miss the fact that ramblings are precursors to revelation. I think it would be
wise to cite some evidence for suggesting that one discovers what one wants to
say amidst rambling about it, and that without rambling or writing out, one has
nothing to discover, as there is precisely nothing to discover prior to the act
of discovering which I claim here to be the ‘skill of rambling or writing’. Let
me cite what the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, the present
Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge University, had to say about something
similar to rambling or writing in pursuit of revelation or discovery:
Saunders Lewis, the
Welsh poet, used to quote somebody saying – a child saying – "How do I
know what I think until I see what I say?" and I have always resonated
rather with that. And that means that for me in writing even a straight forward
prose essay or a short book or a lecture, there is that awkward moment when, if
you like, the engine is turning over a bit and you are wondering exactly at
what point you are going to discover what the argument is. That's a warning
really about the first four pages of everything I have ever written! But I
think, again, it will ring bells in some of those who are trying to write.
Writing isn't translating something in here onto the page. Writing is an act.
If it were just transference, no doubt you could plug in the electrodes and
something would neatly type up what was going on inside your head. I hope we
never get to that point and I very much doubt that we ever will. But meanwhile
writing is an act, it is an action of self-discovery and an action of trying to
put something into being and so it is true of prose as with poetry. -
Of course, I have gone on a tangent, to talk about the ‘act
of writing’ while I should be writing about gratitude! However, this detour is
not merely to justify my method or justification for how I aim to think about
gratitude, rather, I claim that in this detour is found insights with regard to
the processes underlying the language of gratitude that I would like to
explicate. I would like to claim that there are three insights in the above
quote about the ‘act of writing’ that reveal the mechanisms underlying the
mantra of gratitude, which has unfortunately been forgotten in our liberal
society that instructs on showering platitudes.
The first insight draws attention to the posture of enquiry preceding and
enveloping the act of writing. Williams, elaborating the point made by the
Welsh poet, Lewis, in ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’
writes, ‘in writing…the engine is turning over a bit and you are wondering
exactly at what point you are going to discover what the argument is.’ The
insight here is about the posture of enquiry that is begging a discovery or a
receiving or a reception. The stress is on the posture of ‘wondering’ in other
words enquiring. I claim that writing is the most evident site of enquiry. When
one picks up a pen to write, or settles one’s fingers over a keyboard, the
primary posture one is adopting, often unconsciously, is the posture of
enquiry. For words to appear and sentences formed, different strategies that come
to horizon begin to articulate, different strands of thought take form, and even
as ink meets paper or keys strike, these strands converge and an enquiry takes
shape. I want to claim further that this posture of enquiry must be treated as
an ontological posture, in which human life is lived. It is a certain
way of being human, and perhaps one could say, that the primal human posture,
irrespective of one’s waistline, is the posture of enquiry.
The second insight consolidates the posture of enquiry into
a visible act of questing, and this
is revealed in the Williams’ idea that ‘writing is an act’. This translates the
‘posture’ of enquiry into a ‘process’ of questing. The process begins with (a)
an acknowledgement that there is nothing ‘inside your head’ that can be ‘neatly
typ[ed] up’. It begins with the recognition of a lack. Recognizing a lack is
not easy, particularly within a liberal tradition, which has neatly packaged
knowledge and truth into ‘propositions’ that can be easily ‘transferred’ from
one to another, accompanied with platitudes. But human life is a life of lack,
a nothingness which seeks to discover and to receive, thus gravitating towards
a gift. But this acknowledgement of lack must immediately be led or channelled
into (b) an ‘act’ of quest, or as Williams puts it, an act of writing. But how
is the act of writing an act of quest? Here Williams gives us a warning about
the first four pages of everything he writes. He reveals that in them one would
find the quest for discovery for the argument or proposition, for the assertion
that he aims to make in his text. In other words, writing is the act of
articulating and clarifying the quest. But how does this happen? The quest
happens in the act of sifting through ideas, thoughts, being brought forward in
memory, finding being even as fingers bang on keys, and thus questing takes
place in the very act of writing. In the beginning of sentences, and the
searching of words, and finding the appropriate words that complete sentences
is an example of a quest in operation. This can be said of the beginning of
paragraphs or even of articles and books, matter of fact any piece that is
being written that they are driven by a quest that regulates the flow of
thoughts and whose immediate satisfaction guarantees the completion of the
piece. Perhaps that is why it is often said that books, be it theses or of any
other genre, are never finished but have to be abandoned, and their endings
have to be artificially constructed as the ontological questing continues to go
on and is never exhausted by the written piece. There is a third element to the
mechanism of questing, which is not explicit in Williams, but implicitly there
by its mention. I am referring to the content of the ‘first four pages’ of what
he writes. The content of these pages would reveal the (c) tradition of enquiry
within which the quest takes place. The interlocutors and the concepts that are
articulated and connected together, fabricated and constructed into Williams’ text
reveal the ‘world of literature’ to which Williams’ own quest belongs and
extends. It reveals the tradition which is not only inhabited by Williams but the
tradition that is working itself out through Williams’ act of writing. It is
both the tradition’s quest as well as a quest beyond the tradition, but only
through the paths laid out by the tradition embodied in the ‘first four pages’ enacted
out through the body of Williams. I am reminded of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s more
or less ‘four-page’ Preface to his
acclaimed work, Until Justice and Peace
Embrace, which neatly lays out the questing reformed tradition, and
Wolterstorff’s own quest embodying that tradition. It is worthwhile to cite
here what he says about writing this book: ‘There is another reason as well for
this emphasis [the emphasis on the Reformed tradition of Christianity] in this
discussion. The Reformed/Presbyterian tradition of Christianity is my own, and
these lectures represent for me an attempt to appropriate its social vision.’
Thus, we find that Wolterstorff reflexively writes that his questing or
‘attempt’ happens within the tradition of Reformed/Presbyterian tradition of
Christianity. He cites a key Heideggerian/Ricoeurian mechanism in operation in
questing: the mechanism of appropriation. He writes, ‘Appropriation of one’s
tradition implies neither uncritical acceptance nor total rejection; it entails
a discriminating adaptation of its features to one’s own situation.’
Appropriation as ‘discriminating adaptation’ of one’s tradition in one’s ‘situation’
of quest is the key insight in Wolterstorff. There is a dual process in
progress in ‘discriminating adaptation’ – on the one hand the act of
‘discriminating’ which resonates with the idea of quest that we have been
elaborating above and on the other hand, the content of ‘adaptation’ refers to
the tradition that quests and through which the quest is embodied. Now, to
summarize the three stages of the act of questing – it begins with (a) an
acknowledgement of a lack, followed by (b) the act of articulating the quest,
which in turn occurs through (c) the mechanism of appropriation within a
tradition of enquiry.
The third and final insight is about the reception of the gift which Williams
articulates as ‘an action of self-discovery and an action of trying to put
something into being’. If we began with the posture of enquiry, of wondering, which
translates into an active questing within a tradition of enquiry driven by the
recognition of a lack then appropriation as ‘discriminating adaptation’ must
culminate with a finding. If the lack is truly felt, and the quest is authentic
in its search, and the mechanism of appropriation is sincerely followed, then
of course, there must be recompense, a satisfaction, a finding. This finding on
one hand has to be a self-finding, because it is the self that is questing and
therefore the discovery and the finding has to be made by the self. It is a
discovery that the self makes or ‘self-discovery’. But where does the content
of the discovery come from? This is where Wolterstorff’s ‘adaptation’ kicks in
and therefore it is equally about bringing ‘something into being’. The being of
the ‘something’ is the content of self-discovery. To make some sense of this we
will have to at least for this moment discard the subject-object divide that we
are trained to think within and see the integrality of ‘self-discovery’ as the
‘being of something’. The being is of course the self’s being in the discovery,
although the ‘something’ that is discovered and gained being has come from
elsewhere. I would like to call it the ‘gift’ – a gift that has been received
in the questing and discovering by the self. The constraint of the gift is the
tradition within which one is questing and the adaptation of the tradition
through multiple processes of dialogue brings the gift into one’s horizon. The
gift is both within the self and without. It is the conjoining of the inside
and the outside due to the nature of our ‘porous’ self, a la Taylor, thus the
reception of the gift and also the limit of the present gift as the gift itself
is contingent on appropriation and indeed future cycles of appropriation and
adaptation are yet to come. I have mentioned the idea of dialogue which I would
like to claim as the deeper mechanism underlying appropriation and adaptation,
but the mention alone would suffice for our purposes here.
I hope I will not be asked – what has this meditation on a
piece of text from Williams, on writing, got anything to do with the rite of giving
and the mantra of gratitude – precisely because, I hope, one has been able to
recognize the inferences that I have already been drawing albeit implicitly
between act of writing and the act of gratitude. But of course, the implicit
will have to become explicit and take being. Therefore in conclusion, I will
revisit the problematic of ‘gratitude’ in light of these three insights from
Williams, with a hope that we can transform gratitude even as authentic
gratitude transforms us.
What the opening vignette failed to reveal was the state of
affairs after two days or after a week of the performance of the ritual of
giving. The evidence of this can be attested by any parent. The doll, however
pretty, is now lying in a corner or under the bed, and the child is waiting for
the next gift, a new toy, a new wonderment to be beheld and embraced. Now, this
is not just about children, we can recognize this boredom with toys, however
expensive or beautiful, in our own selves. What does this ultimately mean – in
spite of the rite of giving and the rituals of gratitude, the gift has not satisfied
one’s quest and longing. Here is where I claim that the liberal teaching of
gratitude in our societies enacted in our vignette cheapens gratitude and plays
a negative role by making invisible the larger process of questing in which the
reception of gifts plays only a minor part. The reception of the gift has to be
seen as an end to one performance, one cycle of questing, a cycle that will
have to be repeated a million times during one’s life time, and each time with
a hope of receiving a better gift. The easy language of gratitude keeps
invisible both the posture of enquiry and the act of questing that precedes the
reception of the gift. So what am I saying? Simply this – No quick ‘thank
yous’, rather a focus on enquiry and quest and probably even an evaluation of
the gift received and its ontological worth. I claim that this will be an
antidote to the superficial gratitude our social exchange is so full of, while often
accompanied with the cheap gratitude is the simultaneous despise for what is
received, precisely for the lack of fulfilment and satisfaction the gift
brings; and no wonder soon, the gift finds its place under our beds. But if the
reception of the gift aligns itself with our enquiry and quest, then even if
the gift has only provisional value, it plays a powerful intermediary through
which the quest progresses, a tradition lived, and life discovered and perhaps
it would be worthwhile for our social rites and rituals to train our children
in precisely these skills which precede the reception of the gift so that the
gift in turn would fulfil its intention in the receiver’s life journey
which itself ought to be seen as a quest of a greater life, a life that is
indeed lived beyond death.
16th November, 2013
Brainerd
Prince
New Delhi
