The Art of Gratitude

Jeremy David Engels

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438469348
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

In The Art of Gratitude, Jeremy David Engels sketches a genealogy of gratitude from the ancient Greeks to the contemporary self-help movement. One of the most striking things about gratitude, Engels finds, is how consistently it is described using the language of indebtedness. A chief purpose of this, he contends, is to make us more comfortable living lives in debt, with the nefarious effect of pacifying the citizenry so we are less likely to speak out about social and economic injustice. To counteract this, he proposes an alternative art of gratitude-as-thanksgiving that is inspired by Indian philosophy, particularly the yoga philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali's Yoga-Sutras. He argues that this art of gratitude can challenge neoliberalism by reorienting our politics away from resentment, anger, and guilt and toward a democratic ethic of thanksgiving and the common good.

1

Words Matter

On the Rhetoric of Emotion

Si c’est la raison qui fait l’homme, c’est le sentiment que le conduit [“If it is by reason that man is made, it is his feelings that guide him”]

—Rousseau

It is often said that it is our capacity for reason or politics or economics that makes us human, but I believe that our humanity is located equally in our ability to feel, and to feel deeply, with tender hearts and open minds. The central lesson of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, according to Martin Heidegger in his early lecture course “Basic Concepts of Aristotelean Philosophy,” is that the world is disclosed to us through our emotions. How we feel shapes how we see, how we act, how we know, what we understand to be true and false.1 If we are resentful or afraid or depressed, we do not experience the same reality as someone who is grateful. Some emotions skew us toward violence and discord. Others encourage us to promote peace, cultivate compassion, and reduce suffering. Interestingly enough, gratitude is both.

In this chapter, I navigate a middle ground between those who sharply distinguish affect from emotion by describing a rhetorical approach to the study of emotions. Such an approach denies that our emotional reality is biologically predetermined, as scholars of affect often argue. Our words, and our thoughts matter, for they shape our emotions. At the same time, our emotions are not strictly private, nor are they solely ours. Emotions exist in the world.2 Emotions are part of our landscape. Emotions are contagious and catchy. The question is not if we are feeling something—as Heidegger argues, we are always in an emotional state. What matters is what we are feeling and what we do with the emotions we feel.

In his Rhetoric, Aristotle describes three ways a speaker can persuade an audience: with logic, with credibility, and with emotion.3 Emotion is one of the three pillars of all communication, teamwork, and leadership. There is no rhetoric without emotion. Yet Aristotle elevates emotion above strategy. For him, human being is emotional. In the rhetorical tradition, there is no overestimating the power of emotion.

The Greek word for emotion, “πάθος” (pathos) is closely related to the verb “πάσχω,” to “experience” or “suffer.” Colloquially in classical Greek, pathos is “what befalls a person, often in the negative sense of an accident or misfortune.”4 However, one of the great philosophical errors, according to Heidegger, is to presume that humans are rational animals that, from time to time, suffer an emotion. We cannot, for Heidegger, engage the world from a purely rational point of view because humans are “always-already” emotional.5 Heidegger notes that Aristotle speaks of emotion using the word “διάθεση,” (disposition), from the related Greek verb meaning to dispose, to incline, and to arrange.6 Διάθεση is the root of the English word “diathesis,” which connotes a constitutional predisposition or tendency. By employing this word, Aristotle draws out a deeper meaning of pathos. Emotions do more than influence us, though they of course do that; emotions dispose us to the world and incline us to see reality in particular ways. Emotions are like a pair of funhouse glasses that we put on and that then determines what we see and how we see it—except that we can never take off these glasses, for they are permanent.

The enduring insight of Aristotle’s Rhetoric is that our emotions shape our worldview. When we are resentful, we see everything as an offense or an injury, and we go in search of people to blame. When afraid, we fixate on danger, seeing it everywhere, around every corner. When depressed, everything looks cold and grey, even the best meals lack flavor, and our favorite pastimes bring no mirth. When grateful—well, we will discuss gratitude in the coming chapters. The point is that no one judges matters evenly, for each of us sees the world through the lens of our emotions.

To talk emotion is to talk power. It is also to talk exclusion. The very same Aristotle who wrote the Rhetoric famously declared in his Nicomachean Ethics (1.13) that humans are characterized by a rational principle (λόγον ἔχον) that raises them above the level of plants and other animals. Medieval scholastics claimed that humans are the animal rationale.7 In this tradition, it is reason, and reason alone, that makes us properly human. The Enlightenment was premised on a stark antithesis between reason and emotion (in contrast to Aristotle, who saw logos and pathos as argumentative allies)—an antithesis that continues to play an important role in contemporary psychology.8 René Descartes posited a strict dichotomy between mind and body, and also between reason and emotion. Generally, outside of its dark alchemical, occult margins, and setting aside the powerful voices of Romanticism, the philosophers of the Enlightenment prized reason over emotion and, in fact, often defined reason in opposition to emotion. Reason was viewed as active, cold, and calculative, whereas emotion was a reactive, bodily, animal, mechanical, affective experience so powerful that it could completely overwhelm the mind, rendering even the smartest people passive before its great power. The privileging of reason has historically been associated with a fervent, at times almost evangelical, denigration of emotion. “Too emotional” has long been one of the chief justifications used by those in power to exclude individuals and, at times, whole classes of people, from the public sphere and render them politically mute.

Our political system in the United States is founded on a deep fear of public emotion. The founders of the United States faced what I have elsewhere called “the dilemmas of American nationalism,” namely that they were attempting to uphold order against the very same populist, democratic violence that they helped to incite in order to win the Revolutionary War.9 The founders were obsessed with how to calm popular emotions that lead to violence and to cultivate in their place contrasting emotions that would promote order and stability. Early defenders of the Constitution proudly touted it as establishing the first government in human history that could successfully prevent rowdy, unpredictable, destabilizing emotions from gripping the public and roiling the masses into mob violence.10 Emotion, Alexander Hamilton claimed, was a “contagion” and a “cancer.”11 During the ratification debate of 1787−1788, James Madison scolded the anti-federalists by announcing that if Americans rejected the Constitution, “the passions, therefore, not the reason, of the public would sit in judgment. But it is the reason of the public alone that ought to control and regulate the government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.”12 Ideally, Madison affirmed, Americans would be calm, cool, collected, and abide only “the mild voice of reason.”13 Yet people were far from perfect. And so Madison, one of the chief architects of the United States government, informed Americans that it was the job of government both to regulate and to control the passions of the people so that they would see—and also feel—the world as they were told. By controlling public emotions, Madison believed that American leaders could also control the violence of faction and tame the terrors of democracy.

The Enlightenment gave voice to fears long associated with democracy, which, according to its critics, was akin to anarchy, for it encouraged citizens to irrationally follow their desires and emotions to the point of violence.14 As the United States became more democratic in the 1820s and 1830s, prominent pedagogues railed against passionate speech as they attempted to reeducate Americans in the ways of reason.15 “There is something so cool, manly and respectable in convincing, in addressing one’s-self to pure, clear reason or judgment,” Edward Tyrell Channing, the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, proclaimed.16 Here, Channing followed Richard Whately’s popular Elements of Rhetoric (1828), which argued that while rhetors must sometimes employ emotion in their arguments, nevertheless emotion always should be kept under the control of reason lest the audience lose their minds.17

Of course, when Channing said “manly,” he meant it—for far too long women were excluded from American politics for being too emotional, as were many minority groups unable to live up to the standards of “decorous” speech delineated by power brokers like Channing.18 These groups were ostracized because those in power claimed they were unable to control their emotions. Even today, emotions continue to be a political battlefield. A grave mistrust of emotion underlines how many politicians and also many scholars conceptualize democracy and deliberation: we are told to give reasons, and to keep our feelings to ourselves.19 The attempt to purify democratic discussion and politics of emotion weakens citizens and denies one of the deepest, most human parts of ourselves.

Ignore the emotions at your peril. Those in positions of power certainly do not. From cradle to grave, we live per fas et nefas—our emotional lives are carefully regulated. As youngsters we learn how to feel and how not to feel and how to appropriately express these feelings. Power operates on and through our emotions, and so it is vital that we, as citizens of the United States and human beings, attend to our emotional lives, for we cannot engage the world unemotionally. For those of us who are educators, we must do a better job of teaching our students to care for their emotional lives. Generally we treat our students like “brains on a stick”—but our students have bodies and feelings that they must attend to if they are to be capable participants in the world. Chris Uhl observes, “The separation of mind and body—that is, the denial of the feeling body—within schools and classrooms constricts learning and is stultifying to the human spirit.”20 To prepare our students to face the challenges of citizenship, we must rewrite the common script associated with American democracy; we must stop asking how to purge democracy of emotion, and instead begin asking how to cultivate emotions (like gratitude, compassion, reverence, and love) that are productive of democratic virtue.

Kenneth Burke defined humans as “the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal.”21 It is our capacity to communicate (and miscommunicate) that makes us human for Burke. How we feel shapes how we speak—and as the Bible says, death and life are in the power of the tongue. Heedless, selfish words stab like a sword, but the words of the wise are health, for they bring suffering to an end. Though our emotions shape our words, it is equally true that our words shape our emotions. This is rhetoric’s greatest power: it can change an audience’s emotional reality, and with it, their disposition toward the world.

There is a debate in contemporary psychology concerning emotions between biological determinists, who argue that our emotional reality is biologically determined and who seek to tie emotions to activity in particular regions of the brain, and social constructivists, who agree that emotions are rooted in biology but who view emotions as social because the structure and function of the brain is influenced by language and culture.22 Clearly, social constructivism creates space for rhetoric in a way that biological determinism does not. Contemporary psychologists, especially those who study the relationship between mindfulness and well-being, recognize that it is even possible to change the biology of our brains. Neuropsychologists call this the principle of “neuroplasticity.”23 Humans are biological creatures, but that biology is not fixed at adulthood. It, like everything else, can be changed with focus, attention, and practice.24 Though psychologists generally do not use the word rhetoric, the art of rhetoric is foundational to therapeutic practices including Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR): by reframing the narrative of what is happening in our lives, and learning to think and speak differently, it is possible to change how we feel, reducing stress, promoting resilience, and increasing overall well-being.25 CBT and MBSR could revitalize how rhetorical scholars understand “the narrative paradigm,” for these targeted narrative interventions demonstrate the power of rhetoric to reshape our emotions and hence our outlook on life.26

Words can alter our emotions, and for this reason I understand the serious critical, historical, and philosophical study of rhetoric as a foundational practice of the care of the self. When speaking of the care of the self, I am inspired by the work that philosopher Michel Foucault undertook at the end of his life.27 For much of his career, Foucault maintained that individuals are utterly insignificant. He asserted that modern forms of power function to promote the mass fabrication of individuals, and thus to study modernity is to study the myriad ways that humans are made into subjects of particular regimes of power and discourse. Foucault had no patience for humanism. He chided Jean-P...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Gratitude’s Keywords
• Chapter 1 Words Matter: On the Rhetoric of Emotion
• Chapter 2 From “Charis” to “Gratia”: On the Political Origins of the Debt of Gratitude
• Chapter 3 “Gratitudo”: On Christian Gratitude and Existential Debt
• Chapter 4 “Indebted”: On the Contemporary Gratitude Literature
• Chapter 5 “Santosha”: On the Yoga of Gratitude
• Conclusion The Politics of a Sunset: From Gratefulness to the Common Good
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover