What is Gratitude?
Three CAS experts weigh in on what it means to be grateful
What is gratitude? Is it more than just feeling thankful? What does it mean to be grateful, even in troubling times? How do we express our gratitude when we’re faced with challenges, hardships, and hopelessness?
Gratitude is a reflection and a tool—a way of seeing the world and a means to navigate the world. It is the recognition and appreciation of what is good in our lives—relationships, experiences, opportunities, and even the small moments we often take for granted. Gratitude doesn’t erase difficulty, but it can shift our perspective, helping us find meaning, hope, and resilience. It can be a way of staying grounded and connected, even when faced with life’s uncertainties.
As we approach Thanksgiving and the season of giving, we asked three faculty members from three different disciplines to reflect on a big question: “What is gratitude?”
Victor Kumar, associate professor of philosophy and director of the interdisciplinary Mind and Morality Lab. He is interested in cognitive science, evolutionary theory, and how these fields reshape our understanding of individuals and societies. He teaches and speaks about feminism, philosophy of race, and social justice. His book, A Better Ape, was published in April 2022.
Zsuzsanna Varhelyi is an associate professor of classical studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor. Her scholarship focuses on individuality and selfhood in the Roman empire. She has published on human sacrifice and post-traumatic stress among Roman soldiers, gender and domesticity, and ancient literacy, as well as other topics. She teaches a course entitled “What is a good life?”
Karl Kirchwey is a professor of English and creative writing. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing as well as in the departments of English and Classics, and he also teaches Literary Translation. His eighth book of poems, Good Apothecary, is forthcoming in 2025.
Victor Kumar, associate professor of philosophy
Gratitude is what we feel when someone gives us something valuable or makes a sacrifice for our sake—when a friend helps us move apartments or a stranger returns our lost wallet. The feeling inspires us to reciprocate, to sacrifice in turn.
Gratitude is in short supply these days—not because we are more entitled, but because we inhabit a fundamentally different kind of society than those of decades and centuries past. Our predecessors depended intimately on one another in everyday life. Today, in wealthy nations free from grinding poverty and rampant oppression, economic development and the rule of law have generated a surplus of autonomy and a deficit of material want.
We rely on others for economic exchange, true—but what we depend on is their self-interest and basic decency. And of course, there are still plenty of opportunities to feel gratitude toward our family and friends. Yet beyond our immediate social circles, dependency on others’ generosity or self-sacrifice appears to have vanished.
This independence is an illusion. Our deepest debts are to the generations who came before us and made our prosperity and freedom possible.
Consider the scientists who spent decades on research that led to life-saving medicines, the teachers who lived on modest salaries while building our public education systems, the civil rights activists who endured violence and imprisonment to secure basic freedoms, and the countless citizens who volunteered their time to forge the civic institutions we take for granted.
We owe these people everything, yet they are no longer around for us to repay.
Gratitude calls for us to give to future generations in turn. Most urgently, we must accelerate efforts to fight climate change and other forms of environmental degradation. But we can pay it forward in countless other ways: by making our research openly accessible rather than hiding it behind paywalls, by choosing careers that serve public interests over personal enrichment, or by defending academic freedom even when it invites controversy and alienation. Like our predecessors, we must be willing to plant trees under whose shade we will never sit.
True gratitude means recognizing that we are merely stewards of their legacy. We honor their gift not by clinging to what we have inherited, but by building something even better for the people who will follow us, so that we will deserve as much gratitude as those who came before.
Zsuzsanna Varhelyi, associate professor of classical studies and National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor
The ancient myth of Midas is often cited in the 21st century for prefiguring the brilliant entrepreneur whose every venture turns into, so to say, gold—but there is another powerful message included in this story about gratitude.
As he is depicted in Book XI of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Midas was a king in Phrygia, who came upon the satyr Silenus and entertained him in his court for ten days and nights. Silenus had wondered off from his foster-son, the god Dionysus, and the god was very grateful when Midas helped Silenus return to his proper home. Following the powerful ancient Greek ethos of reciprocity, Dionysus offered the king to fulfill one wish of his choosing.
It is in this context that Midas gives his famous answer: “Grant that whatsoever I may touch is turned into yellow gold.” (Ov. Met. XI. 102-3.) Remarkably, although Dionysus fulfills the wish, he does so while grieving what he sees as a terrible choice. Midas, at first happy, rejoices in his new ability touching and turning everything into gold. When he tries to have his dinner however, he realizes the problem. He is not able to eat or drink as bread and wine are equally turned into gold. It is only upon returning to Dionysus that Midas is granted one more wish and can revert to his former self.
On this ancient telling, Midas’ golden touch is as much a boon as a curse. It suggests that while the god, Dionysus, acts on his gratitude to reward Midas, the king uses this reciprocity in the wrong way: by asking for something surpassing human limits. In this, he joins other famous ancient mythological figures, such as Tithonus, the Trojan prince.
Tithonus, with the help of his divine lover Eos (Dawn), sought immortality from Zeus, which was granted–but they have failed to ask for eternal youth, and thus Tithonus withered away in immense old age, but never died. Neither Midas nor Tithonus sought something that truly befitted them, and in Aristotle’s version, Midas never reverts to his former self, but ends up dying of hunger, unable to eat anything as it all turns into gold.
The story of Midas is thus also a meditation about our human condition and our ultimately fruitless desire for More. It reminds us to be grateful for what we have and to wish for what is truly fitting to our humanity. If we do otherwise, we could in fact develop that special power, the “golden touch,” that may seem very appealing, yet it leads to a tragic outcome. In what is probably the most famous American re-telling of the story, by the 19th-century writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Midas realizes the mistake of his original wish in an especially telling way, when he tries to hug his daughter—who, of course, turns into a gold statue on the spot. Even the highly ambitious king would prefer to have his daughter alive over all the gold he could ever wish for.
Contemplating gratitude thus allows us to contemplate the condition of humanity, and, in fact, the humanity of each of us in a social world in which cannot exist alone. The German sociologist of the early 20th century, Georg Simmel, called gratitude “the moral memory of mankind.” He suggested that when we express our gratitude to another, we are grateful not only for what we have received, but for the experience of another caring for us. Beyond the transactional give and take, gratitude is thus a recognition of another, and of their humanity, which we can embrace without turning them, or the world, into gold.
Karl Kirchwey, professor English and creative writing
Gratitude has nothing to do with Thanksgiving, or with the white turkeys in a pen not far from our house in upstate NY, one of which we will eat for Thanksgiving, or with the spring of fresh water in North Truro, MA that the colonist Myles Standish and his band from the Mayflower discovered after their first night or two on American soil in November of 1620. This is true although gratitude may take as its basic object water to slake thirst or food to still hunger.
Gratitude also has nothing to do with saying “Thank you.” A prickly and gifted poet, translator and lexicographer once reproved me for thanking him for a compliment he paid my work. “You should never say thank you,” he said.
Gratitude is best left unvoiced, as a prayer might be, and should be reserved for the most profound things in this life. When Handel finished composing his oratorio Messiah in twenty-four days in the summer of 1741, it is said that he fell on his knees and thanked God. I imagine he felt gratitude for the gift he had been given.
Gratitude is for our love, or for our children. Remembering a friend killed in the Vietnam War, fiction and nonfiction writer Tobias Wolff remarks,
The things the rest of us know, he will not know. He will not know what it is
to make a life with someone else. To have a child slip in beside him as he
lies reading on a Sunday morning. To work at, and then look back on,
a labor of years….
To know such things as these is to feel gratitude.
The poet George Herbert felt gratitude when he wrote “The Flower,” only published in 1633 after his death, including these lines:
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my onely light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.
Gratitude is for untroubled aging, if such a thing exists; for unclouded memory, and for the fortitude to confront what unclouded memory brings, which is both grief and joy.