gratitude agency affordances JECP 2016

Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”

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Gratitude. Agency. Affordances. Fear, 感谢, and Salt-Hearted Withering

A Thanksgiving Day 2016 Letter from Shanghai, on the Subject of Gratitude

© J Ellis Cameron-Perry, PhD 2016

[email protected]

ABSTRACT We perhaps take too narrow a view of gratitude if we contemplate it solely or even chiefly from

the perspective of interpersonal transactions, or assume that what is most distinctive about gratitude is that

it is as an outward-reaching affective state, launched from and guided by human empathy and its Other-

seeking tendrils. If there is a causal relationship between, say, (a) amenability to experiential gratitude (etc.)

and (b) “subjective well-being” (etc.), then we might learn more about it by asking questions about an

individual’s sense of agency and his beliefs about the limitations of his efficacy as an agent. An inability

(whatever its cause or provenance) to apprehend a life-hazard as a hazard debrides everyday life of

opportunities to see in bolder relief both the limits of one’s agency and the non-immunity one has to loss. I

begin with an intentional misreading of ganxie (感谢 grateful/to be grateful) as salty-heart + withering in

order to contextualize an ecological analysis of the feeling of gratitude. I conclude by looking at gratitude

through one of the key framing-assumptions of ecological psychology (affordances), and suggesting why it

may be profitable to reconsider gratitude as a cultivated response to affordances, through which affordances

one learns more about one’s efficacy as an agent, and more about one’s vulnerability to hazard.

KEY WORDS: gratitude, affordances, relief, near-misses, fear, Chinese culture

KEY CHINESE TERMS: gan 感, xie 谢, ganxie 感谢, gan’en 感恩

KEY NAMES: Seneca, Nietzsche, JJ Gibson, Eleanor J Gibson, Martha Nussbaum, Edward S Reed, M E McCulloch, Mathew B Crawford

At such moments, the possibilities for beautiful human action in the world as it is – the undiscovered possibilities of fit – seem inexhaustible. … This can inspire wonder and gratitude: the most creditable of religious institutions is available within a this-worldly ethics of attention. For there does seem to be something benevolent in the disposition of things, relative to us. Such are the rules of gravity and buoyancy that surfing is possible. That’s the kind of universe we inhabit. Being alert to such possibilities and giving their occurrence in the world their due in wonder: to encounter things in this way is basically erotic, in the sense that we are drawn out of ourselves toward beauty.

Matthew B Crawford (2015) The World Beyond Your Head, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, p.254

The eros of everyday experience, the joy of lived experience, is simply the love of life, the pleasure of encounter and use. Eros is intrinsic to our encounters with objects and situations; it is neither a surrogate for anything else nor a subjective feeling. Because everyday experience is intrinsically full of feeling and based on a variety of motives – because it is erotic, if one can recapture the original meaning of the word – it is alive and can grow.

Edward S Reed (1996) The Necessity of Experience, Yale University Press, New Haven, p.124


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Bling and You’ll Miss It: Conspicuous Consumption and the Glittering Ouroboros

So far as Thanksgiving mornings go, this was a good one. The construction

crews working simultaneously on both the exterior of my building and the

unfinished shell of a flat next-door started later than usual. I do not know

what, exactly, they are doing to the façade of our tower, but it involves a gang

of four hovering around my fifth-floor window making noise and dust.

Radiating inwards from all sides, the whiz and whine of power-tools

reverberate throughout my 55 square meter eyrie nine hours a day, every day.

The steep overnight drop in temperature might have something to do with the

workers’ late start. Thanksgiving Day was the coldest day in these latitudes

ever since a mild-mannered Autumn began nudging a tenacious Summer into

the realm of balmier memories. It was cool, clear, dry, and windless, and

Shanghai is rarely all four at once. Where it succeeded in dodging the high-

rises, the sun shot sharp warm shards through the chronic haze of filthy

particulates and fluorocarbons. This, and the bright and cheery crack of

winter’s whip sent people outdoors. Down at street-level it did indeed feel

more festive than November’s three previous Thursdays. My own ecological

niche is smack in the middle of fashionista Ground Zero, and the fashion-

conscious people of metropolitan Shanghai were celebrating. Not celebrating

Thanksgiving Day, or gratitude, but their new winter ensembles – the coats,

hats, scarves, boots, bags, and gloves they bought on “11/11.”1

They were celebrating consumption, in a city built upon it.

The gold leaf atop of Jing’an Temple shimmered in the sun, glistening like the

scales of a gilded ouroborus -- choking to death.

1 “11/11” (shiyi shiyi 十一十一) is China’s equivalent of “Black Friday” and falls on the eleventh of

November. Once upon a time, and not too long ago, “11/11” was simply “Singles’ Day” (the ones

representing not being pair-bonded). But not anymore.

See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/black-friday/0/what-is-chinas-singles-day-and-how-does-it-compare-to-

black-frid/ and, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ahylee/2016/11/07/how-alibaba-turned-chinas-singles-day-into-

the-worlds-biggest-shopping-bonanza/#7addc5b620ba.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/black-friday/0/what-is-chinas-singles-day-and-how-does-it-compare-to-black-frid/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/black-friday/0/what-is-chinas-singles-day-and-how-does-it-compare-to-black-frid/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ahylee/2016/11/07/how-alibaba-turned-chinas-singles-day-into-the-worlds-biggest-shopping-bonanza/#7addc5b620ba

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ahylee/2016/11/07/how-alibaba-turned-chinas-singles-day-into-the-worlds-biggest-shopping-bonanza/#7addc5b620ba


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Polite Refusals

The Chinese for Thanksgiving is gan’enjie (感恩节), which may be parsed-out as

“Feeling-Kindness Festival.” That last character, jie, is alternately rendered ‘festival’

or ‘holiday.’ Christmas is shengdanjie (圣诞节, God-Born Festival), Easter is fuhuojie

(复活节, Resurrection Festival), and Halloween is wanshengjie (万圣节, 10,000 [‘All’]

Gods Festival).

The first character in gan’enjie, gan (感), is perhaps best rendered as to feel.2 The second

character, en (恩), can be translated into English as ‘kindness.’ De-parceled, the

constituent parts (radicals) of these two characters tell a lovely story, as many

Chinese characters do, even in their simplified forms. The top-half of gan 感 is xian

咸, which is in some instances used to mean ‘all’.3 It can however also refer to

something which is salted, as in xian cai 咸菜, ‘salted (pickled) vegetables.’ Beneath

xian 咸 is xin 心, ‘heart.’

I presume that the character gan was constructed so as to communicate ‘all-heart.’

And yet (I’m just playing here) the earlier peoples of China could have seen in gan 感

‘salted-heart,’ viz., a seasoned or preserved and therefore a non-perishable heart. In

Italian, salle nella testa (‘salted-head’) is a term of approbation, an allusion to wisdom: a

salted head is one which has endured through time, gained knowledge, and preserved

the fruits of experience. I see no reason why ‘salted-heart’ couldn’t imply much the

same thing.4

And then again, since gan communicates what Anglophones call ‘feeling,’ there is the

possibility too that salted + heart (once upon a time) recommended itself for the same

reason that one speaks of pouring salt into an open wound. (That certainly feels like

something.) If this sounds farfetched, consider that we translate fierce as meng 猛

(commonly: menglie 猛烈), which consists of the radicals for ‘dog’ (gou 狗), ‘child’ (zi

子) and ‘dish’ (min 皿). I’ve been told that I’m overreaching by reading ‘fierce’/meng

as “dog and child trying to eat from the same plate,” and I probably am. But I’m not

having a Quentin Tarantino moment when I see lots of visual parity between ‘blood’

(xue 血) and ‘dish’ (min 皿).

The en 恩 invites much less ludic guesswork. As with gan 感, the bottom half is xin

心, heart, and the top is yin因, ‘because of’ (as in yinwei 因为, ‘because/on account

2 For reference: ganjue (感觉) = feeling (emotionally); gandong (感动) = to be moved (emotionally); ganxie

(感谢) thankful or grateful, which consists of gan and the character for ‘to thank.’ xiexie (谢谢) = ‘thank

you.’ 3 Compare, for example supra “All Gods Day” (Halloween), wanshengjie万圣节. The numerical unit 10,000

(wan 万) is sometimes used to mean ‘all’ in the sense of ‘all that is’ (cf the use in Laozi), or ‘a lot.’ 4 ‘Heart’ (xin 心) is often used the way English language users would use the word ‘mind,’ hence the Chinese

for psychology: xinlixue 心理学, ‘the study of what’s in the heart.”


4

of’). We could think of Thanksgiving, then, as “All-Heart-Because-of-Heart Festival.”

It is rather a mouthful, but by embracing the characters on these terms (which I

doubt anyone ever does) we get nearer to the robust (or is it merely hopeful?)

Anglophone conception of gratitude than we do with ganxie, “grateful.”

Why? The xie 谢 , which is used in xiexie (谢谢 , ‘thank you’) and ganxie (感谢 ,

‘grateful’) means ‘to decline,’ in the sense of to refuse; and if I am not

misunderstanding my sources, xie 谢 in a botanical/agricultural context means ‘to

wither.’ Maybe it is perforce of the use-meaning of xiexie (谢谢 thank you) that

ganxie (感谢) is grasped as ‘feeling-thanks’ and not ‘feeling-refusal’ or ‘the feeling of

withering.’ In connection with this epistle on gratitude, however, it is precisely this

intentionally playful misreading (ganxie 感谢 as ‘feel-wither’) I wish briefly to explore.

I should make it clear that the text you are now reading is intended as a friendly

philosophical missive - a collegial essai, fresh and warm with Thanksgiving gan’en, and

not a research paper (as we generally understand these things). Before getting around

to affordances and withering-hearts, I’m going to leverage my holiday-infused

neighborly intentions as an excuse for telling you a bit about my previous enquiries

into the nature of gratitude. They are relevant.

Some Pulses Have Hearts

In the early winter of 1996, and perhaps around the time that my family back in the

United States were thawing turkeys and preparing to smash yams and potatoes and

cranberries into sturdy, spoonable seasonal dishes, my local greengrocer on St

Machar’s Road, Aberdeen, graciously let me off the hook when I was a couple of

pounds short. Some might deem this a very small gesture; and, since I was a regular

customer, perhaps the grocer’s generosity was due both to his fully-warranted

expectation that I’d pay next time, and his wish not to inconvenience himself by

recalculating my purchase and dealing with my re-disruption of stock once I’d

returned a few loose eggs, leeks, and a small collection of dried pulses. But whatever

the case may have been, I was moved, and I thanked him enthusiastically, perhaps to

the point of exaggeration.5

A moment subsequent, in exiting the shop, I had the opportunity to hold open the

door for an incoming patron. Damp from a lashing rain, with a formidable bag

hanging heavy from her arm, she was attempting to reach for the handle of the door

while simultaneously closing her umbrella. My effort cost me a still smack of the

Granite City’s granite-like raindrops (it delayed the opening of my own umbrella),

but I received a smile and a thank-you in the lingua franca. Being Aberdeen, it was

probably a slightly shrill cheers or blunt ta. I forget which. But she thanked me.

5 ‘Moved’ in this sense translates nicely in Chinese: gandong (感动), dong 动 suggesting movement, both in

the sense of exercise (yundong 运动) and as an event in which people participate (huodong 活动).


5

I slogged up the road in a cold North Sea downpour, thinking about my giving-of-

thanks to the grocer, and about the thanks given to me by the patron for whom I

held open the door. In the trudge up St Machar’s Road with my leeks and dried

pulses, I attended (for the first time) to the difference between (a) acting so as to

conform to or comply with local cultural conventions regarding protocol for saying

“thank-you,” and (b) saying “thank you” in order to express one’s being moved. By the

time I turned right into The Channonry and made my way towards St Machar’s

Cathedral, I was reasonably confident of the following: whereas my fellow patron

was both conforming to cultural conventions for thanks-saying and probably

sincerely giving-thanks, my own thanks-giving to the grocer merely coincided with

conventional and ritualistic thanks-expression; it was a report of how I felt on account

of his beneficence, and not a ritualistic reaction based on the nature of our

transaction; and, though it would have been inappropriate in the circumstances not to

say ‘thank-you’ to him (or: her to me), even my thrice iterated ‘thank you’ was, from

my position at the time, barely adequate to express how much his gesture moved me.

Considered in this way, the convention of ritualized, automated thanks-saying deprived

my saying-thanks from communicating much. Protocol required I say thanks, but it

was something else which moved me to wish to report on how his kindness (恩)

affected me. From this, I concluded,

(1) that not every ‘thank-you’ necessarily expresses gratitude – viz., is not

necessarily a report that one is grateful;

(2) that saying ‘thank you’ merely is often insufficient to express adequately

one’s grateful feelings; and,

(3) that

(3.1) the absence of a proper susceptibility to the experience of grateful feelings,

and

(3.2) the lack of a sufficiently strong impulse (or susceptibility to being moved) to make

sure that there is such a report, thus ensuring that the expression of gratitude is not

confused with the merely conventional “thank you”-gesture, could possibly be

an indication of…

…well, an indication of what?

In 1999 I presented my one and only paper on the subject of gratitude, at a sparsely-

attended colloquium, at an American university you are unlikely to have heard of. I

addressed specifically ingratitude as treated by Seneca in De Benificiis, and if I

remember rightly I focused on those sections in which Seneca is analyzing the

question Can a son outdo his father’s beneficence? Can a son be more of a benefactor to his father

than the father is to the son? It was nearly a decade later, in half-turning once again to the

subject, that I discovered the work of McCulloch et al. (2001). I was pleased to see

Seneca quoted at the top of that paper.


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Gratitude and Relief: The Thin Edge of the Slippery Slope

The 1999 paper (“No vice more odious: Seneca and Ingratitude”), though, owed less

to the kind greengrocer than it did to my nearly crushing my daughter to death by

accident, on a footpath in Edinburgh.

The idea wasn’t merely to take my daughter with me on my walk up Calton Hill, but

rather to start as early as possible sharing life with her, and experiencing things

together. She was dressed snugly and strapped securely into one of those papoose

contrivances that one wears like a backwards backpack, and I fancied her safer there,

close to my chest and just beneath my chin, than she was in the outrageously

expensive car seat which cradled her during our short drive from Randloph Square.

I walked slowly, and with care, and kept a vigilant grip on my walking stick. We were

no more than fifteen or so steps up the hill when, ascending the next step, I slipped.

For an instant, the sole of my shoe – the shoes I’m wearing at the moment, I just

now notice - had all the traction of a frozen stick of butter on a ramp of solid ice, of

hot motor oil on cold marble. In failing to make a secure landing, the unusual chest-

heavy distribution of my bodyweight threw me off-balance more than it should have.

I moved fast -- forward, and downward. To counteract the lunge, I whipped my

arms back, but I did so with too much panicky vehemence. I rocked to the right and

wobbled nearly off the steps and onto the greasy slope of Calton Hill, throbbing with

the horrible awareness that a minor spill for me could crush my infant daughter. The

lateral hyperextension of my right hand had positioned my walking stick nicely

perpendicular to the hill. The tip of the stick did not plunge deep into the topsoil,

and with a sturdy shove – something between a push and a poke – I tilted us upright,

allowing me a millisecond’s worth of balance and the sense that I wasn’t rolling off

the stairs. This was just enough to get my feet flat and steady on the step. The

grotesque choreography ended when I brought my left arm around the back of my

daughter, and kissed her forehead. We were ok. She seemed not to notice how very

near we were to being very far from ok.

All of this happened in less time than it took you to read about it. I don’t remember

exactly what I thought when I paused to assess what happened and shiver over what

might have been; but I do remember what I felt, and that was relief. I probably

expressed that feeling of relief by muttering a phrase spiced-up with an obscenity or

two, sotto voce, my face twitching with that weird wild-eyed half-smile one has at such

times, those times when we dodge disaster, or disaster dodges us, for reasons we do

not immediately comprehend. I very likely thought Thank Christ!, but thought it in

the profane rather than sacred sense. I do remember walking back down the hill,

very slowly, my left hand holding my daughter close to me, the tip of my walking

stick reaching each step a tiny bit in advance of my right foot.


7

The layers of her papoose-type rig, my waxed jacked, and the strata of wool between

by breast and my Barbour may have baffled the outbound report a tachycardic

heartbeat. But it throbbed in my ears all the way home.

Remembering it, my salty heart beats fast now, too.

Benefits Without Benefactors:

Gratitude Adrift

One should not allow adrenaline to determine entirely either the form or content of

a philosophical investigation; but sometimes one might be wrong not to let

adrenaline write the first line or two. On the slippery slope of Calton Hill, I felt

gratitude, and I was grateful that none of the very possible and very terrible outcomes

had materialized. But back at home I knew that this was the adrenaline speaking,

speaking to me in or at least through the language of layers of convention and a

lifetime of habit.

My own beliefs regarding a transcendent or trans-immanent omnipotent being - that

deus with the ever-ready machina, personally involved in keeping us out of the ER and

the obituary column - are such that I did not think my daughter had been saved. But

however I chose to identify my feelings and their causes, I knew I was constrained

somewhat by a repertoire of old, well-traveled speech-acts. In these sorts of near-

miss cases there are only a few ways to talk (to oneself or others) about the character

of the feeling of relief, about how it feels to feel that way.

It seems to me that, at such times, we cannot much help slipping into terms

indissolubly mixed-up with long standing conventions and dog-eared scripts for both

politeness and prayer – irrespective of one’s efforts to adhere to custom or to creed.

These are core components of a language many of us learn or at least pick-up

throughout childhood, the language of civility and courtesy. For some of us, these are

partially bundled into (or wholly enmeshed with) scripts for the rules of engagement

when courting the Omnipotent. Please. Thank you. I beseech thee. There might not be

any atheists in foxholes, but whether there are or not I’ve heard my share of atheists

say Thank God, and mean it as sincerely as they didn’t. She wasn’t saved, but I was

relived, and I felt fortunate. But it could not have been gratitude I was feeling. Or was

it? Could it have been?

Here’s a point which perhaps does not nowadays require too much emphasis,

especially in a letter to experts, but I’m going to make it anyway. Children learn from

adults to say thank you when they are given something, or when they are the targeted

beneficiaries of some service. Efforts to install the good habit of saying “thank you”

begin before the children themselves understand in any complex way the transaction

between beneficiary and benefactor, before they know what the words ‘beneficiary’

and ‘benefactor’ and ‘transaction’ mean. (Daddy? What’s an ‘etymology’?”) What’s more,

they learn to say “thank you” even when the thing they’re given or service rendered


8

unto them does not bring joy. The rules of the convention are simple, and one-

dimensional: if someone gives you something, or does something for you, then you

say “thank you.” You say “thank you” even if it is something you do not like or do

not want. You say “thank you” even if it is a service you do not fully appreciate or

understand as a service, and even if it brings you fear, discomfort, or pain. I was

taught to say thank you to the dentist after he drilled out my cavities and left my

mouth sore and lips numb. I thanked the barber, even though I hated my haircut

almost as much as I was creeped-out by the barber’s hairy knuckles, annoyed by his

AM radio, and nauseated by the stink of Clubman talc.

Eventually, though, the courtesy-convention begins to make sense to most children,

and one day the thank-you recalcitrant child reveals himself a kid prone to outright

exuberance in his thanks-saying – at least when he is a genuinely happy beneficiary.

He’ll thank you to death for the jackknife, and do his best to seem sincere in

thanking you for the limited-edition Hummel figure. It is as if he suddenly grasps a

big chunk of what all this “thank you” stuff is about. The awkward and almost

grudging cordiality of a child’s forced “thank you” – forced, because it is not a report

of happiness - gradually warms-up a bit, even if he’s yet to master squelching signs of

honest, unprocessed dissatisfaction or disappointment.6

Observe and Rapport

Acknowledgment of the intentions of benef-actors (or, of persons in the benefactor

role), and some appreciation of their feelings, might be essential to this grasping and

warming-up. Along the road to being grateful, youth learn to be gracious, or, graceful;

and gracefulness begins to take a bite out of self-centeredness when one begins to

understand some of the values involved in beneficent-acting. The youth and the adult

still slink out of the dentist’s chair in great discomfort; but once he understands the

value of the dentist’s skill and service (and grasps the value of braces, gum-scrapings,

and root canals), the thanks-saying is sincere in a way it wasn’t in childhood. If

everything goes well, the thanks-saying becomes a real thanks-giving – an expression

of gratitude (or: something which is approaching gratitude), and hence a report of

having been moved rather than a formulaic, ritualistic, semi-automated reaction.

Similarly for the process or processes of learning about gratitude. If one is taught

from an early age “to be grateful,” then it seems inevitable that such lessons are often

taught in direct if not explicit connection with learning the thank-you protocol: not

6 What might we conclude, or ask, about the child who is incapable of grasping that big chunk? It is here that

some of the framing-assumptions of ecological psychology (the concept of affordances chief among them,

see infra) might help us to understand anew some aspects of (eg) the behavior of autistic persons, those

diagnosed with schizophrenia, and those with problems of agency-attribution – see Lindler et al. (2005)

“Disorders of agency in schizophrenia correlate with an inability to compensate for the sensory consequences

of actions,” Current Biology 15: 1119-1124.


9

saying “thank you” would suggest or reveal ungratefulness. (Corollary: it is

bad/wrong to be ungrateful. “You don’t want grandma to think you’re ungrateful, do you?”)

But this is not instruction about what it feels like to feel grateful. It cannot be. It is

instruction about how to avoid appearing ungrateful. It is a learned and practiced

avoidance-maneuverer, and in early stages it is not yet unbound from local rules for

civility and courtesy, for attempting to seem “good.” Children, after all, are not

naturally ungrateful. They are naturally a-grateful.

One might also learn the gist of what the word ‘gratitude’ means – in preparation for

the discovery of what being-grateful feels like - if one is taught that all the good things

in life and in one’s own life flow ultimately from God, the Ultimate Benefactor.

Rudimentary grasp of this unique and eternally lopsided transaction between

benefactor and beneficiary is, I am confident, among the commoner starting points

for early lessons in gratitude, lessons that (in-)form roughly the parameters of the

emerging concept of gratitude. Although the process, here, is not necessarily

disconnected from civility-enculturation and the saying-thanks convention (etc.),

learning about gratitude in the context of an Ultimate Benefactor means that the

thanks-giving protocol is, surely, more or less immediately intertwined with the logic

or rationale of prayer. Given how we learn language (and protocol for interpersonal

relations), it couldn’t really be otherwise.

This I believe binds thanks-saying scripts with notions about appropriate

expectations of rewards and other benefactions in exchange for services (right-living,

abstentions, and obesiances), the former distributed or withheld by an invisible,

inscrutable, and not consistently predictable benefactor. Obesiances and right-living

will include prayer itself, which with children will often be no less formulaic and

meaning-anemic than ritual thanks-saying is. (Except, that is, when the prayer is a

petition for something one wants. In that case it is sincere in the way a thank-you is

sincere when a child is given a battery-powered toy and not a battery of bloodwork.)

Back in Scotland, 1998, I provisionally concluded (thinking grammatically and

without an acute surplus of adrenaline) that to be grateful means that one believes

one has received a good from a benefactor, from an agent who acted intentionally so

as to benefit one; or at least, that one has been intentionally targeted (as an individual,

or as the member of a class) as the beneficiary of a good from one who intended to

be a benefactor – even if the good fails to be a good, or bestowal (or receipt) doesn’t

materialize as planned, or the sincere would-be benefactor mismatched goods and

beneficiaries.7

I therefore concluded also that unless I believed an agent had intentionally saved me

from crushing to death my infant (or rather: saved my daughter from being crushed

to death by me), I could not have “felt” gratitude. What I felt was relief, and I

7 This kind of analysis stretches from Seneca’s De benificiis to Fred Berger (1975) “Gratitude,” Ethics 85 (4)

298-309.


10

misidentify that feeling when I call it “gratitude.” In the absence of a benef-actor,

there is no agent to whom gratitude can be directed.

William James might have put it this way: if I thought it was gratitude I was feeling,

that was only the tincture of the taste of medicine in the milk stored in what was

once a medicine bottle.

And of course, that milk tasted odd. How could it not?

Is Gratitude for Gratitude a Moral Affect?

Sixteen years have passed since McCulloch et al. (2001) addressed the question “Is

Gratitude a Moral Affect?,” a paper which appears to have done much to reignite

academic interest in gratitude and reaffirm the value of sustained analysis of the very

concept of it. It is irrelevant to this missive, but it remains for me a pleasing thought

that McCulloch and I were asking similar questions at roughly the same time. I have

often wondered whether or not the noosphere was, in the late nineties, bristling with

something which made it time to get serious about gratitude. Slight preoccupation on

the part of the (then new) generation of social psychologists et al. with “empathy”

might be one of those bristling somethings. A premiere fluorescence of one thing

never fails to illuminate something else.

The questions for which I wanted answers, though, had nothing to do with empathy.

They included: When there is no benefactor, but one feels “grateful,” can (or: should)

we attempt to forge and sustain a distinction between “feeling relief” and “feeling

grateful”? Could there be good reason to turn someone away from their prima facie

experience of gratitude and towards the analytically more accurate redescription?

No sir. You are not “grateful” that you did not drive into that jogger. You are fortunate

that you did not, and what you felt was relief. It was mere luck, and not Divine

Intervention. And, since it was not Divine Intervention, and since luck is not a benefactor

acting intentionally to benefit you, there is no agent that can lay a claim to your thanks-

giving, or be worthy of your gratitude. You, good man, are profoundly relived – and

nothing more.

The other side of the coin (or edge of the blade) is: When the lucky motorist (though

driving negligently) does not run into the faultless jogger, and thereafter experiences

relief as the only feeling, and does not immediately “feel” grateful, could there be any

good reason to insist that he should feel grateful – even though we know that this is

likely an analytically inaccurate description, which, in the reverse case, we might wish

to correct?

Ah! You’re “relieved,” you say. Is that all? Relief? You reckon yourself (and the jogger)

no more than “lucky”? You should be nauseas! You should be tearful, joyfully-tearful,

that you didn’t kill that jogger. How dare you not feel grateful?! Are you not moved?


11

I’ve never made a systematic attempt to answer these questions. I do, though,

periodically browse the journals, read abstracts, skim papers, and maintain a faint

sense as to what the current ideas and research priorities are. But I’m not exactly on

top of the literature, or the studies and developments reported therein.

Measuring how an aptitude for the experience of gratitude (or: gauging the extent to

which one’s susceptibility to and capacity for feeling gratitude) improves life-quality,

or subjective-wellbeing (etc.) might be a worthwhile errand. Likewise for projects

which seek to divine the existence (or note the absence) of non-trivial correlates or

key causal connections between, say, amenability to gratefulness and empathetic

engagement of others (etc.). We might not need an immediate moratorium on surveys,

questionnaire validations, and the amassing of data. But there is still room for some

phenomenological bullwork, and philosophical assumption-busting too.

And yet, given the current distaste in the social and behavioural sciences for

normative pronouncements – even when wrought as wryly as

“Given that ‘gratitude’ = G, then,

in circumstance C it is wrong for any X not to feel G.”

- I remain doubtful that merely descriptive discourse is worth the effort. Unless

there’s grant money (g) in it.

In that case:

Where X [C (g)], X should be very G.

But surely we want people to experience gratitude, and to be grateful (for some but

not all things), and not to be ungrateful – don’t we? How can serious enquiry into

gratitude not have a strongly and nakedly normative side?

Flame-Retardant, Gratitude-Resistant

Thanks-saying is both learned and deployed in metropolitan China more or less as it

is in New England, and in Scotland -- these being the only places and local-cultures I

know well enough to discuss confidently and without a distracting string of

footnotes. When and to whom one says xiexie (谢谢 ‘thanks’) in China depends,

among other things, on where you are in China, and I’m very cautious about

generalizations. (Shanghai is “representative” of the PRC the way that San Francisco

is “representative” of the USA.) In both Shanghai and Hangzhou (the cities in which

I’ve spent most of these past 16 years), middle-class children are taught to say

“thanks” the same way that I was taught in rural Massachusetts, and the same way

my daughter was taught in rural Scotland. Chinese children, youth, and adults in

Shanghai have their scripts for thanks-deployment, and they are similar but not

identical to the one’s I know and deploy.


12

How the local thanks-saying protocol works in China, and how it may relate to

experiential gratitude in this language-culture (just in case it does) is a question that

seized me first in 2007, when I was based in the city of Hangzhou. I entertained for a

while the idea of surveying how often my native Sinophone neighbors thought about

or in terms of gratitude, and how often (if at all) they were so profoundly moved - by

good luck, by their improving fortunes, survival of near-misses, etc. - that they

thought to themselves:

Wow, I am grateful for that!, or, Gee, I have a lot in my like to be grateful for.

The idea never became a project. But I have done a lot of real-time situational

probing, ever since I began to sense palpably that certain elements of traditional

Chinese culture, and some aspects of the Chinese language, leave less room for being

grateful than one might otherwise conclude from (e.g.) the nation’s wonderful treasure

of wisdom literature, and the post-Reform-and-Opening revival of Buddhist

ceremonial activities.8 This is a terrific paradox, because in contemporary China life is

lived in an arena fraught with risk, fortune-reversal, and near-misses – and none

knows this better than the Chinese themselves.

There is one bit of datum which corroborates my suspicion that the majority of

contemporary Chinese are gratitude-resistant. Among my many friends, colleagues,

and acquaintances, a very small number only are emphatic about the importance of

organizing the significant parts of their life around an active principle of being grateful.

Two things distinguish this tiny subset.

First, not only are they emphatic about the importance of gratitude, but they are quick

to point out that their own marrow-deep acknowledgment of the value of being

grateful is not shared by many other Chinese.

Second, they hold that widespread non-amenability to experiential gratitude, and a

nearly pathological cognitive-unreadiness for it on the part of most Chinese, is one

of the saddest aspects of contemporary Chinese culture, and greatest hazards to

genuine social development here.

8 For example, in Chinese xiwang (希望) can be translated into English as either to hope or to wish. This is

not inconsequential. In English, ‘wish’ allows one to opine or to express a desire for something impossible,

and to look backwards in time (eg, “I wish I had done/not done/chosen,” etc.), whereas the concept of ‘hope’

is often future-oriented. I might wish I had wings, but I cannot really hope to have wings. The Chinese

xiwang 希望 is used as an Anglophone would use both ‘hope’ and ‘wish,’ and I doubt this is entirely

immaterial to understanding how native Sinophones understand, think about, and experience gratitude.


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Acquired Non-Immunity

The people-watching this Thanksgiving Day has been exquisite. Whatever the tensile

strength of the current bubble of boom and bling, the bubble itself was today bathed

in unflinching sunlight, and the fashionistas inside of it were looking sharp. I did not

find myself in the mood to leverage the occasion of my favorite national holiday to

talk to anyone about gratitude. I do not anticipate launching anytime soon a one-man

program of cross-cultural analysis. But a few scenes on the road back to my flat

remind me of the direction in which I once thought I might travel, should I ever set

out on that path.

There’s a lot of “municipal beautification” going on along Yuyuan Road these days.9

One worker drives past me with long sections of rebar hanging from his electric

scooter. These extend more than a meter beyond the bow and stern of his 60 watt e-

moped. Not skewering pedestrians is going to prove a challenge for him, but he

doesn’t appear concerned. Neither does the traffic cop at the intersection. Above me,

on a tower of bamboo staging, a man is cutting something metal with a radial saw.

The sparks are beautiful, and two people have stopped to take photos of the

spectacular shower of bright haephestial orange. I too slow down, but only to

confirm what I suspect: the man is wearing neither gloves nor goggles.

A few steps ahead, on the opposite side of the street, another crew on the sidewalk is

prefabbing some frame-like structure. The man doing the welding has neither gloves

nor eye-protection, and everyone is wearing either green or camouflage tennis shoes

-- jiefangxie (解放鞋, “liberation shoes,” after the People’s Liberation Army). The

stretch of Yuyuan running between Wulumuqi Road and Zhenning Road is beautiful,

even with all the rancor, detritus, and hazards of construction. It is also 500-odd

meters of OSHA’S worst nightmare. I have long since become used to it. I have not

become indifferent to it.

If you ask a local to comment on, say, the man delivering 3’x5’ panels of plate glass

on his scooter, and using his forehead to hold them steady against the scooter’s

steering column, you’ll likely be told: meibanfa (每办法). Literally, this means ‘no

method,’ but idiomatically it means Whataya gonna do?, or, That’s just how it is. I’ve

asked laborers (many times, over many years) why they don’t wear boots or thick-

soled shoes on jobsites. If I ask in the summer, they say such footwear is too hot. If I

ask when the weather is not too hot, I’m assured that there is no safety issue at stake

(mei shi 没事, ‘it’s nothing’/’natta thang’). It’s exactly the same answer I get when I

ask about work gloves. (When you do see workers wearing gloves, the gloves are

9 Construction, demolition, and extensive refurbishment are all virtually non-stop throughout most of China’s

cities. There’s even a joke about it. The character chai (拆) is spray-painted on buildings and walls to indicate

that a structure has been slated for destruction. It is so ubiquitous that someone once suggested the name of

modern China should be read as Chai’nar (拆那儿 chai na’er). This is an interrogative phrase meaning

“Where are we demolishing?”


14

made of cotton – basically facecloths with fingers.) Goggles, visors, and safety-

glasses for welders, and for people operating high-speed spark-spewing cutting tools?

Mei shi.

Pindar’s Vine and Thinking Reeds

Initium Sapientiae Timor Domini – “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

This cheery gem from Proverbs is the motto of the University of Aberdeen and a

swell counterpoint to its favorite tune, Gaudeamus Igitur. I mention it now, because it

relates directly to how I wish to draw together the seemingly disparate threads from

which this missive is woven.

Gratitude, I have come to believe, can grow only in soil nourished with the

knowledge of the fragility of goodness, to borrow from Nussbaum (1986). To feel

grateful, or, to feel gratitude to the degree necessary for a semi-chronic state of being

grateful to become an axis for one’s valuations, is to feel small. Not to feel hunted or

harried by Misfortune, but to know that one is not immune to its slippery steps and

snares, its sparks, splinters, and sharp edges. Nietzsche’s many remarks about

gratitude (and revenge) read differently if one sees Nietzsche as a man wrestling with

(among other agency-issues) the suspicion that he is a proud flowering weed, and not

the alpine pinnacle upon which it grows. The abundance of botanical and naturalistic

imagery in plain sight throughout Nietzsche’s works shows us a man who was not

only keen-scented, but one who could see small and subterranean things as clearly as

he could see uber-things. I suspect Nietzsche understood Pascal’s words about

thinking reeds better than most:

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The

entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to

kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than

that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and [of] the advantage which

the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.

It could have been otherwise, and it was not because of my own agency that it was not otherwise.

This is my a-theistic restatement of initium sapientiae timor domini. I did not slip and fall

and injure or kill my infant daughter – I am humbled by my good luck. In that vast

moment of cosmic tininess there upon the steps of Calton Hill, my relief felt like “feeling

grateful.” When I sorted through my lexicon of terms for “affective states,” gratitude

was the one which fit best. In calm reflection, that grateful-ness was most intelligible –

not as relief, and certainly not as salvation – but as an opportunity to feel

insignificant, microscopic. When I recovered from my long pause, I moved with

greater care, and improved attunement to hazard – enlivened to the presence of more

hazards.

My daughter, hanging from my chest, felt much heavier.


15

Because I did not fall, I discovered gravity. Later at home, I paused again:

For these insights, for this new sense of moral gravity

which I have extracted from that fateful moment,

I am grateful.

The questions Grateful to whom, to which benefactor? should be allowed to arrive when

the rush of adrenaline subsides, and permitted to wander where they wish when one

dares to analyze them, and to deliver in time answers which – whether arriving on

wings, or creeping on their bellies – come to us as responses, as environmental feedback,

and not as answers merely.

Affordances for Gratitude:

The Other Thinking Reed

If there is a causal relationship between (a) amenability to experiential gratitude (etc.)

and (b) “subjective well-being” (or: a “life-affirming attitude” towards the business of

life), then we might learn even more about it by asking questions about an

individual’s sense of agency and his beliefs about the limitations of his efficacy as an

agent. I believe, too, that an inability (whatever its cause or provenance) to

apprehend a hazard as a hazard serves to debride everyday life of opportunities to see

in bolder relief both the limits of one’s agency and the non-immunity we have to loss

– our fragility, or, our witherability. Debrided experience can keep a heart from getting

salty.

I have twice now used the word ‘opportunity’ in connection with occasions for

learning about one’s own agency and fragility, and thereby developing a habit of a

grateful response – a gratitudinous response. A word better than ‘opportunity’ would

be affordance, and I direct readers to EJ Gibson (1988), Greeno (1994), and Reed

(1996). Looking at gratitude through the framing-assumptions of ecological

psychology, I believe we way think about it as a cultivated response to affordances, through

which affordances one learns more about one’s efficacy as an agent, and more about one’s

vulnerability to hazards in a non-empathetic environment and indifferent universe.

Perceiving affordances as affordances, as opportunities for (inter alia) experiential

gratitude (and therefore: moral growth), serves I think as a hint that, while our

indifferent universe is made-up mostly of non-malevolent parts, it can be full of

potentially beneficial relationships – if one sees things the right way. And we are fortunate

to have, now, an excellent guide to an “ethics of attention:”

[T]here does seem to be something benevolent in the disposition of things, relative

to us. ... That’s the kind of universe we inhabit. Being alert to such possibilities and

giving their occurrence in the world their due in wonder: to encounter things in this

way is basically erotic, in the sense that we are drawn out of ourselves toward beauty

(Crawford [2015] p.254).


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Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Matthew B Crawford’s (2015) The World

Beyond Your Head is the extent to which it resembles Edward S Reed’s The Necessity of

Experience (1996). Like Reed, Crawford is worried about the extent and the degree to

which modern life is increasingly forcing mediated, secondary experiences upon us,

and how non-engagement of primary experience seems to be affecting us. As with

Reed, Crawford draws upon the concept of “affordances” articulated and developed

by JJ Gibson. Both Reed and Crawford blame Descartes, dualism, and “scientific”

representational theories of mind and consciousness for the subsequent sins of older,

cruder behaviorism, and for some of the new sins committed in the name of

cognitive science and “neurophilosophy.” Both attempt a resuscitation of the

concept of eros, and both offer hymns to the pedestrian erotic. If there is anything more

extraordinary than the structural and thematic similarities between Reed (1996) and

Crawford (2015), it is this: although Reed was once Gibson’s greatest champion and

apostle, there is no mention of Reed at all anywhere in Crawford.

This is a point I take up elsewhere (“Anemic Agents,” forthcoming). The point now is

to recommend to gratitude researchers to both Reed and Crawford.

And this is my reason, too, for reminiscing about the slippery slope of Calton Hill. I

extracted meaning from a real, primary, non-digitally-mediated experience, in a real

(and not “virtual,” hyper-social) environment. Extracting that meaning was an action. It

was my imperfect proprioception and flawed perceptual judgment as a self-mover

which nearly killed my child. No agent or agency acted to protect or to save her. But

my agency - as a thinking self-mover, and not some rooted “thinking reed” - was

adequate to get something out of the experience. The near-miss was an affordance: it

afforded me an opportunity to grow as a moral-agent. I was amenable to this affordance

because of my sum of experiences as a thinking self-mover, and because I am a

thinking self-mover who explores the world justifiably believing three things:

(1) I move in a world filled with both hazards and potential affordances;

(2) I have a reliable if imperfect sense about where my efficacy begins and where it ends; and,

(3) my causal efficacy, insofar as I know something about its extent and limitations, includes

the ability to find and to make use of affordances in order to grow. And: I can sometimes feel

when I might be growing. These are both doings – my doings, in a world indifferent to me but not

inhospitable to such activity.

Crawford (2015) says it is “something benevolent in the disposition of things.” I say,

that the non-malevolent disposition of things affords opportunities for extracting value,

thus making our environment a partner in the experience of benefaction. Is there a

benefactor? Yes: everyone who taught us something about the language of “thanks-giving” and

the basic concept of gratitude, and who thereby prepared us to extract for ourselves (and

others) beneficial experiences – to extract them from both our successes and from

our near-misses, from both joys and hazards.

Of this, both the universe and the rooted thinking reed know nothing.


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Good Vibrations

I believe that we take too narrow a view of gratitude if we contemplate it solely from

the perspective of interpersonal transactions, or assume that what is most distinctive

about it is that it is as an outward-reaching affective state, based on and/or guided by

human empathy and its soft, fuzzy, Other-seeking tendrils. Appreciating another’s

beneficence is how we “get” to the deeper meaning of out rote-learned semi-

automated thank-yous. It seems certain that one first learns about gratitude, being

grateful, not being ungrateful (etc.) during those lifestages in which one is too young

to have enough conceptual equipment to be able to experience gratitude as gratitude.

The a-grateful child is happy to have a balloon, just happy. He is still beyond grateful and

ungrateful. We teach him to take care not to appear ungrateful, and that “being grateful”

has something to do with a social convention that requires one to say “thank you,”

and that “thank you” should be a report that one is moved for having been given something,

which “something” may or may not make one happy. We nudged towards learning to

how to be moved when another independent self-mover tries to move us.

What really matters here, though, and what the child needs to learn, is that the child’s

getting something (or: the happiness he experiences in getting something he likes)

was not the result of something the child himself did intentionally to bring himself

pleasure. Learning how to recognize the feeling identified by the word ‘gratitude’ entails

the child working-out that he might not have been given a balloon at all, and that all

of the balloons of life might pop in an instant – and: that sometimes there’s nothing he

can do to stop that from happening. Real gratitude isn’t based solely upon

acknowledgement of and enlivened empathy for the benefactor, for that benef-acting

Other. Empathy – or: compassion, to use the word we all should have stuck with - is

merely part of what it takes to understand why (sometimes) our thanks-giving is

meaningful in a way that most automated thanks-saying isn’t.

Gratitude, I suggest, is based on attenuated fear. It is knowing warmly and not just

propositionally that all your balloons might pop at once, that no one might ever love

you enough to give you a Hummel figure, and there is nothing you can do to ensure otherwise.

Your agency does not extend that far – whatever your levels of adrenaline, or

oxytocin.

Consider, too, the early entanglement of these three things: ritual thanks-saying;

appearance-of-ungratefulness avoidance behaviours; and prayer-activity. Since the

child-friendly “primer” scripts for these conventions are all other-directed, it is

perhaps easy to assume that interpersonal empathy is necessarily part of the nature of

gratitude. I suggest that it is only when the specifically other-regarding habit of

benefactor-directed thanks-giving is turned inwards, and reflected upon, that “being

grateful” becomes more than meaningful thanks-saying, more than the slightly

inchoate byproduct of the raw, uncooked feeling of relief after its filtration through


18

vocabularies and scripts, all of which are based on protocol for Other-engaging, be it

common courtesy or divinity-courting.

The process of becoming a compassionate human being (or: an “empathetic agent”)

possibly begins somewhere along the journey between mastery of culture-appropriate

deployment of “thank-you” scripts and appearance-of-ingratitude avoidance

maneuvers, and the eventual emergence of the kind of gratitude-feeling that can be

an Archimedean point in our ever-expanding moral universe. But I doubt that the

emergence of a truly compassionate person ever precedes the emergence of the truly

grateful one.

Re-treads. Re-souled.

Since it is Thanksgiving, I’m going to conclude this letter by suggesting that, like

Thanksgiving cooking, gratitude is all about the salt. A whole-heart, or a salty

“preserved” heart, is one which now and then withers in fear, awe, wonder, and

relief, and regains its rigor through self-nourishment -- insight, humility, and an

improved appetite for observation, attention, and taking-care. That is a heart which

can be grateful, and which will be.

I am home, now, and the power tools are as loud as they have ever been. I wish it

was quieter. I am thinking of my family in the States. For more than 300 years my

tribe has lived and died and eaten turkey within 50 miles of Plymouth, and I know

they’ll soon be waking, dressing, and gathering for a feast that could feed a few

dozen hungry Pilgrims. I miss them, and I’m sad I won’t be with them today. But I

am clothed, shod, fed, and beneath a dry roof. And I know it could easily be otherwise. I

do not know the very real contingency of my comfort as a cold hypothetical, but as a

very warm one. A very near one.

Acknowledging fragility is not the secret to strength, but to preservation. The habit

of attending to possible affordances for experiential gratitude is how one keeps one’s

fragility fragile but intact, witherable but capable of growth.

And so, I utter my one and only Thanksgiving benediction:

For this vibrating roof over my head,

and these (resoled) shoes on my feet,

I am grateful.

Gaudeamus.

Thursday 24 – Sunday 27 November

Jing’an District, Shanghai, China

Sincere and very warm thanks to Jennifer Tang for her feedback and assistance in the development of this letter.


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References and Notes

Berger, Fred R (1975) “Gratitude.” Ethics, 85 (4) 298-309. On JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2380087 Crawford, Mathew B (2015) The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming An Individual in An Age of Distraction, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, NY. See also Crawford (2009) Shopcraft As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, The Penguin Press. Emmons, RA & McCulloch, MA (2003) “Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84: 337-389 Not cited in this letter, but among the papers I had earlier consulted when revisiting the subject of gratitude. Here: http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/mmccullough/Gratitude_Page.htm. Gibson, Eleanor J (1988) “Exploratory Behavior in the Development of Perceiving, Acting, and the Acquiring of Knowledge.” Annual Review of Psychology, 39: 1-41 Greeno, James G (1994) “Gibson’s Affordances.” Psychological Review, 101 (2): 336-342 Jullien, Francois trans. Janet Lloyd, (1995) The Propensity of Things: Towards a History of Efficacy in China, Zone Books -------------------- trans. Janet Lloyd (2004) A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Chinese and Western Thinking, University of Hawaii Press Although I have not cited Jullien, these are extraordinary works which have exerted a tremendous influence upon my thoughts about agency generally. Lindler et al. (2005) “Disorders of agency in schizophrenia correlate with an inability to compensate for the sensory consequences of actions,” Current Biology 15: 1119-1124 Mace, William M (1997) “In Memoriam: Edward S Reed,” Ecological Psychology, 9 (3): 179-88, and here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2380087 McCulloch, ME et al. (2001) “Is Gratitude a Moral Affect,” Psychological Bulletin, 127: 249-266. For a list of McCulloch’s work, see http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/mmccullough/Gratitude_Page.htm. Nussbaum, Martha (1986) The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, New York I have been inspired and informed both by The Fragility of Goodness and The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994), Princeton University Press, Princeton, NY. Reed, Edward S (1996) The Necessity of Experience, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. The other works in his magnificent trilogy are: Encountering the World: Toward an Ecological Psychology (1996) and From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychological Ideas from Erasmus Darwin to William James (1997), both Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2380087

http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/mmccullough/Gratitude_Page.htm

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2380087

http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/mmccullough/Gratitude_Page.htm


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On Cross-Cultural (Sinophone/Anglophone) Studies Those undertaking cross-cultural (Sinophone/Anglophone) studies might also wish to keep in mind the fact that most Chinese live their lives within a topolect and within the culture of that topolect, and, that many topolect-first speakers speak Mandarin only when necessary. Questionnaires and surveys, whether translated into simplified or traditional characters, do not seem capable of capturing important information about how, say, a native-speaker of a Hangzhou, Shanghai, or Taiwanese topolect lives experiential gratitude. In China, many are talking to family and to one’s closest friends (and: reflecting upon things) in their topolect. It is the life-sounds of the topolect, and not the sounds of Mandarin, which are likely to be informing what a speaker really feels, and thinks about what (s/he

thinks) s/he really feels. Written text (hanzi 汉字 ), however, is generally read as Mandarin, and Mandarin might at times be at one or more degrees of variance with the mood, sense, reference, and extension (etc.) of words and phrases used in the topolect.

The World Beyond Your Organ: Motorcycles and the Art of Zen Maintenance I suspect (and hope) that, if Crawford graces us with another book, he will develop themes present in both The World Beyond Your Head and Shopcraft As Soulcraft (2009). Those themes are: there is a relationship between skill, insight, wonder, and gratitude, and this relationship should be attended to, both for an enriched, happy life and a healthy (if not always happy) democracy. The takeaway of that future book will be, I predict: a healthy democracy requires a lot of grateful people; skilled-people are insightful people; insightful people are robustly discriminating and evaluative, and thus amenable to feelings of awe and wonder; and that awe and wonder are necessary for real gratitude – and for seeing things the right way, in the real world beyond your head.

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gratitude agency affordances JECP 2016