On Gratitude

Gratitude tends to be elusive or selective, requiring either a natural gravitation towards appreciative thankfulness or a careful striving for gratefulness across multiple aspects of life.  The grand irony of gratefulness is that it can reinforce a person's psychological stamina and yet a desire for gratitude often needs to be stirred up by specific circumstances.  Namely, loss and fear of loss can motivate people to savor their lives to an extent that they did not before, or perhaps even for the first time.  Since life is full of opportunities to lose stability or pleasure, gratitude becomes a key to maintaining and deepening the stability that can be found.

This is not because it is logically impossible for someone to be naturally grateful in a genuine, constant sense or to put effort into experiencing gratefulness all throughout their life.  It is because even if one is not ungrateful, it can be very easy to focus on some things to the exclusion of others or to fail to recognize just how philosophically, practically, or personally important they are.  To be ungrateful or apathetic towards things of philosophical centrality is asinine by default, but no one has to actually be ungrateful to experience the rejuvenating effects of gratitude.  No one even needs to be directly dwelling on gratefulness at all times in order to not be an ungrateful person.

Still, it might take a great deal of intentionality to become a person who is grateful in a broad sense for whatever (morally permissible) pleasures, discoveries, and victories can be had in life.  Gratitude does not necessarily come naturally or easily even with effort.  However, one fact can make striving for gratefulness easier: to be grateful in a non-irrational way is not the same as being grateful for literally everything exactly as it is.  There is nothing to be grateful for about irrationality, abuse, and hypocrisy, to name some examples, even when these things stir up a desire to turn away from them when seen in others or even in a person's own life.  No, not everything could deserve appreciation or thankfulness.

Gratitude can never legitimately be used in an abstract or moral sense to justify letting whatever problems, sins, or stupidity that need to be confronted persist.  At this point, gratitude is misused as a false basis for tolerating things as they are, no matter how severely problematic things might be, instead of driving someone to desire to resolve problems like anti-rationalism, apathy, and injustice.  Gratefulness for reason, its absolute certainty, and for the fact that it is logically possible for the world to be improved can push someone out of apathy and contentment with the status quo and into a longing for life without irrationality and injustice.

Rationalism and rationalistic self- awareness are indeed at the heart of all gratefulness that amounts to more than random, subjective appreciation for something that might not even be worth appreciating.  To be grateful for something in the fullest sense, one must understand it as it is, and there is no way to understand something that does not involve looking to reason without making assumptions.  In turn, this true understanding can spark a deep personal and emotional response that brings with it the deepest kind of gratitude.  All other forms of gratefulness are petty, selective, or random.  This deeper and philosophically fortified gratitude, in contrast, is empowering and thorough.