The role of gratuitude in Stoicism

I’m going to express a judgment that I imagine will prove provocative and controversial to many readers. That said, if you don’t react straightaway by rejecting the notion and continue on to the case and clarifications being made, I think you’ll find useful ideas to consider for your own Stoic mindset and practice. Here’s the view, put simply:

Gratitude is a notion that can sometimes get a bit overhyped in contemporary Stoicism.

Why, you might ask? I suspect it’s a natural result of understanding gratitude in simplistic and superficial ways, inheriting opinions that amount to sound-bites and “feels” from contemporary culture, or making recourse to a few throwaway lines stripped out of their context from Stoic authors. At the same time, when gratitude is understood in ways more aligned with actual Stoic teachings, placed back into their proper context, not reduced to just some vague warm fuzzy feeling about one’s life or situation, it plays an important role in Stoic personal development and practice.

Many people circulate one particular quote from Cicero about gratitude, often translated as “gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” This is indeed expressed in his speech Pro Plancio (sec 80) , a work that unfortunately almost nobody who cites the passage reads.

Gratitude in its many forms

What do we find when we do read that speech? “Gratitude” translates “esse gratum ”, i.e., being grateful, and he does say it is a virtue he would most like to have, then explains this with that famous line. He then provides several brief examples about how gratitude could be a “mother” (mater) to other virtues, including piety as “a grateful will towards parents”, patriotism as “remembering benefits” provided by one’s homeland, or holiness and religion as “reverence and remembrance” in thanking the gods. Even friendship cannot subsist without gratitude (80).

We should note that in his works Cicero identifies other virtues as most important and sources for the others—justice, for example, in On Duties, or “frugality” (in one of its senses) in Tusculan Disputations. Note that these are two works where he is explicitly presenting and endorsing Stoic ideas, which is not the case in Pro Plancio. Even in that very speech, Cicero declares that piety is the basis (fundamentum) for all of the other virtues (29). He also mentions several people as examples possessing all of the virtues, first Cato (20) and then two of the Torquati (27), and Cicero doesn’t mention gratitude as central in how they became such paragons. We might bring in Seneca as a later and clearly Stoic advocate for the primacy of gratitude, since he asserts ingratitude as the worst of the vices in On Benefits. But as it turns out, Seneca also affirms this pejorative priority to others, for example anger in On Anger. Gratitude is important for Stoics, but it really doesn’t have a strong case as the preeminent virtue.

Difficulties involved in displaying proper gratitude

Both Cicero and Seneca mention and explore some of the difficulties involved in displaying proper gratitude towards all of one’s benefactors. For example, just earlier in Pro Plancio, Cicero expresses the impossibility of appearing properly and equally grateful to every person he owes it to, since they are in conflict with each other (78). In fact, Cicero’s very gratitude to Plancius is being turned by the accuser Laterensis into a charge against him. Similar questions about prudently prioritizing who to display gratitude to most in complex, real-life situations come in for discussion within Cicero’s On Duties and Seneca’s On Benefits.

Gratitude for the past, the present, and the future

That leads to another important feature of gratitude understood in terms of virtue, actions, and affect, namely that it means a lot more and matters most when it is understood not as some global disposition, a proverbial “attitude of gratitude” directed at something vague, for instance the universe or one’s fate, but rather as situated within the fabrics of determinate relationships between the actual people one engages with in one’s life. The specificity displayed by Marcus Aurelius in his notations of gratitude in book 1 of Meditations provides an exemplary model. Cicero also outlines something similar in Pro Plancio, where he talks about turning one’s mind to grateful recollection (grata recordation) of those who cared for him (80). I’ll end here by noting that Stoic authors also stress our need to be ready with gratitude not just for past benefactors but also those we are engaged with in our present relationships, and to continue that disposition into the future.

Greg Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a member of the Modern Stoicism Team, an APPA- certified philosophical counselor, and teaches at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design

---