Gratitude, the Foremost Virtue of the Garden
Life is full with pleasures
Two recent posts have mentioned the great value Epicureanism places on gratitude. Epicurean Spiritual Exercises described how actively practicing gratitude was one of the key practices used by Epicurean students to form one’s mind and move towards eudaimonia, while this week’s Translation Tuesday explained how gratitude for what we have is our chief remedy for the mistaken enthusiasm for unnecessary desires. These articles suggested the importance that gratitude has in Epicurean practice, but didn’t really cover the topic in its full scope. It deserves that level of attention.
Today, I’ll proceed through three sections outlining the Epicurean case for cultivating gratitude. First, I’ll review some of the central passages so we can see what Epicurus & Co. had in mind, followed by a summary of their recommendations and rationale in the most straightforward sense. Second, I’ll discuss how that advice is supported by contemporary work in positive psychology. Third, I’ll share the argument of Benjamin Rider that the Epicureans conceived of gratitude not merely as a transient mental state, but as a virtue—a dispositional tendency we can cultivate that has a wide-reaching influence on our well-being.
1. An introduction to Epicurean gratitude
The Greek word for gratitude is charis (χάρις). In a sense, this is the very first word that many Greek students learn, as the related verb chairo (χαίρω, to rejoice or be glad) is, in the imperative, the standard greeting (chaire! Hi!). While that literal verbal meaning is quite submerged in the salutation, I think it is still quite visible in the case of the noun: it’s worth remembering that Greek “gratitude” is fundamentally and specifically “a being glad about something.” In Latin, gratia is the unproblematic equivalent, and the ancestor of our modern English word.
What do the Epicureans say about gratitude? First and most simply, to consciously direct our minds to “being glad about things” is a pleasurable experience. It would be foolish to spend our attentional energy engaged in elective unhappiness:
But just as we are cheered by the good things we expect, so are we pleased by the good things we remember. The foolish, however, are tormented by the memory of bad things, while the wise delight in past goods, renewed in grateful recollection. (Cicero, On Ends 1.57)
If you no longer reflect on all the good that you have known, then today you have grown old. (Vatican Saying 19)
While “growing old” is here used as an isolated metaphor for someone who has lost their zest and enthusiasm, Epicurus’ actual advice for the elderly is that gratitude is particularly beneficial for the latter stages of life. As in the Cicero passage above, gratitude can be conceptualized as giving attention to the past and present, in contrast to expectation, which looks forward. Since older people have lived through more, they therefore have a larger reservoir of positive memories to pleasurably remember, while (if they are good Epicureans) experiencing a continually more stable life in the present.
And so both the young and old must practice philosophy: the elderly so that they may be young again in the good things of their lives, through their gratitude for what has been, and the young so that they may be old in their lack of fear of what will be. (Letter to Menoeceus 122)
It is not the young man who is most blessed, but the old man who has lived well. For the young man at the height of his strength is led this way and that, tossed about in distress by the whims of chance, while the old man has dropped anchor in the harbor of old age. He has secured the goods that once were uncertain and lives in unfailing gratitude. (VS 17)
We therefore have two possible subjects of gratitude: past pleasures and present blessings. If we are facing difficulties in the present, we can always draw on the past, which cannot be taken from us. Famously, when Epicurus was dying in extreme pain from untreatable urinary calculus, he declared himself to be happy on the basis of remembering past joys:
On this blessed day, the last of my life, I write these words to you. The strangury has tight hold of me and I experience no relief from the painful dysentery that never relaxes in its severity. But against these things I weigh the gratitude that fills my heart when I remember the conversations I have shared with you and your companions. (Letter to Idomeneus)
We must assuage misfortune with gratitude for those things we have now lost and with the recognition that we cannot change the past. (VS 55)
In part three below, I will discuss a few more passages that suggest an additional, wider scope for Epicurean gratefulness as a virtue, a relatively stable dispositional state that can be intentionally cultivated. For now, however, we can see the claimed benefit of feeling gratitude in any given moment: it immediately increases our pleasure and happiness. We have this recourse not only when everything is going swimmingly, but also—in some sense especially—when things are not. Pain and loss are bad. Old age will eventually limit our activity. But we can always find things to be grateful for.
Focus less on problems and more on the good things that abide: the connections you have, the necessities that are now safe and secure, the wisdom you have gained. When times are particularly challenging, you can choose to immerse your mind not in the most negative forecasts for the future, but in the most positive memories from your past. The objects of your thoughts are up to you to choose. Preferring thoughts that make you unhappy is the course of fools. Preferring thoughts that bring you joy is a longer name for gratitude.
2. Support from positive psychology
The modern field of happiness studies is admittedly full of fluff, hype, and overblown claims. Massimo Pigliucci recently highlighted a useful review of the habits and behaviors that actually boost happiness from researchers Dunigan Folk and Elizabeth Dunn.1 This review was uniquely stringent in its criteria for included studies, intentionally aiming to combat the “replicability crisis” that has afflicted a large amount of previous work in the field. While a great majority of published studies were found to suffer from methodological flaws, often basing conclusions on insufficient sample sizes and hunting for any results of marginal statistical significance, the authors found that a few popular interventions for increasing well-being did have some solid evidence of effectiveness. The benefits of exercise, spending time in nature, and mindfulness were mostly unevidenced (which is not to say that they were proven to be ineffective), while positive social interactions provided a more reliable boost to well-being (this also fits quite well with Epicureanism). The single best-supported “tactic” for improving well-being, however, was gratitude.
In the majority of the stronger studies, the strategy under consideration involved some form of listing objects of gratitude. For example, participants might be instructed to briefly write down three people, events, or life circumstances for which they were grateful at the end of each day, or to write a mini essay in which they dwelt on their gratitude at slightly more length at wider intervals. Some studies tested a single “gratitude session,” while others evaluated daily or weekly repetition. Some studies measured emotional well-being and life satisfaction immediately after the intervention, while others conducted follow-up surveys after various intervals from a day to several weeks later.
First of all, I would note that such interventions sound perfectly in alignment with Epicurean practice. While we don’t have a specific document stating the recommended format for ancient gratitude practices, the extant passages suggest that an exercise of intentionally summoning up one’s reasons for gratitude, even when faced with difficult present circumstances, was indeed advocated for by the Epicureans. As Pierre Hadot has elaborated, ancient schools of philosophy emphasized such spiritual exercises as recurrent, formal practices that would be emphasized in verbal instruction of which we have only slight remaining traces—our modern notions of philosophy as a mostly written field, rather than a lived one, systematically underrates the ancient emphasis on shaping one’s mind through specific formal exercises.
Given that the techniques evaluated in the research seem broadly relevant to the likely Epicurean practice, how did they fare? Quite well! In their stringent review, Folk and Dunn found 15 sufficiently powered studies involving some form of gratitude-listing exercise, of which only one failed to find a positive effect. While almost all of these evaluated more temporary aspects of subjective well-being, i.e. the emotional components of positive affect (the intensity of positive emotions such as enthusiasm, determination, excitement, etc.) and negative affect (the intensity of negative emotions such as fear, guilt, irritation, and so on), a large number also found boosts to more big picture questions of happiness (“Taking all things together, how happy would you say you are?” or “Compared to your peers, do you consider yourself happy?”) or life satisfaction (measuring agreement with such claims as “In most ways my life is close to my ideal,” “The conditions of my life are excellent,” or “I am satisfied with my life”).
There are a few critiques of this line of work that I think are easily overblown and which don’t personally cause me to hesitate about the overall value of such exercises. First, among many philosophically-minded persons (including myself, before I looked at several of these studies), I think there is a tendency to be dismissive of reductive “happiness” measures, suspecting that what is primarily being measured is merely some shallow temporary state of mind, while many things that are far more important for a good life are not captured. There is some truth to this, but 1) in my opinion, being routinely happier, even as a momentary state, is still an important element of well-being, and 2) a large share of these studies do include broader life satisfaction measures, which seem to show positive results from gratitude interventions with a similar reliability to the more short-term metrics of positive and negative affect.
A second common vein of critique is that the most sizeable effects are seen when comparing gratitude interventions to interventions that trigger a negative response. For example, one group of participants will list three positive recent events, while another group will list three recent sources of hassle or frustration. (Some studies compare gratitude interventions to “hassle” interventions, some with more neutral controls, and some with both.) I don’t think, however, that the supposedly more neutral control tasks (“Think about the shape of a large black umbrella” in one study, for example) are really representative of normal human behavior—in many cases where we might recommend such an intervention, people do have an unhelpful habit of reviewing their annoyances and causes for complaint. While explicit comparisons between gratitude interventions and hassle interventions may therefore overstate the average effect size, this doesn’t mean that those results are entirely invalid. In some cases, they may be more representative than are the theoretically neutral controls.
Overall, then, my non-expert conclusion from reviewing what the more skeptical specialists are willing to endorse is that there does appear to be solid evidence that simple gratitude practices such as listing things one is grateful for or reflecting on positive circumstances and persons of one’s life, reliably boost both immediate emotional well-being and overall life satisfaction. There are still plenty of reasonable caveats one should make—the effects are not huge, such techniques are no panacea for serious depression or anxiety, and short-term interventions have only short-term effects—but it is still a noteworthy observation that one of the prime emphases of Epicurean spiritual practice replicates the single best-supported happiness exercise known to modern psychology.
3. Gratitude as a virtue
We have, then, a modest but well-evidenced finding: think of some things you are grateful for, write them down or otherwise concentrate on them for several minutes, and you will feel better for hours or days with a decent degree of reliability. This matches the most obvious function of the Epicurean recommendation, that of making your immediate experience of life more pleasant. A deeper dive into the ancient texts, however, reveal an additional, more ambitious hypothesis: that the deliberate cultivation of gratitude can durably shift one’s temperament in a way that has broad, ongoing benefits. In other words: that gratitude is a virtue.
The evidence for this position is helpfully assembled in Benjamin Rider’s excellent paper, “The Ethical Significance of Gratitude in Epicureanism.”2 In his view, gratitude was essentially parallel to the other virtues as conceived in the ancient world, not simply something we feel for a moment, but “an enduring character trait, developed through repeated practice and reinforcement… which plays an important role in a person’s development and flourishing.” The ancient Greeks had a wide degree of agreement that being a brave, generous, temperate, and just person would be good for oneself. The Epicureans seem to conceive of gratitude in a similar way. (While an emphasis on cultivating the virtues is most famously associated with Aristotle, it should be remembered that Epicurus also endorsed the traditional virtues.)
Since the Epicureans view the virtues as advantageous only insofar as they contribute to our pleasure, what are the deeper advantages of not simply experiencing gratitude, but of becoming a more grateful person? They put forth a few plausible channels of benefit. The first is that the routinely grateful person will not be a victim of insatiability, the intense and unsatisfiable desire for more. Unsatisfied desires are intrinsically painful. This floats in the background of numerous texts, but one of the most explicit is Vatican Saying 69, covered in the last Translation Tuesday:
An ungrateful soul is what makes a creature endlessly greedy for variety in its way of life.
The desire for variety is considered “natural, but not necessary” in the Epicurean classification. Nothing is wrong with enjoying variety. Most people enjoy not eating the same food every day. But to be “endlessly greedy” for variety, to be unable to be satisfied if the desired novelty is not forthcoming, is destructive to happiness. According to Epicurus, a rational person will recognize this, will recognize that eating chicken for three dinners in a row, or drinking only water every day, or not buying a new article of clothing all year does not lead to the pain of hunger, thirst, or cold. To persist in such greed, then, is to persist in a form of unhappiness that has no real substantive relation to what our nature requires for happiness. Instead, the source of that unhappiness is ingratitude—a failure to appreciate what we have. If we accustom ourselves to grateful appreciation, therefore, we will no longer suffer from that insatiable greed and will be able to easily give up the desire for any novelty when it turns out to be hard to acquire or to have injurious consequences.
The second danger of an ungrateful character is intimately related to this dissatisfaction: the fear of death. As I have discussed in Death Is Nothing to Us, the perceived need for additional experiences is the most pernicious form of ungrateful insatiability.
What ails you so, O mortal, that you indulge overmuch in sickly lamentations? Why do you groan aloud and weep at death? For if your former life now past has been a source of gratitude for you, if all your blessings have not been gathered up as if in a leaky jar, to have run through and been lost thanklessly [ingrata], why not, like a banquet guest fed full of life, withdraw contented and rest in peace, you fool? But if all that you have enjoyed has been spilt out and lost, and if life offends you, why seek to add more, only for it to be miserably lost again and to perish wholly unappreciated [ingratum]?
(On the Nature of Things, 3.931–42, Smith and Rouse translation, revised by Rider to note Latin cognates for “gratitude”)
There can be other aspects to the fear of death (such as fear of a painful afterlife), but many seem to think the badness of death consists in how it deprives us of various pleasures or other positive experiences we could have added to the sum total of our lives. Epicureanism rejects any such additive model. One’s life can be made more pleasant (or less painful), but we should not mistake mere extension in duration as equivalent to an increase in amplitude of pleasure, which is our real objective. An 81-year life is not intrinsically better than an 80-year life. If we feel it is, this too is the product of ingratitude: the 80 year-old will not secure happiness if he is given one more year. He will be happy when he casts aside the greed for more, and instead turns to grateful reflection on what the past and present give him.
A third benefit of a durably grateful character, in Rider’s interpretation, is that such a quality is an essential prerequisite to generosity. People often hear that Epicureanism is an egoistic philosophy and so struggle to grasp its endorsement of that traditional virtue. If one is an egoist, why would one give things away when faced with hard times? Part of the Epicurean answer is that gratitude leads to contentment with what is easy to obtain, contentment with what is easy to obtain constitutes self-sufficiency (autarkeia), and self-sufficiency makes generosity effortless.
In hard times, the wise man is ready to share and slow to take, for he can always turn to his deep reserve of self-sufficiency. (VS 44)
Given the limited material benefits of miserliness, and the more substantial benefits of social harmony, generosity usually is the more prudent course in the long run. A grateful character is what makes choosing that long-term prudence easy. The same considerations apply in cases of friendship. The misunderstanding might ask: “If one is an egoist, shouldn’t friendship only be engaged in when it is clearly advantageous to oneself and abandoned when it is not? Expressing ‘gratitude’ might make sense as a bargaining chip if it yields some concrete benefit, but we shouldn’t feel obligated to feel such emotions when there’s no payoff, right?” That isn’t Epicureanism either:
The true friend neither constantly asks for help, nor separates friendship entirely from practical support. The first is mercantile, offering gratitude as a payment for services, while a man of the second type necessarily abridges our confidence about the future. (VS 39)
For Rider, the key to understanding such passages correctly is a proper understanding of the centrality of gratitude. For Epicureans, generosity need not be the enemy of self-interest. Instead, generosity is the natural consequence of a deeply grateful character. If one has developed a constant orientation towards gratitude for the simplest of things, then sharing of excess is effortless. For shallow misunderstanders of Epicureanism, the ideal friendship would seem to consist of copious material aid which need be repaid only with costless expressions of “gratitude.” But that isn’t real friendship—that is a merely mercantile relationship which can never have the depth and solidity which would actually improve our lives the most. Gratitude worthy of the name is intrinsically non-calculative: we are grateful for our friends’ assistance, and so we recognize their goodwill, properly recognize them as friends, and reciprocate with generosity that is dismissive of narrow disadvantage. Gratitude leads to something far more valuable: the fidelity and trust of true friendship.
Epicurean gratitude, therefore, is not merely a psychological hack, a shortcut to positive emotions. We will practice it daily, happy to enjoy its immediate pleasure, but also so as to develop a more grateful character. The grateful person does not crave superfluous variety, no longer reacts to the idea of death with an instinctive fear of an incomplete life, and is happier to give than to receive—a virtuous trait by all conventional standards and a key to dependable friendship.
I accept all of these claims. Some are well-evidenced in the literature. Some I’ve found supported by the smallest, but most important sample of humanity: myself. It is pleasant to note how little cause for complaint I have, and how full my life is with pleasures. My family is all hale and hearty. The world beyond is relatively peaceful, safe, and prosperous. I have been victim to no great blows of distress recently, whether physical, financial, or emotional.
Recently, it is true, circumstances required that I move. In my last home, an old house in the country, I was grateful to wake up and hear birds, see the forest, feel the chill, unheated air. Now I live in town, in an apartment, and am grateful to have air conditioning, ice cubes that come right out of the refrigerator door, and a single tree outside my window. Each morning, I hold a mug of fresh-brewed tea and find the sky has grown no smaller. Each evening, I turn the lamps down low and rest my eyes, smiling with amusement at the small voice of my cat, with tenderness at the soft voice of my wife. Each day I hear music.
Dunigan Folk and Elizabeth Dunn, “A Systematic Review of the Strength of Evidence for the Most Commonly Recommended Happiness Strategies in Mainstream Media,” Nature Human Behaviour 7, no. 10 (October 2023): 1697–707, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01651-4. Pigliucci provides a good summary of the methodological errors that Folk and Dunn aimed to exclude.
Benjamin A. Rider, “The Ethical Significance of Gratitude in Epicureanism,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27, no. 6 (2019).