Perhaps: Hope as Gift?

 

Gift in the market is like a party in daily life,

Luxury for the useful, the sacred for the profane,

A prostitute for a bride!

(Guy Douglas)

 

Gift, to be a gift, must be like tobacco – it has to go up in smoke!

As the Gospel itself reminds us in a rather clear way: ‘Give to everyone who asks you for something, and when someone takes what is yours, do not ask for it back. Do for others just what you want them to do for you. If you love only the people who love you, why should you receive a blessing? Even sinners love those who love them…Love your enemies and do good to them; lend and expect nothing back. You will then have a great reward, and you will be children of the Most High God. For he is good to the ungrateful and the wicked’ (Lk 6:30-35).

A gift is not sufficient if the giver is not also present! (Martin Luther).

This – apparently banal observation – highlights that a gift is effective if it is preceded, accompanied and followed by a PRESENCE, that of the giver! Paradoxically, it is not possible to send a gift by a courier, by mail, by a banker’s order, or by a clock of a mouse, or by an anonymous signature and an equally anonymous list of ‘wedding presents’! That, if anything, is a PRESENT, but it is not a GIFT.

The true happiness of a gift lies completely in imagining the happiness of the recipient: and this means choosing, taking time, moving off one’s own tram rails and thinking of the other as a subject – the contrary of being forgetful. A gift requires the creation of a hermeneutic context made up of two faces!

     To speak about a gift today in the Western world has the connotation of being something that is anachronistic, something that is literally demodé. In a capitalistic society man is accustomed to buying almost everything: his dreams and his wishes are increasingly conditioned by advertising, understood in a very broad sense. His imagination, to use the happy phrase of Serge Latouche, has been colonised Gift has a marginal role in his life.

In rich societies presents have a place on very specific occasions: birthdays, Christmas, weddings, and so forth; and on such occasions gifts seem to constitute a problem more than a pleasure. What should I buy? Will my present be adequate? Will the person like it? But the value of a gift goes beyond what people usually think. It has a very important social function – that of creating ties.

I give therefore I am. I am not: we are!! I give and this means that we exist at least in two. This is the antidote to the anti-gift to the utmost – the ‘hand of Adam’: Adam ‘takes and goes home and…ruins’. A ‘well-done’ gift, instead, is such that you ‘take it and take it outside’ and this is not in the least something to be taken for granted, if it is true that the first word that a child utters is not ‘mummy’ (the icon of giving) but ‘my’ (the poisoning of a gift). A gift in this sense constitutes the third paradigm (between methodological individualism and holism).

Descartes formulated the famous adage: Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am). The same applies to a gift: the gift that I offer makes me exist and also makes the person exist to whom I give because my gift says that he or she is ‘thought about’ by me and thus exists!

At this point we should also dwell upon the terms involved in order to grasp the nuances of the realities that they contain – realities that are not always the same. Gift or Present? Gift or Charity? Gift and super-gift: for-giving? I give you a present (the gift that establishes a moment of time). These terminological nuances also bring with them an ambiguity in those who receive a gift. When a gift is given, people often say: ‘you shouldn’t have!’

   We are near to Christmas and this is the period when the subject of gifts truly emerges in all its ‘ars retorica’ or ideological ambiguity: ‘it is not enough to do good (gift): the good (gift) has to be done well (by giving oneself)’ (St. Alfonso M. de Liguori).

One can even use a gift – we may think here of humanitarian initiatives – to mask the evil at work in a reality of war. This ambiguity which weighs upon giving and can pervert its meaning is not something that is new: ‘Time Danas et Dona ferments’ (Virgil, Aeneid II, 49), ‘I fear Greeks, even when they bear gifts!’ (gift experienced as the mythical Trojan horse, used to expel life from the other, another fortress: winning esteem, good feeling, to obtain a plaque, in order to have a good place in the eyes of the other…). On the other hand…we like to please! And what better way is there of using a gift than in order to increase one’s own personal approval ratings?

We are faced with a strong banalisation of giving that is weakened and upset even if it is called ‘charity’: today one ‘gives’ a crumb through an SMS to those whom the mass media indicate to us as being – distant – individuals for whom it is worthwhile to feel emotions, at least for a few seconds!

We have been warned about the risks and possible perversions of gifts: a gift can be refused with violent attitudes or distracted indifference; a gift can be received without expressing gratitude; and a gift can be wasted – giving, indeed, is an action that requires running a risk.

But a gift can also be perverted, it can become an instrument for the application of pressure which has an effect on the recipient, it can be transformed into an instrument of control, it can chain the freedom of the other rather than generating that freedom. Christians well know how in their history even a gift of God – grace – could and still can be presented as capturing or enslaving man who as a new Prometheus rebels against such an awareness of this deformed link with God.

Is, therefore, our situation today a hopeless one? No! To give, like loving and generating trust, is an art that has always been difficult: a human being is capable of this because he or she is capable of a relationship with the other but it remains the case that this ‘giving of oneself’ – because this is what it is: not only giving what one has, what one possesses, but also giving what one is – requires a profound belief about one’s own identity and that of other people (connection and identity: everybody knows who I am, but I do not always know who I am or let others know who I am and as such let them now what I give when they encounter me).

Who is the other? Either he or she is hell – as Jean Paul Sartre wrote acutely – or he or she is a gift whom I recognise when I give myself to the other! What can society, the polis, be? A communitas, a putting together of gifts (cum-munus), or non-recognition, the rejection of the other through an immunitas, an absolute closure! Giving to the other, to others, is not only a form of communal recognition it is also the pre-requisite for entering into the covenant of the communitas.

In the consciousness of men, in the structures of humanisation, there is not only the passion for the useful. There is also the search for ties, for relationships that generate generosity, love and alliances. Often individual behaviour seems to be dictated only by a philautic, selfish, impulse, which only searches for self-interest; or the excess of giving is always experienced because a human being is always capable of doing good, perceiving his or her own insufficiency and looking for the other to achieve a fullness of life which he or she does not possess in himself or herself. For this reason, despite the fact that the cultural dominants at times contradict the logic of gift, the event of the gift continues.

To give means by definition to hand over a good to another without receiving anything in exchange: in giving there is a subject, a giver, who in freedom, without being forced, and out of generosity, out of love, gives another a gift independently of the response he or she will receive.

The logic of giving, indeed, is not measured by the equivalence of the exchange but is a unilateral and gratuitous offering.

Giving, therefore, is an asymmetrical and unilateral movement that arises from spontaneity and freedom. Why is this? There can be many attempts at an answer to this question but I believe that giving is possible because a human being has within himself or herself a capacity to carry out this action without calculations: he or she is capax boni, he or she is capax amoris, he or she knows how to exceed in giving more than what he or she is obliged to give.

This is the greatness of the dignity of the human person: he or she knows how to give himself or herself and he or she knows how to do this in freedom! The human person is homo donator (vr. Homo oeconomicus)! It is certainly the case that a risk is run in the act of giving but this risk is absolutely necessary in order to deny self-sufficient man, autarchic man.

And if the gift does not receive something in exchange, whatever the case the giver has made a revolutionary gesture: through giving he or she has access to a relationship that is not generated by exchange, by a contract or by utilitarianism. He or she has begun a movement ‘against nature’ (against the hand of Adam who takes and takes home and…ruins), he or she has impressed a dyastasis in relationships, in relations, to the point of establishing the possibility of posing the question of the ‘good’ debt, that is to say the ‘debt of love’ that we each have to one another within the communitas!

However it remains a fact that a gift has within it, as a constituent element, something that is paradoxical, something that is hybrid, because it is at one and the same time a matter of duty and something that is free, useful and also gratuitous. It is in a certain sense a matter of duty, that is to say it is dictated by usage, by customs that belong to tradition or culture: there are codified occasions which make a gift a ‘matter of duty’, suggested by what everyone sees as a good thing. But this duty cannot be an obligation, obedience to a law that is honoured without conviction and without there being a wish to obey it. And thus the paradoxical character of a gift emerges, an act of freedom that allows the recipient to be free of providing something in exchange. Only in freedom is a gift truly a gift, because if there is some constraint of some kind, a gift is ruined and destined for dissolution.

Now it is specifically from this condition of freedom that the usefulness and gratuitousness of a gift can emerge. In what sense can a gift be useful, without because of this belonging to the logic of selfishness self-interest, of giving in order to receive something in exchange? There is a utility in giving because a gift has meaning and produces meaning. In giving we meet the need that exists in our interior selves because in not being self-sufficient, solitary, or ‘monads’ we feel the wishes of the other. We need the other to whom to give gifts, to give ourselves and what we have, without ever exploiting the other.

The other, the true great mystery that is in front of each one of us, the other that we wish for, the other that we invoke, the other with whom we are no longer alone, awakens in us the wish to give and asks from us the wonderful exchange of giving and receiving in order to be well together.

 

The Prophet of Gibran Khalil Gibran – Giving