Gifts are a highlight of the holidays for many. We take pleasure in the ritual of giving and receiving presents. But what might seem like a pure expression of generosity often fails to break away from the marketplace logic of exchange and debt. Seneca, Marcel Mauss, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida and Peter Singer on the perils of gift-giving.

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Seneca

Finding the right kind of gift has never been straightforward.

There's a reason you can't just get everyone the same gift, and Seneca explains it best.

“Whoever thinks that giving presents is an easy matter is wrong. This is a subject of extreme difficulty, if the gifts are made carefully and not just cast about randomly and impulsively. To one person I do a favor; to another I return one; to one I help; another I show pity.

I give to someone else because they shouldn’t be overcome by poverty and obsessed by it; to some I will give nothing even though they need it because they would still be in need whatever I give; to others I offer aid and some people I force to take it. I cannot be negligent in this effort and I am never more certain to write down names than when I am making a gift.”

Seneca, De Vita Beata

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Marcel Mauss

Is gift-giving ever done our of pure generosity?

Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist and anthropologist who wrote the definitive book on the ritual gift-giving called, The Gift. One of Mauss’ key theses is that even though we might act like gift-giving is all about being generous, in fact the giving and receiving gifts involves “an accounting system” with the “intricate mingling of symmetrical and contrary rights and duties.” In other words, the receiver of gifts feels like they have an obligation to the gift-giver, while the latter feels a sense of entitlement to have their gesture reciprocated.

"What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?"

Marcell Mauss, The Gift

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Jean Paul Sartre

Is gifting a way of possessing?

Bulding on Mauss's thought, Sartre, paradoxiacally, sees gifting as the ultimate way to possess something.

“Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

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Theodor Adorno

Gift-giving isn’t what it used to be.

We are more suspicious of gift-giving that we perhaps like to admit. Even children are aware there might be a secret agenda to them. Also, today you can usually exchange gifts you receive for something you actually like. But that has ruined the thought process that used to go into gifts, thinking of the other and their pleasure in receiving what we have carefully chosen specifically or them.