Evergreen Reads to Empower Your Mind
The Standard Sister
Note no.23
Philosophy
November 23, 2025
Hello Stranger
When Christmas begins to cast its signals across the world, threatening to swallow us in red, green, and gold, the old longing returns: to celebrate the holiday in its traditional sense or in its extravagant one — its spectacle — the way we’ve been conditioned to do after so many images have been etched into us over the years.
The fantasy of buying gifts for the people I love, standing in line to have them wrapped in shiny paper, or opening one chosen especially for me — still charms me; whether because of the gift itself or the scene we script in our imagination, especially in such a glowing, enchanted season. There is something almost childlike in that anticipation: the way a single moment of unwrapping pulls the entire world into one point of attention. And behind the torn paper and ribbon lies an older question: What is a gift, really?
Elizabeth Montgomery by Victor Mascaro
On the Present (or) The Philosophy of Giving
Article by The Standard Sister
A gift is defined as something you give without receiving anything in return. The moment you do receive something back — even secretly, even just a flicker of satisfaction that you’ve made someone happy, the gift is no longer a “gift” but part of an exchange of value. Two conditions make the idea of a “true gift” possible: that you have something to give, and that you receive nothing in return. Yet in our world— the economic, moral, familial world — there is almost no such thing as giving without return. Everything operates within a cycle of give & return. Even parenthood (often imagined as the purest form of giving) can be read as part of a future debt or a quiet expectation (that the children will care for me when I’m old; that they’ll give me love; that they’ll make me proud in one way or another). And in a seemingly different system (though perhaps not so different), such as the teacher–student relationship, the economic dimension is unmistakable: the teacher gives knowledge and receives money, prestige, or authority; the student receives knowledge to later transform into ability, livelihood, status. All these systems operate within an economy — even if it is spiritual, emotional, or symbolic.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) offers a different possibility: giving something you don’t have — something you don’t yet know. He points to the rare moment in which the worthy teacher gives the student not what he already knows, not the “surplus,” but what has not yet taken shape — the space
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in which the worthy teacher gives the student not what he already knows, not the “surplus,” but what has not yet taken shape — the space in which future knowledge may come into being. This is a kind of giving that does not know itself, that is not recognized as a “gift.” Heidegger suggests that a true gift can exist only when it escapes definition — when the giver is not aware of what he has given. In relationships, for instance, one person may offer another a sense of safety without doing so intentionally: simply through the way he moves through the world, without knowing that this way of being grants the other love, stability, value — perhaps that is the greatest gift of all. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) sharpens the impossibility of the gift: “The moment we know we have given — the gift ceases to be a gift.” The moment the gift is recognized as such — even in the microscopic instant when the thought “I did something good” arises — it becomes framed within an economy of reward. For the gift to remain a gift, it must be unconscious, unseen, immeasurable, outside any logic of exchange. Derrida explains this with striking clarity: If the gift is present (presence) — it can be identified, and thus it is no longer a gift. If the gift occurs in the present
(the present) — it is registered in time, and thus immediately enters the economy.
And here the linguistic–philosophical play around the English word present becomes clear: a word that means both “gift” and “now.” Both meanings stem from the same Latin root, praesens, meaning to be-before, to be-present. From this root emerged two branches: the first — present as the current moment, tempus praesens, the time before us; the second — present as a gift, from the medieval presentare — to offer, to display, to place-before. And through these two branches we discover that language itself is concerned with time and presence: the moment a gift is present, or placed within time, it becomes part of the economy. A true gift, according to Derrida, must evade both presence and the present — existing outside time, outside recognition, outside the moment in which it can be recorded. Only then can it remain a gift unburdened by debt. And in much older texts, such as the Book of Proverbs, we find an intuition that approaches the idea of the gift from the opposite direction: “He who hates gifts shall live” (Proverbs 15:27). This is not merely a moral lesson, but an ancient insight: a gift is never innocent. It binds, obligates, unsettles autonomy. A gift can tie the receiver to the giver, placing him in a position of owing. That is why “he who hates gifts shall live” — not because he is ascetic, but because he is free from the emotional economy that begins the moment a gift is accepted. Once again we see the same truth: a recognized, acknowledged, recorded gift is never truly free. Another way to think about giving comes from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995). Following Levinas, one may propose that the moment we stand before the face of the Other creates a different kind of giving — not the giving of an object, nor of a deliberate act, but the giving of presence itself. It is crucial to distinguish the “presence” Levinas speaks of from the presence Derrida warns against: for Derrida, presence is the appearance that can be identified and registered in time; for Levinas, presence is a primordial relation, a call, something that cannot be recorded or calculated. A presence that is not an economy. Levinas does not speak explicitly of “gift,” yet the encounter he describes — an encounter that gives rise to responsibility without choice — may be read as a kind of ethical gift: something given without intention, without return, and without the action knowing itself as giving. And here, the double meaning of present — already explored earlier — echoes as a reminder that the most genuine giving may be the one that is neither intentional nor timed. Christmas is only one of the beautiful excuses we’ve invented to “give” something to someone else. And even if nearly every serious philosophy insists that no true gift exists — that it dissolves the moment our heart takes pleasure in it, or the moment it is registered in time — perhaps that is not the point. Most of our acts of giving are not pure, not free of motives, and do not meet the standards of Heidegger or Derrida. And yet they happen, and they move something. The desire to make space for another person — even when touched by satisfaction, resonance, or a trace of self-interest — still creates a shift in the world. And it stands on its own — exactly as it is.