a short note about impatience and its absence
Pacience is an heigh vertu, certeyn
—Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, “The Franklin’s Tale”
Is patience really a virtue? People who say it is are not wrong, but I don’t think they’re right either.1
Courage is definitely a virtue because it consists of a definite posture of the will that we take towards fear or adversity. Namely, courage consists of bringing the will to bear in the face of these things and in spite of them. Hence it designates a positive moral virtue.2 The same could be said about temperance, prudence, faith, kindness, etc.
But the same can not be said about patience unless we are willing to affirm that silence is a kind of speech because it’s something we can do with our voice, or drowning is a kind of swimming because it’s something we can do in the water. Whereas courage is something we do when we bristle up our will against fear in the face of necessity, patience is what we are left with when cease vainly with our will to oppose the present facts. Imagine, if you will, someone pushing on a boxcar from the inside in the attempt to move it. That is a positive action and exercise of the will. But if he desisted from these vain attempts, he would have ceased to do something. Similarly, patience not something a person does, but something he refrains from doing. It is like a hole in Swiss cheese, made visible when it is circumscribed by its opposite. A person is patient when he or she has banished all impatience from the soul, and the only effort required to sustain patience is any effort required to hold impatience at bay.
Returning to the unfortunate image of the boxcar passenger: of course, it makes no difference to the movement of the boxcar whether he pushes or not. But it makes a great deal of difference to him, to his subjective state, to the husbandry of his efforts, and to his experience of the passage of time. I would like briefly to elaborate on this last point. “Time” is said in many ways. Here I would like to focus on two of them: physical time and experiential time, or clock-time and life-time. Whereas the decay of radioactive carbon will happen at more or less the same rate regardless of the internal disposition of the one who is observing it, the inner disposition of the one who is observing it will have quite a lot to say about whether it’s happening fast or slowly. Indeed, “fast” and “slowly” are indexical and always relative to some subjective frame of reference. Life-time and not clock-time is being indicated in the old saw, “a watched pot never boils.” Hence, while impatience doesn’t have much of an influence of clock-time, the influence it exerts on life-time—time as we actually experience it—is definitive. The patient person floats in the river of time; the impatient one thrashes and flails about in the same river, which always takes us where we need to go anyway.
Of course, a statement like this is rhetorically provocative, and its truth hinges on what is understood by the term “virtue.” I would like to invite the reader to entertain my argument to consider if it has merit before insisting on some other definition of the term than the one I am employing.
It is also situated, as the aurum mediocritas, between the vices of excess and deficiency—in this case, brashness and cowardice. Patience or forbearance can be construed analogously in the Aristotelian schema, as the balance between the excess of impatience or rashness and the deficiency of indolence or bovinity.
“…patience is not something a person does, but something he refrains from doing.”
Here’s how I see it. Through the etymology of patience, a somewhat different meaning is arrived at. From “patio” - to suffer, to bear, to remain in a state of pain - patience is endurance. It’s the ability to - against discomfort of some sort - sustain a certain activity, or lack thereof, in view of a later-to-come good. As such, it stems from a skillful intuitive orientation in time, able to expand the now, and to infuse with awareness time-scales larger than the instinctive now-scale, dimensioned to the temporal order of magnitude of our vorstellungen - thought-pictures. So I agree it’s more similar to floating than to thrashing in the time flow, in the sense that patience demonstrates an ability to extend the instant, now-like, intuitive grasp of the process of reality to portions of its flow that are larger than the instinctive ones.
With zero patience, the soul is condemned to drifting instinctively and without any resistance - thus amorally - in complete submission to the necessity of instinctive desire and pleasure. Conversely, with patience, the soul is allowed to strike a virtuous balance through time, between set goals and opposing temptations, continuously manifesting throughout the flow. The intuitive grasp can seize larger and larger time-scales. Therefore I would say that patience, like courage, expresses a definite posture of the will, taken against giving in to short-term, vain pleasure, for the attainment of a good further ahead.
For example, consistent study and work to pass an examination can’t be successful exclusively on grounds of determination and focus, pointed to the prospect of getting a pass. If patience is absent, vector-like determination alone fails, because the soul traverses a manifold, voluminous (not vector-like) flow of becoming that incessantly challenges it from all sides, with all sorts of distracting thought-pictures (desires, feelings, sensations) and patience is needed to endure these constant pressure and wisely keep the temptations at bay, so that determination can have a chance to lead the will to its objective.
Perhaps it can be said that, in the strategy of virtuous becoming, patience is like the cavalry units on the sides, covering the thrust of the legion in the center, without which the legion would be decimated by the enemy.
interesting perspective. since i always value the origin of words, i can only see patience as 'knowing how to suffer', but having said that, the key really is in the knowing as much as in the suffering. the indifferent isn't patient, he's just numb.