No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:
A Neglected Virtue
"Patience is a virtue," a friend used to say, before grinning and boastfully adding,
“which I don’t have!” Unlike generosity or compassion, patience seems to be the
kind of virtue people are able to boast about lacking. My friend’s dismissive attitude
toward patience would not be out of place in contemporary analytic philosophy in
the West.[1] This attitude is most often expressed by neglect: one is hard pressed to find much discussion of patience in the works of Plato and Aristotle.[2] Later classics like Spinoza’s Ethics, Mill’s Utilitarianism, and Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals make no mention of patience at all.[3]
When patience is discussed, it is commonly described as a morally unimportant notion. Aquinas defends patience as a virtue, but quickly notes that it is not a principal virtue, and since the best virtues aim at the good and incline us to it patience is not one of them.[4] Aquinas’ criticism of the moral value of patience is echoed later by David Hume and Francis Hutcheson. Hume includes patience among traits that are valuable only for their effect on our conduct:
- There are many other qualities of the mind, whose merit is deriv’d from the same origin, industry, perseverance, patience, activity, vigilance, application, constancy, with other virtues of that kind, which ‘twill be easy to recollect, are esteem’d valuable upon no other account, than their advantage in the conduct of life.[5]
Hutcheson includes it among traits that are admirable, but not in a moral way:
- A penetrating genius, capacity for business, patience of application and labour, a tenacious memory, a quick wit, are naturally admirable, and relished by all observers; but with a quite different feeling from moral approbation.[6]
Here patience is described as having only instrumental value; it is a virtue that helps
us to achieve existing goals (goals that could be moral, immoral, or amoral). Since it
does not supply us with a morally good goal (as generosity and justice do), it is considered as morally valuable as having good business sense or being a clever conversationalist. This view is echoed in more recent discussions. For example, Michael Slote describes patience both as a “minor” virtue and an “other-regarding” virtue, good only for its benefit to others.[7]
In contrast to its treatment by many philosophers in the West, patience plays a central role in Buddhist ethics. One can hardly read a book about Buddhist ethics and not find at least some discussion of patience.[8] Many of the Jātaka tales, fables about the previous lives of the Buddha, feature lessons about patience.[9] In the Theravāda tradition, patience appears as one of the Ten Perfections (Pāli: pāramī), the ten qualities that lead to becoming a Buddha.10 In Mahāyāna Buddhism, it is one of the Six Perfections (Skt: pāramitā) of the bodhisattva, the spiritual and ethical ideal of the Mahāyāna. The eighth-century Buddhist philosopher Śāntideva’s Entering the Path of the Bodhisattva (Bodhicaryāvatāra), one of the most studied and quoted Buddhist texts, devotes an entire chapter to discussing patience. This attention to patience is continued by Tibetan thinkers like Tsongkhapa in his Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path (lam rim chen mo) and Gampopa in his Jewel Ornament of Liberation (dwags po thar rgyan). One need not know much about the specifics of Buddhist thought to see that Buddhist thinkers care about patience in a way that analytic ethicists in the West do not.
The difference between Western analytic views and Buddhist views on patience is not simply a cultural or historical curiosity, but can shed light on the assumptions Western thinkers tend to make about patience and its role in moral life. Joseph Kupfer offers a recent restatement of these assumptions.11 First, following Hume, he claims that patience has only instrumental value: unlike justice or courage, patience does not supply us with goals, but is merely a means to achieving goals we already have. Second, following Hutcheson, he claims that patience does not itself have moral value; if it has moral value at all, according to Kupfer, it is as a product of more basic moral attitudes like self-respect or understanding of the flaws of others.[12]
In what follows, I argue that patience is not always of merely instrumental moral value, but can have moral value itself. In brief: patience and impatience often manifest how we relate to various sources of value in the world in morally important ways. My discussion will begin with patience in a Buddhist context and will offer a Buddhist-inspired account of which sort of patience has moral value and why. I am not suggesting that Western philosophers accept Buddhist ethics wholesale, only that examining a virtue in an ethical system that prizes it can shed light on what many ethicists in the West have overlooked.
Notes
- The case for neglect is certainly weaker when applied to Christian ethics and philosophers outside the analytic tradition, who tend to take patience more seriously as a virtue. I will mention such thinkers, though they may well have less to learn from Buddhism in this respect than their analytic colleagues.
- The S. C. Woodhouse English-Greek Dictionary translates ‘patience’ with various synonyms that capture various aspects of patience: ‘endurance’ (karteria), ‘forgiveness’ (syngnome), ‘gentleness’ (praotes), and ‘quietness’ (hesychia). There is discussion of these notions in the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle says that endurance is less choiceworthy than self-control (VII.7, 1150b1), and Plato’s Charmides offers quietness as a possible definition of moderation (sophrosune), but these are not discussions of patience in the sense I will discuss. Aristotle’s discussion of gentleness and anger (IV.5, 1125b26 ff), however, is closer to the notion I am concerned with. I thank Mary-Louise Gill for these references.
- Though when reflecting on his pietist upbringing Kant comes close to praising something like the notion of patience I will discuss, saying of his parents, “They possessed the highest qualities that a human being can possess, namely that calmness and pleasantness, that inner peace that can be disturbed by no passion. No Need, no person, no dispute could make them angry or cause them to be enemies of anyone” (quoted in Kuehn, Kant, p. 40).
- Summa Theologica, Question 136.
- A Treatise of Human Nature 3.3.4.7.
- A System of Moral Philosophy in Three Books, pp. 27–28.
- Slote, From Morality to Virtue, p. 104. See also Kawall, who claims that patience is an other-regarding epistemic virtue, along with Fowler and Kam, who claim patience as a political virtue that is primarily good for society. Robert Adams’ discussion of patience (A Theory of Virtue, pp. 33–34) sounds somewhat non-moral, calling patience a “structural virtue” that is simply a matter of “personal psychic strength.”
- Popular introductions to Buddhist ethics nearly always include a discussion of patience. For example, the Dalai Lama’s Ethics for the New Millennium, Hammalawa Saddhatissa’s Buddhist Ethics, and Peter Harvey’s An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics all include several mentions of patience. I have never seen any mention of patience in a philosophical introduction to ethics by an analytic philosopher in the West.
- Rerukane Chandavimala Mahathera offers the following list: Mahāsīlava (Analysis of Perfections, p. 51), Khantivādī (p. 313), Chaddanta (p. 514), and Mahākapi (p. 516).
- See Mahathera, Analysis of Perfections, p. 18.
- Kupfer, “When Waiting Is Weightless,” pp. 277–279.
- Cf. Mayeroff, who sees patience as an expression of caring (On Caring, pp. 12–13).
