Why Patience is Always a Virtue

I'll be presenting a paper thus titled this coming weekend in Bowling Green Kentucky at the KPA. These ideas will be familiar to regular visitors here. Here's the abstract:

ABSTRACT: It is sometimes suggested that traits commonly regarded as virtues are not in every instance virtuous. On such views, these traits are not univocally good: one might possess too much courage or too much patience. Such talk has a natural feel — “be patient, but not too patient!” — but it conflicts with traditional ways of thinking about the virtues. In this paper, focusing on the case of patience, I illustrate a way of resolving this conflict that accords with the spirit of the traditional approach — in particular with the thought that the virtuous traits are themselves always good. That means, for example, that patience is always a virtue, and that one cannot be “too patient,” even though those claims seem to conflict with other rather ordinary ways of thinking and talking about patience. The approach illustrated herein can also be applied to similar conflicts and disputes about other virtues.

Comments welcome. I'm hard at revisions and re-writing of the book manuscript, which is a challenge in part because I'm generally trying not to copy and paste from these various papers and presentations, in an attempt to write in a way that is as non-technical as possible (for me and my aims, at least). I hope, however, to merge key ideas in many of these shorter papers into some kind of a journal article (or two) that will hopefully complement the book, and build on some forthcoming book chapters that are also about patience.

Niether Duck Nor Rabbit

As a follow-up to my last post and the comments: as I was reviewing my discussion with Reshef, it occurred to me that my not knowing what the "right" response is on some nights when I stare into the vast sky and can, on the one hand, be filled with thoughts of our smallness and the seeming groundlessness of things, and then, on the other hand, with thoughts about how wondrous the whole world is--perhaps this state of not knowing, of not moving decidedly into either aspect (or way of viewing the world), is itself a "position" rather than a failure to know what the "right" position is? Perhaps this is obvious to those who have considered the issue of aspect-seeing, that the real temptation is to think that the tension between seeing things one way or another must ultimately, in all cases, be resolved. That the true "resolution" is to resolve to learn to accept certain fundamental ambiguities, to accept the tension between apparently contradictory aspects. Perhaps this is why Simone Weil says, in Gravity and Grace:

The contradictions the mind comes up against—these are the only realities: they are the criterion of the real. There is no contradiction in what is imaginary. Contradiction is the test of necessity.

This might shed a different light on Wittgenstein's distinction in the Tractatus between the worlds of the happy man and the sad man, or show that there are different ways of being the happy or the sad. On the one hand, the happy man might be the one who sees the world as a wondrous miracle, and the sad man the one who sees everything as awful and pointless. But on the other hand, the happy man might be the one who has accepted the tension between the two aspects (and yet sees and feels the weight of both aspects, at different times, forcefully), and the sad man the one who cannot accept this ambiguity.