Patience, Inwardness, and Self-Knowledge in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj
Patience is a peculiar quality, especially when viewed from a moral or political perspective. By itself it appears to have no moral or political content, in the ways that telling the truth and treating people fairly clearly do. It is formal to the point of being a nullity. Its substantiality is entirely temporal. It enjoins slowing down, waiting, enduring, and doing things at the appropriate pace and the appropriate time. But it suggests an entirely temporal disposition toward what is to be done, without indicating what that is or taking a position regarding the worth of that thing. Job’s exemplary patience in the Bible is not the pure expression of it because it is clearly backed by a certainty in the knowledge of God and his goodness. That good and evil coexist, the central theme of the book of Job, does not undermine that certainty; indeed, Job is patient precisely because he knows the distinction between the two. He knows God exists and that his goodness will be made manifest, as indeed it is at the end of Job’s trials. He endures the travails that the book describes, but his endurance is not purely temporal because it is backed by a theological certainty — God exists, he is good, and he will redeem his servant Job.
Patience, in contrast, appears to place a value on time, per se. By itself it does not refer to a more specific content. In this respect it is different from the familiar view of virtues, which have a specific content such as charity, faith, truthfulness, or love. This is no doubt why patience was not included in the list of the celebrated theological or cardinal virtues in the Christian tradition. Nor was it included in the four Platonic virtues. Sophrosyne, with which patience is easily confused, is different because the virtue of temperance at least in Plato’s Republic involves an explicit balancing with respect to substantive extremes. Patience has far too much potential for being incorporated into a relativist framework to be readily counted among a short list of virtues.
Moreover, virtues in their traditional rendering have an abstraction built into them. They endorse a particular content as having a broader if not universal value, and they endorse that content independent of who is asserting it or the internal constitution of the person being virtuous. In this sense virtues can be indifferent to the self. It is the content of the alleged virtue and not the self that is being endorsed. This is why as far back as Plato all serious theories of virtue have had to contend with the problem of appearing virtuous while not having an internally virtuous constitution. Thus Gyges in the Republic, with the aid of a ring that at appropriate times made him invisible, appeared to be virtuous, while in reality he was the very opposite of it, that is, in terms of the constitution of his soul.
An important strand of moral theorizing has understood virtues and principles in roughly the same way. They both refer to a substantive content, the evidence of whose value stems from its being universalizable and which furthermore supports or authorizes a moral judgment in the name of that value. The moral judgment follows simply from the fact that the principle or the virtue in question has an abstraction built into it. That abstraction is the claim that the principle and the virtue have a universal validity.
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Notes
I am very grateful to Ritu Birla, Faisal Devji, Shruti Kapila, Aishwary Kumar, and Achille Mbembe for their questions and comments on an earlier version of this article. The article was written during a time when I had the privilege to witness the exemplary courage and patience of the late Carol Breckenridge.