“Patience has generally been considered a virtue, but it has been very difficult to explain why,” said Paul Davies a couple of years ago. And he is right. Not only because we human beings have paid little attention to it, but because patience has something that makes it difficult to understand.
After all, patience is too much like passivity, doing nothing, enduring whatever is thrown at us. What can have positive Be patient if the entire modern world has been built around autonomy, personal will and self-determination?
Luckily, we have Immanuel Kant to get us out of trouble.
An equivocal virtue. As soon as we stop to think about patience, we realize that it has no content of its own: it is always patience “for” something. And, of course, it is difficult to maintain that something is good in itself if it is little more than a psychological ability… Is patience for evil also a virtue?
And Kant’s response is… admit it. For him, patience only acquires moral status if we complement it with something else; but staying there would be a mistake. We speak of “the ability to hold oneself in a position that does not offer immediate gratification without this absence of gratification being experienced as suffering”.
The Kantian virtuous is not someone who suffers from duty, he is someone who develops sufficient moral strength so that this wait becomes a positive experience. That is, he is someone who is patient in the full sense: he is not someone who resists instinct, he is someone who actively experiences that wait.
What the hell does all this mean? Basically, for Kant, although being patient only makes moral sense in virtue of something; If our logic is to “be patient” to obtain a result, everything is wrong. We will have fallen into the trap: if we look for it, we have already lost it.
Although formulating it this way would horrify the Konigsberg philosopher, his vision of patience is very similar to the idea of enjoying the process for its own sake. In more Kantian terms, we could talk about ‘moral satisfaction’: “an indirect enjoyment of the inner freedom that arises from the consciousness of mastery over one’s own inclinations.”
And can this be trained? In several of his worksthe philosopher addresses the question of whether this ‘moral strength‘What we call patience can be trained. And his answer is yes; although, to tell the truth, in an unusual way.
Because it is not about doing self-control exercises, nor conditioning yourself to inhibit specific stimuli. For Kant, what is really important is to train ‘moral attention’: focusing on seeing how our inclinations affect how we see things and the evaluations we make about them; glimpse what is best. Over time, patience will come alone.
The most interesting image has to do with ‘writing’: fluency is not achieved by seeking fluency, it is achieved by writing a lot.
Image | Xataka
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