During a year when there is much tumult around the world and in the United States in particular, it might be surprising to encounter a paper about patience and argumentation. In this paper, I explore the notion of deep disagreement, with an eye to moral and political contexts in particular, in order to motivate the idea that patience is an argumentative virtue that we ought to cultivate. This is particularly so because of the extended nature of argumentation and the slow (...) rate at which we change our minds. I raise a concern about how calls for patience have been misused in the past and argue that if we accept patience as an argumentative virtue, we should hold people in positions of power, in particular, to account. (shrink)

The intensifying speed-up of contemporary economic, social and political life troubles democratic theorists because they assume that democracy depends on patience. This article turns to Martin Luther King, Jr. to challenge democratic theory’s temporal bias. I argue that King demonstrates that impatience, too, is a democratic virtue. Building on impatient knowledge, democratic impatience aides in overcoming undemocratic legacies, fosters democratic subjectivity and agency, ensures political accountability, and creates a more inclusive practice of democratic belonging. I furthermore show that King reveals (...) the temporal sophistication of democratic impatience, thereby contradicting the prevailing interpretation of self-defeating instantaneousness. In particular, democratic impatience’s temporal origins of centuries of injustice, human mortality, and the context of social acceleration provide a mature impetus for democratic action. Moreover, democratic impatience persists over time. On the one hand, it does so because injustice persists. On the other hand, democratic impatience contains within itself a subordinate operational patience. In other words, democratic impatience is always already somewhat ‘patient.’ King’s democratic impatience therefore not only redresses democratic theory’s shortcomings, but it also generates a renewed sense of democratic possibility in our age, as democratic impatience is well suited to help us in redressing the crises and injustices deepened or generated by social acceleration. (shrink)

How leaders and managers respond to not knowing is highly relevant given the complex, ambiguous, and chaotic business environment of the twenty-first century. Drawing on the literature from a variety of disciplines, the paper explores the dominant, unfavorable conceptualization of not knowing. The authors present some potential ethical implications of a negative view of not knowing and suggest how organizations would benefit from identifying any unhelpful aspects of the culture that may encourage unethical, undesirable, and/or hasty actions in situations of (...) not knowing. The paper specifically illustrates how patience, courage, honesty, integrity, and humility are integral to negative capability in the contexts of not knowing. Finally, the paper calls for deeper inquiry into the role of virtue ethics in preparing managers and leaders for not knowing and urges organizations to embrace negative capability in not knowing rather than engaging in damaging delusion. (shrink)

Suppose that Linda, Brian’s partner, is on a business trip. Brian cannot wait for her to come home. It would be plausible to construe his attitude as impatience, and claim that it is called for in this type of situation. But if this is indeed the case, then patience is uncalled for. However, it seems that patience cannot be uncalled for, as it is considered a virtue. So goes the common expression, and so attest all of the philosophical analyses of (...) patience in recent decades. Discussing them, I claim that patience is not always the right attitude. Enthusiasm and excitement, which might be impatient, have their own merits. Furthermore, as patience involves not only waiting, but also enduring or persevering, it might also be the case that one endures too much and thus allows vice to flourish. Being truly virtuous has to do with knowing when and how to be patient, but also when and how to be impatient. (shrink)

Simone Weil wrote that, “We do not have to understand new things, but by dint of patience, effort and method to come to understand with our whole self the truths which are evident.” This is reminiscent of the suggestion in Plato’s Meno that knowledge is recollection. Although most of us would not take Plato at his word, we might charitably read him and Weil as suggesting that the solution to some problems depends not upon learning something new, but rather in (...) understanding how to apply what we have already learned, in knowing how to look at the problem in the right way, or how to ask the right question, so that the solution—the answer, the right course of action—becomes clear. Knowing how to apply ourselves, our skills, and our experiences, is what it means to have practical wisdom. It is traditionally assumed that the virtuous person is also the practically wise person, that there is no human virtue without such wisdom. Although this view that practical wisdom is internal to the virtues has been challenged on various grounds, here I will travel close to the traditional conception while also convinced that what I offer here identifies an important relationship between patience and practical wisdom regardless of whether we construe virtues in an Aristotelian fashion or otherwise. (shrink)