To Gain One’s Soul: Kierkegaard and the Hermeneutical Virtue of Patience

Abstract

In his 1843–1844 Upbuilding Discourses on patience, Søren Kierkegaard makes the claim that one gains one’s soul in patience. Philosophically speaking, this claim seems to be a meshing together of two unrelated topics: the virtue of patience, which usually falls under moral philosophy, and the topic of the soul, which belongs to metaphysics or religious discourse. Rather than interpreting Kierkegaard’s talk about the soul as merely poetic or religious rather than properly philosophical, in this essay I attempt to take his connection between the virtue of patience and the constitution of the person seriously. I do so by arguing that the constitutive elements of the Kierkegaardian self can be understood hermeneutically as a proto-fundamental ontology. I then identify how Kierkegaard describes the virtue of patience in distinctly hermeneutical terms not as qualities or traits that adhere to the person but as a particular way of inhabiting space and time in relation to God. In patience, the self remains rooted in the present, bearing the weight of the loss and lack therein, while maintaining an anticipatory openness toward the future—a future that ultimately only God can provide. Patience, I conclude, is a way of being in time that is necessary at the constitutive level of the hermeneutical self.