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R. W. K. Paterson

70 quotes

“Far from settling his interests on a single, fixed and final object, the nihilistic egoist preserves himself in a constant state of flux and dissolution, perpetually reviewing and modifying the heterogeneous objectives which he provisionally sets for himself.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A world in to whose settled meaning he [the egoist] had committed himself would be a world to which he had alienated himself. His self-possession would be at an end, for the world which he had begun by possessing would at last have come to possess him.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The refusal to make the truth of nihilism one’s own and build one’s life entirely within its shadow is indeed a refusal of existentialism itself.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As proprietor of his beliefs, the egoist never allows them to grow into ‘fixed ideas’: he never allows them to grow into sacrosanct dogmas, which he must not question or alter and of which he would therefore have become the prisoner.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They are supposed to be mature, and it is on this necessary supposition that their adulthood justifiably rests.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Education refers to no particular process; rather it encapsulates criteria to which any one of a family of processes must conform.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the most prevalent fallacies is the so-called genetic fallacy, which tempts men to argue that the first lowly origins of a thing demonstrate what it essentially is even in its most highly developed forms. Psychoanalysis and anthropologists have sometimes specialized in tracing the golden fruits to their grubby roots, and they have had some success in convincing the credulous that greatness is only triviality writ large. A kindred fallacy—which to state is to expose—teaches that the surest way of understanding a type is to inspect its poorest instances.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The direction in which to look for the patrician is always upwards. This is because his nature is to aspire, to rise always higher—not necessarily to rise above others but to rise above where he himself has been and above things as he finds them.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is rare to find the ideal of the patrician standing alone, not joining hands, albeit unavoidably and sometimes most reluctantly, with the ideals of very different human types. Even Plato’s Guardians, who have had the vision of The Good, are presented first of all as ideals rulers of earthly men, although Plato will soon openly declare that the commonwealth of which they are master is ‘set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it, to found one in himself, and whether it exists or ever will exist is no matter, for this is the only commonwealth in who politics he can ever take part’.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The true patrician distinguishes always between what he has to concern himself with, from stark necessity or the dictates of duty, and what he (and everyone else) ought ideally to be concerning himself with, in the proper realm to which he rightly belongs.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The patrician … can absolutely distinguish between ends, which are always and everywhere the same, and means, which we adopt only later to adapt, which we unhesitatingly alter and finally reject altogether when a more efficacious means presents itself, and which are thus of their nature expendable.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us now shrink from parodying Hegel, and state that for our patrician ‘the romantic is the real, the real the romantic’.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Political power, social prowess, monetary reward, mere physical well-being: towards these things he [the patrician] is indifferent, and perhaps contemptuous, for they have no part to play in a life well lived but can too readily become the food of souls starved of real meaning and achievement. No reasonable creature would waste a single hour of his life pursuing such things for their own sakes. When they figure in our attempts to see what shape our lives may take, they merely obstruct the view.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our ridicule and disgust are in the end aimed at some unavowed part of our own selves.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We want to know not merely what men have been, even the best men of their day, but what men can and ought to be.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men are admittedly social beings, language-using beings, tool-using beings, and so on. However, any serious philosophical anthropology has to recognize that first and foremost we are evaluating beings.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Endurance means that failures have to be both accepted and refused: accepted as a sign that fresh efforts now need to be made, and refused as a signal that we may now desist from effort altogether. … Courage means that the external risks and adversities we face (as distinct from or own moral and spiritual failures) are to be assessed at their true importance: that is, for the patrician, as being in themselves of no importance, as objects not of fear but of disdain.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(describing the two aspects of resoluteness), p. 11.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fundamental optimism which is an element of all true nobility … is obviously related to courage since it refuses to be discouraged in the face of what sometimes seems overwhelming evidence.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Optimism draws its strength from what it perceives as the underlying themes of human life rather than from the incidental if frequent and hateful discords of particular notes—from the depth and persistence of dreams compared with the sheer meaninglessness of the miscellaneous evils which may mark our daily experience.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The patrician is recognizable by his passionate idealism. … The material content of our experiences and achievements has value for him only to the extent that it enshrines symbols of beauty and grandeur. He judges events and actions less by their material and social efficacy than by the qualities of mind and character to which they bear witness, because this is where he holds that their truth is to be found, in the romantic kingdom of irrevocable moral fidelities rather than in the calculating republic of material probabilities.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The plebeian … will return [after a traumatic event] to his life of transient surface meanings, still deaf and blind to the deeper symbolisms with which his experience is fraught and to everything that does not thrust itself peremptorily upon his material senses.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The plebeian … absorbs himself in tasks, whether pleasant or tedious, and in the procedures, complicated or simple, needed to carry out these tasks, and he thinks of himself as busy, as usefully occupied. He tries not to think about the end purposes of his activities, where they are supposed to be ultimately leading him to, for he dimly surmises that they are leading him nowhere.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The version of reality a man adopts will depend largely on his values.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The version of reality a man adopts will depend largely on his values. … It is therefore possible for a learned man, who has conscientiously acquired a vast, carefully organized, and scrupulously representative mass of historical, sociological, and psychological knowledge, to be nevertheless disastrously wrong about its human meaning.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is possible to expose cowardly and degenerate hypocrisy in the name of true heroism and purity of spirit. But it is also possible to spatter mud on genuine heroes out of hatred for heroism.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His [the plebeian’s] aim is not to teach, to correct error, but to disturb, to unsettle, to sow disillusioning seeds in the hope of spreading disillusionment as a rooted attitude of mind.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Although he [the plebeian] cannot deny that selfless courage and unswerving rectitude—indeed all the qualities of the patrician—exist as dreams in men’s minds, his mission is to destroy any belief that they have ever influenced, or ever could influence, the motive, character, and conduct of actual men and women. Whenever such ideals are put before us, he wants us to react to them as simply unbelievable.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here, then, we are being given a glimpse of one version of reality. According to this version heroism is an illusion. … The qualities of the patrician are fool’s gold, and a reasonable human being, a clear-sighted realist, will seek what is attainable—what other realistic people have already attained and are enjoying—physical security and comfort, social esteem, a changing variety of dependable pleasures, and the money or status which will ensure that all of these remain with reach.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The version of reality [of the plebeian] is odiously wrong, because it reeks of disbelief in anything which cannot be construed as intrinsically base or shabby. … Even if Gordon had been all that legend has made him, the only effect this would have would be to make his critic less bland and more venomous in his unshakeable hostility.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Far from invalidating the ideal, the fact that men’s behaviours is in opposition to it invalidates their behaviour. We measure the cloth by the yardstick, not the yardstick by the cloth.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ideals are not summaries of the empirical facts about human personality and behaviour: they are the standards by reference to which we pass judgment on the facts. Since ideals are not empirical generalizations, to cite counterinstances, however plentiful, would merely be to betray one’s total failure to understand the nature of the subject-matter under discussion.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When those around us perceive the world as if it were a narrow and humdrum shopping precinct, in which the best life possible consists in avoiding all risk and striking bargain after bargain in order to multiply and spin out a succession of manageable pleasures, all else being folly, we can easily come to doubt any version of reality in which there is space for grandeur.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ultimately, instead of inspecting life to see what we can find to suit us, we inspect ourselves to see what we can find that fits us to receive the standardized packages in which our life-experience is going to arrive.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The plebeian asks himself, ‘What type of person am I?’, and he seeks the answer by comparing the self he believes he is with the norms enshrined in the manufactured packages on public offer.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we live in a plebeianized world, it is because so many human beings have busied themselves making a world fir only for plebeians to live in.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we entrust the domain of values to those whose intellectual concerns are essentially centred on empirical facts, and whose conceptual frameworks are inevitably constructed around sets of empirical facts, we need not be surprised if the result is moral confusion.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sociologists, economists, and anthropologists, who notoriously decline to distinguish between the value judgements men make and the moral realities about which men make these judgments, are occupationally prone to treat all value judgements, however sharply opposed, as if they were of equal merit.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When writers with the reputation of intelligent and perceptive critics of human life teach us, day in and day out, that vileness is distinguishable from decency only in respect of being less hypocritical, … it is small wonder that ordinary people come to disbelieve in any objective principles by appeal to which one form of conduct can be regarded as morally better than another.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The common result is … that the common man comes to feel vindicated in his commonness, and jeeringly turns his back on everything he apprehends as a summons to lift himself up to more challenging levels of personality.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Literature and drama, which ought to breathe life into our imaginings and stir us into a sense of unlimited possibilities, instead manage to convince us that all doors are closed and that in the end nothing is worth the effort. Instead of creating passion out of luminous vision, out of bewilderment they manufacture apathy.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“… the plebeian tendency to become engrossed with the means and to avert one’s eyes from the end”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For many years the best minds in moral philosophy have been less concerned with the content of morality than with its form, less with the actual truth of our many value judgements than with their logical standing.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sceptics often make much of the alleged mysteriousness of values—by which, however, they mean little more than that they are claimed to be essentially different from all classes of physical objects and properties, mental states and properties, historical facts, mathematical theorems, scientific concepts, or whatever. In other words, their objection is simply that values are claimed to be of their nature different everything which is not of its nature a value.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The less familiar and more complex something is, the less we can rely on our immediate feelings, and the greater the risk of error in our ultimate moral judgements. … But equally the more remote or unusual some physical event, the less we can rely on our unaided senses. … The arguments which supposedly show that values are in some vitiating sense ‘subjective’ would also show that the physical world itself is essentially subjective.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Talk of the sublime, the exalted, the eternal, the passionate, of glory, challenge, or majesty fills some of us with bewilderment, discomfort, and embarrassment; others with sour resentment or scornful disbelief. To reinstate such values seems to us like trying to reinstate Ptolemaic astronomy—equally misguided, incomprehensible, and inimical to our perceived interests.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The consciousness of the patrician remains open to the symbolisms which surround him. He believes that they may be rungs on a ladder of being which he can ascend. … He has the courage to dwell in their midst and thus to form his life by reference to dimensions of significance which transcend his narrow mundane interests as a physical organism.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The patrician … has the courage to listen to and retain whatever may be glorious in the ambiguous revelations that are being offered to him; he is resolved to miss nothing, to plumb every depth and scale every height, in the pilgrimage of his consciousness.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We cannot find out what a home is by looking at actual instances of homes, since we cannot even begin to pick these out as putatively instances of ‘homes’ unless we have somewhere in our minds an idea of what a ‘home’ is truly supposed to be. We can only recognize the false if we can compare it mentally with the true. Thus the average home cannot possibly be taken as a standard measure of what a home should be.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are individuals … who propagate lessons inviting self-abasement, bitterness, self-waste, and cynicism; there are those who high pride, like that of Lucifer, is to dethrone everything they perceive as superior and summoning men to what lies above them.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source