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R. W. K. Paterson

70 quotes

“There are individuals who are haunted by self-doubt, whose attitude to life is negative and distrustful, or who exist in a state of confusion about what they are and what they can become. … Unlike physical deprivation or obvious social injustice, evils like these strike at the very roots of human life. When men can no longer picture themselves as worthy of existing, it scarcely matters whether they have the means of existing.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Artist, philosopher, lover, mystic—these words name levels of consciousness which are accessible to all of us. It is not a question of training, education, or degree of sophistication. It is rather a question of openness, of courage and endeavour, of willingness to dwell elsewhere than in the midst of demeaning preoccupations with material fortune, status, and power.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is nether fortune, status, nor power, nor even intellect, which marks out the Patrician, but intensity of consciousness and the resolve to pursue only what is truly worth pursuing.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rebellion is a way of being alive. A consciousness of evil, needful to be combated … is one of our most vivid forms of consciousness. If evil did not exist we should have to invent it, as indeed we do in works of the imagination. … A man who had never rebelled would be a man who did not know what it was to be alive.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The true rebel … may incidentally lend his support to this or that finitely realizable cause, but his unique vocation is to keep the rebellious consciousness alive. In his eyes the crucial feature of any cause is the degree to which it fosters the spirit of private defiance.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Success necessarily emasculates the spirit of rebellion. From the point of view of the true rebel the noblest cause is a lost cause.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The works of Sartre and Heidegger abound in description of the multifarious ways in which men seek to lose themselves in the protective illusions of their society and their age. 'Man', says Heidegger, 'can lose himself to what he meets in the world and be taken over by it'. (Being and Time, 1.1.3.16) As men-in-community, cherishing common institutions, revering the time-honoured procedures of society, and reassured by the approved forms and rituals of our collective being, we manage to deceive ourselves into believing that this retreat into comforting anonymity is a positive assent to hallowed and objective realities. We refuse to accept the mysterious and dreadful fact of our own contingency, and instead pretend that our lives are governed by impersonal and autonomous power, human or divine, deriving their incontestable authority from history or from nature. According to Sartre, the whole human pretence that values exist ‘as transcendent givens independent of human subjectivity’ is what constitutes ‘the spirit of seriousness’, which ‘it must be the principal result of existential psychoanalysis to make us repudiate’. (Being and Nothingness, 1.2.3)”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the one hand, the existentialist seeks to remain true to his original vision of the meaninglessness and futility of everything, since this fundamental cosmic honesty must be the basis of any attempt to live authentically; on the other hand, his stark personal reality is that he finds himself unable to appropriate the truth of nihilism existentially, unable to affirm it as his personal truth, the truth within which he will henceforth live: and it is at this point that he clutches at the artifice of commitment, hoping to save himself from nihilistic despair by a desperate leap towards a faith that will restore purpose and meaning to his shattered world.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a sense the plebeian has no history. He drudges, recruits his pathetic strength, and reproduces drudges. This is true whether the plebeian, man or woman, works in a field, factory, or office, … whether he continues his drudgery by tilling his meagre vegetable patch or decorating his suburban bungalow, and whether he takes his ease over a cock-fight, in a Victorian gin-palace, or somnolent before a colour television set in Wolverhampton. The fact that such activities and pastimes can be painstakingly recorded and taught as history does not mean that they are worthy of notice, except as warnings and admonitions.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The history of the plebeians’ ‘struggles’ … is largely a record of mankind’s struggle to obtain plebeian things. Better food and housing, better physical health, greater economic security— … none of this forms any part of real human living, but at most merely the means to real living, the inglorious subsoil, not meant to be seen, which we tolerate and accept as an unexciting necessity if worthwhile activities and modes of expression are to grow and blossom. … The patrician mind does not deny such necessities. What distinguishes the plebeian mentality is that it treats necessary things as if they were sufficient and treats means as if they were ends.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Plebeians have in every period been treated as mere means, Their mute part is that of serfs, cannon-fodder, wage-slaves, ‘hands’, political tools as mobs or ‘votes’, economic puppets as potential consumers, purchasers, o borrowers. … The double irony is that those who have exploited and manipulated them have typically been no less plebeian of soul. … If their ends have been of the same kind as those of their victims or subjects their human reality has been the same. The greater scale off their activity makes not the slightest difference. Multiply zero by the greatest of numbers and the results is still zero.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For Marx the tragedy is that the wage worker does not consider the hours he spends ‘weaving, spinning, drilling, turning, building, shovelling, stone-breaking as an expression of his life, as life’. In other words Marx wants us to remain plebeians, only glorified plebeians, plebeians who glory in their status as plebeians, as producers of cloth, metal, and stones. We are to find ourselves, our true identity, not as consumers but as producers. We are indeed to find dignity in our ‘personal worth’ not just in our ‘exchange value’, but our personal worth is held to consist in moving bits of earth from one place to another or altering them in shape or composition. We are to take pride in our dirty hands. If the condemnation of Benthamism is that it preaches the gospel of the satisfied customer, … the condemnation of Marxism is that it teaches the doctrine of the self-satisfied workman.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dear, very dear, to himself, he [the plebeian] would be hard put to say anything about this self which would explain why he, or anyone, should hold it dear, since he never does, says or thinks anything which might distinguish him from the millions of his fellow plebeians, whom he spends his life imitating and who in turn are spending their lives imitating one another. What he wants is for others to lead his life for him. Avoiding every occasion on which the finger of responsibility might point to him, he seeks what Kierkegaard calls ‘the most ruinous evasion of all … to be hidden in the crowd’.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We need constantly to compare our evaluation of the patrician character with the portraits of him painted by others who have tried to show us how a patrician distinctively comports himself and especially, from within, what distinctive manner of consciousness he evinces; for it is in the analyses of philosophers, the parables of religious teachers, the perceptions of poets, novelists and dramatists, and indeed often in the songs and symphonies of musicians, that he can be made to arise and speak to us and can assure us that the concepts of nobility we have formed do full justice to the reality. And when we have found his speaking likeness, he will surely not fail to address us, reminding us of a world which we had half forgotten and in the existence of which, perhaps, we had almost come to disbelieve.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not difficult for a man to make a series of true statements, all unimpeachably correct, and yet to be hopelessly wrong. This is not just because there are nearly always many other facts, which he has not chosen to state, which would fill out and could utterly transform the description of reality he is trying to foist upon us. If our perceptions of reality depend on facts, they also depend on our values, for these determine not only how we see the facts but also which facts we shall see. To an embittered man, for example, nearly everything will taste bitter, but this is both because he infects each new experience with his own bitterness and also because he consistently reaches out, with uncannily sure instinct, for those types of experience which will give him fresh cause for embitterment.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The question of whether an ideal has frequently, or ever, been acted upon by men is totally irrelevant. The only relevant question is whether a proposed ideal is one which ought to be acted upon, one which legitimately claims a place in our souls, whether or not we do in fact admit it into our souls and try to live up to it. Justice is not metamorphosed into injustice because there are men who habitually act unjustly. A moral claim, if authentic, does not lapse merely because it is denied, however widely and flagrantly. On the contrary, the very nature of a value implies the possibility that men may fail to comply with it, since a ‘value’ which had legitimacy only if men accepted it but was automatically nullified whenever rejected it could not properly be said to constitute a value at all, that is, something which distinctively seeks to guide and direct our motives and conduct and not just passively reflect what we are already doing or have decided to do. The nature of values is to command or entreat us, to alter and redress our character, not just superfluously to describe it as it already anyway is.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The situations we encounter in life can be subjected to the scrutiny of what we might call our administrative consciousness, which deals with those aspects of our existence which are overt, palpable, manageable by the well-tried techniques of our practical intelligence, and nearly always trivial when judged as elements in our ultimate well-being. Or they can be subjected to the more searching scrutiny of our fuller and more intense consciousness, which recognizes that … the data of sense for the most part function as cues soliciting our creative contribution as agents who schematize, conceptualize, and evaluate everything that lies before us; that we build our freshly given materials into a definite meaningful panorama by enfolding them within other, richer materials drawn from the many reservoirs of memory and structured by our ceaselessly effectual imagination; and that this whole creative activity can terminate either in a turning towards those experiences and images which symbolize possibilities of truer fulfilment at the cost of greater challenge, effort, and risk, or a turning away from these to seek refuge in the narrower but safer confines of standardized external meaning from which every reminder of existential depth and personal trial has been carefully pruned.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Self-distrustful and suspicious of life, the plebeian is nevertheless not wholly deaf to the fancies which rap and knock at his soul, though he forbids them entry. Focusing on what he regards as hard practical matters—his income, work, health, social position, housing, and the extent and security of his physical possessions—he nevertheless dimly feels that he has been cheated of something he cannot precisely define because it springs from values—sacrifice, endurance, commitment, responsibility, faith, a cleaving unto what is truly good and beautiful—which disturb him by the very magnitude of the horizons they unroll, and in which, fearfully, he cannot bring himself to believe. They demand from him a reversal in the whole course on which he has set his life, and it is safer and easier for him to thrust these ambiguous and uncertain promises and challenges into the far off limbo of his paraconscious, into the studiously forgotten regions of his self where they will not perpetually remind him of how little he has in fact gained and how much he may have lost. Yet here they are, and too often emerge as unwelcome visitants, for example when he reads of or perhaps actually meets some other human being who has surrendered material security for a life spent in the pursuit of knowledge, artistic creation, or adventure.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are two kinds of danger awaiting the individual who stakes his life on the conviction that the symbols of romance and grandeur which summon him express ultimate realities wherein he can truly find himself. It may be that our dreams are no more than the pathetic illusions of creatures who are driven by various biological, psychological, and social causes to deceive themselves about their actual status in the scheme of things, and therefore that the patrician’s commitments to ideals of glory and majesty are no better than empty posturings. He may be relinquishing this world’s goals for pathways which lead nowhere. Yet even if this were so, he could still give the reply made by Pascal in recommending his Wager: ‘if you lose, you lose nothing’; for the patrician has already judged that worldly pleasure and profit, if devoid of all higher significance, are not worth having.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are hells into which we can fall, as well as heavens to which we can climb, when we take with absolute seriousness the invitations and avowals which are wafted to us across the paraconscious. And so the plebeian of soul, fearing what may befall him if he hearkens too closely, stops his ears to these siren enchanters calling through the mist. He might hear heavenly music, but he might be summoned to his death. Neither does Ulysses desire destruction, and he takes steps to guard against the entire bewitchment of his intelligence by the magic voices which are singing their song to him. We must preserve our critical faculties when we listen to the call of our dreams.”
R. W. K. Paterson (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source