R. W. K. Paterson Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Our ridicule and disgust are in the end aimed at some unavowed part of our own selves.

R. W. K. Paterson
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
On the one hand, the existentialism 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
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
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
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
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
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