R. W. K. Paterson Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Let us now shrink from parodying Hegel, and state that for our patrician ‘the romantic is the real, the real the romantic’.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

The version of reality a man adopts will depend largely on his values.

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.