R. W. K. Paterson Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(describing the two aspects of resoluteness), p. 11.

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.

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.