R. W. K. Paterson Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.