The version of reality a man adopts will depend largely on his values. - R. W. K. Paterson

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)

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’.

The consciousness of the patrician remains open to the symbolisms which surround him. He believes that they may be rungs on a ladder of being which he can ascend. … He has the courage to dwell in their midst and thus to form his life by reference to dimensions of significance which transcend his narrow mundane interests as a physical organism.