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 | | The New Patricians: An Essay on Values and Consciousness by R. W. K. Paterson ISBN-10: 9780312211943 ISBN-10: 0-312-21194-5 ISBN-13: 9780312211943 ISBN-13: 978-0-312-21194-3 Hardcover 1998-11 Palgrave Macmillan Find Lowest Price |
Reviews | ||
Flawed but still excellent This book is an attempt by the author, a highly learned philosopher, to give a description of the possibilities of living that arise from a transformed and purified consciousness; or, to use his temninology, to describe the "Patrician"'s mindset. As such it is a valuable beggining in the long war againt plebian medocrity which anyone who cares for excellence will have to fight if they intend to go on living in the modern world. It is virtually the only book of it's kind on this subject, which should say something both about it's importance and the creeping medicority that threatens our spritis. That notwithstanding, there are some flaws with this book. Firstly, it does not adequately differentiate between the subjective and the objective. The author is opposed to the kind of stupid, facile relativism which holds that all ideals are purely imaginary constructs, and that is clearly a good thing. Unforutnately he never makes the crucial differentiation between a value, which is the subjective conception of good we may have, and a good per se, which is the objective worth of a thing for human life. This leaves him open to dangerous attacks. After all, if values are not subjective, then how is it that they can exist apart from a mid to perform an evaluation? This kind of thing indicates that the author is confusing concepts with things, and that leaves him open to the easy charges of the shallow relativists. Secondly, very little is said here about how one goes about elevating one's consciousness to a higher plane. That would seem to be a significant topic in such a book, but it is absent here altogether, and that obviously makes the book incomplete. It is not a handbook to the higher life; so much as it is an exhortation to take it up without instructions as to how that should be done. These flaws notwithstanding, this is still a fine and important volume that would do the library of anyone aspiring to be more than a mass-man a great service. | ||
Nobility of character and the consciousness of grandeur... ...may, alas, seem hopelessly out of date to anyone steeped in the habits of mind prevalent in today's "postmodern" academy, but in THE NEW PATRICIANS by R.W.K. Paterson, the examined life has found as able a philosophic interpreter as we are likely to find in our Iron Age. In passage after irresistibly quotable passage, in prose notable for its compactness and clarity, Paterson sketches an "axiological anthropology" whereby an objective realm of values summons us toward a life wherein the content of our consciousness, and the habits of spirit which help us to selectively construct it out of our own unique experience of a world rich in symbolic amplitude, are the ultimate factors underwriting meaning in our lives - not the pursuit of material reward, status, or power (badges of what Paterson terms the "plebeian" mentality). Paterson's penetrating grasp of the spiritual character of power-seekers on the one hand (however superficially "patrician" in social class they may at times be, their craving for the outward trappings of office mark them as irremediably plebeian; but even these are to be preferred to the basest of their kind, who glory in the submission and erosion of dignity they are able to exact from their citizens and hirelings), and the inwardly noble, but often materially or socially deprived "eccentrics" on the other (however heavy their burden from failing to find an answering echo to their private yearnings in the larger world of their fellows, they sense, if only implicitly, the more soul-crushing price to be paid still, should they abandon their unique values and ways of living for the sake of outward "success" as defined by the clamorous herd), are as shrewd as delineations of psychological ideal types as we are likely to find (perhaps Paterson's early work, THE NIHILISTIC EGOIST: MAX STIRNER, has here found its maturest late fruit). We all of us, free beings that we are, have it in us to choose baser or nobler ends and outlooks in life - to live with greater or lesser doses of fear, cynicism, demoralization, pessimism, and moral/spiritual weakness - or we may uphold, and (however imperfectly as finite beings) aspire to embody, the ideals commonly described as nobility, beauty, generosity, courage (and its loftier and more invulnerable cousin, fearlessness), heroism, and largeness of soul, viewing our lives as essentially benign and rich in potential meaning, to be confronted breast forward, in confidence, optimism, and serenity - as our oysters, which we "with sword may open." Those who read THE NEW PATRICIANS once will before long proceed to ther first enraptured re-reading. And like the young lovers decribed by Emerson (in his poem "Give All To Love"), "They shall return/More than they were/And ever ascending." | ||