George Pattison Quotes

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It's strange that in an age when we pride ourselves on our independence of thought we meekly submit without further question to the declaration of a clearly unbalanced nineteenth century philosopher that God is dead! That's cheeky, of course - and one rarely comes away from reading Nietzsche without learning something new and significant. He's certainly FAR more unsettling for faith than any contemporary atheist I know of.

George Pattison

Atheist, Reading, Pride

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Essentially I see the new atheism as largely part of the crisis of the left. Having failed to carry through its agenda in relation to political and economic life it's rounding on religion, ignoring the fact that, in some key respects, many believers are likely to share leftist aspirations.

George Pattison

Keys, Political, Atheism

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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At a theoretical level, I think a naturalist approach to religion is just asking questions I'm not interested in. They're perfectly legitimate in their own terms, but they don't address the actual experience of how one or other aspect of religion becomes existentially meaningful to us in our actual lives. The fact that we ourselves are the subject of investigation makes all the difference.

George Pattison

Meaningful, Thinking, Asking Questions

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Every stroke a tennis player plays is different, yet we perceive them as playing in a distinctive and unique way. It's what Heidegger called a certain 'how' of existing. It's ultimately always singular, and the double task of (a) getting it in view and (b) communicating it to others will inevitably be marked more often by failure than success!

George Pattison

Unique, Player, Views

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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I'm not sure that I 'am' a philosopher - but I do engage with questions that are generally recognized as philosophical questions, such as the character of human existence and what makes for a good human life.

George Pattison

Philosophical, Character, Philosopher

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Of course, if one's reading Kierkegaard for personal interest that's fine - but it's sloppy scholarship just to cherry pick what suits one from a particular author, whether it's Kierkegaard, Heidegger, or whoever. Nevertheless, it does seem to me that even the more religious parts of the authorship can offer significant insights into the meaning of the human condition to those who can't then say that, e.g., they believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God and their personal Saviour.

George Pattison

Religious, Jesus, Believe

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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But, inevitably, as he [Kierkegaard] approaches what we might call his Christocentric climax many readers drop off. Many scholars just leave that part of his authorship alone.

George Pattison

Might, Authorship, Scholar

Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's a paradox here! Kierkegaard's own indirect communication proposes that we start with the experience of those who don't believe and meet them on their own ground. His success in doing this is evidenced by the fact that, at least for some periods of the 20th century, aspects of his work became a major focus for radical thinkers of various kinds, including the non-religious and, interestingly, a significant number of Jewish thinkers (Buber, Rosenzweig, Taubes, and others).

George Pattison

Religious, Believe, Communication

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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And one thing the void certainly can teach us is how to wait, how to become truly patient, and how to let go of superfluous intellectual baggage - all of which is a good lesson for hyper-agitated multi-tasking goal-focussed contemporary human beings.

George Pattison

Letting Go, Goal, Waiting

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Perhaps - and this goes for the Kyoto School too - one of these insights is that nothingness and unknowing don't have to be equated with a destructive nihilism but with the experience of unity and participation - whilst resisting the tendency of objectifying metaphysics to claim that we can in some way 'know' that this experienced unity is really the truth of how things are, i.e., reveals being itself.

George Pattison

School, Kyoto, Unity

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Sartre is one example of someone who does just this. Every text is, after all, a human document and whatever Kierkegaard thought about God was clearly a matter of human thought that can, in principle, be retrieved and interpreted by other human beings. A phenomenological approach to religion must, it seems to me, adopt the old adage: nothing human is alien to me.

George Pattison

Principles, Example, Doe

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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There are kinds of unity other than those of the explicit and systematic unity that Poole is attacking. There are kinds of movement - in music or athletics, for example - that present themselves as having a certain unity about them. In some sphere we might talk about 'style'.

George Pattison

Unity, Style, Example

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Interpretation is a task that we repeatedly have to take up and start again from the beginning, Sisyphus-like. But, as Camus said, we must always imagine Sisyphus happy, and this is not so difficult when it's a matter of texts that reveal important truths about being human.

George Pattison

Important, Tasks, Matter

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Barth's approach tears up any possibility of dialogue between faith and unfaith or between theology and other human sciences. Theology just says what it says on the basis of scripture, and that's that.

George Pattison

Tears, Scripture, Possibility

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Schleiermacher, however, starts by attempting to find what he takes to be a basic element of the human condition as such, namely, that we did not invent ourselves but find ourselves born into a life and a world that precedes us in manifold ways.

George Pattison

Elements, World, Way

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Ultimately, we live in the face of an irresolvable mystery about our origin and, for that matter, about our end. And what Schleiermacher would have us do is (a) acknowledge that this is the case and (b) accept it as something positive, a point of departure for a life of trusting joy.

George Pattison

Joy, Departure, Matter

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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And this is also what he takes Christian doctrine, in all its complexity, to be centrally about, that is, teaching an attitude rather than a set of propositions. Call it joyous openness to life. What's not relevant about that?

George Pattison

Christian, Attitude, Teaching

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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But my point is that 'the death of God' is not something like the Battle of Waterloo or Magna Charta. It's not a historic event of that kind. For many people it hasn't happened yet. Others - to recur to an earlier question - are still in the phase of intense shock.

George Pattison

People, Battle, Events

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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For others the mourning is over. Others would say that whilst one God has died - the God of ontotheology perhaps? - this allows for the good news of a God who is to come, a God who will be better able to gather up and give justice to all the manifold aspirations of human life towards goodness and meaning (and not just to those who are able to fit into a narrow 'religious' framework).

George Pattison

Religious, Giving, Justice

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Now, as at the beginning of the 19th century, there is a certain discovery of Eckhart and related figures. There are questions as to how far our Eckhart accords with the real medieval teacher of that name, but there are certainly images in his work that help us work our way past several of the aporia with which we're confronted in our attempts to think about God.

George Pattison

Teacher, Real, Past

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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I'm not sure if Cupitt himself still uses this term, but it's useful in suggesting that, actually, there are more choices than the choice between nihilism and faith. In fact, the issue may not be faith as such but the fact that for millennia, Christianity has buttressed itself with a particular kind of metaphysics that has now seemingly reached the end of its life-span. But perhaps Buddhist metaphysics could provide an alternative here - or, at least, offer a direction of travel.

George Pattison

Buddhist, Issues, Choices

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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In a sense these are questions that most people ask themselves to some extent. They become philosophical when asked with a persistence and rigour that pushes past conventional or evasive answers. It's nothing to do with acquiring a technical facility in an academic discipline.

George Pattison

Philosophical, Persistence, Past

Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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Perhaps this is an area where every generation starts from scratch. Although the crisis of the First World War inaugurated an especially strong period of disillusion with regard to the optimism of the previous age, the pattern has repeated itself in many ways in more recent times, e.g., the loss of faith in politics as a means of advancing human well-being. And perhaps this also has to do with basic elements in growing up.

George Pattison

Strong, Growing Up, War

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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I still read a lot about teenage angst! Of course, any kind of mourning CAN become pathological and then it 'has to stop', but to move through life untouched by the loss of hopes, beliefs and aspirations once cherished is also questionable.

George Pattison

Teenage, Moving, Loss

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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I'm not sure how far Derrida's later 'theological' interests are really rooted in post-structuralism or whether they don't rather reflect a kind of Kantian-Marxist trajectory - with a French twist on the centrality of liberty, equality and fraternity (cf. Politics of Friendship). Not to mention the role of Levinas and, behind Levinas, Judaism's twinning of eschatology and the call for justice.

George Pattison

Cfs, Justice, Liberty

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Latest quotes from interviews

"And perhaps this has to do with what I sense is a turning away from the idea of religion as being about conserving a certain heritage from the past towards religion as having to do with how we orientate ourselves to the future, to all we truly long for, to hope."

- George Pattison,

www.3ammagazine.com, added Feb 24, 2016

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