George Pattison Quotes

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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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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

Past, Ideas, Long

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

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Ethics arises in the recognition of our obligation to care for others as beings, like us, exposed to mortality - that is, beings who need our help. Buddhism, not wrongly, extends this to 'all sentient beings'.

George Pattison

Buddhism, Needs, Care

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

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Of course, it's always difficult to disentangle fact from fiction in relation to, e.g., the singularity project. Many scientists I know are dismissive of transhumanist claims, BUT the last 100 years has surely taught us never to underestimate the pace and scope of scientific progress. However, even if much of this turns out to be science-fiction, it also reveals a way of thinking about human life that I find deeply troubling.

George Pattison

Thinking, Years, Taught Us

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

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When I'm on the operating table, I'm happy for the surgeon to treat me as a machine, but the moment I return to consciousness I have other needs and aspirations that should be recognized. We're not here only to survive or extend our individual or species life but to do something seemingly more difficult, for which I've used words and phrases like 'love' and the 'Kingdom of God'.

George Pattison

Like Love, Needs, Phrases

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

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I think he [Heidegger] sets the question up in a useful way and, despite appearances, he's not 'against' technology. He just wants us to have a questioning and thoughtful relation to it. This must be relevant to any approach.

George Pattison

Thoughtful, Technology, Thinking

Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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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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One of the most violent attacks on the Church in the Soviet Union was under Kruschev when, during a period of economic and political liberalization, he attacked the Church to demonstrate to old Party members that he hadn't lost it.

George Pattison

Party, Political, Church

"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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In brief, I regard love as a more decisive focus of meaning than death. In terms of Heidegger's argument, this is because I think he misdescribes the importance of the deaths of others and focuses exclusively on my relation to my own death. But, in reality, the deaths of others have a more urgent and immediate impact on our lives than the purely notional knowledge that I too will one day die.

George Pattison

Reality, Thinking, Impact

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

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Positively, he [Heidegger] shows that the prospect of death doesn't of itself destroy all possibilities of meaning but calls instead for these to be relocated from fantasies about a future post-mortem life. However, I don't think he does enough in this work to show that this relocation has - I believe - a primarily ethical character (in Levinas's sense of 'ethical').

George Pattison

Believe, Character, Thinking

Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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But why should a religious person be interested in a work like Heidegger's that many regard as the epitome of nihilism? For a start, because Heidegger forces us in a way that few philosophers do to really think through the seriousness and all-encompassing nature of our mortality.

George Pattison

Religious, Thinking, Nihilism

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

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Religious life is about something real in human experience that is not constrained by what Wittgenstein called 'all that is the case'. In this sense Heidegger is not simply 'mistaken' - he just asks us, as philosophers mostly do, to think more carefully about what we're saying.

George Pattison

Religious, Real, Thinking

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

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It seems that just Being, the sheer fact of existence, that there is something rather than nothing, already inspires a wonder akin to religion. But - as in my comment about the Kingdom of God in the last answer - Jewish and Christian traditions are also prepared to challenge what 'is' for the sake of what could be.

George Pattison

Christian, Challenges, Inspire

Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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However, in brief, I think the connecting of 'God' and 'Being' is one of these things for which there seems to be a natural impulse in human thinking but it can also lead to confusions. Religious believers mostly want to see God as the epitome of what is most really real and in some non-theistic contexts, people talk simply of 'Isness'.

George Pattison

Religious, Real, Thinking

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

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What it does remind us is that 'God' is not to be separated from the quest for the Kingdom of God and is not and cannot be the object of any detached 'scientific' contemplation. Heidegger's critique of onto-theology is also driving a wedge between speaking of God and the aims of science - not so as to get rid of God but rather to free God from a false objectification.

George Pattison

Kingdoms, Objectification, 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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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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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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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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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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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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"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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