George Pattison Quotes - Page 2

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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"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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