Sir Roger Scruton: "he was also an exceptionally good father to his children"

Swimming Always Against the Tide

Roger Scruton, R.I.P.

by Theodore Dalrymple

Sir Roger Scruton, the British conservative philosopher who was preeminent for nearly half a century, died on January 12, after an illness that he had borne for six months. He was 75.

He showed great moral courage throughout his career, swimming against the intellectual tide of his time regardless of the deprecation, insult, denunciation, and even hatred directed at him. For a long time, his very name among much of the British intelligentsia was a byword for political atavism or evil, as if he had been a radical advocate of tyranny and pogroms rather than a defender of freedom and civilized values. At the time of his coming to public notice, much of the intelligentsia refused to believe that a highly gifted and knowledgeable man could also be a conservative. Their own rejection of all that was traditional seemed so self-evidently right to them that they thought that the only possible explanation for someone who valued tradition was obtuseness, moral turpitude—or both.

Scruton’s work was so broad-ranging that the term Renaissance Man seems hardly inappropriate. He published books on Kant and Spinoza, on Wagner’sTristan and Isolde, on the aesthetics of music and architecture, on animal rights, on wine, on hunting, on the importance of culture, on the nature of God, on man’s relations with animals, and on many other subjects. He wrote novels and short stories of distinction, and two operas. The words of Dr. Johnson’s epitaph for Oliver Goldsmith come to mind: he left scarcely any style of writing untouched, and touched nothing that he did not adorn.  

This is not to say that many people, or indeed anyone, would agree with all that he wrote, scarcely to be expected in view of his immense output. He accepted disagreement with equanimity, as the natural and laudable condition and consequence of freedom. Unlike many of his detractors, who affixed labels to him and then believed in their veracity, he was fair-minded to those with whom he disagreed and whose ideas he believed had had a disastrous effect on Western society. In the two editions of his book about thinkers of the New Left, for example, he praised them generously for whatever he considered praiseworthy in them. He paid them the honor of reading their work with attention, trying hard to decipher what it meant (by no means easy, given their frequent resort to high-sounding, multisyllabic verbiage), and refuting what was sufficiently intelligible to be refutable.

Contrary to what his detractors supposed, his reaction to the writers he criticized was far from the result of blind prejudice, ideology, or preconceived ideas. Sartre, for example, was—for his earlier work—Scruton’s hero. Sartre had then the ability seamlessly to combine observation and experience of life with subtle metaphysical thought, very much contrary to the kind of philosophical training that Scruton received at Cambridge, where application of philosophy to life as it is lived was regarded almost as vulgar but which had the compensating advantage of precision and rigor. It was only the later Sartre, an apologist for tyranny and mass murder, whom Scruton reprehended. In other words, he made the necessary distinctions.

Scruton was much in favor of Brexit but was far from a small-minded isolationist. He regarded France, and Paris in particular, as his second, and perhaps as his spiritual, home. His experience of the events there in 1968, however, was formative, and the memory of these events remained a warning to him for the rest of his days. Unlike most young intellectuals, he was appalled, not exhilarated, by the events of May 1968. He saw them as the willful destruction of a beautiful civilization by the spoiled beneficiaries of that very civilization and as a rejection of refinement in favour of crudity. He sided with the preservers rather than with the destroyers. The fragility of our cultural inheritance was clear to him.

He was revered in several Eastern European countries where, with others, and at some risk to himself, he helped keep alive the hopes of dissident intellectuals. He ran clandestine philosophical seminars in several countries. It was a matter of disappointment to him that young British people were so cut off from any historical knowledge and so lacking in powers of imagination that they had no conception of what life in a totalitarian system could be like. This is important because all judgment, including of one’s present situation or predicament, is comparative, and without an awareness of just how terrible things can be, one can easily, and frivolously, start down the primrose path to perdition.

In his last and moving article in The Spectator, indeed in the last paragraph he published in his lifetime, he stressed the importance of gratitude for what one has been fortunate enough to inherit. Take nothing for granted, preserve what is worth preserving, understand the fragility of things, remember debts to the past as well as to the future, take delight in the world. Such was the lasting message of this exceptionally gifted man.

To me he was always kind and encouraging. Much more important, he was an exceptionally good father to his children.       

Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal, the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of many books, including Out into the Beautiful World and the recently published Grief and Other Stories.

Sir Roger Scruton: In Memoriam by Paul Krause Like moths attracted to the flame, students from all continents came together to study and discuss everything from music and aesthetics to politics and metaphysics with Sir Roger, who seemed to be the incarnate flame of wisdom. He was our Virgil through hell and purgatory, and he left us at the top of the mountain, pointing to the light that lay beyond. Befitting a man of such humility, he once revealed that instead of being remembered as the world-class philosopher he was, he wished to be remembered as the organist for the small Anglican parish of which he was a member...  [MORE]

The Last Speech:  "A Thing Called Civilization" by Roger Scruton I myself have obviously got into an awful lot of trouble through defending Western civilization. It seems a strange feature of our times that the more you’re disposed to defend it, the more you are regarded as some kind of narrow-minded bigot. But the people who make that accusation are the real ones with the narrow mind. They’re people who do not see exactly how large and comprehensive our civilization has been and still is... [MORE]

Why Beauty Matters by Roger Scruton “The sacred and the beautiful stand side by side. Two doors that open onto a single space. In that space we find our home. . . . through the pursuit of beauty we shape the world as a home, and in doing so, we both amplify our joys and find consolation for our sorrows.”—Sir Roger Scruton (1944-2020). Please watch this brilliant, classic documentary by the late Sir Roger Scruton on “Why Beauty Matters”...  [MORE] More on Scruton... The Soul of Scruton: How One Philosopher Grounds Faith in a World of Science By Ryan Shinkel - September 4, 2014 It is difficult to imagine an English-speaking philosopher more diversified in his expertise than Roger Scruton when one has finished reading his latest book, The Soul of the World (Princeton: PUP, 2014). There may not be a book by Scruton that is a more comprehensive introduction to his thought than this summation. It draws together a lifetime of reflection on politics and law, science, religious belief and the sacred, Kantian and Hegelian philosophy, self-written Socratic dialogues, and the aesthetics of art, architecture, and music—all united by a single theme that scholar Mark Dooley has identified as“the love of home.” Thematically, Scruton's book is marked by a willful protection for human activity and the home where reason transcends itself—the life of faith. Scruton sets out “to create the space at the edge of reason, where faith can take root and grow” (192). While Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason argued that he “found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith”—and one might be somewhat suspicious of Kant’s candor in that statement for why he rejected much metaphysical reasoning—there need be no suspicion of the candor in Scruton’s latest efforts to discuss the divine. Scruton seeks not to deny but to clarify our knowledge, particularly to distinguish scientific from shared social understandings that the life of faith may have reasonable room for shared human activity. Scruton has written before on aesthetics, notably on architecture and music. But he writes in his preface that he has come to see “that positions that naturally appeal to me in aesthetics also suggest a theological elaboration.” This book is that elaboration—not so much on the God of Abrahamic monotheism, but rather an elaboration on the human soul. To paraphrase Matthew Arnold’s poem, “Dover Beach,” Scruton makes space for faith not by focusing on the recent ebb and flow of disbelief in God, but on the current retreat of the sea of the human soul. Lebenswelt and Science The majority of Scruton’s book contains defenses of the order of human life, in art, architecture, and law, among other areas, from encroachments of “every kind of instrumental way of seeing things.” For instance, Scruton rebuts the scientism of pop evolutionary psychology in order to protect the legitimacy of our immediate thought and felt relations with the earth, the hearth, and the human being. Indeed, the impotence of naturalist explanations for activity like the humanities is almost trivially demonstrated by the fact that the natural sciences cannot tell us whether Mr. Collins is the hero ofPride and Prejudice. But Scruton’s project is far more ambitious: he argues tooth and nail for the legitimacy of the humanities, and of the world of human life in general, as something qualitatively different from the world of nature. His argument is that the order of human life—the Lebenswelt—is a phenomenon emergent from the natural order and not reducible to it. As the face of Botticelli’s Venus emerges from the mere syntactical arrangement of colors and still contains a semantical meaning different in kind and not degree from the arrangement, likewise the order of human life emerges from the order of nature and has a meaning not reducible to the latter. Personhood also “is an “emergent” feature of the human being in the way that music is an emergent feature of sounds: not something over and above the life and behavior in which we observe, but not reducible to them either” (67). Thus while Scruton rejects an ontological dualism whereby the human subject is separate substantively from the mechanics of organic matter, he also rejects any reductionism that denies the existence of the human subject as how we experience being subjects. The reasoning behind this view stems from Scruton’s thesis of cognitive dualism, the epistemological view “according to which the world can be understood in two incommensurable ways, the way of science, and the way of interpersonal understanding” (34). This view has precedents in Spinoza and Kant, and Scruton in joining them asserts that there is a single unified reality, approachable in two qualitatively different avenues (as, say, the chemicals of the pigments and the picture of Venus are two equally real venues by which to understand Botticelli’s painting). There is the way of science, which analyzes the order of nature by explanations and mathematical predictions within the spacetime manifold, and the way of interpersonal understanding, which interprets the order of the covenant. Using the example of the covenant between Yahweh and the Israelites as a model, Scruton argues that the intersubjective relations among people ask us to account for ourselves to each other. It is in the Lebenswelt that we ask “why” and demand reasons for behavior in contrast to the lack of teleological reasons found in the mechanism and abstracted mathematical models of science. Cognitive Dualism A helpful illustration of this difference between the Lebenswelt and the world of science is Wilfrid Sellars’s distinction between the “manifest image” of the world, “the image represented in our perceptions and in the reasons and motives that govern our responses from it,” and the “scientific image” of the world, “which is the account that emerges through the systematic attempt to explain what we observe” (Scruton, 33-34). Whereas Sellars sought to subvert the manifest image and replace it with the scientific image, Scruton defends the Lebenswelt. To borrow Leibnitz’ phrase, it is “a well-founded phenomenon.” The Lebenswelt is manifestly out there, real, and as objectively perceptible as any feature of the natural world is for self-conscious subjects. The important truth about the Lebenswelt, Scruton notes, “and a crucial axiom of my kind of cognitive dualism” is “that surfaces are deep” (113). For example, a patient could be analyzed as an object by a brain scan, yet when the neuroscientist looks at the brain, she looks not at the person but at the body’s nervous system. When she looks at the patient’s face, she sees the appearance of the person. This surface reveals the deepness of human subjectivity. Then the scientist as a human being begins to encounter the patient as the almost inexplicable mystery who is the human subject. We are subjects who live in a world of objects, and yet recognize that we are not just objects but embodied subjects. This recognition occurs for Scruton in the first person knowledge apprehended from the “I-to-You encounter,” a mutual inter-subjectivity through which we can demand accounts from each other. The rationality of theLebenswelt is that it is the order of reasons given by free subjects seeing I-to-I by looking eye-to-eye: “By coming to face-to-face with others, we gain full awareness of the constraints of practical reason, and therefore of the freedom that our social membership bestows on us” (113). This social membership then is extended into the human activity of law and deontic declarations of account to each other across generations. The order of covenant that is human government is necessary but not sufficient for “durable human societies. Societies survive when they are settled, and settlement depends upon piety and self-sacrifice” (176). The sufficient conditions—piety and self-sacrifice—embrace the dead and unborn, and thus transcend the temporal social order. In sacred religious rituals, such as burial rites for the dead, commitments of the living as in marriage vows, and baptisms for the newly born, we are faced with the edge of our Lebenswelt and the face of another order. The Edge of the World A transcendent edge also finds itself particularly in the areas of architecture and music. Scruton spends much ink on music, since it extends the intentionality emerging from our face-to-face encounters to having intentionality in its own right. Music has an overreaching intentionality without object or subject, yet it can be asked to have an account. This “overreaching intentionality of interpersonal responses,” found in music and other areas, presents us with meanings projecting themselves as “I-You” intentionality. In the instance of our musical culture, they require us to respond to the world of subjectivity beyond the world of objects in the musical space of the Lebenswelt. This musical space has no purpose other than its own existence. Our highest responses to music evidence not just that music is a new extension of the Lebenswelt, but as well the ‘real presence’ of the transcendent beauty contained in it. Like Diotima did in Plato’s Symposium, Scruton takes us from the beauty of the human form to the beauty of the law, and ultimately to the transcendent known in the aesthetic experience: “When the world looks back at me with my eyes, as it does in aesthetic experience … revealed to me in the experience of beauty is a fundamental truth about being—that being is a gift” (139). As with covenants, music and our responses to it reach beyond the order of interpersonal reasons into a third, transcendent order (the other two being the Lebenswelt and the order of nature). We encounter this order in the sacred realm, where obligations are sacred and we speak in a language pointing upward. Here the individual asks not just sufficient reasons for particular things, like “why did this person save my life?” or “why does this music sound profound?” One asks for an account of the whole world, of nature and of “I” and “We.” The sufficient reason for the question of “why this reality” is answered, according to Scruton, by the third order the ruling principles of which are “creation and destruction”: the creation of a subject ex nihilo and the destruction of a subject ex nihilo. One calls to account why human subjects come into being and out of being, and the answer we face is God. At the end of his book Scruton takes the reader to the edge of reason and into the great mystical traditions emphasizing “God is a subject, who can and must be loved,” since God is “the end point of our search for reasons” (190). A Few Objections While this book is a just exposition of the phenomenological life of the religious everyman and the aesthetics inspiring theological and philosophical reflection, some readers may conclude dissatisfied with Scruton’s metaphysics and cognitive dualism. To be fair, Scruton qualifies from the beginning that his argument to make room for the religious worldview stops “well short of vindicating the doctrine or practice of any particular faith.” Yet he admits that his “cognitive dualism makes sense so long as “ontological priority” is accorded to the scientific worldview” (67). This insistence makes Scruton accept that while God’s existence could be the sufficient reason for everything, it would not be the primary cause of everything. A classical theist would find it difficult to accept that God—the “sheer act of being,” to use Aquinas’ phrase—could not be the ultimate cause of a physical thing’s existence. Further, giving the scientific worldview an ontological priority does not yield room for veridical reasoning on many metaphysical questions (e.g. the ontology of human intelligence, or how God is present and also immanent). Scruton admits, “the unanswerable nature of questions like this is part of what cognitive dualism commits us to” (186). This somewhat fractured epistemology remains agnostic to meaningful metaphysical questions. The reader who desires to avoid this end, but nevertheless finds Scruton’s cognitive dualism persuasive enough, could instrumentally use Scruton’s cognitive dualism as an optimal conceptual framework for understanding human life and the natural world in which we reside, but nonetheless remain uncommitted to what entails as an incommensurable double vision of reality. This instrumentalism would be analogous to a scientist who uses a theory as a helpful model but remains agnostic or skeptic to some of its metaphysical claims. Cognitive dualism, for this reviewer at least, is most plausible that way—but the reader can be left to make up his mind. I recall having a discussion with several Scruton readers this summer who entertained the thought that something like Frederich Nietzsche’s description of Thomas Carlyle might actually fit Scruton: he is “an English atheist seeking to be honoured for not being so.” I give no credence to it, since in The Soul of the World Scruton plainly shows for the modern person blind on Dover Beach, there is ground to have the faith that sees the Soul behind the face of the world. Source: ethikapolitika.org How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism Oxford University Press The environment has long been the undisputed territory of the political left, which casts international capitalism, consumerism, and the overexploitation of natural resources as the principle threats to the planet and sees top-down interventions as the most effective solution. In “How to Think Seriously About the Planet,” Roger Scruton rejects this view and offers a fresh approach to tackling the most important political problem of our time. The environmental movement, he contends, is philosophically confused and has unrealistic agendas. Its sights are directed at the large-scale events and the confrontation between international politics and multinational business. But Scruton argues that no large-scale environmental project, however well-intentioned, will succeed if it is not rooted in small-scale practical reasoning. Seeing things on a large scale promotes top-down solutions, managed by unaccountable bureaucracies that fail to assess local conditions and are rife with unintended consequences. Scruton argues for the greater efficacy of local initiatives over global schemes, civil association over political activism, and small-scale institutions of friendship over regulatory hyper-vigilance. And he suggests that conservatism is far better suited to solving environmental problems than either liberalism or socialism. Rather than entrusting the environment to unwieldy nongovernmental organizations and international committees, we must assume personal responsibility and foster local control. People must be empowered to take charge of their environment, to care for it as they would a home, and to involve themselves through the kind of local associations that have been the traditional goal of conservative politics. Our common future is by no means assured, but as Roger Scruton clearly demonstrates in this important book, there is a path that can ensure the future safety of our planet and our species. Read more: www.aei.org