Philosophers From England

"One of the most important contributions to its subject matter since Ruskin."

"This book is a remarkable addition to the philosophical corpus in analytic musical aesthetics. Scruton may be unmatched in his numerous use of musical examples in a philosophical text. Unfortunately, it is almost too dense and too complicated to be of much use to anyone wanting to learn about musical aesthetics. A reader would be at a loss to understand much of what Scruton advances without not only a full understanding of the history of musical aesthetics in the philosophical realm, but also a good working knowledge of music theory and music history. Also, without a familiarity of the theories of Lerdahl and Jackendoff as well as a full comprehension of Schenkerian Analysis the reader may be at a loss about many of Scruton's explanations. Thus it is not a good tool for those interested in learning musical aesthetics, but it could be invaluable to those who want to deepen their understanding of the analytic end of the field."

"Scruton does not disappoint. To be sure, niggling doubts about his purely musical analysis surface now and then. While he obviously believes his own insistence that Tristan is thoroughly tonal, it also allows him the convenience of sidestepping a number of complex musico-dramatic issues. He also resorts on occasion, for example on page 98, to the kind of descriptive jargon in which dear old Imogen Holst indulged in her hagiographical writing on Ben Britten. But there are here many quite wonderful turns of phrase that say much, beautifully, in little space. Thus, for example: "Wagner was an intemperate thinker, whose theories were thrown out from his prodigious sensibility like spray from a ship in full sail". I wish I'd written that. Scruton's almost frightening erudition is paired with an ability to explain in lucid, comprehensible prose what are in fact complex philological and philosophical issues. Whether he is elucidating the Upanishads, Schopenhauer, Kant or mediaeval epics, he never browbeats the reader, but draws him in to arguments that seem to possess a remarkable inevitability. Scruton offers a succinct tour of Wagner's sources for Tristan that is the most lucid that the present writer has yet encountered"

"Scruton is one of the best philosophers currently writing on aesthetics and few can match his deep and catholic understanding of the arts."

"Philosophers seldom devote a book to a single art; hardly ever to architecture. Dr. Scruton's book is thus most welcome. It combines wide knowledge of architecture and architectural theories, copious examples and interesting views on aesthetics... Neither architects nor philosophers can ignore this book. Though I find parts of it questionable or arbitrarily stipulative, its richness, suggestiveness and scope make it absorbing reading."

"This is an important book and one of the best to appear in a long while."

"Scruton is at his best not when he is trying to import a 'scientifically'-orientated metaphysic into a phenomenological description, or when he seems to be doing so, but when he articulates so elegantly the humanity that lies in music. "Our music is the music of upright, earth-bound, active, love-hungry beings" (p.172). This book is full of such humane insight and is for that reason, and for many other reasons, compulsive reading. Roger Scruton is passionate and knowledgeable about music. He is also something which it is now unfashionable to be—a passionate and inspiring philosopher writing about what really matters."

"In many ways the topics covered by the book are new territory for Scruton. As a longstanding admirer of his writing and, though with rather more qualifications, of his thinking, I have read a good deal of his published output over the last few years, and find new themes in this book I do not recall before. The prospect of Scruton, the defender of hunting and elegist of rural England, defending the Enlightenment came as something of a surprise, though admittedly it is a somewhat Hegelianized and communized Enlightenment. His treatment of Islamic thought and ideas, while hardly uncontentious, is clearly fed by deep thought and much reading, and, as always, he writes like a dream."

"Roger Scruton has given us a fetching book on the nature and value of architecture, one which is almost as enlightening as it is infuriating (and that's saying a lot). There is a solid structure of argument at the heart of the book, but present too are all the occasions for pleasure usual with Scruton, such as a biting polemic and a nice style."

"Scruton's Beauty is dense with ideas and rich with experience. Like a Renaissance still life, it lays out before us the bountiful fruits of long and successful hunting. Scruton's yield will do little for the jaded appetites of those professional hunters and gamekeepers who have sated themselves casually with their own catch in the field or on the road. But for others who love beauty and would like better to understand what it is they love and why, this book offers on every page and understanding without pedantry, clarity without dogma, insight without mystique."

"It is partly his own fault that outside philosophical circles Roger Scruton's ideas labour under something like a government health warning. Xanthippic Dialogues, however, is a concentrated, integrated, and wholly delightful epitome of his thought, which should appeal to both the philosopher and the general educated reader, and dispel whatever misapprehensions and deliberate misrepresentations have kept its author's profound and humane understanding from receiving the public recognition it deserves."

"Roger Scruton's Aesthetics of music begins as a brilliant, intimidatingly thorough, rather dry exercise in analytical philosophy. It ends as a cultural tract for the times, a mystical rhapsody on the religious basis of art, and a scorching indictment of the twin evils of modernism and pop which have robbed music of its high purpose. To yoke together these two mutually hostile, if not downright incompatible, forms of discourse is a boldness that only Scruton would attempt. But he is bound to do so, given that for him the deepest roots of our being are implicated in even the simplest acts of musical understanding."

"Scruton's conservative philosophy draws upon Burke, Hegel, Oakeshott and Hayek, rejecting universalism and preferring instead a politics based on human instinct. In a Burkean compact between the living, the dead and the unborn, trust is placed in our collective inheritance, particularly in the form of societal organizations, practices and traditions, the law and the constitution. A sense of place and territorial loyalty is therefore central to identity. For Scruton, that place and identity is England, which is "shared not as a reality so much as an ideal which constantly impacts on reality"."

"The roll-call of significant thinkers with both an abiding interest in music and sufficient musical literacy to write about it with the competence of insiders is short indeed: one thinks of Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, perhaps Adorno. It is a cause for celebration when another such figure appears in our midst. Wagner is a particularly suitable subject for Scruton, who writes about the composer's dual nature as a musician and a thinker with uncommon insight and sympathy. His view of the nature of Wagner's achievement in Tristan und Isolde is highly original and mostly persuasive, and it illuminates even when it stimulates opposition. Death-Devoted Heart should be added to the short list of indispensable writings on this opera."

"Professor Scruton's Right consists of the authors of the Salisbury Review under his editorship and is the nearest intellectually reputable thing that England has had to the authoritarian Conservatism which de Maistre, in a Christian, and Maurras in a post-Christian, mode had propagated in France... Professor Scruton is a serious thinker who has produced a versatile and impressive oeuvre which, in addition to dealing with law and politics, deals with aesthetics, literature, philosophy and sexuality (in a sometimes off-beam way), gives unambiguous allegiance to art and culture as modern substitutes for religion, and leaves the impression of believing in "Conservatism" either as an aborted mixture of Christianity and secular truth, or as simply secular truth in itself. For a number of years when young he was a pupil and collaborator of Dr John Casey from whom he acquired intellectual range and seriousness, a faint excess of high-principled intensity, and a coat-trailing, or Irish, contentiousness about race and colour which he had since abandoned. Also, when young, he was a Fellow of Peterhouse, from which he acquired some of the attitudes of "the Peterhouse Right"."

"As a critic, Scruton is perceptive and persuasive... Roger Scruton seems characteristically British, however—an heir not only of the elite, eighteenth-century Dilettanti but of popularizing nineteenth-century propagandists such as Ruskin and Morris. Indeed, there is a moralistic fervor to his evangelism, and occasionally Scruton strikes one as a new Pugin, arguing the opposite side: favoring classicism rather than denigrating it. Unlike those ardent idealists of the last century, however, Scruton peppers his opinions with articulate British wit, irony, and sarcasm."

"There was a time when I knew him very well when he was a fellow at Peterhouse. I liked him very much. When he became editor of the Salisbury Review and for a little while afterwards I thought there was something faintly wooden about his politics, but now I regard him as a very, very good thing. It's not only that he writes about politics, it's that he writes about everything else. He's written a very good book about architecture and aesthetics, a huge great book about sex, a political book about conservatism, and very good books about Kant and Spinoza. He is a remarkably versatile and intelligent person. I used to have some reservations. I do not have any now."

"Why is it after a century of socialist disasters, and an intellectual legacy that has been time and again exploded, the left-wing position remains, as it were, the default position to which thinking people gravitate when called upon for a comprehensive philosophy? Why are "right-wingers" marginalised in the educational system, denounced in the media and regarded by our political class as untouchable, fit only to clean up after the orgies of luxurious nonsense indulged in by their moral superiors?"

"The inescapable conclusion is that subjectivity, relativity and irrationalism are advocated [by Richard Rorty] not in order to let in all opinions, but precisely so as to exclude the opinions of people who believe in old authorities and objective truths. This is the short cut to [Antonio] Gramsci's new cultural hegemony: not to vindicate the new culture against the old, but to show that there are no grounds for either, so that nothing remains save political commitment.Thus, almost all those who espouse the relativistic 'methods' introduced into the humanities by Foucault, Derrida and Rorty are vehement adherents to a code of political correctness that condemns deviation in absolute and intransigent terms. The relativistic theory exists in order to support an absolutist doctrine. We should not be surprised therefore at the extreme disarray that entered the camp of deconstruction, when it was discovered that one of the leading ecclesiastics, Paul de Man, once had Nazi sympathies. It is manifestly absurd to suggest that a similar disarray would have attended the discovery that Paul de Man had once been a communist -- even if he taken part in some of the great communist crimes. In such a case he would haved enjoyed the same compassionate endorsement as was afforded to [György] Lukács, [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty and Sartre."

"We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born."

"Can a programme for less authority, less of the state, less supervision, be reconciled with the conservative idea? Roger Scruton is certain that it cannot. In his sombre, clerkly little book, he claims that freedom "cannot occupy a central place in conservative thinking ... for the conservative, the value of individual liberty is not absolute, but stands subject to another and higher value, the authority of established government." His concern is to hunt down and expose the liberalism which hides itself in conservative colours, and – though he does not explicitly say so – the present British government stands outside his definition of conservatism. Mr Scruton's is a rare, unfashionable voice in British political writing today: the voice of real authoritarianism. He could be a 20th-century inquisitor from Kingsley Amis’s fantasy The Alteration, to whom traditional power is its own end and the very questioning of power a sin. Even the Catholic Church is enfeebled by tolerance, in his opinion. Afflicted by the fad for reform, it has "partially forgotten the tradition of custom, ceremony and judicious manoeuvre ... calling to every man with the voice of immutable authority.""

"Take any aspect of the Western inheritance of which our ancestors were proud, and you will find university courses devoted to deconstructing it. Take any positive feature of our political and cultural inheritance, and you will find concerted efforts in both the media and the academy to place it in quotation marks, and make it look like an imposture or a deceit. (p. 40)"

"He has quoted with approval from Joseph de Maistre, the French arch-reactionary, but hesitates to follow him to the conclusion that the public hangman is the key figure of the social order. And this illuminates an emptiness at the core of this amazing book. It is, as he says at the outset, a work of pure dogmatic. De Maistre thought that God wanted the sort of autocracy he described. Mr Scruton offers no sanction for his fearsome, static hierarchy. Religion may be encouraged, if it tightens the social bond, but is ultimately dispensable. Neither does he provide an anthropology suggesting that authoritarianism is the natural condition of the human race. His destructive criticism of liberal society has a black brilliance: his vision of the Leviathan which should replace it simply floats in the air. He asserts it is "natural"; he does not tell us why."

"Architecture has long lacked a satisfactory treatment by philosophers dealing with the arts. Here, finally, a philosopher gives buildings full attention. The result is an impressive and persuasive account of the nature, objectives, and judgement of architecture that has, because it treats this as a matter of practical understanding, direct and practical application, not least to modern architecture... The Aesthetics of Architecture is a remarkable contribution that should interest designers, teachers, critics, and historians."

"Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy, and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious, and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false."

"Our notions of place, neighbourhood and home have stood us in good stead in all our national emergencies. But this identity is under threat from an ethos of repudiation. This ethos is nothing new. When Britain faced the prospect of annihilation from Hitler's armies, George Orwell wrote a famous essay, The Lion and the Unicorn, urging his readers to unite in defence of their country. The ability of the British to defend themselves, he argued, had been undermined from within, by both right and left. The bewildered remnant of the old ruling class, and the intellectuals who recoiled from patriotic feeling and could not utter the word "England" without a sneer, were combining to betray their country to the Nazis. The instinct of the British people in the face of the threat was to resist it, since that is what duty and love both require... Orwell's essay was a passionate attempt to show that the ordinary people were right. They could be trusted precisely because they were motivated by neither the self-interest of the upper class nor the self-righteousness of the intellectuals on the left, but by the only thing that mattered: an undemonstrative love of their country."

"Orwell's essay speaks to us today. It tells us that patriotism is the sine qua non of survival, and that it arises spontaneously in the ordinary human heart. It does not depend upon any grand narrative of triumph of the kind put about by the fascists and the communists, but grows from the habits of association that we British have been fortunate enough to inherit. We do not use grand and tainted honorifics like "la patrie" or "das Vaterland". We refer simply to this spot of earth, which belongs to us because we belong to it, have lived in it, loved it, defended it and established peace and prosperity within its borders."

"We are not born free, nor do we come into this world with a self-identity and autonomy of our own. We achieve those things, through the conflict and cooperation that weave us into the social fabric."

"[Asked "Do you still favour English independence?"] No, I don’t think I’ve ever really favoured English independence. My view is that if the Scots want to be independent then we should aim for the same thing. Scottish independence, I don't think the Welsh want independence, the Northern Irish certainly don't. The Scottish desire for independence is, to some extent, a fabrication. They want to identify themselves as Scots but still to be part of a,[sic] to enjoy the subsidy they get from being part of the kingdom. I can see there are Scottish nationalists who envision something more than that, but if that becomes a real political force then yeah, we should try for independence too. As it is, as you know, the Scots have two votes: they can vote for their own parliament and vote to put their people into our parliament, who come to our parliament with no interest in Scotland but an interest in bullying us."

"Conservatives believe that our identities and values are formed through our relations with other people, and not through our relation with the state. The state is not an end but a means. Civil society is the end, and the state is the means to protect it. The social world emerges through free association, rooted in friendship and community life. And the customs and institutions that we cherish have grown from below, by the ‘invisible hand’ of co-operation. They have rarely been imposed from above by the work of politics, the role of which, for a conservative, is to reconcile our many aims, and not to dictate or control them."

"Conservatism is a philosophy of inheritance and stewardship; it does not squander resources but strives to enhance them and pass them on."

"I've never been an optimist but that's fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised, and that's a reason for being pessimistic, but I've always defended a certain kind of pessimism because what is known as optimism is really a collection of illusions and I think one must recognise what all religious people know, which is that human beings are imperfect and fallen and there's no way in which they can alone surmount the problems which they themselves create."

"The real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things that they love, and want to preserve them from abuse and decay. They are attached to their family, their friends, their religion, and their immediate environment. They have made a lifelong distinction between the things that nourish and the things that threaten their security and peace of mind."

"This "knowing what to do"… is a matter of having the right purpose, the purpose appropriate to the situation in hand... The one who "knows what to do" is the one on whom you can rely to make the best shot at success, whenever success is possible."

"[T]o teach virtue we must educate the emotions, and this means learning "what to feel" in the various circumstances that prompt them."

"The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world."

"In all the areas of life where people have sought and found consolation through forbidding their desires—sex in particular, and taste in general—the habit of judgment is now to be stamped out."

"In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. (p. 21)"

"Roger Scruton's book [Aesthetics of Music] is the first account of music's nature and purpose — or at least the first to come my way — which attempts to explain what music is and what it is for. One reason for this is the far-ranging, wide-eyed, open-eared quality of his mind; another, more humbly practical, reason is that this may well be the only book about the philosophy and aesthetics of music that is copiously equipped with examples in handsomely printed music type... Roger Scruton's book speaks proudly on behalf of wholeness, haleness, and holiness; a beacon to our bleakness, its 'value' should endure."

"A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political , legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge."

"Throughout my adult life governments around the Western world have been propagating the gospel of multiculturalism, which tells us that immigrants, from whatever part of the world and whatever way of life, are a welcome part of our “multicultural” society. Differences of language, religion, custom, and attachment don’t matter, they have reassured us, since all can form part of the colorful tapestry of the modern state. Anybody who publicly disagreed with that claim invited the attentions of the thought police, always ready with the charge of racism, and never so scrupulous as to think it a sin to destroy the career of someone, provided he was white, indigenous, and male. To be quite honest, living through this period of organized mendacity has been one of the least agreeable ordeals that we conservatives have had to undergo. Keeping your head down is bad enough; but filling your head with official lies means sacrificing thought as well as freedom."

"National loyalty is founded in the love of place, of the customs and traditions that have been inscribed in the landscape and of the desire to protect these good things through a common law and a common loyalty."

"Europe owes its greatness to the fact that the primary loyalties of the European people have been detached from religion and re-attached to the land. Those who believe that the division of Europe into nations has been the primary cause of European wars should remember the devastating wars of religion that national loyalties finally brought to an end. And they should study our art and literature for its inner meaning. In almost every case, they will discover, it is an art and literature not of war but of peace, an invocation of home and the routines of home, of gentleness, everydayness and enduring settlement."

"Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties — the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition, by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole. Wherever the experience of nationality is weak or non-existent, democracy has failed to take root. For without national loyalty, opposition is a threat to government, and political disagreements create no common ground."

"National loyalty involves a love of home and a preparedness to defend it; nationalism is a belligerent ideology, which uses national symbols in order to conscript the people to war."

"Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success."

"The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order, and set an example of orderly living."

"Never in the history of the world have there been so many migrants. And almost all of them are migrating from regions where nationality is weak or non-existent to the established nation states of the West. They are not migrating because they have discovered some previously dormant feeling of love or loyalty towards the nations in whose territory they seek a home. On the contrary, few of them identify their loyalties in national terms and almost none of them in terms of the nation where they settle. They are migrating in search of citizenship which is the principal gift of national jurisdictions, and the origin of the peace, law, stability and prosperity that still prevail in the West."

"The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge."

"The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition."