Roger Scruton

gigatos | April 2, 2022

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Summary

Sir Roger Vernon Scruton, born February 27, 1944 in Buslingthorpe (United Kingdom) and died January 12, 2020, is a British conservative philosopher.

He is the author of more than thirty books, including Art and Imagination (1974), Sexual Desire (1986), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism (2006), The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought (2007), Beauty (2009) and Our Church (2012). Scruton has also written two novels, a number of non-fiction books on philosophy and culture, and composed two operas.In 1969 he joined Peterhouse College, Cambridge University, as a Research Fellow in Aesthetics. Between 1971 and 1992, Scruton taught aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, where he became a professor in 1985. From 1992, he held visiting professorships at Boston University, the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., the University of St. Andrews, and Oxford University, where he was a member of Blackfriars Hall. In 1982, he co-founded the Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal which he edited for eighteen years. He founded Claridge Press in 1987 and serves on the editorial board of the British Journal of Aesthetics. In 2012, he was elected Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

In addition to his career as a philosopher and writer, Scruton participated in the creation of underground universities and educational networks in Soviet-ruled Central Europe during the Cold War. He was rewarded for his efforts in this area.

Youth and training

Roger Scruton and his two sisters were born to John “Jack” Scruton, a schoolteacher, and his wife Beryl Claris (née Haynes). They grew up in Marlow and High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, about 50 miles west of London. Scruton tells the Guardian that Jack came from a working-class family in Manchester – he hated the aristocracy and loved the countryside – while Beryl read romance novels and entertained “silver-blue-haired friends. He describes his mother as committed to an ideal of male chivalry and social distinction that his father “gloated over destroying.” Although his parents were raised Anglican, they considered themselves primarily “humanists.

Between 1954 and 1961, Scruton attended the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe, where he won a merit scholarship to study natural sciences at Cambridge University. He then immersed himself in music, art, and literature (Kafka, Rilke, and T. S. Eliot, among others, influenced him as a teenager), and decided to become a writer. He entered university in 1962, and on the first day, he changed his course of study to moral sciences (philosophy) at Jesus College (Cambridge). His model was Sartre, in whom he appreciated the passage from the abstract to the concrete, and from the general to the particular, seeing a fertile association between philosophy and poetry. From Sartre, he learned that intellectual life should not be confined to the university, but that its most important manifestations lay in art, literature and music, where society acquires an awareness of itself. Scruton, whose philosophy studies at Cambridge were marked by a distance from politics, stopped following Sartre when the latter asserted that the purpose of intellectual life was political engagement. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1965 and his Master of Arts in 1967.

Scruton admired the way philosophy was taught at Cambridge, namely as a prelude to the hard sciences, in the tradition of analytic philosophy. Yet Scruton wanted to reconcile this approach to philosophy with an artistic way of life. In order to pursue this quest, Scruton left for France for a year, where he taught at the Collège Universitaire de Pau and married his first French wife. He observed the events of May 1968 in Paris. He would later say that his association with Parisian militants had definitively disgusted him with left-wing ideologies. He then spent a few months in Italy where he wrote a first novel that was never published.

He then returned to England and prepared a doctorate which he obtained in 1972 from the University of Cambridge for a thesis on aesthetics.

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The 1970s and 1980s

In 1969, he joined Peterhouse as a Research Fellow, which he left in 1971 to join Birkbeck College in London, where he taught philosophy of aesthetics until 1992, first as a Lecturer, then as a Reader (an intermediate status between Lecturer and Professor, devoted to an exceptional research activity), and finally as a Professor. He married Danielle Laffitte in 1973; the couple divorced in 1979. His first book, Art and Imagination, appeared in 1974. Also in 1974, he became one of the four members of the steering committee of the Conservative Philosophy Group, founded that year by Conservative MP Hugh FraserHugh Fraser (politician) to develop the intellectual foundations of conservatism.He studied law at the Inns of Court between 1974 and 1976 and was called to the bar in 1978. He never practiced, however. His next book is also on aesthetics, The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979). In The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), he calls for conservatives to be concerned not only with economics, but first and foremost with moral issues. He told the Guardian in 2010 that this book ruined his academic career; Scruton was indeed demonized by his colleagues at Birkbeck for his political positions.

He then published The Politics of Culture and Other Essays (1981), followed by a history and dictionary of philosophy in 1982, The Aesthetic Understanding (1983), didactic works on Kant and Spinoza (1983 and 1987), Thinkers of the New Left (1985), which is a collection of critical essays on fourteen prominent left-wing intellectuals, including Edward Palmer Thompson, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Sexual Desire: a Moral Philosophy of the Erotic (1986).

The influence of Edmund Husserl”s concept of Lebenswelt then takes on its full importance in Scruton”s journey, as he witnesses its destruction in Eastern Europe under Soviet rule in the 1980s. He then becomes aware of the attempts of some dissident intellectuals (among them Husserl”s disciple Jan Patočka) to restore this Lebenswelt. He quickly became convinced that the duty of philosophers is to save the ideas through which man perceives the world and adapts to it. His experience in Paris in May 1968 convinced him that revolutionary politics inevitably leads to nihilism and a world fragmented by doubt and resentment.

Scruton is deeply influenced by the first sentence of General de Gaulle”s Mémoires de guerre: “All my life, I have had a certain idea of France”. This idea and Husserl”s Lebenswelt shaped the home that Scruton erects as a concept. Scruton shares General de Gaulle”s idea of France, and in turn defends a certain idea of England.

Far from a particularistic definition of his identity, Scruton defines himself respectively as “a French intellectual, a native Englishman, a German romantic, a loyal Virginian, a Czech patriot, and, like Sylvia Plath, perhaps a little Jewish too (see the chapter “How I discovered my name” in Gentle Regrets).

The 1990s, 2000s and 2010s

In 1990, Scruton went to work for the Jan Hus Educational Foundation in Czechoslovakia for a year, then taught philosophy part-time from 1992 to 1995 at Boston University, while continuing to live in the United Kingdom. He returned permanently, settled in the countryside and discovered a passion for hunting as a sporting activity but above all as a means of safeguarding a social identity that was being destroyed. In his book On Hunting, he writes that his life is divided into three phases: “in the first phase I was miserable, in the second I was uncomfortable and in the third I hunted”. It was in this context that he met Sophie Jeffreys, an architectural historian, whom he married in 1996. They have two children and live on a farm in Wiltshire (West of England). Between 2001 and 2009, Scruton wrote a wine column for the New Statesman newspaper, articles for the World of fine wine magazine, and a chapter in Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine (2007) entitled “The Philosophy of Wine”. His book I Drink Therefore I am: A Philosopher”s Guide to Wine (2009) includes articles published in The New Stateman.

University positions

Scruton has held several academic positions in the 2000s: between 2005 and 2009 he was a research fellow at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia. From 2009, he was a visiting professor at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D. C. where he is conducting research on the cultural impact of neuroscience. In January 2010, he was asked to be a visiting professor (unpaid) at Oxford University to teach aesthetics to graduate students. In 2011, he also accepted a quarter-time visiting professorship in moral philosophy at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He is also a research fellow (unpaid) at the University of Buckingham. In 2010, he delivered the Gifford Lectures at St Andrews on the topic of “The Face of God”.

In 2000, Anthony Grayling, philosopher and professor at Birkbeck, described Scruton as “a wonderful teacher of philosophy. His didactic works written for students and the general public are clear, honest, and accurate. Roger Scruton”s presence is part of the reason that Birkbeck”s philosophy department is one of the best in the country.”

The Salisbury Review

In 1982, Scruton became a founding member of the Salisbury Review, a journal that quickly became an important think tank for traditional conservatism in opposition to Thatcherism. The Review was founded by a Tory party group known as the Salisbury Group, with the support of the Peterhouse Right, a circle of conservatives associated with Peterhouse College, Cambridge University, whose members included Maurice Cowling, David Watkin and the mathematician Adrian Mathias. In 2002, he wrote that this editorial activity put an end to his academic career in the United Kingdom. The journal was indeed trying to provide an intellectual base for conservatism, and was highly critical of some of the major concerns of the time, namely the peace movement, the campaign for nuclear disarmament, egalitarianism, feminism, third world aid, multiculturalism and modernism. “At last it was possible to be a conservative and also to be to the left of something,” Scruton writes, and “it was worth sacrificing one”s chances of becoming a member of the British Academy, vice-chancellor, or professor emeritus in order to be able to speak the truth.” Scruton was nonetheless named a Fellow of the British Academy in 2008.Scruton edited the journal for eighteen years until 2001 and served on the editorial board for the rest of his life.

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Activism in Eastern Europe

Between 1979 and 1989, Scruton actively supported dissidents in the Eastern Bloc, particularly in Czechoslovakia, which was under Communist Party rule. He helped to forge links between Czech dissident academics and their Western European counterparts. As part of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, he and other academics travel to Prague and Brno to support an underground university network created by Czech dissident Julius Tomin (they help smuggle books and organize conferences. They managed to offer students a Cambridge degree in theology by distance learning (the theological faculty was chosen because it was the only one to respond to the demand for help). According to Scruton, the study programs were structured, translations of books were circulated in samizdat form, and students took their exams in cellars on copies infiltrated in diplomatic bags.Scruton was arrested and detained in 1985 in Brno before being expelled from the country. On June 17 of the same year, he was put on the list of officially undesirable persons in Czechoslovakia. He was also followed during his travels in Poland and Hungary. For his work in support of dissidents, Scruton received the First of June Award from the city of Pilsen in 1993, and in 1998 President Václav Havel presented him with the Medal of Merit (First Class).

Peter Hitchens writes in 2009 of his admiration for Roger Scruton and others who have worked in this way. In 1994, Roger Kimball wrote that “in the late 1980s, Scruton worked courageously and effectively to help local movements end communist tyranny in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Scruton is very critical of some commentators and personalities in the Western world – in particular the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm – who “have chosen to exonerate the former communist regimes of their crimes and atrocities.

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Death

Roger Scruton died of cancer on January 12, 2020, at the age of 75. His funeral was celebrated on January 24, 2020 at Malmesbury Abbey according to the Anglican rite.

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Aesthetics

Roger Scruton”s entire career has been in the service of a philosophy of aesthetics. In 1972, he obtained his Doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge with a thesis in aesthetics on which his first book, Art and Imagination, published in 1974, is based. In it, Scruton shows that “what distinguishes aesthetic interest from other interests is that it refers to the appreciation of a thing for its own sake.

Subsequently, Scruton published several books on aesthetics, including The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979), The Aesthetic Understanding (1983, with a new edition in 1997), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), and Beauty (2010). Between 1971 and 1992, Scruton taught aesthetics in the Department of Philosophy at Birkbeck College (now known as Birkbeck, University of London) in London, first as a Lecturer, then as a Reader (an intermediate status between Lecturer and Professor, with exceptional research activity), and finally as a Professor.

In July 2008, a two-day international colloquium on Scruton”s aesthetics was held at Durham University. The purpose of this colloquium, which attracted participants from around the world, was to analyze and evaluate Scruton”s impact on the field of aesthetics. As a result of this event, in June 2012 a collection of studies on the scope of Scruton”s aesthetics was published. In a March 2009 debate organized by Intelligence Squared (en) at the Royal Geographical Society in London, Scruton (with historian David Starkey) put forward the following proposal for discussion: “Britain has become indifferent to beauty” by holding side by side a representation of Botticelli”s Birth of Venus and a photograph of English model Kate Moss to show that the perception of beauty in Britain has fallen “to the level of our most primal appetites and instincts.”

A few months later, in November 2009, Scruton wrote and presented a documentary for the British television channel BBC Two entitled Why Beauty Matters, in which he argued that beauty should regain the place it has always had in art, architecture and music. In an article in The American Spectator immediately following the release of the documentary, Scruton said that the very next day he received an avalanche of emails thanking him, with only one exception.

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Culture

The documentary Why Beauty Matters ends with the word home, which introduces not only aesthetics, but also culture more broadly into the design of one”s natural habitat. In his books on culture (An Intelligent Person”s Guide to Modern Culture, 1998, new ed. 2000; Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged, 2007), Scruton defends and updates a certain English tradition. Following Matthew Arnold, this thinking combines a classical conception of culture as education in beauty with a romantic conception of culture as the spirit of a people. Scruton also borrows from anthropology to highlight the role of religion, understood as a sense of the sacred and as religiosity, in the formation and transmission of a culture, and the role of culture and religion in preserving the living together, in reaction to the abstract definition of religion and universalist definition of culture brought by the Enlightenment philosophers. The Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, but especially T. S. Eliot”s Four Quartets, had a decisive influence on Roger Scruton”s thinking on culture.

If he belongs to a certain English tradition of thinking about culture, Roger Scruton does not seek any less to actualize it, to make it intelligible for his contemporaries. All of Roger Scruton”s works seem to converge in one direction: the formulation of a reaction to the modern world that attempts to make sense of it. Like Sartre, Scruton shows that meaning is revealed in appearances, and explores the invitations to be, to act, to feel that are sent to us by the appearances of the world. His philosophy endeavors to show how meaning resides in science, how it appears in art, culture, philosophy. There are modes of appearance that nevertheless escape the educated mind, such as music. Music has been central to Scruton”s thinking, and he has written two philosophical books on the subject (The Aesthetics of Music in 1997 and Understanding Music in 2009), as well as piano pieces, songs and operas.

Scruton wrote three opera librettos, two of which he set to music. The first, a chamber opera in one act entitled The Minister, has been performed several times. The second, a two-act opera called Violet was staged twice at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London in December 2005. It is based on the life of the British harpsichordist Violet Gordon-Woodhouse.

Arguments in favor of conservatism

Scruton became a conservative during the May 1968 student riots in France. Nicholas Wroe writes in The Guardian that Scruton was living in the Latin Quarter of Paris at the time, and watched as students overturned cars to build barricades, and tore up cobblestones to throw at police. Scruton recalls, “I suddenly realized I was on the other side. What I saw was an uncontrollable crowd of complacent middle-class thugs. When I asked my friends what they wanted, what they were trying to achieve, all I got in response was ridiculous, deliberately obscure and convoluted gibberish, typical of Marxism. I was disgusted by this, and came to think that there must be some way to return to the defense of Western civilization against these assaults. That”s when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to preserve things rather than destroy them.

At that time, he read texts of Sartre (The Critique of the dialectical reason and Situations) which did not exert on him the attraction of the writings of youth; of Michel Foucault (and of successors of Marx and Freud, such as Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Jacques Lacan. He then realizes that the fervor with which the demonstrators destroy the structures in place is equaled only by the imprecision of their intentions: what is indeed proposed to replace this world to be destroyed? Such is the question that Scruton asks himself, who has not ceased to follow with passion the evolution of the French intellectual life.

The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) – which he said was “a rather Hegelian defense of Tory values in the face of their betrayal by free-market advocates” – is the book that he believes ruined his academic career. He writes in Gentle Regrets (2005) that he found many of the arguments made by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution (1790) compelling. Although Burke was writing about the Revolution and not socialism, Scruton is convinced that the utopian promises of socialism, in his words, rest on an abstract view of the mind that bears little relation to the way most people think. Burke also convinced him that history has no direction, that there is no moral or spiritual progress; that men think collectively and have a common purpose only in times of crisis or war, and that the attempt to organize society in this way requires finding a real or imaginary enemy. Hence, Scruton writes, the strident tone of socialist literature. He goes on to show, following Burke, that society is maintained in its integrity by authority and the rule of law in the sense of the right to obedience, not by imagined rights of citizens. Obedience, he writes, is “the primary virtue of political beings, the disposition which makes it possible to govern them, and without which societies would disintegrate into ”the dust and powder of individuality”. True freedom, Scruton shows, does not conflict with obedience, but is its complementary side. He was also convinced by Burke”s arguments about the social contract, a social contract that should be extended to include the dead and the unborn. To forget this, he wrote – to get rid of customs and institutions – is “to place the living members of a society in a position of dictatorial domination over those who have gone before them and those who will come after them.

Scruton shows that beliefs that appear as examples of prejudice can be useful and important: “our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified and unjustifiable, from our point of view, and the attempt to justify them could only lead to their loss. A bias towards modesty in women and chivalry in men might stabilize sexual relations and improve child rearing, even if these effects do not provide an a priori justification for the bias. It would then be easy to show that the prejudice is irrational, but that we would lose by abandoning it.

In Arguments for Conservatism (2006), he defines the areas in which some philosophical thinking is necessary for conservatism to be intellectually compelling. He shows that human beings are creatures with limited and local affections. Attachment to territory is the root of all forms of government where law and liberty reign supreme; any expansion of jurisdiction beyond the borders of the nation-state leads to a loss of responsibility. He opposes the elevation of the “nation” above its inhabitants as a threat rather than a protection of citizenship and peace. He shows that “conservatism and conservation” are two parts of the same politics, that of resource management, which includes the social capital embodied in laws, customs and institutions, and the material capital present in the environment. Drawing on his legal studies at Birkbeck College (he was called to the bar in 1978), he further demonstrates that laws should not be used as a tool for special interests. Those who look forward to reform – for example, in the areas of euthanasia or abortion – will find it difficult to accept what is “obvious to others: that laws exist precisely to restrain their ambitions.

He defines postmodernism as the assertion that there is no longer any basis for truth, objectivity and meaning, and that conflicts of opinion are nothing more than struggles for power. He also shows that while the West is required to judge other cultures by their own standards, Western culture is antagonistically judged as ethnocentric and racist. He writes: “the same reasoning that is used to destroy the idea of objective truth and absolute value imposes political correctness as an absolute constraint, and cultural relativism as an objective truth.

Sexual desire

According to Jonathan Dollimore, Scruton”s Sexual Desire (1986) is based on a conservative sexual ethic that rests on the Hegelian proposition that “the purpose of every rational being is the construction of the self”, which implies a recognition of the other as faith in the self. Scruton shows that perversion has its origin in “the sexual act that avoids or abolishes the other”, which he sees as narcissistic and egoistic. In 1989, Scruton wrote in an essay entitled Sexual Morality and Liberal Consensus (1989) that homosexuality was a perversion for this reason: because the body of the homosexual partner belongs to the same category as his own. In the Guardian in 2010, Scruton returned to this position, which he no longer defends. According to Mark Dooley, Scruton”s aim is to show the sacred dimension of sexual desire.

Sexual Desire has been described by the American philosopher Alan Soble as “by far the most interesting and informed philosophical justification of sexual desire produced by analytic philosophy.

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The environment

In 2012, Roger Scruton published a book on the environment, Green Philosophy, which shows that environmental protection should not be the prerogative of certain political parties. He then created the concept of oikophilia, the love of home. He reminds us that conservatism consists above all in conserving, keeping in mind Edmund Burke”s contract between the living and the dead and the unborn.

Religion and totalitarianism

Following Immanuel Kant, Scruton argues that human beings have a spiritual dimension, a sacred core that manifests itself when they reflect on themselves. He shows that we are living in an era of secularization unprecedented in the history of the world. He says that writers and artists such as Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Edward Hopper and Arnold Schönberg “have devoted much energy to trying to recover the experience of the sacred – but as a form of private rather than public consciousness.

He defines totalitarianism as the absence of any restraint placed on central authority, where all aspects of life would be under the control of the government. Scruton shows that advocates of totalitarianism thrive on resentment, and once they have seized power, they begin to abolish the institutions – laws, property, and religion – that create authority. Scruton writes that “for these resentful men, it is these institutions that are responsible for inequality, and thus for their humiliation and failure.” He shows that revolutions are not led from below by the people, but from above, on behalf of the people, by an ambitious elite.

Scruton suggests that the reason the use of Novlanguage is important in totalitarian societies is because the power of language to describe reality is replaced by a language whose purpose is to avoid confrontation with reality. He agrees with Alain Besançon that the totalitarian society envisaged by George Orwell in 1984 can only be understood in theological terms as a society based on transcendental negation. With T. S. Eliot, he believes that true originality is only possible within a tradition, and that it is precisely in a modern context – a context of fragmentation, heresy and atheism – that the conservative project acquires its full meaning.

In 2012, Roger Scruton published Our Church in which he defends the role of the Anglican Church in England in the preservation of culture, architecture, the environment and living together. In the same year, he published The Face of God which is an expansion of the Gifford Lectures he delivered at the University of St Andrews in 2010. Again, in 2014, he published another book on religion, The Soul of the World which grew out of the Stanton Lectures he gave in 2011 at the University of Cambridge”s Faculty of Theology.

An international colloquium is being held April 11-13, 2014 at McGill University in Montreal on the theme Roger Scruton. Thinking the Sacred. Philosophy of Religion, Aesthetics, Culture.

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Criticism of left-wing thinkers

In two books, Thinkers of the New Left (1985) and then with Error and Pride: Thinkers of the Modern Left (2015), Roger Scruton opposes the theses of left-wing intellectuals. He criticizes them for questioning everything in order to submit reality to their ideology. With them, reality is subordinated to thought, as with Foucault, who “suspects in the slightest act of social nature the mark of bourgeois domination.” The left had, according to Scruton, taken such possession of the culture, that it excluded from it anyone who dared to contest its values stemming from a certain interpretation of the History.

The left would be characterized by “resentment towards those who control things” – hence the desire to destroy. This resentment results in those ideals of emancipation and social justice being imposed by “a plan that invariably involves depriving individuals of things they have acquired fairly in the marketplace.”

Roger Scruton notes that since 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union, a transfer of demands has taken place from the working class to women, homosexuals, immigrants and even Muslims. This investment in the defense of “so-called victimized” identities guarantees these intellectuals “a comfortable self-esteem. He observes a refocusing on a politics that classifies people according to their identities. There is the “white heterosexual Christian male” who is supposed to be guilty and the other “identities”. The radical otherness that is thus created forbids any dialogue between equals. The ethic of discussion that allows us to agree on the common good, apart from the characteristics of each person, can no longer exist.

He also attempts to draw attention to culture clashes. In The West and the Rest. Globalization and the Terrorist Threat (2002), he writes that Muslims have not really internalized homelands other than the small homeland of the tribe and clan, based on extended consanguinity, or the homeland of the community that binds together believers to the exclusion of non-Muslims. A controversy pits him against far-left journalist George Eaton in 2019.

In the United Kingdom, he was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honors for his “services to philosophy, teaching and public education.”

For a complete survey of Roger Scruton”s books and articles, see the bibliography compiled by Christopher Morrissey, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Latin at Redeemer Pacific College in British Columbia, Canada.

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External links

Sources