Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy (New York: Penguin, 1994), pp. 438-457, 341-355.
Roger Scruton, The Philosopher on Dover Beach (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), pp. 98-125.
Other titles by Roger Scruton that may be consulted and referred to in this discussion:
Roger Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding (New York & London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 14-31.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein (New York & London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 213-225.
Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy (New York & London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 141-153.
Comparisons:
Alex Comfort, I and That: Notes on the Biology of Religion (New York: Crown Publishers, 1979), entirety.
C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958).
C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).
George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1896), pp. 11-31.
Elizabeth Schellekens, Aesthetics & Morality (London & New York: Continuum, 2007). http://www.continuumbooks.com/
George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 51-111.
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 196-234.
Roger Scruton is a philosopher whose books are fun to read. His prose is accessible, although he is not interested in denying or avoiding the difficulties of the subject nor will he allow you to get away with escaping the hard work that philosophy always demands of the student and thinker. The subtext of his books is that you will have to work hard at understanding the ideas that he is presenting, summarizing and criticizing for your benefit, but that it is always worthwhile to do so.
"The collapse of English studies into [postmodernist chaos] is not, in my view, the cause but the consequence of philosophy's inertia. If literary critics now seem unable to appreciate the difference between genuine reasoning and empty sophistry, it is partly because philosophy, which is the true guardian of critical thinking, has long ago, withdrawn itself from their concerns. When the agenda of philosophy is so narrow and specialized that only a trained philosopher can understand it, is it then surprising that those disciplines which -- whether they know it or not -- depend upon philosophy for their anchor, should have slipped away helplessly into the night?"
This observation should be applied to law and legal reasoning which depends on a sound grasp of logic.
Scruton's literary manner is that of a patient, amused university professor, while the reader is placed in the role of a student of middling abilities who brings a fresh earnestness and devotion to the subject.
When reading Scruton's books I have the uneasy sense that I have arrived a few minutes late for my tutorial.
There is a serious point being made by Scruton in this quoted paragraph which should be taken to heart. Philosophy is a necessity. Philosophy is not a luxury. ("Why philosophy is for everybody.")
We need to know not only the core principles of our society, but also their philosophical foundations. We must be able to defend both. If we cannot defend our core values, rationally, our views and values will be lightly held. They will easily crumble under pressure.
Scruton is an unrepentant Tory and former adviser to Mrs. Thatcher. This makes him a pariah among philosophers in his native Britain. Worse, Scruton defends and has engaged in "fox hunting" and other forms of "aristocratic amusement. "
Fox hunting is "the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable" according to Oscar Wilde. Hence, Professor Scruton (he teaches at Boston University) is officially "politically incorrect." This is an excellent reason to read his books.
I recommend -- although we disagree on a great deal -- Scruton's book concerning the philosophy of sex.
As a result of his political incorrectness I respect and admire Scruton much more, even as I often disagree with his political views and tend to side with his socialist critics on the merits of controversies. It is impossible not to respect and admire Scruton's independence and sincerity, or his great competence as a philosopher.
It is said that Scruton was asked to submit an essay under a young friend's name for evaluation as part of the young man's "A-level" examinations. This is like an SAT examination in secondary level academic subjects which is required of all students pursuing higher education in Britain.
Philosophy is one of the subjects tested in this examination as in most European countries. This inclusion of philosophy in the curriculum is something which is inconceivable in the U.S., where most university graduates have not taken a single course in philosophy during their entire academic careers.
Scruton's essay received a grade of "D" or barely passing.
This is like having Einstein do your physics homework, and receiving a "D" for his efforts. Only in philosophy does this story not surprise me at all. Real philosophy is what happens when you leave school. Philosophy is an engagement with the world, not a flight from it. I say the same of religion.
The subject of art's true nature and importance recurs in Scruton's writings as it does in our lives. Although discussions of art's importance and functions in life were common among ancient Greeks -- as were discussions on most subjects for that matter -- "aesthetics" (the philosophy of art) as a field of philosophical inquiry was born only in the eighteenth century with the writings of Baumgarten and, most importantly, Kant.
Terry Eagleton is eloquent on the reasons for this development and on the ways in which art comes to replace religion in connecting middle class "sensibilities" with the grim politics of imperialism and the economics of the industrial revolution.
Artistic beauty becomes the locus of our rationalizing and of compensation in an unjust world until Marx comes along with a promise of revolution.
The merits of that Marxist promise of revolution must be left for another day. Marx saw the instrumental importance of art and also that art might become (like religion) a form of resistance to injustice.
In commenting on Derrida's Specters of Marx Professor Eagleton paraphrased the comment of an actress "enjoying" intercourse with her Bishop: "His Grace was a long time coming."
Perhaps much the same may be said of the "workers' paradise."
Attempts to say exactly "What is art?" have never been entirely successful because the experience of art is crucial to appreciating its nature as with religion. There are things which simply cannot be known by way of second-hand descriptions. Love-making may be one example. I also recall a lecturer's question in a course on British empiricism: "How do you know when your foot is on fire?"
There is such a thing as immediate awareness or "sense-data." For what it is worth, Scruton tells us that: "... art is the practice of ministering to aesthetic interest, by producing objects that are worthy of it."
This may be fair enough for now as a tentative definition.
Aesthetic experience is subjective and yet seems to point towards or gesture at something objective. Hence, Kant's discussion of the "antinomy of taste": We know art to be significant and yet it has no purpose beyond itself. The point of a work of art is for it to be experienced as a work of art, in itself and for ourselves, never for an ulterior purpose. ("Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.")
We appreciate art as a phenomenon, an object in the material world, to be perceived through the senses.
The etymology of the word "aesthetics" has to do with appealing to (or perceived by) "the senses." Yet art is meaningful not only in terms of instrumental goals served by it, again, but "for itself," because of its appeal to "reason" or "transcendent value."
The meaning of a work of art -- like your meaning -- is in the world but not of the world.
Does the concept of "reason" include emotional insight?
We will need to supplement Kant with Hegel as well as Bradley if we are to answer this question. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
The art object, like us, has a dual nature. Recall my discussion of the kaballistic concept of "Pierced Vessels." The mystical-aesthetic object is physical and yet its meaning is transcendental. To perceive beauty in "communion" with a great work of art is to be "in the moment" with an object that is material as the observer simultaneously undergoes an apprehension of meaning or "epiphany" that is transcendent.
This encounter is to receive an artist's communication or message that is not reducible to the empirical object alone. We are reminded by great art of our spiritual natures. I think there is an analogy to the sexual act which becomes love-making (eros). Love-making is possible for same-sex or heterosexual couples depending on what persons feel for one another. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review" and, again, "'Inception': A Movie Review.")
What is a movie? Only film or celluloid? Or something "seen" or experienced as a movie?
A film that deconstructs cinema and itself is the Harold Pinter/Elia Kazan The Last Tycoon.
Slipstream stars Anthony Hopkins in an exploration of this theme through analogizing identity in cinema to personal or psychological identity in life.
There is no movie without an audience. Furthermore, in the best films audience members are, mysteriously, included in the cast on screen. I feel myself to be a part of some movies in an eerie way because the director intends the film to be about all of us. "Rosebud ..." ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': An Essay Review.")
"For each person the crucial awakening comes in his own time and in response to his own particular object. The [aesthetic] experience nevertheless has something in common with initiation. It is a kind of grace, and once it has come, there is neither going back nor the desire for it. Beauty may be experienced not only in seeing a painting or listening to a symphony, but in a glimpse of a beloved face."
The language of aesthetic experience opens on to both religious mysticism and romance.
These areas of human encounter -- mysticism and aesthetics -- lead us from the material world and the solitary self to spiritual reality and a kind of community. Accordingly, the aesthetic impulse has a cognitive function even in the sciences (or law) although it is distinct from other cognitive activities:
" ... The homuncular indiosyncrasy, if one can call it that, [the metaphysics of presence or Cartesian "I"] has been its Godot -- the constant present dramatic persona who never in fact appears. Kant, by a prodigious effort, manages to drag it into the wings [noumenal reality] but never quite on stage. What strikes us now in reading [Kant's] remarks on the paralogisms of transcendental psychology is not only how much he contributed to the elbow room of mathematical physics by recognizing time and space as 'structures,' but how enormously the universe of discourse has changed."
Notice that this is a recognition of our debt to Kant offered by a scientist, physician, psychologist and expert on human religious/aesthetic experience. Kant's subjective turn makes Einstein possible by providing the intellectual possibilities for a "relative" epistemology that still allows for objective and universal truth in the metaphysics of science -- truth defined by criteria of elegance or beauty. If you follow through on this line of thinking you will be led to Jacques Derrida (from one direction) and Roger Scruton (from the other direction) then to Steven Hawking and Brian Greene. Commonality of interest and sources would horrify Derrida and Scruton who find themselves, as it were, in bed together:
"The change has been in the direction of reinstating what our ancestors called natural philosophy [science:] its components have been the immense success of scientific objectivism and the extension of this, as a simple necessity of the process of getting on with science, to the mental apparatus involved in doing science at all. [Phenomenology-Hermeneutics] We have to make sense of homuncular vision and its effects on empirical observation in order to get on with empirical observation. [transcedental ego?] The point which strikes us today about formal philosophy is not that it asked the wrong questions -- it asked nearly all the right ones at different times and under different guises -- but simply that if we take a different paradigm, the practical comprehension of observation in physics and the practical comprehension of observation in neurology, 'how' questions rather than 'why' questions, we are forced to erect empirical techniques of treating the material, and when we do so the Maginot Lines [created] by the immense philosophical efforts of one period and then frontally assaulted by the next, are found to have been simply outflanked."
Unless we have been travelling in a circle?
This blending of fact and value leads to a new epistemology equally compatible with postmodernist and Modernist aesthetic theory. Essential to science is --
"-- Tolerance of ambiguity, routine use of laws and hypothesis as approximations, and a total disinterest in absolutes except as pitons to which climbing ropes are now standard intellectual equipment not for 'doing philosophy' but for 'doing science' with such practical aims as building a fusion reaction or treating dementias."
This is to speak of an aesthetic impulse in the human sciences that abandons the quest for certainty (epistemology), without giving up on truth as a goal or hope (ontology, metaphysics), nor belief in an objective and independent external reality. Paradoxically, truth has something to do with elegance, beauty is important to knowledge systems and truth. Error (like evil) results in a kind of hideousness.
The truest understanding of another person may be the most beautiful or elegant explanation of the evidence, not the most demeaning or ugliest interpretation of the "facts." ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch on Freedom of Mind.")
Courtly romances were concerned with this "space" created by the poet's adoration of a "beauty" (associated with a distant lady) glimpsed only after being felt, intuitively, and described allegorically. It is to the scientist that nature "reveals" her beauty, according to the Platonist "naturalists" of the Renaissance who ushered in the scientific revolution. ("For Floria Tosca -- With Love and Squalor.")
It is only to this "idealized" lady who calls forth Eros that the artist-poet of courtly romances may reveal his beauty of soul through his song:
"To whom he may entrust his complete self,
Lay bare his mind and speak his perfect will,
Showing the secret places of the heart."
C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), at p. 103. (Quoting Guillome de Lorris, "The Romance of the Rose" and see Shadowlands.)
Please see also my short story, "As You Will ..." then Shakruh Husain, The Virago Book of Witches (London: Virago, 1993) and Judith Johnson, "Women and Vampires: Nightmare or Utopia," in The Kenyon Review, Vol. 5, No. I, 1993, pp. 72-80.
Finally, on the aesthetics of mythology/eros concerning women I direct the reader to Marina Warner's Six Myths of Our Time: Little Angels, Little Monsters, Beautiful Beasts, and More (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 3-25.
Many of my adversaries in debate hate the idea of beauty and the value of goodness. They detest the very idea of genius. I cannot imagine how they live their lives under such constrained conditions, eliminating beauty, goodness, and truth.
What is left for such "haters" of beauty? Money? Sex as distinct from love-making? Why choose ugliness, wallowing in shit, denials of love? ("Is Humanism Still Possible?" and "'This is totally amazing!' -- Donald J. Trump.")
" ... The formulation of the epistemological importance of I-Ness [the transcendental ego] has in fact been left to physics, in which techniques for developing a counterintuitive model of 'reality' [religion, art] have made it unavoidable -- physicists such as Mach and Heisenberg make no bones about the consistency of objective phenomena. ... "
Alex Comfort, I and That: Notes on the Biology of Religion (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1979), pp. 14-15. ("Guerilla Aesthetics and the Lobotomizing of the American Mind.")
Scruton is covering some similar territory in aligning aesthetic and spiritual needs with the possibilities of human cognition. Plug in Amit Goswami right here:
"Aesthetic experience is the core of high culture. It is extremely hard to describe the relation between a high culture and the common culture from which it grows. High culture involves new levels of understanding, not all of which are available to every member of society."
I think that such understanding can be available to many more people:
"It has its roots in religious experience, and it may sometimes have (as in my example) religious experience as its object. But it also has a life of its own, and can grow away from its origins, as the art of our civilization has grown away from the Christian Church which first inspired it. At the same time, when a high culture detaches itself in this way, it preserves the memory [a key word] of a religious sentiment: a core experience of membership in which God was once revealed. High culture is a meditation on its own 'angel infancy,' and that is why I shall suggest, we value it so highly."
In speaking of "angel infancy" and "memory" Scruton strikes the right note. For play in childhood is also a disinterested activity which is its own reward. Children are not only great philosophers, they are also wonderful scientists and artists. Childhood is a territory of remembered wholeness and a place of comfort. It is the homeland that we have left on our life's journeys which has not left us. Thus, we carry within us this (sometimes quite painful) memory of our "angel selves."
In very rare instances of great passionate love these childhood memories and acute vulnerabilities may be shared with another person. All art is derived from this very vulnerable territory of the unconscious. The great text to cite on this topic is Wuthering Heights. "I come to you naked and alone ..." ("A Little Romance" and "Little Manhattan.")
In science or religion and in the apprehension of beauty, specifically, through aesthetic encounters -- most importantly in loving and being loved by another human being -- we experience the "homecoming of the soul." The return of the soul to childhood bliss, peacefulness, meaning and goodness in a world from which we are no longer alienated. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
This is the realization of Romanticism's promise, a promise made (usually) to victims of tragedy and trauma and never to the victimizers.
Perhaps the experience of evil is the exact opposite of this sense of "welcoming" acceptance and joy. I compare the experience of evil to being dipped in a barrel of shit -- as when I encounter new vandalisms of my works each morning or new obstacles to accessing my writings -- and liberation from evil is a kind of stroll in a perfumed garden. Scruton comments:
"If every activity is a means to an end, then no activity has intrinsic value. The world is then deprived of its SENSE. If, however, there are activities that are engaged in for their own sake, the world is restored to us, and we to it. For of these activities, we do not ask what they are FOR, they are sufficient in themselves. [Philosophy? Art? Marriage? Love-making?] Play is one of them; and its association with childhood reminds us of the essential innocence and exhiliration that attends such disinterested activities. If work becomes play -- so that the worker is fulfilled in his work, regardless of what results from it -- then work ceases to be drudgery, becoming the 'restoration of man to himself.' [Think of an actor, male or female, "playing" a role on stage.] Those last words are Marx's, and contain the core of his [post-revolutionary] theory of 'unalienated labor' -- a theory which derives from Kant, via Schiller and Hegel." ('''Blade Runner 2045': A Movie Review" then "'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Movie Review" and "'The English Patient': A Movie Review.")
Beauty is a powerful reminder of something outside of us that is real and worthy of concern. Beauty -- including moral beauty -- compels what Simone Weil describes as the subject's "attention." ("'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
Iris Murdoch shares this insight. Beauty directs us towards a transcendence of our particularities and flawed natures to something greater and communal, goodness and beauty, exactly like love, or (for believers) God generate this liberating experience. ("Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art" and "Martha Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch, and the Philosophy of Love.")
The communal-aesthetic space provided by genuine art is a magical "Neverland." It is the place where we find lost loves, deepest bliss, together with our truest and most innocent selves, even in horrible, exquisite pain. Perhaps especially in moments of suffering and frailty as demonstrated by the aesthetic and spiritual power of the single image/object still at the center of our civilization: a crucifix. This is what Professor Nussbaum calls: "love's knowledge." I like to speak of this enchanted territory as the "Forest of Arden." It is the place where we -- she and I -- must meet ... because we have no other. ("Why Philosophy is for Everybody.")
"The questions brought to our attention by examining the philosophical relation between Aesthetics and Morality are as pressing as they are wide-ranging in their application. As we shall see ... the relation under scrutiny is a changing and flexible one -- in some respects the two disciplines are very close, but not so in others. Indeed, if there is one overall lesson to be drawn from this study, it is that in many respects the provision of a neat, catch-all theory is unlikely ever to emerge, or at least not in a way that renders the many problems we shall encounter during our journey obsolete. For one of the sources of richness of this area of investigation is precisely the resistance to overly blunt theorizing. By their natures, the spheres of aesthetic and moral experience are open-ended, and characterized by their ability to absorb new aspects of life as it is lived. It is perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, that this open-ended character should find its way into the philosophy of the subject." (Schellenkens, p. 10.)
