by Daniel J. Mahoney
How
does one begin to classify the prodigious activities of Roger Scruton?
He publishes a couple of books a year, one as good as the next. He is a
philosopher (in the classical as well as the academic sense of the
term), a man of letters, an astute political thinker, and a student of
high culture in all its diverse manifestations. He has written
successful operas as well as fine novels. “Public intellectual” doesn’t
begin to describe the breadth and depth of his activities and
reflection. He is the opposite of the “specialists without spirit”
lamented by Max Weber in his famous 1919 essay “Science as a Vocation.”
The academy has trouble finding a place for someone who wishes to think
and speak authoritatively about the human world and its relationship to
the whole of things. It is not surprising then that Scruton left the
academic world in 1993 (after twenty years at London’s Birkbeck College
and a stint at Boston University) to become a full-time writer and “man
of letters” (his preferred self-description). As this volume well
attests, he did so with few regrets.
As his
faithful readers appreciate, Scruton is also a philosopher who can
write. While he in no way shares the theoretical extremism and profound
political irresponsibility of Nietzsche or Sartre (quite the contrary),
he shares their aspiration to combine philosophy and literature, to
speak and write with grace, eloquence, and profundity about the human
world. He straddles the worlds of analytic and continental philosophy,
sharing analytic philosophy’s desire for rigorous argumentation and
continental philosophy’s ambition to speak about questions that really
matter. While he admires first-rate analytical philosophers such as his
friend David Wiggins (an analytic Aristotelian) and the American Thomas
Nagel (who has recently challenged the reductionism and dogmatism at the
heart of evolutionary theorizing), he is disturbed by the tendency of
analytic philosophy to drive away “the human questions.” His project, if
he has a project, is to recover philosophically the questions that matter to human beings.
Scruton writes with grace, eloquence, and profundity about the human world.
This work is a narrated dialogue between Scruton and the Irish philosopher and journalist Mark Dooley. Dooley is the author of the best book on Scruton’s thought, ThePhilosopher on Dover Beach (2009), and is the editor of the indispensable Roger Scruton Reader (2009).
He was once enamored of postmodern thought, writing sympathetic books
on Jacques Derrida and the radical philosopher and theologian John
Caputo. But under the influence of Scruton, Dooley has turned to
philosophical conservatism and has become a thoughtful defender of what
the Catholic Church has to offer modern men and women in search of truth
and moral seriousness. Dooley is a perfect interlocutor for Scruton. He
knows his work as well as any contemporary and is a fine thinker—and
conversationalist—in his own right. In these exchanges, he brings
Scruton’s “settlement” in Wiltshire, England to life, allowing outsiders
to experience the charms of Sunday Hill Farm, a largely self-contained
world that Scruton whimsically calls “Scrutopia.” At the beginning of
the conversations, Dooley nicely captures how Scruton’s thinking is
“embodied in his homestead and lifestyle.” This is a man with a precise
sense of place, a man who loves England and its countryside and who
embodies “the humane national loyalty” that he so eloquently defends.
Scrutopia “is a world of farmers and philosophers, of Wagner and wine,
of animals and Aristotle.” In Scruton’s rendering, this very English
setting, which gives rise to humane judgment about what is a fitting way
of life for human beings, is shorn of undue romanticism. Scruton does
not despise cities or industrial civilization. He does not wish to
universalize “Scrutopia,” to make it the basis of an ideology or a
political program. He writes eloquently about hunting as a way of life
that connects three species and informs a dignified rural way of life.
But he is not an “agrarian,” or a “distributist,” or an ideologist of
any sort. That is part of the charm of “Scrutopia.” It is a concrete
reminder, a humanizing reminder, that human beings can live well in a modern world that gives little real thought to human flourishing.
Scruton
rejects the entire modern “culture of repudiation” (a memorable term he
has made famous), but he still finds a home for himself in the modern
world. This is most evident in his 2014 book How to be a Conservative.
While still rejecting the “hysteria of repudiation” he sees all around
us, he finds much of value in liberal and even socialist accounts of
modern politics and culture. His rhetoric is softer and his judgment is
more equitable than it was thirty or forty years ago. Still, he is a man
with a settled point of view, one who is committed to conserving what remains of high culture and civilization, not to mention decent politics in the modern world.
The
formative intellectual experience for Scruton was being in Paris during
the May events of 1968. He dedicates a wonderful chapter of his
autobiographical Gentle Regrets (2005) to this
frontal assault on civilized order. While the student rebels disrupted
classes and proclaimed that it is “forbidden to forbid,” Scruton
instinctively sided with an authentically great man, General de Gaulle,
who had saved France in 1940 and again in 1958. While the students tried
to bring down the liberal university and the French Fifth Republic,
Scruton’s response to this crisis of civilization took the form of a
careful reading of de Gaulle’s Mémoires de guerre,
a classic of French political literature, and a model of humane
political judgment. Asked to choose between the antinomians of ’68 and
the statesman who freely melded together magnanimity and moderation in
his own capacious soul, Scruton chose de Gaulle. May 1968 also
introduced Scruton to the continuing relevance of Edmund Burke. In his
account in Gentle Regrets of how he became a
conservative, Scruton writes that “Burke summarized all my instinctive
doubts about the cry for liberation, all my hesitations about progress
and about the unscrupulous belief in the future that has dominated and
(in my view) perverted modern politics.” Scruton sided with Plato and
Burke in defending a “form of politics that would also be a form of
nurture—‘care of the soul,’ ” a care that would not forget absent
generations. He had no time of day for “adolescent insouciance, a
throwing away of all customs, institutions and achievements, for the
sake of a momentary exultation which could have no lasting sense save
anarchy.” By the early 1970s, Scruton was already a conservative in the
sense of one committed to the preservation of Western civilization and
“the best that has been thought and said.”
An important book would result from the experience of May 1968. Thinkers of the New Left (1985), revised and expanded in 2014 as Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left,
was Scruton’s response to the New Left’s nihilistic claim that all
power is oppressive, that political and moral accountability and
legitimate authority do not exist, that they are chimerical ideological
justifications put forward by an ill-defined oppressor class. Scruton
challenged the absurd claim that liberation and “social justice” would
magically follow from the “easy holiday of destruction” and the “culture
of repudiation” preached and practiced by the New Left. Yet Scruton’s
response to the thinkers of the New Left was never simply polemical or
narrowly “political.” For example, he carefully distinguished between
Sartre the gifted philosopher and Sartre the shameful apologist for
Communist totalitarianism. Sartre, for all his faults, did not belong to
the Parisian “nonsense machine” of Althusser, Lacan, and now Badiou who
really are impostors of the first order, spouting nonsense at the
service of leftist “emancipation.” At his best, Sartre brought
literature and philosophy together in a way that richly explored the
challenges of human freedom. But a book like Critique de la raison dialectique
(1961) was unworthy of Sartre’s gifts since it defends
“fraternité-terreur” and reads, then and now, like a justification for
Stalinist, Maoist, and Castroite terror and tyranny. Scruton makes all
the right distinctions and gives serious thinkers their due while
exposing ideological imposters for the frauds that they truly are. Thinkers of the New Left
did not make Scruton many friends in the academy. But the revised
version of the book has been widely recognized as a serious contribution
to political philosophy and cultural criticism. It should be noted that
in the book of conversations Scruton honors French thinkers such as
Remi Brague, Pierre Manent, and Alain Besançon, who do not always
receive sufficient recognition in the Anglophone work (outside of
circles like First Things) even if they are
highly respected in France and beyond. French thought, it must be
insisted, is not exhausted by an obscurantist literature that is
acclaimed “purely because of its left-wing credentials.”
Conversations with Roger Scruton
dedicates an important chapter to Scruton’s efforts to help the
intellectual underground in Poland and especially Czechoslovakia in the
late 1970s and 1980s (it should be noted that Scruton has been honored
in both Czechoslovakia and Poland for these noble efforts that he made
at some risk to himself). Dooley rightly notes that in his clandestine
efforts on behalf of independent Czech and Polish thought, Scruton gave
“concrete substance” to his anti-totalitarian convictions. As this
volume makes clear, Scruton’s philosophy is profoundly
anti-totalitarian, opposed as it is to every form of scientism,
reductionism, and contempt for the human person. Scruton has always
defended three great “transcendentals”—the person, freedom, and the sacred.
These are at the core of his metaphysical conservatism.
Twentieth-century totalitarianism can be understood as a frontal assault
on the bodies and souls of human beings—and of the three great
transcendentals that give substance to human dignity.
Scruton saw in ideological revolution the self-deification of man.
In a revealing discussion, Dooley shows how these “three transcendental
features of human experience” have direct relevance to the politics of
ideological revolution. He cites Scruton’s powerful and profound 1989
essay “Man’s Second Disobedience: Reflections on the French Revolution.”
Influenced by the work of Alain Besançon, Scruton saw in ideological
revolution the self-deification of man through the positing of an “ideal
community” that negated the existing order of things. “The worship of
an idol”—self-deified man—“becomes a worship of nothing,” the triumph of
pure negation. Only the restoration of the claims of a transcendental
God can free humanity from a potent and destructive nothingness. One
sees that, in 1989, Scruton was already on his way to a return to a more
explicit Christian affirmation. In this chapter of Conversations, we learn of Scruton’s admiration for the great Czech philosopher (and spokesman for Charter 77) Jan Pato?ka,
who applied the Platonic notion of the “care of the soul” to a
political and social situation ravished by totalitarian mendacity.
Scruton played a role in bringing Pato?ka’s great book Plato and Europe
to the attention of the Western world. It should be noted that Scruton
reads Czech and translated one of Václav Havel’s most philosophically
discerning essays, “Politics and Conscience,” for The Salisbury Review.
In this context, mention must be made of Scruton’s superb novel Notes from Underground
(2014). Set in Czechoslovakia circa 1985, this novel artfully conveys
an atmosphere where brave souls can’t breathe freely yet hold on to hope
and grace. Notes is not a hagiography of the
“dissident” world—it, too, saw moral posturing and had its own sometimes
insidious hierarchies. Scruton conveys a world where the ideological
“lie” reigned and where brave souls successfully resisted it. He also
captures that in-between world between moral integrity and open
collaboration that was the fate of so many in a decaying yet frightfully
repressive ideological regime. Scruton remains one of our best guides
to a “surreal” world we are in danger of forgetting—or normalizing. My
field, political science, provides little help in this regard. A
literary work such as Scruton’s, informed by rich personal experience,
can capture what reductive social science—obsessed with measuring
“variables”—cannot begin to convey.
Anti-totalitarianism
is one major facet—and consequence—of Scruton’s conservatism. His
conservatism owes much to Burke and Hegel (the author of the Philosophy of Right
and not the Marxified Hegel of Alexandre Kojève). In philosophy proper,
the major influence is Immanuel Kant. Kant’s moral philosophy deeply
informs Scruton’s account of moral and political accountability and his
view of the person as an “end” and not a “means,” a subject whose
dignity needs to be affirmed and respected. Scruton’s Kantianism
operates at “the flaming edge of things—where the empirical gives out
and the transcendental glitters,” as he says in a particularly striking
formulation. His emphasis is not so much on “the limits of knowledge,”
as in more conventional accounts of Kant. Rather he explores those
intimations of the “mysterious reality of the world” that can be gleaned
from art, music, religious experience, and philosophical reflection on
lived experience or the “life world.” He makes a reasonable, and not
arbitrary, bet that these experiences are not mere projections but
rather provide genuine evidence of the nature of reality. His
philosophical reflections on what can be glimpsed of the noumenal
realm have led him in recent years to a fuller embrace of the Christian
religion. Scruton sometimes refers to his earlier period of “godless
conservatism,” his “apprenticeship in atheism,” an apprenticeship most
evident in his 1980 book The Meaning of Conservatism.
But as Mark Dooley points out, even during his “atheist” period, Scruton never repudiated religion as such. In Sexual Desire (1986),
he saw human sexuality as the meeting of persons and not just the
vehicle for the stimulation of “erogenous zones,” as Freud rather
crudely called them. Scruton has always left a place for the sacred and
for a conception of the person who is a soul and not merely a body, a
subject and not a mere object in the order of nature. He has always been
a theorist of the “life world” against every form of scientism and
reductionism. This affirmation of the soul has led him back to a
philosophical Christianity which is ever more evident in recent books
such as The Face of God (2012) and The Soul of the World
(2014). He is an organist in his local Anglican church and has even
written a moving “personal history of the Church of England,” Our Church (2012). A critic of the scientistic dogmatism at the heart of evolutionary theory, Scruton notes in On Hunting (1998) that the “freedom, translucency and moral presence” of the soul “are never mentioned in the book of evolution.”
Religion,
unlike scientism, can do justice to the consciousness, freedom, and
moral accountability inherent in the human person. In recent years,
Scruton has concluded that God is not dead but is “waiting for us to
make room for him” (see his 2008 article “The Return of Religion” in The Roger Scruton Reader). In Conversations,
Scruton calls the Incarnation, the death of a mediating God on behalf
of sinful man, a “profound thing” since God himself reconciles us to our
own deaths. He also writes movingly about the penitence and forgiveness
at the heart of the Christian dispensation. But his Christian
affirmation is still incomplete. He confesses to Mark Dooley that he is
“skeptical about the Resurrection and afterlife,” a skepticism that does
not, he adds, rule out hope. Like all of us, Scruton has a hard time
imagining the human form of “eternal life.” His philosophically minded
Christianity, so attentive to the reality of the non-reducible soul, is
only able to take this philosopher so far.
Cognitive dualism protects us against a scientism that denies the reality of the human person.
In recent
years, Scruton has defended a position he calls “cognitive dualism.” He
illustrates it with the example of a smile. On one level, a smile is a
merely physiological phenomenon, the movement of muscles, nerves, and
bones. On another equally real level, it is the revelation of the human
spirit and the “intentionality” at the heart of human freedom. It gives
us access to another human person. As this example shows, cognitive
dualism protects us against a scientism that denies the reality of the
human person. But it can’t make a whole of the human being or of human
experience. Perhaps Scruton needs to say more about the personal character
of the scientific enterprise itself. As Marc Guerra has written, the
distinctive operations of truly scientific inquiry “grow out of the
desire to satiate human beings’ epistemic wonder about the full realm of
nature, from the inanimate atom to the material and spiritual being who
can scientifically study the inanimate atom.” “Cognitive dualism”
cannot explain the scientific enterprise itself even if it is a
provisional first step in responding to scientific reductionism.
Near
the end of this delightful and instructive book, Mark Dooley notes
“Scruton’s reputation is certainly not what it used to be.” He is now a
Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature and
has recently been knighted by the Queen. It is a far time from the 1980s
when Scruton was something of an intellectual pariah and when his
humane Conservatism was confused with fascism in some excitable—and
decidedly illiberal—academic circles. Those old battles, too, are
recounted in this volume. Thankfully, these days are mainly behind
Scruton. In the conclusion of this volume, Dooley asks Scruton if he is
hopeful “about the cause of conservatism generally.” Scruton responds
that he is not. Yet he adds that the other side, the academic and
cultural Left, has nothing to offer except “the repudiation of this
feature of our inheritance, now of that.” Scruton ends on an elevating
note. Despite everything, we must hold on to what we “know and love.” We
must be practitioners of the Platonic “care of the soul” and upholders
of the great and primordial Burkean “contract” that connects the living,
the dead, and the yet to be born. Above all, we must be sensitive to
the “glimmers of transcendence” that emanate from “the edge of things.”
As all of this suggests, it is very rewarding to converse with Roger
Scruton.
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