Roger Scruton was more interesting than his obituaries made out
The various encomia which have been written for Roger Scruton have been appropriate, kind, and correct. Roger once said that the philosopher Bertrand Russell was “an aristocrat but not a gentleman”. In Scruton’s case, the reverse is true. Roger was born into a working-class family, and spent his formative years at war with the assumptions of his father: that he should not better himself.
I knew him a little bit. My dealings with him, in academia, were infrequent but always wonderful. He was generous to the point that if it took him a day to reply to an email I got miffed.
What hasn’t been brought out, in the obituaries, is just how good a philosopher he was — or, perhaps, what kind of philosopher he was. Scruton was trained in the Cambridge analytical tradition by people like Elizabeth Anscombe (herself a pupil of Wittgenstein). Even under her austere gaze (and trust me, it was) he was able to develop counter-cultural philosophical interests. To put it simply: Scruton grasped that if philosophy cannot speak to the everyday human experience then it has nothing to say at all.
He took certain things to be ineliminable functions of the human condition: sex, art (especially music) and politics. And in each area, he wrote in ways that amplified the understanding of any interested person. I’ll pick one topic, because it was as a consequence of writing this book that the idiots who think that you can assess an argument merely in terms of its conclusion, came to vilify him.
In his magisterial Sexual Desire, Scruton develops an argument against the Platonic idea that desire is a part of our animal instinct and that (according to Plato) it should be negatively contrasted with erotic love. On the contrary, Scruton argues, sexual desire is part of the structure of thought not of biology; to be aroused is to think of someone under a certain description. Sexual perversion occurs when the object of your thought vanishes, or was never present in your thought in the first place. In these circumstances the sexual act becomes drained of meaning. Sexual desire in its properly constituted form requires that the other person exists as a person under your gaze. Even if the gaze is an act of imagination. To think about someone when you are making love to someone else is not, necessarily, an act of perversion; but to think about nobody at all might be.
What Scruton does in that book is to identify an everyday experience and relocate it within the elaborate structures of the philosophy of mind. He did similar relocation work in the area of aesthetics and, in particular, in the study of music.
How can it be, he asked, that we hear expression, of love or hate, in a piece of music? And how can it be that when we hear three notes played in normal space, we somehow manage to hear them together? In I drink therefore I am: a philosopher’s guide to wine Scruton announces his view that all philosophical mysteries are, in one way or another, reducible to the mystery of music.
Scruton was a genius, and the genius took the form of deep examination of the normal transactions of human existence. His intellectual framework was sort of Kantian. He was bewildered, as all thinking people should be, by the paradox that the human entity is both person and object. We are objects in the world to other people but perspectives on the world to ourselves.
And there was a unifying feature of Roger’s thought that is missed: that all the deep problems are best attended to by an interrogation of our own mental lives. In sex? What it is to be aroused. In art? What it is for me to appreciate this picture or piece of music. What is going on in me when these phenomena occur?
And in politics? Roger was a “conservative” philosopher who spent, by his own admission, much of his working life attempting to define what “conservatism” is. Maybe, though, it’s another one of those things that you only understand when you bring it within the rubric of the philosophy of mind. Maybe to understand what a conservative is you have to look at what it is that is embedded in the sensibilities of the conservative instinct.
So, here’s my point. It’s a glib and easy thing to write an obituary for this man in which you mention that he was a “conservative” who valued tradition and so on, when in fact in many ways he was an iconoclast and a subversive.
You cannot understand a man like this unless you take the effort to get to know him; and that’s not through his obituaries, but through his books.
