Roger Scruton and Mark Dooley: Conversations with Roger Scruton. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 54, Number 5, September/October 2017. Republished with permission.

In Felled Oaks: Conversations with DeGaulle, André Malraux called the founder of the Fifth Republic “the last great man France haunted.” On his gravestone, Roger Scruton wants the inscription, “The Last Englishman, Organist at this Church.” Statesman and Frenchman, philosopher and Englishman, each man warrants a valedictory dialogue with a writer who understands him, a testament to what they attempted to achieve for the civil life of his country. And despite claims that nationality must fade, it may be that ‘globalization’ hasn’t had the last word, after all, that intellect and patriotism may yet endure against the leveling forces of democracy wrongly understood.

Scruton has found an excellent collaborator in Mark Dooley, author of one book on Scruton and editor of another, and himself a former teacher of moral philosophy. Dooley wisely prompts Scruton into a dialogue on his life and works which develops as a sustained argument about the relationship fo morality to esthetics and of both to a decent civic order. With Burke, Scruton rejects any posture of abstractedness from the place where he stands, even as he reflects on considerations that go far beyond any one place. He builds a critique of the misplaced abstraction that social science often finds hard to resist. Recounting the story of his parents’ wartime courtship (he was born in 1944), Scruton says, “They fell in love not only with each other, but with the banks of the Thames”: Two persons, one place, commingling with love, form the image of the kind of philosophy Socrates practiced. Scruton may also be as much the last Socratic as the last Englishman—or, to think more optimistically, the most recent one.

For Socrates, love understood as the erotic quest for wisdom, animates reason, or thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. Scruton’s early studies consisted of a good dose of science, the modern citadel of rationalism, but also literature and music. Crucially, his first memorable English teacher was a student of the great scholar F. R. Leavis, who understood the study of literature to be “a form of judgment and not… a form of enjoyment.” Similarly, among the composers whose works he first heard, it was Mendelssohn, and the contrapuntal development of his Hebrides Overture, “which made it clear that music is a kind of argument from premise to conclusion and not just something to be enjoyed.” From the awakening of his intellectual life, Scruton sought to understand the core of things by means of reason; unlike his contemporaries in the 1960s, he never valorized the passions. Resisting his relentlessly practical parents, he decided “that the only really useful subjects are studies of the useless”—otherwise known as liberal education.

Although he learned Greek and Latin (see ‘uselessness,’ above), his main philosophic preoccupations were the moderns, initially Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche, and Sartre. He did not become so intoxicated by their prose as to sacrifice his own perspective for theirs. Watching a paraplegic bookseller struggling with a pile of books, he “sensed how wrong Nietzsche was about pity, since what I felt was admiration too.” Even as he studied the fashionable analytic philosophers at Cambridge—finding a lasting benefit in their insistence at being no respecters of persons but of men and women who tested any philosopher’s argument they encountered—he never succumbed to fashion. His distinctive philosophic achievement turned out to be to start with the moderns, and indeed many of his older contemporaries, then think his way towards ideas first discovered by the ancients. While continuing to esteem (for example) Hegel, he ‘edits’ the doctrines of the moderns with the same scrupulous intelligence with which he crafts his own prose, taking the sensible parts and discarding the nonsense. Closer to home, in reading Aristotle, he found him to be “doing exactly the same thing as Wittgenstein,” only a lot earlier. T. S. Eliot’s tailor told the American scholar Hugh Kenner, “A remarkable man, Mr. Eliot. Never quite too much.” In these well-judged selections, Scruton exercises a similar wholesomely enthusiastic restraint in thinking about the thinkers he has studied. This comports with the place he began his philosophic scholarship: like literature and music, Cambridge University itself “had once stood for something, had indeed stood in judgment on the national culture.”

Take science, the most prestigious activity of national culture in postwar Britain. Can it judge, or should it instead be judged? “Science begins when we ask the question ‘Why?’ It leads us from the observed event to the laws which govern it, and onward to more general laws. But where does the process end?” It ends when science reaches the necessary limit of its inquiry, namely, “why the series of causes exists,” why the world exists in the first place. In bringing us back as far as the Big Bang, science perforce leaves “something else to be explained, namely, the ‘initial conditions’ which then obtained”: how was it that “this great event was about to erupt into being”? “A positivist would dismiss such a question as meaningless. So too would many scientists. But if the only grounds for doing so is that science cannot answer it, then the response is self-serving.” What goes for the limits of scientific naturalism also goes for the question of what good science, or any other human endeavor, much less the cosmos itself, may serve: Science cannot tell us what science is for, or whether its aims are justifiable.

Philosophy, by contrast, has usually done just that. Postwar British philosophy was dominated by the analytical school, as practice by A. J. Ayer and others. Analytic philosophy “implanted in me a sense of the distinction between real thinking and fake thinking,” his choice of esthetics for his topic of postgraduate research “help[ed] me to synthesize my interest in philosophy with those artistic aspirations that I was still clinging to.” The university’s lecturer on esthetics, Michael Tanner, made esthetics into “a kind of door out of analytic philosophy into the true life of the mind”—a thing that can not only analyze but synthesize and envision.

Hegel, for example, “had an extraordinary synthetic mind,” but characteristically Scruton took from that mind exactly what his own mind sought, and no more. Hegel’s most remarkable philosophic achievement was to develop a new ontology centered in historicism. He argued that ‘History,’ defined by him as the course of events in which the Absolute Spirit is immanent in all things, thoughts, and actions, unfolds itself dialectically, that is, in accordance with a new kind of logic (provided by Hegel himself) in which apparent contradictions are synthesized to produce new modes and orders of human life. The laws of ‘History’ make the course of events predictable; even the laws of nature are historical, a matter of evolution or development. but Hegelian metaphysics left Scruton cold. “That’s the annoying part of him.” What Scruton took from Hegel was rather the moral principle of recognition —effectively the moral importance of honor, in the face of the materialist philosophies of Hobbes and Locke—and the understanding of art as a “moment of consciousness” or self-understanding, which the artist fixes in his creation. “I had set myself the task of doing in the language of analytical philosophy what Hegel had done—which was to put art into the center of philosophy and to say why it is significant.” The logical/ontological notion of ‘History’ as a sort of vast dialectical argument embodied in action gives way to something much less grand, but also less liable to abuse by ‘totalizing’ political thinkers like Marx, Heidegger, and Kojève, apologists for tyranny.

Avowing that “my political convictions are very Hegelian,” Scruton means that they take history as a source of a kind of experiential or experimental truth-seeking, rather than taking ‘History’ as an instantiation of the march of progress toward a predictable culmination, namely, the fully unfolded Absolute Spirit. He remains an Englishman in his politics even as he strives to understand the nature common to England and every other place. In his study of the English common law (he passed the Bar but never practiced) he found not so much a venerable tradition as a way of practical reasoning and “a process of discovery—an “attempt to understand the human world” which “both uncovered and endorsed the impartial justice whereby the English people ordered their lives.” He had prepared an intellectual setting in which he could eschew just about every moral and intellectual fad of the subsequent four decades.

Hence his well-known ‘conservatism,’ which should be taken quite literally as a will to conserve combined with a habit of reasoned judgment about what to conserve and what to relinquish. Like so many British thinkers (most famously, Edmund Burke), he began to find his way politically in response to the antics of the Europeans on the Continent, particularly French and Italian antics. Grounded in experience but rejecting historicism, Scruton witnessed the events of 1968 France and the pervasive influence of Marxism in the Italian universities with revulsion. He especially disliked “those hippies”—the hostel-hopping Americans were the most annoying—whose revolutionary credentials more or less began and ended with resentment of their parents. He immediately saw the contrast between their street theater and the genuine (and genuinely risky) resistance offered by the dissidents under the Communist regimes of central and eastern Europe. Western intellectuals who failed to understand the malign character of those tyrannical oligarchies only served to weaken the societies which sheltered them. “The best thing that Derrida ever did was to get arrested in Prague.” Deconstruct that!

Deconstruction is the analytical impulse of modern philosophy gone wild. It lands its practitioners in an inescapable cycle of claimed victimhood, the demand for recognition, and then some new form of domination. The only way to escape is to recur not to analysis, which offers no purpose, or to Hegelianism tout court, which offers as its end a worldwide statism, but to the intellectual love that animated classical philosophy and to the personal and civic forms of friendship which moderns crave yet fear, habituated as they are to the charms of an administrative state that (in the West) rules them with blandishments, not truncheons.

Scruton’s various philosophic forays consist of attempts to rekindle consideration of love and friendship, to bring them back to the center of philosophy and citizenship as examples of human freedom. His studies of architecture appropriate the Hegelian idea of designing buildings that consist of “the outward realization of the inner life,” an attempt “to set free choice in stone.” It wasn’t the Blitz that ruined London, it was the squalid architecture that replaced the rubble with concrete monstrosities. This wasn’t really architecture at all but engineering—part of a vast attempt at social engineering that expressed a “contempt for man and God,” a depersonalization and de-civilizing of citizens in the name of egalitarianism. Similarly, in his writings on human sexuality, Scruton sees in the ‘Sixties ideology of sexual liberation another failed attempt at leveling—perforce self-contradictory, inasmuch as in any liberation the strongest will rise to the top (in this case the beautiful at the expense of “the unattractive or the helpless”). “Properly construed, sexual desire is an interpersonal relation, which focuses on the self-conscious subject.” To misinterpret sexuality in terms of power, as Foucault did, bespeaks “a serious intellectual defect.”

The social consequences of making science into scientism, of failing to see the ontological and moral limits of scientific knowledge, produces “an emerging human type which doesn’t take risks, which doesn’t go out to the other and which doesn’t form attachments on account of never having been attached as a child.” This “society of reduced humans, who are just bodies,” may still reproduce itself; “a child may be created, as a random by-product of their sexual pleasures,” then “left at the doorstep of the state, so ensuring that it too will grow up as a stranger in a world of the estranged.”

For Scruton, recovery begins with the least bureaucratic practice there is: hunting. Bureaucrats hate hunting, and typically try to regulate it out of existence on the basis of the radically egalitarian argument that men have no right to shoot animals. Hunting resists such false compassion by forming a “collective enterprise in which three species [human beings, horses, and dogs] are giving each other support” quite literally in pursuit of a common object, namely, an animal that either threatens or feeds the human being. Hunting leads the human mind to consider the distinctions among the species that the human mind by nature identifies; hunting sets you straight about equality and inequality, identity and difference.

So does farming, which requires the farmer to acknowledge and understand “the relation between man and nature as one of mutual dependence,” pointing him toward that stewardship of the land that the God of Genesis endows. In Hegelian terms, farming opens a way of understanding oneself as human, as the being which finds itself responsible for the world beyond itself. Nor is this all work and no playfulness, inasmuch as some farms produce grapes, which can be turned into wine. Here Scruton follows not Hegel of beer-gulping Germany but Plato’s Socrates; wine “enable[s] us to step out of the urgencies of daily life into some more relaxed arena”—Socrates would call it a symposium—”where we can encounter people in another mood.” Conversely, “the absence of wine in Saudi Arabia is one reason why it has stayed so solidly locked in its joyless sterility.” Wine even illustrates a philosophic principle, the Kantian distinction of a thing as an object as distinguished from the thing ‘in itself’: “Drink that glass of wine and compare your knowledge of it after you’ve absorbed it with your knowledge of it before.”

Beyond these material indications of love and friendship, whether social, civil-social, or convivially philosophic, Scruton calls his readers to consideration of music and religion. If science can lead us back to origins without being able to explain them, and forward to purposes without being able to tell us what they are, but then denies the significance of such ‘transcendental’ concerns, music turns us toward, not away from them. “Music is like a language, but it isn’t impeded in the some way that language is by the need for conceptualization and answerability to truth conditions. So it naturally becomes a symbol of the thing that wants to be said but cannot be said.” The problem then becomes “whether you can distinguish those things which are mere projections from those things which are, as Wordsworth would put it, intimations of the beyond or of the mysterious reality of the world.” Music sensitizes minds to things undreamt of by science, although not necessarily by philosophy, as philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche illustrate. By “putting meaning into things”—via custom and artistic creation—human beings are not arbitrarily imposing meaning on a meaningless flux; “we build meaning into our experiences, but we can only do so if they already have the valency that makes this possible.” Just as science brings us back to the origins of the universe (the Bible calls it Creation) without finally being able to explain them, artistic creation presupposes some underlying and also ‘transcendental’ reality upon which creation works and toward which it aspires.

If so, this makes religion philosophically respectable. But “that, of course, doesn’t mean the doctrines are true.” The same conversion (the Greek word thus translated means the ‘turning around’ of the soul, its reorientation away from the idols of the cave and toward the light) that religions speak of, Plato’s Socrates also speaks of. Whereas Locke “described philosophy as the ‘handmaiden of the sciences,'” Plato (and Aristotle) think it’s the other way around; the erotic quest for truth, the drive in us to know, makes us want to know more than what science can teach. “I’ve always thought of philosophy in the old Platonic way as the attempt to find a comprehensive picture of what we are, of where we are and of how we care.” Religion arises from that same quest. Both philosophy understood Platonically and religion vindicate science while guarding us against scientism.

Scruton illustrates this by considering the science of brain chemistry. Scientistic as distinguished from scientific thought “takes hold of the embryonic scientific theory about the workings of the nervous system and uses it to re-describe the questions of consciousness and human action”; “all we think, feel and do” get explained (or explained away) in terms of synapses. But analysis of synaptic activity does not show why it is (as Kant observed) “that we are distinguished from every other item in the universe by our ability to say ‘I’.” If my pain nerves jangle, I still say ‘I am in pain.’ In this as in cosmology and morality, science takes us a long way, but not all the way to what we want to know. “But if it’s a question asked from beyond the limit of science, then it immediately takes on a theological character and the question is whether there is such a thing as a theological answer. And that is where philosophy kicks in.”

How so? For most people, religion “fills in the gaps that science leaves open.” Those “living a religious life are, in a sense, completed in a way that they wouldn’t be if they just lived according to the nihilistic worldview that our culture advocates.” The untruth of nihilism manifests itself in the evident point that we exist, that there must be something rather than nothing. Religions tell us why.

Do they speak truly? They cannot all speak truly in their entirety because religions contradict one another. “Religion brings [believers] nearer to the truth about their condition than they would otherwise be,” but “they don’t think this through philosophically.” By contrast, a philosopher finds “concealed truth within” the religions. Scruton points to Averroes as a philosopher who does this, and he might easily go back further to Origen or indeed before Christianity to Plato’s Socrates. There are “two parallel routes to the thing we call ‘religion’: there has to be the religion of the philosopher, and the religion of the ordinary faithful.” Famously, Socrates insists on the need for self-knowledge; Scruton (thinking of Kierkegaard, not Socrates) finds “that the grounds of all religious belief are within the self, and that religion contains the set of stories that encapsulate our self-understanding.” But Kierkegaard, unlike Socrates, retreated into subjectivity. “That is what I would call a philosophical failure, a retreat from truth rather than an encounter with it. You have to accept that truth is objectivity and not subjectivity.” Why?

Here is where analytic philosophy usefully intercedes. “We know from Frege and Tarski that truth is connected with reference, that reference is connected to identity and that identity determines our ontological commitments. Ultimately, therefore, you cannot avoid the scientific realist worldview: it is simply a consequence of logical thinking.” And, it might be added, logical thinking or the principle of non-contradiction is inescapable: The same thing cannot perform or endure opposites at the same time, in the same part, and in relation to the same thing. You can think of something that is black and white; you can even think of something that is grey, a mixture of those opposites, but you cannot even conceive of something ‘blackwhite,’ any more than you conceive of or point to a square circle. You cannot even honestly claim to ‘have faith’ in the existence of a square circle, because you don’t know what you’re talking about. Thinking about Christianity, then, a philosopher would think logically about the Trinity. Without being able to pin down what the Bible means by it, he can at least clear up some confusions about it, and might even discover something profound in it.

Logical thinking, the dialectic seen in and exemplified by the Platonic dialogue, also enables a philosopher to compare and contrast different religions. The polyphony of Christian music (perhaps a result of the ‘social’ or Trinitarian character of the Christian God?) contrasts with Islamic culture. “There is little real music coming out of the Islamic world” because “there is no polyphony in Islam. The culture is saying only one thing, a huge unison which constantly fragments and can restore itself only by violence.” Islamic law builds no institutions, no authoritative pathways to channel human activities away from violence. “Sharia law… is addressed to the individual and it says ‘this is how you must live'”; it does not really show how to live a life in common with other lives. Abraham and Jesus talk to God the Father, but you don’t talk, or at any rate talk back, question, Allah. Recall Scruton’s understanding of the common law as a social or dialogic, and also experiential quest, for understanding justice and you will see why he wants to be remembered as the last Englishman and the organist at his own church.

Mark Dooley’s conversation with Roger Scruton thus accomplishes two highly valuable things. It provides and overview of Scruton’s philosophic quest showing how its elements cohere; better still, it cordially invites us to read his books, arousing the intellectual desire to do such work which animated the souls of the old philosophers.