Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
Sir Roger Vernon Scruton, FBA, FRSLis an English philosopher who specialises in aesthetics. He has written over thirty books, including Art and Imagination, The Meaning of Conservatism, Sexual Desire, The Philosopher on Dover Beach, The Aesthetics of Music, Beauty, How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism, Our Church, and How to Be a Conservative. Scruton has also written several novels and a number of general textbooks on philosophy and culture, and he has composed...
space void building
Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification
language speak
The music takes over the words and makes them speak to me in another language.
artist expectations innovation
There is a crucial distinction to be made between innovation and originality. The second, unlike the first, can never break with what preceded it: to be original, an artist must also belong to the tradition from which he departs. To put it another way, he must violate the expectations of his audience, but he must also, in countless ways, uphold and endorse them.
wine pleasure objects
Wine is not just an object of pleasure, but an object of knowledge; and the pleasure depends on the knowledge.
risk philosopher interpretation
A philosopher who says, 'There are no truths, only interpretations,' risks the retort: 'Is that true, or only an interpretation?'
order voice achievement
The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order, and set an example of orderly living.
loss emotional addiction
Cognitive states of mind are seldom addictive, since they depend upon exploration of the world, and the individual encounter with the individual object, whose appeal is outside the subject's control. Addiction arises when the subject has full control over a pleasure and can ponder it at will. It is primarily a matter of sensory pleasure, and involves a kind of short-circuiting of the pleasure network. Addiction is characterized by a loss of the emotional dynamic that would otherwise govern an outward-directed, cognitively creative life.
liberty fraternity form
[Burke] emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant irrationality.
judgement style demand
Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.
beauty voice people
Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.
music song self
Music exists when rhythmic, melodic or harmonic order is deliberately created, and consciously listened to, and it is only language-using, self-conscious creatures ... who are capable of organizing sounds in this way, either when uttering them or when perceiving them. We can hear music in the song of the nightingale, but it is music that no nightingale has heard.
anarchy abstract intellect
The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.
world addresses borders
Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world
atheist doe propose
Science proposes something and then does everything it can to disprove it. Religion is not like that. It proposes something and does everything it can to keep it from being disproved.