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...
philosophy might problem
The problems of philosophy and the systems designed to solve them are formulated in terms which tend to refer, not to the realm of actuality, but to the realms of possibility and necessity: to what might be and what must be, rather than to what is.
useless
Nothing is more useful than the useless.
beauty clouds fleeting
Affect not to despise beauty: no one is freed from its dominion; But regard it not a pearl of price--it is fleeting as the bow in the clouds.
beauty hours pageant
The pageant of a former hour, Is Beauty in the Grave.
religious art redemption
In the absence of organized religion, the only vehicle for redemption is art - not just the fragmentary arts of painting or music or poetry, but the kind of art that creates a whole world in itself and in that world we see ourselves reflected and see our religious life perfected.
firsts sometimes boring
Sometimes the intention is to shock us. But what is shocking first time around is boring and vacuous when repeated.
truth deeds known
When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.
heart judgement feelings
Faith exalts the human heart, by removing it from the market-place, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion our deeper feelings are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life: the life lived in judgement.
subtle agree position
Kant's position is extremely subtle - so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.
philosophy mad half
In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.
views partnership unborn
Conservatives resonate to Burke's view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead.
bullying institutions protect
Private property is one of the best institutions which has ever evolved, to protect us from the bullying of others.
party views imagination
In literary representation, the distinction between the genuinely erotic and the licentious is a distinction not of subject-matter, but of perspective. The genuinely erotic work is one which invites the reader to re-create in imagination the first-person point of view of someone party to an erotic encounter. The pornographic work retains as a rule the third-person perspective of the voyeuristic observer.
gratitude government apathy
The welfare state that is built upon this conception seems to prove precisely away from the conservative conception of authoritative and personal government, towards a labyrinthine privilege sodden structure of anonymous power, structuring a citizenship that is increasingly reluctant to answer for itself, increasingly parasitic on the dispensations of a bureaucracy towards which it can feel no gratitude.