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...
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.
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.
morning inspiration exercise
Architecture, like dress, is an exercise in good manners, and good manners involve the habit of skillful insincerity - the habit of saying "good morning" to those whose mornings you would rather blight, and of passing the butter to those you would rather starve.
believe criticism world
It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since, as Swift says, it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.
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.
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.
wine pleasure objects
Wine is not just an object of pleasure, but an object of knowledge; and the pleasure depends on the knowledge.
despair shields causes
Being unpopular is never easy; but being unpopular in a good cause is a shield against despair.
simple order socialist
The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.
art war men
The two most potent post-war orthodoxies--socialist politics and modernist art--have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.
space void building
Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification
art real important
There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.
fighting destiny law
All of us need an identity which unites us with our neighbours, our countrymen, those people who are subject to the same rules and the same laws as us, those people with whom we might one day have to fight side by side to protect our inheritance, those people with whom we will suffer when attacked, those people whose destinies are in some way tied up with our own.
spiritual desert matter
Beauty matters. It is not just a subjective thing but a universal need of human beings. If we ignore this need we find ourselves in a spiritual desert.