In the October issue of the Director’s Desk, I told you
about my arrival in England and my introduction to Sir Roger Scruton through
his small book of essays, Confessions of
a Heretic. It’s a beautiful book that provides a great introduction to
Scruton. I highly recommend it.
For this November issue, I want to turn to the ten days I
spent participating in the Scrutopia Summer School. Described as a “ten-day
immersion experience in the philosophy and outlook of Sir Roger Scruton,” the
aim of the program is to “assemble a group of around 25 committed people, with
a shared interest in culture and all that is involved in passing it on.” I was
one of 18 of those committed people who came from all over the world
(Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, Sweden,
and five of us from the U.S.A.).
Most afternoons we visited historic sites such as Stone
Henge, Old Sarum (iron age hillfort), Salisbury Cathedral where we saw the
Magna Carta, Abbey House Gardens in Malmesbury, and the Chedworth Roman Villa. On
two different occasions we visited (and toured) Sunday Hill Farm where Sir
Roger and his wife Sophie live and work. We met their horses, sat in their
library for a classical concert, visited one of the farm’s mossy ponds (it’s
famed for Iris Murdoch diving in for a swim!), and feasted on local produce
from Fernhill Farm and Brinkworth Dairy. And in good Eighth Day style, each
evening concluded with wine and conversation; one of those evenings included a
gala dinner with a talk by James Gray MP. (Scruton has written a book on wine – I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s
Guide to Wine
– in which he uses the ancient symposium for the following
argument: “A good wine should always be accompanied by a good topic, and the
topic should be pursued around the table with the wine. As the Greeks
recognized, this is the best way to consider truly serious questions.”)
The heart of Scrutopia, however, was the immersion in
Scruton’s philosophy. In addition to a tutorial, there were lectures each morning
(and a few afternoons), which covered the following topics:
·The Nature of Philosophy
·Scruton’s Lebenswelt
·Freedom and Oppression
·Culture, Friendship and Paideia
·The Meaning of Conservatism
·Building Better, Building Beautiful: Reversing
the Uglification of England
·Home and Belonging: The Literary Writings of
Roger Scruton
·Why Music Matters
·The Fading of Tradition: The Philosophy of
Modern Architecture
Instead of trying to provide a summary of all those
lectures, I’d like to instead introduce Sir Roger Scruton as a philosopher.
I have noticed several recurring characteristics in those
persons who have become my personal heroes. Besides the obvious one—holiness,
which is the subject of our next Symposium (Jan 22-25)—another one is a
commitment to learning. But not learning as an abstract exercise, disconnected
from concrete life in the real world. Instead, the type of learning that is
hungry for knowledge for the sake of improving oneself and the surrounding
world. It’s the type of learning that results in action. Sir Roger Scruton is
precisely that sort of a philosopher.
A good place to find his fresh perspective on philosophy is
in his book Philosophy: Principles and
Problems
(2nd ed., 2006 by Continuum). In the preface, Scruton
says he hopes his readers will finish his book “with a sense of philosophy’s
relevance, not just to intellectual questions, but to life in the modern
world.” In the most recent Bloomsbury edition (3rd ed., 2016), he
explains his philosophical interests:
From the academic point of view
some of my philosophical interests would be judged to be marginal: music, sex,
architecture, religion, history, culture. At the time, however, I felt strongly
that these topics were every bit as central as the standard fare offered in
university philosophy courses, and I therefore included chapters that touch on
some of them.
He goes on to define philosophy with its emphasis on wisdom
and to note the contemporary failure to apply philosophy to culture:
“Philosophy” means the love of
wisdom. The philosophy taught in British and American universities pays great
attention to the analysis of concepts and the structure of logical argument,
but seldom issues in anything that looks like wisdom. There are many reasons
for this. During the hundred or so years of its existence analytical philosophy
has focused on logic, metaphysics and epistemology, with occasional forays into
ethics and politics, and has tended to neglect the broader cultural landscape.
Topics relevant to the meaning of life—religion, art, music—are often
treated dismissively, and the fact that philosophy is literature, to be judged
and appreciated as much for its beauty as its truth, has been largely ignored.
This posture is something that I
have always wanted to rectify, conscious of the examples set before us by Plato
and Hegel—two great minds for whom every area of life offered fertile ground
for philosophical reflection. If analytical philosophy cannot achieve what
those thinkers achieved, which was to become a vigilant presence in the culture
as a whole, then it will have deserved the contempt of which it has so often
been the target, dismissed as mere “logic chopping,” “playing with words,” “dry
technicalities,” and the rest. I have therefore tried in what follows to
introduce philosophy as a way into the wider concerns of civilization, a guide
to thinking clearly about what matters, and a “coming to consciousness” of all
the practices that we hold most meaningful, from science to religion and from
sex to music.
Scruton’s interest in philosophy then, is motivated by a
love for wisdom that applies to all areas of life, including friendship and
wine. And for Scruton, philosophy needs to once again become a “vigilant
presence in culture”; it should help us think “clearly about what matters” so
that we can more effectively address “the wider concerns of civilization.”
But Scruton doesn’t just say that he believes philosophy
should help us answer the question, “How should I live?” He doesn’t merely
argue that it should help us make sense of the modern condition. Philosophy is
no abstract intellectual exercise for Scruton. Instead, it’s something to put
into action, which is exactly what Scruton does. He practices what he preaches. And he’s been doing it for a long
time.
One way Scruton took action way back in the 1980s was
through his opposition to communism, which led him to Prague, Warsaw, Kraków,
and landed him in jail in 1985 in Czechoslovakia. According to Mark Dooley, in
his excellent book Conversations with
Roger Scruton
,
Roger Scruton gives concrete
substance to his convictions and has often suffered as a result. This was most
apparent in his work on behalf of the dissidents of Eastern Europe during the
communist enslavement—work acknowledged by Václav Havel when in 1998, as
president of the Czech Republic, he awarded Scruton the Medal for Merit (First
Class) for his services to the Czech people, and also by the jury of the Lech
Kaczyński
Award, when they honored Scruton in 2015 for his intellectual courage and
friendship to Poland during the 1980s.
Dooley goes on to suggest that the heart of Scruton’s
opposition to communism can be found in Scruton’s 1989 essay on the French
Revolution, “Man’s Second Disobedience.” According to Scruton, whether we’re
talking about the French Revolution in 1789 or the Russian Revolution in 1917,
revolution “leads to murder, for the simple reason that it rids the world of
the experience upon which the refusal to murder depends.” Upon what experience
does the refusal to murder depend? The experience of the incarnate person,
defined by Scruton as “the animal in whom the light of reason shines, and who
looks at us with eyes which tell of freedom.” Scruton continues:
It is this which forbids us to
treat another’s life and freedom as expendable, or to weigh his survival in the
balance of our own individual profit. Our calculations stop short at the
threshold of the other, precisely, because his flesh is sanctified. The first
effect of the revolutionary mentality is to undo this experience of the sacred.
Once the idols have been brought to earth, individual freedom, and the flesh
which harbors it, become property. They can be placed in the balance of
calculation, and discarded “for the public good.”
According to Dooley, these
early lines give us a glimpse into the themes that will become so dear to
Scruton and will thus be so central to his later thought and writings: “those
of the person
, freedom and the sacred.” The final paragraph of “Man’s
Second Disobedience” illustrates how these three themes—“three transcendental
features of human experience”—apply to revolutions:
In judging the revolutions of
Europe, it is to the religion of Europe that we should turn. The Revolution is,
I believe, a supreme act of Christian disobedience. Rather than worship a
transcendental God, the revolutionary brings him down to earth, and reshapes
him in the form of an ideal community. At once … God’s face in the world is
overcast and imperceivable. The worship of the idol becomes a worship of
nothing—but it is a potent nothingness, which threatens everything real. It
is the very same nothingness which, captured in a handkerchief, caused Othello
to destroy the sacred thing which God had given him—and all for Nothing. As
to what, or who, this nothing consists in, the question answers itself.
Scruton’s opposition to
communism, which he incarnated in his work in Eastern Europe, is only one way
Scruton has demonstrated his commitment to acting on his beliefs (even if they
lead to jail!). And in my books, this makes him a worthy candidate for being
one of my living heroes. If that's not enough to convince you, in a future issue of the Director’s Desk I’ll share at
least two other ways he practices what he preaches: farming and architecture.
In the meantime, here is your
November Podvig, your monthly challenge to renew soul and city:
1. Get to know Scruton by
purchasing and reading Mark Dooley’s book Conversations
with Roger Scruton. And take Scruton up on his offer to introduce you to philosophy
in his book Philosophy: Principles and Problems. His hope is that you will
capture a sense of philosophy’s relevance to the modern world; and he assures
you that the book “presupposes no knowledge other than that which an
intelligent person is likely to possess already.”
2. For both the East and the West,
the Nativity Fast / Advent is just around the corner. Please practice the
ancient tradition of fasting during this period.
3. In addition to fasting from food
and sexual activity, read this short presentation by Jean-Claude Larchet
and
consider adding social media to your fast.
4. Read Fr. Thomas Hopko's short reflection on
the Apostle Philip, whose memory we commemorate on November 14 and whose feast
day leads directly into the Nativity Fast.
5. Read this week's Patristic Word from a homily
by St. Gregory Palamas on the Feast of the Entrance of Theotokos into the
Temple, which is celebrated on November 21
Erin Doom
is the founder and director of Eighth Day Institute. He lives in Wichita, KS with his wife Christiane and their four children, Caleb Michael, Hannah Elizabeth, Elijah Blaise, and Esther Ruth.
