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83a052f
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Accountability in public office is but one manifestation of this cultural inheritance, and we should not be surprised that it is the first thing to disappear when the utopians and the planners take over.
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Roger Scruton |
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bc04136
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It is to overlook the culture that has focused, down the centuries, on the business of repentance.
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Roger Scruton |
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09f7546
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Paul Benacerraf, 'What Numbers Could Not Be,' Philosophical Review (1965).
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Roger Scruton |
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542427e
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Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely. He chose a single word from that language for his device: caute - 'be cautious' - inscribed beneath a rose, the symbol of secrecy. For, having chosen to write in a language that was so widely intelligible, he was compelled to hide what he had written.
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spinoza
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Roger Scruton |
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017d6b5
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The ascent of the soul through love, which Plato describes in the Phaedrus, is symbolized in the figure of Aphrodite Urania, and this was the Venus painted by Botticelli, who was incidentally an ardent Platonist, and member of the Platonist circle around Pico della Mirandola. Botticelli's Venus is not erotic: she is a vision of heavenly beauty, a visitation from other and higher spheres, and a call to transcendence. Indeed, she is self-evid..
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Roger Scruton |
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4df9564
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Political philosophers of the Enlightenment, from Hobbes and Locke, reaching down to John Rawls and his followers today, have found the roots of political order and the motive of political obligation in a social contract - an agreement, overt or implied, to be bound by principles to which all reasonable citizens can assent. Although the social contract exists in many forms, its ruling principle was announced by Hobbes with the assertion tha..
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Roger Scruton |
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5aec8ec
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The recent experience of totalitarianism in Europe was foreshadowed at the French Revolution, when the Committee of Public Safety acted in the same way as the Nazi and Communist parties, setting up 'parallel structures' through which to control the state and to exert a micromanagerial tyranny over every aspect of civil society. Let us at least be realistic, and recognize that, if totalitarian governments have arisen and spread with such rap..
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Roger Scruton |
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4973c30
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The Czech novelist Milan Kundera made a famous observation. 'Kitsch,' he wrote, 'causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!' Kitsch, in other words, is not about the thing observed but about the observer. It does not invite you to feel moved by the doll you are dressi..
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Roger Scruton |
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3897b12
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The imperfect freedom that property and law make possible, and on which the soixante-huitards depended for their comforts and their excitements, was not enough. That real but relative freedom must be destroyed for the sake of its illusory but absolute shadow. The new 'theories' that poured from the pens of Parisian intellectuals in their battle against the 'structures' of bourgeois society were not theories at all, but bundles of paradox, d..
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Roger Scruton |
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f41a934
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We should not be surprised therefore if British conservative thinkers - notably Hume, Smith, Burke and Oakeshott - have tended to see no tension between a defence of the free market and a traditionalist vision of social order. For they have put their faith in the spontaneous limits placed on the market by the moral consensus of the community and have seen both the market and the constraints as the work of the same invisible hand. Maybe that..
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Roger Scruton |
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fc86cca
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Christians are under an obligation to bear witness to their faith, but this does not mean inflicting their faith on other people or forcibly requiring them to adopt it. As the founder of the Christian faith showed, you bear witness not through triumphing over your rivals but through submitting to their judgement.
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Roger Scruton |
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989ed2e
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We are not born free, nor do we come into this world with a self-identity and autonomy of our own. We achieve those things, through the conflict and cooperation that weave us into the social fabric. We become freely choosing individuals only by acquiring obligations to parents, siblings, institutions and groups: obligations that we did not choose.
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Roger Scruton |
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a4f942d
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There are many American conservatives, including those influenced by the Roman Catholic tradition of natural law philosophy, who believe that, in the end, the conservative position rests on theological foundations.
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Roger Scruton |
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f7256b7
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Like the pleasure of friendship, the pleasure in beauty is curious: it aims to understand its object, and to value what it finds.
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friendship
love
disinterest
value
curious
pleasure
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Roger Scruton |
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5ee3a12
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Here we should notice a peculiar fact: that there are movements which are both essentially involuntary and yet confined to persons - to creatures with a self-conscious perspective. Smiles and blushes are the two most prominent examples. Milton puts the point finely in Paradise Lost: for smiles from Reason flow, To brute denied, and are of love the food. These physiognomic movements owe their rich intentionality to this involuntary charac..
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smile
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Roger Scruton |
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a4b082f
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Spinoza follows Maimonides in rejecting the ordinary meanings which attach to words, and in asking his readers to attend, not to language, but to the 'ideas' which he is attempting to convey by means of it. Common usage is governed by the imagination, which associates words, not with clear and distinct ideas, but with the confused conceptions of experience. In the language of imagination nothing can be truly described, and nothing is more m..
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spinoza
word
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Roger Scruton |
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7634c77
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Nonsemes and mathemes stand next to each other in detached and mutually irrelevant jumbles. They lack the crucial valency that ties sentence to sentence in a truth-directed argument or formula to formula in a valid proof, and they can accumulate forever without getting to the point of saying or revealing what they mean.
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Roger Scruton |
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a149667
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We value modesty partly because we value desire, and look with suspicion on those habits which untie the knot of individual attachment. Havelock Ellis put the point tendentiously, but (as I shall argue) correctly, when he wrote: 'In the art of love...[modesty] is more than a grace; it must always be fundamental. Modesty is not indeed the last word of love, but it is the necessary foundation for all love's exquisite audacities, the foundati..
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Roger Scruton |
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3af00b8
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The greatest modern philosopher was moved by nothing more than by duty. His life, in consequence, was unremarkable.
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Roger Scruton |
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82f0088
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The very same 'mystery' that veils the human person from the neurophysiologist veils human history from the Marxian determinist and human morality from the sociobiologist.
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Roger Scruton |
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34592e3
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The picture of a universe of infinitely many wholly unrelated substances is at least as hard to understand as the monism of Spinoza, and far less easy to reconcile with appearances.
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monism
spinoza
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Roger Scruton |
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1d5f35d
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Robert Conquest once announced three laws of politics, the first of which says that everyone is right-wing in the matters he knows about.
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Roger Scruton |
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e03fcef
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accountable government does not come through elections. It comes through respect for law, through public spirit and through a culture of confession. To
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Roger Scruton |
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b242a5b
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Drudgery means doing an ungrateful task for an ungrateful person - and anyone employed at the bottom of the labour market knows what that means. The
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Roger Scruton |
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9ae87ee
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Liberals saw political order as issuing from individual liberty; conservatives saw individual liberty as issuing from political order. What makes a political order legitimate, in the conservative view, is not the free choices that create it, but the free choices that it creates.
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Roger Scruton |
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300c726
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It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only - or even at all - in the present. They have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them and to live in another way.
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Roger Scruton |
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5baaee6
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The worst mistake in politics is the mistake made by Lenin - the mistake of destroying the institutions and procedures whereby mistakes can be recognized. Something
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Roger Scruton |
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6ead2a8
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Human beings, in their settled condition, are animated by oikophilia: the love of the oikos, which means not only the home but the people contained in it, and the surrounding settlements that endow that home with lasting contours and an enduring smile.4 The oikos is the place that is not just mine and yours but ours. It is the stage-set for the first-person plural of politics, the locus, both real and imagined, where 'it all takes place'. V..
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Roger Scruton |
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4140be6
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The Arts Council exists to subsidise those artists, writers and musicians whose work is important. But how do bureaucrats decide that something is important? The culture tells them that a work is important if it is original, and the proof that a work is original is that the public doesn't like it. Besides, if the public did like it, why would it need a subsidy? Official patronage therefore inevitably favours works that are arcane, excruciat..
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Roger Scruton |
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35f9b13
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Now it seems to me that there are bad ways of loving a horse: ways that are bad for the horse, and also bad for the one who loves him. A love that regards the horse as a play-thing, whose purpose is to satisfy the whims of a rider, to be an object of cuddling and caressing of a kind that the horse himself can neither reciprocate nor understand - such a love is a way of disregarding the horse. It is also in its own way corrupt. A person who ..
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Roger Scruton |
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4b3be9f
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For the conservative, human beings come into this world burdened by obligations, and subject to institutions and traditions that contain within them a precious inheritance of wisdom, without which the exercise of freedom is as likely to destroy human rights and entitlements as to enhance them.
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Roger Scruton |
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570a397
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Sexual desire, as it has been understood in every epoch prior to the present, is inherently compromising, and the choice to express it or to yield to it has been viewed as an existential choice, in which more is at risk than present satisfaction. Not surprisingly, therefore, the sexual act has been surrounded by prohibitions; it brings with it a weight of shame, guilt, and jealousy, as well as joy and happiness. Sex is therefore deeply impl..
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Roger Scruton |
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de9e9fb
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When the Communist Party took over Eastern Europe, its first work was to destroy the civil associations that it did not control.
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Roger Scruton |
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943a1ca
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There is a tendency among environmentalists to single out the big players in the market as the principal culprits: to pin environmental crime on those - like oil companies, motor manufacturers, logging corporations, agribusinesses, supermarkets - that make their profits by exporting their costs to others (including others who are not yet born). But this is to mistake the effect for the cause. In a free economy such ways of making money emer..
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Roger Scruton |
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1e00f5e
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Burke rejected the liberal idea of the social contract, as a deal agreed among living people. Society, he argued, does not contain the living only; it is an association between the dead, the living and the unborn. Its binding principle is not contract but something more akin to trusteeship. It is a shared inheritance for the sake of which we learn to circumscribe our demands, to see our own place in things as part of a continuous chain of g..
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Roger Scruton |
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cd20538
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Little Platoons' are the places where traditions form. Social traditions, Burke pointed out, are forms of knowledge. They contain the residues of many trials and errors, and the inherited solutions to problems that we all encounter. Like those cognitive abilities that pre-date civilisation they are adaptations, but adaptations of the community rather than of the individual organism. Social traditions exist because they enable a society to r..
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Roger Scruton |
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cb8a061
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Moreover, in discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. These answers are tacit, shared, embodied in social practices and inarticulate expectations. Those who adopt them are not necessarily able to explain them, still less to justify them. Hence Burke described them as 'prejudices,' and defended them on the grounds that, though the s..
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Roger Scruton |
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f3b7303
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Looks are voluntary. But the full revelation of the subject in the face is not, as a rule, voluntary. Smiles are usually involuntary, and "gift smiles," as one might call them, always so. Likewise laughter, to be genuine, must be involuntary--even though laughter is something of which only creatures with intentions, reason, and self-consciousness are capable. The important point is that, while smiling and laughing are movements of the mouth..
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Roger Scruton |
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c2954a6
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The assault on the human world in the name of science is more pseudo-science than science, and rejoices in its bald, unmoralised image of 'what we really are'. What we really are from the scientific point of view is precisely what we really aren't.
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Roger Scruton |
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3427e0c
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Then there are the fully intentional pleasures, which, although in some way tied up with sensory or perceptual experience, are modes of exploration of the world. Aesthetic pleasures are like this. Aesthetic pleasures are contemplative - they involve studying an object OUTSIDE of the self, to which one is GIVING something (namely, attention and all that flows from it), and not TAKING, as in the pleasure that comes from drugs and drinks. Henc..
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beauty
contemplation
study
pleasure
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Roger Scruton |
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770243a
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We can envisage society as founded in a contract only if we see its members as capable of the free and responsible choice that a contract requires. But only in certain circumstances will human beings develop into rational choosers, capable of undertaking obligations and honouring promises, and oriented towards one another in a posture of responsibility. In the course of acquiring this posture towards others, people acquire obligations of qu..
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Roger Scruton |
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3585305
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In that room was a battered remnant of Prague's intelligentsia - old professors in their shabby waistcoats; long-haired poets; fresh-faced students who had been denied admission to university for their parents' political 'crimes'; priests and religious in plain clothes; novelists and theologians; a would-be rabbi; and even a psychoanalyst. And in all of them I saw the same marks of suffering, tempered by hope; and the same eager desire for ..
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Roger Scruton |
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39112a5
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Those who imagined, in 1989, that never again would an intellectual be caught defending the Leninist Party, or advocating the methods of Josef Stalin, had reckoned without the overwhelming power of nonsense. In the urgent need to believe, to find a central mystery that is the true meaning of things and to which one's life can be dedicated, nonsense is much to be preferred to sense. For it builds a way of life around something that cannot be..
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marxism
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Roger Scruton |
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649f5f7
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Opportunities are enhanced not by closing things down, but by opening things up. It is by allowing autonomous institutions to grow, by protecting the space in which they flourish, and
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Roger Scruton |