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e7feb94
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Virtues like thrift and self-sacrifice, the habit of offering and receiving respect, the sense of responsibility - all those aspects of the human condition that shape us as stewards and guardians of our common inheritance - arise through our growth as persons, by creating islands of value in the sea of price. To acquire these virtues we must circumscribe the 'instrumental reasoning' that governs the life of Homo oeconomicus. We must vest ou..
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Roger Scruton |
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5fbd91d
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That, in my view, is the truth in socialism, the truth of our mutual dependence, and of the need to do what we can to spread the benefits of social membership to those whose own efforts do not suffice to obtain them.
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Roger Scruton |
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8c87218
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The wars of the twentieth century brought home the fundamental truth that people will fight for their country and unite in its defence, but will seldom fight for their class, even when the intellectuals are egging them on. At
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Roger Scruton |
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30ec693
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From this arises the belief that the order of nature is all that there really is. But to draw that conclusion would be a mistake, for two reasons. First, the Lebenswelt is irreducible. We understand and relate to it using concepts of agency and accountability that have no place in the physical sciences; to use the idiom of Sellars, the Lebenswelt exists in "the space of reasons," not in "the space of law."
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Roger Scruton |
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f9111c8
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As a call to rectify the existing order, socialism should appeal to us all. But as an attempt to revise human nature, and to conscript us in the pursuit of the millennium, it was a dangerous fantasy, an attempt to realize heaven that would lead inevitably to hell. We can see this clearly now, as the Western world emerges from the Cold War and the communist nightmare. But still the 'totalitarian temptation', as Jean-Francois Revel called it,..
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Roger Scruton |
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794f102
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If you describe desire in the terms that have become fashionable- as the pursuit of pleasurable sensations in the private parts- then the outrage and pollution of rape become impossible to explain. Rape, on this view, is every bit as bad as being spat upon: but no worse. In fact, just about everything in human sexual behaviour becomes impossible to explain- and it is only what I have called the 'charm of disenchantment' that leads people to..
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Roger Scruton |
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769c86a
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A society governed by consent does not necessarily issue from a social contract, whether actual or implied. It is a society in which dealings between citizens, and between citizens and those in authority, are consensual, in the manner of daily courtesies, games of football, theatrical events or family meals. As Adam Smith made clear, order may emerge from consensual dealings. But it emerges 'by an invisible hand', and not, as a rule, becaus..
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Roger Scruton |
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161f471
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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 think that there is a merely accidental connection between those virtues and our Judaeo-Christian heritage is to live in cloud cuckoo land. 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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a0714ff
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While he joined eagerly in the contemporary intellectual battles, philosophy was, for Spinoza, not a weapon but a way of life, a sacred order whose servants were transported to a supreme and certain blessedness.
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philosophy
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Roger Scruton |
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99ae88e
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Smith did not regard economic freedom as the sum of politics, nor did he believe that self-interest is the only, or even the most important, motive governing our economic behaviour. A market can deliver a rational allocation of goods and services only where there is trust between its participants, and trust exists only where people take responsibility for their actions and make themselves accountable to those with whom they deal. In other w..
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Roger Scruton |
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b281aab
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Free speech is a sign of a strong first-person plural, which enables people who disagree over fundamental things to live together in a condition of mutual toleration.
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Roger Scruton |
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2b32191
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We must not think of this merely as a theological or metaphysical question. For
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Roger Scruton |
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08d2fe9
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As I try to show, conservative thinking has never been devoted to freedom alone. Nor has the agenda been about economic freedom, important though that was during the debates and upheavals of the twentieth century. It has been about our whole way of being, as heirs to a great civilisation and a many-layered bequest of laws, institutions and high culture. For conservatives our law-governed society came into being because we have known who we ..
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Roger Scruton |
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cb57395
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The American liberal is certainly not averse to the power of the state, provided it is exerted by liberals, and exerted against conservatives.
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conservatism
liberal
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Roger Scruton |
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003435f
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He describes a particular faculty, reason, in its illegitimate employment; he also demolishes all the claims to knowledge that this faculty tempts us to make.
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Roger Scruton |
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73a086b
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The diagnosis of these errors follows a common pattern. Each attempt by pure reason to establish the metaphysical doctrines towards which it is impelled transgresses the limits of experience, applying concepts in a manner that is 'unconditioned' by the faculty of intuition.
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Roger Scruton |
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dab9abc
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In American popular usage today, 'liberalism' means left-liberalism - not to be confused with 'neoliberalism' ... and is expressly contrasted with 'conservatism'. In this usage a liberal is one who leans consciously towards the underprivileged, supports the interests of minorities and socially excluded groups, believes in the use of state power to achieve social justice, and in all probability shares the egalitarian and secular values of th..
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social-justice
left-liberalism
liberal
liberalism
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Roger Scruton |
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d4f98e8
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nacionalismo, como uma ideologia, e perigoso apenas a medida que as ideologias sao perigosas. Ocupa o espaco deixado vago pela religiao e, ao faze-lo, estimula o verdadeiro crente a venerar a ideia nacionalista e a buscar nesta concepcao aquilo que ela nao pode oferecer -- o proposito ultimo da vida, o caminho da redencao e o consolo para todas as aflicoes.
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conservadorismo
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Roger Scruton |
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5720134
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The main point, it seems to me, is to maintain a life of active risk and affection, while helping the body along the path of decay, remembering always that the value of life does not consist in its length but in its depth.
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Roger Scruton |
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1e65558
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If I am right, then enjoying music involves a kind of outward-going sympathetic movement. In music, as in sex and architecture, the relation between subjects can be uprooted and replaced by an arrangement of objects. And in a hundred ways the result of this is a culture of idolatry, in which freedom and personality are obliterated by intrusive images, clamoring for an addictive response. As I argued in the previous chapter, there is every r..
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Roger Scruton |
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5071a08
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While exorting us to judge other cultures in their own terms, he [Said] asks us to judge Western culture from a point of view outside---to set it against alternatives, and to judge it adversely, as ethnocentric and even racist.
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edwardsaid
westernculture
liberal
liberalism
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Roger Scruton |
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48efd01
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The term persona comes to us from the Roman and Etruscan theater, where it denoted the mask worn by the actor and therefore the character whom the actor portrayed. The term was borrowed by Roman law to describe any entity that has judiciable rights and duties, including corporate entities and other more abstract constructions. It was borrowed again by early Christian theologians in order to explain the doctrine of the Trinity, by distinguis..
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Roger Scruton |
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03ba270
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Durkheim pointed out that you don't merely believe a religion but (more importantly) you belong to it, and that disputes over religious doctrine are, as a rule, not simply arguments about abstruse questions of metaphysics but attempts to give a viable test of membership, and hence a way of identifying and excluding the heretics who threaten the community from within. Religion
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Roger Scruton |
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39df031
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At the same time, there flourished around them an equally remarkable, and for us more interesting, defiance of the Calvinist spirit: the art and culture of the Netherlands, in which man's relation to the world of objects, and to his own physical life, became the subject of a profound spiritual interrogation.
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netherlands
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Roger Scruton |
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b81472c
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Burke saw society as an association of the dead, the living and the unborn. It's binding principle is not contract, but something more akin to love. Society 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 giving and recieving, and to recognize that the good things we inherit our not ours to spoil.
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Roger Scruton |
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417ef73
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The laws of physics, which govern the behaviour of atoms and the movements of the stars, govern also the conduct of rational beings. And yet: Being is still enchanted for us; in a hundred Places it remains a source - a play of pure Powers, which touches no one, who does not kneel and wonder. Words still go softly forth towards the unsayable. And music, always new, from palpitating stones Builds in useless space its godly home. [Rilke, ..
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sacred
realism
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Roger Scruton |
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e4c520f
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We must inevitably conclude, therefore, that the main influences over Spinoza's thought during his formative years were not those philosophers, such as Descartes, to whom he later devoted his attention, but the Jewish and Muslim writers of earlier centuries, whose thoughts provided the main arguments of contemporary Judaism.
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spinoza
muslim
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Roger Scruton |
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7ae48cd
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From this state of bewildered scepticism the student may take a leap of faith. And the leap is never backwards into the old curriculum, the old canon, the old belief in objective standards and settled ways of life. It is always a leap forward, into the world of free choice and free opinion, in which nothing has authority and nothing is objectively right or wrong. In this postmodern world there is no such things as adverse judgement - unless..
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humanities
political-correctness
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Roger Scruton |
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977a3c6
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Beneath every society where self-interest pays off, lies a foundation of self-sacrifice.
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Roger Scruton |
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e172171
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Religious quarrels,' he added, 'do not arise so much from ardent zeal for religion, as from men's various dispositions and love of contradiction, which causes them habitually to distort and condemn everything, however rightly it may have been said.
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spinoza
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Roger Scruton |
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73a87a9
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And I saw that this desire to control society in the name of equality expresses exactly the contempt for human freedom that I encountered in Eastern Europe. There is indeed such a thing as society; but it is composed of individuals. And individuals must be free, which means being free from the insolent claims of those who wish to redesign them.
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Roger Scruton |
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8d1ff03
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Throughout the proofs of the , therefore, the reader can never be certain whether the extraordinary ideas which are brought so compellingly before him are fiction or reality.
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spinoza
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Roger Scruton |
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0a5e0fe
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The letters between the two philosophers were cordial, although Spinoza at first distrusted Leibniz, who in turn referred to him privately as 'a Jew expelled from the synagogue for his monstrous opinions'. Since the fundamental assumptions behind their two systems are profoundly similar, it is perhaps not surprising that the two philosophers - whose conclusions are wholly opposed - should have treated each other with a certain caution.
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spinoza
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Roger Scruton |
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c9bfc6c
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In the event things got worse, and Spinoza gave up the idea of publishing the Ethics, believing that it would create such a cloud of hostility as to obscure, in the minds even of reasonable people, the real meaning of its arguments. Meanwhile, the book was read attentively, and at least one club existed for the express purpose of working through its proofs.
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spinoza
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Roger Scruton |
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b70a1d3
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The seclusion of Spinoza's life was necessitated by intense labour and intellectual discipline, and his frugality expressed independence of spirit rather than meanness or self-concern. The strength of Spinoza's social feelings, and his Aristotelian emphasis on friendship as a necessary human good, are abundantly shown in the Ethics.
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Roger Scruton |
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c3180d9
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While Spinoza did not condemn marriage, he rejected it for himself, perhaps fearing the 'ill temper of a woman', and in any case recognizing in matrimony a threat to his scholarly interests.
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spinoza
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Roger Scruton |
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dbeaca5
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By seeing society in class terms we are programmed to find antagonism at the heart of all the institutions through which people have attempted to limit it. Nation, law, faith, tradition, sovereignty - these ideas by contrast denote things that unite us. It is in terms of them that we attempt to articulate the fundamental togetherness that mitigates social rivalries, whether of class, status or economic role. Hence it has always been a vital..
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hobsbawm
invented-tradition
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Roger Scruton |
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fb5b384
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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.
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Roger Scruton |
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e635d06
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The philosopher and the scientist emphasize different features of the world, follow different interests and inspire different passions in the soul. But the aim of their study is in each case the same: the supreme good which consists in the adequate knowledge of God
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scientist
spinoza
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Roger Scruton |
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8892551
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To the mass of mankind, therefore, the philosopher may appear as a spiritual saboteur, a subverter of things lawfully established, and an apologist for the devil. So Spinoza appeared to his contemporaries, and for many years after his death he was regarded as the greatest heretic of the 17th century.
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spinoza
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Roger Scruton |
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96e9484
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Many social and political changes have swept the world clean of the apprehension of sacred things: the rejection of custom and ceremony; the conversion of marriage into a defeasible contract; the relaxing of the laws governing, sexual conduct and obscenity; the decline of faith and saintliness. As those changes take their effect, the experience of erotic love becomes darigerous and uncertain in its outcome. Our responsibility retreats furth..
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love
sacred
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Roger Scruton |
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a30dd25
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Hence we inevitably see ourselves from outside, as others see us, and seek for their approval and sympathy, which is the greatest of social goods.
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Roger Scruton |
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9f53b24
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No linguistic behaviour can logically determine its own sequel, since no past time can logically determine the future. A man may 'follow a rule' as we do, and yet, at some future time, diverge from us, insisting all the while that what he is doing is the same as what he has always done. We cannot establish, once and for all, and with no possibility of doubt, that another really does understand a word as we do -- whether that word be 'he' or..
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Roger Scruton |
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892849f
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As soon as another person becomes important to us, so that we feel in our lives the gravitational pull of his existence, we are to a certain extent astonished by his individuality. From time to time we pause in his presence, and allow the incomprehensible fact of his being in the world to dawn on us. And if we love him and trust him, and feel the comfort of his companionship, then our sentiment, in these moments, is like the sentiment of be..
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individuality
love
gravity
uniqueness
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Roger Scruton |