benefits...................

 

     One last point about laughter.  As I described it laughter seems to have a beneficial effect on human communities: those who laugh together also grow together and win through their laughter a mutual tolerance of their all-too-human failings.  But not everything that confers a benefit has a function.  Entirely redundant behavior—jumping for joy, listening to music, bird-watching, prayer—may yet confer enormous benefits.  By calling it redundant I mean that those benefits are the effect of the behavior, not its cause.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

the winding ill-lit stairway of our life...........

There is nothing wrong with referring at this point to the ineffable.  The mistake is to describe it.  Jankélévitch is right about music.  He is right that something can be meaningful, even though its meaning eludes all attempts to put it into words.  Fauré's F sharp Ballade is an example; so is the smile on the face of the Mona Lisa; so is the evening sunlight on the hill behind my house. . . . Anybody who goes through life with open mind and open heart will encounter these moments of revelation, moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words.  These moments are precious to us.  When they occur it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across an open window, through which, we catch sight of another and brighter world—a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter.

-Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic

What.................................?

 Every enquiry into first principles, original causes, and fundamental laws, will at some state come up against an unanswerable question: what makes those first principles true or those fundamental laws valid?  What explains those original causes or initial conditions?  And the answer is that there is no answer—or no answer that can be expressed in terms of the science for which those laws, principles and causes are bedrock.

-Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic

withness.................................

 

     There is no reason why social dancing of the kind I have been praising should not return.  Indeed, the craze for Salsa suggests that it might.  And there is no reason to think that young people will not find some other way of rediscovering the withness that they will not find by clubbing.  Maybe the rise of sport as a social arena is to be explained, at least in part, by this hunger for an elegant display of the human body.  And maybe, when young people search, as they must, for a paradigm of withness, they will find it on the football field, or learn it from watching what goes on there. All is not lost, if that is so.  But it is worth drawing one last lesson from this thought.  Social dancing of the kind I have praised did not merely exercise the virtues of freedom and order.  It obeyed the precept of equality.  Anybody could learn the steps, and everybody could join in, regardless of how agile, young, or attractive they were.  The new replacement activities arise to a considerable extent from the official culture of equality and political correctness, with its fear of elegance and distinction.  They are nevertheless massively discriminatory.  The cult of sport, good though it is for our sense of withness, requires us to turn the spotlight on young, athletic, and attractive people, and to rub into the remainder the humiliating awareness that they are not part of the game.  In losing the love of dancing, therefore, we have lost a major source of our love for ourselves.

-Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic

gratitude and obligation................

 There is a line of obligation that connects us to those who gave us what we have; and our concern for the future is an extension of that line.  We take the future of our community into account not by fictitious cost-benefit calculations, but more concretely, by seeing ourselves as inheriting benefits and passing them on.  Concern for future generations is a non-specific outgrowth of gratitude.

-Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Grand Tradition

a precious inheritance...............

      In all those ways modern conservatism arose as a defence of the individual against potential oppressors, and an endorsement of popular sovereignty.  However, it opposed the view that political order is founded on a contract, as well as the parallel suggestion that the individual enjoys freedom, sovereignty and rights in a state of nature, and can throw off the burden of social and political membership, and start again from a condition of absolute freedom.  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 likely to destroy human rights and entitlements as to enhance them.

-Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

need......................Part 1

      We human beings live naturally in communities, bound together by mutual trust.  We have need for a shared home, a place of safety where our claim to occupancy is undisputed and where we can call on others to assist us in times of threat.  We need peace with our neighbors and the procedures for securing it.  And we need the love and protection afforded by family life.  To revise the human condition in any of those respects is to violate imperatives rooted in biology and in the needs of social reproduction.

-Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

need.......................Part 2

 . . . But to conduct political argument as though these factors are too far from the realm of ideas to deserve a mention is to ignore all the limits that must be borne in mind, if our political philosophy is to be remotely believable.  It is precisely the character of modern utopias to ignore these limits - to imagine societies without law (Marx and Engels), without families (Laing), without borders or defenses (Sartre).  And much conservative ink has been wasted (by me among others) in rebutting such views, which can be believed only by people who are unable to perceive realities, and who therefore will never be persuaded by argument.

-Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Grand Tradition

haunted..................

 

     The spirit of Plato, and that of his pupil and critic Aristotle, have haunted philosophy throughout its history, and it is to them that almost all medieval controversies in the subject and ultimately be traced.  They each bequeathed to the world arguments and conceptions of superlative intellectual and dramatic power, and it is not surprising that, wherever they were read, their influence was felt.  Each of the important Mediterranean religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—attempted either to assimilate their doctrines or to present some alternative that would be equally persuasive and equally compatible with our intuitive sense of the nature of the world and of our place within it.

-Roger Scruton, A Short History of Modern Philosophy

A teaser.........................

..................................as I crack open the third "summer of Scruton" book.

We often forget the "duties" part........

 But in itself morality consists in the "side constraints," to use Nozick's expression, that make agreement rather than coercion into the foundation of our social conduct.  These side constraints are embodied in a system of rights and duties: around each individual is a wall of rights that protect him or her from unjust coercion, and on every individual is imposed a set of duties by which those rights are guaranteed.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

in charge......................

      To develop fully as persons, I have argued we need the virtues that transfer our motives from the animal to the personal center of our being—the virtues that put us in charge of our passions.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

understand things rightly...............

 Human beings find their fulfillment in mutual love and self-giving, but they get to this point via a long path of self-development, in which imitation, obedience, and self-control are necessary moments. This is not a hard thing to understand once we see the development of personality in the terms suggested by Aristotle. But it is a hard thing to practice.  Nevertheless, when we understand things rightly, we will be motivated to put virtue and good habits back where they belong, at the center of personal life.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

principles...................

      The picture that I have been developing of the moral community translates easily into an attendant system of law—the common law whereby disputes and grievances are brought before an impartial judge and resolved according to the ancient principles of natural justice, which advocate the avoidance of bias and the right to a fair hearing.  The habit of settling our disputes in that way therefore seems to be the natural adjunct to the moral order.  Just those principles that underlie common-law practice in the English-speaking tradition emerge from our spontaneous ways of negotiating solutions to our conflicts.  All of the following principles, for example, seem to be accepted by those who lay down their weapons and reason toward solutions instead:

1. Considerations that justify or impugn one person, will, in identical circumstances, justify or impugn another,

2. Rights are to be respected.

3. Obligations are to be fulfilled.

4. Agreements are to be honored.

5. Disputes are to settled by negotiation, not by force.

6. Those who do not respect the rights of others forfeit rights of their own.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

Accountability and the impartial other............

 Those principles have been taken as defining the field of "natural law," for the reason that their validity depends only on the idea of negotiation itself and not on the circumstances of the one who embarks on it.

      Something like this was surely at the back of Adam Smith's mind when, in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he argued for the "impartial spectator" as the true judge of our moral duties.  When asking myself what should I do, I entertain the thought of what another would think of my action when observing it with a disinterested eye.  If, as I suggest, morality is rooted in the practice of accountability between self-conscious agents, this is exactly what we should expect.  The impartial other sets the standard that we all must meet.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

our repertoire............................

I now turn to another feature of the human condition that divides us from our simian relatives: the feature of responsibility.  We hold each other accountable for what we do, and as a result we understand the world in ways that have not parallel in the lives of other species.  Our world, unlike the environment of an animal, contains rights, deserts, and duties; it is a world of self-conscious subjects, in which events are divided into the free and the unfree, those that have reasons and those that are merely caused, those that stem from a rational subject, and those that erupt into the stream of objects with no conscious design.  Thinking of the world in this way, we respond to it with emotions that lie beyond the repertoire of other animals: indignation, resentment, and envy; admiration, commitment, and praise—all of which involve the thought of others as accountable subjects with rights and duties and a self-conscious vision of their future and their past.  Only responsible beings can feel these emotions, and in feeling them, they situate themselves in some way outside the natural order, standing back from it in judgment. 

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

On laughter.....................

      Consider one of those features of people that set them apart from other species: laughter.  No other animal laughs.  What we call the laughter of the hyena is a species sound that happens to resemble human laughter.  To be real laughter it would have to be an expression of amusement—laughter at something, founded in a complex pattern of thought.  True, there is also "laughter at what ceases to amuse," as Eliot puts it.  But we understand this "hollow" laughter as a deviation from the central case, which is the case of amusement.  But what is amusement?  No philosopher, it seems to me, has ever quite put a finger on it.  Hobbes's description of laughter as "sudden glory" has a certain magical quality; but "glory" suggests that all laughter is a form of triumph, which is surely far from the truth.  Schopenhauer, Berson, and Freud have attempted to identify the particular thought that lies at the heart of laughter: none, I think, with more than partial success. Helmuth Plessner has seen laughing and crying as keys to the human condition, features that typify our distinctiveness.  But his phenomenological language is opaque and leads to no clear analysis of either laughter or tears,

     One contention, however, might reasonably be advanced, which is that laughter expresses an ability to accept our all-too-human inadequacies: by laughing we may attract the community of sentiment that inoculates us against despair. . . . From that suggestion, however, another follows.  Only a being who makes judgments can laugh.  Typically we laugh at things that fall short or at witticisms that place our actions side by side with the aspirations that they ridicule.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

provinces.....................

      It is not only in science that this attitude of critical reflection is maintained.  Matthew Arnold famously described culture as "a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thoughts upon our stock notions and habits."  Like so many people wedded to the nineteenth-century view of science, Dawkins overlooks the nineteenth-century reaction—which said, "Wait a minute: science is not the only way to pursue knowledge.  There is moral knowledge too, which is the province of practical reason; there is emotional knowledge, which is the province of art, literature, and music.  And just possibly there is a transcendental knowledge, which is the province of religion.  Why privilege science, just because it sets out to explain the world?  Why not give weight to the disciplines that interpret the world and so help us to be at home in it?"

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

If Roger Scruton was a blog.....................

 ....................methinks he would be a lot like this.

entertaining..................

 It is one of the distinguishing characteristics of human beings, however, that they can distinguish an idea from the reality represented in it, can entertain propositions from which they withhold their assent, and can move judge-like in the realm of ideas, calling each before the bar of rational argument, accepting them and rejecting them regardless of the reproductive cost.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature