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Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton Books

Philosopher

Beauty

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Modern Culture

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On Human Nature

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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. Hence such pleasures are not addictive - there is no pathway to reward that can be short-circuited here, and a serotonin injection is not a cheap way of obtaining the experience of PARISFAL or THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.”

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Book:On Human Nature
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“The erotic kiss is not a matter of lips only: still more are the eyes and the hands involved. And surely Sartre is right to think that, in the caress of desire I am, as he puts it, seeking to ‘incarnate the other’ – in other words, I am seeking to bring into the flesh that I touch with my hands or lips, the thing that Sartre calls freedom, and which I am calling the first person perspective. Sartre goes on to argue that sexual desire is inherently paradoxical, since it can succeed in its aim only by ‘possessing another in his freedom’ – in other words possessing another’s freedom while also removing it. I don’t agree with that. But I do think that the kiss of desire brings into prominence the very same ambiguity in the face that is present in eating. The lips offered by one lover to another are replete with subjectivity: they are the avatars of I, summoning the consciousness of another in a mutual gift. This is how the erotic kiss is portrayed by Canova, for example, in his sculpture of Eros and Psyche, and also by Rodin in ‘The Kiss’, a work that was originally called ‘Paolo and Francesca’. The lips are offered as spirit, but they respond as flesh. Pressed by the lips of the other they become sensory organs, bringing with them all the fatal entrapment of sexual pleasure, and ready to surrender to a force that breaks into the I from outside. Hence the kiss is the most important moment of desire – the moment in which soul and body are united, and in which lovers are fully face to face and also totally exposed to one another, in the manner that Francesca describes. The pleasure of the kiss is not a sensory pleasure: it is not a matter of sensations, but of the I–You intentionality and what it means. Hence there can be mistaken kisses, and mistaken pleasure in kissing, as was experienced by Lucretia, in Benjamin Britten and Ronald Duncan’s version of the story, kissing the man she thought to be her husband, and whom she discovered to be the rapist Tarquin, though too late to defend herself.”

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Book:Face of God: The Gifford Lectures
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“There is an important insight contained in the book of Genesis, concerning the loss of eros when the body takes over. Adam and Eve have partaken of the forbidden fruit, and obtained the ‘knowledge of good and evil’ – in other words the ability to invent for themselves the code that governs their behaviour. God walks in the garden and they hide, conscious for the first time of their bodies as objects of shame. This ‘shame of the body’ is an extraordinary feeling, and one that no animal could conceivably have. It is a recognition of the body as in some way alien – the thing that has wandered into the world of objects as though of its own accord, to become the victim of uninvited glances. Adam and Eve have become conscious that they are not only face to face, but joined in another way, as bodies, and the objectifying gaze of lust now poisons their once innocent desire. Milton’s description of this transition, from the pure eros that preceded the fall, to the polluted lust that followed it, is one of the great psychological triumphs in English literature. But how brilliantly and succinctly does the author of Genesis cover the same transition! By means of the fig leaf Adam and Eve are able to rescue each other from the worst: to ensure, however tentatively, that they can still be face to face, even if the erotic has now been privatized and attached to the private parts. In his well-known fresco of the expulsion from Paradise, Masaccio shows the distinction between the two shames – that of the body, which causes Eve to hide her sexual parts, and that of the soul, which causes Adam to hide his face. Like the girl in Goya’s picture, Adam hides the self; Eve shows the self in all its confused grief, but still protects the body – for that, she now knows, can be tainted by others’ eyes. I have dwelt on the phenomenon of the erotic because it illustrates the importance of the face, and what is conveyed by the face, in our personal encounters, even in those encounters motivated by what many think to be a desire that we share with other animals, and which arises directly from the reproductive strategies of our genes. In my view sexual desire, as we humans experience it, is an inter-personal response – one that presupposes self-consciousness in both subject and object, and which singles out its target as a free and responsible individual, able to give and withhold at will. It has its perverted forms, but it is precisely the inter-personal norm that enables us to describe them as perverted. Sexual relations between members of other species have, materially speaking, much in common with those between people. But from the intentional point of view they are entirely different. Even those creatures who mate for life, like wolves and geese, are not animated by promises, by devotion that shines in the face, or by the desire to unite with the other, who is another like me. Human sexual endeavour is morally weighted, as no animal endeavour can be. And its focus on the individual is mediated by the thought of that individual as a subject, who freely chooses, and in whose first person pespective I appear as he or she appears in mine. To put it simply, and in the language of the Torah, human sexuality belongs in the realm of the covenant.”

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Book:Face of God: The Gifford Lectures
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“In conclusion, it is appropriate to say something about the destiny of the face, in the world that we have entered – a world in which eros is being rapidly detached from inter-personal commitments and redesigned as a commodity. The first victim of this process is the face, which has to be subdued to the rule of the body, to be shown as overcome, wiped out or spat upon. The underlying tendency of erotic images in our time is to present the body as the focus and meaning of desire, the place where it all occurs, in the momentary spasm of sensual pleasure of which the soul is at best a spectator, and no part of the game. In pornography the face has no role to play, other than to be subjected to the empire of the body. Kisses are of no significance, and eyes look nowhere since they are searching for nothing beyond the present pleasure. All this amounts to a marginalization, indeed a kind of desecration, of the human face. And this desecration of the face is also a cancelling out of the subject. Sex, in the pornographic culture, is not a relation between subjects but a relation between objects. And anything that might enter to impede that conception of the sexual act – the face in particular – must be veiled, marred or spat upon, as an unwelcome intrusion of judgement into a sphere where everything goes. All this is anticipated in the pornographic novel, Histoire d’O, in which enslaved and imprisoned women are instructed to ignore the identity of the men who enjoy them, to submit their faces to the penis, and to be defaced by it. A parallel development can be witnessed in the world of sex idols. Fashion models and pop stars tend to display faces that are withdrawn, scowling and closed. Little or nothing is given through their faces, which offer no invitation to love or companionship. The function of the fashion-model’s face is to put the body on display; the face is simply one of the body’s attractions, with no special role to play as a focus of another’s interest. It is characterized by an almost metaphysical vacancy, as though there is no soul inside, but only, as Henry James once wrote, a dead kitten and a ball of string. How we have arrived at this point is a deep question that I must here pass over. But one thing is certain, which is that things were not always so. Sex symbols and sex idols have always existed. But seldom before have they been faceless. One of the most famous of those symbols, Simonetta Vespucci, mistress of Lorenzo da Medici, so captured the heart of Botticelli that he used her as the model for his great painting of the Birth of Venus. In the central figure the body has no meaning other than the diffusion and outgrowth of the soul that dreams in the face – anatomically it is wholly deformed, and a girl who actually looked like this would have no chance in a modern fashion parade. Botticelli is presenting us with the true, Platonic eros, as he saw it – the face that shines with a light that is not of this world, and which invites us to transcend our appetites and to aspire to that higher realm where we are united to the forms – Plato’s version of a world in which the only individuals are souls. Hence the body of Botticelli’s Venus is subservient to the face, a kind of caricature of the female anatomy which nevertheless takes its meaning from the holy invitation that we read in the eyes above.”

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Book:Face of God: The Gifford Lectures
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“The plain fact is that, because we live in a world structured by gender, the other sex is forever to some extent a mystery to us, with a dimension of experience that we can imagine but never inwardly know. In desiring to unite with it, we are desiring to mingle with something that is deeply- perhaps essentially- not ourselves, and which brings us to experience a character and inwardness that challenge us with their strangeness.”

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Book:Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation
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“Mahomed has often been mocked for peopling his paradise with desirable women, and inviting us to long for their caresses. But surely he was responding to a natural and healthy instinct, which finds in the contemplation of a beautiful body, not only the stimulus to desire, but also the satisfaction of a deeper yearning. We yearn, in fact, to justify the human body, to give grounds for our feeling that this is God's image. And in this yearning is expressed our real knowledge that we are our bodies and that they are we.”

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Book:Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation
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“Even if the fantasy can be overcome so far as to engage in the act of love with another, a peculiar danger remains. The other becomes veiled in substitutes; he is never fully himself in the act of love; it is never clearly him that I desire, or him that I possess, but always rather a composite object, a universal body, of which he is but one among a potential infinity of instances. Fantasy fills our thoughts with a sense of the obscene, and the orgasm becomes, not the possession of another, but the expenditure of energy on his depersonalised body. Fantasies are private property, which I can dispose according to my will, with no answerability to the other whom I abuse through them. He, indeed, is of no intrinsic interest to me, and serves merely as my opportunity for self-regarding pleasure. For the fantasist, the ideal partner is indeed the prostitute, who, because she can be purchased, solves at once the moral problem presented by the presence of another at the scene of sexual release.”

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Book:Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation
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“Where does all that leave the cinema? First, we must acknowledge that a film is a photograph of a drama, and that skilful use of the camera can never excuse the paltriness, sentimentality or weakness of the action. What I have said about modernism and its search for an art that will perpetuate the ethical vision, applies as much to the cinema as it does to the other arts. There are directors who have presented dramas that can be compared with the great modern works for the stage – Bergman, for instance, in Wild Strawberries, where an original situation, conveyed through masterly dialogue, is enhanced by dream sequences and flashbacks of a kind that can be managed successfully only through the skilful cutting that is the essential ingredient in cinematic art. Secondly, however, we must remember the distinction between fantasy and imagination, and the inherent tendency of the camera to realise what it shows – to present not a world of imagination, but a substitute reality. This is never more obvious than in the case of sex and violence, and is the root cause of the fact that these now dominate the cine screen, and would dominate television too, were it not for the censor. With the aid of the camera you can realise violence or the sexual act completely, and so minister to the fantasy which has sex or violence as its focus. If fantasy breaks through the tissue of imagination, then the dramatic thought is scattered, and the imaginative emotions along with it: drama then sinks into the background, and all that we have is obscenity – human flesh without the soul. Hence many people are quickly satiated by cinematic representations, and at the same time deeply disturbed and absorbed by features (violence in particular) which, from the dramatic point of view, have little intrinsic meaning. Imagination withers when realisation blooms, and the ethical view of our condition withers along with it. It is a significant fact that most cinema-goers are disposed to see their favourite films only a few times, and that even people whose interest is not in the drama but in the blood, screams, and orgasms have no great interest in revisiting the last occasion of excitement, and will proceed joylessly to the next one without raising the question of the value of what they watch. This contrasts with every other kind of dramatic art – theatre, novel, opera, dramatic poem – in which the perception of beauty brings with it a desire constantly to return to the source, to re-enact in our emotions a drama which never loses its point for us, since it touches the question why we are here.”

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Book:An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture
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“Moreover, there are things that it is wrong to watch but permissible to do — and I think this point would not have needed spelling out in the days before Internet pornography, and all the other temptations that lie in wait for our contemporaries. ‘ What am I doing watching this? ’ is a deep moral reaction — the ‘ guilt ’ version of the shame that would accompany the knowledge Downloaded from that other people are watching you watching. To explore this aspect of fantasy, which has of course been of great concern to psychologists and psychotherapists in recent years, is beyond my scope. But it points us towards an important feature of fantasy, which again distinguishes it from imagination — namely, that fantasy is addictive, and exhibits the pattern of press-button rewards which we find in other addictions. Neuroscientists have had a lot to say about this pattern, and about the dopamine surges on which it depends. But it is not simply a matter of deviant neural pathways. There is a deviant intentionality involved in fantasy, and one that is connected with other deviations from what I call the ‘ aesthetic understanding ’ — a pathway back to the self, that escapes the demands of the other”

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Author:Roger Scruton
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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 misleadingly rendered by the imagination than the ultimate subject matter of philosophical speculation – God himself”

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Book:Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction
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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 beauty—a pure endorsement of the other, whose soul shines in his face and gestures as beauty shines in a work of art.”

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Book:Beauty
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“The modern adolescent finds himself in a world that has been set in motion; he is beset by noise, by external pressures, and by forces that he cannot control. The pop star is displayed in the same condition, high up on electric wires, the currents of modern life zinging through him, but miraculously unharmed. He is the guarantee of safety, the living symbol that you can live like this forever. His death or decay are simply inconceivable, like the death of Elvis, or, if conceivable, understood as a sacrificial offering, a prelude to resurrection, like the death of Kurt Cobain.”

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Author:Roger Scruton
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“The old morality, which told us that selling the body is incompatible with giving the self, touched on a truth. Sexual feeling is not a sensation that can be turned on and off at will: it is a tribute from one self to another and—at its height— an incandescent revelation of what you are. To treat it as a commodity, that can be bought and sold like any other, is to damage both present self and future other. The condemnation of prostitution was not just puritan bigotry; it was a recognition of a profound truth, which is that you and your body are not two things but one, and by selling the body you harden the soul. And that which is true of prostitution is true of pornography too. It is not a tribute to human beauty but a desecration of it.”

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Book:Beauty
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“Kitsch deprives feeling of its cost, and therefore of its reality; desecration augments the cost of feeling, and so frightens us away from it. The remedy for both states of mind is suggested by the thing that they each deny, which is sacrifice. Konstanze and Belmonte in Mozart’s opera are ready to sacrifice themselves for each other, and this readiness is the proof of their love: all the beauties of the opera arise from the constant presentation of this proof. The deaths that occur in real tragedies are bearable to us because we see them under the aspect of sacrifice. The tragic hero is both self-sacrificed and a sacrificial victim; and the awe that we feel at his death is in some way redemptive, a proof that his life was worthwhile. Love and affection between people is real only to the extent that it prepares the way for sacrifice—whether the petits soins that bind Marcel to Saint Loup, or the proof offered by Alcestis, who dies for her husband. Sacrifice is the core of virtue, the origin of meaning and the true theme of high art. Sacrifice can be avoided, and kitsch is the great lie that we can both avoid it and retain its comforts. Sacrifice can also be made meaningless by desecration. But, when sacrifice is present and respected, life redeems itself; it becomes an object of contemplation, something that ‘bears looking at’, and which attracts our admiration and our love. This connection between sacrifice and love is presented in the rituals and stories of religion. It is also the recurring theme of art. When, in the carnage of the Great War, poets tried to make sense of the destruction that lay all around, it was in full consciousness that kitsch merely compounded the fault. Their effort was not to deny the horror, but to find a way of seeing it in sacrificial terms. From this effort were born the war poems of Wilfred Owen and, much later, the War Requiem of Benjamin Britten. So there, if we can find our way to it, is the remedy. It is a remedy that cannot be achieved through art alone. In the words of Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’: ‘you must change your life’. Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter; and we live that way because we have lost the habit of sacrifice and are striving always to avoid it. The false art of our time, mired in kitsch and desecration, is one sign of this.”

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Book:Beauty
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“The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep coined the expression ‘rites of passage’ after noticing the important structural analogy between ceremonies of birth, puberty, initiation, marriage and death. The ceremonies, he argued, involve three components, ordered successively: separation of the individuals or groups from their previous condition; existence on the margin (marge) during which they remain suspended in limbo, and incorporation (agrégation) as participants in their new condition. Thus the initiation into full membership is preceded by a period of alienation, as the youth is cast out from childhood and care, and forced to earn the fruits of adult freedom. Imagine, however, a situation in which the adult world is clouded over: everything pertaining to adulthood has become dark, forbidding, treacherous. The only freedom lies in youth itself. Identity must be forged by the youth from his own adolescent experience – the experience of alienation, in which the protection of the adult world has been withdrawn, and nothing put in place of it. The traditional totems, which represent the continuity and longevity of the tribe, now lose their significance. The youth must construct his own totem, his own ceremonies of initiation and membership, his own sense of togetherness, while borrowing nothing at all from the expertise and knowledge of his forefathers. His dances must be formless and violent, so that only youth can dance to them; sexual pleasure, the mark of youth, must occupy the foreground of the ritual, but sex must be meticulously divorced from marriage and the birth of children. His totems must be formed in his own image – perpetually young, perpetually transgressive, perpetually incompetent. As he dances among his kind, such a youth will be conscious of a lack. All this commotion ought to mean something; it ought to be lifting him to a higher plane. But it leaves him exactly where he was – on the margin of society, enjoying a freedom that is empty since it has no goal. He tries to lift himself with drugs, and as a result sinks further into the void. His protest resolves itself at last in a strangulated cry – a song which sounds like music only when the drumming feet of adolescents sound along with it. And if he discovers words for this song, they will probably be these: I can’t find words to say About the things caught in my mind.”

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Book:An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture
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“We identify ourselves as persons, and assume that we endure as persons. As a human being I have a past and a future; as a person I lay claim to that past and that future as mine – as things that originate in me, in this very subject who must account for them. Persons do not form a natural kind, and the concept of personal identity is problematic in a way that the concept of animal identity is not. This we have surely learned from countless thought experiments, from John Locke to Sydney Shoemaker and Derek Parfit.”

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Book:Face of God: The Gifford Lectures
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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 character, for it is this which suggests that they show the other 'as he really is'. Hence they become the pivot and focus of our interpersonal responses, and of no response more than sexual desire. The voluntary smile is not a smile at all, but a kind of grimace which, while it may have its own species of sincerity—as in the smile of Royalty, which as it were pays lip-service to good nature — is not esteemed as an expression of the soul. On the contrary, it is perceived as a mask, which conceals the 'real being' of the person who wears it. Smiling must be understood as a response to another person, to a thought or perception of his presence, and it has its own intentionality. To smile is to smile at something or someone, and hence when we see someone smiling in the street we think of him as 'smiling to himself, meaning that there is some hidden object of his present thought and feeling. The smile of love is a kind of intimate recognition and acceptance of the other's presence - an involuntary acknowledgement that his existence gives you pleasure. The smile of the beloved is not flesh, but a kind of stasis in the movement of the flesh. It is a paradigm of 'incarnation': of the other made flesh, and so transforming the flesh in which he is made. Thus the smile of Beatrice conveys her spiritual reality; Dante must be fortified in order to bear it, for to look at it is to look at the sun (Paradiso, XXIII, 47—8): tu hai vedute cose, che possente set fatto a sostener lo riso mio.”

LoveSmile
Book:Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation
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“All rational beings laugh--and maybe only rational beings laugh. And all rational beings benefit from laughing. As a result there has emerged a peculiar human institution--that of the joke, the repeatable performance in words or gestures that is designed as an object of laughter. Now there is a great difficulty in saying exactly what laughter is. It is not just a sound--not even a sound, since it can be silent. Nor is it just a thought, like the thought of some object as incongruous. It is a response to something, which also involves a judgment of that thing. Moreover, it is not an individual peculiarity, like a nervous tic or a sneeze. Laughter is an expression of amusement, and amusement is an outwardly directly, socially pregnant state of mind. Laughter begins as a collective condition, as when children giggle together over some absurdity. And in adulthood amusements remains one of the ways in which human beings enjoy each other's company, become reconciled to their differences, and accept their common lot. Laughter helps us to overcome out isolation and fortifies us against despair. That does not mean that laughter is subjective in the sense that 'anything goes,' or that it is uncritical of its object. On the contrary, jokes are the object of fierce disputes, and many are dismissed as 'not funny,' 'in bad taste,' 'offensive,' and so on. The habit of laughing at things is not detachable from the habit of judging things to be worthy of laughter. Indeed, amusement, although a spontaneous outflow of social emotion, is also the most frequently practiced form of judgment. To laugh at something is already to judge it.”

PhilosophyHumorCultureJudgmentLaughter
Book:Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged
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“Tears of merriment flow from the eyes, so too do tears of grief and pain. Hence tears are symbols of the spirit: it is as though something of me is lost with them. For this reason people have since ancient times felt the impulse to collect their tears in lachrymatories. Psalm 56, v. 8, laments to God ‘Thou tellest my wanderings, put Thou my tears in Thy bottle; are they not in Thy Book?’ Tears are like pains: they cannot be voluntary, even if you can do something else in order to produce them. Although there are actors and hypocrites who can produce tears at will, that does not make tears into intentional actions; it just means that there are ways of making the eyes water without producing ‘real tears’. But laughing and smiling can be willed, and when they are willed they have a ghoulish, threatening quality, as when someone laughs cynically, or hides behind a knowing smile. Voluntary laughter may also be a kind of spiritual armour, with which a person defends himself against a treacherous world. Similar observations apply to blushes, which are more like tears than laughter in that they cannot be intended. What Milton says about smiles could equally be said of blushes. Blushes from reason flow, to brute denied, and are of love the food. Only a rational being can blush, even though nobody can blush voluntarily. Even if, by some trick, you are able to make the blood flow into the surface of your cheeks, this would not be blushing but a kind of deception. And it is the involuntary character of the blush that conveys its meaning. Mary’s blush upon meeting John, being involuntary, impresses him with the sense that he has summoned it – that it is in some sense his doing, just as her smile is his doing. Her blush is a fragment of her first person perspective, called up onto the surface of her being and made visible in her face. In our experience of such things our sense of the animal unity of the other combines with our sense of his unity as a person, and we perceive those two unities as an indissoluble whole. The subject becomes, then, a real presence in the world of objects.”

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Book:Face of God: The Gifford Lectures
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“The mask shows that the individualized face of the other is, in a certain measure, our own creation: remove the mask and beneath it you find a mask. This observation leads to a certain anxiety, since it suggests that the other’s presence in his face may be no more real than his presence in the mask. Perhaps we are even mistaken in attributing to persons the kind of absolute individuality that we unavoidably see in their features. Maybe our everyday interactions are more ‘carnivalesque’ than we care to believe, the result of a constant and creative imagining that behind each face lies something like this – namely, the inner unity with which we are acquainted and for which none of us has words. Maybe the individuality of the other resides merely in our way of seeing him, and has little or nothing to do with his way of being.”

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Book:Face of God: The Gifford Lectures
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“Writers who see the existential loneliness of man as I see it – as a longing to be dissolved in the subjectivity of God – have written in ways so obscure that I have real doubts whether I can do any better. I am thinking of Kierkegaard, Levinas and Berdyaev, and also of Hegel, in whose shadow they wrote, and whose vision they confirmed by the very vehemence of their attacks on it. Hegel argued that we self-conscious beings become what we essentially are, through a process of conflict and resolution. Self-consciousness is implanted in us as a condition to be realized, and we acquire it through Entäusserung – through building the public arena in which the dialogue between self and other can occur. The self becomes real through the recognition of the other. Language, institutions, laws are the vehicles through which we achieve Selbstbestimmung, the certainty of self, which is also a limiting of self and a recognition of the boundary between self and other. The process that leads me to see myself as other to others also makes me other to myself, and this is the ‘moment’, to use Hegel’s language, of self-alienation, in which subjects become strangers to themselves, bound by external laws, hampered in their freedom and in rebellion against the constraints that press on them from outside. It is in this way that the fatal fracture splits our world – the fracture between subject and object that runs through me. Healing that fracture means reconciling my own view from somewhere with the competing views by which I am surrounded, so that how I am in the eyes of others matches how I am for myself. For Hegel this is achieved objectively through law and institutions, subjectively through art and religion. These are ways in which we re-connect with the world from which our own struggle for freedom and self-knowledge had separated us. Hölderlin expressed some of this in his great invocations of home and homecoming – the journey outwards, which is also a journey back. And Hölderlin’s spiritual journey has been traced in our time, and through a changed emotional geography, by T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets.”

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Book:Face of God: The Gifford Lectures
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“Kitsch tells you how nice you are: it offers easy feelings on the cheap. Beauty tells you to stop thinking about yourself, and to wake up to the world of others. It says, look at this, listen to this, study this - for here is something more important than you. Kitsch is a means to cheap emotion; beauty is an end in itself. We reach beauty through setting our interests aside and letting the world dawn on us. There are many ways of doing this, but art is undeniably the most important, since it presents us with the image of human life - our own life and all that life means to us - and asks us to look on it directly, not for what we can take from it but for what we can give to it. Through beauty art cleans the world of our self-obsession.”

BeautyKitsch
Book:Confessions of a Heretic
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“Our need for beauty is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition, as free individuals, seeking our place in a shared and public world. We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves. The experience of beauty guides us along this second path: it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us.”

Beauty
Book:Beauty
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“(...) jealousy is painful not least because it sees the object of love, once sacred, as now desecrated. One cure for the pain of desecration is the move towards total profanation: in other words, to wipe out all vestiges of sanctity from the once worshipped object, to make it merely a thing of the world, and not just a thing in the world, something that is nothing over and above the substitutes that can at any time replace it.”

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Book:Beauty
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“Techno-music is the voice of the machine, triumphing over the human utterance and cancelling its pre-eminent claim to our attention. In such music we encounter the background noise of modern life, but suddenly projected into the foreground, so as to fill all the auditory space. However much you listen to this music, you will never hear it as you hear the human voice; not even when it sounds so loudly that you can hear nothing else. You are overhearing the machine, as it discourses in the moral void.”

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Book:An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture
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“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 reproduce itself. Destroy them heedlessly and you remove the guarantee offered by one generation to the next. .... [F]or Burke, traditions and customs distil information about the indefinitely many strangers living *then*, information that we need if we are to accommodate our conduct to the needs of absent generations. 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, far less justify them. Hence Burke described them as 'prejudices', and defended them on the grounds that, though the stock of reason in each individual is small, there is an accumulation of reason in society that we question and reject at our peril.”

CommunitySocietyTraditionConservatismSocial Traditions
Book:Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition
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“The lesson of history for Hume is that the established order, founded on customs that are followed and accepted, is always to be preferred to the ideas, however exultant and inspiring, of those who would liberate us from our inherited sense of obligation.”

OrderLibertySocietyObligationCustomsConservatismPolitical PhilosophyDavid HumeLessons Of History
Book:Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition
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“When society is organised from above, either by the top-down government of a revolutionary dictatorship, or by the impersonal edicts of an inscrutable bureaucracy, then accountability rapidly disappears from the political order, and from society, too. Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.”

GovernmentSocietyBureaucracyCivil SocietyPolitical Order
Book:Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition
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“It always astonishes me to discover people who think that religion and sex have nothing to do with one another, and that you can act as you like in the one sphere while thinking what you should in the other. In fact, of all the rites of passage that religions have taken under their wing, that of sexual initiation has been by the most tenaciously adhered to. English people today look with incredulity on the habit in some Muslim communities of veiling and hiding women, of forcing them to marry the man chosen for them, and of occasionally killing them for 'honour's' sake. What can this possibly have to do with obedience to Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, they ask themselves? In fact, it has everything to do with it. Sex is not only the gateway through which the next generation enters the community; it is the place in which our actions are most unavoidably subject to the ethic of 'pollution and taboo'.”

ReligionSexDeviance
Book:Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England
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“Civil society is, indeed, composed of individuals, acting freely.... But freedom entails responsibility, founded in the sentiments of sympathy that make us strive to look on our own and others' conduct from the standpoint of the impartial judge. The institutions of law and government exist in order to assign responsibilities and to ensure that they are not evaded or abused. Of course, this is something that liberals [(i.e. classical liberal)] too will acknowledge. But the difference of emphasis is crucial to the conservative position. Conservatism is about freedom, yes. But it is also about the institutions and attitudes that shape the responsible citizen, and ensure that freedom is a benefit to us all. Conservatism is therefore also about the limits to freedom.”

GovernmentFreedomResponsibilityConservativeLiberalismCitizenshipConservatismCivil SocietyLiberal
Book:Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition
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“Faith exalts the human heart, by removing it from the market-place, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion our deeper feelings are sacralised, so as to become raw material for the ethical life: the life lived in judgement. When faith declines, however, the sacred is unprotected from marauders; the heart can be captured and put on sale. When this happens the human heart becomes kitsch. The clichéd kiss, the doe-eyed smile, the Christmas-card sentiments advertise what cannot be advertised without ceasing to be. They therefore commit the salesman to nothing; they can be bought and sold without emotional hardship, since the emotion, being a fantasy product, no longer exists in its committed and judgement-bearing form.”

FaithBeliefArtificiality
Book:An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture
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“If you ask a conservative for a statement of his political convictions, he may well say that he has none, and that the greatest heresy of modernity is precisely to see politics as a matter of convictions as though one could recuperate, at the level of political purpose, the consoling certainty which once was granted by religious faith. In another sense, however, conservatism does rest in a system of belief, and is opposed as much to the theory as to the practice of socialist and liberal politics.”

ReligionConservativeSocialismLiberalismConservativesConvictions
Book:Conservative Texts: An Anthology
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“The two goals of liberation and social justice are not obviously compatible, any more than were the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution. If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead, and what should we allow ourselves by way of constraining them?”

PoliticsLeft Wing
Book:Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left
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“Burke's complaint against the [(French)] revolutionaries was that they assumed the right to spend all trusts and endowments on their own self-made emergency. Schools, church foundations, hospitals - all institutions that had been founded by people, now dead, for the benefit of their successors - were expropriated or destroyed, the result being the total waste of accumulated savings, leading to massive inflation, the collapse of education and the loss of the traditional forms of social and medical relief. In this way contempt for the dead leads to the disenfranchisement of the unborn, and all that result is not, perhaps, inevitable, it has been repeated by all subsequent revolutions. Through their contempt for the intentions and emotions of those who had laid things by, revolutions have systematically destroyed the stock of social capital, and always revolutionaries justify this by impeccable utilitarian thinking.”

Social ResponsibilityFrench RevolutionSocial CapitalRevolutionsEdmund Burke
Book:Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition
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“Throughout his life Hayek wanted to affirm his identity with the classic liberal tradition, believing that the true cause of the crises leading to two world wars was the steady increase increase in the power of the state, and its misuse in the pursuit of unattainable goals. 'Social justice' was the name of one of these goals, and Hayek expressly dismissed the expression as a piece of deceptive Newspeak, used to advance large-scale injustice in the name of its opposite.”

Social JusticeHayekSocial Justice Warriors
Book:Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition
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“Had Heidegger attached his great ego to the cause of international socialism, he would have enjoyed the whitewash granted to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Hobsbawm and the other apologists for the Gulag.1 But the cause of national socialism could enjoy no such convenient excuse, and the sin was compounded, in Heidegger’s case, by the fact that it was precisely the national, rather than the socialist aspect of the creed that had attracted him.”

MarxismNational SocialismHeidgger
Book:Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left
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