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Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Roger Scruton Quotes

“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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“There is a common instinct that fantasy, even when gratified, does not contribute to, but is in fact more likely to detract from, personal satisfaction. I here offer a semi-philosophical reason for thinking that this instinct might have sound. It seems to me that the fantasy-ridden soul will tend to have a diminished sense of the objectivity of his world, and a diminished sense of his own agency within it. The habit of pursuing the realized unreal seems to conflict with the habit, which we all, I believe, have reason to acquire, of pursuing what is real. There is no expenditure of effort involved in the gratification of fantasy, and hence the fantasist is engaged in no transformation of his world. On the contrary his desires invade and permeate his world, which ceases to have any independent meaning. The nature of the fantasy object is dictated by the passion which seeks to realize it; and the world therefore has no power either to control or resist the passion. Normal passions are founded on the sense of the independent reality of their object. They do not invade, but on the contrary, are disciplined by, the world. The change as understanding changes, and come, in time, to bear the imprint both of the subject’s agency and of the world’s reality. Thus it is with the greatest of human benefits- love between equals. In love, all my fantasy is destroyed just so soon as it is erected, by the deeper desire to understand and respond to a being whose essence resides in his independence, in his freedom from me. It seems to be no accident that people have repeatedly described sexual fantasy as ‘loveless’.”

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Book:The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture
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