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Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Roger Scruton Quotes

“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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“In literary representation, the distinction between the genuinely erotic and the licentious is a distinction not of subject-matter, but of perspective. The genuinely erotic work is one which invites the reader to re-create in imagination the first-person point of view of someone party to an erotic encounter. The pornographic work retains as a rule the third-person perspective of the voyeuristic observer.”

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Book:Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation
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