The Soul of the World

by Roger Scruton

In "The Soul of the World," renowned philosopher Roger Scruton defends the experience of the sacred against today s fashionable forms of atheism. He argues that our personal relationships, moral intuitions, and aesthetic judgments hint at a transcendent dimension that cannot be understood through the lens of science alone. To be fully alive and to understand what we are is to acknowledge the reality of sacred things. Rather than an argument for the existence of God, or a defense of the truth of religion, the book is an extended reflection on why a sense of the sacred is essential to human life and what the final loss of the sacred would mean. In short, the book addresses the most important question of modernity: what is left of our aspirations after science has delivered its verdict about what we are?

Drawing on art, architecture, music, and literature, Scruton suggests that the highest forms of human experience and expression tell the story of our religious need, and of our quest for the being who might answer it, and that this search for the sacred endows the world with a soul. Evolution cannot explain our conception of the sacred; neuroscience is irrelevant to our interpersonal relationships, which provide a model for our posture toward God; and scientific understanding has nothing to say about the experience of beauty, which provides a God s-eye perspective on reality.

Ultimately, a world without the sacred would be a completely different world one in which we humans are not truly at home. Yet despite the shrinking place for the sacred in today s world, Scruton says, the paths to transcendence remain open."

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Theology, Cultural, Christianity

216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Sir Roger Scruton was a writer and philosopher who has published more than forty books in philosophy, aesthetics and politics. He was a fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He taught in both England and America and was a Visiting Professor at Department of Philosophy and Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, he was also a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington D.C.

In 2015 he published two books, The Disappeared and later in the autumn, Fools Frauds and Firebrands. Fools Frauds and Firebrands is an update of Thinkers of the New Left published, to widespread outrage, in 1986. It includes new chapters covering Lacan, Deleuze and Badiou and some timely thoughts about the historians and social thinkers who led British intellectuals up the garden path during the last decades, including Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband.

In 2016 he again published two books, Confessions of A Heretic (a collection of essays) and The Ring of Truth, about Wagner’s Ring cycle, which was widely and favourably reviewed. In 2017 he published On Human Nature (Princeton University Press), which was again widely reviewed, and contains a distillation of his philosophy. He also published a response to Brexit, Where We Are (Bloomsbury).

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The Soul of the World, Roger Scruton argues for a form of cognitive dualism that accounts for both the natural world—that is, the objective world of the neuroscientist and Darwinian evolutionist—and the Lebenswelt, the life-world that “emerges” from the natural world that is yet irreducible to it. Scruton is clearly influenced by the big names of continental philosophy: Kant, Husserl, Sartre and others, and he often cites Searle for his speech-act theory. What Scruton provides, with rare clarity for an author influenced by such difficult thinkers, is a fascinating description and defense of our attachment to the sacred, in the world and the other.

The book is primarily a defense of lived experience in phenomenological tradition. Scruton argues that our lived experience in the Lebenswelt (a term borrowed from Husserl) is an “overreaching intentionality,” that is, a response to a “subjectivity that lies beyond the world of objects” (175). In a world of objects, somehow the subjective emerges. When we glance at another’s face, we see more than flesh; we see one’s subjectivity. “The face,” he writes, “although it appears in the world of objects, belongs essentially to the subject” (96). This encounter with the other is the “I-you” relationship that cannot be explained or reduced to neuroscience. When we encounter the face of another we see past it, at its “horizon,” to encounter the other’s subjectivity, and this demands that we give more than explanations for our actions (through the examination of causal connections in brain states or “adaptability” in Darwinian evolution), but also reasons and understanding. This is part of the cognitive dualism: explanation on the one hand, understanding and reasons on the other. When we dwell only on explanation, the person vanishes as with our responsibility toward the person. When the person vanishes our action is governed by nothing but the presence of an object.

For Scruton, this encounter with the other not only occurs with the face of another, but with the world as well. He describes this best with a fascinating phenomenology of music. Music has a “movement” that emerges from the experience of sounds, but when analyzed as sounds one cannot find movement. This property of music as experienced is irreducible to the sounds, yet we hear it. No matter how much we analyze sound waves or even our experience with each sound or tone in a musical movement, we cannot explain why or what it is that we hear. We simply hear the music move. As with the face, in hearing this movement we are experiencing our capacity for “overreaching intentionality.” This experience with the world is like encountering a subject that isn’t there: “Music addresses us as others address us….it address us from beyond the borders of the natural world” (175).

In a few places Scruton addresses political theory taking a stance against reductionistic social science and Rawlsian and contractual theory. On his account, these all involve “clearing away from the Lebenswelt all the threads of pious observance that cannot be replaced by free choice and self-make obligations….[forming a world] in which we humans are not truly at home” (94-95). Instead of trying to reduce the life-world to explanation (which, again, he thinks is impossible), it should be embraced as fundamental to human and social happiness: “Through the transcendent bonds of piety we enter the realm of the sacred things, of obligations that cannot be accounted for in terms of any deal that we made, and which speak of an eternal and otherworldly order” (176). Scruton is known for his indebtedness to the thought of Edmund Burke, and it shows here. This attempt to philosophically ground our attachment to people, places, and things is a form of justifying Burke’s theory of the “little platoons” of society that provide meaning for its members. Our encounter with the other in the face and the Other in the world provides the basis for intersubjectivity in the form of shared meaning and solidarity in an age of alienation.

Scruton addresses other topics including Hegel’s political theory, religion, creation myths, the existence of God, and architecture. Much of the content is a summary of his previous work in aesthetics. Overall, the book is less than persuasive not due to any fault in the arguments (thought I question a few), but because the scope of the book is so wide that it inspires the reader to read on rather than settle. Scruton beautifully touches the surface of so many issues that while a reader might not be fully convinced of all his points, he demonstrates the potential for a coherent and comprehensive worldview with a robust and legitimate life-world.

[Blair Hodges · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly, I wanted to give the book two stars but I don't want to unfairly deflate its rating. My low rating probably reflects my own under-preparation for this book as much as anything else. The truth is, there's much to recommend here. But I can only say "it was OK," which is what 2 stars mean on Goodreads, because it was often too difficult to follow the argumentative line Scruton was tracing. He assumes a familiarity that I doubt many lay readers will bring with them to the book. I could've used a bit more hand-holding and explanation along the way.

I really appreciate Scruton's desire to acknowledge the utility as well as the shortcomings with our developing scientific worldview, and that is the main reason I wanted to read this book. He argues that the world and our place in it can be best understood through a concept called "cognitive dualism," which basically distinguishes between description (scientific) and understanding (humanistic). The "what" does not account for the "why," and this discrepancy is best detected when we consider aesthetic things like art and music. He's arguing that description is great, but not enough. We experience the world as agents who make decisions and have experiences that transcend the claim that we are merely evolved reproducing gene machines.

I'm particularly interested in his idea that human personality is created in relationships and community rather than being solitary and individualistic. I think a few readings of the book could help

[Samuel Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, Scruton presents an intriguing and pleasing bricolage of Continental philosophy, Buddhism, and a moderately theistic existentialism based around the concept of accountability, faces, and the interactions of subjects. I suspect that he is wrong on several points, but he is wrong in illuminating ways, and this broad consideration of the difference between objects and subjects that he frames in terms of a cognitive dualism (one might also say conceptual) that "casts an ontological shadow" has given me much food for thought in my own life and theological writing projects. For readers who find New Atheism philosophically inadequate but don't want to rush into polemics, I think this book could serve as a useful apologia for a theism comfortable in the presence of Sartre and Badiou. I found myself ultimately uncertain whether his requirement for a personal God (i.e., a God who is a subject in the world of subjects) in addition to a grounding God was actually robust in the terms he presents it. Still, I think that in about a year I will look at this book again as a useful and reasonably sophisticated summary and example of ways that many threads of Continental philosophy could converge on a useful kind of theism.

[Shem Doupé · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think it is fair to say that this book has definitely changed me. It is one of the few books that I've read that really required my focus and attention and then rewarded me for it. I think it took me about a month to finish this 200 page book. Reading each page very slowly and very carefully. Even now, I feel like I could spend another month chewing on each chapter and trying to figure out exactly what's being said.

If I were to summarize this book (If that were even possible) it would be something like... Scruton is trying to explain that there are two things happening at once. A cognitive dualism in which there is the world of the physical objects and then there is the world of experience. Or as Scruton repeatedly calls it, The Lebenswelt. He draws on this idea of our lived experience and uses examples of art, beauty, music, architecture and faces, and the meaning that each of these has to us as humans. He looks at the way that each of us finds meaning as subjects and draws on that to point to something more transcendental.

I would say if you're going to read this book, there's probably some preliminary philosophical reading that You could do ahead of time, but if you take your time and read slowly and carefully and maybe do a little research as you go, I think this book would benefit you immensely.

One of the truly incredible and best parts about this book Is that in addition to all the philosophical knowledge that it contains, I was able to see the world in a much more meaningful and beautiful way just by reading Scruton's words. I feel like when I talk to people I see the soul behind the faces, when I look at art I see beauty and meaning in it now, when I listen to music I either hear garbage that has no soul or a piece of transcendental beauty that I can't understand but makes me emotional. This is something that I will forever be indebted to Roger Scruton for helping me find.

[Andrew Roycroft · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, Scruton's attempt to account for the 'aboutness' of beings and things, is a masterful exposé of the shortcomings of scientism and materialism. Through complex reasoning and voluminous cultural/literary/musical/scientific referencing, Scruton builds a case for transcendence and for God, against the backdrop of the totalitarianism of modern secular thought.

Scruton is a theist in the broadest sense(i.e. not exclusively a Christian theist). He rejects many of the doctrines which I would hold as being central to Christian faith and practice, but what he does offer to me as an evangelical reader is a powerful means of provoking in myself and in my peers a realisation of the divine which eschews trite apologetic arguments for God's existence in favour of the complex and disconcerting truth that as human beings in relationship with one another in a world of objects, transcendence will not leave us alone.

The philosophical precision which Scruton brings to his case is stirring and thought-provoking, and might provide a helpful bridge in speaking to our secular peers about the possibility and feasibility of faith in a world which pretends that these issues are no longer worthy of consideration, let alone discussion.

A rigorous, complex, challenging, enlightening, helpful read. Quite simply wonderful in places, it's the kind of book which begs for multiple re-readings.

[Pieter · Rating 5 out of 5]

In het Nederlands kent men de uitdrukking 'door de bomen het bos niet meer zien' voor mensen die het groter geheel weigeren te zien. Het is deze filosofische boodschap die Roger Scruton wil brengen: de postmoderne mens blijft hangen in het materiële, het oppervlakkige. Maar het leven is groter, spiritueler. Hij zoekt deze in de muziek, kunst en uiteraard in de natuur. Filosofen als Kant en Hegel dienen hem daarbij. De auteur legt ondermeer de link tussen Hegel's these-antithese-synthese en het christelijke eenheid-verdeeldheid-verzoening.

Zo gebruikt Scruton de beeldspraak van een foto op de computer die bestaat uit oneindig vele pixels. Men kan deze bestuderen op zich, maar niet erdoorheen te kijken en het werkelijke beeld te zien. Het goddelijke openbaart zich niet fysiek, maar verborgen. Zie naar de vele vermommingen waarin onder andere Griekse goden als Zeus en Pallas Athena zich hulden.

Het heilige is ontzag ten opzichte van het niets. Het toont zich onder andere via Girard's offer (sacrificium - sacrum facere) dat de gemeenschap terug samenbrengt.

Uiteraard gaat Scruton in op de deterministische en materialistische verklaringen van de natuur. Hij behandelt voornamelijk de evolutionaire psychologen die hij intellectueel van antwoord biedt. Het is in ieder geval verfrissend om wat tegengewicht te lezen voor deze dominante strekking in onze maatschappij.

Als laatste staat de schrijver stil bij het antwoord dat godsdienst biedt op de dood. Ze overstijgt die door het respect voor de voorvaderen, door de eeuwige graftombe, de overgang van subject naar object. In "Het onsterfelijkheidscomité" beschrijft John Gray treffend hoe seculiere ideologieën zoals het communisme via de wetenschap trachten de dood te vermijden. Denk ook aan Westerse 'eeuwige jeugd'. Maar Scruton roept op om de dood te mijden als vernietiging, eerder te zien als een overgang. En zo krijgt het boek dat zich aankondigde als een filosofisch werk, plots een duidelijk religieuze dimensie. Een intellectuele knipoog van deze Engelse reus dat filosofie niet tegengesteld is aan religie, maar ze helpt naar het religieuze verlangen en die ervaring te beleven.

[Yaaresse]

Abandoned about 1/3 in because I was bored out of my mind by it.

Wish I'd read the author's bio before starting this. Knowing he is referred to as 'the father of the New Right" and his published views on social issues would have warned me off trying to engage with this. Unfortunately, I was basing my decision to read it by the book's synopsis since I knew nothing about the author, and that promised something other than what the text delivered.

Not my wheelhouse. Just too preachy and lacked interest for me.

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Note: Usually I don't affix a star rating to books on my DNF/abandoned list. That said, I make exceptions if A) I've gotten more than 1/3 of the way through the book before giving up, and/or B) I thought the book especially inane, insufferable or just plain old awful.
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[Davis Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is breathtaking in its level of cogency and exhilarating in its erudition. It is the kind of book where you know you are coming into contact with a great mind of the century - this has the potential to be catalogued as a Great Book of the Western World in a hundred years. Scruton's incendiary passion for revealing the truth of experience makes me want to be a philosopher to carry on his legacy. After the first chapter, I found it a bit tough to track along with his Lebenswelt argument, but stick with it - it is a startlingly novel and imaginative proof for the existence of the sacred that, on its most basic level, is likely to chime with everyone. His chapters on architecture and music were especially stunning, and the final essay is beautiful. I don't like that Scruton feels the need to Bultmann-ify his arguments at time by referring to the biblical concepts at the heart of his argument as "myths" (if they explain sacred experience, what prohibits them from being true?) but he is clearly trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Not for lay readers, but I can think of no other book off the top of my head that is more likely to convict materialist intellectuals of the inconsistency of their worldview.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Soul of the World is a short but massive book, rich with erudition and provocative references. It's worth reading and brooding over, tackling questions that are regarded as somewhat embarrassing because unanswerable in modern secular discourse.

Scruton suggests there are two worlds: 1) the world science gives us, our dominant modern paradigm, constructed by thinkers like Newton and Darwin who focused as do we all on causes and 2) the world we construct in contact with each other--I to I--in the shadows of the transcendent, focused on the reasons we offer for our commitments, our sacrifices, our love and even our disenchantment (Sartre's Being and Nothingness plays an important role in Scruton's analysis.)

From Descartes or Kant forward (take your pick), we have come to regard that which we know as known within our brains, or minds. All of our sensations and impressions take shape there, always, every instant, and there is no way around this even though we easily agree that what I see you see and what I taste you taste and these things are roughly the same. Kant endows us with certain innate prerogatives emerging from our way of experiencing existence in time and space but extending beyond time and space to realities confected by our reason and grasped by our understanding. We encounter geometry this way. We also learn to pose the question of whether we are free or obscurely determined. As to that which is really real, the thing in itself, or God, we cannot know a thing, not through reason and/or understanding.

From Darwin forward Kant's analytic thinking took a turn, based on the concept of evolution wherein we see two reciprocal drives, almost two sides of the same coin: survival and reproduction. We live to survive and we survive to reproduce--all life forms do--and this is, viewed over time, an immensely complex proposition. Ingrained in this proposition and reinforced by the sciences of Newton and others, we begin to see biology, or life, as material. Going fast forward, we enter today's world of neuroscience where we look for the specific neural elements of humans being humans--self-conscious, rational/irrational, story-telling, etc. The idea, if not today's research, is an old one. Where is the ghost in the machine, the strange force of mind that haunts that body?

Scruton proposes that the world we make through our face-to-face interactions, the world of subjects encountering subjects not objects, replicates or echoes or induces us to contemplate and access not only each other but whatever is sacred and perhaps divine. He sees the search for causes a means of advancing our external possibilities but the search for encounters as advancing our internal needs. He calls this the lebenswelt, German for 'the world that is lived,' and he suggests it is the doorway to that which is beyond cause--God would have no cause, how could he?

Like Schopenhauer, Scruton sees art as a facsimile of eternal meaning, only possible by virtue of a human being's perception of the beyond and skill in operating there in the no-space of the imagination. He writes well and provocatively about architecture and music in particular in this regard.

For Scruton, the big move is the uncaused move: falling in love, falling under the spell of two eyes that are so magical that they feel like they are your own eyes, in which you can stare forever. He proposes that life is a gift, if it is properly construed, and death, when it comes, is a gift, too, moving us into bodiless encounter with what was before us and what comes after us.

Again, Scruton's erudition is breathtaking. He supports his argument with apposite references to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and of course the full range of philosophical thinkers from Plato forward. Along the way, he demonstrates knowledge of the most interesting contemporary books I've never heard of and would like to read, studies in cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, ritual, music, and much more.

I am sure I have done Scruton little justice with this note, and I suspect he goes through life never being done justice. He's written some 50 books, considers that some of his more polemical and speculative works have ruined his academic career, held high posts in many universities and think tanks, and planted his flag on the soil of Burkean conservatism, which at least endows him with one wonderful conviction: we must preserve the earth, seas and sky, they are only ours in trust. So he is a polymath popularizer but at the same time a multidimensional original thinker and an excellent and ingenious writer, and I gather that he has a lot of enemies who don't want to hear about faith, conservatism, and the unlikelihood that science ever will catch the ghost in the machine by the toe.

[Justine Olawsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! I finally finished this book -- though, I am rather sad that I did, as I loved savoring it bit by bit. It definitely is the sort of read that makes you want to set it down every few pages and just digest every phrase, every nuance, every little by-way of thought. Also, I learned at least five new words, which is always a good thing.

The Soul of the World is an extended meditation on the very human need to experience the sacred and the importance of finding space to experience the transcendent in our lives. Mr. Scruton draws upon philosophy, neuroscience, mythology, art, nature, music, and, of course, religion, to make his case, and he does a beautiful job of interweaving the disciplines into a glorious whole.

His argument starts from deontic power imperative in the I-You relationship. That is, by acknowledging the Other as a subject separate from and as worthy of consideration as ourselves, there is a certain moral obligation attached in the relationship. Into this, Scruton considers the value of the covenant within this I-You relationship -- both within the wholly human sphere as well as that which intersects with what we perceive as the divine.

Scruton goes on to elaborate upon this I-You theme in "Facing Each Other" which concerns the revelatory experience of ourselves and others in the human face. "Facing the Earth" was one of my favorite chapters, as Scruton writes of the strong pull of place, how we live within the natural world, and how we alter and adorn it as reflections of our sense of the sacred. Anyone who hates modern architecture as much as I do has a friend in Roger Scruton. What describes the mess of "modernity" better than this imagined exposition of Archeanassa as she decries the desecration of sacred space in her town of Colophon? "This town is like a frozen junkyard, and even if it looks like this forever, it will look forever temporary." Anyone who has seen the Experience Music Project in Seattle will have an immediate visual to accompany this pithy observation.

"The Sacred Space of Music" (a discipline about which Scruton has the participant's appreciation and knowledge) is followed by "Seeking God", which is fascinating from beginning to end. In a nutshell, "the God to whom [the philosophers] point is outside the envelope of causes, while our God-directed thought demand an encounter within that envelope, and encounter with the 'real presence.' God himself demands this, we believe, since he requires us to enter into a covenant with him." To do this, to experience this presence of the sacred, we must "create the space at the edge of reason where faith can take root and grow." One final thought, and it is, I believe, a supremely true and beautiful one: "I say, rather, that faith asks that we learn to live with mysteries, and not to wipe them away -- for in wiping them away, we may wipe away the face of the world."

[Carissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an unusual book. There are arguments within the book, and the book itself concludes with an argument for a sort of faith. Yet in many ways, it is more of a meditation on the nature of the world than an argument. The most interesting idea, which is developed throughout the book, is Scruton's idea a type of "cognitive dualism". Humans are both animals and persons, for example, and music is both a succession of pitches and something else - a line, a melody - to which we respond. Our great struggle, he thinks, is the temptation to treat others and the world as merely objects, rather than subjects - to strip others of their personhood and treat them as merely bundles of cells.

As a warning, Scruton does not adhere to what would be considered orthodox Christianity (he beleives the Incarnation is just a story, and seems inclined toward the radical "One-ness" of God expressed in Islam and Judaism). If you pick up this book expecting an apologetic, you will be sorely disappointed. Scruton's idea of a sort of post-Christian theism that does not worry about doctrines but instead is best conceived as a sort of openness to the transcendent is not, I think, the faith the world is looking for. (As a Catholic, I also think he is wrong, of course.) Scruton's intellectual theism, which places great emphasis on the transcendence and unintelligibility of God, seems to me unlikely to satisfy the average person. But perhaps it offers a way back to some sort of theism for skeptics who are philosophically inclined. (I don't mean to sound harsh. I enjoyed the book and found it thought-provoking.)

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing look at how art suggests a human need for transcendence. This will not convince anyone who has not "seen" God's presence in an intimate relationship, religious ritual or in a great work of art; however, those who have experienced this wondrous gift will have their faith confirmed. God is indeed present. We need only to know where to look.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, dense, eloquent, impassioned reading of faith, religion, and the soul.

A must for all interested in the topic

Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars.

[Dan Graser · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this brief collection of philosophical notions, based on his Stanton Lectures delivered in 2011, Roger Scruton discusses his notions for what admittedly seems at first like a dated form of cognitive dualism. In his framing, this worldview accounts for both the natural world of the explanation-seeking-naturalistic skeptic and the "Lebenswelt," a term from Husserl literally translated as "life-world" that emerges as a result of the lived experience of interpersonal, artistic, and societal relationships. Readers of Scruton will not be surprised at all by the influence of continental philosophy especially Kant, Husserl, Sartre and extensive discussion of Searle.

One of his key talking points is centered around the “I-you relationship" which he emphasizes can be accounted for to a certain degree naturalistically, but not fully explained without reference to the phenomenology of lived experience. Essentially when you encounter another being you are not just encountering a human but another subjectivity. Thus his notion cognitive dualism is framed in this context as scientific (mostly neurological) explanation countered and complimented with interpersonal understanding. Through a slightly stretched discussion of the fall of Adam and Eve, he makes the point that once we allow only for scientific, knowledge-based explanation, the actual person is no longer considered as such, now merely an object and in the case of the biblical story mentioned, one of both base desire and eventual shame.

I've discussed Scruton's works on music before and I can't say I am any more of a fan after this volume. He certainly makes some salient points especially on Adorno but he seems to not be aware of several more layers of analysis possible with the music he cites. I appreciate that he recognizes the power of music but other writings of his and some of the notions presented here display that his range of musical appreciation is quite small.

The two main issues I have with the work is that is that first, it seems like he sets up a bit of a familiar strawman, that of countering the atheistic naturalists who don't find inherent value in anything and are merely hoping to reduce it to entirely physical explanations. Having read the work of so many prominent skeptical thinkers, naturalists, secularists, and atheists I have never found this philosophical blindspot in any of their texts. And secondly, though his prose is remarkable and sometimes beautiful, he really doesn't make his point stick because the scope of areas he addresses is so large that you don't get a complete picture of any and thus don't feel comfortable accepting such cursory examinations. I enjoyed getting to know his conception of the "Lebenswelt," and will certainly do some further thinking in that direction, however, I think his view on the great naturalist writers, researchers, and public intellectuals are much more bleak than any of their world-views.

[Adam Carrington · Rating 5 out of 5]

The essentialism of soul. The duality created by its longing for details in this life that are, at once, unnecessary and therefore also necessary. A concept I had long believed in and yet, never found words quite like these to explain certain aspects of my life are important to me. The book is gorgeously written, points are credibly argued from first principles with the candour of one firmly in his element. I have enjoyed Scuton in the past but 'The Soul of the World' is rare, and breached a high watermark inside of me that is now leading me to actively study its contents further and also to consume everything else I can find by the author.

[Larry · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice read for people who are not familiar with philosophy. Scruton’s style is marvelous. The worst part is the one about politics, the best the one about music. It’s a sort of hodgepodge of Wittgenstein, Anscombe and Nagel against reductionism in the philosophy of mind. The presentation of the issues and arguments is somewhat honest and abundantly clear. It is obviously a minor work of Scruton’s (compared to his Art and imagination and The Aesthetics of Music).

[Benjamin Culver · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't usually rate the books I read. But this thoroughly deserved 5 stars.

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a magnificent musicality to this book, and to the mind of this wonderful man. A kernel of a theme is introduced, and then developed over many movements. There are no redundancies, nothing is over-explained, and each bar grows organically from the previous while still saying something entirely new. Rare is the book where each sentence demands attention. The same cognitive dualism that he uses in every chapter of this book, should be used to separate this book of words from the experience of its ideas in the Lebenswelt. In that realm of subjectivity, it is less important that he is conservative and makes a case for conservatism, and more important that he makes the case in a specific way, as a specific sort of person, a truly integrated human being who builds out multifaceted arguments from a single set of first principles, the I-You relation, intentionality and the essence of personhood with elegance and consistency: reinen Vernunft. If only he’d lived long enough to provide the world with a similarly beautiful and reasoned argumentation for the opposite side.

Clippings
I know that I am a single and unified subject of experience. This present thought, this pain, this hope, and this memory are features of one thing, and that thing is what I am. I know this on no basis, without having to carry out any kind of check, and, indeed, without the use of criteria of any kind—this is what is (or what ought to be) meant by the term “transcendental.” The unity of the self-conscious subject is not the conclusion of any inquiry, but the presupposition of all inquiries. The unity of consciousness “transcends” all argument since it is the premise without which argument makes no sense.

Maybe we shall find him in the world where we are only if we cease to invoke him with the “why?” of cause, and conjure him with the “why?” of reason instead. And the “why?” of reason is addressed from I to you. The God of the philosophers disappeared behind the world, because he was described in the third person, and not addressed in the second.

In all that touches what is deepest and most lasting in our lives—religious faith, erotic love, friendship, family ties, and the enjoyment of art, music, and literature—we address the horizon from which the other’s gaze is seeking us.

Moral education involves the maintenance of this overreaching intentionality, so as to make it possible, in the hardest circumstances, to look the other person in the I. That is what people mean by “spiritual” discipline, and it is what Plato called “the care of the soul.”

Hegel suggests that in all of us there is a kind of residue of relations of domination and servitude, and that our disposition to seek the I-You encounter, in which free agreement and open acknowledgment of the other replaces dictatorship, has emerged from and bears the traces of the “life-and-death struggles” that preceded the emergence of negotiation and law.

It is precisely the emphasis on outcomes, rather than actions, obligations, and responsibilities, that has led to the overriding of ordinary contract and tort with legislation aimed at redistributing rewards.

My face is a boundary, a threshold, a place where I appear as the monarch appears on the balcony of the palace. (Thus Dante, in the Convivio, describes the eyes and the mouth as “balconies of the soul.”)

The spoiling of the earth and the vandalizing of our human habitats arouse in us an echo of the desolation that the psalmist records in those words: the desolation that ensues when a place loses its spiritus loci, is reduced to ruins, and ceases to be a home within the Lebenswelt. And it seems to me that we will not understand what is really at stake in the environmental consciousness that has captured the imagination of so many people today, if we do not recognize a religious memory at the heart of

The temple symbolizes the collective intention to dwell in this place where the community has made a renewed bid for permanence.

“And for those very reasons, although the tower is tall, vertical, and slim, it does not really stand before us. For it has no posture and no repose. Its vertical extent expresses no vertical order. On the contrary, its order is horizontal. The tower is composed as a ground-plan, which is then projected upward through slab upon slab and floor upon floor, until the required number of desks or beds or cells can be accommodated. To make the design easy to execute, the plan is regular—usually square or oblong. And this means that the tower must be constructed in a cleared site, and rises up surrounded by empty lots and destroyed streets.

Architecture cannot progress as music and poetry progress, so as to conform solely to the needs of genius. Architecture is a public enterprise: the architect does not build for the private client, but for the city. All of us are compelled to live with the result, which must therefore be offensive to no one. Originality should be second to good manners. The case is no different from clothing, which ought to be original only if it first conforms.

When we see the world exclusively as an assemblage of objects, then nothing is rescued from barter and exchange. That is what we now do to each other and to the earth. It is also what we do to our habitat, which is ceasing to be a home and becoming instead a “machine for living in,” as Le Corbusier, the ideologist of modernist planning, described his ideal house.

The junk streets of modern cities should be contrasted with the jumbled compositions that arise by an invisible hand when traditional vernacular facades are forced to align themselves. Consider the backwater canals of Venice (fig. 4). These are transparently lived in, and every detail has a use: but no detail was dictated by its use, and a pleasing redundancy inhabits each facade. Such examples help us to understand what was lost when the modernist vernacular took over, and the city of slabs replaced the city of columns. The “machine for living in” is not a subject but an object—a place in a fallen world.

The embodied form of the other, as this comes before us in love, anger, and desire, is understood as a revelation. The other haunts his body, and is revealed in it, not as something seen in a window, but as something that flits out of sight, inhabiting the “space of reasons” alone.

this presents us with something that we do not encounter in everyday life, which is too much troubled by randomness—namely, the completed gesture, the gesture that completes itself out of its own inner content, which has no purpose but itself and yet which also accomplishes that purpose. For many people this is the central mystery, and the most important reward, of serious music—that it shows us human action drawing itself to a close.

Adorno is a latter-day Moses, and his hero Arnold Schoenberg tried to set the episode from the Old Testament to music, as an illustration of the way in which we must never sacrifice difficult truth to easy communication.

the features that we hear in the music are not necessarily features that the music shares. Indeed, I contend that they are in this case features (drooping, heaviness, weariness) that it cannot literally share. So in explaining what it is to hear sadness in the music, we have simply helped ourselves to the very notion that needs to be explained—the notion of hearing x in y, when x is a feature that y cannot literally possess.

The life in the music is the power to elicit a parallel life in you, the dancer. To put it another way: the life in the music is an imagined life, and the dance one way of imagining it. This explains a fact noticed and made critical by Plato, namely, that the moral quality of a work of music rubs off on the one who dances to it.

The acts that stir our wonder and admiration, and the great tragic gestures put before us by art and literature, remind us that there is another world behind our daily negotiations. It is a world of absolutes, in which the ruling principles are creation and destruction, rather than agreement, obligation, and law.

If sacrifices of this kind have a religious significance, I suggest, it is because they put annihilation on display. The tribe crowds into the window, to watch as the light of being is extinguished in the creature pushed into the void. What is significant is not the therapeutic effect but the spectacle, in which being and nothingness contend within the victim. That, it seems to me, is the only way in which the sacred could be suggested by such an event. But, so conceived, the sacred is a pure abstraction—an unmediated experience of awe in the face of nothingness. It stands to be surpassed, aufgehoben

Any reasonable monotheism will understand God not merely as transcendental, but as related to the world in the “space of reasons,” rather than in the continuum of causes. He is the answer to the question “why?” asked of the world as a whole. You may well say, with the atheists, that the question has no answer. But if you say this because you think that there are no cogent “why?” questions other than those that seek for causes, then you are merely turning aside from the argument. The teleological foundation of the world is not perceivable to science, or describable in scientific terms. Hence it can be neither proved nor disproved by scientific method. It can be established only through the web of understanding, by showing, as I have tried to show in this book, that accountability lies in our nature.

In the Mathnawi Rumi has the following verses: Someone once asked a great sheikh what Sufism is. “The feeling of joy when sudden disappointment comes.” Rumi does not mean joy in the face of disappointment, but joy because of disappointment: the recognition that you have been asked to relinquish something, and that this too is a gift.

faith is not the same thing as religion. It is an attitude to the world, one that refuses to rest content with the contingency of nature. Faith looks beyond nature, asking itself what is required of me by way of thanks for this gift. It does not, as a rule, bother with theology; it is open to God, and actively involved in the process of making room for him, the process that Scheler called Gottwerdung, the becoming of God.

Dialectic between Ritual and Doctrine: Important what you do vs what you believe. Judaism Halakhah/Torah and Buddhism/Hinduism focus on former. Islam/Christianity made a change towards doctrine, such that when rituals were changed like Rome/Constantinople, the doctrine had to change to reflect the difference in belief. Breaking point with Calvin, Reformation.

Husserl’s Lebenswelt, orthogonal to physical world. Cognitive dualism’s treatment of emergent quality like consciousness as separate and incommensurable from the underlying mechanisms, like melody from pitched frequencies.

Locate the other at the horizon of their being - you see neither their ‘true essence’ nor your perception of them, but only the actions/behavior of that horizon.

Dennet’s intentionality, scaled both down and up. Physical particles minimizing of entropy can be perceived with the intentionality of creation/preservation. Scale farther up from human? God.

If we know ourselves through the other (the network of free interactions), then no science can replace/explain our understanding of each other.

Human shaped by first-person awareness and practical reason (giving/taking reasons for action)

Searle’s declarative speech acts like promises, laws, that create obligations that exist as fact, but in the realm of human relations, Lebenswelt, different from how animals can also communicate a desire.

Claim right: I am owed something by someone, ie contract price or damages. X has claim right from Y, who has a duty to pay, and the link between them is a responsibility for Y.

Freedom right: no responsibility, but duty of all to preserve, do so by non-invasion.

Human rights were seen as freedom right, in order to protect from powerful state impinging on individuals. But Eleanor Roosevelt’s declaration included claim right, like education, health etc, which then necessitate larger state. Claim right implies I have a duty but arising out of no responsibility of anything I have done.

Right establishes my sovereignty, the basis for all I-You relations that can emerge.

Bentham’s ‘nonsense on stilts’, ie rights inflation to include ‘interests’, blocking way to negotiation and compromise.

Obligations need to be freely undertaken in order to be objectively binding.

Original Sin: knowledge of ourselves as objects, fall from realm of subjectivity to world of things (now need to categorize, some objects we want, others are either aids or barriers).

Know the difference between contracts and vows (marriage), justice and piety (children’s duty to parents though it was an obligation not freely undertaken), and affection and love.

[Ken Montgomery · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compelling critique of reductionism. Great thoughts on the human face and a philosophy of music. Also incorporates the idea of covenant in his analysis! Less than 200 pages but very rich, like eating cheesecake for the brain.

[Fatemeh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is another book that took me one and half years to finish. This book is not advocating God or religion but it is emphasizing on an aspect of our lives that might be disappearing.

Evolutionary psychology and neuroscience should enhance our understanding of the human condition, not warp it. Humans are accountable subjects in an I-You world not merely survival machines or conditioned organisms.

“But learning to direct your attitudes to the horizon of the other's being, from which he in turn directs his gaze—this requires a discipline that goes further than mere respect. In all that touches what is deepest and most lasting in our lives—religious faith, erotic love, friendship, family ties, and the enjoyment of art, music, and literature—we address the horizon from which the other's gaze is seeking us. Moral education involves the maintenance of this overreaching intentionality, so as to make it possible, in the hardest circumstances, to look the other person in the I. That is what people mean by "spiritual" discipline, and it is what Plato called "the care of the soul." It is vanishing from our world today, for reasons that I do not need to elaborate. But in what follows I will try to show why this matters.”

The thing is the scientific method eliminates the “subject” and looks for “causal” connections in a world of objects. Humans live in a world of reasons, aboutness and intentionality.

I have selected some rather long excerpts from the book which you can find in the following.

“Reason, for Hegel, is constantly transcending its own partial viewpoints, on its journey toward the "Absolute Idea." Reason aims of its nature toward a kind of final narrative of how things are, in which all the contradictions (which are contradictions only from a partial perspective) are overcome, If Hegel is right, then the cosmological path points beyond the edge of the world as science describes it, to a place where another kind of question can be asked, a question that cannot be answered with a cause, but only with a reason: the question "why?" asked of the world as a whole—the question addressed to Brahman. We can answer such a question only by giving a teleological, rather than a causal, account of things. That account will make no difference to, and have no contact with, cosmological science.”

“There is a widespread habit of declaring emergent realities to be "nothing but" the things in which we perceive them. The human person is "nothing but" the human animal; law is "nothing but" relations of social power; sexual love is "nothing but" the urge to procreation; altruism is "nothing but" the dominant genetic strategy described by Maynard Smith; the Mona Lisa is "nothing but" a spread of pigments on a canvas, the Ninth Symphony is "nothing but" a sequence of pitched sounds of varying timbre. And so on. Getting rid of this habit is, to my mind, the true goal of philosophy. And if we get rid of it when dealing with the small things—symphonies, pictures, people—we might get rid of it when dealing with the large things too: notably, when dealing with the world as a whole. And then we might conclude that it is just as absurd to say that the world is nothing but the order of nature, as physics describes it, as to say that the Mona Lisa is nothing but a smear of pigments.”

“Those and similar features mean that first-person awareness and accountability to the other are wound into our social intentionality. The states of mind that are directed toward the world of human covenants and institutions are directed toward a world of "I's and "You"s, and are founded on the assumption that all participants in that world know immediately and on no basis not only what they intend but also their reasons (some of them, at least) for intending it. This assumption places a radical constraint upon the way in which the objects of social awareness can be conceptualized. I do not look on the other, still less on myself, as an organism, whose behavior is to be explained by some hypothesis concerning the nature of its intentional states. I look on the other as I look on myself as an "I," whom I address in the second person, and whose self-attribution of reasons takes precedence, for me, over any third-person vision of what makes him tick.”

“Brain-imaging techniques have been used to cast doubt on the reality of human freedom, to revise the description of reason and its place in human nature, and to question the validity of the old distinction of kind, which separated person from animal, and the free agent from the conditioned organism. And the more we learn about the brain and its functions, the more do people wonder whether our old ways of managing our lives and resolving our conflicts—the ways of moral judgment, legal process, and the imparting of virtue-are the best ways, and whether there might be more direct forms of intervention that would take us more speedily, more reliably, and maybe more kindly to the right result.”

“In a creature with a mind, there is no direct law-like connection between sensory input and behavioral output. How the creature responds depends on what it perceives, what it desires, what it believes, and so on. Those states of mind involve truth-claims, and reference-claims, which are not explicable in mechanistic terms. Cognitive science must therefore show how truth-claims and reference-claims arise, and how they can be causally efficacious.”

“In a well-known series of experiments Benjamin Libet has used brain-imaging techniques to explore the causal antecedents of human choice. His results show that when people choose between alternative movements, there is a particular burst of activity in the motor centers of the brain leading directly to the action. But the subjects themselves report their decision always some moments after this, when the action is already (from the point of view of the central nervous system) "under way." The conclusion often drawn from these experiments is that the "brain" decides what to do, and our consciousness follows only later, when the switch has already been flipped. But that conclusion in no way follows from the data. Sometimes an intentional action is preceded by a decision or choice, certainly; but usually the action is the choice. And what makes it intentional is not that it arose in a particular way, but that the subject can say on no basis that I did this, or am doing this, and in doing so make himself accountable for it. To say that we are free is to point to this fact: namely, that we can justify and criticize our actions, lay claim to them as our own, and know immediately and with certainty what we will do-not by predicting what we will do but by deciding to do it. (Hence Anscombe's idea that intentional action is distinguished by the application of a “certain sense of the question ‘why?'”.) Freedom emerges from the web of interpersonal relations, and comes into being as a corollary of “I,” “you” and “why?””

“The mystery, such as it is, arises from the privileged view of the subject, and lies on the horizon within which the world of the subject plays itself out. No attempt to pin down the subject in the world of objects will ever really succeed. You can extract from the person as many body parts as you will, but you will never find the place where he is, the place from which he addresses me and which I in turn address. What matters to us are not the invisible nervous systems that explain how people work, but the visible appearances to which we respond when we respond to them as people. It is these appearances that we interpret, and upon our interpretation we build responses that must in turn be interpreted by those to whom they are directed. These responses are directed not to some item in the world that we share, but to the horizon, the I, that identifies the other's point of view, and which only the other can occupy. It seems then that there is an impassable metaphysical gap, between the human object, and the free subject to whom we relate as a person. Yet we constantly cross that gap. How is this?”

“I know that I am a single and unified subject of experience. This present thought, this pain, this hope, and this memory are features of one thing, and that thing is what I am. I know this on no basis, without having to carry out any kind of check, and, indeed, without the use of criteria of any kind—this is what is (or what ought to be) meant by the term "transcendental." The unity of the self-conscious subject is not the conclusion of any inquiry, but the presupposition of all inquiries. The unity of consciousness "transcends" all arguments since it is the premise without which argument makes no sense.”

“The indispensable presence in our lives of this overreaching intentionality is at the root of philosophy, and is the real reason that people find evolutionary and reductionist perspectives on the human condition so hard to accept. It also explains the oft-heard complaint that, while our secular societies make room for morality, for knowledge, and for the life of the mind, they suffer from a spiritual deficit. Human beings, we hear, have a "spiritual" dimension, with spiritual needs and values, and people say such things even though they withhold assent from any religion, and even though they reject the old myth of the soul, or regard it as an elaborate metaphor. The reason, I believe, is this: the "overreaching intentionality" of our interpersonal attitudes is not an unalterable given; it can be educated, turned in new directions, disciplined through virtues, and corrupted through vice. In some cases of extreme autism it may even be lacking, as it is lacking in animals. ”

“How different such a case is, at least, from that of freedom rights. For these are by their very nature "sovereignty protecting devices. They are vetoes on what others can do to me or take from me, rather than demands that they do something or give something in which I have an interest, The duty that they define is one of noninterference, and the interest that they protect is the most fundamental interest that I have, namely, my interest in retaining the power to make decisions for myself in those matters that most closely concern me. Freedom rights exist to ensure that we can each appear in the public realm as free subjects, so as to engage in those I-You relations upon which the public realm is ultimately founded.”

“We can understand what is at issue here in terms of three contrasts—that between a contract and a vow, that between justice and piety, and that between affection and love. A contract has terms, which define the agreement. When the terms are fulfilled, the contract is at an end; if they are not fulfilled but breached, then the obligation to perform is changed into an obligation to compensate. Fraudulent contracts, coerced agreements, or contracts that are escaped when the innocent party has fulfilled his undertaking are paradigm cases of injustice-in such a case one person treats another as a mere instrument, and tramples on his rights. Vows, by contrast, may not have precise terms, and are open-ended commitments to make oneself trustworthy in a certain respect. They have an existential character, in that they tie their parties together in a shared destiny and what was once called a "substantial unity."”

“The second contrast that interests me is that between justice and piety. An obligation of justice is owed to another because he has a right to it, or because he deserves it. Rights and deserts are comparable but not identical privileges: rights are, on the whole, positive benefits to the one who holds them, whereas deserts can be negative, as in a deserved punishment. If all our obligations arose from undertakings, in the manner supposed by Searle, then it would be natural to assume that they are all obligations of justice. But this is not so.
There are obligations of piety—obligations that have never been undertaken but which are owed to others in recognition of their entitlement, or in gratitude for their protection, or simply as a humble acknowledgement that we are not the authors of our fate.”

“Finally, the contrast between affection and love. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle pointed out that friendships are of several kinds, and singled out three for particular attention—friendships of pleasure, of business, and of virtue, corresponding to three kinds of reasons for action (the pleasing, the useful, and the good). All of these come under the general heading of philia, as opposed to eros, and both philia and eros are to be distinguished from the love advocated in the gospels under the name of agape, traditionally translated as charity or neighbor love. All of these relations create obligations, but only rarely can the obligations be translated into contractual terms. Moreover, the language of obligation does not capture what is special about our loves, namely, that they cannot be generalized. I can have general duties of charity, of business partnership, of neighborly goodwill duties that do not demand that a specific person be acknowledged as their target. But love involves attachment to an individual, whose presence and well-being are integral to the identity of the one who loves—part of the ground of his being, to use the theological phrase. Hence love—properly understood—fills the world with another kind of necessity than that deriving from the obligations of charity and neighborliness. People find themselves bound by nontransferable attachments. These attachments invest the other with a unique value and distinguish him from all others in the universe. People find their fulfillment in this way, by discovering objects of attention and affection for which there are no substitutes.”

“Now, if we put together those three ideas, recognizing that human beings, as persons, do not live only in a world of contracts, but also in a world of vows, pious duties, and nonsubstitutable attachments, we arrive at another aspect of interpersonal cognition, and one that distances that form of cognition yet further from the scientific worldview. We cannot live in full personal communication with our kind if we treat all our relations as contractual. People are not for sale: to address the other as you rather than as he or she is automatically to see him or her as an individual for whom no substitutes exist. In the relations that really matter, others do not stand before me as members of an equivalence class. I endow them, in my feelings, with a kind of individuality that cannot be represented in the language of science, but which demands the use of concepts that would not feature in the commonsense scheme of things: concepts like those of the sacrificial and the sacramental.”

“In other words, freedom is fully realized only in the world of persons, bound together by rights and duties that are mutually recognized. It is then concrete, determinate freedom, through which agents achieve the full consciousness of themselves and of their reasons for doing what they do.”

"The freedom of the subject presupposes membership of a world in which the distinction can be drawn between the ends of action and the means needed to secure them. That distinction is made available by practical reason, which in turn presupposes a community of rational beings who respect each other as persons and recognize in each other the freedom that is realized through their deals and projects. In short, the immediate knowledge of my own freedom, which is the premise of practical reason, also presupposes the world that practical reason creates, the shared Lebenswelt, structured by deontic powers.”

“By coming face-to-face with others, we gain full awareness of the constraints of practical reason, and therefore of the freedom that our social membership bestows on us.

When Sellars introduced his distinction between the manifest and the scientific image, he argued, in a way not entirely remote from my thoughts in this chapter, that the idea of the person is central to the manifest image, and that with the idea of the person comes that of the community. The manifest image represents a shared cognitive investment.“

“To say what it is we see when we see a face, a smile, a look, we must use concepts from another language than the language of science, and make connections of another kind from those that are the subject matter of causal laws. And what we witness, when we see the world in this way, is something far more important to us, and far more replete with meaning, than anything that could be captured by the biological sciences.”

“The human body is the place here the other is both present and hidden, protected from me but nevertheless revealed when the right words are uttered and the right gestures made. “There is but one temple in the world." wrote Novalis (Hymns to the Night), "and that is the body of man ... We touch Heaven when we lay our hand on a human body" In everyday life we don’t see things in quite that way. But in the intimacy of love, anger, or desire I encounter the other as haunted by himself. I look into him, and he becomes a presence that I sense but which flees from my attempts to conjure it, until the right look or word or touch brings it suddenly to rest and face-to-face with me.”

“When we see the world exclusively as an assemblage of objects, then nothing is rescued from barter and exchange. That is what we now do to each other and to the earth. It is also what we do to our habitat, which is ceasing to be a home and becoming instead a "machine for living in," as Le Corbusier, the ideologist of modernist planning, described his ideal house.”

[Bruce Newsome · Rating 4 out of 5]

The late, great Sir Roger Scruton (1944-2020) was clear about his politics, but not religion, even though he wrote a lot about religion, particularly towards the end. He wrote one book about the Church of England, in which he was raised. He certainly advocated for conservation of Christian culture. He was well read on other religions and atheism.

For some interpreters, he was spiritual but not religious. For others, he was evangelical. Mark Dooley, whose philosophy is influenced by his Irish Catholic background, told a meeting of the Scruton Legacy Foundation in October that Scruton’s personal religiosity infuses all his work. Anthony O’Hear, Scruton’s colleague in the philosophy department at the University of Buckingham, isn’t sure. Scruton was “very private,” he said, and never revealed any religion or spirituality. At the least, Scruton was a cultural Christian. He may have been a Christian atheist, as his friend and colleague Douglas Murray self-identifies. However, as we shall see, his experience of religion seems to go beyond atheism, although not to any endorsement of religion.

From November to December, I joined a group of Scruton’s colleagues, students, and admirers, organized by the Scruton Legacy Foundation, for a weekly discussion of his most dedicated book on religion.

“The Soul of the World” is a thin book, less than 200 pages of main body text. The arguments are quick, sparse, sometimes evasive. Scruton was always pithy. His writing is alive with references to his wide reading, with which most in his own profession will never catch up. “The Soul of the World” is extreme in these regards. The preface warns that he is revisiting and building on themes he explored more thoroughly elsewhere. He warns of few citations: “[F]or the most part the manner is informal, and allusions to other writers more conversational than scholarly.” Most of the chapters are based on talks to scholars of divinity or philosophy. He sometimes assumes familiarity with his prior work.

Analysis of a short book can seem like over-analysis. However, Scruton chose to give us “The Soul of the World” as his only work dedicated to religion in general, and he chose to keep it short. (Scruton went on to explore religion, in passing, in “On Human Nature,” published in 2017.)

Some participants in the group introduced themselves honestly as repeat readers in hope of clarification. Anthony O’Hear opened the discussion by admitting that the book is unusually difficult to read. O’Hear also warned of some internal contradictions. Often I found Scruton betraying his own dissonance, even self-censorship (although this was surely subconscious, for such an overtly fearless writer).

In the preface, Scruton summarizes his “argument as making room, in some measure, for the religious worldview, while stopping well short of vindicating the doctrine or practice of any particular faith.”

Scruton was explicitly “making room” against confrontations from the perspectives of science (e.g., Richard Dawkins) and counter-extremism (particularly after 9/11). Scruton quickly, in the second paragraph, dismisses the confrontations as too “intellectual” and missing the “emotional” imperative.

However, the confronters think that science explains the emotional. Dawkins, for one, articulates the evolved need for religion to ameliorate the uncomfortable facts of life, such as mortality. Scruton doesn’t discuss mortality, except briefly towards the beginning and again at the very end, as one of the life events that are sanctified and rationalized by religions.

Scruton doesn’t admit any particular confronters, but goes on to refute “evolutionary psychology” as having “no bearing on the content of our religious beliefs and emotions.” I am not persuaded by Scruton’s sparse argument, which addresses only Sigmund Freud (not a scientist). Scruton has a habit of referring to “scientific” when he means material (such as when contrasting a “scientific view” of the Mona Lisa – as a collection of pigments – versus a visual experience). I share Scruton’s discomfort with reduction of religion to genotypes and phenotypes. But here Scruton is as casual in his dismissal of the scientific as is Dawkins of the spiritual.

Scruton refutes evolutionary psychology in general by denying that reproduction is the core of religion. Scruton nevertheless admits the theory that humans have genetic imperatives to belong to a group – for material, sexual, and genetic benefits, at the cost of some individual sacrifice. A group secures its members and thence their genes. This is why, Scruton admits, religions have so much interest in sexual and reproductive matters.

I found Scruton’s thinking on the origins of religion more political than he cares to admit. “The Soul of the World” is reminiscent of his writings on the importance of belonging – to a place, a culture, a society, a morality. His first citation is of Emile Durkheim, whose core explanation for religion is membership of community. Scruton doesn’t make the link explicit until later: “It has been evident at least since Durkheim that religion is a social phenomenon…Human beings desire to ‘throw in their lot’ with something…the normal tendency of the religious urge is toward membership…Durkheim pointed out that you don’t merely believe a religion but (more importantly) you belong to it.”

Later still, Scruton makes use of René Girard’s Catholic philosophical view that humans choose religion to escape conflict in the state of nature. Scapegoats are used to purge or vent the society’s lingering need to wage violence on the outsider. Members who disobey societal taboos become outsiders subject to scapegoating. Christianity is unique, for Girard, in offering a voluntary scapegoat (Jesus).

However, Scruton claims that “Girard’s narrative fails to explain what it is to regard a thing as sacred.” Yet Scruton had already paraphrased Girard as saying: “It is in the effort to resolve this conflict that the experience of the sacred is born.” As in many other places, Scruton wants to separate the established psychosocial origins of religion from a form of religious “thought” that he fails to adequately define.

In the final chapter, Scruton will confirm that he regards individual “sacrifice” as necessary to community, such as being prepared to defend the community in emergency and to forgive other members on a daily basis. Faith helps to find the teleology in this sacrifice. Such faith does not need to be religious, but religion helps, by making faith doctrinaire.

Certainly we atheists can agree that the collapse of religion is associated with a collapse of community. At risk of transposing too much of myself, I keep wondering whether nostalgia for community is Scruton’s core driver towards religion.

In this book, Scruton describes the “core” of religion as “the religious thought – the aboutness of the urge to sacrifice, of the need to worship and obey, of the trepidation of the one who approaches holy and forbidden things and prays for their permission.” This statement is beautiful but circular. It is also personal, at least in phenomenological terms. Scruton’s subjectivity is both liberating and frustrating. Subjectivity is fairer in philosophy than science, and Scruton had right to continue with it, but he shies from making explicit his personal religious experience or views.

Increasingly in this book, Scruton refers to the “transcendental,” for which he seems to draw on personal experiences, without admitting them. In the final chapter, he refers to “the supernatural” too, where humans search for “reasons and meanings” beyond the “natural” causes of real things. He refers also to a “domain” beyond nature and an “afterlife.” In this final flourish, he admits these things as articles of faith, although he still leaves them as prerogatives (and thus avoids endorsing them).

Many of the reading group’s participants knew Scruton, but none recalled any personal transcendentalism. O’Hear told me that Scruton never discussed transcendental experiences, but clearly was “overwhelmed” by some of the classical music concerts they attended. Music is central to the book: Scruton uses it from Chapter 2 onwards, and dedicatedly in Chapter 7, to illustrate an “I-You experience” that parallels what we seek in a god. Music is not a being, but we relate to it as if it speaks to us, moves us, comforts us, accompanies us...

[Read the rest of this review at https://thecritic.co.uk/rogers-religion/

[Jonathan Hockey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book good in many ways in its critique of the pure naturalistic approach to all human problems. The person we know in our interpersonal relations cannot be reduced to the human being as a part of the order of nature. To keep these two things separate Scruton suggests his view of cognitive dualism. A dualism between the world of interpersonal meaning and the natural world. He makes good arguments in support of this view and also acknowledges its limitations in certain areas regarding death and god, where we come up against an unknowable mystery. Death ends the physical human being, but what happens to our emergent life world of interpersonal meaning at this event. And how can we give a meaning to such a blunt physical termination? I think we see here a limitation of this view which is that it leaves some things inexplicable precisely by creating this dichotomy between two areas that cannot overlap causally or interact in anyway.

On the other hand his suggestions regarding the sacred, music, sacrifice and that our interpersonal relations must go beyond mere contractual obligations within a society, towards unconditional gifts, responsibilities and vows I find to be a useful conceptual framework within which to approach some of the problems in our society that has objectified the other too much, turning our relationships with the lifeworld into unhealthy addictions. His reliance on Sartre for much of his positive analysis of the interpersonal world, I find to be a weakness though in this work also. This notion of a transcendental self confronting a world makes interaction with it liable to the dramatic extremes of void, sacrifice, faith etc, if this how you perceive things. But, say if we see the self not as transcendent, but as embodied, we can place our interpersonal relationships a bit less dramatically so to speak, and a bit more humanistically. Yes, the danger here is we lose a point of orientation, a pivot point, that the transcendent self provides. We lose a special claim to universality in our reasonings in some areas, but I think the reality of the situation compels us to this position in some ways...

Regardless of these specific complexities, the general idea that we must understand the interpersonal world of meaning on its own terms, and not let it be reduced to an objectification along the lines of some evolutionary adaptation in our history, is a critical insight for the future conservation of our society, and of just how dangerous it is to attempt to reduce all to such things, purely for the sake of completeness, and out of a refusal to accept any mystery in the world, when clearly mystery remains, whether we are willing to acknowledge it or not.

[Ayezu Tamarapreye Okoko]

BOOK REVIEWER: OKOKO AYEZU TAMARAPREYE

BOOK TITLE:THE SOUL OF THE WORLD BY ROGER SCRUTON.

SYNOPSIS:-

This book is written as a response to the conflicts between Christianity, modern science, Islam and modern world looking at teachings of the bible,Qur'an and Buddhism.The book looks at faith and human challenges using philosophies, theories and arguments and their loopholes to justify certain positions and behaviours.A wide range of subjects are discussed such as sacrifice;sexual habits;religion;evolution; incest;reproduction; mathematics; response to temptation and taboo; the burden and torment of leadership;dualism belief that human is not one thing but two; consciousness as distinguished from self consciousness; life and obligations beyond social contracts;law;property ownership; music; fear of death; intentional relations with God;Joy because of disappointment;marriage; and religion as remedy for death and refusal to acknowledge departure of a loved one.

LESSONS LEARNT FROM THE BOOK READ:-

🖲️Desire of sacrifice as the core of religious experience in Muslims sacrifice of self for Allah;Christian religious claim of sacrifice of self over the sacrifice of another as victim of sacrifice explained in Durkheim account of religion not just encouraging and demanding sacrifice but showing consuming interest in the reproductive life of their members or one generation conceding victory to its successor at birth,coming of age,marriage and death.

🖲️Incest as an existential crime that changes what we are to ourselves and to others using Freud's reasons why incest is forbidden.

🖲️Altruism as judgment that what is bad for another is something that I have a motive to remedy and a dominant strategy in reproduction and the morality of thinking beyond our genetic needs.

🖲️Whether a God who exists outside space and time can influence the physical is depicted in Gods presence as the Shekinah or Shakhan expressed in the Bible and the Koran to mean the peace and comfort that comes from God concealed in the burning bush amongst other circumstance to the people.

🖲️Looking for God is not for the proof of his existence but to belong in Durkheim's theory even if the price is submission or Islam

🖲️That according to Durkheim , religion is a unified system of beliefs and practice relating to sacred things which are set apart and forbidden.They are forbidden to one but permitted to or demanded of another.

🖲️According to Girard that monotheistic religion as seen from the bible and Koran promise peace but also deeply implicated in violence.

🖲️Scapegoating as societies way of recreating difference and so restoring itself by uniting against the scapegoat thus being released from their rivalries and reconciled purging society of violence through his death.The scapegoat here is one marked by the community as an outsider and and not entitled to vengeance against it.

🖲️That through incest, kingship or worldly hubris the victim marks himself as an outsider.

🖲️Thr victim here is both sacrificed and sacred, the source of the cities plague and their cure(set apart and forbidden either of themselves or of others and in Durkheim' s theory an interest is shown in the Reproductive life of the individual: seen in the sacrifice of God in Christianity)

🖲️In judging religion, we are influenced by the extent of sacrifice they ask for whether they are of others or sacrifice of self and that this probably influenced Islamist martyrs.

🖲️Often when a faith community settles on some particular object ,rite or words as sacred,it loses the presence of the thing in question, which retreats into the eternal as did the God of Moses and Abraham when his temple was destroyed.

🖲️Koran and the Bible as proof of Gods absence, the trace left behind as he departed forever from our midst.

🖲️Sufis belief of the Koran that God is a friend who moves amongst us.

🖲️Religion helps us to be emotional towards a moral life that reveals its inner truth.

🖲️The Buddhists and the belief that the search for the foundation of the world is the search for the "I" that looks down on us from a point outside time.

🖲️For the Buddhist, to look for God is to look for the redeeming person, to whom you can entrust your life.

🖲️Persons are objects and subject, a someone and not just a something.

🖲️In this world of institution, laws and covenants, things exist and that their perpetuity depends on our acquiesce and social intentionality and our collective obligations.We cannot understand human life without understanding this.

🖲️That moral virtue and habit of obedience to moral law is an adaptation to be at an advantage in the game of life using the game theory and communities embracing death in furtherance of this does so in full consciousness of what it is doing because death is the honourable option.

🖲️The need for information, decoding same and the need for use of intentional language that describes the content of certain thoughts rather than the objects to which those thoughts refer.

🖲️Consciousness as a feature shared with other high animals and is not the real problem: self consciousness is.

🖲️That there is cognitive duality as one reality can be perceived in more than one way.

🖲️Our relations with God and fellow men are based on covenants in which each person is responsible for their actions.

APPLICATION OF LESSONS LEARNT:-

On the argument that if claimed rights such as reproaching a doctor for refusal to treat a patient are included in human right it will increase the power of the state which already has so much power and that they be left as they are as they are available without legal backing, this takes me back to the authors argument on social contracts and rights creating room for negotiation which I term exceptions.There should be exceptions in our moral obligations.

Secondly ,I am confused by the theories that places the one who chooses to be a King as one sacred and forbidden as this may seem as a fight against leadership except that one says he who chooses to lead has for the time being so sacrificed himself.This however is a difficult one.

On Rumi and the feeling of joy when disappointment comes not being joy in the face of disappointment but joy because of disappointment and that relinquishing something is blessing in disguise.By application one can say most disappointment are indeed blessings.

[Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I have gotten to the point at which I can follow the thinking of philosophers like Scruton, I do not exactly enjoy the verbal dissection of life's mysteries. However, this is my problem, not the author's so the two stars are strictly my reaction, not a measure of the book's quality for someone else.

[Justinian the Great · Rating 1 out of 5]

He didn't take many things into consideration here.

[Jung]

Cognitive dualism allows us to see the same world in two different ways: the way of science and the way of interpersonal understanding. The latter is concerned with the Lebenswelt, or world of life. In this view, persons are treated as free subjects who can explain the reasons for their actions rather than as biological organisms whose actions can be explained by a chain of causality. Modern societies tend to forego the Lebenswelt in favor of the biological lens, but this is a tragedy – it causes us to view one another as objects rather than subjects. The author argues that it’s only through religion that we can reorient our attitudes toward meaning, gain a moral education, and confront the most difficult and important crises in our lives.

---

Religion is a search for intersubjective encounters with the transcendental.

A particular religious problem has plagued the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions for millennia. And that’s the problem of God’s “real presence.”

According to the Old Testament, God is present in the physical world and communicates directly with believers. Yet, paradoxically, he also transcends the physical world, existing outside of space and time – which means he can’t be part of this reality.

People who believe in God understand that they can’t experience him directly. However, a core part of religion is that very experience. It happens through all the phenomena of faith, including rituals, prayers, and encounters with the sacred. Through these experiences, people seek a kind of interpersonal encounter with God.

The key message here is: Religion is a search for intersubjective encounters with the transcendental.

It’s easier to understand a religious person’s posture toward God if we compare it to the way a practitioner of ceremonial magic might address the natural world.

We can imagine a magician trying to summon occult powers to cast a spell. When he does this, he addresses the natural world as if it were a person and tries to assert his will over it.

When religious people address God, they aren’t attempting to bend his will to theirs. But, similar to the magician, they experience the thing they’re addressing as a subject – a person who can be communicated and reasoned with, and who can respond to demands. That’s why religious people aren’t concerned with proof of God’s existence, per se. They’re looking for a subject-to-subject encounter with him.

The search for God, then, is the search for a transcendent, timeless person. But that leaves us with a simple yet baffling question: What exactly is a person?

Philosophers have theorized about this for eons, of course, but we’ll define persons as entities that straddle the line between object and subject. In other words, persons are objects – things that can be acted upon by the world. But they also refer to themselves in the first person –⁠ as “I” –⁠ which makes them subjects.

Persons’ behavior can be described in two ways. The first is through the biological or physical lens, which treats them as objects at the mercy of various outside forces. The other is the lens that treats them as subjects –⁠ the one that asks the question “Why?” It examines the motivations behind a person’s intentions, beliefs, or desires – rather than their causes – and treats their behavior as something that can be understood rather than explained.

This distinction points at two ways of viewing the world –⁠ a cognitive dualism. Let’s dive deeper into that idea.

[Robert Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was published in 2014 and is based on a series of lectures Scruton gave at Cambridge in 2011. Perhaps because of its origin as a series of lectures or perhaps just because it’s a logical arrangement of ideas, the book is divided into chapters on the subjects of God, People, the Brain, the First-Person Plural, Each Other, the Earth, Music, and finally returning once again to the idea of God. Those contents, and particularly using conceptions of divinity as bookends, reveals fundamentally what Scruton is on about here. He’s exploring human experience of the sacred from an artistic and philosophical perspective.

As he puts it in his own words in the introduction, “My intention has been to draw on philosophical discussions of mind, art, music, politics, and law in order to define what is at stake in the current disputes over the nature and ground of religious belief. I regard my argument as making room, in some measure, for religious worldview, while stopping well short of vindicating the doctrine or practice of any particular faith.”

And it’s a much-needed argument indeed. While also forcing myself to stop well short of arguing for or against any particular religious viewpoint or doctrine, the psychological experience of religion has long been a subject of great interest to me. Scruton’s perspective is a little bit different, though. He seems to be connecting the experience of the sacred to something even more abstract or more fundamental than religion itself. He seems to be arguing for a view of the sacred as an inherent component of human experience, often but not always connected with religious faith, that has been too-often neglected in contemporary society.

It's an unfortunate reality that much of our art, for instance, has gotten ugly and meaningless. Now don’t get me wrong. I enjoy a good piece of mindless schlock just as much as the next guy, so I’m not trying to pick any fights here. But I’ve noticed a trend of late in which people are drawn more to cheap and easy entertainment instead of anything that dares challenge the intellect. Authors churn out formulaic novels guaranteed to sell enough copies to pay the rent and then immediately be forgotten. Hollywood cranks out soulless films that cost an obscene fortune to produce but leave people feeling like they wasted two hours of their lives. And don’t even get me started on architecture. And it’s not just the content of our media that seems to be to blame. Though Scruton never reaches this argument himself, it seems to me that our digital-only world of ebooks and streaming movies threatens to devalue our art because of its impermanence and intangibility.

Scruton’s book offers a desperately needed push in the opposite direction. Through discussions ranging from art and music to philosophy and politics to science and psychology, he presents a view of a world in which we continue to strive for and experience something sacred. Something, regardless of one’s own religious views, we might consider akin to divinity. And though his book isn’t exactly light reading and occasionally tumbles down an intellectual rabbit hole, it’s always ready to pull the reader back with a poetic turn of phrase that may not always express a truly original thought but certainly causes the reader to think about the familiar in a productively novel manner.

This is a highly recommended read. In fact, given the urgency of Scruton’s message these days, I’d consider it required reading for anyone with even the slightest hint of intellectual curiosity about the human experience.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hidden beneath nearly all modern perspectives of life, are histories of philosophical thought. During the last 100 years, unnoticed by most, the foundation of "common" understanding has become dominated by a monolithic idea - all that is, is material. And, as material existing in cause-effect relationships, the explanation of existence is simply a map of the "what" and "how" elucidated (exclusively) by science. The body is a machine (and object), relationships are transactions of mutual benefit or contract, the earth is a machine in which we dwell, emotion a sum of biochemistry etc. "Value" is derived from utility. The question of "why" is archaic and senseless.
This relatively new foundation for human "understanding" explains music as sounds in pitches at frequencies, it explains smiles as a selectively advantageous product of social evolution and so on. It eliminates an absolute reference point for morality, does not support the notion of personal freedom or agency or accountability, nullifies any basis for discerning quality in art or creative works and, of course, relegates the notion of god, particularly a personal one. Among the many casualties of materialist philosophy (no serious thinkers bother labeling it "materialist", that is foregone) is the idea of the sacred.
Scruton, in The Soul of the World, patiently develops an argument for the existence of two aspects of life, the a priori existence of material which emerges into a space of meaning, agency and personhood called lebenswelt (life-world). He presents a cohesive case for seeing two aspects of reality, a cognitive dualism, and places the sacred on the boundary between the transcendent and the material.
Scruton's philosophies, while not strictly Christian, are a much-needed defense of sanity. Not a defense of the "spiritual", certainly not of "religion", but of sanity. Scruton opens a space of understanding that is necessary for humanity to regain a basis for seeing individuals as persons with freedom and will, for listening to music (not just hearing sound), for affirming meaning, and entering into relationship (I-you, subject to subject) with one another and with god.
Although Scruton writes in accessible language, readers unfamiliar with philosophical texts may find The Soul of the World difficult to follow. Likewise, Christian readers should recognize that the plane of Scruton's thought incorporates Christian views but also exceeds, and sometimes negates, them.

[Lewis Whelan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Philosophy, for Roger Scruton, is the seamstress of the *Lebenswelt*, not the handmaiden of the sciences. Soul of the World is Scruton's attempt at repairing the tears in the *Lebenswelt* - our shared phenomenological world. This work is thus an attempt to reconnect philosophy to the human world: the world as it appears to us.

The book presents and defends *cognitive dualism*. The lead thesis is that we are in possession of two incommensurable conceptual schemes. Our concepts can be divided, that is, into two classes: the interpersonal/religious and the explanatory/scientific. The first class - concepts like I, you, we, the face, melodies, God, reasons - are meaningful to us because of the form of life to which we belong, wherein we address one another (and our environment) in a manner of mutual accountability. Whereas the second class - concepts like atoms, causes, information - are meaningful insofar as they reduce the world to more basic components and thereby explain it. The former, Scruton argues, are *not* reducible to the latter.

The book takes the form of a transcendental argument, drawing on all aspects of the human world - art, literature, music, interpersonal relations, and architecture - to point toward a new way of looking at the world and our place in it. Scruton employs linguistic analysis and phenomenology - and an impressive grasp of music, literature, and architecture - to suggest that humane phenomena cannot be reductively explained by more basic scientific concepts. The upshot of the argument is that all the things that matter to us disappear on a purely materialist view of the world, and that we ought to reconcile ourselves to the mysteries of the first-person perspective. Indeed, interpersonal concepts turn out to be an irreplaceable feature of living as a member of a human community.

Scruton's humane philosophy won't convince hard-headed sceptics, and nor will his utilisation of phenomenology appeal to hard-line analytic types. But a thorough and fair-minded engagement with this text suggests that the sacred elements of human life certainly *do* pose us with a mystery that no amount of science will resolve. It is the recognition and ritualisation of this mystery that Scruton thinks is key to reconciling us to our place in the scheme of things. In this sense, cognitive dualism can be interpreted as a thesis of existential significance.

When all is said and done, the interpersonal perspective stains everything that it touches - from the way we design our buildings, to the creation of artistic artefacts, to our response to the melodic line. Soul of the World patiently draws out the connections between that perspective - *our* perspective - and the sacred; and in so doing locates God among our most familiar living moments. Scruton's God is of a kind with Spinoza's; but while Spinoza identifies God with the world itself, Scruton argues that God is woven into the *Lebenswelt* - the phenomenological spaces that we as persons inhabit.

This is a technical text, that will challenge those who are uninitiated in philosophy. But it will reward the attentive reader in numerous ways. Most prominently, with a familiarity of Scruton's sense-making enterprise. An enterprise that promises a whole new perspective on the world. Apart from philosophical interest, though, the sheer breadth of Scruton's erudition and his writing style alone are more than worth the effort. In the final analysis, Soul of the World is a book for those looking to make sense of things, and engagement with Scruton's perspective - though eccentric - is always time well-spent.

Soul of the World remains a touchstone for me. I have consulted it many times, and each time I have learned something new. My conception of philosophy was radically challenged by this book, and Scruton still exerts a profound degree of influence over my thinking on religious and metaphysical themes.

[Iancu S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-written and often profound - it continues in the same vein as his "Human Nature", making the case for an alternative understanding of notions like personhood and values, over and above (or orthogonal to) a reductive materialism. Occasionally, the sections on music felt a bit schoolmaster-ish, to me (even though I am a musician), but overall, well worth a read.

Some snippets I enjoyed:

• Personhood is an “emergent” feature of the human being in the way that music is an emergent feature of sounds: not something over and above the life and behavior in which we observe it, but not reducible to them either. -p. 74

• Ideas of the self and freedom cannot disappear from the minds of the human subjects themselves. Their behavior toward each other is mediated by the belief in freedom, in selfhood, in the knowledge that I am I and you are you and that each of us is a center of free and responsible thought and action. Out of these beliefs arises the world of interpersonal responses, and it is from the relations established between us that our own self-conception derives – p. 70-1

• Sometimes an intentional action is preceded by a decision or choice, certainly; but usually the action is the choice. And what makes it intentional is not that it arose in a particular way, but that the subject can say on no basis that I did this, or am doing this, and in doing so make himself accountable for it. To say that we are free is to point to this fact: namely, that we can justify and criticize our actions, lay claim to them as our own, and know immediately and with certainty what we will do—not by predicting what we will do but by deciding to do it. (Hence Anscombe’s idea that intentional action is distinguished by the application of a “certain sense of the question ‘why?’ ”.)19 Freedom emerges from the web of interpersonal relations, and comes into being as a corollary of “I,” “you,” and “why?” -75-6

• free choice is not the only material from which the realm of duties is built. – 95

• This is the truth that surfaces are deep. Enfolded within the glance, the blush, the kiss, and the smile are those layers of being that are more easily set out in Hegel’s way, through a myth of origins, than in the way familiar to analytical philosophers. - 118

• we understand what an acorn is only by understanding what it becomes – 123

• “Surely the power of tragedy consists not, as Aristotle argued, in arousing and purging pity and fear, but in showing that we humans can face annihilation, and yet retain our dignity as free, self- conscious beings: that we can face suffering and death as individuals, and not merely as lumps of flesh” - 184