Sir Roger Scruton, Philosopher and Public Intellectual, Passes Away

The last six months have been tragic for academia, particularly in the humanities. January 12, 2020, marked the passing of Sir Roger Scruton, the accomplished British philosopher and aesthetician who was regarded, much like Harold Bloom — who passed away only a few months before on October 14, 2019— as a public intellectual par extraordinaire.

Scruton was widely regarded as a conservative philosopher and intellectual, but the vicious charge of elitism could not be levelled against him, for he was born and raised in inner-city Manchester, and went to grammar school on a generous scholarship, and continued to win another scholarship to Jesus College at Cambridge University, where he studied moral philosophy and graduated with a double first, the highest honours one could possibly achieve. He was a prolific writer, writing books spanning fiction, nonfiction, philosophy, and musical librettos, interspersed between regular columns in newspapers as hallowed as the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal.

It was only in France, seeing the violent uprisings of the French against their government, this time in 1968, that he avowed himself the conservative disposition that has caused so many of us to cherish his work:

I suddenly realised I was on the other side. What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans. When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook. I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defence of western civilisation against these things. That’s when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down.

The same event, readers will recount, radicalised Michel Foucault and created an entire school of postmodern philosophy, which is the bane of academia in the humanities and social sciences today. How Scruton managed to avoid radicalisation is a remarkable story in itself. What I remember and will miss Scruton the most, however, for is his contributions to aesthetics. He famously summarised his views in Beauty: A Very Short Introduction:

We praise things for their elegance, their intricacy, their fine patina; we admire music for its expressiveness, its discipline, its orderliness; we appreciate the pretty, the charming and the attractive — and we will often be far more confident in such judgements than in an unqualified assertion that a thing is beautiful. To speak of beauty is to enter another and more exalted realm — a realm sufficiently apart from our everyday concerns as to be mentioned only with a certain hesitation. [p. 11]

Scruton was an indefatigable defender of objectivism from the throes of constructivism and relativism. He reminded us when we needed it the most that there was, in fact, a real, objective world out there, with objective truth, goodness, beauty, and virtue, and fought the onslaughts of those who did not believe in the truth and sullied academic discourse with their meaningless meanderings.

He even saw the beauty of the small things in life. An ardent advocate of fox hunting, he left the UK for the USA to ensure he could continue with his hobby when it was outlawed in his home country. He was also a prolific pipe and cigar smoker, and famously wrote a 221 page love letter to wine.

Toward the end of his life, as attacks from the radical left continued to mount, Scruton published an article entitled ‘An Apology for Thinking’ in The Spectator. He points out:

We in Britain are entering a dangerous social condition in which the direct expression of opinions that conflict — or merely seem to conflict — with a narrow set of orthodoxies is instantly punished by a band of self-appointed vigilantes. We are being cowed into abject conformity around a dubious set of official doctrines and told to adopt a world view that we cannot examine for fear of being publicly humiliated by the censors. This world view might lead to a new and liberated social order; or it might lead to the social and spiritual destruction of our country. How shall we know, if we are too afraid to discuss it?