The republication by Bloomsbury of the Irish philosopher and journalist Mark Dooley’s superb 2009 intellectual biography of Roger Scruton, Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach,should be warmly welcomed by all serious students and admirers of the late English philosopher and man of letters (the latter appellation was, Dooley tells us, Scruton’s preferred self-designation). The book was originally published at a time when Scruton was still subject to endless criticisms, almost all of them thoughtless, vituperative, and ideologically driven. “Misinterpretations and caricatures,” as Dooley rightly calls them, clouded the recognition of “the exceptional grace, virtue, and vision” that informed Scruton as a human being, writer, and philosopher.
Dooley’s great gift, then and now, was to appreciate that Scruton was that rare thinker who offered “love in place of hate, affirmation in place of repudiation, and hope in place of nihilism.” Dooley, as gifted a writer as Scruton himself, makes palpable the “joyful wisdom” that informed everything the English philosopher wrote. Dooley makes abundantly clear that Roger Scruton was the anti-nihilist par excellence. As Dooley says in the afterword to the 2024 edition of the book, Scruton wanted to restore the love of “existing things—of community, home, and settlement,” thereby helping to revivify Burke’s great primordial contract that connects the living to the dead and the yet-to-be-born. But in home and settlement and the ordinary experiences of life, Scruton found intimations of transcendence, of the “sacred,” as he called it, manifested in those places and moments where time mysteriously intersects with eternity. His philosophy took aim at what he so aptly called “the culture of repudiation” and the sundry forms of destruction and desecration that increasingly deform academic and intellectual life today. But in the end, Dooley tellingly adds, Scruton’s “was a philosophy of consolation for people tired of repudiation and rejection, of nihilism and naysaying.” Scruton’s repudiation of repudiation was always a form of affirmation and thus of hope.
The new edition of Dooley’s book includes a revised introduction, an afterword, and an expanded bibliography, material that serves as helpful bookends to the original volume which has been otherwise left untouched. Read in conjunction with Dooley’s 2016 volume, Conversations with Roger Scruton, and his 2022 collection of Scruton’s journalism, Against the Tide, the reader gains a rich and ample sense of Scruton’s remarkable achievement and intellectual itinerary. The reader can then turn to any of Scruton’s myriad books that both embody, and refract, his deepest insights from Sexual Desire (1986) to The Philosopher on Dover Beach (1990, revised 1997), Gentle Regrets: Thoughts From a Life (2005), A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism (2006), The Soul of the World (2014) and On Human Nature (2017), as well as his moving and profound novel about the intellectual underground during Czechoslovakia’s period of Communist captivity, Notes from Underground (2014)—a personal favorite of mine.
Other readers will have other favorites. But whatever Scruton book one chooses, from before or after 2009, separately and together they illumine profound and liberating insights that are explored with clarity and grace in Mark Dooley’s philosophically minded intellectual biography. Scruton found his Boswell, but one who is a philosopher and man of letters in his own right (Dooley is a Catholic thinker who began as an acolyte of Kierkegaard and Derrida). Dooley’s book is itself a work of restoration and an expression of deep affection and respect. Its tone, insights, and vision are richly Scrutonian.
Before we turn to the enduring insights of the thinker, it is important to encapsulate Scruton’s life and achievement as a whole with the help of Mark Dooley’s introduction. In a passage at the beginning of the book, Dooley aptly summarizes a series of Scrutonian paradoxes. The following encapsulates everything essential that needs to be said regarding them:
Sir Roger Scruton (1944–2020) was a most uncharacteristic contemporary intellectual; a philosopher of deep learning who spent much of his long career at war with the academy; a prolific author who eschewed the city for life on a farm, who hunted to hounds and wrote movingly on wine as that which comes wrapped in a ‘halo of significance;’ a conservative who rejected liberal internationalism, but whose outlook was genuinely cosmopolitan; a courageous activist expelled from Communist Czechoslovakia for daring to speak of hope at a time when none existed; … someone that “served a full apprenticeship in atheism,” but who, having pondered his loss of faith against the backdrop of advancing secularism, steadily regained it.
As Dooley rightly observes, Scruton “spent a lifetime, as he put it, seeking ‘comfort in uncomfortable truths.’” That is undoubtedly one of the sources of his appeal to so many readers searching for liberating truths in an age of repudiation.
Ideology and Scientism versus the Human Person
Dooley characterizes Scruton as a “philosopher of love” with no sentimentality or undue affectivity intended. Scruton was deeply wary of doctrines of “progress” and “liberation” since they tear us apart from traditions and a cultural and civilizational inheritance (and the enduring goods of human nature) that it is vital for us “to love and cherish.”Such traditions sometimes need to be reformed and reinvigorated by prudently adjusting to changing circumstances and by addressing and overcoming rank injustices. But to denounce the “common home” passed on with much sacrifice by our forebears as “oppressive,” “patriarchal,” and “exclusionary” is to display terrible ingratitude (and no small degree of hubris) by denying “absent generations a say in how we live now.” To say the least, such rank ingratitude hardly lays a viable foundation for justice and civic comity.
Dooley helpfully reminds his readers that Scruton’s conservatism (everyone who knows anything about Scruton knows he was a conservative of one kind or another) was philosophical as well as political. Scruton, indebted to Immanuel Kant in this crucial respect, defended the irreducible human person against the “repeated attempts” of revolutionary ideology and various forms of science and pseudo-science “to undermine it.” Dooley richly explains Scruton’s efforts to reconnect philosophy to life as it is experienced by human beings who are “persons” as well as “subjects” and who are thus “bearers of rights, responsibilities, duties, and claims.”
The inexorable “laws of nature” articulated by modern science cannot explain away the “I” that “is the defining feature of the human being.”
Unlike rocks, stars, or even animals, human persons live in a world marked by self-conscious “mutual accountability.” The inexorable “laws of nature” articulated by modern science cannot explain away the “I” that “is the defining feature of the human being.” Various forms of scientism and reductive materialism (including vulgarized neuroscience or “neurobabble” as Scruton sometimes contemptuously called it) try to “de-personalize or deface the world” as the revolutionary mindset of Communism did with murderous intent.
But we do not live in one homogenous world of objects devoid of all personality and responsibility. In the smile of another human being (an example loved by Scruton), we see not merely the movement of the face, of muscles and flesh and blood, but another person who “smiles back at us from beyond time.” When philosophy does full justice to the Lebenswelt or life-world, the world of ordinary experience, when it resists the ideological and scientistic temptations “to ‘peel back’ the personality of the world,” it allows us to experience, however fleetingly and mysteriously, genuine intimations of the sacred and transcendent.
Dooley quotes the final paragraph of Scruton’s magisterial 1986 essay “The Philosopher on Dover Beach” to great effect. In that essay, Scruton noted that the human “experience of the sacred is the sudden encounter with freedom; it is the recognition of personality and purposefulness in that which has no will.” Sacred rites and rituals, and civic ones, too, serve to remind us of “the point of intersection of the timeless with time,” an experience available to manifestly imperfect sinners as well as saints. “Without the sacred,” which is denied and warred upon by both ideologists and the purveyors of scientific reductionism, “man lives in a depersonalized world: a world where all is permitted, and where nothing has absolute value.” In the hubris of scientism, purblind self-deification, or collective “self-affirmation,” Scruton finds nothing but a “reckless superstition” at war with what he calls “the soul of the world” (his 2014 book by that name arguably serves as his philosophical masterpiece on these themes).
Scruton is a partisan of what Dooley calls “intentional understanding” where free and responsible persons refuse to be reduced to helpless objects, playthings of various determinisms that negate the human element, what Scruton from time to time calls, in a more traditional idiom, the soul. In his delightful and enchanting little book On Hunting, recently rereleased by St. Augustine’s Press, Scruton writes that the soul is defined by its “freedom, translucency, and moral presence,” palpable goods and realities “never mentioned in the book of evolution.” Scruton in no way denies the fact of evolution. But Darwinism, dogmatic to the core, has closed itself off to the “subjectivity of the world” which we experience “when we look at the world from ‘I’ to ‘I’.” Scruton devastatingly adds that “when you look on people as objects, then you see Darwin was right. When you look on them as subjects, you see the most important thing about them has no place in Darwin’s theory.” The same might be said of scientism in all its forms. As Plato already discerned, scientific materialism cannot account for the erotic quest of the knower, of the person who searches for the truth about the nature of things and the nature of the soul. It obscures the self or the soul and thus the quest for self-knowledge. But what is science without self-knowledge, without a serious and sustained effort to grasp human interiority, that of ourselves and others whom we encounter as embodied persons accountable to themselves and to other free and responsible human beings (and to a sense of overarching moral obligation we do not make or create)?
Against the Profanities of the Age
The central chapters of the book illustrate how Scruton applied his principles to the full range of human phenomena. Refusing to reduce human beings to the status of objects, or even to the status of somewhat more complex animals, he took pointed aim at the “pseudo-science of sexology” and the ubiquitous world of cyber-pornography. He defended the “intentionality” inherent in the sexual act, as in all quintessentially human phenomena, and thus saw human sexuality more as “an expression of interpersonal longing” than a form of animal rutting or even mere pleasure seeking. Pornography profanes and pollutes the sexual act, turning persons into mere pleasure-generating objects. Without a modicum of inner control, of civilized self-command, sexual eros loses its luster. Marriage ceases to be a “sacred obligation” worthy of deep commitment but also rich with enduring satisfaction. When all relations become contractual, when human beings are liberated from natural and conventional constraints, unhappiness is sure to follow. “Human joy does not result solely from the short-term sating of bodily appetite,” as Scruton states in a wise and lapidary formulation. As Dooley shows, Scruton’s thought points in a much more promising direction.
In a disciplined and attentive openness to aesthetic phenomena, Scruton saw a path for conveying and recovering “awe, wonder, and astonishment.” He saw in both architecture and music “objects of sympathy.” Aesthetics as Scruton saw it was “an attempt to save the sacred from the profanities of the present age.” But he doubted whether aesthetics could convey the truths of the soul when it cut itself off completely from the religious impulse to which it was initially connected. Still, if we can recover beauty in “the woods and streams of our native country, friends and family, the ‘starry heavens above,’” we are closer to finding “the true meaning of our lives on earth.” Scruton may have been excessively critical of popular culture (with its inherent tendencies toward vulgarity and egalitarian pandering), but he was right to affirm what was legitimate and noble in high culture, even if it, too, risks giving way to modernist complacency.
Scruton’s Conservatism
In a key chapter of the book, Dooley ably sketches the distinctive meaning of conservatism according to Scruton. With Burke, he opposed ideological despotism and “armed doctrine.” With Hegels The Philosophy of Right, he defended the concrete expressions of home (and civilized freedom) against dangerous and airy ideological abstractions. Scruton rejected social contract theory as historically untenable, and morally thin because too “individualistic” in its accounts of human freedom and obligation. Yet he greatly valued the achievements of bourgeois civilization and the precious inheritance that was the common law and Anglo-American constitutionalism. In socialism, he saw the seeds of servitude (in both theory and practice); in humane national loyalty, and the civil and political liberties that accompanied “territorial democracy,” he saw a form of governance that admirably escaped tribalism, religious sectarianism, and the threat of transnational despotism. He was deeply wary of the increasing bureaucratic heavy-handedness (and contempt for national sovereignty) of the European Union. Along with the French political philosopher Pierre Manent, he was, and remains, the greatest philosophical defender of national loyalty, rightly understood (for a representative example of his views on the nation, see Scruton’s 2017 book Where We Are: The State of Britain Now). His conservatism is marked by a balanced yet emphatic defense of both local and national attachments against the temptation to succumb to the chimera of “global citizenship.” And Scruton’s conservatism never lost sight of the indispensability of the old cardinal virtues (e.g. courage, justice, temperance, and prudence) and the noble Platonic concept, given renewed attention in our time by the Czech dissident-philosopher Jan Patoçka, of “care of the soul,” the imperative that lies at the heart of any true polis.
To love what is truly worthy of affirmation, is to oppose adamantly the impatience and even recklessness of a new human type, the activist intellectual turned hubristic social engineer.
From Dooley’s account, it becomes clear that, as of 2009, Scruton, like almost all of us, had excessive confidence in the capacity of the United States (and the American people) to resist the culture of repudiation and the assault on patriotic attachments of a traditional kind. Today, Scruton would be appalled by the significant advances wokeism has made in the United States, the sorry state of the American university, and the erosion of religious attachments among the American people (developments exceedingly well advanced by the time Scruton died in January 2020). He strongly supported Brexit but not the weak, hesitant, and ineffectual ways in which it was implemented. About all the above, Scruton’s instincts and judgments were sure and solid because they were rooted in a deep solicitude for the inherited goods that could be readily undermined but not easily rebuilt or replaced. To love what is truly worthy of affirmation is to oppose adamantly the impatience and even recklessness of a new human type, the activist intellectual turned hubristic social engineer. Scruton took informed and elegant aim at the irresponsibility of modern intellectuals in his 2015 book, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, a significant revision of a book originally published in 1985. It is obligatory, and delightful, reading for any student of Scruton’s thought.
One of the merits of Mark Dooley’s book is that it shows, faithfully following Scruton, how state socialism is the enemy of prudent environmental measures rooted in humane and responsible care for home; and that a defense of the market mechanism, as advocated by Scruton, does not entail turning a business into a “profit machine.” Profit comes when one is pursuing other goods with vigor, integrity, and vision. And as Scruton showed with clarity and moral insight in books like Animal Rights and Wrongs (1996, 2000), to avoid gratuitous cruelty towards animals, caring for our pets who take on some of the “personality” of the human world, and responsibly safeguarding natural animal habitats, has nothing to do with pretending that animals are persons, with corresponding rights and obligations. Scruton truly defended and embodied the juste milieu on these and other matters of contemporary importance. Scruton’s example reveals the intimate connection between authentic conservatism and tough-minded moderation. But those who succumb to, or remain tepid before, the culture of repudiation can hardly call themselves moderates or conservatives.
Above all, Dooley exposes the parti pris, and bad faith, of those commentators who insist that Roger Scruton always remained trapped in what he once called “his atheistic apprenticeship.” Dooley shows that Scruton’s turn toward the Christian religion was perhaps idiosyncratic but also substantive and sincere. In the “sacred,” in religious phenomena as such, the English philosopher saw a most welcome “fusing of the experience of beauty with the moral order.” Religion, more than philosophy, teaches self-absorbed human beings, “why our deepest longings will remain unsatisfied once we deny truth, goodness, and the beautiful.” In this elegant, thoughtful, and inviting book, Mark Dooley demonstrates how Roger Scruton did everything within his power to“rescue the sacred from the decline of religion.” Scruton repudiated repudiation with courage and impressive moral and intellectual integrity precisely because he loved persons and the civilization that created a home for them.