A review of Roger Scruton's "The Soul of the World", written for The Salisbury Review

Roger Scruton

A few months before I was due to start at university I decided to switch my course from English to Philosophy. I wrote to my college, and I got a letter back asking me to produce a critique of A.J. Ayers’ 1936 logical positivist classic, Language, Truth & Logic. I found the book on my brother’s bookshelves and got stuck in. If you don't know the book, it's as breezily readable as philosophy gets. Ayer expresses himself with such extraordinary clarity that his arguments were immediately graspable even by an ignorant 18-year old. The disconcerting thing was his dismissal of statements which couldn’t be empirically verified or which weren’t tautologous as literally meaningless, and therefore, as far as Ayer was concerned, of no interest to philosophers.

The problem for me was that this suggested I’d have to spend the next three years not studying any of the things I'd rather imagined philosophy concerned itself with, including religion, ethics and aesthetics. If this bugger Ayer had decided that the answers to the great mysteries of life didn’t matter, why was I switching?

Nevertheless, I wrote the essay and my request to change courses was accepted. I’d calmed down a bit by the time I arrived at university, having dipped into a few more of my brother’s philosophy books, and having discovered that, despite Ayer’s best efforts, others were still indulging in the sort of metaphysical vapourings of which young Freddie (he'd written the book at the age of 25) had disapproved. But what about my supervisor, Roger Scruton, the chap who’d asked me to read Language, Truth & Logic? To which side of the metaphysical/empirical divide did he “dress”? The answer, fortunately, turned out to be “both”: he definitely worked within the British analytical philosophy tradition, but, as revealed by the title of his first book, Art & Imagination, published the year he had the honour to start teaching me, his real interest lay in those areas of conjecture declared out of bounds by those of a fiercely empiricist persuasion.

I was reminded of all this recently when I was asked by that august journal, The Salisbury Review, to review Scruton’s The Soul of the World, published earlier this year. Climbing back into the philosophy saddle proved more challenging than I’d expected, and may very well have resulted in some cranial bleeding: but it was as rewarding an experience as  those mind-bending, horizon-stretching, life-enriching one-to-one tutorials I was privileged to attend more than 40 years' ago. Here it is:

The Soul of the World, Roger Scruton, Princeton University Press, 2014, £19.95

In the four decades since the publication of his first book, Art & Imagination, Roger Scruton has philosophised about the sort of things that gives our lives meaning – including sex, morality, wine, music, politics, architecture, and, increasingly of late, religion. The Soul of the World, which represents an elegant weaving together of a number of Scruton’s long-term themes, focuses primarily on the religious impulse. Rather than promoting belief in a particular religion, it puts the case for maintaining a religious view - specifically, for retaining the concept of the sacred, without which we find ourselves in a world drained of meaning, one in which ‘we humans are not truly at home.’

Science and its pseudo-scientific handmaiden, evolutionary psychology, seek to dismiss religious belief as nothing more than an adaptive evolutionary strategy. According to this view, religion has served its evolutionary function and is now a positive force for harm. Those clinging to the old dispensation are enemies of human progress. The unenlightened among us must face the fact that science alone is capable of explaining our world to us.

This variety of hard-core reductivism jettisons what it insists are myths regarding human activity – for example, that we are essentially free agents capable of making decisions based on our reason - preferring instead to delve beneath the chimerical layer of mere appearance to reveal the blind neurological processes that actually decide our behaviour. At a stroke, human beings are reduced to the status of bacteria observed through a microscope, objects acting under the laws of cause and effect. For some reason, we’re supposed to adopt this unappealing view of ourselves, wipe what Freud called “the mud of occultism” from our boots, and embrace the truth that we are simply animals ‘swimming in a sea of causality’.

The problem with the claim that evolution offers a comprehensive explanation of human behaviour is that it does no such thing: ‘We pursue the true, the good, and the beautiful, even though the false, the nasty, and the messy might have been just as useful to our genes.’ Presumably this is why our anti-religious left-liberal establishment has redefined the good as whatever promotes the modern religion of equality, lavishes subsidies on art which does dirt on the human spirit while ignoring work which even hints at traditional concepts of beauty, and prefers to see truth as culturally relative.

Moral thinking is a particular problem for science’s claim to explain the world of human interactions – what Husserl termed the Lebenswelt. People are impelled to do what they think they ought to do – “But it is the moral judgment, rather than some blind instinct, that compels them.” Are we seriously expected to view our moral judgments as a by-product of our species’ struggle for survival? Well, yes, we are. This bracing approach – ‘nothing buttery’, as it’s commonly known – doesn’t only make a nonsense of morality: ‘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… the Mona Lisa is nothing but the spread of pigments on a canvas, the Ninth Symphony is “nothing but” a sequence of pitched sounds of varying timbre.’

So widespread and so pernicious is this view that Scruton concludes ‘Getting rid of this habit is, to my mind, the true goal of philosophy’ and seeing through it ‘is the first step in the search for God.’

To counter ‘nothing buttery’, Scruton advocates cognitive dualism, by which he means that there are two ways of viewing the world: the scientific, which looks for causal explanations of our behaviour, and the human, which looks for reasons. ‘We live on the surface and 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.’ Not only does a purely scientific outlook have nothing interesting to say about our interactions with others, it can’t even begin to tackle the religious impulse which has been a defining characteristic of humanity throughout its existence:  ‘God disappears from the world as soon as we address it with the “why?” of explanation, just as human persons disappear from the world, when we look for the neurological explanation of their acts.’

If the religious impulse and the very idea of God are dismissed as anachronisms, the concept of the sacred becomes redundant. This desacrilisation of the world, would, according to Scruton, lead to our dehumanisation (to a large extent, it already has): ‘Through sacred things we can be can influence and be influenced by the transcendental. If there is to be a real presence of the divine in the world, it must be in the form of some sacred event, moment, place, or encounter…’ The possibility of contact with the transcendental imbues our everyday lives and the objects and people we encounter with a meaning, a reality, they otherwise wouldn’t possess. The search for God, Scruton argues, is a search for a subject like ourselves: we are seeking an encounter with another “I” rather than with some impersonal object or force. It is this sense of God as a subject which allows us to view other people as subjects.

Without a sense of the sacred, our route to God is blocked. As a consequence,  other people become mere objects to be exploited for our own personal ends. The resulting lack of respect and empathy for others destroys our sense of obligation to the past (our ancestors) and to the future (our heirs). Our immediate environment – human and natural – is there to be plundered for our immediate gratification rather than cherished, protected and passed on to future generations. Locked inside our own little sliver of time, traditional obligations become a matter of contracts (think of the way pre-nuptial agreements make a mockery of marriage vows made before God), human relations become the stuff of barter and exchange, ugly inhuman buildings replace the courteous, humane architecture of previous eras, we are numbed by soulless industrial music created by software programmes, and the sole aim of modern art becomes to convince us that  humanity is essentially worthless, a harmful virus. Denigrating our search for God doesn’t elevate humankind’s status: it diminishes it.

The Soul of the World isn’t necessarily an easy book – hardly surprising, given that it represents arguably our era’s leading philosopher grappling with mankind’s greatest mysteries - but it is undoubtedly a profound, rewarding, and oddly moving one.

(The Soul of the World is available on Amazon (here). You can visit the Salisbury Review website here.)