Roger Scruton Quotes on Knowledge
Roger Scruton (1944–2020), the British conservative philosopher whose The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979), Modern Philosophy (1994), and the late The Soul of the World (2014) supplied late-twentieth-century Anglophone conservatism with one of its most rigorous philosophical voices, defended a distinctive analysis of the kinds of knowledge that resist the reductive ambitions of modern naturalism. The framework treats the phenomenology of the lived human world — personality, meaning, aesthetic value, the religious response, the experience of beauty — as irreducible to the third-person scientific image, with the consequent case that conservative political and cultural commitments are themselves rationally defensible as the protection of the conditions under which this lived knowledge is transmitted.
Quotes
-
“Culture is the way a society confronts the eternal questions: who we are, where we come from, and what we owe each other.”
A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political , legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge. -
“It goes without saying that apartheid is offensive. It was adopted, however, as the lesser of two evils. The Afrikaners believe that black majority rule has, in almost every case, led to the collapse of the constitutional government which they brought to South Africa , and upon which their freedoms and privileges – and perhaps even their lives – depend. And it did not seem so very bad to deny to b”
A lift at last for the other Afrikaners', The Times (17 May 1983), p. 12 -
“A developed legal system, with elaborate common law rights, and supported by a system of natural justice , was the most precious legacy of our empire . If it were still permissible to defend colonization , I should justify it in terms of this bequest, and at the same time contrast the colonization of Africa with the Soviet "colonization" of eastern Europe, which has advanced not by the generation ”
A colonial inheritance once again cast off', The Times (6 September 1983), p. 10 -
“Race is at best an influence on behaviour, not the moral source of it. It is the individual alone who acts, and he alone who should bear the benefits and the burdens of moral judgment. In all questions of right and duty, it is both wicked and nonsensical to refer to a person's race – whether the purpose be to accuse him, or to exonerate him. To do so is to place the crucial attribute of responsibi”
A socialist evil to rival racism', The Times (28 February 1984), p. 14 -
“Of course, there are those — Sandel , Walzer and Dworkin , for example — who propose "communitarian" ways of thinking, as a further move in the direction which a sophisticated liberalism requires. But none of them is prepared to accept the real price of community: which is sanctity, intolerance, exclusion, and a sense that life's meaning depends upon obedience, and also on vigilance against the en”
In Defence of the Nation', The Philosopher on Dover Beach (1990), p. 310 -
“How to be a Non-Liberal, Anti-Socialist Conservative," Intercollegiate Review: A Journal of Scholarship and Opinion (Spring 1993)”
An international socialism is the stated ideal of most socialists; an international liberalism is the unstated tendency of the liberal. To neither system is it thinkable that men live, not by universal aspirations but by local attachments; not by a “solidarity” that stretches across the globe from end to end, but by obligations that are understood in terms which separate men from most of their fel