The fact that Roger wrote on politics, wine, music, art, beauty, philosophy, religion, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Wagner, and other individuals and subject matter is a testament to his erudition not amateurism as unread critics might charge (which was all too common in critiques of Roger the great unlearned and unread, faking as if they were learned, assaulting a man who was unarguably learned and read). It was because he dared challenge the public leftwing orthodoxy by skewering leftwing icons in 1986: Thinkers of the New Left, now republished as Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands. Roger’s academic life came to an end not because of he lacked intellectual substance-far from it, the fact that even after he embarked on a career outside of the academy and still wrote well-received works on Kant, Spinoza, and introductions for Oxford University Press speaks for his intellectual depth. It is, then, appropriate that this short volume of essays begins with a distinction between the liar and the fake the liar is bad enough, the faker, worse-and Roger undresses the fake. Not merely because he was a self-declared conservative, but also because he wasn’t a “faker” in the intellectual life. In a world dominated by pseudo-intellectuals, almost all of whom are liberal or lefties, Roger stood apart. If people know anything about Roger Scruton it is that he was something of a conservative philosopher. As Murray notes, “After all, while other people might have been able to write one of his books, who else could have written them all?” As a former student of Roger’s, when asked what of the many voluminous works of the sage to read, where should I point them? His writings on Wagner? His writings on aesthetics and architecture? His writings on conservatism? What about wine? Perhaps this little volume now suffices. In the wake of Roger’s death in 2020, the British public and cultural intelligentsia lost a figure who was one of a kind. “Heretic might seem like a strong word to describe Roger Scruton,” writes Douglas Murray in his introduction to a new edition of Roger Scruton’s anthology of essays Confessions of a Heretic. And it is precisely this that engenders our unscrupulous favouritism – the favouritism that has made it a crime in my country to shoot a cat, however destructive its behaviour, but a praiseworthy action to poison a mouse, and thereby to infect the food-chain on which so many animals depend.Roger Scruton. And because of this we judge them purely in terms of their ability to share our domestic ambience, to profit from our affection, and from time to time to reciprocate it in their own mute and dependent way. They do not distinguish right from wrong they cannot recognise the call of duty or the binding obligations of the moral law. Elevated in this way to the plane of moral consciousness, they find themselves unable to respond to the distinctions that morality requires. But perhaps the greatest damage done by the idea of animal rights is the damage to animals themselves. “I have argued against the idea of animal rights elsewhere.5 My argument stems, not from a disrespect for animals, but from a respect for moral reasoning, and for the concepts – right, duty, obligation, virtue – which it employs and which depend at every point on the distinctive features of self-consciousness.
And”Ĭonfessions of a Heretic: Selected Essays Horses treated in this way are frequently discarded, like the dolls of children. Such a love takes no true note of the horse, and is quite compatible with a ruthless neglect of the animal, when it loses (as it will) its superficial attractions. The horse has become the object of a self-regarding love, a love without true care for the thing that occasions it. A person who lavishes this kind of affection on a horse is either deceiving himself or else taking pleasure in a fantasy affection, treating the horse as a means to his own emotion, which has become the real focus of his concern. A love that regards the horse as a play-thing, whose purpose is to satisfy the whims of a rider, to be an object of cuddling and caressing of a kind that the horse himself can neither reciprocate nor understand – such a love is a way of disregarding the horse. “Now it seems to me that there are bad ways of loving a horse: ways that are bad for the horse, and also bad for the one who loves him.
0 kommentar(er)
