book reviews | 323

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Beauty
roger scruton
oxford university press. 2009. pp. xi + 223. £10.99
(hbk).
In chapter 1 of his book on beauty Roger Scruton dis-
tinguishes two concepts of beauty. ‘In one sense
“beauty” means aesthetic success, in another sense it
means only a certain kind of aesthetic success’ (p. 16).
The kind in question is that sort of beauty which, as
Scruton puts it, takes our breath away, and he gives as
examples ‘Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Keats’s Ode to a
Nightingale or Susannah’s aria in the garden in
Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro’ (p. 16). One sees his
point. But he is not really concerned with this type of
beauty; his main concern lies with beauty ‘in its gen- Kant y páginas
que le dedica al punto
eral sense, as the subject-matter of aesthetic judge- de vista de Kant en la
belleza y el interés
desinteresado y el
ment’ (p. 17). Concerning this sense of the term placer.

‘beauty’, Scruton is attracted to a Kantian view and

devotes a few pages to exploring Kant’s view on
beauty and disinterested interest and pleasure (pp.
26–33). His remarks here in support of Kant’s posi-
tion are inconclusive, as they would have been had he
spent a great deal longer on them, since, as Scruton
acknowledges, Kant’s view are inevitably controver-
sial (p. 33). Indeed, Scruton goes on to say that he does
 324 | book reviews
not want to claim that Kant’s views here are right—
they just form a useful starting point for reflection on
the concept of beauty (p. 33). This is all to the good:
too often in philosophy one fails to see the wood, the
overall view or outlook, for the trees, the detail of in-
dividual arguments, which are unlikely to accepted
anyway if one does not find oneself in sympathy with
the general view being offered—and so going straight
for the big picture has a lot to be said for it. In Scruton’s
case, the big picture involves, amongst other things,
the idea of the sacred and the desire to feel at home in
the world:
We can wander through this world alienated, re-
sentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can
find our home here, coming to rest in harmony
with others and ourselves. The experience of
beauty guides us along the second path: it tells us
that we are at home in the world, that the world
is already ordered in our perceptions as a place
fit for the lives of beings like us. But . . . beings
like us become at home in the world only by ac-
knowledging our ‘fallen’ condition. . . . Hence
the experience of beauty also points us beyond
this world, to a ‘kingdom of ends’ in which our
immortal longings and our desire for perfection
are finally answered. . . . [T]herefore, the feeling
for beauty is proximate to the religious frame of
mind, arising from a humble sense of living with
imperfections, while aspiring towards the highest
unity with the transcendental. (pp. 174–175)
It is not entirely clear how this view fits in with Scru-
ton’s earlier remark that beauty can be, amongst other
things, disturbing, profane, and chilling (p. ix), but let
us leave that aside. The connection between beauty
and the religious had, in any case, already come out
earlier in the book, through reflection on the relation
between human beauty—the topic of chapter 2—and
the sacred. Scruton’s thought here finds its root—or,
Aquí encuentra
su raíz at any rate, one of its roots—in the experience of
sexual jealousy: the amante
jiltedabandonado
lover feels that his former
beloved has become ‘polluted or desecrated. . . . This
phenomenon parallels the sense of desecration
profanación
that
attaches to the misuse of holy things. Something held
apart and untouchable has been defiled . . . [For the
jilted lover, what] was most beautiful to him has been
spoiled’ (pp. 52–53). And beauty involves, in the case
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of human beings, so Scruton claims, the sense of the
‘transcendental subject’ (p. 53), or ‘the soul, the
psyche, the self’ (p .51). Beauty in a human being is
not just, or not really, the beauty of a body but the
beauty of the person as embodied (p. 47). Hence De ahí / por lo tanto
Scruton can write that ‘sexual interest, the sense of
beauty and reverence for the sacred are proximate
states of mind, which feed into one another and grow
from a common root’ (p. 57).
I suppose that it will be partly or evenly largely a
matter of temperament whether Scruton’s overall
view looks plausible to you, or even whether you want
it to look plausible. It is built partly on an understand-
ing of sexual desire which is, in my view, false—or,
more exactly, confuses sexual desire with erotic love.
For Scruton claims that sexual desire is determinate:
[T]here is a particular person that you want. Peo-
ple are not interchangeable as objects of desire,
even if they are equally attractive. You can desire
one person, and then another—you can even de-
sire both at the same time. But your desire for
John or Mary cannot be satisfied by Alfred or
Jane: each desire is a desire specific to its object,
since it is a desire for that person as the individual
that he is. (p. 44)
But while that may be true of erotic love or a sexual
desire which otherwise expresses a concern or care
for the other, this is surely not true of all sexual desire:
someone looking at pornography wants one or other of
those people represented, as Scruton knows (p. 185).
If you say that even in such a case the person in ques-
tion has a different desire for each person he sees, then
you are surely missing part of what pornography is
about and one of the things that makes it so troubling.
In any case, Scruton seems to admit this point when he
grants that ‘[t]here is a distinction, familiar to all of us,
between an interest in a person’s body and an interest
in a person as embodied’ (p. 47) . But if you are inter-
ested in a person’s body, as the consumer of pornog-
raphy is, then you are still experiencing sexual desire,

of course, but one that precisely is not focused on this
individual. Further, cases such as the sex-starved pris-
oner who longs for a woman surely cannot be accom-
modated by Scruton’s view, since the prisoner both
has a sexual desire and wants some woman or other: his
desire is not one for a given individual. Scruton could
deny the prisoner has a genuine sexual desire, but that
looks wildly implausible. In truth, Scruton is not really
telling what sexual desire is, but what it ought to be
(he later calls this desire ‘normal desire’, p. 159):
Humanity is a kind of extended rescue opera-
tion, in which drives and needs are lifted from
the realm of transferable appetites, and focused in
another way, so as to target free individuals, sin-
gled out and appreciated as ‘ends in themselves’.
(p. 46)
In reality, sexual desire can be (I do not say always is)
transferable—but erotic love is not. It is as if Scruton
is telling us that we should always be vigilant that our
sexual desires be ‘rescued’ from their nature as drives
and needs and transformed at every point into forms
of love. There is something lovely in that view—as
there is in so much of what Scruton says in this book—
but it seems to me clear that he is not providing a phil-
osophical analysis of the way the world is, but telling
us how he would like it to be.
Be that as it may, Scruton’s view of the connection
between beauty, sexual desire, and the sacred repre-
sents not something that could possibly be arrived at
by any argument, let alone one of the kind that (ana-
lytic) philosophers like to employ. And, in truth,
Scruton is not really articulating an argument at these
points in his book so much as conveying a world-
view, a general outlook on things. It is, as I have al-
ready suggested, a lovely view, even noble in its
aspiration, and one must be grateful to Scruton for
articulating it, but one wonders whether something
that goes by the name of ‘philosophy’ is really the
best way of conveying this view. Those who look for
tight argument in the style of analytic philosophy will
be disappointed, I think, and those others, such as
myself, who are sceptical about that kind of argument
from the first, will wonder whether Scruton’s view
book reviews | 325
would not be better conveyed in some other way, a
way in which the content did not come up against the
form or style so markedly. For one of the things with
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which Scruton is grappling at least some of the time,
implicitly and at a level just below the surface of the
text, is how he could articulate his view in the terms
available in contemporary philosophy. In my view, it
is clear that Scruton’s range of emotional and spiri-
tual sympathies, his sense of the human condition,
and the range of concepts to which he would like to
appeal, burst the bounds of what is available in phi-
losophy to such a degree that he shows, not only the
richness and complexity of his own mind and tem-
perament, but also the limitations of that philosophy.
All of this connects in various complicated ways
with Scruton’s claim that the pursuit of beauty and the
pursuit of truth can come into conflict: ‘The love of
myths, stories and rituals, the need for consolation
and harmony, the deep desire for order all have drawn
people to religious beliefs regardless of whether those
beliefs true’ (p. 3). Scruton is walking on shaky ground
here, and he knows it. It is hard to resist the thought
that underlying Scruton’s view is a horrible fear that a
kind of Schopenhauerean–Nietzschean view of things
might be right, and that one has to find ways of avert-
ing one’s gaze. The experience of beauty helps us do
this. Scruton is, so far as one can tell on the evidence
presented here, one of the disinherited minds that Er-
ich Heller so acutely analysed: a mind longing for faith
in a world hostile to belief and divided in itself be-
tween a remorseless intellect which tells us ‘that we
are not very reliably at home/in the interpreted world’
as Rilke has it (Duino Elegies, ‘First Elegy’) and a soul
that wants to believe otherwise.
If we were to believe ourselves at home in the
world, then the experience of the beauty of the natu-
ral world might help and Scruton devotes his third
chapter to such beauty. As Scruton writes: ‘The expe-
rience of natural beauty . . . contains a reassurance that
this world is a right and fitting place to be—a home in
which our human powers and prospects find confir-
mation’ (p. 65). Having dismissed the attempt by the
‘Marxist tradition’ (p. 62) to suggest that the experi-
ence of natural beauty is really a matter of interpreting
326 | book reviews
the natural world in ‘bourgeois’ terms, and having
made one or two remarks about the notion of the sub-
lime, Scruton again suggests a connection between the
beautiful and the sacred by saying that reflection on
the beauty of the natural world ‘raises, for us, the root
question of theology, namely, what purpose does this
beauty serve?’ (p. 78). Of course, it is true that one
can be struck by the gratuitousness of the beauty of
the natural world, but one might think nonetheless
that it serves no purpose at all, even if we have a ten-
dency to think it does. Scruton could say that it is
God’s purpose, and I cannot help feeling that this is
what he wants to say but cannot quite bring himself to
say—here, in this context, at any rate. It is odd, in any
case, that he does not explore at this point some of the
profound things that, for example, Simone Weil has to
say about natural beauty, which she thinks of as God’s
trap or snare (piège) for us, and its connection with the
religious sensibility.
Chapter 4 of the book continues the theme con-
cerning how we might find ourselves at home in the
world, pointing out ways in which ordinary, everyday
attention to aesthetic matters—the design of doors,
buildings and furniture, the planting and design of gar-
dens, the setting of the table for a meal, and so on—
can contribute to this. Chapter 5 rehearses some
well-known distinctions in aesthetics—content and
form; representation and expression—serving as a
kind of swift introduction to these topics. In addition,
Scruton suggests that we can only really explain artis-
tic meaning through connecting works of art to human
action, life, and emotion. This will sometimes be
through figurative language—metaphor, simile, per-
sonification, and so on (pp. 123–124)—and some-
times through placing ‘two things side by side, using
no figure of speech, but simply letting the experience
of one leak into the experience of other’ (p. 124).
There is, in my view, much plausibility in this, and,
indeed, I would be inclined to say that Scruton himself
does this kind of thing a great deal when he is explor-
ing the relation between the beautiful and the sacred—
which is partly why I said earlier that he is not really
offering an argument for his view (in one sense at least
of the term). Chapter 5 also contains some extremely
interesting and profound remarks about the point of
art: ‘Art answers the riddle of existence: it tells us why
we exist by imbuing our lives with a sense of fitting-
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ness’ (p. 128). He gives Schubert’s Winterreise as an
example: when rejected in love one can, says Scruton,
through this music, come to see one’s loss as necessary,
as a form of suffering that is no longer arbitrary. This,
he says, is consoling.The point is elusive but wonderful
and I cannot do justice to it here. Suffice it to say
that it provides, surely, the best short commentary on
Nietzsche’s claim that ‘Only as an aesthetic phenomenon
is [sic] existence and the world eternally justified’ that
is not a commentary on that claim. Or, at any rate,
one’s own existence and world.
In chapter 6 Scruton is worried about the justifica-
tion of judgements of taste and the question of objec-
tivity, but the chapter, though suggestive, is too brief
to deal with the matter in any detail. In any case, this
issue, along with the parallel issue in ethics concerning
the objectivity of moral judgements, seems to me to
be badly misconceived by philosophers, who are
haunted in this area by the image of empirical claims,
wanting the same kind of certainty in ethics and aes-
thetics as there is there (hence, for example, the com-
parison between the colours of objects and moral and
aesthetic properties, which Scruton, along with many
other philosophers, appeals to (p. 143)). But if I am
sure, as I am, that the music of Bach is greater than that
of U2, to take one of Scruton’s examples (p. 133),
what does it do for me if I insist, or claim that I have a
philosophical argument to show, that this is because
‘[b]eauty is . . . firmly rooted in the scheme of things’
(p. 147)? If you cannot hear the wonder of Bach’s
work and prefer U2, then my having that conviction
about the scheme of things will do nothing to get you
to hear things otherwise: only listening carefully, com-
paring, discussing, and so on, will do that, if anything
does, as Scruton points out (pp. 137–140). But if you
come to agree with me after all, then nothing is
achieved by saying that now, at last, you are properly
responsive to the scheme of things: that is just a round-
about way of saying that you agree with me, for good
reasons, that Bach’s music is greater than that of U2.
This is not to deny that one can say that it is true that

Bach is greater than U2. It is to resist a philosophical
construal of what that is, which is, I think, little more
than an intellectual enterprise on my part to convince
me, and those who agree with me, that we are right. It
is a form of self-reassurance which is, as Adorno
pointed out, the kind of thing that philosophy, in its
best forms, should aim to undermine.
Chapter 7 returns to the relation between art, sex-
uality, and beauty, containing a delightful short discus-
sion of the nude in art, and making some comments
on soft pornography. Chapter 8, the penultimate chap-
ter before the few concluding thoughts in chapter 9, is
a kind of manifesto of culture, defending once again
the ideas of the sacred and the beautiful, and express-
ing not only contempt for the seemingly limitless trash
book reviews | 327
and kitsch by which we are surrounded in modern
culture, but also a sense that modern people love
desecrating their world. There is, beneath Scruton’s
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optimistic, rather upbeat Kantian-inspired talk of us as
free, rational beings, a melancholy, gloomy, suspicious,
even somewhat misanthropic attitude towards human
beings. This is not a criticism, but somehow or other
one feels that Scruton has not made his peace with
these conflicting attitudes. That is probably one of the
things that makes him the kind of philosopher whose
work is most emphatically worth reading.
Christopher Hamilton
King’s College London
christopher.hamilton@kcl.ac.uk
doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayq013