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Tradition and Modernity in Scruton's Aesthetics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 July 2019
Abstract
During the last century, most Western artists abandoned the traditional forms of Western art. Two closely related questions arise at once: why did artists do this, and were they right to? Scruton is famous for arguing that the answer to the latter question is no. His response to the former question is, by contrast, little known. In this paper, I investigate Scruton's discussions of it, arguing that a more complex and equivocal picture of the relationship between tradition and modernity quickly emerges. Scruton actually gives two mutually inconsistent genealogies of the flight from tradition. The first, surprisingly, is inconsistent with Scruton's defence of traditional forms, as well as with a number of his other commitments. The second coheres better with his other commitments, and on one version is consistent with his traditionalism. To vindicate his traditionalism this way, however, Scruton would be constrained to make an interesting and significant commitment.
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References
1 ‘Why Beauty Matters’, Roger Scruton, BBC, 28 November 2009; Scruton, Roger, Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (New York: Encounter Books, 2007)Google Scholar; Roger Scruton, ‘The Great Swindle’, Aeon, 17 December 2012 at https://aeon.co/essays [accessed on 25 November 2018].
2 Scruton, Roger, ‘The Aesthetic Endeavour Today’, Philosophy 71:277 (1996): 331–350CrossRefGoogle Scholar; republished in, inter alia, his The Aesthetic Understanding, 2nd edn (South Bend IN: St Augustine's Press, 1998 [1983]) and then in a shorter form in his Modern Culture, 3rd edn (London: Continuum, 2005), chs. 7 and 8. Hereafter I quote from The Aesthetic Understanding.
3 Scruton, Roger, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), ch. 15Google Scholar.
4 Pevsner, Nikolaus, An Outline of European Architecture, 7th edn (London: Penguin, 1963 [1943]), 375Google Scholar. This is not though the whole truth about Pevsner, who was also a founding member of the Victorian Society.
5 ‘The Aesthetic Endeavour Today’, 220.
6 Ibid., 221–222.
7 ‘The Aesthetic Endeavour Today’, 224.
8 The view sketched is present throughout Scruton's aesthetics. See esp. his Art and Imagination (London: Methuen & Co, 1974), chs. 14, 15 and 16, Aesthetics of Architecture (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), chs. 8 and 10, and Aesthetics of Music, chs. 6, 11 and 12. It is adumbrated in ‘The Aesthetic Endeavour Today’ at pp. 220–221.
9 Scruton is here influenced by Leavis, F.R., especially ‘Thought and Emotional Quality’, Scrutiny 13 (1945): 53–71Google Scholar and ‘Reality and Sincerity’, Scrutiny 19 (1952–1953): 90–98.
10 ‘The Aesthetic Endeavour Today’, 234.
11 Ibid., 220.
12 Ibid., 225.
13 ‘The Aesthetic Endeavour Today’, 228–234. I omit some details of Scruton's discussion of postmodernism that are not important for the present argument.
14 Ibid., 235
15 Ibid., loc. cit.
16 ‘The Aesthetic Endeavour Today’, 233.
17 Ibid., 234.
18 These conclusions would be mitigated somewhat in the case of architecture, on account of its status as a vernacular art. See esp. Scruton, Roger, ‘Vernacular Architecture’ in his The Classical Vernacular (Manchester: Carcanet, 1994)Google Scholar.
19 For the population of Württemberg, see Theibault, John, ‘The Demography of the Thirty Years’ War Revisited: Günther Franz and his Critics’, German History 15:1 (1997): 1–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar at 21.
20 Many philosophers have defended variants of this. For a recent example, see Kaufman, David A., ‘Normative Criticism and the Objective Value of Artworks’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60:2 (2002): 151–166CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 ‘The Aesthetic Endeavour Today’, 219. Cf. ibid., 225.
22 Aesthetics of Architecture, 54.
23 ‘The Aesthetic Endeavour Today’, 220–221 and 225.
24 Broch, Hermann, Die Schlafwandler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994 [1931/1932]), 445Google Scholar; Adorno, Theodor, Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976 [1951]), p. 26Google Scholar, translations mine.
25 Roger Scruton, ‘On Defending Beauty’, Spectator, 17 May 2010.
26 e.g. in his Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (London: Bloomsbury, 2015 [1985]), esp. in chs. 5 and 7.
27 Understanding Music (London: Continuum, 2009), 208.
28 e.g. Culture Counts, viii-ix.
29 For love and nobility in Scruton's novels, see e.g. Zoë in A Dove Descending and Other Stories (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1991) or Laura in The Disappeared (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
30 We might likewise suspect that it is at best an overgeneralisation that all artists since the decline of modernism lack sacramental ideals, but I shall not pursue this here.
31 Aesthetics of Music, 462–467.
32 Aesthetics of Music, 480
33 Fowler, H.W. and Gowers, Sir Ernest, Fowler's Modern English Usage, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965 [1926]), 90–91, 234–235Google Scholar.
34 I condense here the discussion at Aesthetics of Music., 479–488.
35 For advertising, see Modern Culture, 83–4; for secularisation, see Aesthetics of Music, 505–506; for ‘democratic culture’, see ibid., 496–498 and 504–505.
36 Aesthetics of Music, 491.
37 Mann, Thomas, Doktor Faustus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008 [1947]), 179–181Google Scholar, translation mine.
38 Modern Culture, 80–81.
39 On tonality, see e.g. Aesthetics of Music, esp. ch. 9; on architecture, Aesthetics of Architecture, 252–254 and The Classical Vernacular, 77–84; on what Scruton calls ‘constructionism’, see Modern Culture, 81–82.
40 Understanding Music, 223. Further possible reasons are discussed at Aesthetics of Music, 469–474.
41 Aesthetics of Music, 490–491. Scruton sounds the same note in the book's closing lines; see ibid., 508.
42 His most confident expression of this view is at Culture Counts, 90; cf. more cautious optimism at Aesthetics of Music, 482–485, 488 and 493–494.
43 Aesthetics of Music, 471. His views here seem to be influenced by Irving Kristol, ‘The Adversary Culture of Intellectuals’, Encounter (October 1979): 5–14.
44 Aesthetics of Music, 479. Cf. his ‘Beckett and the Cartesian Soul’ in The Aesthetic Understanding.
45 Scruton, Roger, News from Somewhere: On Settling (London: Continuum, 2004), 4Google Scholar.
46 My thanks to Stefan Riedener, Andrew Huddleston, James Tabbush and Mikołaj Sławkowski-Rode for their comments on drafts of this paper.