Conversations with Roger Scruton

Mark Dooley. Bloomsbury / Continuum, 2016. A book-length interview conducted over several years at Scruton's farm in Wiltshire — Sunday Hill Farm — and arranged by theme rather than by chronology.

Dooley, an Irish philosopher and Scruton's biographer, plays the questioner; the book is Scruton thinking aloud about the whole shape of his work. It is the most candid single account of how the parts of that work — aesthetics, music, architecture, religion, conservation, the idea of home — belong to one another.

There is no single thesis; the book's value is the through-line it reveals. Scruton's recurring claim is that the things that matter most — beauty, the sacred, attachment to place, the sense of being at home in the world — cannot be justified in the language of use. They are not means to other ends; they are the ends. To treat a building, a piece of music, or a settled landscape as merely useful is already to have mislaid what makes it matter.

The conversations return repeatedly to oikophilia — the love of home, of the place and the inheritance one is answerable to. Scruton makes it the root of both his aesthetics and his conservatism: the disposition that leads a person to care for a room, a town, or a tradition is the same disposition that leads them to find it beautiful.

Asked why beauty matters, Scruton answers that it is the experience in which the world is briefly given back to us as meaningful — arranged, for a moment, for its own sake. He places this experience adjacent to the religious: both are forms of attention in which something is permitted to matter unconditionally. This is the argument Beauty makes in compressed philosophical form; here it is given its biography.

Conversations with Roger Scruton is a secondary source across the wiki's philosophical domains. Where Beauty and The Aesthetics of Music give Scruton's arguments their finished form, the Conversations show the single sensibility beneath them — the reason the wiki treats Roger Scruton as one of its central voices, in Domain IV — Beauty and Domain V — Philosophy alike.