"It's early afternoon as we prepare to leave Sunday Hill Farm for Bristol Airport. For three days Scruton and I talked about his life and the past, philosophy and prose, his music. But before we leave I have one last question. How, I ask him, would he like his epitaph to sound? Without a moment's hesitation he smiles and says: "It should be placed on a tombstone at the All Saints' Church in Garsdon and it should read: The last Englishman. The last organist in this church." Behind this often misunderstood public figure is therefore a man for whom nothing matters more than to be sanctified by the music of the land he loves. But does this land still exist? Is "Scrutopia" a hope or a farewell? I'm considering it when we leave this old limestone house in Cotswold, this "nowhere" that has become "somewhere" - writes Mark Dooley.at the end of his interview with Sir Roger Scruton. The book "Conversations with Roger Scruton" was published in 2016. Scruton died on 12th January 2020 in a halo of the best known contemporary British philosopher.
Who was he? The author of several dozen books and probably going into hundreds of articles. He was a preacher and teacher of conservative ideas. Often mocked and harassed representative of the academic world and the old, uncompromising school and university idea. Lover of old England and good architecture. Musician. Composer. Aesthetics and an expert in the philosophy of aesthetics. A man for whom beauty was a metaphysical value and if it wasn't God Himself, it was at least His most perfect and most tangible substitute. In the twentieth and twenty-first century western civilization, he was given the role of an arbitrator of elegance. He believed that we are living in a time when the sense of aesthetics and the aesthetics of the person itself are disappearing, or - to put it more generally in the words of Ryszard Legutka - the triumph of the common man. In response to this, the "last Englishman" gave his own meaning to Oscar Wilde's famous motto that "only shallow people do not judge by appearances". The problem of beauty was central to his thoughts, writings and his life. This issue was not only about architecture, image, word, music, dance or costume. Ideas, relationships and attitudes are also beautiful. Fidelity, nostalgia, bravery, consistency and sacrifice are beautiful. Beauty therefore gave coherence to all Scruton's interests and actions. Also his farm, this "Scrutopia", mentioned by Dooley, was supposed to be a place where one breathes beauty and where various archaic forms of attachment and life find a safe haven. Such as, for example, hunting with dogs. So it was beautiful - ultimately - to have a house: from a book-filled stone living room with two pianos to Western civilization and its tradition. His whole life seems to be just looking for, arranging and protecting the house.
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Scruton's parents didn't have a happy relationship. His father - a strict and closed-minded man, a low-level teacher full of unfulfilled ambitions - presented socialist and egalitarian views typical of his generation and his class, characterized by a high degree of resentment towards the upper classes and successful people. Scruton describes him as "an electrically charged ball taking its place in the middle of the living room". A mother who loves her children in a quiet and humble way never found out, the philosopher confesses, how much she meant to them and how much her affection was reciprocated. There was an atmosphere of eternal tension between the parents, a latent conflict that Scruton never fully understood. He had no doubt, however, that the source of this attitude and atmosphere in the family home was precisely the resentful father, probably, in retrospect, a thinker suffering from some kind of depression.
Scruton's parents were not religious either. His mother describes the philosopher as a typical example of a common-sense approach to faith. She was convinced that since there was a war as terrible as the one she witnessed, God could not exist. However, both parents had no objection to their children attending some appropriately wordless - and class connotations - Baptist chapel. Their son, however, sneaked out to the services of the Anglican Church. Not for God and faith. In fact, he felt, as Orwell and earlier Hume expressed it, that "The English have no religion. They healed themselves from it after the fierce religious wars of the 17th century. The Anglican Church - its "ceremonial, holistic, music and choir" - were, however, a source of strong aesthetic experience for young Scruton. Over the years England has become for him a moral idea and a kind of artistry.
Scruton claimed that his vocation to write began to be felt around the age of sixteen. In the 17th he left his family home. The education he had received earlier, and which he was to receive for a few more years, was old-fashioned, exocentric, full of demands and discipline, until he applied physical punishment. Scruton was not mourning his schooling fate, but rather what had happened to education when it took up the leads that egalitarian ideologies and ideologies had given it.
He started entering the world of philosophy while studying at Cambridge. Before this happened, however, he discovered Rilke's poetry. Significantly, he drew attention to this author through the beauty of his name. The love for this poetry that was important to him came along such an unexpected path. Scruton's first philosophical readings were Nietzsche and Sartre, but at Cambridge he came into contact primarily with the dominant analytical philosophy there. He later confessed that during his "analytical period" he had not opened any book published before 1900 for two years. However, afterwards, Jonathan Bennett's excellent lectures opened Kant's world of thought to him. Scruton's horizons began to expand. Importantly, at that time, the academic work consisted largely of the lecturer's struggle with the author being studied. It was published rarely. Only when a representative of the academy was sure he had something really meaningful to say.
In 1971 Scruton took up his first "real" work, as he himself says. He became a philosophy lecturer at Birbeck College London. He was affiliated with this college until 1991. It was then that he turned out to be a "rebel against rebellion". Following the moral revolt of 1960s, he concluded that it is "a self-centred fight against the imaginary system". The "Parisian" winds arrived in England with a delay of about three years, as," said Scruton, "no ideas have an easy access to English heads. This distance allowed for a calm assessment of the phenomena and their effects. It also made it possible to reject the rebellion and make efforts to save, preserve, and pass on to future generations the proven and challenged ways of living.
Scruton's social and social life at that time started to get complicated. He published for "Spectator", but at the same time he began to be subject to strong ideological pressure in the academic community. In his opinion, a constant element of left-wing thinking is that everything is political. There are no areas, activities and behaviours that are not political. Thus, non-political interpersonal relations are impossible. He found friends outside the academic world. With great difficulty he started to edit the conservative magazine "The Salisbury Review" and write to "The Times". Throughout his life, he searched for and created places where it would be possible to express views other than circulating. And that meant then, and means today, conservative views.
Scruton was very critical of the discussion strategy proposed by liberals and socialists. He wrote that conservatives, being attached to prejudice as a form of knowledge, and seeing the dangers of thinking away from the concrete, express their views in an uncluttered, unrestrained and conciliatory way. However, neither a socialist nor a liberal can be satisfied and reassured by this. Their ideological devotion does not allow any form of reconciliation, and their claims are categorically formulated. Thus, a conservative who clings to his beliefs and the way they communicate them is always "outwitted" by his opponents who claim to make claims whose meaning - as Scruton noted ironically - is not always well captured by them, but which they are always ready and willing to express.
The pen and Scruton's personality have always been the clarity of their position. However, there were certain consequences associated with this, which his biography abounds in. From powerful attacks to minor acts of daily harassment, opponents have always made sure that Scruton is aware of his "sins". For example, after the book "The Meaning of Conservatism" was published Scruton's Marxist colleague, Jerry Cohen, refused to conduct a seminar with him. (With age, however, he moved to conservative positions and valued the achievements of his former opponent.) This is just a small example of the bites that the author of a contemporary lecture on conservatism collected during his life - not from a blind fate, but from people who should be particularly reserved and perspicacious.
Scruton's biography is separate from and one of the most important chapters in his work is his involvement in Eastern Europe before 1989. President Vaclav Havel honoured Scruton with the Czech Medal for Merit in 1998. Merits for the Czech nation. In 2016 he received the Lech Kaczyński Prize for intellectual courage and friendship for Poland in the 1980s. In June 2019, President Duda decorated Roger Scruton with the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland "in recognition of his outstanding merits in supporting democratic change in Poland, for developing Polish-British scientific and academic cooperation". In the same year in London, Prime Minister Victor Orban decorated Scruton with the Knight's Cross with the Star of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary. The decorations received in our region of Europe were of particular value to Scruton. He emphasized that they come from people who know the difference between honour and dishonour, and who often lived according to it themselves.
An important text from Scruton's communist period is the essay "Man's Second Disobedience" devoted to the French Revolution and directed against the revolution as such (including communism) announced in 1989. The author puts forward the thesis that the revolution is the highest expression of Christian disobedience. A revolutionary is not able to recognize and worship a transcendent God, instead giving worship to something earthly, embodied in the form of an ideal community. And since worship given to an idol is worship given to nothing, it is the annihilation that begins to threaten everything that exists truly.
Scruton's contacts with Europe under the communist regime began with Professor Kathy Wilkes, who invited him to attend a seminar in Prague in 1979, and Barry Smith, publisher of The Monist magazine, fascinated by Polish logic and phenomenology, including Roman Ingarden's thought. Smith recommended Scruton to the organizers of the international conference in Krakow immediately before his planned visit to Prague. In doing so, Scruton was to visit a bit of the world on this side of the Iron Curtain: in one fell swoop, Poland and Czechoslovakia. His experiences from that first visit were complicated. (This strange atmosphere of both poverty and horror, but also some subcutaneous desire to save, he tried to convey in his book "Notes from Underground"). In an interview with Dooley, he says that the Warsaw airport impressed him with an almost military place. Soon it turned out that it was not possible to book a hotel accommodation and together with a random travel companion he received an offer of shelter for five dollars in his apartment from a stranger. The apartment was wretched and cold, and breakfast consisted of a coffee substitute ("ersatz coffee") and onions. It proved impossible to find a restaurant in the city where one could eat something. Scruton says that it was then that he first experienced a feeling that did not leave him until 1989. He had the impression that he saw a mirage on the surface of a place made of dark matter - a place completely unknown, where all previously known ways of dealing with reality are lost. In another place, he describes his experience of entering the social reality of communist countries as "entering a dark place where you are the only free person".
The conference itself lasted two days and the conditions were very decent. Only the presence of the secret police and the loud, disciplining speakers from the Eastern Bloc were attracting attention when they were too far away from historical materialism. Scruton recalls that Poles lived a double life at that time. In the evenings, young people walked on the streets as if nothing ever happened. The spirit of the John Paul II pilgrimage was still in the air, people were clearly uplifted. From Krakow Scruton went to Prague. In the Czech Republic the atmosphere was much more depressing. There, again, not without adventures, he came across young dissidents whose hopeless faces made an unforgettable impression on him. On the advice of Kathy Wilkes, he prepared a speech about the "private language argument" in Wittgenstein's mind. He made a closer acquaintance with two people. One of them was Lenka. From the spark of understanding between them, says Scruton, a slow, silent flame that did not go out for the next three years was lit. This acquaintance was even heading for a marriage, which did not happen. The girl's friend started to persuade her that by marrying a foreigner and setting up in a foreign country she would betray her homeland and her cause. The girl accepted these arguments. She then married this very boy and became the mother of four children. They met with old love once again, in 2013. Scruton wanted to make sure that he did not commit any indiscretions in the Notes from Underground that were to be released at that time.
After returning to England from a trip to Poland and Czechoslovakia, Scruton and Wilkes began to raise funds to buy books and organize seminars in communist countries. Their attitude was a challenge for those Western intellectuals who held pro-communist positions. Interestingly, one of those who did not succumb to this temptation was Scruton's opponent, Jacques Derrida, founder of the Jan Hus Foundation in Prague. His arrest in Prague met with a strong reaction from French diplomacy, which in turn cooled down the enthusiasm of the communist security services for further arrests of Western academic staff and gave them greater freedom of action. It was not clear why this freedom was to serve the purpose. Scruton did not hide that he never expected the fall of communism. In any case, without any hope of success in the fight against the colossus, he decided to become a co-founder of the Jagiellonian Trust and organize intellectual life alternative to the communist ideology in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Years later he noticed that his Czech friends of that time represent today a stable middle class. And while they are generally satisfied with what they have achieved, they note the corrupting influence of the European Union on the values for which they fought: national sovereignty and cultural integrity.
In 1992, Scruton left his job at Birkbeck College. The reasons for this decision were complex. Birkbeck's increasingly difficult and unbearable atmosphere played a role here. It seems, however, that an important reason was the new opportunities that opened up in the Eastern Bloc countries with the fall of communism. Scruton took care of mediating between western investors and representatives of the government, the press and the legislature, so that his nationalists could lobby for their interests. "We knew the new elite," he says, "of the people in government and those who came out of the underground, many of whom were my protégés. The Czech and Hungarian branch of this venture did not work well, but Poland has developed beyond all expectations. Scruton began to believe that he could leave the university and earn his living as a "consultant". At the same time, he received an unexpected offer to work part-time at the University of Boston and decided to accept it. However, he became primarily a pen man. He left Boston in 1995 and began to lead a rural life in England.
Scruton's activity in Poland in the early period of the political transformation is certainly not easy to evaluate, nor does it have to be unequivocal, including unambiguously positive. Even if Scruton was sentimental in his Britishness and conservatism (or at least defended nostalgic feelings), it was also pragmatic and vital. It was not sentiments, but convictions that guided his actions and forms of engagement. In recent years, this coherence of beliefs made him opt for Brexit, and in his argumentation, he emphasized the importance of the difficulties that were associated for the British people in accepting large numbers of emigrants from former Eastern Bloc countries. Faithful to the ideal of democracy, he also emphasized that the consent to the enlargement of the European Union to include the countries of our region was not a decision of the inhabitants of the European Union itself, but of EU politicians. His assessment of the legitimacy of admitting Eastern European countries to the European Union and his assessment of the related social processes seems at least restrained. However, it was this delusional clarity of vision - Scruton himself defended the benefits of pessimism - that earned him much respect among post-communist societies. As before, as today.
In addition to the consistent, insensitive proclamation of the losers - seemingly conservative positions - Scruton was distinguished by the power to strive for some kind of fullness, to be as complete as possible. This not very happy child, the son of a highly competitive father, could be a tender father and present for his own children. An unpopular, sometimes hated thinker, he did not give in and did not give in to the ideas he believed in. He could create strong and lasting friendships. His actions were characterized by a particular pragmatism, but also a typical British reticence. He was a singer of beauty, and nothing is as beautiful as life. That is why he will also be remembered as a vital man, loving every day and sophisticated joys, especially rural life, good food, wine and hunting. His "Sunday Hill Farm" was a kind of elegance in honour of old England and all its charms. In the book News from Somewhere, he explained that his path led "from nowhere". He wrote about himself: "nowhere person arriving somewhere".
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One can only hope that this English soul, hungry for beauty, has found its final form. As Scruton always taught the aims of education and training, it is incumbent on the living people to pass on to the ascending generations everything that constitutes the integrity of a given culture and promotes its preservation. Scruton's legacy should be cherished and passed on.
R. I. P.
Justyna Melonowska –doktor filozofii, psycholog. Adiunkt w Akademii Pedagogiki Specjalnej im. Marii Grzegorzewskiej w Warszawie. Członkini European Society of Women in Theological Research. W latach 2014 - 2017 publicystka „Więzi” i członkini zespołu Laboratorium “Więzi”. Publikowała również w „Tygodniku Powszechnym”, „Gazecie Wyborczej”, „Newsweeku”, „Kulturze Liberalnej” i in. Od 2017 autorka „Christianitas. Pismo na rzecz ortodoksji”. Uczestniczka licznych debat publicznych