We are told on the dust jacket of this book that ‘it argues conclusively that Roger Scruton is a prophet for our times’. The laudatory language – ‘beautiful citation’ (12), ‘magisterial account’ (12), ‘extraordinary artistry’, ‘stunning commentary’ (26) – leaves the reader in no doubt that Dooley sees Scruton in these prophetic terms. However, he makes no attempt to argue for this vision and to engage critically with the central tenets of his thought. The explanation we are given for this descriptive approach is that Scruton's ‘astonishingly beautiful prose is so clear and cogent that it requires no further elucidation’ (9). It is certainly true that Scruton writes clearly and cogently, but the idea that this beautiful prose requires no further elucidation is remarkable. It is remarkable not merely because it fails to do justice to Scruton the philosopher, but also because it suggests that the problems with which he is grappling can be solved in one rather hasty, magisterial swoop. Perhaps Dooley believes that this is so, in which case, he is suffering from what Wittgenstein would call ‘a loss of problems’. The Scruton I know, however, remains fully aware of the difficulties which lurk behind his beautiful prose – difficulties which become explicit if we subject his position to more careful scrutiny.

Here, for example, is what we are told about Scruton's take on the God question: ‘Religion is nothing short of a social fact. While it may not supply objective truth, it does however furnish us with “complex allegories of the human condition”’ (24); ‘there is much more to the philosophical question of God than the mere fact of his existence’ (25); ‘God is the subjectivity of the world’ (32). Now even if we accept, as we surely must, that there is more to the question of God than that of whether He exists, it would be helpful to get a clear statement of where Scruton really stands on this existential issue, and how is position is to be situated with respect to the more traditional religious alternative. We are given an answer of sorts, namely, that, for Scruton, God is the subjectivity of the world, or rather, that God is the subjectivity of the world. But what does this mean? Dooley offers the following gloss: ‘By seeing in another's eyes a vision of the sacred, the miraculous and the mysterious, we look upon that person as though he were not of this world. That is to say, we look upon him from the religious perspective’ (32).

This tells us very little about what it means to say that God is the subjectivity of the world. However, it suggests that our subjectivity has relevance for an understanding of the issue, and that our encounters with others provide some kind of gateway to the divine. This latter idea is familiar from the work of philosophers like Levinas. For Levinas, we encounter God only via the other person – ‘“Going towards God” is meaningless unless seen in terms of my primary going towards the other person’Footnote ¹ – and the relevant encounter involves being morally responsive to that person. Hence: ‘without the significance they draw from ethics, theological concepts remain empty and formal frameworks’.Footnote ²

How are we to understand Scruton's account of the religious and moral significance of the encounter between two persons? And where is it to be situated with respect to a position like that of Levinas? Dooley makes it clear that, for Scruton, the relevant encounter takes place in the context of erotic love. Erotic love is a relation between persons, and this relation is moral in the sense that it involves care and respect for the beloved, and a preparedness to acknowledge that she is no mere instrument of my will – no body or thing to be defined purely in terms of sexual use. The idea that this relation is moral suggests that Scruton's picture has something in common with that of Levinas. But how is the moral dimension of eros to be squared with the fact that it involves sexual desire? As Scruton puts it in his Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, erotic love ‘notoriously bypasses moral judgement’,Footnote ³ ‘(w)hereas your friend wants your good, your lover wants you’.Footnote ⁴ And where does God come into the equation?

A discussion of the first question would have been a welcome addition to Dooley's book, for Scruton's position is not easy to understand, and it is left unclear what kind of possession is at issue when the lover is said to want or to possess her beloved. The obvious way of taking it is to suppose that the lover wants her beloved in the way that she might want an ice-cream. This would imply that such a relationship bypasses moral judgement, but it would make the beloved a mere object of appetite, and it is clear that Scruton rejects this. As he puts it, he wishes to identify what is ‘special about erotic love, what sets it apart from the other desires which besiege us in our everyday existence’.Footnote ⁵ It is made clear enough that erotic love is set apart from these other desires by virtue of its religious significance. However, Scruton remains ambivalent over what this significance really amounts to, oscillating between an anti-realist position which suggests that the sacred is simply a human construction, and one which lends emphasis, rather, to the mysterious and ineffable nature of the reality to which we are responsive in sexual desire – a reality which, on this way of thinking, is ‘brought into being’ by us only in the innocuous sense that desiring is something that we do.

So does Scruton believe in God? Or is he a mere ‘voyeur of holiness’Footnote ⁶ (Gentle Regrets) who remains ever tempted to put the self on the throne once occupied by God? Dooley leaves us unclear. We are told that, for Scruton, the sacred affords man a glimpse of eternity in the midst of time (27), that it is connected with the transcendental, and that it endows the world of objects with a ‘personal’ character and provides an ‘antidote to (our) temporal isolation’. We are told also, however, that to see the world from the first-person perspective is to ‘perceive it in sacral terms’ (60), that the self is an illusion, that we must belong to a world in which this illusion can be sustained (60), that we have ‘survived (our) gods’, and that we must ‘live as if our lives mattered eternally’ (73).

The idea that we must live as if our lives mattered eternally, does not imply that they do not. But there is enough in Scruton to suggest that he retains sympathy for this negative reading, and that he is offering a version of the claim that the reality to which we are responsive when we interact with others is a human construct. Of course, there is equal evidence to the contrary, and as Dooley points out, Scruton rails against the ‘more outlandishly extreme wing of French postmodernism – the view “that the human world is also a human construct”’ (80). Again, however, Dooley does nothing to convince us that this is not Scruton's position, and his brief and rather muddled description of Derrida's position – the supposed prototype of this kind of ‘anti-realism’ – leaves one with the impression that Derrida and Scruton have rather a lot in common. Thus, having told us that Derrida believes that it is simply impossible to step outside of language and confront the thing in itself, Dooley concedes that he doesn't believe that Derrida ever actually denied the existence of the external world, that he was ‘never a dangerous iconoclast who sought the demolition of existing institutions and settled things’, and that he claimed to be ‘a very conservative person who ‘love(s) institutions’ (81). We are then told that Derrida explicitly deploys theological categories, but that, in Scruton's words, ‘the God of deconstruction is not a “real presence” in the Christian sense, but an absence: a negativity’ (83). The sole objective of this religion, Dooley continues, is to ‘invert the central idea of our religious tradition: the idea of a sacred utterance, the word of God, enshrined in a text. The text remains sacred, but is no longer the word… Gone are all claims to objectivity – even as an ideal’ (83). Derrida's deconstruction opts for a ‘rootless existence founded “upon nothing”, a life akin to that of Abraham’(83).

Scruton is a very conservative person who loves institutions, and his God is clearly not a ‘real presence’ in the Christian sense. Furthermore, there is enough to suggest that he is seeking to define a conception of the sacred which is shorn of any reference to God, and that he relinquishes all claims to objectivity as far as religion is concerned. As Dooley himself states on his behalf – religion does not supply objective truth. None of this implies that Scruton is an atheist, for it may be that God is not best viewed as a ‘real presence’, and that the god he is seeking to reject is a false god. Nor does it imply, however, that Derrida is an atheist. As for the claim that Derrida's deconstruction opts for a ‘rootless existence founded “upon nothing”, a life akin to Abraham’, we would do well to remember that it is God that calls upon Abraham to embark upon this journey into the unknown. As far as Levinas is concerned, this is no mere journey to nowhere. Rather, it is one which grants genuine communion with others and with God as one leaves behind the temptations of selfish consciousness – the very temptations to which, as Scruton sees it, we shall succumb only at the cost of inhabiting a desacralized world.

There are no quick solutions to the difficulties and tensions I have identified, and it is a measure of Scruton's philosophical talent and commitment that he grapples honestly and persistently with such massive questions. In doing so, he has restored philosophy as a humane discipline, and given us a sense that it really matters. Like his friend Iris Murdoch, he sees the problems of philosophy as the problems of his life, and his artistic endeavours – music, poetry, fiction – are continuous with his philosophical understanding and serve as an attempt to grasp human experience in its completion. In this Scruton is almost unique among modern English-language philosophers. Dooley makes a strong case for taking him seriously and puts to rest the absurd and, thankfully, now less fashionable view that he is the ‘unthinking man's thinking man’, as one rather less impressive philosopher once put it. However, his book does not quite get to the core ideas which animate his writing, and settles for description rather than engagement. In this respect it is no substitute for the works themselves, and it is the works themselves that testify to the importance and originality of this Dover Beach philosopher.