Roger Scruton is a philosopher who is very much aware of the fact that writing is more than just putting ideas on paper, it is a way of reaching the other while trying to express the I. Scruton is arguably one of the most prolific philosophers of the past few decades, perhaps even the most prolific one. He has written more than thirty books of philosophy, numerous essays and countless lectures; all of which testify to their author's sharp mind and beautiful pen. Due to the fact that Scruton has written so many original works of philosophy, people are inclined to overlook the fact that he has also written four novels, several collections of short stories, four libretti, a whole string of poems, a couple of works that are difficult to label as they are a mixed genre of philosophy and fiction, and at least three works of autobiography that are also undeniably literary works. Such a creative output could easily qualify as an oeuvre an sich, and justifies the claim that apart from a prolific philosopher, Scruton has also been a diligent writer. The latter claim however, might possibly surprise many, since Scruton's identity as a literary figure has been overshadowed by his successes as a philosopher and his literary writings have somehow and somewhat failed to generate an attention and appreciation that match those of his philosophical work.
Terrific philosophers are often terrible writers. Reading Kant and Scheler feels pretty much like riding uphill on a bike with square wheels. It takes the greatest effort, and many give up halfway, but if you make it to the end, the view from the top is breathtaking. There is also a minority of great thinkers who also happen to be great writers, and quite a few of them have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature: Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus most notably of course, but also Rudolph Eucken, Henri Bergson and Bertrand Russell. There are people who hold the view that literature and philosophy are incompatible things, two different exercises of the mind that serve two completely different goals. Iris Murdoch, philosopher and novelist, proclaimed the view that literature and philosophy are worlds apart from each other: literature mystifies, philosophy clarifies she maintained. Literature wants to entertain, philosophy wants to explain. A similar view was also expressed by Harry Mulisch, one of the most important Dutch writers of the postwar era. Mulisch maintained that the purpose of literature is not to explicate but to enlarge the mystery of life. Whether the nature and purpose of philosophy and literature are indeed so different from one another is however very questionable, for there are too many beautifully written works of philosophy and too many profoundly philosophical literary works. The meaning and significance of philosophy and literature should probably not be reduced to one single thing, but surely a case could be made for the claim that literature and philosophy are both attempts at obtaining a better understanding of the world and ourselves.
Both Scruton's philosophy and his fiction are such attempts, and in this article I will explore Scruton's fiction and address a question that is always tempting whenever a philosopher writes fiction, namely: how do the literary writings relate to the philosophical ones? In other words: do the Leitmotivs of the philosophical writings also play a pivotal role in the literary ones? One might be inclined to think that the answer to this question must obviously be positive. After all: if the writer is one and the same person, the worldview that comes to the fore in the works of fiction and in the philosophical writings must surely be the same as well. However, it is far from obvious that “yes” is the answer to the above question. Iris Murdoch serves as an interesting example here, since she was both a philosopher and a novelist, but her literary and philosophical writings don't always have much in common. In Sartre's oeuvre too, there is a remarkable discrepancy between the viewpoints he expresses in his novels and plays, and those of his philosophical works. As a philosopher, Sartre defends the idea that man is ultimately completely free and responsible for what he does and who he becomes. But when we read his fiction, we are presented quite a different picture of human nature. In Les jeux sont faits for example Sartre even seems to suggest that the entire opposite is true: we are determined and incapable of changing the course of our destiny, even if we get a second chance at life. And, to give one last example, one could also notice a discrepancy between the writings of Camus as a novelist and playwright, which are often characterized by a certain moral ambiguity and indifference, and a seeming reluctance of the writer to express a moral judgement, and Camus's philosophical works, in which Camus is not reluctant to take a stand.
If we want to know to which extent Scruton's philosophical thought influenced his literary writings, we must first understand the core of his philosophical thought. In this regard, Scruton's oeuvre presents us with quite a challenge. Given its scope and range it is not easy to single out its most important topics. Scruton has written about pretty much everything that matters, and therefore his work could justly be called an overall exploration of our human nature and the human condition. In a way, all of Scruton's ideas and writings seem to orbit around one very general concept, that of the human person. In exploring the meaning of beauty, the sacred, the sense of belonging, the other, sexual desire and all the phenomena and concepts that are quintessentially human, Scruton attempts to offer us the many pieces of the puzzle that is man. If one puts all those pieces together, one can formulate a comprehensive answer to what is perhaps the principal philosophical question: What is man? What does it mean to be a human being, a person? It is no coincidence that in many of his recent writings, which bring together decades of thinking, the pivotal concept is that of the person. It is the fundamental topic of The Face of God, The Soul of the World and most recently On Human Nature.
It is impossible to capture the essence of our nature in a single sentence, to grasp what a person is in a short definition. Any such attempt is doomed to neglect the complexity and many components of the concept of the person. Bearing this in mind though, one could maintain that certain features are more important and integral to our nature than others, and one could also maintain that one of those features is particularly central in many of Scruton's philosophic and literary writings: home. We are nomadic settlers, and one of the great aims of our lives, one of the great desires intrinsic to our human nature, is to create a home of our own.
Home in Scruton's Philosophy
The desire to have a home of one's own, is one that has marked Scruton's life, both as a philosopher and as a person. ‘I think of myself as a half-rootless person, who's lived his life in search of home, always settling somewhere only to move on’, Scruton said in an interview two years ago.Footnote 1 The longing to belong is the epicenter of Scruton's life and work, and it is no coincidence that Scruton's philosophical memoires, Gentle Regrets, contain a chapter in which Scruton expresses, once again, his criticism of modernist architecture, and that this chapter, very aptly, bears the title: Returning Home.
The problem with modernist architecture is that, according to Scruton, it neglects the social, communal meaning of architecture. Scruton is an outspoken critic of Louis Sullivan's famous principle – form follows function. If you only focus on function and utility, you risk ending up with buildings whose form is so ugly that nobody wants to live in them, hence they become dysfunctional. Modernist architecture, Scruton maintains, fails to understand this, and as a consequence, it fails to fulfil our profound need of a home, the latter which is both an aesthetic and social concept. ‘The business of architecture is the building of home – not my home and your home only, but the home of the community that includes us.’Footnote 2
Gentle regrets is both a literary memoir and a work of philosophy. In it Scruton, repeatedly reflects on his complicated relationship with his father. Despite the fact that personally and intellectually they very much differed, Scruton could sympathize deeply with his father's view, who ‘like Peter Fuller, whom he never met, saw modernist architecture as the enemy of home.’Footnote 3
Scruton reiterates this idea in many of his writings on architecture and aesthetics. In The Soul of the World, he dwells again on the loss of home as a consequence of modernist architecture.
When we see the world exclusively as an assemblage of objects, then nothing is rescued from barter and exchange. That is what we now do to each other and to the earth. It is also what we do to our habitat, which is ceasing to be a home and becoming instead a ‘machine for living in’, as Le Corbusier, the ideologist of modernist planning, described his ideal house.Footnote 4
In his philosophical writings on music too, the idea of home and belonging play a central role, and in The Aesthetics of Music Scruton emphasizes that his views on home and belonging in architecture apply to music as well. The social role of architecture and music is of the greatest importance, and consists in creating a home where You and I can belong.
We could not possibly know what we are doing, if we began to build without consideration for what looks right and what looks wrong. These experiences of right and wrong define our idea of home. Through them we make sense of our being with strangers. Moreover, it is imperative that we should reach agreement with these strangers. The appearance of your house matters as much to me, your neighbor, as it does to you. When people lose sight of this, they retreat from the public realm: the atomization of the city has begun, and with it the atomization of civil society. Those considerations apply equally to music. For although music can be understood and heard in private, we should be entirely at loss if we did not hear it as a social gesture.Footnote 5
In Music as an Art, Scruton's most recent collection of essays on music, Scruton once more explores the transcendental and moral meaning of music, and reflects on how our musical culture used to have secure foundations in the church, the concert hall and in the home, and on what we have lost when those foundations were brought down by pop culture. What we have lost, is a way of belonging through music.
The common practice of tonal harmony united composers, performers and listeners in a shared language, and people played instruments at home with an intimate sense of belonging. They belonged to the music that they made, just as the music belonged to them.Footnote 6
Scruton's philosophy is an attempt to fight the enemies of home, and conservatism, at least Scruton's version of it, is a philosophy of home. Scruton's philosophy explicates our need to belong and the ways to create communities to which we can belong, the ‘little platoons’ – a term Scruton frequently borrows from Burke – that we form and that form us. Scruton's environmental conservatism, as expressed in Green Philosophy, his concept of oikophilia (the love of home), his criticism of modernist architecture and art, his views on sexual ethics and how we encounter and should encounter the other, are all part of the bigger picture that is home. The tragedy of modern man is that, through the way we build and the music we listen to, due to the way we engage with each other and the way we greedily exploit nature for our egotistic self-interest, because of the repudiation of our roots and traditions, we are losing home and are becoming alienated from the world and ourselves. That nothing good can come from being without a home and the unfulfilled desire to belong, is a concern Scruton not only expresses in his works of philosophy. It is also, as I shall now argue, one of the most important themes of his literary writings.
Dysfunctional families
In 1981 Scruton published his debut novel, Fortnight's Anger, and in it already the main Leitmotiv of his later work occupies a distinct place: the damages caused by an irreparable loss of home. Scruton tells the compelling story of Kenneth Fortnight and his dysfunctional family, in a style that is at the same time gripping and poetic on the one hand and alienating and disturbing on the other. When his mother dies Kenneth returns to the house he ran away from several years ago; a house that failed to be a home for the family. Not much has changed, and the relationships between Kenneth, his father and his brother are of such a kind that the complete breakdown of home is inevitable.
When home is a place filled with anger, accusations, resentment and painful memories it ceases to be a home. Home should be a place where I and You meet, but in the case of the Fortnight family, there is no such place, which is perhaps best expressed by the fact that Kenneth's brother – whose behavior borders madness – is addressed in a depersonalized way as ‘The Kid’, and Kenneth's father is referred to as ‘The Colonel’. That one sometimes cannot recover from the loss of home is expressed both by the inevitable death of The Kid and by the fact that Kenneth seems incapable of creating a home of one's own with his love Barbara, albeit that the book ends with him falling into Barbara's arms after the Kid's death.
Characters who run away from home and later on struggle to create a new home can be found in nearly all of Scruton's literary writings. That applies to Francesca, Scruton's second novel, to several stories contained in A Dove Descending (for example the opening story, Departures), to the libretto The Minister and the unpublished libretto Going Home, and to Scruton's latest novels: Notes from Underground and The Disappeared. Scruton's fascination as a writer with this topic might possibly be rooted deeply in his own personal life, since he himself at a young age left home, began a personal Odyssey and travelled all over the world, living a seemingly permanent state of transition, only to create a home of his own at a later age.
Most of Scruton's characters however fail to achieve the latter, as is also the fate of Zoë, the main character of A Dove Descending. The novella tells a story of being displaced on two levels. On one level, it is a story about Cypriot migrants in England, forming a community within a community, who struggle to belong, to whom Englishness continues to be something exterior, and who constantly play with the thought – albeit sometimes only at the back of their minds – of a return to their country of origin. Such is also the desire of Zoë, for whom Cyprus is more present in dreams than in reality, and yet a real presence nevertheless. With great sympathy for, and understanding of, the situation of people who are at the same time insider and outsider, Scruton describes the goings of these migrants for whom home is always just beyond reach, no matter where they reach.
On another level, A Dove Descending is again the story of a dysfunctional family, of a mother and daughter who cannot cope with the death of their husband/father and drift away from each other, up to the point where Zoë runs away. But despite her dreams and ambitions of creating a home of her own and despite the fact that she has a real connection with Michael – who is also a runaway, and who is the main character of Departures (the story preceding the title story A Dove Descending) – Zoë’s story is one of failure: the failure to achieve what her father had taught her to be the most important thing in life: being home. ‘The task is to find one's place in the world that is, and then to live in freedom: so she had been taught by Yannakis, and so she would always believe.’Footnote 7 In one sentence, Scruton captures something essential about the meaning of home: being home is a precondition of living freely, since not belonging alienates people not only from the people around them, but also from themselves.
The Loss of England
In many of his philosophical writings Scruton laments the loss of an ideal of England he so much cherishes. It is the ideal he grew up with, but which he believes has been thrown on the dustbin of history in recent years. He expresses his concerns about what is lost with the loss of this ideal – in particular in England: An Elegy (2000) and Where We Are: The State of Britain Now (2017) – and what is above all lost is a sense of home. For Scruton, a country is not a geographic territory, it is a civilization, built on tradition, values and a sense of belonging.
That home is sometimes a country confined to the realm of the past is not only a theme in A Dove Descending, but also in Scruton's most well-known opera Violet, which tells the story of the acclaimed harpsichordist and clavichordist Violet Gordon-Woodhouse, who formed an unusual, sexless ménage a cinq with her husband and three intimate friends. In Scruton's libretto, Violet's great-niece is preparing to sell Violet's neo-Classical Nether Lypiatt Manor, and Violet's valuable possessions are being auctioned. Jessica tells the auctioneer: ‘It's not the house I object to – it is all this waste, this debris – objects which once had a soul, and have a soul no longer.’
On one level the opera is about a home that is no more, because of the death of the people who used to make it a home: with their deaths, the objects with which they made this home have lost their soul and also died. On a deeper level the opera tells the story of an England that is no more, a part of the English soul that was lost, swept away by the First World War and the developments thereafter. The worldview and set of values that formed its essence conflicted with those of the new era and ultimately had to vanish. Lypiatt Manor, with its ‘air of an abandoned shrine, with votive offerings to a forgotten god’, represents this England that is no more and the spiritual, metaphysical loss this entailed.
Enabling the Experience of Home
Two works in Scruton's oeuvre stand out as a unique mixed genre of philosophy, history and fiction: Xanthippic Dialogues (1998) and Perictione in Colophone (2000). These two works don't seem to have any equivalent in contemporary world literature, and by using the great Greek philosophers as his main characters, Scruton is able to combine fiction with thorough philosophical exposés without one hindering the other. It comes as no surprise that the topic of home recurs once again in these works. In Perictione in Colophone Scruton has his characters’ viewpoints challenged by using the Socratic method, or maieutics. One of those viewpoints, in a conversation between Perictione and Archeanassa, is exactly the opposite of the one Scruton puts forth in his writings on the social meaning of music, which is similar to that of architecture.
‘Architecture, you said, is not like the other arts. For it is public. It does not take place, like this little concert of ours, between consenting adults in private. Therefore, you said, in distinction from music or poetry or painting, architecture is not free to innovate and experiment and give itself airs.’
‘And do you not agree?’
‘I neither agree nor disagree.’Footnote 8
In Xanthippic Dialogues too, a recurrent theme is the need to belong and the troubles that occur because of lacking a home that is truly home. In Perictione's Parmenides Plato and Perictione discuss the importance of home, and Plato envisages a society in which ‘the experience of home is no longer available. Nor is the hope of final bliss… which derives from it.’Footnote 9 It is a society in disarray and of alienation, in which gods are no longer worshipped and people live together in permanent antagonism. The message Scruton again conveys is that if we lose the sense of home, society itself is lost. A sense of home is a precondition of long-term peaceful co-existence.
Outlining the things that enable the experience of home, and reflecting on what it means to lose those things, as individuals and as society as a whole: this is possibly the essence of Scruton's oeuvre as a philosopher and a writer. Home is not an abstract concept: it is something we construe with the things that matter most and about which Scruton has written so much: music, architecture, beauty, etc. These are all the components with which to create a home and a place where we can really belong.
In the next part of this article I will discuss three of those components, three pillars of home, so to speak, about which Scruton has written much. They are aspects of Scruton's philosophy that also manifestly come to the fore in his literary writings. I will focus on Scruton's most recent novels – Notes From Underground and The Disappeared – to make my case and show how three key topics that are most intimately connected to the concept of belonging are interwoven in, and illuminated by, the respective stories. First, the concept of depersonalization. Secondly, the concept of oikophilia. And thirdly, the transcendental experience of beauty.
Depersonalization and alienation
I already mentioned the concept of depersonalization previously, and how depersonalization undermines the possibility of really belonging. Home is a place where people live together, not as mere individuals but as persons. Throughout the 20th century philosophers who have made the concept of the person central in their thinking have argued that depersonalization is the essential moral defect of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century: Nazism and communism. Personhood is marked by I-You relationships, and central to the phenomenon of depersonalization is the unwillingness to engage in such a relationship with the other, along with the blatant neglect of the Kantian principle that we must treat others as ends and not as means only.
In Scruton's depiction of the atmosphere of communist Prague in Notes From Underground the topic of depersonalization is very much present: we get to see life as it was under communist rule, a life where trust, love, care and openness to your neighbors were highly dangerous. Without those things people stop being real persons, they become shadows cast by the all-observing glare of the police state. In such circumstances it is only by retreating underground that you can practice being a free and responsible person. Scruton's characters have retreated underground. They are like Kafka's beetle, Gregor Samsa, striving to live as real persons when the official view of them is that they are repugnant, outside the human norm, ‘enemies of the people’.
To put the point directly, you cannot live freely in a regime of lies, and without this freedom you cannot be who you are or truly belong to the place where you are. Father Pavel, one of the novel's main characters, reminds us of this. Father Pavel is an underground priest, imprisoned for criticizing the Pacem in Terris movement that absorbed the Czech priesthood into the communist system of deception. The knowledge that Father Pavel reveals to the novel's hero is an underground knowledge: a forbidden truth. He reveals that communism is the life of the lie, and also that the lie will one day destroy itself. In Father Pavel's words:
We learn to distrust each other, and every call to love enshrines a summons to betrayal. The precious element from which the soul itself is built, the element of sacrifice, which caused one person once to lay down his life for the rest of us, this precious element is extracted from all our dealings and cast onto the dust heap of history.Footnote 10
But depersonalization is not a feature of totalitarianism only. In The Disappeared, a novel set in the North of England as it is now, Scruton shows how sexual exploitation, trafficking and rape always involve a depersonalization of the gravest kind, and how this eventually excludes the possibility to belong, to be at home in one's own life. The Disappeared exhibits a remarkable synthesis of the philosophical and the literary use of language. Scruton shows us the effect of sexual abuse on his characters’ self-understanding, expressing the point in language that is eloquent, lucid and objective. But in the literary register, he strides right off the page, and forces the reader to confront what is happening. In each chapter devoted to Laura, the outsider who has fallen against all her life plans into the trap of sexual exploitation, the events are narrated in the second person singular, so that the reader is suddenly not ‘I’, ‘he’ or ‘she’ but ‘you’. This narrative perspective is not often used in fiction and is difficult to bring off, but Scruton uses it to create an extraordinary feeling of estrangement. The reader is both detached from the events and at the same time there in the center of them, as frightened and annihilated as Laura. A telling quote from the third chapter illustrates this:
“You know he has come through the door behind you, that he is moving towards you and will soon put his hands on your face. Why can't you turn to look at him? Your body is no longer your own. Nothing like this has happened before: even the time when, as a child, you lost your feet in the river Wye on that summer holiday in Monmouth, and the water closed over your head as though to swallow you forever. At last you find your voice.”
‘Don't touch me or I'll scream.’”Footnote 11
Laura cannot think in the first person singular, since that would be to acknowledge these events as invading what she really is: it would be to represent them as really happening to her and changing her, perhaps degrading her, forever. From a distant perspective she can describe these things, but only so as to stand back from them. She has become the ‘you’ in an ‘I-you’ relationship, from which the I has disappeared.
Scruton has written a lot about the importance of intersubjectivity and the directedness to the other as a person in human relations. When it comes to sexual desire he makes clear why sexual violence and rape are not merely violations of someone's physical integrity, but assaults on the other's being as a person, the result of which is always alienation of the deepest kind. In his novels too, Scruton reminds us of this truth, but then in a less direct manner, beyond the realm of theoretical reflections, by showing the actual Lebenswelt, the lived experience, of his characters.
Oikophilia
Let me turn to a second pillar of home: the concept of oikophilia, which too occupies a central place in Scruton's thought, and serves as recurrent motive in his literary writings. Oikophilia is the care and love for the place you call home. Oikophilia is what keeps a community together, and without it society as a whole has no other destination than atomization. It is a point Scruton makes in several of his philosophical works, most notably in Green Philosophy, but it also comes to the fore in his novels. In the world described in Notes From Underground oikophilia is an almost impossible state of mind, because communism forbids it. When people live in a regime of political oppression and lies, and when private property is something to be hidden from the state and not exposed to public scrutiny, the task of caring for a place, rather than the person, family or community that occupies it, is almost impossible. People will have dreams of escape, into the home that will finally be theirs and which they can secure against invasion. But this will be a purely private home, not a settlement to be shared or a place to be cherished by others. It will not be a true somewhere but part of the ever-expanding nowhere of the totalitarian state.
At one point Jan Reichl, the first-person singular narrator of Notes from Underground, aptly calls Czechoslovakia a homeless nation, capturing this widespread feeling of not-belonging and alienation. However, one character has to some extent been able to create a home for herself, Betka, the heroine of the book. Betka is an intriguing character. She lives in conscious defiance of this world where trust, love, care and openness to your neighbors are forbidden. She has found a way (a polluted way, it turns out) to confront the threat, and to make room in her life for the most dangerous kinds of love. This capacity for love comes from something deep in her. She is in metaphysical rebellion against the depersonalization of the surrounding world. Lapsed Catholic and cynical unbeliever, she is nevertheless the one who believes that somehow, somewhere, holiness survives.
One part of her rebellion against the totalitarian normality is her oikophilic character. She feels responsible for the place she comes from, even though her relationship with it is ambivalent. Jan and Betka visit the small village where Betka grew up, a place in the Sudetenland, where German-speaking people lived, before being violently chased away at the end of the war. The village is partly abandoned, partly distributed to the ‘partisans’ who ‘liberated’ it, with Soviet help, from its true owners. The people who tended this place as their Heimat had been driven out, and those who replaced them, like Betka's grandfather, had never been able to stamp another identity on the landscape than the one it had lost when their occupants fled. So the usurpers too had left.
‘These fields are not ours’, Betka says. But she adds: ‘This place is home to me.’Footnote 12 Betka is about the only person who manages to feel at home there, though in a peculiar manner. ‘Betka's refuge had been built from the uselessness of once useful things; you could belong here only as Betka belonged, by not belonging.’Footnote 13 What follows is a vivid description of the place Betka made into her home: the decoration, the furniture, the lamps, the icons, the knick-knacks, the vegetables stored in the cellar, the stove on which a family once had slept – all the things that turned this room where Jan and Betka spend the night into ‘a shrine maintained, with impeccable taste, to a life that had gone.’Footnote 14
It is however not only a shrine to the past. Betka is motivated to conserve this place by her vision of the future.
One day, when this nightmare is over and people can travel freely between East and West, those children or their children or their children's children will be back, seeking their inheritance. I am keeping it for them, and this place that is home to me is not my home at all, but somewhere entrusted to me by suffering.Footnote 15
In The Disappeared the topic of oikophilia is perhaps of even greater importance. In portraying several leading characters who are displaced, feel no loyalty or attachment to the place they live, Scruton subtly shows what happens to individuals and society when oikophilia is lacking. The novel also contains a beautiful meditation on the care for home:
To care for the beauty and the lastingness of the home that you make together – that, surely, was the solution. We protect what is ours, and we do so by loving it: and when we lose what is ours, as the villagers on the edge of the moors had lost their landscape, then we cease to care. Love and beauty, only these two mattered.Footnote 16
What is particularly interesting here is the link between beauty and oikophilia. Your ability to care for home does not merely depend on your inner strength and your moral qualities as a person; it also depends on the socio-historic circumstances in which you live. It is of course much easier to develop an attitude of oikophilia when you live a comfortable life in a beautiful and protected part of the world, than when you live on the margins of society, when you live like Sharon in the Angel Towers, the depressing tower blocks that play such a central role in The Disappeared. Such places are infertile soil for oikophilia and the breeding ground of evil. Yet Sharon, the underprivileged girl, victim of rape, who resides there with the adopted mother who no longer cares for her, is looking for home, is sure that she can find it in the sad little apartment where her teacher lives and, arriving there, promptly destroys the thing that she yearns for.
Beauty and belonging
Having mentioned beauty, we arrive at a third central topic in Scruton's thought that serves as a precondition of being at home in the world: beauty. Beauty could easily serve as the connecting thread between all the topics about which Scruton has written. As much as he is a philosopher of home, Scruton is, essentially, a philosopher of beauty. His views on architecture, oikophilia, music, culture, sexuality, and the human person all revolve around the idea that beauty is not simply in the eye of the beholder, but something that lifts us into another realm, where the most important things are not subjective but shared. This realm is, to use the philosophical term, immanent: it is present in the here and now. But it is also transcendent: what it means can only be grasped by looking beyond the here and now.
The experience of beauty opens us to the transcendent, because the experience of beauty is more a metaphysical than a physical experience. The female heroines of Notes from Underground and The Disappeared – Betka and Muhibbah – are enigmatically beautiful and have such a profound impact on the lives of their male counterparts because the strength and meaning of their beauty lies not in physical pleasure, but in the way it shows the path to what transcends us.
In order to emphasize the fact that this is not merely an existential, but also a metaphysical matter, Scruton repeatedly refers to the female heroines of his novels, not only Betka and Muhibbah, but also Sharon, as angels coming from a world beyond. Through the rhythm and imagery of his prose he succeeds in showing that we human beings can see the extraordinary in the ordinary things. The experience of beauty, of the sacred, of something that comes from beyond, is an experience that changes his characters’ lives fundamentally, by opening their hearts to another meaning than the one residing in the here and now. Jan Reichl, the narrator of Notes from Underground, feels he is being liberated by Betka, as if she is an angel who guides him out of the underworld, but the irony is she could only set him free because she was imprisoned in another way.
In Scruton's stories female beauty and the hope for love have the power to make a man unexpectedly swing from ordinary daily life to something that surpasses his understanding. This is nicely depicted in the short story, Yusuf, about the fragmentary consciousness of a naïve terrorist:
“And then it happens. Without warning the door opens and the most beautiful girl in the world glides through it, like a spirit wafted on the air. She is smiling at me, from soft sand-coloured lips in a perfect oval face, and her dark eyes glow with interest. Fareed looks away. Maybe he doesn't want to see the spark that passes between us. Zeynab leans back happily and says”
‘Halima, come and meet Yusuf.’
I jump to my feet as she approaches. The blood has drained from my face and my lips tremble. I search for words. And still she smiles, keeping her distance as she must, bowing slightly and crossing her hands on her breast. How not to look at her is all my effort: how not to defile her with my eyes or my words or my thoughts. Eventually I am able to call down Allah's blessing on her and hers. She bows again and looks up at me through her eyelashes. Then she lowers her arms, shows firm pointed breasts before turning quickly away and retreating to the door.”Footnote 17
What is, regarding this article, perhaps the most important aspect of beauty, is that it helps us make us feel at home in the world. Scruton's male characters, who are desperately looking for a place to call home, often attach their hopes to a woman whose beauty resonates in their souls, but of whom they often create an idealized picture. That is in particular the main theme of Francesca, in which Collin runs away from home, and invests his hopes of home in a woman he has only spoken to once. In the end, he vainly looks for a place to belong to, for even when he is with Francesca the object of his love always lies beyond his reach.
Conclusion
Although Scruton has repeatedly expressed his suspicion of phenomenology as a ‘method’, largely on account of the arguments of Wittgenstein around the idea of first-person privilege, he has also been persuaded that we can understand our condition only if we attend to the subjective aspect of it – ‘what it is like’, and the way the many aspects of the world are brought together in a single experience. In this connection, he takes a certain inspiration from Croce's Aesthetic, his crudely characterized but suggestive view that a work of art conveys an untranslatable and essentially singular ‘intuition’. Sharing this intuition we understand things from the inside, as it were, and their meaning shines through, showing emotion and experience in their transfigured and completed forms. That is why style, imagery and allusion are so important. And it suggests the way in which fiction can complete the work of philosophy, bringing home to the reader the full weight of a worldview that is otherwise merely sketched in the realm of ideas.
In this way A Dove Descending takes the reader into the feelings of Zoë Costas, so that you know the lost home of Cyprus as she knew it, including ‘the still afternoons, under the dense incumbent light of summer, when a lavender haze hung on the bed of sea. Tiny fingers of foam fussed at the water's edge, pulling it tight and tucking it in. And out at sea the gulls perched on a foundered cargo-boat, clinging motionless to its rim with proprietorial airs, like the souls of sailors drowned.’ Through imagery and rhythm the story inserts this pure, orphaned, about-to-be-wounded soul into the routines of 1970s London more effectively than any philosophical theory of home and its loss.
The very strange situation invoked in Francesca becomes, through the rapid, image-laden style, a symbol of something vast, something that once occupied the whole field of vision and action, but which in Scruton's view has vanished. That vanished thing is England, or at least a romantic ideal of England, as Scruton's generation had been taught to believe in it, and in its place are fragments, all of them redolent of the thing from which they have been detached. Scruton's way of describing these fragments, each somehow connected to every other, but now impossible to reassemble, is not a philosophy of history, but a way of conveying what history really means, for the mere individuals who compose it.
In a similar way, in the two books of Xanthippic dialogues in which he takes up themes from Plato, Scruton is concerned at every point to employ literary means, in order to convey the subjective synthesis that gives meaning to the here and now. Plato saw eros as the call addressed to the soul, inviting it to ascend from the treacherous world of particulars to the pure realm of Ideas. Scruton's reply concerns the ‘what it is like’ of sexual emotion, and gradually, stage by stage, takes the reader down from the Platonic stratosphere, through love, intrigue and jealousy, into the depths of physical desire. In a remarkable erotic poem, and in the character of Archeanassa for whom it was written, he conveys what it really means, when the individual person responds to the other whose caresses incarnate her in the world of mere particulars. This Sartrean way of describing physical desire captures some of what Scruton sets out to do, which is to realize the desire that he describes, and to show that the Platonic attempt to transcend it will always be a kind of self-deception. Only the more Aristotelian vision of Xanthippe, with whose exposition of the theory of virtue the dialogue ends, can really protect us from the real dangers to which sexual pleasure exposes us. This dialogue (Phryne's Symposium) presents us with a clear example of the use of literature to explore beyond the boundary that philosophy can reach, and thereby to complete the argument.
In line with his philosophy, Scruton's fiction reveals something essential about our nature, by showing the extraordinary in the ordinary. That applies in particular to the desire for home and the longing to belong, that are such an integral part of our human nature. In his philosophical writings, Scruton explains what home means and what it means to be ‘homeless’, in his novels he lets us experience it. The value of his writings resides not merely in the aesthetic pleasure that they bring. His novels are not just nice stories with which one can kill a couple of hours. They invite us, perhaps even urge us, to reflect on human nature, and on the subjectivity that lies at its heart. And as such they reveal the mystery of life from under the veil of ordinary things.
