Eminent writer and philosopher, Professor Sir Roger
Scruton, has for over three decades taught at institutions on both sides of the Atlantic,
including Birkbeck College, Boston University, and more recently, the University of Buckingham. He is an author of over forty books. In his work as a philosopher, he has specialized
in aesthetics with particular attention to music and architecture. He has written several works of fiction as
well as memoirs and essays on topics of general interest. He engages in contemporary political and cultural
debates from the standpoint of a conservative thinker and is well known as a powerful polemicist. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
and the British Academy. He has been officially honored by the Czech
Republic by the city of Plzeň-- I hope that's close-- and by Virginia's general assembly. In 2004, he received the Ingersoll Weaver
Prize for Scholarly Letters. In 2015 he published three books, all of which
were chosen among the people's books of the year. In 2016, he was recipient of the Polish Lech
Kaczynski foundation's medal of courage and integrity, was awarded the Italian Mossy Prize
for the culture of wine in recognition of his book, "I Drink, Therefore I Am" and was
knighted that year in the Queen's birthday honor list. We're glad to have with us Professor Roger
Scruton. As you heard, that was on the verge of becoming
a list of my sins. I realize that, in this place, I’ve got
to be on my very best behavior, so I shall begin by thanking the Wheatley Institution,
and Richard Williams especially, for inviting me and for thinking about this important question
of what these three great concepts really embrace and what they have to do with each
other. Richard Williams got in touch with me saying,
“Look. You’re an expert on aesthetics, and we here
in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe in the beautiful, and the good,
and the true, but we don’t know how to say what we believe. You have been working all your life on this,
so you should come and tell us.” All I can say at this point is that, perhaps
because I’ve been working all my life on this, I don’t know how to say anything about
it. Always, I come back to questions, and the
only benefit of having thought about these questions for so long is that there’s a
certain clarity in asking them, but no further clarity in answering them. Now, that shouldn’t depress you, because
in a true philosophical approach to things, it is the clarity of the question, in the
end, that really matters. That enables you to fit the subject matter
into your own life and make the decisions that you have to make about it. Let me say a few things about art and truth
first of all. The enlightenment—by which I mean that mass
of thinking and idea-mongering that began in the beginning of the 17th century and went
on through the beginning of the 19th—brought with it, as I’m sure you know, a certain
loss of the religious anchor in everyday life. Maybe in this part of the world, that loss
was not felt so much. But of course, there was nobody living in
this part of the world just then. But, there were your ancestors lost somewhere
on the way to this place who did, probably, feel a residue of this great movement of ideas
that began in Europe and recognized that the scientific worldview, which had come to the
fore with Newton, was posing a certain threat to the more naïve of once religious beliefs. Among educated people (especially in France
and Britain, and in Germany, too) there was an attempt to find a rival source of meaning
to the religious—to find that rival source of meaning in art, because for various reasons,
art struck people as having a different status from science. Science was a threat to religion. That’s true, because it was undermining
the old explanation of things in which God took such an important place. But, art seemed to represent a different way
of looking at the world from science, one which preserved the mystery of things and
didn’t undo the mystery. Since the mystery was so important, why not
look to art as a source of meaning? So, art suddenly became prominent as a human
enterprise, and with it the birth of the subject of aesthetics—aesthetics being the philosophy
of art and the philosophy of beauty. There are three important figures that I mention
there: Shaftsbury, Baumgarten, and Kant. Shaftsbury was an English philosopher, third
Earl of Shaftsbury, who was a pupil of John Locke (who wrote very influential essays about
the role of the beautiful in the formation of the human spirit). Shaftsbury was an educationist and somebody
who felt that it was his duty to draw the attention of his contemporaries to the complexity
of human life and to the consolations that we find in human life, and beauty is one of
them. He was very influential, though his theories
are somewhat all over the place. Baumgarten was the person who invented the
word “aesthetics” as a name for a discipline. He wrote a book called Aesthetica, which was
about the art of poetry. The original word is a Greek word, as I’m
sure many of you know, for feeling. We have it in our word “anesthetic.” The burden of his book, Aesthetica, was that
poetry communicates truths about our condition, but communicates them not through abstract
thought, but through concrete feeling. Therefore, it’s a different kind of truth,
and it has a different role in our lives and a different value for us. He began the whole enterprise of distinguishing
the artistic way of looking at the world from the literal-minded and possibly scientific
way. Kant, who was much influenced by Baumgarten,
took this up and wrote the first systematic work of aesthetics. These great thinkers raise the question: what
do we learn from art? Is what we learn from art a kind of truth—a
truth that we, perhaps, couldn’t learn from any other human activity? Well, for a start, art is not one kind of
thing. There is abstract art and representational
art. Abstract art is like music or like abstract
painting, abstract sculpture. It doesn’t actually have a subject matter. That’s the whole point of it. You’re supposed to appreciate it for what
it is in itself, for the harmony of lines and figures, for the ways in which things
balance against each other. It’s supposed to attract attention purely
for its own sake and not for the subject matter that it represents. Already, that makes it rather difficult to
say exactly what it is that we learn from art And then, of course, what about fictions? The realm of art includes things like novels,
plays, films, poetry—all of which are about the world in some way, but they don’t give
you literal truths about the world. They are about fictional worlds, and it requires
an effort of the imagination both to create a fiction and also to appreciate it. When you read a great novel, like Jane Austen’s
Emma, it’s not in order to find out about some person called Emma Woodhouse. You know there is no such person. But you do know, nevertheless, that in the
creation of this fiction, Jane Austen has put some part of herself, and some part of
her deep observations of the human condition. But, there aren’t literal truths about a
particular person’s life. What kind of truths are they? Or, is there another kind of truth? That’s one of the problems that we encounter
in this area. Then, there is the problem of the role of
experience. If you read a poem to yourself, or recite
a poem, you know that what matters is the sound of that poem, the structure of it, the
way the verse unfolds, the form of it, but not what it literally says—or, at least,
not what it literally says when extracted from that form. It is not like a textbook. If you are curious about a nuclear physics,
you might pick up a textbook of nuclear physics, read it, and having absorbed it and being
diligent students, memorized the whole lot, you put it on the shelf. And that’s it. That’s the last time you look at it, because
you’ve extracted the information from it. But that’s not the way that people appreciate
poems, is it? It’s not that they extract the information
and then never visit it again. On the contrary, a good poem is one that gains
from repetition, even when you know it by heart, and even when it says something that
seems extremely light. Even if it touches with a light touch on the
realities of this world, like Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods.” It doesn’t say very much, but the form,
the rhythm, and the way in which it seems to touch something deep in you, mean that
you will want to repeat it, want to go on reading it again and again. One thought, then, is that we don’t actually
go to art for information. The information content is not the primary
thing. It’s the experience. But, of course, not all truth is information. We have lots of different ideas of truth. Christ said, famously, “I am the way, the
Truth, and the Life.” He didn’t mean “truth” in the sense
that scientists use that word—that he is somehow a true representation of the world—He
meant something deeper. He meant that you can trust in him; and by
trusting in him, you come to know something about yourself—how far you can go in whatever
direction and with what kind of hope. Perhaps that use of the idea of truth, which
brings in a notion of trust, is a more important one for considering art, because we find support
in the person we trust. It’s like that with art as well. In many works of art, we feel that we are
in the presence of a genuine spirit. Many people feel this, of course, about the
works of Beethoven, who described his Missa Solemnis, in the preface, as “from the heart
. . . to the heart.” What he meant was that this was an utter,
sincere outpouring of what he felt, and he expected the audience to engage with it in
the same spirit, trusting in him to be the guardian of their emotions for the hour-long
experience that he was offering. That kind of an idea of truth is a very different
one from the scientific one, but it still seems to be an idea of truth. Now, this brings up the topic of desire and
pleasure. Huge topic. I have to say that I’m talking here as a
professional philosopher. I know many people in this audience are studying
other subjects, are simply curious about the intellectual world, and are not used to thinking
in this abstract, philosophical way, so I apologize. I just hope that I will inspire you to go
on and pursue the matter further. There is a connection between desiring something
and feeling pleasure on obtaining it. If you really want a glass of water, then
upon obtaining that glass and drinking, you feel pleasure, the pleasure of satisfying
a desire. But it’s not a simple connection, because
we know that many things that we desire don’t give us pleasure when we obtain them. This is one of the most important parts of
moral education: to recognize the difference between those things that you desire which
will bring satisfaction when you obtain them, and those things which you desire which, when
you taste them, you push them away with revulsion. I won’t go into that, but of course, you
might think that maybe art has something to do with that, too. Maybe it can teach us in advance about the
things which we won’t enjoy when we possess them. There are many kinds of pleasure. There’s pure sensual pleasure. You sink into a hot bath at the end of the
day. This is a pleasure of the senses as the warmth
spreads through your body. It doesn’t tell you anything about the world. It’s not based on any kind of thinking,
but it’s the kind of pleasure that animals have But, we also have intellectual pleasures—pleasures
which come from thinking things. The pleasure of reading a book is not a sensory
pleasure at all, is it? It’s a pleasure of the mind, the pleasure
of following an argument, of playing with words, and so on. And then there’s what I call intentional
pleasures. The word “intentional” means directed
outward onto the world, like the pleasure you take on somebody’s giving you a present,
or the pleasure you take when you go to see your child take part in a hundred meter race
(or in the long jump or whatever) and you see in the playing field—there he is! He’s done it! He’s got the first prize! That’s a pleasure about something. When you have a pleasure about something,
that means you can make a mistake as well. The race was at the other end of the field,
and it looked exactly as though your son had won it. Only later do you discover it was someone
else, a look-alike. So, was your pleasure real, or not? In a sense, it was real, but it was also a
mistake. So, there are mistaken pleasures, and that’s
a very interesting fact. So, pleasures can be at something. I can take a pleasure at the beautiful scene
out of the window. I can take a pleasure about the triumph of
my son in the long jump and so on. Aesthetic pleasure is of the first kind. It’s pleasure at something. It’s not like pleasures of taste. When you eat a strawberry ice cream and take
pleasure in it, that’s a pleasant taste in the mouth. When you look at a profound picture and are
moved by it, that’s not a pleasant feeling anywhere in you, is it? It’s not a sensation of pleasure. You’re pleased at this thing that you’re
looking at, and pleased by it, maybe pleased about what it’s saying. It’s completely different from a sensory
pleasure. There’s a question, therefore, that we must
ask: what is the relation between tastes in food and drink, and tastes in music and painting? They’re not the same kind of thing at all. You like strawberries, and I like blueberries. Fine. There’s no real disagreement between us,
just different tastes. But, you like Beethoven and I like Heavy Metal. This is a bit more like a disagreement, especially
if you then go on to say, “Your liking heavy metal is a sign of the degeneracy of your
soul.” The argument can begin then. It may not be possible to resolve it. But the fact is, in matters of artistic and
aesthetic judgment, we do argue, and the arguments are very important to us. Maybe you don’t think this, because you’re
not interested in Beethoven or heavy metal, but there are always going to be areas where
you are interested. Suppose you live in a little town which has
beautiful houses and beautiful streets, and you’re really pleased with it. Your neighborhood is charming and somehow
consoling because of its orderliness. Then, someone puts in a planning application
for a huge skyscraper in bright orange tiles. You start getting together with your neighbors
to campaign against this. There will be arguments put forward as to
who is right and who is wrong. These arguments matter enormously to people. Looking at the architectural mess between
Salt Lake City and Provo, I suspect that Americans don’t think about this as much as they should. But, on the other hand, anybody who has been
to Europe will recognize that there, people do think about these things and argue about
them all the time. And, as a result, all sensible tourists don’t
spend their holidays here, but in Europe. Anyway, that’s another matter. The great question, then, is: what is the
value of this kind of pleasure—the pleasure that we feel in works of art and aesthetic
objects? Can it be a vehicle of truth? It’s very interesting that we can feel pleasure
in works of art, even when the works of art are sad, or even tragic. We take pleasure in a sad story, because the
story does something to the sadness. The weepy movie may have enormous appeal. You may feel like it hasn’t worked if you
haven’t had a bit of a weep during the course of it. The sadness is part of what was promised. It’s part of the deal. And yet, it can’t be real sadness, because
nobody voluntarily submits himself to that. It’s something like sadness put in a frame. The story puts it in a frame and makes it
such that it doesn’t hurt you in the way that, for instance, the death of someone you
love would hurt you. That framing of our emotions seems to be one
of the things that works of art do for us, isn’t it? We seem to be able to come to terms with the
sadness of human life, partly because we can represent it in ways that make it more meaningful—framed
and isolated. To pleasure, we always say “Come again,”
but to knowledge, we say, “Thanks.” Once you’ve obtained the knowledge, that’s
it. You’ve got it. The pleasure, you’ve had it once, but you
want it again. Especially in the case of works of art, the
repeatability of the pleasure is what it’s all about. But, perhaps there is knowledge in repetition. So, let’s just think about that for a moment. Though, I want to say something about art
and virtue first. What is the moral value of art? What kind of moral improvement can art generate
in us? Has it got a particular role in presenting
the moral world and improving our own engagement in it? Well, obviously, art is a source of moral
examples, but the work of art does not merely present the example. There are lots of examples which prompt you
to sketch for yourself ideas of good behavior and bad behavior. It puts us in a position of judgment. I mention there Henry James’s portrait of
Isabelle Archer (which I’m hoping you young people will be about to read, if you haven’t
read it yet) in Portrait of a Lady, in which Henry James presents to us a good woman who
is also naïve and exploited by a cunning and evil man. James doesn’t judge these characters himself. He puts us in a position to make a judgment
and to make the judgment through the eyes of Isabelle Archer. The reader gradually comes to understand her
situation as she comes to understand it. That’s real art. Henry James never says anything. He makes you think it, but think it for yourself. That might have a special moral value, mightn’t
it? Rather than just telling you what to think,
morally, making you think it for yourself so that it’s a course of education in the
emotions that he’s directed at you. Well, that all looks quite plausible for fiction
and for representational art, but what about abstract art? People think that abstract art—art which
doesn’t have a representational content—can also have some kind of moral value. That’s what Beethoven was saying about his
Missa Solemnis—and what many people say about music generally—that it is telling
us something about our emotions by leading us to feel secondhand, so to speak, what those
emotions are. There’s a kind of emotional education going
on there, too. But then, there are real problems, and this
is one that Richard Williams wanted me to talk about. It’s a very difficult one to talk about. What happens when you encounter a work of
art that presents vice, but aesthetically in such a way as to make the vice attractive? I take the example here of Salome. Here is the problem, as you remember, of Salome,
the story of the daughter of Herodias who danced before the king. She coveted the head of John the Baptist (perhaps
because her mother had put her up to it), and had finally persuaded the king to give
it to her. In other words, she had persuaded the king
to kill the prophet that he had been reluctant to kill up to that moment because of his manifest
holiness. This was made into a play by Oscar Wilde,
a rather clever play, and then that was set to music by Ricard Strauss. His music is full of a distraught lasciviousness,
but it’s very beautiful and seductive. I won’t play it to you. I’ll leave it to you to encounter it. It’s all over YouTube, of course. This music kind of brings you to Salome’s
side. You feel that somehow she’s in the grip
of an emotion that she can’t deal with. She’s got to satisfy it, but as represented
by Strauss and Oscar Wilde, Salome goes the whole hog and takes hold of the head and kisses
it. Here’s the kind of thing that you see in
modern opera productions. Modern opera productions are designed especially
to be offensive to members of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, so don’t worry. They’re usually much worse than this, but
here is Salome, having sung her incredible Aria of sensual ecstasy over the severed head
of John the Baptist, seizing it and kissing it in this unacceptable way. Well, most people would feel that’s going
too far, and perhaps people did think that it was going too far. This opera did have quite a bit of trouble
in its early life, but now it’s part of the repertoire. And yet, it seems to take a kind of ghoulish
pleasure in artily perverted behavior, and the music seems to put that behavior in a
kind of enchanting light, because the music is drawing you in all the time. You find similar things in other works of
art of the mid-to-late 19th century, art that rescues evil by making it seem beautiful. Baudelaire’s Fleur Du Mal (which I’m sure
some of you who’re doing French here will be reading and studying) is a very good example
of this. He takes the excesses and the degeneracies
of life in a modern city and looks for a meaning that lies concealed within them. He does this through incredibly powerful imagery
and beautiful verse forms that make it look as though there is a spiritual meaning behind
all this that redeems it. The spiritual is revealed, even though what
is described denies the possibility of the spiritual. It’s as though, by denying things in the
right way, we can affirm them. I think that’s what Baudelaire himself thought,
and often people have described him as a Christian poet, precisely for this: he rescues from
the heart of corruption and despair that little germ of spiritual purity which lies in the
imagery of his verse and which we take away and then make to grow within us. I’m not sure if that is true, but it’s
an interesting thought. In Shakespeare, of course, there’s a lot
of evil—the evil of the character of Iago in Othello, for example, and also Macbeth,
who is a self-doubting evil man. But, it’s straightforward. Shakespeare doesn’t expect you to be on
their side in any way. He certainly doesn’t do a Salome on them,
although at a certain point, there is a lot of sympathy for Macbeth. Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost is another
very important example of an evil character who is so portrayed by the verse that you
cannot fail to be on his side. His wounded pride is something you immediately
identify with, and you come to see that there’s a kind of nobility about it. This is what the verse is doing. Is this immoral verse, therefore, that’s
bringing you to the side of Satan? Blake, in his illustrations for Paradise Lost,
seems to think that. So, there are some other examples that I give
you there: Claggart, the Bosun in Herman Mellville’s Tale of Billy Budd (another one that you’re
probably about to read), sexed and made into a brilliant opera by Benjamin Britten. Then there’s Dimitri in The Brothers Karamazov,
by Dostoevsky. What do we think about him? Is he just confused, or are we being, again,
brought into the world of a character who is unable to make moral judgments for himself? Are we also, perhaps, confused about whether
we can make those judgments? One of the questions that will arise here
is: what is the distinction between moral art and moralizing art? Here is a piece of Russian revolutionary art
from the 1917 revolution, which is manifestly moralizing. It’s telling you that these people are obviously
mistreated. So what? Is it saying anything that helps you to understand
that mistreatment, or to take a different stance towards it? Or, is it just like a moral tale, just an
illustration to something else? Many people feel that art shouldn’t moralize
as directly as this. It’s too crude. It should be more like Henry James in The
Portrait of a Lady, making you do the moralizing rather than doing the moralizing itself. Well, that may be so, but let’s go on. I want to say a little bit about beauty now. I’ve said some things about art’s relation
to truth, something about its relation to goodness In both cases, it’s extremely complicated. It seems that there’s nothing simple that
you can say. What about beauty? There’s a certain kind of habit that arose,
especially in the late 19th century, connected with people like Oscar Wilde of putting aesthetic
values first, saying that these are the things that matter. Wilde famously said, “In matters of grave
importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing." And he lived his life, or at least pretended
to live his life, as though that were his guiding principle: to be elegant and soothing
to the eye and to ignore all those simple, old-fashioned moral values which got in the
way of that. But in his works of art, he didn’t think
that. To put aesthetic values first is, or might
be, a kind of immoralism. Osmond, who is the husband of Isabella Archer
in The Portrait of a Lady, is somebody who really does put aesthetic values first, and
his delight in collecting beautiful things and living this aesthetic way of life has
led him to great pecuniary need. He needs money, and she has money, so he marries
her in order to get ahold of that money, and also in order to collect her. She was beautiful, too, so he collects her
as a beautiful object, but doesn’t love her. Oscar Wilde does a slightly cruder version
of the same idea in the character of Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray. There are two sides to the aesthetic experience. There’s the kind of relishing side, and
the exploring side. Relishing a beautiful work of art or a sublime
work of music is something that you can do without necessarily exploring the depths of
the human heart, even though the work of art touches on them. And, perhaps, this kind of aestheticism means
forgetting the cognitive dimension of aesthetic pleasures and realizing that they’re not
just sensory pleasures. They’re not just pleasures in the way you
experience things. They’re also directed toward a vision of
the world. Each of those goals that I’ve talked about—truth
and goodness and beauty—is important because they are what you’re focusing on, but they
seem to reduce art itself to an inadequate means. They seem to leave out the aesthetic dimension. Only when combined in a unity do these values—the
kind of truth and the kind of goodness of which beauty is the sign—mark out a path
for art. If beauty is the way in which truth is presented,
the way in which goodness comes to your consciousness, then we seem to have something like an account
of the value of art. There’s also a question here about meaning
and form. The meaning of a work of art—and this goes
back to Baumgarten—lies in the form and is not really detachable from it. If you try to translate a poem into straight
prose, say what it means, and give its equivalent in simple language, then you lose the meaning. The meaning is not just what it says; it also
resides in the form and is not detachable from that. This is a little bit like religion and revealed
truth. In much religion, there’s a promise of another
way of seeing the world, what we might call a God’s-eye perspective. It’s not just that there are theological
doctrines, such as: God exists, Christ is the son of God, etc., although those are important
to the Christian religion. There is also revealed truth when you meditate
on these things, and suddenly you see the world in another way, as though from God’s
perspective. Perhaps in those circumstances, the form of
the language that you’re studying in a sacred text, for instance, is very important, just
as it is in poetry. That’s why those great texts have been preserved,
not just for what they say but for their way of saying it. And again, in religion, as in art, repetition
is very important. You repeat the service every week. You say the Lord’s Prayer every day. If somebody said to you, “What a waste of
time. You’ve said it once. Why say it again? You know what it means. You know the words. What’s all this about?” You know that that’s not what prayer is
for. Prayer is about putting you back into the
relation with God that you’re constantly slipping out of. Therefore, it demands repetition. And there are truths that have to be rehearsed
if they are to be owned and in order for you to know exactly how to feel something and
what to feel towards the world around you. You might feel you know it one moment, but
you’ve lost it the next. And getting the right words helps you to recapture
it. That idea of revealed truth that comes to
you through repetition (as in prayer) is a bit like the aesthetic experience as I’ve
been describing it. Perhaps it gives you a secular version of
revealed truth. That’s what people like Nietzsche and Wagner
thought. They went further and thought that, actually,
art could therefore be a substitute for religion. That’s what we really should be now devoting
ourselves to. We have art, as Nietzsche says, so as not
to die of despair. Art is still there, giving us this meaning,
even when we’ve lost faith. Finally, some thoughts about the intrinsic
values of art. Poetry and plays and paintings present imaginary
worlds. Representational art gives us an opening onto
the world of the imagination, and they all rescue their subject matter from a purely
instrumental conception of its significance. Things portrayed in art are not portrayed
as useful. They’re portrayed as interesting for their
own sake. They’re rescued from the instrumentality. That’s why every allusion matters; the image
is a distillation of the thing depicted. Poetry and painting work in the same way. Here is a landscape by Van Gogh, which everybody
knows, probably. The brush strokes there imbue the landscape
with an observing consciousness. They are marks of the moral being for whom
this is not a thing, but a vision. To absorb that, you recognize that it’s
a very long way from the way a field of wheat with a flock of rooks above it would look. This doesn’t look in any way realistic,
but somehow it has a power that it wouldn’t have if it were wholly realistic, because
the brush strokes of the painter imbue that landscape with his own soul. It’s as though the imagination of the painter
had reworked the thing that he’s painting so that it isn’t just the thing. It’s also that thing distilled into his
own consciousness. In the imagination, we are thinking about
absent and nonexistent things, but the consciousness involved is a creator of its own object, as
in that case of Van Gogh. The imagination is something that we can will. I can ask you to imagine some things. I can say, “Imagine a field of wheat.” You won’t be able to imagine it like Van
Gogh did, but nevertheless, you will summon it up in obedience to that order. That is an interesting thing. Through works of the imagination, we bring
distant things into close relation with each other. That’s what we do in figures of speech,
in poetry. We’re bringing things into relation with
each other. The brush strokes in the painting bring a
human action into relation with a landscape. These imaginary worlds that we create can
strike us as true, or as false, and I want to contrast that Van Gogh with a painting
by Thomas Kinkade. This is one of his visions of paradise. This is a controversial painter, as you know. Van Gogh died in poverty. Kinkade died leaving $53 million, and died
of drink. I think 1 in 10 Americans have a Kinkade above
their mantelpiece, because it’s a soothing thing. For some people, this is a vision of what
painting should be. It’s much truer to the appearance of things
than Van Gogh, but there’s a question about it. What is that question? Many people would say there’s a falsification
behind this painting. I don’t want to cast judgment on it, but
just say a few things about it. Why does this strike so many people as false? In one sense, it’s truer than the Van Gogh. It’s closer to the way things actually look. But the falsification, if it exists, is the
falsification of the observer rather than of the observed. It shows a world presented through a veil
of self-congratulatory sentiment. That’s at least what the critic would say. It tells you that you’re a good person and
no further efforts need to be made. Van Gogh is not telling you that at all. He’s telling you that life is rough, and
you need to make efforts even to see this. It tells you that further efforts need be
made, and that meaning lies in the forms and colors. There are pastel shades smeared over the landscape
like a disease. Well, is that right? I’ll leave it to you to think. But, this brings us back to the parallel between
art and religion. Religion provides us with truth, but it’s
not just straightforward, literal truth about the way the world is. There are all sorts of things that we believe,
but there’s a much more important dimension to it. A spiritual truth tells us how things really
are for us and what our position really is in the world of human relations and human
emotions. In religion, we recognize that there’s no
redemption through falsehood, and the same seems to be true of art. That’s what those two pictures, I think,
lead us to suppose. Art, too, has its own way of presenting the
spiritual truth of things, and if it falsifies, then it doesn’t produce the kind of redemptive
consolation that we’re looking for. This might explain sadness in the works of
art. It might explain tragedy. In tragedy, you go to the depths, but you
find a kind of rescue there. Only if you go to those depths, however, will
you be rescued. Enjoying sadness for its own sake, in just
a sentimental and pretense of grief, is not going to help, but in actually going to the
full encounter with mortality and what it means, as in a real tragedy, maybe there is
a help. Maybe that does take us to a point where we
can learn something that we need to learn, and learn it in our hearts and in our emotions,
learn to bear this thing. Perhaps that is why we want to go to tragedies
again and again. So, art is certainly not going to be any help
to us if it loses sight of what we are and what we need. And we do recognize that there is a distinction
between true and false emotion. False emotion comes about when the ”I”
eclipses the “you.” Most real love is about you, the other. Sentimental love pretends to be about you,
but it’s really about me—me feeling this wonderful thing and showing thereby my moral
distinction. We find that kind of sentimentality in art,
and also we find art which challenges that sentimentality. Thomas Kinkade is all about me being a lovely
person, whereas Van Gogh is all about the “you” that appears to him, even in a field
of wheat—because, of course, that’s God who’s appearing to him. As I go back to what I said about Henry James,
remember that real art doesn’t judge; it opens the world to judgment and
inspires that judgment in us. I wanted to finish with some difficult examples. In The Brothers Karamazov (another book that
you might be on the verge of reading, or on the verge of not bothering to read) Dostoevsky
doesn’t judge. He invites us to judge in his stead, but what
he’s inviting us to judge is a whole community of people who don’t judge, but just do in
the most horrifying way. And this is a very challenging book. Dickens, in The Old Curiosity Shop, the death
of little Nell lays it on with a trowel. They’re trying to make us weep over the
death of this innocent little girl who’s forgiving everybody for dying before her time,
and it’s not only unrealistic and implausible, but real schmaltz. Oscar Wilde famously said about this, “A
man must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of little Nell.” Which is a brilliant way of summarizing it. Salome, though, is a realization in imagined
form of a grim state of mind—a really horrible state of mind—but realized without any negative
judgment. That’s the great problem: this is music
of sublime power which simply happens to have been applied to this horrible situation. Strauss was able to do that. He once said that, “If you gave me a railway
time table, I’d set it to the most beautiful music.” Is this a fault? Again, just to conclude, to get you to compare
two portrayals of the crucifixion. Grunewald, is the famous Isenheim Alter Piece
in Germany, gives a hyper realistic portrayal of the horror of the crucifixion, such that
nobody can say that he’s denying the reality of this or that he’s turning away, or falsifying. There’s no falsification. But, somehow it leaves you without hope. It’s as though it really is just that: the
death and destruction of a person. Whereas, in Tintoretto’s case, you see the
most extraordinary sequence of events in which, actually, not just of the resurrection of
Christ, but the redemption of mankind is foretold in every detail of the painting. And this, therefore, is not a horrifying painting
at all, but a consoling one, and one in which you see just why it is that Christ had to
be sacrificed. From Grunewald, you don’t know why it is. It’s just yet another inexplicable and horrifying
accident of human degenerate life. Those are two examples that you might take
away to think about, and I think I’ve gone on for long enough now. I can invite some questions. Thank you. We'd invite you, please, to use the microphone. We have a few minutes for questions. Then, Dr. Scruton has agreed to autograph some books. They are available for purchase. If you'd like, he'll be there for a few minutes and would be happy to sign some for you as soon as the Q&A is over. We'll go about 10 or 15 minutes. Q&A
Question: My question is this: I have a dilemma as a listener
to music, or other art forms, when I know that this particular artist is, perhaps, living
a life of dissipation, or is immoral in some way, and yet the art they’re creating seems
to be an art full of light. Is that my difficulty that I’m not seeing
the dissipation in their art? Is that something that I should be judging
or listing to that? Scruton: You can live an immoral life, and
as it were, compensate for it by putting all the virtue that you fail to have into your
works of art. And this is not unusual, actually. Quite a lot of the romantic artists were like
that. Schubert led a fairly dissolute life, but
you won’t hear any of it in his music. You’ll hear tragedy and pain and suffering,
but also the pure love of the human condition. So, there isn’t any reason to think this
is not possible. One of the problems these days is that we
know too much about artists, and they do tend to live in a slightly wild way. Not all of them, but there are very few great
artists whom one can imagine living a respectable, middle class, married life with 2.5 children
and dressed in a three-piece suit every day. It just doesn’t seem to work that way, but
there were some in the past. They weren’t necessarily the best. Question: So, divorce the art from the artist? Scruton: Yeah. I think that, in the literature on this, there
are quite a few people who write about things called the intentional fallacy. It’s a fallacy to think that works of art
have to be understood in terms of the intention of the artist. And there are others who write about the death
of the author: the author disappears behind his work. All we have is his work. Dostoevsky was a completely degenerate character,
but his novels are imbued with the highest kind of Christian orthodoxy. Question: I’m curious more about what you
were saying on aesthetics, and specifically when you talked about relishing vs. exploring. What I interpreted that to mean was relishing
in the style or the specific manner of the art and then allowing yourself not to be confined
to that. Is that what you meant, or is there something
more? Scruton: I meant that there are two different
attitudes to art. The first is the attitude of the connoisseur,
who wants to experience new things and evermore refined emotions and enjoys those emotions
for their own sake, and regards himself as somehow a kind of virtuoso of feeling. There is that response, which is sort of the
aestheticist response, and then there’s the response of somebody who sees the work
of art as a means of exploring the world, something that’s taking him on an adventure
into knowledge and into the moral reality, which is a more healthy attitude. That’s all I wanted to say. Question: Okay, and you’re saying they need
to be merged together? Scruton: Well, both are there, but the question
is: which are you going to emphasize? The emphasizing of the relishing can lead
to this kind of narcissistic concentration on the self. Question: My question is, basically, that
we have a lot of art that is great and wonderful art, but has been tarnished not by the artist’s
representation himself, but by society. Certain pieces of art, such as the operas
of Wagner (or some of the less politically correct works of Gilbert and Sullivan, or
other artists in all different medias) have been tarnished, not because of who these artists
were (well, maybe somewhat in the case of Wagner) but because society has deemed these
pieces of art “immoral” based on how they are used or how they are viewed in the light
of today’s society. What are your thoughts on that, and how ought
we to respond to that kind of art today? Scruton: Well, of course what you mean is
that works of art can pick up bad associations through their use, and it’s not very different
from what the first question was about. Does this affect the intrinsic value of the
work of art, or is it just an extraneous thing? We all know, in the case of Wagner, that he
was tainted with the brush of anti-Semitism, and that was his fault. He certainly was anti-Semitic. He wrote the most horrible things about the
Jews, but he wrote them a hundred years before Hitler without envisaging anything like that. But the Nazis took a serious interest in his
operas and always presented them as though they were celebrations of the Nazi ideal of
the Arian race. And this did lead to many people being totally
put off them and thinking that they can only be used in that way because there is something
in them that lends them to that use. That’s one of the great questions for Wagner
lovers: can you rescue his works from that accusation? This is an important question for me, because
I just tried to do this with a book I’ve just written on "The Ring of the Nibelung,"
which, at least in my view, does rescue Wagner. Question: I’m glad that someone’s going
to rescue Wagner, because I love Wagner’s Rings. Scruton: Well, there you are. You’re on the right lines. All you have to do now is save up and buy
this book. Question: Poor college student in Provo. Probably couldn’t afford it. Question: What’s the
most beautiful color, objectively? Scruton: The most beautiful color, objectively,
is the pale violet used by Tiepolo in painting the lips of degenerate women. Question: What’s the most truthful one? Scruton: I think that one is equally truthful. Question: Back to the Kinkade and the Van
Gogh. Between the two of them, I think I’ll take
home the Van Gogh. I think I’m with you on that, and my response
to the Kinkade that you presented, when I saw it, was a kind of revulsion. I’m kind of perplexed, though, by a pang
of sympathy that I imagine myself feeling for someone who might look at the Kinkade
(which I would say “Kitschy” is what I would call that). I can imagine someone of religious sensibility,
maybe not my kind of religious sensibility, looking at the Kinkade and feeling a kind
of genuine moral edification from a picture that I would call kitschy, and I’m curious
about my own reluctance to dismiss it entirely out of hand for that reason. Scruton: This is a very important observation. Of course, the natural description of it is
“kitsch”, but it’s a very difficult concept to define, or to put your finger on
exactly what’s wrong with it. It is even more difficult to put your finger
on what’s wrong with the person who loves kitsch. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that person
at all; it’s just that he or she has no taste in art. But it doesn’t follow that his religious
emotions directed towards the Kinkade, for that reason, are false. And this is the real question. There’s a very beautiful story by James
Joyce called “The Dead,” which is the last story in Dubliners (another book that
the young people are about to read), in which he describes a reunion of people whose emotions
are all wrapped up with sentimental songs and weak little memories of the past, but
there’s a real regret and a real love in there They are directing all their emotions through
kitsch objects and kitsch language, and yet the story itself is completely redeemed from
kitsch. It’s about kitsch, but not itself kitsch. That’s a very interesting revelation, because
it’s a forgiving story which shows that, indeed, people can latch their emotions onto
these unworthy objects, and that we who seek to see through them are maybe actually not
such good people as the people who love those things. Question: The sort of corollary would be a
kind of malicious judgment that I might see on someone that I see in a European museum
with their guidebooks, knowledgeably scrutinizing a religious painting that I suspect means
as little to them as an irreligious painting, however aesthetically formed it may be. Scruton: Yes, but in the end we do want the
content of a religious painting—the religious content—to somehow match the aesthetic experience. The Tintoretto isn’t just a beautiful painting. It’s a triumph of religious thinking, as
well. Question: I loved what you had to say about
repetition and prayer, that “truth must be rehearsed if it is to be owned, knowing
what to feel” and that prayer puts you back into the relation you are constantly slipping
out of. My question is two-fold: what would you say
about the role of imagination in prayer? And then: what would you say—because, on
the one hand I completely agree with you about the importance and primacy of form in prayer—but
what would you say to people who suspect that form becomes rote and belies sincerity? Scruton: Form becomes rote? Question: Yes, that somehow form could take
away from the sincerity that we are striving for. Scruton: Yes. It’s difficult. There’s a famous Victorian hymn that begins
“teach us how to pray aright” We all lack words with which to pray for the simple reason
of the huge distance between us and the object, and that distance can be overcome just like
that with the right words. All religions have those basic, rote-learned
prayers which help the people to overcome the distance—something like the Hail Mary. Every Catholic is able to put himself immediately
in the presence of God with that prayer. Or the Hear, O Israel of the Jews, and so
on. We need also to make our particular requests
and establish our particular relation with God, and there imagination is important. But, on the other hand, it’s a little bit
like the Kinkade example, again. We might just end up uttering total platitudes
and clichés. God must think to himself, “I’ve heard
all that so many times, and I gave you this really good prayer. Why don’t you say that?” There are real questions as to how to go forward
with the imagination and how to go forward safely, really, and I think that’s one reason
why religious poetry is so beautiful to us. Someone like George Herbert gives us new prayers
of his own which also correspond to bits of us which haven’t been put into the language
of prayer before. I think that’s all I can say, though. Question: I’m hoping to major in communications,
and I’m fascinated by how you speak of the importance of ruminating over art and allowing
it to teach us different truths. I feel like in the world today (especially
my generation—the “I” generation as they say—the social media generation), it
seems to be more focused on rapidity of sharing information and less on reflection. It’s more about who can get what out first. I guess my question is: as a man who has spent
his entire life studying aesthetics and appreciating art, what would you say to someone in my shoes
who finds themselves in this world that seems to discourage this type of artistic reflection? Scruton: This is a very important question. My own children have this question, obviously,
as they’re slightly younger than you. There are two things to say: one is that,
of course, social media has changed the nature of communication, because it’s taken away
the filters through which people communicated. When I was young, to communicate something
really important (like your love for someone) you would write a letter. There would be lots of crossings out, and
then you would do another version. The written word filters out all the clichés
and all the nonsense, and eventually, if you’re lucky, you got something that she can keep
and treasure. Or, if you’re not lucky, to throw away. That’s the kind of filter that forces you
to improve what you’re saying to the point where you, yourself are conscious of what
you’re saying. As you know from Twitter (I said I wouldn’t
refer to Trump, but this is such an obvious example), there you can just throw out into
the world half-formed thoughts in which all your incompetence and illiteracy are perpetuated. Should you do that? Maybe that’s the way things will be. But if you’re studying communications, what
you should be addressing is the question of whether you can keep the value of these immediate
communications—of Twitter and Facebook and so on—and gradually improve the form. Can you introduce a filter? The only filter on Twitter is the number of
characters, but on Facebook you could perhaps start a movement whereby people learn how
to despise the badly arranged wall and the illiterate words and so on. Introduce criticism into social media. That might be a step forward. I admit, it won’t get you to the point where
T.S. Eliot might have joined Facebook. Alternatively, of course, there is the possibility
of not using social media at all. There is a real question then of whether you
gain from that or lose. You certainly gain a better quality of contacts
but far less quantity, and for many young people, that’s the problem. It’s the quantity of contacts and the immediacy
of the relations with them which is really the temptation. I don’t really have anything to say that
would give you a cause for hope. This social media is now with us, and that’s
the way we’re going to be governed, it seems, as well as the way in which we establish relations
with each other. Maybe in the end, there’ll be small communities
of savages who don’t use these things, like me, but our circle of acquaintances will get
smaller and smaller until we can all be contained in one museum.
