Notes From the Lebenswelt: Roger Scruton’s “The Soul of the World”

Of all contemporary philosophers, Sir Roger was my favourite. It was a great loss to the world of thought when he passed on in 2020.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Adam Sandonato

Roger Scruton’s “The Soul of the World” is nothing short of a quest to defend Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. It is one of those rare works that marshals a lifetime’s work of thought and reflection from the author into a discussion that provides a lifetime’s worth of study and enjoyment to the reader.

The Soul of the World, by Roger Scruton (216 pages, Princeton University Press, 2016)

Any serious study of human nature must devote considerable attention to religious belief, if only because of its ubiquitousness across time and space. On the progressive view, the ubiquity of religion has already been explained–approached first by anthropologists, then taken up by sociologists, and reaching explanatory perfection in the grammar of evolutionary psychology. Religion, the anthropologist tells us, emerges from a collective desire to understand, predict, and even control the natural world. What begins as an attempt at magic develops into an organized mysticism we call religion, which is ultimately supplanted by the sober gaze of science. The sociologist calls attention to the social value of religious belonging. Communities develop elaborate narratives, myths, and rituals in order to command obedience to social structures and provide a sense of belonging to its members. At the bottom of all of this, the evolutionist says, are dominant reproductive strategies. Religion, like everything else, is an adaptation; its persistence means that the sense of the sacred is especially suited to the propagation of our species.

Religion, then, is an exclusively natural phenomenon. The stunning array of creeds, sects, rituals, and liturgies we uncover through the study of the human experience–not to mention the traditions of art, law, music, and literature that grow out of them–is a shining example of what can emerge through natural selection. But at the end of the day, the scales must fall; if we are to follow the light of reason, we must accept that the experience of the sacred and the transcendent can be written entirely in the language of natural processes.

In the Fall of 2011–a decade after the attacks of September 11th injected discussions of faith and reason with a renewed urgency–Roger Scruton delivered the Stanton Lectures at the Divinity Faculty at Cambridge with the express purpose of challenging the progressive narrative offered above. A book based on these lectures was published in 2014 under the title, The Soul of the World (Princeton University Press). According to Scruton, his intention was to “define what is at stake in the current disputes over the nature and ground of religious belief.” He would “make room, in some measure, for the religious worldview, while stopping well short for vindicating the doctrine or practice of any particular faith.”^[1]

In a word, The Soul of the World is an extended philosophical defense of transcendence. Its effort to “make room” for the religion more than succeeds; it clears the room for religion. The book reveals an entire world for us–the lebenswelt–and serves as a lasting testament to the gift of inquiry and wonder.

At the heart of Scruton’s study is a form of cognitive dualism, “according to which the world can be understood in two incommensurable ways, the way of science, and the way of interpersonal understanding.”^[2] Invoking Wilfrid Sellars’ famous distinction between the “manifest image” and the “scientific image,”^[3] Scruton claims that the world we inhabit as persons–the lebenswelt, or life world–is beyond the reach of scientific explanation. Taking aim at the evolutionary account of religious belief, Scruton argues that purely functional explanations cannot account for their most essential component, namely, their content. Religious beliefs not only direct us towards certain actions, but are subjects of conscious reflection and decision.

To illustrate, Scruton takes the example of the incest taboo. On the evolutionary account, human beings are disgusted by incest because it is maladaptive. Humans who procreate in this manner will not be equipped to survive against those who avoid it, and therefore evolution has selected for behaviors and thoughts that avoid incestual relations. Freud famously had a different idea: we do not avoid incest because it is genetically disadvantageous, but because we subconsciously want to do it. Both theories attribute the incest taboo to a rational strategy, just by different means. The point here is not that Freud is right–Scruton is adamant that he is not–but that once behavior is raised to the level of self-conscious reflection, we have left the realm of mere behavior and entered the space of reasons. And once we enter this space, we find both reasons for and against incest: what leads “Oedipus to stab out his eyes and Jocasta to hang herself,” also amounts to Siegmund and Sieglinde’s “sole moment of joy.”^[4]

As Scruton explains, “From the point of view of evolution it would be sufficient that incest should arouse disgust, in the way that rotten flesh or feces arouse disgust. The thought processes add nothing to the reproductive function. On the contrary, they compromise it, by winding it into the peculiar intentionality of our personal relations causing us to lift this reproductive error out of the dark realm of biology into the light of moral reflection.”^[5] Once brought into this light, we are confronted not with questions of utility and function, but with right and wrong.

This brings us to Scruton’s second major contention with comprehensive evolutionary explanations: they cannot fully account for the truth-directedness of our thoughts and motives. “Evolution explains the connection between our thoughts and the world, and between our desires and their fulfillment, in pragmatic terms. We think and feel in ways that promote the goal of reproduction. But our mental states have no such goal. We pursue the true, the good, and the beautiful, even though the false, the nasty, and the messy might have been just as useful to our genes.”^[6] The logic of evolution–and scientific reasoning as a whole–is in no position to evaluate the veracity of transcendental values such as truth, since the independent status of truth is presupposed in the endeavor: “We have reason to believe [science] only because we trust that the directedness of our thinking is not an accidental byproduct of the evolutionary process but an independent guide to the way things are, whose credentials go beyond its adaptive benefits.”^[7] By their own admission, scientific theories cannot offer an “outside view” of science since they are “written in the language of science.”^[8]

What if evolution told us that false beliefs are more advantageous than true ones? Would that not cast doubt on the reliability of all our insights, evolutionary theory included? “In other words,” Scruton adds, “if we attempt to reach the high ground of naturalism by this route, we encounter a version of the liar paradox: an obstacle to which there is only one response–turn back!”^[9]

Scruton’s contention throughout the book is not so much with science as it is with scientism. The Soul of the World is replete with Scruton’s reservations about evolutionary psychology and neuroscience not as illegitimate forms of inquiry, but as unable to account for transcendent urge that separates human life from all others in the natural world.

What defines this separation? In Scruton’s words, “We are persons; but persons are also objects that we come across in the world of our perception. Persons act on and are acted on by other objects and there are laws that govern their coming into being and their passing away…but they are also subjects. They identify themselves in the first person, and this way of identifying themselves is an immovable part of the ways in which we describe them.”^[10] Our world is one in which we seek not the causal explanations of others’ actions, but the reasons for them. We act as free and rational agents in a world among other subjects, addressing others as you and ourselves as I. This I-You mode of address, for Scruton, is a transcendental in the Kantian sense: it is a condition that renders possible the world we inhabit as subjects:

The I-You encounter is not an encounter between objects, and therefore not an encounter between objects of a special and ontologically primitive kind. It is an encounter between subjects, and one that can be understood only if we recognize that the logic of our first-person awareness is built into the concepts through which our mutual dealings are shaped…First-person awareness is the premise of interpersonal relations, and it is on those relations that our nature as persons depends.^[11]

Scruton takes pains to distinguish his transcendental “I” from other forms of dualism that would paint self-consciousness as some “peculiar residue” or “inner glow” that operates within an otherwise natural order. What is more, this “I” is not entirely private. Apart from the epistemic privilege afforded by our status as self-conscious subjects, it is our relations to other subjects that grounds the lebenswelt. What exactly the nature of the relationship between subjects and objects is at a metaphysical level, Scruton only hints.^[12] More important is the explanatory force of Scruton’s account of the person within the lebenswelt, what he describes as a state of “overreaching intentionality.”^[13]

Philosophical jargon aside, the world that Scruton opens up for us under the banner of the lebenswelt and overreaching intentionality is nothing short of magnificent. What is described by Scruton as the space of subjects, reasons, motives, and values earlier in the book is concretized by a set of discussions on art, architecture, myth, music, eros, and law. Strikingly, Scruton arrives at the conclusion that being is ultimately a gift; that our place in the lebenswelt points beyond the bounds of pure nature. Though we can, within the bounds of secular thought, account for contracts, promises, and relationships of use, we cannot, without reaching to the transcendent, even begin to understand covenants, vows, and perfect friendship. If we discard the latter as mere helpful fictions, we collapse from orthodoxy into idolatry, defacing the world of the sacred, and losing personhood along with it.

This line of thinking is best encapsulated in Scruton’s meditations on the Fall:

The Fall did not occur at a particular moment in time; it is a permanent feature of the human condition. We stand poised between freedom and mechanism, subject and object, end and means beauty and ugliness, sanctity and desecration. And all those distinctions derive from the same ultimate fact, which is that we can live in openness to others, accounting for our actions and demanding an account from them, or alternatively close ourselves off from others, learn to look on them as objects, so as to retreat from the order of the covenant to the order of nature.^[14]

Whatever its theological merits, its philosophical import is second to none. And this, I argue, is one of the chief virtues of the Soul of the World. The arguments developed in the book rescue philosophy from the incoherent tyranny of naturalism and gains significant ground in restoring philosophy as the “handmaiden of theology.”^[15]

Though Scruton is decidedly modest about the reach of his conclusions—and indeed, the state of his personal relationship with Christianity remains a matter of debate after his death—The Soul of the World is nothing short of a quest to defend Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. It is well worth reading for Catholics, in particular, given Scruton’s explorations, both implicit and explicit, of the gratuity of being, the incarnation, the inviolability and peculiarity of the person, the necessity of faith, the hiddenness of God, and the sacramental nature of reality, among many other vital themes that find their home in the truth of the Catholic faith. But it is worth reading for all, because at bottom, this is one of those rare works that marshals a lifetime’s work of thought and reflection from the author into a discussion that provides a lifetime’s worth of study and enjoyment to the reader.

__________

Notes:

[1] Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), Preface

[2] Ibid., 34

[3] Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1963), pp. 1-40. A classic distinction in analytic philosophy, Sellars’ “manifest image” is a useful point of departure for the cognitive dualism that Scruton develops. Scruton goes further, however, highlighting both the irreducibility of the manifest to the scientific image and the interpersonal nature of the “space of reasons.”

[4] Scruton, The Soul of the World, 5. For a detailed discussion on the significance of incest in Die Walküre and beyond, see Scruton, The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung (London: Penguin Random House, 2017), pp.

[5] Ibid., 4-5, emphasis added

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., 7

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 32

[11] Ibid., 49, emphasis added

[12] Ibid, 68. Though only a passing reference, Scruton hints at a possible solution in Aristotelian hylomorphism and a modern variant discussed in Mark Johnston, “Hylomorphism,” Journal of Philosophy 103, no. 12 (2006): 652-98. ¹⁸ Ibid., 71

[13] Ibid., 17

[14] Ibid., 174

[15] Whether or not Scruton would have agreed with the second part of this statement is open for debate; but he does express clear skepticism about the attitude that our scientific understanding comes at the expense of the relevance of philosophy–see pp. 51-52.

The featured image is “Landscape with a Calm” (1650 – 1651), by Nicolas Poussin, and is in the pubic domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.