Scruton's thesis is one that promotes the value of the 'Sacred' and communicates this in a deeply personal way. The current scientific reductionism is nakedly exposed through closely knitted argumentation and a foundation in moral, aesthetic and humanity rather than theological dogma and philosophical argument alone.
For Scruton, the majesty of art, music, moral duties and values, silence, ritual and liturgy all point beyond a reductive view of mankind that is so evident in today's cultural elite. However, Scruton eschews Cartesian dualism - he takes swipes at it on numerous occasions, favouring a 'cognitive dualism' akin to Spinoza and Kant. I still don't really see how he has avoided 'both affirming and denying the unity of reality.' (pg.36).
A larger quotation is needed here:
"I don't want to say that I am something other than this organism that stands before you. This here thing is what I am. The best way of proceeding, it seems to me, is through the kind of cognitive dualism I adumbrated earlier, whereby can grasp the idea that there can be one reality, which is understood in more than one way." (pg.66. Emphasis in original).He describes this using the opening bars of Beethoven's 3rd Piano Concerto - the melody, harmonic tension etc are emergent from the physical descriptions of the series of pitches.
"Personhood is an "emergent" feature of the human being in the way that music is an emergent feature of sounds..." (pg 67).This simply sounds like the rank physicalism that Scruton treats with animus. I cannot see his answer clearly at all. However, in discussing Cartesian dualism and assessing arguments for it Scruton is fascinating to me. He merely refers to Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations' to 'definitively demolish' the challenge of Qualia; something called the 'private language argument' and Scruton says in the footnote that he has amended this argument in his book 'Modern Philosophy'.
This will inspire further reading and I'm excited as I have five books on the Mind/body problem lined up for this year.
He can't deny intentionality as easily though. In fact Scruton chides Alex Rosenberg's denial of intentionality at the end of a wonderful discussion about information content in the Botticelli 'The Birth of Venus'. So trenchant is the problem of intentionality, that Scruton ends Chapter 3 with an outstanding summary of the problem (pg.75). What puzzles me is why he conflates all substance dualism with Cartesian dualism - interactionist substance dualism seems to me to avoid some of the problems Scruton outlines.
Scruton is at his strongest talking about aesthetics - indeed his summary of Christian death is miserable. Linked to his aversion to an substance dualism, in any form, his conclusion about death follows inescapably:
"The afterlife, conceived as a condition that succeeds death in time, is an absurdity." (Pg. 198)
If there is no soul that separates from the body, of course he is correct. However, Scruton's religious beliefs seem to disclose an apotropaic mysticism, one that is directed towards the conservation of the comfort, beauty and morality of a religious society. I, for one, think that there are good reasons to affirm substance dualism and believe its affirmation to be a necessary condition for Christian belief. Strangely, Scruton has made me more certain of this truth.
4 Stars
