Monday, 10 December 2012

Roger Scruton Interview - Beauty and Consolation


http://youtu.be/YLSGQQygsI8


ROGER SCRUTON YOUTUBE VIDEO BEAUTY AND CONSOLATION

The following are the words of Roger Scruton meant for research only. These are not my words. I have not written them in the precise coherent manner that they were spoken.

She embodied some of the serenity that I was looking for. What is the relationship between the hunt and the interview? A return to some kind of natural condition that civilised man has removed himself from; detached himself from the search for beauty; to rediscover that condition that we were once in. Being part of one species and not being an individual. Consolation comes when one relaxes into the species life. We lose our individuality together. The horse has always been part of that. The hunt has a beauty “how but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born” ceremonial event that death itself becomes part of the ceremony. Without the consciousness of death there cannot be beauty. It is an attempt to revitalise our experience of beauty.

Consolation is something that human beings seek. Other animals are in need of shelter, warmth and food. It is a sense of being fully at home in the world. Most of our lives we are not fully at home. Were detached from what we truly are. Homecoming is important to maintain ourselves. Individual pleasure, success, these put us at variance to ourselves. There’s a need in us to rest and put us back in our home for peace and reconciliation. Being at peace with the world and therefore with ourselves. We are the only animals with a religious sense, our life needs to be complete, and that it’s not here but in the beyond. To understand our desire for our consolation we must look at our roots in a religious sense. The roots of religion lie deep in us.  There is in all of us a need to establish a connection with something greater than us. Being part of a drama, the drama of one’s own life, and united with others beyond the living. Modern people have been nomadised by their civilisation, they have been set in motion, ease of movement from one relationship to the next, thought to thought, entertainment to entertainment, nothing keeps them still, but there is an urge within them to rest to be attached to the place that is theirs, and the people that are theirs. Our sense of the divine is a recognition that we cannot create this sense of home on our own. The tragedy of our society is that we have lost it (being part of the species).

Fox hunting is symbolic -  making themselves at home, establishes a claim on home (the species), deeper in their species than day to day entertainment. Touches what is most urgent in our being. Outside everyday activity when we are at rest with our world. We are hunter gatherers; our sense of unity comes with that hunter gatherer species. Reaffirms your place with a particular place in a particular time.

People no longer dwell on the earth, they move from place to place, searching. “Only if we learn how to dwell can we build and only if we build can we live with each other.”(Heidegger) Modern architecture is hideous built for nomads who seep through it like a wind and disappear. Every serious idea is dangerous. Peaceful existence as a form of being. In all of us there is a desire for home coming. Consolation resides. We have ventured out and then coming back and being part of a social order that is bigger than us.

Relationship between horse and rider, horse and hound is a beautiful one of animal joy. How we relate to the animal in us. One way is to deny it. Another way is to allow it to dominate us. The indulgence of appetite above everything else. My own view is that you should not deny it but that you should let it give added poignancy to it. Romantic love is a good example, a cultural achievement of our age. Literature is an effort to lift the erotic experience out of the animal realm and making it into a kind of spiritual principle setting it in stained glass. Returned to the animal experience and recreating it at the unconscious level transforming it into something that is aware of itself.

Purity and childhood. Sense of Arcadia. I had nothing to go back to so I had to create it for myself.
Discussing beauty and consolation Roger Scurton talks about our deep desire for homecoming.  My home is created by books and music in the middle of the countryside with people doing things with animals.

Rojer Curston … it’s your 70 years and it’s up to you to live them well. These 70 years are eternal. They will always be your 70 years.

What really matters is to be serene, to know that you are important and not important.  To know that there are others who are far more interesting than me.

I  am "I".

People live in a tiny time slice of the modern world.

Emmanuel Kant
Begins with raw experience.  Intuition is immediately given to us in experience. We use concepts to make sense of our intuition concepts are rules synthesis (a unified whole resulting from the combination of different ideas, influences, or objects)
Passions of the body at odds with reason.

You should only do something if you thought that everyone could do it all of the time - universality

You should never manipulate anyone, ever. Kant thought that the greater good is irrelevant.  You should always tell the truth whatever the circumstances - you are only responsible for your own choices.

Philosophy raises questions it doesn’t give answers.



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