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Roger Scruton
I describe the development of my thinking in the subject of aesthetics, from my first efforts in Art
and Imagination to recent work on music and beauty. Central themes are imagination, aesthetic
properties, double intentionality, understanding art and the place of aesthetic experience
The Cambridge to which I went as a Natural Science scholar in 1962 was not, at the time,
particularly creative in the field of philosophy. Indeed, there was, officially, no such field,
and those with philosophical interests were pointed towards the tripos in Moral Sciences,
which included large elements of psychology, as well as papers devoted to logic, ethics,
and metaphysics. The memory of Wittgenstein lingered in the words and mannerisms of
those who had known him, but his philosophy was not taught in any clear way, and was
regarded more as a field of controversy than as the greatest contribution that the univer-
sity had ever made to the subject. The living philosophers in the university included sev-
eral whose reputation depended on work done in response to idealism or to logical
positivism—men such as A. C. Ewing (my tutor), C. D. Broad, and Richard Braithwaite,
who, whatever their merits, did not give the sense that philosophy was a real source of
intellectual excitement. The advances made by Russell and Ramsey were still honoured in
the field of logic, ably expounded by Casimir Lewy and Timothy Smiley. But it is fair to say
that—for a student who had come over from the natural sciences at the call of art, music
and literature—Cambridge philosophy did not offer much in the way of inspiration.
In the course of my time as an undergraduate, however, I came across two lecturers who
shaped my future thinking: Michael Tanner, whose course on aesthetics convinced me that
there really is such a subject; and Jonathan Bennett, whose belligerent lectures on Kant
(which were really lectures to Kant, of which we students were front-row spectators) im-
planted in me a lifelong interest in that philosopher, as well as a model of analytical method
that I have been unable either to follow or to forget.
My literary inclinations led me to lose confidence in analytical philosophy, so that I de-
cided not to stay at Cambridge when I graduated and instead to go abroad to pursue what
I thought to be my real calling as a writer. I spent a year in France, as lecteur in the Collège
universitaire at Pau, and, after a period at home, went to live in Rome, before returning to
Cambridge to study for a PhD in 1967. By then I had decided that I had no ability to pursue
an intellectual or literary career without a guide, that philosophy was my only hope of
acquiring one, and that the best way to combine my philosophical and literary interests
was to read for a doctorate in aesthetics. During the four years that followed—two spent
as a research fellow of Peterhouse—I learned much from Michael Tanner, with whom I
began my research, and much from John Casey, whose Language of Criticism had recently
appeared: one of the first attempts to apply Wittgensteinian ways of thinking to the prac-
tice of literary criticism. My own intellectual map of aesthetics, however, first began to
British Journal of Aesthetics Vol 49 | Number 4 | October 2009 | pp. 317–325 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayp039
© British Society of Aesthetics 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics.
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318 | ROGER SCRUTON
take shape when I read Frank Sibley’s seminal papers on aesthetic concepts, which I dis-
cussed at length with Malcolm Budd, then also a research fellow at Peterhouse, working
on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind.
The details of the map became a little clearer through studying Wittgenstein’s later re-
marks on philosophical psychology, and trying to work out a theory of the imagination that
might be relevant to understanding the nature and value of aesthetic experience. Mean-
while I read widely in the topic of aesthetics, came to believe that little of lasting value
had been said about it by philosophers in the empiricist tradition, and that the idealist
alternative—represented by Hegel, Croce, Collingwood, and Bradley—was, for all its
their semantic interpretation, entirely misses the connection between artistic content and
the aesthetic experience. In particular, it fails to show how, or why, expression in art is a
value—a mark of aesthetic success, which can be grasped only by someone who is also alert
to the overall aesthetic impact of the work that exhibits it.
In subsequent writings I develop that objection in opposition to semiotic and post-
structuralist approaches to literature, music, and architecture, and lay the foundations for
the theory of expression which I develop at length in The Aesthetics of Music. In Art and
Imagination, however, I was content merely to account for the intuitions about expression,
about the form/content relation, and about symbolism that have been rightly emphasized
the urban fabric of which this building is to be a part; thirdly, the builder cannot know
‘what it is like’ to fulfil the various functions that a building is to serve simply by studying
those functions and providing an optimal solution to them. The resulting ‘solution’ will
also address us in ways that have no reference to function: the building will stand in our
public space, and demand our acknowledgement. For those and similar reasons, I argued,
there is no way of building rationally without placing aesthetic considerations at the very
centre of the task. And once we have done so, all kinds of a priori constraints will follow.
I went on to describe some of those constraints—the need for articulate detail and vo-
cabulary, the centrality of vertical order, the requirement for shadow and the mouldings
not, however, belong in the world of material events. They are available only to creatures
like us, who can hear the virtual movement and virtual causality that are present in music.
These musical processes have a purely intentional status. Questions of musical ontology
therefore hinge upon the problematic concept of intentional identity (a concept explored,
for example, by Geach in an important paper). Theories that do not begin from this point
will therefore produce arbitrary and aesthetically irrelevant accounts of the identity and
individuation of musical works.
The problem comes to the surface in the discussion of authentic performance. Many
writers attempt to analyse authenticity in terms of sound, telling us that an authentic per-
The argument of The Aesthetics of Music (1997) therefore begins with two linked chap-
ters, one devoted to sound, and the other to ‘tone’, as I call it—that which we hear in
sound when we hear it as music. Developing this distinction has caused me quite a few
headaches. I am persuaded by the position defended for a variety of conflicting reasons by
Schenker, Zuckerkandl, Riemann, and Meyer, that the experience of music involves per-
ceiving a certain kind of order, in which members of the sequence are understood in
terms of their contribution to a Gestalt, in something like the way that words are under-
stood in a sentence. But I argue resolutely against the view that musical order is produced
and recuperated through the mastery of a generative grammar, or that it is in any other
1 ‘Thoughts on Rhythm’, in Kathleen Stock (ed.), Philosophers on Music, Oxford, 2008); and ‘Sounds as Secondary
Objects and Pure Events’, in Casey O’Callaghan and Matthew Nudds (eds), Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical
Essays (Oxford, 2009).
324 | ROGER SCRUTON
music of Boulez and Stockhausen, leaves the space between its components empty. Melody
does not merely exploit the spatial features of the pitch spectrum: it also acts, in conjunc-
tion with harmonic organization, to create fields of force within that space, so that tones
exert attraction and repulsion over each other, of the kind that is exploited by the masters
of counterpoint.
In the course of expounding that account of musical organization I develop a concept of
‘metaphorical perception’, in which the intentional object (in this case of hearing) is orga-
nized by concepts applied metaphorically. I try to clarify this idea through the theory of
imagination developed in Art and Imagination, though I am conscious that my exposition is
been met by quite a lot of vituperation it has attracted, so far as I can see, next to nothing
in the way of opposing argument.
Two other aspects of my work have proved controversial: my attempt to show, in a pair
of articles, that photography is not a representational art, and that this has important conse-
quences for the aesthetic status of film and its offshoots; and my discussion of sexual desire.
I disagree with semantic theories of visual representation; nevetheless, I acknowledge that
the relation between a picture and its subject is both intentional (the subject being defined
as the intentional object of an intended perception) and also (for that reason) intensional.
The relation of a photograph to the thing of which it is a photograph is a causal, rather than
Roger Scruton
rogerscruton@mac.com