Working Towards Art

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

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in practical reasoning and in the moral life.

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

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many insights, dependent on a totally unacceptable philosophy of mind. I was constantly
troubled by the image of Jonathan Bennett, lecturing the great dead philosophers on their
failings, and challenging them with cutting-edge theories that they had been too immersed
in the past to bone up on. It was a hard act to follow, but I tried, and Art and Imagination
(1974) owes much to Bennett’s model—not least the attempt to develop an anti-realist
theory of aesthetic descriptions in which Davidson (then just appearing over the Cambridge
horizon) would be duly acknowledged.
Art and Imagination presents a theory of aesthetic judgement and aesthetic experience. I
do not stand by everything contained in the book, least of all by the somewhat antiquated
form of conceptual analysis that guides some of the specific arguments. But its broad ap-
proach still seems to me to be the right one. If there is a subject of aesthetics, I argue, it is
not because there are judgements ascribing ‘aesthetic properties’, but because there are
distinctive states of mind—aesthetic experiences, responses, and choices—that are
expressed in aesthetic judgements and have an importance of their own in the life of rational
beings. Realism finds the significance of aesthetic judgements in the properties they as-
cribe, while anti-realism finds their significance in the states of mind they express. Anti-
realism, so described, is not the same as subjectivism, and I argue that aesthetic
experiences and responses have a complex intentionality, which gives sense to the practice
of criticism, and enables us to argue for and against aesthetic judgements with a measure
of objectivity. My approach to the ‘logic of aesthetic discourse’ is therefore very similar to
the approach to the ‘logic of moral discourse’ defended by Simon Blackburn in Ruling Pas-
sions (1998).
Aesthetics must begin, I thought, from a theory of the aesthetic states of mind, and not
from the theory of art. To understand art we must understand what art is for, and until we
recognize that works of art are designed as objects of aesthetic appreciation we will not
have a basis to explore any of the traditional questions concerning their identity and sig-
nificance. On the other hand, I suggest, there is no proof that we have given a satisfactory
account of aesthetic interest unless we can use our account to make sense of the experience
of art.
There are therefore three lines of argument in Art and Imagination, besides the purely
negative argument against the realist theory of aesthetic judgements. First, there is an ac-
count of the aesthetic attitude , and the experiences that arise from it. This account is really
a reconstruction of the theory presented by Kant in the Critique of Judgement. I describe aes-
thetic interest as interest in an object ‘for its own sake’, where that is interpreted in a
highly theoretical way, to denote an interest of which only rational beings are capable. Such
 WORKING TOWARDS ART | 319

an interest is connected—though in a complex manner—with the sensory presentation of

an object.This is a feature that I found difficult to isolate at the time, and to which I returned
with (I hope) greater competence, and at any rate greater confidence, in my paper ‘In Search
of the Aesthetic’, published 34 years later in the British Journal of Aesthetics 47 (2007). I also
argued that aesthetic interest is normative, distinguishing appropriate from inappropriate
objects, and that this feature underlies the practice of criticism, giving sense to the concept
of taste. Finally I suggested that the freedom of aesthetic interest from normal practical and
cognitive concerns (a freedom contained in the idea of ‘for its own sake’) opens the way to
the importation of thoughts, feelings, and experiences about objects other than the object

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attended to, and that therefore imagination will have a central role in the aesthetic experi-
ence.
Secondly, Art and Imagination contains an account of imagination, as a capacity of rational
beings that is not shared with other members of the animal kingdom. This account is gen-
eralised beyond the two central cases of imagining and ‘seeing as’, to include any way of
entertaining ‘unasserted thoughts’ and their equivalent in mental imagery and perception.
The book also lays the groundwork for a theory of ‘double intentionality’, according to
which one and the same emotion or response can be focused simultaneously on two ob-
jects—the object that is believed to exist, and on which attention is focused; and the imag-
inary object which is summoned into, seen in, or heard in the present object. My argument
emphasizes the connection between imagination and the will, and the incipient normativ-
ity that this introduces into the practice of imagining, when this forms part of the under-
standing of art.
Thirdly, Art and Imagination presents a theory of art, as a proper object of aesthetic inter-
est. I suggest that
it is a feature of the intentionality of aesthetic attitudes that they are primarily directed
towards works of art. By this I mean that the thoughts and feelings involved in aes-
thetic interest can acquire a full elaboration only if the aesthetic object possesses just
those features which are characteristic of art. (p. 163)
I begin from the observation that art is an object of understanding, and that the aesthetic
experience of a work of art is predicated on understanding it. I develop a theory of under-
standing music (to be elaborated and amended later, in The Aesthetics of Music), and use this
to show the inescapably experiential nature of understanding, not only in the case of music,
but in all our responses to art. I also try to show that the imagination, as I have described it,
is at the heart of understanding, and that this determines the three primary ways in which
works of art have meaning for us: representation, expression, and symbolism. I attempt to
refute the semantic theory of artistic meaning (including the version given by Goodman in
Languages of Art), and I emphasize the experiential and imaginative components in our grasp
of both representation and expression. In general, it now seems to me, semantic theories
must either hide behind an intransigent nominalism, as Goodman’s does, so forbidding all
enquiry into how, and by what conventions, works of art deliver their meaning; or else
commit to a rule-governed theory of artistic meaning, according to which the ‘content’ of
a work of art is connected by convention with its artistic form.This second view, which sees
the work of art as ‘encoding’ its meaning, in the way that syntactical structures encode
320 | ROGER SCRUTON

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

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by expressionist theories in the tradition of Croce and Collingwood. I concluded the book
with some remarks concerning ‘imagining what it is like’, and its place in understanding
art, and tried to show that this identifies the role of art in the education of the emotions,
and also suggests an internal relation between moral and aesthetic judgement.
The Kantian emphasis of Art and Imagination raises an important question. If the core of
aesthetic interest is the focus on the individual object, as presented to contemplation, and
studied ‘for its own sake’, then what is the connection between aesthetic interest and ordi-
nary practical concerns? Does the theory not reduce aesthetic interest to a kind of redun-
dant luxury, with no necessary connection to the world of everyday rational choice? In
response to those worries I turned my attention to ‘the aesthetics of everyday life’. What is
the role of aesthetic judgement in ordinary practical reasoning, and how do our aesthetic
responses form part of ‘knowing what to do’ when designing, building, or decorating? The
philosopher is brought face to face with these questions by the writings and slogans of the
architectural modernists, just as the ordinary person is brought face to face with them by
the willing or unwilling confrontation with their buildings. It seemed to me that aesthetic
interest, as I had described it, is an avenue—and maybe the clearest avenue we have—to
intrinsic values, as well as a way of understanding intrinsic values which removes some part
of their mystery. The person who knows what to do is the one who has a clear conception
of the end of his activity. How do we obtain this conception of the end in advance of achiev-
ing it? How do we know what it would be like to achieve our goals, and whether we would
still be content with them when we have achieved them? We need procedures which will
help us to imagine what things are like in advance of achieving them, and which will imbue
our present practice, and the choice of means, with some experienced premonition or presenti-
ment of the end. This marks out a role for aesthetic values, and aesthetic education, in ev-
eryday tasks, and also suggests some a priori constraints on the arts of building and design.
In The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979) I took off from that thought, exploring the role of
imagination in the experience of architectural forms, and examining some of the things
that had been said by theorists and practitioners concerning form and meaning in architec-
ture. In that book, and subsequent writings, I argued that aesthetic understanding is funda-
mental to practical reasoning, and that those who take a purely functional or utilitarian
approach to building will (in an important sense) not know what they are doing. There are
several reasons for this: first that builders have no way of knowing the specific uses to which
their buildings might be put, since functions change far more frequently than buildings;
secondly, that the builder cannot factor in the specific desires of all the users of a building
even now, since ‘all the users’ includes passers-by, neighbours, and those who depend upon
 WORKING TOWARDS ART | 321

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

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that create it, and so on. And I argued that the classical tradition, while not the only way of
conforming to those constraints, serves as a paradigm. Exploring this subject took me far
afield, in the attempt to refute the false ideas of ‘essence’ that have animated the discussion
of architectural modernism—for example, that the essence of a building is its function, or
its structure, or its materials, or its relation to the historical conditions of its production,
and that this essence must determine the appearance, if the building is to be ‘honest’ or
‘truthful’. A proper understanding of the aesthetic experience and its role in practical de-
cision-making would show those ideas to be illusory, and also destructive in their applica-
tion. In a later publication, The Classical Vernacular (1994), I presented a qualified defence of
the classical vernacular styles as paradigms of the aesthetics of everyday life, which owe
their survival and their popularity to their ability to generate persuasive and consensual
answers to the perennial problems of design.
Although architecture has been a lifelong interest of mine, it has always taken second
place to music. But it was not until 18 years after publishing The Aesthetics of Architecture that
I felt able to develop my thoughts about music in a systematic way. I wrote a few articles—
including one on representation in music, which created a certain amount of interest, and
one on musical understanding, developing ideas that had arisen out of the discussion in Art
and Imagination. But I hesitated to go further into the field, for two reasons. First, in com-
parison to what has been written in recent times concerning the theory of architecture, the
academic study of musicology has been one of the intellectual success stories in the hu-
manities, with cogent and interesting theories produced on every side. Some of these the-
ories—Schenker’s analysis of tonal syntax, for example, Leonard Meyer’s account of
rhythmical hierarchy, Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s attempt at a generative theory of tonal
grammar, Allen Forte’s set-theoretic approach to atonal music—clearly impinge on the
areas that raise philosophical questions, and present a daunting challenge to anyone ap-
proaching them from outside the discipline of musicology.
Secondly, philosophers had defined many of the issues in ways that I found inimical. One
example is worth mentioning, that of musical ontology. The questions ‘What is a work of
music?’ and ‘When is work a identical with, or a version of, work b?’ have generated a vast
literature in the professional journals, without any writer noticing, so far as I could see,
that musical works are the intentional objects of musical perceptions, not the material
objects of hearing. We hear sounds; but we also hear music in those sounds. Questions of
ontology concern a particular kind of event—the event that we know as a sound. They are
not questions of musical aesthetics, but questions concerning the identity and individuation
of events, event-types, and event-kinds. The musical processes that we hear in sounds do
322 | ROGER SCRUTON

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-

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formance of a baroque concerto is, for example, one that produces sounds similar to those
that would have been produced by competent musicians presented with a definitive score
at the time when that score was written. (That is only one suggestion, of course.) But it is
surely obvious that what we hear in sound depends upon the state of the musical culture
and this culture is a dynamic and developing thing. Hence the identity of sound across time
will not guarantee identity of musical movement across time. Indeed it is impossible to lay
down conditions governing the production of sounds that will provide a real distinction
between sequences which are, and sequences which are not, authentic performances of a
single work of music. The authentic performance is the one in which we, listeners here and
now, hear not merely the sequence of pitched sounds that the composer intended, but the
movement in and through those sounds which he heard in them. Only in the context of a
constantly evolving musical culture can we retain the collective memory of that move-
ment. How this is done in any generation is not to be determined by acoustical facts alone,
but depends upon a tradition of musical sympathy that is passed on in something like the
way religious traditions are passed on. The cult of authentic sound in musical performance
is as likely to be a threat to that tradition of musical sympathy as a way of continuing it: and
so, I believe, we have seen.
Such thoughts suggested to me that a systematic aesthetics of music should begin by
distinguishing musical objects from the physical sounds in which we hear them. How is this
to be done? I have always retained a profound suspicion of phenomenology in the tradition
of Husserl, and have indeed often consulted that philosopher’s Phenomenology of Internal
Time-consciousness as proof of how philosophy should not be done. This study in depth of the
first-person case seems to me not merely to fall foul of the private-language problem that
Wittgenstein laid definitively before us—surely a sufficient explanation of the impenetra-
ble jargon with which the results of Husserlian phenomenology come wrapped—but also
to open the way to radical scepticism about values. Why is music important, if it has no
presence in the public world in which we, as social creatures, move and act, if it exists only
in that ‘inner’ sphere where the self is alone with its noetic contents? At the same time,
there is no doubt that the distinction between sounds and the music that we hear in them
is a distinction between physical events and a way of perceiving them. The task, as I saw it,
was to illustrate this ‘way of perceiving’ in terms that would show it to be publicly recog-
nizable, publicly teachable, part of a way of life and a culture. (Whether this counts as
‘hetero-phenomenology’ in Dennett’s sense I am not sure. But Dennett is surely right in
thinking that we need an approach to the questions that the phenomenologists put before
us, which is independent of the first-person metaphysics of Husserl.)
 WORKING TOWARDS ART | 323

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

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way to be understood on the model of syntax in language. It is an order with three dis-
tinct dimensions: rhythm, melody, and harmony. And I argue that the mode of production of
a sound is of only secondary importance when it comes to hearing that sound as music (a
thesis that has excited much opposition, especially from the defenders of improvised
music). The arguments here are involved and technical, but I remain persuaded that they
are basically right. I have returned to them in two recent articles, one on sound, the
other on rhythm (conceived as a feature of tone, but not of sound).1 I argue that sounds
are not properties of objects but events in their own right, and also that they are pure
events: events which happen, but which do not happen to things, and which may therefore
be identified and individuated without reference to their cause. It is precisely these meta-
physical features which make it possible for sounds to be the vehicles of the virtual causal-
ity and virtual movement that we hear in music.
The paradigm of this virtual movement is rhythm. I distinguish rhythm from metre
(which involves the division or addition of time-spans), accent (which involves the empha-
sis of events within a time-span), and grouping (which involves another kind of Gestalt
organization, often dependent upon melodic and harmonic gravitational effects). Rhythm
exhibits an organization which can be understood only by a creature with imagination—
who is capable of hearing movement in a sequence that does not literally move, who re-
tains the kind of control over what he hears that permits double aspects and voluntary
groupings, who is capable of double intentionality and the importation of thoughts from
other and imaginary spheres. And the primary way of understanding a rhythm is through
intentional bodily movement—a ‘moving with’ the movement imagined in the notes.
Melody is another kind of movement—one that makes essential use of the pitch spec-
trum and the relation of auditory ‘between-ness’ that is founded in it. Thanks to melody,
musical movement takes place in and through a musical space, and this space exhibits some
of the structural features of space as Hilbert and others have defined them. Harmony, too,
makes use of this spatial organization, and the difference between a chord and a simultane-
ity corresponds to that between solids and points in the physical world. A chord, like a
solid, takes up the space between its extremities; a simultaneity, such as we observe in the

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

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far less clear than it ought to be. Nevertheless, the concept of metaphorical perception has
the advantage of generating a unified theory of musical understanding, and one that delivers
answers to the leading questions, as I see them, of musical aesthetics. I try to show that
music is a non-representational art, which is understood without reference to any extra-
musical ‘world’ to which it gives imaginary access. And I develop an anti-realist theory of
expression, which attempts to explain all of the following: why music expresses only when
it is expressive; why the primary notion of ‘expressiveness’ is intransitive, not identifying a
state of mind that is expressed; why expression is a value; why the expressive features of a
work of music are bound up with the musical argument, and not just ‘stuck on’ like effects.
Crucial to my account is the Fregean thought that expression must be part of what you
understand when you hear or play with understanding; to which I add that understanding
is not a matter of naming an object or recuperating information, but a matter of moving with
the music, so as to ‘know what it is like’ to experience its inner motivating force.
There is a central argument to The Aesthetics of Music which parallels that of The Aesthetics
of Architecture. Just as, in the earlier work, I had defended the classical tradition as a para-
digm of aesthetic understanding—a system which enables us to know what we are doing when
we build—so in the later work do I defend the tradition of tonality, as a paradigm of musi-
cal organization, and one from which our concept of musical space derives. Naturally this
is a controversial position to take; so too is it controversial to proceed to an account of
musical culture, and the place of music in the life of rational beings, which is largely dismis-
sive of pop. These are issues to which I have returned in more recent writings, some of
which are contained in my recent collection entitled Understanding Music (2009). I remain
convinced that criticism involves linking the objects of aesthetic interest to the moral life,
and that when we dismiss a work of art as sentimental, morbid, dehumanizing, or what-
ever, we are saying something serious which does not merely condemn that work of art,
but also condemns those who idolize it. Criticism naturally leads to the criticism of cul-
ture, and while I disagree with most of what Adorno says, I think he was absolutely right to
identify mass culture as a problem, and right also to think that music is in jeopardy from
what he called the ‘regression of listening’. Thanks to pop and its mass-produced succes-
sors there has been a loss of long-term attention and of the sense of musical argument.
Losing these things, we also lose the experience of music as a discipline of thought and
feeling, a charm to the ear which is a guide to life. In the last chapter of The Aesthetics of
Music I try to give a mitigated account of musical culture which shows just what is at stake
when the tonal tradition is abandoned by serious composers and prostituted by the music
of the marketplace. Naturally what I say is partial and controversial; but although it has
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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

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an intentional relation—even though it is a relation that is intended. It is also an exten-
sional, rather than an intensional, relation: and it is essential to understanding photographs
that we ‘quantify in’ to the context they present, saying to ourselves that ‘there is/was such
a scene or such a person’. Such, at any rate, is true of the central and normally understood
case, and I try to show that this central case is also definitive of what a photographer is doing.
And I argue that there are large and far-reaching consequences for our attitude to photog-
raphy which make it questionable to consider photography as one of the representational
art-forms—which is not to deny that it is an art-form of another kind.
It was Plato who first connected eros and beauty. My own account is, however, very dif-
ferent from Plato’s, and involves developing an idea of individualizing intentionality which
closely parallels the theory of aesthetic responses given in Art and Imagination. Sexual Desire
(1986) is not a work of aesthetics. But it mounts a criticism of the instrumentalizing ap-
proach to people which in many ways parallels the criticism of functionalist theories of
architecture given in The Aesthetics of Architecture and the criticism of addictive responses to
music adumbrated in the last chapter of The Aesthetics of Music. Moving on from all three
books I have, in my latest contribution to the subject Beauty (2009), tried to bring these
three critiques together in a brief but general account of the experience of beauty. This
book also takes up themes relating to culture and society: it gives an account of pleasure,
its uses and abuses; of modernism and the ‘flight from beauty’; of humour and the judge-
ment of taste; and of certain cultural plagues like kitsch, porn, and addiction. Like all my
writings on aesthetics, it takes a serious and critical stance towards modern society—a
stance that I owe, I suspect, to my original training in Cambridge, where Leavis was still a
major force, relayed to students of philosophy by Michael Tanner, and dominating our dis-
cussions of art and literature. I do not regret this influence; on the contrary, I regret that it
is no longer as widespread as it then was.

Roger Scruton
rogerscruton@mac.com