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The Soul of the World Hardcover – April 6, 2014

by Roger Scruton (Author)

32 customer reviews

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In The Soul of the World, renowned philosopher Roger Scruton defends the experience of the sacred against today’s fashionable forms of atheism. He argues that our personal relationships, moral intuitions, and aesthetic judgments hint at a transcendent dimension that cannot be understood through the lens of science alone. To be fully alive—and to understand what we are—is to acknowledge the reality of sacred things. Rather than an argument for the existence of God, or a defense of the truth of religion, the book is an extended reflection on why a sense of the sacred is essential to human life—and what the final loss of the sacred would mean. In short, the book addresses the most important question of modernity: what is left of our aspirations after science has delivered its verdict about what we are?

Drawing on art, architecture, music, and literature, Scruton suggests that the highest forms of human experience and expression tell the story of our religious need, and of our quest for the being who might answer it, and that this search for the sacred endows the world with a soul. Evolution cannot explain our conception of the sacred; neuroscience is irrelevant to our interpersonal relationships, which provide a model for our posture toward God; and scientific understanding has nothing to say about the experience of beauty, which provides a God’s-eye perspective on reality.

Ultimately, a world without the sacred would be a completely different world—one in which we humans are not truly at home. Yet despite the shrinking place for the sacred in today’s world, Scruton says, the paths to transcendence remain open.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

One of The Times Literary Supplement’s Books of the Year 2014, chosen by Jonathan Clark
One of Flavorwire’s 10 Best Books by Academic Publishers in 2014
One of the Scotsman’s Books of the Year 2014, chosen by Alexander McCall Smith

"The interest of his project lies not so much in the conclusions themselves, but rather in the way he attempts to establish them. Most conservatives place great weight on contingent features of the human condition. They emphasize our cognitive limitations, our anti-social impulses and the sheer extent of our ignorance, or they delve into the details of human history in order to establish that the old ways cannot be abandoned so quickly. Scruton's conservatism is more rationalistic."--David Owens, Times Literary Supplement

"[A] stately and often beautiful journey through various areas of human experience. . . . [W]ide-ranging and intellectually impassioned."--Sarah Bakewell, Financial Times

"[I]n no previous work has he woven together so successfully his thoughts on aesthetics, personhood, politics, and religion. . . . [A] book that--for its richness, scope, and beauty--may be remembered as among his best."--Spencer Case, National Review Online

"Reading Scruton is to take delight in his clarity of expression and linguistic economy, and it's to feel as though you're in the hands of a guide who is unafraid of doubts and uncertainties."--Laura Keynes, Standpoint

"[F]ascinating."--Christopher Hart, Sunday Times

"[C]onvincing."--Jonathan Derbyshire, Prospect

"The Soul of the World is a rich and rewarding work, one composed by a scholar clearly possessing exceptional depth and broad learning."--Jerry Salyer, Catholic World Report

"[T]he English conservative philosopher . . . really is a gift and a wonder."--Rod Dreher, American Conservative

"Once again drawing on insights offered by his conservatism he inquires into the nature of intimacy, relatedness, inter-subjectivity, moral intuitions and the capacity for aesthetic appreciation, and their implications for the sacred and transcendent in a society besotted by an arrogant scientism unprepared to accept its own profound limitations."--Mervyn Bendle, Quadrant Magazine

From the Inside Flap

"Its passion, imagination, and sensitivity to all aspects of our world mean that this is a book that can be enjoyed by humanists as much as by those who identify themselves as religious. Scruton's God is embedded in the human world, including our art, architecture, music, and literature to which he is such a fascinating guide, which is the right place for gods to be."--Simon Blackburn, author ofThink and Mirror, Mirror

"This is a wonderful and in many places beautiful work; closely argued, though best read not as an argument but as a genuine 'turning for home' on the part of a learned and deeply thoughtful man, who offers us hard-won insights as he fixes his gaze on our final end."--Mark Johnston, Princeton University

"This is a rich and highly sensitive book, which engages the reader on many levels, and which approaches religion not doctrinally, but via the full range of human sensibility, especially moral and aesthetic, and our capacities for seeing the world not just in terms of impersonal scientific structures, but in deeply personal terms. Finely written and argued, the book is philosophically sophisticated yet accessible."--John Cottingham, Heythrop College London and University of Reading

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Product details

Hardcover: 216 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press; 1st edition edition (April 6, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0691161577
ISBN-13: 978-0691161570
Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.2 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
Average Customer Review: 32 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #324,331 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #624 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Religious
- #65840 in Books > Religion & Spirituality

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Tom Currie

thoughtful and thought provoking - tackles the burning issues of our times with great

June 26, 2016

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

only part way thru this - enjoying it immensely - well written, thoughtful and thought provoking - tackles the burning issues of our times with great erudition

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John A. Buehrens

How to Read a Conservative Philosopher

October 13, 2014

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Roger Scruton is a conservative. I am not. Yet I make it a point to read thoughtful perspectives from wise conservatives. Scruton, who teaches philosophy at Cambridge, once wrote a book called "How to Be a Conservative." As a spiritual heir of Emerson, I was curious how Scruton would deal with "The Soul of the World." What I found was an argument I think the Transcendentalists would recognize, but updated to the brain science, evolutionary thinking, and philosophical issues of the 21st century. There are echoes here of another hero of mine, Martin Buber, but also in a more systematic way. Scruton starts by observing that there are two basic ways we humans have of encountering the world. One is to treat all of it as made up of objects, with only the perceiving self as a subject. This is I-It discourse. It is what Kant called "pure reason." But in the inter-human, inter-subjective realm, it is our capacity for I-You encounter that makes all the difference in "practical reason" and ethics. I cannot agree with all of Scruton's aesthetics. He finds dehumanizations in too many aspects of modern life, from modern architecture to sexual liberation. But I was quite taken with the precision of his argument that music is a realm in which we can be "addressed" by an unseen subject and moved toward empathy. He is NOT a "ghost in the machine" philosopher. He believes in ONE ontological reality, but believes -- as I do -- that we need an I-You relationship with the world. As a good contemporary ecological bumper sticker puts it, "Love Your Mother."

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Tonya Roberts

Five Stars

April 7, 2017

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Thank you!

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Amazon Customer

Five Stars

June 19, 2016

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Do you have a more complete biographical work on Matj Tansey?
Thank you,
Tim

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Amazon Customer

Five Stars

January 18, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This book will illuminate your life!

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Gene C. Bammel

Soul, Indeed!

May 28, 2014

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Roger Scruton is one of the best defenders out there of "traditional" points of view. He is expert on the heritage of Kant and Hegel, and of the Consciousness-Neurobiology crowd, but does an admirable job of defending traditional beliefs. He writes well, and, even if you disagree with his convictions, you know you have read someone who does a brilliant job of defending the "traditional" viewpoints.

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Sondra McClendon

A Beautiful Philosophical Journey

July 2, 2014

Format: Hardcover

Books on philosophy tend to either be very dry or to focus on one aspect so closely that they often don't have the space to consider other, related topics. "The Soul of the World" is not one of those books. Author Roger Scruton draws from art, literature, music, architecture, politics, and law in oder to give readers a full, well-rounded journey into the human need for sacred things and a way to explain the world that we live in.

No matter your views on religion, you will find "The Soul of the World" a thought-provoking and insightful exploration (whether you agree with all points or not) that he been written with a sensitivity to all beliefs. Scruton explores, wihtout necessarily arguing in a forceful way. His style is informatl at times, while still maintaining the cadence of a scholarely lecture on philosophy. With roughly forty books under his belt, Scruton knows his stuff!

The chapters that branch out into areas like the brain and music are particularly fascinating. In "The Sacred Space of Music", Scruton discusses Beethoven's "C-sharp Minor Quarter" and how it contains "all human life" within it. A composition like this invites you to "live and feel in a purer way". Eloquent explanations like these succeed in taking us down a path toward figuring out what we believe and what we find sacred in a way that is easy to relate to.

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Navigating the Lebenswelt in Search of the Sacred

December 6, 2014

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Scruton’s arguments are rich, complex and lovely in their articulation. They are not easily summarized, but I will take a stab at doing so. Epistemologists in the early enlightenment often focused on the question of substance and focused upon its ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities. Primary qualities are real, objective, and, ultimately, the subject of scientific study. Among them are number and extension. Secondary qualities are evanescent and subjective—such things as color, smell and taste. They hover at the surface of the primary qualities and are less ‘real’. They are not the subject of scientific investigation. When we say that force equals mass times acceleration we are not thinking about ‘its’ taste, smell or color.

Berkeley challenged this dichotomy, arguing that if we try to conceive of, e.g., an apple, we should hold it in our minds and then divest it of all secondary qualities. What remains? Not the ‘real’, ‘substantive’, ‘actual’ apple but, in fact, nothing. We cannot actually ‘do’ abstraction and the materialism implicitly celebrated by the division between ‘real’ primary qualities and will-of-the-wisp secondary qualities must give way to an appreciation of what we might broadly call the ‘spiritual’.

Scruton takes this construct and argues for cognitive dualism. On the one hand we apprehend the world scientifically, seeking to explain, predict and bring phenomena under the control of universal laws. At the same time we perceive the world as an object of our attitudes, emotions and choices. Dilthey called this activity ‘verstehen’. It constitutes a way of seeing the world that emerges from our interpersonal dialogue. That is the world that is closest to our actual experience (we don’t regularly see subatomic particles) and Scruton calls it the ‘lebenswelt’.

He cites Spinoza who said that the world is one thing seen in at least two distinct ways and he cites Kant’s distinction between understanding and practical reason.

Scruton then meditates on our experience of the lebenswelt, utilizing aesthetics, theology, and philosophy and places particular emphasis on human self-consciousness and the relational nature of personhood. Part of his argument is phenomenological as he meditates on such complex notions within our experience as ‘the sacred space of music’.

There are other more direct and rationalistic arguments as in his critique of Darwinianism. The book is beautifully written. It contains a number of illustrations, including musical passages. The book is the product of an erudite reader in search of the sacred who is equally well-versed in the analytic and the rational.

Highly recommended.

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