Beauty is assailed from two directions - by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life.
Roger ScrutonFantasy consists in a morbid fascination with unrealities, which secretly transforms itself into a desire to make them real. Imagination is a form of intellectual control, which presents us with the image of unrealities in order that we should understand and feel distanced from them. In imagination we dominate; in fantasy, we are dominated.
Roger ScrutonThe two most potent post-war orthodoxies--socialist politics and modernist art--have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.
Roger ScrutonTo speak of beauty is to enter another and more exalted realm-a realm sufficiently apart from our everyday concerns as to be mentioned only with a certain hesitation. People who are always in praise and pursuit of the beautiful are an embarrassment, like people who make a constant display of their religious faith. Somehow, we feel such things should be kept for our exalted moments, and not paraded in company, or allowed to spill out over dinner.
Roger ScrutonA writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is โmerely relative,โ is asking you not to believe him. So donโt.
Roger ScrutonThereโs a real question as to what beauty is and why itโs important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us theyโre not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something thatโs in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.
Roger Scruton