Ferenc Hörcher is a historian of political thought, as well as a political philosopher and a philosopher of art. He is currently the head of the Research Institute of Politics and Government at the National University of Public Service in Budapest, and is a senior fellow at its Institute of Philosophy. He was previously the director of the Institute of Philosophy at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. A prolific author, his most recent books include Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Political Philosophy (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and A Political Philosophy of Conservatism: Prudence, Moderation and Tradition (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). When we first met him nearly a decade ago, he was a speaker alongside the late Sir Roger Scruton on a panel focusing on aesthetics.
What is the role of aesthetics, or beauty, in people’s lives? Why is it important, particularly according to Roger Scruton?
In my book on the late British philosopher, Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy, I try to reconstruct Scruton’s genuine conviction that beauty plays an integral role in human life.
The ancients, most particularly Aristotle, taught that the human being is a political animal—that his activities concern the common good. Similarly, we can say that man is also a homo aestheticus, who orients himself with his sensory judgements. (This expression is Dezső Kosztolányi’s, who contrasted this term with homo moralis.)
Human life constantly presents man with choices. Healthy judgement necessitates many considerations of different kinds, and a crucial one is concerned with the aesthetic sense or taste. At times, an aesthetic judgement can help someone make a decision in a case where there is no other cognitive guidance.
In his book On Beauty, Scruton legitimized our aesthetic interest in a different manner: he distinguished between forms, layers, or manifestations of beauty, starting from what he called everyday beauty—such as the way we set the table or choose our clothes—through human beauty, erotic love, to artistic and transcendental beauty. His aesthetic taxonomy is, of course, somewhat Socratic, somewhat Hegelian, but the important thing for him was to show that beauty can lead us from worldly concerns to the most important themes of our lives—including the realm of the metaphysical. In this sense, beauty seems to be vital.
Does the lack of beauty in one’s environment have an impact on a person’s personality, behavior, or character? Doesn’t Scruton speak of the need for us to be replenished and revitalized by spending time away from urban chaos and noise in the countryside?
It is relatively easy to answer your first question: we human beings are born into the world dependent on our environment. Our natural propensity to fit in prepares us for social accommodation. This was well understood in traditional societies. However, with the birth of the modern notion of individuality and personal identity, the individual is disoriented and unable to easily find his place in his own context. Accommodation and decorum have become difficult, perhaps even impossible. We have to re-learn how to find our place in the networks of family, friendship, generation, nation, church, school, and workplace.
The next question concerns Scruton’s choice between urban and rural ways of life. That is more difficult to answer. It seems to me that in his youth and early adulthood, he lived the life of the metropolitan cultural elite. But he became disillusioned, due to his experience of extremism in the circles of the French, German, British, and American intellectual elite. He decided to withdraw into the confines of a countryside home, first in the United States, and later in Britain. This choice was in tune with his existential decision to live the vita contemplativa rather than the vita activa.
My understanding of his preference for the rural in his later life is connected to Scruton’s realization that he could not proceed in the English-speaking academic world, due to his commitment to British conservatism. He left academia and began his own way of life in the countryside. It was in this context that he rediscovered the virtues of the English countryside and the beauty of landscape, vernacular architecture, and rootedness. His concept of oikophilia (the love of home) is rich in ancient analogies, but it also shows his own search for natural beauty and the beauty of an ordinary human life along traditional lines, including family, household, ordinary pursuits, and religious practice.
What are some of the most important lessons you have drawn from Scruton’s works and teachings? What areas or aspects would you hope to expand on, or do you wish he had been able to elaborate on more before his passing?
Perhaps one of the most important lessons is that what really matters in philosophy is not only a thinker’s words, but also his character and life story. Scruton’s legacy is therefore much more than his academic work. It is also a story of existentially significant choices. He started as an academic at Cambridge, a position which he eventually abandoned after he embraced conservatism during the student protests in 1968. He went on to become the founding editor of The Salisbury Review and became known for his controversial journalism. He also played a vital role in an underground network of intellectuals that helped students and enthusiasts study the Western tradition behind the Iron Curtain. He finally found a safe harbour in the English countryside in his own family, where he consciously withdrew from the hurry of the metropolitan centre.
Readers are moved both by his clear philosophical writing and his exciting life as a philosopher in search of wisdom and answers to burning metaphysical questions. This duality of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa encapsulates Scruton’s appeal, which is so important for me personally, as a philosopher, as a poet, and finally as an aging old man, a husband, and father of two adult children.
Does the whole of Scruton’s writings and lessons on art and aesthetics give rise to a ‘school of thought’?
I am not sure it does. Scruton did not have an easy character and he did not seek to establish a philosophical school, like Heidegger or Joachim Ritter. Yet at the end of his life, he had two circles of students or disciples: one at Oxford’s Blackfriars Hall, the other at Buckingham University. I did not belong to either, as I was unfortunately too old to be a student of his. Yet I think that, after his death, Scruton has become a great master of a surprisingly large pool of young philosophers, political thinkers, and lovers of the liberal arts, as well as of elderly enthusiasts like me. Yet becoming a ‘pop icon’ is a real danger for Scruton, and it is our responsibility not to turn his heritage into a kitschy, mass-produced article. We need to read his works and reflect on them in the same serious manner that he read his colleagues and his forerunners: ready to learn from them but also ready to criticize them when necessary.
Someone once told me that a project like The European Conservative could not successfully combine art and politics. He was wrong. How would you describe the relationship, if any, between the realms, beyond merely recognizing the political use of art in propaganda?
I think homo politicus and homo aestheticus are closely bound to each other within us. Both help a person reach decisions in difficult situations. A political judgement has the function of making the right choice in situations of political crisis.
It cannot be a simple rational choice as economists and political scientists would wish. People like Aristotle, Giovanni Botero, Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, and Alasdair MacIntyre point out that we need virtue, prudence, or practical wisdom, excellence—particularly moral excellence—acquired by habit, to be able to make good judgements in politics.
This also applies to the art world and to aesthetic value. We need experience and refinement, which we can call the taste of the connoisseur, to help us make the right judgements. Political prudence and aesthetic discretion are closely interconnected, as the early modern paradigm of taste—from Castiglione, through Gracián, up to Shaftesbury and Addison—illustrate.
Can you summarize in a few pithy statements Scruton’s core contribution to the field of aesthetics? How would you articulate his main insights about the importance of art (a) for the inner life and perhaps even personal redemption, and (b) for the development of citizenship and the functioning of the polis?
Scruton contributed most profoundly to the understanding of art’s personally redemptive role in his writings on the aesthetics of music, most particularly on Wagner. He was not naturally a religious believer. On the contrary, he was a modern philosopher, with all his doubts. Yet by the end of his life, his search for wisdom led him to recognize that in great works of art, we can have an experience (Erlebnis) which can lead us beyond the natural limits of what we can possibly know by reason, into the realm of the unknown. Wagner, specifically, showed Scruton that even if we do not believe in an afterlife, we can trust that through artfully expressing the exercise of selfless love we can transcend our own finite and sinful nature.
As for the relevance of art to the political life of a community, we can turn to his writings on architecture and urban theory. Here he explores how a community can order itself spatially. The key to planning buildings is that each must have its place and special function within the whole, just as individuals have to find where exactly they belong within their community in order to contribute to the common good. The right place is discovered by an experienced eye, a refined taste, and a reliance on those traditions which transmit the indirect and often ‘unreflected’ wisdom of those who founded and built a town or city. Scruton was critical of modern urbanism and defended traditional ways of building, by insisting on aesthetic qualities, like the ones Vitruvius bequeathed to us: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas (firmness, utility, and beauty).
Vitruvius was, of course, a Roman. Throughout her history, Italy has produced some of the most profound works of art. What was it in Italian culture, character, and history that contributed to and produced such works?
Italy is a crucial reservoir of the most important art of European culture. In my recent book The Political Philosophy of the European City, I argue that this is due to the specific form of urban republicanism that characterized the Italian city-states of the medieval and early modern peninsula. These communities might have been ruled by an aristocracy, by a monarchy, or in a genuinely republican manner, but they were all uniquely characterized by their refined ways of human cooperation.
A key feature of this cooperation was that political prestige was closely connected with fostering high culture and intellectual achievement, from architecture, painting, and sculpture, to music, literature, philosophy, science, and theology. In modernity, people often believe that mass culture makes high culture unnecessary and out-of-date, but I think the totalitarian experience of the 20th century proved that art for its own sake is one of the strongest criticisms of authoritarian power and its inhumanity.
When art turns into propaganda, we can be sure that our politics is endangered.
How do you define that element or feature in a given work of art or music that allows it to endure as a classic across generations, cultures, and languages? What is a classic? What is its transcendent value, in both your words and Scruton’s?
So far, no one has found that single element which characterizes all classical works of art. In fact, we cannot give a definition of art generally. It changes its forms and appearances from age to age. As Wittgenstein pointed out, instead of a definition we can only point at family resemblances in this field.
However, Hans-Georg Gadamer defined a ‘classic’ as a work of art which does not speak purely to its own age but speaks to audiences across time and cultures. Perhaps the key to that success is, according to the Scrutonian paradigm, that they address existential questions which always interest mankind. In other words, classic works serve as reservoirs of human wisdom, not coded in a conceptual language, but engraved into the raw material of the artfully formed world of objects that are perceived by that sensory cognition I mentioned above.
What should be the role of educators and policymakers in promoting art and beauty for the good of all?
Well, I am hesitant to advise policymakers in general terms, beyond cautioning them against destroying well-founded and effective social networks, legal frameworks, and traditional institutions. As for the role of educators, I think they must first regain a good reputation, which they can do by engaging honestly with society. They must do everything possible to ensure that our social networks do not collapse as a result of the current crises of technological alienation and intellectual deadlock. Educators should defend age-old institutions like the family, the church, the university, and high culture in order to safeguard civility.
Civility is, in fact, the theme of my next book, which I will present in an Aristotelian framework, supplemented by relevant research from 20th-century authors like Eliot, Elias, Gadamer, Shils, and Oakeshott. This is important—for, without civility, our culture will rapidly decline, as did Ancient Rome, before the eyes of the Augustines of our day.