The Soul of the World

By: Roger Scruton

Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte

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.

©2014 Princeton University Press (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Very good!

The narrationi is very clear and suitable for the theme. The book is a profound reflexion about how the sacred is peesent in our world.

Roger Scrouton at his best!

Outstanding book! great narration. Will listen to it several more times. I definitely recommend it

Incredible

Incredible book that teaches some of the most important things you could ever know.

Inadequate reading of a very good book

In this performance, the mispronunciation of numerous names (Kant, Durkheim, etc.), most foreign words (Lebenswelt, verstehen, etc.), and even some English words (casual for causal) is a near-constant distraction.

"Against Reductionism"

After watching the BBC documentary "Why Beauty Matters", and reading Scruton's book on beauty, I became a big fan of this brave Englishman, and The Soul of the World did not disappoint me, even though I will have to reread it to understand everything.


The title of the book is not very good, though. I doubt that it has the power and clarity to capture the attention of those who should read it. In my view, a better title would have been something like "Against Reductionism (and Desecration)".


Scruton's "desecration" theory, explained in books like Beauty, is perhaps the best explanation I have ever come across for fact that so much contemporary art and architecture is so ridiculously ugly. The chapter on Colophon in The Soul of the World elaborates on this key to understanding today's culture.


I especially liked the parts on evolutionary psychology, cognitive dualism and emergent realities. Here are some passages I found particularly briljant:


12:03: “We pursue the true, the good and the beautiful, even though the false, the nasty and the messy might have been just as useful to our genes. The case of mathematics is especially vivid.”


17:52: “In other words, if we attempt to reach the high ground of naturalism by this route, we encounter a version of the liar paradox, an obstacle to which there is only one response: Turn back.”


1:42:25: “There is a widespread habit of declaring emergent realities to be ‘nothing but’ the things in which we perceive them. The human person is ‘nothing but’ the human animal … the Mona Lisa is ‘nothing but’ a spread of pigments on a canvas. Getting rid of this habit is, to my mind, the true goal of philosophy.”


4:01:24: “The world of obligations has been steadily remade as a world of contracts, and therefore of obligations that are rescindable, finite and dependent upon individual choice. Burke long ago made the point, in opposition to Rousseau’s social contract theory, and its subversive effect, namely that if society is a contract, then it is one to which the dead, the living and the unborn are all equally partners. In other words, not a contract at all, but an inheritance of trusteeship, which cannot be reduced to the agreement to be bound by it. All obligations of love are like that.


The process of secularization can be understood from the example of Rousseau. It involves clearing away from the Lebenswelt [Lifeworld] all the threads of pious observance that cannot be replaced by free choice and self-made obligations. The world is remade without the transcendental reference, without the encounter with sacred things, without the vows of allegiance and submission, which have no other justification than the weight of inherited duty. But it turns out … that these vows were far more deeply woven into the fabric of our experience than enlightened people tend to think, and that the world without transcendent bonds is not a variant of the world that has not yet been cleansed of them, but a completely different world, and one in which we humans are not truly at home.”


5:31:12 “Vast and overbearing though the buildings of new Colophon may be, they have no air of permanence. The town is like a frozen junkyard, and even if it looks like this forever, it will look forever temporary.”


6:18:48: “The most famous triumph in this respect is that of the Frankfurt school critic, Theodore Adorno, who, coming as a refugee to Hollywood in the 1930s, repaid the vast hospitality of which he was a recipient by poring scorn on the people who offered it, and in particular, on the entertainment industry in which he imagined them to be enslaved.”

Please learn how to pronounce foreign names.

It is very annoying when professional readers can't pronounce foreign names and words properly. It is Kant and not can't.

Excellent analysis of Western thought

enjoyed the analysis of the social contract. Clinical psychologists should read this book. it may give them a greater analysis of intention and consciousness

Great book, pity about the delivery.

So great to be able to listen to this book while walking the dog. Many deep issues to ponder and pointers to relevant material from other authors past and present. However, the reading does the writing no favours. Little effort has been made to pronounce names and titles correctly, and it is rather painfully clear in some cases that the sentence is being read without being understood. “Causal” has been read as “casual” three times and I’m only up to Chapter 3. I fight to imagine how Roger Scruton himself would read it through what I am actually hearing.
All this notwithstanding, it is the ideas that are important here, and they do shine through, a bit like the sun on a cloudy day, for which I am very grateful.

Too tainted with a certain illuminism

The illuminists in general were tainted with naturalism and rationalism, which are simply false conceptions.
To the scholar you would do so much better by reading the work of Jean Borella, especially his Crisis of Religious Symbolism. To the layman I recommend simply reading the visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich edited by Angelico Press (The version of TAN books is incomplete and more or less inaccurate). Or a layman could simply watch the 5h documentary of the life of St. Paisios on YouTube. Or read the writings of st. Paisios where he speaks of rationalism which would be much more beneficial than this bad book.

Not persuasive

The author constructs an elaborate edifice on highly questionable foundations. I try to be open to different ideas and perspectives, and I do like to think that there is a place in the modern world for spirituality, beauty and ideals. However, this particular book does not present a persuasive argument for any of those things.

The author makes many assumptions about history, psychology, and human relationships, and treats them as if they were self-evident and universally accepted. They are not. Many of them are, in fact, controversial and counter-establishment. These controversial assumptions, presented without any objective evidence to support them, are the premises for his argument. I find this problematic.

Much of the author's argument is that the nature of human relationships - whether with each other, with art, or with God - cannot be understood by science or from a scientific, rational perspective. Neuroscience and secular humanism have, according to his argument, dehumanized modern society. However, I question that the author is as well-acquainted with neuroscience as he would have us believe. He accuses science of reductionism - and then proceeds with a brutally reductionist, not at all fair portrayal of scientists. Much of the book is devoted to restatements of the "science strips the world of magic" cliché. Frankly, the nihilistic mindset that Scruton ascribes to scientists is more commonly found among high-school-aged wannabe intellectuals, or perhaps among journalists writing sensationalist, superficial articles about science. I find that real scientists have more respect than anyone for the astonishing, humbling complexity of their subject of study - in this case, the human brain and the miracle of human consciousness. See, for example, Oliver Sacks or Steven Pinker. (I enthusiastically recommend their highly readable books to anyone haunted by the idea that neuroscience has dehumanized humanity.)

There are also many nostalgic reflections here, about earlier times when life had been more meaningful. Like all romantics dreaming of golden ages, Scruton conveniently ignores the misery and brutality of the past, focusing only on the aspects that fit in with his thesis. And even then, he presents no actual facts, but only general observations about how people had once behaved. By rejecting the scientific approach, Scruton has denied himself any means to ground his arguments in objective reality. This book is a case of philosophy begetting philosophy: his starting points are his own ideas about how the world is and should be - not the world as it appears objectively to a reasonable observer. Much of what he says - for example, about human interactions having been more meaningful in more spiritually-minded times - can be easily challenged, if not refuted, by historical facts and psychological studies. Of course, that would be counter to the spirit of the book, since it would require us to implement the dehumanizing approach of the scientific method. But for my part, I am more interested in the world I can see with my eyes than in the world that exists inside Scruton's head, no matter how beautiful, poetic and meaningful the one inside his head might be.