Replies to Critics

Roger Scruton

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I am grateful for the patience and sympathy with which the contributors to this issue have
treated my work, and have learned much from their observations and criticisms. In
responding to them I will address only those points which seem to me to be central, and
which mount a challenge to my general stance.
It is appropriate to begin from the subject of photography, since the matters raised
include one of the most precise questions in aesthetics, and also one of the broadest. The
precise question is that concerning the nature and significance of representation in art; the
broad question is that concerning the place of aesthetic values in an age of mechanical
reproduction—a concern that has occupied continental philosophers but which seems
disconnected from analytical aesthetics. In their subtle and intricate papers Dawn Phillips
and David Davies show how the broader concern and the narrow question are connected.
Philostratus, in his wonder-struck descriptions of the vanished paintings of the ancient
world, reminds us that likenesses were once regarded as miracles, products of rare genius,
which magically subdued the world to our dominion. The paintings in the Lascaux caves
should be seen in a similar light. They are a bid for power, the result of intense and concen-
trated thought, which endeavours to conjure onto the wall, and to reduce into submission,
the animals that rule the surrounding wilderness. Images, in former ages, were precious
achievements and vehicles through which the artist could present not just the object por-
trayed, but the subject seeing that object, absorbing that object and dissolving it in spells.
That is surely what Walter Benjamin had in mind, in referring to the ‘aura’ that images once
possessed for those who encountered them. And naturally my concern was to emphasize
the enormous difference between image making, so conceived, and the results of pointing
a machine at a thing, pressing a button, and printing the result.
But then, as Phillips and Davies rightly remind us, not all photography is like that. The
holiday snap is at the margins of a serious art-form, and one which has its own traditions,
its own discipline, and its own intricate procedures for transforming the raw input into an
eloquent and meaningful output. Photography is like painting in so many ways that it might
seem arbitrary to draw any clear dividing line between them. This is why I wished to begin
my account from the precise question, concerning the nature of representation. I argued
that representation is an intentional relation, and that a work of art represents an object by
expressing thoughts about it.You understand the representational content by recuperating
those thoughts. The object may not exist, and if it does exist it may not be as it is repre-
sented to be in the work of art. And the representation may not be specific as to which
object is being portrayed. Those features of intentionality, made familiar by Chisholm and
others, have a role to play in representational art, since they are the root of imaginative
story-telling.
I wanted to say that photographs are not representations in that sense. They may
be works of art, and undeniably the great photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson and

British Journal of Aesthetics Vol 49 | Number 4 | October 2009 | pp. 451–461 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayp038
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452 | ROGER SCRUTON

Diane Arbus have been motivated by aesthetic goals of the most demanding kind. But these
goals, I suggested, presuppose that the photograph is transparent to its subject-matter. The
viewer spontaneously and rightly believes (such is the nature of photography) that the thing
that appears in the photograph appears there because it is a specific thing, an existent thing,
and a thing which really presented just this appearance. (That last feature needs teasing out:
but it is why Arbus’s photographs are cruel, in a way that no painting is cruel.You can deny

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a painting, but not a photograph, and paintings have never played the part of photographs
in a court of law.) I explain all this by arguing that, whereas the relation ‘is a painting of’ is
intentional and therefore non-extensional, the relation ‘is a photograph of’ is causal and
therefore extensional. And I suggest that these facts profoundly influence, and must pro-
foundly influence, the way that photographs are seen.
Davies and Phillips respond to that argument in two quite different ways. Davies accepts
that the relation between a photograph and its subject is causal, but argues that this does
not prevent the photograph from expressing a point of view on the subject, and thoughts
about it, in such a way as to stimulate the same kind of interest that might be awakened by
a representational painting. The sophisticated viewer, in the hands of the skilled photogra-
pher, responds to the photograph not as a presentation of some piece of reality, but as the
representation in thought of ‘the world from a point of view’. Phillips’s response is more
radical. She admits that photography is founded in a specific causal relation, but denies that
the relation in question is between the photograph and its subject. The crucial causal rela-
tion, she argues, is contained in ‘the recording of the light image’. That light image, how-
ever, is not the output of the photographic process but the input. The photograph is what
issues from the photographic treatment of the light image; and the subject of the photo-
graph is not necessarily identical with the object that gave rise to the original image. So
when I say ‘this is a photograph of a toy horse on a wall’ I cannot be assumed to be talking
about the subject of the photograph, what the photograph is about, since what a photograph
is about depends upon what the photographer does with the light image.
Both writers develop their positions with considerable subtlety, and I am not sure that
I am able convincingly to reply to them. Nevertheless I remain persuaded that my original
position is broadly correct. Dawn Phillips is surely right that a photograph can be ‘about’
many things other than the object or event that is the causal origin of the light image. But
‘about’ is a tricky word, and stands in need of a theory. Botticelli’s Venus is ‘about’ the
Platonic vision of erotic love, it is ‘about’ Botticelli’s love for Simonetta Vespucci, it is
‘about’ Lorenzo da Medici’s mistress—but it is a representation of none of those things.
Even the most abstract art can be ‘about’ things, as Bach’s Art of Fugue is ‘about’ discipline
and exactness, and Jackson Pollock’s action paintings are ‘about’ the opposite. So we need
a theory of representation if we are to deduce, from Phillips’s true observation that photo-
graphs are often about things which were never in the light image or have vanished from it,
that photographs share with paintings the distinctive relation to the transmission of thoughts
which is characteristic of representational art.
In my original article I described ‘ideal’ photography—meaning photography devoted
to the photographic relation (as I understood it), which is appreciated largely as a means of
recording ‘how it was’, ‘how things looked’, ‘what happened’, and so on. I admitted that
you could use photography and photographic techniques in other ways, so as to divert
 REPLIES TO CRITICS | 453

interest from the causal origins of the image to something else—even something fictional.
But I argued that, as soon as you take this enterprise seriously, so as to use photography to
create an imaginary world of its own, and to invite aesthetic interest in that world and its
representation, you must move away from the causal process that is definitive of photography
towards the symbolic and figurative processes that are characteristic of painting. I think
that Phillips’s argument is a kind of endorsement of this observation, and that she rescues

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photography as a representational art-form by rescuing it from photography.
David Davies makes many important points in defending my position from the criti-
cisms of Dominic Lopes, but rounds on me in the end. He argues that photographers make
stylistic and other choices, which bear on how we see the image in the photograph, and also
that ‘we can see these choices in the image and thereby see the subject as presented to the
viewer in a particular way by the photographer’. He takes interesting examples in order
to show that photographers do not merely ‘frame’ a piece of reality that was there to be
seen, ‘but present us with a way of seeing the subject that was not available without the
photographer’s intervention’. And this, for him, is sufficient to show that the photograph
is a vehicle for conveying thoughts about its subject and that understanding the photograph
involves recuperating those thoughts.
All that, I think, is true, and says something important about photographs and the kind
of artistic virtues at which they might aim. But is it sufficient to make photography into a
representational art-form? This is not a question about definitions and the use of words. It
is a question about our attitude to photography. A painting does not merely present a point
of view on a world: it presents that world, unfolds it before us in an imaginative thought
that it invites us to share. Understanding the painting involves grasping the narrative con-
tent. Davies has shown that photographs can reproduce one part of that communicative
process—the part which involves the presentation of a point of view. But the other part—the
most important part—is lacking. The photograph is not leading us into its own world, a
world that it itself creates through its narrative content. It is relying on our ability to latch
on to an independent reality—the very reality that we see framed in the picture. And then
it invites us to share in its own unusual, ironical or whimsical perspective on that reality.
The difference here is not just a quibble. It concerns the difference between the way we
understand paintings, and the way we understand photographs. Although there are paint-
ings of real people and real scenes—where we can, so to speak, ‘quantify in’ to the narra-
tive content—we understand figurative paintings as we understand narratives in language:
they tell a story, and their aesthetic success does not as a rule depend upon the literal truth
of that story.They also convey a point of view; they are ‘about’ many things other than their
subject-matter; and they express emotions, moods, and attitudes. But the story-telling part
comes first; it is the sine qua non without which nothing else in the painting can be under-
stood. This story-telling part comes through the visual aspect, what we ‘see in’ the picture.
And the subject of a photograph is also, as a rule, ‘seen in’ the photograph. But the subject
of a photograph is understood in quite another way: not as the creation but as the creator
of what we see. And that is why we respond so differently to two objects, one a photo-
graph, the other a painting, even when they look exactly the same.
Kathleen Stock deals with another aspect of my argument about photography, concerning
the ease with which photographs administer to fantasies. This is something that I have
454 | ROGER SCRUTON

argued for in other terms, but which clearly connects to the fact that photographs are
understood as windows on to the things that we see in them. This is especially true of mov-
ing images, and I have tried to suggest that this fact, combined with the representational
incompetence of photography, explains some of the reservations that people have
expressed (at least in pre-postmodern times) about the moving image. There is very little
in Stock’s enlightening paper that I would wish to quarrel with. However, I think that

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neither she, nor my original paper on ‘Fantasy, Imagination and the Screen’, goes far
enough in identifying the real distinction between fantasy and imagination. The paradox
about fantasy is that, because it deals expressly in unrealities, it demands the life-like, the
realized, the substitute reality. And imagination, which is aimed at and controlled by the real,
demands just the opposite. Imagination flourishes best in a resistant medium, which filters
out what is irrelevant to the reality on which it focuses. Such a medium stands like a censor
before all the doors which might open into the world of the fantasist, and enables us to
maintain a certain moral discipline in the face of scenes which might otherwise tempt us
to transgression.
The distinction here is hard to draw precisely, but what I had in mind can be understood
through the example of the Greek tragedy—an art-form in which conventions govern
character, form, structure, language, versification, and just what can and cannot be pre-
sented on the stage. Perhaps there has never been a more ‘resistant’ medium through
which to penetrate to the heart of the human condition. But we instinctively feel that this
resistance is part of what makes the final encounter so much the more urgent, illuminating
and real. The scene in which Cassandra foretells her death, in rhythmical verse that seems
to play its own part in propelling her to her unjust fate, is one whose realism has seldom
been matched in the cinema. Yet the conventions insist that she speak in heightened
language, that she dance her way, so to speak, into Agamemnon’s palace, and that in no
manner should her death be shown—at most a cry might issue from behind the stage. This
is the opposite of the full-scale Tarantino-style butchery that we are now invited to enjoy—
butchery that involves a flight from emotional realities. Tarantino only pretends to be a
realist; in fact he is a fantasist, who relishes dismemberment and pain for their own sakes,
without reference to the human signifance of the drama. That is why his films are already
on the edge of being forgotten, whereas Aeschylus’ representation of Cassandra’s death
speaks to us down the centuries, and awakens in all of us anguish, pity and knowledge of
the human heart.
Stock dwells on the element of prohibition that I identify in fantasy—the barrier to the
really real, that turns the fantasist towards the merely realized. She underplays, as I did, the
most important aspect of this barrier, which is that it involves a judgement against the self.
The person who enjoys watching scenes of torture is, of course, overcoming the moral
prohibition against torture. But the one who enjoys watching scenes of simulated torture
is overcoming a prohibition of quite another kind: the prohibition against watching this kind
of thing, the kind of prohibition that makes me walk out of Tarantino films. Moreover,
there are things that it is wrong to watch but permissible to do—and I think this point would
not have needed spelling out in the days before Internet pornography, and all the other
temptations that lie in wait for our contemporaries. ‘What am I doing watching this?’ is a
deep moral reaction—the ‘guilt’ version of the shame that would accompany the knowledge
 REPLIES TO CRITICS | 455

that other people are watching you watching. To explore this aspect of fantasy, which has
of course been of great concern to psychologists and psychotherapists in recent years, is
beyond my scope. But it points us towards an important feature of fantasy, which again
distinguishes it from imagination—namely, that fantasy is addictive, and exhibits the pattern
of press-button rewards which we find in other addictions. Neuroscientists have had a lot
to say about this pattern, and about the dopamine surges on which it depends. But it is not

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simply a matter of deviant neural pathways. There is a deviant intentionality involved in
fantasy, and one that is connected with other deviations from what I call the ‘aesthetic
understanding’—a pathway back to the self, that escapes the demands of the other. I think,
from Stock’s concluding example, that she would agree with me that this kind of short-cut
back to the self is one of the ways in which aesthetic values are negated.
This brings me to the general question of culture. In two rich and far-reaching papers
Andy Hamilton and Christopher Stevens set my contributions to analytical aesthetics in the
wider context of my various attempt to give an account of culture. Stevens rightly sees that
my approach to philosophy connects with an outlook that he calls ‘cultural conservatism’,
and Hamilton refers to the work of the Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams by way of
identifying the area in which many of my arguments fall and where I am in deep disagree-
ment with the tradition represented by Williams. Their discussions raise many specific
questions and challenges, and I will have to content myself with two very broad responses.
First, Stevens is right to suggest that I see culture as a realm of intrinsic values, and also that
this is connected to a position in moral philosophy that now tends to be known as ‘virtue
ethics’. Moreover he is right to stress that I see the value of culture in general and art in
particular as residing in the transmission of ‘emotional knowledge’—which I would gloss
as knowledge what to feel, the kind of knowledge that King Lear lacks at the beginning of
his tragedy, and which Cordelia possesses. Knowledge of intrinsic values and knowledge
what to feel are internally connected. Virtue does not reside in action only, but in motives,
themselves rooted in feeling. Feelings are rational responses to objective situations; they
can be educated and amended, and the way to do this, Adam Smith and David Hume plau-
sibly argued, is through sympathy. Culture is the sphere in which sympathies are adjusted
and through which others become real to us, so as to address us from that ‘second-person
standpoint’ which has been powerfully described in recent work by Stephen Darwall.
Inevitably, if you take this view of culture, and if you believe, as I do, that emotional knowl-
edge is more easily lost than won, you are bound to be a cultural conservative. This does
not mean that you will be a political conservative too—Leavis is a striking example to the
contrary. But it does mean that you will have some kind of vision of what is at stake in
political life. If you look over those who have had useful things to say about culture (in the
sense of that term in which culture includes, and is paradigmatically represented by, the
arts) then you will not fail to notice that they have had useful and far-reaching things to say
about political matters too. If I name merely those who come immediately to mind—Hegel,
Coleridge, Arnold, Ruskin, Eliot, Pieper, Maritain, Arendt, Raymond Williams, Bourdieu,
Eagleton—it will at least illustrate Stevens’s point that few among them have been
analytical philosophers.
I would add, however, that it is a radical defect in analytical aesthetics that it has
detached itself from culture, and from the philosophical anthropology that is needed to
456 | ROGER SCRUTON

make sense of it. Too often, lacking any vision of where art, literature, and music fit into
the fulfilled life of a rational being, analytical aestheticians look to evolutionary biology, or
even to neuroscience, for the general theory that will underpin their specific arguments.
I would argue, rather, that we can make sense of aesthetic values only through a philosophical
account of the interpersonal states of mind, such as Hegel presented in The Phenomenology
of Spirit, and that evolutionary psychology and neuroscience are never going to deliver that

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account. I am not as sceptical as Stevens seems to be concerning the possibility of developing
a theory of human flourishing that will do justice to the place of culture and the aesthetic
in a life properly lived. Actually I think that Hegel took giant steps in this direction, and
things were going swimmingly until the Marxists took over.
Andy Hamilton’s essay is again focused on the general question of the meaning and value
of culture, and the place of aesthetic values within it. Hamilton’s main concern is what he
calls ‘elitism’, and he describes me as an elitist, on the strength of my traditionalist approach
to art and culture. Now, elitism could mean one of two things. It could mean the belief that
in any sphere of rational enquiry there is a distinction between those who know and those
who don’t, and that the first should take precedence over the second. I endorse ‘elitism’ in
that sense, as does everybody who thinks about it, Hamilton included, though he prefers to
call it ‘meritocracy’. But ‘elitism’ has also been used, by T. S. Eliot among others, to denote
the situation in which people rise to positions of authority through their membership of an
‘elite’ and without reference to any knowledge that might qualify them for the rôle. (Eliot
had the Soviet Communist Party in mind.) I am not an elitist in that sense, though I think we
live in an elitist society, in which you advance through political and ideological networks to
positions of influence. It is surely obvious that you would get nowhere in the world of the
arts in Britain if you were not connected to the network which disposes of patronage through
the Labour Party, the Arts Council, and the BBC. Knowledge of art or culture seems to be
a handicap, and is likely to be dismissed as ‘elitist’, the buzz-word used by the new elite to
exclude the old, and used in its other sense, to describe those who rightly believe that here,
as elsewhere, there is a real distinction between ignorance and knowledge.
I make those points because Hamilton seems to want to push the discussion in a political
direction. His defence of meritocracy makes it clear that he agrees with me that aesthetic
judgement involves knowledge, and that we must defend the institutions and practices
whereby that knowledge is passed on. I agree with him that elitists (in the bad sense) are
‘not eager to empower anyone other than the presently qualified elite’. But I would contest
the term ‘qualified’ in that sentence.To qualify for membership of the elite it may be better
not to have any qualifications in the matter of culture.The real question, as Hamilton makes
clear, is that of rescuing culture from the elites. How do we identify and pass on the
cultural products that matter, and how do we do so as a service to culture, rather than to the
elites who are currently in charge of it? I think that nineteenth-century thinkers had much
to say about this. Hegel, Humboldt, Ruskin, and Arnold were witnesses to the decline of
aristocracy and to the loss of the cultural guardianship that hereditary elites had provided.
They asked how traditions of artistic reflection and Bildung could be passed on, in an age
when no one class can set the ‘standard of taste’, about which Hume, a Scottish aristocrat,
was so confident. That question is still with us, and I do not think Hamilton really disagrees
with the suggestions I have made in answer to it.
 REPLIES TO CRITICS | 457

In no field of aesthetic enquiry is that question more urgent than in the field of architecture.
When my friend Quinlan Terry was a student at the Architectural Association he several
times submitted, as his qualifying project, a beautifully worked out scheme for down-town
development, obeying updated Palladian principles of the kind he was later to deploy so
successfully at Richmond Riverside and in Williamsburg, Virginia. Each time he was failed
by the examiners. Only when he submitted plans in a kitchen-sink modernist idiom was he

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passed, the examiners failing to notice his satirical intention. This is a perfect illustration,
to my mind, of what happens when an elite seizes control of a sphere of cultural knowledge
and makes elite membership rather than cultural knowledge into the ‘standard of taste’.
Since that time the Architectural Association has been a byword for vociferating
ignorance of the Le Corbusier kind, polished up every now and then with a bit of ‘theory’
hot from the Parisian pseudosphere. When I wrote The Aesthetics of Architecture it was in
part because I wanted to show that there really is such a thing as architectural knowledge,
and that it cannot be squeezed into the moulds that were then fashionable. The underlying
theme of the book is that there are forms of knowledge—knowledge what to do, what to
feel, what something is like—which do not fit into the patterns explored by analytical
philosophers (who have focused on knowledge that and knowledge how). These other
forms of knowledge have large intersubjective and imaginative components, and one pur-
pose of architectural education, and in particular education in the use of style, order, and
detail, is directed towards acquiring them. I took apart some of the texts of the modern-
ists in order to show just what happens to knowledge when elites take charge of it. And
the argument that I developed about proportion is just one part of a comprehensive
attempt to show how such concepts work, when devoted to conveying the knowledge
of appearances.
Rafael de Clercq’s patient exposition of one of my arguments has given me much food
for thought, and I can here offer only a suggestion in reply to his concluding criticism.
One part of my argument about proportion, he suggests, ‘rests on a mistaken assumption,
to wit, that rightness of proportion is relative to a point of view’. ‘However,’ he goes on,
‘rightness of apparent proportion is of course so relative (since apparent proportions are
relative), raising the question of which are more important: the real proportions of a
building or its apparent proportions?’ My response to this is to say that Oscar Wilde’s
quip is more true of aesthetics than of any other realm of rational enquiry, namely that ‘it
is only a very shallow person who does not judge by appearances’. Of course, we have a
use for the idea of the real proportions of, say Bramante’s Tempietto, as opposed to the
apparent proportions from this or that perspective. But this is a case where we must, to
borrow Wallace Stevens’s line, ‘Let be be finale of seem’. Aesthetic understanding is
essentially directed towards appearances, with a view to seeing in those appearances the
meanings that give them intrinsic value and lend them to our intersubjective interests.
Aesthetic interest and aesthetic creativity are concerned with constructing and under-
standing the Lebenswelt, and many of the shallow ways of thinking that I criticized in my
book on architecture come from believing that there is some real essence to a work of
architecture, that lies beyond and behind its many appearances. Whether this thought can
be developed to provide a full rebuttal to de Clercq’s objection I do not know. But it
prompts me to look for one.
458 | ROGER SCRUTON

This same emphasis on appearances governs my approach to musical aesthetics. Music,

I argue, is what we hear in sounds, when we are hearing musically. And the first question for
musical aesthetics is therefore to account for musical hearing. The two very distinguished
papers by Jerrold Levinson and Alison Denham address this question, and again I can only
give a sketch of a response to them. My gut reaction has been, and remains, that we should
begin from the genealogy of musical understanding, in the spirit of Nietzsche’s Birth of

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Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. The root experience, I suggest, from which music grows, is
that of the dance. In dancing we express ourselves through gestures that are entirely
ordered, and entirely free. These gestures have a social intentionality, so that the primary
form that dancing takes is ‘dancing with’. It is this experience that we somehow manage to
invest in music, when we shift from moving with the music, to listening to it. And when we
listen musically, I argue, metaphors of movement, spatial order and agent causality inform
our perception. Levinson makes the powerful point that the realm of music is in fact far bet-
ter provided with freedom than the space in which we dance, and that in following music
we are granted a vision of gesture that attains to a subtlety and finesse that cannot be at-
tained through physical movement. Generally, he suggests, dancing is too coarse a vehicle
to communicate all the ways in which we understand and follow a musical argument, and
therefore it should not be taken as a paradigm of musical understanding.
Levinson is surely right, and the conclusion to draw is that my genealogy cannot be easily
translated into an analysis of musical understanding. Much more is built on our involvement
with music than the mere transmission of gestures. In particular there are the phenomena,
unknown in all ordinary dance-forms, of musical development, thematic structure, long-
range movement, closure, and just about everything else that musicologists puzzle over.
Nevertheless, we have got to start somewhere if we are to understand how these things fit
into the life of the listener, and how they are echoed in the attentive musical mind. I start
from dancing since it gives a clear paradigm of musical attention, and gives some insight
into the well-known experience of music, as a cure for loneliness, and a consolation in our
darkest hours. From this simple case we can, I believe, build a picture of the long-range
musical understanding that is engaged by a Bach fugue or a Bruckner sonata movement.
And the idea of musical understanding as a ‘moving with’ accounts for much that critics
and others have wished to say about expression, mood and atmosphere in music.
This brings me to Alison Denham’s far-reaching argument about tonality. She
challenges me to show why my singling out of tonality is anything more than an arbitrary
fixation with certain kinds of music, to the exclusion of other kinds, equally the objects of
musical attention. And she suggests that the method by which I privilege tonality is nothing
more than ‘armchair phenomenology’, offered in defence of a thesis which, if true at all,
must be taken as a truth of empirical psychology, to be backed up by a proper cognitive
science of listening. Denham’s argument is developed at a deep level, and raises questions
of method that I cannot address. And she is no doubt right that I have overstated the case
for tonality, and also been less clear than I should have been about what it is. But here is a
partial response.
The mineralogist who classifies porphyry and onyx together (both being, from the
architect’s point of view, ‘ornamental marbles’) will not get far with his science: one is a
silicate, the other an oxide. In general, science depends upon sorting reality into ‘natural
 REPLIES TO CRITICS | 459

kinds’, and this places a priori constraints on classification. No such constraints apply in the
realm of culture. Music is not a natural kind, and it is not at all clear what, if anything, goes
wrong, if you start off from a deviant classification, counting birdsong, wind in the pine
trees, the mooing of cows, and the clatter of saucepans along with the rest of our familiar
repertoire, as music. A lot of second-rate philosophy and third-rate music criticism has
begun from the question ‘Is John Cage’s 4⬘ 33″ a work of music?’ Say yes or no; it hardly

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matters. Nevertheless, there is more to be said. Music is not a natural kind, but it is not an
arbitrary kind either. It is an interest-relative kind. It has arisen from bringing together the
actual, possible, and hypothetical objects of a certain kind of interest that human beings
have. When the ‘progressivists’, as Denham calls them, point to some new work such as
Crofts’s Inventions de l’autre, and say that this too is music, and therefore what Scruton says
about the centrality of the tonal tradition is wrong, my response is to say that this is no
more persuasive than pointing to a page on which someone has written a few Chinese
characters, and saying that this too is poetry. In either case we have made only the first move
in a discussion that is many moves away from its conclusion.
Tom Phillips famously took the printed version of W. H. Mallock’s A Human Document
and, isolating fragments of text that could be joined into evocative sentences, and overlaying
each page with a brilliant painted image that somehow illustrated the words, he produced
a new book—a ‘treated Victorian novel’ called A Humument. Behind the sequence of words
and images an untold story lingers, just out of reach. I want to say, this too is a novel. But
I have not produced a counter-example to the person who says, when asked to explain the
art-form of the novel, that a novel is a fictional story, in which human characters are taken
through adventures which put them in some way to the test. It is precisely because of
the tradition which that statement describes that Tom Phillips’s ‘treated novel’ can be
presented to the reader as belonging to it. It is a possible object of the interest which grows
from the central examples and which also defines them as central—the interest in character,
narrative, and plot.
I want to say that something like that is true of tonality.The progressivists are not producing
counter-examples to my thesis, for this is an area in which the game of counter-examples
cannot be usefully played. In isolating tonality as central to the musical understanding I
was trying to define an artistic tradition—not a style or an idiom, but something bigger,
less bounded, and more humanly significant. What I did not make clear, however, because
I was only feeling my way towards the point, is that the ‘common practice’ tradition that
Denham refers to, and which emerged from medieval polyphony through innovation and
discovery, is in turn the natural outcome of the experience which is central to the art of
music—the experience of following a melodic movement from upbeat to closure.
Although our harmonic language is rarely to be observed outside the European diaspora,
we find the framework of tonality wherever people have made the art of singing, playing,
and listening central to their lives. Tonicization, octave equivalence, the privileging of the
fourth and the fifth, cadences onto the tonic, and the pentatonic and diatonic scales are
everywhere to be observed in listening cultures, and the triads have emerged of their own
accord in the music of Polynesia.
People make and listen to unpitched sounds that cannot be organized melodically—as
in certain forms of African drum music. I did not, in The Aesthetics of Music, consider this
460 | ROGER SCRUTON

kind of example, and it is a legitimate criticism of my argument that it assumes melodic

organization to be a given in the art of music. However, I would suggest that the onus is on
the critics to show why interest in the African drums should be wrapped up in the kind
called music, and why this should cause me to revise the judgement that tonality is central
to musical organization. If the drum beats are not treated as magic, as communal noise, or
as a form of communication, but are made to be listened to, then clearly this shows that

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there are phenomena on the edge of music from which the familiar dimension of melody is
absent. My argument in the chapter on tonality, however, was directed to those, like
Schoenberg and Adorno, who wished to retain the three familiar dimensions of melody,
rhythm, and harmony, along with the listening culture which has stemmed from them,
while defying the organization which I hold to be implicit in the ear of the beholder.
Tonality is not just central to the listening experience: it is also an artistic medium, one
that is directed towards aesthetic experiences and judgements of taste.That is why I brushed
cognitive science aside. A cognitive scientist will begin from such questions as these:
‘Which chord sequences do people find satisfying?’ ‘Which phrase structures are
preferred?’ ‘Which intervals are heard as natural, which as forced?’ It might be possible to
produce a general account of how ordinary human musicality works—what sequences
appeal, what offend, and so on. But it would not be a theory of an artistic tradition: at best
it would be a theory of the raw material from which the tradition is constructed.
Confucius dismissed the taste of ordinary people as depraved. Schoenberg believed that
ordinary musical syntax had become vapid and kitschified. Adorno argued that mass
culture had taken tonality under its wing and poisoned it. None of those judgements is
absurd, however much they may irritate people today. The limited melodic, harmonic, and
rhythmical lexicon of the pop song seems to have achieved a kind of stability—it is what
most people prefer to hear in the background. And this psychological fact invites a theory
of cognitive pathways that would show why you do not need taste, education, or anything
else to ‘get’ music of this kind. But that theory will not tell you why those very harmonic
and melodic sequences have been expelled from the tradition of serious music, explicitly
tonal music included. The meaning that attaches to the great works in our tradition
attaches to them on account of the way tonality is used, to create objects of aesthetic interest.
No cognitive science is going to get very far in predicting that use, which is governed at
every point by aesthetic choices.
I have no quarrel with the cognitive science of music. However, as I try to show, the
search for deep structure, associated with Schenker, and with the Chomskified theory of
Lerdahl and Jackendoff, is misconceived.You do not understand a piece of music by recu-
perating the process whereby it is generated from a ‘deep structure’. Musical hierarchies
are built up in the ear of the beholder, and not retrieved from the cognitive apparatus that
operates behind the scenes. They lie on the musical surface, as when I hear a canonical
structure that is built from the staggered repetition of a single theme, or when I hear the
rhythmic order of a single bar (say, downbeat plus three) repeated at the higher level (one
emphatic bar followed by three subdued).
I rebut the accusation that, in place of a cognitive science, I give only ‘armchair
phenomenology’. (Incidentally, is there any other kind of phenomenology?) The question
of the nature of philosophy, its relation to science on the one hand and criticism on the
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other, is a deep and difficult one, and it ought not to be necessary to have a theory of
philosophy before you are entitled to embark on doing it. But here, for what it is worth, is my
view of the matter. Philosophy gives the broadest possible description of a phenomenon, in
order to identify its place in human life, and the ways in which we can relate to it. It is
therefore best seen as an a priori anthropology, in Kant’s sense. And my account of music,
and of tonality as its backbone, is an account of one part of the Lebenswelt—the world of

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appearances that people construct through their interactions, and in which they find their
home, as free, rational agents. Whether that counts as ‘phenomenology’ I don’t know.
I suppose that my use of Husserl’s term Lebenswelt invites that diagnosis. But in my view that
is about the only useful word that Husserl ever uttered.

Roger Scruton
rogerscruton@mac.com