Jenny Bunker sees an unashamed elitist betrayed by popular packaging

Beauty by Roger Scruton (Oxford University Press) £10.99/$19.95 (hb)

The cheery gnome on the back cover, the patronising blurb, the brevity of the book itself, all suggest that Beauty is another addition to the well-stocked Introduction to Aesthetics shelves. That is not what Scruton has given us. Indeed Beauty reads far more like a conclusion than an introduction – sweeping in scope but by no means a comprehensive treatment of the topic, rich in resonances with Plato, Hume, Kant and Schopenhauer among many others but offering little in the way of analysis of their work. This, it is clear, represents the distillation of a career’s worth of thought on the subject: confident, ruminative and idiosyncratic rather than thorough and impartial.

Perhaps, then, we should forgive the absence here of the taught, detailed argumentation familiar from Scruton’s earlier works on aesthetics. For much of the book Scruton seems content simply to offer a phenomenology of aesthetic experience – a register of its typical features – rather than an explanation of what makes such experience possible or an account of whether it has any firm grounding. This can feel frustrating; far more so, though, are the cop-outs and deferrals that pepper the text: the beauty of Titian’s painting and that of the Venus of Urbino herself coincide “in some mysterious way”, in artworks and sacred objects our lives’ meanings are “somehow” summarised and consecrated. The most trying of these lapses concerns the central idea of a “kingdom of ends”, a Kantian conceit which recurs time and again without ever being satisfyingly skewered.

If arguments aren’t always in evidence, then opinions certainly are, and Scruton doesn’t fight shy of the big questions in aesthetic theory. On the form/content debate Scruton sides with the expressionists, insisting that no strict separation can be maintained, but also that appeals to emotional content are no less legitimate than the figurative language used by formalists themselves.

On the question of a standard of taste, he takes a Humean stance according to which beauty is a quality of experiences rather than objects and the closest approximation to an aesthetic rule we can hope for is a set of criteria for putative judges. This subjectivism granted, Scruton nonetheless maintains that artworks convey particular meanings and that reasons can be given and minds changed in the case of judgements of taste just as much as with moral judgements. In fact possessing an intentional, cognitive dimension is, he suggests, one of the principle characteristics common to the four varieties of beauty – human, natural, “everyday” and artistic – under discussion in this work.

If a concern with everyday beauty (the nicely-laid table, the stylish outfit) sounds surprisingly democratic, the reader needn’t fear that Scruton has suddenly turned over a progressive leaf – if anything, Beauty develops an increasingly conservative twang with each passing chapter. By the end of the book the tone is elegiac, even sermonising. Scruton mourns beauty’s betrayal by both artists and theorists during the course of the twentieth century. “Art,” he remarks, with a stern eye on Duchamp’s Fontaine, “picked up the torch of beauty, ran with it for a while, and then dropped it in the pissoirs of Paris.” Arthur Danto, too, gets a black mark for arguing, according to Scruton, that beauty “is both deceptive as a goal and in some way antipathetic to the mission of modern art”.

Scruton himself plausibly diagnoses art’s restless pursuit of innovation over the last hundred years as a reaction against kitsch, but for him the cure is no better than the disease. Both are forms of desecration, denying beauty lest they be judged and found wanting in the light of it.

With beauty, as with love, we enter the realm of the sacred. Beauty’s function is to offer solace, to persuade us that we find a fitting home in the universe and that human life is worth the living. Our responsibility, in turn, is to educate our tastes with the hope of reaching consensus, something that will require sacrifice and mutual accommodation. If we fail, we risk living without either civilization or love – the holocausts and gulags of the last century warning that we may already have fallen into that state. At stake, for Scruton, is not only the future of art but that of humanity itself. To educate oneself aesthetically, it seems, has become an urgent moral duty.

Beauty is too slight a book to contain the sheer volume of argumentation that would be needed to make such weighty, apocalyptic pronouncements compelling – to fill in the gaps, we may need to return to Scruton’s much more closely argued back-catalogue. But if this latest work is too elliptical to fulfill its author’s ambitions, it is far too interesting to satisfy those looking for a pithy introduction.

Jenny Bunker is a lecturer in philosophy at Roehampton University