Philosopher finds room for the sacred

“The Soul of the World” by Roger Scruton (Princeton University Press, 211 pages, $27.95)

“Within the envelope of nature, there are only causes. But for the eye of faith the envelope has a telos, a reason for its being as it is.”

– From “The Soul of the World”

How do we comprehend the vast, nearly infinite universe we inhabit? If we hew strictly to the cause-and-effect principles of natural science, do we find room for faith and a sense of the sacred? Or if we profess allegiance to a transcendental telos (or purpose), is there a place for a more secular, “scientific” outlook that claims that this world is all there is?

To the prolific philosopher Roger Scruton, the answer to both questions is yes. We all face one reality, he argues, but we approach it through two, incommensurable orders of meaning – the order of nature and the order of creation, the order of Darwinian adaptations and the order of interpersonal relations.

It is this second order that introduces the notion of the sacred, the soul of the world, as Scruton puts it – an order of self-conscious individuals whose desires and questions reach beyond the limits of the natural world and the sciences that explore it, “and in so doing, uncover our religious need.”

Thus, the two ways of approaching reality cannot overlap – “the way of explanations, which searches for natural kinds, causal connections, and universal covering laws, and the way of understanding, which is a ‘calling to account,’ a demand for reasons and meaning.”

This strict reliance on what Scruton terms “cognitive dualism” leads to several enigmas, chief among them our identity as “one and the same being (that) can be an organism and also a free subject who is called to account in the space of reasons.”

Another: “We see the world as contingent and furnished with a reason, even if it is a reason that we cannot discover.”

Yet another: “The teleological foundation of the world is not perceivable to science, or describable in scientific terms.”

Not unexpectedly, Scruton privileges the teleological order of inquiry. He remains particularly at pains to insist that self-conscious personhood – our first-person awareness of our own accountability and free will – cannot be explained by the mechanics of evolutionary psychology. The “I” is something more than a genetic adaptation; it contains riches unrelated to natural selection.

Indeed, personhood ranks as the central concept in Scruton’s metaphysics. “The ‘I’ is transcendental,” he writes, “which does not mean that it exists elsewhere, but that it exists in another way, as music exists in another way from sound, and God in another way from the world.”

While sympathetically espousing a type of modified naturalism, Scruton wants to stress the priority of the Lebenswelt, the lived world of experience in which the fundamental question “why?” – posed to the entire universe – points to I-You relationships and a realm of values not limited by the natural.

“The Lebenswelt is irreducible,” he writes. “We understand and relate to it using concepts of agency and accountability that have no place in the physical sciences … concepts … (that) extend their reach beyond the horizon of nature, so as to pose the question that science cannot formulate – the question ‘why’ asked of the world as a whole.”

All of this is truly remarkable coming from a thinker steeped in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. Scruton draws heavily on Continental philosophers – Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, who coined the term Lebenswelt, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the chief existentialist whose tome “Being and Nothingness” Scruton calls “a great work of post-Christian theology.” (Although it should be noted that he also turns to Ludwig Wittgenstein at crucial moments in his argument.)

Unfortunately, Scruton ranges far afield in making many of his points. He spends a large chunk of his book analyzing contracts vs. covenants and an entire chapter detailing the sacred space of music. Likewise, his tendency to repeat himself could have been helped by a good editor.

Still, his case for the foundational nature of the Lebenswelt sounds air-tight: “The I exists on the edge of things, neither part of the physical world nor removed from it.”

And his phenomenology of the sacred convincingly speaks of “the revelation, in the midst of everyday things, of another order, in which creation and destruction are the ruling principles … for no merely human reason.”

Scruton’s strongest ideas prove intriguing and thought-provoking in this relatively short book. Of course, there are ways to critique his overall argument, but they seem more like nit-picking than an erudite rebuttal of his premises.

In the end, he has done both philosophy and religion a great service, “remind(ing) us that there is another world beyond our daily negotiations,” a world “at the deepest level of who and what we are,” and that we can be enlivened and refreshed by communing with the soul of this world, even if we see it ultimately only as a metaphor.

This story was originally published September 6, 2014 at 7:48 AM with the headline "Philosopher finds room for the sacred."