Why Beauty Matters with Roger Scruton

In an excellent article in the American Spectator, British philosopher and author Sir Roger Scruton discusses his superb new documentary, Why Beauty Matters, that has recently been shown on the BBC. Scruton incisively examines the importance of beauty in the arts and our lives, including fine arts, music, and architecture. In the process, he illuminates the poverty, dehumanization and fraud of modernist and post-modernist cynicism, reductionism and nihilism. Scruton discusses how the human aspiration and longing for truth, goodness and beauty are universal and fundamentally important and that the value of anything is not utilitarian and without meaning (e.g., Oscar Wilde’s claim that “All art is absolutely useless.”). Human beings are not purposeless material objects for mechanistic manipulation by others, and civil society itself depends upon a cultural consensus that beauty is real and every person should be respected with compassion as having dignity and nobility with very real spiritual needs to encounter and be transformed and uplifted by beauty.

Here is the video:

Please also see the following books:

Beauty, by Roger Scruton

Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged, by Roger Scruton

Modern Culture, by Roger Scruton

The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis

The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, by C.S. Lewis

The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, by C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness and Beauty, edited by David J. Baggett, Gary R. Habermas and Jerry L. Walls

HT: José Yulo