Scruton on nothing buttery
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From The Soul of the World, in which the late Roger Scruton mounts a sophisticated philosophical attack on reductionist accounts of religion, the experience of the sacred, and the personal encounter with God. Having just described the way in which describing a sequence of pitched sounds is inadequate as an explanation of a chord or harmony in Beethoven, and just before moving on to a detailed argument against the pretensions of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology to explain thought, consciousness, and personhood, Scruton writes:
It is helpful at this point to register a protest against what Mary Midgley calls “nothing buttery.” 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; law is “nothing but” relations of social power; sexual love is “nothing but” the urge to procreation; altruism is “nothing but” the dominant genetic strategy described by Maynard Smith; the Mona Lisa is “nothing but” a spread of pigments on canvas, the Ninth Symphony is “nothing but” a sequence of pitched sounds of varying timbre. And so on. Getting rid of this habit is, to my mind, the true goal of philosophy. And if we get rid of it when dealing with the small things—symphonies, pictures, people—we might get rid of it when dealing with the large things too: notably, when dealing with the world as a whole. And then we might conclude that it is just as absurd to say that the world is nothing but the order of nature, as physics describes it, as to say that the Mona Lisa is nothing but a smear of pigments. Drawing that conclusion is the first step in the search for God.
Compare CS Lewis in The Abolition of Man. In this famous passage, he critiques reductionist attempts to debunk or explain away traditional understandings of reality as cynical attempts to “see through” things to what is “actually” happening. This mindset or hermeneutic of suspicion proves self-defeating in the end:
But you cannot go on “explaining away” forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.
Scruton’s book is an extended examination of why that’s the case. It’s worth your time, and I regret that it took his death two weeks ago for me to pull it off the shelf and, finally, read it.
