Thursday, February 10, 2022

Roger Scruton (1944-2020)

周四,有點冷,剛看完 Roger Scruton (Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left,2015)
那章,修理巴黎無厘頭 (Nonsense in Paris) 三寶,阿圖塞,拉岡桑,德勒茲,其實後兩者,有點無辜,因為基本上,與共匪無關,而明顯 Scruton 對共匪,乃至親共舔共者,跟我一樣,厭惡之入骨,

Scruton 也寫了一本史賓諾沙簡論 (1986),我倒想看看,他的老史,跟德勒茲的,有什麼不同,

Roger Scruton (1944-2020)

In the 1980s he helped to establish underground academic networks in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, for which he was awarded the Czech Republic's Medal of Merit (First Class) by President Václav Havel in 1998.

It was while visiting her during the May 1968 student protests in France that Scruton first embraced conservatism. He was in the Latin Quarter in Paris, watching students overturn cars, smash windows and tear up cobblestones, and for the first time in his life "felt a surge of political anger":

I suddenly realised I was on the other side. What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans. When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist 

I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defence of western civilization against these things. That's when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down.

His experience of dissident intellectual life in 1980s Communist Prague is recorded in fictional form in his novel Notes from Underground (2014).

He wrote in 2019 that "despite the appeal of the Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and many more, it is the shy, cynical Czechs to whom I lost my heart and from whom I have never retrieved it".