Sir Roger Scruton was a philosopher who published more than forty books on philosophy, aesthetics and politics, and whose work was translated around the world. His thesis was that art, architecture and music had turned their backs on beauty, making a cult of ugliness and leaving us in a kind of spiritual desert.

He insisted that beauty is a real and universal value, one anchored in our rational nature, and that the sense of beauty has an indispensable part to play in shaping the human world.

Sir Roger was the finest philosopher of beauty of his generation, a mentor to me, and for a long time one of the very few people willing to say in public that beauty is not merely a matter of taste.

His views on beauty are, more or less exactly, the same as those found in Ars Amorata — arrived at independently by me, but stated by him with a clarity, elegance and depth of understanding I could never hope to match.

“I think we are losing beauty, and with it there is the danger of losing the meaning of life.”

Roger Scruton

What we had planned

I attended his lectures and summer events over a period of four or five years — first in Ireland, later in the Cotswolds, and eventually at his home. I made excellent friends there, and came to know his family and the people who run his foundation.

Before he died, we had talked about arranging something I was deeply excited about: a weekend symposium at his home, with a small number of men who cared about beauty as much as we did, simply to sit at the feet of this great man. When I presented the idea to my audience, the response was overwhelming. He was willing. It was going to happen.

Then, in January 2020, he died, and it did not.

Carrying the torch

I am not a philosopher and I do not pretend to his standing. But the case he made for beauty still needs to be made, and there are not many people making it.

So that is what this is all about. The Ars Amorata philosophy described on this site, the conversations recorded over the years, the men who identify with the Amorati archetype and carry this devotion to beauty into their own lives — all of it is an attempt to keep saying, in whatever way is available to me, what Sir Roger understood and said better than I ever could: that beauty is real, that it matters, and that a world which stops believing in it loses something it cannot replace.

His own foundation continues his work properly, and with more authority than I ever could. It is worth your time: scruton.org.