The Ring of Truth by Roger Scruton

The Ring of Truth by Roger Scruton

Author:Roger Scruton
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780241188569
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-05-01T16:00:00+00:00


5

Understanding the Story

Der Ring des Nibelungen is in a certain measure elusive, since no character is the centre of the drama, enabling us to say that the story is his or hers, and no standard account is consistent enough to displace its competitors. In this chapter I give an interpretation of what the story is about. It is only one of many possible interpretations. But it will serve as a framework within which to place the philosophical and moral themes that I go on to address.

The story is of course about Wotan, Alberich, Siegfried, Brünnhilde and the other leading characters. But it is also about the human world, the Lebenswelt, the world as we humans experience and construct it. We do not understand the Lebenswelt merely by giving a scientific explanation of our experience – an explanation in terms of cause and effect – relevant though that explanation might be.1 We understand it through our own experience, and by exploring the concepts and categories that arise from experience and which order experience in an intelligible way. These concepts and categories may have no place in science – not even in the science of what we are.

Take the concept of the person – the free and accountable being who acts for reasons and who faces other persons eye to eye and I to I. This is the concept that occupied German philosophy in the generations after Kant, and which is expounded in all the most influential arguments of the German idealists, touched on in Chapter 2 of this book. What place for that concept in human biology, which treats of organisms and brains, finds nothing in the physical world that could conceivably correspond to freedom, and regards the I as no different from the here and the now: the vanishing point in a space-time continuum that makes no objective place for it? Yet for us self-conscious beings the concept of the person is indispensable; we cannot relate to our world without it, and the distinctions between person and thing, subject and object, action and movement, reason and cause, understanding and explaining, are distinctions that we must make if we are to live with each other in a world of shared meanings.

In their efforts to understand the Lebenswelt our ancestors elaborated myths and tales expressive of the deep intuitions that informed their daily conduct. They told stories of gods and heroes, of sublime actions, and of the forces that opposed them. They distinguished, in their experience, between good and evil, free and unfree, duty and right, sacred and profane, permitted and forbidden. In a thousand ways they painted the world in the colours of their own emotions, not in order to hide the truth, but in order to make the truth – the truth about themselves – perceivable.

In the Ring cycle Wagner is doing something similar. But he is not merely telling another story; he is telling the story of our stories. He is expressing the deep truths that inform the myths



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