In the seventh-century Malmesbury Abbey, the Speaker of the Eighth Sejm Marek Kuchciński bid farewell to the British philosopher and his long-time friend Roger Scruton.
It has been said that if philosophy were to disappear during the lifetime of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Roger Scruton could single-handedly restore it. In the same Thomasian spirit, I will offer a similar proposition: if philosophy were to suddenly disappear now as we sit here, Roger Scruton could also restore it to us. And if cars were to disappear, we wouldn't have to worry about how to get home, because he would restore the art of riding," Jonathan Price said in a laudation in Scruton's honour at the conferment of a knighthood on the philosopher by Queen Elizabeth II. - It is rare to have a huge part of the world reflected in one's head in such a way that one can give back to the world as much as one has taken from it," he argued. Poland is a country to which Scruton gave a great deal; he mapped out the paths to freedom and offered support and resources to help the nation liberate itself from the Soviet yoke. Scruton himself argued that his first real experience of intellectual freedom was actually here in Poland, where he came to speak at conferences and private seminars organized by a small group of people in Britain who, like him, wanted to connect with other dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. At the Central and Eastern Europe Summit organized by the Polish Parliament, he emphasized that in Poland, widespread contempt for the communist system meant that students and professors alike were willing to discuss it broadly. - For them, conservatism was not a sin or heresy, but a possible worldview, all the more interesting because it was condemned by the Communists and despised by the Western left. Traveling around Central and Eastern Europe in those days, carrying the message of alternative philosophy, was one of the most liberating experiences of my life, regardless of the dangers and deprivations. I began to believe that I could be right in theory and not just in practice," he argued.
Marek Kuchciński, Scruton's friend, referred to those times. In a condolence letter addressed to Roger's wife Sophie Scruton, the Speaker of the Sejm recalls Scruton's words from the introduction to the reprint of "The Cultural Attic":
By the 1980s, the Solidarity period was already a memory, and martial law had reduced Poland to a kind of somnambulistic silence. I traveled in search of small groups of people who wanted to discuss, learn, ask questions, and reclaim at least some of the intellectual life that once flourished in Poland. (...) I came across Przemysl and the underground magazine "Cultural Attic", edited by Marek Kuchcinski, a former student of art history, who lived outside the (communist) system and was an ardent believer in culture as a liberation of the spirit and opposition to the totalitarian order. The following people gathered around him
writers, painters, teachers," Scruton recalled.
I also bid him farewell on their behalf - anticommunist oppositionists and people of culture as well as residents of my hometown," Marek Kuchciński wrote.
Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. He left the world over forty books, hundreds of articles, both popular and scholarly, two operas, and countless lectures on architecture, wine, the proper way to dance, and the need not to talk too much (so as not to put into words what cannot be put into words).
The philosopher's farewell in London was attended by, among others. Arkady Rzegocki, Polish Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Wiktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary, Marek Kuchciński, Marek Matraszek, Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky, Hungarian Ambassador to the United Kingdom, the Marquis of Salisbury, Lord Chartres, former Bishop of London, Lord Sumption, former High Court Judge, Lord Patten, Jonathan Gaisman, Her Majesty's Counsel, James Gray MP, Lord Maurice Glassman MP and Michael Gove, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. A remembrance of Sir Roger Scruton during the farewell was delivered by Professor Robert Grant.
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