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Michael Oakeshott - A Fish too big or too slipper?
by Leslie Armour
REVIEW ARTICLE
Recent Books on Oakeshott 2
Wendell John Coats Jr.: Oakeshott and his Contemporaries: Montaigne, St. Augustine, Hegel et al., Selinsgrove, PA : Susquehanna University Press, 2000, 144 pp., $31.50. ISBN 1575910381.
Anthony Farr: Sartre's Radicalism and Oakeshott's Conservatism: The Distress of Freedom. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998,275 pp., £75, $65, ISBN 0-333-68449-4.
Paul Franco: The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990, £25, $50. ISBN 0-300-04686-3.
Paul Franco: Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004, xi + 209 pp., £20. ISBN 0-300-104-9,.
Steven Anthony Gerencser: The Skeptic's Oakeshott, Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 2000, viii + 214 pp. £29.63. ISBN 0-33391386-8, Leslie Marsh, ed.: Michael Oakeshott, Philosopher: A Commemora tion of the Centenary of Oakeshott's Birth, London: Michael Oakeshott Association, 2001, 84 pp. no price. ISBN 0-9541200-0.
This essay began as a review of two books, but it soon became clear that they could hardly be understood without reference to a flock of recent books about Oakeshott. In finding my way through these complex and interesting - but troubling - vistas I was helped by a correspondence with James Connelly who, however, is not to be blamed for the result. There are at least two more works that will appear soon from Imprint Academic: Exeter: Suvi Soininen, From a 'Necessary Evil' to an Art of Contingency: Michael Oakeshott's Conception of Political Activity; and Glenn Worthington, Religious and Poetic Experience in the Thought of Michael Oakeshott. There is at least one unpublished doctoral thesis: Matthew James Britnell: The Historical and the Political in the Writings of Michael Oakeshott, Warwick: University of Warwick,2000.
Kenneth B. McIntyre: The Limits of Political Theory: Oakeshott's Philosophy of Civil Association, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004, 210 pp. £25, $49.90. ISBN 1-84540-010-0.
Terry Nardin: The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001, 264 pp. £26.95. ISBN 0-271-02156-x.
Luke O'Sullivan: Oakeshott on History, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003, xii + 296 pp. £25, $40 ISBN 0-907845-290,.
Efraim Podoksik: In Defence of Modernity, Vision and Philosophy in Michael Oakeshott, Exeter: Imprint Academic 2003, 259 pp. £25, $49.90. ISBN 0-907845-665.
Roy Tseng: The Skeptical Idealist: Michael Oakeshott as a Critic of the Enlightenment, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003, pp. x + 302, £25, $40. ISBN 0-907845-223.
In 2001 Michael Oakeshott's admirers gathered for the centenary of his birth to celebrate him as a philosopher. It fell to Anthony Quinton to sum up his 'philosophical legacy'. He said 'Oakeshott has practically no direct philosophical legacy'. He explained that
Experience and Its Modes [Oakeshott' s magnum opus] is an uncompromising work of absolute idealism in the tradition of Hegel and Bradley, and, as such, excites little interest considered as pure philosophy in the current intellectual climate. But it has considerable indirect influence by way of its bearing on his political thought. 3
But James Alexander, a lecturer on political theory at Bilkent University in Ankara, suggests that Oakeshott might be 'the greatest English philosopher of the Twentieth Century'. He acknowledges that many people doubt it, but he says this is because Oakeshott offers 'release from the deadliness of doing' and that most philosophers are 'secular Pelagians, whereas Oakeshott was a secular Augustinian'.4 If Augustine is taken as a source for the notion that our commitment to the state should always be limited by our commitment to our own integrity and by whatever higher values there may be, Oakeshott was a secular Augustinian. Wendell Coats links Oakeshott's notion of 'watery fidelity' which ties us to each other and state but leaves our individual freedom intact and open to higher things with Augustine, and says that this might be the right relation between inhabitants of Augustine's two cities.
Undoubtedly, Oakeshott did think it's not easy for us to save ourselves, and thought that we are better off being nudged along by our traditions than by trying to overturn them. What nudges us is not much like the Augustinian Holy Spirit. We should, Oakeshott thought, delight in our modes of thought and welcome them for what they are rather than trying always to find a use for them, but it is not because he objected to Pelagian striving that saving souls was not his first thought.
Lord Quinton is right to the extent that it has been political theorists who have shown most interest in Oakeshott, though his philosophy has begun to attract attention. And his philosophy though interesting is by no means easy to be clear about. Kenneth McIntyre says that though Oakeshott is 'one of the most profound philosophers of political activity in the 20th Century' he has been neglected and this comes from two 'misunderstandings' - thinkers cast 'his thought primarily in terms of the familiar schools of 20th Century philosophy' and claim 'to identify radical breaks or major transformations in the development of [his] ideas.
It is perhaps this enticing combination - an interesting political theory that depends on a difficult philosophy which is hard to see as a unity - that lies behind the surge of works about Oakeshott.; but he is quite often claimed as a theorist of the right at a time when such theorists are in short supply. Perhaps more importantly, Oakeshott is, especially if one takes his aesthetic theory seriously and tries to apply his political theory, a philosopher who might make a difference to people's lives despite his alleged anti-Pelagianism and his conviction that philosophy itself changes nothing. For it seems to have been his final view that philosophy can clear the ground for the creative imagination and direct us back to our accumulated tradition.
Of the eleven books at the head of this article, ten have been published since 2000. There are twenty-one books in the British Library that are essentially about Oakeshott, though many others mention him, but he may elude capture.
Maurice Cranston's summary of the seeming paradoxes - made forty years ago - still stands:
[Oakeshott] is a traditionalist with few traditional beliefs, an 'idealist' who is more skeptical than many positivists, a lover of liberty who repudiates liberalism, an individualist who prefers Hegel to Locke, a philosopher who disapproves of philosophisme, a romantic perhaps (if Hume could possibly be called one), and a marvellous stylist.
Others have tried to give us an orderly view of him. Roy Tseng, a Taiwanese graduate of the London School of Economics, the scene of Oakeshott's mature work, sees Oakeshott as a critic of the enlightenment, a post modernist - and an idealist. 8 One can find all these elements somewhere in Oakeshott's writings. But Oakeshott may not fit any categories that come readily to hand.
His early work shows a deep strain of Bradleyan pessimism with occasional flashes of the hopefulness of T. H. Green. But Efraim Podoksik thinks the influence of Bradley wore off. He sees Kant in the background as Oakeshott became more preoccupied with the independence of the modes.
Many readers see in Oakeshott's later work the pessimistic ideas one might expect of a philosopher with a kinship with Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes figures strongly in Oakeshott's later writings and Steven Gerencser says that though 'Hegel and Hobbes are the stars of Oakeshott's political universe ... it is Hobbes' star that is rising as Hegel's is setting'. He associates with the 'waxing' of Hobbes the waning of 'absolute idealism,.10 Gerencser notes as well that the strand of skepticism that runs through much of Oakeshott's writing - making him suspicious of grand theories in politics and disinclined to see knowledge as unity - always ran counter to the idealist strand in his early writings. There is something in this, but the question is really about the nature of Oakeshott's idealism, and the suggestion of Anthony Farr and others that Oakeshott never really gave up his own kind of idealism seems well founded.
Hobbes does pose a problem, but Roy Tseng associates Hobbes with Oakeshott not in terms of Hobbes' view of human nature but in view of his legalistic account of civil relationsY This is a way of reading Hobbes so as to allow a kind of communitarianism. Tseng says that for Oakeshott Hobbes' materialism is irrelevant, and this allows Oakeshott to admire Hobbes and remain - in some way - an idealist. Tseng has to agree that Oakeshott accepts that Hobbes' philosophy is individualist. 12 Oakeshott can accommodate individualism, though I think one must dig a little deeper into his metaphysics than most of the authors of recent books have done to see just how this can be so.
Perhaps Oakeshott is a fish too big to catch in our nets, though his detractors might say that he is a fish too slippery. At the centre of all the attempts to understand this welter of ideas, three central problems define the task of interpretation. One is about Oakeshott's idealism and its meaning. Does it continue through all his work even if it changes somewhat, or does it fade after Experience and Its Modes,J3 the book that along with On Human Conduct,14 and The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind 15is at the centre of Oakeshott's work? What role does it play in his philosophy and political theory? A second question is about the relation of the ideas of community and freedom and their associations with knowledge and tradition. It is here that his relation to Hobbes is important and it is here that we face the questions about how Oakeshott has lately been used or misused by the political right. The third problem is with the modes of thought.
The recent books dwell on Oakeshott's politics and the relation of claims to knowledge and the practical life and its puzzles about morality. History receives attention but Oakeshott's underlying metaphysics is left somewhat hazy and, though many authors recognise the importance of his aesthetics, there is evidently much more to be said. Oakeshott's very narrow and rigid accounts of the natural and physical sciences - accounts designed evidently to leave room for humanistic reflection and political tradition - seem to me to be still in need of critical review.
'Idealism' receives much attention at least as a feature of political theory, and it is best to begin with it because it provides the clue to understanding the controversies about his politics, his view of history, and his account of knowledge. The thesis of Experience and Its Modes is that we shape our experience into structures of ideas, scientific, historical, and practical. Oakeshott included the arts as well as religion among the sub modes of practical experience. Later he apologised and insisted that poetry was a separate mode. This gave his philosophy an important new direction.
The modes all draw on ideas to organise the same presented data. We could look at human beings as collections of atoms, biological organisms or conscious agents engaged in an unfolding story; but we can also shape our awareness to promote whatever practical activity motivates us at any given time. Oakeshott refused to take one of these modes as primary or to say that people are 'really" bundles of chemicals. Nor would he organise our historical knowledge to promote our current ends and policies. He resisted claims such as those made by R. G. Collingwood in Speculum Mentis 1 6 that the different forms of knowledge could be arranged in a hierarchy with philosophy at the top (Collingwood was by the 1930s skeptical about this, too). Oakeshott did not simply believe that the modes were to be taken as wholly distinct ways of experiencing. Reflection on the modes and the ways in which they developed - a process which constituted the centre of philosophical activity - should reveal a view of the human condition.
The notion that 'the Absolute' was the totality of experience, the foundation on which the analytical powers worked was, when Oakeshott wrote, the standard reading of F. H. Bradley's metaphysics; but he warned readers about the 'myths' associated with the idea of the Absolute, and in later years he became chary of the notion of 'absolute experience'. Oakeshott continued to believe that philosophy must resist attempts to take the fragments of reality grasped by the intellect as ultimate reality, though philosophy lost its place as a master discipline. Religion remained as perhaps the most significant of 'practical activities'.
The picture opened by Experience and Its Modes revealed the human inquirer as standing at an intersection of the modes and thus as free of all of them, and this view remained. Oakeshott's notions of individuality and freedom seem always to develop from it. Science may propose a deterministic picture of the univer~e or one composed of invariant laws and occasions of indeterministic chance, but science is only one of our modes of thought. Similarly political theory may reveal complex systems within which individuals appear as partially differentiated elements in encompassing systems, but political and social theory are themselves to be located within specific modes of thought.
Anthony Farr says: 'I take Oakeshott's understanding of the intellect to be that it is "artificial". He follows Hegel and Bradley in holding that we discover the nature of life only as our endeavour gives it reality'. Farr adds: 'Man's experience is comprehended within an intellect constructed by man, but his being is always further into the darkness than his knowing' Y Oakeshott always believed that what we take to be the objects of knowledge are shaped in some activity of the mind.
The various modes of thought are not subjective. Oakeshott saw them as objective orders structured by ideas. 18 They are public and form a background to our shared civil activity. Thus his metaphysics and epistemology prevented him from being neatly pigeon-holed as either an individualist or a communitarian. The community is not made up of social atoms, but community provides an environment for individuals to develop.
His idealism thus consisted of the notion that the intellect structures the objects of knowledge combined with the notion that, though there are objective orders within the modes of thought, they are orders of ideas. There are evident elements of the idealist 'self-realisat16n' ethics in all this, for the point of philosophical reflection is indeed to show us that we transcend the
17Sartre's Radicalism and Oakeshott's Conservatism, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, p. 237. 18There are Platonist implications in Ihis, but it is not clear how fully Oakeshott embraced them.
modes of thought and to show us how it is that we can be free beings. There is nothing of Hegel's notion that we find our ends in the state or society. Oakeshott could never see a state or the social order as more real and important than the individuals in it.
Politics is a practical activity. In On Human Conduct Oakeshott's thought centres on the notion of 'civility' and the related notion of civil association. Civil association is an idea oflaw. In an essay in The Achievement of Michael Oakeshott, Josiah Lee Auspitz says: 'All the rule of law requires is a body of formal equals who understand the law as authoritative, recognize an obligation to comply with it', and subscribe to procedures for enacting, amending and interpreting it.
The state as we normally understand it consists of institutions - legal, political, educational, economic. These are what Oakeshott would call 'enterprise associations'. Oakeshott's example is a fire station. 2o We can see a university, a business, or a hospital along the same lines; but there are also associations based, he says, on what it is to be a human being and these involve rules identifying the 'civitas' itself? I These must have the characteristics of law, which include public knowledge and objectivity.
He says that he does not mean that there are no known civil obligations until a court has decided them;22 for the court is one among many institutions. There is a 'respublica' ,23 a public understanding which is the foundation of the institutions.
However, this it is not the end oflife. An 'empire, realm or state ... has no purpose of its own to defend'.2 4 The purposes are those of various other associations and individuals. The state can accommodate many commu nities so long as the principle of mutual recognition holds. Yet the state must somehow hold the institutions together and arbitrate between them. How is this to be done? One Oakeshottian answer is that we appeal to tradition.
The concept of tradition does not playa role in On Human Conduct, but it does in Rationalism in Politics.2 5Traditions provide the continuities which we rupture at our peril. However, they only intimate rather than determine conduct. Oakeshott speaks of 'the pursuit of intimations'.2 6 Traditions are sources of political action but also of political disputes which people find relevant.
Paul Franco calls our attention to the fact that R. H. S. Crossman argued that Oakeshott could not distinguish good from bad traditions. 27 But the point is that Oakeshott means by a tradition whatever can sustain a genuine civil relation. There may be many such traditions in a multicultural society.28
The debate about whether or not Oakeshott was a 'conservative' hangs on ambiguities about what it is to be a conservative. Paul Franco in a second book notes that some of the American 'neoconservatives' have tried to appropriate Oakeshott. 29The New Republic in 1999 associated Oakeshott with Leo Strauss and said he would have supported the Iraq War, an event in the advocacy of which a number of Strauss's American disciples played an important part. 30 But the association is very tenuous. Against that, in The New Yark Times David Brooks had Oakeshott in an imaginary debate on the war, and he conceded that Oakeshott would have had trouble justifying the imposition of democracy [American style?] or anything else on the Iraqis. Oakeshott was generally a non-interventionist, and his political writings pointedly centre on 'modern European states,.3l It is true that Margaret Thatcher offered to make Oakeshott a Companion of Honour, but he refused.
'Conservative' is a slippery term. In England it has gradually taken on some of the colouring of an American usage in which it means much what 'economic liberal' used to mean, though it has not taken on the American association with religious fundamentalism; but it also continues to be used for Tory traditionalism which always had strong elements of paternalism in it and, indeed, was associated with a variety of kinds of opposition to untrammelled capitalism.
Oakeshott like David Hume believed that there is never enough evidence to overturn our natural beliefs and he was a High Tory in the sense that many people believe that Hume was?3 He also had a strong sense of community and of social responsibility, and there is no sign in his writings of an admiration for a devil-take-the-hindmost society. He liked to say that he voted for the party that would do the least harm. He lacked a passionate belief in our ability to organise society for the better; but, though he warned of the dangerous possibilities opened by the state he refused to see Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps as tyrants. 34 There are echoes of the pre-1930s 'conservatism' of R. G. Collingwood and of Oakeshott's first philosophy tutor, 1. M. E. McTaggart. McTaggart much admired Cambridge and its traditions and warned of pushing them out of shape but he also campaigned for the education of women and as an undergraduate wrote an essay defending the rights of homosexuals. In Canada, Oakeshott would have been called a 'Red Tory' (a once very pervasive but now disappearing breed).
All this raises 'the Hobbes problem'. But it is evidently not the Hobbes who spoke of human beings as engaged in the state of nature in a 'war of all against all', or the materialist Hobbes, who played a major role in Oakeshott's own philosophy. Nor was it the notion that we should surrender all our natural rights to a sovereign that Oakeshott found useful.
One should note that in his celebrated introduction to Hobbes' Leviathan Oakeshott insisted that Hobbes brought home to us man's 'littleness, his imperfection, his mortality'. This leaves us with the problem of the modes, and the search for Oakeshott's ultimate notions of the self, freedom, and knowledge. Oakeshott, like Collingwood faced a difficulty at the heart of modem life. Science, history, religion, and metaphysics all offer us pictures of ourselves and of the world, and they compete - or often seem to - with the ordinary common sense worlds in which we live our lives and face our moral problems. In a distant past the main competitors were religion and philosophy but the depth of modern expertise has multiplied them. One option is to make one primary and to try to how how the others might be ''reduced' to it or eliminated as superstition or misunderstanding. Another option is to show how, somehow, they might all be assembled into one. A third is to regard them as simply separate, incapable somehow of further compression or reorganisation.
Oakeshott first understood the forms of knowledge as modes of experience, a notion which he clearly derived initially from Spinoza 36 though there was some conflation between the notion of mode and the Spinozistic notion of attribute, for Oakeshott's modes of experience are ways in which the whole of experience is focussed and understood. Later the modes seem to be more nearly ways of talking about the world, for Oakeshott speaks of their relation to one another as a conversation.
Science and history offered two ways in which experience could be organised by sets of ideas and given a determinate structure which, as such, provided a framework for objective knowledge. The organising ideas perhaps belonged to the Platonic tradition, though the notion that the structure of experience provided the basis for objectivity had evident Kantian overtones. 38 Practical experience remained distinct from both science and history. History, proper, was not a study that people undertook for the sake of solving their l'Olitical and social problems, and the purpose of science was objective knowledge, not technology.
Oakeshott's view of history is perhaps best summed up in an essay entitled 'The Activity of Being an Historian'.39 He said: 'The "past", then, is a certain way of reading the present'.40 'What we call past events are the product of understanding (or having understood) present occurrences as evidence for happenings that have already taken place'.41 There is an historical attitude and the historian is detached, but his concern 'is not with causes but with occasions,.42 The particularity of history is always evident. Oakeshott insisted that historical writings are individual and unique and do not sum to a general history.
All of this seems very much to be history for its own sake and, indeed, Oakeshott always resisted the notion that the goal of history, science or literature is to be found outside the activities themselves. Yet, despite some of his readers, he did not mean that practical activity should not make use of the findings of history and science. In Experience and its Modes he said: 'It [history] has nothing to do with the practical in itself but this does not mean that in matters of practice appeal to the past is always irrelevant' .43 And in Rationalism in Politics, he said that history may be practical, scientific or 'contemplative,.44 Wendell Coats rightly argues that Oakeshott explicitly rejected the notion 'that there is any action devoid of social consequences' though he rejected any 'Kantian-like absolute value in conscientiousness' .
In fact Oakeshott and Guy Griffin wrote a book about how to pick a Derby winner. It is not to be taken wholly seriously, perhaps, but it does contain a warning that those who rely on 'systems' rather than the facts about track records and breeding will learn that lunch in the workhouse is bad.
In insisting that history is independent, Oakeshott was making a social point about education and research. Still, the separation remained problematic. In Experience and Its Modes, the central notion is always experience. History was not Collingwood's recapturing of the past in rethinking (albeit a constructive and creative rethinking that still took place in the present) but a way of focussing present experience. Historians read books, look at artifacts, and talk to survivors.
Science Oakeshott saw as an activity that draws in a precise and orderly way on the experiences of physicists and chemists; but for him there was only one science. In Experience and its Modes,46 he says 'the diversity of science appears to me merely a misconception due to historical circum stances'. This follows from his premise: 'Scientific experience is a single, specific mode of experience, distinguished by a single method and a single subject matter; and the world of scientific ideas is a single, homogeneous (but fortuitously divided) whole' .47 He adds: 'Scientific experience is defective experience, it is a mode of experience which falls short of the totality of experience, and scientific experience is abstract, conditional, incomplete, self-contained but not self-sufficient ... .' History is not science because it does not deal in abstract generalisation.
The social sciences get a mixed reception. The scientific claims of anthropology are demolished on Oakeshott's premises. 48 He says that anthropology can be an historical study but it cannot be a science because the world of its ideas cannot be abstract and quantitative. Its 'general isations will be rendered negligible' by the 'scantiness of data.' He really meant that anthropology's subject matter is human behaviour, the wrong kind of thing for science to grip.
Economics fares better, though 'Economics as we find it in the books of many of its most distinguished professors, comprises a meaningless miscellany of scientific, historical, and practical ideas and arguments,.49 But over the next thirteen pages econometrics (as it is now called) are equated with scientific economics. It has nothing to do with the being of humans, with history or with the attainment of the social good but only with abstract characteristics. These are given by 'quantitative terms, cost, price, utility, and disutility,.5o This tells us something about Oakeshott's notion that science must be quantitative and bstract but not much about the richness of economic thought, but it was not Oakeshott's last word. In On Human Conduct a way of associating economics with history and the state seems to appear. 51 Oakeshott discusses the free market thesis that people would be better off if free to buy and sell as they pleased and notes that the free market required the state to defend it. But this is a piece of useful meta economic theorising that belongs, one supposes, to practical life.
Finally, psychology is allowed to be a science in On Human Conduct, but not ociology. The complaint about sociology is largely that it is, like anthropology, tied to a seeming history that is not really history. 52 The psychology he liked is a mathematicised science of measured behaviour. Practical life organises the experiences of businessmen and firemen around defined goals whose reality is in their experience. But, like F.H. Bradley, Oakeshott believed in 1933 the foundation for all the 'modes' was an underlying unity. This unity was experience itself.
A great deal had changed thirty-six years later. In Experience and Its Modes philosophy had a central place but art was relegated to the status of one among many practical activities. Oakeshott said in an introductory note to a reprinting of the slim volume Poetry - built from a lecture - that this little book was 'a belated retraction of a foolish sentence in Experience and Its Modes'. He did not specify the sentence but it was surely 'in art, music, and poetry we are wholly taken up, in the end, with practical ife'
But it might well have been the sentence 'philosophical experience supersedes all modifications of experience, not historically, but logically,;54 for at the end of Poetry he relates the poetic imagination to contemplation. In Experience and its Modes Philosophy is devoted to reflection on the distinctness and relatedness of the modes. It does not assemble their 'information', rather it considers hat kind of thing it is that is capable of being expressed as a mode by which a free agent organises the world. In Poetry, the poetic imagination becomes the creative force.
Thus, the basis of Oakeshott's notion of freedom is in the poetic image which is the basis of , self- making'. 55 Oakeshott's most serious account ofthe self and of human freedom is in Poetry. He explains: 'The self appears as an activity. It is not a "thing" or "substance", and this activity is 'primordial; there is nothing antecedent to it'.
The central thesis of Poetry is that we make ourselves through images. He says:
'By poetry I mean the activity of making images of a certain kind and moving about among them in a manner appropriate to their character. Painting, sculpting, acting, dancing, singing, literary and musical composition are different kinds of poetic activity'. Not everyone who engages in such activities makes poetry. The poetic 'involves' delight. 57 The images are not some superior reality, but they are a source of freedom and self-making. Oakeshott denies that the images are Platonic. They are not like the ideas that constitute history and science. Indeed, poetry is 'a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat'.
Oakeshott's recent commentators have not been too sure what to make of this. Paul Franco says Oakeshott's 'art for art's sake' would 'have made even Oscar Wilde blanch'. But the point is that poetry (in the broad sense of 'art') is the source of our freedom. Think of the child at home in Wigan imagining himself in Polynesia or alone in the stormy seas off Tristan da Cunha _ creating a self liberated from all normal surroundings and nriched by images. But this delight is not pointless; it is the way, or part of the way, that one becomes a free being. This is something one does for its own sake, not in order to become a good worker in the modern state or a saint or an innovative writer of advertising copy. 'Art for art's sake' does not quite capture that. Franco's references are extensive, but they do not overlap with his discussion of freedom.
Terry Nardin has many references to Poetr/! - but only one 62 overlaps with Nardin's freedom references. This concerns self-enactment. 63 Nardin notes that Oakeshott's view of philosophy is changed by this view of poetry. But the point may be that in associating poetry with freedom and contemplation, philosophy and poetry become linked: Philosophy is still the business of seeing the underlying reality of things, but it takes creative imagination.
Efraim Podoksik is also skeptical of Oakeshott's aesthetic views. Podoksik says that Oakeshott was 'very ambiguous' about the character of aesthetic experience. 64 Oakeshott's views lay 'within the art for art's sake tradition' but Podoksik thinks beyond that we face problems of interpreta tion. He thinks Oakeshott separated art and thought and this undermined the kind of idealism he once held. 6s But he may miss the new association of art and philosophy through contemplation.
So far we have not confronted what might be the most important change. Experience and its Modes is couched in terms of forms of experience conceived as systems of ideas. The complexities of this notion - the idea of idea and its relation to experience in the formation of 'modes' - have not been deeply explored. But Poetry is couched in terms of discourse, and Oakeshott suggests that while we often regard all human intercourse with knowledge as framing an enquiry, we should regard our attempts to know as conversations. Enquiry admits only the voice of 'argumentative discourse'.66 'As civilised human beings we are the inheritors [not]. .. of a body information but of a conversation. It is a conversation which goes on in public and within each of ourselves'.67 Oakeshott thinks our conversation has fallen into a bog and that it would require 'a philosophy more profound than anything I have to offer' to rescue it. 68 Indeed, the conversation we now have is 'dominated by the voice of practice and science', but we can understand how poetry can be heard.
The poetic image is special. In other discourse what is said and how it is said are separable. Poetic images have a conversational relation. 'They neither confirm nor refute one another, they merely evoke one another'. This may seem to give poetry a use, yet Oakeshott says 'Poetry has nothing teach us about how to live or what we ought to approve, Poetry merely frees us and then we must decide for ourselves what to do.
Not everyone has been impressed. Grant said that Oakeshott on poetry is 'less convincing' than in his analysis of history. Writing in 1990, he also noted that there was still no serious analysis of Oakeshott's aesthetics. 7 ! It remains true that it is difficult to find much light on the relation between Oakeshott's aesthetics and his politics.
There is no doubt that powerful images do, or can, enable us to go beyond the immediate and see the world from many different perspectives. No doubt, too, the way in which we break free will shape the selves that we become.
There is no perfect consensus on any of the major issues in the most recent books, and the conversation among Oakeshott's readers will go on for a long time. However, as Oakeshott himself might have said, there are intimations. One must be careful not to create a mythical Oakeshott who believed in history for history's sake, art for art's sake and science for science's sake. But Oakeshott did believe that each of these 'modes' had to be pursued as something valuable in itself and pursued objectively without any attempt to influence other enquiries before their bearing on human conduct itself could be determined. There was no 'libertarian, neo conservative' Oakeshott. He did believe that human beings should not be rebuilt to suit any ideology, that our commitments to society and especially to the state, though real, are limited. Oakeshott believed too that selves are made by the things that delight us and that poetry is a necessary ingredient in our freedom. There is no hope for a society of drudges. Finally, his outlook was always idealist in its own way and there was no violent change; but there was a slow evolution in the thesis that everything we know has an origin in experience and reality is to be understood as experience informed by ideas. The sense of a system gradually gives way to the notion of a 'conversation' between different kinds of discourse. However, not all the elements of his philosophy take on a satisfactory shape. Oakeshott's views of science - and especially his view of the social sciences - was surely much too narrow and his admirers should set about examining the basis for them and asking themselves what we should now make of the complexity of the natural sciences and the richness of the social sciences.
Recent Books on Oakeshott 2
Wendell John Coats Jr.: Oakeshott and his Contemporaries: Montaigne, St. Augustine, Hegel et al., Selinsgrove, PA : Susquehanna University Press, 2000, 144 pp., $31.50. ISBN 1575910381.
Anthony Farr: Sartre's Radicalism and Oakeshott's Conservatism: The Distress of Freedom. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998,275 pp., £75, $65, ISBN 0-333-68449-4.
Paul Franco: The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990, £25, $50. ISBN 0-300-04686-3.
Paul Franco: Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004, xi + 209 pp., £20. ISBN 0-300-104-9,.
Steven Anthony Gerencser: The Skeptic's Oakeshott, Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 2000, viii + 214 pp. £29.63. ISBN 0-33391386-8, Leslie Marsh, ed.: Michael Oakeshott, Philosopher: A Commemora tion of the Centenary of Oakeshott's Birth, London: Michael Oakeshott Association, 2001, 84 pp. no price. ISBN 0-9541200-0.
This essay began as a review of two books, but it soon became clear that they could hardly be understood without reference to a flock of recent books about Oakeshott. In finding my way through these complex and interesting - but troubling - vistas I was helped by a correspondence with James Connelly who, however, is not to be blamed for the result. There are at least two more works that will appear soon from Imprint Academic: Exeter: Suvi Soininen, From a 'Necessary Evil' to an Art of Contingency: Michael Oakeshott's Conception of Political Activity; and Glenn Worthington, Religious and Poetic Experience in the Thought of Michael Oakeshott. There is at least one unpublished doctoral thesis: Matthew James Britnell: The Historical and the Political in the Writings of Michael Oakeshott, Warwick: University of Warwick,2000.
Kenneth B. McIntyre: The Limits of Political Theory: Oakeshott's Philosophy of Civil Association, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004, 210 pp. £25, $49.90. ISBN 1-84540-010-0.
Terry Nardin: The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001, 264 pp. £26.95. ISBN 0-271-02156-x.
Luke O'Sullivan: Oakeshott on History, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003, xii + 296 pp. £25, $40 ISBN 0-907845-290,.
Efraim Podoksik: In Defence of Modernity, Vision and Philosophy in Michael Oakeshott, Exeter: Imprint Academic 2003, 259 pp. £25, $49.90. ISBN 0-907845-665.
Roy Tseng: The Skeptical Idealist: Michael Oakeshott as a Critic of the Enlightenment, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003, pp. x + 302, £25, $40. ISBN 0-907845-223.
In 2001 Michael Oakeshott's admirers gathered for the centenary of his birth to celebrate him as a philosopher. It fell to Anthony Quinton to sum up his 'philosophical legacy'. He said 'Oakeshott has practically no direct philosophical legacy'. He explained that
Experience and Its Modes [Oakeshott' s magnum opus] is an uncompromising work of absolute idealism in the tradition of Hegel and Bradley, and, as such, excites little interest considered as pure philosophy in the current intellectual climate. But it has considerable indirect influence by way of its bearing on his political thought. 3
But James Alexander, a lecturer on political theory at Bilkent University in Ankara, suggests that Oakeshott might be 'the greatest English philosopher of the Twentieth Century'. He acknowledges that many people doubt it, but he says this is because Oakeshott offers 'release from the deadliness of doing' and that most philosophers are 'secular Pelagians, whereas Oakeshott was a secular Augustinian'.4 If Augustine is taken as a source for the notion that our commitment to the state should always be limited by our commitment to our own integrity and by whatever higher values there may be, Oakeshott was a secular Augustinian. Wendell Coats links Oakeshott's notion of 'watery fidelity' which ties us to each other and state but leaves our individual freedom intact and open to higher things with Augustine, and says that this might be the right relation between inhabitants of Augustine's two cities.
Undoubtedly, Oakeshott did think it's not easy for us to save ourselves, and thought that we are better off being nudged along by our traditions than by trying to overturn them. What nudges us is not much like the Augustinian Holy Spirit. We should, Oakeshott thought, delight in our modes of thought and welcome them for what they are rather than trying always to find a use for them, but it is not because he objected to Pelagian striving that saving souls was not his first thought.
Lord Quinton is right to the extent that it has been political theorists who have shown most interest in Oakeshott, though his philosophy has begun to attract attention. And his philosophy though interesting is by no means easy to be clear about. Kenneth McIntyre says that though Oakeshott is 'one of the most profound philosophers of political activity in the 20th Century' he has been neglected and this comes from two 'misunderstandings' - thinkers cast 'his thought primarily in terms of the familiar schools of 20th Century philosophy' and claim 'to identify radical breaks or major transformations in the development of [his] ideas.
It is perhaps this enticing combination - an interesting political theory that depends on a difficult philosophy which is hard to see as a unity - that lies behind the surge of works about Oakeshott.; but he is quite often claimed as a theorist of the right at a time when such theorists are in short supply. Perhaps more importantly, Oakeshott is, especially if one takes his aesthetic theory seriously and tries to apply his political theory, a philosopher who might make a difference to people's lives despite his alleged anti-Pelagianism and his conviction that philosophy itself changes nothing. For it seems to have been his final view that philosophy can clear the ground for the creative imagination and direct us back to our accumulated tradition.
Of the eleven books at the head of this article, ten have been published since 2000. There are twenty-one books in the British Library that are essentially about Oakeshott, though many others mention him, but he may elude capture.
Maurice Cranston's summary of the seeming paradoxes - made forty years ago - still stands:
[Oakeshott] is a traditionalist with few traditional beliefs, an 'idealist' who is more skeptical than many positivists, a lover of liberty who repudiates liberalism, an individualist who prefers Hegel to Locke, a philosopher who disapproves of philosophisme, a romantic perhaps (if Hume could possibly be called one), and a marvellous stylist.
Others have tried to give us an orderly view of him. Roy Tseng, a Taiwanese graduate of the London School of Economics, the scene of Oakeshott's mature work, sees Oakeshott as a critic of the enlightenment, a post modernist - and an idealist. 8 One can find all these elements somewhere in Oakeshott's writings. But Oakeshott may not fit any categories that come readily to hand.
His early work shows a deep strain of Bradleyan pessimism with occasional flashes of the hopefulness of T. H. Green. But Efraim Podoksik thinks the influence of Bradley wore off. He sees Kant in the background as Oakeshott became more preoccupied with the independence of the modes.
Many readers see in Oakeshott's later work the pessimistic ideas one might expect of a philosopher with a kinship with Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes figures strongly in Oakeshott's later writings and Steven Gerencser says that though 'Hegel and Hobbes are the stars of Oakeshott's political universe ... it is Hobbes' star that is rising as Hegel's is setting'. He associates with the 'waxing' of Hobbes the waning of 'absolute idealism,.10 Gerencser notes as well that the strand of skepticism that runs through much of Oakeshott's writing - making him suspicious of grand theories in politics and disinclined to see knowledge as unity - always ran counter to the idealist strand in his early writings. There is something in this, but the question is really about the nature of Oakeshott's idealism, and the suggestion of Anthony Farr and others that Oakeshott never really gave up his own kind of idealism seems well founded.
Hobbes does pose a problem, but Roy Tseng associates Hobbes with Oakeshott not in terms of Hobbes' view of human nature but in view of his legalistic account of civil relationsY This is a way of reading Hobbes so as to allow a kind of communitarianism. Tseng says that for Oakeshott Hobbes' materialism is irrelevant, and this allows Oakeshott to admire Hobbes and remain - in some way - an idealist. Tseng has to agree that Oakeshott accepts that Hobbes' philosophy is individualist. 12 Oakeshott can accommodate individualism, though I think one must dig a little deeper into his metaphysics than most of the authors of recent books have done to see just how this can be so.
Perhaps Oakeshott is a fish too big to catch in our nets, though his detractors might say that he is a fish too slippery. At the centre of all the attempts to understand this welter of ideas, three central problems define the task of interpretation. One is about Oakeshott's idealism and its meaning. Does it continue through all his work even if it changes somewhat, or does it fade after Experience and Its Modes,J3 the book that along with On Human Conduct,14 and The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind 15is at the centre of Oakeshott's work? What role does it play in his philosophy and political theory? A second question is about the relation of the ideas of community and freedom and their associations with knowledge and tradition. It is here that his relation to Hobbes is important and it is here that we face the questions about how Oakeshott has lately been used or misused by the political right. The third problem is with the modes of thought.
The recent books dwell on Oakeshott's politics and the relation of claims to knowledge and the practical life and its puzzles about morality. History receives attention but Oakeshott's underlying metaphysics is left somewhat hazy and, though many authors recognise the importance of his aesthetics, there is evidently much more to be said. Oakeshott's very narrow and rigid accounts of the natural and physical sciences - accounts designed evidently to leave room for humanistic reflection and political tradition - seem to me to be still in need of critical review.
'Idealism' receives much attention at least as a feature of political theory, and it is best to begin with it because it provides the clue to understanding the controversies about his politics, his view of history, and his account of knowledge. The thesis of Experience and Its Modes is that we shape our experience into structures of ideas, scientific, historical, and practical. Oakeshott included the arts as well as religion among the sub modes of practical experience. Later he apologised and insisted that poetry was a separate mode. This gave his philosophy an important new direction.
The modes all draw on ideas to organise the same presented data. We could look at human beings as collections of atoms, biological organisms or conscious agents engaged in an unfolding story; but we can also shape our awareness to promote whatever practical activity motivates us at any given time. Oakeshott refused to take one of these modes as primary or to say that people are 'really" bundles of chemicals. Nor would he organise our historical knowledge to promote our current ends and policies. He resisted claims such as those made by R. G. Collingwood in Speculum Mentis 1 6 that the different forms of knowledge could be arranged in a hierarchy with philosophy at the top (Collingwood was by the 1930s skeptical about this, too). Oakeshott did not simply believe that the modes were to be taken as wholly distinct ways of experiencing. Reflection on the modes and the ways in which they developed - a process which constituted the centre of philosophical activity - should reveal a view of the human condition.
The notion that 'the Absolute' was the totality of experience, the foundation on which the analytical powers worked was, when Oakeshott wrote, the standard reading of F. H. Bradley's metaphysics; but he warned readers about the 'myths' associated with the idea of the Absolute, and in later years he became chary of the notion of 'absolute experience'. Oakeshott continued to believe that philosophy must resist attempts to take the fragments of reality grasped by the intellect as ultimate reality, though philosophy lost its place as a master discipline. Religion remained as perhaps the most significant of 'practical activities'.
The picture opened by Experience and Its Modes revealed the human inquirer as standing at an intersection of the modes and thus as free of all of them, and this view remained. Oakeshott's notions of individuality and freedom seem always to develop from it. Science may propose a deterministic picture of the univer~e or one composed of invariant laws and occasions of indeterministic chance, but science is only one of our modes of thought. Similarly political theory may reveal complex systems within which individuals appear as partially differentiated elements in encompassing systems, but political and social theory are themselves to be located within specific modes of thought.
Anthony Farr says: 'I take Oakeshott's understanding of the intellect to be that it is "artificial". He follows Hegel and Bradley in holding that we discover the nature of life only as our endeavour gives it reality'. Farr adds: 'Man's experience is comprehended within an intellect constructed by man, but his being is always further into the darkness than his knowing' Y Oakeshott always believed that what we take to be the objects of knowledge are shaped in some activity of the mind.
The various modes of thought are not subjective. Oakeshott saw them as objective orders structured by ideas. 18 They are public and form a background to our shared civil activity. Thus his metaphysics and epistemology prevented him from being neatly pigeon-holed as either an individualist or a communitarian. The community is not made up of social atoms, but community provides an environment for individuals to develop.
His idealism thus consisted of the notion that the intellect structures the objects of knowledge combined with the notion that, though there are objective orders within the modes of thought, they are orders of ideas. There are evident elements of the idealist 'self-realisat16n' ethics in all this, for the point of philosophical reflection is indeed to show us that we transcend the
17Sartre's Radicalism and Oakeshott's Conservatism, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, p. 237. 18There are Platonist implications in Ihis, but it is not clear how fully Oakeshott embraced them.
modes of thought and to show us how it is that we can be free beings. There is nothing of Hegel's notion that we find our ends in the state or society. Oakeshott could never see a state or the social order as more real and important than the individuals in it.
Politics is a practical activity. In On Human Conduct Oakeshott's thought centres on the notion of 'civility' and the related notion of civil association. Civil association is an idea oflaw. In an essay in The Achievement of Michael Oakeshott, Josiah Lee Auspitz says: 'All the rule of law requires is a body of formal equals who understand the law as authoritative, recognize an obligation to comply with it', and subscribe to procedures for enacting, amending and interpreting it.
The state as we normally understand it consists of institutions - legal, political, educational, economic. These are what Oakeshott would call 'enterprise associations'. Oakeshott's example is a fire station. 2o We can see a university, a business, or a hospital along the same lines; but there are also associations based, he says, on what it is to be a human being and these involve rules identifying the 'civitas' itself? I These must have the characteristics of law, which include public knowledge and objectivity.
He says that he does not mean that there are no known civil obligations until a court has decided them;22 for the court is one among many institutions. There is a 'respublica' ,23 a public understanding which is the foundation of the institutions.
However, this it is not the end oflife. An 'empire, realm or state ... has no purpose of its own to defend'.2 4 The purposes are those of various other associations and individuals. The state can accommodate many commu nities so long as the principle of mutual recognition holds. Yet the state must somehow hold the institutions together and arbitrate between them. How is this to be done? One Oakeshottian answer is that we appeal to tradition.
The concept of tradition does not playa role in On Human Conduct, but it does in Rationalism in Politics.2 5Traditions provide the continuities which we rupture at our peril. However, they only intimate rather than determine conduct. Oakeshott speaks of 'the pursuit of intimations'.2 6 Traditions are sources of political action but also of political disputes which people find relevant.
Paul Franco calls our attention to the fact that R. H. S. Crossman argued that Oakeshott could not distinguish good from bad traditions. 27 But the point is that Oakeshott means by a tradition whatever can sustain a genuine civil relation. There may be many such traditions in a multicultural society.28
The debate about whether or not Oakeshott was a 'conservative' hangs on ambiguities about what it is to be a conservative. Paul Franco in a second book notes that some of the American 'neoconservatives' have tried to appropriate Oakeshott. 29The New Republic in 1999 associated Oakeshott with Leo Strauss and said he would have supported the Iraq War, an event in the advocacy of which a number of Strauss's American disciples played an important part. 30 But the association is very tenuous. Against that, in The New Yark Times David Brooks had Oakeshott in an imaginary debate on the war, and he conceded that Oakeshott would have had trouble justifying the imposition of democracy [American style?] or anything else on the Iraqis. Oakeshott was generally a non-interventionist, and his political writings pointedly centre on 'modern European states,.3l It is true that Margaret Thatcher offered to make Oakeshott a Companion of Honour, but he refused.
'Conservative' is a slippery term. In England it has gradually taken on some of the colouring of an American usage in which it means much what 'economic liberal' used to mean, though it has not taken on the American association with religious fundamentalism; but it also continues to be used for Tory traditionalism which always had strong elements of paternalism in it and, indeed, was associated with a variety of kinds of opposition to untrammelled capitalism.
Oakeshott like David Hume believed that there is never enough evidence to overturn our natural beliefs and he was a High Tory in the sense that many people believe that Hume was?3 He also had a strong sense of community and of social responsibility, and there is no sign in his writings of an admiration for a devil-take-the-hindmost society. He liked to say that he voted for the party that would do the least harm. He lacked a passionate belief in our ability to organise society for the better; but, though he warned of the dangerous possibilities opened by the state he refused to see Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps as tyrants. 34 There are echoes of the pre-1930s 'conservatism' of R. G. Collingwood and of Oakeshott's first philosophy tutor, 1. M. E. McTaggart. McTaggart much admired Cambridge and its traditions and warned of pushing them out of shape but he also campaigned for the education of women and as an undergraduate wrote an essay defending the rights of homosexuals. In Canada, Oakeshott would have been called a 'Red Tory' (a once very pervasive but now disappearing breed).
All this raises 'the Hobbes problem'. But it is evidently not the Hobbes who spoke of human beings as engaged in the state of nature in a 'war of all against all', or the materialist Hobbes, who played a major role in Oakeshott's own philosophy. Nor was it the notion that we should surrender all our natural rights to a sovereign that Oakeshott found useful.
One should note that in his celebrated introduction to Hobbes' Leviathan Oakeshott insisted that Hobbes brought home to us man's 'littleness, his imperfection, his mortality'. This leaves us with the problem of the modes, and the search for Oakeshott's ultimate notions of the self, freedom, and knowledge. Oakeshott, like Collingwood faced a difficulty at the heart of modem life. Science, history, religion, and metaphysics all offer us pictures of ourselves and of the world, and they compete - or often seem to - with the ordinary common sense worlds in which we live our lives and face our moral problems. In a distant past the main competitors were religion and philosophy but the depth of modern expertise has multiplied them. One option is to make one primary and to try to how how the others might be ''reduced' to it or eliminated as superstition or misunderstanding. Another option is to show how, somehow, they might all be assembled into one. A third is to regard them as simply separate, incapable somehow of further compression or reorganisation.
Oakeshott first understood the forms of knowledge as modes of experience, a notion which he clearly derived initially from Spinoza 36 though there was some conflation between the notion of mode and the Spinozistic notion of attribute, for Oakeshott's modes of experience are ways in which the whole of experience is focussed and understood. Later the modes seem to be more nearly ways of talking about the world, for Oakeshott speaks of their relation to one another as a conversation.
Science and history offered two ways in which experience could be organised by sets of ideas and given a determinate structure which, as such, provided a framework for objective knowledge. The organising ideas perhaps belonged to the Platonic tradition, though the notion that the structure of experience provided the basis for objectivity had evident Kantian overtones. 38 Practical experience remained distinct from both science and history. History, proper, was not a study that people undertook for the sake of solving their l'Olitical and social problems, and the purpose of science was objective knowledge, not technology.
Oakeshott's view of history is perhaps best summed up in an essay entitled 'The Activity of Being an Historian'.39 He said: 'The "past", then, is a certain way of reading the present'.40 'What we call past events are the product of understanding (or having understood) present occurrences as evidence for happenings that have already taken place'.41 There is an historical attitude and the historian is detached, but his concern 'is not with causes but with occasions,.42 The particularity of history is always evident. Oakeshott insisted that historical writings are individual and unique and do not sum to a general history.
All of this seems very much to be history for its own sake and, indeed, Oakeshott always resisted the notion that the goal of history, science or literature is to be found outside the activities themselves. Yet, despite some of his readers, he did not mean that practical activity should not make use of the findings of history and science. In Experience and its Modes he said: 'It [history] has nothing to do with the practical in itself but this does not mean that in matters of practice appeal to the past is always irrelevant' .43 And in Rationalism in Politics, he said that history may be practical, scientific or 'contemplative,.44 Wendell Coats rightly argues that Oakeshott explicitly rejected the notion 'that there is any action devoid of social consequences' though he rejected any 'Kantian-like absolute value in conscientiousness' .
In fact Oakeshott and Guy Griffin wrote a book about how to pick a Derby winner. It is not to be taken wholly seriously, perhaps, but it does contain a warning that those who rely on 'systems' rather than the facts about track records and breeding will learn that lunch in the workhouse is bad.
In insisting that history is independent, Oakeshott was making a social point about education and research. Still, the separation remained problematic. In Experience and Its Modes, the central notion is always experience. History was not Collingwood's recapturing of the past in rethinking (albeit a constructive and creative rethinking that still took place in the present) but a way of focussing present experience. Historians read books, look at artifacts, and talk to survivors.
Science Oakeshott saw as an activity that draws in a precise and orderly way on the experiences of physicists and chemists; but for him there was only one science. In Experience and its Modes,46 he says 'the diversity of science appears to me merely a misconception due to historical circum stances'. This follows from his premise: 'Scientific experience is a single, specific mode of experience, distinguished by a single method and a single subject matter; and the world of scientific ideas is a single, homogeneous (but fortuitously divided) whole' .47 He adds: 'Scientific experience is defective experience, it is a mode of experience which falls short of the totality of experience, and scientific experience is abstract, conditional, incomplete, self-contained but not self-sufficient ... .' History is not science because it does not deal in abstract generalisation.
The social sciences get a mixed reception. The scientific claims of anthropology are demolished on Oakeshott's premises. 48 He says that anthropology can be an historical study but it cannot be a science because the world of its ideas cannot be abstract and quantitative. Its 'general isations will be rendered negligible' by the 'scantiness of data.' He really meant that anthropology's subject matter is human behaviour, the wrong kind of thing for science to grip.
Economics fares better, though 'Economics as we find it in the books of many of its most distinguished professors, comprises a meaningless miscellany of scientific, historical, and practical ideas and arguments,.49 But over the next thirteen pages econometrics (as it is now called) are equated with scientific economics. It has nothing to do with the being of humans, with history or with the attainment of the social good but only with abstract characteristics. These are given by 'quantitative terms, cost, price, utility, and disutility,.5o This tells us something about Oakeshott's notion that science must be quantitative and bstract but not much about the richness of economic thought, but it was not Oakeshott's last word. In On Human Conduct a way of associating economics with history and the state seems to appear. 51 Oakeshott discusses the free market thesis that people would be better off if free to buy and sell as they pleased and notes that the free market required the state to defend it. But this is a piece of useful meta economic theorising that belongs, one supposes, to practical life.
Finally, psychology is allowed to be a science in On Human Conduct, but not ociology. The complaint about sociology is largely that it is, like anthropology, tied to a seeming history that is not really history. 52 The psychology he liked is a mathematicised science of measured behaviour. Practical life organises the experiences of businessmen and firemen around defined goals whose reality is in their experience. But, like F.H. Bradley, Oakeshott believed in 1933 the foundation for all the 'modes' was an underlying unity. This unity was experience itself.
A great deal had changed thirty-six years later. In Experience and Its Modes philosophy had a central place but art was relegated to the status of one among many practical activities. Oakeshott said in an introductory note to a reprinting of the slim volume Poetry - built from a lecture - that this little book was 'a belated retraction of a foolish sentence in Experience and Its Modes'. He did not specify the sentence but it was surely 'in art, music, and poetry we are wholly taken up, in the end, with practical ife'
But it might well have been the sentence 'philosophical experience supersedes all modifications of experience, not historically, but logically,;54 for at the end of Poetry he relates the poetic imagination to contemplation. In Experience and its Modes Philosophy is devoted to reflection on the distinctness and relatedness of the modes. It does not assemble their 'information', rather it considers hat kind of thing it is that is capable of being expressed as a mode by which a free agent organises the world. In Poetry, the poetic imagination becomes the creative force.
Thus, the basis of Oakeshott's notion of freedom is in the poetic image which is the basis of , self- making'. 55 Oakeshott's most serious account ofthe self and of human freedom is in Poetry. He explains: 'The self appears as an activity. It is not a "thing" or "substance", and this activity is 'primordial; there is nothing antecedent to it'.
The central thesis of Poetry is that we make ourselves through images. He says:
'By poetry I mean the activity of making images of a certain kind and moving about among them in a manner appropriate to their character. Painting, sculpting, acting, dancing, singing, literary and musical composition are different kinds of poetic activity'. Not everyone who engages in such activities makes poetry. The poetic 'involves' delight. 57 The images are not some superior reality, but they are a source of freedom and self-making. Oakeshott denies that the images are Platonic. They are not like the ideas that constitute history and science. Indeed, poetry is 'a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat'.
Oakeshott's recent commentators have not been too sure what to make of this. Paul Franco says Oakeshott's 'art for art's sake' would 'have made even Oscar Wilde blanch'. But the point is that poetry (in the broad sense of 'art') is the source of our freedom. Think of the child at home in Wigan imagining himself in Polynesia or alone in the stormy seas off Tristan da Cunha _ creating a self liberated from all normal surroundings and nriched by images. But this delight is not pointless; it is the way, or part of the way, that one becomes a free being. This is something one does for its own sake, not in order to become a good worker in the modern state or a saint or an innovative writer of advertising copy. 'Art for art's sake' does not quite capture that. Franco's references are extensive, but they do not overlap with his discussion of freedom.
Terry Nardin has many references to Poetr/! - but only one 62 overlaps with Nardin's freedom references. This concerns self-enactment. 63 Nardin notes that Oakeshott's view of philosophy is changed by this view of poetry. But the point may be that in associating poetry with freedom and contemplation, philosophy and poetry become linked: Philosophy is still the business of seeing the underlying reality of things, but it takes creative imagination.
Efraim Podoksik is also skeptical of Oakeshott's aesthetic views. Podoksik says that Oakeshott was 'very ambiguous' about the character of aesthetic experience. 64 Oakeshott's views lay 'within the art for art's sake tradition' but Podoksik thinks beyond that we face problems of interpreta tion. He thinks Oakeshott separated art and thought and this undermined the kind of idealism he once held. 6s But he may miss the new association of art and philosophy through contemplation.
So far we have not confronted what might be the most important change. Experience and its Modes is couched in terms of forms of experience conceived as systems of ideas. The complexities of this notion - the idea of idea and its relation to experience in the formation of 'modes' - have not been deeply explored. But Poetry is couched in terms of discourse, and Oakeshott suggests that while we often regard all human intercourse with knowledge as framing an enquiry, we should regard our attempts to know as conversations. Enquiry admits only the voice of 'argumentative discourse'.66 'As civilised human beings we are the inheritors [not]. .. of a body information but of a conversation. It is a conversation which goes on in public and within each of ourselves'.67 Oakeshott thinks our conversation has fallen into a bog and that it would require 'a philosophy more profound than anything I have to offer' to rescue it. 68 Indeed, the conversation we now have is 'dominated by the voice of practice and science', but we can understand how poetry can be heard.
The poetic image is special. In other discourse what is said and how it is said are separable. Poetic images have a conversational relation. 'They neither confirm nor refute one another, they merely evoke one another'. This may seem to give poetry a use, yet Oakeshott says 'Poetry has nothing teach us about how to live or what we ought to approve, Poetry merely frees us and then we must decide for ourselves what to do.
Not everyone has been impressed. Grant said that Oakeshott on poetry is 'less convincing' than in his analysis of history. Writing in 1990, he also noted that there was still no serious analysis of Oakeshott's aesthetics. 7 ! It remains true that it is difficult to find much light on the relation between Oakeshott's aesthetics and his politics.
There is no doubt that powerful images do, or can, enable us to go beyond the immediate and see the world from many different perspectives. No doubt, too, the way in which we break free will shape the selves that we become.
There is no perfect consensus on any of the major issues in the most recent books, and the conversation among Oakeshott's readers will go on for a long time. However, as Oakeshott himself might have said, there are intimations. One must be careful not to create a mythical Oakeshott who believed in history for history's sake, art for art's sake and science for science's sake. But Oakeshott did believe that each of these 'modes' had to be pursued as something valuable in itself and pursued objectively without any attempt to influence other enquiries before their bearing on human conduct itself could be determined. There was no 'libertarian, neo conservative' Oakeshott. He did believe that human beings should not be rebuilt to suit any ideology, that our commitments to society and especially to the state, though real, are limited. Oakeshott believed too that selves are made by the things that delight us and that poetry is a necessary ingredient in our freedom. There is no hope for a society of drudges. Finally, his outlook was always idealist in its own way and there was no violent change; but there was a slow evolution in the thesis that everything we know has an origin in experience and reality is to be understood as experience informed by ideas. The sense of a system gradually gives way to the notion of a 'conversation' between different kinds of discourse. However, not all the elements of his philosophy take on a satisfactory shape. Oakeshott's views of science - and especially his view of the social sciences - was surely much too narrow and his admirers should set about examining the basis for them and asking themselves what we should now make of the complexity of the natural sciences and the richness of the social sciences.
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