To the end of his life Berlin received honorary degrees—evidence, he felt, “that I am harmless.” Not yet 87, he wrote to Ruth Chang, a young American philosophy professor, that he could not care less how he is remembered: “I do not mind in the least if I am completely forgotten—I really mean that.” Poor Isaiah Berlin, all his life he played it safe, gave pleasure to his friends, took care to make no enemies in important quarters, and would seem to have won all the world’s rewards, except the feeling of self-satisfaction that comes with accomplishment and courageous action.
Michael Oakeshott
(2015)
Philosophers, held Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990), are of two kinds: didactic and contemplative. The former tend to have minds that gravitate to the formation of bold and graspable ideas, the latter to thoughts less readily summarized. Aristotle’s golden mean, Descartes’s cogito, Kant’s categorical imperative, Hegel’s dialectic, and Marx’s economic determinism are examples of the first kind of philosopher. Schopenhauer, Santayana, and William James, figures without a reigning idea associated with their names, are examples of the second. The first group risks being too quickly understood; the second risks being easily misunderstood. Michael Oakeshott himself was among the second kind of philosopher.
In his essay “America’s ‘Exceptional’ Conservatism,” Irving Kristol tells of arriving at his desk one morning during his time as editor of Encounter in London to discover the mail had brought, unbidden—or over the transom, as the phrase then was—a lengthy essay titled “On Being Conservative” by Michael Oakeshott, whom Kristol much admired. Kristol read the essay, he notes, “with pleasure and appreciation.” He reports that “it was beautifully written, subtle in its argument, delicate in its perceptions, and full of sentences and paragraphs that merit the attention of anthologists for decades, perhaps even centuries, to come.” Having finished reading the essay, Kristol turned to his typewriter and tapped out a letter of rejection.
Greatly admiring the essay though he did, Irving Kristol disagreed with it, and in fundamental ways. Kristol was, as he put it, “then in the early stages of intellectual pregnancy with those attitudes and dispositions that later emerged as ‘neoconservatism,’” and he found his own thoughts on a distinctly different track than Oakeshott’s. Kristol’s thinking had a religious bent; Oakeshott’s seemed ineluctably secular. Kristol was future-minded; Oakeshott locked firmly into the present. Finally and decisively, Oakeshott’s conservatism, in Kristol’s reading, offered no “guidance in coping with all those necessary evils, and destroyed whatever philosophical equanimity we have received as a result of reading the writers of philosophy.”
Part of Irving Kristol’s disagreement with Michael Oakeshott had to do with the radical differences between English and American conservatism. England is (or at least was) a society aristocratic in spirit and based heavily on tradition. America is based on revolution. Americans, even ultra-conservative ones, have not given up on the idea of progress; English conservatives wish (or used to wish) to retard, even stop, progress. Evelyn Waugh once remarked that he would never again vote for the Tories: They had been in power for more than eight years and hadn’t turned back the clock one minute. American conservatism, Kristol recognizes, is “a populist conservatism,” which “dismays the conservative elites of Britain and Western Europe, who prefer a more orderly and dignified kind of conservatism—which in actuality always turns out to be a defensive and therefore enfeebled conservativism.”
Contemporary American conservatives look to the Founders and The Federalist as the sources of their political philosophy. Yet, according to Oakeshott in “Rationalism in Politics,” the Founders themselves were men who had no need of “persuasion that knowledge begins with a tabula rasa.” The Declaration of Independence, in this reading, is not a conservative document, but rather one closer to the ideas behind the French Revolution and “many later adventures in the rationalist reconstruction of society.”
At the heart of Irving Kristol’s disagreement with Michael Oakeshott, though Kristol doesn’t mention it, is the fact that Kristol was an intellectual, an immensely well-read and highly thoughtful intellectual, to be sure, and an activist; Oakeshott was a philosopher, one without the least interest in changing the world. As a philosopher, Oakeshott was labeled an idealist in the tradition of such English philosophers as J. M. E. McTaggart, R. G. Collingwood, and F. H. Bradley. Oakeshott’s systemic philosophy, as found in his Experience and Its Modes (1933), can be technical and, hence, formidable (or so I found) and not for amateurs, of whom I am one. Yet his view of the role of philosophy is limited, modest, skeptical even.
Oakeshott’s philosophy isn’t about “persuading others, but making our minds clear.” For him, philosophy was in no wise a privileged form of knowledge but, instead, a manner of thinking, a machinery for making distinctions, a continuing act of clarification—one especially useful for investigating and waylaying presuppositions. Too often, he felt, philosophy was devoted to “making riddles out of solutions,” and philosophers were people who spent their lives “imagining where the candle flame went when it was blown out.”
Although he declared himself a conservative, Oakeshott suggested no programs, advocated no policies, and worked with no specific ends in mind. He held that the best we can do is attend to those “thinkers and statesmen who knew which way to turn their feet without knowing anything about a final destination.” Scientists, historians, politicians, economists, and poets all perceived the world through what he termed their separate “mode of experience.” And each of these modes, in the nature of the case, was partial, incomplete, only part of the story. Experience was, for various reasons, so richly complicated that the whole story might not be available: Certainly it was not to be encompassed through any discrete mode. Nor was there a mode encompassing all other modes; no one mode, not even the philosophical, is architechtonic.
What there is, Oakeshott believed, is conversation—unending conversation about the complexities of life and life’s proper ends. This conversation, he held, ought never to lapse into argument. Nor is it hierarchical. Every thoughtful person can participate. In “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” he wrote that “conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, nor is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure.” Life, for Oakeshott, as he put it in “A Place of Learning,” is “a predicament, not a journey.” The predicament is how to make the best of it and get the best out of it.
The answer for Oakeshott, as he set out most emphatically in “On Being Conservative,” is to cultivate
the propensity to use and to enjoy what is present rather than to wish or look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be. To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.
For Oakeshott, conservatism was a disposition rather than a doctrine. From this disposition certain political positions followed, views of change and innovation key among them:
Whenever stability is more profitable than improvement, whenever certainty is more valuable than speculation, whenever familiarity is more desirable than perfection, whenever agreed error is superior to controversial truth, whenever the disease is more sufferable than the cure, whenever the satisfaction of expectations is more important than the “justice” of the expectations themselves, whenever a rule of some sort is better than the risk of having no rule at all, a disposition to be conservative will be more appropriate than any other; and on any reading of human conduct these cover a not negligible range of circumstances.
Oakeshott found more reinforcement for these views in Montaigne and Pascal and Hume than in Burke or Benth
am.
Politics did not hold out much promise for Oakeshott. He held that government
is a specific and limited activity, namely, the provision and custody of general rules of conduct, which are understood, not as plans for imposing substantive activities, but as instruments enabling people to pursue the activities of their own choice with the minimum frustration, and therefore something which it is appropriate to be conservative about.
Oakeshott had his own religious sentiments and complex morality, but he felt that neither religion nor morals had to do with politics, and politics had nothing whatsoever to do “with making men good or even better.” Dreams of perfect justice or perfect freedom ought to be excluded from politics, for “the conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny.”
The role of government should be much simpler: “to keep its subjects at peace with one another in the activities in which they have chosen to seek their happiness.” Ideally, politics, Oakeshott believed, should not be (as it has been in recent years in the United States) about dueling virtues, with one side intent on crushing the other. Nor, for those of conservative disposition, ought politics
to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed upon, but to inject into the activities of already too passionate men an ingredient of moderation; to restrain, to deflate, to pacify and to reconcile; not to stoke the fires of desire, but to damp them down.
Oakeshott’s strong antipathy was for what he terms “rationalism” in politics. Rationalism is the reign of confident reason expended on a subject that cannot readily be reasoned upon. Politics, “always so deeply veined with both the traditional, the circumstantial, and the transitory,” will not obey the kind of technical expertise under whose banner rationalism travels. For the rationalist, no problem evades solution, and perfection will arrive promptly when, one by one, all problems are solved.
“Political activity,” Oakeshott writes, “is recognized [by rationalist thinkers] as the imposition of a uniform condition of perfection upon human conduct.” His book, On History (1983), concludes with a dazzling essay, “The Tower of Babel,” about the greatest utopian planning project of all time: that of erecting a building that would reach to heaven. The essay ends on a scrap of verse left by a poet of the day that reads:
Those who in fields Elysian would dwell
Do but extend the boundaries of hell.
The villainous thinkers for Oakeshott are those who claim to have all the answers. Thus, he condemns Francis Bacon, Descartes, Machiavelli, Locke, Bentham, Godwin, and, of course, Marx and Engels, “authors of our most stupendous rationalisms.” The rationalist thinkers can only breathe in an atmosphere of pure abstraction: “Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; he can never get a square meal of experience.”
The thinkers Oakeshott most admired are Montaigne, Pascal, Hobbes, and Hume. They understood that, in political activity,
men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbor for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behavior in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.
Elsewhere in the same vein, he wrote: “If we are looking for something that is difficult to understand—this life supplies the need, we require to invent no others.”
Unlike most modern philosophers, Oakeshott was steeped in literature. When he writes of the rationalist’s knowledge never being more “than half knowledge, and consequently he will never be more than half-right,” he cites a character in a less-than-well-known Henry James story, “The Private Life,” who is in the same condition. Oakeshott’s writing is rife with literary references and allusions: He read Cervantes, La Rochefoucauld, Goethe, Austen, Keats, Landor, Valéry, Proust, D. H. Lawrence, A. J. Symons, and T. S. Eliot. He dabbled in Chinese literature. He planned, though it never got underway, a biography of Lord Nelson. He was a philosopher with a literary sensibility.
This shows up in Oakeshott’s prose style, which, from the outset, was impressively aphoristic. In the first 20 pages of his Notebooks 1922–86, begun when he was 21, one finds the following sentences:
The first act of a democratic state would be to form an aristocracy. . . . Religion is the poetry of morality. . . . Thought is always spasmodic. There is no such thing as an unbroken chain of thought. . . . The quest for God is the whole meaning of human life. . . . Present society is pretty well calculated to demoralize a great character.
All these, be it noted, were written before he was 25.
Oakeshott’s Notebooks are partly precisely that: notes made from observations from his reading of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and others; insights from his experience; adumbrations of works he would like to compose. Other material can be intensely personal, some of it confessional. It can go from the most arresting general thought to a searing cri de coeur. Many of his entries are about what used to be called “love life,” for Oakeshott at several points states that love is the ultimate meaning of life. Chunks of the Notebooks are given over to a woman he refers to as La Belle Dame Sans Merci, whom he pursued for decades without consummation.
As Edward Gibbon wrote of Charlemagne, so might one write of Oakeshott: “Of all his moral virtues, chastity was not the most conspicuous.” Although thrice married, Oakeshott was a sedulous seducer, and often had two or three love affairs going on simultaneously.
The Notebooks, along with giving a more comprehensive of Oakeshott’s general views than do any of his other books, give us a stronger sense of the man. The ample subjects of Love, Death, and Religion dominate its pages, though they are not necessarily the most interesting, if only because they are not subjects upon which originality is readily adduced. Politics come in chiefly for contempt: “Politics are an inferior form of human activity,” he writes. Later: “Politics seen as a struggle for power—is it any more than this?” He longed for a modern Voltaire “who would take the superstition out of politics.”
The two things that qualify a person for being a conservative, he held, were having a passionate interest outside politics and a strong sense of mortality. And, dare one indite this in so political a time as the present: “A general interest and preoccupation with politics is the surest sign of a general decay in a society.” Still, politics is necessary to life lived among “people whom chance or choice has brought together.”
The problem, Oakeshott felt, was not only that “politics is an uninteresting form of activity to anyone who has no desire to rule others” but that those it attracts are, too often, unimpressive human beings. At one point he calls them “scoundrels.” What isn’t required, but is too often evident, in politics is “manufacturing curable grievances.” What is needed is the assurance of “those little things: to go where we like & when; having paid my taxes to spend my money on what I wish.” His final word is this: “Politics is the art of living together & of being ‘just’ to one another—not of imposing a way of life, but of organizing a common life.”
So much of Oakeshott’s views on politics are propelled by his unshakeable belief in the imperfectability of human beings. Montaigne is his intellectual hero here, the Montaigne who understood that all human judgment and wisdom is fallible. In “A Place of Learning,” Oakeshott disavows a belief in human nature, asserting that “there are only men, women and children responding gaily or reluctantly, reflectively or not so reflectively, to the ordeal of consciousness, who exist only in terms of their self-understandings.” Self-understanding, though, is a rarity. “The intellectual life of the majority of men and women,” he writes, “is cankered by indiscriminate knowledge.”
He underscored the wretched condition of “people who have no selves other than those created by ‘experts’ who tell them what
they are.” Others walk about with heads “so full of ideas that there is no room for sense.” In a world of boundless distractions, serious education—not “education that is merely instruction in the current vulgarities”—is the only (if somewhat dim) hope: “To be educated is to know how much one wishes to know & to have the courage not to be tempted beyond that limit.” Genuine culture, he held, teaches that “there is much one does not want to know.”
For Oakeshott the trick was somehow to be above the humdrum world and yet also be in it. “One is under an obligation to be happy with the here and now,” he writes, a sentiment he expresses more than once. Yet he also notes that “it is certain that most who concentrate upon achievement miss life.” On his gravestone, he wanted this bit of verse from the Scottish poet William Dunbar:
Man, please thy Maker, and be merry,
And give not for this world a cherry.
While still a young man, Oakeshott set out to achieve a life that dispensed with everything doctrinaire: “Whenever I have become conscious of a presupposition,” he writes, “I have questioned it.” And so he does, relentlessly and impressively, in the pages of the Notebooks. He even questions whether curiosity is a good thing, noting that neither Aristotle nor Aquinas thought it was. He deflates the importance of the study of mathematics beyond basic arithmetic. Even the sacred subject of science falls under his blade. He calls the scientist a blackmailer who
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