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    Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott
    Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott
    Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott
    Ebook343 pages4 hours

    Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott

    By Andrew Sullivan

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    In this book Andrew Sullivan examines Oakeshott's transition from his original emphasis on philosophy as providing what was ultimately satisfactory in experience to his later emphasis on practical life. This satisfaction is best achieved by a fusion of the modes of poetry and practice, leading the author to examine Oakeshott's view of religious life as the consummation of practice in its most poetic incarnation. The book also examines how the conception of practice is applied in Oakeshott's political writings, focusing on the notion of civil association.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherImprint Academic
    Release dateJun 7, 2016
    ISBN9781845405267
    Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott

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      Book preview

      Intimations Pursued - Andrew Sullivan

      57-60.

      Chapter One

      The Claims of Philosophy

      The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,

      For the pattern is new in every moment

      And every moment is a new and shocking

      Valuation of all we have been.[1]

      Perhaps the most noteworthy character of the distinction drawn between philosophy and practice in Michael Oakeshott’s first major work, Experience and Its Modes (EM), is its absoluteness. It is a point made forcefully in the introduction and reiterated in the conclusion. It is sustained throughout Chapters II and V devoted to philosophy and practice respectively. It frames the opening and concluding paragraphs of the book. It is impossible to avoid the impression that the distinction is critical to the entire project. In a clear rebuttal of the classical tradition which saw practical and theoretical wisdom as separate but hierarchically connected, and the Enlightenment tradition which saw practical wisdom as a product of theoretical wisdom, Oakeshott urges their utter irrelevance to one another. And much hinges on this radical claim.

      The extremity of the claim is perhaps its most salient characteristic. Philosophy, Oakeshott argues, ‘depends for its existence upon maintaining its independence from all extraneous interests, and in particular from the practical interest’.[2] The separation of the two realms is, in other words, not merely an after-thought to their elucidation; it is intrinsic to the respective identity of each. Philosophy is not simply endangered or confused by inter-penetration with practice, its very existence is dependent upon the distinction. And, in response, practice cannot remain merely indifferent to the invasions of philosophy. It must react with extremity: ‘Indeed, the pursuit of philosophical truth is something which must be condemned by practice as inimical to life.’[3]

      The two realms not only deny each other, they destroy each other. Oakeshott echoes Nietzsche against Socrates in the rhetoric of his claim: ‘To turn philosophy into a way of life is at once to have abandoned life and philosophy. Philosophy is not the enhancement of life, it is the denial of life.’[4] Later, he frames the distinction in even more dramatic terms:

      Not until we have become wholly indifferent to the truths of this world of practice, not until we have shaken off the abstractions of practical experience, of totality and religion, good and evil, faith and freedom, body and mind, the practical self and its ambitions and desires, shall we find ourselves once more turned in the direction which leads to what can satisfy the character of experience.[5]

      Yet the nature of the distinction - for all its extremity - is unfamiliar. It is not the intuitive distinction between thought and action, subjectivity and objectivity, with which we are familiar in everyday discourse. Within Oakeshott’s idealist system, such a distinction cannot exit. All experience for Oakeshott is thought, and action cannot exist without being in some sense thought. Within this system, the distinction between philosophy and practice cannot be between two different realms of experience, since there can be only one realm of experience, which is thought.

      Nor can it be between two modes of experience, a distinction between two equal rivals for the human consciousness, between two types of thinking, since philosophy, unlike practice, is presented as more than a mode of experience, or a type of thinking: it is defined as experience itself when pressed to its irresistible conclusions. The distinction Oakeshott wants to draw, then, is a distinction between experience itself and one of its modes: between complete and incomplete experience; between the concrete and the abstract; between what is ultimately satisfactory in experience and what must be rejected altogether and put to one side.

      There is no distinction in EM which is more insisted upon. Yet it is a deeply troubling assertion. To claim the complete autonomy of practice from philosophy would seem to drain from practice any reflective capacity whatsoever, to separate theoretical thought from moral thought, to argue that there is absolutely no connection between the questions: ‘What should I do?’ and ‘Why is it right for me to feel this obligation?’ That they are separate questions is obvious. That they can in no way inform each other seems to go against every moral and practical intuition. Yet this is the clear claim of Oakeshott’s argument.

      The examination of this initial argument is the purpose of this chapter. Its inconsistencies and difficulties, I shall argue, are never fully resolved by Oakeshott throughout his entire writings, but this early wrestling with the dilemma in clear terms points to an eventual settling of his doctrine. How this is settled reflects importantly on the cogency of his later arguments about the autonomy of tradition in politics and morals, and the role of poetry in evoking that autonomy. In a sense, this early debate is a distilled version of the conversation which will echo and give coherence to much of his subsequent thought.

      Part I deals with the distinction between philosophy and practice, at each point that it is drawn by Oakeshott, in order to pinpoint the dilemma exactly in the terms Oakeshott frames it. Part II analyses those aspects of practical experience as described by Oakeshott which seem most troublesome for his view of the absolute distinction between practice and philosophy. And Part III examines those aspects of philosophical experience as described by Oakeshott which seem most troublesome for his view of the absoluteness of the distinction. I hope to argue that Oakeshott’s initial separation is denied by his own text; that he is forced to support a more modified version of the case; and that, in the process, his more immoderate claims for philosophy as representing what is ultimately satisfactory in human experience are fatally qualified.

      I

      To discover what, for Oakeshott, the distinction between philosophy and practice entails, some understanding of the structure of thought which generates the postulates of experience and practical experience themselves is necessary. And this structure is heavily dependent on the concepts of late nineteenth-century Idealism.[6] Philosophy, for Oakeshott, is nothing but the consummation of ‘experience’, which has, as its primary definition, a unified world of ideas. It cannot be divided into what is experienced and what is experiencing; it is a concrete whole. It is indivisible and inseparable from thought. It is, in fact, thought itself.[7] There is no independent reality distinguishable from it: all reality is experience and all experience is thought. It is constructed, not received; created, not discovered.

      The raw material of this thought is nothing but thought itself.[8] Nor is there any form of experience which escapes thought. Sensation is thought. Perception is thought.[9] Intuition is thought.[10] The notion of unmediated experience, experience without judgment, is categorically and elaborately rejected.[11]

      In this universe, thinking cannot take the form of the relation of ideas to reality, since the two are indistinguishable; nor can it be the interpretation of sensation; nor even the action of mere thought upon itself, if thought is conceived as separate from the world of sensation. Rather, thinking is the action of thought upon itself, where thought comprises all of reality. As such, it is the tireless transformation of reality, ‘the explicit and conscious qualification of existence by an idea.’ The limitlessness of this is difficult to grasp, but Oakeshott insists upon it. Thinking is not

      the mere qualification of existence by an idea; it is a qualification of existence by itself, which extends, in the end, to qualification of the whole of existence by its whole character.[12]

      Because reality is thought, all thought is a transformation of all reality, as well as a transformation of itself: ‘in its full character thought is not the explicit qualification of existence by an idea, but the self-revelation of existence.’[13]

      This mysterious conception of self-revelation operates according to a simple principle: it reveals itself by attempting to construct out of itself a world of experience which is unified and complete, which requires nothing beyond itself to make sense of itself. The criterion of this process, which Oakeshott at one point seems to understand as a form of self-correspondence, he generally refers to as ‘coherence’.[14] It is the master-concept of EM.

      The process of reaching coherence is one of permanent transformation of all of experience so as to correspond with itself, a process of total revolution, since the indissoluble unity of experience requires that a change of any part is a change of every part, just as the addition of any new substance to a solution alters the entire balance and composition of the solution as a

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