The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

t h e

phi l o so p hy

o f

OAKESHOTT T E R R Y

N A R D I N

the philosophy of michael oakeshott

the philosophy of

t e r r y

n a r d i n

the pennsylvania state university press university park, pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nardin, Terry, 1942– The philosophy of Michael Oakeshott / Terry Nardin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-271-02156-X (alk. paper) 1. Oakeshott, Michael Joseph, 1901–1990. I. Title. B1649.O34 N3 2001 192—dc21

2001021478

Copyright © 2001 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper for the first printing of all clothbound books. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

C o n t e n t s

Preface

vii

Abbreviations

xi

Introduction

1

1

Understanding

15

2

Understanding and Doing

55

3

Understanding in the Human Sciences

101

4

Historical Understanding

141

5

Understanding the Civil Condition

183

Conclusion

225

Index

237

P r e f a c e

To read Oakeshott with care is to sense that one is in the presence of a peculiarly philosophical mind. And the more carefully one reads his works, the more one is likely to see Oakeshott as making an important contribution to twentiethcentury philosophy, even though his ideas are seldom discussed in the literature of academic philosophy. There are many reasons for this neglect. Oakeshott was educated in the history of political thought and pursued a career teaching that subject. His home ground is political theory, broadly defined, and his forays into the broader fields of philosophy and history are motivated in part by a need to solve problems he encountered as a philosopher of politics or a historian of political thought. Consequently, Oakeshott’s writings are most familiar to historians, philosophers, and political scientists interested in political thought, and most of what has been written about him has been written by such scholars (among whom I must include myself). Beyond this, Oakeshott was a remarkably independent person–a teacher and thinker who shunned honors and notoriety, seldom cited the work of other scholars, and persisted in working out his own ideas and formulating them in his own terms instead of entering the terms of current debate. Partisans have invoked his ideas to advance one side or another in the political controversies of our time, but the effort has seldom been successful because Oakeshott’s concerns are by and large not immediately political, whatever their political implications may appear to be, but philosophical. It is unfortunate that Oakeshott is still largely known through the more polemical essays in Rationalism and Politics, and that his most philosophical

viii

Preface

writings, especially the early Experience and Its Modes and the late On History and Other Essays, have been ignored by almost everyone. For all these reasons, casual references to Oakeshott in both the popular and academic political literature are mostly beside the point even when they are not, as is often the case, merely uncomprehending and hostile. There are books and articles that pay attention to the larger philosophical context of Oakeshott’s political thought, some of them quite good, but few have set out to understand Oakeshott’s philosophy apart from his thought as a political philosopher. No one, certainly, has attempted to reconstruct that philosophy systematically. My book does give some attention to Oakeshott’s philosophy of politics– more precisely, of morality, law, and government. But it is primarily concerned with his ideas on a broader range of questions, including the idea of truth, the various forms of knowledge, the relationship between theory and practice, the place of interpretation in the social sciences, the character and importance of historical explanation, and the definition of philosophy itself. My aim is to provide an interpretation of the philosophy constituted by these ideas that explains both its details and its spirit more fully and more clearly than has so far been done. To study how a thinker investigates philosophical questions is inevitably to think about the questions themselves. But this can be done either deliberately or incidentally, that is, either more or less philosophically. This book is a work of philosophical interpretation, one that rests upon and is disciplined by the texts on which it comments and that takes account of their historical context. But it also seeks to restate and sometimes to revise or extend the arguments of those texts in a manner that is faithful not only to what each text has to say but to the implicit coherence of their arguments. Doing this means paying attention to how Oakeshott’s ideas changed over a period of more than sixty years while also noticing continuities, reconciling what can be reconciled and identifying what is irreconcilable. To facilitate this project of philosophical reconstruction, I have chosen for the most part to organize my discussion topically rather than to treat Oakeshott’s writings individually and chronologically. In my judgment, the costs of doing so, from the standpoint of the intellectual historian, are compensated for by the understanding gained from comparing arguments made at different times and in different contexts. By attempting to reconstruct Oakeshott’s philosophy, I hope that both its power and its limitations will come more clearly into view. I try to read, as everyone should, both critically and sympathetically. The writings of a philoso-

ix

Preface

pher typically reveal a system that, no matter how carefully constructed, is marred by irrelevancies, logical inconsistencies, unexplored implications, and rhetorical exaggerations. To read unsympathetically is to make much of such blemishes while failing to attend to the overall system. A sympathetic reading, in contrast, will focus on that system, noting the imperfections but keeping them in proportion, and it will not reject a philosopher’s conclusions simply because they are at variance with commonly acknowledged truths. My aim in this book is to help those who are interested in engaging Oakeshott philosophically by providing an appropriate context, which is his philosophy as a whole, within which to understand his particular arguments, their significance, and their occasional but inevitable failures of coherence. There are two things a reader might expect from a book of this kind that this one does not provide. First, it does not provide an evaluation of Oakeshott’s philosophy from an external standpoint. My concern is to interpret and explain Oakeshott’s ideas, not to support or criticize his conclusions according to an independently grounded standard. Because Oakeshott’s own antifoundational conception of knowledge is one that depends on internal coherence rather than correspondence to an external criterion, it is especially appropriate to see where Oakeshott’s philosophy does and does not make sense in its own terms. To judge that philosophy by how well it corresponds to such a criterion would in any case be a difficult undertaking. In addition to mastering Oakeshott’s own subtle and subversive thought, one would have to articulate an alternative system of ideas and defend its objectivity. At this stage in the history of our appreciation of Oakeshott’s contribution to philosophy, there is more to be gained by attempting to understand the structure and presuppositions of his thought than by judging his conclusions from some other standpoint. Much of what has been written on Oakeshott does precisely that, and is the worse for it. It is all too easy to dismiss an argument or even an entire philosophy when it is expressed in an unfamiliar idiom or challenges one’s own assumptions. Second, the book does not provide a full discussion of the scholarly literature on Oakeshott. Although I have learned much from those who have explicated or criticized Oakeshott’s ideas, I mention their writings only occasionally–often in the notes, which contain nothing that is necessary to the argument of the book. In choosing for the most part not to engage this literature directly, I am not trying to avoid controversy: my interpretations and arguments, if others disagree with them, are controversial. But my purpose is to understand Oakeshott’s philosophy, not to endorse or dispute what others have said about it.

x

Preface

As Oakeshott once put it, the philosopher, qua philosopher, writes to make his own mind clear. If the reader who chooses to come along finds this personal journey instructive, both will have gained something. I want to thank Sarah Tobias, my research assistant when I began working on this project, for assembling what at the time was a nearly complete collection of published writings by or about Oakeshott. Thanks are also due the librarians in the Interlibrary Loan Department at the Golda Meir Library of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee for patiently handling our many requests; to Alison Sproston at the library of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, for copies of essays Oakeshott wrote for the college magazine; and to Josiah Lee Auspitz and David Boucher, who supplied other rare items. Luke O’Sullivan’s dissertation, “Oakeshott on History” (Australian National University, 1996), pays careful attention to Oakeshott’s work on the history of political thought, much of it still unpublished. The dissertation is an invaluable source of information and insight, and I thank Dr. O’Sullivan for providing me with a copy. John Liddington kindly shared an early version of his indispensable bibliography, now available in Jesse Norman, ed., The Achievement of Michael Oakeshott (London: Duckworth, 1993), 107–43. For updates to this bibliography and much else of use to those interested in Oakeshott, one can now consult the web site of the Michael Oakeshott Association (www.michael-oakeshott-association.org). I am indebted to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee for granting me a Graduate School Research Committee award and then a sabbatical leave to work on this project. The School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton provided a stimulating environment in which to write the first draft of this book, and the Center for European Studies at Harvard University was generous in making its resources available to me as I revised the manuscript for publication. The readers for Penn State University Press, Joseph Margolis and David Boucher, provided excellent criticism and advice. Finally, for help and encouragement at critical stages I want to thank William F. Halloran, David Mapel, Michael Walzer, Timothy Fuller, Noël O’Sullivan, Sanford Thatcher, and above all Jane Nardin. I have incorporated parts of my article “Michael Oakeshott’s World of Ideas,” Studies in Political Thought 2 (1993), 17–30, with the permission of the editors.

A b b r e v i a t i o n s

CPJ EM HCA MPME OH OHC PFPS RP RPML VLL VMES

“The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence,” Politica 3 (1938), 203–22 and 345–60. Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933). Hobbes on Civil Association (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975). Morality and Politics in Modern Europe: The Harvard Lectures, ed. Shirley Robin Letwin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). On History and Other Essays (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). On Human Conduct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, new and expanded ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991). Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). “The Vocabulary of a Modern European State,” Political Studies 23 (1975), 340.

Introduction

Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) is widely recognized as one of the more important political thinkers of the past century. It is less widely recognized that he is one of the more philosophical. Oakeshott is concerned with our understanding of political activity, but he goes far beyond this concern to offer a critical philosophy of human activity generally and of the disciplines that interpret and explain it. And, against a persistent tendency in these disciplines, he defends the view that inquiry can be independent of practical concerns, even when its subject is the thoughts and actions of human beings. This book is a study of Oakeshott’s efforts, during the course of many years, to articulate a comprehensive, nonreductive, and fully philosophical understanding of human conduct and of our knowledge of human conduct. Instead of focusing on Oakeshott’s political thought, it is concerned primarily with his ideas about the character and forms of knowledge, especially our knowledge of intelligent human activity. Such an approach is warranted not only by Oakeshott’s interest in philosophy but also by his depreciation of politics as usually conceived and his rejection of established styles of political theorizing. Even if we accept the view that Oakeshott’s most valuable and enduring contribution is as a theorist of politics, we cannot fully understand this contribution unless we read his work in the context of a wider range of

2

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

ideas. The book examines, philosophically, ideas about human experience and what might be called “the human sciences” that shape his thought. Three concepts—modality, contingency, and civility—are central to Oakeshott’s philosophy and therefore to my reconstruction of it. In his first book, Experience and Its Modes (1933), Oakeshott develops the view, already present in the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and the British Idealists from Green to Collingwood, that ideas are prior to and therefore not merely the product of experience. Ideas, moreover, sometimes acquire the character of distinct and self-consistent “modes” of understanding: scientific, historical, practical, aesthetic, and so forth. To the inherited problem of identifying these modes and discerning their relationships with one another, the book contributes a skeptical and innovative answer. For Oakeshott, modes are not permanent forms arranged, as the Idealists were inclined to argue, in a necessary and hierarchical manner; they are historical, mutable creations. Each mode brings to experience its own criteria of factuality, truth, and reality. Some recognized forms of experience or inquiry cannot, however, be regarded as coherent modes; they are ambiguous unions of ideas belonging to different modes and, as such, a source not of genuine knowledge but of confusion and error. Oakeshott was especially interested in history as a mode of understanding and inquiry. What distinguishes historical inquiry from other modes, he argues, is that it is concerned not merely to explain the past but to discover it. Positivist theories of historical explanation, which appeared with the emergence of history as a systematic discipline in the middle of the nineteenth century, assume that historical inquiry aims to account for the occurrence of events whose meaning (“character”) is already known. But this, Oakeshott maintains, is precisely what the historian cannot assume. Historical inquiry is not a matter of explaining known events, events whose character is simply given. It requires historians to infer past events on the basis of evidence that has survived into the present. To explain an event historically is to relate it to antecedent events so that its character is illuminated by the relationship (which Oakeshott calls a relationship of “contingency”) the historian has identified. Contingency, which must be distinguished from accident on one side and from necessity on the other, is therefore central to the conception of causality presupposed in historical explanation. And because the historian cannot take for granted the existence, boundaries, and significance of historical events, it is proper to say that historical inquiry not only infers but constructs a past on the basis of evidence. Discovery, it turns out, is a kind of disciplined creation. This constructionist theory, expounded most fully in On History (1983), refines

3

Introduction

the view of history as a distinct mode of inquiry that Oakeshott first stated in Experience and Its Modes, fifty years before. In his magnum opus, On Human Conduct (1975), Oakeshott uses the ideas of modality and contingency to identify the forms of inquiry best suited to understanding human activity. Here, he develops the argument that history, not science, provides the model for explanations in the human sciences. It does so in two ways. First, in all the social sciences and humanities, we explicitly or implicitly refer to individual, historically-particular practices (customs, traditions, genres, discourses, etc.) in making sense of particular acts, utterances, works of art, and other human performances. But to explain why these performances and not others occurred, we must go beyond displaying their conventional character as expressions of practices and show them to be the outcome of events to which they are contingently related. Second, although certain aspects of human behavior can be explained scientifically as the unconscious product of psychological, physiological, genetic, or other natural processes, such knowledge is irrelevant to understanding human conduct as “conduct”—that is, as intelligent choice and action. The scientific paradigm, when applied beyond its proper limits, involves modal confusion. Such confusion, Oakeshott argues, is endemic in the social sciences, which persistently confuse scientific with historical inquiry and theoretical understanding with practical relevance. Oakeshott puts these ideas about the study of human conduct to work in his writings on morality, law, and government. In these writings he defines morality as a noninstrumental practice affecting transactions between intelligent and freely-choosing human beings, distinguishes the rule of law from managerial rule, and provides an acute examination of our inherited vocabulary of political discourse. Central to these inquiries is the idea of civil association, understood as a mode of human relationship in which the moral life is actualized in a system of laws. But the idea of civil association is, for Oakeshott, more than a tool for understanding the problem of legal order; it is also a metaphor for the civilized coexistence of different viewpoints, an emblem of the modal diversity of human experience. As a number of careful studies have shown, much light can be cast on Oakeshott’s political thought by relating it to his philosophy.1 But his political thought also illuminates this philosophy 1. W. H. Greenleaf, Oakeshott’s Philosophical Politics (London: Longman’s, 1966); Josiah Lee Auspitz, “Individuality, Civility, and Theory: The Philosophical Imagination of Michael Oakeshott,” Political Theory 4 (1976), 261–94; and Paul Franco, The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

4

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

by illustrating how its organizing ideas work when they are used to interpret a particular domain of human activity. A few of Oakeshott’s ideas—his critique of “Rationalism” as a style of practical thinking or the image (popularized by Richard Rorty) of civilization as a “conversation” between modes of thought—have filtered into general literate culture.2 But these ideas are often misunderstood and other aspects of Oakeshott’s thought remain unknown except within a narrow circle of specialists. Until quite recently, the secondary literature has been preoccupied with the political implications of his ideas and with locating those ideas on a left-right continuum. Only now is attention beginning to focus on Oakeshott’s efforts, historical as well as philosophical, to understand the basic concepts used in thinking about politics. I hope to show that his writings on philosophy, science, history, morality, religion, and art offer arguments that go far beyond a practical, historical, or even philosophical concern with politics to enter broader debates about the character of human thought and action, the scope and limits of the human sciences, and the relationship of these sciences to other kinds of inquiry and understanding.3 What Oakeshott has to say on these subjects is interesting in itself and constitutes a significant contribution to philosophy. This significance can be described in a variety of ways. One approach is to identify Oakeshott’s contribution as providing an alternative to naturalism that avoids the common mistakes of twentieth-century antinaturalism. Like Dewey, Heidegger, Foucault, Rorty, and many other twentieth-century philosophers, Oakeshott rejects the naturalist premise that the experienced world consists of objects that are real in the sense that their existence is independent of human experience and therefore of human concepts and practices. But he does not accept the conclusion often reached by such thinkers that philosophy, because it criticizes the claims of naturalist epistemology, is inherently practical or normative—“a matter of fulfilling human needs and interests,” as Rorty puts it.4 Oakeshott’s conception of philosophy took shape during a period in 2. The conversation metaphor is used by Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) and seems to have been propagated mainly from that source. 3. Broader treatments of Oakeshott’s thought include Robert Grant’s insightful but brief Oakeshott (London: Claridge Press, 1990); David Boucher, “Human Conduct, History, and Social Science in the Works of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott,” New Literary History 24 (1993), 697–717; and Harwell Wells, “The Philosophical Michael Oakeshott,” Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994), 129–45. 4. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), xxvii. I cannot do justice here to Rorty’s complex and deliberately provocative arguments.

5

Introduction

which philosophers were especially concerned with rethinking its proper aims. The view he arrived at is a Socratic one: philosophy is not a set of answers to questions about the nature of the physical world, the foundations of mathematics, the good life, or any other subject; it is the activity of questioning itself. It is a way of thinking about such questions and moreover a way of thinking that is essentially critical or destructive. In holding this view, though not in many other respects, Oakeshott is close in spirit to the strand in twentieth-century British analytic philosophy exemplified by the later Wittgenstein, and to a parallel strand in Continental philosophy evident in the writings of Nietzsche or Derrida. In philosophy one does not acquire knowledge about things presumed to exist as the things they are apart from that knowledge; one dispels illusions, uncovers presuppositions, disentangles linguistic confusions, clarifies concepts, distinguishes interpretive contexts, or deconstructs ontological distinctions. In doing so, one comes to grasp the character and limits of one’s knowledge. Nothing in this attitude commits one, however, to the conclusion that the criterion of truth in philosophy is the power of its insights to satisfy human desires. One of the main forms of naturalism in modern times is “scientism,” the claim that only science can provide genuine knowledge of the nature of things and therefore that scientific knowledge is the model or foundation of all knowledge. For Oakeshott, science is not a description of the world as it really is but one “mode” of understanding among others. Like history, practice, or art, science organizes experience according to its own categories and presuppositions, including its own distinctive criteria of reality and truth. To insist that the categories and criteria of scientific realism are the only terms on which rational discourse can proceed is to deny the autonomy and significance of all other kinds of discourse. A. J. Ayer’s version of logical positivism is but an extreme example of this argument.5 Because scientism is recurrent in philosophy and is still common in the social sciences despite broad acceptance of the case against positivism, what Oakeshott has to say on this theme remains relevant to current debates about the character of scientific knowledge, including the place of science in understanding human conduct. Another way to bring out Oakeshott’s significance for contemporary philosophy is to locate his thought in the context of twentieth-century philosophical hermeneutics. Like other philosophers for whom “meaning” is a crucial idea, Oakeshott can be understood as working through the implications of Hegel’s 5. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (London: Gollancz, 1936).

6

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

program for theorizing the basic categories of human experience. Like Hegel, Oakeshott is critical of the naive “positivity” of inherited religious, moral, and scientific ideas, but, against Hegel, he is skeptical that a completely critical and therefore permanent and unconditional understanding is achievable or even intelligible. No matter how thoroughly it criticizes its own conditions, understanding is always conditional and therefore subject to further criticism. Like Hegel, Oakeshott views all conclusions as historically-conditioned constructions. But he rejects Hegel’s view that history is the story of the development of “reason” or “mind” through a dialectical process that must yield, as a consequence of its progressive logic, ever more complete and coherent understandings within which the particular constructs of religion, science, and other forms of experience have their place. For Oakeshott, human understandings have their histories, but there is no universal history of progressive enlightenment, no grand narrative of the cumulative and irreversible evolution of mind, no teleological march of spirit revealed in the collective self-education of the human race, no “end of history” in which mankind, having come to understand itself fully, will at last be “at home in the world.” If these Hegelian ideas are among the defining assumptions of modernism, Oakeshott’s rejection of them can be seen as characteristically postmodern. But like postmodernism in general, Oakeshott’s version of it retains Hegel’s commitment to the proposition that the world is constituted by meanings, and therefore that all understanding, including scientific knowledge and philosophy itself, is necessarily interpretive or hermeneutical. With respect to this issue, one can compare Oakeshott’s version of philosophical hermeneutics with the views of other practitioners from Heidegger to Rorty. All thinkers in the hermeneutic tradition start with the premise that experience is shaped by meanings and therefore that interpretation is part of experience itself. We naively believe that we experience the world as it really is, unaware that this experience is mediated by concepts. Because all our perceptions, judgments, and theories are interpretations, understanding cannot be divorced from the effort to become aware of the interpretive concepts we take for granted. To understand is to understand better something we already in some way understand. Hence the supreme importance of interpretation in philosophy, which may be defined in this context as an inquiry distinguished from other inquiries in being more fully committed to questioning the interpretations that constitute knowledge in any domain of experience. Each domain has its own specialized hermeneutics in the narrow sense of rules for interpreting evidence. But, as Gadamer in particular has emphasized, philosophical hermeneutics is not a

7

Introduction

method of generating knowledge in philosophy, conceived as one field among others. It is a theory of knowledge according to which understanding in any field, including ordinary experience, must be seen as emerging from encounters between an interpreter and what is interpreted. Every such encounter yields an interpretation that can itself be examined in a critical juxtaposition with other interpretations. Understanding is a dialectical process in which understandings are achieved, criticized, refined, revised, and sometimes abandoned, and in which an understood world is thereby gradually and provisionally constructed.6 Although he shares this dialectical conception of knowledge, Oakeshott’s philosophical hermeneutics departs in significant ways from the versions offered by pragmatism and phenomenology. In its origins, hermeneutics was understood to be a matter of interpreting texts, but the idea of a “text” soon expanded to include a variety of text-analogues—gestures, rituals, costumes, and other cultural objects. Hermeneutics became the method of a wide range of disciplines concerned with human conduct and its products, and then (in the philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey) the key to distinguishing the human from the natural sciences. But one could also argue, as did Idealists after Kant, that because experience always requires ideas to organize its perceptions, all experience is determined by meanings. For Heidegger and Gadamer, exploring the implications of this basic Idealist claim, hermeneutics is universal because experience is always mediated by ideas, always a matter of language and meaning. But if all knowledge is dependent on meanings, it would seem that we cannot categorically distinguish the human from the natural sciences, for both are expressed in language and bring concepts to the interpretation of their material. Rorty offers a version of this monist view when he argues that because all experience involves meaning and the interpretation of meaning, “anything is, for purposes of being inquired into, ‘constituted’ by a web of meanings.” It follows that there is no significant distinction between matter and mind, nature and consciousness— “no interesting difference between tables and texts, between protons and poems.”7 Hermeneutics is as necessary to explaining natural phenomena as it is to explaining human actions. It may be convenient for certain purposes to distinguish between the natural and the human sciences, but no purposeindependent validity can be claimed for the distinction. 6. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976). 7. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 199, 153.

8

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

Like others who defend the autonomy of the human sciences, Oakeshott rejects as misconceived the positivist program of explaining human thought and action in the same terms that science uses to explain natural phenomena. But he also rejects the hermeneutic claim that because all knowledge involves the interpretation of meanings, no distinction can be made between the natural and the human sciences. From Oakeshott’s perspective, the defect in “universal hermeneutics” is that it fails to distinguish two levels of meaning evoked by the actions of any being who can grasp and use meanings. The first of these levels consists of meanings that the observer brings to the interpretation of a given passage of experience, including the events and processes of inanimate nature. The second consists of meanings that belong to the experience that is being observed, as happens when this experience involves the intelligent acts of human beings. These meanings include both the self-understandings of an agent and collective understandings—about which an agent may know little or be mistaken—that are embedded in languages, traditions, and cultures. Such meanings, which do not exist in what we choose to categorize as “nature,” are required to make sense of human conduct insofar as it involves intelligent thought and action. To understand human conduct, when we conceive it as something more than an outcome of natural processes, we must pay attention to both levels of meaning. In the human sciences, the things we explain, as well our explanations, consist of meanings. If all sciences are hermeneutic, the human sciences are doubly hermeneutic because they involve a level of meaning, and therefore of interpretation, beyond that required in the natural sciences. This is a significant difference between the natural and the human sciences.8 It is not, however, an ontological difference, because the distinction lies not in the “nature” of the objects we want to understand but in how we categorize them. Another doubtful conclusion recurrent in the hermeneutic tradition is that because understanding necessarily involves interpretation, all knowledge must reflect the interests of the interpreter. In its more extreme forms, this claim becomes an unqualified relativism according to which all judgments are subjective and without rational justification. A more plausible version is the prag8. Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor distinguish the human from the natural sciences in terms of the doubly hermeneutic character of the latter, but like many philosophers in the hermeneutic tradition they obscure their case by linking it to a Heideggerian assertion of the primacy of ordinary lived experience (Dreyfus) or the related alleged impossibility of “value neutrality” (Taylor). Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Holism and Hermeneutics,” Review of Metaphysics 34 (1980), 3–23; Charles Taylor, “Understanding in the Human Sciences,” Review of Metaphysics 34 (1980), 24–38.

9

Introduction

matist argument that the justification of any distinction lies in its use. According to this argument, the truth of a proposition depends not on whether it corresponds to a given, objective reality but on whether it proves useful in a given context. Truth is not a matter of epistemology but of utility, and because what is useful depends on human values and aims, what counts as knowledge cannot be determined apart from the particular human interests it serves. All knowledge is practical knowledge because it is a tool for making sense of the world in relation to human concerns. If we can distinguish different sciences, it is because they respond in different ways to such concerns. Jürgen Habermas makes such an argument when he rejects the naturalist claim that scientific inquiry yields knowledge of the world as it is, knowledge that is objective in the sense that it is independent of human concerns. Science, Habermas agues, is knowledge constructed from the standpoint of an interest in controlling nature to realize human aims. Knowledge of human conduct, in contrast, involves meaning and agency, and this implies an interest not in technological control but in transparent communication and the emancipation of human action from forms of power that depend on technological control or hermeneutic manipulation.9 For Habermas, there is no such thing as knowledge in and for itself. But even if we grant his point that inquiry is always practically motivated, it does not follow that its conclusions are practical. It is trivially true that knowledge is the outcome of a social activity, but unless we wish to reduce knowledge to ideology, we must regard this outcome as an “assemblage of truths” (that is, putative truths—hypotheses or propositions) and recognize that to reason within a given field is to be concerned with these truths, not with the social process that generated them.10 Oakeshott argues that even if we regard every conclusion as the outcome of a practical activity, its truth can be judged according to criteria that are independent of the interests of those who produced it. Habermas’s argument that knowledge in all its forms is inherently practical draws on German theories of the primacy of the “life-world,” the world of ordinary, prescientific human experience. According to these theories, which are central to phenomenology and existentialism, practical experience is not a limited mode of experience but a necessary feature of human existence and

9. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971). 10. Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 66–67.

10

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

therefore the ultimate basis of all knowledge. Heidegger, for example, argues that we inhabit a world that we understand immediately in relation to ourselves and our purposes. Everything we think is determined by these purposes. Science and other “objective” forms of knowledge presuppose the understanding that springs from our immediate practical activities and concerns. They are interpretations of the primordial experience of living. But in Oakeshott’s view, this conclusion awards unjustifiable primacy to ordinary practical experience. No experience, no interpretation, can be deemed primary on the (mistaken) grounds that it is not mediated by concepts or that it constitutes the raw material for all other interpretations.11 Practical activity can be understood in ways that are not themselves practical: we can stand outside the world of practical activity and interpret that world using ideas that belong to another universe of discourse. To make a decision is to reach a conclusion within the practical mode. But that decision can be understood not only practically—as prudent or imprudent, lawful or unlawful, or in some other way good or bad. It can be understood historically—as a contingent outcome of antecedent events—or philosophically—as entailed by the ideas it presupposes. It can be regarded as material for a painting, poem, or novel or made an object of scientific explanation by being aggregated with other decisions to generate statistical patterns. In each of these modes, knowledge escapes the practical circumstances of its creation and succeeds or fails according to the standards of judgment acknowledged in that mode. Each mode of understanding, in short, has its own criteria of truth according to which it determines what is factual and real. In contrast to the arbitrary foundationalism of those who privilege practical experience, Oakeshott’s modal epistemology is pluralistic. It challenges the conclusion that practice, science, art, or any other mode of understanding enjoys a uniquely privileged position with respect to what is true or real. In this sense, it offers a critique not only of naturalism but of foundationalism in all its forms. Not only is this critique more nuanced and less reductive than the critiques offered by pragmatism, but it reveals pragmatism itself to be foundationalist insofar as it privileges ordinary lived experience as the source of all knowledge and human concerns as the criterion of its adequacy. It is in this context that we can appreciate Oakeshott’s significance as a political philosopher. The study of politics typically proceeds within one mode 11. On Oakeshott’s rejection of the “primacy of practice” argument, see Horst Mewes, “Modern Individualism: Reflections on Oakeshott, Arendt, and Strauss,” Political Science Reviewer 21 (1992), 136–37.

11

Introduction

or another. It may describe constitutions, votes, policies, or ideologies and seek to explain them historically or scientifically. It may offer judgments or prescriptions—propositions in the practical mode—about these objects. Often, at the risk of modal confusion, it does several of these things at once. And in addition to interpreting political activity and discourse within these modes of inquiry, one can seek to uncover its presuppositions and to clarify its concepts. Such inquiry can be called philosophical, bearing in mind that it is not the only activity that goes on under the label of philosophy. Any aspect of practical experience can be examined philosophically in this sense of the term. Philosophical inquiry, so conceived, has a recognized place in the fields of moral and legal philosophy. Moral philosophers commonly distinguish the branch of their field they call metaethics, which investigates ethical concepts and assumptions, from normative ethics, which is prescriptive. Similarly, legal philosophers distinguish between analytical and normative jurisprudence. There is no reason why political philosophy, too, cannot be truly philosophical, critically examining the assumptions that underlie political discourse to achieve clearer and more coherent definitions of political ideas. But the place of purely philosophical concerns is less widely acknowledged in the field of political theory than in moral and legal philosophy. Political theorists are inclined to see their proper activity as prescriptive reflection and argument. Many would insist that philosophical detachment is impossible and, when claimed, spurious. One reason for reading Oakeshott is that he challenges this widely held view, illustrating in his own work the proposition that one can theorize politics without engaging in prescriptive political theorizing. For Oakeshott, to investigate an activity philosophically is not, as such, to engage in the activity being investigated, though one’s philosophizing can, of course, be affected by unacknowledged practical assumptions or concerns. But we can distinguish within the miscellany of concerns that constitutes political theory as actually practiced a concern to generate propositions that are not themselves practical. If the study of practical activity is authentically philosophical, it cannot provide us with ends to pursue. For that reason, Oakeshott argues, a “philosophy of politics” does not fail as philosophy because it fails to provide the practical guidance that is often looked for in “political philosophy.” Because philosophy, as the criticism of concepts and presuppositions, is skeptical, even destructive, it cannot answer the demand placed upon it to provide practical guidance. To offer such guidance is to make use of practical ideas, not to examine them. It is to presuppose the truth of these ideas, not to question their truth. But, Oakeshott insists, we can study the prescriptions of political discourse in ways that are not themselves prescriptive. We

12

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

can step outside the world of political debate to investigate its character and presuppositions. The self-understanding of political theory, as it is commonly practiced, sadly denies the genuinely philosophical character that it is capable of achieving. It is his achievements as a philosopher committed to disengaging theorizing from practical concerns that will, I believe, ultimately distinguish Oakeshott from the political theorists of his time. But one should not exaggerate the differences between Oakeshott and his twentieth-century contemporaries, significant though these differences are. Doing so merely reinforces the mistaken judgment that he is a marginal figure without much to contribute to the philosophical questions that concern us. Instead of relegating Oakeshott to a minor role as the scourge of Rationalism, an articulate defender of conservatism, or one more member of the liberal chorus, we can regard him as carrying on a tradition of philosophical criticism in which practically engaged political theorists also participate, despite their denial that such criticism can be divorced from practical concerns. We can read him as sharing Leo Strauss’s fascination with the Platonic view of philosophy as an ascent from the cave of unexamined ideas, but without joining Strauss in concluding that political opinion can be replaced by the philosopher’s knowledge of the unequivocal “nature” of political things. We can read him as joining Michael Walzer in exploring the shared meanings that constitute a community, without resolving, as Walzer does, to “stand in the cave.”12 And we can read him as inspiring J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and other contributors to a revived discipline of historical studies of political thought by emphasizing the importance of languages of discourse as the context for reading political texts. But, for the most part, Oakeshott did not himself minutely investigate particular texts and contexts; nor was he inclined, like some practitioners of this craft, to reduce the arguments of all such texts to mere ideologies.13

12. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), xiv. 13. Oakeshott distinguishes “ideological” writings concerned with claims to rule and the duties of rulers from those concerned with “instrumental reflection” on the exercise of power or with “philosophical reflection” that rises above both ideology and expediency. Review of Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Historical Journal 23 (1980), 449–50. Oakeshott’s influence on the historical study of political thought is evident in J. G. A. Pocock, “Time, Institutions, and Action: An Essay on Traditions and Their Understanding,” in Preston King and B. C. Parekh, eds., Politics and Experience: Essays Presented to Professor Michael Oakeshott on the Occasion of His Retirement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 209–37.

13

Introduction

Like Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, Oakeshott examines the tension between governmental power and individual freedom. For Oakeshott, as for Hayek, the laws of a free society are rules, not purposive commands, and they constrain government while providing a framework in which individuals can pursue their own self-chosen goals. But where Hayek’s concerns are largely prescriptive, Oakeshott stands back to analyze the history and presuppositions of the concepts central to the modern practice of individual freedom. For Oakeshott, “the rule of law” is neither a slogan nor an ideal but a mode of human association. Like Popper, Oakeshott seeks to identify the kind of society within which individual liberty can flourish, but he does not accept Popper’s scientific realism, his teleological view of the “evolution” of human knowledge, or his conclusion that scientific rationalism is the key to rational planning: unlike Popper, Oakeshott does not conclude that social engineering is defensible if prudently exercised, as if the objection to managerial government were technical rather than moral. Like John Rawls, Oakeshott sees “justice” as suspended between political practice and philosophical abstraction. Both think that no conception of justice can be acceptable to the philosopher without being transformed through criticism of its assumptions, but also that no philosophical conception of justice can entirely escape being an interpretation of the political experience of particular communities. But Oakeshott does not share Rawls’s understanding of society as a scheme of cooperation conceived, in part, as an enterprise for distributing substantive benefits, or his view that justice includes principles governing such a distribution. Like Robert Nozick, Oakeshott regards morality as a noninstrumental practice premised on the idea that human beings are freely-choosing agents and, by implication, on the rights of agents to recognition and respect. But he does not simply postulate such rights, as Nozick does; nor does he conclude that the market and the minimal state are, even in principle, joint instruments for securing the enjoyment of such rights. And he does not link human agency and human rights to some set of basic goods or capabilities, in the manner of John Finnis or Martha Nussbaum. Like Habermas, Oakeshott articulates a comprehensive vision of morality, law, and government in relation to human experience as a whole—a vision that is attentive to the diversity of human experience and to the modes of understanding we use to interpret and explain that experience. But he would regard as misguided Habermas’s underlying pragmatism or his efforts to synthesize moral, philosophical, and sociological conclusions within a common framework.

14

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

Unlike many of his contemporaries, then, Oakeshott does not think that political philosophy can establish a determinate foundation for substantive moral and political principles. Nor does he think that the task of political philosophy is to work out the practical implications of such principles. Political philosophy seeks an understanding of justice and other political concepts that is neither metaphysical nor political. Once one understands that Oakeshott’s project is philosophical—where philosophy is understood to investigate critically the presuppositions of different modes of human understanding and association—one understands why his writings can leave readers who are looking for substantive political arguments puzzled and unsatisfied. One also understands why the demand for intellectual and moral closure in philosophy is unreasonable, and why the promises of political theory are so often empty. Reading Oakeshott, one acquires a deeper understanding of the character of philosophy and its place in the conversation of mankind.

chapter

o n e

Understanding Perhaps the only satisfactory view would be one which grasped, even more thoroughly than Hegel’s, the fact that what we have, and all we have, is a world of “meanings,” and constructed its philosophy without recourse to extraneous conceptions which belong to other views. —“Experience and Reality” (EM 61) The greatest difficulty in philosophical reflection is to throw off the allegiance, which continuously forces itself upon us, to so-called “fact.”. . . We speak of reflection on or about something, and thereby inadvertently attribute the character of a foundation to what is really only a starting-place. —“Political Philosophy” (RPML 152)

Oakeshott’s first book, Experience and Its Modes, is concerned with the central concepts and problems of epistemology, an inquiry often regarded, at least in modern times, as the core of philosophy. But epistemology is not easily distinguished from metaphysics or from other philosophical inquiries. It is sometimes said that epistemology is concerned with how knowledge (true belief) is acquired and justified, whereas metaphysics is concerned with what is real and with the basic categories of existence, but one cannot go far in investigating truth without engaging questions about reality and existence. Or it may be said that epistemology is concerned with knowledge in general and other branches of philosophy with particular kinds of knowledge. But to say this is to beg one of the main questions of epistemology: whether there is such a thing as knowledge in general, as distinct from specific kinds of knowledge. An epistemological work, then, is one that must confront other philosophical

16

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

questions as well, and one of these is the character and scope of epistemology itself. It might help, in grasping what Oakeshott is up to in this book, to locate his inquiry in relation to two broad epistemological traditions. The first conceives epistemology, as Descartes conceived it, to be a response to skepticism. The skeptic denies the possibility of knowledge, so to answer skepticism one is forced to define what knowledge is and show that it is possible. Though they claim to be concerned with knowledge in general, philosophers in this tradition focus on certain supposedly elementary ways of knowing, like sensation or perception. The implication is that what holds for them holds for more complex forms of knowledge as well. Traces of this approach, well represented in both analytic philosophy and phenomenology, can be detected in Experience and Its Modes, but the book is more securely located in another tradition that begins not with skepticism but with the kinds of knowledge we actually have: with ordinary sensory experience but also with mathematical, linguistic, historical, and other kinds of knowledge that are not easily analyzed in terms of such experience. For philosophers in this tradition, a theory of knowledge must concern itself with the diverse, often complex, forms that knowledge actually takes; it cannot limit itself to sense-data or treat sensation as paradigmatic. Oakeshott, then, begins his philosophical career standing with the British Hegelians and German neo-Kantians against whom, around 1900, Moore and Russell in England and Husserl in Germany had launched their revolutions. Oakeshott considers the character and forms of knowledge in many of his writings, but nowhere more thoroughly than in Experience and Its Modes. The book takes as its subject “experience,” which it defines not only as the activity of a thinking subject and the sensations, perceptions, memories, and other ideas generated by this activity, but as a real world in which these ideas receive confirmation from the totality to which they belong. The arguments that spring from this inquiry, though widely regarded as important for understanding Oakeshott’s later thought, are seldom viewed as an important contribution to philosophy. It is helpful in assessing the philosophical as well as historical significance of these arguments to compare them with what Oakeshott has to say in On Human Conduct. This book begins with an essay examining the assumptions underlying our knowledge of human activity as an expression of intelligent thought and action. Though it goes over some of the same ground as the earlier work, the essay focuses on the self-conscious and critical activity of acquiring and justifying knowledge that Oakeshott calls “theorizing.” In

17

Understanding

each of these books Oakeshott identifies categories of knowledge and distinguishes philosophy (“unconditional theorizing”) from other kinds of inquiry, on the grounds that it involves a uniquely self-critical approach to understanding. The two therefore share a consistent outlook, despite many differences. In On Human Conduct, as in most of his later writings, Oakeshott is pursuing the intimations of ideas articulated in Experience and Its Modes.1

Understanding and Experience What is it to understand the world? In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott links the idea of understanding to that of experience. Understanding is experience, which must in turn be understood as a unity involving both experiencing and what is experienced. Although “experience,” a word used in the tradition of British empiricism against which Oakeshott is reacting, implies the existence of something external to a thinking subject, an independent object to be experienced and understood, Oakeshott intends no such separation. In this respect, “understanding” and “experience” are like “interpretation,” a word Oakeshott thinks is misleading because it presupposes the existence of and assigns an identity to a “something” that is independent of how it is interpreted. “Interpretation,” he suggests, implies that the datum to be interpreted and the interpretations that are made of it exist in two permanently separated worlds, one an intellectually constructed world of interpretations, the other a world of givens that exists apart from all attempts to interpret it. “Interpretation requires something to interpret, but when we speak of it our language slips under our feet, for there is never in experience an it, an original, distinguishable from the interpretation, and consequently there can be no interpretation” (EM 31–32). But as the same can be said of “experience” and “understanding,” it is not immediately clear why Oakeshott prefers them to “interpretation,” or why he switches from “experience” in Experience and Its Modes to “understanding” in On Human Conduct. When a philosopher gives up one term and adopts another, it is often in response to the paradoxical need, in moving beyond conventional opinion, to both use and escape conventional meanings. Because any vocabulary creates 1. Oakeshott’s well-known definition of politics as the “pursuit of intimations” within a tradition of political activity (RP 56–58, 66–69), which is often taken as ideological rather than philosophical, echoes his definition of knowledge as the achievement of coherence within a system of ideas through the “pursuit of the implications” of that system (EM 41).

18

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

as well as resolves difficulties, a philosopher may look for new words to replace those that have come to seem misleading. This impulse can be seen, for example, in Rorty’s repudiation of the term “epistemology” or Heidegger’s rejection of “philosophy” itself in favor of “thinking.” It can be seen in Wittgenstein’s inauguration of a mode of philosophizing concerned with the puzzles of language and in the aphoristic style of his Philosophical Investigations and other late writings. In Oakeshott’s case, the temptation to adopt a new terminology is reinforced by an acknowledged preference for writing essays, each of which aims to express in a new way the results of rethinking an old topic.2 This recurrent desire to make a fresh start may seem inconsistent for a self-proclaimed anti-Cartesian and antirationalist, but there is in fact no inconsistency. To question the assumptions that underlie old questions is inherent in philosophy, and what Oakeshott repudiates is not this critical activity but the further effort to achieve certainty by building a structure of positive and incontestable knowledge on a presuppositionless foundation. It is characteristic of philosophy, then, that it should seek to avoid or redefine words whose uses in a given context are confused or misleading so that criticism of received ideas can continue. Philosophical thinking cannot be permanently unencumbered, but it can be liberated temporarily from meanings that have become attached to particular terms. But the philosopher’s effort to fix the meaning of words is never an end in itself: philosophy aims to define concepts, not words. As Oakeshott puts it in an early essay, philosophical definition is concerned with classification, not with stipulating meanings.3 When he rejects “interpretation” or substitutes “understanding” for “experience,” he is avoiding a word that has become too encumbered with meanings to do useful work. The wish to escape unwanted associations explains why, at the beginning of On Human Conduct, Oakeshott uses the odd expression “goings-on” where we expect him to speak of “events” or “phenomena,” and why, when, later in the book, he discusses government according to the rule of law, he relies on the Latin civitas, cives, lex, and jus instead of the English “state,” “citizens,” “law,” and “justice.” What seems like pedantry or even mere eccentricity is in fact a philosopher’s characteristic effort to control, as far as possible, the meaning of every word he uses. 2. With the exception of Experience and Its Modes, the books Oakeshott published during his lifetime are collections of essays. On Human Conduct treats the presuppositions, idea, and history of civil association in three related essays. 3. “A Discussion of Some Matters Preliminary to the Study of Political Philosophy” (unpublished typescript, 1925), 15.

19

Understanding

I have used the word “understanding” as an organizing term in this book for a number of reasons. Because Oakeshott relies on it in his later writings, where it is often paired with “inquiry,” a deliberate engagement to understand that begins and ends with an understanding, we may suppose it to reflect his considered view of an appropriate word to use in discussing experience or knowledge. Moreover, the word “understanding” figures prominently in the broad hermeneutic tradition in which much of Oakeshott’s thinking is appropriately located. As will become clear in Chapter 3, “understanding” has a diversity of contested meanings both within and beyond this tradition, so using the word does not necessarily commit one to a specific point of view. I use it, as does Oakeshott, as an umbrella term whose precise sense remains to be specified in each context in which it is deployed. I also speak of “interpretation,” an indispensable word that Oakeshott himself occasionally uses, despite his criticism of it in Experience and Its Modes. Experience as a World of Ideas The argument of Experience and Its Modes begins with the claim that to experience is to be conscious of something, and to be conscious of something is always at some level to recognize, distinguish, or identify it as something of a particular kind—a noise, a rumbling, a heavy truck going by. Such identifications already involve thinking. It hardly matters whether we begin with what is experienced or with the activity of experiencing, for the distinction is an artificial one. To speak of “experience” is to invoke a single world in which these abstractions are interdependent. Experience “not merely is inseparable from thought, but is itself a form of thought” (EM 10). Objections to this conception of experience usually rest on the argument that there are kinds of experience—sensations, perceptions, intuitions, volitions, feelings—that are in some manner independent of thought. How Oakeshott responds to objections of this kind is illustrated by his refutation of the view that “sensation” does not involve thinking or judgment. According to this view, versions of which exist in continental phenomenology as well as British empiricism, sensory experiences are unmediated by thinking of any kind. But, Oakeshott argues, the idea of sensation independent of thought is self-contradictory. Such a sensation could be no more than an isolated, unrecognized, and indeterminate “this,” the momentary state of a particular sense. There could be no continuing, individual subject whose seeing, hearing, tasting, or touching the sensation is, or any object to which the

20

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

sensation could be attributed by such a subject. In immediate sensation there is neither a determinate object nor a determinate subject. But actual experience is not like this, for experience always involves consciousness and so can never be completely indeterminate. To be conscious of something is already to recognize it and therefore to judge. And to judge is to be a thinking subject engaged in judging. What is true of sensation must also be true of perception and other more complex kinds of experience. We perceive only what has meaning for us. The proposition that there must be something prior to judgment on which judgment can act, a kind of raw material for thought, is a mistaken inference from the fact that in thinking we are always thinking about something, for it is false to infer that this something cannot itself consist of thought. In thinking we interpret interpretations, not a pure datum independent of and prior to interpretation.4 Everything given in experience is already complex, recognized, mediated, and judged—whether it is sensed, perceived, felt, willed, intuited, or deduced. Sensation and perception differ from other forms of judgment only in being less complex, less explicitly reasoned, less precisely formulated, and perhaps less coherent. Every form of experience involves some degree of judgment and thought. It follows that philosophy, especially, cannot be what it is for the empiricists or for phenomenologists like Brentano and the early Husserl, an understanding of the world that rests on uninterpreted reports of what is given in experience. Oakeshott’s arguments cogently restate a view initiated by Hegel’s revision of Kant and subsequently developed by Wilhelm Dilthey, T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, and many others. According to the line of reasoning pursued by these philosophers, because all experience involves thinking, the experienced world is a world constructed by thinking. It is, as Oakeshott puts it, “a world of ideas.” Here he adopts a concept, that of a “world” as distinct from a “class,” already common in the literature of British Idealism.5 A world, 4. “In thought there is nothing analogous to the painter’s colors or the builder’s bricks— raw material existing apart from the use made of it” (EM 19). 5. Those who use the concept include F. H. Bradley in The Principles of Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1883), Bernard Bosanquet in The Principle of Individuality and Value (London: Macmillan, 1912), and R. G. Collingwood in An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933). Oakeshott is wary of labels, but at the beginning of Experience and Its Modes he identifies his work as an effort to restate the first principles of a philosophy “known by the somewhat ambiguous name of Idealism,” and he acknowledges a debt to Hegel and Bradley (EM 6, 7).

21

Understanding

Bosanquet writes, is “a system of members, such that every member, being ex hypothesi distinct, nevertheless contributes to the unity of the whole in virtue of the peculiarities which constitute its distinctness. . . . It takes all sorts to make a world; a class is essentially of one sort only.”6 For Oakeshott, too, the unity of a world of ideas is not the unity that belongs to a class, whose members share a common element, but the kind of unity in which every element is distinct yet affected by its place in the whole. The unity of a world is to be found in the relationships among its different parts; it is not a matter of uniform abstraction. What we judge to be true is always determined by the coherence of the larger world of experience within which we judge. Experience gives us ideas that are related to other ideas. A world of ideas—what Dilthey calls a geistige Welt—is “a whole of interlocking meanings which establish and interpret one another” (VLL 45).7 To accept or reject an idea is therefore to make a judgment about whether it fits into the system of ideas we bring to bear on it and in terms of which we seek to understand it. If accepting an idea leads to discrepancies in this system, we have encountered an incoherence that demands to be resolved. To seek to understand is to pursue “satisfaction in experience” (EM 35) by arriving at an understanding that is without discrepancies demanding further investigation. So long as there are unresolved questions in a system of ideas, or aspects of experience that appear to lie outside it, there is incoherence and dissatisfaction. One is tempted to object that these remarks on coherence are unacceptably vague. It is clear that coherence is a property of a set of ideas, not of its members, but the character of these members and their relationship with one another remains unspecified. Are we talking about propositions that are consistent with one another? That entail one another? That explain one another? If the ideas in question are something other than propositions, in what sense can we speak of consistency and entailment? And is “satisfaction” (a word used often by Bosanquet and other Idealists) to be taken as a formal property of coherence or a psychological concept? In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott 6. “The Concrete Universal,” in Principle of Individuality and Value, 37. 7. Johann Gustav Droysen uses the expression “world of ideas” in his Outline of the Principles of History, trans. E. Benjamin Andrews (Boston: Ginn, 1893; first German edition 1868), 10. The expression geistige Welt is translated as “human world” in Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, vol. 1 of Selected Works, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

22

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

discusses objections that Russell and others had made to Idealist coherence theory, but he does not define the concept of coherence. This failure can be explained, at least in part, by his commitment to the view (considered below) that different kinds of knowledge display different kinds of coherence. As the positivist depreciation of anything other than logic, mathematics, and science illustrates, the cost of embracing a precise definition of coherence is apt to be the exclusion of certain ways of thinking from the category of “knowledge.” For Oakeshott, who is reluctant to privilege one kind of knowledge over another, the idea of coherence necessarily functions as a metaphor, not a technical concept. Oakeshott shares the epistemological pluralism characteristic of Idealism, and in fact he takes this pluralism more seriously than many Idealists. He criticizes, for example, Hegel’s teleological view that knowledge develops by achieving an ever more perfect coherence over time. Understanding is not a progressive march toward complete coherence in experience, a sequence “in which that which comes later is necessarily nearer the end than that which came earlier” (EM 35); it is the outcome, always revisable and therefore necessarily impermanent, of an activity guided by the ideals of completeness and consistency. It is, as Oakeshott explains elsewhere, “not the simple exclusion of all that does not fit, but the perpetual re-establishment of coherence” (HCA 11). The pursuit of understanding is a dialectical activity in which reflection proceeds by “considering something recognized as knowledge and supposed to be true, yet considering it with the assumption that it is not true” (RPML 139). The conception of understanding implicit in these remarks presumes that ideas fit together systematically: that they can be reconciled, redefined, and rearranged so as to eliminate whatever does not make sense, given the presuppositions of the inquiry in question. But there is no single, necessary arrangement of ideas—one that actually will, in the course of time, be ever more closely approached. Even though he rejects Hegel’s progressivism, in Experience and Its Modes Oakeshott reiterates the Hegelian view, periodically asserted by critics as well as defenders of the coherence theory, that the idea of coherence implies the idea of complete or “absolute” coherence, a condition in which all discrepancies are resolved. He also affirms the related conclusion that philosophy is distinguished from other kinds of inquiry in being committed to seeking such coherence. Complete coherence may be unreachable and therefore not an actual goal of inquiry, but it remains an implicit ideal. Whatever else “the absolute” might be taken to mean in philosophy, Oakeshott writes, the idea of the absolute as “a world or system of ideas

23

Understanding

which is at once unitary and complete” is indispensable as the criterion of satisfactory understanding (EM 47). The absolute, in this sense, is the imagined end of an endless dialectic of discrepancy and reconciliation. As we shall see, Oakeshott came to regard even this watered-down version of the absolute as misleading, and in later writings he explicitly denies that philosophy can be distinguished from other kinds of knowledge as an inquiry that uniquely aims at comprehensive understanding. Coherence and Correspondence Implicit in the preceding discussion is a distinction between coherence within a system of ideas and coherence between different systems. A perception, judgment, or argument that makes sense in a particular context, because it is compatible with all that this context defines as relevant, may cease to make sense if the context is problematized. And a body of ideas that is consistent within the limits of its unrecognized assumptions may constitute the real world for those whose experience it shapes. But as soon as those assumptions are identified and therefore implicitly called into question, the world they constitute is no longer the entire world but only one thing within that world which we are immediately invited to reconcile with other things. Within the limits of its presuppositions, a system of ideas may be sufficiently consistent and complete to compel the belief that it is real, but as soon as those presuppositions are questioned it becomes merely one system among others. A system whose foundations have been exposed is no more than a point of view. It is not the world itself but merely an aspect of the world—a “universe of discourse” but not the universe. The pursuit of understanding therefore proceeds at different levels: we can seek rational coherence within a given set of ideas or we can try to reconcile discrepant sets of ideas, even if only by awarding each its own proper sphere. We respond to experience by attempting to resolve the contradictions we find there. And the coherence we find is all there is. Oakeshott thus joins Hegel and Green in attacking as self-contradictory the idea of unknowable things-inthemselves. We cannot assert the existence of that about which, by hypothesis, we can know nothing. There is, therefore, nothing outside experience by which experience can be judged. There is no point in arguing that an idea is acceptable if it corresponds with a criterion that is not itself an idea—that it corresponds, for example, with experience that is not mediated by ideas, or with what is outside experience altogether—for what is given in experience is

24

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

already an idea and what is beyond experience cannot provide a criterion for judging anything. Nor can we rescue correspondence as the criterion of knowledge by privileging some particular way of thinking as uniquely capable of providing access to reality. If, for example, we take common sense as the criterion by which to judge the acceptability of historical or religious claims, we are at a loss to explain why this way of thinking should be taken as definitive, why it should be the indisputable criterion for all the others (EM 38–39). In attacking the idea of correspondence, Oakeshott is also attacking the idea of a single, unshakeable foundation for knowledge. There is, in other words, an inherent skepticism in Oakeshott’s arguments about understanding. If we have reservations about sensory perception, about memory, about historical evidence, and about the conclusions of scientific inquiry, the stability of the experienced world is well on its way to being undermined. The world as we know it rests on premises that we usually do not question and which therefore seem solid and reliable. But that we do not question these premises does not mean they are unquestionable, that what has served us reliably is therefore infallible. No realm of experience provides data that are simply beyond doubt, facts with which a conclusion has only to agree to be established as true. To argue against the idea of foundational certainty is not to reject correspondence as a criterion of truth so much as to hold that the correspondences we find in ordinary experience or in formal inquiry are always provisional. What we see as correspondence between our ideas and an external, independent reality is for Oakeshott a correspondence between two sets of ideas, one given in what our perceptions, inferences, or scientific methods identify as data, the other shaping those perceptions, inferences, and methods. In no area of experience, in no inquiry or science, do we verify or correct a relative claim by testing it against an absolute; to understand is always to move within a world of relatives, testing each against the others. The only absolute in this world of relatives is the notional absolute of complete coherence, but this abstract and undefined ideal has no place in any actual inquiry. As a criterion of truth, correspondence is an aspect of coherence. For Oakeshott, the distinction between so-called coherence and correspondence theories of truth is misleading, for we can never do more than look for correspondences between different kinds of evidence, checking everyday perceptions against instrumental measurements, the testimony of one witness against that of another. And we examine such correspondences in the context of a particular kind of inquiry: an autopsy, a jury trial, an experiment in particle physics, or a search for the car keys. We construct knowledge in these

25

Understanding

inquiries by establishing patterns of coherence in what each inquiry defines as relevant information, reconciling conflicting evidence and reaching a verdict. As we shall see, this pluralist conception of coherence offers a solution to the problem of distinguishing the human from the natural sciences explored by Dilthey and other philosophers at the end of the nineteenth century. The human sciences, Dilthey argued, are defined by their concern to understand individuals, not to generalize. To understand an individual is to understand its internal coherence, and in fact only an object that displays such coherence can count as an individual and therefore as an object to be understood. The problem facing Dilthey and other defenders of the autonomy of the human sciences was to determine the criteria of individuality that identify the objects to be investigated in each science. But this problem assumes as many forms are there are sciences. We cannot know how the human sciences are to be divided and organized until we have ascertained the specific kind of coherence that defines the objects of each.8 Because each distinguishable inquiry defines its own objects of inquiry, there can be no such thing as a “brute fact,” one whose existence or character is independent of interpretive concepts, criteria of identity, or canons of evidence and inference. A “fact” is a verdict, the product of judgment, something we are compelled to think by the pattern of our ideas: it is an achievement rather than a given. The view that understanding begins with facts or is ultimately validated by them rests on the mistaken belief that facts are independent of the theory that identifies and connects them. As Oakeshott observes in an essay written long before the publication of Experience and Its Modes, “facts are not facts until they are seen fully, that is, theorized.”9 The difference between a fact and a theory is not categorical: a theory is a set of facts related to one another to compose a coherent whole, a fact something we are obliged to accept because it is reinforced by other facts.10 What we call “reality” is the totality of established facts, the cumulative outcome of the conclusions we reach by reconciling identified facts within a system of ideas, and that thereby becomes compelling for us. Words like “fact,” “thing,” “objectivity,” “truth,” 8. Theodore Plantinga, Historical Understanding in the Thought of Wilhelm Dilthey (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 27–28, 158. 9. “A Discussion,” 50. The point is developed in EM 42–43. 10. Oakeshott’s argument resembles that subsequently made in a narrower context by Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Both Oakeshott and Kuhn emphasize the interdependence of theory and fact as well as the permeability of these categories. For Kuhn, what counts as a fact is determined by the postulates of a scientific theory, and it is only within a given tradition of scientific inquiry that theory and fact appear distinct.

26

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

and “reality” stand for experience itself, not for something beyond experience. And experience is not simply given, unmediated by thought; it is already and inescapably an intersubjective world built up from what is understood in different moments of experience. Since nothing can be known independently of experience, knowledge must be regarded as experience organized into various kinds of order. It is not the accumulation of information but the achievement of coherence in what we experience as the real world. The idea of coherence as the criterion of truth, factuality, and reality has survived the end of nineteenth-century Idealism. Dismissed by logical atomists and empiricists who defined truth as correspondence between propositions and their referents, “coherentism” (as it is sometimes called) soon reasserted itself within the tradition of analytic philosophy. Although the logical positivists of the 1930s held empirical verifiability to be the criterion of cognitively meaningful statements, some, like Neurath and Reichenbach, argued that the concepts used to describe empirical sense data (“observation terms”) were themselves theory-laden. And Neurath, with Carnap, eventually rejected the correspondence theory of truth in favor of a coherence theory.11 Wittgenstein, abandoning the foundationalism of his early thinking, came to hold that truths are internal to the language in which they are expressed. Though they defend the proposition that knowledge is generated from sensory experience, Quine and Sellars argue that because experience becomes knowledge only when it is organized by the mind, correspondence with sense data (“the given”) cannot be the criterion of knowledge; empiricism, they conclude, requires rather than rejects coherence as a criterion of truth. Putnam, articulating a view he calls “internal realism,” argues that proof and refutation presuppose a system of concepts within which claims for and against a proposition can be made. Truth is not “correspondence with mind-independent or discourseindependent ‘states of affairs,’” but an “ideal coherence of our beliefs . . . with our experiences as those experiences are themselves represented in our belief system.”12 Other analytic philosophers who have defended at least some aspects of a coherence epistemology include Strawson, Chisholm, Goodman, Rorty, and Davidson. Coherentism has even invaded the philosophy of sci11. Hilary Putnam, “A Half Century of Philosophy, Viewed from Within,” in Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske, eds., American Academic Culture in Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 193–94, and P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), chap. 3. 12. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 49–50.

27

Understanding

ence, long a bastion of realism and correspondence theory, beginning in the 1950s with the work of Hanson and Kuhn. Despite these inroads, correspondence theories are still common in mainstream analytic philosophy, which, especially in the United States, continues to privilege science as the model of authentic knowledge and to understand science in realist terms. Because they do not regard scientific knowledge as paradigmatic or foundational, philosophers in the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions, like Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Taylor, are more receptive to coherence theories. They maintain that ordinary experience, though shaped by meanings, is prior to scientific and other kinds of theoretical knowledge, and that realism is an illusion that occurs when, unaware of the concepts that structure all experience, we imagine that we are perceiving things as they are “in themselves,” that is, independent of our interpretations. There are no brute or atomic facts whose character is independent of concepts and therefore invariant across different modes of experience. This emphasis on meaning makes interpretation and the study of interpretation (hermeneutics) central to philosophy. Hermeneutics is not merely a method for extracting truth from texts; it is an epistemological theory according to which knowledge is the product of a continuing interaction between text and context, the knower and the known, the activity of interpreting and whatever that activity takes, provisionally, as the object of interpretation. Truth is established only in a dialectical process in which the two halves of this interaction illuminate each other to achieve coherence. Oakeshott’s conclusion that the criterion of knowledge is coherence between ideas, not correspondence between ideas and something that is completely independent of ideas, is not, then, the relic of a discredited Idealism but a view that, whatever its difficulties, invites consideration whenever the question of knowledge arises. Identity and Individuality To understand is to identify—that is, not merely to notice or be aware, but to notice or be aware of something. It is to be able to distinguish things from their surroundings and to recognize and name them. Understanding begins and ends with identifiable things, “identities,” which are both objects to be understood and the terms in which they are understood. In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott considers the criteria on the basis of which identities—discernable, distinguishable, recognizable “things”—are recognized. He rejects the view that in deciding what we mean by the word

28

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

“thing” we must begin with the ideas of matter or substance. A thing need not be a material object, for it can be an idea, performance, practice, or institution. The balance of power, Islam, Gödel’s proof, or the Victorian multiplot novel are all things in this sense. They are things not because they contain a substance but because they behave in a manner that produces “the appearance of there being a substance in them” (EM 62). That is, each appears through a range of transformations—the Victorian novel, for example, in particular novels by Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope—as if it were a single whole or unity, distinguishable from other things. As Oakeshott puts it (in a later discussion of the topic), what we call a thing is no more than “a certain sort of image recognized as such because it behaves in a certain manner and responds to our questioning appropriately” (RP 497). It can be grasped as a distinct, unified, integral whole that exists without reference to something external, as something that has attributes rather than being itself an attribute. Recognition, identification, and understanding, then, are all connected to the idea of a thing and therefore to the idea of individuality, understood here in its general and philosophical sense, not as a quality, desirable or otherwise, of human beings. Oakeshott’s conception of individuality—which seems to have taken shape in his early reflections on the identity of Christianity—is central to the theory of understanding he develops in Experience and Its Modes and subsequent writings.13 Oakeshott’s handling of this theme in Experience and Its Modes is a metaphysical tour de force that prepares the way for the concept of the modes as a provisionally distinguishable but neither necessary or permanent forms of understanding. In a few pages (EM 43–45 and 61–66) Oakeshott sketches the foundations of his claim that all modes of understanding are subject to change and therefore historical. An individual, he suggests, is a distinguishable something—an idea abstracted and held separate from its environment. To be an individual is not only to be distinct but also to be able to maintain that distinctness. Individuality, then, means both independence and self-completeness. Each of these criteria presents difficulties, however. If we say that an individual is something distinguished from its environment, it is hard to say where the environment ends and the thing begins. There are degrees of abstraction, separation, and distinctness, and therefore we must admit the possibility of degrees of individuality. This seems to undermine precisely what the idea of individuality 13. See the discussion of Oakeshott’s views on religion as a form of practice in Chapter 2 and on the history of religion in Chapter 4.

29

Understanding

seeks to establish. But if we define an individual as whatever is self-complete, nothing can count as an individual except the whole of all there is—the union of a thing and its environment. Again, the idea of individuality seems to get us nowhere. An individual thing, we want to say, is not whatever displays an uncertain degree of distinctness, a mere quality or attribute, but neither is it the totality of all that exists. It seems natural to define a thing as an enduring substance that possesses attributes and can maintain its distinctness, its identity, as its circumstances and even its attributes change. But this is not a satisfactory definition because there is no necessary and final way of distinguishing substance and attribute. What endures may be matter, shape, size, purpose, or spirit—never a single, fixed, and original “substance.” The idea of a stable substance underlying the unstable attributes of a thing—a core of existence that is untouched by change—is an abstraction, a mere fancy. There is no such thing. Identity consists not in retaining a hypothetical substance but in maintaining a character that unifies the changes a thing may undergo. But if identity is the maintenance of such a character, it is once again a matter of degree, because a particular character can be more or less well maintained. And with this we once more come up against the problem of distinguishing between a thing and its environment from which we have been trying to escape. Oakeshott concludes, then, that one cannot escape from the problem of context. There is no fixed, final, and nonarbitrary way of establishing identity, and consequently there can be no permanent and unequivocal things or completely independent individuals. “In experience what is given is, not particular, isolated things, but a world of things; for things, because they are ideas, cannot be bare and unconnected” (EM 66). The world is not a world of brute facts, unquestionable givens, or fixed and unequivocal data; it is constituted by identities abstracted from the context to which they belong, and therefore about which there is always something more to be asked, more to be understood. Short of complete understanding, which can never be achieved, every thing is open to question, to reinterpretation and reclassification, and therefore to being transformed into another thing. This is not Cartesian skepticism, a tool for clearing away errors so that one can establish incontestable truths, but a hermeneutical skepticism that follows from the conclusion that all identifications and therefore all things are context-dependent. The experienced world of things is a world of meanings and, as Derrida was later to emphasize in propounding the idea of différance (“the movement according to which language, or any code, any system of reference in

30

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

general, is constituted ‘historically’ as a weave of differences”),14 meanings are relatives, not absolutes. It is entirely in keeping with the spirit of these arguments that Oakeshott should have continued to reformulate them, for the arguments themselves have no more claim to permanence than anything else. The theory of understanding articulated forty years later in On Human Conduct, with which the view just discussed is usefully compared, cannot therefore be regarded as anything other than one more provisional effort to understand the character of understanding itself. In this work Oakeshott argues that every attempt at understanding begins with a “going-on” that is already to some extent understood, just as he had argued in the earlier work that to experience something is always to be aware of, and thus to have distinguished and identified, that which is experienced. Before it becomes reflective and deliberate, understanding exists as an unsought and unavoidable condition of human existence: consciousness itself is already, at some level, understanding. Awareness without understanding of some kind is impossible: to be conscious is unavoidably to “inhabit a world of intelligibles” (OHC 1). One can question whether the new expression “world of intelligibles” is an improvement over the old “world of ideas”— Oakeshott’s late writings depart even further than his early ones from plain speech—but the shift is characteristic. Identification is the activity of discerning resemblances and differences in what is going on. It involves recognizing these resemblances and differences as characteristics, abstracting them from their contingent circumstances, and “assembling” them to compose a concept. To identify something is not simply to recognize it as having certain features, for these may be incidental. Nor is it to merely to distinguish one thing from another on the basis of possibly superficial differences. It is to attribute to the identified thing an “ideal character,” that is, to specify its character as a composition of characteristics and to grasp the criteria according to which the identification is made.15 Our identifications are sometimes simply mistaken: it was not in fact you I thought I saw across the street. But different identifications (a birthday present, a promising first 14. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 12. 15. For Bradley, the identity of a thing “is a character, which exists outside of and beyond any fact which you can take.” F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1897), 63. Oakeshott’s concept of an “ideal character” springs from the same source as Weber’s “ideal type”—the nineteenth-century idea of the historical individual (see Chapter 4).

31

Understanding

novel) can coexist without correcting one another, for they may pick out different attributes or presume different contexts. Identifications may be carefully articulated or crudely sketched, and they may be progressively elaborated and altered without denying the understanding provided by the cruder or less detailed accounts (OHC 5–6). And, if an identity can be treated as unproblematic and simply to be used (like a tide table), it can also be an object to be investigated and therefore the starting point of an inquiry. Of course, there may be no inquiry and understanding may remain at the level of identification. Understanding both begins and ends in identification or, as Oakeshott sometimes says, in “definition” (EM 52, 147–48; RPML 127–28), for to define a thing is to specify its exact character after it has been identified. The spirit here is Socratic (RPML 130) and also Aristotelian: understanding grows by moving, in a dialectic that involves clarification and redefinition, from “what appears to be the case” to the principles underlying these appearances.16 In understanding we seek to identify what is going on and to account for what we have identified. The event or experience that is the subject of our inquiry is itself an intellectual construction, and therefore a product of thought; it is a conclusion that may be reinforced or revised by subsequent inquiry. It is at once the end of one inquiry and the starting place of another, “an understanding waiting to be understood” (OHC 2). Here, as in Experience and Its Modes, it is clear that there is no absolute distinction between a fact and a conclusion or theory: what is designated “fact” always holds that title provisionally and is never an unquestionable arbiter of theories, and no conclusion, no matter how well confirmed, is ever unconditional or definitive. Facts and theories alike are only identities which can always be queried and better understood. To understand anything, then, is to understand a specified identity. But making an identification is only a tentative stage in the course of understanding, for one can always question an attributed identity. To problematize a given identity is to question the criteria that determine it. It is to understand an identity in relation to what it presupposes (or, as Oakeshott prefers to say, “in terms of its postulates”). A way of speaking someone takes for granted may be seen by a linguist as a marker of social class. To question an identity is 16. “Beginning with things that are correctly said, but not clearly, as we proceed we shall come to express them clearly, with what is more perspicuous at each stage superseding what is customarily expressed in a confused fashion” (Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1216b31–34). For Oakeshott, “definition is the making clearer of something which is already to some extent apprehended and therefore to some extent clear. . . . We never move from what we are entirely ignorant of to complete knowledge, but from what we know to what we know more fully” (CPJ 347).

32

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

to see it as something to be investigated, not a categorical conclusion simply to be used. When we no longer regard an identity as given, it becomes “an invitation to an inquiry designed to expose and specify its postulates, to relate them systematically to one another, and, by displaying them as the postulates of this identity, to make it intelligible” (OHC 12). Such an inquiry is therefore an “escape,” for in questioning how things are presented to us, we are “released from the prison” of our current understanding (OHC 9). But this inquiry is also (to use another of Oakeshott’s favorite metaphors) like putting to sea, for in shifting our attention from the features of an identity to its postulates, we embark on an adventure in understanding that must soon carry us far beyond the familiar shores we had once inhabited (OHC 10). With each such departure we come to occupy a new, though always temporary, level or “platform” of understanding.17 Any understanding, once achieved, can be explored and its conclusions can be treated, for the purposes at hand, as definitive and unconditional. We need not question the conclusions we have reached. We can regard these conclusions as unproblematic and use them to explore the area of knowledge to which they belong. In such an exploration the identities we rely on are treated as facts, that is, as verdicts which, for the moment at least, we do not doubt. Instead of questioning the assumptions underlying our achieved understanding, we enter a restricted mode of inquiry in which we rely on the identities and definitions, the facts and conclusions, presupposed within that mode and are content to investigate what can be understood within their limits. And this brings us to another idea that is central to Oakeshott’s thinking, the idea of modality.

Modality The idea of modality is the idea of coherence sustained at a particular level. When we succeed in making sense of some aspect of experience, we are inclined to think of it as real, not as a mere intellectual construct. The world viewed in a certain manner may lack perfect coherence, but if we think that knowledge lies not in abandoning that comprehension but in attempting to explain its 17. The platform metaphor need not imply superior and inferior vantage points. The platforms in a railway station, for example, are usually parallel and on the same level; if on different levels, only contingently, not necessarily, so.

33

Understanding

anomalies, an understanding has emerged that can sustain the belief that the world so understood is the real world. Although I may occasionally doubt the evidence of my senses, for example, I rely on the coherence of that evidence to affirm the reality of the everyday world in which I live. When such coherence reaches the point at which it can perpetuate itself as an autonomous manner of thinking, we have what Oakeshott calls a mode of experience. Oakeshott’s theory of modality includes the following claims: that a mode is all of experience as understood from a certain point of view, that there exists an indefinite plurality of modes, that every mode is a historical creation, that each is independent of the others, and that none is fundamental. Oakeshott sometimes uses the word “mode” informally to mean any manner, style, or idiom of thought or behavior. Mostly, however, he uses it as a term of art to distinguish ways of thinking or being that are coherent, comprehensive, and independent from those that are not. A mode of understanding, he writes in On History, is “not merely an attitude or a point of view.” It is “an autonomous manner of understanding, specifiable in terms of exact conditions, which is logically incapable of denying or confirming the conclusions of any other mode of understanding, or indeed of making any relevant utterance in respect of it” (OH 2). And there are modes of conduct as well as of inquiry: a “mode of relationship,” for example, is “a categorially distinct manner of being related which . . . cannot be reduced to any other” (OHC 122).18 No matter what the context, modal differences are differences of kind, not degree. Because modes can be seen as providing categories for organizing experience, we can illuminate Oakeshott’s theory by considering it in relation to alternative conceptions of the aims of metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that explores the basic categories of being and knowledge. According to one such conception, which goes back to Aristotle, metaphysics is concerned with the nature of being itself. What does it mean to say that something “exists”? What are the basic kinds of things that exist? Is the world composed only of material objects, or does it also include nonmaterial “things” like propositions, actions, or events? Do only particular “things” exist, or can we say that various attributes exemplified in particular things (redness, justice, or other “universals”) also exist? And if being can take different forms, are these differences real or merely apparent? Questions like these are implicit in the distinction, 18. Oakeshott prefers the neologism “categorial” to “categorical” when he is speaking of categories because “categorical” has ontological implications he wishes to avoid.

34

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

explored by Descartes and Spinoza, between substance and the modes it can assume. Metaphysics, then, is concerned not only with being in general but also with its special forms (material, temporal, rational, divine), and it includes inquiries into the meaning of identity, the possibility of change, the nature of mind, and the existence of God. A quite different conception of metaphysics springs from Kant’s effort to reconcile the view just described with the empiricist argument, defended by Locke and Hume, that authentic knowledge rests on sensory experience. Kant’s solution is that knowledge is the joint product of sensory experience and the concepts that shape that experience. It follows that the external world that causes our sensations and perceptions cannot be known except in terms of concepts that belong to the structure of the human mind. Conversely, these concepts cannot generate authentic knowledge unless they are applied to sensory experience. Because metaphysics, as traditionally conceived, asks questions that cannot be answered on the basis of sensory experience, it makes claims that transcend the limits of human knowledge. Once this is appreciated, Kant argues, the only kind of metaphysics that remains intellectually respectable is that which seeks to characterize, in the most general terms, the concepts that the mind brings to experience. With Kant, then, the focus of metaphysics shifts from being itself to being as experienced by the human mind. It is a shift from existence to knowledge, from ontology to epistemology. Modality has a place in this new, post-Kantian, conception of metaphysics, but what is at issue are now modes of knowledge rather than of being. There are two main ways of proceeding here. The first, which Kant adopted, is to look for a single underlying structure of concepts that determines all human thought. In this approach, the aim of philosophy is to identify the most basic categories of understanding—categories like space, time, and causality. The second, followed by those, like Hegel or Bradley, who regard the historical character of knowledge as more than merely accidental, is to take seriously the possibility that knowledge is shaped not by a single scheme of basic categories but by a plurality of categorial schemes or modes, each of which orders experience according to its own principles. Because ideas are learned, they must be understood at least in part as the product of history and culture. It follows that epistemology cannot ignore the inherited ways of judging, naming, and reasoning within which human cognition takes place.19 The modes are part of this inheritance. 19. “No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.” Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, 50.

35

Understanding

In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott distinguishes autonomous forms of experience, identifies the defining presuppositions of each, and articulates a conception of philosophy as the enterprise of accounting for experience as a whole. But in venturing a hypothesis about how the modes are related to the whole of experience and by identifying philosophy as the perpetual search for a conceivable if unreachable “Absolute” that transcends all limited modes of understanding, he seems to move back toward the Kantian idea that all thinking is shaped by a single and necessary structure of concepts. In subsequent writings, Oakeshott abandons this concern with totality, redefining the ideas of experience, modality, and philosophy in ways that alter their relationships to one another. We will return to the theme of how Oakeshott uses the idea of a mode after Experience and Its Modes, but we need first to examine how he understands modality in that work. The aim of philosophy, as Oakeshott saw it in 1933, is to achieve complete coherence in experience, to seek a comprehensive understanding of understanding in which everything has its place. Implicit in this enterprise is the effort to distinguish the various forms that understanding can take, for if philosophy looks for complete coherence in experience, there must be other kinds of understanding that are satisfied with less than complete coherence. In them the search for coherence, for unconditional or absolute understanding, would be arrested, and the outcome of such an arrest would be a conditionally self-consistent and self-sustaining mode of understanding that philosophical inquiry might recognize, name, explore, and criticize. A mode is a “modification” of “something larger and more generic.”20 If coherence is the criterion by which the adequacy of any understanding is judged, then any anomaly extends an implicit invitation to consider why it exists and how it might be accounted for. Contradictory reports, discrepant measurements, and different readings of a text call for explanation if not reconciliation. The desire to make sense of experience generates a pressure toward consistency. But our efforts to respond to this pressure will never produce a single, perfectly coherent picture of the world. We can, however, forego this end and instead seek consistency within the limits of a given point of view. Instead of pursuing a single, comprehensive, perfectly coherent reality, we can explore some aspect of experience, attempting to make sense of it in its own terms while ignoring discrepancies between our conclusions and whatever can be seen from other points of view (EM 70). And this exploration can be undertaken deliberately or inadvertently. If we are unaware of the 20. “A Discussion,” 14.

36

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

assumptions on which our thinking rests, we remain locked without knowing it in a prison of concepts, mistaking that prison for the world itself. Each such world, if it can achieve coherence within the bounds of its presuppositions, is a mode of experience. In Experience and Its Modes Oakeshott discusses three such modes, which he calls “history,” “science,” and “practice.” These, he suggests, are at present the most highly developed and self-consistent modes of understanding (EM 84). Art and religion, which Bradley and Collingwood had identified as distinct kinds of experience, are subsumed under the category of practice; only much later does Oakeshott promote aesthetic experience (“poetry”) to the status of a mode.21 The idea that these modes have emerged from a larger, undifferentiated flow of experience might seem to imply that modality is a matter of degree rather than kind, and therefore to undercut the very idea of modality. But there is in fact no contradiction: that distinctions are constructed, and that they can be constructed and used in different ways, does not mean that they are arbitrary or spurious. Like any other identity or individual, a mode emerges out of and must be distinguished from its context, and whether it is truly distinct, truly a mode, must remain a matter of interpretation. And because each mode is an intellectual construction, it has a history and might disappear. Science, history, and practice are not the only modes, and there can in principle be no determinate number of modes. In subsequent chapters, I will discuss Oakeshott’s changing views of the particular modes with which he is concerned, as well as some of the difficulties these views raise, but it may help in grasping the concept of modality to briefly sketch the presuppositions that define each mode. “Practice,” as a mode, is the realm of doing: a present, living, and always changing world of choices and actions, composed of images of desire and aversion, approval and disapproval. This world is organized by our concern to bring what “is” into harmony with what we want it to be. In practical activity we recognize what is going on as it relates to our own desires, choices, and fortunes. And in understanding the world in its relation to ourselves we judge things as friendly or hostile, useful or useless. We respond to our environment, as it is ordered by such categories, by thinking about causes and effects in an effort to control this environment as it affects us (RP 158–59). As we shall see, although in Experience and Its Modes Oakeshott conceives practice largely 21. The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1959), subsequently included in Rationalism and Politics.

37

Understanding

as a realm of prudential judgments, in later writings he distinguishes between prudential and moral judgments with increasing precision. “History,” in contrast, is experience organized in terms of the idea of the past. Its aim is to construct, from present evidence, an intelligible and objective world of past experience. Historical understanding emerges from an inquiry that is concerned solely with what that evidence can sustain about a world gone by, a world that is clearly understood to be distinct from the present world we inhabit. Historical inquiry seeks to understand this bygone world by uncovering contingent relationships among the elements composing it—relationships in which antecedent events cast light on subsequent events by being assembled in explanatory narratives. Histories are not “accounts of the past focused upon our contemporary selves purporting to tell us how we have become what we are and containing messages of warning or encouragement, but . . . stories in which human actions and utterances are rescued from mystery and made intelligible in terms of their contingent relationships” (VLL 33–34). History can even be said to be the entire world understood under the category “past.” Everything that exists can be understood as having already happened: we can imagine a future, but it does not yet exist and may never come to be; it is a possibility, not an actuality. And even the present is a fiction, an infinitesimal moment between future and past, which, insofar as it is real, is past. “Science” is another highly developed mode of understanding, one that many of its defenders claim provides definitive access to reality itself. As Oakeshott understands it, however, scientific reality is not the only reality. But neither is scientific inquiry the study of “nature,” understood as a separate part of reality; it is concerned with the world and everything in it, understood, as far as possible, in purely abstract terms involving invariant concepts, quantitative measurements, and mathematical generalizations. And because science is the whole of reality conceived in this manner, it includes the study of human beings, to the extent that this study can be carried on “scientifically.” Science in this sense is concerned with relations between classes of events, not (like either historical inquiry or practical activity) with particular events understood in their particularity. In contrast to historical inquiry, science is interested in particular, contingent happenings only for what they reveal about abstract, general relations. And in contrast to practice—and also to such modal hybrids as “natural history” and “applied science,” whose names suggest concerns other than purely scientific ones—science as a mode of inquiry demands an “objective” attitude, one that not only resists the biases

38

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

that distort our measurements and inferences, but frames its explanations in terms of causes and processes that are identified according to criteria independent of human interests. In a scientific inquiry, “we are concerned, not with happenings in their relation to ourselves and to the habitableness of the world, but in respect of their independence of ourselves” (RP 159). This sounds like a realist conception of science, but it is realist only in the sense that “objective idealism” is realist—that is, the reality it postulates is that which rests on intersubjective consistency among a number of observers, observations, or observational schemes. “Poetry”—that is, aesthetic experience—is the world as it appears in moments of contemplation, where “contemplation” is understood to involve images that are regarded, not as factual or not factual, but simply as images, detached from other concerns. Practical images imply a future, historical images a past, but the images in aesthetic experience exist in a timeless present. In moments of contemplation, one does not care where these images came from or worry about their consequences; one simply reflects on their associations and enjoys their presence. In imaginative literature, in music, in the visual arts, images (insofar as they are aesthetic) are not turned into conclusions; they are “made, remade, observed, turned about, played with, meditated upon, and delighted in” (RP 517). All such images can be understood, from the standpoint of another mode, as historically anachronistic, scientifically absurd, morally objectionable, etc. A work of art is “merely an image which is protected in an unusual degree from being read (that is, imagined) in an unpoetic manner, a protection it derives from its quality and from the circumstantial frame in which it appears” (RP 518). An object displayed in a museum, for example, is one that has been separated from its original context and use and treated as art. Where their origin or use is unknown or no longer of interest, objects may acquire a new context in which they can invite a purely aesthetic response. The arts achieve modal autonomy, then, when the images they construct are regarded aesthetically, that is, contemplatively, and in no other way.22 22. This conception of the aesthetic realm, as Oakeshott acknowledges (MPME 6–7), draws upon J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (London: Arnold, 1924). It also owes something to Bloomsbury and Dada. In art “we are lifted above the stream of life” and “inhabit a world with an intense and peculiar significance of its own.” Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1914), 25, 26. For the Dadaists, a work of art can be the most mundane or repellent article, like the urinal Marcel Duchamp sought to exhibit under the title “fountain.” Removed from its usual context, any object can acquire aesthetic significance.

39

Understanding

Each identifiable mode constitutes a universe of discourse within which words and actions have their own special meanings. “Water” and “H2O,” to use one of Oakeshott’s examples, are not two ways of referring to the same thing, but symbols used according to different rules in the different worlds of practical life and scientific inquiry. Each symbol reflects a different way of organizing experience. Each belongs to a different aspect of experience—not to a single, unified world of human experience but to experience within a certain point of view. Different modes of experience are not different parts of experience; they are different ways of abstracting from undifferentiated experience to achieve intellectual coherence. It is, however, only from the outside that each mode appears as a point of view. What is asserted within each mode is asserted as true, not as mere belief. To the degree that they achieve coherence, the judgments that constitute a modal world are true, given the presuppositions of that world. But these judgments are not true in all worlds, and therefore they cannot be asserted as true without qualification. Truth is determined by criteria internal to the world within which it is asserted. Each mode, then, is an abstract conceptual system constituted and limited by its premises and displaying only an incomplete and therefore spurious coherence. Because they are normally unrecognized, these premises can appear to define not merely a world but the world. Those who fail to realize that the world as they perceive it is a conditional world—that their understanding of what is true or real rests on presuppositions that can be questioned—mistake a particular mode of experience for the world itself. For them, “the character of the mode is the character of the world” (EM 74). Each modal world— whether it is the ordinary world of Dr. Johnson kicking the stone, or the scientific world of the physicist for whom a stone is energy organized in a certain way—implicitly claims to be unconditional and therefore ultimately real. “An arrest in experience,” Oakeshott writes, “knows no better than to assert itself absolutely; it is impossible that it should not be ignorant of its own defect, for to be aware of its defect would be to have overcome it, to have ceased to be this arrest” (EM 330). In Experience and Its Modes, then, a mode is more than a distinct kind of inquiry. It is a self-contained world of experience that makes an implicit claim to completeness and coherence. But because it is a mode—that is, an aspect of, or perspective on, experience—it is not, after all, complete. The apparent coherence of the world as it is represented within a given mode is no more than the limited coherence of a manner of thinking that rests on premises it

40

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

takes for granted—premises that have not been established because they have not been questioned. At this point in the argument of Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott has begun to paint himself into a corner. Because the modes are self-contained and ultimately self-contradictory, he argues, criticism must result, in principle, in their being absorbed into a single, comprehensive, and self-consistent system of ideas. To say that a mode is a temporary “arrest” in experience is to assert the ultimate unity of understanding. Against the view that practical, scientific, and other kinds of inquiry provide access to different parts of experience, each mode of experience is the whole of experience conceived in terms of the presuppositions that define it. When these presuppositions have been fully revealed, each mode will be seen to be an aspect of a more comprehensive system, and the modes will, from the standpoint of this larger system, no longer be distinct. They will be aspects of a single, all-inclusive “theory of everything.” If experience is a river flowing toward perfect coherence, the modes are backwaters. One can turn out of the “main current” (EM 70) to explore them, but they lead nowhere.23 Because it is satisfied with its own point of view, modal thinking is an obstacle to a comprehensive understanding of experience that must be not merely criticized but “destroyed.” The claim that the modes are destined, in principle, to be absorbed into a single comprehensive understanding of reality, which Oakeshott defends in Experience and Its Modes, must not be confused with argument, which he rejects, that some modes are closer than others to approaching such an understanding, and therefore that the modes can be ordered hierarchically according to the degree of truth achieved within them. With respect to this issue, the image of experience as a river and the modes as backwaters is misleading, for it suggests that the modes occupy locations passed successively in the voyage toward complete understanding. No doubt human beings were concerned with practical matters before they learned to think scientifically, but this temporal ordering says nothing about the logical relationship between practice and science. That one mode emerged later than another is no evidence of its superiority as knowledge. And philosophically, no mode of experience can be said to be logically prior to or more fundamental than any other. To say that the modes represent different kinds of imperfection is not to say that they are stages, historical or logical, in the development of understand23. A better image of the futility of modal thinking: “like the rivers of Persia, [the modes] perish of their own inanition” (EM 83).

41

Understanding

ing. On this issue Oakeshott breaks with the Idealist tradition from Hegel to Collingwood, the river metaphor being merely a ghost of Hegel’s conception of history as the progressive development of mind or of Collingwood’s hierarchy of forms.24 For Oakeshott, the modes of experience are to be explained not in relation to one another but in relation to experience as a whole. They are selective, abstract accounts of experience that fall short, in different ways, of achieving complete coherence. Each mode rests on a foundation that it does not question and constructs a coherent world on this foundation. Each attempts to reconcile, within the limits of its presuppositions, whatever contradictions it encounters, thereby achieving coherence in its own terms. The modes are selfcontained, abstract worlds, and, as such, they are not related to each other at all (EM 219, 327; OH 2). Where arguments are modally distinct, each follows its own logic and neither confirms nor refutes arguments in any other mode. What is true in geometry is neither true nor false morally speaking. A poet’s metaphor is not reinforced by statistical evidence. A legal argument can challenge other legal arguments, but no legal argument can support historical or scientific conclusions. Each mode is a closed system within which conclusions may achieve a conditional validity but outside of which they have no validity whatsoever. What is true in one system is not false but simply irrelevant in another. The significance of an idea, fact, symbol, proposition, argument, or proof is determined by the system within which it is asserted. It follows that a conclusion cannot carry its certainty as a conclusion from one realm of discourse to another. “An idea cannot serve two worlds” (EM 327). A result that makes sense in one context cannot, when removed to another, be employed to settle disagreements, confirm hypotheses, or construct an argument. Taken out of its proper context, it is simply irrelevant. “It is impossible,” Oakeshott asserts in a much-disputed claim, “to pass in argument from any one 24. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924). Bosanquet hints at a hierarchical conception of modality when he says that to study something philosophically is to understand “its kind and degree of self-maintenance in the world,” thereby revealing its “rank and significance” in the world as a whole. Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1923), 2–3. Heidegger’s search for a primordial (ursprünglich) level of being, a fundamental mode of experience, also presupposes a hierarchy. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). Oakeshott’s theory of modality, in contrast, has much in common with Bradley’s view that all aspects of experience are equally real: “none is primary, or can serve to explain the others or the whole.” Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 429.

42

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

of these worlds of ideas to any other without involving ourselves in a confusion” (EM 76). One cannot use ideas that belong to one mode in arguments belonging to another without committing the fallacy of irrelevance. And irrelevance is inevitable whenever the attempt is made to combine arguments belonging to one manner of discourse with those belonging to another—when, for example, a scientist claims to speak with special authority on a political question, a historical conclusion is rejected on moral grounds, or in some other way we try to reason “from what is abstracted upon one principle to what is abstracted upon another” (EM 5). Disputants who engage one another from the standpoint of different ways of thinking are doomed to argue at crosspurposes. The failure to determine the modal character of an idea, image, or argument can only lead to error.25 One is tempted to object that in pushing the idea of modality to this conclusion, Oakeshott turns a possibly useful tool into a dogma. Historians, scientists, and artists seem to get along, even to flourish, borrowing eclectically from different disciplines, combining different theories, blurring genres, and creating new discourses. But even granting this optimistic picture of intellectual discourse, it does not follow that modal distinctions are academic, mere symptoms of a sterile purism. If irrelevance is an error, it is something we should try to avoid, and to avoid it we must be able to distinguish considerations that belong to different kinds of discourse. The distinction between kinds of discourse is a modal distinction, for a mode is a way of thinking that has achieved autonomy and internal consistency within the limits of its own assumptions. The idea of modality, then, can help us avoid the confusion that arises when we import ideas from one kind of discourse into another where they are inappropriate. A more penetrating objection to the idea of modality is that the emergence of a mode is, for Oakeshott, a mere fact rather than a necessary stage in the development of knowledge. If the modes are historical creations, subject to change and indefinite in number, then their existence is arbitrary from the standpoint of understanding as a whole. It is simply a given about which philosophy has nothing to say. Why, we may ask, is experience arrested at some points and not others? Collingwood argues that in treating this question as one without an answer, Oakeshott betrays his conception of philosophy as 25. What Oakeshott analyzes as modal confusion was subsequently identified by Ryle, more influentially though less precisely, as a “category mistake.” Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), 16–18.

43

Understanding

the pursuit of complete coherence in experience. By his own principles, Oakeshott is barred from merely noticing the emergence of particular modes; he must try to explain them by providing what in fact he does not attempt to provide, an account of the modes of experience as necessary parts of a coherent whole.26 Anticipating this objection, Oakeshott argues in Experience and Its Modes that it misunderstands the aim of philosophy, which is to comprehend the totality of experience. All philosophy need do to realize this aim is “to recognize abstraction and to overcome it” (EM 84)—that is, to identify, criticize, and get beyond the presuppositions of particular modes of understanding. Philosophy’s interest in the modes is limited because its job is to escape their limitations. It is concerned with a given mode of experience solely for what it can contribute to the search for comprehensive understanding. This concern must be distinguished from the effort to determine the degree to which each mode is defective, and hence to determine “a logical order or hierarchy of modes” (EM 84). Where the aim is to understand experience as a whole, what is important is that error and incoherence should be overcome; the degree of misunderstanding embodied in this or that mode is of little interest. From the standpoint of philosophy, then, what one learns from examining history, science, and other modes of understanding is not how they can be joined together, while retaining their independence, to provide a coherent picture of reality: they cannot. One learns that the modes offer competing, incompatible versions of reality that must be transcended if reality itself— reality unqualified by the adjectives “scientific,” “practical,” or “historical”—is to be understood. A mode is an abstraction from the whole: not a separate part but a partial account of the totality of all there is. It follows that this totality cannot be an aggregate of modes. Each mode is a suspension of critical thought, and so, from the standpoint of completely coherent understanding, a failure, and no collection of failures can make a success (EM 328). And that is why, so far as philosophy is concerned, the modes must be superseded rather than assimilated. Still another objection to Oakeshott’s account of modality in Experience and Its Modes is that it is wrong in asserting that modal thinking cannot know

26. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946; rev. ed. 1993), 156–57. Similar objections are made by W. H. Greenleaf, Oakeshott’s Philosophical Politics (London: Longmans, 1966), 94–95, and Noël K. O’Sullivan, The Problem of Political Obligation (New York: Garland Press, 1987), 127–29.

44

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

its own limits.27 Oakeshott sometimes writes as if to think within a given mode is to be blind to any other way of thinking and to be incapable of skepticism about one’s own assumptions. But to think historically or scientifically does not require one to deny that there are limits to historical or scientific thinking. The objection is therefore compelling only if one understands modal thinking to be the thinking of actual scientists or historians. Properly speaking, modal thinking is the activity of an ideal-typical scientist or historian, not an actual one, and this ideal-typical activity cannot know its own limits because it is, by definition, thinking within those limits. One must not confuse the idea of a mode with its imperfect actualization in the thinking of actual persons. Although some actual scientists and historians are naïve realists, others are perfectly capable of grasping the notion that what appears to be a scientific or historical truth may be context-dependent, just as most people understand that what seems real in ordinary experience can be illusory. Be that as it may, in later works Oakeshott explicitly retracts the claim that to think within a given mode is to be unable to see beyond it. Modal limits on inquiry may arise from choice and not merely ignorance: we may put on blinders deliberately, knowing that we must make assumptions if we wish to reach conclusions and that to criticize everything at the same time is impossible (OHC 25–26). Oakeshott also concedes ground on the issue of whether there can be a comprehensive system of modal categories when, in On Human Conduct, he replaces the distinction between science, history, and practice with a distinction between inquiries that postulate intelligent activity and those that postulate not-intelligent processes. In doing so, he can be said to have reduced his modes to two mutually-exclusive categories and therefore to have achieved a degree of systematic order lacking in his earlier discussions of modality. Yet because these newly identified modes remain independent of one another, Oakeshott cannot be said to have embraced the idea, so important in the Idealist tradition, of higher and lower levels of reality. I will consider these new modal distinctions, and their implications for the questions we have been discussing, in subsequent chapters.

Philosophy Oakeshott’s later writings reconsider much of what he says in Experience and Its Modes about the character and forms of understanding. These writings are 27. Robert Grant, Oakeshott (London: Claridge Press, 1990), 41. I am grateful to Corey Abel for helping me understand the issue Grant raises.

45

Understanding

less systematic and certainly less “Idealist.” “Experience” is no longer the organizing concept and “the Absolute” vanishes entirely. Modality recedes as an explicit focus of discussion, though it remains a tool of analysis. And philosophy is less sharply distinguished from other kinds of reflection or theorizing. In several essays written between the mid-1930s and late 1940s, Oakeshott emphasizes the inherently dialectical character of philosophy while renouncing the idea that philosophy seeks total coherence in experience.28 Philosophical inquiry is still critical and autonomous, but it no longer aims at comprehensive understanding, even as an ideal. And in On Human Conduct he concedes that philosophy is not, in fact, categorially different from other kinds of theorizing. All theorizing is to some degree dialectical; philosophy is simply more singleminded in its commitment to the criticism of presuppositions. Philosophy and Modality In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott defines philosophy as the search for perfect coherence. To dispel the mystery of experience, to comprehend it fully, we must reconcile the conflicting evidence of different senses, observers, or modes of thought. We must dissolve incoherence wherever we detect it. And because we cannot, once launched on this enterprise, tolerate unresolved contradictions or accept, as conclusions, propositions that are in fact mere postulates, we can justify no stopping place short of complete coherence. It is this commitment to achieving this absolute coherence that distinguishes philosophy from other kinds of thinking. Philosophy is thinking “without reservation or arrest,” reflection that is “self-conscious and self-critical throughout, in which the determination to remain unsatisfied with anything short of a completely coherent world of ideas is absolute and unqualified” (EM 3, 82). Because it critically examines modal thinking, philosophy is independent of any mode. Inquiry within a given mode does not question the organizing assumptions that define that mode, and it cannot question those assumptions without abandoning its modal character. The thinking required in practical 28. The essays are a 1938 article, “The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence” (CPJ), and two papers, “The Concept of a Philosophy of Politics” and “Political Philosophy.” The unpublished papers are included in Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life (RPML). The editor of this volume, Timothy Fuller, assigns these undated papers to the late 1940s, but it can be argued that “The Concept of a Philosophy of Politics” was written at least a decade earlier because it shares a substantial passage with the 1938 article (compare RPML 127–31 with CPJ 345–50). See Robert Grant, Times Literary Supplement (15 April 1994), 31–32. The existence of a shared passage does not settle the issue, however, for Oakeshott might have used material from the published article in a subsequent paper.

46

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

life or in scientific or historical inquiry may be critical to a degree, but it must suspend criticism of the assumptions on which it proceeds. And the reason for this is clear enough: to become involved in exploring the implications of the premises underlying the activity in which one is engaged is no longer to engage in that activity. Against this view of philosophy as thinking that transcends the bounds of modality, it might be objected that philosophy is itself simply another mode resting on its own unexamined postulates. But if philosophy is a mode of inquiry, what are its postulates? And what shall we call the inquiry that examines these postulates? Oakeshott’s response in Experience and Its Modes cleverly deploys all the concepts in his Idealist armory. If we regard philosophy as an abstraction from experience, in the manner of other modes, this implies the existence of a more comprehensive reality from which each mode, philosophy included, has been abstracted. Because the incompleteness inherent in abstraction implies completeness, we are left with the problem of accounting for that larger reality (EM 351). We can, however, restate this rejoinder without using the problematic idea of complete coherence. The distinction between philosophy and modality follows from the idea of modality itself: conditional understanding implies the possibility of pursuing unconditional understanding by critically examining whatever conditions one can detect. As Oakeshott put it many years later, philosophy subjects “every purported achievement of human understanding” to “an enquiry into its conditions” (VLL 34). Its goal is not to replace that understanding with another conditional understanding; it is to free understanding from whatever conditions can be identified and thereby approach the unreachable goal of unconditional understanding. The character of philosophy does not, however, lie in its actual achievements. To define philosophy in relation to its aims is not to claim that philosophy has actually realized or ever will realize these aims. To achieve a comprehensive and entirely self-consistent view of experience is impossible (EM 356). The idea of complete or unconditional understanding may inspire inquiry, but no inquiry, including philosophy, can provide an absolutely secure foundation for knowledge. The results of philosophical inquiry are never complete or final. To attempt to premise a philosophical argument on an unquestionable proposition contradicts the character and spirit of authentic philosophy. This view of philosophy implies the unity of philosophy. The understanding sought by philosophy is in principle a single whole, and although there may be differences within this whole, these are not differences between distinct forms of philosophical knowledge, each resting on its own unrecognized

47

Understanding

assumptions. For in that case the branches of philosophy would be independent modes, not parts of philosophy. The conventional divisions of philosophy, then, are even more arbitrary than the modes, for arguments in one depend on arguments in the others, so each branch of philosophy must eventually deal with questions arising in other branches. Logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics are “barren abstractions” (EM 348) which, if treated as beyond question, impede the philosopher’s enterprise. Although these claims may seem exaggerated, the history of philosophy suggests that the boundaries between its diverse branches are continually being redrawn, often in ways that initially seem shocking. As Rorty has observed, philosophy is an unstable enterprise, in danger of being taken over either by the sciences or the humanities depending on whether it asserts its positivist or its interpretivist side.29 Insofar as any branch of philosophy claims autonomy, perhaps by asserting its ties with mathematics or some other discipline outside philosophy, it denies its dependence on philosophy as a whole and therefore its standing as philosophy. As we shall see in Chapter 2, the mistake of moral, political, and other kinds of practical philosophy is to accept arbitrary limits on inquiry that make them incompletely philosophical. Oakeshott disputes the common view that its increasing professionalization has strengthened philosophy. Philosophy, understood as the criticism of concepts and presuppositions, is not served if what is recognized as philosophy in a given place and time is defined by an establishment that would deny its autonomy by assimilating it to logic, science, ideology, or the history of ideas. Schools of philosophy that take religious, scientific, or other conclusions as the indisputable foundation of speculation have already betrayed the inherently critical character of philosophy. Nor is philosophy served by the pressures toward doctrinal conformity that arise in university departments and professional associations. Philosophy relies upon no special source of knowledge and recognizes no authorities. When philosophers display their learning, or even acknowledge the source of their arguments, they “promote a groundless trust in books, and a false attitude of mind” (EM 8). And examining one’s assumptions is not something that only professionals can do, nor is it even something they are especially good at. Oakeshott was evidently drawn, inconveniently, into philosophical reflection by curiosity about the premises of his own work as a historian of political thought. One hears an autobiographical 29. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 168.

48

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

note when, in Experience and Its Modes, he describes philosophy as “a mood” that is scarcely compatible with normal life and the philosopher as “the victim of thought” (EM 2, 83; RP 150). Like Wittgenstein, who ruled Cambridge philosophy in the 1930s, Oakeshott has a romantic view of philosophizing as a way of life, not an academic specialty. This attitude toward the practice of philosophy throws light on the virtual absence of references to other authors in his writings. Oakeshott has been criticized for merely asserting his conclusions and for ignoring objections. And these failures have been attributed to a patrician disregard for his contemporaries or, worse, dogmatic indifference to philosophical argument. But it is clear that this style has been carefully considered and that it follows from his view of philosophy as the critical examination of presuppositions. Because the philosopher uncovers and rejects assumptions that others take for granted, philosophical thinking creates an ever-widening chasm between philosophical and nonphilosophical ideas. In undertaking to think philosophically, one is slowly but inexorably separated from those who choose not to question the assumptions on which their own thinking and activity rests. And because even philosophers must make assumptions if they are to question other assumptions, the authentic philosopher is separated from any school of philosophy that rests on shared assumptions. That is why in philosophy the best way to defend a view is simply to elucidate it and why it is futile to attempt to win arguments, even with other philosophers. “Philosophy consists, not in persuading others, but in making our own minds clear” (EM 3). Oakeshott, it need hardly be said, does not adhere consistently to this ideal. No one could. But understanding it can help us to decode some otherwise puzzling aspects of his philosophical style. And it should provoke us to reflect critically on the practice of philosophy. Philosophy and Dialectic After Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott gradually moved away from the view that philosophy is an inquiry that aims at comprehensive understanding. He continued to distinguish philosophy from other kinds of inquiry, defining it some years later as thinking “without reservation or presupposition” (RPML 127), but the contrast is less sharply drawn. For Oakeshott all inquiry, including philosophical inquiry, involves the dialectical transformation of received ideas. This is a view he shares with Plato, Aquinas, Hegel, Gadamer, and other philosophers who emphasize the dialec-

49

Understanding

tical character of thinking. We always begin with an understanding of one kind or another and turn this understanding into something new. Thinking, and especially philosophical thinking, is therefore best characterized as involving interpretation rather than invention or discovery. “The process,” Oakeshott writes in language evidently borrowed from Collingwood, “is always one of coming to know more fully and more clearly what is in some sense already known” (RPML 128; CPJ 346).30 All reflection springs from the paradox that we both know and do not know, a paradox that is resolved not by simply adding to our knowledge but by revising it. Philosophy is distinguished from other inquiries only in being more skeptical of every “stopping place” in this dialectical process (CPJ 348). When a philosopher sets out to reconstruct received ideas, “the process is always one of radical reformulation of the whole of what is already known” (RPML 128).31 Because it exempts certain conclusions from skeptical criticism, modal thinking is incompletely dialectical. The scientist or historian challenges received opinions and, in so doing, appears to discover a natural world of scientifically verified processes or to recover a past world of historically verified events. But this impression of having moved from mere opinions to objective facts is misleading, for facts are only “relatively unshakable opinions” (RPML 141). They are not exempt from critical examination. In science or history, reflection may center on an unquestioned identity, but philosophy questions all identities. A mode of inquiry, then, only partly subverts the received ideas upon which it both operates and rests. What distinguishes philosophy from modal thinking is that it is radically subversive of received ideas. It follows that much of what is called “philosophy” is not authentically philosophical. If philosophy is inherently skeptical, then the defect of Cartesianism, positivism, and other kinds of foundationalism is that, by taking some unquestioned identity as a starting point, they set “a limit to the subversion permitted” (RPML 142). It is in statements like these that Oakeshott comes closest to identifying philosophy with Pyrrhonism. Oakeshott sometimes describes the dialectical process in philosophical inquiry as one of conceptual clarification and redefinition. Beginning with the concepts we rely upon in ordinary experience or in a given field of knowledge, 30. Compare the words quoted in the text with similar words in R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 11. 31. I have deleted the word “not” before “always” in this sentence. It is an obvious misprint, incompatible both with the corresponding sentence in “The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence” (CPJ 43) and with the sense of Oakeshott’s argument.

50

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

philosophy undertakes “an extended, detailed and complete exposition of those concepts, an exposition which is itself a definition” (RPML 128; CPJ 346). It proceeds by removing ambiguities in the concepts it begins with, making those concepts more coherent. And the process continues until it can go no farther. “The aim of philosophy is to arrive at concepts which, because they presuppose nothing, are complete in themselves; the aim is to define and establish concepts so fully and completely that nothing further remains to be added” (RPML 127; CPJ 345). The idea of complete coherence seems to reappear in this formulation, but it is coherence within, not between, concepts. It follows that philosophical concepts—concepts that emerge from this dialectical process of redefinition—are necessarily different from the concepts with which the process begins. “If what is undertaken is a transformation, you must not reject the result if it is different from what you started with” (RPML 129). “Justice” for Plato or “the state” as Hegel defines it are remote from the concepts for which those names stand in ordinary discourse. Nor is this the defect that naive criticism takes it to be. A philosophical concept cannot be judged according to whether it agrees with the concept from which it has been generated. It cannot be verified merely by reference to ordinary experience, for such experience cannot be both raw material for philosophical reflection and the criterion of its success. It is therefore a mistake to defend philosophical conclusions by appealing to “our intuitions.” Nor must we expect agreement between philosophical concepts and those used by scientists or historians in their own, nonphilosophical, inquiries. This is not to say that there is no connection between the concepts with which philosophy begins and those it ends up with: a philosophical concept must emerge, through a continuous argument, from ordinary practical, scientific, or historical thinking. But for those who have not followed the argument, the gap between the concepts that are taken for granted in some particular sphere of life and those of the philosopher may appear complete. Philosophy as Theorizing Oakeshott begins On Human Conduct by restating what has become a relatively settled view of human understanding. According to this view, philosophy differs from other kinds of thinking only in being more skeptical of its own conclusions. All deliberate thinking (now called “theorizing”) begins with received ideas, examines them critically, and reformulates them dialectically to generate a new system of ideas. By problematizing the ideas with

51

Understanding

which it begins, theorizing sees these ideas not as unconditional truths but as provisional conclusions whose validity rests on certain assumed conditions. Skepticism about these assumptions is therefore not limited to philosophy. Any inquiry is theoretical to the extent that it recognizes the conditionality of its conclusions. Philosophy differs from other kinds of theorizing only in being more radically self-critical. A theorist can, however, suspend self-criticism and simply use the conclusions that have been reached as tools to further explore the domain of understanding to which these conclusions belong. Nonetheless, the suspension of theorizing to explore what lies within the limits of a given field is never more than temporary, and a theorist’s reliance on the conclusions that are accepted in that field can never be more than provisional. Those who allow the defining postulates of their field to limit their thinking fail to realize, and in that sense betray, the full, philosophical character of theorizing. Oakeshott’s use of the term “theorizing” in this work needs to be clarified. He normally uses it for what he calls the “engagement” to understand. Understanding, in other words, is not always the result of an active engagement, a deliberately undertaken inquiry. Simply to be human is to inhabit an experienced world that is already understood. It follows that understanding is unavoidable and can be possessed without being sought. But understanding is also pursued in a deliberate effort “to inhabit an ever more intelligible, or an ever less mysterious world” (OHC 1). In contrast with understanding in general, then, theorizing is a deliberate activity. But Oakeshott sometimes uses the word “theorizing” for inquiries that seek a certain kind of understanding: an understanding of things that springs from uncovering their presuppositions. Underlying this narrower usage is a distinction between two kinds of inquiry—a distinction that reflects the distinction, central to Experience and Its Modes, between modality and philosophy. In a modal investigation we make sense of identified objects, events, processes, and practices by observing their characteristics and relating these characteristics to one another in various ways. In performing these operations we make certain assumptions for the sake of getting on with our inquiry. We do not question the characteristics we are studying, once we have decided what they are; we take these characteristics for granted and simply use them. They become the actors in our historical narratives, the “variables” in our statistical analyses, or the inescapable facts of a practical situation to which we must respond. In philosophical thinking, in contrast, we attempt to understand the things we identify not by studying their characteristics but by uncovering the postulates that underlie these characteristics. If I ask “What

52

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

time is it?” I am asking a question that presupposes and therefore does not problematize the idea of time. But if I ask “What is time?” I initiate an inquiry of a different kind, one no longer reflecting an ordinary practical concern but rather the theoretical concerns of a physicist or a philosopher (OHC 9). The different questions generate different inquiries and imply different kinds of understanding. This suggests that, for Oakeshott, any engagement to understand is theorizing, but that there are two kinds of theorizing: (1) “conditional theorizing,” which “saves the appearances” of the things it studies by assuming these appearances to be factual and treating them as “data” for analysis or as useful information on the basis of which to act, and (2) “unconditional theorizing,” which does question appearances by looking behind the “facts,” critically examining the categories and measurements on which they depend. Oakeshott is not consistent in his use of the word “theorizing,” employing it sometimes for both conditional and unconditional theorizing and sometimes only for the latter. The best way to reconcile these usages is to conclude that, for Oakeshott, theorizing is not limited to efforts to understand by questioning presuppositions. Rather, it includes any effort to understand that is undertaken with the awareness that, whatever level of understanding may be achieved, there is still more to be understood, and that any achieved understanding is itself a point of departure for further inquiry. In short, the pursuit of understanding through the criticism of presuppositions—which is most characteristic of philosophy—can be suspended without being repudiated. Theorists can use, as well as examine, their theoretic equipment (OHC 11). The philosopher or unconditional theorist, however, is entirely committed to an effort “to understand in other terms what he already understands.” These terms are the conditions (postulates) of the something that is already understood. One of the conditions of telling the time, for example, is that events are ordered in such a way that one event can either precede, coincide with, or follow another. Telling the time, in the manner we now take for granted, also presupposes a system of measurement in terms of which we cannot only order events in relation to one another but also measure the intervals between events. The concern of the philosopher is to identify postulates like these and make sense of them. In a philosophical inquiry, “the understanding sought . . . is a disclosure of the conditions of the understanding enjoyed and not a substitute for it.” But this understanding is itself unavoidably conditional: because all inquiry rests on assumptions it does not question, even unconditional theorizing cannot transcend its own conditions. One cannot

53

Understanding

both use and repair one’s tools at the same time. Given its inherently self-critical character, philosophical reflection is always tentative, always conditional. It is “an intellectual adventure which has a course to follow but no destination,” and philosophical writing, which finds its most fitting expression in the essay rather than the treatise, is “a traveller’s tale,” the adventure itself recollected in tranquillity (OHC vii). Philosophy, then, is not a special method of thinking, much less a particular kind of knowledge. It is simply thinking made as critical as possible. All thinking is to some degree critical. What is given in experience “is never solid, fixed and inviolable, never merely to be accepted” (EM 29). What seems factual and real sooner or later evokes criticism, which then transforms it. The more skeptical and subversive the criticism, the more likely we are to call it “philosophy.” But it is not a unique activity. Philosophy is simply the effort to understand, theorizing, pushed to its limits. It is thinking that emerges from and is continuous with the thinking about which it thinks. All theorizing is a never-ending “engagement of arrivals and departures” in which each achievement of understanding is also a new invitation to understand. Philosophy is not the pursuit of unchallengeable and permanent truths: “the notion of an unconditional or definitive understanding may hover in the background, but it has no part in the adventure” (OHC 3). To the extent that it can be distinguished from other efforts to understand, philosophy is defined by its commitment to examine the presuppositions of whatever understanding has been achieved, including the presuppositions of theorizing itself.

chapter

t w o

Understanding and Doing

Action or doing constitutes a world, the world of practical activity. Oakeshott reaches two main conclusions about understanding in relation to this world. First, as a world of ideas, practical activity is itself a mode of understanding. Second, though history, science, and other modes involve practical activity (the activity of historians or scientists, for example), this does not deprive the understanding each generates of its distinct modal character. The character of authentic history is historical, not practical. The same can be said of philosophy: philosophical inquiry is a practice, but it generates ideas that are authentically philosophical. Its conclusions are distinct from practical conclusions. Before examining science and history as autonomous modes of understanding, we need to consider the claim that practical activity can be understood in ways that are modally distinct from the kind of understanding implicit in practical activity itself: the claim that though doing is a kind of understanding, understanding (“theory”) and doing (“practice”) are radically distinct. And to do this we need to examine Oakeshott’s efforts to define the most general concepts in terms of which practical activity is understood: concepts like fact, value, action, agent, and will. To illustrate how Oakeshott uses these concepts to make sense of a particular realm of experience, I will consider what he has to say about religion. I will also consider the relationship

56

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

between Oakeshott’s early and late writings on the theme of doing, specifically how his discussion of “conduct” in On Human Conduct alters the theory of practice as a mode he provides in Experience and Its Modes.

Practice as a Mode Like other philosophers, Oakeshott uses the words “practice” and “practical” in ways that depart significantly from ordinary usage. What he calls practical activity is not necessarily practical in the usual meaning of that term: a person who is impractical in the sense of being inept or imprudent, or who unrealistically tries to reform the world, is still engaged in efforts to produce or prevent change and therefore inhabits the world of practice. For Oakeshott in Experience and Its Modes, practice is nothing other than “the conduct of life,” so it includes more than what is ordinarily called “practical.” It includes moral as well as prudential conduct and, in general, any effort to reduce the distance between is and ought. In his later works, Oakeshott assigns additional meanings to “practice” and “practical,” and so we will have to consider these as well. The defining presupposition of practical activity is that “it belongs to the character of thought to be for the sake of action” (EM 248). This presupposition is seldom seen to be a presupposition, for the world of practical experience—which might, following Husserl, be called the Lebenswelt—is where we spend most of our lives, the world we normally take for granted as “the real world.”1 It is a world so compelling that to step outside it takes conscious effort. For many it is the only world, reality itself: like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave, they “find it impossible to entertain the idea that this practical world, within which they are confined as if in a prison, is other than the universe itself ” (EM 249). But this naive assertion of reality, sometimes echoed in the theories of philosophers, is an illusion: practice is a mode, not reality itself. How is practice distinguished from other modes? Science and history— understood not as actual and therefore modally ambiguous activities but as 1. For Husserl, the “life-world” is given in immediate experience and therefore prior to the “special” (constructed and objective) modes of cognition represented by the sciences. It is “always already there” as the “universal field of all actual and possible praxis.” Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 142. This world should not be confused with Dilthey’s geistige Welt, the world of ideas, mind, or culture; the latter includes, as the world of immediate practical experience does not, scientific, aesthetic, and other differentiated kinds of understanding.

57

Understanding and Doing

unambiguous modes—are “objective” or “explanatory” in the sense that they aim to understand objects, situations, or events in terms that are independent of practical concerns. In the aesthetic mode, too, we are detached from such concerns. But in practical experience we react to things as they affect us (OH 11). Things are large or small, near or far, easy or difficult, threatening or reassuring. In acting we have in mind a future that is hoped for, feared, or in some other way relevant to our wants, and we explicitly or implicitly evaluate things in relation to our efforts to improve our situation or to keep it from getting worse. Practice, then, can be called “evaluative” rather than explanatory. The distinction between practice and other modes is not that practice involves doing as opposed to thinking, for doing is itself a kind of thinking. For Oakeshott evaluation is not a speculative activity but an aspect of acting, and acting is the exercise of will. The aspect of thinking most evident in action is neither contemplation nor explanation but willing. Practical experience is the world understood under the category of will (EM 258). In the mode of practice, we want to understand the world so that we can change or maintain it. Our concern is to alter the conditions under which we or others live, or to preserve those conditions against a threatened change. Action, which always presupposes some state of affairs to be achieved, springs from an understood discrepancy between what is or might be and what we would like to be the case. This is true even when what we want is to maintain an existing state of affairs, for in such cases what we want is that particular changes should not occur. The world of practical experience is one in which change, wanted or unwanted, is possible and significant. It is a “mortal world” of growth and decay, a world of uncertainties and unintended consequences quite unlike the fixed, unchanging world of the historical past or the abstract, hypothetical world of physics. Practical activity, then, involves both what is (fact) and what is desired (value). How, when we are thinking “practically,” do we understand these elements of human action? That action assumes a state of affairs to be altered implies a distinctive idea of fact. Science and history presuppose the idea of permanent facts: if a scientific or historical fact changes, it is not the fact itself that has changed; rather, what was once believed to be a fact turns out not to have been a fact after all, but only the illusion of fact. In this sense, history and science presuppose an unchanging reality. Practice, in contrast, presupposes a changeable reality: the world that is presupposed in practical activity is “the world of what is here and now” (EM 273), and the point of acting is to alter some aspect of that world. Unlike scientific or historical facts, practical facts

58

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

are mutable; they are simply those that present themselves as given in a situation in which we must make a choice. And what is given, regarded as fact, can change from one situation to another without losing its factual character: yesterday’s enemy is today’s ally, my comfortable shoes a shabby disgrace. Similarly, what is “real” from the standpoint of action is changeable because it, too, is defined in relation to what is wanted: whatever in a particular situation has to be dealt with is regarded as real. If I want to write a best-seller, the tastes of the reading public and the priorities of publishers are real considerations; if I want to write a good poem, reality may assert itself in my limited imagination or defective grasp of poetic form. Because wants change from one situation to another, practical ideas are validated by their correspondence with a miscellaneous and shifting body of circumstances, not with a relatively unchanging standard of truth. In acting, we swim in a sea of contingencies. Besides a factual world, which it wants to alter, practical activity presupposes an imagined world: the world as it would be if our desires were realized. And it presupposes the criteria of good and bad that are implicit in having desires. In the vocabulary of Experience and Its Modes, practice presupposes a world of “value,” an equivocal term, happily no longer fashionable, that implicitly reduces all practical judgments to judgments of desirability or utility. Oakeshott does not distinguish different kinds of value in this book, and in particular he does not distinguish the moral quality of an action from its utility. This (undifferentiated) world of value is abstract and incomplete, for values are unstable and sometimes incommensurable. This does not mean, however, that they are “subjective.” We can look for coherence between different sets of values because our ideas of what is good and bad do not express a merely personal point of view; they make claims to truth that can contradict one another. The world of value is an “inter-subjective” world of judgments in which value claims can be compared and sometimes reconciled. As Oakeshott later explains in On Human Conduct, objectivity is an attribute not of correct judgment but of reasoned judgment. Misunderstandings can be objective, in this sense, because they belong to a realm of discourse about correct and incorrect judgment (OHC 51–52). But values, though more than merely subjective, are never “absolute,” that is, unconditional or independent of their context. If we understand practical thinking to involve an effort to reconcile different values, there is no reason why any particular value should be regarded as fundamental, the criterion of all the others. Every value judgment “must submit itself . . . to the world of value as a whole” (EM 278).

59

Understanding and Doing

In practical activity, we attempt not only to reconcile different values but to overcome the discrepancy between is and ought. We try to make what exists correspond to our desires, either by exchanging what is for what ought to be or by eliminating those desires. “Action,” it should be noticed, can include daydreaming or fantasy, for fantasies are sometimes imaginary achievements and are therefore distinguishable from purely contemplative (“poetic”) images. Like other modes, then, the practical mode both exhibits coherence and invites its pursuit. But “coherence” has a distinct meaning in this mode. In scientific and historical inquiry, coherence is pursued in thought, but in the practical mode it is sought in action. Does the idea of coherence make sense in the context of action? Or is Oakeshott using the word “coherence” so loosely as to turn it into a mere metaphor? Coherence always involves bringing ideas into what, according to the postulates of a given mode, is an acceptable relationship, of reconciling discrepancies to achieve a modally appropriate consistency. Acting presumes an existing state of affairs and an imagined state of affairs we wish to realize. These states of affairs are ideas that action must reconcile to achieve a specifically practical kind of coherence. The way things “are” is as much a matter of judgment and thought as the way we would like them to be. Coherence in the practical realm, as in any other, is therefore a matter of reconciling discrepant ideas. In history and science, coherence is impermanent because new information may lead us to revise our understanding of what happened in the past or what must happen according to the laws of nature. Practical coherence—the reconciliation of is and ought—is also limited and temporary, but for a different reason. Because there are some things we cannot change, we act in a world that we can affect but can never completely control or transform. Even when we do succeed in achieving our purpose, the change that we have brought about is never final: all changes are subject to further change. What is and what ought to be can therefore never be permanently reconciled. As soon as one discrepancy is overcome, a new one appears, and so on ad infinitum. We might try permanently to resolve such discrepancies, but the resolutions we actually achieve in practical activity are never more than momentary. In practice “there are no ‘final solutions’” (OHC 45–46). This aspect of practical experience is summed up in what might be called the “irony of practice,” though Oakeshott does not use this expression—in the depressing (or maybe liberating?) truth that practical activity “undertakes what, from its nature, can never be brought to a conclusion” (EM 291). In

60

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

acting we look for a response from others, yet these responses are undependable. Acting is therefore always “making a bargain with an imperfectly imagined future” (OHC 44). And even if others respond as we wish, our acts may fail to provide the satisfaction we hoped for. What we do results in a new situation, one in which new desires appear and further choices must be made. Action is necessarily inconclusive and episodic—an aspect of life, Oakeshott observes, that some have deemed “absurd” and others have endowed with meaning by reading it as part of a larger plan or story (OH 14n). Absurd or meaningful, depressing or liberating, this uncertainty is the inescapable predicament of practical existence. It is part of the human condition. But despite its inherent contingency, the practical mode, like any other mode, is not “a shapeless, unspecified encounter with the confusion of all that may be going on.” It is a “coherent, self-sustaining understanding of the world in which a single formal character is imposed upon everything that receives attention”—“an autonomous universe of discourse” (OH 20). At the same time, the impossibility of achieving final coherence in practical experience is a necessary feature of this mode, for to reconcile what is and what ought to be in general and absolutely would deny the gap between is and ought that is presupposed by practice (EM 304). In this sense, at least, the world of practice is one of permanent and necessary incoherence.

Religious Experience It may be impossible to achieve permanent coherence in the world of practice, but that has not discouraged human beings from making the effort. And one of the ways in which they pursue this goal is through the practice of a religious faith. Most of what Oakeshott wrote about religion belongs to the late 1920s and early 1930s. During these years he wrote several papers and many book reviews on the topic.2 Religious experience also receives careful, if brief, treatment in Experience and Its Modes. But after that, with the exception of a few acute pages in On Human Conduct, Oakeshott mentions religion only in passing. These writings can be read for clues about Oakeshott’s own religious beliefs, but it is what they say about religion that is relevant here. The theory 2. These papers, though not the reviews, have now been collected by Timothy Fuller in Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life (RPML).

61

Understanding and Doing

intimated in the early essays on religion and argued explicitly in Experience and Its Modes is that religion seeks coherence in the world of practical experience. It is philosophy, not religion, that pursues coherence in experience as a whole. Oakeshott’s earliest writings reveal a developing awareness that thinking about religion must be distinguished from religious thinking. They show a movement from religious to historical and philosophical concerns and from an interest in the identity of Christian religion to an interest in defining religion more generally. Religion appears successively in these essays as the fundamental principle of social order, the chief motive for and only sure way of realizing the moral life, and the antithesis of worldly realism, before finally assuming the character Oakeshott assigns to it in Experience and Its Modes as the completion of practical experience. The question most often posed in these writings is one of definition: What is religion? And the successive answers they offer reveal a characteristic concern to distinguish a self-consistent realm of experience, rather than to tailor a definition that fits whatever contingent phenomena happen to be collected under the label of religion. Religion, for Oakeshott, is an ideal character, and the philosophical effort to define this character can yield a conception that departs significantly from received ideas. Oakeshott’s first attempt to frame a definition of religion appears in “Religion and the Moral Life.” The essay, written in 1927 for a group of Cambridge dons who met weekly to discuss theological questions, distinguishes three views of the relationship between religion and morality: that religion is identical with morality, that it is the sanction of morality, and that it is the completion of morality. Oakeshott judges the first view, the “identity thesis,” to be obviously mistaken, even though there are similarities between religion and morality that make it plausible. The most important of these similarities is that both presuppose human agency: to submit to God’s will is moral only if it expresses our own will. God can impose a moral order on us only through our own sense of right and wrong. This insight reveals the defect of the second view, that religion is the sanction of morality, which holds that to be moral is to obey God’s commands. This view of moral conduct has it backwards, Oakeshott thinks, for it suggests that we behave morally only insofar as we obey God. But because we are autonomous agents, it can be said with more truth that we obey God only insofar as we behave morally. In fact, if moral conduct is choosing for oneself, “the notion of an external moral law, the will of God, is an immoral notion” (RPML 43). Morality is the premise, not the consequence, of religious belief.

62

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

Even so, there is more to morality than autonomy, and this additional element is the moral knowledge that makes it possible for human beings to react in ways that are not only freely chosen but “adequate” (RPML 44) to the situations in which they find themselves. It is true that moral conduct, as a product of human understanding and effort, can never be completely adequate, but completeness can be sought in the practice of a religious faith. The implied third view—that religion is the completion of morality, a way of transcending its inadequacies—may strike us as obscure where the other views are transparent. But it would not have seemed obscure to the readers for whom Oakeshott was writing, for what might be called the “completion thesis” was a familiar part of Idealist thought. When Oakeshott writes that morality is “an endless practical endeavour” (RPML 44), he echoes the conclusion of Bradley’s Ethical Studies (a new edition of which had appeared in 1927, the same year as Oakeshott’s essay). Bradley works through a series of conceptions of morality, only to conclude that the moral point of view is inherently incomplete. “Morality,” Bradley writes, “is an endless process, and therefore a self-contradiction.”3 As Oakeshott puts it, “morality tells us to realize that which can never be realized; the moral life is a ‘vain search after the true good’” (RPML 42). This perpetual lack of moral closure is experienced both individually (because the situation one brings about by choosing morally always demands a new response, which results in an endless, uncompleted series of oughts) and socially (because the moral sense of a community, which springs from these individual choices, can never cease changing). And, Bradley argues, because it is self-contradictory, morality looks for a solution to something beyond itself: morality “does not remain standing in itself, but feels the impulse to transcend its existing reality.”4 Religion responds to this impulse by providing what morality cannot: that the good be both real and achievable. From the standpoint of religion, we achieve goodness not by our efforts to become better (that is the paradox of morality) but “by losing ourselves in God” (RPML 42). “Completion” is achieved by faith, not by reasoned argument, in a process of atonement. It is a union of the individual self and the divine will, the sinful and the divine, the part and the whole.5 If faith is central to religious experience, it follows that religious truth is practical, not theoretical. What is “real” in religion cannot be established by 3. F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1876; 2d ed., 1927), 313. 4. Bradley, Ethical Studies, 313. 5. Bradley, Ethical Studies, 320–24.

63

Understanding and Doing

scientific, historical, or philosophical argument. Religion for Bradley is not a matter of knowing, as knowledge is ordinarily understood, but of doing: it is the experience of “religious consciousness,” which requires us not merely to think but to act.6 Oakeshott shares Bradley’s view of religion as an aspect of practical experience. As he writes in “The Importance of the Historical Element in Christianity” (1928), the “value” of religious ideas is pragmatic, not a matter of ultimate truth (RPML 68). Religious consciousness springs from our felt wants: One of these felt wants, one to which the religious consciousness is particularly sensitive, is the need for an almost sensible perception of the reality of the object of belief. Religion demands not that the necessity for the existence of what it believes in should be proved, for that is an academic interest, but to be made intensely aware of the actual existence of the object of belief. . . . The thoughts of religion must . . . strike the mind and compel not merely acquiescence but action. (RPML 71) Hence the importance of ritual, even idolatry, in some forms of religious practice. The historical story of Christianity, which appeals to the senses and the emotions, provides those for whom it carries conviction with “the required actuality of the object of religious belief ” (RPML 73). The main difference between religion and morality, then, is that the former makes real an ideal that the latter can merely hope for: as Bradley puts it, “what in morality only is to be, in religion somehow and somewhere really is.”7 It is religion that keeps us engaged in the endless search for moral perfection because it provides a motive for our efforts “to invent and to refine in the moral life” (RPML 45). Religion can provide the motive for moral conduct because it “shows the whole from which this endless ‘ought to be’ is an abstraction” (RPML 45). If morality is the endless search for the perfect good, we need a conception of that good toward which to strive, and it is religion that provides this conception. Implicit here is the Aristotelian identification of the perfect with what is complete or whole: “Religion, then, is the completion of morality, not in the sense of a final end to an historical series, but as 6. “Religion is essentially a doing, and a doing which is moral.” And again: “Religion is practical; it means doing something which is a duty.” Bradley, Ethical Studies, 315, 333. 7. Bradley, Ethical Studies, 334. The Catholic doctrine of the “real presence” of the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament of communion provides an aptly named example.

64

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

the concrete whole is the completion of all the abstractions analysis may discover in it. Religion is . . . the whole of which morality is an aspect, and in which mere morality perishes, that is, is discovered as an abstraction” (RPML 42). As Oakeshott restates it, the Bradleyian view of religion as the completion of morality looks like an early version of the theory of modality: here, morality is treated as a distinguishable “mode” of religion, just as practical activity will later be treated as a mode of experience as a whole. In “Religion and the Moral Life,” Oakeshott does not conclude (as he does later in Experience and Its Modes) that religion is the completion of practical experience as a whole, and not only of “moral” experience, because he does not in this essay explicitly distinguish morality from other kinds of practical activity. He has not yet arrived at the view, later so important, that moral conduct is a matter not of pursuing good ends but of respecting the moral practices that constrain this pursuit. In this essay, he does distinguish between the effort to bring about good ends through action and the effort to meet an ideal of conduct in acting, but he identifies the latter as religious. To put it differently, the contrast between the instrumental and the noninstrumental, which Oakeshott’s later work presents as a distinction between the outcome-oriented (“prudential”) and the conduct-oriented (“moral”), first appears as a contrast between the worldly and the religious. In “Religion and the World” (1929), written two years after “Religion and the Moral Life,” Oakeshott moves toward the view that religion is the completion of practical experience from a position that seems, at first, to contradict it: that religious sensibility is wholly opposed to the sensibility of those who are immersed in the concerns of daily life. In this essay, he contrasts religious consciousness with the self-congratulatory realism of those who cannot see beyond the experienced world they take as fact. This idea of a sharp separation between religion and the world, which has been part of Christianity from the start, has been interpreted in different ways within that tradition. The early Christians construed the difference temporally, as a distinction between the present order and the world to come. But the new world did not come, and there emerged in Christian thinking a dichotomy between material and spiritual existence, between the natural and the supernatural, in which the two realms are seen not as sequential but as coexistent. To live religiously meant to live as much as possible spiritually and to reject the ordinary world of material activities. But implicit in this dichotomy is a third view: that “the world” of ordinary human concerns is a set of beliefs and values, a particular way of thinking, and that to live religiously is to reject

65

Understanding and Doing

these worldly beliefs and values. Religious faith, according to this view, does not depend on the existence of a supernatural realm from which material interests and activities have been excluded; it is itself a spiritual realm “in which everything is valued, not as a contribution to some development or evolution, but as it is in itself ” (RPML 30). Religion is “for itself,” not for the sake of something else (RPML 34). This is an understanding of religion Oakeshott had encountered in the writings of anthropologists as well as theologians.8 The defining element of worldliness is a pragmatic attitude based on belief in the reality and supreme importance of whatever presents itself in practical experience. The worldly point of view presupposes a standard of worth according to which things are valued only for their contribution to producing some future, external, contingent result. “The future is the Moloch to which the present is sacrificed, and the life which leaves behind it actual accomplishments is valued more highly than that which strove to be its own achievement” (RPML 31). The ideals of worldliness are ambition, productivity, and achievement; its chief virtue is prudence. These beliefs are inimical to religion: “Could any notion of life be more empty and futile than this idea that its value is measured by its contribution to something thought more permanent than itself—a race, a people, an art, a science or a profession? This surely is to preach an illusive immortality, to make humanity a Sisyphus and its life the pointless trundling of a useless stone” (RPML 32). Though religion has often been interpreted in prudential terms, it is worldly, and therefore irreligious, to live prudently for the sake of future benefit. To be religious is not to accept a doctrine or contract for future salvation: “it is to be ‘saved’ here and now, delivered from the treadmill of egoism and the Faustian tyranny of ‘achievement,’ which in another idiom has been the bane of European politics.”9 This sharp contrast between religion and the world would seem to divide religion from practical experience. If religion is the antithesis of worldliness, on what grounds can we assign religion to the domain of practical experience? The answer, of course, is that the practical domain includes more than prudential considerations. The effort to satisfy our wants is an important part of the world of practice, but it does not exhaust its content. The respect for 8. Reviewing Joseph Needham, ed., Science, Religion, and Reality, Journal of Theological Studies 27 (1926), 317–19, Oakeshott mentions Malinowski’s view that there is no real conflict between science and religion because, unlike magic, religion is, Malinowski says, “a body of selfcontained acts being themselves the fulfillment of their purpose” (317). 9. Robert Grant, review of Oakeshott, Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life, Times Literary Supplement (15 April 1994), 31.

66

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

things apart from their use that characterizes religion (and, Oakeshott will argue, morality) is also an aspect of practical experience. Worldliness is an attitude within the world of practice, not coextensive with it. But religion, though itself an aspect of practical experience, is not simply another aspect of the practical world. Religion can resolve the contradictions of prudential and even moral striving. It is not a kind of practice but the “completion” of practice. These arguments are briskly restated in Experience and Its Modes. Oakeshott here distills his explorations of the religious consciousness in two distinct claims. The first is that religion is practical activity. Oakeshott rejects the view that religion is not part of the practical world because it requires one to put aside the concerns of this life: retirement from “the world,” even when it takes the form of suicide, is itself a way of living and therefore remains in the world of practice, properly defined. Religion belongs to the conduct of life, and it looks to another world only to determine what our conduct shall be in this world (EM 293–94). Oakeshott’s second claim is that religion differs from other forms of practice only in degree. Religion is not a distinct mode of practical activity but simply the attempt to reconcile the “is” and the “ought to be” carried as far as possible. In religious experience we discover a kind of integration—a clarity about what belongs to our life and a determination to follow it without reservation—that is more thorough and more reliable than that provided by worldly prudence. But it would be misleading to say that religion provides this frame of mind; we should say that those who achieve this frame of mind have achieved religion. “Whenever the seriousness with which we embrace this enterprise of achieving a coherent world of practical ideas reaches a certain strength and intensity, whenever it begins to dominate and take possession of us, practice has become religion” (EM 295). But religion, as the completion of practice, remains in the mode of practice and, like any other kind of modal thinking, is ultimately a distraction from the quest for unconditional understanding. All roads lead to Athens, not Jerusalem. This view of religion, stripped of the rhetoric of completion, is reaffirmed many years later in On Human Conduct. There, religious faith is understood as providing a deliverance from the ultimate futility of action (“the deadliness of doing”) because it is related not to contingencies but to the integrity of a person’s character. As in the early writings, religion is a response to the human condition, one that can be expressed in different ways. The character of a person’s faith, the way he or she seeks to escape life’s contingencies, is itself a his-

67

Understanding and Doing

torical contingency, one often shaped by an inherited religious tradition. Each religion has its own images of the divine and of what it means to be a human being, and each offers an “idiom of faith” reflecting the civilization to which it belongs (OHC 86). To provide the serenity it promises, a religious faith must do more than provide a way of accepting life’s burdens, disappointments, and calamities. It must speak not only to our suffering but to our conduct, insofar as we are responsible for anyone’s suffering. Serious wrongdoing is an offense against God and must be expiated if the offender is to be redeemed. But, for Oakeshott, religion is concerned above all with the hollowness and futility of human existence. Human activity is essentially episodic, its ultimate pointlessness “concealed in the illusion of affairs,” its achievements fragile and evanescent. “What is sought in religious belief is not merely consolation for woe or deliverance from the burden of sin, but a reconciliation to nothingness” (OHC 83–84): “Religious faith is the evocation of a sentiment . . . to be added to all others as the motive of all motives in terms of which the fugitive adventures of human conduct, without being released from their mortal and their moral conditions, are graced with an intimation of immortality: the sharpness of death and the deadliness of doing overcome, and the transitory sweetness of a mortal affection, the tumult of a grief and the passing beauty of a May morning recognized neither as merely evanescent adventures nor as emblems of better things to come, but as aventures, themselves encounters with eternity” (85). What is striking about this passage is not merely its poignancy but the surfacing of an aesthetic element in the argument itself. Here, religious experience, which is actualized not only in piety but in moments of “numinous awareness,”10 seems suspended between the practical and the poetic. Its power is not merely practical but includes the power to turn conduct into art: to transform, if only for a moment, the temporal world of actions, consequences, and judgments into a timeless world of contemplation. Religious experience may acquire a poetic dimension, but it does so without shedding its practical character. It is not an independent mode of experience, being both an idiom of practice and (if we take the aesthetic interpretation 10. Robert Grant, Oakeshott (Claridge Press, 1990), 107.

68

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

seriously) modally ambiguous. Authentic religion is in any case, as we have seen, never a matter of mere prudence: Oakeshott’s view of religion is certainly not that of Hobbes, for whom religion is the response of prudence to “fear of what is beyond the power of prudence to find out” (HCA 32). Authentic religion shares with morality the quality of being noninstrumental. Linking it with aesthetic contemplation simply reemphasizes an already emphatic distinction between the religious and the pragmatic. By locating religion in the mode of practice, which he did long before deciding that poetry and practice are modally distinct, Oakeshott distinguishes it not only from science (its Victorian rival, with which it has largely ceased to compete) but also from history and philosophy. This sorting out is evident in his reflections during the mid-1930s on the identity of Christianity. We cannot say what Christian faith is without knowing what it has been, and to do that we must engage in historical inquiry. But the historical conclusions we arrive at are not, as such, religious conclusions, and religious conclusions can never be truly historical: Christians may insist on the religious significance of certain historical events, but “the importance of these events is a religious and not a genuinely historical importance.”11 Nor can we define Christian religion, much less religion generally, without engaging in philosophical inquiry. But philosophical conclusions are no more religious than historical conclusions. As Oakeshott puts it in On Human Conduct, “although a faith is an understanding, a theoretical understanding of a faith is not itself a faith” (OHC 81). One might object that Oakeshott’s account of religion is an unsatisfying, external one that is unconcerned with what believers actually believe or with questions of religious truth. But the objection fails to distinguish between modally different claims. A philosophy of religion examines the presuppositions of religious experience and is, for that reason, intrinsically critical. It cannot simply reassert what faith accepts as given. Assertions of religious truth can be made within a body of religious beliefs, but in that case they are themselves matters of religious belief—claims to be proved by the testimony of faith or whatever other means of establishing truths are recognized within a particular system of religious belief. An argument that seeks to prove a religious claim on other grounds—by appealing, for example, to historical evidence or scientific reasoning—is not, as such, a religious argument. This conclusion is unavoidable if religious experience is, as Oakeshott argues in Experience and Its Modes, 11. Review of H. G. Wood, Christianity and the Nature of History, Cambridge Review 56 (1935), 248.

69

Understanding and Doing

an aspect of practical experience. It follows from the distinction between adhering to a faith and understanding that faith in other terms, between religion and the study of religion. The understanding of religion that is sought by philosophy, which defines it by uncovering its presuppositions, cannot be the understanding that religion itself provides. Religious belief is not to be confused with theology, which is theoretical inquiry into a faith, carried on from within that faith. Religious beliefs can be theorized and this theorizing can generate a theology, but a theology is neither a religion nor a philosophy of religion. For Oakeshott, theology is an example of inquiry gone astray through modal incoherence (EM 335n). It is not, like scientific or historical inquiry, an investigation carried on within the limits of a distinguishable and provisionally coherent mode of understanding. Theology inhabits a no-man’s-land between the conditional theorizing demanded by the conduct of life and the unconditional theorizing of philosophy. Because it begins with certain articles of faith, it necessarily rests on premises it cannot question. It aspires to a philosophical understanding of religious beliefs without having to challenge those beliefs. Therefore, despite its efforts to transcend practical concerns, theology can never become fully philosophical.

From Practice to Human Conduct Oakeshott’s investigation of practical activity in Experience and Its Modes is penetrating but abstract. It goes a long way with a few elementary concepts: the ideas of fact and value (what is and what ought to be), of human action as an effort to reconcile the two, and of the necessary failure of this effort. What it lacks is a detailed analysis of the elements of human action and of the contexts in which action occurs. Oakeshott provides such an analysis in On Human Conduct. In this work Oakeshott renews the attempt to define practical activity that he began in Experience and Its Modes and carried on in essays written during the 1940s and 1950s, some of which are collected in Rationalism in Politics. But instead of building upon these earlier investigations, Oakeshott makes a fresh start. Instead of continuing to treat practice as a mode of experience, he analyzes human activity as comprising individual performances and the “practices” (plural) they perform. And instead of relying on general ideas like “value” or the distinction between “is” and “ought,” he provides a nuanced

70

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

account of morality and law as practices. These shifts are important in understanding Oakeshott’s philosophy of the human sciences, for they signal a concern to specify the proper subject matter of those disciplines. What are we looking at when we study human beings, their choices and actions, their ideas, artifacts, and institutions? What modes of inquiry are appropriate to understanding these things? How are the objects we study related to the categories we use in studying them? Actions and Agency The concept of “action” is ill-defined. It encompasses not only bodily movements (including speaking) but the internal “movements” that constitute intending, willing, and choosing. And these are in turn related to desiring, believing, knowing, and thinking; to perceiving, sensing, experiencing pleasure and pain, and so on. We never quite know where to draw the line between action specifically and experience in general. But no matter how we go on to delimit the concept of action, we always start with some inherited ideas about what it means to be human—ideas that come not only from the theories of philosophers, theologians, and cognitive scientists, but from the stories of parents and poets, journalists and historians, and, at an even more basic level, simply from seeing and hearing, hoping and fearing, deliberating and deciding. Because these various levels of understanding are related, our view of action can never be “pre-theoretical,” in the sense of being independent of conclusions about it. But we can attempt to articulate a concept of action that includes only its most general features. And an obvious way to do this is to begin with ordinary experience in what is, ironically, its least general form: our own experience. Like many other philosophers who have trodden this ground, Oakeshott moves from our ordinary understanding of action—people making choices in situations that seem to them to demand a response—to conclusions about the character of action and agency. To theorize action—or “human conduct,” as Oakeshott’s new vocabulary would have it—is to begin with an identity: “a human being responding to his contingent situation by doing or saying this rather than that in relation to an imagined and wished-for outcome” (OHC 32), and to investigate the presuppositions of this identity: a thinking agent, a situation believed by an agent to require a response, deliberation about which response to choose, and a context within which that choice is made consisting

71

Understanding and Doing

of prudential, religious, moral, and other practices that are taken account of (or ignored) in choosing and that give meaning to the chosen act. These presuppositions of human conduct reveal it to be an exhibition of intelligence. The first presupposition of conduct, accordingly, is a human being whose conscious and self-chosen actions are what the word “conduct” primarily designates. A human being, here, is a “reflective consciousness” (OHC 36), an agent making choices in an understood situation that he or she might attempt to alter. And the conduct of such a being is “behavior determined, not by nature, but by art” (RP 466). This idea of reflective consciousness distinguishes human conduct from behavior defined as a nonreflective manifestation of underlying biological or psychological processes, not from conduct that is unreflective in the sense of being habitual, thoughtless, or irrational. This does not mean that to count as “conduct” everything we do or say must be done or said self-consciously or intentionally. We may not be fully aware of what we are doing. We may not know, for example, whether we are speaking grammatically or choosing prudently. But no matter what we do, whether we act deliberately or impulsively, we are responding in a manner we have learned, and therefore “intelligently,” to a situation as we understand it (OHC 89). The concept of action, in other words, is one that rests on a distinction between intelligent conduct and not-intelligent behavior. For Oakeshott, “intelligence” is a fundamental ordering category of understanding, and it is therefore critical in defining the scope of the human sciences. Viewed as an expression of intelligence, human conduct is thinking and acting that involves meanings that can be understood and must be learned. This is not to say that what we interpret as intelligent activity cannot also be interpreted in other ways. But to understand human activity as intelligent conduct implies a kind of inquiry that is categorially different from the kind of inquiry we engage in when we explain it as the outcome of a process that does not involve intelligence. Oakeshott’s theory of action is incompatible with behaviorist or other reductionist theories that do not view human action as a choice between understood alternatives. An act, understood as an act, that is, as an individual performance, is what it is because of its meaning to the agent, which is in turn related to meanings defined by the practices upon whose resources the agent draws. Understood as an act, a homicide can be a crime, an offense against God, an instance of justifiable self-defense, an expression of anomie, or a horrifying spectacle. It is something we make sense of according to recognized conventions and standards of judgment. It is never simply a

72

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

causal outcome, a mere discharge of biological or psychological energy. To understand human action as intelligent choice is, in other words, to understand it in a particular way—a way that can, if precisely specified, help us to distinguish the modes in which inquiry into human conduct, understood as conduct, is properly carried on. Implicit in Oakeshott’s definition of human conduct, then, is a view of its proper study. As we shall see, by locating human conduct in the category of intelligence, Oakeshott commits himself to certain conclusions about what kinds of knowledge are possible in the humanities and social sciences. An inquiry into human conduct that begins with agents and action cannot, for example, be a scientific inquiry, if by “science” we mean a way of understanding human behavior that looks beneath the surface phenomena (as it regards them) of thinking and choosing to discover the biochemical or other processes that produce these phenomena. It must be a kind of inquiry that does not dismiss as mere illusion the very things it seeks to explain. This does not mean that human beings cannot be understood “scientifically,” only that those aspects of human activity that involve intelligence and meaning cannot be understood in scientific terms. The issue is not one of method but of categorial relevance. To theorize human conduct we must begin with a person who acts: a thinking being who can be distinguished from other such beings. Human conduct understood under the category of intelligence presupposes a “free” self or agent capable of diagnosing a situation and choosing a response. To be able to act at all, is (according to this theory) to exercise a kind of freedom: not freedom from coercion or convention but the sort of freedom without which talk of agency and choice would be self-contradictory and unintelligible. Oakeshott calls this freedom the “freedom inherent in agency” (OHC 37). It is “the ‘freedom’ (so to call it) of which a human being cannot divest himself or be deprived without temporarily or permanently ceasing to be human” (VLL 18). Oakeshott at times refers to “free agents” and “free agency,” but the “free” in these expressions is redundant, as is the “human” in human conduct—we are speaking, here, of conduct as intelligent action and of agency as intelligence in acting. The freedom inherent in agency has to do with the conditions intrinsic to action, not with various conditions that might constrain what an agent can do. It has nothing to do with “autonomy” or “individuality,” which is the quality of being self-directed. The existence of this freedom is not revealed in a person’s success in achieving his or her aims, nor can someone who fails to

73

Understanding and Doing

achieve these aims be said to lack it. And it is perfectly compatible with being constrained by commands or obligations. The freedom inherent in agency is not freedom from constraints on choice, but rather “freedom from natural necessity” (RP 466). Freedom, as a presupposition of human conduct, is a postulate both of obedience and command, of the slave as well as the master (OHC 235). The only kinds of constraint that reduce agency are those, like physical compulsion, that push human behavior beyond the limits of intelligent action. According to this view of conduct, I am, as a human being, a conscious individual intelligence. I have arrived at a certain understanding of myself and my situation. Whether correct or not, this understanding is something I have learned and, however unoriginal it may be, it is my own understanding. My beliefs, emotions, affections, convictions, and aspirations belong to me and constitute my identity. My understanding of my own situation leads to action when I find this situation to be unsatisfactory in a way that calls for me to respond. In this sense, therefore, I cannot be said to be an “agent” with respect to a situation I do not find unsatisfactory or about which I can do nothing. When I act, it is because I am unhappy in a particular way that seems to me to invite a particular response. Because my situation is what it means to me, my actions are the result of my own understanding (even if others judge it to be a misunderstanding). My action is, therefore, the outcome of an intelligent engagement. This intelligence in doing is the “will,” and will is nothing more than the exhibition of intelligence in acting. The idea that the will is free is implied by the idea of action, for to act is to choose, and to choose is to exercise will (EM 270; OHC 39). And it is proper to call my action “free” because it is my own response to my situation, as I understand it: it is an expression of the independence I enjoy as a person able to think and choose. Actions, in short, are choices persons make to remedy what is deficient in their situations, as they understand those situations and their deficiencies, and the meaning or intention of an action lies in that choice. Conduct, then, presupposes an agent, and agency is “free” (that is, intelligent but not necessarily unconstrained) choice and action. But action entails a further activity: the deliberating we do in choosing an action. Whether selfconscious or subconscious, prolonged or abbreviated, this deliberation, like choice itself, is presupposed by action. And deliberation, in turn, opens up possibilities that may lead us to understand our situation in new ways and even to change our minds about our goals. Because acts are responses to understood situations, we deliberate about alternative concrete performances,

74

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

not about alternative ways to attain an independently determined end. In acting, we choose not an end, nor a means to an end, but an act with a specific meaning or intention. Of course, what is achieved may not be what we expect: an agent “may be seeking a satisfaction, but what he chooses is an action” (OHC 40), and an action may fail to achieve its end or have unintended consequences. Finally, despite appearances, we are not limited to choosing among given alternatives, because we may invent actions as we deliberate: “deliberating is not merely reflecting in order to choose, it is also imagining alternatives between which to choose” (OHC 43). There is in every situation an unlimited number of choices, each a different act with its own meaning, and none determined by the situation in the sense that no other choice is possible. Those inclined to deny these propositions may mistake, as necessary determinants of action, interests or pressures that may seem compelling but that an agent can in principle resist. A soldier ordered to commit an atrocity may imagine that he has no choice but to obey the order, but in fact he is free to refuse to comply. He might argue with his superior, shoot him, or run away. The probable consequences of these alternatives might be so grim that it would be hard to choose them, but they are nonetheless actions the soldier can consider and might in fact choose. Similarly (to use Oakeshott’s own example), a person without money in hand to discharge a debt might decide to pay it in installments, to get money to repay it by refinancing or embezzlement, to contest it, or to ask the creditor to forgive it. He might choose to commit suicide or simply to do nothing. And so on, in ways that are limited only by one’s imagination. There is in this analysis of conduct a dash of existentialism, with its conception of the freedom enjoyed by human beings as the freedom to determine, within wider limits than we ordinarily recognize, one’s own “way of being” by responding to one’s circumstances in self-chosen actions. For Oakeshott, then, the presuppositions of human conduct include (1) intelligence or reflective consciousness as the definitive criterion of agency; (2) situations regarded as calling for a response and involving an imagined future condition to be achieved by acting; and (3) deliberation and choice as elements of action. But this list is neither definitive nor exhaustive, for there is no fixed number of presuppositions, and those that have been identified can be analyzed and classified in various ways. Such analyses have generated an entire branch of philosophy, the “theory of action,” concerned with the significance of alternative ways of describing actions, the relationship between the concepts of action and intention, the criteria for distinguishing acts from their

75

Understanding and Doing

consequences, the question of whether reasons for actions can be “causes,” and so forth. And it is clear that these concerns soon lead to others and into other regions of philosophy. Oakeshott’s discussion of the idea of human conduct is therefore in no sense a comprehensive exploration of the topic. It must be understood as an effort to clarify the assumptions underlying his own investigation of the civil condition as a mode of human association. In doing so, he pays particular attention to an aspect or presupposition of human conduct we have not yet considered: the contextual conditions of action he calls “practices.” Practices So far, we have focused on human conduct understood in prudential terms: agents responding to contingent situations by choosing actions intended to bring about desired outcomes. But we must also consider the context in which such choices are made. Part of this context is provided by other agents whose responses will affect the consequences of choosing. In acting we not only affect and are affected by other agents indirectly; we also interact with them in direct encounters or transactions. Like actions, transactions between agents begin in a diagnosis and end in a new situation for each of the parties. But transactions cannot occur unless there are ways for agents to communicate with one another and procedures by which they can reach agreement. Transactions therefore presuppose “more durable relationships between agents which are not themselves transactions but are the conditional contexts of all such transactions” (OHC 54). These more durable relationships are “practices.” As we have seen, there is an additional reason for giving practices an important place in any theory of conduct. Unlike behavior, understood as the outcome of not-intelligent processes, action involves intelligent choice. Philosophers sometimes make this point by saying that unlike behavior, action is “meaningful” or that it is the result of beliefs and desires that are “intentional” in the sense that they contain propositions. (The belief that mountaineering is dangerous, for example, contains the proposition “mountaineering is dangerous.”) It is these propositions, which have meaning and which express what an agent believes or desires, that make our beliefs and desires, and therefore our actions, what they are. To explain a bit of repeatable behavior, all we need to know are the conditions under which that kind of behavior is likely to occur. But to explain an action, which is a particular contingent performance— an agent’s chosen response to an understood situation—we must understand

76

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

what action it is, what distinguishes it as a particular performance, and this in turn requires that we understand what it means to the agent. To explain an action, in other words, is to be able to interpret it in terms of the agent’s beliefs and desires, for it is these beliefs and desires, these intentions, which make it the action it is. But as soon as we say this, we must realize that it is not the agent alone who determines the meaning of his actions. Beliefs and desires are ideas, and ideas, together with the language in which they are formulated, are shared with other human beings. The meaning of an action, then, depends on shared meanings, and systems of shared meaning are “practices.” In Experience and Its Modes the word “practice” is used as a synonym for “practical experience,” that is, for everything as it appears in the practical mode. In On Human Conduct the word “practice” is never used in this way, and we find instead the plural “practices.” But the idea of a practice, as a way of doing things, a set of understood conventions forming part of the circumstantial context of action, can be found in Oakeshott’s work long before the publication of On Human Conduct. It is implicit in the word “tradition” (as in “a tradition of behavior”), which Oakeshott favors in Rationalism in Politics (RP 8–9, 59, 61–62). But even before the publication of that book, Oakeshott was beginning to speak of practices rather than of traditions, for despite his effort to turn “tradition” into a philosophical term, its utility for this purpose, or at least for the purpose of communicating with others, was being undermined by its ideological connotations. Oakeshott first uses the word “practice,” in the sense of a manner of activity, in a 1958 essay, “On the Activity of Being an Historian,” in which he writes that “a direction of attention, as it is pursued, may hollow out a character for itself and become specified in a ‘practice’; and a participant in the activity comes to be recognized not by the results he achieves but by his disposition to observe the manners of the ‘practice’” (RP 151). A practice, then, is a pattern of conduct emerging from the actions and responses of intelligent agents—doings condensed into ways of doing, into habit, custom, skill, prudence, and procedure. In this new vocabulary, “practical” pertains not to the realm of action in general but only to practices. Oakeshott, noting the ambiguity of the word (OHC 57n), proposes to use it (within the covers of On Human Conduct) to stand only for participation in a practice. One advantage of speaking of human actions as “conduct” rather than “practice” is that it allows us to sidestep the obscurities and pretensions that have accumulated around the words “practice” and “practical” and cognates like praxis and “praxeological.” Oakeshott thinks too much has been made (by Hannah Arendt, for example) of

77

Understanding and Doing

Aristotle’s distinction between making or fabricating (poiesis) on the one hand, and acting or doing (praxis) on the other12—not because there is no difference between making, which results in an artifact, and acting, which may seek a response in the performances of other agents, but because producing an artefact does not exclude the response of others as a desired outcome: I may choose to make something that others will buy or praise me for making (OHC 35). Conduct, therefore, includes making as well as acting, or, to put it differently, making is a kind of acting that yields, besides various satisfactions and responses, a fabricated object that is not itself conduct. Another advantage of the word “conduct” is that it contrasts with “behavior” to suggest that we are dealing with intelligent performances: we speak of the behavior of an electron but not its conduct. It reminds us that human conduct can be explained as conduct only by using concepts like deliberation and choice, not concepts like instinct or genetic inheritance. And in this way of thinking, practices are both the outcome of and the context for intelligent conduct: human inventions that must be understood to be used and must be learned to be understood. A practice can be understood as a kind of relationship, one “signalled by the names of the personae concerned” (OHC 57): friends, colleagues, or speakers of English, teacher and student, parent and child, doctor and patient, and so on. It a relationship that can be explained, at least in part, by pointing to the kinds of considerations found in its customs, conventions, or procedures—considerations that agents may observe in acting but which they may also neglect or violate. The suggestion that practices are considerations that agents take account of in acting is easily misunderstood, and Oakeshott is careful to specify what is involved in “subscribing” (as he puts it) to a practice. Unlike a particular request or command (like “please shut the door”), which dictates an actual substantive performance even though it may permit a choice of means, a practice “prescribes conditions for, but does not determine, the substantive choices and performances of agents” (OHC 55). To express this elusive distinction between dictating particular choices and prescribing conditions to be respected by agents in choosing, Oakeshott sometimes writes that practices are “adverbial conditions” of action or that they “adverbially qualify” performances. A practice will instruct us to behave lawfully, speak politely, or dress fashionably without specifying the actual performances that count as responding adequately to those 12. Nichomachean Ethics, VI, 4–5.

78

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

adverbial conditions. A practice may seem to prescribe particular acts—“wear black”—but this is an illusion, as those who are the wrong age or live in the wrong city soon discover. Practices, in other words, presuppose and therefore respect agency: the choice of what to think, feel, say, or do remains with the agent and is not specified by the practice, and the considerations embodied in the practice are used by rather than imposed on the agent. What we learn in learning to be able to participate in a practice, then, is “not what to do or say, but the arts of agency” (OHC 59). The considerations composing a given practice may be expressed in the form of rules, but a practice is not itself a set of rules. What analytic philosophers, following Wittgenstein, call “rules” are sometimes more aptly characterized as “practices.” A rule is the product of an effort to specify the considerations composing a practice, and is best understood as an abridgment of that practice. Furthermore, rules must be distinguished from argumentative and persuasive statements (such as advice, requests, pleas, warnings) and from imperatives (orders, commands, directives, prohibitions). Unlike rules, each of these is a communication addressed in a particular situation by one person to another; each constitutes a transaction in which an agent seeks a particular, substantive satisfaction. Requests or commands may be authorized or regulated by rules (the police, for example, may ask your permission to search your house, but they cannot carry out the search without a warrant if you refuse), but they are not themselves rules. A genuine rule, in contrast, is not aimed at a particular respondent; it does not have a named recipient but a “sphere of concern” or jurisdiction within which it applies (OHC 125). Thus, though one can “obey” a command, one cannot obey a practice, only “subscribe” to it. There are different kinds of practices, different dimensions along which practices can vary. Some govern only a narrow range of conduct, others constitute a way of life. Some are informal, others elaborately institutionalized or ritualistic. A practice can be analyzed into its component practices or combined with others to compose a more inclusive practice: Oakeshott’s quaint example is teaching and scholarship united in the practice of a university. Practices are themselves the outcome of innumerable individual performances, and they are “subject to historic vicissitudes and local variations” (OHC 57). Most are the unplanned by-products of performances aimed at something other than establishing a practice, and even practices that are expressly instituted cannot avoid being affected, altered, or even transformed by the actions to which they relate. Oakeshott’s essays and lectures on the history of political

79

Understanding and Doing

thought vividly illustrate the uses to which the concept of a practice (and related concepts like a tradition or language of discourse, thought, or conduct) can be put. Human conduct, then, is the activity of agents responding to situations by choosing actions in contexts provided by various practices. Of these, Oakeshott is especially concerned with “moral” practices (a subject I explore in Chapter 5). He also considers the implications for the social sciences of the distinction between understood practices and quantitative generalizations (see Chapters 3 and 4). Here, however, I want to return to the question of how conduct, which involves both practices and performances, is related to the activity of theorizing—in other words, to what is commonly called the relationship between theory and practice. I do not want to suggest that the distinction between theory and practice is fundamental for Oakeshott: for him, the idea of modality is more important. But modality has implications for the theory-practice debate that are worth considering.

Theory and Practice “All thought exists for the sake of action. We try to understand ourselves and our world in order that we may learn how to live.” So begins Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis, published nine years before Experience and Its Modes.13 Contrast this with Oakeshott’s announcement at the beginning of his own book that, though we sometimes look to philosophy for guidance on how to live, “philosophy is without any direct bearing upon the practical conduct of life” (EM 1). Some thought is for the sake of action, but authentic philosophy is not. A philosophical inquiry may grow out of some practical concern, but once under way it has its own concerns and the conclusions it generates are philosophical, not practical, conclusions. The concerns of philosophy are wholly distinct from those of practice. The same can be said of the relationship of science and history to practical activity. If we call the concerns of historical, scientific, and philosophical inquiry “theoretical,” not only are theoretical 13. Speculum Mentis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), 15. Oakeshott presents the claim, antithetical to his own, that all understanding is ultimately practical, in these words: “All thought exists for the sake of action; action is the consummation of experience, and we try to understand the universe only in order to learn how to live” (EM 317). The similarity between this sentence and the quoted sentences from Speculum Mentis suggests that Oakeshott is responding to Collingwood here. For further discussion, see Grant, Oakeshott, 30.

80

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

propositions without relevance for practice, and practical judgments theoretically irrelevant, but the effort to combine ideas drawn from one of these realms with those from the other must end in confusion. In explaining these provocative claims, Oakeshott attacks the common view that theory generalizes from practical experience and serves, in turn, as a guide to action. About the “unity of theory and practice” so often asserted by political theorists he is playfully dismissive: “Is not this a somewhat decrepit animal, hardly able to stand up much less . . . clear a fence with a rider on its back? Lead it gently to the knacker’s yard.”14 From the standpoint of Oakeshott’s modal theory, the belief that “all thought exists for the sake of action” is a belief within the world of practice about how theorizing and doing are related; as such, it merely reinscribes the practical point of view. Its prevalence is evidence of the power of practical thinking. In this section I will explore Oakeshott’s account of how practical activity is distorted by abstract theorizing (an account for which he is famous), but I am more concerned with the reverse distortion, that of theorizing by practical concerns. From the standpoint of philosophy, Oakeshott’s most interesting arguments are those he directs against the asserted ontological primacy of practice, for these arguments, if sound, explain how it is possible to think, even about human conduct, in ways that are independent of practical concerns. In arguing that theory and practice are independent and mutually irrelevant, Oakeshott reshapes the perennial theme. In On Human Conduct, he redefines the key terms so as to clarify distinctions that the familiar terminology obscures, distinctions that are also obscure in his own earlier work. As we have seen, he analyzes the concept of practice into performances (actions) and practices (activities and expectations that spring from and modify performances). But he also forswears the words “theory” and “practice,” speaking instead of “theorizing” (used deliberately as a transitive verb, as in “theorizing human conduct,” to emphasize that a theory is not “another thing” but a reinterpretation of its object) and of “doing” or “conduct.” 15 This new vocabulary is designed to avoid certain recurrent confusions in the theory-practice debate. As Oakeshott observes in an important footnote, the vocabulary of “theorizing” goes back to the ancient Greeks. Its elements are a going-on, a spectacle (thea); 14. “On Misunderstanding Human Conduct,” Political Theory 4 (1976), 355. 15. Oakeshott uses “theorizing” as a transitive verb in a very early work, “A Discussion of Some Matters Preliminary to the Study of Political Philosophy” (unpublished typescript, 1925): “To theorize a thing . . . is to rehearse it in the mind and in so doing to create it again in such a way that all its ‘intimae essentiae’ stand out” (49; see also 50).

81

Understanding and Doing

a spectator concerned to understand what is going on, a theorist (theoros); the activity of seeking to understand, theorizing (theoria); and what emerges from this activity, an understanding or theorem (theorema) (OHC 3n).16 Theorizing, for Oakeshott, is the effort to understand something for its own sake and not in order to act. This claim can, in one way, be taken as a definition of theorizing. But because the claim is precisely what is challenged by the counter-claim (advanced not only by Collingwood but by a variety of pragmatists, instrumentalists, Marxists, and critical theorists) that all thinking, and therefore all theorizing, is for the sake of doing, a definition can hardly settle the question. It can, however, help us frame the question more exactly. Oakeshott’s seemingly paradoxical claim is that theorizing, including theorizing about action, is an autonomous activity not to be confused with acting or with preparing to act. The business of a theorist of conduct is to generate theorems or propositions about conduct, not to perform or prescribe actions (OHC 33). If theorizing and doing involve different modes of understanding, to theorize about doing is not itself “practical.” Clearly, a great deal hangs on the meanings we assign to words like “theorizing,” “activity,” and “practical.” Let us try to understand what Oakeshott is getting at by considering some objections against the proposition that theorizing and doing are distinct. Theorizing as Doing One objection that springs to mind is that theorizing is itself a kind of activity and therefore belongs to the world of practice. This objection can take different forms, one of which is that practical experience is not a mode of experience but a necessary feature of human existence and therefore the foundation of all human understanding. A version of this argument can be found in the writings of pragmatists who hold that ideas are instruments used by human beings to satisfy their wants and that all truth is practical truth (EM 264, 318–19; OH 20n). Another version of what might be called the “primacy of practice” argument is advanced in the traditions of Lebensphilosophie, phenomenology, and existentialism—for example, by Heidegger, who holds that 16. This note condenses material Oakeshott presented to participants in one of his seminars at the London School of Economics in the late 1960s, some of which is reproduced in Martyn P. Thompson, “Michael Oakeshott: Notes on ‘Political Thought’ and ‘Political Theory’ in the History of Political Thought 1966–69,” Politisches Denken: Jahrbuch 1991 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), 103–19.

82

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

practical understanding is “primordial” and inescapable.17 Human beings are born into a “life-world” of objects, including other human beings, which they understand in relation to themselves and their purposes, and everything they think or do is governed by these purposes. The “things” we encounter in ordinary experience—Heidegger’s favorite example is a hammer—are what they are in relation to human purposes. They are things we use, or at least understand in terms of their use, not objects we observe from a purpose-independent (“objective”) standpoint. They are experienced as “ready-to-hand,” not merely “present-at-hand.” Experience, moreover, is shaped by prudential anxiety (“care”). All other modes of understanding build upon and extend (or corrupt) an understanding of the world constituted by practical experience and concerns. What appear to be distinct modes of understanding (science or art, for example) are therefore but “disguised versions” of practical understanding (OH 10, 20–21). Even philosophy is a kind of prudence, a “self-caring” or “extreme existential engagement.”18 Oakeshott suggests that this conclusion—that theoretical understanding remains a mode of practical understanding—awards an unconditionality to practical experience in the face of evidence that it is itself a limited and conditional mode of understanding. The conclusion rests on nothing more substantial than the claim (asserted, in different ways, by Descartes, Husserl, and others) that the objects composing the practical world—unlike those of science, history, and other kinds of self-conscious or systematic reflection—are experienced directly or immediately. But experience (sensation, perception, intuition, apprehension) always involves judgment and is therefore never “immediate” (EM 16, 21–26, 252–53). For Oakeshott, no mode of experience can be said to be unmediated by thinking and therefore independent of ideas. Practical understanding, like any other mode of understanding, makes sense of experience in terms of its own distinct concerns and ideas. Practical experience may come earliest in the life of a human being—even though “some of 17. Oakeshott himself in one place remarks that “practice is primordial” (PFPS 6), but by this he means only that the political practices of a society are more important than the writings of its political theorists in shaping its understanding of politics because political theorizing is parasitic on the practices it theorizes. This has nothing to do with Heidegger’s claim that all thinking is itself originally and inherently practical. 18. Care (Sorge) is an organizing concept in Being and Time. The claim that philosophy, like all thinking, is a response to the basic existential situation of human beings (Dasein) is implicit in Being and Time and made explicit in other prewar writings. Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 172, 177.

83

Understanding and Doing

our earliest experiences are not practical, governed by usefulness, but poetic and governed by delight” (OH 23n)—and it may be universal to humanity and (contingently) necessary for human survival. But this priority, if it has any significance, is circumstantial, not logical: practical experience does not provide the raw material out of which other kinds of understanding are constructed, but is put aside when we think scientifically or in other modally distinct ways. Physics, for example, uses concepts that are unrelated to the objects of everyday experience. History, properly speaking, is concerned with what happened in the past, not with the present relevance of past events. In every mode of inquiry we interpret what is going on in relation to the conditions (the categories or presuppositions) that define that mode, “unconcerned with what previously and in terms of other conditions we may have found there” (OH 24). Each mode supplies its own criteria of factuality, truth, and reality and uses them to construct its own characteristic understanding of what is going on. The inevitable result of attempting to transfer ideas from one mode to another is modal confusion. But even if the notion of “immediate experience” were less problematic, the argument that all modes of experience reduce to practical experience is self-refuting. If theorizing is nothing but doing, then to make this claim (“theorizing is nothing but doing”) is to perform an action, not to state a proposition. To assert the primacy of practice is therefore pointless, for it can only be “an action performed by the claimant in pursuance of a current practical purpose” (OH 22). It is not a true statement about the world, because there are no such statements. Theorizing is nevertheless unquestionably a kind of doing. A theorist is a human being who acts and responds to the actions of other human beings, and therefore “every engagement to understand, whatever its modal conditions, is a practical performance” (OH 24). Each such engagement is the activity of an agent, moved by particular desires and intentions, undertaking one study instead of another, and generating products—books, patents, copyrights, and the like—that can be bought, sold, used, or destroyed and that necessarily take their place in the world of practical objects. But the conclusion sometimes drawn from these observations, that “every engagement to understand is nothing but a practical activity” (OH 25), is based on a misunderstanding. Though all activity is practical activity, it does not follow that all knowledge is practical knowledge. A theory is a conclusion (a “theorem”), the product of theoretical activity but not itself an action. Theorizing is indeed an

84

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

activity, but, qua theorizing, it is an activity that eventuates in a theorem, not an action. A theorist may conduct a study and publish its results. But these activities and objects must be distinguished from the understanding that is achieved or expressed by them. A copy of the Critique of Pure Reason as a physical object, like Kant’s writing it as a performance, belongs to the world of practice, but its argument belongs to philosophy. To make an argument is to perform an action, but what is argued, the argument itself, is a theorem, and the activity of the theorist, qua theorist, is to discover theorems, not to perform the actions of speaking or writing in which these theorems are expounded. And this is true even when the subject of theorizing is practical activity: “the theorist of conduct is not, as such, a ‘doer’, and the theoretical understanding of conduct cannot itself be theorized in terms of doing” (OHC 35). Doing as Theorizing The objection that there is a necessary unity of theory and practice because theorizing is a kind of doing is, then, less compelling than it first appears. But an argument linking theory and practice can also be made the other way around: that theory and practice are united because doing is itself a kind of theorizing. Doing or practice, it can be argued, always involves thinking, and because thinking is what theorizing in essence is, practical activity invariably involves theorizing. The trouble with this objection, of course, is that it stretches the idea of theorizing, for we do not usually regard “theorizing” and “thinking” as synonyms. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which doing does involve theorizing, even on Oakeshott’s definition of theorizing. As we saw at the end of Chapter 1, Oakeshott uses the term “theorizing” in two ways: as an inquiry into the implications of a set of ideas whose basic outlines are treated as given (“conditional theorizing”), and as an inquiry into the presuppositions of a set of ideas—an inquiry in which what is ordinarily taken as given is now treated as problematic (“unconditional theorizing”). These senses of “theorizing” are reconciled by the qualifying adjectives (conditional or unconditional) by which they are distinguished: “theorizing” is any investigation, whether of givens or of the presuppositions underlying givens, and the two forms it can take are shown to be related in that conditional theorizing is a suspension of unconditional theorizing, and unconditional theorizing a departure from conditional theorizing. With these definitions in hand, let us consider the kind of understanding that is implicit in practice. In what sense of the term “theorizing” can we say

85

Understanding and Doing

that doing involves theorizing? In doing there is always understanding: to identify a situation as one that requires an action (what should we do now?) is already to have reached an understanding. Moreover, the understanding achieved in this identification may be expressed not merely in a description of the situation, or even in a statement about how it should be handled, but in the performance of an action that is a response to what is going on. One might respond to feeling chilled by putting on a sweater, turning up the heat, or making a cup of tea. Or one might respond with an argument (that you should make the tea because I made it last time), for to speak is to perform an action. One’s response may follow from a conscious judgment intervening between the sensation and the action, but this is not a necessary part of responding, for one might also respond without making a conscious judgment. Doing, in short, not only presupposes but is itself a kind of understanding. Even when it does not involve a deliberate effort to understand, then, doing can be seen as a kind of conditional theorizing, for the appearances composing a given situation can be “explored in conduct” (OHC 7). It is true that we would not ordinarily say that we “theorize” simply by acting, but the philosopher cannot privilege what we “ordinarily” think and say. Just as knowledge can be tacit rather than explicitly stated, so the activity of knowing can be informally rather than deliberately pursued. One can think through a problem without being aware that one is doing so: everyone has had the experience of solving a problem while doing something else. A more serious difficulty arises when Oakeshott writes that “the understanding exercised by an agent in conduct is not itself a theoretical understanding of conduct” because “it is exhibited in the performance of actions, not in the formulation of theorems” (OHC 89). Here he seems to contradict the claim that theorizing is a way of exploring appearances in conduct. What he must be taken to mean, to avoid inconsistency, is that conduct does not involve unconditional theorizing because to respond to an identified situation with an action is to treat the identification as unproblematic—that is, to accept it as given, as being an adequate diagnosis or verdict to be used. To act is not to forget one’s reservations but to put them aside in order to choose, to take the plunge into the swirling river of events. When Oakeshott says, in On Human Conduct, that “in ‘doing’ an agent casts off a mooring” and that the beginning of action is “courage to put out to sea” (OHC 40), we are reminded that he also describes thinking or theorizing in these terms (OHC 10; RPML 152–53). The metaphor is apt for both and simply emphasizes that theorizing is a kind of doing, and doing a kind of theorizing.

86

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

Doing, then, involves a kind of conditional theorizing, for we explore the implications of our practical knowledge when we respond to a situation with an action. But, as we have seen, theorizing can be conditional in ways that are not practical in this sense. Historical and scientific inquiry are forms of conditional theorizing, for each seeks to comprehend the world within limits that it does not itself question: historians, for example, use and therefore do not examine the idea of the past, while scientists presume the existence of observed regularities and natural laws. The “theorizing” that we engage in when we draw conclusions from practical experience is simply another kind of conditional theorizing. If, however, we take the conditions (presuppositions) that delimit a particular kind of theorizing and make them the subject of an inquiry—an inquiry in which we query rather than use these conditions, and in which the task we undertake is continually to interrogate the presuppositions of whatever level of understanding we have achieved—the exploration becomes an exercise of unconditional theorizing. The claim that doing is not a kind of theorizing must therefore be qualified: the kind of theorizing we have in mind when we say that doing is itself theorizing is the limited investigation, the conditional theorizing, that is inherent in doing itself. It would include both the “exploration in conduct” that occurs whenever we learn from experience and the kind of reflection that goes on when we make prudential, moral, legal, and other kinds of practical judgments and arguments. It would not, however, include the conditional theorizing characteristic of scientific and historical inquiry as modes of thought, or the unconditional theorizing of philosophy understood as an activity limited to examining presuppositions and defining concepts. Such theorizing is explanatory rather than prescriptive. The Distortion of Doing by Theorizing To question the assumptions underlying an activity is to move beyond the conventional understandings that shape it. But that one has acquired a new understanding does not mean that this new understanding can be substituted for the old. It is an understanding of a different kind and is, for that reason, irrelevant to the concerns that have been left behind. It follows that the “theoretical” understanding of human conduct that comes from questioning its presuppositions cannot replace “practical” understanding. Practical activity is distorted if theoretical knowledge about prudent or moral conduct is confused with knowing how to behave prudently or morally. That is why “a phi-

87

Understanding and Doing

losophy which pretended to offer something practically useful would be a philosophy living beyond its means,” and why “we should listen to philosophers only when they talk philosophy” (EM 355).19 It is a common mistake, Oakeshott maintains, to regard the knowledge implicit in conduct as something less than real knowledge, or to believe that scientific knowledge offers a better guide to conduct than practical experience. And it is a characteristic mistake of theorists to think that the knowledge at their disposal qualifies them to instruct those who lack it. Such belief is an illusion: it signals confusion between the presuppositions of conduct itself and the principles of good conduct, and involves the further mistake of thinking that good conduct depends on being able to elicit correct performances from explicitly articulated principles (OHC 26). Those who have learned practical wisdom—who know how to conduct themselves in activities like sailing, child-rearing, or scientific research—are like the cave-dwellers in Plato’s allegory (interpreted here most anti-Platonically by Oakeshott), who are willing to acknowledge the cleverness of one who has been outside the cave, but rightly doubt the relevance of the returned traveler’s new ideas to “the real world” in which they live. “What the cave-dwellers resent is not the theorist, the philosopher . . . but the ‘theoretician,’ the philosophe, the ‘intellectual;’ and they resent him, not because they are corrupt or ignorant but because they know just enough to recognize an impostor when they meet one” (OHC 30–31). The lesson of the cave (as Oakeshott understands it) can be generalized, for it is not only philosophy that is misapplied in practical life but also the conditional theorizing of scientific or historical inquiry. Science and history are just as likely as philosophy to distort conduct if their conclusions are taken out of context and imported into the world of doing. To apply “science” to conduct implies a misunderstanding of both domains, for though science and practice are forms of conditional theorizing, they rest on different assumptions. When we apply scientific knowledge in making practical choices, we are not, as such, engaged in scientific theorizing. Science and practice are shaped by different aims, concepts, and presuppositions and therefore generate different worlds of fact, truth, and reality. A scientist may be motivated by practical concerns, but genuine science (which must not be confused with technology) emerges only when scientific thinking frees itself from 19. Oakeshott makes a similar point in a review of Hans Driesch, Ethical Principles in Theory and Practice, Journal of Theological Studies 32 (1931), 327.

88

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

the assumptions underlying such concerns. Science, as a mode of understanding, presupposes a world of abstract relations whose truth is independent of human concerns, not the world of concrete objects that is the context of human activity. To the degree that chemistry, physics, or economics are really sciences, they have, qua science, no bearing at all on human conduct: the scientific ideas that seem relevant to practice are no longer scientific ideas, properly—that is, modally—speaking, for they have been removed from the abstract world of scientific generalizations and have turned into crude practical analogies. The view that science “works,” that it actually has practical utility, is based on a misunderstanding of the relationship between scientific knowledge and practical activity. Riding a bicycle may illustrate the principles of mechanics, but bike riders do not “apply” these principles, and skill in riding a bike is not to be confused with being able to explain them. A knowledge of physics may help us grasp the motions involved in cycling, but it is useless in mastering the skill: scientific principles “belong to a separate performance, the performance of explaining” (VLL 53). It may seem as though we use scientific conclusions to develop new medicines, build bridges, or put satellites in orbit. But the “science” that is used in technology is not the pure or theoretical science that is the paradigm of science as a distinct mode of inquiry and understanding. What is applied is never science in this modal sense. What actually has effects and can sometimes produce a desired result in practice is not a scientific theory itself but the way we use that theory. Because this use is a series of actions, what is going on when we apply a theory is not theory affecting practice but practice affecting practice. What we actually use is not a scientific theory, a set of abstract and explanatory theorems, but an adaptation (of practical but not scientific interest) of these theorems to the contingencies that concern us. If a practical problem involves new or arcane knowledge, it may appear to be one for the scientist rather than the practitioner. But a person who designs nuclear weapons is, in that capacity, engaged in the same kind of inquiry, modally speaking, as one who makes a pipe bomb. When we apply what we know about how objects behave or how processes can be controlled in a given practical situation, we identify certain effects as “results,” others as “miscalculations,” “side-effects,” or “unintended consequences.” These expressions represent practical, not scientific judgments. A concept like causation plays a very different role in practical efforts to forecast the weather or to determine tort liability than it does in scientific theorizing. The scientist who turns to solving a practical problem is no longer engaged in “science” as a mode of inquiry. To

89

Understanding and Doing

solve the practical problem, he or she uses ideas that belong to practical activity—not scientific theories but their practical analogues. What can be said about the irrelevance of science to practical activity can also be said about history. Historical understanding appears to affect practical life when historical experience, or rather what purports to be historical experience, is relied upon in making practical decisions—when, for example, politicians defend a policy as reflecting the lessons of history (EM 316). But when we invoke the past in this manner, we are not learning from history; we are engaging in a “retrospective politics” in which events are resurrected to deliver a message regarding our own concerns. The historical past has no such messages for us: historical events “have no over-all pattern or purpose, lead nowhere, point to no favored condition of the world and support no practical conclusions” (RP 181–82). The imagined past to which we look for guidance is not the complicated, problematic past of authentic historical inquiry but a past of “emblematic characters and episodes, abstracted from record in a reading which divests them of their contingent circumstances and their authentic utterance”—stereotypes that “become available to us, not in a procedure of critical inquiry but merely in being recalled from where they lie, scattered or collected, in the present” (OH 38). This past is a repository of icons and lessons—Moses leading his people to the promised land, Chamberlain announcing his triumph at Munich—that provide us with a vocabulary of practical discourse, not access to an authentically historical past. Oakeshott’s conclusion that science and history, as modes of understanding, are irrelevant to the world of practice follows directly from the idea of modality. Each mode is composed of ideas which, because they are defined in relation to other ideas within that mode, cannot appear in any other. Ideas cannot be transplanted from one mode to another, and it is always an illusion to think that one has achieved a successful transplant. The efforts of Marx, who sought to convert the abstractions of economic science first into an explanation of historical contingencies and then into a program for practical action, are an illuminating paradigm of modal confusion and error.20

20. Oakeshott discusses the Marxist effort to substitute demonstrative truth for judgment in political deliberation in “Political Discourse” (RP 70–95), an essay based on a broadcast talk, “Political Laws and Captive Audiences,” in G. R. Urban, ed., Talking to Eastern Europe (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), 291–301. Another discussion of Marxism is “Official Philosophy,” Cambridge Review 56 (1934–35), 108–9.

90

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

As Oakeshott puts it with respect to aesthetic experience, “contemplative activity is never the ‘conversion’ of a practical or a scientific image into a contemplated image; its appearance is possible only when practical and scientific imagining have lost their authority” (RP 514–15). In practical activity we do not use, borrow, apply, convert, or reconstruct scientific, historical, or poetic images. Rather, those images are superseded by practical images which, even though they appear the same, are images of a different kind because they obey different rules. If this point is hard to grasp, it is because we are not used to thinking of science or history in modal terms—the “science” and “history” that seem so readily applicable to practical life are already themselves departments of practical activity, not genuine history or science. In practical activity, the impulse of scientific or historical inquiry is suspended, not extended; to do something, in the sense of engaging in thinking that eventuates in an action rather than in a theorem, is to put aside the concerns of the scientist or historian for those of the engineer or social reformer, to lay down the theorist’s tools and take up the practitioner’s. These modal distinctions help us to grasp how conduct is distorted by theorizing, whether it takes the form of scientism, historical mythologizing, or the spurious practical wisdom of the political theorist. Oakeshott’s name for the distortion of practical activity by the misguided effort to apply what looks like useful theory is “Rationalism.” His account of the Rationalist style of thinking in Rationalism in Politics, his best-known book, anatomizes the typically (though perhaps not uniquely) modern disposition to reduce practical reasoning to rules of conduct. These rules are often thought to be the result of scientific, historical, or philosophical inquiry, but they are really distillations of practical activity.21 Rationalism is a disposition to reject habit and convention, to privilege “reason” over experience. And for the Rationalist, reason means technique (RP 16). Rationalism rests on the premise that real knowledge of human activity is knowledge that can be stated clearly and converted into methods or rules, that is, into technical knowledge. Implicit in the Rationalist conception 21. Because Oakeshott’s concern with “Rationalism” is usually identified with the essays dating from the late 1940s and the 1950s that he published as Rationalism in Politics, it is worth noting that the theme of Rationalism (and even the word itself, with a lower-case “r”) makes a brief appearance in an essay that antedates Experience and Its Modes: “The New Bentham,” Scrutiny 1 (1932–33), 114–31, now easily consulted in the expanded 1991 edition of Rationalism in Politics. A rationalist is defined there as one who “believes that what is made is better than what merely grows, that neatness is better than profusion and vitality” (RP 139).

91

Understanding and Doing

of knowledge is a rejection of any understanding that is traditional rather than reflective: knowledge that cannot be formulated in rules and that exists only in use (RP 12). Technical knowledge is “information,” facts that can be easily learned, recalled, and applied; traditional knowledge, in contrast, resides in the kind of expertise or judgment that can only be acquired and used by participating in a practice.22 Oakeshott has been criticized for rejecting the usefulness of technical knowledge, but this is a mistake. For Oakeshott, practical activity often calls upon technical knowledge, which is a distillation of traditional knowledge, as well as upon traditional knowledge itself. What it cannot dispense with is experience, “know-how,” and a feel for the traditions within (and against) which judgment, skill, and even creativity are exercised. All require a practitioner to move beyond the narrow realm of explicitly formulated principles. For Oakeshott, practical wisdom in the exercise of prudence or moral judgment does not depend on the existence of rules from which an agent can obtain instruction about what to do. There are such rules, but they cannot be mechanically applied because it takes more than an understanding of the rules to put them into practice. You have to know how to fly an airplane to make sense of a flight manual: you not only have to know the rules but also how to use them, how to “illustrate them in conduct,” and there are no rules for how to do this. Oakeshott’s point is a familiar one. Kant, for example, holds that to judge is to subsume a particular under a universal, to see it as an instance of a general rule. But judgment cannot be reduced to rules, for it still requires judgment to apply the rules of judgment. It follows that judgment must be learned through experience.23 An agent may seize upon an explicit rule or principle for guidance in some situation, but, Oakeshott insists, “he cannot engage in this operation until he has chosen his principle and there is no principle to tell him how to do this; and since all such principles are equivocal, it will provide him neither with a reason for acting nor with a response to his situation. Moral and prudential principles may indirectly illuminate the theater of conduct, but they can neither direct nor ‘justify’ an adventure of doing” (OHC 91). 22. In Rationalism in Politics, Oakeshott often calls the latter “practical knowledge,” but I have not used that expression here to avoid confusing practical (that is, traditional) knowledge with the mode of practice (which includes traditional as well as technical knowledge). 23. Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying: ‘This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice,’” in Hans Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 61.

92

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

The rules of an activity are like the grammar of a language; to know how to use a rule, one must already know how to speak this language. “It is only in fantasy that . . . to understand [a practice] is to know one’s way around a rulebook” (OHC 91).24 Oakeshott’s conception of rationality in conduct should now be clear. We come to understand an activity by practicing it and therefore learning how it is done. The rules we abstract from a particular practice, and which seem to govern it, are in fact abridgments of the practice itself and neither exist in advance of nor govern it (RP 121). We act rationally not by “applying” rules to conduct, but by learning from experience. Experience is necessary not only as a source of the ideals, purposes, rules, and precepts that may be abstracted from practical activity, but in making use of these abstractions. To know how to conduct oneself in an activity is always to know more than can be stated in the form of rules. Rationality in conduct, then, involves faithfulness not to the rules that may be abstracted from an activity but to the activity itself and to our knowledge (which we cannot always formulate as rules) of how to conduct ourselves. It involves a kind of knowledge or capacity that is “capable of carrying us across those wide open spaces . . . where no rule runs” (VLL 54). A chief mistake of Rationalism is to assume that conduct is only rational when it is guided by “theory,” that is, by general ideas that we can formulate as propositions or laws. Because no activity is ever fully coherent, theorizing can help to reveal its incoherence. But the insight we acquire as a result of theorizing is already one that has been removed from its context. If practical ideas are abstracted from the activities they guide, the mistake is not serious, for it amounts to forgetting that such ideas can only be used by those who possess experience in that activity. If, however, one tries to carry on an activity according to ideas belonging to a different practice, one faces a graver problem, for what makes sense in one practical context may be inappropriate in the other. In fact, alien ideas can only be used by being “reinvented” within the practice at hand. And if the ideas to be used belong not only to a different activity but to a different mode of understanding, then a radical transformation will be required to achieve the illusion of relevance. 24. Noël O’Sullivan argues that, for Oakeshott, Rationalism is self-contradictory because it denies the premise of action itself, which is a gap between is and ought. The Rationalist “fails to recognize the inevitability of this gap, persisting in the foolish attempt to achieve a once-and-for-all unification of the ideal and the actual.” Noël O’Sullivan, The Problem of Political Obligation (New York: Garland Press, 1987), 233. On this interpretation, religious experience (as Oakeshott understands it in “Religion and the Moral Life” or Experience and Its Modes) is inherently Rationalist.

93

Understanding and Doing

The biggest gap of all is the gap between unconditional (philosophical) theorizing and the kinds of conditional knowledge required in the conduct of life. To attempt to extract practical guidance from an authentically philosophical understanding of practical activity is to treat what is philosophically problematic as if it were established. In making practical use of a philosophical concept, one is not applying a theory; one is constructing a practical analogue, an ideology, and applying that. Where political theory is understood as applied philosophy, Oakeshott suggests, what is applied is not “theory” but a form of practice. As he puts it in reviewing Walter Lippman’s The Public Philosophy, political theories of this kind are best viewed as “conduct itself in another idiom.”25 Political philosophy can only yield conclusions that are relevant to practical politics if reflection is subordinated to politics. “Where there is genuine philosophy there can be no guidance; if we seek guidance, we must ‘hang up philosophy’” (RPML 155). Philosophical theorizing disappears when its definitions and theorems are put to use where they have no proper business to perform. Moral philosophers have long sought to identify the most general principles underlying particular moral rules and the judgments based on them—the principle of the mean, “the Golden Rule,” the categorical imperative, the principle of utility, and so forth. But, properly understood, these principles are not themselves moral precepts; they are the product of efforts to systematize a received body of moral ideas. Appearances notwithstanding, they do not provide a criterion by which particular, contingent acts may be judged morally right or wrong, nor is knowledge of them required to act morally (VLL 53). They are philosophical definitions of right and wrong, criteria for identifying whether a particular precept is or is not a moral precept, not themselves precepts of conduct. Yet the literature of “normative” or “applied” ethics is full of efforts to extract prescriptions from what are, philosophically speaking, essentially definitional or explanatory principles. To do this is to do philosophy in a way that undermines the activity, and it is to this side of the question that I now want to turn. The Distortion of Theorizing by Doing Paralleling the error of Rationalism is a converse and equally destructive mistake: the disposition to allow theorizing to be governed by practical concerns. 25. “The Customer Is Never Wrong,” Listener 54 (1955), 302, now reprinted in Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life. That Oakeshott’s view of philosophy as conceptual criticism resembles that of the “ordinary language philosophy” of the 1950s has often been noted.

94

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

Oakeshott’s conviction that understanding languishes under the tyranny of practice is evident as early as 1925, when he wrote (in a fit of practical fervor) that “we shall never discover the secret of the self or of anything else, if we are not prepared to go beyond the conceptions which are necessary for practical conduct” (RPML 52). Art, he suggests a few years later, is especially susceptible to damage by practical demands. It is separated from “the world” not because it has nothing to contribute to but because “to be free from the world is the condition of [its] contribution” (RPML 96). Scientific inquiry, too, is compromised by a failure to exclude extraneous concerns: from the standpoint of science, the practical utility or moral acceptability of its conclusions is irrelevant. Oakeshott’s arguments for the independence of theorizing from practical life become progressively more nuanced as the years go by, but he never abandons his commitment to resisting efforts to reduce all voices in the conversation of mankind to the voice of practical being, of which Heidegger’s self-absorbed Dasein is but an extreme example. Oakeshott argues the case for the autonomy of theorizing most fully in relation to two inquiries that are central to human understanding: history and philosophy. Historical inquiry yields a distinct kind of understanding, and this distinctness is itself a historical achievement. Historical inquiry has suffered from recurrent attempts to define it as the explanation of events on the basis of general laws—attempts that are motivated by a wish to reduce history to a branch of science but that display an inadequate understanding of both science and history. It has been even harder to free history from the influence of practical concerns. Oakeshott’s criticism of E. H. Carr’s account of the Bolshevik Revolution illustrates the theme: the tendency, especially pronounced in the study of contemporary history, to write history backwards, siding with the victors in historical struggles, ignoring lost causes, and employing moral and political ideas to frame historical interpretations.26 In his essays on the character of historical inquiry, Oakeshott attempts to distinguish the past as it is understood by historians (“the historical past”) from the past as it is seen in practical activity (“the practical past”). He argues that history emerges as an autonomous mode of inquiry and understanding only when these two conceptions of the past are clearly differentiated.27

26. “Mr. Carr’s First Volume,” Cambridge Journal 4 (1950–51), 350. 27. Oakeshott’s extends his discussion of how practical concerns distort historical inquiry, initiated in Experience and Its Modes, in “The Activity of Being an Historian” (RP 151–83), “Present, Future, and Past” (OH 1–44), and many book reviews.

95

Understanding and Doing

The practical past is a past that corresponds to a present world of practical experience. The world of practice is the world of present activity, but past events are often relevant to this world and we can, therefore, have a practical interest in them. In the practical mode we are not interested in what an event might once have signified or in what it can tell us about another time and place, but only in its present significance. A lawyer, for example, is (qua lawyer) interested in a will only for its present consequences, and may be said to have a practical attitude toward all such evidence of past events. And in general we are interested in artifacts, records, stories, memories, and other survivals not as evidence from which to reconstruct a world that has disappeared but because we can use them to make sense of our own identities and predicaments (OH 16–18). Our living, practical present in this way generates a parallel conception of the past, the practical past. “We call upon the past to speak to us in utterance related to the present; and what appears is a practical past” (RP 162). This practical past is constructed according to demands arising in the present world of practical life, not according to the principles of historical scholarship. Because the world of practical experience is so compelling, we find it difficult to see “historically” any past event, person, situation, or institution we believe to be related to our present circumstances or self-understanding. But when we adopt a practical view of the past, we destroy historical understanding by substituting for its true object, the historical past, a past imagined in terms of present conceptions and concerns. And if, in addition, we insist that the practical world is the only “real” world, we must deny the possibility of an independent historical past, because the only possible past would be a past examined for its relevance to present practical concerns. If this is the only possible past, then history as an independent form of inquiry is impossible. Philosophy, too, is compromised when it is made to serve practical interests. As we have seen, Oakeshott defines philosophy as the effort to transcend modal thinking through the never-ending dialectical criticism of presuppositions. It is the activity of unconditional theorizing. This conception of philosophy implies its separation from, rather than continuity with, other kinds of theorizing. Authentic philosophy comes into existence only when theorizing posits, as a principle of inquiry, a refusal to proceed on the basis of foundational assumptions, insofar as these can be identified. Such assumptions are made in historical inquiry, in the sciences, and in practical activity for the sake of getting on with the task of understanding what can be understood within the limits of those assumptions. But in philosophy, to accept such limits is to abandon dialectical criticism for other concerns.

96

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

Because it must, by definition, question conclusions reached in other modes of inquiry, philosophy cannot find its own foundation in these conclusions. And this means that it cannot accept, as the criterion of its validity, that it should correspond to common sense or to any other form of practical experience. A political philosophy, for example, is often understood to be a reasoned system of ideas (an ideology) corresponding to the facts of political life and providing guidance for political activity. But to hold this view of political philosophy is to accept a nonphilosophical criterion of philosophical adequacy. It is, absurdly, “to suggest that a fully thought-out concept must conform to a concept which we have not troubled to think out at all” (RPML 136). If we view political theorizing as inherently practical, we are forced to choose between its being philosophical and its being “true.” The argument that political theory should mirror the generally accepted “facts” of political life and that it should, on the basis of these facts, prescribe ends for political action implicitly asserts the nonphilosophical character of such theory. In philosophy, “the criterion is never conformity with our ordinary view of the matter” (RPML 135).28 Philosophy assumes its distinctive character only when it is purged of modal concerns, including, above all, “an extraneous desire for action” (EM 1). But this is least likely to occur when action itself is the subject of philosophical inquiry. The confusion between philosophy and practice—between thinking philosophically about practice and thinking practically—is greatest when the philosopher deals with morality, law, and other aspects of practical life. Moral and political philosophy are subjected to incessant demands that they contribute to the solution of practical problems or that they reflect (or not reflect) this or that practical attitude. Though he qualifies it in various ways, Oakeshott never abandons the view that “a philosophy of practical experience” can have nothing in common with “a so-called practical philosophy” (EM 249), and that practical concerns are 28. Oakeshott criticizes Locke for confusing practice with philosophy by making common sense the criterion of philosophic truth. Locke’s Second Treatise, he suggests, is not a work that articulates a theory of politics but “a work of ‘political theory’—the questionable enterprise of recommending a political position in the idiom of general ideas.” Locke, one of the more skilled of such political moralists, “recognizes no firm distinction between explanation and prescription; he moves, often inadvertently, between these two disparate worlds of discourse, giving a spurious air of principle to his recommendations and a false suggestion of practical applicability to his explanations—exactly the sort of work to make a profound impression upon mankind.” Review of P. Laslett, ed., Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Historical Journal 5 (1962), 100. See also “John Locke,” Cambridge Review 54 (1932–33), 72.

97

Understanding and Doing

irrelevant to philosophy, where their propensity to “obtrude” is merely a distraction.29 When we fail to separate thinking about practice from practical thinking, when we bring into philosophy considerations that belong to practical activity, we invite confusion. Oakeshott calls the understanding that results from this mixture of inquiries “pseudo-philosophy.” Although this epithet reflects a polemical intent, the argument behind it is of more than merely historical interest. To understand what Oakeshott means by “pseudo-philosophy” one must keep in mind that in Experience and Its Modes he does not see philosophy as a mode: a limited, conditional manner of theorizing. What he understands in this book to be authentic philosophy is what he later calls “unconditional theorizing,” the criticism of modal postulates. Pseudo-philosophical theorizing, in contrast, is theorizing that proceeds partly within and partly outside a given mode of inquiry. Ethics, for example, goes beyond making practical judgments to examine general principles, but it has not abandoned its practical aims and therefore remains bound by the assumptions of practical activity. Ethics seems philosophical because it criticizes received ideas of right and wrong. But insofar as it insists on remaining practically relevant, it cannot be fully philosophical. By subordinating itself to the demands of practical life, by placing the search for usable “truth” above the criticism of presuppositions, it brings its investigations to premature closure and in doing so fails to earn the title “moral philosophy.” Because it falls short of modal autonomy, a pseudo-philosophical inquiry is necessarily indeterminate. A mode of inquiry has an identity even if its coherence is only provisional. But an indeterminate inquiry lacks a specific identity and so cannot achieve even the conditional coherence of a mode (EM 332). Because they mix practical and philosophical concerns, ethics and political theory not only exhibit the kind of practical error Oakeshott calls “Rationalism,” they fail to achieve the fully dialectical character of authentic philosophy. To make moral judgments or to rationalize them into a system of principles is to use moral ideas, not to identify and criticize their presuppositions. Arguments that are relevant in moral theorizing are not relevant to theorizing about morality because they rest on different assumptions. Either activity can be pursued alone, but they cannot be combined because the second questions 29. In relation to other modes, the alleged priority of practical understanding is “obtrusive, not intrusive” (OH 24). That is, practical thinking does not enter into (intrude upon) other kinds of thinking but pushes them away.

98

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

what the first takes as given. If moral philosophy is to achieve coherence, it must give up one or the other of these concerns. And without question, Oakeshott maintains, what it should give up is the effort to recommend ends and to prescribe conduct, the effort to “organize, integrate and complete our world of values and to apply its conclusions to our conduct of life” (EM 340). A genuine philosophy of moral life provides “not a moral judgment about which of many ends is preferable, but a purely logical judgment about which of many analyses is true” (RPML 125). If ethics is to be concerned with prescribing ends, it can avoid confusion only by severing its connection with philosophy. To do this, however, would be “to abandon . . . what is strong and disciplined in the ethical tradition for what is merely popular and pedantic” (EM 340). It would be, in effect, to surrender the effort to understand moral judgment and conduct. And the same, of course, can be said of political theory.30 The most common objection made to this sort of conclusion—by Marx against Hegel, for example, by Nietzsche and Foucault, by Habermas against Gadamer, and by many other critics of morality, patriarchy, liberalism, law, science, and culture itself—is that understanding itself requires criticism of the social structures within which knowledge is produced. Such critics explain received understandings, from the theories of science to the presuppositions of ordinary lived experience, as ideologies, rationalizations, or discourses of oppression. But they hold open the possibility that we can achieve, through criticism, knowledge that achieves an acceptable standard of science, rational self-understanding, or undistorted communication. Theory must be critical, and this means that its concerns are never purely theoretical; they are and should be practical. To hold that theory and practice are distinct, the critical theorist argues, is to ignore the distorting effects of power in the construction of knowledge, especially in those disciplines that are directly concerned with practical life. But this is not an objection to the distinction between theorizing and doing, as Oakeshott has formulated it. What is being claimed for critical theory is not that moral philosophy is indistinguishable from moralizing,

30. Many commentators on Oakeshott have noticed similarities between his views on the autonomy of philosophy and those expressed by Hegel in section 23 of The Philosophy of Right. But Oakeshott does not rely on Hegel for arguments condemning the reduction of political philosophy to “normative theory,” nor does he subscribe to Hegel’s historicist view of philosophy as “its own time comprehended in thought.” For a rare contemporary effort to defend the philosophical in political theorizing, see Jeremy Waldron, “What Plato Would Allow,” in Ian Shapiro and Judith Wagner DeCew, eds., Theory and Practice, Nomos 37 (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 138–78.

99

Understanding and Doing

but that it is distorted by considerations of interest and power. The link between theory and practice that is asserted is a contingent, not a conceptual one. But it is the latter, not the former, that Oakeshott is concerned to deny. To argue that all theorizing is “distorted” by practical interests is in fact to agree with Oakeshott’s argument that theoretical knowledge and practical concerns are distinct. It implies at least the notional possibility of undistorted knowledge, knowledge determined by considerations other than practical ones. The main defense of the “unity of theory and practice” in moral and political thinking is one we have already considered: that efforts to understand practical experience and practical understanding speak to and depend upon one another because they are, in the end, the same kind of understanding. They compose a common world of discourse. But there is no reason why we cannot study practical judgments in such a way as to generate knowledge that is categorially distinct from those judgments themselves; no reason why we cannot ignore the prescriptions of a morality and reflect upon its character. Such reflection is “the engagement of a moral philosopher as distinct from that of a moralist” (OH 133). Oakeshott’s understanding of this engagement, perhaps because it is distant from the current self-understanding of moral and political philosophers, helps to illuminate one of the hazards of their enterprise.

chapter

t h r e e

Understanding in the Human Sciences

Oakeshott’s efforts to theorize human conduct rest on the conclusion, explored in the preceding chapter, that conduct can be understood in ways that do not involve the kind of understanding required in conduct itself. Theorizing, though a practical activity, can generate knowledge that is not itself practical. Unlike those who assert the inherently practical character of knowledge, and especially knowledge of human conduct, Oakeshott thinks reflection can be detached from practical concerns and acquire a purely explanatory character, and he devotes special attention to two forms that explanatory reflection can take: scientific and historical inquiry. From first to last, Oakeshott’s writings reveal a desire to clarify how scientific and historical knowledge are related to each other and to other kinds of knowledge. What are the presuppositions of science and history? Are they really distinct? Uniting scientific and historical inquiry under the label “explanatory” suggests that the two can be seen as aspects of a single explanatory mode, not as categorially distinct, and many philosophers have reached precisely this conclusion. One of the tenets of positivism, for example, is that historical explanation is governed by the same logic as explanation in the natural sciences. But the unity of scientific and historical knowledge is also asserted on the hermeneutic side by those who maintain that all knowledge rests on

102

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

human constructs and involves interpretation. On this view, the natural sciences, no less than history, are hermeneutic disciplines. Still another puzzle is the kind of understanding provided by sociology, linguistics, literary criticism, religious studies, and other fields in the humanities and social sciences. Few of these fields fit comfortably within the category of science as defined by the natural sciences, but neither can they be considered “history” in any straightforward sense of that term. Where, modally speaking, should we locate these disciplines? In investigating such questions, Oakeshott is following a well-trodden path, so to understand his conclusions it is useful to know something about their context. Because he thought about the connections between history, the natural sciences, and other disciplines over a period of many years, and because he read widely in the history of philosophy, this context is both vast and indeterminate. But we can understand much about Oakeshott’s philosophy of the human sciences by locating it within a debate that has been going on since the middle of the nineteenth century (and which has, of course, its own antecedents) over the grounds on which the study of human beings can be distinguished from the study of nature. In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott analyzes the presuppositions of science as a distinct kind of inquiry and defends the efforts of psychologists and economists to develop a science of human behavior, although he also criticizes the modal ambiguity of many such efforts. And in On Human Conduct he explores how, even on the premise that all inquiry involves interpretation, the natural and the human sciences can be shown to be categorially distinct.

The Problem of the Human Sciences With the emergence in the nineteenth century of history as a self-conscious discipline, it became possible for philosophers to consider the epistemological status of historical inquiry and its relation to the natural sciences. Their investigations were complicated, however, by the ill-defined character of both history and science. “History” stood not only for the rigorous study of the past but for many other inquiries into human behavior, beliefs, customs, artifacts, and institutions—inquiries that by the end of the century were being identified collectively as the “historical,” “human,” or “cultural” sciences, and that today are divided between the “humanities” and the “social sciences.” And “science” meant not only the study of nature but any inquiry that sought general

103

Understanding in the Human Sciences

and systematic knowledge, no matter what its subject matter might be. Philosophers were aware of Aristotle’s dismissal of history, with its concern for particulars, as inferior to poetry, which expresses universal truths—a dismissal echoed in Schopenhauer’s charge that history cannot be scientific because science generalizes and history does not. Many of them, impressed by the achievements of the natural sciences, regarded these sciences as the model of all knowledge that deserves the name. The problem for those who rejected this “positivism” was to demonstrate the possibility of a distinctly historical form of knowledge that could be made coherent in its own terms. Drawing inspiration from Vico, Goethe, Herder, and Kant, the antipositivists sought to identify criteria by which history and other disciplines concerned with human actions and accomplishments could be distinguished from the natural sciences. Positivism, in this context, is the claim that human behavior can be explained in the same way that nonhuman phenomena are explained within the natural sciences, that is, on the basis of knowledge derived by induction from observable facts and expressed in the form of general laws. This claim is central to the arguments of Auguste Comte, who coined the term “positivism,” and J. S. Mill, whose defense of the methodological unity of the natural and the “moral” sciences (as he called the study of human behavior) provoked Dilthey and others to develop alternative theories of the human sciences— and, a century after its publication, still provided a point of departure for Winch, Gadamer, and other hermeneutic critics of the positivist program.1 Defending what has come to be called the “covering law model” or “deductive-nomological explanation,” positivism determined the agenda of debates about the philosophy of history and the social sciences in the middle of the twentieth century. It underlies the behaviorist and rational choice movements within the social sciences and the even more ambitious programs of sociobiology and cognitive science. That those who defend the autonomy of the humanities still march under the banner of antipositivism is further evidence of positivism’s resilience. One of the first to respond to the positivist attack was the German historian J. G. Droysen. Like his famous contemporary Ranke, Droysen wanted to justify the autonomy of the emerging discipline of historical studies, and he did so by arguing that history and nature required categorially different kinds of understanding. And like Hegel, whose philosophy of history influenced his own, Droysen followed Kant in distinguishing the natural and the human 1. John Stuart Mill, The Logic of the Moral Sciences (London: Duckworth, 1987), first published in 1843 as the sixth book of Mill’s A System of Logic.

104

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

realms—the “starry heavens above and the moral law within,” the first a realm of necessity, the second of freedom. Both history and nature must be understood empirically, but the methods of historical inquiry are not those used in the natural sciences. Historical inquiry constructs a coherent body of knowledge on the basis of its own specific presuppositions, continually correcting and enlarging that knowledge through the critical examination of historical evidence. History is a science not because it emulates the ideas and methods of the natural sciences but because it is a disciplined way of representing its own distinctive subject, the historical past. The historian’s task, then, is to articulate a method that, however different it may be from the method of the natural sciences, is no less scientific.2 The ensuing debate over the character and autonomy of historical inquiry centered on two criteria for distinguishing the human from the natural sciences. The first is that the human sciences are distinguished by their focus on individuals. The idea of the individual is central to nineteenth-century German historical thinking. “Individuality,” which refers to things of any kind and not only to human beings, is a recurrent theme from Goethe and Humboldt at the beginning of the century to Dilthey and Meinecke at its end. It seemed evident to historians that their subject matter was the deeds of individual persons and the character of individual events, institutions, nations, and cultures. The proposition that the natural sciences are distinguished from history and the human sciences by their different attitudes toward individuality received its canonical statement in Windelband’s suggestion that the natural sciences are “nomothetic,” the historical sciences “ideographic.”3 The empirical sciences, Windelband argues, can be divided into those concerned with generalizations about recurrent phenomena, which they seek to formulate as laws of nature, and those concerned with the unique character of individual occurrences, which they seek to describe. The distinction between the natural and the historical sciences, then, is that the former provide knowledge by framing general laws, the later by describing particular events. Windelband rejects the view that the natural and the human constitute different subject matters, arguing that psychology, as a nomothetic discipline, must be classed among the natural sciences. 2. Johann Gustav Droysen, Outline of the Principles of History, trans. E. Benjamin Andrews (Boston: Ginn, 1893). 3. Wilhelm Windelband, “History and Natural Science,” trans. Guy Oakes, History and Theory 18 (1980), 175. Another translation is in Theory & Psychology 8 (1998), 5–22. This is Windelband’s inaugural address as rector of the University of Strasbourg in 1894.

105

Understanding in the Human Sciences

Critics of the individuality criterion objected that many of the human sciences, not excluding history itself, seek to generalize about the objects they study. Individuality, they argued, must be distinguished from mere particularity. Bradley, for example, suggests that every individual thing is a mixture of particularity and generality (a “concrete universal”). And Dilthey, aware that individuality involves generality, used the idea not to distinguish the human from the natural sciences but to differentiate between the human sciences. Although all the human sciences are concerned with individual things, some generalize by comparing these individuals and others particularize by examining a single individual and its relation to other individuals. For Dilthey, the problem of defining the human sciences arises not only from their ill-defined boundary, considered as a group, but from their internal diversity. Unlike the natural sciences, the human sciences do not form a “logically-constituted whole.” Some are generalizing, others are individualizing, and all reflect a diversity of concerns arising from their connection with practical life.4 The other criterion of demarcation that emerged in the nineteenth-century debate is that the human sciences are distinguished from the natural sciences in that they are concerned with mind, not matter. To deal with the objection that psychology, though concerned with mind, is closer in its aims and accomplishments to physics than to history, defenders of the human sciences distinguished the study of mental processes, which can be explained in terms of general laws, from the study of mental content—beliefs, desires, arguments, and ideas, which must be understood in terms of their individual characteristics to be identified at all, even if one goes on to compare and contrast them once they have been defined. The required distinction is between psychological and hermeneutic understanding. Droysen, for example, gives a psychological interpretation of understanding (Verstehen) as a procedure for making sense of the experience of other human beings by evoking one’s own inner experience, and he identifies “the method of understanding” as the method of the historical sciences. But he is also aware that because each person’s experience goes on within, and is therefore structured by, an inherited world of ideas, “psychological interpretation” must be supplemented by “the interpretation of ideas.”5 Dilthey reaches a similar conclusion: his early writings treat

4. Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, vol. 1 of Selected Works, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 73. This is a translation of Dilthey’s 1883 work and related unpublished material. 5. Droysen, Outline, 91, 30.

106

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

psychology, which he takes to be a discipline concerned with immediate lived experience, as the foundation of the human sciences. Our present subjective experience, Dilthey later came to think, is determined by our own past experience and by actions and institutions that constitute an objective cultural world. And it is hermeneutics, not psychology, that gives us access to this world. Dilthey is concerned not only with history, understood as the study of the human past, but also with the character of all the disciplines that describe, explain, and judge “mankind”—with “economics, jurisprudence, politics, the study of religion, literature, poetry, architecture, music, and of philosophic world views and systems, and, finally, psychology.”6 He calls these disciplines, collectively, the Geisteswissenschaften, which is how the expression “moral sciences” had been rendered by the German translator of Mill’s Logic. In accordance with German usage, Dilthey defines a “science” (Wissenschaft) as any system of clearly defined concepts and well-grounded propositions, and he condemns as shortsighted and presumptuous the views of those who take their definition of science from the natural sciences and conclude that history and the other humanistic disciplines are not sciences. But for Dilthey, who recognized the difficulty of the task he had set himself, Geisteswissenschaften (usually translated back into English as “the human sciences”) is merely “the least inappropriate” of the names commonly applied to the disciplines that study human activity.7 Dilthey initially regarded his effort to define the human sciences as part of a larger effort to articulate a unified “philosophy of life” covering all aspects of human experience. This philosophy would start by recognizing that the physical and mental aspects of human experience can be separated only by abstraction. Matter and mind, in a human being, are not different parts of reality but aspects of that being regarded as an intelligent organism. The activity of speaking, for example, involves physical motions and semantic content, and to understand it we must take account of both. What is not clear, however, is how the physical and the mental are to be combined in a single theory. Dilthey struggled for years with the difficulties inherent in this program. Do 6. Wilhelm Dilthey, “The Construction of the Historical World,” in W. Dilthey: Selected Writings, ed. H. P. Rickman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 170. This work, originally published in 1910 and translated here only in part, represents Dilthey’s mature thought on the character and scope of the human sciences. 7. Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, 57. The arguments of Comte and Mill “truncate and mutilate historical reality in order to assimilate it to the concepts and methods of the natural sciences,” 49.

107

Understanding in the Human Sciences

the Geisteswissenschaften encompass all the disciplines concerned with human life, including those that study its material aspects? Or, as the contrast with the Naturwissenschaften implies, do they include only disciplines that are concerned with mind—that is, with the semantic and cultural, but not the physical or biological, aspects of human behavior? In his later writings Dilthey, somewhat hesitantly, takes the second path. With Dilthey’s conversion to hermeneutics, the meaning of Geist migrates from the inner, private experience of individual consciousness to what Hegel calls “objective mind,” the outer, public world of collective consciousness expressed in language, art, and other practices that make communication and understanding possible. In literary history or literary criticism, for example, we are concerned not with processes in the mind of an author or a reader, but with “a structure created by these processes,” an intellectual object that must be understood in “the sense in which Montesquieu spoke of the spirit of the laws.”8 Accordingly, the Geisteswissenschaften are inquiries into mind-created objects. Human conduct becomes the subject matter of the human sciences only when we seek to ascribe meaning to the gestures and words, the activities and traditions, in which human experience finds expression. As a method of the human sciences, hermeneutics involves treating all human expressions as if they were texts. The objects of this interpretation, its texts and text-analogues, include not only written and spoken words but an immense variety of actions, artifacts, practices, beliefs, laws, and other cultural expressions. And the techniques of interpretation that are needed make sense of these expressions are similarly diverse. The positivist response to the theory of “understanding” (Verstehen) that Dilthey developed (with others, like Simmel and Weber, who were thinking along the same lines) was to object that hermeneutics cannot provide an objective method for the human sciences because it must rely on intuition to make sense of human expressions, and because the propositions it generates are mere hypotheses that still need to be confirmed by other methods. But these objections confuse interpretation with other kinds of understanding. Hermeneutic understanding does not depend on empathy (Einfühlung), a procedure in which historians, anthropologists, or literary scholars re-create in their own minds the thoughts and emotions of those whose expressions they are studying. Hermeneutic understanding is not, like empathy, a psychological concept. It rests on the premise that thoughts and emotions are ideas and 8. Dilthey, “Construction of the Historical World,” 174–75.

108

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

that ideas depend on the shared meanings that constitute languages and other cultural practices. Hermeneutic understanding must therefore be distinguished from empathy and imaginative reconstruction. It also follows that the second positivist charge—that empathy is a heuristic device for generating hypotheses, not a mode of explanation—is irrelevant to hermeneutics, which verifies interpretive hypotheses according to its own highly developed methods of confirmation. The existence of such methods further deflates the charge that the human sciences cannot be objective. Because cultural expressions are public and can be examined by anyone, objectivity according to the canons of historical, literary, and other kinds of scholarship is possible.9 The hermeneutic criterion can be used to distinguish the human sciences not only from the natural sciences but also from the arts and aesthetic experience. Neither the arts themselves nor aesthetic experience, which can be a response to nature as well as to art, would seem to belong to the human sciences, for these are explanatory disciplines. Both, however, belong to the geistige Welt of human meanings and can become the concern of various explanatory inquiries. The distinction required here is between artistic activity and aesthetic experience as human conduct, on the one hand, and art history, literary criticism, musicology, and so forth, as inquiries into particular kinds of artistic activity, on the other.10 These inquiries may themselves have an aesthetic dimension: a historical narrative can be read for the imaginative pleasure it yields, and aesthetic judgment can be important in writing history. But as inquiries, the human sciences presuppose the existence of cultural objects from which they are themselves distinguished. A parallel argument can be used to distinguish the human sciences from practical concerns. The argument uncovers a deeply rooted mistake in the hermeneutic tradition. By reducing all experience to practical experience (which they understand to be the realm of ordinary experience, “life,” “praxis,” “values,” or common sense), Dilthey, Rickert, Croce, Collingwood, Heidegger, Habermas, Taylor, and many other antipositivist philosophers argue that the Geisteswissenschaften aim at a theoretical understanding of human conduct that is also practically relevant. But if the human sciences are distinguished from the poetic arts, they are also distinguished from the practical. Though 9. Georg Henrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 5–6, 30, and Gurpreet Mahajan, Explanation and Understanding in the Human Sciences (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), chap. 3. 10. “Poetry was composed before poetics arose, as people talked before there were grammar and syntax.” Droysen, Outline, 105.

109

Understanding in the Human Sciences

these sciences study practical experience, it does not follow that they cannot generate knowledge that is detached from the values, interests, and other practical concerns that compose ordinary lived experience. One reason antipositivists so often assert the inherently practical, or as they sometimes say, “value-laden,” character of the human sciences is that in opposing positivism they believe themselves compelled to disagree with the positivist claim that knowledge can be “value-free.” But positivism might be correct on the issue of objectivity even if it is mistaken in claiming that there is no real difference between explaining human and natural phenomena. Although the human sciences have, historically, united theoretical and practical concerns, it does not follow that these concerns cannot be distinguished analytically. Combining them is a source of modal confusion, and often of politicization and intellectual corruption, not an inherent, much less desirable, aspect of theorizing in the humanities and the social sciences. The hermeneutic tradition can therefore be accused of failing to question the premises of the sciences it seeks to theorize. A philosophy of the human sciences must be aware of the self-understanding of those sciences, but it cannot uncritically accept their presuppositions. Since Dilthey, philosophers have advanced many versions of the hermeneutic criterion as a basis for distinguishing the human from the natural sciences. One is that the human sciences explain human action in relation to an agent’s reasons for acting, whereas the natural sciences seek causal explanations.11 Another, which is based on Wittgenstein’s view that reasons make sense only in relation to particular linguistic practices or forms of life, is that explanations of human conduct presuppose rules. A theoretical understanding of human conduct must pay attention to the self-understanding of those whose conduct is being explained, and this self-understanding cannot be described except in terms of the meanings that human beings share with other members of the communities to which they belong, meanings expressed in the rules of those communities.12 According to still another version of the hermeneutic criterion, the human sciences are concerned with “intentional phenomena,” which in the jargon of philosophy means not only intentions in the ordinary sense of the term but all states of mind that, like a belief, are directed toward an object and have propositional content regarding that object. Because 11. It is sometimes argued that reasons can be causes, but of a different kind than those that operate in nature. Donald Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 12. Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1958), 87–89.

110

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

it involves beliefs, desires, and other intentional phenomena, human action cannot be explained without referring to this propositional content. Natural processes, in contrast, can be the subject of propositions (scientific hypotheses), but they do not themselves contain propositions.13 In On Human Conduct, Oakeshott offers a version of the hermeneutic criterion that distinguishes between expressions of intelligence and manifestations of not-intelligent processes. The disciplines that study human conduct, as expressed in particular languages, literatures, moral traditions, and other forms of cultural activity, he suggests, are those that “used to be called the ‘human sciences’—Geisteswissenschaften—in order to make clear that their concern is with human beings as self-conscious, intelligent persons” (VLL 34), not with human beings understood, as they are in the natural sciences, as organisms whose behavior is the consequence of underlying biological processes. Before discussing the theory of human conduct that Oakeshott develops from this distinction, however, it will be helpful to consider his earlier investigation, in Experience and Its Modes, of science as a mode of inquiry and its relation to historical inquiry in explaining human behavior. For that theory is best understood as the outcome of an effort to reformulate the conclusions of the earlier work.

Scientific Understanding Like Dilthey, Oakeshott wrote little about the natural sciences. But neither thinker can be called antiscientific. Their shared concern is to refute exaggerated claims on behalf of science by defining the limits of scientific understanding and defending the autonomy of historical inquiry. In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott attacks the belief (common at the time and still held by many philosophers, scientists, and social scientists) that scientific knowledge is the model of all knowledge. His argument is in the tradition of Nietzsche’s claim that science is an interpretation, not a description of the world as it “really” is.14 “Science” is not a synonym for “knowledge.” It is nothing more than a provisionally independent and self-consistent system of ideas, one mode of understanding among others. From the standpoint of scientific realism, 13. Franz Brentano, “The Distinction Between Mental and Physical Phenomena,” in Roderick M. Chisholm, ed., Realism and the Background of Phenomenology (Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview Publishing, 1960). 14. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 65.

111

Understanding in the Human Sciences

Oakeshott’s rejection of the foundational claims of science looks naive, wrongheaded, even antirational.15 But for those who refuse to privilege scientific knowledge as the model of all knowledge, scientific realism is itself naive and irrational—a kind of narrow, arrogant, even barbaric, fundamentalism. To insist that a single external reality is the criterion of rational discourse is to assert that there is only one such discourse: that which consists of stating propositions whose truth lies in their correspondence to meaning-independent facts. No one familiar with post-Kuhnian conceptions of science will find Oakeshott’s view of science as one mode of understanding among others surprising, even if the terms in which he makes the case against scientific realism are unfamiliar. Scientists, Oakeshott argues, are apt to fasten uncritically on some conventional and superficially plausible philosophy of science. But the scientist, qua scientist, is not the best judge of what science is, because conclusions about the character of scientific knowledge do not rest on scientific inquiry and are not themselves scientific conclusions. To define science is a philosophical undertaking and scientists are not especially well equipped to engage in it.16 But Oakeshott’s own conception of science seems to have been inspired by the views of a scientist, Arthur Eddington, a professor of astronomy at Cambridge from 1913 to 1944 and himself a philosophical Idealist. Eddington famously illustrated the difference between the world of everyday experience and the world of modern science by distinguishing the table at which he writes from the physicist’s table, the first a solid and enduring thing, the second mostly empty space and rapidly moving particles. Commenting in 1926 on one of Eddington’s essays, Oakeshott observes that it offers an account of physics that applies to all the sciences. “The scientific conception of the universe is the most abstract of all conceptions, it is of a universe consisting solely of physically measurable relationships, and physical science is a closed system created by the study of these relationships,” Eddington wrote.17 This is a fair statement of Oakeshott’s own view of science as a mode. 15. “Realism and a correspondence conception [of truth] are essential presuppositions of any sane philosophy, not to mention any science.” John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995), xiii. 16. Oakeshott offers a similar caution about relying on the efforts of artists to define art: we must avoid uncritically appropriating the “rough and ready vocabulary of artists” in constructing an aesthetic theory, for the reflections of artists on art have no special authority in the realm of aesthetic theory. Review of J. Chiari, Realism and Imagination, British Journal of Aesthetics 1 (1960–61), 198–99. 17. Quoted by Oakeshott in his review of Joseph Needham, ed., Science, Religion, and Reality, Journal of Theological Studies 27 (1926), 318. This view of science differs from the one that Eddington later defended.

112

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

For Oakeshott, the chief distinguishing feature of scientific knowledge is that its ideas are quantities. Science substitutes precisely defined concepts for commonsense categories and exact measurement for direct sensory experience. Its theorems state mathematical relationships among concepts, and its observations are measurements assembled, corrected, and stabilized in statistical generalizations. Scientific observation and theorizing are inherently quantitative because general, observer-independent, and replicable theorems depend on unambiguous and invariant concepts and on precisely measured observations. Scientists do sometimes use imprecise concepts and measurements, but this is an expedient, not an ideal. The ideal in scientific inquiry is to make observation independent of the observer and to formulate theorems with mathematical precision. Nor is this merely an incidental feature of science. Scientific knowledge is defined by its impersonality, uniformity, precision, and communicability—not, as both scientists and nonscientists often assume, by being about an objective material world. Science, so conceived, must be distinguished from other inquiries with which it is often confused. It must, for example, be distinguished from what used to be called “natural history,” the study of animals, plants, and nonliving things as they appear when we depend on ordinary methods of observation. The objects of natural history are “specimens” of nature studied “in the field” or collected in museums, zoos, and botanical gardens. Natural history remains in the practical mode insofar as it relies on the approximate categories and common names that denote the objects and reflect the concerns of everyday life. Even when it introduces new names and classifications, natural history remains descriptive rather than explanatory. It may provide a starting place for scientific inquiry, but it fails to achieve the abstract and relational character of authentic science. The view, which positivist philosophers of science have borrowed from naturalists, that science studies an existing, objective world of nature belongs not to science as a mode of understanding but to common sense. Science, for Oakeshott, is not simply a rigorous version of common sense. “Science begins only when the world of ‘things’ opened to us by our senses and perceptions has been forgotten or set on one side” (EM 186). Inquiry is not scientific so long as it relies on crude classifications that help us to organize the world of ordinary human experience but do not take us beyond that world. It follows that science must be distinguished from technology, which, like common sense, is concerned with solving practical problems. Science also differs from natural history in being freed from any connection with historical time. Natural history is concerned with events as well as

113

Understanding in the Human Sciences

things; it investigates the natural rather than the human past. But scientific propositions are not statements of fact about observed past events; they are hypothetical statements of relations between quantities, like E=mc2. Scientific time is the abstract time of a mathematical equation (t1...t2...tn), not the concrete time of a historical narrative (May 8, 1995). “The world of scientific generalization is a world ignorant alike of past and future as such, it knows nothing of historical time, and recognizes time only within its world, as a means of relating its own concepts” (EM 228). The reality that is asserted in a scientific theory is the reality of timeless “laws of nature,” not of temporal events. For an observed event to serve the aims of science, it must be transformed into an instance of a general rule, a transformation that is achieved only when events become numbers and historical narrative gives way to abstract, quantitative relations. But observed events cease to be individual historical facts as soon as they become instances of a general rule: “the scientific way of thinking . . . begins where the historical way ends.”18 Scientific knowledge, then, is abstract and hypothetical, not concrete and categorical. A statement about the existence of individual things or the occurrence of individual events is not a scientific statement. Science as a mode of understanding does not begin with given (“natural” or “material”) objects whose existence, properties, and relations it then tries to explain. The objects of science are defined by scientific theories; they are “the product, not the datum, of scientific thought” (EM 190). And the world of such objects is not “the physical world” of popular understanding but the physicist’s world of abstract and often counter-intuitive ideas, of mathematical constructs like n-dimensional space and wave-particle indeterminacy: “a world of pure, quantitative abstractions which can be neither seen, touched nor imagined” (EM 195). Since Oakeshott wrote these words in the 1930s, physics and cosmology have generated ever more puzzling “objects,” like black holes and superstrings, which cannot be given an ordinary realist interpretation. Such concepts are not names for things but tools for making quantitative sense of experience. Scientific theory postulates physical objects, which it needs to simplify the laws of experience, as (in Quine’s words) “convenient intermediaries . . . comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer.”19 18. Oakeshott, “History and the Social Sciences,” an exchange with M. M. Postan, in The Institute of Sociology, The Social Sciences (London: Le Play House Press, 1936), 80. 19. W. V. O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 44. Quine’s view may be contrasted with the naive realism of Dr. Johnson’s famous refutation of Berkeley or the equally question-begging assertion of a prominent physicist that “the

114

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

On this understanding of science, the most “scientific” explanations are the simplest, most general, and most quantitative. Underlying these desiderata of scientific explanation is a demand for conceptual consistency. The use of consistent, objective, concepts in science lends plausibility to realist philosophies of science, for it is easy to see such concepts as referring to “things” that exist independently of the terms in which they are defined. But for Oakeshott, conceptual consistency is a presupposition of science, not its product. It is an aspect of the specific kind of coherence that distinguishes science as a mode of understanding. In a scientific inquiry, Oakeshott argues, we do not verify theories against an accumulation of given, theory-independent facts to which they must correspond. Rather, we look for coherence within a system of scientific ideas, some of which are the product of theoretical reasoning and others of observation, measurement, and data analysis. The collection and analysis of data goes on within a theoretical framework of concepts and hypotheses. Observations are significant only in relation to such a framework. What counts as disconfirming evidence depends on the rules provided by that framework. A curve, for example, may pass through no data points and yet be said, according to the rules of statistical generalization and inference, to be supported by the evidence (EM 206). Discrepant observations can lead a scientist to reject a hypothesis they fail to support, but scientists often reject observations that are incompatible with an accepted theory, treating contrary evidence as tainted and irrelevant. Because its validity is supported by the theory to which it belongs, a hypothesis may be retained in the face of contradictory evidence if it is necessary to the coherence of that theory. Scientific inquiry proceeds by collecting the evidence that particular theories call for, not by the mere accumulation of information. To formulate a scientific hypothesis is always to extend an existing theoretical understanding: it is to imagine what the world would be like if it were better understood. A hypothesis is not “a self-generated bright idea” (RP 51) that directs scientific inquiry from outside; it is an inference made in the context of an already existing inquiry. It can guide research only as an integral part of the scientific inquiry within which it is significant. Scientific evidence, too, is theory-dependent, as Hanson and Kuhn were to emphasize thirty years after the publication of Experience and Its laws of nature are real in the same sense (whatever that is) as the rocks on the ground.” Steven Weinberg, “The Revolution That Didn’t Happen,” New York Review of Books 45 (8 October 1998), 52.

115

Understanding in the Human Sciences

Modes: evidence depends on observations, observations on measurements, and measurements not only on standards of measurement but on the theorydetermined concepts to be measured. Theories and observations are aspects of a unified system of scientific knowledge and can be distinguished only in relation to each other. In the end, observation and explanation are the same, for “what is not proved is not discovered” (EM 181). The view that scientific inquiry reconciles theoretical and empirical propositions, not theoretical propositions with nonpropositional facts, is supported by the way science interprets observations statistically to confirm or disconfirm hypotheses. In the social sciences, statistical methods are often linked with mere empiricism, so it may come as a surprise to find Oakeshott defending the importance of statistical reasoning in science. The view that statistics is essential to science is not limited to empiricist conceptions of science, however, because the connection between scientific propositions and confirming evidence is intrinsically statistical. Scientific observations are aggregated to control measurement errors and other kinds of nonsignificant variation. Scientific inquiry depends on stable measurements, which it obtains by computing averages, differences, correlation coefficients, and estimates of statistical significance. Statistical generalization is more than simply a way of summarizing a series of observations; it enables the scientist to express the precise character of these observations. What statistically consolidating a set of observations achieves is not “accurate” measurement, which implies an external world that the measurement best represents, but invariable (“reliable”) results (EM 206n). In scientific inquiry we are not interested in describing a particular situation by collecting information about it, but in relating one class of observations to another. Because science is concerned with general relations, it is concerned with patterns of evidence, and these patterns are statistical. Scientific inquiry presupposes invariant concepts, abstract relations, testable hypotheses, and reliable measurements, observations, and statistical generalizations, and it seeks to make them consistent with one another. But, in the Idealist analysis of Experience and Its Modes, science can never be more than an incomplete and conditional set of ideas, for even when coherence is achieved according to the presuppositions of scientific inquiry, there remains a categorial gap between the knowledge defined by these presuppositions and other kinds of knowledge. The world as science understands it is not the whole of reality but merely an aspect of this whole. Scientific knowledge is confined to general relations between quantities; scientific propositions are formal and hypothetical. They are “never more than the assertion of the dependence of a

116

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

consequent upon a condition not asserted to be realized” (EM 215). Scientific understanding is coherent only within the limits of its own presuppositions, which distinguish it from other kinds of understanding. Science has a place in our efforts to know the world, but that place is not to serve as the criterion of knowledge itself. Scientific knowledge can be reconciled with the knowledge that comes from ordinary experience, from history, or from the arts, not by showing its superiority but only by defining its limits. Any effort, like Oakeshott’s, to characterize science as a distinct way of seeking to understand the world and therefore as a single, unified enterprise must meet the objection that the various sciences differ significantly from one another. Science, it can be argued, is not one thing but many things, not a mode of inquiry but a multiplicity of separate inquiries. The diversity of explanatory paradigms that characterizes physics, chemistry, and the biological sciences, not to mention psychology and economics, is more evident than the unity that comes from a shared commitment to objectivity and scientific method. In Oakeshott’s view, however, differences between scientific disciplines are not necessary or categorial but reflect their different subject matters. Science as a mode is not determined by its subject matter any more than history is, but different sciences, like different branches of history, can develop differently according to the demands of their material. These differences are also the contingent outcome of historical circumstances. Chief among these circumstances is the distortion of scientific research by practical concerns. Because they are affected by funding priorities, institutional constraints, and other extrascientific pressures, scientific disciplines are seldom organized according to their own theoretical principles. Many are practically driven “semi-sciences” (VLL 33). In every science one must distinguish the search for abstract theoretical understanding from efforts to solve practical problems. Practical concerns may motivate the search for knowledge, but they can also obstruct it. Physiology, for example, “has become a science not on account of its connection with medicine, but in spite of it” (EM 233). Science and medicine are connected in many ways, but their aims are different: science is concerned with theoretical coherence, clinical medicine with what works in practice, even if the science behind it is not well understood. But despite the contingencies that shape particular disciplines, the sciences are unified insofar as they rest on the assumption that the world can be understood in terms that are abstract, general, objective, quantitative, invariant, hypothetical, and transparently communicable— that is, mathematically. This assumption, which defines scientific thinking, is more than a methodological commitment; it is a commitment to the idea of

117

Understanding in the Human Sciences

science as “a single, homogeneous (but fortuitously divided) whole” (EM 243)—an internally diverse but distinguishable mode of understanding. Because scientific understanding is defined by its presuppositions and not by its subject matter, there is no reason why at least some aspects of human activity cannot be understood scientifically. A science of human behavior would abstract from that activity data bearing on hypothetical relationships among theoretically defined concepts. Like other kinds of genuine science, it would be concerned with abstract relationships, not concrete individuals, and would be implicitly if not explicitly mathematical. When we turn to what are now called the social sciences, however, we see much that does not belong in Oakeshott’s picture of science because it is descriptive and interpretive, not abstract and quantitative. The work of social scientists is often ethnographic or historical. The generalizations with which they are concerned are not always quantitative generalizations. And many social scientists are interested in evaluation and prescription—in unmasking interests, condemning institutions, and recommending policies. In short, the social sciences as they are practiced today display a multiplicity of intellectual and practical concerns and a confusion of inquiries. For Oakeshott, the worst misunderstanding in these disciplines arises from the failure to distinguish different modes of understanding. As he explains in an essay written many years after Experience and Its Modes, “by the modality of an enquiry I mean the conditions of relevance that constitute it a distinct kind of enquiry and distinguish it both from an inconsequential groping around in the confusion of all that may be going on and from similarly distinct enquiries but of other kinds. These conditions of relevance are of course formal, but where there are none, where there is no specifiable modality, there can be no enquiry and so no consequential conclusions” (OH 2). Theorizing in the social sciences is obstructed when explanatory and evaluative inquiries are run together or the scientific and historical modes of inquiry are combined. As Oakeshott writes, rather colorfully, in Experience and Its Modes, “the conjunction of science and history can produce nothing but a monster” (EM 168). The social sciences cannot achieve theoretical coherence if they persist in confusing the categorially distinct concerns of scientific, historical, and practical understanding. Their failure to achieve coherence is not, however, a necessary failure. “What is peculiar in these sciences is nothing inherent in their character, but merely the prejudices by which they have suffered themselves to be hindered” (EM 178). If a true science of human behavior is possible, there can be no categorial distinction between that science and the natural sciences. Science is concerned

118

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

with general, quantitative relationships, and if these relationships can be looked for wherever there are patterns of order to be observed, then from the perspective of the mode of inquiry involved, the distinction between the natural sciences and disciplines that study human behavior in the scientific mode is arbitrary. It may be hard to formulate general, invariant, quantifiable and objective concepts about human behavior. But the scientific study of human behavior encounters no difficulties that are not also difficulties for the natural sciences (EM 219–20). The difference between the natural and the social sciences, insofar as the latter are inquiries in the scientific mode, is not a modal difference. Among the social sciences, economics and psychology come closest to meeting the modal criteria of scientific inquiry. Anthropology, sociology, and political science, in contrast, remain largely historical disciplines. Economics and Psychology The scientific mode as it appears in the study of human beings is most easily discerned in economics, not because of the quantity of numerical information available to economists but because economic theory rests on abstract and invariant concepts, like marginal utility and comparative advantage, which it relates mathematically to one another. If we look at all that goes on under its label, economics is hardly more than “a meaningless miscellany of scientific, historical and practical ideas and arguments” (EM 220). But this does not mean that we cannot identify areas of scientific coherence within this miscellany. There are, in other words, to be found amid the confusion of inquiries called “economics” at least some that meet the criteria of knowledge that define the natural sciences. Authentic scientific inquiry elucidates a coherent system of general, unchanging relationships by constructing theories in terms of which mathematical models are formulated, hypotheses articulated, data collected, statistical patterns identified, and inferences drawn about phenomena not actually observed. When economics proceeds in this mode, it is fully scientific. As always in modal analysis, the philosopher’s concern is not to describe the various pursuits that are carried on under a name like economics, for these are pursuits that may have little in common beyond the name itself. The challenge is to abstract an ideal character from these diverse pursuits and to identify its defining characteristics or presuppositions. Modal analysis does not aim to account for all that is going on in a particular field at any given moment, but to construct an intellectually coherent identity out of a confusion of

119

Understanding in the Human Sciences

observables. To demand that the concepts defined by this process of abstraction should simply “describe” that confusion is to mistake definition for description. It is, in effect, to bar the theorist from criticizing the concepts that are taken for granted in a given field, even when those concepts are eclectic, incoherent, or distorted by extraneous beliefs and interests. “To center thought upon a mere name not only will never produce a homogeneous world of ideas, but it will tend also to establish in our minds a pseudo-relationship between sets of ideas which do not and cannot belong together” (EM 220). As it is actually practiced, economics has not completely separated itself from the practical and descriptive concerns out of which it developed, and it therefore includes both scientific and nonscientific ideas. From one point of view this is an advantage; in economics, as in other fields, there are those who think, with Clifford Geertz, that “blurred genres”—which combine, even deliberately confuse, different kinds of inquiry—are stimulating and productive. But Oakeshott does not share this optimistic view of the heuristic value of modal anarchy. In his judgment, descriptive and normative economics, far from strengthening economic theory and making it more relevant, simply stand in its way. Economists who explain historical events, or offer predictions and recommendations about current affairs, require knowledge about the contingent circumstances surrounding past or present economic decisions. But such knowledge does not belong to scientific economics—that is, to a system of mathematical theorems—precisely because it is concrete, contingent, particular. The Nobel laureate partners in the hedge fund that crashed because the Russian government chose to stop paying its foreign debts were not discredited as economic theorists. Their economic theories would not have been strengthened by including information about Russian politics. The ideas that belong to scientific economics are those that cohere with one another in an economic theory and with what that theory defines as the relevant data, not those that help us make practical decisions in particular, contingent situations. Scientific economics is a branch of mathematics, not an empirical guide to the behavior of actual economic agents or the performance of actual economies.20 It is, therefore, a misunderstanding of science to make success in predicting events in the world of practical human experience the criterion of scientific truth. Doing so confuses science with practice. The prediction (or “retrodiction”) of 20. Alexander Rosenberg, “If Economics Isn’t a Science, What Is It?” in Michael Martin and Lee C. McIntyre, eds., Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 661–74

120

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

scientifically defined observations is a valuable tool in scientific inquiry, which is concerned with coherence between theoretical and observational propositions, among other kinds of coherence. But a science, qua science, does not aim to predict events described in practical rather than in scientific terms. “Science, as such, has nothing to say about ‘events’ in the world of perception, and a scientific generalization can no more be vindicated by a demonstration of its applicability to a certain occurrence than it can be called in question because it fails to predict the future” (EM 228). By defending policy-relevant prediction as the criterion of successful economic theory, advocates for “positive economics” reveal the unscientific character of their positivism.21 Economics is authentically scientific only when it substitutes an impersonal world of general and timeless relations for the familiar human world of persons and practices, wants and satisfactions. Oakeshott is unconvinced by arguments purporting to show that economics cannot be scientific in the sense defined. The claim that because it deals with human behavior economics can never be an “exact” science rests on a misconception: all science deals with probabilities, and in this respect the theorems of economics do not differ from those of physics or genetics. “The behavior of a particular electron is not less unaccountable, not less ‘capricious’ than the behavior of a man of flesh and blood” (EM 224–25). If concepts like supply, demand, price, elasticity, and utility cannot be measured as precisely as temperature or angular momentum, this may have implications for the success of economics as a science, but not for the kind of inquiry it is undertaking. Nor is it a telling objection that economics fails to meet the test of genuine science because its generalizations are limited (to market economies, for example). No scientific generalization, even in physics, has an unlimited range. And, as we have seen, it is not an objection to the scientific character of economics that it lacks reliable generalizations that can serve as a basis for policy, for the claim that economics is a science does not rest on its ability to predict contingent events but on its ability to generate a coherent system of abstract, general, relational, and quantitative theorems. A similar debate surrounds psychology. Just as economics is not scientific when it is concerned with individual events or entities (whether actual persons, households, companies, or economies), or with the demands of economic policy, psychology is not scientific when it is concerned with individual personal21. Milton Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 3–43.

121

Understanding in the Human Sciences

ities or the requirements of clinical practice. But even when it seeks to generalize, psychology might seem to be something other than a science, modally speaking, because it is concerned with mind rather than with nature, with intelligent conduct rather than not-intelligent processes. Psychology is sometimes supposed, for this reason, to be one of the “human sciences”: a discipline intent on interpreting individual human thoughts and actions rather than explaining observed behavioral regularities. Those who see psychology as either individualizing or hermeneutic are, however, a minority among either psychologists or philosophers. Psychology had come by the end of the nineteenth century to be regarded as one of the natural sciences, not only by positivists but by Windelband, Rickert, and others who conceived the human sciences as disciplines concerned with individuality. Psychology was classed with the natural sciences because it was understood to aim at generalizations, not to be concerned with describing the mental qualities of particular individuals, much less the semantic content of their actions and utterances. A century later, psychology is still viewed as a natural science concerned with “mental processes” that are themselves explainable by biochemical processes, not a humanistic discipline concerned with “substantive human thoughts, beliefs, emotions, recollections, actions and utterances” (VLL 36). This understanding of psychology is not a misunderstanding. But, like economics, psychology as it is currently practiced is only partly scientific, for it still incorporates concerns that belong to other modes of understanding. Psychology remains, in other words, a categorially-ambiguous undertaking. The idea that psychology studies individual personalities may seem naive, but it is implicit in psychoanalysis, psychological biography, criminology, and other fields that draw upon psychological generalizations to diagnose, explain, and sometimes alter the behavior of particular persons. Such inquiries involve modally indeterminate mixtures of historical and practical concerns. They are not scientific, in Oakeshott’s sense of the term, because the idea of the individual personality, which they presuppose, is a practical or historical idea, not a scientific one. If by “science” we mean a mode of inquiry that generalizes, there is no such thing as a science of individual behavior. The study of individual personalities, like the study of particular national economies, is really a kind of natural history, not part of an authentic science. Much of what is called psychology (especially in clinical psychology and psychotherapy) is concerned with actual, living personalities and is therefore still in this prescientific or permanently nonscientific condition. But there is also an authentic science of psychology, one that has severed its ties with natural history and

122

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

clinical practice and thereby achieved a more general and quantitative understanding of behavioral regularities. The objection that psychology cannot be scientific because it seeks to understand consciousness or other mental phenomena raises more difficult issues. For Oakeshott, this objection misconceives the character of scientific inquiry. The claim that psychology is a science does not rest on its ability to provide knowledge of sensations, emotions, or other mental states; it rests only on the success of its efforts to understand human behavior in quantitative terms. The nonscientific parts of psychology explain mental phenomena using nonquantitative concepts like “consciousness,” “memory,” and “personality.” Scientific psychology, in contrast, is concerned with observable regularities in behavior, which it expresses in quantitative propositions. These propositions are framed in terms of concepts, like instinct, drive, and reinforcement, that refer to psychological processes, not to conscious thought and action. Scientific psychology has developed extensive links with genetics, biochemistry, and neuroscience, which suggests that its theorems might some day be expressed as (and therefore reduced to) theorems belonging to these other sciences. As long as psychology confines itself to explaining human behavior in relation to natural processes, it can avoid modal confusion. Such confusion occurs whenever the propositions of scientific psychology are used to explain particular beliefs rather than the process of believing or learning, or to explain particular actions, choices, and intentions rather than behavioral regularities. In the movement from abstract quantitative relations to particular beliefs and actions, processes are confused with practices, mechanisms with meanings, causes with the reasons agents use to explain their own and other people’s conduct. A person’s beliefs, judgments, commitments, arguments, and tastes are, as Oakeshott puts it, “ideas he has learned (but might not have learned) to think” (OHC 22), and to reduce these ideas to phenomena like genetic inheritance, biological urges, or infantile experiences is to forego the effort to understand them as ideas. It is tempting to explain ideas—especially ideas we wish to dismiss—as nothing other than expressions of psychological forces. But psychologists do not explain their own ideas in this dismissive way. To engage in a psychological inquiry is to think, argue, and in other ways to move with self-awareness in a world of meanings that is categorially distinct from the world of physiological or neurological processes. Scientific psychology may be able to explain behavioral regularities as manifesting such processes, but its explanations are categorially irrelevant to the judgments, arguments, and actions that comprise human conduct, if by these

123

Understanding in the Human Sciences

we mean the “chosen responses of self-conscious agents to their understood situations which have reasons but not causes and may be understood only in terms of dispositions, beliefs, meanings, intentions and motives” (VLL 35). Like scientific economics, scientific psychology is hindered more by its connection with practical contingencies, and by the modal confusion this connection produces, than by the inherent resistance of human behavior, properly conceived, to scientific explanation. “Where psychology is a science, its conclusions will have the same character, significance and validity as the conclusions of any other science” (EM 241). Anthropology and Sociology Oakeshott discusses economics and psychology in the chapter of Experience and Its Modes that is devoted to science as a mode. But he discusses anthropology in the chapter on history because, unlike economics and psychology, which can be genuinely scientific, anthropology is inherently historical. All the disciplines concerned with human activity straddle the realms of historical individuality and scientific generalization, but there is little room in anthropology for the latter. What explains the essentially historical character of this field? Despite the desire of some anthropologists to generalize their conclusions, anthropology cannot escape historical description because it studies the beliefs and practices, the cultures, of particular peoples, and these cultures and peoples are historical individuals. Though anthropologists sometimes generalize about languages, kinship structures, or religious beliefs, they are also committed to studying actual cultures and to using methods, like archaeology, ethnography, and “thick description,” that are both individualizing and hermeneutic. Because their concepts do not for the most part lend themselves to quantitative treatment, anthropologists rarely express their conclusions in generalizations that go beyond what they have observed. Nor can anthropology give up these concepts and go beyond the stage of description, as economics and psychology have, and still retain its identity as a separate field. The interpretation of actual, historical ways of life, based, if possible, on detailed ethnographic fieldwork, is essential, for if anthropology were to generalize, it could longer distinguish its conclusions from those of the other social sciences or, in the case of physical anthropology, the biological sciences. As an abstract, relational, and quantitative science of human behavior, anthropology lacks a distinctive theory of its own, and therefore, to the extent that it becomes scientific, it is absorbed into other fields and vanishes.

124

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

It used to be argued that anthropology can produce truly scientific generalizations, while retaining its autonomy, through what used to be called the comparative method. But, Oakeshott reasons (stating a proposition that holds beyond the boundaries of anthropology), comparison is pointless unless we compare independently generated instances of the same phenomenon. Comparing religious rituals, for example, cannot yield valid generalizations if these rituals have influenced one another, or if the meaning of religion in one culture is radically different from its meaning in another. Even if we can assume that our observations are independent and that we are collecting instances of the same thing, these instances are often too few to permit significant statistical inferences. Because, like science, it assumes “a world of repetitions and recurrences” (EM 167), the comparative method remains largely inapplicable to anthropology. The idea of an anthropological science is, in short, illusory: anthropology is historical or it is nothing. The course of anthropology since the 1930s, when Oakeshott discussed it in Experience and Its Modes, seems to bear out his analysis. He suggested then that if anthropologists were to grasp the essentially historical character of their inquiries, they would shift their emphasis from similarities to differences. “The anthropologist, intent upon developing the pseudo-scientific character of his subject, has in the past concentrated upon the observation of similarities; but history is regulated by the pursuit of differences. . . . The institution of comparisons and the elaboration of analogies are activities which the historian must avoid if he is to remain an historian” (EM 167, 168). During the past half-century, anthropology has moved toward history and away from science, Lévy-Strauss and structuralism notwithstanding. Cultural anthropology, especially, has become a self-consciously hermeneutic discipline. Focused on the study of cultural texts, it has become a model of interpretive social science. And its recent partial conversion, under the pressures of postmodernism and critical theory, into a branch of “cultural studies” has not altered this interpretive character, despite its confusion of explanatory and practical concerns. Sociology, too, is more historical than scientific, although because of its amorphous character this is less obvious than in the case of anthropology. Oakeshott criticizes sociology in terms similar those Dilthey used around 1905. For Dilthey, who by this time had discarded his earlier conception of the human sciences as a comprehensive philosophy of life, sociology is defective because it attempts to encompass all human activity in a single universal science. Its goal is therefore far more ambitious than that of the natural sciences, which, though they aim to understand the same material world, recognize the

125

Understanding in the Human Sciences

independence of separate sciences like physics, geology, and biology. For the natural scientist, the unity of science is an ideal, not a working premise. Because human activity takes different forms, it must be approached in different ways. It is appropriate, therefore, to speak of the human sciences, but “sociology,” Dilthey insists, “is not the name of a science.”22 For Oakeshott, the uncertain identity of sociology is reflected in the ambiguous words “social” and “society” that designate its subject matter. These terms sometimes identify a residual class of phenomena left behind after those that have been successfully theorized by specialized fields like economics and psychology have been removed. But the miscellaneous contents of a residual class cannot form the subject of a coherent theoretical inquiry. More often the words “social” and “society” are used to refer to the sum total of all human actions and relationships, and the inquiry they postulate is a general science of society that successfully integrates the conclusions of all the other social sciences. In this case, however, what they identify is a fiction, for nothing coherent can be identified under this general, all-embracing conception of society. “Social” and “society” make better sense when they stand for relationships and practices. A society may be an association of persons united in the observance of certain rules: professional associations, clubs, churches, even states are societies in this sense. In such cases, to speak of a society is to speak of an identifiable historical individual. But an expression like “human society” is not historical in this sense; it is merely a vague abstraction about which nothing significant can be said. Social relationships are shaped by the diverse practices in which persons stand toward one another as partners, citizens, or litigants. Relationships like these are defined by the terms they impose on those who are joined in them. All are “human devices, autonomous manners of being associated, each with its own specified conditions of relationship,” not “the components of an unspecified, unconditional interdependence or ‘social’ relationship, something called a ‘society’ or ‘Society’” (VLL 34–35). There is no such thing, Oakeshott insists, as a social relationship that is not a relationship of a specific kind: “human conduct is continuously and decisively ‘social’ only in respect of agents being associated in terms of their understanding and enjoyment of specific practices” (OHC 87). Leaving aside the preoccupation with practical matters that causes modal confusion in all the social sciences, there are, then, two obstacles facing a science of sociology. The first is that it lacks a focus that distinguishes it from 22. Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, 497–500.

126

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

other social sciences. When sociology adopts the methods and assumptions of scientific inquiry, it is not easily distinguished from economics or psychology because there exists no well-defined realm of distinctively “social” phenomena. The second obstacle is that sociology is unable to free itself from being concerned with a subject matter, human conduct, that is unsuitable for “scientific” consideration. No autonomous science of sociology, should it emerge, could have anything to say about the beliefs, actions, and relationships of individual human beings, or the specific practices, the systems of shared meanings, in terms of which they are associated. For the most part, then, anthropology and sociology would seem to belong to the “human sciences” understood as either individualizing or hermeneutic disciplines. If the achievements of these fields in the scientific mode are not especially impressive, it is because they are disciplines concerned with contingent human practices and with human actions made intelligible in terms of such practices: “respectable and somewhat attenuated engagements in historical understanding” (VLL 36). Political Science Despite its unfortunate name, political science is no more a science, modally speaking, than any other field within the social sciences. It is true that political scientists have for some time been engaged in analyzing data from elections, opinion polls, and legislative decisions. And they have successfully applied decision theory and related mathematical models and techniques, first developed by economists, to the study of bargaining, voting, and other activities involving “rational choice.” But despite these efforts, political science remains a miscellany of inquiries including (besides statistical analysis and mathematical modeling) institutional description, historical narrative, conceptual analysis, moral argument, policy analysis and advocacy, and efforts to predict particular events. Political science is therefore not a discipline, if by this we mean a mode of inquiry based on shared theoretical and methodological premises. It is at best a loosely organized field identified by its concern with government and politics, but this concern (itself ill-defined) does not guarantee modal consistency. “A mode of understanding cannot be specified in terms of a so-called subject matter; here, as always, the conditions of understanding specify what is to be understood” (OH 5). “There is,” Oakeshott observes, “no specifically ‘political’ explanation of anything” (RP 212). The frequent references by political scientists to “political analysis” and “the discipline” are evidence not of unity but of

127

Understanding in the Human Sciences

wishful thinking or uneasiness within the field. Moreover, there are reasons for thinking that political science lacks even a coherent subject matter. As Oakeshott concludes in Experience and Its Modes, there is “nothing in politics to distinguish it finally from what is non-political, what is economic or religious” (EM 102), economics and religion being, like politics, activities involving values and beliefs, choices and policies, institutions and power. Oakeshott published many essays that do not question the common opinion that there is such a thing as politics, and he made repeated attempts, often in unpublished writings, to define the character of political activity. But in On Human Conduct and other late writings, he offers no philosophy of politics at all, choosing instead to identify his enterprise as one of articulating a philosophy of human conduct in general and what he calls “the civil condition” specifically. He allows politics a place in this philosophy but defines it so narrowly that it scarcely resembles ordinary conceptions.23 About politics as the subject of a distinct and coherent discipline, then, Oakeshott remains skeptical. The field of political science nevertheless has an identity of sorts, for it is organized as a profession, with associations, journals, and an established place in the departmental structure of universities. And the concerns of this field are sometimes brought together by their practical interest. But the result of this accumulation of concerns is a confusion of inquiries, not modal coherence. Political science can free itself from modal ambiguity only by distinguishing its explanatory concepts from those that belong to the prescriptive languages of political debate. These prescriptive concepts have no place in the study of politics, despite their importance in “political theory”—an expression often qualified by adjectives like “conservative” and “liberal” that belong not to philosophy but to the vocabulary of political debate. This “so-called ‘political theory,’” Oakeshott complains, is not a theory of politics, an effort to explain; it is “itself a form of political activity . . . to be explained, historically or philosophically” (RP 34; VLL 331). When theorizing in political science is tailored to the demands of practice, it becomes a part of practice and ceases to have explanatory value. “Normative political theory,” then, is an oxymoron. Ironically, Oakeshott sides here with positivist defenders of a value-free political science against such hermeneutic philosophers as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, who insist on the inherently normative character of political science. Can we, nevertheless, identify within political science explanations that are genuinely scientific in the modal sense? Oakeshott thinks we can, but it is clear 23. I discuss Oakeshott’s definition of politics in the Conclusion.

128

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

that he is not impressed with the scope or power of such explanations. In a 1930 review of a book devoted to arguing the case for the scientific study of politics, Oakeshott suggests that if it wishes to be scientific, “political science must . . . be quantitative,” and he chides the author for failing to recognize the importance of statistics in this enterprise.24 Many years later he writes that “the now vast literature concerned with what is currently called ‘the science of politics’ should, perhaps, be recognized to have broken new ground here and there,” but insofar as the study of politics succeeds as science it must abandon most of its traditional concerns (OHC 311). Among these is the concern to predict particular events such as the outcome of an election or a judicial decision. As with forecasting the weather or the stock market, such predictions require information about innumerable contingencies, much of it necessarily external to any theory. Predicting the future is an unavoidable part of practical life, but it is irrelevant to science as a mode of inquiry and understanding. In short, there is room for efforts to formulate mathematical theorems about voting systems, legislative coalitions, arms races, and other “political” phenomena, but as in the case of economic and psychological theorems, these theorems can be made relevant to history or current affairs only by abstracting them from the context of scientific explanation and transforming them into generalizations of doubtful value in understanding, explaining, predicting, or responding to an action or event, given the innumerable contingencies that must be taken into account in each of these engagements.

Orders and Idioms of Inquiry In On Human Conduct, Oakeshott relies on a version of the hermeneutic criterion to distinguish the human and the natural sciences: the former, he suggests, are concerned with intelligent conduct, the latter with not-intelligent processes. To understand something as an expression of intelligence is to ascribe meaning to it and to invoke an inquiry that interprets this meaning. The distinction between the intelligent and the not-intelligent is more basic than the distinction between history and science because it determines the domains of the human and the natural sciences. And it is more comprehensive because while history and science are merely two among an indefinite number of modes, 24. Review of G. E. G. Catlin, The Principles of Politics, Cambridge Review 51 (1929–30), 400.

129

Understanding in the Human Sciences

the categories “intelligent” and “not-intelligent” are exhaustive: all experience must be understood under one or the other of these categories. The significance of this new distinction is that the natural sciences are categorially barred from having anything to say about human activity as an expression of intelligence. As we have seen, “science” includes inquiries in economics and psychology that seek to explain human behavior as the outcome of underlying processes. But these inquiries are not concerned with “human conduct” defined as intelligent choice and action. Science, as a mode of inquiry, is concerned with not-intelligent processes, including those that affect the behavior of human beings as living organisms, not with human ideas, practices, and performances. The distinction here is between “behavior,” which does not depend on an agent’s own understandings and is not under the agent’s control, and “conduct,” which does involve such understandings and implies the possibility of voluntary choice. Only inquiries that attend to the character of human conduct as conduct—interpretive inquiries concerned with the meanings, intentions, and contexts that make an individual practice or performance what it is, and thereby explain human activity without explaining it away—can be called inquiries into human conduct, and only the “human sciences” meet this criterion. In Experience and Its Modes, science is a distinct mode of inquiry. But science (Wissenschaft) can also be defined as any systematic inquiry, whatever its mode. Adopting this more inclusive conception in On Human Conduct, Oakeshott calls any reasonably coherent set of theorems “a science” and speaks not of “science” but of “sciences” (OHC 14, 17–20, 25). In the expression “human sciences,” Geisteswissenschaften, the word science conveys this more inclusive meaning. But the expression is unfortunate because, paradoxically, the sciences to which it refers seek an understanding of human conduct that is not, in modal terms, a scientific understanding. As Gadamer puts it, “the human sciences are connected to modes of experience that lie outside science: with the experiences of philosophy, of art, and of history itself.”25 The study of human beings includes fields like human genetics, physical anthropology, and experimental psychology that do not belong to the human sciences, defined as hermeneutic disciplines. Because they explain human behavior as the outcome 25. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d rev. [English language] ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1989), xxii (emphasis added).

130

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

of underlying psychological, biological, or chemical processes, these disciplines do not yield explanations that depend on the idea of conduct understood as intelligent choice and action. When economics and psychology explore the implications of their concepts in mathematical models and statistical analyses, they too must be classed with the natural sciences. Insofar as they are concerned with human conduct as the performances and practices of intelligent agents, Oakeshott suggests, the human sciences belong to the “humanities,” and distinguishing them from the humanities was “an unfortunate mistake” (VLL 34). Because this view of the human sciences rests on the distinction between the categories “intelligent” and “not-intelligent,” that distinction calls for further elucidation. For any inquiry to get under way as a distinct and coherent engagement, it must decide whether what it wishes to understand belongs in one or the other of these categories. To identify something is already to have chosen its category, that is, to have recognized it either as an expression of intelligence or as a not-intelligent object or occurrence. It is, moreover, to have chosen the kind of inquiry to be undertaken, for the category into which the identity falls dictates the kind of understanding required. These categories determine what Oakeshott calls the “order” of an inquiry. When we identify something as expressing intelligent conduct, we imply an order of inquiry different from that which is implied by identifying it as the product of a notintelligent process. And no inquiry can yield conclusions that make sense if the identities it investigates are categorially ambiguous: “a categorially unambiguous identity is the condition of every significant adventure in theorizing, and the recognition of the category of the identity concerned is the first step in every such adventure” (OHC 15). For Oakeshott, the expression “social science” as it is commonly used confuses the scientific and historical modes of inquiry, and we can now see that this confusion involves the categorial error of attempting to explain intelligent conduct as the outcome of non-intelligent processes. No significant understanding is possible where “rules are misidentified as regularities, intelligent winks as physiological blinks, conduct as ‘behavior’ and contingent relationships as causal or systematic connections” (VLL 35). In the first category are things recognized as exhibitions of intelligence and therefore as human conduct, or as artifacts, ideas, arguments, practices, and the like understood to be products of human conduct. These things invite an inquiry that employs the concepts of thinking, learning, and choosing, and that pays attention to meanings. In the second category are things, like a thunderstorm or a field of wildflowers, that are recognized as not being exhi-

131

Understanding in the Human Sciences

bitions of intelligence. Phenomena like these are understood by discovering the processes that determine them—genetic, ecological, chemical, or other processes that do not involve thinking, learning, or choice. If I recognize a pile of eroded stones on a hillside in Tuscany as the ruin of a Roman fort, I have placed it in the category of expressions of intelligence, and my putting it there implies a range of possible inquiries into the conduct it expresses. One such inquiry might be a study of Roman military practices. And the ideas I would use in attempting to find out more about this fort would be ideas about beliefs, customs, decisions, technologies, and the like— ideas related to human thought and conduct. I might see the ruin as providing evidence for a history of Roman settlement or as illustrating the influence of Etruscan ideas on Roman engineering—each a distinguishable inquiry, but inquiries of the same “order.” But if I am interested in the stones for the evidence they provide regarding a hypothesis about glaciation, I am abstracting identities categorially different from any that are implied by the word “fort.” These identifications point toward a range of inquiries that belong to a different order. They make no use of the ideas needed to discuss intelligent activity but rely instead on ideas like sedimentation and striation that pertain to processes rather than to practices. To avoid misunderstanding, several things need to be said about the distinction between identifying a thing as an expression of intelligence and identifying it as the manifestation of a not-intelligent process. First, the distinction, though categorial in the sense that each of these identifications excludes the other, is not an ontological one. Oakeshott is not saying that there are two kinds of things in the universe—mental things and physical things—but rather that one constructs the world differently depending on whether one assumes that what one is trying to understand is or is not an expression of intelligence. The kind of “thing” we are dealing with—intelligent or not-intelligent—is not a given but a choice. A field of wildflowers may be seen as an outcome of human behavior (a meadow made by clearing a forest, an empty lot neglected), just as a brick may be seen not as an artifact but in terms of the chemistry of its material components. A rain shower may be understood, correctly or incorrectly, as intelligent conduct (God answering the drought-stricken farmer’s prayers), and we may explain an aspect of human behavior—for example, the uncontrolled swearing in Tourette’s syndrome—as a neural malfunction and therefore as part of a not-intelligent process. Like the distinction between modes, that between process and conduct is “a distinction within the engagement of understanding, a distinction between ‘sciences’”

132

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

(OHC 14). The inquirer’s task is not to discover a uniquely correct description of what is going on, but to be clear about what category the description belongs to and the order of inquiry it implies. Second, to say that the distinction is a categorial one is to say that explanations that reflect these different ways of understanding the world are mutually incompatible. To see the world as the product of intelligent conduct and to see it as the result of a not-intelligent process is to see it in mutually exclusive ways. The kind of understanding provided by one order of inquiry cannot be translated into that provided by the other. One can understand an intelligent activity (like writing a book) as the causal product of certain not-intelligent processes, but it cannot be understood as these processes. Propositions concerning these processes cannot explain the views an author is expressing or their circumstantial relation to other views. Such propositions may explain the biochemistry of thinking and writing, but they cannot explain the ideas that are being thought and written down. They have nothing to say about the semantic content—the meaning, significance, or truth—of these ideas. The claim that arguments are nothing more than the outcome of biochemical or other processes is, in fact, self-refuting, for this proposition (which is also an argument) must then itself be a manifestation of such a process, not a proposition with truth value. But if it has truth value, so do other propositions, and the fact that they are the result of a process is irrelevant to choosing between them on the basis of their truth or falsehood. The process does not invalidate the argument or, what is the same thing, the argument remains distinct from the process that produced it. It cannot, therefore, be replaced by or reduced to that process. Each is governed by its own laws—the process by the causal laws that are its mechanism, the argument by the rules that are its standards. A similar point can be made about hedonistic or rational choice explanations of human conduct. Such explanations assume that human beings are motivated by wants and conclude that all conduct can be explained as efforts to satisfy these wants. Yet those who make these claims about human motivation do not merely seek to satisfy their own wants: like Marx and Engels, who criticized the “ideology” of their epoch from the standpoint of a “science” able to transcend the errors of that ideology, they “assume a relationship between themselves and those whom they address which is . . . that of persons capable of considering the truth or falsehood of a theorem” (VLL 27). Motivational explanations of ideas are irrelevant to their validity. Third, although to identify a thing as either intelligent or not-intelligent determines the “order” of the inquiry appropriate to it, it does not determine

133

Understanding in the Human Sciences

what Oakeshott calls the “idiom” of the inquiry. Within each order there are different idioms of inquiry—different disciplines or “sciences.” Choosing the right category is therefore only the first step in an inquiry, for there may still be “contingent ambiguities” within a categorially unambiguous identity. These ambiguities must be resolved before the identity can be investigated, for many different kinds of inquiry are possible. Having identified an object as an expression of human intelligence, and therefore having chosen to understand it as something to be interpreted and explained in terms of concepts like belief, intention, choice, and action, we still need to determine whether we are trying to understand the object as, say, evidence of a historical event, an example of an architectural style, or an object that has meaning within a system of religious belief. Each identification points to a different kind of inquiry. Within each category, in other words, we may distinguish various idioms of inquiry that, although distinct, do not categorially exclude one another and between which translation is conceivable. An authentic idiom is one that can be made provisionally coherent in its own terms. Each such idiom remains independent insofar as it rests on premises that are exclusively its own. But it need not be distinguished absolutely from other idioms. One idiom might conceivably be reducible to another within the same order: the principles of physiology, for example, might be restated in chemical terms or political philosophy shown to be an extension of moral philosophy. But an authentic idiom of inquiry will avoid the kind of incoherence that exists in a field that offers a categorially ambiguous understanding of its subject matter. The human sciences, then, are distinguishable but not necessarily independent inquiries concerned with the ideas, actions, customs, and cultures of human beings. Each begins by identifying these phenomena as expressions of human intelligence and is therefore an idiom within the order of inquiries that is determined by this presupposition. What is the relationship between the idea of orders and idioms of inquiry and the idea of modes of experience? If by a “mode” we mean a distinct and reasonably self-consistent kind of understanding, then the distinction between the categories of intelligent conduct and not-intelligent processes, each of which generates an order of inquiry, is itself a modal distinction. But the distinction between idioms of inquiry is also, according to this definition, a modal one. The modes defined by these new distinctions are not, however, those identified in Experience and Its Modes. In that work, Oakeshott identifies history, science, and practice as modes, but he defines philosophy as an

134

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

activity that, by criticizing modal presuppositions, moves beyond modal thinking to a more general, less conditional, understanding. We can now see, however, that Oakeshott’s original treatment of the modes as parallel and independent ignores certain relationships between them. Looked at in one way, the historical and practical modes share a conception of human conduct that distinguishes them from the scientific mode. Each assumes that what is going on involves intelligent choice and attempts, in its own way, to make sense of conduct on that assumption. But looked at another way, practice, which is evaluative and prescriptive, can be contrasted both with science and with history, which are explanatory. This distinction between prescriptive and explanatory inquiries appears often in essays Oakeshott wrote after Experience and Its Modes. In a 1938 article on the philosophy of law, for example, he distinguishes the concern to understand law as a particular kind of human activity, which is a philosophical concern, from the practical concern (such as a legislator might have) to use particular laws to prescribe conduct—a distinction that is obscured, he argues, by the word “jurisprudence” (CPJ 203). And in several essays from the 1940s and 1950s on the study of politics, Oakeshott distinguishes the prescriptive languages of political discourse from the “explanatory languages” that are appropriate to the academic study of politics (RP 34, 212–13, 216). Science, history, and philosophy are explanatory rather than prescriptive. Therefore when, in On Human Conduct, Oakeshott distinguishes “intelligent” and “not-intelligent” as alternative categories for explaining experience, he is making clear something that is merely implicit in Experience and Its Modes. And the consequence of this new distinction is to redefine the modes. Practice is replaced by “human conduct,” that is, transformed from a mode of understanding to an object of understanding: intelligent thought and action to be interpreted and explained. History becomes the study of past conduct and undergirds a set of related explanatory inquiries collectively, though ambivalently, designated “the human sciences.” And science is redescribed as an inquiry that attempts to explain the world under the category of not-intelligent phenomena. It might be said, then, that the distinction between two orders of inquiry, one that explains identified goings-on as expressions of intelligence, the other that explains them as a result of not-intelligent processes, is implicit in Oakeshott’s original distinction between the historical and scientific modes. The modes have been redefined through philosophical criticism, but they have not been discarded or destroyed. It is worth noticing that Oakeshott refers to

135

Understanding in the Human Sciences

history and practice as modes in On History, which he published eight years after On Human Conduct. Nor has the idea of modality itself vanished in the new analysis; it has only been refined. The categories “intelligent” and “not-intelligent” define mutually exclusive orders of explanation. And within each order we can distinguish idioms of explanation that are merely different. But if modality marks the points at which differences of degree turn into differences of kind, then both “order” and “idiom” are modal concepts.

Interpretation and Individuality All understanding, Oakeshott argues in Experience and Its Modes, is concerned with meanings. Reality, as we encounter it in our efforts to understand, “is what we are obliged to think; and, since to think is to experience, and to experience is to experience meaning, the real is always what has meaning” (EM 58). When, in On Human Conduct, he defines the categories “intelligent” and “not-intelligent,” he does not deny this basic idea but merely refines it by distinguishing two kinds of meaning in understanding: that which belongs to the object to be understood and that which the observer brings to the study of the object. Intelligent things have meaning in both senses, not-intelligent things only in the latter. The doubly hermeneutic character of knowledge concerning what we identify as an expression of intelligence permits us to distinguish Oakeshott’s version of the hermeneutic conception of the human sciences from the view that there is no significant distinction between the human and the natural sciences. Rorty, for example, dismisses the distinction between the natural and the human sciences, together with the mind-nature distinction itself, as arbitrary and insignificant.26 According to this line of argument, all human experience is intentional or semantic; that is, the only possible relationship of human beings to experience is through meanings. But if all experience involves meanings, then all experience requires interpretation if it is to be understood. Hermeneutics becomes as relevant to our experience of nature as to our experience of human conduct. 26. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 343–56.

136

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

If this were all there was to be said, the distinction between the natural sciences and the human sciences would be superfluous. “Universal hermeneutics” takes Vico’s celebrated dictum—that the study of human beings must be distinguished from the study of nature because human beings can know what they have made—and extends it from the human to the natural world, for to say that the world is experienced in terms of human categories is to make nature itself a product of mind. The geistige Welt, which is the inherited world of meanings into which every human being is born, is a world composed not of physical objects but of shared beliefs or ideas. It is “a world . . . of ‘expressions’ which have meanings and require to be understood because they are the ‘expressions’ of human minds. . . . The starry heavens above us and the moral law within are alike human achievements” (VLL 45). But if both the natural and the human worlds are human achievements belonging to the same geistige Welt, on what grounds can we distinguish between the natural and the human sciences? As Robert Grant puts it, “if the geistige Welt is really a unity, why does it require two distinct kinds of study?”27 And the answer, it should by now be clear, is that although all understanding involves meanings and is therefore hermeneutic, to understand human conduct involves paying attention to two levels of meaning. The human sciences require a second level of interpretation, beyond that needed in the natural sciences viewed as systems of ideas, because the object of inquiry as well as the inquiry itself is composed of meanings. We can explain an earthquake using the principles of geological science (which in turn uses ideas from physics, chemistry, and the other natural sciences), and we require only these principles. But to explain human actions we must take into account the self-understandings of those human beings whose actions they are. It is, in other words, the self-consciousness inherent in every act that distinguishes a human act from a natural event. And this self-understanding is not idiosyncratic; it is built upon the intersubjective meanings that constitute human practices. Explaining it requires an interpretive, not a naturalistic, mode of understanding. The natural sciences generate theories that are themselves systems of meaning, but these theories ignore the element of meaning that may be present in the objects they are intended to explain. If our concern is to understand a process, the choice of an interpretive scheme (a theory) that excludes meaning, at the level of the object to be explained, is productive and indeed necessary. But intelligent conduct as such cannot be 27. Robert Grant, Oakeshott (London: Claridge Press, 1990), 42–43.

137

Understanding in the Human Sciences

explained by natural, and therefore not-intelligent, processes. To think otherwise is to be categorially confused. There is, moreover, a connection between understanding something as an expression of intelligence and being concerned with its individuality—a connection that illuminates the relationship between the two criteria for distinguishing the study of human activity from the study of nature identified by nineteenth-century theorists of the human sciences. To understand something as an expression of intelligence is to see it as an individual object having, like the al-Aqsa mosque or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, its own character and significance. To grasp the properties of a natural object, in contrast, is to comprehend the properties of the class to which it belongs. Where our concern is scientific, we are not concerned with the individual object before us but with the kind of figure it represents. We are concerned with a type, not its tokens. But in the human sciences our concern is to understand individual human performances—particular acts, utterances, gestures, languages, texts, genres, traditions, institutions, cultures—not the class “human performances.” Human conduct, understood as expressing intelligence, consists of the performances of particular persons, believing this or that, engaged in various schemes and transactions, choosing to do one thing instead of another. And it includes the relationships and practices that are constituted by, while also providing a context for, these performances. To understand actual, significant performances and practices, in contrast to the psychological, economic, or other processes that may be abstracted from them, calls for a kind of inquiry that is distinct from the scientific study of human activity. It is, Oakeshott argues, a kind of historical inquiry. History, he suggests, is the proper science of individual performances and practices. There is much about this view of historical inquiry as central to the study of human conduct that needs to be clarified, above all the relationship between interpreting practices and explaining performances. Does it make sense to describe both kinds of inquiry as historical? Is history one among a number of human sciences or is it coextensive with the human sciences? Or should we say instead that there is a historical dimension to each of the human sciences? Before dealing with these questions, I want to look more closely at the idea of a “performance” and at the view of history as especially concerned with explaining performances. I shall return to the question of the place of history in the human sciences at the end of Chapter 4. To understand a performance we must first understand the performer, an “agent” who thinks and therefore can make mistakes, who understands and

138

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

so can misunderstand. An agent, qua agent, is not a biological or psychological entity whose actions are explained by biological or psychological processes. There is for Oakeshott, as we have seen, a significant difference between understanding human conduct as intelligent activity and understanding notintelligent identities like digestion or the motions of planets. Performances belong to the first category, processes to the second. But a performance is an individual event as well as one that has meaning. It is an actual, particular occurrence—a distinct event that can be understood as the unique outcome of other events and therefore as something other than an illustration of a class of similar events. Human conduct, understood as intelligent performances related to other performances that they elicit or to which they respond, consists of individual occurrences connected to one another not causally but in the kind of relationship that Oakeshott calls “contingency.” And the kind of inquiry that seeks to discover such connections is not scientific but historical inquiry. “Contingency” can be a misleading term because it stands, in the historian’s jargon as well as in plain English, for what is merely accidental and therefore, as Collingwood observed in criticizing nineteenth-century historical positivism, for unintelligibility. And to define contingency as accident is, in fact, to assume an underlying positivism, for it implies that contingent events are those that cannot be satisfactorily explained in terms of natural processes. For Oakeshott, however, “contingency” is not a relationship of accident. The explanation of human conduct as comprising choices and responses to choices excludes explanation in terms of not-intelligent processes. It never uses the idea of accident to account for events that cannot be explained by the laws governing such processes. To understand what people are thinking and doing is to pay attention to their acts as intelligent performances and to relate those acts to other such performances. The acts that are related to one another in this way, that is, contingently, are linked in a sequence of understood (or misunderstood) occurrences to compose a narrative within which each act has its place. Contingency, then, far from standing for accident and therefore for unintelligibility, makes an occurrence intelligible as a significant event in relation to other significant events. This account of human conduct and its proper understanding has several elements that need to be made explicit. First, a contingent relationship, like that between Spinoza’s voicing unorthodox views and his excommunication, is a temporal or sequential one. Second, the acts or other events that are con-

139

Understanding in the Human Sciences

tingently related are congruent with one another in the sense that what comes after is understood to be a response to what went before. To understand my writing this book as an individual performance is to understand it as an invitation to which your reading this sentence is, in some way, a response. Third, the elucidation of this congruence between my actions and yours depends upon an understanding of their context. And because there are many possible contexts for an action, there are many ways of elucidating its meaning. Every performance, every utterance or gesture, invokes an idiom or language (a practice) that is part of its context and that is relevant to understanding it. But the meaning of an action is not exhausted by its relation to the various idioms into which it may fit; it is also a particular act whose meaning depends on other acts to which it responds and which it provokes. Therefore, finally, actions that are contingently related must be understood to throw light on one another and thereby render one another more intelligible. To understand human conduct as a connected series of intelligent acts is to see these acts as composing a story (OHC 105; VLL 34). But unlike a fictional, religious, or hortatory narrative, this kind of story, sometimes called a “history,” has no unconditional beginning or end and offers no moral or lesson. It results, moreover, from an inquiry that is not itself a practical inquiry: the historian who wishes to understand a performance is “not concerned to understand the performance merely in order to respond to it” (OHC 106). Like other stories, it is concerned with details, and its meaning lies in these details: the individual occurrences that are related in a historical narrative acquire significance from their contingent connections with other occurrences. Historical inquiry, insofar as it is concerned with actions at all, aims to understand particular performances (recorded exploits) as they are circumstantially related to other performances. And no performance can be understood solely through mere observation: “the authentic characters of performances which have survived are what they are in terms of their transactional relationships with others, and they may emerge only in an inquiry in which they are made to interpret and criticize one another” (OH 51). What distinguishes the kind of explanation provided by a history of contingently related acts from other kinds of explanations, and specifically from scientific explanations, is that each act is understood not as a necessary consequence, or as a mere accident, but as an intelligible event. This analysis of contingency implies an understanding of history as a distinct mode of inquiry. It also provides the basis for a more general philosophy of the human sciences, one that not only recognizes the centrality of meaning

140

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

to the subject matter of these sciences, but that distinguishes between the task of understanding human practices as systems of meaning and that of explaining particular, substantive performances. It is a conception Oakeshott had begun to articulate in the 1920s and was still working on half a century later. A conception of considerable complexity and subtlety, it calls for detailed attention.

chapter

f o u r

Historical Understanding

In ordinary usage, the word “history” stands, ambiguously, for past events and for a particular way of understanding past events. History as past events is what actually happened, the subject of historical inquiry. History as a way of understanding past events is this inquiry itself, the study or “science” of history. While history as past events is made by those who participated in the events, history as inquiry is “made” only by the historian (OH 2). As a historian of political thought, Oakeshott has much to say about history in the first sense, but my concern in this chapter is with what he has to say, as a philosopher, about history as a mode of inquiry and understanding.1 1. Oakeshott’s historical writings are numerous and scattered, but the main items are his essays on Hobbes, now collected in Hobbes on Civil Association, and the interpretations of the history of European political thought found in the following works: (1) The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Skepticism, probably written in the early 1950s but published in 1996; (2) Morality and Politics in Modern Europe, some lectures delivered at Harvard in 1958 and published in 1993; (3) “The History of Political Thought from the Ancient Greeks to the Present Day,” an unpublished set of lectures at the London School of Economics from the middle 1960s; and (4) the third part of On Human Conduct, published in 1975, entitled “On the Character of a Modern European State.” On Oakeshott as a historian of political thought, see L. O’Sullivan, “Michael Oakeshott on European Political History,” History of Political Thought 21 (2000), 132–51.

142

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

Oakeshott never departed from the view, articulated in his earliest writings, that the philosopher, qua philosopher, can have nothing to say about past events themselves. A philosopher is neither a historian nor a theorist of “the historical process” conceived in either teleological or causal terms, and therefore the efforts of Vico, Condorcet, Hegel, Marx, Comte, Toynbee, and many others to tell the story of the world or to discover the laws of its historical development must be regarded as misconceived. This view—that the philosophy of history must confine itself to examining the nature and limits of historical knowledge—is one that, by the middle of the twentieth century had come to be widely accepted by philosophers under the label “critical” or “analytical” philosophy of history. Oakeshott’s writings on historical inquiry span a period of more than fifty years. The main texts are an important chapter in Experience and Its Modes; a 1958 essay, “The Activity of Being an Historian,” later included in Rationalism in Politics; and three related essays (“Present, Future and Past,” “Historical Events,” and “Historical Change”) in On History and Other Essays (1983). Oakeshott also treats historical inquiry at the end of the first part of On Human Conduct and in many reviews of historical books. In what follows, I draw on all these writings to interpret the theory of historical inquiry they jointly present. The essays in On History deserve particular attention because they are the most recent and least discussed of Oakeshott’s writings on the subject. I begin by discussing his account of the presuppositions of history as a distinct mode of understanding. These presuppositions include the ideas of knowledge, fact, and truth as they are defined within this mode; the idea of an authentically historical past distinguished from other, modally distinct, kinds of past; and the idea, which Oakeshott both expounds and criticizes, that what is real in history are particular persons, nations, periods, and events (“historical individuals”). With these presuppositions as a basis, I go on to consider Oakeshott’s analysis of historical explanation, which holds that change is explained “historically” by showing it to be the outcome of contingent relationships between events—an analysis that rejects the positivist theory that historical explanations, like scientific explanations, aim to account for particular events as instances of general laws. For Oakeshott, this historical positivism is mistaken not only because it assimilates history to science but because it misconceives science as explaining particular events: genuine science is concerned with abstract relationships, not with particulars. Finally, I return to a theme of Chapter 3 to consider Oakeshott’s view of the place of historical inquiry within the human sciences.

143

Historical Understanding

History as a Mode of Inquiry The effort to define history as a mode of inquiry encounters the same objections made against other efforts to distinguish a mode from the self-understanding of an actual discipline. Like the practitioners of other disciplines, historians are inclined to doubt the competence of outsiders to determine the aims and scope of their craft. History, they object, is best defined by the practicing historian, not the philosopher. We have met this objection before in the context of science, but because Oakeshott is especially interested in history and has immense respect for historical scholarship at its best, he responds to it here with particular care. Underlying the objection, he thinks, is a failure to distinguish between the historian’s interest in understanding the past and the philosopher’s interest in locating historical inquiry on the map of knowledge. The latter is not itself a historical concern, and historians are not especially qualified to pursue it. On the contrary, their views on what historical knowledge is and how it relates to other kinds of knowledge are those of scholars speaking beyond their professional competence.2 Historical questions are best answered by the historian, but the character of historical knowledge raises philosophical rather than historical questions. To answer such questions, we must put aside the practice of historical inquiry to examine the assumptions on which it rests. To define the historical, one must of course know something about the practice of history, but such knowledge by itself is insufficient. The philosopher of history is interested in what the historian takes for granted: the presuppositions, the “symptoms of modality” (EM 88), that distinguish historical understanding from other kinds of understanding. A more substantial objection to the effort to define history as a mode of inquiry is that historical inquiry is not one thing but several. “History is what historians do,” as historians like to say, and because they do a number of different things, historical inquiry cannot be said to rest on a single set of definitive assumptions. History is an ever-changing collection of questions asked and methods used in studying the past, not a distinct mode of thought. But, Oakeshott replies, identifying shared assumptions in the work of historians is compatible with there being a diversity of approaches to historical scholarship. To insist that the past can be studied in different ways is already to acknowledge 2. The true historian escapes the errors of positivism “not by a reflective knowledge of the philosophical principles of historical thought, but by means of his intuitive grasp of his own subject, and without knowing in detail what he is escaping.” Review of Collingwood, The Idea of History, English Historical Review 62 (1947), 86.

144

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

that history can be defined because it identifies “the past” as the common concern of historical studies, and this suggests at least the possibility of specifying the character of historical inquiry more precisely (OH 3). Historians do, however, rightly object to the interference of philosophers in the conduct of historical scholarship, Oakeshott thinks, for if the historian is not as such a philosopher, neither is the philosopher a historian. Even if philosophers have something cogent to say about the definition of historical inquiry, it is not for them to tell historians how to conduct their studies. But, he insists, an effort like his own to define history as a mode of inquiry is not itself prescriptive. The criteria that define historical inquiry as a distinct mode of inquiry are its presuppositions, its working assumptions and foundational beliefs, not prescriptions for how to conduct historical research. The reflections of the philosopher on this manner of inquiry aim to distinguish it from the practical and other concerns from which it emerged and with which it is still often confused. A philosophical understanding of historical inquiry abstracts from the practice of historians and therefore neither describes that practice nor prescribes how it should be carried on. Historical Knowledge According to the ordinary view of history—a view that is reflected in the positivist conception of historical research—historical events exist independently of the historian’s knowledge of them. Historical knowledge is not an intellectual construct but a record of real events. Events occur, and the historian’s task is simply to discover what has occurred. This commonsense view is easily demolished, however, for even if we choose to speak of “events” as having “happened” (two problematic ideas that I will examine below), we must recognize that some actual events have not been recorded and that some recorded events never actually happened, and this, Oakeshott thinks, is enough to undermine the idea of historical knowledge as a mere chronicle of successive events. The events that comprise this putative series cannot be identified apart from one another, not only because the available information is unreliable but, more important, because its sources represent a point of view that is different from the historian’s. As every historian knows, before a recorded event can become part of a historical narrative or explanation it must be judged according to the historian’s ideas. A historian cannot simply accept the beliefs of those about whom he or she is writing: “what is a ‘miracle’ for the writer of any of the gospels cannot remain a miracle for the historian” (EM 90), for

145

Historical Understanding

example. Nor can one historian uncritically accept the conclusions of others. The information on which a historian relies in constructing an account of the past is not history until it has been critically reinterpreted. The ordinary empiricist view of history might, however, be reformulated to meet this objection. History, it might be said, even if it is more than a mere series of events, is nevertheless a collection of objective historical facts, not an intellectual construct. What actually happened, whether or not it has been recorded, is independent of what historians think: historical events determine what historical narratives record. Oakeshott’s response to this argument follows from his view of experience or understanding itself: “history cannot be ‘the course of events’ independent of our experience of it, because there is nothing independent of our experience. . . . An event independent of experience, ‘objective’ in the sense of being untouched by thought or judgment, would be an unknowable” (EM 93). Historians do not merely record what appears as given, but must uncover evidence, decide which evidence is relatively solid, and reconcile discrepant pieces of evidence. Historical evidence is not an unproblematic gift from the past that the historian simply accepts. There are no “authorities” in history—sources of evidence that are beyond question. A historical event is always the conclusion of an inquiry into surviving records, where these records are understood as themselves historical performances that need to be understood. To put it differently, the starting place in a historical investigation is never the past itself but a provisional view of the past—a view that is itself only imperfectly historical. “The historian begins, not with an array of ‘facts,’ but with an understanding, and with an understanding which ex hypothesi is nonhistorical because it is an understanding in relation to what were believed at the time to be the fortunes of the age concerned.” The historian’s task is to generate a historical understanding “by allowing the categories of historical thinking to work upon this ‘non-historical’ material.”3 For the historian to conclude anything at all about what happened, historical “facts” must be made to criticize one another within an understanding shaped by the presuppositions and procedures of a historical inquiry. To assert a historical occurrence is therefore always to make an inference that something did in fact happen. Historical inquiry begins not with a miscellaneous assortment of brute facts, which the historian arranges to construct a coherent narrative or explanation, 3. Review of Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History, Cambridge Journal 6 (1952), 248.

146

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

but with an existing body of ideas—as Gadamer says, with inherited meanings and the judgments (“prejudices”) they bear. Historical facts, like all facts, are conclusions.4 They are “verdicts” based on what has been determined (according to other judgments) to be the relevant evidence. And like any other judgment, a judgment of historical fact can be mistaken. Historical facts are not “what really happened” but “what the evidence obliges us to believe” (EM 112). The past as understood by the historian consists of facts that are objective because they have been established by historians in the course of inquiries that critically examine a body of evidence according to the canons of historical research. The historical past is constructed on the basis of intersubjectively grounded facts. As Droysen observed in the 1860s, we cannot restore past events objectively but can only construct a more or less subjective view of them on the basis of what we determine to be evidence, and these constructions are all we can know of the past. “‘History’ exists not outwardly and as a reality, but only as thus mediated, studied out, and known.”5 This is essentially the view defended by certain philosophers of history since the mid-1970s under the label of “constructionism.” Historical knowledge, the constructionist argues, is inferential, not perceptual; it can never be confirmed by “observation,” as that term is used either in ordinary or in scientific discourse. It is therefore unreasonable to expect historical inquiry to satisfy criteria of factuality, truth, and reality that make sense when we can engage in direct observation. What contributes to the reality of a historical fact is that so much supports it and so much else depends on it.6 This cautious historical constructionism must be distinguished from the more radical view (“deconstructionism”) of those who argue, rather incautiously, that because the real nature of the past cannot be ascertained, there are no objective constraints on the way historians choose to imagine the past. Such arguments, by erasing the boundaries between history, poetry, and practice, in effect deny the autonomy of history as a mode of inquiry and understanding. Oakeshott’s constructionism must also be distinguished from the “social constructivism” that is now

4. F. H. Bradley emphasizes the inferential character of historical facts in an essay first published in 1874, The Presuppositions of Critical History (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), 87–93. For Gadamer’s view of the place of “prejudice” in interpretation, see Truth and Method, 2d rev. [English language] ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1989), 269–77. 5. Johann Gustav Droysen, Outline of the Principles of History, trans. E. Benjamin Andrews (Boston: Ginn, 1893), 111–12. 6. Leon J. Goldstein, Historical Knowing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), 80.

147

Historical Understanding

orthodox in many parts of the humanities and social sciences, which defends a morally engaged and therefore, from Oakeshott’s perspective, modally confused, understanding of the human sciences.7 The world understood historically is a constructed world of ideas, but this world is one that has been constructed according to the specific ideas, the categories and canons, that define the historical outlook. The historian begins an investigation already equipped with certain assumptions: “a system of postulates (largely unexamined) which define the limits of his thought,” and an identified subject matter to be studied, “a specific view of the course of events, a view consonant with his postulates” (EM 97). These assumptions determine which materials will be collected for study and how they will be studied. This is not to say that what are judged to be historical facts do not also influence the historian’s assumptions and theories, only that the two are interdependent. Theories, recognized or unrecognized, guide historical research, but they are also affected by what this research discovers. For what is discovered can transform our ideas about the past and even our understanding of historical inquiry itself. In a historical investigation we proceed not by accumulating new information, which we incorporate into an existing framework, but by considering the known past in the light of new discoveries that are themselves the product of historical thinking. Clearly, this view of historical facts belongs to the general theory of knowledge that Oakeshott presents in Experience and Its Modes. Oakeshott’s definition of historical truth likewise follows from that theory. The truth of a proposition is not determined by a criterion that lies outside experience—an absolute, permanent, universal, or unquestionable standard against which any proposition can be tested. It is determined by how that proposition fits with others within a given system of ideas. It is this conditional coherence—coherence relative to a given system—that allows us to speak without contradiction of different kinds of truth: scientific, moral, artistic, and so forth. It follows that there can be no test of historical truth outside the historian’s reconstruction of the past. Words like “discover,” “recover,” and even “reconstruct” are misleading insofar as they imply a reality independent of experience, and to avoid this implication Oakeshott prefers to say that the historian’s task is “to create and construct” (EM 93). As he later emphasizes, the meaning of a historical fact, which makes it the fact it is, can be established 7. Ian Hacking examines the expression “social construction” and its various uses in The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

148

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

only in relation to other historical facts. The meaning and therefore the very identity of historical facts is determined by their place in the story the historian constructs according to the evidence. “The historian is like the novelist whose characters (for example) are presented in such detail and with such coherence that additional explanation of their actions is superfluous” (EM 141). Historical truth is coherence and coherence of a specific kind: coherence within a system of historical ideas. One must be careful not to read too much into the idea of history as a coherent “story.” Historical conclusions are often presented in a narrative, but the narrative form is not itself a presupposition of historical knowledge. To argue that narrative is essential to historical understanding is to confuse a common way of presenting the results of historical research with the epistemological status of historical knowledge. Narrative is a mode of expression, not of understanding. The same can be said of particular narrative styles or genres (sometimes called “tropes”).8 The criteria of coherence in a romance or tragedy are criteria of literary, not historical, coherence. A narrative, moreover, is merely one way in which the results of a historical inquiry can be presented. If an inquiry has been conducted according to the canons of historical research, its conclusions are historical knowledge no matter how they are presented. Oakeshott has been charged with advancing a theory of historical knowledge that lacks a criterion of truth, and without such a criterion, one critic protests, “we are unable to arbitrate between two coherent but incompatible pieces of historical reconstruction.”9 But this objection misconstrues the idea of coherence. If two historical reconstructions are incompatible, there must be an incoherence in each supposedly coherent reconstruction insofar as it cannot make sense of the facts identified by the other. The idea that we can be rescued from this dilemma by postulating an independent standard of historical truth to which our various accounts must correspond merely privileges, without justification, some third reconstruction that is presumed to be beyond doubt and therefore able to adjudicate between the others. Implicit in this objection to a coherence theory of historical truth is the same uncritical attachment to realism, with its definition of truth as correspondence, that is evident both in science and in ordinary practical experience. Because it studies what no longer exists, historical inquiry is without an “object” in the usual 8. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 9. John Gray, review of On History and Other Essays, Political Theory 12 (1984), 452.

149

Historical Understanding

sense of that term. This anomaly in itself should be enough to make us skeptical of a historical epistemology drawn from ordinary experience or from a naive and outdated view of science (even if it is a view still common among scientists). And because philosophy in any case involves the criticism of received ideas, that it reaches conclusions different from the ideas it criticizes cannot be proof that these conclusions are erroneous. The definition of historical truth as coherence within a body of historical ideas cannot be dismissed, then, simply because it has surprising implications. One of these surprising implications, Oakeshott thinks, is that what we call “the past” is an aspect of the present. If historical truth is not correspondence between a historian’s ideas and “what really happened” but coherence within a present system of ideas, with the present state of historical knowledge based on presently available evidence, it follows that the historical past “does not lie behind present evidence” but is itself “the world which present evidence creates in the present” (EM 108). History as a mode of understanding is the historian’s experience of a present world conceived as that which has passed by, the present world as “past.” The past is distinguished by being not present, and yet it can exist only in the form of present ideas. “Historical fact and historical truth . . . are necessarily present, because all fact and all truth is necessarily present, and at the same time they are conceived of in the form of the past” (EM 118). What the paradoxical quality of historical existence reveals, however, is not the unreality of history but the limits of any simple realist epistemology. The historical past, the past recovered in a historical inquiry, is therefore always an inference from present evidence, the product of judgments that belong to the historian’s present experience. The historian constructs a historical past, using one piece of evidence critically to determine the significance of another. But the historical past is not whatever the historian happens to think— it is what the historian is compelled to think by the pattern of the evidence. The Historical Past The historian attempts to achieve coherence among ideas that are not merely present but present in a particular mode. It follows that the historian’s past is not the only past that can be constructed. The argument for this conclusion— that the historical past is one among a number of modally distinguishable pasts—is straightforward if one grants the premises on which it rests: that the

150

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

historical past is an aspect of present experience, and that the present is experienced in different ways. For if the present can be understood in a number of modally different ways, and if the past is simply the present understood under the category of the past, then there must be a corresponding number of modally different pasts, each defined by the assumptions of the modal present to which it corresponds. As Oakeshott puts it, “a mode of past is to be distinguished in terms of the modal conditions of the present to which it is related” (OH 9). “There is a past for every way of thinking: there is neither one preeminent past, nor is there any past at all except for some way of thinking.”10 Only a past constructed according to the postulates of historical understanding is an authentically “historical” past. Past and present in a scientific theory have nothing to do with the historical present and past. The past implicit in a set of differential equations that defines a thermodynamic or an economic system, for example, is not what happened, as a matter of fact, but what according to the equations must have been the state of the system at an earlier time. And the past as we understand it in relation to the lived world of everyday experience is a practical, not a historical, past. Corresponding to a given present situation understood in practical terms is a remembered past that is also understood practically. This practical past is quite distinct from a past established by historical investigation. Memory is not history, even though memories may be among the evidence a historian examines in constructing a historical past. A historian cannot simply transcribe his or her own memories into a historical account of events witnessed, for to do so would be to treat memory as an authority. What the historian remembers is only evidence subject to critical examination, not a direct source of historical knowledge.11 Memoirs, as everyone knows, make bad history. We might even speak of a poetic or contemplative past, one composed of images like the characters in a historical novel, though strictly speaking there can be no poetic past because to enter the imagined world of the novel is to ignore the “pastness” of these characters by imagining them as immediately present (RP 164). But the practical past is the nonhistorical past that Oakeshott is most concerned to distinguish from the historical past. And with good reason, for the practical awareness of the past is both older and more com10. Oakeshott, “History and the Social Sciences,” The Institute of Sociology, The Social Sciences (London: Le Play House Press, 1936), 73. 72. To indicate that there can be more than one past, in On History Oakeshott speaks of not of “the past” but simply of “past,” omitting the definite article. 11. Goldstein, Historical Knowing, 147.

151

Historical Understanding

pelling than an authentically historical awareness. Because historical scholarship typically originates in a study of persons and events that are likely to interest the historian’s audience, it has trouble distancing itself from present practical concerns and maintaining itself as an autonomous mode of inquiry. Furthermore, there are similarities between historical and practical understanding that make them all too easy to confuse. Both, for example, are concerned with human affairs, that is, with intelligent conduct rather than not-intelligent processes. This shared concern might seem to imply that the modes of practice and history are “closer” to one another than either is to science. But it does not follow that the difference between history and practice is not a modal difference. Historical understanding may emerge, in a historian or in a civilization, from the concerns of practical life, but the understanding it generates neither supersedes nor remains subordinate to practical understanding. As we saw in Chapter 2, history and practice are sometimes identified with each other because historical inquiry is itself an activity or practice. But the conclusions generated in an authentically historical inquiry are historical, not practical, conclusions. The practical present of the historian’s own activity and the historical present created by the conclusions of that activity are categorially distinct. What distinguishes the historical present, the present of historical knowledge, is that it is composed of objects understood to be survivals from (and therefore evidence of) a historical past, not of objects whose significance is practical. But because “even the most severely ‘historical’ concern with the past is still liable to be compromised by seeking the answer to questions which are not historical questions and by asides and even judgments which belong to some other mode of understanding” (OH 118), historical inquiry must struggle continually to free itself from other ways of understanding the past, and above all from the practical past. This practical past includes, besides a remembered past of personal memories, a public past of religious and national origins—a “living past,” peopled by founders, patriots, and martyrs, of the kind that is taught to children, not the dead (that is, finished) past that is the subject of critical historiography. The practical past is a source of models or ideals, of practical wisdom, or of religious or legal authority. An authentic historical past must be distinguished from these and other practical pasts, which are pasts we regard as significant because they preceded our own present and because we think they are relevant to our concerns. It is especially hard to separate the historical study of religion from practical concerns. Where religious conclusions are made the premise of what purports to be a historical inquiry, for example, the past is

152

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

interpreted in a context that already determines its significance, as when Saint Augustine is treated as a figure in “Christian history.”12 The more distance we have from religious, political, or other practical concerns that may be brought to the study of history, the easier it is to see the pasts that are constructed under the influence of these concerns as practical constructions, and to do this is to be on the road to critical, and therefore genuine, history. The historical past, in short, is distinguished from various practical pasts by the absence of any connection with present practical concerns. But the historical past cannot be divorced from present evidence. This evidence is all the historian has from which to construct a historical past. Historical knowledge is present knowledge concerned exclusively with a past inferred, according to an appropriate procedure, from present evidence. The present that concerns the historian, qua historian, is composed of objects, which may be artifacts, recorded statements, and other performances, that are understood to be survivals from the past, and for this reason and only this reason objects of historical attention. The raw material of historical inquiry is not the past, which no longer exists, but things in the present that we have grounds for treating as evidence of a vanished past. In Droysen’s words, “the data for historical investigation are not past things, for these have disappeared, but things which are still present here and now, whether recollections of what was done, or remnants of things that have existed and of events that have occurred.”13 Some of these survivals, like a parish register or a canceled check, may be the remains of earlier practical transactions, but others may be mathematical theorems, philosophical ideas, or works of art. However fragmentary or damaged they may be, however detached from the activities of which they were once a part, such survivals are the only materials the historian has to work with in reconstructing the past. As Oakeshott understands it, then, the sole concern of historical scholarship is to construct a past from these present survivals: to recover, assemble, identify, order, and repair them, to discern their connections with one another, and, by recognizing each in relation to its proper context, “to determine its authentic character as a bygone practical or philosophical or artistic . . . performance” (OH 32). But this recorded past, this past of surviving objects, is

12. Review of J. Burleigh, The City of God, Cambridge Journal 4 (1950), 568. 13. Outline, 11. “The present in historical understanding is composed of objects recognized, not merely to have survived, but solely and expressly as survivals, vestiges, remains, fragments of a conserved past” (OH 28).

153

Historical Understanding

not itself the historical past. The historical past has not survived, and can only be inferred in a critical investigation in which authenticated survivals are used as circumstantial evidence of past events. It is this inferred past, and only this inferred past, that is authentically historical. Historical Reality In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott links the concept of “reality” to that of self-completeness or individuality. What is real is what has boundaries and an identity: a “thing” that has been distinguished from its environment, an identity that persists through change, an “individual.” And what is individual, and therefore real, is something that each mode of experience defines in its own characteristic way. What, then, is real in history? Historical reality, Oakeshott initially suggests, lies in the individuals used in a given historical inquiry: in the persons, institutions, situations, or events it seeks to understand. These identified individuals are always somewhat arbitrary, however, for they are constructed objects and the distinctions that separate them are not absolute. The Bolshevik revolution, for example, can be defined as an event or a series of events, as an institution or a set of related institutions, or as the actions of particular persons, as changes in ideas, and no doubt in other ways. To put it differently, the expression “the Bolshevik revolution” means different things in different contexts, and none of these contexts is the unconditionally correct context for using the expression. Another way to understand the rather tenuous character of historical individuals is to see that they are constructed identities that are defined by how they resemble as well as by how they differ from other identities. We typically identify new things by noticing that they are like and unlike familiar things. It is sometimes said that history is concerned with particulars, but this is misleading because there are no absolutely particular things: every individual thing, in being identified as a thing of this or that kind, also possesses a degree of generality. All knowledge, and therefore historical knowledge, involves generalization. Historical identities are constructed by noticing the general in the particular, as when we recognize Zaire to have been a “state” and Mobutu to have been its last “president.” All identities, all individuals, are “unities of particularity and genericity” (OHC 102). To say that history concerns itself only with particulars—in contrast, say, to science, which generalizes about classes of particulars—is to make historical understanding impossible, for

154

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

what is absolutely particular cannot even be identified and therefore cannot be understood. Historical generality is not the same as scientific generality, however. As should be clear from the discussion of historical knowledge in Chapter 3 (and as we shall see more clearly when we examine Oakeshott’s theory of historical explanation), historical generalizations are not general laws with particular instances. They are collective or enumerative judgments, like “few Americans in 1945 owned television sets”—limited and provisional generalizations that a historian constructs somewhat arbitrarily for a particular purpose. Such generalizations have a certain interpretive utility in making sense of the material being organized into a historical account, but their place in a genuine historical explanation is secondary. Even the kind of generalization required to identify historical individuals takes the historian only so far. As we shall see, Oakeshott came to think that what distinguishes history proper from other ways of explaining human conduct is that the identities it studies are not related to one another in generalizations of any kind but in a narrative of contingently related events. History, as a distinguishable kind of knowledge, might be said to have begun to separate itself from practical experience in becoming skeptical of the names given, by the members of a community, to the persons and events they believed to compose its past. The individual things that are identified as significant and real in the practical past of a community, when subjected to critical scrutiny, are gradually transformed into historical individuals. The problem for historical inquiry is that this skepticism regarding received names is potentially unlimited, for whatever is identified by criticizing something formerly taken for granted can itself be dissolved by criticism. A historical investigation, like any other inquiry, requires at least a temporary suspension of skepticism. Once a situation, event, or other identity has been chosen for use in a historical investigation, it acquires a relatively fixed character that defines its individuality. It becomes an identity to be used, not questioned. This does not mean that historical individuals are unalterable, only that each investigation must begin by identifying the individuals whose history it investigates. What counts as a historical situation or event, or even a person, is “designated” by the ideas the historian brings to the investigation, not discovered in a past that is independent of those ideas. As Oakeshott puts it in Experience and Its Modes, “History itself does not and cannot provide us with the historical individual, for wherever history exists it has been constructed upon a postulated conception of individuality” (EM 120).

155

Historical Understanding

The point must be qualified, however, because even though a historical inquiry must designate its identities, it never absolutely fixes those identities—a point Oakeshott emphasizes in later writings. To be useful in a historical investigation, an identity must be reasonably consistent and stable, but it is never beyond question. It is a working assumption, not an unalterable postulate. Precisely because they are designated, historical individuals are no more than interpretive tools. And because they are tools, historians can and do question their adequacy. In recognizing that historians can be tentative about the concepts they employ, Oakeshott softens the distinction between modal and philosophical thinking he drew so sharply in Experience and Its Modes. But he still holds that such questioning, if pressed far enough, can destroy a historical inquiry by turning it into something else. If, for example, instead of using the idea of the Enlightenment we persist in questioning it, we are no longer studying a designated thing, the Enlightenment, but its designation, “the idea of the Enlightenment.” When we problematize instead of simply using an identity, we transform our original inquiry into a different inquiry, one less historical and more philosophical. The success of any historical investigation therefore depends on maintaining a balance between using and interrogating the identities in terms of which it is conducted. The problem of determining this balance, and therefore of demarcating the line between history and philosophy, is one that engaged Oakeshott’s attention for many years. His earliest writings on history, while recognizing the fluidity of historical identities, stress the need to presuppose their stability in order to proceed with a historical investigation. Oakeshott’s last writings, in contrast, while not denying the historian’s need for identities, emphasize this fluidity. To clarify the differences between Oakeshott’s earlier and later conception of historical identities, it is helpful to compare his discussions of the historical individual in several essays on religion from the late 1920s and in Experience and Its Modes with his discussion of historical change in On History.14 The problem he explores in each of these writings is that, in history as in other areas of experience, the “things” we identify for use or study are continually changing. Does something that has changed over time in certain ways, or that has moved to a different place, remain the “same thing”? In the course of its 14. The essays are “The Importance of the Historical Element in Christianity,” Modern Churchman 19 (1929–30), 313–27, reprinted in Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life, and a review of G. G. Atkins, The Making of the Christian Mind, Journal of Theological Studies 31 (1930), 203–8.

156

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

long existence, the Roman Empire changed its boundaries, its inhabitants, its citizens, its capital, its religion, and its laws—and yet we speak of it as an individual thing, one that had a beginning and an end and that can be distinguished from its environment. A historical individual, Oakeshott suggests in Experience and Its Modes, is defined not by time and place, or even by what are presumed to be its essential features, but by continuity and discontinuity. Rome exists—is a real historical individual—because we think there was some discontinuity at its beginning and (because it is finished) at its end, as well as significant continuity through all the changes “it” experienced in between. Oakeshott’s philosophical interest in the idea of historical identity grows out of a religious and then historical interest in the identity of Christianity. In a characteristic shift from the practical or the historical to the philosophical, he moves from a concern with the identity of Christian religion to a concern with the concept of identity itself. One answer to the question “What is Christianity?,” Oakeshott suggests in “The Importance of the Historical Element in Christianity” (1928), is that authentic Christianity is original Christianity: if what is today identified as Christian differs from the original, it is not Christian. But the theory of identity implied by this definition is a mere tautology, for even a small change causes an identified thing to become something other than itself and destroys the identity (RPML 64). In the case of Christianity, the theory prompts us to look for an original faith, but such a faith can never be discovered. Christianity cannot be the religion of Jesus, for example, because it involves beliefs about Jesus and about his death. Moreover, the teachings of Jesus and of his disciples changed in the course of time. Which of these teachings, and which interpretations of them, should we identify as the original and therefore essential faith? This theory of Christianity is faulty because the theory of identity on which it rests is faulty. A second answer is that the identity of Christianity lies in an unchanging core of belief that has persisted through centuries of change. But the theory of identity implied here, the theory of “identity as substance,” turns Christianity into an abstraction that captures only a small part of Christian experience. We suppose that this unchanging, and therefore “invulnerable,” substance of Christian faith can be discovered “by whittling away the differences and so exposing the thing,” but what remains when all the differences have been discarded is not a faith but “an invulnerable nothing” (RPML 66). “We must give up speaking of ‘the essence of Christianity’ if that means merely ‘the most

157

Historical Understanding

important part of Christianity.’”15 The substance of Christianity is to be found not in the essence but in the whole of Christian experience. Rejecting these flawed originalist and essentialist theories of identity, Oakeshott argues that the identity of Christianity lies in whatever “qualitative sameness” can be discovered in the historical record. This “qualitative sameness” may sound suspiciously like an essence, but it is not. In contrast to an essential substance, which is defined independently of the historical record, the sameness discerned by someone who takes the whole history of Christianity into account is based on that record. According to this view, any belief or practice is properly identified as Christian if it fits into the overall pattern of the Christian tradition. A belief or practice can therefore be identified as Christian even if it differs from what was once called “Christian.” But there must be not an unchanging core of belief but an overall pattern, a continuing but also changing identity into which new beliefs and practices have been incorporated. Without such an identity there can be no change: “Christianity is neither a bottle filled once and for all time, nor one into which anything may be poured so long as the label is retained.”16 The principle of identity that emerges in this discussion, though it is not clearly articulated in this essay, is the principle of continuity. Oakeshott continues this line of argument in Experience and Its Modes, suggesting that what is true of institutions like the Roman Empire or the Christian faith is also true of historical events and persons. Events have no fixed duration but are defined by continuity within designated limits: Luther’s nailing his ninety-five theses on the door is an event, but so is the Reformation. What makes an event is an apparent discontinuity between what is designated as the event and what is thought to have preceded it. And what maintains its individuality is continuity within this designated identity. Persons, too, are identified by an original discontinuity (birth) and by continuity (a self, centered in a body, which persists until death). Yet even historical persons, in some inquiries, can merge with an office or some other aspect of their environments: it is often difficult, for example, to distinguish the private and public personae of rulers. Every historical individual is an identity chosen according to the purposes of the inquiry in which it figures. 15. Review of Atkins, 207–8. 16. Review of Atkins, 207. Oakeshott is persuaded that the problem of Christian origins played an important role in the emergence of a distinctively historical mode of thinking. See his reviews of R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, English Historical Review 62 (1947), 85, and W. H. Walsh, An Introduction to Philosophy of History, Philosophical Quarterly 2 (1952), 277.

158

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

The idea of the historical individual, which is merely a kind of continuity, therefore implies the idea of change. And like the idea of the individual, the idea of change combines alteration or difference with sameness or identity. We recognize differences as change if we can attribute them to an underlying element in the situation that persists unaltered. We can say that “Paul has changed” if we notice that he has lost weight or become nervous and irascible, because we notice a difference in what we take to be a stable substrate, an unchanging identity, “Paul,” that we distinguish from its changeable properties. But, Oakeshott argues in On History, this familiar conception of change, on which philosophers of history as well as historians have relied, is unhistorical. It comes from ordinary practical experience, where we typically assume the existence of unchanging identities. And the reason this idea of change is unhistorical is that nothing in history can be assumed, in advance, to be unchanging. The historian may regard some things in the historical past as relatively stable, but this is a conclusion, not a postulate, of historical inquiry. Unlike our ordinary practical idea of change, which rests on identifying differences in the attributes of an unchanging entity, the idea of historical change does not postulate unchanging entities. There is no authentic history of “the Arabs” or “international law” that is not a history of changes undergone by what is itself a changing subject; no history of an idea, practice, or person in which the identity studied is not itself a changing identity. The further we press a historical investigation, the more it becomes clear that there are in history no enduring ideas, practices, or persons, but only ever more minutely analyzed events—noticed changes in changing identities. The “identity” in historical change (the element in the situation that changes) is, in short, even less stable than a tentative and mutable “historical individual.” In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott makes the designation of historical individuals a presupposition of historical inquiry. Although such identities are designated rather than discovered, and are therefore no more than interpretive tools, and although no historical individual can be assumed to be immutable, the historian must presume a degree of continuity or else there is no identifiable thing whose story can be told. But in On History, the historical individual is dissolved into relations between events. In a historical inquiry, as Oakeshott now sees it, institutions and even persons are understood not as changing identities but as sequences of events, and events are themselves analyzed into smaller, constituent events. A historical inquiry may spring from an interest in a particular person or institution, but as the historian works on received material that has been organized in terms of such categories, it

159

Historical Understanding

becomes clear that there are no authentic historical individuals apart from the events the historian must try to make intelligible. Authentic historical identities, Oakeshott in the end maintains, are the contingently related events that are collected to compose a historical narrative. The only real historical individuals in an authentic (modally pure) historical understanding are the events, the “differences,” the historian has identified. Furthermore, events are understood to be the contingent outcomes of antecedent events and the contingent antecedents of subsequent events.17 “Where an historical past is understood to be composed of historical events (that is, differences) assembled in answer to an historical question there is no room for an identity which is not itself a difference” (OH 101). In a historical inquiry, what unites a collection of events into an identified change is “its character as a passage of differences which touch and modify one another and converge to compose a subsequent difference” (OH 114). The entities of history, in this difficult theory, have become as elusive as the particles of the nuclear physicist. A historical identity, properly understood, is nothing other than its own circumstantial coherence understood as a contiguity of discernible differences. This historian is not concerned with the accumulated changes experienced by a persisting thing but with a continuous chain of happenings that is itself the changing thing to be understood. The kind of change exemplified in Sir John Cutler’s silk stockings, darned with wool until no thread of silk remained (the example is Bradley’s), is therefore not (as is sometimes supposed) an illustration of historical change, because the example postulates an unchanging, and therefore unhistorical, substrate that goes from being silk to being wool.18 Historical inquiry, Oakeshott insists, is the study of changes produced in and by identified events that are themselves changing identities. To grasp the implications of this new, and in its own careful way deconstructive, conception of historical understanding, we must consider Oakeshott’s theory of historical explanation. In articulating this theory, Oakeshott builds upon his analysis of historical identities to distinguish a distinctly historical 17. In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott incautiously suggests that the meaning of historical events is affected by their subsequents: in the world understood historically “the terms of a ‘series’ . . . lose their isolation and come to depend upon the criticism and guarantee of other, perhaps subsequent, terms” (EM 91). It is possible that his effort to analyze the logic of historical inquiry is derailed here by a concern to show that history is defective in relation to philosophy, as Luke O’Sullivan suggests in “Oakeshott on History,” dissertation (Australian National University, 1996), chap. 2. 18. Cf. David Boucher, “The Creation of the Past: British Idealism and Michael Oakeshott’s Philosophy of History,” History and Theory 23 (1984), 210, 211–12.

160

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

way of explaining change from other modes of explanation that, though often imported into historical writing, are intrinsically alien to it. Once we have understood this theory, we will be in a position to consider the further implications, for historical inquiry in particular and for the human sciences in general, of Oakeshott’s suggestion that the identities relied upon in explaining historical change are themselves changing identities.

Historical Explanation Historical inquiry, we have seen, begins in (though it may soon pass beyond) a study of historical individuals: identified persons, institutions, situations, and events that are themselves subject to change. It is an inquiry that seeks to explain change, for to ask why events have happened, or how institutions have altered over time, is to invite an explanation of historical change (EM 125; OH 98). Oakeshott’s theory of historical explanation is, as one would expect, related to a wish to defend the modal autonomy of historical inquiry, and in this case the immediate enemy is positivist, evolutionist, and Marxist historiography. Oakeshott pursues this aim by distinguishing authentic historical explanations from quasi-scientific explanations that rest on general laws and causal conditions, on the one hand, and from explanations that ascribe to history an overall end or direction, on the other. Such explanations are distorted by scientific or practical concepts and concerns, and sometimes by both. Whatever form the argument takes, the effort to look beneath the surface of events to discover causal or teleological laws that are not themselves events has no place in a historical inquiry, for such laws cannot be inferred from surviving evidence of connected events (OH 59). They are obstacles to historical inquiry imposed upon it by unhistorical scientists and prophets or by unwary historians. Causal or teleological explanations, Oakeshott insists, even if coherent in their own terms, cannot be the kind of explanations sought in historical inquiry understood as the inferential construction of a past composed of related historical occurrences: explanations based on identifying contingent relationships between antecedent and subsequent events. According to this view of historical explanation, to explain a historical event is to fit it into a pattern that the historian must construct and make intelligible on the basis of the available evidence. But this intelligibility is gained “always by means of greater and more complete detail” (EM 143), not by appealing to causal or teleological laws. In the historical mode nothing is natural or inevi-

161

Historical Understanding

table: there is no plot or plan in history, no mechanism, no Providence, no dialectic, no dénouements, no mainstream, no “meta-narrative.” A historical event is not an inevitable outcome, a necessary consequence of antecedent conditions or the “culmination” of a series of events, because in historical understanding events have no necessary causes, inherent potentialities, or permanent meanings. The only outcome of historical events is other events, themselves unknown and unforeseeable, whose “character”—hermeneutic individuality— is simply the circumstantial convergence of what went before. Practically speaking, events may be seen as progressive or regressive, but as objects of historical investigation they are neither, because history is concerned solely with reconstructing past events from present evidence. And although all such reconstructions are revisions of previous understandings and are themselves subject to revision, no properly historical revision can depend on what came afterward: John F. Kennedy may provide evidence on which to base a historical understanding of Bill Clinton, but not vice versa. Whatever significance may be read back into the past from subsequent happenings is not historical significance. The danger in defining historical inquiry as the construction of narratives is that in a narrative one may interpret the past with the benefit of hindsight, and although this may be illuminating it is not history. An account of the past in which events, as one narrativist philosopher puts it, “are continually being re-described, and their significance reevaluated” in relation to subsequent events, is not a historical account, for it allows the meaning of historical facts to depend on concepts and judgments that are not themselves historical.19 Historical Events and Contingent Relations One cannot understand Oakeshott’s theory of historical explanation unless one recalls that the proper task of the historian is not to explain events that are assumed to have happened but to identify events that can be shown to have happened. Furthermore, the issue in historical explanation is to explain the character and not the mere occurrence of events. A historical event is not an atomic, isolated, permanent thing but (as we have seen) an “identity” or “historical individual” constructed by the historian. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, analytic philosophers of history were so entirely preoc19. Arthur C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 11.

162

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

cupied with the problem of historical explanation that they neglected the prior question, one that faces every historian: “How does one come to know what happened in the historical past?”20 History books—books “about” history—implicitly invite their readers to take a realist view of the historical past for granted, for in a historical narrative the past is there to be recounted and explained, not an unknown that has to be established. But the author of such a narrative, the historian, cannot take this view. The historian’s task is to show, given the rules of historiography and the evidence identified according to those rules, what it is reasonable to believe about the past. The philosopher of history cannot avoid the epistemological difficulties that face the historian by simply assuming that these difficulties have been overcome. A genuine historical explanation, Oakeshott maintains, concerns events that are understood to be the outcome of earlier events, not of underlying processes. An explanation of the latter sort is not a historical but a scientific, or more probably a pseudo-scientific, explanation. Historical explanation is concerned with relationships among individual events, that is, events understood to be related not as types of events but with respect to their individual features in a past composed of human thoughts and actions. And this means that it must concern the circumstantial character or meaning of these events. The historian’s task is to establish, from present evidence, a past composed of events understood in relation to antecedent events in such a way that the events to be explained are made intelligible. The explanation, in other words, must be one in which what are taken to be the relevant antecedents are those that not merely account for the occurrence of an event but illuminate its meaning. In a historical explanation, the antecedent events that explain another, subsequent event are those that affected “the coming into being of a subsequent and which converge to constitute its historical character” (OH 98). A historical explanation is really just a collection of antecedent events selected by a historian for “what they contribute to the understanding of the historical character of a subsequent event” (OH 111–12). To explain an event historically is therefore to comprehend its character as an individual event by distinguishing, among its innumerable antecedents, other events that can make that character clear because their meaning or significance is related to its own. It is “to detect the significant in the merely antecedent and thus to transform the subsequent into some kind of a consequent” (OH 72). 20. Leon J. Goldstein, The What and the Why of History: Philosophical Essays (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), xii.

163

Historical Understanding

An authentically historical relationship between events is, in short, internal and intrinsic, never merely external and fortuitous. It is, to recall the discussion at the end of Chapter 3, a relationship of “contingency.”21 As Oakeshott analyzes it, the concept of contingency is more precise than the concepts of “configuration” and “colligation” that others have proposed to capture the distinctive character of historical explanation, and it more adequately differentiates authentically historical explanations from explanations that are only spuriously historical. A historical explanation may be “configurational” in the sense that it explains an event by showing how it fits into a pattern of occurrences. And historians may generate explanations by “colligating” events, connecting them to compose a coherent account. Both concepts fail, however, to exclude the attempt to make sense of events by interpreting them in the light of subsequent events, which is unhistorical because it reads a present understanding back into the past.22 In a contingent relationship, an event is seen as a consequence of its antecedents. But the kind of consequence envisioned must be carefully specified. For Oakeshott, a contingent relationship is one in which the event to be explained is understood to be “the difference made” by the confluence of these antecedent events. Why, for example, did the United States send a military force to overthrow the Marxist government of Grenada in 1983? According to one explanation, the decision was the consequence of several antecedent situations and events: a long-standing wish to be rid of that government; the existence of an invasion plan designed to achieve this end; the emergence of an opposition; a climate of increasing insecurity together with the presence of American citizens on the island; and a growing fear, following a terrorist attack on Americans in Lebanon, that something similar might happen in Grenada. These elements combine to make intelligible the United States government’s decision to invade in a particular manner and at a particular moment. And the ambitions, fears, and dispositions that belong to the situation in which the decision was reached can themselves be analyzed into historical events and explained as outcomes of events. In constructing a historical explanation, the 21. It is the relationship between historical events that is “contingent,” not the events themselves (OH 94). Oakeshott does not use the term “contingency” in Experience and Its Modes, but the idea is there in what he calls the “unity or continuity of history” (EM 141). 22. On the idea of “configuration,” see L. O. Mink, Historical Understanding, ed. Brian Fay, E. O. Golob, and R. T. Vann (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 51–54; on “colligation,” W. H. Walsh, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History, 3d ed. (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1967), 24–25, 59–63.

164

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

historian establishes contingent relationships between the event to be explained and the antecedents, themselves events or sequences of events, that account for its character. So accounted for, a historical event can be seen as “itself a convergence of significantly related historical events” (OH 92). A contingent relationship is both immediate and circumstantial. It is immediate in being a relationship of proximity or contiguity. Contingently related events, Oakeshott suggests, are connected with one another by a filling in of ever smaller details. When a historical account is finished, one event “touches” another in such a way that there is neither need nor room for further mediating events or relations. And it is circumstantial in the sense that events in a historical explanation are related simply because, according to the evidence, they happen to be contiguous: the relationship is a matter of evidence and not of causal necessity or probability. Historical events are not joined by “the glue of normality or the cement of general causes” (OH 94) but only by an evidential contiguity in which particular antecedent events fit together to generate a subsequent event. The idea of contingency, analyzed in this way, casts additional light on Oakeshott’s version of the claim that historical conclusions are inferential. Because its identity as an event is the object of historical inquiry, an explained event is always the outcome of an investigation in which a historian seeks to understand its relation to other events that have converged to make it what it is. This point is of the utmost importance and therefore bears repeating. Despite the illusion of reality that is created by a historical narrative, a historical explanation does not seek to account for a given, univocal, already understood event—an “actual” event. Its aim is to specify the character—the individual circumstantial meaning—of a provisionally identified event, and this can be done only by understanding the meaning of that event in relation to its antecedents. To explain an event historically, in other words, is to understand it as an intelligible outcome of these antecedents and not merely to account for its occurrence. One cannot assume that one already understands an event one hopes to explain, for its character as a historical event cannot be understood before one has looked into it. To explain an event historically is to make more intelligible something that has been provisionally identified but that needs to be further defined and understood. In a historical inquiry, then, we do not simply examine an understood historical event to discern what its antecedents must have been, for in coming to understand those antecedents our understanding of the event is inevitably altered. In explaining an event, we come to understand it differently, which is

165

Historical Understanding

to say that the very thing we want to explain changes as we succeed in explaining it. It is in this sense that it is proper to say that in framing a historical explanation the historian not only infers but “constructs” the event to be explained. Where historians know almost nothing about what happened, we can see a single historian constructing events for the first time; where much is known, we should say that events have been constructed by the community of historians. In both cases, the past is always the outcome of intellectual labor.23 For Oakeshott, to speak of explaining historical events and explaining historical change is to speak of the same thing. It follows that if the former must be understood in terms of contingency, so must the latter. “Change in history,” he writes in Experience and Its Modes, “carries with it its own explanation; the course of events is one, so far integrated, so far filled in and complete, that no external cause or reason is looked for or required in order to account for any particular event” (EM 141). But the aim of historical explanation is to account only for historical change. “There is no such thing as change per se, and . . . every distinct notion of change has its counterpart in a different mode of understanding the past” (OH 116). Because historical thinking is recurrently distracted by other conceptions of change, it is important to distinguish historical change from change as it is understood in ordinary life, in religion, or in science. Authentic history is impossible where an inquiry imposes on the interpretation of events a notion of change that, because it belongs to another mode, is extrinsic to those events understood as historical events. A historical narrative may be a “story” of change constructed by a historian, but it is not a fiction constructed by a novelist or tragedian. The hand of providence or the revolution of rising expectations are explanations of change that may make religious or scientific sense, but they have no place in an authentically historical explanation. Such a view of historical explanation implies two grounds on which the idea of historical change can be distinguished from other, modally different, kinds of change. First, the past as it is constructed historically is composed of historical events and nothing but historical events. What at one level is understood as a community, a situation, or a policy resolves itself, if the analysis is pushed far enough, into a pattern of connected events. In an authentic historical investigation, a historical identity—the thing that is studied and that 23. Goldstein, Historical Knowing, 58. Goldstein’s book provides many illuminating examples of historical construction.

166

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

undergoes changes—is itself seen as an event or a sequence of events, a “composition of differences” whose elements are selected because they make a difference in the way the event to be explained is understood. This identity, which is the true object of historical knowledge, is not something outside an understood collection of events, an unchanging element in the situation. It is no more than the “inherent continuity” of this collection of events, whose pattern is not the presupposition but the conclusion of a historical inquiry. And, second, in a historical inquiry, every historical event—that is, every event that is part of a historical change to be explained—is recognized as significant because it helped to shape a subsequent event whose historical character the historian is trying to ascertain. All the elements of Oakeshott’s constructionist account of historical explanation are now in place. In an authentically historical inquiry, the historian constructs a past by making inferences from past objects that have survived into the present and are treated as evidence. And this past can be understood either as “a past of historical events” or as “historical change,” that is, either as an assemblage of events contingently related to one another as antecedents and subsequents or, which is the same thing, what Oakeshott, in the forbidding style of On History, calls “an assembled passage of antecedent differences which, in virtue of its continuity, constitutes a passage of historical change” (OH 115). A historical explanation, by showing how historical events fit together to shape the character of other events, makes intelligible the differences that constitute a historical change. Historical Causation I have explicated Oakeshott’s hermeneutical view of historical explanation with such care not only because it is both extremely subtle and crucial to his conception of the human sciences generally, but also because it is not the view of historical explanation that most historians or philosophers of history hold. The model of explanation most often articulated is one that relies on causality, as it is understood either in ordinary or in scientific discourse. In this alternative model, to explain an event historically is to identify its causes or causal conditions. In Oakeshott’s judgment, most causal explanations fail as historical explanations because they attempt to explain historical events in nonhistorical terms. Historians who propose causal explanations of historical events or philosophers who defend them dismiss the historian’s primary concern, which is to infer an

167

Historical Understanding

unknown past from present evidence and to explain that past by making its occurrences intelligible as the outcome of other occurrences. By replacing this distinctively historical concern with an enterprise of seeking causal explanations, their arguments risk crossing the boundaries that separate history from practice or science. The result is modal irrelevance and confusion. Talk of causation does not, however, invariably signal a nonhistorical attitude, for there are different kinds of causal explanation. Different conceptions of causation figure in what purport to be historical explanations, and these conceptions need to be distinguished from one another. The word “cause” is sometimes used loosely, and quite unhistorically, to call attention to the antecedents of an event believed to be abnormal or especially significant (as when the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand is identified as the cause of the First World War) or to assign responsibility for an event that is regarded as the outcome of an intentional act (as when Hitler’s decision to invade Poland is identified as the cause of the Second World War). Or it may stand for the pseudo-scientific invocation of climate or national character treated (in the manner of Ibn Khaldun or Montesquieu) as an underlying factor that explains historical change. In some cases the causes invoked—God or human nature—are so comprehensive as to explain little or nothing. Such explanations may have little appeal to professional historians, but they are commonplaces of popular history. Underlying many conceptions of the causes of historical change is a distinction between essential and incidental events, the former understood to have produced, the latter merely to have accompanied, a given historical change. An essential event (the intervention of God or decision of a “great man”) is sometimes supposed to have altered the ordinary or “natural” course of events, in the same way that the application of force to a moving object will alter its speed or direction. Weber’s theory that capitalism emerged as a consequence of the impact on economic life of an extraneous event, the protestant revolution, invokes the idea of an intervention that alters what would otherwise be the normal course of events. But this distinction between the essential and the incidental has no place in an authentic historical explanation, Oakeshott argues. It is, on the contrary, an “incursion of science into the world of history” (EM 129). A similar objection can be made against the view that historical change is the result not of identifiable causes but of accident. Because it is the historian’s job to find coherence in the past, nothing in history can be regarded as accidental. For accident—mere chance or “fortune”—explains nothing, and a

168

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

past composed of accidents is as unhistorical as a past of necessary consequences. Any account of such a past would be incoherent and scarcely intelligible—at best, mere chronicle, at worst not even that. Neither Gorbachev’s decision to liberalize the Soviet regime nor the murder of President Kennedy were accidents that altered the course events; they were themselves events and therefore part of the course of events. An intervention never changes the course of events because it is the course of events and therefore not an “intervention” (RP 169). History is concerned with what the evidence compels us to conclude did happen, and not with what must have happened or with what might have happened. Unlike the participant or the eyewitness, who may see luck or fate in a flood, a victory, or the outcome of an election, the historian looks only for, and seeks only to explain, what actually took place (that is, what the evidence forces him to conclude took place). Historical inquiry is concerned neither with necessity nor with accident, but only with “the actual course of events which the evidence establishes” (EM 140). In addition to these informal, essentially practical ideas about historical causation, one can identify a number of more systematically elaborated conceptions. According to one influential version of the causal model, a past event is explained by showing it to be the outcome of an economic, evolutionary, or other social process governed by laws of historical change. Marxist history provides the most prominent, though not the only, example of this model. But as most philosophers of history now recognize, explanations of this sort are self-contradictory because the laws on which they rely must be generalizations that summarize observed regularities, and such generalizations (assuming they could be formulated) would be scientific laws, not laws of history. That is, they could not refer to individual historical events while remaining scientific laws, because scientific laws are abstract statements of general relations, not descriptions of actual sequences of particular events. General laws belong to science, sequences of events to history, and between them lies an unbridgeable modal gap. There is a further reason why an understanding of historical events cannot be based on the natural scientific laws governing an evolutionary or other biological process. An evolutionary process is one governed by a law of organic development that accounts for a sequence of biological events. But in history, the idea of biological evolution is no more than a metaphor, one that has been applied indiscriminately to languages, poetic genres, scientific disciplines, civilizations, and other cultural entities. None of these corresponds to an organic species except on the loosest of analogies, and none is actually understood in

169

Historical Understanding

relation to any “laws” of evolutionary change. Though Oakeshott has in mind the social Darwinist and other pseudo-evolutionary social theories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of what he has to say in Experience and Its Modes about this sort of thinking applies with equal force to the more sophisticated sociobiological theories of the present. Another version of causality in history rests on teleological rather than scientific laws. But a cause of change in an authentic historical inquiry cannot be teleological any more than it can be physical or biological. In teleological change of the kind postulated in the Judaic, Christian, Enlightenment, and Marxist stories of mankind’s origin and destiny, each significant event represents a stage in an already known process of development, and the underlying identity that changes is a potential to be realized as this process unfolds. But the events in an account of authentic historical change do not culminate in a condition whose potential and therefore character is already known. “‘No oak trees without acorns’ may be a formally true proposition, but that this acorn did in fact produce this oak tree, there and then, is not a teleological necessity; it is a circumstantial occurrence” (OH 104–5). Because history is what happened, not what must have happened, there is no room in an authentic historical explanation for teleological causes. Because there are, in the world understood historically, no previously postulated underlying causes or fixed potentialities, and therefore no necessary causal or teleological laws, the object of historical scholarship must be defined by criteria intrinsic to the events the historian is seeking to understand, unless the historian is content to regard historical change as a series of unrelated accidents. What makes a body of events intelligible as an episode of historical change is neither a presupposed extrinsic order (which would be unhistorical) nor mere chance (which would be unintelligible) but whatever order can be seen to emerge from the events themselves, as they are identified by the evidence relevant to the questions that the historian is trying to answer in a given inquiry, and as they are related contingently to one another on the basis of that evidence. No explanation that discovers the causes of historical change outside history itself can qualify as a historical explanation, for it contradicts the postulated character of historical inquiry as an effort to recover a past, as Oakeshott puts it, “composed of passages of related events, inferred from present objects recognized as survivals from the past, and assembled as themselves answers to historical questions” (OH 46). The most sophisticated version of the causal model of historical explanation is one in which the occurrence of an individual event is shown to be a

170

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

necessary consequence of the conjunction of general laws and factual conditions. More precisely, an explanation of this kind (sometimes called a “deductive-nomological explanation”) seeks to derive a statement describing the occurrence of an event from two other kinds of statements. One is a statement of law-like relationships that are based on empirical regularities and can be empirically falsified, but which are assumed for the purposes of historical explanation to be valid. The other is a statement of the antecedent conditions that, in conjunction with those laws, constitute the causes of the event to be explained. This positivist model of historical explanation, which preoccupied philosophers of history for several decades following the publication in 1942 of Carl Hempel’s landmark article, “The Function of General Laws in History,” takes its departure from the commonsense view of history shared by historians and laymen.24 Instead of considering questions about the epistemology of history raised long ago by Croce, Collingwood, and other philosophers who were familiar with historical scholarship, philosophers of history in English-speaking countries focused on the issue of explanation, itself narrowly defined, in isolation from such scholarship. Such a focus, which assumes that issues of historical fact are unproblematic, begs the central philosophical question raised by history as the study of that which no longer exists: How is historical knowledge possible? Oakeshott’s objection to this version of the causal model, in other words, is that it ignores the main thing a historical explanation is supposed to do, which is to identify significant relationships between events that are not yet fully identified and understood. A deductive-nomological explanation assumes that the existence and meaning of a historical event have already been established, and it aims to explain the occurrence of this event. But what needs to be explained in a historical inquiry is not the occurrence of already-understood events; it is the occurrence of events whose character is not yet known. The boundaries of these events, their identities as historical individuals, have to be established. To deduce one understood event (a consequent) from another (an antecedent) by means of general laws cannot form part of an inquiry that seeks to understand a past that is not yet understood. For Oakeshott, this dismissal of the historian’s main concern—to understand a not-yet-understood past—is inherent in the idea of causal explanation. 24. Journal of Philosophy 39 (1942), 35–48. The landmark rejoinder, William Dray, Laws and Explanation in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), does not question Hempel’s premise that historical inquiry aims at explanation.

171

Historical Understanding

We look for causes only where we are trying to explain already known and understood effects. But a historical inquiry must account not merely for the occurrence of an event but for the kind of event it is—for its individual character or meaning in relation to other events. And this meaning cannot be understood until we inquire into it. In other words, to explain an event as the outcome of general laws requires that we understand the event to be explained, and this requires interpretation. The positivist model of explanation assumes as already known what in fact it is the purpose of historical scholarship to discover. In a causal explanation we are not concerned with the individual character of an event. We are concerned with types of events, for only recurrent events, accumulated into types, can be regularly preceded and caused by other recurrent events. An individual event cannot be “regularly” accompanied by anything because regularity implies repetition. Monet used an uncharacteristically garish palette in the works he painted shortly before his cataract surgery, and no doubt there is information about the effects of cataracts on color vision that can help us to understand this incident. But not every painter afflicted with cataracts chooses garish colors. Causal explanations cannot explain individual events in all their circumstantial complexity, but only “the occurrence of happenings abstracted and identified in terms of their kinds” (OH 81–82). And such explanations, while perhaps a proper concern of science, have nothing to do with historical inquiry. History, as members of the nineteenth-century German historical school and its contemporary philosophical interpreters had argued against an earlier generation of positivists, is concerned not with abstract and general relations among classes of occurrences, but with “events in respect of their individuality, not merely in place and time, but of character” (OH 88). To explain a historical event is to display it as the consequent of other, antecedent, events that can illuminate its significance. It is to identify a relationship (a relationship of contingency) in which an event to be understood is related to those antecedent events that make it intelligible. It is true that an explanation of this kind is sometimes described as one that seeks to identify the causes of an event. But, Oakeshott suggests, to use the word “cause” in this way is to exclude “all that properly (or even distantly) belongs to the notion of causality” (OH 85). For to do so is not to identify necessary, sufficient, or exclusive relationships between events, nor to is it to explain an event as the joint outcome of antecedent conditions and general laws. If the word “cause” has any meaning in historical explanation, it is simply as a way of

172

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

expressing the historian’s proper concern, which is to establish connections between events by distinguishing the antecedents that are significant for understanding a historical event from those that are not.

History and the Human Sciences In historical understanding, human conduct is composed of individual occurrences, each seen as the contingent outcome of other occurrences involving agents whose actions are responses to their understood situations. To understand such occurrences historically is to be concerned “with the transactions these actions . . . circumstantially converged to compose and with the reverberations they contingently set going” (OHC 107). Historical understanding, then, is a particular way of understanding human conduct. How is it related to other ways in which human conduct may be understood? As in the case of practical understanding, it is helpful to contrast Oakeshott’s views with Collingwood’s. The two had an enduring interest both in history and in the philosophy of history and they admired each other’s achievements. Each embraced a version of the view that, as Collingwood puts it, “the science of human affairs [is] history.”25 But they often disagreed. In particular, Oakeshott explicitly repudiates the two claims about historical understanding for which Collingwood is most famous. The first of these claims is that historical inquiry aims to recover past thoughts and feelings and that it proceeds by reenacting the past. Collingwood is often taken, for this reason, to be a constructionist, but to reenact past experience is not to reconstruct an objective historical past. For Oakeshott, the aim of historical inquiry is to construct a past of contingently related events, and these events may not have been understood by those participating in them. What people once thought and felt is part of the past, but their thoughts and feelings cannot be all of it. Furthermore, because different people think and feel different things, past persons, factions, classes, faiths, or peoples cannot be said to have understood themselves in only one way. Though recovered thoughts and feelings may figure in a historical explanation, they are not themselves such an explanation. “An historical account of the past at least purports to present something which was never in the mind of anybody at the time; the historian at least appears to have a way of thinking about the past which would 25. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), 115.

173

Historical Understanding

have been impossible for anyone who lived in that past.”26 An event inferred in a historical inquiry is not an action—an “assignable performance” (OHC 64)—but a result or outcome (the word “event” has its origin in the Latin eventus, the past participle of evenire, “to come out” or “happen”). Because it is not an action, an event cannot be explained in terms of intentions; it may involve intentions, but it also includes unintended consequences.27 For all these reasons, the historical past as it is constructed by the historian must be distinguished from a past reexperienced in the historian’s imagination. Second, and more important for our discussion here, is Collingwood’s assertion of what might be called the primacy of history: the view that all knowledge rests on past experience. One of Collingwood’s arguments for this conclusion belongs to the theory of knowledge he develops in Speculum Mentis (1924), according to which different forms of understanding build upon and transcend one another, philosophy being the highest and most comprehensive stage in a sequence of forms. Philosophy works not with the material of immediate experience but with that material as it has been progressively transformed by art, religion, science, and finally history. One might wonder how philosophy can be the highest science if it is a commentary on or outgrowth of historical knowledge, and in some lectures on the philosophy of history he wrote two years after the publication of Speculum Mentis, Collingwood in fact casts doubt on this conclusion, arguing that because history is the immediate source of philosophy and therefore closest to it in spirit, “all philosophy is the philosophy of history.”28 By making historical understanding the mediator between philosophy (viewed, in the Platonic or Idealist manner, as the most critical and comprehensive of all ways of knowing) and the rest of experience, Collingwood privileges historical knowledge, just as realists privilege scientific knowledge, theologians religious knowledge, and pragmatists practical knowledge. “Almost imperceptibly,” Oakeshott writes, “Collingwood’s philosophy of history turned into a philosophy in which all knowledge is assimilated to historical knowledge.”29 Though he does not mention Collingwood in Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott does consider a number of “historicist” arguments in that work. Leaving aside the view, sometimes called historicist, that historical events are 26. Review of Walsh, 277. 27. Robert Grant, Oakeshott (London: Claridge Press, 1990), 102–3. 28. R. G. Collingwood, “Lectures on the Philosophy of History” (1926), in The Idea of History, rev. ed., ed. Jan Van Der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 425. 29. Review of Collingwood, 85.

174

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

governed by scientific or teleological laws (a view Oakeshott rejects and that we have already discussed), historicism may be defined as the view that all knowledge either begins with or ends with historical knowledge.30 According to the first of these claims, all knowledge is derived from history and is therefore inherently historical. If historical experience is the most primordial form of human existence, if experience itself is historical, then all other modes of understanding must be seen as modifications of historical understanding. According to the second, historical thinking is the highest, most critical, form that understanding can achieve. It is higher even than philosophy, whose questions and answers the historian can show to be rooted in time and place. If this is the case, other kinds of knowledge, when criticized and corrected, reveal themselves to be no more than inferior forms of historical knowledge. Historicism, in either of these versions, promises privileged access to reality—a promise that, for Oakeshott, is as spurious as any other kind of foundationalism. The conclusion that historical knowledge is foundational is sometimes taken to rest on the premise that historical individuals are tangible and real— in contrast, for example, to the mathematical abstractions of science. But recall Oakeshott’s reason for thinking that this premise is mistaken: that the historical individual is not a given, objective, permanent “thing.” Individuality is always a matter of degree and of choice. Even historical persons, whose attributes, like everything else in the historical past, must be inferred, are historians’ constructions. Because these attributes depend on historical evidence, and this evidence is not evidence until it has been interpreted within a framework of supporting assumptions and conclusions, we cannot say that historical persons, institutions, situations, or events exist except as they are constituted through inferences made and sustained in historical scholarship. Far from being real givens, historical individuals are designations that make sense only within a system of historical ideas, and they certainly cannot be invoked as a ground for that system. Historical thought is no more independent of judgment than any other kind of thought. Historical knowledge is not knowledge of a given, autonomous, premodal reality. It is the construction of a reality from problematic evidence 30. The scientific/teleological meaning of “historicism” gives an unfortunate twist to a word that, though ambiguous, formerly connoted a specifically historical mode of understanding. The new meaning was popularized by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1945) and The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957). Its influence among philosophers of history is illustrated in Maurice Mandelbaum’s History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).

175

Historical Understanding

according to the categories and canons of historical inquiry. Far from rescuing us from transience and uncertainty, historical inquiry selects from the transient material of present experience to construct a continually changing view of the past. There is, for Oakeshott, an irony in the hope that by knowing history we can escape the impermanence of the present: far from avoiding change, historical thinking organizes all experience under the category of change. No “historicist” effort to assert the priority of historical understanding can survive close scrutiny. For Oakeshott, history is a mode of understanding; it is neither a source of raw material for other modes nor a kind of understanding that supersedes, or even employs, their conclusions. History is neither the beginning nor the end of knowledge; it is merely one kind of knowledge among others. Like any other mode of understanding, it is conditional: it rests on assumptions that it cannot question without turning itself into a different kind of inquiry. In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott maintains that as a mode of understanding, history must be regarded as defective, because these assumptions (like the idea of the historical individual) are revealed on examination to be arbitrary—mere tools, not reality itself. In his later writings, however, he is no longer interested in arguing that history, as an inquiry bound by modal presuppositions, is inferior to philosophy, which transcends such presuppositions. His concern is simply to identify the presuppositions of historical inquiry and to defend its autonomy as a distinctive manner of thinking. Nothing in this shift of emphasis can be interpreted as awarding historical knowledge ontological priority or as supporting the conclusion that Oakeshott’s approach to the human sciences is “historicist,” as I have been using that term. Though he rejects historicism, Oakeshott nevertheless regards historical inquiry as central to the human sciences. What exactly is at stake, then, in the claim, which he seems to endorse, that the disciplines that study human conduct— the humanities and the social sciences—are in some sense historical sciences? The identification of history and the human sciences goes back to the efforts of nineteenth-century German historians to distinguish historical writing from belles lettres, and to free it from the practical concerns of moral instruction and statecraft, by turning the study of history into a rigorous empirical discipline.31 History was to be the science of mind, just as physics and chemistry are sciences of the material world. But by the end of the century it was becoming 31. This is the polemical intent behind Ranke’s assertion that historians must aim to understand the past “as it really is” (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist). Felix Gilbert, History: Politics or Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 45.

176

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

clear that just as there are many sciences of nature, so there are many “human sciences”—sciences of mind or culture rather than of nonhuman nature. The question that had to be addressed, then, is whether history is one among the human sciences or comprehends them all. Those who identified the disciplines concerned with human action and its products as “historical sciences” understood them as disciplines concerned with meaning. The historical sciences, in this context, are interpretive sciences, those that understand human practices as systems of meaning and human performances as expressions of meaning. But the word “historical” also implies a concern with particularity or individuality, and the resulting view of the historical sciences as both hermeneutic and individualizing can be a source of confusion unless one is clear which attribute is intended in a given context. Rickert, for example, uses the expression “historical science” to stand for any science, whether or not it deals with human beings, that is concerned with individuality rather than with generalization. Sciences that describe individuals instead of discovering natural laws are historical sciences, regardless of their subject matter: “Empirical reality becomes nature when we view it with respect to its universal characteristics; it becomes history when we view it as particular and individual.” For Rickert, the human sciences are “historical [that is, individualizing] sciences which deal with cultural phenomena.”32 In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott stands with Rickert in insisting that history is a point of view, not a subject matter. The character of historical knowledge is defined by its postulates, not by the material on which they are brought to bear. Just as the postulates of science constitute the objects of scientific inquiry, so those of history constitute what historians seek to understand. It follows that the subject matter of historical inquiry is not limited to human conduct: “there is nothing in the human to distinguish it absolutely from the non-human past” (EM 102). On this definition of history, the eruption of a volcano on a given occasion is a historical as well as a natural event. But despite these implications of his modal theory, Oakeshott is mainly concerned with historical inquiry as a way of understanding human conduct, and in later writings he makes this limitation of scope clear. Historical inquiry, so understood, is neither more extensive than the human sciences nor coextensive with them; it is one of several ways of understanding human conduct 32. Heinrich Rickert, Science and History: A Critique of Positivist Epistemology, trans. George Reisman (Princeton: Van Nostrand and Co., 1962), 57, 16; The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science: A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sciences, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

177

Historical Understanding

and therefore one among the human sciences. Not all ways of understanding conduct explain it in terms of contingency. But the other human sciences, insofar as they explain individual performances, still depend on historical explanation. The explanations of human conduct offered by scholars in the human sciences are in effect partial or truncated historical explanations. They fall short as explanations because even though they offer an interpretation of human conduct, they cannot account for why a particular person responded in a particular way in a particular situation, or, in general, why individual performances, events, and practices, are what they are. The failure of the human sciences to provide genuine explanations of individual human performances can be seen most clearly in those disciplines that remain committed to the idea of a science of human conduct on the model of the natural sciences, and which rest on the claim that, even if the conclusions of this science cannot be reduced to those of biology or physics, one can still frame generalizations about intelligent action and use such generalizations to explain particular acts. In On Human Conduct, Oakeshott considers two versions of this claim: the argument that actions can be explained as expressions of human nature and the argument that they are explained by the agent’s social circumstances. For Oakeshott, the venerable enterprise of understanding human acts as expressions of human nature has only limited explanatory utility. Whether we rely on the idea of human nature in general or on a more precisely defined set of dispositions believed to be characteristic of a class of persons, the effort to conceive an agent as composed of certain “characteristic” dispositions cannot tell us much about any particular act he or she may perform (OHC 95). Women are not invariably nurturing, nor are liars invariably untruthful. Such general characteristics, in other words, cannot illuminate differences between different expressions of the trait in question. That politicians are characteristically disloyal and dishonest, even if true, tells us little about why Alcibiades or Richard Nixon broke this promise or told that lie. Neither “human nature” in general nor any set of dispositional qualities ascribed to a particular class of human beings can provide an adequate explanation of particular acts. Such concepts can be used to formulate generalizations, but if we want to explain individual performances, these generalizations cannot take us very far. The same point can be made about the efforts of sociologists, political scientists, market researchers, and many others to explain particular acts in relation to an agent’s “social circumstances”—that he or she is college-educated, unemployed, or an immigrant, for example. Such characterizations are often

178

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

used in ordinary life, and they provide the organizing categories for many statistical analyses. But ordinary practical explanations based on common sense must not be confused with a quantitative, explanatory science of society. Moreover, statistical studies, which are often taken by those who engage in them to constitute such a science, are barred, even when they succeed in reaching their aim, from explaining any particular human choice. A science that relies on information about social circumstances must find its explanations not in the intelligent choices and self-understanding of agents performing actions but in causal relationships between not-intelligent identities: income levels, suicide rates, and other variables that are abstracted from conduct (Durkheim’s “social facts”). And even when it is successful, this enterprise has nothing to do with understanding or predicting the thoughts and actions of individual persons on specific occasions. Implicit in both strategies for salvaging the idea of a natural science of human conduct that can explain individual performances is the unwarranted assumption that an explanation that draws upon statistical generalizations is a scientific explanation. But generalizations about how people in general, people of a certain sort, or people in certain social circumstances customarily behave are not scientific generalizations about a time-independent class of phenomena; they are more or less well-disguised descriptions of customs specific to a particular historical situation. To explain an event in terms of the customs it is said to exemplify is to invoke, not laws of the sort uncovered by science, but descriptive generalizations about the practices of a particular time and place. The same can be said of the efforts of social scientists to predict particular events, such as the outcome of an election, for such efforts typically rely not on causal laws but on statistical models that extrapolate data patterns of limited generality. It should be added that statistical social science is not the only enterprise that seeks to represent intelligent human conduct as the unintended outcome of human dispositions or social circumstances, for this is also the program of structuralism and poststructuralism in the hands of LéviStrauss, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, and others whose arguments, though diverse and often incompatible, reduce human actions to the systems (“structures,” “discourses”) that produce them. When the pretense of scientific generalization is dropped, we are left with historically-specific generalizations, and with a way of speaking about conduct that is concerned not with particular actions but with historical situations or practices. Historians, for example, often make use of the kind of historical individual that Oakeshott calls a “situational identity” (OHC 57).

179

Historical Understanding

Situational identities are broad interpretive concepts like “the civilization of Renaissance Italy,” “the French Revolution,” or “Jeffersonian democracy,” each of which is a pattern of related occurrences identified by a historian in an effort to answer a historical question. But reconstructing a historical situation is only part of what is involved in formulating a historical explanation, for the identified situation is static: the situational identity gives us a historical past conceived as permanent, a past that cannot properly accommodate an account of change. To account for historical change we need an inquiry that aims not only at reconstructing a past situation but at explaining any occurrence, whether a simple performance or a complex situation, as itself a historical event or sequence of events—that is, to reveal it as an intelligible outcome of what went before. And because what went before are events, to explain an event historically is not to reveal its place in an unchanging situation, but to locate it in time and in relation to other events and to change. Like a generalization concerning human nature or social circumstances, then, a situational identity is an interpretive tool that falls short of explaining particular, contingent happenings. And the same may be said of efforts to account for human actions as expressions of unchanging structures or discourses. Many ways of explaining conduct seek to make sense of individual performances as expressions of, or reactions to, literary genres, architectural styles, moral ideals, and other practices composing conventional human understandings and arrangements. Much of what goes on in anthropology, literary criticism, cultural history, constitutional law, and other humanistic disciplines is concerned with the interpretation of actions as subscribing or not subscribing to such practices, understood as patterns or (as Oakeshott sometimes says) “languages” or “idioms” of human performance. The human sciences are concerned, each in its own way, with theorizing human conduct in relation to practices. A practice provides a “map” on which to locate individual performances. But the understanding provided by assigning performances a location on such a map is not a complete understanding: it reveals only their character as performances of a certain kind. When, in other words, we interpret a performance as reflecting a given practice, we reveal “the character of an action . . . in terms of its ‘conventionality’” (OHC 99–100). Such an approach requires learning and skill and is obviously important in the human sciences. But the understanding of human conduct it provides is limited. The explanation of performances as expressions of practices that may be used to illuminate them remains, then, an exercise in open-ended interpretation. It is

180 The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

incomplete and indeterminate for several reasons. First, every performance draws upon and is shaped by an indefinite number of practices, and is therefore open to being interpreted in an indefinite number of ways and to being described as an indefinite number of actions. Second, because practices are themselves historical occurrences, their intelligibility is also contextual. That is, although a practice provides a context for understanding individual performances, it requires its own context in order to be understood. A practice can itself be viewed as an event to be explained as the contingent outcome of antecedent events. The historian may, for example, want to understand how a practice came to be what it is and may explain it by composing a narrative that connects contingently related actions or other events. What is said about explaining performances therefore applies, by extension, to explaining practices (OHC 92n, 100n). Third, practices are not independent of the individual performances they are used to interpret, for practices are themselves created and continually modified by performances. Fourth, practices are displayed only in performances: a practice is the trace, the residue, of its performances. Practices are not “stable compositions of easily recognized characteristics.” They are nothing more than “footprints left behind by agents responding to their emergent situations, footprints which are only somewhat less evanescent than the transactions in which they emerged” (OHC 100). Like other historical identities, the practices that are used to illuminate performances are not immutable; properly understood, they are themselves changing identities in terms of which to understand change. And, finally, the conventionality of a performance is only one aspect of its character, and no performance can be explained or otherwise understood merely in terms of its having or not having a conventional character. No action can be understood only as it exemplifies or fails to exemplify a practice. For all these reasons, there are no conclusive interpretations. Interpretive theorizing in the human sciences involves “an engagement of historical understanding of a certain limited sort” (OHC 24), because it is always the interpretation of an individual expression of human intelligence. But interpretation is not historical in a narrower sense of the term—it is not history “properly so-called” (PFPS 19)—because it cannot explain particular performances: individual acts, distinguishable from other acts that exhibit a given practice. To interpret an act in relation to a practice cannot explain why an agent has chosen to view a situation or to respond to it in a particular manner. Practices can provide a context for interpreting a performance, but they are only one aspect of a larger context. They cannot provide more than a par-

181

Historical Understanding

tial and tentative understanding of the occurrence and meaning of a performance as an individual event because performances are related not only to practices but to other performances. What is needed to fill in the free space of interpretation that remains after an action’s conventionality or lack thereof has been explored is an account of its relationship to other actions, that is, an account that places it in a narrative of contingently related events: a historical explanation proper.

chapter

f i v e

Understanding the Civil Condition In the night of thick darkness enveloping ancient times there shines the eternal never-failing truth beyond all doubt: that the civil condition is certainly a human invention and that its principles are therefore those of human intelligences. —Vico, The New Science, § 331 The moral life appears only when human behavior is free from natural necessity; that is, when there are alternatives in human conduct. . . . Moral conduct is art, not nature: it is the exercise of an acquired skill. —“The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes”1

Many of the ideas we have been considering are brought together in Oakeshott’s efforts to answer one of the fundamental questions of political theorizing: How can human beings be related within an order that constrains their conduct while respecting their individuality? His answer is to imagine a mode of human relationship that is moral, in being premised on mutual recognition, but also legal, in that the considerations imposed on those related are compulsory. Reviving the vocabulary of an earlier time, Oakeshott identifies this mode as a relationship of “civility” (“civil association”).2 But, as one might 1. Oakeshott’s essay on Hobbes was written in 1960. The quoted passage is at RP 195–96 and HCA 76. The passage from Vico is as Oakeshott gives it at the head of the second essay in On Human Conduct (OHC 108). 2. Oakeshott’s first extended consideration of civil association (or “civil society,” as he then called it) is the introduction to his edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1946). For

184

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

expect, these terms (and related expressions like “the rule of law”) acquire particular meanings in the context of his investigation. Because even he found these meanings hard to disengage from other, less philosophical meanings, understanding Oakeshott’s theory of civil association requires careful attention. Moralities and legal systems are human practices that can be described and explained historically as the contingent outcome of antecedent events. And because these practices are used in conduct, they both exhibit and invite practical understanding. But morality and law can also be understood philosophically, as distinguishable kinds of human activity, by uncovering their presuppositions. Philosophical inquiry yields conclusions that are neither historical nor practical: conclusions that neither explain the occurrence of individual events nor offer precepts to guide individual acts, but which illuminate human practices by distinguishing modes of conduct as well as modes of inquiry. It is true that in discussions of morality and law, as elsewhere, ideas that belong to different modes of inquiry are often hard to disentangle. But we can, in principle, distinguish the philosophical task of elucidating the presuppositions of morality and law from the practical activity of making moral and legal judgments or from the historian’s concern to explain those judgments. Oakeshott is in some moods a moralist, a judge of mores and of conduct. But in writing about morality, he is concerned as a theorist to pursue an inquiry that excludes making moral judgments. Philosophers are always trying to change the world, he implies, but their proper task is to understand it. My aim in this chapter is to consider the view of morality and law that Oakeshott develops from his conception of practices as the outcome of and context for intelligent conduct. This will involve identifying what morality and law, as modes of human relationship, have in common as well as what distinguishes them from each other. Insofar as it is concerned with conceptual definition, Oakeshott’s analysis is philosophical, not descriptive. Morality, understood as a distinguishable manner in which human beings may be related to one another, presupposes agents engaged in the prudential pursuit of satisfactions within an order of authoritative and nonprudential (noninstrumental) considerations. And law, understood as a kind of moral association, comes into being where these considerations take the form of express obligations and where Oakeshott, as for Hobbes, the concern of “civil philosophy” is not to justify but to define and explain civil association. And for both, civil association is a work of art springing not from natural human sociability but from the convergent choices of separate wills. The most substantial of Oakeshott’s writings on Hobbes are reprinted, with some significant alterations, in Hobbes on Civil Association.

185

Understanding the Civil Condition

there are procedures for authoritatively interpreting legal obligations and securing compliance with them. Though Oakeshott has much to say about the history of the ideas of morality and law, my concern here is with his philosophical effort to define these ideas, not his investigations of the contexts in which they emerged and in relation to which they might be understood historically.

Morality and Moral Conduct Oakeshott has little to say about morality in Experience and Its Modes; that work is concerned with the logic of the practical world in general, not with distinguishing particular kinds of judgment or conduct within it. Nor does he treat morality except in passing in other early works. But beginning with “The Tower of Babel” (1948) and continuing in several essays on Hobbes, in a series of lectures on modern political thought delivered at Harvard University in 1956, in “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” (1959), and eventually in On Human Conduct and in a neglected but important essay on “The Rule of Law,” Oakeshott develops an increasingly subtle analysis of morality as a distinguishable mode of human conduct.3 Two main approaches to theorizing morality can be discerned in these writings. One distinguishes alternative idioms of European moral experience. Oakeshott initially contrasts moralities of habit or custom with those that rest on self-consciously articulated ideals or rules. Later, he makes a threefold distinction between communal, individualist, and collectivist moralities. Judging the first of these (perhaps prematurely) to be a relic in the modern world, he identifies the tension between individualist and collectivist moralities as an essential context of modern politics. Because it is largely historical and descriptive, I do not consider Oakeshott’s treatment of this theme except as it relates to his discussion of the idea of civil association. The second approach, which becomes prominent in that discussion, involves a narrower concern with philosophical definition. This explicit concern to define morality as a mode of human relationship makes its first appearance in “The Voice of Poetry.” In this essay, Oakeshott distinguishes aesthetic experience from other modes of experience, and especially from the mode of practical 3. “The Tower of Babel,” reprinted in Rationalism in Politics, should not be confused with a subsequent essay with the same title published in 1983 in On History. References to “The Voice of Poetry in the History of Mankind” are to the essay as it appears in the 1991 edition of Rationalism in Politics. “The Rule of Law” can be found in On History, 119–64.

186

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

experience (in which he had previously located it), but in doing so he also explores the ideas of morality and prudence, thereby anticipating the distinction between instrumental and noninstrumental modes of association that is central to his later efforts to theorize morality, law, and government. The idea of civil association, for example, is the idea of individuals coexisting within a framework of noninstrumental laws. In “The Voice of Poetry,” Oakeshott develops the idea of a prudential mode of practical activity from an essentially Hobbesian conception of prudence as ends-means reasoning. The world of practical activity, he suggests, is a world composed largely of “images” of pleasure and pain—images that, practically speaking, have real consequences for obtaining pleasure and avoiding pain.4 And the skills required to obtain pleasure and avoid pain are prudential skills. In practical activity, understood prudentially, “every image is the reflection of a desiring self engaged in constructing its world and in continuing to reconstruct it in such a manner as to afford it pleasure” (RP 499). Practical images are conceptions of things to be either used or avoided. The world of practice, viewed solely in prudential terms, is a world of desire and will, inhabited by a Hobbesian “desiring self.” As we experience it, this world is real: we seek pleasures and avoid pains that we regard as real, not illusory. The criterion of reality in practical activity is therefore pragmatic: an image is real if it has consequences for the satisfaction of our wants and especially “if by regarding it as ‘fact’ (pleasurable or painful) the desiring self is preserved for further activity” (RP 499). What we have so far, then, is a model of stark simplicity that reveals a crucial aspect of practical existence. But it is not the only aspect, and so we need a more complicated model. The world of desire and aversion is a world of many selves, but in this world only one of these is recognized as an authentic self. For the desiring self pursues pleasure and avoids pain in a world of other selves whom it regards in the same way that it regards things that are not selves: that is, instrumentally. It “admits the ‘fact’ of other selves, but refuses to recognize them as selves, refuses to recognize their subjectivity” (RP 499–500). This self inhabits a world of images related exclusively to its own desires, and this is (in Hobbes’s vivid metaphor) a solitary world where human life is unavoidably a war of all against all. 4. The key term in “The Voice of Poetry” is “imagination,” in contrast to “experience” (as in Experience and Its Modes) and “understanding” (in On Human Conduct).

187

Understanding the Civil Condition

To experience pleasure and avoid pain, one needs only the prudential skills of being able to recognize practically-relevant “fact” and to escape illusion. Such skills are needed most in dealing with other selves, who are there to be mastered and used, if possible, and otherwise avoided or destroyed. In this Hobbesian world, other people are repelled, enslaved, or turned into allies. These relations of coercion or exchange may be temporary or they may be relatively permanent, but they create no obligations and confer no rights. Even the making of alliances, which seems to require the recognition of other selves, is no more than “a disingenuous recognition of subjectivity: the bellum omnium contra omnes carried on by other means” (RP 501). The world of desire and aversion, so analyzed, achieves a certain degree of coherence. Though incomplete, it has a logic and the economic worldview it supports must be faulted not for what it sees but for what it fails to see. For there is more to life than satisfying wants, competing for resources, and practicing the arts of prudence and war. Practical activity also has a “moral” dimension, and when this is taken into account we find ourselves in a world that includes images not only of desire and aversion but also of approval and disapproval. Approval and disapproval differ from desire and aversion in that they imply standards of judgment: we may be averse to something and yet approve it, just as we can desire what we disapprove. And when this is recognized, conduct is seen as a complex activity of achieving both what is desired and what is approved, an activity that involves moral as well as prudential considerations. The skill required in moral conduct “is not that of knowing how to get what we want with the least expenditure of energy, but knowing how to behave as we ought to behave: the skill, not of desiring, but of approving and of doing what is approved” (HCA 76; RP 296). But, adding further complexity to our model, moral conduct involves more than simply paying attention to standards of approval, for morality implies a relationship between selves or agents that is categorially different from their relationship to things. In the world understood morally, one recognizes other persons not only to control them, but unconditionally, as “ends” in themselves and not only as “means” to one’s own ends. It is this recognition that defines the moral point of view. Morality, in this now Kantian and Hegelian as well as Hobbesian model, is possible only in a relationship between mutually recognizing subjects, for although an action can “go wrong” when it fails to achieve its imagined object, it can only “be wrong” in relation to “mutually recognized . . . conditions or practices” (OHC 259). Implicit here is the proposition that recognizing a practice as the basis of a relationship means recognizing

188

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

the selfhood of those related. In the moral point of view, persons are understood to be members of a community of persons, and “approval and disapproval are activities which belong to them as members of this community” (RP 502). Morality, in other words, inheres in the communal standards according to which judgments of approval and disapproval are made. Moral conduct is conduct that responds appropriately to these standards: it is conduct that involves “knowing how to behave in relation to selves ingenuously recognized as such” (RP 502). What is essential in moral conduct is the ability to treat other people as ends and not as mere instruments for the satisfaction of one’s own desires. In On Human Conduct, and then in “The Rule of Law,” Oakeshott further refines the distinction between prudence and morality as modes of human relationship. The first exists to satisfy wants, but the second is premised on an acknowledged practice or set of rules within which people seek to satisfy their wants. Because the distinction between these two modes is basic to Oakeshott’s analysis of the idea of law, and because critics have denied its cogency, it deserves detailed examination. In the prudential mode, human beings are related insofar as they impede or assist one another in their efforts to satisfy substantive wants. Prudential relationships and the instrumental practices they generate are evident in the activities people engage in, individually or collectively, in pursuing their goals— activities whose rationale lies in the purposes that motivate their participants. It is important to see that the wants that motivate agents need not be their own wants: there is no reason why an agent cannot define the situation as one in which the wants of others should be satisfied, and therefore no reason why an agent cannot be prudent on behalf of others. Prudence, in other words, is not limited to the management of one’s own interests (OHC 52–53). Purposive activity may involve rules for successfully achieving goals, but these rules have no independent significance. Such rules are maxims for exercising power, not moral precepts. They are a guide to “the prudential disposition of the available resources” (OH 124): “mutually understood instruments to promote the transactions they govern” (OHC 113). Where people cooperate in pursuing a shared purpose, rules are instrumental to that pursuit and are desirable only insofar as they are useful. They are the product of association, not its basis, and do not alter the mode of the relationship, which remains purposive. Let us call this kind of relationship “relationship in terms of wants”—an awkward but precise expression Oakeshott sometimes uses. As a mode of

189

Understanding the Civil Condition

relationship, it is shaped by the purposes those involved have chosen to pursue, by bargaining or cooperating, in an effort to satisfy their wants. “Transactions” of exchange between agents independently pursuing their own purposes can be distinguished from cooperative “enterprises” in which agents pursue shared purposes, so Oakeshott distinguishes “transactional association” (OHC 112), on the one hand, from the kind of association he calls “enterprise” (OHC 114, 118, 313, 315; OH 133), “purposive” (RP 453; OHC 313), or “corporate” (OHC 264), on the other. Both kinds of association, however, are relationships premised on the pursuit of interests: a transaction is no less purposive than cooperative activity and cooperation can be seen as a series of transactions. The distinction between a transaction and a cooperative enterprise is a distinction within the more inclusive “relationship in terms of wants.” A moral relationship cannot be a relationship of this kind, however. Moral conduct presupposes mutual recognition between independent agents, each pursuing his or her self-chosen ends. These agents, in seeking to satisfy their separate or collective wants, are related in various purposive transactions and enterprises and therefore concerned with a multiplicity of procedures, skills, and other practices that are instrumental to achieving their ends. But they are also constrained by practices that are not instrumental to the achievement of these ends: “moral” practices. In contrast to a prudential relationship, which exists to procure individual or joint satisfactions, a moral relationship is defined and ordered by noninstrumental standards of conduct: “conditional proprieties” expressly or tacitly recognized in all other relationships (OHC 88). These “proprieties” are authoritative considerations that agents must acknowledge, even if doing so interferes with efforts to achieve their individual and collective goals; they not only state criteria for judging right and wrong in conduct, but prescribe obligations (OH 132). It is, for example, proper that promises should be kept even when inconvenient, improper that a person should be “punished” for an offense of which he or she is known to be innocent. The reasons for adhering to an instrumental practice derive from its purposes or from the expected consequences of adhering to it, but the reasons for adhering to a moral practice are internal to the practice itself. The grounds on which behaving morally are justified are determined by a moral, not an extramoral, standard or criterion. In a moral practice, the standard is antecedent to the act, not tied to its consequences. One does not act morally for the sake of benefits to oneself or even to others. Moral practices are concerned with the intrinsic propriety of actions, not the desirability of outcomes. As Oakeshott puts it, a morality is “a practice without any extrinsic purpose; it is concerned

190

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

with good and bad conduct, and not with performances in respect of their outcomes” (OHC 62). It may help in understanding the argument Oakeshott is advancing here to put aside the semantic question of how the word “moral” should be used, and to consider whether one can, as he asserts, distinguish the desirability of an act in relation to its consequences from its propriety in relation to a noninstrumental precept or principle. This distinction is often denied by those who defend a utilitarian or some other consequentialist theory of morality. But it is denied irrationally, for their own position—that an act is right or wrong because of its expected consequences, not its relationship to a moral practice—in fact presupposes the distinction. Persons who are related in a “moral” (noninstrumental) practice may share the same beliefs, enjoy a happy convergence of interests, or find themselves joined in pursuing a shared goal. But recognizing the authority of moral constraints does not presuppose such agreement. And because morality does not presuppose purposive agreement, it can exist even among enemies. Indeed, a moral relationship may be all there is between those with incompatible aims. Nations at war with one another are morally required to observe, and sometimes do observe, rules limiting the conduct of war—not only because observing these rules can be shown in certain or in all circumstances to have objectively desirable consequences (this might or might not be true) but for reasons of “honor,” “humanity,” “civility,” or “respect for human rights,” all of which, in the tradition of the rules of war, express the ethos of the tradition itself. The objection that to acknowledge moral rules as obligatory requires at least some agreement on ends, because people would otherwise have no motive to accept common constraints on their conduct, confuses the contingent circumstances for the existence of a practice with its defining characteristics.5 For Oakeshott, steering a narrow course between the Scylla of Kantian Moralität and the Charybdis of Hegelian Sittlichkeit, a moral practice is a “language”: each morality is a noninstrumental practice, but each has its own vocabulary and syntax, can be used to conclude different things, is learned only in being used, and can be employed with varying degrees of skill. A morality is a “vernacular language of intercourse” and moral conduct is “a kind of literacy” (OH 133). And those who use a moral practice, like the speakers of a language, implicitly acknowledge the authority of its conventions. It is, moreover, because they are using their own acquired moral standards that 5. For a version of this objection, see Richard E. Flathman, The Practice of Political Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

191

Understanding the Civil Condition

they exist as agents. For just as one must have a language in order to speak, so one needs a “language of conduct” through which to express oneself in action. We use various prudential languages in the transactions and enterprises in which we are involved, but we cannot avoid expressing ourselves, also, in a noninstrumental “language of moral converse.” It is primarily in relation to our own moral practices that, as agents, we understand our situations, choose actions, and, in choosing, disclose our identities (to ourselves and others). In acting we explore the varied characters, styles, and relationships that are made possible by the moral practice we have learned to use. As Oakeshott puts it in an essay on Hobbes, “what we ought to do is unavoidably connected with what in fact we are,” and “the idioms of moral conduct which our civilization has displayed are distinguished, in the first place, not in respect of their doctrines about how we ought to behave, but in respect of their interpretations of what in fact we are” (HCA 76; RP 296). Michael Walzer makes a similar point when he suggests that our morality “is authoritative for us because it is only in virtue of its existence that we exist as the moral beings we are” and that “our categories, relationships, commitments, and aspirations are all shaped by, expressed in terms of, the existing morality.”6 Who I am depends not only on what I believe but on the beliefs embedded in the practices of the various communities to which I belong and in terms of which I define my identity. A moral practice is, for this reason, an inescapable condition of agency itself: “the ars artium of conduct; the practice of all practices; the practice of agency without further specification” (OHC 60). Though it can be understood, on the analogy of language, to provide a grammar of moral conduct—rules by which acts may be judged morally “correct” or “incorrect” (VLL 53)—a moral practice is not identical with such rules. Moral rules are merely abridgments of moral conduct, “passages of stringency in a moral practice” (OHC 67). But there is always more to a moral practice than can be stated, and much is lost when its nuances are replaced by codified formulas. The familiar words of moral discourse (justice, right, duty, responsibility, and the like) are abstractions, “faded metaphors” whose meaning alters with the contexts in which they are deployed. There are, moreover, many moral practices, many “vernaculars” of moral converse, each “a historic achievement of human beings” (OHC 63). Every morality, like every spoken 6. Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 21. Alan Donagan considers Oakeshott’s views on the character of morality in relation to those of Kant and Hegel in The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 9–17.

192

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

language, has its individual qualities, its peculiar resources and liabilities, for each is a continually renewed product of the actions of those who use it. Like a person or institution, a moral practice is an individual, always changing and yet continuously itself. It has a character but is not immutable: “it is its vicissitudes” (OHC 64). This account of morality displays a number of characteristically Oakeshottian features. It is theoretical rather than practical: it seeks to explain, not to prescribe. It is philosophical rather than historical, for though the conception of morality it identifies is a generalization from moral experience, that conception is defined by specifying the formal characteristics that distinguish a moral practice from other practices, not by describing the substantive content, the particular prescriptions, of individual moralities. When Oakeshott defines morality as a practice composed of noninstrumental considerations, he is offering neither a moral judgment nor a descriptive generalization but a tool for distinguishing alternative modes of human conduct. What he provides is a philosophical definition, one that necessarily diverges from ordinary conceptions of morality because it is the result of a dialectical procedure in which an idea is examined in relation to what it presupposes, purged of ambiguity, and progressively redefined. To object, as critics sometimes do, that Oakeshott’s definition of morality does not correspond to “what we ordinarily think of as moral” is to take ordinary ideas not as the starting place for philosophical definition but to make them the criterion of a satisfactory definition. Furthermore, in noticing the plurality of moral practices and rejecting efforts to reduce this plurality to a single set of substantive principles, Oakeshott offers an account of morality that is antifoundational and therefore, in that sense of the term, relativist. In this respect, he stands closer to Hegel than to Kant— or, to offer a more a contemporary comparison, closer to Walzer than to Donagan.7 This relativism is a consequence of Oakeshott’s view of philosophy, not merely of his definition of morality. A philosophical theory, he writes in a 1938 article, is not a “solid basis upon which things like science and the conduct of practical life ultimately rest; science and practical life, as such, have no philosophical foundations” (CPJ 345). Nor can the existing plurality of moral languages “be resolved by being understood as so many contingent and regrettable divergencies from a fancied perfect and universal language of moral intercourse” (OHC 80). The aim of philosophy is to understand this plurality, not to eradicate it by demonstrating that one moral language is superior to all others. The demand for moral uniformity is more often practical than theoret7. Donagan, The Theory of Morality, and Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism.

193

Understanding the Civil Condition

ical, a demand for moral certainty where none is possible. It is, for Oakeshott, an essentially religious demand, and although an individual agent can seek absolutely reliable guidance in faith, this is not an option that is available to the theorist. There are, however, limits to Oakeshott’s relativism, for if a morality is, by definition, a noninstrumental practice premised on mutual recognition, the diversity of moral practices is confined within boundaries that correspond to a broadly Kantian, nonconsequentialist understanding of morality as presupposing “respect for persons.” But this is a theoretical understanding of morality, not itself a moral argument. Oakeshott’s view of the noninstrumental and plural character of morality is crucial to his analysis of law. But Oakeshott also takes his exploration of morality in another direction, in a discussion of what he calls the “self-enactment” of agents (OHC 70). His concern here is with acts understood in relation to their motives, the sentiments in which they are performed. Moral conduct is not only a matter of responding to considerations of propriety in choosing actions. It also means having an acceptable motive for choosing and, in choosing, representing oneself as one would like to be. In conduct we not only disclose our desires in the actions we choose; we also enact or “live” a character by cultivating certain motives or virtues. Our self-disclosure in our choice of actions and our self-enactment in our choice of motives, though often confused—by those, for example, who think that to be concerned with the propriety of an action rather than its consequences is to be concerned with one’s integrity—are distinguishable considerations in every actual language of moral conduct. The distinction here is not merely between act and motive, between an agent’s choices and the character that determines those choices; it is between relating to others and escaping what Oakeshott, in his early essays on religion, calls “the world.” For actions are not given but contingent. They depend upon an agent’s understanding, which because it is an understanding could be different. An act is a response to an understood situation, a response that might not have been chosen. It can be compromised, even defeated, by other agents, because acts performed in relation to others are dependent on their responses and are, for that reason, “infected with contingency” (OHC 73). In contrast, because it does not seek such a response, what one does in relation to one’s self is independent of what others think or do. It therefore escapes, not all contingency, but at least the contingencies of compromise or failure in transactions with other agents: in examining my motives, I am evaluating my own character, not their responses. Nevertheless, the effort to enact a self, which seems to offer permanence that outlasts one’s actions, is also an illu-

194

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

sion. One cannot, even here, escape the world, for self-enactment is still action, always contradictory and invariably mortal: “the enacted self is itself a fugitive” (OHC 84).8 This discussion of sentiments, motives, and character, illuminating though it may be, takes us away from the effort to understand morality as a practice regulating the purposive interactions of agents. In our efforts to coexist with other human beings, the sentiment in which they act is less important to us than what they do, for not only does the success of our actions depend on their responses but morality itself is more often a matter of how people act than of why they act. As far as motives are concerned, we must for the most part “take our fellows as we find them; not ‘judging’ them (as we sometimes have to judge their self-disclosures), but contemplating them with admiration, with reserve, or with indulgence” (OHC 77). The choice of the word “contemplation” here may be significant, for it suggests that in reflecting on the motives of other human beings we are touching a modal boundary, one that divides the practical and the aesthetic realms. What we cannot rightly control we can only contemplate, and it is a consequence of human freedom (the kind of freedom that is inherent in agency) that we cannot dictate what others think. We can, however, choose our own motives: though we have to live with the character we have, through a lifetime of choices, made for ourselves, we are not forced (though we may in fact choose) to rest in the mere contemplation of this character. There is certainly more to be said on the theme of character and virtue, but Oakeshott’s inquiry into morality and moral conduct is focused on considerations governing the relations of agents: considerations that are appropriately a matter of public concern and can therefore be embodied in a system of laws. Let us therefore turn to what Oakeshott has to say about law and about the connection between morality and law.

The Rule of Law One of the central concerns of legal theory is to identify law as a kind of practical activity. This concern generates two subsidiary questions: first, how to 8. The part of On Human Conduct in which these ideas are floated should be read in the light of Oakeshott’s 1929 essay, “Religion and the World” (RPML 27–38), discussed in Chapter 2 above, whose argument it revises.

195

Understanding the Civil Condition

distinguish law, as a kind of activity, from the contingent features of particular legal orders; and, second, how to distinguish law from other kinds of practical activity, like custom and command, which it resembles and to which it is related in various ways. The theoretical challenge, in other words, is how to distinguish law, so understood, from various other things to which the word “law” has been applied. Oakeshott’s answer to these questions is that a legal order is a moral practice that has turned into a system of rules and acquired what such a system intimates: a mechanism for identifying rules that are valid or “authentic” within that system, for using such rules in particular situations, and for ensuring that they can be relied upon. For as soon as there are rules there is interpretation, and with interpretation comes disagreement and the need for a way to settle interpretive disputes. When interpretation remains in the hands of those to whom the rules apply, there is little to distinguish a legal system from other kinds of moral practice. Every morality has its moralists, its specialists in interpretation, but in most they occupy no office and possess no exclusive authority. But when a morality has official interpreters—“legislators” to make, revise, or nullify rules, “judges” to determine what the rules mean in specific situations, and “rulers” to ensure that the rules are attended to—it has become a legal system. In communities without these offices, the distinction between morality and law is unimportant. It hardly matters whether we say that such communities are without a legal system or that their legal systems are decentralized or “primitive.” As Oakeshott sees it, then, a legal system is a moral practice adapted to the task of regulating a contentious multiplicity of individuals by being distilled into authoritative and justiciable rules, including rules for declaring, interpreting, and securing observance of these rules.9 Though it yields a definition, Oakeshott’s theory of law does not aim to say how the word “law” is or should be used, or to describe the diversity of human arrangements to which that word has been applied. A philosopher is not concerned to collect everything that may fall under a received name and to search for coherence in that miscellaneous body of materials. No philosophically 9. Oakeshott’s definition of law as an institutionalized system of moral rules resembles and doubtless owes something to Hart’s definition of law as a union of (“primary”) rules of obligation and (“secondary”) rules for identifying, altering, and applying these obligations. H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). But the distinction between instrumental and noninstrumental rules, which is crucial both to any nonconsequentialist view of morality and to Oakeshott’s theory of law as institutionalized morality, is absent from Hart’s discussion, which rests on utilitarian premises.

196

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

consistent theory of law could explain the diversity of things to which the word “law” has been applied. The philosopher’s task is to articulate a coherent conception of law, even though it departs from ordinary ideas.10 Oakeshott’s way of accomplishing this task is to distinguish a form of human relationship, a “relationship of civility” (OHC 108) or “the rule of law” (OH 119) in which persons are related to one another on the basis of authoritative and noninstrumental rules. His aim is not to say what an expression like “the rule of law” has actually meant in this or that context (as an ideological slogan, for example), but “what it must mean” if it is to designate a distinct and coherent idea (OH 119). Still less is his aim to recommend the concept of law it designates as morally required or otherwise desirable: the philosopher’s aim is not to advocate the rule of law but to theorize it. Civil association or the rule of law is an ideal relationship defined by principles abstracted from the actual activity of human beings. We can understand this relationship by inquiring into its principles. But the activity in which these principles are exhibited precedes the inquiry. The aim of this inquiry is therefore neither to invent the activity nor to use it but, in reflecting on it, to endow it with a coherent character (OHC 109; OH 121). Because the point is so often misunderstood, it must be emphasized that this abstract relationship is not to be confused with the contingent miscellany of rules, rulings, commands, orders, and managerial directives that constitutes the actual laws of any particular state. As used by Oakeshott in his later writings, the expressions “rule of law” and “civil association” designate an ideal character, a mode of human association.11 And the aim of his inquiry is to understand this ideal character “in terms of its postulates” (OHC 109, 111)—that is, to analyze the presuppositions of the civil mode of relationship, not to describe the features of any actually existing association, past or present. To understand this kind of relationship theoretically, we must avoid confusing it with the contingent features of particular legal systems. The distinction here is between a kind of activity and an actual instance of that activity. A game, for example, is both an event—a series of actions occur10. Oakeshott explicitly discusses the aims and scope of legal philosophy in “The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence” (CPJ). 11. Oakeshott refers to “the rule of law” in “The Political Economy of Freedom” (RP 390–93, 399–400) and The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (88–89), works dating from the late 1940s and early 1950s, but his understanding of the expression is more conventional and less carefully theorized in these works than in his 1983 essay “The Rule of Law” (OH 119–64).

197

Understanding the Civil Condition

ring on a given occasion—and a practice, defined by its rules, that exists independently of the event that is an instance of it (OH 127). Just as we can distinguish baseball as a game constituted by certain rules, from the play of particular persons on a particular occasion, so we can distinguish law as a practice from what is actually going on in this or that legal system. As a mode of relationship, civil association is not a plenum of actual contingent transactions involving concrete individuals (“assignable agents”), but an ideal (conceptual) relationship among legal subjects understood as abstract personae. And just as in a game we can separate the abstract personae of the players (pitcher, shortstop) from the actual persons who may adopt those personae on a given occasion, so in civil association we can separate the persona civica (or its various forms, like voter, juror, etc.) from the individual, named citizens of an actual state (OHC 129). The laws of an actual, individual state are always a mixture of rules instrumental to achieving various substantive purposes and noninstrumental “rules of the game” regulating the activities of subjects, no matter what their purposes. Every actual state is, therefore, in different proportions, both a substantive enterprise and a civil association. In sketching these modal alternatives, Oakeshott is not presenting two portraits of the modern state, one a good likeness and the other not. His argument is, rather, that every actual state is an ambiguous construction displaying both understandings of its character and purpose.12 According to one conception, a state is a corporation whose associates are joined in the pursuit of shared goals (which may be religious, economic, military, etc.), whose laws are instruments to further this pursuit, and whose government devises policies for reaching these goals: a purposive or enterprise association. According to the other conception, a state is an association of citizens joined not in the pursuit of shared goals but solely in acknowledging the authority of a common body of rules: a civil association. In such an association the laws are not commands instrumental to the pursuit of a collective purpose. They are noninstrumental constraints on conduct, and a government is the custodian of the civil condition constituted by these laws. 12. The claim that states are “ambiguous associations” (OHC 128) is crucial to Oakeshott’s argument, and is one of the places where many interpretations go astray. For a cogent analysis of “the ambiguity thesis,” see Richard Friedman, “Oakeshott on the Authority of Law,” Ratio Juris 2 (1989), 27–40. The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, a work evidently completed in the early 1950s, suggests that Oakeshott was concerned with the ambiguity of modern political activity long before he articulated this concern in terms of the alternative modes of association that might be displayed in a state.

198

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

In the first, “law” is the rule-book of a managerial enterprise; in the second, it is a framework of authoritative rules of coexistence among individuals engaged in their own, self-chosen transactions and enterprises. Civility, then, is an imagined condition of association, fully realized in no existing state but implicit to some degree in all, in which efforts to satisfy substantive wants are constrained by obligations that are not themselves instrumental to satisfying wants. In the civil mode, those associated (“citizens”) are united not because they share the same beliefs and values (they may not, and shared beliefs or values are in any case not the basis of this kind of association), but only in recognizing a common body of rules and the authority of a government whose office it is to make and apply these rules. Civil association, as a mode of relationship, is “association in terms of rules” (OHC 127), a relationship that depends on the operation of reliable procedures for ascertaining which rules are the authoritative rules of the association and for securing their observance. Turned into deliberately chosen and administered laws, these noninstrumental obligations constitute a particular kind of moral relationship, one in which those related are related on the basis of such laws: the rule of law. Oakeshott summarizes the elements of the rule of law, as a mode of relationship, in the following way: Association, not in terms of doing and the enjoyment of the fruits of doing, but of procedural conditions imposed upon doing: laws. Relationship, not in terms of efficacious arrangements for promoting or procuring wished-for substantive satisfactions (individual or communal), but obligations to subscribe to non-instrumental rules: a moral relationship. Rule, not in terms of the alleged worth, “rationality” or “justice” of the conditions these rules prescribe, but in respect of the recognition of their authenticity (OH 148). Taking up each of these elements, I will discuss civil association or the rule of law as a mode of relationship based on noninstrumental laws. I will also consider Oakeshott’s argument that there is a conceptual connection between the rule of law and individual freedom. And I will conclude by examining his conclusion that institutions for recognizing, altering, and securing observance of laws, which are needed if this mode of association is to be realized in an actual community, belong to the idea of civil association. Doubts have been raised about each of these claims, and these, too, need to be considered.

199

Understanding the Civil Condition

Relationship in Terms of Rules The rule of law, Oakeshott says, is “relationship in terms of the recognition of rules as rules” (OHC 148). But what does it mean to be related “in terms of ” rules? What is a rule, and how do rules differ from requests, commands, warnings, and the like? How, precisely, do instrumental and noninstrumental rules differ? And how can the rule of law be distinguished from other practices that are also “relationship in terms of rules”? Oakeshott shares with legal positivism the view that law is a practice in which human beings use and must therefore interpret rules.13 But he rejects as confused John Austin’s view that a rule is a kind of command, “the command of the sovereign.” For Oakeshott, as for H. L. A. Hart, laws are rules, not particular performances. But a command is a performance, not a rule. It is an order, addressed to particular persons, to perform particular acts, and it can be obeyed or disobeyed only by those to whom it is addressed. It is “an injunction to perform a substantive action and it calls for obedience; that is, the performance of the action it specifies.” It is itself a performance, a contingent response to a particular situation that “is used up on the occasion” (OH 129). A rule, in contrast, is a practice, not a performance, and in being used is not “used up.” Being general, it exists in advance of the contingent situations to which it may later be applied, and “remains ‘standing’ for unknown future occasions” (OHC 126). Central to this analysis of law as a system of rules is the argument that rules, unlike commands, do not prescribe particular performances and therefore cannot be obeyed or disobeyed. What Oakeshott means in advancing this counterintuitive claim is that rules do not prescribe individual actions. Rules require or forbid types of action, and it is a matter of interpretation whether a particular act falls under the rule. Rules cannot tell an agent “what choice he shall make” or “what to do or to say,” for their meaning must still be specified by the agent in deciding what to do. Rules presuppose the making of choices and the performance of acts and prescribe considerations (“conditions”) to be acknowledged and taken into account (“subscribed to”) in choosing performances, but which cannot themselves be performed (OHC 55–56, 58, 126). And that is why it is misleading to speak of “obeying” a rule; strictly speaking, 13. Oakeshott mentions, as thinkers engaged (sometimes uncertainly) in theorizing the rule of law, Bodin, Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Austin, Jellinek, and “many so-called ‘positivist’ modern jurists” (OHC 171n, 251–52; OH 161–62). Although he does not name them, Hans Kelsen and H. L. A. Hart would figure prominently among the latter.

200

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

one responds to a rule by subscribing adequately or inadequately to the conditions it prescribes (OH 129). Rules do presuppose judgment about what counts as adequate subscription. But because every rule is general, one must decide how it relates to a given situation. And because there are many ways of taking a rule into account, many different performances can be said to fulfill the obligations it prescribes: a rule can “never relieve us from the necessity of choice” (VLL 54). Oakeshott uses the word “adverbial” to capture this aspect of rule-following. Rules “adverbially qualify” actions, for to act according to the prescriptions of a practice is to act (depending on the practice) morally, lawfully, punctually, tactfully, and so forth. To say, for example, that a rule forbids rudeness is an imprecise way of saying that it forbids behaving rudely: “rudeness” is not itself an action but is a possible aspect of any action. “A criminal law, which may be thought to come nearest to forbidding actions, does not forbid killing or lighting a fire, it forbids killing ‘murderously’ or lighting a fire ‘arsonically’; and these adverbs are narrowly specified in terms of the evidence required to substantiate or to rebut the considerations alleged” (OHC 58n). When we say that the law forbids murder, we are referring elliptically to such considerations, not to specific, contingent performances. This point, which is much disputed in the secondary literature on Oakeshott’s theory of civil association, is an aspect of reasoning well understood within the hermeneutic tradition. If interpretation, like judgment, is an “art” that cannot be completely specified in terms of rules, the same must be said for other kinds of conduct, for all conduct involves meaning and requires interpretation.14 There is a problem with the argument that rules do not determine performances, but it is not, as our ordinary, careless way of speaking invites us to assert, that rules do in fact demand or forbid particular actions. The problem is that even commands, which can be said to prescribe individual performances, must fall short of completely determining an agent’s choice in a given situation. If, because of the interpretive freedom that is inherent in human conduct, an agent’s situation never completely determines his response, this must be true even when that situation includes prescriptions in the form of commands. For commands as well as rules can be interpreted or executed in dif14. The “art of judgment,” explored by Kant in his Critique of Judgment, is made central to hermeneutics by Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, and Other Writings, trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

201

Understanding the Civil Condition

ferent ways, and therefore cannot be said to completely specify performances. The distinction between commands and rules, then, is not that the former completely specify action and the latter do not; it is that commands, unlike rules, are themselves substantive performance. Rules are practices, not performances. In defining laws as rules and distinguishing rules from commands, we have gone only partway toward articulating a coherent view of the rule of law, however, for the rules on which this mode of association is based are not only general but noninstrumental. This brings us to the most important (and contested) distinction in Oakeshott’s theory of the rule of law as relationship in terms of rules, the distinction between instrumental and noninstrumental rules. An instrumental rule is a statement of advice. Advice can come not only in the form of a suggestion that a particular agent do a certain thing (in which it resembles a command), but also in the form of general hypothetical rules or maxims. Maxims of this sort are instrumental because they state how to achieve a desired result: bread dough should be left to rise slowly in a cool place; honesty is the best policy; “men must be either caressed or extinguished” (Machiavelli). When we call such prudential maxims rules, it is clear that we are speaking of instrumental rules. Noninstrumental rules, in contrast, are not prudential and do not convey advice. But how, more precisely, can we distinguish noninstrumental from instrumental rules? First, a noninstrumental rule is concerned solely with the propriety of acts, not their usefulness in achieving a particular outcome (OH 128). A noninstrumental rule is not an admonition or a piece of advice urging a course of action on consequential grounds. This characteristic of a noninstrumental rule—its concern with propriety—can be seen in the rules of public debate, for such rules “do not tell a speaker what to say and are wholly indifferent to any particular conclusion” (RP 454). Noninstrumental rules are concerned with form and procedure, not substantive content. Second, a noninstrumental rule is authoritative. That is, the reasons for attending to it derive from its character as an authentic rule, not, as with a recipe, warning, or other instrumental rule, from its consequential worth. And the criteria by which this authenticity is determined have nothing to do with its efficacy in producing a desired outcome. Third, noninstrumental rules create obligations. Rules of this kind are not merely standards for judging actions; they guide conduct by prescribing considerations to be taken into account in choosing actions. A noninstrumental rule does more than distinguish between right and wrong; it is “an authoritative

202

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

prescription of conditions to be subscribed to in acting and its counterpart is an obligation to subscribe to these conditions” (OH 130). An obligation, in turn, is not a feeling or a habit, but an understanding, for to be obligated by a rule is nothing more than to recognize it as a rule, that is, to acknowledge it as authoritative in a given situation. This recognition need not be explicit. It can be implicit in conduct because to use a rule—to invoke it in making a judgment, for example—is already to acknowledge its antecedent authority. But as we shall see, acknowledging this authority—either expressly or simply by acting in a way that shows awareness of the rule as a rule—does not necessarily mean that one approves what the rule prescribes. In the understanding of law that Oakeshott explores, the grounds on which a rule is recognized as authoritative and the grounds on which one might approve or condemn it as desirable or undesirable, just or unjust, are not confused with one another. Taken together, these characteristics of a noninstrumental rule, in contrast to those of a command or prudential maxim, help to specify the ideal character that Oakeshott calls “relationship in terms of rules.” In this mode of relationship one can distinguish between intelligent subscription to a rule and mere conformity; between recognizing a rule and liking it; and between being obligated by a rule, which means having a duty under it, and being compelled to obey it, which is independent of duty. Relationship in terms of rules presupposes agents engaged in pursuing their own self-chosen purposes and imposes duties that these agents are expected to observe in the course of this pursuit—obligations that remain in effect even when they are ignored. These obligations are derived from rules whose authority rests not on their efficacy in advancing the goals of those whose conduct they govern, but on independent procedures for ascertaining their validity and for interpreting them in particular situations. The mode of association here is formal: association not voluntarily chosen for the sake of satisfying wants, but association on the basis of authoritative “conditions to be observed in seeking the satisfaction of wants” (OHC 313). The distinction between “practice” and “rule,” where both are noninstrumental, is one of emphasis and degree. But the distinction between relationship defined by respect for noninstrumental conditions, of any sort, and purposive or enterprise association is a distinction between kinds of association. It is, Oakeshott suggests, extending the concept of modality from understanding to conduct, a modal distinction. To object, as some of Oakeshott’s critics do, that the noninstrumentality of a rule is a matter of degree, not kind, is to confuse the mode of relationship in terms of rules with the contingent

203

Understanding the Civil Condition

features of actual rules.15 Actual states may reflect, to different degrees, aspects of civil and purposive association, but the difference is one of kind, not degree. Other critics attempt to dissolve the distinction between considerations of propriety and considerations of consequences, between form and substance, and therefore between noninstrumental and instrumental rules, but their objections rest on nothing more substantial than doubts about whether these distinctions can be sustained.16 We are now in a position to see why relationship in terms of rules, and therefore the rule of law as a relationship of this kind, is relationship on the basis of noninstrumental rules. It is because to be joined in observing instrumental rules is really to be related on the basis of the wants that conformity to such rules is thought to secure. Where the rules are instrumental, association in terms of rules reduces to association in terms of wants, that is, to association for pursuing the satisfaction of those wants. An association whose rules are instrumental is a purposive, not a moral, association. It is not surprising, then, that many of those who contest the distinction between the modes of civil and enterprise association are utilitarians or other kinds of consequentialists for whom all relationships are ultimately relationships in terms of wants.17 What distinguishes law as a kind of moral relationship, then, from law as a relationship to achieve certain ends is that it rests neither on commands nor on rules that are instrumental to the satisfaction of particular wants, but on noninstrumental rules that presuppose and are confined to regulating interactions between agents seeking to realize their own purposes. Such rules are, Oakeshott sometimes says, “indifferent” to those purposes, in the sense that they constrain human beings from using one another as means to an end without imposing ends on them. To be constrained in this way, that is, by 15. See, for example, John Gray, “Oakeshott on Law, Liberty, and Civil Association,” in Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1989), 210. 16. Examples include John Liddington, “Oakeshott: Freedom in a Modern European State,” in Z. Pelczynski and J. Gray, eds., Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy (London: Athlone Press, 1984), and David Mapel, “Purpose and Politics: Can There Be a Non-Instrumental Civil Association?” Political Science Reviewer 21 (1992), 63–80. In Mapel’s view, Oakeshott does not adequately defend his identification of the moral and the noninstrumental. Mapel suggests that moral judgments are purposive and therefore instrumental because all rules have purposes, but this claim rests on an unanalyzed and equivocal conception of “purpose.” Respect for persons, for example, is for Kant a postulate of morality, not “the purpose of morality” (73). 17. This consequentialism is clearest in Liddington, “Oakeshott,” but it can be discerned in the arguments of other critics who assume that there is no significant distinction between what, since Aristotle, have been called external and internal goods, and therefore between extrinsic and intrinsic purposes, prudence and propriety, instrumental and noninstrumental rules, etc.

204

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

noninstrumental rules, is not to be used a means to the achievement of anyone’s purposes, including the purposes of those who enact and administer the laws. This claim should not be confused with the argument, sometimes mistakenly attributed to Oakeshott, that those who make the laws have no purposes of their own, or that laws are neutral in the sense that they do not affect different people in different ways. Oakeshott’s argument is only that, in the civil mode, it does not belong to the office of government to rule by declaring authoritative purposes and prescribing the performances by which they are to be realized, and therefore that laws that are purposive in this sense represent a kind of legal order that must be distinguished from the kind of order properly designated by the expression “the rule of law.” In contrast to managerial rule, government in a state understood to be a civil association does not set goals for its subjects and set them to work to achieve those goals.18 Only a legal order composed of noninstrumental rules can be a “relationship in terms of rules,” rather than a relationship in terms of the wants of rulers who use the persons over whom they rule as a means to satisfy these wants. There is, however, a problem with conceiving morality as “relationship in terms of rules.” It arises, as we have seen, from the fact that relationship in terms of rules calls for a reliable means of ascertaining what the rules are. Rules require interpretation: they are complicated and ambiguous, and they imply exceptions. And more than one rule pertains to any situation in which an agent might find himself. Interpretation therefore, for these reasons as well as others we have already considered, cannot yield univocal results: the skill in using rules is “deliberative, not demonstrative” (OHC 68). And a key problem in deliberating is how to decide which rules and interpretations are authoritative in a given situation: how, in other words, to determine what Oakeshott calls the “authenticity” of a rule and to distinguish this authenticity from its alleged “rightness.” In a moral practice reduced to rules, both authenticity and rightness are “prime and contentious considerations” (OH 135). Authenticity and Rightness Rules cannot be the basis of association unless there is some way of settling interpretive disputes. If no such way is available—if there exists no procedure for resolving disagreements over the correct meaning of a rule, no umpire to 18. Richard Friedman, “What Is a Non-Instrumental Law?” Political Science Reviewer 21 (1992), 97.

205

Understanding the Civil Condition

say what a contested rule means in a given situation—interpretations may diverge so greatly as to undermine the premise of relationship in terms of rules. This premise is that there is agreement about the meaning of the rules, and that these meanings are authoritative. The rules, as interpreted, must be generally recognized as valid. But in a moral practice, there is usually no recognized method for choosing between interpretations. And where a practice makes no provision for resolving interpretive disputes, “every man must do his own casuistry for himself or accept the conclusions of some self-appointed moralist” (OH 135). To make things worse, moral practices seldom provide a clear way of separating the issue of whether a rule is authoritative from the issue of whether it is desirable or just. What is required to settle disputes over the proper interpretation of moral rules is that interpretation should itself be governed by rules. There must be an agreed procedure to decide which interpretations are “correct,” that is, a procedure according to which disagreements over the authority of a rule can be settled even where there is unresolved disagreement over whether the rule is moral, expedient, or otherwise desirable. A legal system, by specifying procedures for ascertaining the “authenticity” (legal validity) of rules, makes it possible for the meaning of rules of conduct to be determined apart from determining the “rightness” (the justice, fairness, reasonableness, desirability, etc.) of the obligations they prescribe. “Rightness,” here, includes all the considerations that bear on the approval or disapproval of a rule apart from its validity within a given system of rules. But it is usually important to distinguish considerations bearing on the consequential desirability of a rule from those that are related to its moral propriety: in other words, between the instrumental and noninstrumental considerations in terms of which the “rightness” of a rule might be evaluated. Because the word “justice” can stand for both moral propriety and consequential desirability, using it without further specification generates confusion in contexts in which distinguishing instrumental and noninstrumental considerations is important. Restating one of the basic insights of a long tradition of political and legal theorizing, Oakeshott suggests that civil association can be understood as an attempt to remedy the inability of morality to resolve disputes about the meaning of its rules by providing a rule-governed procedure for determining these meanings. The civil condition is an imagined order of things that emerges when moral rules are combined with procedures designed to generate authoritative conclusions about the meanings of rules in cases of dispute—to declare, in other words, which rules and interpretations are to count as authentic law.

206

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

In this conception of human association, the question of whether the laws are just is separated from the question of what the laws are. There are moral theories that purport to provide objective criteria for choosing between interpretations, criteria on the basis of which both the authority and the rightness of alleged rules can be determined. In a theological ethic, for example, a moral rule may be thought to derive its authority from God: the rule prescribes an authentic obligation because God has willed it. But the justice of this rule also derives from God, because God, who is by definition perfectly good, could not will anything that was not just. The divine origin of a rule makes it authoritative while guaranteeing its justice. A similar tendency to merge criteria of authenticity and rightness can be discerned in theories of natural law, in which reason takes the place of God. Where they spring from the same source, the authority of a rule and its justice are distinguished only with difficulty. In most systems of religious or natural law, to recognize the validity of a moral rule is also to recognize its justice and to approve of what it prescribes. In law, as it is understood within the civil mode, the authenticity (legal validity or justification) of a rule and its rightness (justice or nonlegal justification) are more easily distinguished. A valid legal rule is one that has been declared according to recognized procedures: for example, a statute duly enacted, an interpretation upheld in the courts, a treaty properly ratified. Though the issue of justice may remain contentious, it can be separated from that of legal validity. This does not mean that the issue cannot be confused: some theories of positive law insist that the only standard of justice in a legal system is the law itself. It is precisely this confusion that has led legal theorists, Oakeshott among them, to distinguish the idea of the rule of law within the broader category of positive law. The rule of law is a mode of association in which the authority of the rules (lex) and the rightness or justice (jus) of these rules “are both recognized but are not confused” (OH 136). It is a mode resting solely on general recognition of the authority of the laws, not on shared opinions regarding whether or not the laws are morally right or otherwise desirable. But although the rule of law distinguishes legality from justice, it does not prevent those associated in terms of law from considering the justice of their laws. It simply keeps this activity separate from the activity of interpreting the laws. What, then, is the criterion of justice? As usual, Oakeshott approaches the question by excluding various possibilities. Where the rule of law is the mode of association, the justice of a law does not depend on the manner of its cre-

207

Understanding the Civil Condition

ation: procedural violations result in invalid laws, not necessarily unjust laws. A just law, strictly speaking, is not one created according to a proper procedure but one proper (on grounds not yet specified) to have been created (OH 141). Nor does the justice of a law depend on criteria sometimes identified as “the inner morality of law,” but which are in fact inherent in the idea of law itself—criteria such as that a law cannot be secret or retrospective, or that it cannot arbitrarily exempt certain persons from the obligations it prescribes.19 These are not criteria of “just” law but merely of “law” (as it is understood within the mode of civil association) because they belong to the idea of relationship in terms of rules. They are therefore part of the idea of law itself, where law is understood to consist not of purposive injunctions but of noninstrumental rules (OHC 128). It is, however, equally a mistake to identify justice in civil association with universal, absolute, and demonstrable criteria outside the law itself, whether these criteria take the form of a higher law, divine or natural, or of a deliberately enacted basic law or constitution that is thought to embody this higher law. Justice in the civil mode is not a matter of human rights, fundamental values, the common good, “the basic requirements of practical reasonableness,”20 or any other set of unconditional values, standards, rights, or liberties (OH 142). All such criteria are irrelevant to rule of law. Nor is civil justice related to the consequences of a law. That a law efficiently provides or even fairly distributes substantive benefits is a consideration of expediency, not of justice. The only concern of the rule of law with respect to these or other possible outcomes is to “prescribe obligatory conditions to be observed in seeking them” (OH 141). A theory of the state that understands it to be an association ruled by justice, like that of John Rawls, is incompatible with the idea of civil association because it identifies justice as, in part, “a consideration of ‘fairness’ in the distribution of scarce resources, and . . . as what rational competitors, in certain ideal circumstances, must agree is an equitable distribution.” It regards laws as instrumental rules to be taken as “guides to the achievement of a substantive state of affairs” (OH 156n) and evaluated according to their consequences. For Oakeshott, a criterion of justice compatible with the rule of law is one that, while not identical with the laws of civil association, is nevertheless intimated by those laws. It implies, not an abstract, external standard for determining 19. Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 39 and passim. 20. The reference (“practical reasonableness”) is to John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

208

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

the justice of particular laws, but “a form of moral discourse, not concerned generally with right and wrong in human conduct, but focused narrowly upon the kind of conditional obligations a law may impose” (OH 143). Where the rule of law is the mode of association, he concludes, the prime consideration in judging the justice of a law is that “the prescriptions of the law should not conflict with a prevailing educated moral sensibility capable of distinguishing between the conditions of ‘virtue,’ the conditions of moral association (‘good conduct’), and those which are of a kind that they should be imposed by law (‘justice’)” (OH 160). Justice in civil association combines fidelity to the formal character of law and to the “moral-legal acceptability” of the obligations imposed by law, where this acceptability in turn reflects “the moral-legal self-understanding of the associates” (OH 160). These somewhat cryptic remarks suggest several things about the kind of deliberation that is proper in debating the rightness of a law. First, they suggest that such deliberation must on the whole exclude a concern with motives and character (“virtue”) as beyond the scope of law. In civil association the laws are concerned with what human beings do, not with what they are. They are concerned with human actions and with their impact on other human beings, and it is these that are regulated, not the beliefs, values, wants, desires, and dispositions that motivate action. Second, even moral standards that are concerned with good conduct are not necessarily to be secured by means of law. Even though the laws of a state understood in civil terms are noninstrumental, like other moral rules, there is no necessary connection between these laws and any particular body of moral principles. That an act is morally wrong is not, in itself, a ground for prohibiting it legally, nor does it follow from the fact that something is a positive moral duty (like the duty of parents to educate their children) that it must be legally required. This does not mean that what is desirable in a law is unrelated to moral concerns, but only that it cannot be derived from the latter: “no civil rule can be deduced from the Golden Rule or from the Kantian categorical imperative” (OHC 174). The prescriptions of civil association are not conclusions derived from any foundational set of natural conditions, propositions about human needs, moral truths, or principles of justice. So it is not necessarily a problem if there is tension between what is civilly and morally desirable, between law and morality. In civil association, then, determining the justice of the laws excludes arguments based on unchanging and unconditional moral criteria of the sort sometimes offered by philosophers. There are writers on law who argue that

209

Understanding the Civil Condition

the appeal to moral considerations is unavoidable in interpreting laws, and others who translate this conclusion into a normative argument about how judges ought to decide cases or, more broadly, how citizens should respond to the conflicting claims of morality and law. But such arguments fail to take the issue of authenticity seriously. It is pointless to prescribe that ordinary citizens or public officials should conduct themselves according to law and according to canons of justice established independently of law unless the respective jurisdictions of these alternative forms of practical guidance are clearly defined. Various kinds of “ethical” and “critical” jurisprudence typically blur these jurisdictions. In Oakeshott’s view, ideas like natural law, fundamental values, basic rights, and “justice as fairness” are detrimental to the rule of law: “more often than not they are the occasion of profitless dispute, and when invoked as the conditions of the obligation to observe the conditions prescribed by lex they positively pervert the association: they are the recipe for anarchy” (OH 160). The rule of law is a mode of association grounded on recognition of the authority of laws, not on their alleged worth, rationality, or justice. Without this recognition there may be justice, according to some definitions of justice, but not law. Law can answer the need for agreed principles only if it is authentic law—law, that is, whose authority as law is established apart from its moral propriety or consequential desirability.21 This does not mean that a legal system can entirely ignore the issue of rightness, as some versions of legal positivism suggest. Positivists are so skeptical of claims about “justice” that they sometimes insist that justice can have no meaning apart from law. Such thinkers confuse justice with authority by making law itself the sole criterion of justice. The idea of the rule of law, then, occupies the middle ground between the alternatives of a moral order in which human law is secondary and a legal order in which moral justice is secondary—that is, between the extremes of natural law and legal positivism. Whether or not the laws in an actual community conceived as a civil association should enforce some particular set of moral considerations depends to a significant degree, Oakeshott suggests, on the traditions—on the “morallegal self-understanding”—prevailing among its inhabitants. Where the standards used to evaluate a law are not closely related to those already embodied 21. “Laws remain in credit not because they are just, but because they are laws. That is the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no other. . . . Whoever obeys them because they are just, does not obey them for just the reason he should.” Montaigne, “Of Experience,” Essays, bk. 3, chap. 13.

210

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

in legal discourse, “justice” becomes an abstract and arbitrary standard that is at best irrelevant to, and at worst subversive of, the rule of law. The American senator in Anthony Trollope’s 1877 novel with that title attacks primogeniture, Parliamentary representation, fox hunting, and other English institutions, invoking abstract principles of right that are, in fact, merely generalizations of American experience. The novel suggests that these institutions, though hardly beyond criticism, are more appropriately judged according to principles drawn from English experience—principles already immanent in local practice.22 The reasonableness and therefore the relevant justice of a law cannot be determined apart from a community’s other laws and moral practices, and especially from its tradition of discourse regarding the nature and limits of legally imposed obligations—limits illustrated (in England) by John Stuart Mill’s harm principle and related understandings of the proper scope of legal paternalism (OHC 179). Deliberation regarding the circumstantial propriety or desirability of civil laws, Oakeshott argues, requires “a disciplined imagination” that can forgo utopian thinking to focus on the requirements of civil association, that is, on “the conditions which should be required to be acknowledged and subscribed to” as law (OHC 164). Civility is a practice, and every actual civil practice is a continually changing body of ideas (“person,” “equality,” “property,” “contract,” “public order,” and so forth) that provides material for deliberation and intellectual tools to be used in deliberating. These tools are no more than “aids to reflection,” not indisputable criteria for choosing what, in the “circumstantial flux” of civil life, should receive attention (OHC 178). A law may be deemed undesirable, for example, if it cannot be enforced without relying on a degree of policing that is incompatible with reasonable norms of civil conduct. But underlying such specific considerations is the general consideration that any law, existing or proposed, must make sense as part of the system of laws to which it belongs. And although proposals to alter a system of laws cannot be deduced from moral principles, “a rule of civil association is desirable in respect of the accuracy with which it reflects, or does not affront, the moral imagination of the associates when it is directed to what they have learned to distinguish as a relationship not of moral perfection but of civility. . . . There are, in this matter, no absolute standards; this moral imagination, concerned with civil obligations, is all there is” (RP 455). We cannot, Oakeshott 22. Jane Nardin, “The Social Critic in Trollope’s Novels,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 30 (1990), 679–96.

211

Understanding the Civil Condition

insists, prescribe the content of this “moral imagination.” We can, however, identify its premise: that civil association, as a realizable mode of human relationship, is an association of persons within an order of moral rules constructed in such a way as to reconcile the coercion needed to actualize these rules with the individual freedom that is the postulate of this mode.

Individuality and Freedom Politics in a modern state is concerned with the laws of an association that is, whether understood in civil or corporate terms, a compulsory association. The rule of law may be premised on individual freedom, but it is nevertheless a mode of association that is realized through obligatory and enforceable laws. And because few habitable parts of the earth are not part of some state, citizens cannot escape the jurisdiction of one state and its laws without falling under that of another. The result is an unavoidable tension between citizenship and freedom. To understand this tension, and perhaps to resolve it, has been a concern of political theorizing since the appearance of the modern state, and it is central to Oakeshott’s reflections on the civil condition. To understand the problem of freedom in the modern state we must shift our attention from the association to its members. For Oakeshott, the modal character of a state and its government implies a corresponding character in those governed. Just as an actual state is an ambiguous construction—an equivocal mixture of civil and enterprise association—so is a citizen a mixture of two distinct personae. Each is an “ideal character,” a possible mode of human agency, not a description of actual persons. Though each persona is highly developed in some persons and barely detectable in others, every actual subject in a modern state can be understood as an equivocal combination of these alternative conceptions of the citizen. The persona corresponding to the mode of civil association is that of the citizen as a distinct individual. Speaking philosophically, rather than historically, we may say that civility and individuality are conceptually related. Civil association presupposes citizens who regard themselves as separate persons, each pursuing his or her own self-chosen purposes.23 In civil association, those 23. It may also be the case that, in an actual community, such a mode of association is most likely to flourish where its members regard individuality as intrinsically desirable and see the freedom inherent in agency as an opportunity to cultivate their own individuality, but this is a proposition about the realization, not the definition, of civil association.

212

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

associated, though subjects of a common body of laws, remain diverse in their self-conceptions, projects, and activities. To be an individual, in this sense of the term, is “to be and to find virtue in being a distinct person” and “to recognize and respond to ‘distinctness’. . . in others” (OHC 250). The persona corresponding to a state understood to be a purposive association, in contrast, is that of someone performing an assigned role in an organized enterprise. In a purposive state, the citizen is either a manager or a subordinate. Those associated are at best partners (joint managers) in promoting policies of which they are the intended beneficiaries; at worst they are resources to be used by the managers of the enterprise.24 Both identified personae—the independent individual and the partner or subordinate in a purposive enterprise—presuppose freedom because both involve human agency. The idea of agency distinguishes intelligent “conduct” from not-intelligent “behavior.” And agency, so conceived, involves a kind of freedom: “the freedom inherent in agency.”25 This freedom distinguishes intelligent choice, no matter how irrational or constrained, from behavior that is the product of not-intelligent processes. The distinction here is between a conception of a human being that postulates free will and one that postulates natural necessity. The identified personae do, however, represent distinct responses to agency. Each represents a way of dealing with the difficulties of being an agent: a distinct response to “the ordeal of consciousness” (OHC 326). Because it is a response to agency that values its inherent freedom, the idea of individuality is sometimes said to be antithetical to that of community. But there is, Oakeshott maintains, no contradiction between being an individual and associating with other human beings. Human beings can without compromising their individuality choose to be partners in an enterprise or mem24. It is, of course, possible to imagine a state managed by some for the benefit of others—a benevolent despotism or enlightened imperial government. Oakeshott explores the historical character corresponding to the purposive conception of the citizen in La Idea de Gobierno en la Europa Moderna (Madrid: Ateneo, 1955), in the Harvard lectures (1956), and most fully in “Die Massen in der repräsentativen Demokratie,” in A. Hunold, ed., Masse und Demokratie (Erlenbach-Zürich und Stuttgart: Rentsch, 1957), 189–214. A version of this essay, in English, appears in the 1991 edition of Rationalism in Politics and forms the basis for his discussion of the theme in the third part of On Human Conduct. These writings, which may be taken as Oakeshott’s contribution to debates of the 1950s concerning mass society and the authoritarian personality, combine historical interpretation, philosophical definition, and moral evaluation in ways that undermine the coherence of each. That Oakeshott himself might accept this criticism is suggested by his remark that to seek a “general explanation” of the analogous characters of the modern state and its citizens is “a temptation” to which he has “somewhat improperly” yielded (OHC 323, 326). 25. The freedom inherent in agency is discussed in Chapter 2 above.

213

Understanding the Civil Condition

bers of a group. To make such a choice is, in fact, a way of expressing individuality. Because even careful students of Oakeshott have failed to understand him on this point, it should be emphasized that there is nothing in individuality to bar its expression in communal membership.26 Individuals may be related not only in transactions and cooperative enterprises but in cultivating a religious, ethnic, or other communal identity. They may seek refuge or self-expression in sects, “counter-culture” communes, and other communities representing “varying degrees of chosen detachment or retreat from ‘the world’ and its concerns” (OHC 265). To be a distinct individual is not to refuse communal ties, but it is to surrender one’s individuality in a community only by an act of choice, in which case that choice is itself a symbol of distinctness. Participation in a purposive enterprise, it follows, can be an expression of individuality only when it is freely chosen. For to be an associate in such an enterprise is to endorse the common purpose, to commit oneself to acting in ways that are instrumental to achieving this purpose, and to accept “the managerial decisions which determine how it shall be contingently pursued” (OHC 316). Those joined in a purposive enterprise can be said to enjoy “individual freedom” only if they have chosen to be associated in the enterprise and if they are free to reverse that choice. The associates in a compulsory purposive association retain the freedom inherent in agency because that freedom is the postulate of all human conduct, no matter what its circumstances. But some at least cannot enjoy individual freedom because their membership in the association, and therefore their participation in pursuing its purposes, is not optional. Individual freedom in purposive association is therefore “conceptually tied to the choice to be and remain associated” (VMES 340; OHC 158). It is, Oakeshott concludes, the freedom to dissociate as well as to associate. The difficulty, then, with the idea of a state as both an association of “individuals” and a purposive association is that a state is a compulsory association. Citizenship is not generally a matter of choice, and though there is no theoretical obstacle to it, no modern state, no matter how democratic, has ever been constituted by the choice of every subject to acknowledge its laws or advance its purposes. A purposive state is inherently compulsory because it cannot avoid binding at least some of its citizens to a purpose that they have not chosen, for it is the corporate purpose that constitutes the state as an association and 26. On Oakeshott’s alleged “animosity to the idea of community,” see Josiah Lee Auspitz, “Individuality, Civility, and Theory: The Philosophical Imagination of Michael Oakeshott,” Political Theory 4 (1976), 286, and Oakeshott’s reply, “On Misunderstanding Human Conduct,” in the same issue, 365–67.

214

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

determines the policies of its government. Not only is such a state an association in terms of “wants,” not “rules,” but the wants of some—those who are managing the enterprise, even if they are acting on behalf of the managed— determine the conduct of others. In a purposive state, the citizen has substantive actions to perform that arise from the will of these managers. And because a purpose “can be pursued only in the performance of substantive actions,” the citizens of a purposive state are joined “as co-operators related in the performance of actions each of which is (or is alleged to be) contributory to the achievement of the common purpose” (OHC 315). The laws of such a state are instrumental commands, not noninstrumental rules. Because citizenship is not freely chosen and cannot easily be given up, and because its laws are commands, a purposive state is a compulsory enterprise association. And where one is compelled to participate in a purposive enterprise, that participation does not express individual freedom but denies it. In contrast, the citizens of a state understood to be a civil association retain their individual freedom even though it, too, is a compulsory association. Membership in a civil state is compulsory because it is by definition an association based on the authority of laws, which presupposes that citizens are obligated, and can therefore be compelled, to subscribe to these laws. But although its laws are compulsory, citizens in a civil state (a state insofar as it is a civil association) remain individually free—that is, they retain their personae as autonomous, coexisting individuals—because these laws are noninstrumental rules regulating the activities of citizens pursuing their individual purposes, not substantive commands instrumental to realizing a common purpose. The citizens of such a state are left free to meet their obligations in self-chosen actions (OHC 251, 314–15). What they are not free to do is to impose their purposes, values, and beliefs on other citizens. Purposive association cannot provide the model for a legal order that is obligatory and yet respects the individual autonomy of everyone it governs, for a compulsory purposive association imposes on some of its members purposes that are not their own. A legal order composed of noninstrumental rules, though also compulsory, does not impose such purposes on its subjects; it does no more than impose nonpurposive constraints that they are obligated to take into account while pursuing their own self-chosen purposes. The rule of law therefore respects individual freedom in a way that a coercive order of instrumental rules cannot. Only one “end” (to use a word that Oakeshott employs in the Harvard lectures but not in On Human Conduct) can be ascribed to a state that is compatible with individual freedom: “the realization

215

Understanding the Civil Condition

under compulsory laws of the right of each man to choose his own ends by securing him against the arbitrary encroachments and assaults of others” (MPME 62). The paradox (endlessly explored by theorists of the modern state) of a system of laws restricting freedom leading to a condition of greater freedom is resolved only where the laws are part of a practice of civility. In a state understood to be a purposive association, not only actions but agents can, in principle, be regarded as instrumental to the pursuit of the common purpose. In the absence of the moral constraints that belong to the civil mode, and which have been theorized, cogently or otherwise, under labels like justice, human rights, civil liberties, and the like, each subject in a corporate state can be understood as “the property of the association, an item of its capital resources,” and “whether he remains or whether he is permitted to go must be a management decision” (OHC 317). Indeed, Oakeshott adds, because the state is a compulsory association, “it is not easy to rebut the view that the logic of a state thus constituted assigns to the office of its government the authority to exterminate associates whose continued existence is judged to be irredeemably prejudicial to the pursuit of its purpose” (OHC 317n). This sentence has been taken as a polemical jab at the welfare state and a sign of what we might, holding Oakeshott to his own standard of modal purity, call an “unpurged relic” of practical concern.27 The sentence may well reveal the moralist as well as the philosopher, but it states a philosophical claim that cannot be lightly dismissed because it concerns the idea of the state as a compulsory purposive association. The relationship among those who bear the persona of associates in such an association is, Oakeshott suggests, a prudential, not a moral, one. It is a relationship in which the partners “use” one another according to their ability to do so, that is, in proportion to their power. But where persons are used, they are not (in Kant’s expression) “ends in themselves.” They are “means” or instruments for promoting a purpose, and, in the absence of nonpurposive, that is, “moral,” constraints, can be used or discarded as the purpose dictates. Oakeshott’s controversial sentence therefore does accurately express the logic of compulsory purposive association. The freedom of a citizen in civil association, then, is more than the freedom inherent in agency, and it is not diminished by the obligation to subscribe to civil laws. It lies 27. See, for example, Alan Ryan’s review of On Human Conduct, Listener 93 (1975), 517–18, and David R. Mapel, “Civil Association and the Idea of Contingency,” Political Theory 18 (1990), 409 (note 14).

216

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

first, in the associates not being related to one another in the pursuit of any substantive purpose they have not chosen for themselves and from which they cannot extricate themselves by a choice of their own, and secondly in their actions and utterances being not even officially noticed or noticeable (much less subjected to examination or direction) in respect of their substantive character but solely in respect of the civil conditions to which they are required to subscribe (OHC 314). Furthermore, this freedom is not increased by participation in the making or administration of civil laws nor decreased by its absence. In a corporate state, in contrast, the managers have more freedom than the managed. With this analysis of individual freedom as a postulate of civil association, Oakeshott completes the redefinition of law as a distinctive mode of human relationship begun in “The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence” in 1938. As Richard Friedman has argued, the problem that Oakeshott has set himself to solve in investigating freedom in the modern state is a traditional one in legal theory: to identify the character of law as a specific way of guiding the conduct of human beings, and to distinguish it from other ways of doing this.28 Following a procedure of progressive differentiation, he identifies law, first, as belonging to the realm of intelligent agency rather than of not-intelligent processes; second, as a compulsory rather than a voluntary way of influencing human conduct; and, third, as involving a kind of compulsion that nevertheless respects individuality by regulating the interactions of agents pursuing their own self-chosen purposes.29 The only way an association can be compulsory and also respect individuality is to regulate human conduct in a nonpurposive manner, and the idea of civility or the rule of law is Oakeshott’s (affirmative) answer to the question of whether such a mode of regulation, and by extension a mode of association premised on it, is conceivable.

The Conditions of Civility If the rule of law is to be realized in an actual state, there must not only be laws as these are understood within the civil mode: known, authoritative, and

28. This, he suggests, is why Oakeshott continually contrasts law with force, commands, advice, persuasion, and other methods for influencing conduct. Friedman, “What Is a NonInstrumental Law?” 86. 29. Friedman, “What Is a Non-Instrumental Law?” 94–96.

217

Understanding the Civil Condition

noninstrumental rules setting limits to the conduct of agents engaged in activities of their own choosing. There must also be procedures for declaring these laws, relating them to contingent situations, applying penalties for inadequate observance of the obligations they prescribe, and pursuing policies needed to maintain the civil order they establish. In discussing civil association we are therefore led to consider the institutions required to implement such procedures. But we must also consider whether these institutions are among the presuppositions of civil association or merely contingent conditions favoring its emergence and persistence—conditions that must be regarded as incidental to the rule of law as a mode of association. Separating the essential from the incidental is difficult, however, for once we begin to ask whether particular institutions are contingently related to the existence of the rule of law in actual states, we are no longer asking a purely philosophical question. We begin to ask historical as well as conceptual questions and may find it hard to say which is which. But if the issues are difficult, the terrain is familiar: we are concerned with institutions for legislation, adjudication, and administration. We are also concerned with institutional decisions regarding the circumstantial desirability of individual laws (“politics”) and, especially, with prudential efforts to preserve a civil order against a variety of internal and external dangers (“policy”). Association on the basis of common laws assumes that those associated know what their legal obligations are (or else these obligations could not be the basis of their relationship). It also assumes that the laws are generally observed (otherwise the civil relationship, having no basis except these laws, would disappear). What must be known, however, is not merely what the laws are in general, what constitutes authentic law, but what counts as compliance with a law in a given situation. And what is required to ensure compliance is not only a sanction, but some way of determining what must be established before a sanction can be applied: whether or not the law has been adequately observed or “subscribed to.” There can be no civil association, no rule of law, in the absence of “a means of settling uncertainties and disputes about the adequacy of contingent subscriptions” (OHC 130–31). Civil association therefore implies an authoritative procedure of adjudication for resolving such disputes and for determining what the laws mean in particular situations, and this, in turn, requires courts and judges. Because an authentic law is one that has been authoritatively declared according to a recognized procedure, the rule of law postulates legislating as well as judging. The requirement that citizens must know what their laws are, Oakeshott insists, is “satisfied only where laws have been deliberately enacted . . .

218

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

and may be deliberately altered or repealed” (OH 138)—that is, where there exists a legislative office of some kind to make, amend, and certify the authenticity of the laws. There can be customary law in a state understood as a civil association, but its authority rests on its presumed compatibility with statutes currently in force, and it can always be revised by legislative enactment. The rule of law does not require that the legislative power should reside in a body of any particular size or composition, either one that is “representative” of the various nationalities, classes, or interests that might be concerned with making laws, or one whose members are selected “democratically” or in some other desirable manner. These are important concerns, but they are not concerns that arise from the rule of law, which is in principle compatible with a wide range of constitutional arrangements. Finally, in addition to institutions for enacting laws and settling disputes about their meaning in contingent situations, the rule of law requires some way of ensuring that the laws are adequately observed. Civil association cannot be a relationship based on laws unless those related can rely upon a reasonable level of respect for legal obligations. It therefore requires a third kind of institution, one distinguishable from either legislative enactment or judicial determination, to enforce the law by requiring or forbidding actual persons to do or avoid doing particular things in specific contingent situations. This office of “ruling” (as Oakeshott calls it) is itself the exercise of an authority conferred by law. In civil association, it is linked to the judicial power and is a way of ensuring that the judgments, injunctions, punishments, and other orders of a court are carried out. But for a civil order to work properly, it may be necessary, in addition, to authorize administrative activities that go beyond the implementation of judicial rulings. These have mostly to do with “policing” (OHC 143): arresting suspects for future accusation in a court or imposing martial law in disorders that threaten the rule of law. Nevertheless, in a civil state, administration is concerned with securing adequate subscription to the laws and not with pursuing policies related to other interests. Ensuring that citizens do in fact observe the laws is necessary if the rule of law is to be realized in the circumstances of an actual community, but this does not mean that effective enforcement is the criterion of law. Although some members of a society may neglect their legal obligations in the absence of commands and sanctions, civil association is not an association of persons united by shared expectations about the consequences of obeying or not obeying legal rules. Such an association would be one disciplined and held together by effectively enforced rules, not an association based on the recognition of

219

Understanding the Civil Condition

rules as standards of proper and improper conduct: “rules are not rules in virtue of the sanctions attached to them” (OHC 149). Nor do legal rules cease to be rules because particular respondents violate them. Ruling is a power created by law, not a power to create law.30 Furthermore, although ruling in civil association is not itself a managerial activity with respect to those ruled, it does require an apparatus of rule (staffed by secretaries, assistants, commissioners, inspectors, tax collectors, coroners, and the like), and rulers have to manage this apparatus. But the office of ruling and the activity of managing an office are distinct: “rulers may employ clerks but they rule subjects” (OHC 146). Administrators may, in their capacity as employers and managers, engage in substantive transactions with the persons they employ and manage, but such transactions do not constitute a relationship between ruler and subject. And the relationship of ruler and subject (a civil relationship) cannot be one in which the resources of the latter are used to advance a purposive enterprise of which the ruler is a manager, for when that happens, the civil relationship is displaced by a different relationship. Finally, as actually practiced, legislation, adjudication, and ruling, whose sole rationale in civil association is that they are needed to make the laws more reliable, may become self-defeating. Legislators may be distributors of pork, and administrative officials may be more interested in evading than in executing the laws. The rule of law must therefore allow a state to provide safeguards against such abuses. And these safeguards, though they must themselves be governed by law, cannot be limited to the enactment of still more laws: particular abuses require particular remedies, and general rules must be translated into substantive injunctions. Oakeshott’s concern here is with how civil association as an idea, a possible mode of association, can be actualized in a living, individual community. If the rule of law is to be “a possible practical engagement,” something more than “a logician’s dream” (OH 149), it must be realized in the contingent circumstances of actual communities. But where civil association exists, it is (like any other relationship) vulnerable to harm, and so actual governments must sometimes pursue substantive purposes, require or forbid specific performances, and act to produce particular, substantive outcomes if civility is to 30. The classic contemporary statement of the argument that legal authority and obligation are conceptually independent of enforcement is H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, chap. 2. Oakeshott gives careful attention to the relationship between authority and power in two essays from the mid-1970s, “Talking Politics” (in RP) and “The Vocabulary of a Modern European State” (VMES).

220

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

flourish or even survive. Here we are at the margin that divides a philosophical concern to define civil association as a mode of human relationship by identifying its presuppositions from a historical concern to describe the features of particular states or from a practical concern with the circumstances under which the rule of law can be strengthened. It is not easy to distinguish these different inquiries, and Oakeshott himself sometimes seems to run them together, thereby lending unwarranted credence to doubts about the cogency of his theory of the civil condition. In On Human Conduct, Oakeshott reasons that certain kinds of consequence-driven government action, like injunctions designed to ensure that the judgments of a court are carried out, are implicit in the operation of the civil order itself: no actual state can dispense with policing, no matter how closely it approximates to the rule of law, and civil institutions must be paid for and protected against corruption. But an actual state must also be prepared to deal with other substantive concerns. For civility can be undermined not only through inadequate observance of law by the citizens of a state or the corruption of its government but also by economic collapse, the dissolution of civil authority, and other contingencies. Ironically, then, the preservation of civil association can depend upon the pursuit of policies that have no proper place within civil association. The civil condition, Oakeshott suggests, is not necessarily compromised by the temporary imposition of martial law, by policies designed to maintain a stable currency or prevent monopolies, or even by carefully circumscribed arrangements to provide education, food, medical care, or other support for certain classes of persons—children, the poor, refugees, and so forth. Because great disparities of wealth undermine civil association (this is the main thesis of Oakeshott’s 1949 essay, “The Political Economy of Freedom”), it might (as Hegel argued) be expedient even in a state understood as a civil association to institute “the exercise of a judicious ‘lordship’ for the relief of the destitute” (OHC 305n). And these ideas can easily be extended to include expedients Oakeshott did not consider, such as “affirmative action” to overcome entrenched patterns of discrimination.31 From the 31. If civil association unites individuals within a coercive order of rules that respects their individuality, then Oakeshott’s view of the situation of women in a state aspiring to be a civil association is an advance over his claim, in Rationalism in Politics, that enfranchising women in Britain is called for only because of “an incoherence in the arrangements of the society” (RP 57). Here it is not the coherence of the arrangements of an actual state that are being invoked but the postulates of civil association as a mode of human relationship.

221

Understanding the Civil Condition

standpoint of a concern for the integrity of civil association, the chief issue raised by policies that provide substantive benefits is not whether such policies can be defended at all but the manner in which they are defended. Because Oakeshott has suggested that there are circumstances in which civil rulers may demand particular performances, some of his readers have concluded that the idea of civil association collapses into that of enterprise association.32 But Oakeshott denies that the rule of law is compromised by such demands: even though they constitute contingent commands rather than noninstrumental rules, remedial injunctions are (in civil association) authorized and regulated by law, and are required for its effective operation. A court that assigns damages or an official who issues administrative orders does not violate the rule of law, provided such measures are required to secure compliance with the laws. In such cases (and bearing in mind that Oakeshott is here exploring the logic of civil association, not describing what happens in actual states, in which practices that belong to the civil mode are always combined with purposive practices), it is not the laws themselves that demand substantive performance; the demand comes from a judge or administrator concerned with the contingent implementation of the laws. Oakeshott may seem to contradict himself by saying, in one place, that rulers may command particular performances where there has been inadequate subscription to general rules, and, in another, that a ruler in civil association is “a master of ceremonies” whose office is “to keep the conversation going, not to determine what is said” (OHC 202–3). But the latter is a metaphor for the kind of governing that is appropriate to civil association, not a statement about the office of ruling, narrowly defined. (Unfortunately, Oakeshott sometimes uses the term “ruling” not only for administering the laws in a civil state but for governing in general.) Oakeshott is not saying that command and compulsion have no place in civil association, only that they cannot be the basis of association because the mode of association they imply is one in which agents may be compelled to pursue ends they have not chosen for themselves and that the role of commands is the secondary one of maintaining the civil character of a state when it is threatened by crime, corruption, subversion, or war. If the rule of law

32. John Gray thinks that Oakeshott’s account of law as a system of noninstrumental rules seems “to founder on the hard fact of the circumscription of action by legal coercion.” Review of On History, Political Theory 12 (1984), 453. A similar objection is advanced by Bhikhu Parekh, Contemporary Political Thinkers (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982), 122.

222

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

is to be significantly realized in a given community, some connection with actual human performances has to be made. The challenge, for the civil ruler, is to make this connection in the way that least compromises the rule of law. By separating the presuppositions of civil association from the contingent features of particular legal systems, Oakeshott’s effort to theorize the civil condition seeks to avoid the categorial confusion so common in legal and political theorizing. Nevertheless, one can ask whether, in considering the institutions needed to secure the rule of law, Oakeshott has not entangled himself in a confusion of precisely this kind. Procedures for enacting and applying rules are presupposed by the idea of civil association. But the institutions needed to implement these procedures in an actual state—courts, legislatures, and administrative offices—do not themselves belong to the idea of civil association; they are instruments for securing the rule of law in the contingent circumstances of a particular community. The rule of law may be unlikely in the absence of governing institutions, but it is not inconceivable. Let me illustrate the problem by discussing Oakeshott’s assertion that adjudication is a “necessary condition” for the rule of law (OHC 133; OH 144). It is not clear whether the word “necessary” here means that adjudication is conceptually presupposed by the idea of the rule of law itself, or that it is contingently required for the rule of law to emerge or for it to survive in any imaginable or probable set of circumstances. The rule of law presupposes (and is therefore conceptually tied to) some method for authoritatively resolving legal disputes. But an actual court, because it is concerned with how a law is related to a contingent situation, is already concerned with something outside the rule of law as a mode of association. And when we add to this the idea of particular substantive orders, addressed to particular persons to secure compliance with the judgments of a court, we are occupied almost entirely with contingencies: not with the rule of law as a mode of relationship but with the devices required to make it effective in an actual community. A mode is always an abstraction; it is concerned not with contingencies but with ideas, not with persons but with personae, not with actual laws but with the idea of obligatory noninstrumental rules. The idea of adjudication may belong to the rule of law as a mode of association, but courts and judicial enforcement do not. For Oakeshott, the rule of law includes “offices” (an equivocal term that refers both to legally defined duties and to institutions for performing those duties) for altering, interpreting, and administering laws. This equivocation may explain why he sometimes writes as if there were a conceptual connection between any, “relationship in terms of rules,” and these offices. But there

223

Understanding the Civil Condition

are moral practices in which rules are the basis of relationship but in which such offices are lacking or rudimentary. Oakeshott himself acknowledges that there is a problem in drawing the boundaries of the idea of civility when, in replying to critics of On Human Conduct, he writes that he had allowed the consideration of contingencies to creep into his discussion of civil association and that he should have made that discussion even more abstract than it is.33 And he barely mentions such contingencies in “The Rule of Law,” published eight years after On Human Conduct, where the treatment of enforcement is confined to a single sentence (OH 148). But to avoid discussing contingencies is not to avoid categorial confusion if among the “conditions” (OH 137, 144, 148) of the rule of law are offices that can demand that citizens perform particular actions. To treat a condition of this kind as one of presuppositions of civil association is to cross the modal boundary that separates the idea of the rule of law (a relationship of abstract personae on the basis of general rules) from an actual legal order (an actual relationship among particular persons secured through the issuance of substantive commands).34 To avoid this difficulty, we must carefully distinguish the conditions that are entailed in the idea of civil association, understood as an ideal mode of relationship based on respect for noninstrumental laws, and those that are required to actualize the idea of the rule of law in the contingent circumstances of a particular community. Just as moral association can exist in the absence of a system of laws, as Oakeshott recognizes (OHC 202), so association in terms of laws can (as in the case of customary or international law) exist without legislators or rulers. Whether Oakeshott has drawn the line between conceptual postulates and contingent conditions in the proper place is, therefore, a matter for debate. But because every ideal mode of association is an abstraction from contingencies, 33. “On Misunderstanding Human Conduct: A Reply to My Critics,” Political Theory 4 (1976), 364. 34. If policing, though necessary to realize the civil mode, does not itself belong to that mode, it is certainly a mistake to say that war, or reason of state generally, must be “counted as part” of civil association. Robert Grant, Oakeshott (London: Claridge Press, 1990), 83. Oakeshott asserts bluntly that “war is the enemy of civil association” (OHC 273), and his reason is that where the civil condition is threatened by destruction through civil war or foreign conquest, the preservation of a civil state becomes a common purpose, rulers the managers of its pursuit, and subjects participants in what has been turned into a compulsory enterprise association. “So far from its being the case (as Hegel suggested) that the character of an association in terms of the rule of law is most fully expressed when it is . . . at war, these are the occasions when it is least itself ” (OH 164).

224

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

and every set of arrangements is itself constituted by ideas, the question of where to draw that line cannot be definitively answered. The distinction between the conceptual and the contingent, between the universal and the particular, between the formal and the substantive, between an abstract mode of conduct and an actual, historical practice, and between philosophical and historical inquiry, is in each case relative rather than absolute. This is not to say that modal distinctions are differences of degree rather than kind, which would mean there is no such thing as a categorial difference. But it is to say that modal boundaries can be drawn in different places, and therefore there are no permanent and unconditional criteria according to which the lines must be drawn. And this conclusion is consistent with the view, present in Oakeshott’s thought from the beginning, that all distinctions are distinctions in human understanding, not ontological givens that exist independently of understanding.

Conclusion

Because political philosophy is commonly thought to aim at making or grounding moral judgments about politics, and so to be a kind of practical reasoning, identifying Oakeshott as a political philosopher risks attributing to him the view that philosophy generates practical knowledge. But this view is incompatible with the proposition, which he maintains in various ways in all his works, that philosophy and practice are categorially distinct and that political discourse is raw material for, not the product of, philosophical inquiry. To call him a political philosopher is to suggest that Oakeshott should be read as a moralist, a social critic, a “normative theorist,” even an ideologue. And he is, in fact, often read as someone whose concerns, whether conservative (according to the conventional view of his work) or liberal (as the revisionists would have it), are essentially prescriptive.1 Such readings do not take seriously Oakeshott’s commitment to 1. Readings of Oakeshott in the context of conservative thought include Anthony Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection (London: Faber and Faber, 1978); Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); and Robert Devigne, Recasting Conservatism: Oakeshott, Strauss, and the Response to Postmodernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). The revisionists include Richard Rorty, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983), 583–89; Wendell John Coats Jr., “Michael Oakeshott as Liberal Theorist,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 18 (1985), 773–87; and Paul Franco, “Michael Oakeshott as a Liberal Theorist,” Political Theory 18 (1990), 411–36.

226

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

the view that theorizing must be distinguished from doing; they implicitly treat him as a moralist who is, if not actually disingenuous, at least naively unaware of the true character of his own activity. Oakeshott does at times write as a moralist, but he does not often confuse moralizing with philosophizing. To call Oakeshott a political philosopher is also to suggest that politics, however it is approached, is the primary subject of his reflections. This suggestion is not mistaken, but it can lead to a mistaken emphasis on the political in his work and a corresponding neglect of other concerns. Despite an interest in the history of political thought already evident during his years as a Cambridge undergraduate, Oakeshott was not especially interested in politics as current affairs. As he writes in an autobiographical letter, “‘politics’ at the level of opinion was [not] a very significant part of [my father’s] life, and it is certainly not with me.”2 And elsewhere he suggests that with its characteristic confusion, hypocrisy, and self-deception, politics is always “an unpleasing spectacle” (PFPS 19). In a 1939 essay, “The Claims of Politics,”3 Oakeshott disputes the conviction, typical of the times, that all human activity has political implications, that politics is the most important part of civilized life, and that everyone ought to engage in political activity. Like those who award supreme importance to religion, he suggests, those who assert the importance of politics arbitrarily elevate one human concern above all others. But in choosing to question such claims, as well as in devoting much of his life to the study of political thought, Oakeshott implicitly acknowledges the actual, if unwarranted, importance of politics among human concerns. Politics, for Oakeshott, is an activity that springs from and therefore presupposes a way of life. Because it seeks to conserve or alter an existing order, its purpose lies in the ideas and practices that constitute this order. Political activity is therefore necessarily a matter of making adjustments in what is already a going concern. A government is the custodian of an order, not its creator; like the “governor” of a steam engine, it can do little more than maintain a system whose motive power is generated elsewhere. This skeptical view of the possibilities of politics leads directly to Oakeshott’s famous definition of politics as “the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice have brought together” and, specifically, as

2. Letter to Robert Grant, quoted by Grant in Oakeshott (London: Claridge Press, 1990), 12. Grant provides additional biographical details in “Inside the Hedge: Oakeshott’s Early Life and Work,” Cambridge Review 112 (1991), 106–9. 3. Scrutiny 8 (1939–40), 146–51.

227

Conclusion

the activity of amending these arrangements “by exploring and pursuing what is intimated in them” (RP 44, 56). As critics of this definition of politics have observed, the arrangements that constitute a way of life can intimate many different things, and the definition itself cannot tell us which of these intimations should be pursued. But this is not, from Oakeshott’s standpoint, a telling objection, for it cannot be the aim of a philosophical definition to provide practical guidance. There is, in any case, no single and infallible criterion for deciding political questions, the answers to which depend not on science, revelation, or any other kind of proof, but on judgment. Politics is deliberative, not demonstrative. It is the practical activity of responding to situations that are believed to be public, not private, and therefore to be the concern of government. Political arguments grow out of deliberation in which situations of this kind are interpreted in such a way as to diagnose a problem requiring a practical solution, not as situations to be understood and explained independently of action. Such arguments may invoke principles of various kinds or involve an appeal to the probable consequences of a given response to a situation and to whether such consequences are likely to be better or worse than those likely to follow from some other response. Insofar as it is designed to justify or to persuade, political discourse often makes use of general ideas and of words expressing these ideas: words like “nature,” “reason,” “equality,” “democracy,” and their corresponding adjectives. Such words are combined in languages of political argument: “ideologies” in terms of which choices are debated and which are themselves possible objects of historical and philosophical examination.4 Oakeshott’s later writings reflect a growing inclination to doubt that politics is a useful interpretive category and a corresponding tendency to define that concept ever more narrowly. Although he struggled for years to determine the character and scope of political activity and political theorizing, Oakeshott seems finally to have concluded that the words “politics” and “political” are used so loosely as to be virtually useless: “already ambiguous in the Aristotelian vocabulary,” they are now “merely rhetorical expressions, powerless to identify anything in particular” (VMES 320). “Politics,” he suggests, has been used not only for certain kinds of human conduct to be understood practically or historically but for behavioral processes understood scientifically; not only for deliberating on public concerns but for negotiating private advantages (as 4. Oakeshott sketches these ideas in “Political Discourse,” an essay published in the 1991 edition of Rationalism in Politics.

228

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

in “office politics”); not only for debating the policies of governments but for debating those of voluntary associations; and not only for considering what should be legislated, adjudicated, or administered but for the activities of legislating, adjudicating, and administering. And he has definite views about how each of these ambiguities should be resolved. There is no place for the concept of politics, as one that postulates “human conduct” (intelligent thought and action), in a purely scientific account of human behavior, nor is it illuminating to identify a concern for public things with the pursuit of private interests. Even if we restrict the word “politics” to the activity of governing, it still covers a diversity of concerns. Because many of these concerns have acquired their own specific names (like “legislation” and “administration”), Oakeshott argues that “politics” is best reserved for an activity that, though familiar and important, does not have a name: the activity of considering the desirability (as opposed to the authority) of a state’s laws. In the end, he narrows its meaning even further, defining “politics” as the activity of considering the desirability of the laws of a state only insofar as it is a civil association.5 With this final attenuation, the gap between the philosopher’s concept and ordinary usage has grown wide indeed. In philosophy, the chief reason for delimiting a concept is, as always, to define a domain of inquiry more coherently. Conceptual revision is needed in the domain marked out by “politics” and “political” because these words, even when they are linked to the general arrangements of a state, do not identify a single activity and are not consistently applied. They are most intelligible, Oakeshott thinks, in discourse concerned with the proper “office” or duty of a government, which, depending on the mode of association, is either ruling or managing. Formally, political discourse is concerned with the desirability of a state’s laws, but the substantive character of that discourse depends on the mode of association attributed to a state. The civil and purposive conceptions of a state therefore generate categorially different conceptions of politics, as well as of law. In a state understood as a civil association, politics is concerned with whether the current laws are desirable and with proposed changes in the laws. It is not concerned (as in Harold Lasswell’s famous definition) with “who gets what, when, and how” as a result of government decisions; civil laws, properly under5. One of the few interpreters of Oakeshott to consider his conception of “politics” in this narrow sense is Glenn Worthington, “Oakeshott’s Claims of Politics,” Political Studies 45 (1997), 727–38.

229

Conclusion

stood, are not awards of advantage or disadvantage (VMES 414; RP 455). Of course, this view of politics in civil association is a philosophical definition, an “ideal character,” not a report on how the word “politics” is ordinarily used. In a state understood as a civil association, concern with the desirability of the laws focuses on the obligations that are the terms of association, not on the state’s purposes. Only when it proceeds in the civil mode, then, is politics “concerned with what itself constitutes the association” (OHC 162). But in a state understood to be a purposive association, politics becomes deliberation on what is desirable with respect to managerial decisions to advance that state’s purposes. It follows that the word “politics” does have an analogical use in connection with the affairs of a purposive state because the rules of such a state can be considered from the standpoint of their desirability. But there is a difference: the rules of a purposive state are instrumental rules, and they are desirable or not only in relation to what is really important in such a state: achieving its purposes. The point can be made in another way by noticing that the words “politics” and “policy” mean different things in each mode. In a state understood as a civil association, “politics” (which concerns the circumstantial desirability of the civil rules that constitute the association) can be distinguished from “policy” (which concerns the expediency of managerial decisions guided by a common purpose). Policy, so understood, is a concern even in a civil state, for no actual state, however closely it approaches the model of civil association, can dispense with a prudential concern to secure its laws or to maintain itself against internal and external enemies. But where a state is seen as a corporate enterprise, “politics” and “policy” can no longer be distinguished because the rules whose desirability is being considered are instruments for promoting the corporate purpose. The rules of an enterprise are desirable if they are expedient: “their desirability or otherwise is merely their propensity to favor or to obstruct the achievement of wished-for satisfactions” (OHC 160). The reason for restricting the word “politics” to considering the desirability of the laws of a state understood as a civil association, then, is that politics emerges here as an independent activity, one that is distinct from a prudential concern with outcomes. Only when “politics” is defined in this (restrictive) way does it identify a distinct and internally coherent universe of discourse. Despite his own doubts that politics—except when defined so narrowly as to lose contact with ordinary usage—is a coherent subject for inquiry, most of those who write about Oakeshott are concerned with his ideas about politics, as ordinarily understood, or with what are ordinarily taken to be the political

230

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

implications of his ideas. The publication after his death of works on political thought that Oakeshott did not choose to make public while he lived, while unquestionably a contribution to scholarship, has served to reinforce the picture of a scholar preoccupied with politics as it is ordinarily understood, when in fact most of his published writings are concerned with other things.6 Oakeshott’s work is misinterpreted by being read as a contribution to one kind of inquiry, when, in fact, he is engaged in another. In this book, I have tried to show that Oakeshott’s most significant contributions as a thinker are philosophical, not practical, that his interests range far beyond the boundaries of politics as it is ordinarily understood, and that the very idea of politics is one he came to disparage as largely incoherent. Given his lifelong effort to distinguish different modes of understanding by uncovering their presuppositions, Oakeshott is best read as a theorist of knowledge, not a moralist (much less an ideologue), and as a philosopher of human experience generally, not only of politics. Woven through Oakeshott’s reflections on human experience are the ideas of modality, contingency, and civility. And uniting these ideas, one might say, is the idea of difference. For each is concerned with difference: modality with different kinds of inquiry and understanding; contingency with the individual actions and events that compose the worlds of practical activity and historical inquiry; and civility with the accommodation of individuality, and therefore of difference, within a common framework of moral rules. Modality, the most basic of these ideas, appears in everything Oakeshott wrote. The modes are categorially different from one another: modal distinctions are distinctions of kind, not degree. But, as I have emphasized, a mode is not a permanent, unquestionable division of reality. It is an interpretive tool, not an ontological given. Each identifiable mode is the outcome of reflection on an activity that over time has achieved significant coherence. A mode is an idea that has a history and that is open to revision. And the idea of modality is itself a tool, one that can be adapted to new tasks. Oakeshott makes modal 6. Oakeshott wrote four books whose titles include the word “politics”: Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962 and 1991), Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life (1993), Morality and Politics in Modern Europe: The Harvard Lectures (1993), and The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (1996). Of these, all but the first were published after his death and assigned titles by their editors. Although the titles are not inappropriate, the fact remains that Oakeshott did not choose to publish these writings. In his later years, however, he did publish books on “human conduct,” “civil association,” “history,” and “liberal learning.”

231

Conclusion

distinctions that are appropriate to the problem at hand: he distinguishes, according to context, different modes (orders, idioms, sciences, languages, traditions) of understanding (experience, thought, inquiry, explanation, discourse) and of conduct (activity, practice, relationship, association). Furthermore, the proposition that modal distinctions are ways of making sense of experience, not given and permanent features of a world that displays these features apart from experience, holds not only for the modes (science, history, and practice) Oakeshott considers in Experience and Its Modes but also for the categories of identity (intelligent and not-intelligent) he employs in On Human Conduct: both involve distinctions in understanding, not in what is understood. The mode or category chosen defines the identity to be understood and imposes a character on it, and this character determines the kind of inquiry that is appropriate to understanding it. Contingency, as a consequential relationship between actions or events that is neither accidental nor necessary, is the organizing principle of human activity; it is the inescapable condition of human conduct and the defining presupposition of historical explanation. In practical activity, agents respond to particular situations, each itself the contingent outcome of previous actions. Exercising the freedom that is inherent in agency itself, different agents choose different responses depending on how they understand those situations. And in a historical explanation, identified events are joined, not in a necessary relationship of cause and effect or in belonging to a mere sequence of accidents, but in a relationship of meanings in which the individual character of each event to be explained is understood in terms of its antecedents. The historian assembles contingently related events to compose, according to the canons of historical scholarship, an intelligible account of what happened. A history is an “assembly of differences.” Civility, too, is concerned with difference. It is the principle according to which differences of all kinds can be accommodated within a common moral order. A civil order is an “assembly” not merely of human beings but of individuals. Whereas the citizen in an enterprise state is the performer of an assigned role, the citizen in a civil state remains an individual even though he or she may assume the persona of a voter, a representative, or a litigant. The civil condition is a mode of association in which relations among human beings are regulated in a manner that, though at times unavoidably coercive, nevertheless respects individuality, and therefore diversity, by not imposing upon them purposes that are not their own.

232

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

The idea of unity in diversity that is implicit in these explorations is captured in the characteristically Oakeshottian metaphor of conversation. In a conversation, Oakeshott writes, the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no “truth” to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing. Of course, a conversation may have passages of argument and a speaker is not forbidden to be demonstrative; but reasoning is neither sovereign nor alone, and the conversation itself does not compose an argument (RP 489). Irrelevance is a defect in an inquiry but not in conversation. In a conversation, different voices acknowledge, respond to, and animate one another in “an oblique relationship” that “neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another” (RP 490). A conversational relationship preserves the individuality of the participating voices, and is, for this reason, inherently playful: it is a relationship in which each voice learns “to recognize itself as a voice among voices” (RP 493). Here we have the deconstructionist idea of “play” as well as “difference”—but with a difference. For Oakeshott, siding in effect with Wittgenstein and Gadamer against Derrida, play is not subjective but something that is defined in relation to the rules that constitute a particular game. Conversation itself has rules, which is why the conversationalist who insists that others must speak his language is a boor. To have a voice of one’s own is to acknowledge other voices. A mode of understanding is such a voice. The modes, Oakeshott suggests in a now-famous phrase, are voices in “the conversation of mankind.”7 Each identifiable mode of experience is a distinct way of understanding the world and a distinct expression of human self-understanding. Human beings can experience the world scientifically, historically, practically, or aesthetically, and they can understand themselves as biologically determined organisms, as historical individuals each of whom is a contingent outcome of past events, as 7. Although the metaphor of conversation is fully developed only in The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1959), it appears a decade earlier in “The Universities,” Cambridge Journal 2 (1948–49), 515–42, and “The Idea of a University,” Listener 43 (1950), 424–26. Both articles are reprinted in The Voice of Liberal Learning.

233

Conclusion

free agents making their own prudential and moral choices, as servants of a master or a cause, as works of art, and in many other ways. A civilization can be seen as a particular composition of these understandings and self-understandings, an inherited culture within which human beings emerge into consciousness, acquire the arts of agency, and learn to be human in a particular manner. The proper relationship between all such modally different understandings is conversational rather than argumentative or demonstrative. Because the idea of intermodal conversation is a metaphor, one must be careful not to read too much into it. To begin with, one must avoid confusing it with an exchange between persons, which is what the word “conversation” ordinarily implies, or with an exchange that aims to reach an agreed conclusion. The voices in Oakeshott’s conversation of mankind are modes, not persons, and their juxtaposition reveals no agreed truths, only necessary differences. One can see both misunderstandings in Rorty’s characterization of hermeneutics as a way of doing philosophy that sees different discourses as contributions to “a conversation which presupposes no disciplinary matrix which unites the speakers, but where the hope of agreement is never lost so long as the conversation lasts.”8 A conversational relationship between actual speakers is one in which ideas are exchanged informally and in which establishing an agreed conclusion is not the point. By extension, a metaphorical conversation between modes is also not an exchange of arguments that might result in agreement. Persuasion is possible only within a mode of discourse, where there are common standards of judgment and common “reasons” for reaching conclusions. It is irrelevant in an exchange between modes, between universes of discourse that by definition do not presuppose common standards and common reasons. If they did, they would constitute a single mode. One is also reading too much into the metaphor if one objects that, on Oakeshott’s own premises, a conversation between modes is, strictly speaking, impossible. It might seem that to the degree that the modes can communicate with one another at all they cease to be modes. But if, on the contrary, the modes are hermetic discourses, each a monadic world locked within the prison of its own assumptions, what can they possibly have to say to one another? How can the modes “engage one another” without some shared concerns, and if they have shared concerns does this not challenge the claim that modal boundaries are impermeable? To the extent that it implies that 8. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 318.

234

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

there can be no exchange whatsoever unless there are shared concerns, assumptions, ideas, and conclusions, the conversational metaphor is indeed misleading. But no metaphor is exact, and it is therefore pointless to interpret this one literally. When modes are juxtaposed with another, they do not join in argument, but ideas belonging to different modes can nevertheless illuminate one another even though they are, strictly speaking, irrelevant. If what one mode takes for granted as plain fact another does not even recognize, one is made aware of unsuspected assumptions or interpretive possibilities and invited to consider the grounds on which fact and not-fact might be distinguished. Ideas engage one another across modal boundaries not in a joint enterprise that culminates in agreement but in a juxtaposition of ideas that leads one to a recognition of difference. As Oakeshott puts it in On History, different understandings “may exclude one another but they do not deny one another, and they may be recognized by those who do not share them” (OH 11). A conversational relationship presupposes not only different voices but recognition of those voices as equally entitled to participate. Just as persons in a moral relationship are equally entitled to be recognized as agents, so the modes in a conversational relationship are equal participants in an intermodal exchange of images. And like a civil relationship among distinct individuals, a conversation among modally distinct voices is one without an extrinsic purpose to be pursued. In the metaphoric conversation of mankind, modally different ideas engage one another, not in an enterprise of inquiry or debate designed to produce a valid conclusion, but in a civil exchange with no determinate outcome. A conversational relationship is, in other words, an essentially civilized relationship. But just as civility is compromised when the views of some are imposed on others, so conversation is compromised when it loses its civil restraint and its inherent playfulness. Each voice can become preoccupied with its own concerns, hearing in other voices only an inferior version of itself. And a single voice can seek to dictate the terms of conversation. When one voice begins to dominate, conversation is at an end. The degeneration of conversation into monologue, dogmatic assertion, is barbarism. A civilization encompasses many different ways of interpreting the world, different modes of experience and conduct. Just as modes are historical creations, so is the culture that is shaped by the conversational relationship among them. To know one’s culture is, therefore, to acquire some appreciation for the diversity of voices that compose it and, in doing so, to be able to understand the world in more than a single way. And because this is an ability that must be learned, there is a close connection between conversation and

235

Conclusion

learning—a connection Oakeshott explores in his essays on education but that must remain unexplored in this book.9 To be educated today is to be initiated into a cultural inheritance composed of different modes of understanding and self-understanding. It is not only to acquire an understanding of different ways of being human but also to be able to recognize the diversity of understandings that compose a given civilization. It is also to respect that diversity. All this can, of course, be read in such a way as to extract a doctrine. But, as I have tried to show, to read Oakeshott in this manner is to misconstrue the spirit of his reflections on the human condition and the different ways in which it can be understood. Oakeshott’s greatness as a philosopher lies not in his conclusions but in an inspired union of unusual abilities: an ability to create an intellectual world of imaginative grandeur by painstaking attention to detail; an ability to construct a system whose coherence rests not on foundational axioms or dogmas but on the harmony of its many and diverse parts and its consequent power to illuminate almost any philosophical question; an ability to criticize the prevailing doctrines without embracing the prevailing criticisms and to sail a steady course through the shifting currents of intellectual fashion; and an ability to accomplish all this in language that, at its best, achieves a level of clarity, eloquence, dignity, and force seldom found in philosophical writing. Oakeshott’s peers, with respect to these qualities, are not his twentieth-century contemporaries but Plato, Augustine, Montaigne, Hobbes, and a few other acute philosophical observers of the human scene.10 What Oakeshott says of Hobbes’s Leviathan—that its context, the setting in which its meaning is revealed, is as broad as the history of philosophy itself (HCA 3)— can be applied to his own masterpiece, On Human Conduct. To read Oakeshott narrowly as a conservative critic of the welfare state or liberal defender of individualism and pluralism, or even as a political philosopher or historian of political thought, is therefore to misunderstand, and seriously to underrate, his contribution to philosophy.

9. Most of Oakeshott’s writings on education, the liberal arts, and the universities are collected in The Voice of Liberal Learning; a related essay, “The Study of Politics in a University,” appears in Rationalism in Politics. 10. A study of Oakeshott in relation to this larger context is Wendell John Coats Jr., Oakeshott and His Contemporaries (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2000). The “contemporaries” are Montaigne, Augustine, Hegel, Hobbes, Constant, Rousseau, and Hume.

I n d e x

action, 55, 57, 59–60, 109, 193. See also conduct and agency, 61–62, 70–75, 137–38, 200–201, 212 futility of, 59–60, 62, 65, 66–67, 194 and intention, 71, 75–76, 173 theory of, 74–75 adjudication, 217, 222 administration, 218–19, 221–22 aesthetic experience, 38, 90, 108, 184–85, 194. See also art and poetry anthropology, 123–24, 129 Arendt, H., 76–77 Aristotle, 31, 33, 77, 103, 203 n. 17 art, 38, 94, 108, 111 n. 16 association, modes of, 33, 189, 202–3, 231. See also civil association and purposive association Austin, J., 199 authority, 190, 198, 201–2, 206, 209. See also rules, authenticity vs. rightness Ayer, A. J., 5 barbarism, 234 behaviorism, 71–72, 103

Bosanquet, B., 20–21, 41 n. 24 Bradley, F. H., 20 n. 5, 30 n. 15, 41 n. 24, 62–63, 105, 146 n. 4 Brentano, F., 20, 109–10 Carr, E. H., 94 category, 33 n. 18, 34, 42 n. 25, 44, 128–35. See also modality causation, historical, 160, 166–72 change, 165 historical, 6, 158–60, 165–66, 168–69, 175, 179 practical, 57, 59–60, 158 Christianity history of, 63, 64, 144, 151–52, 157 n. 16 identity of, 61, 68, 156–57 citizen, 197, 198, 211–12, 214 civil association, 3, 196–98, 231 and individuality, 183, 211–12 conditions of, 216–24 politics in, 228–29 civilization, 3, 233, 234 coherence, 21–27, 32–33, 35–36, 39, 50, 59 absolute, 22–23, 24, 35, 40, 45, 60 historical, 147–49

238

Index

coherence (continued) practical, 59, 61, 187 scientific, 114–15, 119 Collingwood, R. G., 41, 42–43, 49, 79, 108, 172–73 community, 188, 212–13 comparative method, 124 Comte, A., 103, 106 n. 7 conduct, 3, 70–77, 134, 137–38, 231. See also performances and practices vs. behavior, 71, 75, 77, 129, 130 language of, 191 consciousness, 19–20, 30, 71, 73. See also intelligence and the human sciences, 107, 122–23, 136 religious, 63, 66 consequentialism, 190, 203 n. 17 constructionism, 6–7, 36, 146–47 historical, 3–4, 141, 146–49, 152–54, 165–66 contingency, 2–3, 231 historical, 37, 138–40, 159, 160, 162–66 practical, 58–60, 62, 66–67, 128, 193–94, 220–24 conversation, 4, 14, 232–35 critical theory, 81, 98–99 Danto, A. C., 161 Davidson, D., 26, 109 n. 11 deliberation, 73–74, 204, 210, 227 Derrida, J., 29–30, 232 Descartes, R., 16 dialectic, 7, 22, 27, 31, 45 difference, 29–30, 230–35 in anthropology, 124 historical, 157, 159, 163, 166, 231 political, 212, 231 Dilthey, W., 21, 25, 105–7, 110, 124–25 discourse political, 134, 227, 228, 229 universe of, 23, 39, 41–42, 60, 233 Dray, W., 170 n. 24 Droysen, J. G., 103–4, 105, 108 n. 10, 146, 152, 163 Durkheim, E., 178 economics, 118–20 Eddington, A., 111 education, 234–35 enterprise association. See purposive association

epistemology, 10, 15–16, 27, 34 ethics. See moral philosophy events, historical, 2, 144–145, 157–72, 167–68, 180 existentialism, 9–10, 59–60, 74, 81–82 experience, 16, 17, 25–26, 70 immediate, 19–21, 82, 83 sensory, 16, 19–20, 34, 70 explanation, 3, 56–57, 101, 115, 134, 177–81 deductive-nomological, 103, 170 historical, 3–4, 139, 142, 160–72 teleological, 160, 169 fact, 15, 25–26, 29, 31, 49 historical, 145–47, 147–48 practical, 57–58, 96, 186–87 and theory, 25 n. 10, 31, 114–15, 147 faith, 62–63, 65, 67, 68–69, 193 Foucault, M., 98, 178 foundationalism, 10, 18, 24, 49 historical, 174 practical, 14, 81, 96, 192–93, 208 scientific, 5, 111 freedom in agency, 72–74, 194, 200–201, 212 individual, 13, 211, 212–13, 214 Friedman, R., 197 n. 12, 216 Gadamer, H.-G., 6–7, 103, 129, 146, 232 Geertz, C., 199, 123 Geisteswissenschaften, 106–7, 108, 110, 129 geistige Welt, 56 n. 1, 108, 136 generalization historical, 154, 160, 168–69, 170–71, 178–79 scientific, 104, 112–14, 120, 168–69 statistical, 112, 114, 115, 124, 178 Goldstein, L. J., 162, 165 Grant, R., 65, 67, 136, 223 n. 34 Habermas, J., 9, 13, 98, 107–8 Hart, H. L. A., 195 n. 9, 199 Hayek, F., 13 Hegel, G. W. F., 5–6, 22, 98 n. 30, 107, 220, 223 n. 34 Heidegger, M., 7, 10, 18, 41 n. 24, 81–82, 94 Hempel, C., 170 hermeneutics and the human sciences, 105–10, 135–37, 176 philosophical, 5–8, 27, 233 universal, 8, 101–2, 135–36

239

Index

historicism, 173–75 history, 2–3, 37, 102–4, 134, 143–76 and the human sciences, 102–4, 137–40, 172–81 and practice, 89, 94–95, 134, 150–51, 154, 176 Hobbes, T., 68, 183 n. 2, 186–87 human conduct. See conduct humanities, 102, 130, 179 human nature, 167, 177 human sciences, 7–8, 25, 170, 101–10, 117–40, 176–81. See also humanities and social sciences Husserl, E., 29, 56 Idealism, 2, 7, 20 n. 5, 22, 44, 111 ideas, 2, 6–7, 76, 122, 132. See also meaning ideal character, 30, 61, 196–97, 211, 229 world of, 20–21, 30 identity, 19, 27–32, 231 historical, 153–60, 166, 178–79 personal, 190–91 ideology, 12, 96, 132, 142, 227 idiom of inquiry, 116, 132–34, 135 imaginative reconstruction, 107–8, 144–45, 172 individuality, 28–29, 104–5, 192, 232 historical, 30 n. 15, 104, 142, 153–60, 170–72, 174 and the human sciences, 25, 104–5, 120–22, 123, 137–40, 176 political, 183, 211–16, 212–13, 234 intelligence category of, 44, 130–33, 135 and the human sciences, 8, 70, 72, 110, 128–30, 135 as presupposition of conduct, 3, 71–72, 136–37 intentionality, 75–76, 109–10, 135 interpretation, 6–7, 17, 20, 27. See also hermeneutics in the human sciences, 105, 107–8, 122–23, 124, 135–37, 180–81 of rules, 195, 199–200, 204–5 judgment, 20, 58, 91–92, 200, 227, 233 adverbial, 200 approval and disapproval, 187, 202, 205 justice, 13, 14, 205, 206–10

Kant, I., 34, 91, 103–4, 187–88, 215 Kuhn, T., 25 n. 10, 27 law, 184–85, 194–96. See also rule of law enforcement of, 209–10, 218–19, 220 evaluation of, 210–11, 228–29 philosophy of, 11, 134, 184–85, 195–96, 216 legal validity. See rules, authenticity vs. rightness legislation, 217–18 life, philosophy of (Lebensphilosophie), 81, 106, 108 life-world, 9–10, 56, 82 Locke, J., 96 n. 28 Malinowski, B., 65 n. 8 Marx, K., 81, 89, 98, 132, 142, 168 meaning concept of, 5–6, 15, 29–30 and conduct, 71, 75, 109, 139–40 of historical events, 2, 3, 152, 159–62, 164, 170–72 memory, 150 metaphysics, 15, 33–34. See also ontology Mill, J. S., 103, 106 n. 7, 210 mind, 105–7, 121, 175–76. See also intelligence modality, 2, 32–44, 117, 224, 230–31. See also modes and philosophy, 45–46, 51–52 modes, 33, 35, 39–42, 55, 83, 133–35 confusion of, 2, 3, 41–42, 118–19, 126, 127 as historical, 2, 28, 34, 36, 42, 230 relationship between, 33, 40–41, 43, 134, 233–34 Montaigne, M. de, 209 n. 21 morality, 3, 13, 184, 185–94, 234 and law, 195, 207, 208–9 and prudence, 64, 186, 187–88 and religion, 61–62, 63–64, 66 moral philosophy, 11, 93, 97–98, 184–85, 192–93 motive, 63, 193–94, 208 narrative, 6, 138, 139, 148, 161, 165 natural history, 112–13, 121 naturalism, 4, 5 natural law, 206, 207, 209 nature, 8, 12, 37, 103–4, 136

240

Index

Nietzsche, F., 93, 110 Nozick, R., 13 objectivity, 25–26, 58, 82, 108, 112, 113–14 historical, 145, 146 obligation, 189, 190, 201–2 ontology, 8, 33 n. 18, 34, 131, 224, 230–31 being, 33–34 substance, 28, 29, 34, 156–57 order of inquiry, 130–35 O’Sullivan, N., 92 n. 24 past, 149–50 historical, 37, 89, 94–95, 143–44, 145, 149–53 practical, 94–95, 150–52 scientific, 113, 150 performances explaining, 3, 137–39, 179–81 prescribing, 199–201, 217–19 phenomenology, 9–10, 16, 19–20, 27, 56, 81–82 philosophy, 4–5, 6–7, 14, 18, 45–53 and definition, 18, 31, 49–50, 192, 195–96, 227–28 and history, 142, 143–44, 161–62, 173, 217, 220 and practice, 11–12, 93, 95–99, 215, 225 Plato, 12, 56, 87 Pocock, J. G. A., 12 poetry and contemplation, 38, 57, 67–68, 194 as a mode, 36, 38, 103, 150 and practice, 59, 67, 83, 90, 94 policy, 217, 220–21, 229 political philosophy, 11–14, 93, 96, 98, 127 political science, 10–11, 126–28 political thought, history of, 12, 78–79, 141 n. 1 politics, 17 n. 1, 127, 217, 226–30 Popper, K., 13, 174 n. 30 positivism, 5, 22, 26 historical, 2, 103, 142, 144–45, 160, 170–71 and the human sciences, 8, 101, 107–8, 109, 120 legal, 199, 206, 209 postmodernism, 6, 178 practice. See also theory and practice as a mode, 10, 36–37, 56–60, 76, 82 primacy of, 9–10, 40, 56 n. 1, 80, 81–83

practices, 75–79, 125, 126, 189–90, 196–97. See also rules and performances, 71, 75, 77–78, 139, 179–81 pragmatism, 4, 8–9, 10, 65, 81, 186 prediction, 119–20, 128 prudence, 36–37, 56, 64, 68, 82, 186–88 psychology, 104, 105–7, 120–23 purpose, 10, 82, 188–90, 203–4, 214 purposive association, 189, 197–98, 203, 212, 213–15 politics in, 228–29 Putnam, H., 26 quantification, 112, 113, 114, 122, 128 Quine, W. V. O., 26, 113 rational choice, 103, 132 Rationalism, 13, 90–93, 97 Rawls, J., 13, 207 realism historical, 148–49, 162 internal, 26 scientific, 5, 13, 27, 110–11, 113 n. 19 reality, 25–26, 43 historical, 142, 153, 159, 164, 174–75 practical, 57–58, 62–63, 186 scientific, 115 relativism, 8, 24, 30, 192 religion, 60–69, 92 n. 24, 151–52, 156–57, 193–94, 206 philosophy of, 68–69 and worldliness, 64–66, 193–94, 213 Rickert, H., 108, 121, 176 Rorty, R., 4–5, 7, 18, 47, 135, 233 rule of law, 13, 183–84, 194–211, 219, 222–23 rules, 78, 91–92, 199–201 authenticity vs. rightness, 204–11 vs. commands, 77, 78, 197, 199–201, 214 instrumental vs. noninstrumental, 188, 195 n. 9, 201–4 relationship in terms of, 198, 199–204 ruling, 218–19, 221–22 Ryle, G., 42 n. 25 Schopenhauer, A., 103 science, 37–38, 102–3, 106, 110–18, 129, 134 and history, 101–3 and practice, 87–89, 116 scientism, 5, 27, 110

241

Index

Searle, J. R., 111 n. 15 self, 62, 186–87, 191 disclosure, 191, 193 enactment, 193–94 Sellars, W., 26 skepticism, 16, 29, 53, 154 Skinner, Q., 12 social sciences, 102, 117–28, 130, 177–78 sociology, 124–26, 177–78 state, 13, 197–98, 203, 228–29 as compulsory, 211, 213–15, 221 Strauss, L., 12 structuralism, 178, 179 Taylor, C., 8 n. 8, 108–9, 127 technical knowledge, 90–91 technology, 87–89, 112 teleology, 6, 13, 22, 142, 160, 169 theology, 69, 206 theorizing, 16–17, 50–53, 80–81, 83–86, 95. See also philosophy theory and practice, 8–12, 55, 79–99, 101, 108–9 tradition, 76, 91 Trollope, A., 210

truth, 9, 10, 21–27, 39, 53, 132. See also coherence as correspondence, 23–27, 111 n. 15 historical, 147, 148–49 religious, 62–63, 68 understanding, 19, 31–32, 231 conditional vs. unconditional, 52, 85–86, 95, 105, 107 in the human sciences (Verstehen), 105, 107 utilitarianism, 190, 203 value, 57–58, 63, 65, 108–9 Vico, G., 103, 136, 142, 183 Waldron, J., 98 n. 30 Walzer, M., 12, 191 wants, 57–58, 63, 65, 132, 186–89 relationship in terms of, 188–89, 203, 214 war, 186–87, 190, 223 n. 34 Weber, M., 30 n. 15, 107, 167 Winch, P., 103, 109 Windelband, W., 104, 121 Wittgenstein, L., 18, 26, 48, 83, 109, 232