John Allman’s lecture as part of the Brain, Mind and Consciousness series put on by the Skeptics Society. Allman is best known for his work on the anatomical structure of the Von Economo neurons (102 minutes).
Hameroff Lecture: A New Marriage of Brain and Computer
Consciousness studies luminary, Stuart Hameroff, Professor of Anesthesiology and Psychology and Director, Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson (59 minutes)
Dave Chalmers interview
Some rare footage of Dave Chalmers, philosopher of mind extraordinaire. Below is an interview conducted by John Horgan.
Here is full the interview (77 minutes)
Complex Systems Resource
Thanks to the stigmergic properties of the Web I am thrilled to make the acquaintance of Vitorino Ramos of the Evolutionary Systems and Biomedical Engineering Lab., IST, Technical University of Lisbon. For those interested in all things related to Artificial Life and Intelligence, Bio-Inspired Computation, Collective Intelligence and Complex Systems, Evolution, Self-Organization and emergent Cognitive Learning, and of course all things stigmergic, Vitorino is THE MAN. His website is a wonderfully rich resource for online papers, lectures and much more besides. I re-produce some excellent footage from Vitorino’s homepage – flocking Starlings whose collective movements are as smooth as any animated morph. Great stuff!
BBC Nietzsche Documentary
Part of the BBC’s Human All Too Human series on existentialist thinkers (50 minutes). Features the late Reg Hollingdale, Nietzsche’s translator, who I first met at the founding of the Nietzsche Society of Great Britain. We met next when Reg stepped in at the last minute to give a wonderfully compelling talk about his life’s work as translator when a speaker at the Nietzsche Society conference (Essex that year I think) dropped out.
Heidegger: thinking the unthinkable
A BBC documentary that gives a good introductory overview of Heidegger’s philosophy and controversial life featuring his son, Gadamer, Rorty, Steiner and others (49 minutes).
The Sin of the Academic (an affectionate take-off of Oakeshott)
by John Jascoll.
The Background
When I read in last summer’s LSE Magazine that an association had been formed to honour Michael Oakeshott it made me pause to reflect on my connection with the man. Unlike most of the people involved with the conference to commemorate him, I am far removed from the world of academia. Yet I too am an Oakeshottian. And I have a debt to pay. Let me explain.
I studied under Oakeshott when I attended Elie Kedourie’s History of Political Thought seminar for my master’s degree back in the early ’70s. I was one of 16 students who met with faculty each week to discuss such worthy topics as “the identification of history as a mode of thought”, “the emergence and nature of historical understanding” and “the interpretation of an historical event.” Although he was just a guest at our get-togethers, Oakeshott dominated the seminar. From the word go, he set the highest standards for our philosophical discussions, either with his own erudite papers or with his incisive input on the pieces the rest of us presented. I can actually recall the moment when my mind was pushed over a threshold – somewhat akin to being led out of the shadows of Plato’s cave and brought closer to the ideal form. It was an extraordinary cerebral experience. I know some very learned professors are attending the September conference to present papers describing his impact on the academic world. But there must also be a vast number of non academics like myself who have had little connection with academic life since they left the LSE yet who’ve felt the benefit of their studies with Oakeshott.
In my own case I’ve worked within the corporate world, been the development specialist for a non-profit and worked as a freelance writer on the side. In each job I’ve applied the intellectual training I received from my master of philosophical inquiry. Whether it be in creating a marketing strategy for a new product, planning a charity auction fundraiser or simply writing travel articles. I’ve used the same logical approach that Oakeshott drilled into us when we attempted to make sense out of those abstruse philosophical concepts. So when I learned of the Michael Oakeshott conference I realised the time had come to acknowledge my debt to the man.
Oakeshott was a frequent visitor to Elie Kedourie’s History of Political Thought seminar where he presented a series of papers on the philosophy of history. Oakeshott collected three of these some 10 years later in his book On History and Other Essays. We corresponded after the book was published and he wrote me in October 1983: ‘I am glad to hear what you are doing now and delighted that you have happy memories of that seminar . . . as for the book . . . in the first part you will find, rewritten and made less casual, something of what we used to talk about in the seminar. I wish I could have made it more readable, but I thought that if it were permitted I should make it more guarded.’
He was then living in Swanage: ‘As you can see, I have now left London. At long last I retired from the fray and have come down here to live in the country. It is a lovely part of the world. I enjoy it, and would do even more if I could get rid of the attack of arthritis which has gone to my shoulders and hands. No doubt I shall do so, and I cannot complain because it comes after 80 years with hardly a days (sic) illness except for the childish complaints which nobody of my generation escaped.’
He wrote in a small, neat, legible script, and in spite of his age and arthritis it’s not in the least shaky. His thoughts too are as clear as a bell – as clear as they had been in the seminar. In fact I can almost hear his precise tones as I read his words.
Oakeshott was a stickler for precision when it came to defining the key words of his special subject – the philosophy of history. I’ll never forget my first encounter with him in the seminar when he picked us up, one after the other, for our slapdash use of the term history. ‘When you casually use the word history you are actually talking about the past and that’s the word you should be using.’ Oakeshott then went on to spend the following three hours defining the correct use of the word history. In fact, if truth be told, we spent the following ten months defining it! Hence my parody. The ‘erm-erm-erms’, incidentally, are absolutely accurate. These were the vocal pauses he used to collect his thoughts.
Oakeshott was a small yet impressive man to look at, always well groomed and neatly dressed, with a sharp eye and an even sharper mind. I would go further and say he had the greatest mind I’ve encountered. I admired Michael Oakeshott tremendously. He was so clear, so precise, so brilliant.
The Sin of the Academic
‘The sin of the academic is that he takes so long in coming to the point.’ –
Professor Michael Oakeshott (‘Rationalism in Politics’).
If the historian is to talk about the past he must first understand the terminology of time: past, present, future, yesterday, the middle of next week, and now. Now-erm-erm-erm, now – and there’s a word which many of us use, but do we know what we mean by ‘now’? Many would stop here and ask what we mean by ‘mean’ or indeed by ‘what’, ‘do’ and ‘by’. And excellent questions too. However, let us concentrate on the question in hand. Let us assume that when we ask what do we mean by ‘now’ that we are looking for a specific definition, that is to say that we are looking for the contexts in which ‘now’ could be appropriately used.
OOPS
Now-er-er-erm-oops there I go again erm-erm-erm-this word ‘now’ has three letters and that’s a very important point. Before we go any further we must consider what we mean by ‘letter’. Is it something that Mr Smith places in a pillar-box for Miss Jones? Or is it maybe a form of prophylactic that Mr Smith may intend using in connection with Miss Jones? Or I suppose ‘letter’ could conceivably be construed as being the components of the words which Mr Smith has written down in his missive to Miss Jones. Let us take this final – some would say far-fetched – definition of the word ‘letter’ for use in this context.
N.O.W.
That is to say, a letter composed of lines, angles and curves is itself a component of a word. In this case the word ‘now’ has three letters. In short, ‘now’ contains an N, an O and a W.
Er-er-erm having ascertained what this word is, namely that it is a literary phenomenon composed of the three letters N O W, and that it is spoken or written down either manually or by some perhaps more sophisticated typographical means, let us proceed to analyse it one step further.
‘Now’ gives us an impression of the immediate, of the present – in short, of the immediate present. But is this present as the historian would take it the same present as everyone else would understand by the word? For instance, if Mr Smith gives Miss Jones a gaily-wrapped parcel tied with some bright-coloured ribbon for her birthday, is this the kind of ‘present’ which the historian is talking about? Or is he rather referring to the exclamation ‘Present!’ meaning ‘I am here’? Or could he possibly be . . . ad infinitum.
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To hear some audio of Oakeshott, click here.
Why read Oakeshott?
Some years ago I commissioned Noël O’Sullivan to contribute to the program for inaugural conference of Michael Oakeshott Association in 2001 which was held at the LSE. This is his beautifully crafted essay and is a companion piece to Ken Minogue’s portrait.
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When Leslie Marsh asked me to talk about the apparently simple subject, ‘Why the academic or educated reader reads Oakeshott’, I hesitated because there are obviously so many possible answers that anything I might say would inevitably seem arbitrary. In the end, I simply accepted this and decided to go ahead with a purely personal response to the question. So if you can’t line up what I find in Oakeshott with what you find there, don’t worry about it.
My starting point is the assumption that the most common reason for reading Oakeshott probably relates to his critique of twentieth century ideological politics developed in the book Rationalism in Politics. If we look beyond what Oakeshott has to say about rationalism and tradition in that book to his work as a whole, however, I suggest that there are four reasons for reading him which are likely to remain of increasing relevance. I will try to present them in a way that constantly connects with Anthony Quinton’s reflections on Oakeshott’s philosophical heritage and Kenneth Minogue’s more personal reflections on the man himself.
1. The first reason for reading Oakeshott is that he was almost unique in achieving a fundamentally affirmative outlook in an age whose leading intellectuals have been best known for such concepts as nothingness, absurdity, angst, despair and nihilism. There is, as I shall note at the end, an important qualification to be made about this optimism so far as Oakeshott’s view of contemporary politics is concerned, especially in his late work; but for the present I want to concentrate on the overall mood which inspired his general view of life, and in particular that boundless intellectual curiosity upon which Robert Grant, for example, has commented.
If we ask what the secret of this affirmative achievement was, I think the answer is that Oakeshott’s positive mood has three components, each of which is clearly discernible in his writings
• The first component is a certain kind of modesty, the philosophical foundations for which were laid early, in Experience and its Modes, in a rejection of absolutes of every kind and a stress upon the inescapable conditionality of experience, which is what Oakeshott had in mind when he spoke of the ‘modality’ of experience.
The main qualification to be made about Oakeshott’s philosophical modesty is that in this early work, he still believed that philosophy itself could escape from the conditionality of modal experience and offer an absolute vantage point. In his later work, however, Oakeshott abandoned this position and restricted the philosophical achievement to what may be called ‘the questioning of the question’, whatever that question may be. On this later view, in other words, philosophy never moves towards an absolute vantage point of any kind but merely turns back on the question asked, to expose the assumption about the thinker and his or her topic which have caused puzzlement. There is a resemblance here, needless to say, to Wittgenstein’s view of the task of philosophy as letting the fly out of the fly-bottle. There is also a similarity to Heidegger’s view that philosophical questions are always questions about a pre-reflective experience whose nature can be clarified, but which can never be transcended in the course of that clarification.
Perhaps Oakeshott’s refusal to assign a privileged status to philosophy is best reflected in his view that the decision whether to pursue it or not is, in the end, entirely a matter of mood: a decision, that is, which should never be made under the impression that philosophy could enable one to say the last word on the nature of reality.
• The second component is a sense of piety, in the pagan sense of that term in which what it refers to is a respect for all those aspects of the human condition which are not of man’s making or choosing. Oakeshott’s favourite story, and the one to which he returned in his last published work, was the story of ‘The Tower of Babel’, which is first and foremost a story of impiety. More generally, it was a dislike of impiety which inspired Oakeshott’s sustained attack on rationalism, the rationalist being impious in his desire to live in an entirely self-created world – a world ‘abridged’, as Oakeshott put it, from the complex flow of events which actually nurtures him.
There is, however, at least one major problem created by Oakeshott’s sense of piety. This is that it is in practice increasingly difficult to distinguish what is simply ‘given’ in human existence from what is made by us. Recognition of this would not, however, have altered Oakeshott’s fundamental distaste for the self-created world to which western modernity aspires, a distaste ultimately rooted in his temperamental sympathy for the life of the bee rather than that of the spider. Whereas the bee gathers the pollen from which its honey comes from flowers whose existence is quite independent of it, the spider lives in a self-created world, in the form of a web spun from its own innards. Oakeshott did not, of course, think that it made sense to regard spiders as impious for making their webs, but he did feel that the spider’s mentality would inevitably be incompatible with the preservation of freedom through a constitutional way of doing politics, if it was applied to the sphere of government. Whether he was right in this respect is of course a matter for debate which, in the nature of things, can never be finally resolved.
• The third component is one which links Oakeshott with Nietzsche, and is his conviction that the final perspective open to us is provided, not by reason, but by laughter. It is only laughter, not philosophy, which can protect us against egotism and self-importance, two of the most corrupting aspects of human nature. Oakeshott’s laughter is, however, laughter of a particular kind: it is the laughter incorporated above all in the modern western tradition in which Oakeshott felt most at home, although his relation to it has been generally neglected. This is the picaresque tradition. Oakeshott was particularly fond of one of the best known sayings from that tradition, viz. ‘Le plus l’homme se perfectionne, le plus il se dégrade’ (Marivaux). And he was also fond of one of the best known characters in that tradition, which is that of Don Quixote, whose life is a story of constant disasters, after each of which Don Quixote simply picked himself up, dusted himself down, and set off again to follow his fancy.
It is not generally known that his personal hero was Nelson (Oakeshott tried to enlist in the navy when he was eleven, but was turned down on grounds of colour blindness). What Oakeshott particularly liked about Nelson was the picaresque side of Nelson’s own life – he liked in particular to quote a saying of Nelson’s, to the effect that he was completely at home when at sea, and completely at sea when on land.
2. The second reason for reading Oakeshott is that he not only achieved an affirmative view of life: he also insisted that such a view is inseparable from an ideal of civilized living.
But what does civilized living require, according to Oakeshott? He believed that it involves three closely related things which are not now very well appreciated or understood:
• (a) education: in an age when most of the talk about the self is in terms of autonomy or self-expression, Oakeshott held (like the ancient Greeks, and like Hume and Burke in the modern period), that the civilized self is essentially an educated self. The education in question is not a matter of training; it is, rather, a matter of critical induction into the on-going tradition of self-interpretation which constitutes a society’s culture.
(b) civilization involves, secondly, limits – or, more precisely, it involves non-instrumental moral limits. So far as the modern European world is concerned, these limits are incorporated above all in the ideal of civil association, in one’s identity as a citizen.
What is particularly relevant in this connection is that the limits relevant to the politics of civil association are essentially the product of compromise – compromise, that is, between claims which may all be perfectly rational and valid. The politics of civil association, that is, cannot be properly understood as the pursuit of some one right answer, which is then imposed on the governed by rulers who claim to possess a truth which their subjects are too intellectually benighted to be able to grasp.
(c) civilization involves, thirdly, play, a topic whose importance in Oakeshott’s writings has largely been ignored. If play seems at first a trivial subject, it may help to recall that Oakeshott was sympathetic to a book by the Dutch historian Huizinga in which Huizinga argued that the past periods of civility in western Europe were only possible because of the existence of an outlook which refused to treat everything in instrumental or manipulative terms. More specifically, Huizinga had argued in Homo Ludens that the ancient Greek world, for example, had possessed the Olympic Games, and that the medieval world had possessed the ideal of chivalry, an ideal which had been passed down to the nineteenth century in the ethical code of the gentleman (to which Oakeshott himself subscribed). From this standpoint, Huizinga maintained, the unique feature of the modern industrial civilization in the west is the triumph of a mentality which only understands the question, What is it for? Such an outlook, in a word, is wholly instrumental. I will not stop here to do more than point rapidly to the interesting link between Oakeshott and Heidegger (and indeed the Frankfurt School of Marxist theory) on this issue: Heidegger too, it will be recalled, was convinced that western modernity is wholly dominated by a technological perspective.
Against this background, it is easy to understand why Oakeshott wrote, in an early essay on play, that ‘The complete character of a human being does not come into view unless we add Homo Ludens, man the player, to Homo Sapiens (intelligent man), Homo Faber, man the maker of things, and Homo Laborans, man the worker’. (p.6 of manuscript essay). Oakeshott added that it is not Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber and Homo Laborans, but Homo Ludens, man engaged in the activities of play, who is the civilized man. (Ibid., p. 9)
More generally, Oakeshott believed that the liberal element in modern culture could only be valued by those who refuse to succumb to the modern tendency to place work above all other activity and continue to place play at the heart of civilized existence. Above all, he believed, the liberal concept of education, which atttaches intrinsic value to the activity of understanding (whether in the form of philosopy, science or history) and to art and poetry, is now under constant threat because it presupposes a civilization based upon the value of play. Although our universities continue to offer a liberal syllabus, this has no secure position in an age dominated by the culture of work, in relation to which the liberal ideal inevitably looks parastic and inconsequential. Although the liberal educational ideal may survive, what it offers is now often valued only for what it contributes to public entertainment, or to personal recreation and relaxation: to things, that is, which work is assumed to require if it is to be efficiently pursued after a short break from it. (Ibid. p.9)
It is not only liberal education, however, which Oakeshott believes to be threatened by the work ethic. He also believed that morality and civil association can only survive in a culture in which play occupies a central position, since the non-instrumental outlook which both presuppose cannot otherwise exist.
When Oakeshott’s emphasis upon the role of play in civlized life is remembered, it is easy to understand the despair of western modernity which characterizes his late essay on ‘The Tower of Babel’. As that essay indicates, he came to believe that everything he valued in education, social life and the politics of civil association was unlikely to endure for much longer in an age so completely devoid of the sense of play.
3. The third reason for reading Oakeshott appears at first sight to be narrowly philosophical. It concerns, above all, his love of intellectual precision, to such an extent that when reading a late work like On Human Conduct, it is obvious that every word has been weighed many times.
This love of precision might easily have made Oakeshott a philosophical pedant, but it didn’t, mainly because his view of philosophy was inseparable from a theme which intimately connected his conception of philosophy to something which has generally been excluded from philosophical concern in modern western intellectual life. This is the role of imagination in disclosing the full texture and complexity of human experience. For Oakeshott, it is only imagination which saves us from remaining blind to many aspects of the world in which we live.
So far as these aspects of the world are concerned, the one whose structure Oakeshott believed he had done most to clarify was the historical one. His work on this structure was, indeed, what he considered to be the most original part of his philosophy. Although a few fellow philosophers – R. G. Collingwood being perhaps the most notable among them – have appreciated the importance of Oakeshott’s work in this area, his exposition of the distinctive logic of historical inquiry has generally received less scholarly attention than practically every other aspect of his writings.
I will not try to summarize Oakeshott’s view of historical inquiry here. My concern is only to suggest that while that work is often regarded as a relatively restricted and very complicated attempt to rescue the study of man and society from the confusion which Oakeshott believed had been caused by positivism on the one hand, and ideology on the other, the deeper and more enduring significance of what he has to say about historical understanding lies elsewhere. It lies, to be precise, in the claim that human identity is always an historical identity, and that the nature of this historical identity can only be explored by historians who are capable of the kind of imaginative insight which enabled Burckhardt, for example, to recognize the common theme of individualism running through the politics, art, religion, economics and philosophy of the event which he termed ‘the Renaissance’. The historical event known as the Renaissance, in other words, does not merely describe a fact which we inevitably come upon in the course of late medieval and early modern European history. It is, on the contrary, a dimension of European history which can only be identified through the constructive work of imaginative insight.
In this respect, Oakeshott is at one with the American philosopher, Richard Rorty, in breaking down the rigid line of separation that has long been drawn between the world of fiction, on the one hand, and the world of social studies, on the other. In the world of fiction, imagination is accepted as perfectly legitimate, but with results that are regarded as purely subjective; while in the world of social studies, it is assumed that we eliminate imagination and instead adopt an empirical methodology which is supposed to guarantee objective explanation. For Oakeshott, however, the main difference is not that imagination is vital in the case of fiction, but merely distorts in the case of social studies; on his view, imagination is crucial in both cases, but is subject to different constraints. In the case of fiction, the inner logic of a character or the likely consequences of a situation can be developed solely in the light of what seems plausible to the author. In historical explanation, however, the play of the author’s imagination is tied to making intelligible the interplay between purely contingent events over which the author himself has no control, but must explore entirely in the light of the historical evidence he can produce in support of the linkages he seeks to establish.
As I have said, the detail of Oakeshott’s view of historical explanation is not what concerns me here: what is of interest is rather the central position occupied by imagination in his philosophy in general, and in his understanding of historical explanation in particular.
4. The fourth reason for reading Oakeshott links his philosophy to his personal life in a way which helps to explain the admiration he evoked from those who came to know him well. The link is provided, I think, by an ideal of liberation which has some similarities to that found in certain continental thinkers. Liberation as Oakeshott understood it was inseparable, for example, from an aristocratic individualism which connects him in particular to Ortega y Gasset, whose little book on The Revolt of the Masses he greatly admired. More generally, his ideal of liberation is quite close to Heidegger’s existentialist concept of maturity as a commitment to ‘Being in the world’ to the extent that (as was noted above) Oakeshott, like Heidegger, systematically rejects the pursuit of absolutes of any kind.
What matters at present, however, is that Oakeshott refused to define liberation in negative terms. He refused, that is, to equate it, like Isaiah Berlin has done, with doing whatever one wishes to do in a condition that is free from the fear of physical coercion. For Oakeshott, the liberation worth striving for is at once civil, since it always acknowledges mutually accepted rules of civility, and educated, since it also always consists of striving to acquire a distinctive voice of one’s own not by rejecting the cultural tradition from which one comes but by critical self-immersion in it.
This ideal of liberation, needless to say, bears little relation to the modern romantic one, which takes the self-expression of a given or natural self as the focal point. It requires, on the contrary, an endless, highly exacting and – Oakeshott would insist – more or less imaginative and adventurous process of refashioning the given self through education, in the broadest sense of that term. When this ideal of liberation is borne in mind it is possible to understand the note of profound disillusion with contemporary western life already noticed in Oakeshott’s later work. Oakeshott’s disillusion arose, as has been seen, because the decline of any place for play in contemporary culture inevitably broke the link he himself wished to maintain between liberation and civilized living.
Oakeshott also had a somewhat different way of expressing the reason for his disillusion with the contemporary world which it will be useful to mention. What has happened, he believed, is that modern mass democracies have forgotten that civilized life requires us to combine two different identities. One identity is the natural one which we all possess in so far as we are beings moved by our needs, wants and desires. From the standpoint of this natural identity, everything in the universe is always in danger of being treated from a purely utilitarian or instrumental point of view.
The other identity we possess, potentially at least, is a moral one. This moral identity relates, not to the natural order of desire, but to the limits or, as Oakeshott called them, the ‘compunctions’ which we impose on the ways in which we satisfy those desires. What has happened, on Oakeshott’s view, is that we have increasingly tended to forget this second identity and to think only of the first identity: we have become, that is, creatures mainly of desire, and our culture has become, accordingly, a culture of gratification, in which the sovereignty of desire is largely unchallenged. Liberation, in a word, has now become almost exclusively associated with wanting and having.
Although Oakeshott is generally thought of as a sceptic, the depth of his late disillusion is in fact a testimony to the intensity of the idealism which had previously inspired his political thought. It is, I suggest, the combination of liberation with civility and idealism that characterized both his philosophy and his life, and it is this combination that will, I think, continue to communicate itself to his future readers. But if that is so, then perhaps the principal task now facing those who sympathize with Oakeshott’s ideal of liberation is to find ways of sharing it without, however, following in the path which led Oakeshott himself to such deep disillusion. How that is to be done is not altogether clear to me, but unless it is done, there is a certain irony in the fate likely to befall them. That fate is to end, as Oakeshott did in his essay on ‘The Tower of Babel’, with an indictment of contemporary western life so sweeping and unrelentingly bleak that it threatens at times to end in the kind of extreme left-wing alienation found in Frankfurt School Marxists such as Herbert Marcuse.
Michael Oakeshott as a Character
In light of the level of interest shown in the Oakeshott audio that I recently posted, I thought this beautifully crafted personal portrait by one of the people who knew him longest, might act as a nice complement to further flesh out Oakeshott the man. It’s by Ken Minogue, who was for many years, Oakeshott’s colleague and friend. (Also see the companion piece Why read Oakeshott” by Noël O’Sullivan.
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That Michael Oakeshott was a remarkable philosopher is something we here will all agree upon. But what sort of man was he? Different portraits will no doubt be painted from different points of view. What I shall say makes no claim to be comprehensive or even intimate. Others were closer to him. But I was a colleague and friend of Michael’s from 1956 till his death in 1990. I was familiar, as it were, with him in some of his most characteristic roles.
First, the physical: He was of medium height, slim and graceful in his movements. His voice was never loud, but it carried remarkably well to the back of a room. His dress was always stylish and original, constructed of relatively simple materials (sometimes from the Oxfam shop) but capable of any necessary formality – as when a bit of darkish corduroy and a bow tie made him completely at home on a formal occasion. He long looked young, and was taken for a student even when he was a tutor at Cambridge. He retained a youthful air all his life. He laughed easily.
He was a terrific friend to have. He remembered anniversaries, took care over presents and he sent them with witty notes. He had a special talent for finding as a present something appropriate to the receiver from a second hand bookshop. These talents reflected the fact that he responded deeply to a person’s individuality. One of the epigraphs he toyed with for On Human Conduct was a sentence from a letter Machiavelli wrote to Soderini: “Each man according to his own imagination [la sua fantasia] guides himself.” For Michael, to know someone was to enter in some degree into that person’s own imaginative world. A human life was an adventure, and he was very considerate of his fellow adventurers.
On the other hand, during the time I knew him, he tended to be rather passive socially. This may have been in part because he had quite enough socially going on in his life – above all with his close friends the Letwins who provided a circle for him. It may also have been that as a university teacher, much of his time was taken up in accepting invitations to parties or drinks with students and colleagues. If in later life you said you were coming down to Dorset, he became an immensely considerate host, and many came to see him. If you asked him to a party, he and Christal would happily come. I remember being rather surprised that he had a taste for sweet Cinzano. By the 1950s he knew a lot of people in the literary and academic world, and no doubt ran into them at College occasions, but he was not socially enterprising. No one was more indifferent to mixing with the fast set. And one might, I think, pose that as the problem from which we might begin.
The reason for it, I think, is that Oakeshott was a philosopher down to the tips of his toes. While he had an efficient grasp of the practicalities of life, the other side of his mind was always conscious that the world was a mystery. Another epigraph he toyed with for On Human Conduct (and used in other contexts) was the remark Cinq Mars made as he put his head on the block: “Qu’est-ce que ce monde?” He read voluminously and there was always so much going on in his head that he seldom felt an actual need for mere sociability. His manners were in any case polished and considerate. He was, in other words, easy meat for bores.
The fact that the centre of his existence was always his own thought meant that his doubts were always philosophical, and never (at least as I knew him) about his own competence, adequacy and identity. He took the world and human character, in which he delighted, as he found it, never concerned with the fact that many of the eccentricities that he judged captivating in others might well be an expression of pure desperation. He was considerate of any evident sufferings in others, without being highly empathic to the psychic problems which lay behind the sometimes amusingly eccentric face they presented to the world. Although he was essentially someone who found perfection in the life of a don, he did have slight yearnings for the road not taken. He once remarked jocularly to me that he didn’t think he could bear to die without having taken part in a cavalry charge. But whenever he writes of scholarship and the university, he expresses such passion that there is no doubt that in academia he had found the niche in life that suited him perfectly.
This marvellous philosophical self-sufficiency was vital in his life because he had to put up with a simply immense amount of pretty gross misunderstanding of his philosophy. Sometimes this came from rather baffled admirers such as Bernard Crick, sometimes from intellectual enemies whom he found vulgar and gross, such as Ernest Gellner. Gellner proselytised for precisely the kind of rather uncritical belief in the superiority of the contemporary world that Oakeshott spent his life attacking. For Gellner, everything was practical, including philosophy, whereas Oakeshott was fighting a rearguard action for the independent and disinterested value of philosophy, history and poetry. In a world dominated by technocratic ideas, this looked like a familiarly old-fashioned position. Hence, one of the problems he encountered in the intellectual world of his time was that his thought could superficially be identified with earlier writers. Susan Stebbing reviewing Experience and its Modes in Mind could remark that it was all in Bradley, and I remember mentioning Oakeshott to A.J. Ayer. “Oh it’s just a rehash of Burke” he remarked. But these superficialities were perhaps less intolerable than the caricatures that came out in the special issue of Political Theory in which distinguished writers such as Hanna Pitkin and Sheldon Wolin made a complete hash of interpreting what he had to say. For someone who worked very hard to make himself transparent, these misunderstandings, not surprisingly, brought out the element of indignation which intensified in his character as he got older. The general problem was that his critics regarded as broad and challenging a fallacy he thought riddled modern thought: irrelevance, or fitting answers to the wrong questions. Another way in which he transgressed the rhetorical conventions of his time was a consequence of the widespread demand that any account of a problem should lead to concrete proposals for a cure. His inaugural lecture on political education provoked just this kind of storm. If our culture is rationalist, and that’s bad, what must we do about it?
Mostly, however, Oakeshott was remarkably forbearing when he encountered ignorant criticism or the misunderstanding of students. He vouchsafed the soft answer, or took up some apparently peripheral question and changed the subject. Sometimes jangling coins in his pocket and looking up into the middle distance as he puffed at a cigarette, he would respond to a student making some absolutely banal remark with “oh you think that, do you?” My impression is that he was hardly ever shaken by criticism, and indeed the discussion of his papers usually degenerated into misunderstandings. It was not always easy to understand what he was getting at, and since he always began any investigation in the outfield, as it were, critics found it difficult to penetrate the core of his argument. The only way to develop a discussion with him was to press on into the meaning of whatever concept was central to his argument.
For this reason he was something of a fish out of (Cambridge) water at LSE. It lacked the ethos, the frivolity and the scholarly delicacy of Cambridge, where he really belonged. Why did he move? Shirley Letwin once suggested to me that he had personal reasons for staying out of Cambridge at that time; that may be. He had, of course, resigned his Cambridge post in 1949 and moved temporarily to Oxford. But there is also no doubt that part of him did respond to London life, and that in the middle fifties and early sixties, he did enjoy the company in the LSE Senior Common Room, liking people like Paish, Firth, Devons, Smellie, Freedman, and of course Kedourie, and later Cranston, Schapiro, and many others. He got on well with people, but I think he found the patrician manner of Robbins a bit grand for his taste. And as a smoker, he hardly ever encountered Popper.
What does it mean to say that Oakeshott was essentially a philosopher? We are not, of course, talking of the Platonic notion that virtue is knowledge and that to be a philosopher is to ascend to higher planes of virtue. We now think that philosophers are no different from your common clay, and that the philosopher with a toothache will behave no better than another. We think of Bertie with his atrocious breath pursuing Lady Ottiline down the paths of Garsington. But in Oakeshott’s case, being a philosopher seems to me to have infused his whole character. His mind was always preoccupied with one curiosity or another, such as how one can breathe and swallow at the same time. What simple people identified with reality seemed to him largely a construction of the imagination. Being essentially a philosopher meant not only that he found the world a mystery, but that he was self-sufficient to a remarkable degree. As to virtue, I hesitate to raise such an old fashioned expression. We now believe that there are many forms of virtue, and no one exhibits them all. Oakeshott had a reputation as a ladies man, and he had various affairs. On the detail of any of that I know nothing, but I think that he had a weakness for romance, and that he tended to see his latest love as a princesse lointaine. He was no doubt Bohemian in various ways, but this did not prevent him during the 1960s from being impatient with student rebellion. He did not bother to involve himself in the endless committees taking a stand against it. I think he simply had better things to do.
There may well be ground for criticising Oakeshott from a moral point of view, but one would have to say that he was a good man. He was conscientious, considerate, polite and honest. He enlisted as a private early in the war, and found himself billeted with (as the story has it) an illiterate cockney, for whom he wrote letters home. Some think that he resented the lack of recognition he tended to suffer till later years (though he was certainly a big celebrity in the 1950s). Against this, I remember Perry Worsthorne’s story about spending a year or two with Oakeshott when he was an officer in the special intelligence unit called “Phantom” during the war, and then coming back to Cambridge, finding to his astonishment that his old military comrade was a distinguished don, turning up to lecture him on the history of political thought. English upper class conversation, of course, is slow to spill the beans. Oakeshott continued to attend reunions of Phantom for many years. It must have been an interesting lot. The actor David Niven was one of them.
His philosophical character comes out pretty obviously in the way in which he approached the task of philosophising. He always began way back, at the very terms of the question, as he did in On Human Conduct, where he starts, you will remember, with the question of what it is to theorise human conduct. It was perhaps because his life consisted in forever rethinking the questions that interested him that critics in seminars had little new to say to him. I remember getting a letter from him in the early seventies in which he said he was writing something extended, and discovering that things he thought he had got clear were “as clear as mud.” A recent writer has been tracing the movement of his thought, from absolute to sceptical idealism. This is plausible, but I think the truth of the matter is that there was a continuing shifting behind the scenes of what he thought he could take for granted.
This world of thought in which he lived made him an elusive figure to deal with intellectually, and perhaps was responsible for familiar misunderstandings of his character. Some of his remarks in the essay “Rationalism in Politics” suggested a certain contempt for the parvenu but should actually be regarded as part of his dislike of pretentiousness. Remarks about “jumped-up kitchen porters deputizing for an absent cook” or “Like a foreigner or a man out of his social class, he is bewildered by a tradition . . . of which he knows only the surface; a butler or an observant house-maid has the advantage of him”, suggest an attitude of de haut en bas in which everyone should know his place. Nothing could be further from Oakeshott’s actual attitude.
A similar detachment marked his dislike of “politics”. The term was coming to signify that everything should be judged in terms of power and utility. It was increasingly used to disseminate the kind of practical attitude to everything which he most detested. Similarly, he was pretty sceptical of the idea of political science, remarking once that the only thing mathematics can contribute to social understanding is what makes a society indistinguishable from an ant heap. The outcome of these features of Oakeshott’s life was that many of his colleagues in the business of teaching politics rather thought that he looked down upon them. He always denied it.
There was nothing high flown about his conversation. He preferred understatement to bombast, and as Noel O’Sullivan has remarked, his philosophy dealt with many of the themes of existentialism, but without the angst and the melodrama. He respected Heidegger (“he understands about modes”) but could never understand the fuss about Sartre. Asked about Wittgenstein who had been around Cambridge in his time, he merely remarked that there were a lot of Austrian comedians around the place at that time. That the universe was totally indifferent to human concerns he took for granted. He knew all about cyclotrons but he tended to regard scientific experiments as simple contrivances put together with a few pullies and some sellotape, while chemistry was just about combining things, like domestic science.
I remember him giggling once over Belloc’s rhyme:
I’m sick of love and I’m tired of rhyme
But money gives me pleasure all the time.
But in fact it didn’t really. He took the view that he was fortunate in being able to spend his life in scholarly pursuits and that he did not need much in the way of money. He said he bought his first car for £2.10 shillings, and sold it for £1, to a circus. They wanted to transport lions in it. He was unworldly in his relations with publishers, and indeed his own books. He claimed to have left “The Masses in Representative Democracy” out of the Rationalism in Politics volume out of sheer inadvertence. (I sometimes doubt this, because I think the essay has problems.)
He didn’t pay much attention to bargains, or indeed to price. As he expressed the position in relation to someone else, “he’d rather be bilked than bothered.” There was a sense in which he was easily amused, and he had a charming giggle with which he would often respond to what was funny. He smoked a lot, though he seldom inhaled. At the end of seminars the room could be opaque from smoke, given that others (such as myself) were also smoking. He liked opera and played tennis when young, but did none of this when I knew him. He loved stories and was forever reading novels. Late in life, Shirley Letwin came across a copy of Gone with the Wind in a second hand bookshop and bought it for him. He loved it.
He was a superb after dinner speaker, though he avoided the task when possible. LSE had a distinguished but rather pompous professor of public administration called William Robson, and Michael gave the Departmental speech at his farewell, referring to such occasions as Willie coming to see him, and standing at the door of Michael’s room in the manner of “Lord Curzon on the threshold of Woolworths.” It was an image that perfectly caught the slightly disdainful sniff of the nose with which Robson (underneath a friendly man) seemed to respond to the world. When he spoke at the party for the festschrift Bhikhu Parekh and Preston King had edited, he organised his remarks around the idea that he as an undistinguished figure, not even a proper scholar, had decided in life “to go misere”, which in whist means that in order to win you must lose all but five tricks. Here in the Festschrift, said Oakeshott, was his misere hand being quite shattered by winning a trick he had never meant to have. His own retirement speech was a fantasy cast around the Hindu idea that the world rests upon an elephant supported on a tortoise “Some people say,” he remarked “the world’s the thing; and the rare glimpses of it I have had suggest that they might be right. I too have dabbled in it from time to time. But, on the whole, I have found it over-rated.”
For all his unworldliness, he was a marvellous administrator, who ran the Government department at LSE quite brilliantly for nearly twenty years. There was never any question of his establish a school of right-thinking colleagues. It was typical of his lack of self-importance that he put up with having a secretary working at a desk which was in his own room. He was a remarkably uncomplaining man! He did not in fact use the secretary a great deal, preferring to communicate with the Department through short and elegant handwritten notes. There was one Departmental meeting each year, or occasionally two, but they did not last long. Oakeshott’s reputation, lucidity and common sense were such that he generally got his way on committees and in School administration. He was not, and did not need to be, much of an academic politician. Occasionally he would take on tasks such as drafting instructions to students. This was the kind of material (I am thinking here of his remarks on what was involved in being a ”moral tutor”) that had to be revised every few years as the School went through one more agony of reform and improvement, but it was notable that Oakeshott’s formulations commonly survived on the basis of their elegance.
He liked women, but he tended to value them for their charm rather than their intellectuality, except perhaps for his great friend Shirley Letwin. But perhaps one should not press this too far, since he was also supposed to have had an affair with Iris Murdoch in his Oxford days. Shirley had both charm and intellectuality, and had perhaps the best grasp of what he was on about of anyone. Michael was in large measure the model for her idea of the gentleman in her book on The Gentleman in Trollope. Certainly no feminist, he did remark in a review that women were at last rightly reclaiming a lot of activities from which men had long excluded them.
As he got older, a certain tendency to indignation developed, and he could almost roll himself up into a ball as he described something he had heard as “absolute rubbish.” He thought that a lot of opinions politicians and academics had were “dishonest”, by which I think he meant that they were posturing rather than sincere. He came to dislike many features of the modern world, including paperbacks. Going into Bowes and Bowes one day he observed that the entire ground floor had been given over to paperbacks. “Where are the books?” he asked, and the assistant immediately knew what he meant and pointed upstairs. I can remember him in his eighties at an Honorary Fellows dinner agreeing with another aged son et lumiere about the problems of age, and saying: “I know: no day is long enough to do anything in.” In 1967 he came to the funeral at Roehampton of a porter who had had a heart attack in the course of a student protest. The funeral was on a beautiful day at Roehampton, and he remarked: “it’s the sort of day when you can believe in immortality.”
It is not easy to convey quite the quality of the man, and this is only partly because (as he said in his retirement remarks) “like most people, I am more or less happy when being praised, not very uncomfortable when being abused, but I have moments of embarrassment when being explained.” The point is, I think, that his view of anything happening would be different from one’s own, and usually so surprising that one’s own view would fade to the commonplace by comparison. It would never have occurred to me, for example, to regard socialism as a degenerate kind of knight errantry, a kind of Quixotism. He took over from Montaigne the Socratic view that philosophy is a preparation for death, a systematic detachment from the desires and passions of ordinary life. The great thing about the residue left in Michael Oakeshott after any such amputation of worldly desires was a charming and amused view of the (fortunately rather agreeable) civilisation in which he lived. And it is in exploring the charm of this philosophical world that we come together on this occasion.
manwithoutqualities 