Learning from the Insights and the Errors of a Great Mind: Michael Oakeshott on Liberal Education

The Voice of Liberal Learning by Michael Oakeshott (Indianapolis:
Liberty Fund, 2001).

For more than half a century now, there has been mounting
evidence of a serious and continuing decline in the standards of
teaching and learning throughout much of Western society. In
response, there has been no shortage of “expert”” diagnoses and
prescriptions to address the problem. What makes Michael
Oakeshott’s contribution to this already extensive literature stand
out is his, in many ways, far more radical approach.

We can detect something of the enormity of the educational
challenge that Oakeshott senses—even apart from any malaise—in
his observation that “”no one is born a human being.”” Indeed, he
refuses to admit of even so much as an innate human “”latency”” in the
newborn, in the sense of a natural proclivity for humane learning.
The whole burden of creating human beings, he is convinced, rests
upon proper education, beginning with the family, proceeding to
include the “”school,”” and culminating in the university.

As for educational reform, Oakeshott is dismissive of the many
proposals that have been made in recent decades to revise curricula,
to devise programs more responsive to public expectations, to be
more accommodating of changing student work and life styles, and
to bring the latest technologies to bear upon methods of teaching
and learning. For, to his thinking, most of these efforts fail to address
the root of the problem and, indeed, often exacerbate it.

Professor Oakeshott’s focus in The Voice of Liberal Learning
(hereafter referred to as Liberal Learning) is specifically on university
education. What is required to cure its ills, he tells us, is, first of
all, not less than a fundamental reconceptualization of the proper
tasks of education, the university itself and its proper relation to the
larger community, the roles of both teacher and learner, the proper
relationship between the scholarly and teaching endeavors, and—
only then—the proper means, structural and procedural, for implementing
these concepts.

The distinctive and central goal of a liberal education, Oakeshott
advises, is the emancipation of the student from his society’s and his
own preconceptions, in the process of opening to him or her
glimpses of the vast wisdom of the ages. However, this grand task,
contrary to many proposals, he insists, cannot be accomplished
within the circumstances of contemporary Western society by a
simple return to some classical model—Greek, Latin, or German—
of liberal education, any more than it can be accomplished by simply
going with the changing times.

Oakeshott develops his own model of liberal teaching and
learning in the course of the six essays that comprise Liberal
Learning. Originally published in 1989 by Yale University Press, a
year before his death, they are as relevant to the problems faced
today in higher education as they were when they first appeared—
perhaps even more relevant, because more urgent. However, the
importance of these essays lies not only in their provocative probing
of educational concerns but also in the clarity they bring to his
important earlier, often abstract and elusive, epistemological writings,
to which I shall have occasion to refer later in this essay.

The rationale that determined the order of sequence in which
the six essays are presented in this volume is not at all clear. Although
they were initially delivered as lectures over a period of twenty-five
years, the order in not chronological. Many of Oakeshott’s themes
are revisited over the course of several essays, but in virtually every
instance he approaches the theme from a somewhat different angle
and context, providing new insights. Therefore the repetition of
themes (probably motivated by his desire, on each occasion, to deal
with liberal education holistically) does not represent sheer redundancy.
Without attempting to represent the full scope of his
endeavors in this collection, I shall attempt to present what I
consider to be some of his most insightful themes.

Liberal Learning as Conversation

For Oakeshott, higher education should be conceived of as
essentially an informed “”conversation”” among students, among
faculty, and especially between students and faculty—informed
by a familiarity, first and foremost, with the traditional literary,
historical, artistic, philosophical, and scientific expressions of
Western civilization. Of course, this interpersonal dialogue assumes
also, as Oakeshott reminds us, the student’s ability to carry
on an informed dialogue with him- or her- self. To be sure,
Oakeshott does not neglect the importance of students’ becoming
acquainted, also, with non-Western traditions; but this, he is
convinced, can be fruitful only after they have been well grounded
in their own traditions. It appears that Oakeshott would then
invite non-Western ideas into the conversation.

He suggests that the defining characteristic of the university’s
role is its provision of an “”interval””—a unique and, once forfeited,
essentially irretrievable time and place in one’s life in which [the
student] may encounter his moral and intellectual inheritance, not
in the terms in which it is being used in the current engagement and
occupations of the world outside (where much of it is…neglected,
obscured, vulgarized or abridged…). “”School”” [schole] is an emancipation
achieved in a continuous redirection of attention. Here, the
learner is animated, not by the inclinations he brings with him, but
by intimations of excellence and aspirations he has never yet
dreamed of; here he may encounter…questions which have never
before occurred to him; here he may acquire new “”interests”” and
pursue them uncorrupted by the need for immediate results; here
he may learn to seek satisfactions he had never yet imagined nor
wished for. (70)

Oakeshott criticizes those reformers who, since the 1762 publication
of Rousseau’s Emile (regarded, incidentally, by Rousseau as
his best book and by Kant as an event comparable to the French
Revolution), have to the present day attempted to “”allegedly
emancipate…the child-adult…from ‘the intrusion of adult interference’.””
And to greater length he criticizes those, at the opposite
extreme, who perceive the task of education as exclusively that of
accommodating, or “”socializing,”” the student to the requisites of the
presumed “”real”” world, rather than also developing his or her mental
competence to assess critically and, if necessary, challenge that
world. This “”socializing”” trend began, over three centuries ago, with
the laudable intention “”to provide an alternative to education
[specifically] for those who…fell outside the educational engagement,””
and, indeed, it allowed these young people to acquire skills
that they otherwise would not have had. However, Oakeshott warns,
this development has now come, in our time, to be “”the greatest of
the adversaries to have overtaken our culture.”” (99) This “”socializing,””
which was once a separate, limited, and justifiable project, has
become the general norm for education itself: “”It is now about two
centuries since our educational engagement [i.e. an informed and
self-validated ‘conversation’] began to be corrupted by having imposed
upon it the character of a school of dancing.”” (104)

Oakeshott observes that the components [what, we shall see
shortly, he refers to as “”voices”” or we might call fields of study] of
liberal education are united and distinguished…in terms of their
concern with what Valery calls le prix de la vie humaine, and their
emancipation from the here and now of current engagements. (28)

#page#

Although he recognizes the legitimacy of some vocational instruction
as part of the larger enterprise of liberal education,
Oakeshott speaks out against what he perceives as an increasing
dominance of the curriculum by vocational courses, as well as an
increasing tendency by many to “”justify”” and to define higher
education in terms of such learning. Even where vestiges of liberal
learning survive, he observes, innumerable worldly pressures and
distractions make it difficult for students to experience what he
describes as an increasingly rare but “”precious gift of an interval”” and
to have their minds challenged on matters of liberality and substance.
I am reminded of a conversation I had with one of my
students years ago who confessed that he had been unable to find the
time to do even the basic reading for my course. It turned out that,
in addition to taking a full load of courses, he was also working forty
hours per week. I asked him, if he felt compelled to take so many
courses, why he needed to work so many hours. He replied that he
had to because, without the full-time job, he would not be able to
make his car payments. When I then inquired why he needed to
maintain a car, he replied that he needed it to get to his job! He
seemed to have no sense of the vicious circularity that was depriving
him of the precious interval necessary for the special kind of
conversation (if only with assigned authors) so central to education.

One does not have to extol the Mark Hopkins-at-one-end-of-alog-
with-a-student-at-the-other model of education to be alarmed at
the erosive threat to this precious space represented by technology.
Nowadays, when students come to the university they bring with
them into their residences (residences, themselves, often no longer
even within the once protective borders of the campus) their stereo
amplifiers, TVs, cell phones, computers, and iPods. Much of their
educational experience has come to be shaped and channeled
through these advanced technologies.

Writing his essays even prior to the advent of many of these
technologies, Oakeshott warns of an increasing obsession with
educational technologies, technologies often promoted by educators
themselves. About fifteen years ago my own university made a
concerted effort to encourage its faculty to make more use of
computer technology in their classrooms. A visiting advocate of this
reform from the university’s computer center gave an impassioned
speech to my department urging not only that we reformulate our
pedagogical procedures to maximally utilize this technology but also
that most traditional teaching approaches had become outmoded.
He actually maintained that new developments in virtual technology
made it possible to replicate the learning experience not only more
efficiently but also more effectively. I could not resist exclaiming to
him how exciting it was to learn that we could actually simulate
through virtual technology the full experience of a professor engaged
in conversation with a group of students around a seminar
table. With no indication of his having sensed my intended and not
very subtle irony, he reiterated his complete confidence that this
could, indeed, be accomplished!

Oakeshott observes that “”the current emphasis on apparatus of
all sorts… is almost wholly destructive of ‘School’.”” (71) Jacques Ellul
was one of very few of Oakeshott’s contemporaries who had already
issued an alert—one that had gained little attention—on some of the
adverse impacts that technology was having on society.¹ Oakeshott,
like Ellul, warns that the very “”efficiency gains”” that have driven the
increasing reliance on computer and other technologies are themselves
symptomatic of the over-cluttering and consequent stifling of
that critical and unhurried interval for conversation. Oakeshott is
particularly concerned that educators were unwittingly destroying
this “”precious interval”” in students’ lives by overcrowding the
curriculum and suggests that this problem could perhaps be somewhat
mitigated by placing more emphasis upon the tutorial/examination
system “”as an alternative to the practice of ‘getting signed up
for attending a course,’ [thereby giving] a greatly added freedom to
the undergraduate in the disposition of his time and energy.”” (153)

Having been so audacious over the years as to recommend to
serious high school students and their parents, usually with totally
incredulous reaction, that they seek out a college experience as near
as possible to a monastic experience, I was delighted to encounter
Oakeshott’s description of the properly conceived university as
“”‘monastic’ in respect of [its] being a place apart where excellences
may be heard because the din of worldly laxities and partialities is
silenced or abated.”” (71)

However, part of the problem faced in higher education is that,
even when universities are prepared to offer the best experience of
an “”interval”” devoted to “”conversation,”” Oakeshott acknowledges
(quoting from a mid-century government report on British universities)
that the typical undergraduate “”has not the background of
culture which could once be assumed,”” that his “”range of interest is
more circumscribed,”” that he has “”little initiative or resilience,”” and
that “”he looks upon the university first and foremost as the avenue
to a desirable job.”” (151) The problem is compounded by the fact
that social and economic pressures coming from the larger society
reinforce these tendencies and the destruction of “”School”” by
pressing upon the university overloaded and increasingly specialized
curricula and a demand for immediate results and quick closure
to the student’s learning experience. In short, an effective revitalization
of higher education requires transformations throughout the
broader culture and at all levels of teaching and learning—concerns
that extend well beyond Oakeshott’s focus in these essays.

To those already well committed to the precepts of liberal
education, what I have so far summarized of Oakeshott’s analyzes
and recommendations probably sounds commonsensical, perhaps
even cliché. But the disturbing fact, underscored by him, that these
clearly do not resonate as commonsensical among the general
populace, or even among major portions of the teaching profession
today, makes his message all the more imperative.

Two Kinds of Experience

There is, however, another facet of his essays—his thought-provoking
exploration of the various “”voices,”” or structural parts, of higher
education and the proper relations among them—that, in some
respects, is often not so obvious and, indeed, is more controversial
even among devotees of liberal education. To appreciate fully the
rationale behind his structural/relational themes it helps to have
some appreciation of Oakeshott’s epistemology, which is brilliantly
presented in his, to my thinking, chief philosophical contribution,
his first book, Experience and Its Modes (1933)—hereafter referred
to as Experience, and to a lesser extent in his The Voice of Poetry in
the Conversation of Mankind (1959)—hereafter Poetry, and On
Human Conduct (1975)—hereafter Conduct.²

Oakeshott faults higher education both for its excessive curricular
fragmentation and for what he perceives as its misguided attempts
at curricular integration. His development of this argument
depends upon an important distinction he makes—in Experience,
Poetry, and Conduct—between what he perceives as two kinds of
conceptual or, more broadly, experiential and contextual wholes
which enable us to comprehend our world as coherent and therefore
meaningful. First, Oakeshott speaks of the “”whole of experience””
(sometimes he uses the phrase “”world of experience””), which he
characterizes as “”concrete”” and comprehensively coherent. It is the
truest kind of experience, or knowing, because, to the extent that it
is—or at least aspires to be—totally comprehensive of all of reality
(i.e., truly holistic), it is completely coherent. All the experiences
that comprise it are informed by the context of that same whole
which is—or at least aspires to be—all that can possibly be known.
Oakeshott also depicts this “”whole of experience”” as the purest kind
of experience, or knowing, because it strives for complete clarity and
precision of definition. This experience is the knowledge claimed, or
at least aspired to, by philosophy. Oakeshott says that only philosophy
is a “”wholly satisfying”” and, in this sense, “”concrete,”” experience,
because only it is all-embracing and therefore totally coherent.
It is important to keep this in mind as we turn later to examine
the role he assigns to philosophy relative to the other fields of
learning.

Second, Oakeshott speaks in Experience of the “”modes of
experience,”” and provides as examples “”science,”” “”history,”” “”poetry””
(by which he means “”the activity of making [and contemplating]
images…painting, sculpting, acting, dancing, singing, literary and
musical composition…””³), and “”practice”” (which includes politics,
psychology, and the other social endeavors), although he also
reminds that “”there is no fixed number”” of these modes.⁴ He
characterizes these “”modes of experience”” as distortions because
they are only fragments taken from the “”whole of experience”” and
therefore do not have the significance—that is, the epistemological
configuration—they had within their original, totally comprehensive
context. Indeed, it is only when we view these modes from this
original, higher, more comprehensive, and allegedly (according to
Oakeshott) absolute perspective offered (or at least aspired to) by
philosophy, or the whole of experience, that we can recognize them
as abstract (that is, not ultimately satisfying, or concrete), “”arrested””
(that is, partial, not truly comprehensive), and distorted (that is, not
completely coherent). Modes, seen—we might say—from a god’seye-
view, are “”shackled by partiality and presupposition.””⁵ Absent
this loftier perspectival vantage point, however, when we view
ourselves and our world strictly from within our more limited modal
conceptual frameworks (as most of us do most of the time), each of
these worlds of interpretation and endeavor is perceived as an
autonomous whole, complete, concrete, and coherent—a world
unto itself. “”A mode of experience is…the construction of a world of
ideas at the point of arrest.””⁶ “”Each abstract world…in so far as it is
coherent [in itself], is true for itself.””⁷

If we can imagine our earliest, undifferentiated consciousness
of ourselves and our worldly environs prior to our first rudimentary
efforts to differentiate and order this “”whole of experience”” in terms
of such specific intentions or goals as the satisfaction of our desires
(“”practice””), the contemplative enjoyment—not mere pleasure, he
insists, because of its contemplative nature—of our creative imaginations
(“”poetry,”” by which Oakeshott means, in general, the arts,
i.e., also literature, the graphic arts, music, drama, etc.), our control
of the physical world through its objectification and quantification
(“”science””), or the objective placing of ourselves within the context
of the occurrences and traditions of the past (“”history””), this earliest
consciousness—however diffuse and indescribable—he regards as
a kind of pure, original, coherent and total wholeness of experience.
It is only the mature mind that can later attempt, through the creative
categories of philosophy, to bring an articulated and definitive clarity
to this pristine experience.

However, in the meanwhile we are confronted early on with
coming to a presuppositional and conceptual understanding of
ourselves and our world in a way that we can address far more
specific, pressing, and immediately manageable needs than the
impartial, elusive, and indeed distracting search for truth as an end
in itself—the task of philosophy. “”Practice,”” in this sense, is the most
urgent and, therefore, according to Oakeshott, “”important”” of all our
modal endeavors, for our very survival depends upon it. This
becomes evident when we consider the specific sub-fields, or
constituent activities, that he includes within “”practice””—particularly
politics, whose task (at least in the modern period) is the
successful exercise and pursuit of power, whether rationally persuasive
or coercive, both among individuals and collectives.

#page#

In other words, in order to meet the practical and other needs
and desires of quotidian life, we must abstract or separate from the
“”whole of experience”” “”conditional”” and lesser “”worlds”” of understanding
and experience, reconceptualized to accommodate and
address those tasks. Again, each of these modal worlds—defined in
terms of its own limited, self-set tasks and its corresponding assumptions
and coherent set of concepts, experiences, and truths—by
definition is (relative to, and viewed from, the larger and complete
whole of experience) a limited, or “”arrested,”” experience, or set of
experiences. Indeed, it is this very limitedness, conditionality,
abstraction, and distortion relative to the whole of experience that
makes it possible for these goals to be successfully addressed. And
it is the coherence (as perceived within each mode) of each of these
experiences or endeavors that makes it a self-contained, self-sufficient,
and paradigmatically autonomous world, or universe of discourse,
unto itself.

Modal and Disciplinary Boundaries

Because the boundaries of each mode (practice, science, etc.) have
been drawn from experience to optimize its internal coherence, and
therefore the successful pursuit of its task, these boundaries are not
arbitrary in regard to their degree of inclusiveness of the “”conversation””
they permit. If the boundaries are too narrowly drawn, the
deficient comprehensiveness of the resulting experience restricts
both the fruitfulness and the coherence of the conversation it
engenders.

It is within this epistemological context that one can best
understand Oakeshott’s criticism, in Liberal Learning, of the overfragmentation
of university education. The increasing specialization
of the academic disciplines is represented not only by narrowly
defined vocational courses—whose unfortunate “”socializing”” objectives
(we earlier observed) he forcefully addresses—but also by nonvocational
fields of learning that once were more broadly, and
therefore more substantively or liberally conceived. Not only do
“”political scientists”” seldom converse with economists (except in
Commonwealth countries, where there have long been academic
departments of “”Political Economics””) or with psychologists or with
historians, they also seldom converse among themselves, e.g., those
focused on Western politics with those in Eastern politics, constitutional
law scholars with students of comparative government, foreign
policy specialists with internationalists, and any of these with
political philosophers. Fruitful conversations among previously
isolated groups of scientists—e.g., biologists with physicists, leading
to exciting discoveries in microbiology—have recently pointed the
way, one might hope, for other disciplines. But there is still much
insularity even among the sciences. Academic fields of study still
tend, as someone once observed, to say more and more about less
and less. The conversations that often take place in universities are
so alienated from their traditional epistemic roots—so narrowly
focused on method and process and so lacking in substance and
significance—that, Oakeshott declares, the enterprise no longer
deserves to be called “”education,”” and the institutions themselves no
longer deserve to be called “”schools.””

Relevance to its task, fruitfulness, coherence, substantiveness,
significance—these are the criteria that appear to be appropriate for
defining the modal boundaries, or curricular areas, within the
pursuit of liberal learning. It is interesting, therefore, to observe that
Oakeshott chooses to give as examples of his academic modes of
experience—his “”conversations,”” “”voices,”” “”idioms,”” or “”universes
of discourse””—not only what we already recognize as academic
“”disciplines””—e.g., history, but more often what represents groupings
of traditionally recognized disciplines. He does not define, e.g.,
physics, or chemistry, or biology as a “”conversation,”” or “”voice,”” but
rather “”science.”” We already noted that he similarly groups the
various dramatic, graphic, and literary arts into the “”voice,”” of
“”poetry.”” And students and practitioners of politics, economics,
sociology, psychology, etc., are all considered participants in the
“”conversation,”” or “”voice,”” of “”practice.”” Indeed, in regard to this last
academic conversation, Oakeshott asserts that to the extent that we
conceive of the proper tasks of “”sociology, anthropology, psychology,
economics,…jurisprudence and…politics”” (that is, as neither socialization
nor scientific endeavors), they should be understood as
participants in a common conversation, itself one among multiple
conversations constituting the “”humanities””—and certainly not identified
as “”social sciences””! (113)

Having criticized the fragmentation of education and the overlynarrow
definitions of many of its curricular pursuits, Oakeshott goes
on to criticize what he considers a “”more subtle but hardly less
damaging”” trend at the other extreme: an over-extension of the
modal boundaries. This is where liberal learning has come to be
misconceived as a “”general”” education; that is, as learning not only
liberated from the here and now of current engagements but
liberated also from an immediate concern with anything specific to
be learned. Learning here is said to be “”learning to think for oneself””
or to be the cultivation of “”intelligence”” or of certain intellectual and
moral aptitudes—the ability to “”think logically”” or “”deliberatively,””…
the ability to read attentively and to speak lucidly, and so on.
(20-21)

The problem is that these general skills and values are devoid of
meaning when devoid of cultural specificity. “”A culture is not a
set of abstract aptitudes; it is composed of substantive expressions
of thought, emotion, belief, opinion,…intellectual
discriminations,…inquiries….”” (21) Lacking the substantiveness of
specificity, academic generalists, we might observe, end up “”saying
less and less about more and more.”” Ironically, both the overextending
of curricular boundaries and the inappropriate shrinking
of these boundaries lead, each in their own way, to the same results:
superficiality, often incoherence, and inevitably the destruction of
truly liberal education.

Further, Oakeshott cautions that trying to bring integration to
the inevitably and legitimately disparate fields of liberal learning
through globally encompassing courses (like Global Studies, or even
Western Civilization?) is an invitation to intellectual dishonesty. He
suggests that, by carefully selecting for undergraduate study the
“”various branches of the world of learning”” and by teaching them “”at
a profound level,…there is some chance that each may be seen, even
by the undergraduate, as a reflection of the whole.”” But if a student
cannot live with the discomfort of dealing with a curriculum that
honestly reflects the ultimately inevitable disconnections among the
various fields of liberal learning, he or she would be “”better advised
to apply his mind in some other direction.”” (155) When we, shortly,
take note of the broad-ranging conversation that Oakeshott considers
central to liberal education, we shall see that he does not intend
his criticism of the over-extending of curricular boundaries as a
criticism of thoughtfully conceived and well informed courses and
“”conversations”” of a genuinely interdisciplinary nature, but simply
an observation that what has gone under the rubric of “”interdisciplinary””
or “”general”” has more often than not been essentially nondisciplinary,
that is, devoid of a firm grounding in any discipline or
in anything specific and substantial.

Conversation Within and Among the Disciplines

When the boundaries of the academic “”modes,”” or fields of study
and endeavor, are properly defined—that is, neither too narrowly
nor too broadly, because each of these “”modes”” (some, as we have
seen, consisting of what have traditionally been regarded as individual
disciplines and others consisting of clusters of these disciplines)
is oriented toward accomplishing its distinctive and meaningful
task, each perceiving itself as based upon a set of distinguishing
assumptions, and each productively communicating internally
by a distinctive “”language,”” “”voice,”” or set of “”idioms,”” and therefore
because each “”mode,”” or academic field, is therefore, in fact and by
definition, not only completely insular but self-sufficient in relation
to every other mode, there can be no relevant discussion among
them. What is conducive to a meaningful, relevant, and self-contained
internal discussion within each of these paradigmatic worlds
precludes such meaningful and relevant discussion among them.
Oakeshott insists that the modes are, in this sense, completely
“”autonomous.”” “”They are not partners in a common undertaking,…nor
are they suppliers of one another’s wants.”” (30)

In other words, because the idiom internal to a mode, or
academic field, has relevance only within that modal world, or
universe of discourse, it is folly to assume that any of the modes have
anything relevant to say to any of the other modes. Indeed, the
assignment of relevance and meaningfulness to inter- (as opposed
to intra-) modal conversation leads not only to futility but often
to disastrous results. Throughout the twentieth century, for
example, it became increasingly obvious that, when we impose
upon politics the idiom of science, or that of history, we end up
with the conceptually confused monstrosities represented, respectively,
by scientism and historicism. However, having clearly
asserted the modal status and attendant autonomy of history,
among the other modes, in Experience, by the time he wrote his
essay “”Political Education,”” eighteen years later (included in
Liberal Learning), he seems to have modified his view regarding
the ability of history to inform politics:

It is proper that, at the academic level, the study of politics should
be a historical study—not in the first place, because it is proper to
be concerned with the past, but because we need to be concerned
with the detail of the concrete. (181)

Does this mean that Oakeshott has become ambivalent in his
defense of history as a separate and autonomous mode of experience?
He does still continue to refer to history as a mode. He still
appears to adhere strictly to his original understanding of history’s
task as that of merely reporting the past, and therefore not to be
corrupted by the goals and partisan agendas of politics. And he also
continues to assume that the purpose of politics (or more generally
“”practice””) is to act upon such goals and agendas, and therefore is not
to be corrupted by the passive detachment of history or worse, by
assuming that one’s present political options are historically predetermined.

Perhaps Oakeshott is suggesting that politicians (and students of
politics) need to be informed of the concrete details of history in
order to have a sense of the complexity of the world, that there are
many forces, besides political forces, at work in the world both
shaping the problems the political actor must address and limiting
how much influence he can have in shaping his society’s, or his own,
destiny. One might also suspect that Oakeshott’s reliance upon
tradition to provide normative direction to action (a matter we shall
take up shortly) requires a relationship of dependence between
politics and history. Throughout his writings Oakeshott makes
suggestions that support both of these speculations. The problem
is, either rationale assumes that history is relevant to politics
(although the former speculation does not, perhaps, suggest substantive
relevance), and that therefore history does not have the
insularity that, he otherwise insists, must characterize a mode of
experience, or a field of learning. He himself is aware of a possible
inconsistency here and, indeed, struggles with it. But he fails to
reconcile it.

Oakeshott’s otherwise consistent defense of the autonomy of
each academic field and of the irrelevance of the voice of each to that
of another interestingly does not lead him to say that the “”conversation””
that characterizes liberal learning—even concerning the nonhistorical
fields, must be strictly intra-modal, that is, a conversation
confined within the boundaries of the individual academic fields, as
important as these latter conversations are to the university. Although
he does maintain, as we have just observed, that science has
nothing relevant to contribute to politics, or vice versa, and that
neither can either add to the understanding of the arts, or vice versa,
still he emphatically insists that the “”conversation”” of liberal learning
must be far more comprehensive than the more circumscribed
conversations conducted within the scope of any “”voice,”” or individual
field of learning.

How can this be, if one “”voice”” cannot communicate anything
relevant to another? What can be learned from this larger conversation
is a greater awareness, understanding, and appreciation of the
other voices on their own terms. “”Perhaps we may recognize liberal
learning as, above all else, an education in imagination, an initiation
into the art of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the
voices….”” (30) Through this larger conversation, we can learn the
integrity of these other voices and the value they have in themselves—
neither as appendages to other voices nor as co-participants
in some larger, unified, and all-encompassing goal or scheme. One
liberally educated, however, should be able to see his own immediate
field of interest as part of a larger, inevitably highly differentiated,
civilizational enterprise, and perhaps even be awed and chastened
by a sense of what he does not know.

Philosophy As a Special Discipline

And where does philosophy fit into this conversation, if it does at all?
All of the ideas that comprise philosophy are formed or informed, we
are told, by the context of its aspiration toward a totally comprehensive
and absolutely coherent world of experience; whereas the
modes consist of experiences and ideas abstracted and configured to
conform coherently to contexts of worlds more limited in their
comprehensiveness because they are predicated and constrained by
their various self-set tasks. So philosophy itself, by virtue of its lack
of presuppositions and its aspiration toward complete comprehensiveness
and coherence, as we have seen, is not a mode. Nor should
it be conceived as an aggregate, or a collective sum-total, of all the
modes. The abstracted ideas or experiences that constitute even all
the modes can never serve as building blocks for recapturing or
achieving the concrete coherent world of experience from which
they have been abstracted because, by virtue of their abstracted and
modified character, they are not only fragments but distortions of
concrete reality. They are therefore not relevant to, or parts of, the
philosophical experience. The experiences and ideas of the modes—
in our present focus: science, “”poetry,”” “”practice,”” and history—can
have no more substantive relevance for philosophy than it, in turn,
can have for these fields of study and endeavor.

When the various fields of academic scholarship attempt to
advise philosophy, philosophy (if it listens) can only be corrupted.
And where philosophy operates under the illusion that it has
something of substance and relevance to say to these specific
endeavors, either its advice will be met with uncomprehending
incredulity or, if it succeeds in imposing itself, it can only succeed in
bringing chaos to each specific area of self-understanding and
practice. The properly defined academic fields exist in their complete
autonomy for a reason: science, history, the arts, and “”practice””—
even the non-modal academic field of philosophy—have
been able to achieve their many successes only on their own terms.
Philosophy, because of its elevated status (if properly conceived)
among the academic studies has a special temptation to regard itself
as “”Queen of the sciences,”” etc., but it has no business meddling in
these other academic endeavors.

#page#

According to Oakeshott’s unique and thought-provoking interpretation
of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the Philosopher (presumably
Socrates?) deserved the abuse he received from his compatriots
when he returned to them from his revelational ascent into the
soaring heights of his philosophic “”awakening.”” It is not that they
were not rightly, even if uncomprehendingly, impressed with, even
awed by, his “”fresh, questioning, unconventional intelligence.””⁸ The
problem was that he was unappreciative of their competence, of the
skilled ways in which they went about their own endeavors. It was
the philosopher’s arrogance in presuming that these less lofty
pursuits were no longer necessary and that they should be displaced
by the grander visions and recommendations of philosophy. But the
truth was, the philosopher, although obviously inspired on matters
of strangely other-worldly significance, had “”lost…the ability to tell
one end of a horse from the other.”” ⁹ The lesson we ought to learn
from this Allegory, says Oakeshott, is that—contrary to Socrates’
seemingly sage advice—philosophers should never be kings or, for
that matter, students of politics; nor should one engaged in the study
or the pursuit of politics pretend to have anything relevant to offer
to philosophy. To proceed otherwise can only obfuscate each of
these legitimate endeavors.

Still, Oakeshott insists in Liberal Learning that philosophy must
be considered an important participant in the wide-ranging, informed
discussion that typifies truly liberal learning. Even though it
is not a mode, he assigns to philosophy, as he does to the modes, a
“”voice.”” But we have already observed that he also insists that
philosophy can neither address the self-set tasks of the various
academic pursuits nor properly try to persuade them to take up its
supreme task (as Plato phrased it: it’s “”concern with postulates””);
that, despite its lofty perspective, it can offer no relevant higher
vision and, as we shall note, no values to either guide or to unify the
multiple academic fields. Is this exalted academic endeavor capable
only of uttering some empty and inarticulate Buddhistic OM? If it
can’t speak with any more substantive relevance to science, history,
the arts, or to any of the other academic modes than they can to it,
what is the point of including philosophy in the liberal conversation?

Oakeshott’s answer appears to be twofold. First, although
philosophy indeed has nothing to offer to the larger conversation of
liberal learning of substantive relevance to the various modal endeavors,
it can still perform a valuable critical and cautionary service
to these modes, or fields of learning. From its advantageous perspective,
philosophy can better understand the relations that properly
pertain among the various modes and between the various modes
and itself, than can they. It “”has the impulse to study the quality and
style of each voice, and to reflect upon the relationship of one voice
to another.””¹⁰ Therefore, Oakeshott tells us that philosophy’s primary
responsibility in this conversation is constantly to remind the
participants in these endeavors of the inherent limits of their
disciplines (or properly grouped disciplines) and of the abstractions,
or distortions, that are an inevitable aspect of their understandings.
We might say, it referees without entering the game.

Second, although Oakeshott says that philosophy has no relevant
higher vision to offer to the other academic fields of study, it is
obvious—from what he has said about philosophy’s task of articulation
the whole of experience—that he is not suggesting that philosophy
has no higher vision. It has the grandest of all visions! Therefore,
just as the liberally educated person should be acquainted with the
substantive wealth of knowledge represented by the various modes,
or fields of learning, even though they cannot inform his particular
field, so too should he be somewhat conversant with the grand vision
of philosophy, even though it cannot inform his own field. Therefore,
just as the former should be participants in the larger conversation
of liberal learning, so should philosophy.

Experiential and Disciplinary Continuity/Discontinuity

Whether or not philosophy has more of substantive relevance to
offer to the conversation than Oakeshott acknowledges turns upon
the question of whether we, like the ancient Greek philosophers,
detect more of a substantive continuum between the whole of
experience and the modal endeavors than does he. By duly warning
us that a disregard of proper boundaries and distinctions endangers
liberal education, he provides us with something worthy of our
pondering. However, Oakeshott himself, even in Experience, where
he initially identifies these boundaries, acknowledges that there are
several areas of human reflection and understanding that lead him
to consider whether his sharply drawn boundaries should be modified.
He thinks that political philosophy, ethics (actually, by his
definition, what we understand as “”meta-ethics””), theology, and
“”perhaps”” psychology are such areas. By trying to ask ultimate
questions about penultimate endeavors (philosophy is assumed to
ask ultimate questions about ultimate endeavors or concerns), these
activities do not fit precisely the characterizations he has assigned
either to the modes of experience or to the whole of experience
(philosophy). And so he assigns to each of them the “”neither-fishnor-
fowl”” (my phrase) designation of “”pseudo-philosophy.”” Because
he elaborates upon this special designation only in regard to political
philosophy (in Liberal Learning as well in his earlier philosophical
works) and “”ethics”” (mostly in his earlier works), and because his
discussion of these has considerable relevance to how we might
approach the structuring, or possible restructuring, of liberal teaching
and learning, I shall say more about both of these.

Interestingly, he suggests in Experience that political philosophy
can provide relevant advice to politics. In Liberal Learning, he
even spells out the specific nature of this advising in a manner that
is strikingly similar to the role he assigned to philosophy in the grand
conversation of liberal learning: The object of political philosophy,
Oakeshott proposes “”is to consider the place of political activity itself
on the map of our total experience.”” (183) And he offers the same
caveats that he provided in his description of the limited relevance
of philosophy’s conversational task, which, we recall, while formally
relevant, was not relevant to the pursuit of substantive modal tasks.

Political philosophy cannot be expected to increase our ability to
be successful in political activity. It will not help us to distinguish
between good and bad political projects; it has no power to guide
or to direct us in the enterprise of pursuing the intimations of our
tradition. But the patient analysis of the general ideas which have
come to be connected with political activity—ideas such as
nature, artifice, reason, will, law, authority and obligation—
insofar as it succeeds in removing some of the crookedness [i.e.,
distortions] from our thinking and leads to a more economical use
of concepts, is an activity neither to be overrated nor despised.
But it must be understood as an explanatory, not a practical [i.e.,
normative or prescriptive], activity, and if we pursue it, we may
hope only to be less often cheated by ambiguous statement and
irrelevant argument. (184)

(The last sentence reminds us of the main obligation he had,
eighteen years earlier in Experience, assigned to philosophy: the
bringing of clarity and precise definition to the whole of experience.)

However, Oakeshott makes clear that these striking similarities
should not tempt us to regard political philosophy as an adjunct of
philosophy any more than we should consider it an adjunct of politics
(or, more broadly, “”practice””). Political philosophy cannot be subsumed
under the voice of politics because its voice is informed by (or
from) the larger perspective and qualitatively different concerns of
philosophy. And it cannot be subsumed under philosophy because
the voice of political philosophy, however well informed, is limited
in its formal response to only the arrested and preconfigured
conditions, or perceptions, that, by definition, characterize politics,
or “”practice.”” This is why Oakeshott, in Experience, calls political
philosophy “”pseudo-philosophy.”” Although he makes no use of that
term in Liberal Learning, in his essay on “”Political Education”” in this
collection he merely gropes unsuccessfully “”for want of a better
name”” than political philosophy.

It is questionable whether his analysis of the role of political
philosophy vis a vis philosophy and politics and his struggle over
appropriate nomenclature resolve any issues, either epistemic or
pedagogic. But it does highlight the kind of problems that confront
us, in practical experience, when we encounter a type of “”abstraction””
that Oakeshott seems reluctant to recognize within the terms
of his theory, namely the abstraction that can characterize philosophy,
or theory, itself when it is not adequately informed by a type of
“”concreteness”” that his epistemology similarly fails to acknowledge,
namely the concreteness that characterizes the sense in which we
regularly enter into our practical endeavors. However, for one to
detect something concrete in what Oakeshott perceives as our
“”abstract”” and “”arrested”” quotidian engagements as well as in almost
all—even of his prescribed—liberal academic fields of study, one
must first assume more continuity between the ultimate and the
penultimate, the transcendent and the immanent, aspects of our
existence (or experiences) than Oakeshott is willing to admit. He
never even attempts to reconcile his, earlier noted, fleeting and
hopeful observation that perhaps even the undergraduate student
may be able to perceive his specialized pursuit “”as a reflection of the
whole”” (155) with the underlying dualistic assumptions of his
philosophy.

In addressing the epistemological questions of modal boundaries
and experiential continuity, Oakeshott has made perhaps his
two most important philosophical and pedagogical contributions.
Although I have attempted within the scope of this essay to represent
in some detail only his treatment of the former, the latter deserves
equally thorough examination. Oakeshott’s argument that the abstracted
and conditional nature of our penultimate endeavors not
only distinguishes them in kind from the more ultimate pursuits of
philosophy, but also renders each irrelevant to another, has considerable
merit. But it must also be recognized that this sharply
dualistic character of his epistemology is made almost inevitable by
his essentially modernist assumptions about the rationalist and
explicit character of all knowing.

I consider both the pre-modernist approach represented by
Plato and the post-modernist approach taken by Michael Polanyi to
be more satisfactory attempts to deal with the question of continuity.
Plato manages, even in his rationalistic approach to knowledge, to
ameliorate the severity of his dualistic perspective through his
doctrine of anamnesis: through recollection human beings are able
to perceive in the mundane world imperfect representatives of
grander Archetypes. Michael Polanyi does a better job of bridging
the experiential gap through his concept of tacit knowing: all our
worldly knowledge is grounded in tacit awareness that opens the way
to ever greater comprehension. Polanyi’s concepts allow for open
boundaries and, therefore, for relevant conversation between disciplines—
e.g., science and faith, or religion—assumed by Oakeshott
to be completely isolated from each other.¹¹

Values in Liberal Learning

Given the centrality that liberal arts advocates have traditionally
assigned to the teaching and learning of values, it has surprised many
that Oakeshott gives little attention to this subject in his Liberal
Learning, and when he does it is largely in reaction to those who have
accused him of rejecting general principles in his earlier writings.
(188) In fact, where he has given much more extended attention to
considerations of value (in Experience and Poetry), a large part of his
effort is expended in attacking the very idea of “”general principles””
or “”universal values.”” There are no “”general principles”” or “”universal
values,”” he asserts. Liberal education should not be assigned such
all-encompassing tasks as the formation of character, or the conveying
of truths regarding “”human nature”” and “”natural law,”” for such
efforts represent the over-extension of pedagogical and modal
boundaries that can only result in a confused vacuity or, in the
compensating effort to bring a narrower focus to these matters, an
imposing of ideologies (as, he suggests in Liberal Learning, was
illustrated in an earlier phase of British higher education that
focused upon producing a class of “”gentleman”” and is currently
manifest in the university’s perceived role of supplying what the
market demands). Liberal education should not even pretend to
supply the student with something so grand as a “”philosophy of life””
for the same reasons. Besides, he argues, “”the…view that every man
without a philosophy of life is ‘maimed and useless’ is…most absurd.””
(140) Further, we must regard the interval of a student’s life
at university as only a “”middle”” stage in the life-long process of
learning; therefore, we should recognize that such more ambitious
efforts, even when properly conceived and qualified, take a
lifetime.

However, at the heart of the controversy surrounding Oakeshott’s
treatment, or alleged “”neglect”” of values is his more fundamental
theoretical stance on the matter. For him, there are no absolute or
universal principles, nothing so lofty to guide us, such as “”justice,””
“”brotherly love,”” or “”some other abstract ‘principle’.”” (186) (Note his
lapse, here, from his customary inversion of the conventional use of
“”abstract.””) Therefore, philosophy cannot address the subject. Even
truth itself “”may be considered ‘a value’ only when it is conceived as
practical truth.””¹² The need for moral values arises only within our
“”abstracted”” and “”arrested”” mode of “”practice,”” or practical experience.
Rather than being derived from some transcending Platonic
intuition of the Good, our “”moral…’principles’ are [simply] abridgements
of traditional manners of behavior.”” (187) Strictly within our
circumscribed, autonomous, and practical experiential world, we
create a lesser “”world of values”” to give order and coherence to that
world. “”‘What ought to be,’ should be, because the coherence of the
[modal] world of ‘what ought to be’ requires it to be in that world.””
We take something to be valuable because it “”appears to make our
world of values coherent.””¹³

Our emergent constellation of values—constantly being modified
by being added-to, “”each given value…modified by every other
value,””¹⁴ and all values accommodating themselves to the practical
situations and experiences of our lives—constitutes an important
part of our thereby “”attained”” world. Inasmuch as Oakeshott holds
a basically Hobbesian view of the human being, as essentially
motivated toward the satisfaction of his/her desires, it is only natural
(he would prefer “”a fact of life””) that the moral principles we adopt
are oriented toward each person’s optimal satisfaction of his/her
desires. “”The world of practical activity…is composed not merely of
images of desire and aversion but also of images of approval and
disapproval.””¹⁵ Moral principles, in other words, are what Oakeshott
calls “”images of approval and disapproval.””

“”In general,…moral activity may be said to be the observation of
a [principle-defined] balance of accommodation between the demands
of desiring selves….””¹⁶ For example, since it is obvious to
Oakeshott that all people want to maximize the satisfaction of similar
desires, in order to allow each to attain optimal success in this
endeavor, they agree, each with each other, that every person should
be viewed as an end in him/her self and never as a mere means.
Despite his employment of this Kantian moral principle, it is for
reasons far more pragmatic and far less idealistic than those represented
by Kant: for Oakeshott, there is no inherent human nature
that suggests human beings should be treated as ends. Therefore,
moral values are strictly “”conditional”” and “”situational,”” to use his
own terms. If we take the term “”moral relativist”” to suggest the
position that designating some action as “”right”” or “”wrong”” indicates
no more than what a person may choose to call it, since Oakeshott
takes his moral direction from a description of the traditions extant
in a given society at a given time, he would appropriately be called
a “”moral relativist.””

#page#

But on this point I find a glaring inconsistency in his writing.
One of his major criticisms of twentieth century education in Liberal
Learning, as we noted earlier, was that it was more attuned to
accommodating itself to the larger society than in challenging it.
How can one challenge society without having license to challenge
its existing norms? Still, I must qualify the sense in which I refer to
Oakeshott as a relativist since that term often implies the absence of
any reasoned grounds on which to make a moral judgment. Oakeshott
assumes that if we are thoroughly aware of the particular situation or
circumstances that provide the detailed context of the act calling for
moral judgment, we can proceed to make a “”correct”” moral judgment
based upon that knowledge. Even in such specific circumstances,
Oakeshott allows, there may be more than one “”right””
course of action; but not any course of action in these same
circumstances should be judged “”right.”” Therefore, it might be
more instructive to refer to his approach to moral judgment as
“”situational”” (as he does himself) since this distinguishes him from
moral absolutists or moral idealists.

Some of Oakeshott’s most interesting reflections come when he
moves from morality into “”ethics.”” Whereas morality is concerned
with norms of “”right”” and “”wrong”” (a task appropriately belonging,
in his view, to experience as a mode, specifically “”practice””),
he understands the task of “”ethics”” as that of establishing the
fundamental rationale of morality—of making non-moral and
value-neutral judgments about “”right”” and “”wrong”” from the
larger whole of experience. This is exactly what virtually all
philosophers refer to as “”meta-ethics””; so, to avoid confusion, I
shall use the term “”meta-ethics”” to refer to what Oakeshott has
chosen to label “”ethics.””

As we noted earlier, the philosophical pursuit is to establish, as
much as possible, a totally comprehensive and coherent experience,
a thoroughly holistic comprehension of reality. Similarly the ultimate
criterion of meta-ethics is comprehensive coherence—ironically,
an essentially non-qualitative, “”morally-neutral”” concept.
We have already noted that even at the modal level of morality, the
principle of coherence enters in: the qualitative, moral principle of
each person being viewed as an end in him/herself, is predicated
upon the non-qualitative criterion of the coherence of the modal
(or practical) constellation (or world) of values, which in turn
makes possible the optimizing of desire-satisfaction. But, an important
distinction between the modal world of morality and the
larger world of meta-ethics is that the ultimate criterion for the
former is moral in the sense of being valuational (desire-satisfaction)
and the ultimate criterion for the latter is non-moral, in the
sense of being entirely value-neutral, or descriptive (comprehensive
coherence).

In other words, what occurs as we probe ever-deeper into the
foundation of moral values is that we, by Oakeshott’s own admission,
“”supercede,”” leave behind, or define-away values themselves.
This is what makes meta-ethics, like philosophy, impotent in the
practical world. Oakeshott insists that, anyway, it is coherence—
value-neutral context—that confers meaning, not value. Some might
argue that within the worlds of both practice and philosophy,
according to Oakeshott’s logic, greater or lesser degrees of coherence
connote correspondingly greater or lesser degrees of value. But
philosophical coherence is so qualitatively different from the limited
and “”arrested”” coherence of practical life, that this distinction,
Oakeshott acknowledges, hardly gives philosophical “”meanings”” any
more relevance than the value-neutral coherences, left in the
wake of “”superceded”” values, have for the practical world.

Probably most meta-ethicists today, captivated by the same
rationalism that characterizes Oakeshott’s philosophy, are comfortable
with this “”supersession”” of values. Many of them seem unaware
of the cost that this unquestioned commitment to a deracinate
rationalism (what Polanyi perceives as explicit knowing divested of
its roots in tacit awareness) entails. Oakeshott, at least, feels—and
gives tentative expression to—some of this sense of loss:

There is perhaps something decadent…even depraved, in an
attempt to achieve a completely coherent world of experience; for
such a pursuit requires us to renounce for the time being everything
which can be called good or evil, everything which can be
valued or rejected as valueless.¹⁷

However, in the name of a very misguided sense of “”intellectual
integrity”” that is more accurately perceived as Enlightenment rationalism,
he apparently still feels it is worth the cost. The gains in the
university’s abandonment of “”Classical Humanism”” and Christianity,
for example, far outweigh, in his judgment, any losses. (121,
138ff.)

Interestingly, although he is not altogether clear on this, it
appears that in his exploration of the modal world of “”poetry”” (the
arts, or aesthetics), Oakeshott does not attempt to carry his analysis
of aesthetic values into some grander meta-level that requires the
subjection of aesthetic values to the same “”supersession,”” or valueneutralization
that moral values were subjected to. At least, for
“”poetry”” he does not come up with some related “”pseudo-philosophy””
as he does for both politics and, as we shall see, morality.
Perhaps it is because he realizes the sterility of trying to reduce the
aesthetic experience to the terms of pure rationality and the interpretation
of the arts to strictly cognitive categories. Why he did not
react similarly to the “”perhaps”” sterile results he admitted were the
product of his treatment of moral values, one can only speculate. He
seems content with his ultimate assessment of aesthetic values in
terms of the criterion of the “”giving of delight.”” He does not, at least
clearly, subject them ultimately to the value-neutral criterion of
coherence.

#page#

From what we have said about Oakeshott’s understanding of
meta-ethics, it might seem that he would consider this to be a facet
of philosophy. In fact, he toys with the thought. But, for the same
reasons he gave for finally refusing this status to political philosophy,
he similarly concludes that this endeavor is appropriately viewed
neither as an adjunct of “”poetry”” (the arts, or aesthetics) nor as an
adjunct of philosophy. Although meta-ethics addresses its concerns
from the viewpoint of the whole of concrete reality, and therefore its
perspectival context is indeterminate, or without modal (moral)
constraints (i.e., it is value-neutral), its discussion, or focus, is
constrained by the determinacy of the practical/moral world of
experience. Meta-ethics (like political philosophy and unlike morality)
can be informed by philosophy because, according to W. H.
Greenleaf, it

fail[s] to achieve a homogeneous and self-contained world of [its]
own…. [It is] incomplete and [has] no specific identity to defend
so that philosophy may intrude without irrelevance….¹⁸

However, meta-ethics is confined to asking ultimate questions
(value-neutral questions related to the criterion of comprehensive
coherency) about penultimate endeavors (practical/moral actions).
As we saw with political philosophy, meta-ethics is, therefore,
designated “”pseudo-philosophy.””

We suggested earlier that the qualitative disjunction that
Oakeshott assumes must exist between modal experience, or the
penultimate, on the one hand and the whole of experience, or the
ultimate, on the other, is inevitably reflected in the rigidly demarcated,
categorical distinction and resulting problematic substantive
irrelevance that come to characterize the relation he perceives
between, on the one hand, his designated fields of academic
endeavor (science, history, practice, art…) and philosophy, on the
other—a problem that he apparently motivated his somewhat awkward
introduction of the concept of “”pseudo-philosophy,”” but is not
thereby essentially resolved. Similarly, Oakeshott’s assumption of an
essential qu