Experience and Its Modes by Michael Oakeshott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, paperback edition, 1985; originally published 1933).
The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind by Michael Oakeshott (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1959).
On Human Conduct by Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
Because most of Michael Oakeshott’s writings have been of a social and political nature, it has been easy to overlook his major work in philosophy, Experience and Its Modes, even though he is arguably first and foremost a philosopher.1 Most of the journalistic symposiums on Oakeshott appear to have been dominated by political scientists, and the essays contributed to these symposiums seldom cite more than his political and social writings.2 References to Experience tend to be fleeting. It took thirty-one years to sell out the first (1933) printing of one thousand copies of this book,3 and its subsequent distribution, despite its release in paperback in 1985, has been consistently overshadowed by Oakeshott’s collection of political essays, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, published in 1962.4
The neglect of Oakeshott’s broader philosophy, beyond his political philosophy (for him, only “pseudo-philosophy””)—particularly his epistemology—leaves an impression that since his political thinking is appropriately characterized as tentative, cautious, practical, contingent, tradition-based, realistic, and conservative, these terms must also characterize his philosophical stance. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Philosophically, Oakeshott is a self-acclaimed absolute idealist. Despite his recurrent criticism of ration-alism in politics, his epistemology is radically inferential, ideational, and rationalist. For him, it is the essential coherence of ideas that gives meaning to experience—and experience is reality. Whereas the real world of politics must be rooted in the given facts of human desire, human fallibility, and the contingent events of history, the reality of philosophy must be defined not in terms of what is “”out there”” in the world or in history, but in terms of the wholeness and integrity of people’s—both individuals’ and communities’—thoughts: ultimately, in terms of a clear, coherent, and comprehensive God’s-eye view of the whole of experience, indeed, of the universe. This leaves us with the inevitable question, then, of how are we to relate philosophy to politics.
In order to understand the rationale for his answer to this question, we must first understand his broader philosophy, and in particular his epistemology. Because the latter is most thoroughly treated by Oakeshott in Experience and to a lesser but still significant extent in his 1959 essay The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind (hereafter referred to as Poetry) and still less, but importantly, in his 1975 book On Human Conduct (hereafter referred to as Conduct) our attention will be given to these three works which span more than four decades of his scholarly career. These works make it clear that Oakeshott’s major philosophical tenets remained essentially unchanged throughout that period, as indeed they did to the end of his long life (1901–1990). Virtually all the commentators conversant with Oakeshott’s philosophy concur on this.
There are several ways in which Oakeshott’s philosophical thinking appears to have anticipated and, in some instances, even explored to greater length, a number of epistemological insights that would emerge some twenty-five years after Experience in Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge,5 and in his subsequent writings.6 But even where Oakeshott and Polanyi frequently and significantly diverge, their separate approaches to matters of common concern—questions of truth, reality, meaning, and value—provide a most intriguing opportunity for the further pursuit and productive development of these concerns. It is for this reason that the present critique of Oakeshott’s philosophy is from a Polanyian perspective. (I include within this “”Polanyian”” perspective, with due reservation, also some of the Polanyi-inspired insights of William Poteat.)7
Comprehensive Coherence, or Meaningful Experiential Whole,
as Criterion of Truth and Reality, the Goal of Philosophy
Beginning with his Personal Knowledge and continuing through all of his subsequent epistemological writings, Michael Polanyi’s recurring terminology—e.g., “”tacit integration,”” “”joint meaning,”” “”focal comprehension,”” “”comprehensive whole,”” “”gradient of deepening coherence””—underscores the criterion of comprehensive coherence that is fundamental to his understanding of truth, reality, and meaning. Similarly, Michael Oakeshott in Experience frequently speaks of “”coherence”” and “”comprehensiveness”” and uses numerous related terms to characterize truth and meaning.
For Oakeshott, a self-acknowledged philosophical idealist, reality is nothing less and nothing more than the unified totality, or world, of experience. It is “”the world of experience as a coherent whole.”” (Exper., 323) He characterizes experience as both complex and homogeneous. It is complex in the sense that (1) it spans the entire experiential spectrum to include sensation, perception, emotion, intuition, volition, judgment, and cognition. Further, experience is complex in the sense that (2) it is manifested in both its full, integral, thoroughly self-critical, real, and “”concrete”” form and also in “”abstracted,”” “”arrested,”” “”partial,”” “”modified,”” and therefore distorted forms or “”modes.”” (We shall treat the subject of Oakeshott’s “”modes of experience”” later.)
Despite this variety or complexity, there is also a pervading homogeneity of experience because, in whatever manner it manifests itself, “”it is impossible to discover a form of experience which is less than [thought or] judgment.”” (Exper., 21) Oakeshott is suggesting here that throughout the entire range of our cognitive/affective experience discerning occurs, and therefore the broad spectrum of experience “”knows no absolute division”” (Exper., 27), only various degrees of discernment, criticism, or judgment. “”Sensation, perception, intuition, feeling and volition are never independent kinds of experience, they are different levels or degrees of judgment.”” (Exper., 322) Indeed, sensation even in the most rudimentary forms of animal life represents a kind of primal or incipient judgment and thought.
In this sense, “”experience is a world of ideas.”” (Exper., 27) And it is this concrete, real, non-abstracted world to which Oakeshott, as philosopher, initially turns his attention. Acknowledging that he will eventually have to examine also the arrested and modified modes of experience that characterize most of our thinking most of the time, he suggests that to understand these other forms of experience as modifications, we need first to understand experience in its purest and absolute form, as philosophy. “”Philosophy,”” he says, is “”experience without reservation or arrest, experience which is critical throughout, unhindered…by what is…partial or abstract”” (Exper., 3); as the “”unified totality of experience,”” it is therefore the touchstone or perspectival vantage point from which all arrested forms of experience must be assessed.
The concrete world of experience that is accessed and achieved in philosophy, “”experience itself,”” is a system or “”world of ideas,”” characterized (1) by its coherence, or unity, and (2) by its completeness, its all-inclusiveness. We must note here Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (published in 1931, two years prior to the publication of Experience, but given no attention by Oakeshott), which prove (a) that any consistent (i.e., coherent) formal system must contain at least one statement that is neither provable nor disprovable within the logic of that system, and (b) that the very consistency (coherence) of a formal system cannot be proved by means formalizable within that system. The first theorem would appear to suggest that, contrary to Oakeshott, his “”world of ideas”” could not be self-sufficient or complete in itself. And the second theorem would seem to suggest that, particularly for a system, such as Oakeshott’s concrete “”world of ideas,”” characterized as absolute and all-inclusive—i.e., with no coherent world apart from it—his system could not be proved coherent. However, nowhere does Oakeshott (nor, for that matter, Polanyi or Poteat) provide a formal definition of what he intends by “”coherence.”” Therefore, Oakeshott would probably point out that an inability to either prove or disprove the truth or coherence of something does not establish its truth or falsity, its coherence or incoherence; further, that since he did not consider his world of ideas a completely formal system, he would likely conclude that Gödel’s theorems do not even apply to this system; and, finally, that, quite apart from any formal procedure of “”proof,”” he can still know the concrete world of ideas to be coherent and complete. We shall have to judge for ourselves whether his criteria for knowing can bear this burden.
Apart from any attempt at formal definition, what does Oakeshott intend by “”coherence””? To begin with, it is important to recognize that experience as it is “”given”” to us is not in the form, suggested by William James, of a chaos of “”bloomin’ and buzzin'”” particular sensations which it is then our task to organize de nouveau into coherent patterns and concepts. Instead, Oakeshott informs us, “”experience begins with ideas”” (Exper., 28): that is, with judgments and coherences, however rudimentary. It does not make sense at any level of experience to speak of isolated, unrelated particulars—not even ideas that are called self-evident or ideas considered merely to be inherently isolated and without relations. “”Particular ideas, in this extreme sense, are…nowhere to be found in experience…[their being] devoid of significance and consequently…outside experience.”” (Exper., 28) “”To be given means to be…recognized and understood, …while the isolated, as such, is…unrecognizable, meaningless.”” (Exper., 29) Nor is it even a “”manifold,”” i.e., a plurality of unrelated particulars, with which we are presented in experience. “”The given is neither a collection nor a series of ideas, but a complex, significant whole.”” (Exper., 29) It is the whole, the world of ideas, that is ultimately, experientially primordial, integral, and concrete,”” for it is this that is ultimately and experientially meaningful. And it is from this coherent and total whole that, “”in a modified sense particular ideas may perhaps be said to be known in experience as the products of analysis and abstraction”” (Exper., 28), not vice versa. We can achieve neither the world of concrete experience nor even our worlds of abstracted experience by an accretion of isolated—and therefore meaningless—ideas. (A similar epistemological contextualism also characterizes Polanyi’s thought.)
Although the integrity of the whole of experience is original, in the sense of being epistemologically primordial, its articulation as philosophy (understood as an absolutely comprehensive system of ideas)—just like the less comprehensive worlds of experience represented, e.g., by science, history, and politics—must be “”achieved.”” But the development of a philosophy, as we have seen, is not a process of simply aggregating a set of given ideas:
[A] given world or unity of ideas is reorganized into a closer unity. No constituent [idea], either of this given world or of the world achieved, can be said to have an independent place within the unity of its world, nor is this unity a world constituted of separate yet related ideas; each idea, in so far as it is distinguishable, expresses the unity of its [larger, total] world, and the world (in turn) is presented as a whole [WM: however distorted or incomplete] in each constituent. (Exper., 30-31) … In every [concrete] experience there is the whole of reality. That is, experience or reality is not divisible into parts or departments; there are no distinct and separate…fields of knowledge. In every judgment whatever something is [implicitly] asserted of the whole reality.”” (Exper., 323)
That same kind of implicational relationship exists between abstracted individual ideas and their respective abstracted world of ideas, or modes, as exists between individual ideas and the concrete world of ideas
The relationship is, I would suggest, “”holographic””—organic in the sense in which each biological cell contains the genetic image and potential for the whole organism. But it is the whole, not the cell that is the substance or reality of the full manifestation. The chicken, epistemologically, semantically, and ontologically, precedes the egg. It is from the chicken (for Oakeshott, the idea of the chicken) that the egg (the idea of the egg) derives its significance, therefore (for Oakeshott) its being. I have chosen to use the biological cell and chicken/egg analogies because, on first impression, they seem appropriate: they take us beyond the implication of a mere simultaneous present inherent in a visual image, even a holograph. Oakeshott suggests that our “”reading”” of our experience also “”may be retrospective or prospective.”” (Exper., 30) But his recommendation, later in Experience, that philosophic thought consider both “”place and time…irrelevant”” (Exper., 349) would seem to limit the significance of his present observation to a consideration of that which is logically, not temporally, prior and consequent in thought. This falls considerably short of the tacitly indwelling and anticipatory dynamics of the Polanyian “”imagination,”” and especially of Poteat’s elaboration of these dynamics in his expressly temporal portrayal of reflexivity.8 So, the cell and chicken/egg analogies should be understood accordingly.
This holographic/holistic image of the nature of the unity, or the coherence, that constitutes the epistemologically primordial world of concrete experience suggests that any attempt to define this unity in terms of a common element or a unifying principle is reductionistic. “”The common element is never the whole idea…. Classification is an arrest in experience.”” (Exper., 32)
“”Nor, again, should the unity of experience be confused with that which arises from conformity to some fixed and central principle…. In experience separate and independent ideas are never gathered together round a given principle or nucleus.”” (Exper., 33) Instead, within his concrete “”world of ideas”” (he uses the plural far more often than the singular), the “”relation”” (a word that, once we understand the primordial givenness of the whole, must, it seems to me, appear to be an abstraction, an arrest in experience) that, according to Oakeshott, best describes the character of coherence is “”implicational.”” The proper definition of implication is a matter of some controversy among logicians, but for most it suggests a formal, linear relation between premises and conclusion, if only hypothetical.9 However, as we have seen, Oakeshott rejects any such linear, or even dominantly formal, understanding of coherence. “”In a system each constituent rests upon the whole.”” (Exper., 30) “”In experience there is neither an association of ideas, nor the construction of a chain of ideas.”” (Exper., 32) He could easily at this point have made good use of Polanyi’s later insight into the unspecifiable integrative process that is achieved through a tacit indwelling of subsidiary particulars. But he appears to have no appreciation of this “”personal”” fundament of knowing. Instead, as we shall demonstrate in greater detail later, he insists upon an epistemology—at least at the level of pure knowing, or philosophy—whose criterion of achievement is that of explicitness, and whose mode of understanding is entirely focal:
In experience, as the development…of a system of ideas, we proceed always by way of implication. We never look away from a given world to another world, but always at a given world to discover the unity it implies. (Exper., 31; emphasis is Oakeshott’s)
It is no wonder that Oakeshott, in his review of Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge, found that work to be “”disordered, repetitive, digressive, and often obscure…leav[ing] much to be desired.””10 William Poteat, after reflecting upon Experience, came to the conclusion that
Oakeshott’s shortcoming was that he remained essentially detached, a mere spectator, in his examination of experience.
One almost never has the sense that it is “”experience”” that Oakeshott feels himself to have and to be in the midst of. “”Experience”” …remains…unowned…. [There is no] sense of the author’s own personal and dynamic embodiment in [concrete experience].11
Still, to his credit, Oakeshott does not provide any specific definition of “”implication”” and, therefore, of “”coherence”” (whether by default or by choice is not clear), and when he addresses the question of how we can recognize concrete, philosophical truth—which he equates with total coherence—when we encounter it, his final criterion is a subjective one, in the sense of being essentially intuitive-emotive: “”Truth…is the world of experience itself in so far as that world is satisfactory in itself.”” (Exper., 28; emphasis mine.) And what is it that gives us that sense of satisfaction? It is the coherence and comprehensiveness of that world of experience, or ideas. On strictly formal and linear logical terms, this would constitute a truly “”vicious”” circularity, but what saves Oakeshott from such criticism is (1)his broadly implicational and holistic understanding of philosophical experience and (2) his rooting of philosophical exper-ience in nothing more ultimate than a kind of aesthetic experience itself.12
Some important insights emerge from Oakeshott’s struggle to deal with the relation of coherence to completeness, or comprehensiveness (the whole). Here we detect Hegel’s influence upon Oakeshott. The coherence, or unity, of a system, or world of experience, cannot be established apart from its completeness, and when that completeness can be assumed, the coherence of the world of ideas that constitutes concrete experience is characterized by necessity. Another way to express this: comprehensive coherence is epistemologically compelling. What appears coherent in a partial (abstracted) whole, or mode of experience, might be found to be incoherent when viewed from the perspective of total comprehension; for, in the context of that not only larger but purer (undistorted) perspective, the arrested experience loses its assumed meaning. Similarly, that which appears incoherent in itself from a partial perspective may be discovered to be coherent when viewed within the context of full, concrete experience, which transforms its significance.
According to Oakeshott: “”A whole which is all-inclusive and yet not a unity [WM: i.e., not coherent] is a contradiction. The incomplete is, as such [WM: i.e., when viewed from the full, concrete world of experience] internally discrepant.”” (Exper., 33-34)13 He concludes:
A world of ideas which is unified because it is complete and complete because it is unified is a coherent world of ideas, and such a world alone is satisfactory in experience…. Experience remains incomplete until the world of ideas is so far coherent as not to suggest or oblige another way of conceiving it. (Exper., 34)
Oakeshott explicitly distances himself from the realists and the correspondence theorists (and implicitly, also, from some types of intuitionists and foundationalists) when he declares that
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fact is coercive, not because it is given (for the given and the questionable stand ever close together), but because it is complete. Fact is what we are obliged to think, not because it corresponds with some outside world of existence, but because it is required for the coherence of the world of experience. And in experience satisfaction is reached when the level of fact is reached. (Exper., 42)
This is not to deny that facts are “”given,”” only that their mere givenness is not what compels our credence. Even when he speaks of “”facts,”” we must remember that anything that is “”given”” in experience must have some meaning if it is to gain our recognition as an experiential “”given.”” And to have meaning, these facts must present themselves to us as “”ideas,”” however rudimentary, that are not simply a manifold of isolated “”ideas.”” To recognize a “”fact”” is already to perceive, or at least sense, its place within a larger whole.
For Oakeshott, as we have seen, the real world, reality itself, is the world of experience. Within that ever-changing reality “”self and not-self divulge themselves to reflection”” (Poetry, 17), and “”reality”” encompasses both.
An object is not something independent of experience, but merely what I am obliged to think, and for that reason it is real. And the subject, the I, which belongs to this object, is…not…an element or portion of my world, but is my world as a whole. And my world is a world of objects. (Exper., 60)
Or, again: “”The real world…is real…in so far as it is satisfactory in experience.”” (Exper., 60) Oakeshott admits that the distinction between subject and object, or self and not-self “”is ambiguous and unstable: it is difficult (if not impossible) to find anything which, in principle, belongs exclusively to either side of the partnership.”” (Poetry, 17) When Oakeshott speaks in Experience of the subject as “”my world as a whole,”” he is merely making explicit what is already apparent in his thought: that the subject is coterminous with, identical with, the totality of his experience, or knowing. This does, indeed, eliminate any distinction between self and not-self when the latter is conceived as the world of experience which the self can claim as his knowledge (therefore, as his world), but a distinction must remain between the self and the larger world that encompasses experiences or ideas (e.g., those of other selves) not yet appropriated by oneself. Of course, if philosophy were to achieve the goal that Oakeshott sets for it—omniscience—then, at least for the philosopher, that distinction would dissolve. Such an audacious philosophical aim to see, in effect, with the “”eye of God,”” even though not viewed by Oakeshott as likely to be accomplished, is of course an aim not even imagined by Polanyi, and antithetical to his constant reminder of the presence of the unknowable in all our thinking—and further, of the possibility of all our claims to knowing being in total error. Oakeshott, writing sixteen years after the publication of Experience, appears only slightly chastened by a greater awareness of human fallibility when he characterizes the self as that which makes and recognizes images and moves “”about them in manners appropriate to their [WM: in various degrees, abstracted] character and with various degrees of aptitude.”” (Poetry, 17)
Oakeshott concludes that “”the self…is not a ‘thing’ or ‘substance'””—there are, strictly speaking, no things or substances in his “”idealistic”” world—””capable of being active; it is activity.”” (Poetry, 17; emphasis mine.) Apparently there is room for activity in his otherwise ideational world. And further, he insists that although “”the self is constituted in the activity of making and moving among images”” (Poetry, 18), “”this activity is primordial; there is nothing antecedent to it.”” (Poetry, 17) We cannot avoid some perplexity over Oakeshott’s juxtaposition of (1) self-as-activity being primordial and (2) activity being constitutive of self; but when we next turn to examine his concept of the world of experience (and, therefore, of self) as both “”given”” and “”achieved,”” we shall see that this dilemma is resolved. The important point that Oakeshott is making here is that the materialistic evolutionists have turned things ontologically upside-down: the experiential self is not emergent from matter. Polanyi accepts this concept and develops it much further through his elaboration of “”higher-level principles”” influencing the “”boundary conditions”” left open by lower-level particulars.
Oakeshott further insists that the Kantians, despite their incorporation of a modified Cartesian cogito, have misconceived the nature of reality by their positing of an independent and inaccessible ding an sich. For “”the not-self…is composed of images [which]…are not anything at all out of relation to a self.”” (Poetry, 18) Apparently the primordial self is able to make and recognize and indeed become the images it “”moves among,”” because it has, or is, the even more fundamental capacity for questioning and “”ascertaining what kinds of questions are relevant to be asked about [these] images.”” (Poetry, 18) The self, as judging-questioning-judging activity interrogates “”the world or field of images which on any occasion constitute the not-self.”” (Poetry, 18)
As objects of interrogation, the images or ideas subject to questioning, while meaningful, are still constitutive of the “”given”” world of experience and do not qualify as truths. As constituents of a partial world, these ideas are abstractions and therefore “”cannot be supposed to afford satisfaction in experience. (Exper., 48) Yet, Oakeshott insists, these partial images or ideas, given to experience, are not to be perceived as “”wholly false, for that would imply that [they are] meaningless, and wherever there is experience there is meaning.”” (Exper., 68) Still, the unqualified, or unmodified, truth encompassed in the holistic/holographic (my term) concrete world of experience, and the accompanying satisfaction it affords, must be “”achieved.””
“”Truth does not belong to the given world in experience, as such, but only to what is achieved in experience. Truth is…true because it is a result.”” (Exper., 48) Truth, in other words, is recognized only through the critical process of recognizing and dismissing the abstractions that distract us from it and through the arduous imaginative and creative process of bringing to explicit expression the coherent and total whole implicit in our original experience of the given world. It then becomes clear, retrospectively, that “”the only evidence of truth is self-evidence.”” (Exper., 48) This achievement of ultimate, comprehensive truth, as we have earlier intimated, is, according to Oakeshott, the proper task of philosophy.
It is clear from what we have already said that, for Oakeshott (as, indeed, for Polanyi), it is of the primordial nature of self to strive toward the achievement of ever more comprehension of the world. “”Achieved experience”” is not only the self-set task of the philosopher, but it is an objective inherent in what it means to be human. Therefore, what is given in experience is never, as such, to be accepted as “”solid, fixed and inviolable,”” but “”is given in order to be transformed”” (Exper., 29), to be “”amplified by the elucidation of its implications.”” (Exper., 33) One must always attempt thus to transform the given world of experience into still “”more of a world,”” and this achieved world into even more of a world, and still more, etc. (Exper., 29) And each greater achievement, as we have seen, is “”more”” not simply in the sense of being a larger, expanded, more extensive world of experience, but in the more qualitative sense of being more comprehensively coherent. It would seem, to my thinking, that Oakeshott’s own logic here would compel him to attribute to these greater heuristic achievements greater experiential, or ideational, concreteness. But he prefers to emphasize the qualitative distance that inherently and inevitably separates all achieved modes of experience—all thought that is characterized by even the slightest degrees of abstraction, incompleteness, and conditionality—from truly complete and coherent, that is, concrete—or philosophical—experience. “”If what is given, if this world of ‘what is here and now’ is abstract, what is achieved will be no less abstract.”” (Exper., 308) One is reminded of Saint Augustine’s sharp separation between the civitas terrana and the Civitas Dei. However, because each greater world provides through its expanded comprehensiveness a greater frame of meaning, “”every achievement brings with it a new sense of the criterion”” (Exper., 291) for the ongoing heuristic quest. We cannot fail to see here a resemblance, in some apparent respects, to Polanyi’s concept of a “”gradient of discovery,”” even though that gradient for Oakeshott is less steady or continuous between its lower and upper reaches.
As we proceed in this endeavor of elucidating the implications of what is given and also of what we temporarily achieve through our elucidations, we must recognize that, while “”every element is indispensable””—that is, must be interrogated for its implications—””no one is more important than any other””—again, as we have seen, there are no central, unifying or paradigmatic principles—””and none is immune from change and rearrangement.”” (Exper., 33) If we may utilize again Polanyi’s terminology, Oakeshott’s gradient of heuristic achievement points always toward a most un-Polanyian completion:
…a world or system of ideas which is at once unitary and complete;…it is…to this [that] the word absolute [is] appropriate. [The] absolute…here [is] that which is…emancipated from the necessity of finding its significance in relations with what is outside itself. It means that which is self-complete, whole, individual, and removed from change. What is absolute, in this sense, is no inscrutable Absolute, beyond conception and outside the world of experience, it is the world of experience as a coherent unity…. And every idea, in proportion as it is individual [WM: i.e., unified, coherent] and complete, in proportion as it approaches the condition of being a world itself, approaches the condition of absoluteness. (Exper., 47)
Apart from Polanyi’s employment of common criteria—coherence and comprehensiveness—for characterizing truth and reality, the contrast between the two thinkers is stark. Never does Polanyi anticipate any, even approximate, completion of the heuristic task; indeed, for him it is inherently inconceivable. For him, the indication of one’s coming closer to truth, in the process of discovery, is an increasing awareness of the likelihood of an increasing number of “”indeterminate future manifestations””—themselves characterized by an increasing reach of indeterminacy. Nowhere does he characterize the process as one approaching completion, no longer subject to change, nor as one where knowing is freed from a dependence upon awarenesses beyond one’s immediate and conceptual perception. The understanding of human knowledge, as “”personal,”” for Polanyi can never lend itself to being characterized as “”Absolute.”” Yet, ironically, as we shall see, Polanyi’s epistemology, despite his disavowal of such concepts, is far less vulnerable to relativism than is Oakeshott’s, despite his embracing of them.
Specific Universes of Discourse / Modes of Experience:
Arrested Experience Defended as Necessary
We shall come to a fuller understanding of Oakeshott’s absolute ideal, his concrete world of experience, by exploring further, and by way of contrast, his abstracted and partial “”modes”” of experience. The latter, unlike the former, is “”shackled by partiality and presupposition.”” (Exper., 74) A mode’s autonomy in relation to other modes is defined by its envisaged purposes or objectives, in contrast to the purposes and objectives of other modes, and—it becomes especially evident in his later, political writings—by a society’s traditions. By the time he published his follow-up volume to Experience, The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind, some twenty-six years later, he appears to have become somewhat uncomfortable with the term “”mode,””14 and although he still continued to rely upon the word occasionally, he began to use more frequently such terms as “”idiom,”” “”universe of discourse,”” and especially “”voice”” in referring to the same phenomenon of experiential arrest and abstraction. Throughout his subsequent writings on politics and up to the end of his life, the concept remained important in his thinking.
As we have seen, according to Oakeshott, all meaning, and therefore all knowing, derives from the integral relation of that to which we ascribe meaning, or claim to have knowledge, to a larger world of experience. This is the case whether that larger world is a modification, or arrested mode, of experience or the concrete, primordial, and absolute whole of experience itself. Arrested exper-ience, to be experience, can only exist within its own self-contained, abstracted world of ideas.
“”Since abstraction…is not merely selective omission, …but also and always the construction of a separate world of ideas at the point of the arrest, since it is not merely separative, but also synthetic and integrative, a mode of experience is…the construction of a world of ideas at the point of arrest. (Exper., 73-74)
Therefore, “”every mode of experience is, in spite of its modification, still a form of experience…”” (Exper., 75; emphasis added.) It shares with concrete experience the same criterion—namely, coherence—by which it defines and judges itself. Further, even though each mode of experience—e.g., history, science, politics, art—is a world of ideas abstracted from (and to that extent a distortion of ) the totality of experience, “”each derives its character from the whole from which it is an abstraction.”” (Exper., 75) Indeed, because of its inherent defectiveness, each such arrest in experience “”calls out for itssupression by which is conplete.”” (Exper., 80) Thus the concrete world of experience is not another, separate world, wholly different in character from any abstract world. It is the complete world which every abstract world implies and from which it derives its significance. (Exper., 75) Having asserted that an abstract wold of ideas is a form of experience, Oakeshiott immediately insists he uses interchangeable7y with “”totality of experience””). (Exper., 78) “”The whole is not made up of [a collection of] abstractions, it is implied in them; it is not dependent upon abstractions, because it is logically prior ot them.”” (Exper., 79)15
Thus we have abstracted worlds, or universes of discourse, that (as when we think scientifically) treat “”mind”” as “”brain,”” divorced from the concrete world of “”mindbody,”” to use Poteat’s central concept; other universes of discourse that treat space separately from time (in our everyday, “”practical”” mode of thinking); etc. As we have noted, once divorced, these abstracted ideas can never serve as building blocks for recapturing, or achieving, the concrete, coherent world of experience from which they have been abstracted (because, as abstracted ideas or modified worlds, they are not only partial but also distortions of concrete reality). This is strikingly suggestive of Polanyi’s later observation regarding the irreversibility of the focal integration of subsidiaries, although Oakeshott’s “”subsidiary”” particulars do not appear to be of a tacit nature and appear to remain fully specifiable even though of transformed (abstracted) character. (Recall his observation that, in understanding the modes of experience, we do not look away from them but at them.)
Therefore, our independent understandings of mind and of body, or of space and of time, do not by juxtaposition produce a true understanding of mindbody, nor of space-time. Still, when the more satisfactory and concrete understanding has been achieved, it does not render invalid the lesser insights. The kinds of questions that we address to history, science, art, and the many practical concerns of life, however important, themselves represent questions that are unrelated to the ultimate questions (whose provenance is philosophy) and therefore can be answered only by employing concepts and ideational systems, or modes of thought, that themselves are penultimate—if you will, that represent a kind of philosophically premature, but necessary (if these questions are to be addressed) closure (my phrase). “”Each abstract world… in so far as it is coherent [in itself], is true for itself.”” (Exper., 75) (In light of Oakeshott’s earlier observation that true coherence cannot occur without wholeness, or full comprehensiveness, it would appear that the coherence he speaks of here, that of a modified world of experience, can be at best only a modified coherence, that is, only as perceived apart from concrete reality. This seems to be implied in his observation that “”each abstract world of ideas, in so far as it is coherent, is, then, true so far as it goes, true if its postulates are accepted, true if its reservations are admitted.”” [Exper., 77])
Philosophy, because of its lofty embrace of the whole, of concrete (i.e., non-abstracted) experience, is not equipped to address these valid but penultimate concerns, and when it attempts to do so it can only provide chaos and confusion. It is with this understanding that Oakeshott provides, in a work of his later years, his On Human Conduct (1975), his unique and provocative interpretation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: The knowledge that people need for survival and the practical conduct of life was amply available to the prisoners viewing the flickering images on the wall of the cave, and the philosopher, returned with his newly achieved insights from his sojourn outside the cave was a real threat to their continued survival. For the practical and vital tasks of getting on with life, he was in far greater need of them than they of him. And his arrogance in refusing to understand this made him deserving of every abuse he received from them. In short: philosophers should not become kings, nor kings philosophers.
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“”There is,”” Oakeshott tells us, “”no fixed number”” (Poetry, 12) of idioms, modes, universes of discourse which—although by definition they fall short of complete coherence and fail to provide complete satisfaction—are legitimate and even philosophically defensible in the sense that philosophy can not rightly pretend to be able to displace them. He identifies only a few of them: history, science, poetry (by which he intends, in addition to poetry as we think of it, also “”painting, sculpting, dancing, singing, literary and musical composition”” [Poetry, 31]), and practice (or practical life, within which, with some qualifications, he includes moral valuing). Each universe of discourse is, within itself, an effort to organize, or bring order to, a segment of reality in order to deal exclusively with the concerns that are appropriate to it. Historians are properly concerned with organizing and elucidating the world of human activity in terms of worldly goals and ambitions (“”sub specie praeteritorium“” [Exper., 147]). Those engaged in artistic and literary expression (“”poetry””) have no practical objectives, not even criteria based on “”fact,”” “”truth,”” or even “”beauty”” per se, but are involved only in the activity of making and manipulating images with the intent of bringing “”delight””—not to be confused with the bringing of pleasure, since “”‘delighting’ is only another name for ‘contemplating'”” (Poetry, 37), which is concerned not with feelings or emotions, per se (a “”practical”” concern), but with artistic utterance. (Oakeshott considered his Poetry an important follow-up to Experience because in the earlier work he had improperly included artistic expression within “”practice.””) And “”a poetic utterance (a work of art) is not the ‘expression’ of an experience, it is the experience and the only one there is”” for the artist. (Poetry, 49)
Those engaged in ordering the world of their practical activities (i.e., all of us in as much as we are concerned with survival and “”getting on”” in life) are motivated by their desires. “”The coherence of the images of the practical world…springs from their being the creatures of desire.”” (Exper., 35) (Here we detect the great influence that Thomas Hobbes had on Oakeshott’s thinking. A former student of his commented to me: “”Sometimes Professor Oakeshott would, somewhat jokingly, refer to ‘the only four philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, and Hegel.'””) Efforts are directed toward the attaining of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, and to succeed in this one must develop the practical means for obtaining these ends, e.g., the skills of calculating the expected and the unexpected, and the ability the choose and to reject. It is in regard to the mode of practical activity that volition needs to be developed and understood as a form of practical thought and judgment.
Practical experience is the world sub specie voluntatis; and…volition is not a separate kind of experience [WM: i.e., it is a level of judgment], but an inadequate mode of experience. (Exper., 304)
“”What we will is always a [coherent] world, perhaps a self.”” (Exper., 261) This ties the world of “”valuation”” closely to the world of practice—the implications of which we shall shortly explore further. For now, it suffices to indicate the fundamental connection that he perceives between the two worlds, or modes, in the task he assigns to moral activity: specifically “”the observation of a balance of accommodation between the demands of desiring selves each recognized by others to be an end and not a mere slave of somebody else’s desires.”” (Poetry, 27) Again, we sense the strong influence of Hobbes.
Finally, when Oakeshott describes the scientific mode, he observes that scientists are driven by intellectual curiosity to explain and order their world in terms of strictly rational and consequentially related concepts. We note that, ironically, the non-scientist Oakeshott sharply diverges from the scientist Polanyi’s description of scientific motives and methods. For Oakeshott, “”scientific observation is designed expressly to replace observation in terms of personal feelings by observations of an absolute stability, by quantitative measurements.”” (Exper., 176) And, “”what is indefinite is of no value to science….”” (Exper., 183) For Polanyi, by contrast, science, like every other type of human inquiry, is grounded in personal commitment and the indeterminacy of both tacit integration and intimations of future manifestations.
Oakeshott’s discomfort with indeterminacy in scientific method leads him to discredit the validity of “”inductive”” procedures: “”A direct inference from ‘some’ or ‘many’ to ‘all’ is not only logically fallacious, but scientifically useless.”” (Exper., 206) The reliability of scientific generalization, where it takes us beyond mere analysis, is due to “”statistical generalization.”” One must concur with Oakeshott’s recognition of indeterminacy in the inductive process, and it is instructive to think of what occurs under the rubric of “”induction”” in terms of an at least implicit process of statistical generalization. But Polanyi’s detection of the “”tacit coefficient,”” and therefore indeterminacy, in all formal logic, including mathematics, suggests that Oakeshott has not in any way evaded his nemesis by redefining scientific generalization in terms of statistical methodology. Still, he insists that what distinguishes science from all other modes is the stricter “”principle of homogeneity”” to which it adheres, namely complete quantification, and the precise, determinate measurements this permits.
The distinctions Oakeshott makes among his “”modes”” do not imply for him a hierarchy among them. They are merely differences in the various ways in which people appropriately go about ordering their experiences for addressing various concerns. While Polanyi’s ordering of experience is characterized by hierarchy, both epistemological and ontological, Oakeshott denies any “”hierarchical order among the voices.”” (Poetry, 14) Still, as we noted earlier, he maintains that different voices, or modes, often represent different degrees of abstraction—that is, different levels of both coherence and comprehensiveness, and therefore varying degrees of truth and reality. He even suggests that, among the abstract worlds of experience, practice (and therefore politics) is considerably more important than either history or science:
It is possible that such modes of experience as science and history may actually be abolished. The world lived long enough and happily enough before they appeared…. But…the modification of experience I have called Practice…is indispensable to life. (Exper., 350)
I would agree with him that neither history nor science should be deemed important to us—but only if we are content to regress to the level of simple primates…or audacious enough to think that we should aspire to become gods! He, indeed, appears to propose the worst of both worlds or, rather, options: His defining of morality in terms that make it subservient to desire would seem to point him in the former direction and his assigning to philosophy the lofty aim of approximating what I term a “”God’s-eye”” view of reality seems to point him in the latter direction.
Oakeshott tells us that the autonomy of the modes of experience, or voices, is such that there are no possible meaningful conversations among them.
Each mode begins and ends wholly within itself…. The images of one universe of discourse are not available (even as raw materials) to a different mode of imagining. (Poetry, 37)
Again, each universe of discourse is structured to deal exclusively with the concerns appropriate to it. Each frames its images accordingly. So, within each world, or universe, the constituent images or concepts are meaningful only within that universe.
No experience save that which belongs exclusively to its mode can help to elucidate the contents of an abstract world of ideas; the experience which belongs to another mode is merely irrelevant…. (Exper., 81)
Oakeshott illustrates this with the images of “”water,”” a practical concept, and “”H2O,”” a scientific concept:
A scientist does not first perceive “”water”” and then resolve it into H2O: scientia begins only when “”water”” has been left behind…. H2O is a symbol the rules of whose behavior are wholly different from those which govern the symbol “”water.”” (Poetry, 37)
“”No image can ever survive outside its proper universe of discourse.”” (Poetry, 39) Therefore, meaningful discourse between different universes of discourse is impossible. The breach of this principle is what Gilbert Ryle labeled a “”category mistake.”” (Both Ryle and Oakeshott agree that it is the task of philosophy to identify and correct these mistakes.) It can lead to confusion that is relatively benign or more serious in its consequences. Oakeshott, continuing with his previous illustration, says that “”to speak of H2O as ‘the chemical formula for water’ is to speak in a confused manner.”” (Poetry, 37) The consequence does not appear to involve more than puzzlement. But to speak of the study or conduct of politics, a practical endeavor, as “”political science“” (my own example, but one consistent with Oakeshott’s later writing on politics) builds upon a serious misconception of the human factor in politics and one with dangerous consequences. Oakeshott’s reminder of the inherent autonomy among the modes is certainly valuable. But it seems to me that Polanyi’s recognition of a hierarchical relationship among these various universes of discourse—a relationship that preserves their conceptual and operational autonomy while still recognizing that the higher universes are able to exercise “”marginal control”” over the lower by virtue of an openness of the lower levels to the higher—offers a greater opportunity for understanding what Oakeshott himself has identified as the various “”degrees of reality”” that confront us in experience.
However, the most serious breach of autonomy in Oakeshott’s view involves that which exists between the modes of experience, on the one hand, and concrete experience, i.e., philosophy, on the other hand. As long as each mode, or world of abstract ideas, adheres to its own proper and limited tasks—that is, as long as it does not attempt to be more or less than it properly is—it is “”unassailable.”” (Exper., 329) But there appears to be an inherent instability in these abstract modes of experience. This is suggested in what seems to me Oakeshott’s most mature and adequate description of a mode, which appears in his On Human Conduct:
It is a conditional [WM: in the sense of being partial, abstracted, and contingent] understanding of the world, valuable so far as it goes, and indispensable in the engagements of practical life; but not fully in command of itself [when] it is unaware of its conditionality. (27; emphasis added)
So a major breach of the separation between, on the one hand, the practical and other abstract modes of experience in which we regularly engage and, on the other hand, the rarified, holistic experiences we have that constitute concrete reality, to the extent that we philosophize, occurs when we mistake the former for the latter, the partial for the whole, the abstract for the concrete, lesser degrees of reality for perfect and complete reality. We have seen that truth, in its ultimate characterization, is “”the coherent world of experience taken as a whole”” and that “”each abstract world of ideas, in so far as it is coherent, is, then, true so far as it goes”” (Exper., 77), assuming its postulates are accepted and its conditionality acknowledged.
But…when whatever truth it may contain is asserted absolutely and unconditionally, its truth turns to error. The truth of a mode of experience is always relative…to the degree of completeness which belongs to its world of ideas, its organization of reality. (Exper., 77)
Oakeshott is convinced that, in principle, any mode of experience, as a world—when judged from the standpoint of the totality of experience, and therefore seen for its incompleteness and conditionality—””has no contribution to make to the totality of experience.”” (Exper., 308) But, he warns, “”in the end it is impossible for a mode of experience not to assert itself absolutely.”” (Exper., 330)16 I would point out in support of his thesis, history shows us that virtually every intellectual endeavor has had its absolutist (Voegelin’s term: “”gnostic””) manifestation: science, when it yields to the guiding principle of scientism; practice, when it is shaped by rigidly conceived principles of pragmatism; history, when it becomes historicism; and so on.
Most of us, I think, would wholeheartedly agree with Oakeshott in his assessment of the improprieties and dangers that are incurred when we engage in such “”isms”” by losing sight of the finitude and fallibility of human wisdom. Eric Voegelin and Michael Polanyi, in addition to Oakeshott, have certainly been among the most insightful commentators regarding this problem in the twentieth century A.D., just as Plato was in the fourth century B.C. But Oakeshott’s warning becomes more controversial when he suggests that dangers from breaching the autonomy between the modes and concrete, or philosophical, experience occur not only when the former are elevated to the status of the latter, but also when the latter, philosophic experience, with all good intentions, is assumed to be relevant for addressing the questions defined by the modes. Oakeshott’s underlying assumption is that philosophy is totally irrelevant to the substantive concerns of the abstract modes of experience. So, when it meddles in these concerns, it can only bring the same results that come from “”elevating”” the modes: at least, confusion, and, at most, serious misdirection by virtue of its absolutist presuppositions. “”The experience…which belongs to the concrete whole,”” when introduced into an abstract world, “”is merely destructive of the abstract world as a world.”” (Exper., 81) In the following statement, Oakeshott describes the distinctly separate concerns of philosophy vis a vis the practical mode, but his characterization applies to the separation between philosophy and all the modes of experience:
From the standpoint of practical experience…a man’s first business is to live. And life…can be conducted only at the expense of an arrest in experience…. It is not the clear-sighted [i.e., the philosophers]…who can lead the world. Great achievements are accomplished in the mental fog of practical experience. What is farthest from our needs is that kings should be philosophers…. The practical consciousness…is secure in the knowledge that philosophical thought can make no relevant contribution to the coherence of its [practical] world of experience. (Exper., 320-21)
As we have seen, he severely criticizes Plato for attempting to address worldly concerns through philosophy—specifically for assuming that “”the world,”” i.e., the conditional modes of experience, “”acquires unconditional intelligibility in being understood in terms of the ultimate postulate, ‘the Good’.”” (Conduct, 29; emphasis added.)
To understand how Oakeshott is led to the conclusion that concrete experience, or philosophy, must be kept separate from the practical and other modes of experience, it is necessary to explore further, and to assess, his understanding of philosophy.17
The Concrete World of Experience: Philosophy as
Absolute, Unconditioned Explicit, Definitive,
Complete and Perfect Knowledge
We have already had occasion to observe that, for Oakeshott, since it can be said about philosophy what is said about the concrete world of experience, philosophy is experience that is totally comprehensive and thoroughly coherent, and therefore “”Philosophy is experience without reservation or arrest…unhindered by what is partial [or] abstract.”” (Exper., 3) Being thereby “”emancipated from the necessity of finding its significance in relations with what is outside itself…it is self-complete, whole, individual [i.e., unity], and removed from change.”” (Exper., 47) Being perfectly comprehensive and coherent, philosophy “”has no degrees”” of greater or lesser truth. (Exper., 67) It is, in a word, “”absolute”” (Exper., 47)…””the only absolute truth.”” (Exper., 151) And nothing short of the whole of concrete experience, he insists, can properly be called “”absolute.”” (Exper., 278)
But Oakeshott, throughout his epistemological writings, is inconsistent in his characterization of philosophy. Sometimes he describes the achievement of total, unconditional, absolute knowledge as the very nature of philosophy, or of the philosophical experience. At other times he presents it as the aim of philosophy. At all times he maintains that “”what is absolute…is no inscrutable Absolute, beyond conception and outside the world of experience.”” (Exper., 47) At one point he admits that one’s experience “”may never be seen to be absolutely true,”” but we are divested of any suggestion of a correlate with Socrate’s humble admonition to an awareness of inevitable philosophic ignorance when he continues with his rationale…””not because this [experiencing of absolute truth] is an impossible condition, but because it is a highly improbable condition.”” (Exper., 68) Being omniscient is apparently difficult, but not out of reach. If it were known to be impossible, it could not be logically maintained as a valid intention or goal of the philosophic endeavor. But, says Oakeshott, it is possible. In all fairness to him, one might perhaps argue that what he intends by his statement is that, even if we do happen, improbably, to stumble across a portion of the absolute truth, lacking the total view we would not be able to know for certain that this truth is integral to the whole. And, indeed, even our best efforts may well provide less than this crucial total view: “”Even when we put behind us all merely modal experience, we may still fall short of a whole which is seen as a whole and complete.”” (Exper., 346)
But, given the holistic character of concrete, absolute truth, on Oakeshott’s own terms, a mere “”portion”” could not partake of the nature of the absolute. Without the experience of the concrete whole, we would be deprived not only of knowing whether we have come across an absolute truth, but of any experience of that absolute truth itself. In the end, Oakeshott’s refusal to deny categorically the possibility of human omniscience, and his employment of such phrases as “”may fall short”” and even “”not…impossible”” in regard to our grasping the whole of truth, must leave us uneasy. And as we shall come to see that Oakeshott excludes from philosophy all that cannot be known with exactitude and certainty, the attempt to moderate his more startling claims becomes more difficult.
Whether omniscience be viewed as the character or as merely the aspiration of philosophy, Oakeshott asserts that philosophical achievement is of such a superior order compared to the arrested and only “”partially integrated”” achievements of his modes of experience (Exper., 304) that philosophy—while still unable to make any specific contributions to the modes—being at least capable of full integration—can “”study the quality and style of each voice and…reflect upon the relationship of one voice to another”” (Poetry, 12), demonstrate “”their abstract character, their incapacity to provide what is completely satisfactory in experience,”” (Exper., 352), and presumably, caution them when they (inevitably) tend to reach beyond the boundaries between themselves and between themselves and philosophy itself. In other words, philosophy can relate to the modes only in a critical, or negative, capacity: it can (and should) remind them of their limits and imperfections, but it cannot advise them by way of offering positive insights.18
One implication of Oakeshott’s understanding of concrete reality that has not escaped the attention of at least one commentator19 is that this “”perfect and complete”” world of ideas which constitutes the substance of philosophy can itself, as a world or whole, have neither meaning nor value. Oakeshott is candid in stating this. His understanding of both meaning and value leads inevitably, within the context of his thought, to this conclusion. Since the “”valuable,”” for Oakeshott, is that which contributes to coherence (Exper., 287-88), and the world of ideas constituting philosophy is total in its comprehensiveness of all experience (Exper., 47, 151)—i.e., it is not a constituent or contributing part of some larger whole—the concrete world of ideas, and existence itself, can have no value. “”The valuable as such never even appears to be the whole, nor the universe as such to be valuable.”” (Exper., 287) And again: “”Reality as a whole is neither valuable nor worthless.”” (Exper, 307)The concept of value is an abstraction, applying only to the world, or mode, of practical judgment. As for meaning, Oakeshott understands it as that which something has by virtue of its being seen, or experienced, in relation to something that is outside itself (Exper., 47): that is, by being experienced in the context of a coherent larger whole. However, because the concrete world of ideas, as such, has no larger context, is “”without either environment or relations”” (Exper., 151), it—and therefore ultimately philosophy itself—cannot be said to have meaning. The whole of experience, as such, has no value or meaning, only coherence.
If philosophy, because of its total and perfectly coherent understanding of all that is to be understood, or because of its aspiration toward this ideal, cannot contribute to the worlds of arrested and abstract experience, what—apart from its responsibility to identify and caution against the absolutizing tendencies of the modes—is its proper task? Oakeshott’s answer to this question immediately distinguishes his philosophical program from that of the mystic. Whereas the latter seeks complete and coherent “”understanding”” through the abandonment of conceptualization, through some kind of indescribable transcendence of all human cognition, culminating in the absorption of the conscious self into a sense of the ineffable wholeness of being, Oakeshott takes a markedly opposite approach. The absolute, he confidently proclaims, is neither “”inscrutable…[nor] beyond conception.”” (Exper., 47) To achieve the full satisfaction that philosophy offers in capturing the coherent fullness of reality, philosophy must articulate that reality with exactitude and clarity. The task of philosophy is to render the implicit explicit and to transform ambiguity into clear definition. This stands in stark contrast not only to the approach taken by mysticism, but also to the approach taken by Michael Polanyi, who was guided to his sense of meaning and reality through primally rooted, tacit, and largely unspecifiable intimations. Oakeshott identifies experiential certainty with clarity, whereas Polanyi breaks that Cartesian bond and instead warns against “”unbridled lucidity.””
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We noted earlier that, according to Oakeshott, science properly attempts to order its abstract world strictly in terms of analytic relations and though quantitative measurements. Still, he observes that the real world is not capable of achieving coherence in strictly quantitative terms:
The world conceived under the category of quantity is not, itself, a coherent world of experience. It is the real world from a limited and abstract point of view; it is experience arrested…. (Exper., 214)
So, if the real world cannot be rendered coherent by quantitative criteria, it would appear that it—and philosophy, its ideational embodiment—must rely on qualitative considerations. However, value criteria have already been ruled out in this regard. Taking “”qualitative,”” then, to mean broadly “”non-quantitative,”” it appears that Oakeshott intends merely to go beyond the strictly formal-analytic procedures that he identifies with scientific method and to open to philosophy, as we suggested earlier, an understanding in terms of non-linear implicational relations.20
