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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Despite recent interest in Michael Oakeshott's work, his aesthetics have yet to receive an extended consideration. The paper surveys Oakeshott's writings on the character of art and provides a critical account of how his aesthetics complements his moral philosophy. Through his aesthetics Oakeshott provides his moral philosophy with an idea of authenticity. Societies and individuals that have failed to recognize the poetic dimension in the moral life suffer a corruption of consciousness. Far from the poetic dimension of the moral life being responsible for nihilism and aestheticism as some critics have argued, its recognition saves the moral life from becoming a pursuit of arbitrary preferences.
1. Franco's, PaulThe Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar remains the most extensive treatment of Oakeshott's political philosophy, yet his aesthetics are not mentioned once in this work. Shortly after the appearance of Franco's work Robert Grant published a shorter volume entitled Oakeshott (London: Claridge Press, 1990)Google Scholar which acknowledges the importance of Oakeshott's aesthetics in his moral philosophy without drawing any specific conclusions concerning the relation between art and morality. Grant's work remains the best treatment of Oakeshott's philosophy of art to date, but his account is limited by the shortness of the work. Anthony Farr has also published a booklength account of Oakeshott's political philosophy entitled Sartre's Radicalism and Oakeshott's Conservatism: The Duplicity of Freedom (London: Macmillan, 1998)Google Scholar, however, like Franco's work it contains no treatment of aesthetics. For a more detailed consideration of extant literature on Oakeshott's aesthetics see section 4 of this essay.
2. Oakeshott, M., The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1959)Google Scholar. “The Voice of Poetry” was republished in Rationalism in Politics and other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962)Google Scholar and again in the new and expanded edition edited by Timothy Fuller, (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991). All references are to the latest publication.
3. See Oakeshott, , Rationalism in Politics, p. 509Google Scholar. “By ‘poetry’ I mean the making of images of a certain kind and moving about among them in a manner appropriate to their character. Painting, sculpting, acting, dancing, singing, literary and musical composition are different kinds of poetic activity.”
4. In the “The Voice of Poetry,” Oakeshott refers to the world of conduct as the world of practice or the world conceived sub specie voluntatis. His employment of the appellation “practice” to describe the world of conduct is consistent with chapter five of Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar (First published 1933.) in which he considers the characteristics of practical experience. I have preferred to use the term conduct, which Oakeshott exchanged for practice in On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)Google Scholar to avoid a confusion which Oakeshott himself sought to avoid. See “On Misunderstanding Human Conduct,” Political Theory 4 (1976): 364Google Scholar where Oakeshott states that in On Human Conduct “I have become more strict with the word practice.” In On Human Conduct “practices” qualify all forms of experience thus we have scientific, historical (theoretical) practices as well as moral and other “practical” practices. Thus “practice” does not denote a distinct type or world of experience (distinct from theoretical worlds of experience) as it did in Experience and Its Modes and “The Voice of Poetry.” Oakeshott's changing employment of the term “practice” dates from the period in which the essays that were published in Rationalism in Politics were composed. It can be detected in his distinction between “practical” and “technical” knowledge in “Rationalism in Politics,” first published in Cambridge Review 1 (1947)Google Scholar and becomes explicit in the publication of “On the Activity of Being an Historian” in Historical Studies I edited by Williams, T. D. in 1958Google Scholar.I have chosen to follow Oakeshott's later employment of the term conduct over the term practice to denote the world conceived sub specie voluntatis in order to make clear that, for Oakeshott, poetry and conduct are not distinct from theory as the common opposition of praxis and theoria, but (at least in “The Voice of Poetry”) poetry and conduct are distinct praxes or worlds of experience. I am grateful to an anonymous reveiwer for the invitation to clarify this point.
5 Collingwood, R. G., Speculum Mentis: or the Map of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924)Google Scholar. David Boucher has argued that Oakeshott and Collingwood are in significant disagreement concerning the character of the relation of each form of experience to the others, but this is to one side of the present consideration. I am focusing on the common characteristics that each thinker ascribes to the orders of experience and not the relation of these orders one to another. See Boucher, D., “Overlap and Autonomy: The Different Worlds of Collingwood and Oakeshott,” Storia antropologia e scienza del linguaggio 4 (1989)Google Scholar.
6 Oakeshott, , Rationalism in Politics, p. 504Google Scholar.
7 See for instance, Experience and Its Modes, p. 292Google Scholar. Religion is “practical life in its most concrete mood.” and Collingwood, R. G, The New Leviathan or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism, rev. ed. Boucher, D. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pt. 1, chap. 8Google Scholar.
8 Collingwood, , Speculum Mentis, pp. 126–28Google Scholar.
9 Collingwood proceeds to argue that this is why religious wars have been among the most vicious of conflicts. He presents persecution as an integral component of religious experience because of the inseparability of symbol and meaning. Religious factions do not generally respect the religiosity of other factions but view these other rituals and symbols of devotion as blasphemous. See ibid.pp. 116–17.
10 Oakeshott, , Rationalism in Politics, p. 503Google Scholar.
11 Collingwood, , Speculum Mentis, p. 157.Google Scholar
12 Oakeshott, , Rationalism in Politics, p. 508.Google Scholar
13 Ibid., p. 527, cf. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, chap. 4, sect. 4.
14 See Oakeshott, , Rationalism in Politics, p. 526Google Scholar, “quite clearly, [Keats' Ode to Melancholy] could have been composed by a man of sanguine temperament who never himself felt the touch of melancholy; clearly, also, it is not designed to excite melancholy in the reader (or, if that were its design, it fails signally); and it cannot be said to tell us what melancholy really is.”
15 For example, the quite detailed description of the feast set by Eve for Raphael is an affirmation of Milton's belief that angels are corporeal beings. See Milton, J., Paradise Lost, in Poetical Works, ed. Bush, D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), bk. 5, lines 397–467, pp. 308–309Google Scholar.
16 Ibid., bk. 1, line 56, p. 213 and bk. 5, lines 285–88, p. 305.
17 Oakeshott, , Rationalism in Politics, p. 528, also p. 525Google Scholar, “The changes poets are apt to make in their work are not strictly speaking, ‘correction’—that is to say, attempts to improve the ‘expression’ of an already clear mental image; they are attempts to imagine more clearly and to delight more deeply.”
18 Oakeshott, , Rationalism in Politics, p. 535Google Scholar. Steven Gerenser provides an excellent discussion of Oakeshott's account of conversation and illustrates the form that such a conversation might take between philosophy and politics (an idiom of conduct). See Gerencser, S. A., The Skeptic's Oakeshott (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), pp. 37–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 Ibid., p. 537.
20 See ibid., p. 537, “the world sub specie amoris is unmistakably the world of practical activity; there is desire and frustration, there is moral achievement and failure, there is pleasure and pain, and death (of one kind or another) is both a possibility and is recognized as the summum malum.”
21 Oakeshott, , Rationalism in Politics, p. xGoogle Scholar.
22 Grant, , Oakeshott, p. 104Google Scholar.
23 Oakeshott, M., “Shylock the Jew: An Essay in Villainy” The Caian 30 (Michaelmas, 1921)Google Scholar.
24 Ibid., p. 63.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., p. 64.
27 Ibid., p. 34.
28 Oakeshott, , Experience and Its Modes, p. 296Google Scholar.
29 Ibid., p. 297.
30 Oakeshott, , Experience and Its Modes, p. 297.Google Scholar
31 Ibid., chap. 5.
32 Oakeshott, , Cambridge Review 59 (1937–8): 487Google Scholar.
33 Oakeshott, M., “The Claims of Politics,” Scrutiny 8 (1939–1940)Google Scholar. Republished in Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, ed. Fuller, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. All references are to the later publication.
34 Ibid., p. 95.
35 Greenleaf, W. H., Oakeshott's Philosophical Politics (London: Longmans, 1966), p. 30Google Scholar.
36 I am grateful to Luke O'Sullivan for making this essay available to me well before its electronic publication. The essay can be accessed at http://www.firstthings,com/ftissues/ft9506/articles/oake.html. A case could be made for “Work and Play” having been composed in the late 1950s as it reflects the philosophical mode of writing that Oakeshott adopts in “The Voice of Poetry.” However, in terms of the development of Oakeshott's aesthetics “Work and Play” belongs with his review of Collingwood's Principles and “The Claims of Politics” because art is not explicitly distinguished from other theoretical worlds of experience—art, like theory is not an idiom of conduct. As we will see shortly Oakeshott explicitly distinguishes poetry from other theoretical modes in “Leviathan: A Myth” published in 1948Google Scholar. Thus, I would date the composition of “Work and Play” as occurring sometime in the decade after 1938 before the publication of “Leviathan: A Myth.”
37 Oakeshott, M., “Work and Play” (Unpublished and undated), p.13Google Scholar.
38 Ibid., p. 13.
39 Ibid., p. 14.
40 Oakeshott, M., Listener 37 (1947)Google Scholar. Republished as “Leviathan: A Myth,” in Hobbes on Civil Association (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975)Google Scholar. All references are to the later publication.
41. Editor's introduction to Hobbes, T., Leviathan, ed. Oakeshott, M. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946).Google ScholarRepublished in Hobbes on Civil Association and the Fuller edition of Rationalism in Politics. All references are to the latest publication.
42. Oakeshott, , Rationalism in Politics, p. 223.Google Scholar
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., pp. 225–28.
45. Oakeshott, , Hobbes on Civil Association, p. 150.Google Scholar
46. Ibid.
47. The debate between Skinner and Warrender shows what this sort of (theoretical) engagement entails. See, for example, Skinner, Q., “The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought,” The Historical Journal 9 (1969)Google Scholar“Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy” in The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement 1646–1660, ed. Aylmer, G. E. (London: Macmillan, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar“Warrender and Skinner on Hobbes: a reply,” Political Studies 36 (1979)Google Scholar and Warrender, H., The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957)Google Scholar and “Political Theory and Historiography: A Reply to Professor Skinner,” The Historical Journal 22 (1979).Google Scholar
48. Oakeshott, , Hobbes on Civil Association, p. 150.Google Scholar
49. Ibid., pp. 150–51.
50. Ibid., p. 151.
51. Ibid.
52. The presentation of philosophy as an iconoclasm may recall Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols: Or How One Philosophizes with a Hammer, such a reading would, however, miss the subtlety in Nietzsche's title. As Kaufmann points out in his “Editor's Preface,”Nietzsche had originally entitled the work A Psychologist's Idleness and changed the title as “an afterthought.”See The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Kaufmann, W. (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1984), pp. 463–64.Google Scholar Kaufmann points out that “It is usually assumed that [Nietzsche] means a sledge hammer. The preface, however, from which the title is derived…explains: ‘idols are here touched as with a tuning fork.’” When read in context the poetry in Nietzsche's image is unmistakable: “The essay …is above all a recreation, a spot of sunshine, a leap sideways into the idleness of a psychologist”(p. 466).
53. See Oakeshott, , Rationalism in Politics, pp. 516, n. 14 and 520.Google Scholar
54. Oakeshott, , Hobbes on Civil Association, pp. 150–51.Google Scholar
55. Grant, , Oakeshott, p. 109.Google Scholar
56. Oakeshott, , On Human Conduct, p. 35.Google Scholar
57. Ibid. p. 36.
58. Ibid. p. 35.
59. Ibid., p. 84.
60. See ibid., pp. 81–86.
61. See Grant, , Oakeshott, pp. 106–107.Google Scholar
62. In contrast to Greenleaf, Grant argues that in “The Claims of Politics” “Oakeshott wrote in a similar vein”to Experience and Its Modes (Grant, Oakeshott, p. 104).Google Scholar
63. See Nietzsche, F., Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 139,Google Scholar Nietzsche describes his “third metamorphosis” in the following terms: “Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes’. For the game of creation…a sacred ‘Yes’ is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.”
64. Blumler, J. G., “Politics, Poetry and Practice,” Political Studies 12 (1964): 355.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
65. Ibid., p. 361.
66. See, Crick, B., “The World of Michael Oakeshott or the Lonely Nihilist,” Encounter 20 (06 1963),Google Scholar also his In Defence of Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1968), chap. 6, sect. 1,Google Scholar “A Defence of Politics Against its Friends: The Non-political Conservative”; Falck, C., “Romanticism in Politics,” New Left Review 18 ((January-February 1963);Google ScholarRaphael, D. D., “Professor Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics,”Political Studies 12 (1964);CrossRefGoogle ScholarAnderson, P., “The Intransigent Right at the End of the Century, ”London Review of Books 24 09 1992;Google ScholarRorty, R., Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979);Google ScholarGray, J., Post-liberalism: Studies in Political Thought (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1993).Google Scholar
67. O'Sullivan, N. K., The Problem of Political Obligation in the Writings of T. H. Green, B. Bosanquet and M.Oakeshott (New York: Garland Press, 1987), p. 261.Google Scholar
68 Ibid., p. 262.
69. Oakeshott sets out in explicit terms the character of religious experience as the completion of the moral life as opposed to a sanction in “Religion and the Moral Life,”(Cambridge: The “D”Society Pamphlets, 2 [1927]).Google Scholar Republished in Religion, Politics and the Moral Life. As I have already observed, there are strong parallels between religion and art in Oakeshott's essays of the 1920s.
70. Oakeshott, , On Human Conduct, pp. 70–78.Google Scholar
71. Oakeshott, M., “The Tower of Babel, ”Cambridge Journal 2 (1948).Google Scholar Republished in Rationalism in Politics. All references to the latest edition, see, p. 479.
72. Oakeshott, , Rationalism in Politics, pp. 472–77.Google Scholar
73. Ibid., p. 474. A morality conceived in terms of the reflective application of ideals displays many characteristics of what in a later essay Oakeshott described as “a theory to praxis.” See “On Misunderstanding Human Conduct: A Reply to My Critics,” Political Theory 4 (1976): 354–55.Google Scholar
74. Oakeshott, , Rationalism in Politics, pp. 467–72.Google Scholar
75. Here and in what follows I use “practical”in the later sense that Oakeshott employed in On Human Conduct. See note 4.
76. See, for example Oakeshott's distinction between practical and technical types of knowledge in “Rationalism in Politics,”sect. 2.
77. Oakeshott, , Rationalism in Politics, p. 479.Google Scholar
78. Oakeshott observes that “a society is a common way of life; and not only is it true that a society may perish of a disease which is not necessarily fatal even to those of its members who suffer from it, but it is also true that what is corrupting in the society may not be corrupting in its members”(ibid. p. 480).
80. See Collingwood, The Principles of Art, bk. 1, chap. 5. One result of mistaking art proper for amusement is the reduction of the criteria that determine good art from bad to the expression of taste, that is, mere subjective preference. “In the end, it is simply snobbery”(pp. 87–88).
81. Rationalism in Politics, p. 482.Google Scholar
82. Oakeshott, M, Review of Janko Lavrin, Nietzsche: An Approach, in Cambridge Journal 1 (1947–1948): 450.Google Scholar
83. Collingwood, , Principles of Art, p. 336.Google Scholar
