On Being a Conservative Philosopher: Tensions in the Work of Michael Oakeshott
Michael Oakeshott has often been considered to be a conservative philosopher. This essay will explore what that might mean and highlight some of the tensions between conservatism and philosophy in Oakeshott’s writings.*
October 3, 2024
Introduction
The phrase ‘conservative philosopher’ is ambiguous. A 'conservative philosopher' might be one with political views associated with the US Republican or UK Tory party, or more generally with what is sometimes called the 'right wing'. But I will not be concerned here to explore Oakeshott's political affiliations, or the influence he may or may not have had on British or other politics.
Alternatively, a 'conservative philosopher' might be one who continues to propound an approach that was more prevalent in an earlier age. And in that sense, Oakeshott might be regarded as conservative. The philosophical Idealism that informs Experience and its Modes was part of a tradition that had already become seriously unfashionable when Oakeshott started his career. It is a matter of some scholarly dispute whether, and to what extent, that Idealism persisted in Oakeshott's later writings. But except incidentally, I will not be considering the relation between Oakeshott’s earlier and later work. Nor will I be addressing either the relation of his work to its academic predecessors, or Oakeshott's influence in sustaining a particular philosophical tradition.
The question being addressed here is neither political nor historical; it is, rather, philosophical. It is whether being conservative in the Oakeshottian sense is compatible with being a philosopher. This is itself a philosophical question, which relates to the natures (or as Oakeshott might say, the postulates or presuppositions) of those different activities. Investigating it requires examining what is meant by being conservative in the Oakeshottian sense, and what is involved in being a philosopher.
Conservatism Characterised
Oakeshott helpfully tells us what he means by being conservative, explaining it in the essay 'On being Conservative' ('OBC'). Originally a lecture given at the University of Swansea in 1956, it was subsequently published in 1962 as part of the collection Rationalism in Politics (RIP). In it, Oakeshott characterises conservatism as a disposition.
To be conservative... is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one's fortune, to live at the level of one's own means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one's circumstances. (OBC, p.169)
Oakeshott's theme in 'On Being Conservative' is that the conservative disposition is eminently appropriate in respect of politics. It is utterly unlike the disposition that, in his view, actually characterizes modern politics: rationalism. The rationalist disposition stands instead
...for independence of mind on all occasions, for thought free from obligation to any authority save the authority of ‘reason’... [the Rationalist’s] mental attitude is at once sceptical and optimistic... he... never doubts the power of his ‘reason’... to determine the proper worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action... He has no... power of accepting the mysteries and uncertainties of experience without any irritable search for order.... (RIP, pp.1-2)
Categorial Incompatibility
If conservatism were a disposition that occurred only in practical experience, it would, for Oakeshott, be incompatible with philosophy by that very fact. According to Oakeshott:
... philosophy... depends for its existence upon maintaining its independence from all extraneous interests, and in particular from the practical interest. (EM, p.3)
Philosophy so conceived is incompatible with practical experience, and indeed with all other modes of experience. As an unconditional, concrete experience, philosophy is superior to all the other modes.
The supremacy of philosophy expressed 1933 in Experience and its Modes did not persist in Oakeshott's later writings. As early as 1959, in the essay 'The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind' (‘VPCM’), philosophy became merely one voice amongst many, with no hierarchical superiority to the other voices. But notwithstanding this substantial change, the voices in the conversation of mankind (as the modes of experience have now come to be called) remain entirely incompatible with each other: ‘...the images of one universe of discourse are not available (even as raw materials) to a different mode of imagining.’ (VPCM, p.222) Oakeshott gives a telling example:
...the word 'water' stands for a practical image; but a scientist does not first perceive 'water' and then resolve it into H20; scientia begins only when 'water' has been left behind. (VPCM, p.222)
The fundamental incompatibility of the different modes of experience does persist throughout Oakeshott's writing. In On Human Conduct, the 'voices' have become 'modes' again, or 'platforms of understanding'; the latter locutions are also used in On History, the last major work to be published during Oakeshott's lifetime. Whatever they are called, however, they remain categorially distinct. As Oakeshott reaffirms in On History,
A mode of understanding, then, is not merely an attitude or a point of view. It is an autonomous manner of understanding, specifiable in terms of exact conditions, which is logically incapable of denying or confirming the conclusions of any other mode of understanding, or indeed of making any relevant utterance in it.' (OH, p.2)
If, therefore, conservatism related only to practical experience, it could not relate to the other, categorially different voices, and a fortiori, could not relate to philosophy.
It would, however, be hasty to conclude on this basis alone that conservatism and philosophy are incompatible. In 'On Being Conservative', Oakeshott's analysis of conservatism occurs in the context of practical experience; conservatism's fundamental relation to the categories of preference and benefit, profit and value reinforces that connection. But even in that essay, conservatism is also associated with a tendency to 'delight', a category later linked with the distinctly impractical voice of poetry. Moreover, the presuppositions of a 'conversation amongst the voices' might be such as to sustain conservatism across them. For the notion of a conversation amongst the voices of mankind to be meaningful, even as a metaphor, there must be something common to them all, at least tangentially. Even more fundamentally, some common ground must exist for the notion of ‘mankind’ to be coherent. [1]
Oakeshott obliquely acknowledges the need for some common ground, chiefly in his various discussions of how practical experience relates to the other modes. In On History, for example, he states:
In every determinate mode of understanding we go again to the confusion equipped with a set of modal considerations and unconcerned with what previously and in terms of other conditions we may have found there. (PFP, OH, p.24; emphasis added)
The 'confusion' may be -- indeed clearly was -- of no interest to Oakeshott, but its mind-independent reality is conceptually necessary for the rest of his analysis to be coherent.
Also necessary is some more robust (probably naturalistic) understanding of who or what the 'we' are who 'go again to the confusion'. Despite contending that the self and object are strict counterparts, Oakeshott concedes that one mode of imagining can 'give place'[2] to another. For that to be possible, however, the 'place' in which the imagining occurs -- or, less literally, that which is doing the imagining -- must exhibit at least a minimal continuity; some element of 'self' must persist between the various changes in order to connect them.
An enduring self is also required for a disposition to be operative... or even meaningful. Dispositions are not free-floating, but are the dispositions of something, and denote capacities or tendencies which themselves typically emerge only intermittently and over time. So the disposition to be 'conservative' — acquired by a persistent self in respect of practical life — might function when the self, or some aspect of it, is in other modes.
It is perhaps significant that, near the end of 'On Being Conservative', Oakeshott states: ‘...it is not at all inconsistent to be conservative in respect of government and radical in respect of almost every other activity.’ (OBC, p.195) And it is not obvious that the other activities must be practical ones. Indeed, insofar as the concepts of 'conservative' and 'radical' are counterposed, they might be supposed to have equal, or at least similar, ranges of application. It is not implausible, even in Oakeshottian terms, to imagine philosophy as a 'radical' activity, or as one that might be conducted 'radically'. To the extent that 'radical' might apply to more than just practical life, so therefore might 'conservative'... even if not altogether appropriately. Accordingly, for the sake of analysis, it is worth at least considering that conservatism might apply to theoretical as well as practical pursuits. Only then can the relationship between conservatism and philosophy be addressed fully.
Philosophy Is Ostensibly 'Conservative'
The first step in doing so is to examine more closely what Oakeshott meant by philosophy. Whereas Oakeshott wrote several essays explicitly exploring the activity of being an historian[3], his views on philosophy are both more diffuse and less constant. Much of Experience and its Modes is devoted to the subject of philosophy, insofar as in that work, philosophy is contrasted with all the other modes of experience. In On Human Conduct, however, though it is the most explicitly philosophical of Oakeshott's later works, philosophy does not even rate a mention in the index. In On Human Conduct, what is elsewhere referred to as 'philosophy' is (after the Preface [4]) usually described as an 'unconditional engagement of understanding' or as 'theorizing'. And it consists there of understanding phenomena -- sciences as well as processes, performances and practices -- in terms of their postulates.
Although Oakeshott undeniably changed some of his fundamental views concerning philosophy between Experience and its Modes and On History, certain key themes persist. And several of them suggest ways in which philosophy might be considered to be conservative.
First, for Oakeshott, as for Aristotle, there is a sense in which philosophy always begins, indeed must begin, with something that is already, albeit inadequately, understood. Philosophy is the process ‘...of coming to know more fully and clearly what is in some sense already known.’ (CPJ, p.97). In the language of On Human Conduct, it is
...attending to a 'going-on' understood in terms of an ideal character specified as a composition of characteristics, but engaged to understand it in terms of its postulates. (OHC, p.9)
Although philosophy is a distinct form of knowing, it is conservative in taking its subject matter from that which is familiar. Logically, if the philosophical investigation is to count as an elucidation of that initial subject matter, the outcome of the investigation must be related to the original subject matter at least sufficiently to permit such identification.
And this is a second reason why philosophy might be considered conservative: there are intrinsic limits to philosophical questioning. Again following Aristotle, Oakeshott recognises that it is logically impossible for everything to be questioned at once:
An ideal character (e.g., a 'science') cannot be both used and interrogated at the same time... [The] self-consciously conditional theorist ... understands that nothing will come of questioning everything at the same time. Indeed, he recognizes this to be the condition of any specific achievement in understanding. (OHC, p.25)
Moreover,
...the unconditional engagement of understanding must be arrested and inquiry must remain focused upon a this if any identity is to become intelligible in terms of its postulates. An investigation which denies or questions its own conditions surrenders its opportunity of achieving its own conditional perfection; the theorist who interrogates instead of using his theoretic equipment catches no fish. (OHC, p.11; emphasis in original)
Explaining away is not the same as explaining. Like Aristotle, Oakeshott recognises that 'saving the appearances' is more than just a conservative ambition. It is a logical and methodological necessity.
Finally, for Oakeshott (unlike Aristotle), philosophy is conservative in that as a purely theoretical discipline, it cannot directly affect or reform practice: ‘...philosophy is without any bearing upon the practical conduct of life.’ (EM, p.1) The same categorial distinctness that separates modes of experience or understanding from each other, and that might prevent conservatism from affecting philosophy, necessarily prevents philosophy from modifying practice. Philosophy cannot justify existing practice; nor can it promote or justify any changes to existing practice: this is made explicit in Oakeshott's retelling of the Myth of the Cave.
Philosophy Is Actually Radical
Despite these ways in which philosophy might be considered conservative, there is a more fundamental sense in which philosophy is by its nature radical. Subject only to the limits of logic, philosophy properly goes wherever its arguments may lead. As Oakeshott states in Experience and Its Modes, philosophy
...means experience without reservation or presupposition, experience which is self-conscious and self-critical throughout, in which the determination to remain unsatisfied with anything short of a completely coherent world of ideas is absolute and unqualified. (EM, p.82)
Although the notion of a 'completely coherent world of ideas' disappeared from Oakeshott's later writings, the notion of philosophy as relentlessly self-critical persisted throughout. His description in On Human Conduct is unequivocal:
What distinguishes a theorist is his undistracted concern with the unconditional, critical engagement of understanding in which every understanding (be it 'fact' or 'theorem') is recognized as a not-yet-understood and therefore as an invitation to understand. (OHC, p.2)
It is not true that for a philosopher -- as opposed to a conservative -- 'to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy...'. (OBC, p.169)
The task of philosophy is to go beyond initial presentations, and to understand phenomena in a radically different way: in terms of their postulates.
...a 'theorist'... engaged to understand [a 'going-on'] in terms of its postulates, may be said, alternatively, to be seeking to understand a familiar identity in terms different from those in which it is already understood, or to have replaced one subject of inquiry by another. (OHC, p.9)
In contrast to the account given in Experience and its Modes, this engagement of theorizing
...is not unconditional on account of the absence of conditions, or in virtue of a supposed terminus in an unconditional theorem; what constitutes its unconditionality is the continuous recognition of the conditionality of conditions. (OHC, p.11)
And the latter sort of unconditionality is crucial. It alone is what distinguishes philosophy from the other forms of theorizing in On Human Conduct. Whereas all 'sciences' involve understanding phenomena in terms of their postulates, philosophy characteristically exhibits a continuing commitment to identifying, challenging and criticising those postulates. As Oakeshott acknowledges, 'A received philosophy is one already dead' (EM, p.6). Philosophy cannot be bound by authority; it profoundly rejects the conservative preference for '...the familiar to the unknown,... the tried to the untried... the convenient to the perfect' (OBC, p.169). Rather, the 'calling of a philosopher' is
...an unconditional adventure in which every achievement of understanding is an invitation to investigate itself and where the reports a theorist makes to himself are interim triumphs of temerity over scruple. (OHC, p.11)
As Oakeshott declared in Experience and its Modes, '...there is less place for what is second-class in the field of philosophy than in any other field of intellectual interest.' (EM, p.7) Unlike the conservative, the philosopher cannot be 'content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one's circumstances' (OBC, p.169). The essential task of philosophy is to bring greater clarity and understanding to things that are only dimly comprehended, in part through argumentatively challenging received wisdom.
Oakeshott's Personal Conservatism vs Oakeshott's Philosophy
The essential tension between philosophy and conservatism is evident in Oakeshott's own work. The problem is Oakeshott's apparent (and perhaps conservative) adherence to the idealist metaphysics of Experience and its Modes. It is not required for his distinctive philosophy of history. And his important distinction between ‘enterprise association’ and ‘civil association’ can be (better) understood without it. Nevertheless idealism does inform On Human Conduct, at least insofar as it may explain what in it Oakeshott takes for granted. He never explicitly repudiated Idealist metaphysics. To the extent that he did not, his standing as a philosopher has suffered. Known by academic philosophers mainly for his early work, and identified as an Idealist, Oakeshott has too often been ignored or dismissed by them.
And that is because Idealist metaphysics is fundamentally incoherent. As indicated briefly earlier, a metaphysics that cannot sustain the existence of an objective, common reality cannot make sense of a 'conversation' of voices or modes of understanding. More fundamentally, it cannot explain the ordinary phenomena that philosophy and political theory presuppose. It is hard to understand how a world that is wholly mind-dependent can contain things or persons, far less conduct by them or associations of them, civil or otherwise. Despite Oakeshott's attempts to differentiate his views from those of the 'subjective Idealism' he rejected, his starting points -- the identities of reality and experience, subject and object, thing and idea -- prevented his views from escaping the fatal defects of all Idealism.
Oakeshott's failure to relinquish Idealism is particularly unfortunate, because Idealism was wholly unnecessary for supporting his later philosophical views. There is no need to renounce the natural world to reject either floating sense data as the basis of reality or individuals as atomistic. Nor need the natural world be denied to reject the views that 'practical reality' is either the only or an unconditional reality, or that history does not give access to ‘what really happened’, or that propositional knowledge is the only kind. But unfortunately, in his concern to correct genuine errors, Oakeshott discarded the metaphysical baby along with the analytical bathwater.
It is noteworthy that Oakeshott's arguments in support of the Idealist position were few and typically negative. Instead of arguing specifically for the Idealist position, he contrasted it with various other doctrines; rejecting those doctrines, he asserted his Idealism. But his targets were not the robust notion of objective reality that is necessary for a coherent understanding of the self. Rather, they were the inadequate surrogates for it that were pervasive when Oakeshott was writing: radical empiricism and/or logical positivism. But despite what Oakeshott's arguments seem to suppose, those inadequate doctrines do not exhaust the possibilities. In his writings, Oakeshott never explicitly considered, far less refuted, the claims of an objective, naturalist (Aristotelian) reality. [5]
It is a great shame that he did not, because it is in the context of such a naturalistic world that Oakeshott's substantial contributions to political philosophy and the philosophy of history are most meaningful. Had Oakeshott applied his understanding of philosophy to his own philosophical postulates, and more critically challenged the presuppositions of Idealism, his valuable analyses of human conduct, history and politics would have been more solidly grounded... and perhaps more widely appreciated.
NOTES
1. Supporting that statement would require an excursion into metaphysics far beyond the bounds of this paper... though it will be touched upon briefly later on.
2. "...it is clear that one mode of imagining may give place to and supersede another, and the relationship between those different universes of discourse will be illuminated if we understand how this may come about. Of all the modes of imagining practical activity is unmistakably the commonest among adult human beings and understandably so, for the avoidance of death is the condition of any sort of activity.' VPCM, p.222 [RIP2, p.515].
3. E.g., 'Historical Experience' (EM, pp.86-168), 'The Activity of Being an Historian' (RIP, pp.137-167), and 'Three Essays on History' in OH.
4. 'Philosophical reflection is recognized here as the adventure of one who seeks to understand in other terms what he already understands and in which the understanding sought (itself unavoidably conditional) is a disclosure of the conditions of the understanding enjoyed and not a substitute for it.' OHC, Preface, p.vii.
5. Even in person, he never renounced his idealist metaphysics. As Oakeshott’s last PhD student, and as a colleague in the Government Department of the London School of Economics, I persistently argued the fundamentals with him from 1968 to 1974. Oakeshott steadfastly refused to defend his idealism even in the context of supervising my thesis on (Aristotelian realist) metaphysics and epistemology.
*With small amendments, this is the text of a paper that was written for and presented at the Michael Oakeshott Association Conference, On Being Conservative in the 21st Century, 9 June 2006.
REFERENCES
- CPJ: ‘The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence’ in Oakeshott, The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence: Essays and Reviews 1926–51 (Thorverton: Imprint Academic, 2007)); page reference is to Kindle edition. First published in Politica, 3 (1938), pp,203-22, 346-60.
- EM: Experience and its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933; reprinted 1966)
- OBC: ‘On Being Conservative’; RIP pp.168-196; RIP2 pp.407-37.
- OH: On History and Other Essays (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). The relevant contents are the 'Three Essays on History': I: 'Present, Future and Past'; II: 'Historical Events: The Fortuitous, the Causal, the Similar, the Correlative, the Analogous, and the Contingent'; III: 'Historical Change: Identity and Continuity').
- OHC: On Human Conduct. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
- PFP: 'Present, Future and Past', essay 1 in OH.
- RIP: Rationalism in Politics (London: Methuen, 1962).
- RIP2: Rationalism in Politics and other essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1999).
- VPCM: 'Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind', 1959, in RIP.
