Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics

Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics. Elizabeth Campbell Corey. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2006.

What is so fascinating about the philosophical writings of the English philosopher, Michael Oakeshott, is his “continual protest” against modernity’s perception of man as amendable to a mechanical rather than a moral interpretation, the consequent negation of man as an “agent of truth,” and its definition of the modern, therapeutic, managerial state (Leviathan) as the ultimate sovereign. Oakeshott directly challenged the doctrines of modernity even critiquing the efficacy of its central tenet, “progress.” In his criticism one detects a religious component, a component that accedes to the idea of man as a material and spiritual creature capable of knowing the transcendent God, while acknowledging both the pre-political societies of family, church, and community and the yearning for a political society that is “established by a determination of the noble, the good, and the just, which is expressed and then desired in reason.”

His numerous books and essays published over seven decades of work, his corpus, reflect an answer to the question Oakeshott posited as a youth (1924), “what it is to be a human being,” which is inherently a “moral” query that launched his philosophical quest. Oakeshott wrote frequently on religion in the 1920’s and in his first major publication, Experience and Its Modes (1933), but it would be forty-two years before he would again directly broach the subject, commenting somewhat enigmatically upon “the difficulty of saying anything of value on the most important questions.”

Little has been written about Oakeshott’s religious perspective until recently when several academics examined his “religious character” and his interest in “salvation.” We must now add to that list a new book, Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics by Ms. Elizabeth Campbell Corey, a lecturer in the Great Texts Department and Interdisciplinary Core Program at Baylor University. Ms. Corey argues that Oakeshott’s religious “sensibilities” are both explicit and implicit; explicit in certain essays found in Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life, and in two of his major works, Experience and Its Modes and On HumanConduct; and implicit in his general approach to “enjoy rather than exploit the created world,” his call to spend at least some time in the present and to avoid constantly agitating ones self over the future, and in his warnings about the dangers of “excessive human pride.”

To her credit, the author does not proclaim some new philosophic revelation, rather she acknowledges the work of established authorities, such as the British publishing house, Imprint Academic, as well as those that have “influenced (her) views about the breadth and depth of Oakeshott’s thought . . . .” Emulating the late philosopher, the author has chosen to follow his sage advice and not allow pride to interfere with her intellectual inquiries. Ms. Corey’s efforts incorporate Oakeshott’s corpus, including his recently published notes. She is a splendid thinker and a facile writer whose exertions indicate a concern for those lay readers who share an interest in Oakeshott’s writings. Yet, in rendering the work suitable for the non-academic she does not avoid the complicated and complex ideas that make Oakeshott, at times, a most delightful mystery.

In her chapter “Oakeshott and Augustine on Human Conduct” Elizabeth posits the startling proposition that “. . . Augustine was an ancient, “religious” thinker whose ideas are at a distant remove from our contemporary political situation.” Fortunately, she follows with the comment, “But this would be a naïve reading of both thinkers, for in crucial respects they are remarkably similar,” indicating a decided intellectual maturity in recognizing the wisdom of Mgsr. Robert Sokolowski’s truism in his essay, “The Human Person and Political Life,” “We must avoid thinking that we can only understand philosophers as the products of their historical circumstances, the products of their epoch. We must recover the idea that philosophy is a perennial thing, that there are philosophical truths that persist throughout all the periods and ages, and that there is a truth about human nature and about political life that has been there all along.”

The author’s examination of the similarities in the thinking of Oakeshott and Augustine adduces her thesis. She argues that the key to understanding Oakeshott’s philosophy is to grasp the significance of his search for “other worldliness.” Oakeshott defined the “practical” life as one of the modes of human experience (along with history, science, and later he added poetry). It is a life of action, always doing something, and always looking to the future. It is the mode we exist in when engaged in business, family, and moral activity, it is “the world of cause and effect.” And, while this modal experience occurs now, in the present, “. . . it always looks to a future.”

The author provides a quote from Pascal to allow us to better understand Oakeshott’s criticism of the “practical” mode by examining what happens when man comes to rest. Nothing, Pascal wrote, “is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversions.” Ms. Corey further explains, “Man then feels his “nothingness,” his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness.” And, we should understand that the “man” the author has in mind is contemporary man, material man, he who lives to acquire or to seek his own gratification and pleasure, the Benthamite. The practical mode demands a constant, never ending effort to modify the future. It is a Sysiphean task that leaves us dissatisfied, always pushing reality “into the future, into something new and to be made.” Perhaps, Oakeshott’s most brilliant “insight” was that “the practical world can never be wholly transformed,” that human existence is “transitory,” fleeting, a moment in eternity where man is imprisoned within the “practical.”

Oakeshott’s antithesis to the practical is described by Ms. Corey as “presentness,” It is essentially a “religious” exercise, living in the moment where Oakeshott writes; “The goal of life is not, for us, distant, it is always here and now in the achievement of a personal sensibility.” Presentness, then, is the choice to focus on an understanding of “self” (not to be confused with self-centered) to exclude the world, in “finding meaning in the actual conscious living of one’s own life.” Oakeshott rejects modernity’s view that human life should mirror the workings of a machine where “all actions and inputs (are) calculated to result in certain future outputs.” He expands his criticism in stating that the goal of the practical life is achievement and described the concept of “achievement” as “diabolical” (a wonderfully accurate word) in that it reduces “human experience to investment and explicitly denies the value of (presentness).”

Oakeshott’s dichotomy between the practical and presentness, as Ms. Corey tells us, is the most significant “insight” in Oakeshottian philosophy because it is within this context that he developed his realization of religious consciousness and allows the possibility of “losing ourselves in God,” It gives man the choice to reject modernity and accept the opportunity to “cultivate a personal sensibility” that may (or may not) place him in a proper relationship with God. It is that moment in time and being, that German theologian, Robert Spaemman, defines as the “heart,” and Mgsr.  Robert Sokolowski describes as the “impulse for or against truth, the inclination that makes a person to be what he is.” This moment of the “heart” and Oakeshott’s “sensibilities,” while they are not the same experience, manage to provide a nexus between reason and revelation, it is the “movement towards truth,” and ultimately can lift man out of the miasma of modernity and allow him to become an “agent of truth.”

I have dwelt at some length on Elizabeth’s discourse on Oakeshott’s idea of human “sensibilities,” on her definition of “presentness,” because these themes clearly indicate the philosophers’ preference for a morality that lies “within established practices,” rather than the morality of “rule following” or “the pursuit of ideals,” what C. S. Lewis referred to as “wearisomely explicit pietism.” In order for man to engage in this higher morality that spontaneously, through habit, inclination, and experience consistently chooses the right over the wrong, truth over lies, he must first have the will, moral imagination, and reason to understand that the attainment of such a condition is in effect a spiritual surrender to the will of God, an acceptance and desire to know God’s revealed Word (Logos), and a recognition of the insignificance of man before a transcendent and omniscient God.

Elizabeth Corey has a special ability to stimulate the reader’s mind. Her thoughtful disquisitions on Oakeshott’s brilliantly rendered essay, The Tower of Babel, and her chapters dealing with Oakeshott’s critique of Rationalism, Faith and Skepticism, Civil Associations are erudite, well-crafted, and reveal a decided acuity. However, her penultimate chapter, Rationalism andGnosticism: Oakeshott and Voegelin is so well presented that it, alone, is worth the price of the book. In this chapter Ms. Corey illustrates the striking similarities between Rationalism and Gnosticism. Both conjure a vision of man as an agent able to “change and control (his) circumstances and largely discounting the mystery of existence.” The perceived need for this worldview is predicated on the inherent anxiety in man when he realizes that “All human accomplishment is an unfinished search within a horizon of divine mystery.”

Modern Rationalists and Gnostics address the disorder and tensions of modernity by rejecting the transcendent order of the universe in favor of “arranging all of experience into logical, “rational” categories.” It is their intense dissatisfaction with the world that manifests the desire to correct its perceived disorder and imperfections, while providing the added benefit of engaging in a perverse, diabolical, self-salvation. It is the displacement of the Christian God, and the elevation of man as the final arbiter of the world. In the hands of the Rationalists and Gnostics technology and technique have had a profound effect on the power of modernity and its domination of the mind of man and the erosion of his spirit. They are the high sacraments of the moderns that allow the activity of consumption, production, and progress to inhibit contemplation, prayer, love (of God and man), and friendship. It is Oakeshott’s practical mode consuming Ms. Corey’s presentness; it is the victory of economic man over moral man.

I have but one criticism of Ms. Corey’s delightful book, and that lies within her discussion of Voegelin’s agreement with Aristotle that “ethics starts from the purposes of action and explores the order of human life in terms of the ordination of all actions toward a highest purpose, the summum bonum.” Oakeshott and Hobbes, Elizabeth points out, did not share Voegelin’s insistence that when the summum bonum was removed the community declines into disorder. Voegelin argued that man requires a “community of spirit” in which to exist, a “common good” or basis for a moral tradition, experienced and understood by all. Elizabeth agrees with Hobbes and Oakeshott that there is no requirement for an “end” of society, but that it is sufficient that we agree on the rules or laws that govern us “so that individuals might be free to pursue their self-chosen purposes.”

The fly in the proverbial ointment lies within the nature of contemporary law and as Bard College professor, Roger Berkowitz, has brilliantly illustrated in his seminal study, The Gift ofScience (Harvard Press, 2005), “Beyond the waxing and waning of the felt actuality of justice that persists through history, modern society is witnessing the silent, unacknowledged extinction of justice. . . . Within the rarefied world of the academy, the increasingly normalized divorce of law from justice is given the name positive law.” Therefore law, as have many of the pursuits of modern man, has become little more than what Leviathan’s nomeclatura say it is. Modern law is not “a moral agreement in which the actors acknowledge that they will abide by the “rules of the game,”’ rather, it is the abandonment of a most important agent of summum bonum, natural law, and the rise of “a purely formal and technical legal apparatus that is distinguished by its serviceability to any and all ends.”

Elizabeth’s delightful disquisition on Oakeshott’s thought inclines me to believe that although he was nonsectarian in his faith — however he choose to live it — he understood the domination of evil in the world, and perhaps the personification of evil. His use of the word “diabolical,” is most intriguing. Nevertheless, as Elizabeth points out, “. . .Oakeshott was a philosopher through and through, someone concerned with wondering, marveling, and delighting in the world around him.” And included among his many inquiries was an intense interest in the “life of the spirit.” “I do not know,” Elizabeth writes almost wistfully, “whether Oakeshott retained some kind of faith even as he moved away from his early orthodox views.” Whether Michael Oakeshott knew God is a question that may never be answered, but without a doubt God knew him.

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