Intelligence, habit and principles
Oakeshott was, I think, what would now be termed an ‘anti-naturalist’, persistently denying the reducibility of ‘mental’ to ‘physical descriptions’ as a Davidsonian might say. In adopting this position, I think he was more of a fundamentalist than even Collingwood — at least, one cannot find in Oakeshott’s work any of the ambiguity one finds in (for example) The Principles of Art’s use of causal language when describing ‘imaginative’ thinking, or The New Leviathan’s emphasis on ‘free will’ always being had by degree rather being something one should either just attribute or not attribute to a person or a thing.
Despite this though, I am unconvinced that the various ways Oakeshott came to characterise the mental in his work are consistent with each other. So, and if I may use the more Oakeshottian-sounding term ‘intellegence’ instead of ‘mental’, one may identify at least four different ways the notion is understood across his career:
- Experience and its Modes — ‘intelligence’ is ‘experience’ (i.e., thought or thinking) that consistency presupposes a ‘categorially distinct’ set of postulates.
- Rationalism in Politics — ‘intelligence’ is not a matter of explicit, universalistic reasoning, but coherence to, and imaginative development of, particularistic custom.
- The post-RP, pre-OHC essays collected in The Voice of Liberal Learning — ‘intelligence’ is about learning. The unintelligent — trees for example — are thus understood as such because they cannot/do not learn.
- On Human Conduct: ‘intelligent’ behaviour is ‘understood’ (meaningful) behaviour, and as such, should be theoretically reconstructed as a matter of agents adhering to procedure rather than of events being constitutive of a causal process.
Now, these charaterisations are surely different, and moreover, may even be thought prima facie incompatible. Thus, it is unclear what RP’s emphasis on ‘tradition’ has to do with EM’s claim that reason requires the presupposition of a set of consistent ‘postulates’ — indeed, the ahistorical way Oakeshott theorises the ‘modes’ (including the mode of ‘historical experience’ itself!) might be thought curiously ‘rationalistic’ by the standards of RP. Similarly, while the VLL essays’ emphasis on learning coheres with RP’s emphasis on (for example) the master-apprentice relation to an extent, the way the latter construes learning as an essentially tacit process falls away — a ‘tradition’, one might say, can no longer do its influencing over the heads of those who it influences. Move forwad to OHC‘ and its central dictum that ‘a belief is what it means to the believer’, and RP’s claim that the rationalistic politician does in fact act within tradition whether he realises it or not has completely fallen by the wayside, quite fundamentally changing Oakeshott’s working conception of ‘intelligence’ in the process, or so I would suggest.
Not for the first time, I think Oakeshott’s underlying problem here was not that he simply got everything wrong, but that he sought to grant his theories imperialistic pretentions that they could not sustain (cf. the moral of this), which in the present case led to a certain ‘flip-flopping’ through his career. More on the particular issue at hand next time…
This is a suggestive post but your argument is a bit of a muddle. If you want to compare his argument in RP with what he previously argued in EM why not also read an intermediate essay such as The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence (1938). I think you’ll then find that the claim that the difference you suppose exists between EM and RP is greatly exaggerated.
I’ll also add that the following characterisation: “Rationalism in Politics — ‘intelligence’ is not a matter of explicit, universalistic reasoning, but coherence to, and imaginative development of, particularistic custom” is mistaken. Can you square this view with O’s ‘Introduction to Leviathan’ or other essays like ‘Political Discourse’, or ‘The Tower of Babel’. I very much doubt you can. For Oakeshott, intelligence spans theoretical and practical reasoning; it is never only practical reasoning which it would only be if your characterization of it as “coherence to, and imaginative development of, particularistic custom” was accurate.
“Similarly, while the V[o]LL essays’ emphasis on learning coheres with RP’s emphasis on (for example) the master-apprentice relation to an extent, the way the latter construes learning as an essentially tacit process falls away”
Simply wrong. If you look at his essay ‘Learning and Teaching’ in VoLL and its distinction between information and judgment Oakeshott has more or less recapitulates his argument in RP but in other words.
Finally, I don’t think you characterization of OHC is much better but probably worse.
If I appear a little rude its only because your argument is followed by this observation:
Not for the first time, I think Oakeshott’s underlying problem here was not that he simply got everything wrong, but that he sought to grant his theories imperialistic pretentions that they could not sustain.
This is true of your post; not of its subject.
Heh, it’s as if you’re goading me to continue! It’s a shame you only started to comment as I was throwing in the towel.
Anyhow, a few cursory points –
1. Sure, my typology abstracts — hypostatises? — overlapping tendencies in Oakeshott’s thought, and in so doing, doesn’t truly grasp the concrete universal that is that thought in its evolving identity through time. Alas, but any typology would do the same, so maybe your position is that typologies as such are a bad thing when a person seeks to investigate another’s thought…?
2. You like to assert a lot, but I don’t find much elaboration. E.g.:
What does CPJ bring to the table exactly? A discourse that overlaps with both EM’s and RP’s? I’ll readily grant that, but this doesn’t have anything to say about my own problematic, viz., of whether there are distinct tendencies in Oakeshott’s thinking on what ‘intelligence’ is, and if so, of whether these different tendencies are coherent with one another.
3. I find this interesting though:
Does this imply that on your interpretation, theoretical/philosophical thinking for Oakeshott is non-traditional? Surely it must, since the coherence line you quote just summarises what Oakeshott says he means by saying all practical thinking is ‘traditional’. If you accept this, then a follow-up question would be: if theoretical/philosophical thinking can (and should be?) extra-traditional, then why not practical thinking? Put another way, have we spotted a chink in the gleaming armour of Oakeshott’s critique of political rationalism…?
4. Re the late 1960s essays — in the original post, the idea was to portray them as transitional, so for sure, overlaps with RP wasn’t something I was denying as such. That said, have you read Peter Winch’s Idea of a Social Science, and in particular, its friendly criticism of Oakeshott’s position in RP? I ask because in the background of my characterisation of VLL is how I see them as Oakeshott basically accepting Winch’s criticisms, or at least, meeting them half way.
5. Re OHC, since you simply assert I don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ve no idea *why* you think this (surely you can accept OHC’s dictum that ‘a belief is what it means for the believer’ was *not* upheld in RP, especially ‘Political Education’?). For sure, Oakeshott doesn’t want to concede he has repudiated any of the doctrine of RP — the question, then, is whether he actually did. Check out my ‘Tradition Explanation’ paper for where I’m coming from on this.