Practical vs. theoretical thinking
A comment to my previous post suggests that my little typology conflated practical and theoretical thinking on Oakeshott’s scheme, since theoretical thinking (my critic claims) is on Oakeshott’s view not a matter of ‘coherence to, and imaginative development of, particularistic custom’. This is not an unreasonable criticism I think; at least, it would be a way into reconciling possible tensions between RP (and in particular, ‘Rational COnduct’ and ‘Political Education’) and Oakeshott’s other works. Nonetheless, it raises the interesting question of why, if ‘theoretical’ thinking is non-traditional (or at least can be non-traditional – for ‘traditional’ thinking, in Oakeshott’s semi-technical sense, simply is thought that exhibits ‘coherence to, and imaginative development of, particularistic custom’), why can’t – shouldn’t – practical thinking be so too?
Connected to this is the further question of where the divide between ‘practical’ and ‘theoretical’ (or ‘philosophical’) thinking is supposed to lie, assuming there is a divide defined (or partly defined) by practical thinking being traditional and theoretical/philosophical thinking being potentially non-traditional. One answer is that for Oakeshott, the divide is one between ‘intuitive’ and ‘reflective’ thinking. So, in being ‘intuitive’, practical thinking is a matter of doing, there being no space between the conclusion of a practical ‘inference’ and acting on the basis of it. If the essence of theoretical thinking, in contrast, is reflection, then one’s thinking loses its theoretical character whenever the urge to reflect recedes in favour of an urge to simply act on the basis of one’s theoretical inferences – for in the moment of acting, there can be no reflection, since to reflect is to set about taking the presuppositional rug from under one’s feet. To take a trivial example, my act of going to the fridge for a pork pie to cure a small pang of hunger presupposes that there is a fridge and that the fridge contains a pork pie, that the fridge is turned on, that acceptable food has not gone off, that a powered on fridge keeps food fresh, that a fresh pork pie will quell my feeling of mild hunger, etc. Set about reflecting on any of these presuppositions (e.g. – perhaps the fridge isn’t turned on? perhaps a fresh pork pie won’t quell my mild hunger? perhaps a sense of mild hunger can obscure different types of ‘hunger’ that require different responses, which may or may not include the retrieving of a pork pie? etc.), and the rationality of ‘going’ to ‘the fridge’ to get ‘a pork pie’ to ‘quell’ a ‘feeling’ of ‘mild hunger’ becomes questionable right up until the reflection ends.
Now to an extent, this suggestion just repeats well-known dicta of both EM and OHC – ‘The irony of all theorizing is its propensity to generate, not an understanding, but a not-yet-understood’ and all that. There is, however, a significant classificatory problem arising from it: for, this portrayal of ‘theoretical’ thinking as reflective with no end rules out categorising any actual philosophical treatise as truly ‘theoretical’. Take Oakeshott’s own work, for example. So, in RP, Oakeshott does not just interrogate the presuppositions of ‘rationalism’; rather, he interrogates them so as to make a constructive conclusion, viz., that consciously ‘traditional’ politics is more successful politics. Likewise, in OHC, he doesn’t just examine the postulates of civil association, and the postulates of the postulates of civil association; rather, he goes on to draw strongly-put conclusions with practical implications, in particular the dictum that perceiving the state as an enterprise association is inimical to human freedom, and thus, human flourishing. In neither case has reflection been entered into with no conceivable end, so he doesn’t appear to have engaged in ‘theoretical’ thinking strictly speaking; and yet, in advocating consciously ‘traditional’ politics and disparaging enterprise association conceptions of the state, Oakeshott is surely engaged in ‘theoretical’ rather than ‘practical’ thinking in any reasonable sense of the word. In the jargon of EM, his own constructive theses must be considered ‘arrests’ of ‘experience’ (i.e., thinking); surely, though, they are more than that…?
