| The
key text for an understanding of Oakeshott’s view on Rationalism
is the essay Rationalism in Politics.1 The object of Oakeshott’s
essay Rationalism in Politics is to consider what he calls the most
remarkable intellectual fashion in post-Renaissance Europe. For
Oakeshott Rationalism is not the Rationalism of classical times,
that is to say, it is not the same thing as the use of reason in
intellectual inquiry. His Rationalism has a quality exclusively
its own, a strong and highly mannered thinking, which can be detected
in the intellectual composition of contemporary Europe.
The general character and disposition of the Rationalist, according
to Oakeshott, are not difficult to identify. The Rationalist stands
for independence of mind on all occasions, for thought, free of
obligations to any authority, save the authority of ‘reason.’
The mental attitude of the Rationalist is at once skeptical and
optimistic; skeptical because no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing
is so firmly rooted or so widely held, that he hesitates to question
it and to judge it by what he calls his ‘reason’ and
optimistic, because the Rationalist never doubts the power of his
reason to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion
or the propriety of an action. Furthermore, he is fortified by a
‘belief in a reason common to all mankind,’ the common
power of rational consideration. There is in the Rationalist a touch
of intellectual Equalitarianism, and as a consequence, he finds
it difficult to believe that anyone, who can think honestly and
clearly, will think differently from himself.
It is in the nature of the Rationalist to reduce the tangle and
variety of experience to a set of principles. These principles will
be expanded into a system, and he will attack or defend the system
only on rational grounds. For the Rationalist, the past is significant
only as an encumbrance.2 The Rationalist’s forte is the power
of recognizing the large outline which a general theory imposes
upon events. The mind of the Rationalist is a finely tempered mental
instrument which might be qualified as a well trained, rather than
as an educated mind. His ambition is not so much to share the experience
of the race as to be demonstrably a self-made man.
This gives to his intellectual and practical activities an almost
preternatural deliberateness and self-consciousness, depriving them
of any element of passivity, removing from them all sense of rhythm
and continuity, and dissolving them into a succession of climacteric
clashes, each to be surmounted by a tour de raison. The mind of
the Rationalist has no atmosphere, no changes of seasons and temperature,
his intellectual processes are insulated from any influences and
go on in the void.3
Having
cut himself off from the tradition of his society, the Rationalist
strives to live each day as if it were his first. There is in the
temperament if not in the character of the Rationalist a deep distrust
of time, an impassioned hunger for eternity and an irritable nervousness
in the face of everything topical and transitory. The Rationalist
believes in the open mind, the mind free from prejudice and he believes
that the unhindered ‘reason’ is an infallible guide
in human activity. To the Rationalist, nothing is of value merely
because it exists and certainly not because it has existed for many
generations. Familiarity has no worth and nothing is to be left
standing for want of scrutiny. And his disposition makes both destruction
and creation easer for him to understand and engage in than acceptance
or reform. To patch up, to repair, that is, to do anything that
requires the patient knowledge of the material, he regards as a
waste of time, and he always prefers the invention of a new device,
to making use of a current and well-tried expedient. He does not
recognize change, unless it is self-consciously induced change,
and consequently, he falls easily into the error of identifying
the customary and the traditional with the changeless.
This is aptly illustrated by the Rationalist attitude towards the
whole realm of traditional ideas. For him there is, of course, no
question either of retaining or improving on these, for both these
attitudes involve a stance of submission. The old must be destroyed,
and to fill its place, the Rationalist puts something of his own
making, an ideology, the formalized abridgement of the supposed
substratum of the irrational truth contained in the tradition.
The conduct of affairs for the Rationalist is a matter of solving
problems, and no man can hope to be successful, whose reason has
become inflexible, by surrender to habit, or is clouded by the fumes
of tradition. In this activity, the character that the Rationalist
claims for himself is the character of the engineer, whose mind
is controlled throughout by the appropriate technique and whose
first step is to dismiss from his attention everything not directly
related to his specific intentions. Life is resolved into a succession
of crises, each to be surmounted by the application of reason. Each
generation should see un-rolled before it the blank sheet of infinite
possibility. And if by chance, this tabula rasa has been defaced
by the irrational scribblings of tradition-ridden ancestors, then
the firs task of the Rationalist is to scrub it clean. As Voltaire
remarks, the only way to have good laws is to burn the existing
laws and to start fresh.
Let us now turn to the key element of Rationalism, the root, as
it were, of the Rationalist attitude.4 Every science, every art,
every practical activity requiring skill of any sort involves knowledge.
Universally, this knowledge is of two sorts, both of which are always
involved in any actual activity. It is possible to call theme two
sorts of knowledge because, though in fact they do not exist separately,
there are certain important differences between them.
The first sort of knowledge can be called technical knowledge, or
knowledge of technique. In every art and science as well as in any
practical activity technique is involved. In many activities, this
technical knowledge is formulated into rules, which are, or may
be, deliberately learned. Its chief characteristic is that it is
perceptive of precise formulation, although special skill or insight
may be required to give it that formulation. The second sort of
knowledge can be called practical, because it exists only in use,
is not reflective and, unlike technique, cannot be formulated in
rules. This, of course, does not mean that it is an esoteric sort
of knowledge; it means only that the method by which it may be shared,
and becomes common knowledge, is not the method of formulated doctrine.
In a way, it could be called traditional knowledge. In every activity
this sort of knowledge is also involved, the mastery of any skill,
the pursuit of any concrete activity is impossible without it. These
two sorts of knowledge then, distinguishable but inseparable, are
the twin components of the knowledge involved in any concrete human
activity.
Of a great importance are the differences between these two sorts
of knowledge. And the important differences are those that manifest
themselves in the divergent ways in which these sorts of knowledge
can be expressed and in the divergent ways in which they can be
learned or acquired. Technical knowledge is susceptible of formulation
in rules, principles, directions, maxims, comprehensibly in propositions.
It is possible to write down technical knowledge in a book. It is
no surprise, then, that when an artist writes about his art, he
writes mainly about the techniques of his art. This is not so, because
he is ignorant of, what may be called the aesthetical element, or
thinks it unimportant, but because what he has to say about that,
he has said already in his pictures, in his poems, in his music
and he knows no other way of saying it. On the other hand, it is
a characteristic of practical knowledge that it is not susceptible
of formulation of this kind. Its normal expression is a customary,
or traditional way of doing things, or simply in practice. This
gives it the appearance of imprecision and, consequently, uncertainty,
of being a matter of opinion, of probability rather than truth.
It is indeed a knowledge that is expressed in taste, or connoisseurship,
lacking rigidity and ready for the impress of the mind of the learner.
Technical knowledge can be learned from the book, it can be learned
in a correspondence course, it can become the subject of academic
lectures. Moreover, much of it can be learned by heart, repeated
by rote, and applied mechanically. The logic of the syllogism is
a technique of this kind. Technical knowledge in short can be both
taught and learned in the simplest meanings of these words. On the
other hand, practical knowledge can neither be taught, or learned,
but only imparted and acquired. Since it exists only in practice,
the only way to acquire it is by apprenticeship to a master, not
because the master can teach it, for he cannot, but because it can
be acquired only by continuous contest, with one who is perpetually
practicing it. In the arts and in natural science, what normally
happens, is that the pupil, in being taught and in learning the
technique from his master, discovers himself that he has acquired
also another sort of knowledge, than merely technical knowledge,
without it ever having been precisely imparted and often without
being able to say precisely what it is.
Rationalism, according to Oakeshott, is the assertion that what
he has called practical knowledge is not knowledge at all, the assertion
that, properly speaking, there is not knowledge which is not technical
knowledge.
The
Rationalist holds that the only element of knowledge involved in
any human activity is technical knowledge and that what we have
called technical knowledge is really only a sort of nescience. The
sovereignty of “reason” for the Rationalist means the
sovereignty of technique.5
At
the heart of all these is the preoccupation of the Rationalist with
certainty. Technique and certainty are for him inseparably joined,
because certain knowledge is for him, knowledge which does not require
to look beyond itself for its certainty. Knowledge is that, which
not only ends with certainty but begins with certainty, and is certain
throughout. And this is precisely what technical knowledge appears
to be. It seems to be a self-complete sort of knowledge, because
it seems to range between an identifiable initial point, and an
identifiable terminal point, where it is complete. It has the aspect
of knowledge that can be contained only between the two covers of
a book, whose application is, as nearly as possible, purely mechanical
and which does not assume a knowledge, not itself provided in the
technique. For example the superiority of the ideology, over a tradition
of thought, lies in its appearance of being self-contained. It can
be taught best to those whose minds are empty and if it is to be
taught to one who already believes something, the first step of
the teacher is to administrate a purge, to make sure that all the
prejudices and preconceptions are removed, to lay his foundation
upon the unshakeable rock of absolute ignorance. In short, technical
knowledge appears to be the only kind of knowledge which satisfies
the standards of certainty which the Rationalist has chosen.
Oakeshott assumes that the knowledge involved in every concrete
activity is never solely technical knowledge. If this is true, it
would appear that the error of the Rationalist is of a simple sort,
the error of mistaking the part for the whole, of equating a part
with the qualities of the whole. But the error of the Rationalist
does not stop here. If his great illusion is the sovereignty of
technique, he is no less deceived by the apparent certainty of technical
knowledge. The superiority of technical knowledge lay in its appearance
of springing from pure ignorance, and ending in certain and complete
knowledge, its appearance of both beginning and ending with certainty.
But at a closer look, this is an illusion. As with every other sort
of knowledge, learning a technique does not consist in getting rid
of pure ignorance but in reforming knowledge which is already there.
Nothing, not even the most nearly self-contained technique can in
fact be imparted to an empty mind and what is imparted is nourished
by what is already there. A man who knows the rules of one game
will, on this account, rapidly learn the rules of another, and the
man altogether unfamiliar with “rules” of any kind could
be a most unpromising subject. And just as the self-made man is
not literally self made, but depends upon a certain kind of society
and upon a large, unrecognized inheritance, so technical knowledge
is never in fact self-complete, and can be made to appear so only
if we forget about the hypothesis with which it begins. And if its
self-completeness is illusory, the certainty, which was attributed
to it, on the account of self-completeness, is also an illusion.
What
we, in fact, are trying to do, what we are considering is not merely
the truth of a doctrine but the significance of an intellectual
fashion in the history of post-Renaissance Europe. The question
that arises is: what is the generation of this belief in the sovereignty
of technique, whence springs the supreme confidence in the human
reason as interpretative? What is the provenance, the context of
this intellectual character?6
The
appearance of a new intellectual character is like the appearance
of a new architectural style, it emerges almost imperceptibly, under
the pressure of a great variety of influences, and it is a misdirection
of inquiry to seek its origins. Indeed, there are no origins at
all, that can be discerned, out of the slow changes, of the shuffling
and reshuffling, the flow and ebb of the tides of inspiration which
issue finally in a shape identifiably new. The ambition of the historian
is to escape that gross abridgement of the process, which gives
the shape, a too early, or too late, and a too precise definition,
and to avoid the false emphasis, which springs from being over impressed
by the moment of unmistakable emergence. Yet, that moment must have
a dominating interest, for anyone who is in the business of trying
to understand its emergence.
In the emergence of modern Rationalism, in the formation of the
intellectual character and disposition of the Rationalist, there
is one element which is of supreme importance. This moment is the
early Seventeenth Century, and it was connected with the condition
of knowledge of both natural and civilized world at that time. The
dominating figures in the emergence of the new intellectual character
Oakeshott called the Rationalists are Bacon and Descartes, and we
may find in their writings inclinations, of what later became the
Rationalist character.
Bacon’s ambition was to equip the intellect, with what appeared
to him necessary if certain and demonstrable knowledge of the world
in which we live, is to be attained. Such knowledge is not possible
for natural reason, which is capable of only ‘petty and probable
conjectures,’ not of certainty.7 This imperfection is reflected
in the want of prosperity of the state of knowledge. The Novum Organum
begins with the diagnosis of the intellectual situation. What is
lacking is a clear perception of the nature of certainty, and an
adequate means of achieving it. “There remains but one course
for the recovery of a sound and healthy condition, namely that the
entirely work of understanding be commenced fresh, and the mind
itself be from the very outset not left to take his own course but
guided at every step.”8 What is required is a “sure
plan,” a new “way” of understanding, an “art”
or “method” of inquiry, an “instrument”
which shall supplement the weakness of the natural reason. In short,
what is required is a formulated technique of inquiry. Bacon recognizes
that this technique will appear as a kind of hindrance to the natural
reason, not supplying it with wings, but hanging weights upon it,
in order to control its exuberance. It is lack of discipline, which
stands between the natural reason and certain knowledge of the world.
The art of research, which Bacon recommends, has three main characteristics:
first, it is a set of rules, it is a true technique, in that, it
can be formulated as a precise set of directions, which can be learned
by heart; secondly, it is a set of rules, whose application is purely
mechanical, it is a true technique, because it does not require
for its use any knowledge or intelligence, not even the technique
itself; thirdly, it is a set of rules of universal application,
it is a true technique, in that, it is an instrument of inquiry
indifferent to the subject matter of the inquiry.
What is significant in this project is not the precise character
of the rules of inquiry, both positive and negative, but the notion
itself, that a technique of this sort is even possible. For what
is proposed – the infallible rules of discovery – is
something very remarkable, a sort of philosopher’s tone, a
key to open all doors, a “master science.” From our
point of view, the first of his rules is the most important, the
precept that we must lie aside received opinions, that we must “begin
anew from the very foundations.” Genuine knowledge must begin
with a purge of the mind, because it must begin, as well as end,
in certainty, and must be complete in itself. Knowledge and opinion
are separated absolutely. There’s no question of ever winning
true knowledge out of “the childish notions we at first imbibe.”
The doctrine of the Novum Organum may be summed up, from our point
of view, as the sovereignty of technique. It represents, not merely
a preoccupation with technique, combined with the recognition that
technical knowledge is never the whole of knowledge, but the assertion
that technique, and some material for it to work upon, are all that
matters. “This is an early and unmistakable intimation of
the new intellectual fashion.”9
Descartes, like Bacon, derived inspiration from what appeared to
be the defects of contemporary inquiry. He also perceived the lack
of consciously and precisely formulated technique of inquiry, and
the method proposed in the Discours de la Methode and the Regulae
corresponds closely to that of the Novum Organum. For Descartes,
no less than for Bacon, the aim is certainty. Certain knowledge
can spread only in an empty mind. The technique of research begins
with an intellectual purge. Further, the technique of inquiry is
formulated in a set of rules, which ideally compose an infallible
method, whose application is mechanical and universal. And thirdly,
there are no grades in knowledge. What is uncertain is mere nescience.
Descartes, however, is distinguished from Bacon in respect of the
thoroughness of his education in the scholastic philosophy, and
in the profound impression that geometrical demonstration had upon
his mind. The effect of these differences in education and in inspiration
is to make his formulation of the technique of inquiry more precise,
and in consequence, more critical. His mind is oriented towards
the project of infallible and universal method of research. But,
since the method he advocates is modeled on that of geometry, its
limitation when applied not to possibilities but to things is easily
apparent. Descartes is more thorough than Bacon, in doing his skepticism
for himself, and in the end, he recognizes it to be an error, to
suppose that the method can ever be the sole means of inquiry.
The sovereignty of technique turns out to be a dream and not a reality.
Nevertheless, the lessons his successors believed themselves to
have learned from Descartes was the sovereignty of technique and
not his doubtfulness of the possibility of an infallible method.10
Based
on the above, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the Rationalist
character may be seen as springing from the exaggeration of Bacon’s
hopes and the neglect of the skepticism of Descartes. Modern Rationalism
is “what commonplace minds made out of the inspiration of
men of discrimination and genius.”11 But the history of Rationalism
is not only the history of the gradual emergence and definition
of this new intellectual character; it is also the history of the
invasion of any department of intellectual activity by the doctrine
of the sovereignty of technique. It is common knowledge that in
the seventeenth century in poetry and in drama there was a remarkable
concentration on technique, on rules of composition, on the observance
of the bien séances of literature, which continued unabated
for nearly two centuries. Neither Religion, nor Natural Sciences,
nor Education, nor the conduct of life itself escaped from the influence
of the new Rationalism. No activity was immune, no society untouched.
The deeper motivations, which encourage and develop this intellectual
fashion are, for the most part, obscure. They are hidden in the
recesses of the European society, but among its other connections
it is certainly closely allied with the decline in belief in Providence.
A
beneficent and infallible technique replaced, as it were, a beneficent
and infallible God. Where Providence was not available to correct
the mistakes of man, it was all the more necessary to correct such
mistakes. A society or a generation which thinks that what it has
discovered for itself is more important than what it has inherited,
an age over impressed with its own accomplishment and liable to
accept these illusions of intellectual grandeur which are the characteristic
lunacy of post – Renaissance Europe, an age never mentally
at peace with itself, because never reconciled with its past were
the result.12
And
the vision of a technique, which puts all minds at the same level,
provided just that shortcut, which would attract a man in a hurry
to appear educated, but incapable of appreciating the concrete details
of the total inheritance. Indeed, it may be said that all, or almost
all, the influences, which in its early days serve to encourage
the emergence of the Rationalist character, have subsequently been
more influential in our civilization.
Of course, Rationalism was not able to establish itself easily and
without opposition. The significance of the doctrine of the sovereignty
of technique becomes clearer, when we consider, what one of its
first, and profoundest critics has to say about it. Pascal is a
judicious critic of Descartes not to be opposing him at all points
but opposing him, never the less, on points that are fundamental.13
Pascal perceived that the Cartesian desire for certain knowledge
was based upon false criteria of certainty. Descartes must begin
with something so sure, that it cannot be doubted, and was led,
as a consequence, to believe that all genuine knowledge is technical
knowledge. Pascal avoided this conclusion by his doctrine of probability.
The only knowledge that is certain, is certain on account of its
partiality. The paradox of probable knowledge is, that it has more
to say about whole truth, than certain knowledge. Secondly, Pascal
perceived that the Cartesian raisonnement is never, in fact, the
whole source of the knowledge involved in a concrete activity. The
human mind, he asserts, is not wholly dependent, for its successful
working, upon a conscious and formulated technique. And even where
a technique is involved, the mind observes the technique “tacitement,
naturellement et sans art.” The precise formulation of rules
of inquiry, endangers the success of the inquiry by exaggerating
the importance of method.
Pascal was followed by others and, indeed, much of the history of
Modern Philosophy revolves round this question. But, though latter
writers were often more elaborated in their criticism, few detected
more surely than Pascal that the significance of Rationalism is
not its recognition of technical knowledge, but its failure to recognize
any other.
Its
philosophical error lies in the certainty it attributes to technique
and in its doctrine of the sovereignty of technique. Its practical
error lies in its belief that nothing but benefit can come from
making conduct self-conscious.14
How
deeply the Rationalist disposition of mind has invaded our current
thought and practice is illustrated by the extent to which traditions
of behavior have given place to ideologies, the extent to which
the politics of destruction and creation have been substituted for
politics of repair, the consciously planned and deliberately executed
being considered (for that reason) conclusively better than what
has grown up, and established itself unselfconsciously, over a period
of time. This conversion of habits of behavior, which were never
quite fixed or finished into comparatively rigid systems of abstract
ideas, is not, of course, new.
By casting his technique in the form of a view of the course of
events, past, present and future, and not of human nature, Marx
thought he had escaped from Rationalism. But, since he has taken
the precaution of first turning the course of events into a doctrine,
the escape was an illusion.
Like
King Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position
of not being able to touch anything without transforming it into
an abstraction. The Rationalist finds the intricacy of the world,
of time and contingency so unmanageable, that he is bewitched by
the offer of a quick escape into the bogus eternity of an ideology.15
Rationalism
involves an identifiable error, “a misconception with regard
to human knowledge, which amounts to a corruption of the mind.”16
Consequently, it is without the power to correct its own shortcomings.
It has no homeopathic quality. You cannot escape its errors by becoming
more sincerely or more profoundly Rationalistic. This is one of
the penalties of living by the book. It leads not only to specific
mistakes but it also dries up the mind itself. Living by precept,
in the end, generates intellectual dishonesty. And further, the
Rationalist has rejected in advance the only external inspiration
capable of correcting his error. He does not merely neglect the
kind of knowledge which would save him; he begins by destroying
it. First, he turns off the light and then complains that he cannot
see.
In
short, the Rationalist is essentially trapped and he can be educated
out of his Rationalism only by an inspiration, which he regards
as the great enemy of mankind. All the Rationalist can do when left
to himself, is to replace one Rationalist project in which he has
failed by another in which he hopes to succeed.17
The
Rationalist inspiration has now invaded and has begun to corrupt
the genuine educational provisions and institutions of contemporary
society. Some of the ways and means by which hitherto genuine, as
distinct from the merely technical knowledge has been imparted,
have already disappeared. Others are on the way out and others,
again, are in the process of being corrupted from the inside. The
Rationalist never understands that it takes about two generations
of practice to learn a profession. Indeed, he does everything he
can to destroy the possibility of such an education, believing it
to be mischievous. Like a man whose only language is Esperanto,
he has no means of knowing that the world did not begin in the twentieth
century.
The
predicament of our time is that the Rationalists have been at work
so long on the project of drawing off the liquid, in which our moral
ideas were suspended, and poured it away as worthless, that we are
left only with the dry and gritty residue, which chokes us, as we
try to take it out.18
Notes:
1 Oakeshott, Michael (1901-1990): best known as a conservative political
philosopher. Educated at Cambridge as a historian, he developed
an interest in the philosophy of John McTaggart (1866-1925), especially
as regards the nature and non-existence of time. His first and only
continuous book, Experience and its Modes (1933) was almost totally
ignored but provides the philosophical structure for later volumes
of essays in which he develops educational and political themes
deeply influenced by Montaigne’s scepticism, as well as the
political philosophies of Hobbes and Burke.
2 “He has none of that negative capability, (which Keats attributed
to Shakespeare) the power of accepting the mysteries and uncertainties
of experience, without any irritable search for order and directness,
only the capability of subjugating experience” (Michael Oakeshott,
Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962),
2).
3 Oakeshott, op. cit., 10.
4 “The placid lake of Rationalism lies before us in the character
and disposition of the Rationalist, its surface familiar and not
unconvincing, its waters fed by many visible tributaries. But in
its depths there flows a hidden spring which…is perhaps the
pre-eminent source of its endurance. This spring is a doctrine about
human knowledge” (Oakeshott, op. cit., 7).
5 Ibid., 9.
6 Ibid., 11.
7 Bacon, Novum Organum (Fowler, 1959), 184.
8 Ibid., 182.
9 Oakeshott, op. cit., 13.
10 Ibid., 14.
11 Vanvenarques, Maxims et Reflections (Paris: Pleiade, 1965), 221.
12 Oakeshott, op. cit., 14.
13 cf. Pascal, Pensees (vol. I, Paris: Brunscvicg, 1959), p. 76.
14 Oakeshott, op. cit., 15.
15 Ibid., 16.
16 Ibid., 18.
17 Ibid., 18.
18 Ibid., 19.
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