The Sceptical Idealist

Michael Oakeshott was one of the leading British 20th century philosophers, and for anyone who wishes to do research into this dispiriting area, this book will be essential reading. If only Roy Tseng had interpreted his terms of reference more widely, this book might have been not merely a useful academic reference, it could have offered a revealing insight into Britain's cultural and political history in the 20th century, but such was not to be. The title of the book is really only half true. Oakeshott was certainly a sceptic. He was sceptical of the Enlightenment project of finding the political means to a society founded on the Common Good. He was sceptical of the capacity of philosophers to say anything worthwhile about anything outside the bounds of academic philosophy. He was even sceptical of scepticism. He had little use for the Logical Positivists claim that truth is only to be found in logic and hard empirical facts. However Oakeshott was only an Idealist in the narrow technical sense that he followed the Idealist philosopher F.H. Bradley in holding that "truth" was the property of the coherence of a set of internal relations, not the property of correspondence with some external fact. It follows from this that there are degrees of truth, as the coherence gets tighter, but Oakeshott did not follow Bradley in thinking that in the end everything coheres together into one Absolute consciousness, which is what Idealism really means. Instead Oakeshott held that there were different modes of experience, religion, science, and what he called "practice", and the job of the philosopher was to work inside these "modes" and make more sense of them, and not to imposes some abstract rational structure from outside. This gave a strongly traditional and conservative flavour to his political philosophy. Working within the "practice" of any society means working within the institutions and laws of that society. Oakeshott admits no higher test. In particular he is against any appeal against the law in terms of abstract "human rights", as the Enlightenment thinkers would urge. Tseng observes that "Oakeshott is simply leaving aside the problem of the legitimacy of authority without providing any alternative resolutions for it." p.204. , but he does not recognise what a devastating criticism this is. In other words Oakeshott's philosophy provides no grounds for internal opposition to slavery in the Southern states of America, the bomb plot against Hitler, or resistance to Stalin's terror. Oakeshott's reply might be that his political philosophy was never intended to give practical advice. Indeed he is quite specific on that point - "We should listen to philosophers only when they talk philosophy". In other words the job of the philosopher is to write footnotes to other philosopher's footnotes. Tseng is totally at home with mid-20th century British philosophy, but he is Taiwanese, and it is a pity that he did not take advantage of his more detached perspective to try and set Oakeshott's philosophy in a wider context. Oakeshott was a leading British political philosopher. Does the total negativity of his philosophy matter? Twice in the 20th century Britain was dealt a hand full of aces, and has played them like jokers. After the 1st World War it had the largest Empire the world had ever seen, but possessed no profound vision of Imperial unity which could preserve the democratic dignity of different peoples, and yet retain planet-wide Imperial power. After the 2nd World War when the days of Empire were obviously over, Britain was the only Western European country of note left standing, and could have built up a European Union on its own terms. In the perspective of history does this political failure matter, and did the self-declared bankruptcy of British philosophy during this period have any effect ? It was not for Tseng to answer these vast questions, but perhaps he might have indicated them.