Education and Conversation: Exploring Oakeshott’s Legacy 9781472584335, 9781472584328, 9781474287289, 9781472584359

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Acknowledgement
Notes on Contributors
Introduction David Bakhurst and Paul Fairfield
1 Education and Conversation David Bakhurst
Voices
Conversation
Many voices, one subject
Truth
Initiation
Conclusion
Notes
2 Experience in Experience and its Modes Barry Allen
Experience
Philosophical experience
Present experience
From modes of experience to the conversation of mankind
Notes
3 Oakeshottian Pragmatism – Conversation or Inquiry? Cheryl Misak
Oakeshott and classical pragmatism
Cambridge pragmatism
Pragmatism: inquiry or conversation?
Notes
4 Bildung, Post-Kantian German Idealism and the Conversation of Mankind James Scott Johnston
Bildung and the conversation of beauty
Kant, Bildung and the education of taste
Hegel, beauty and the end of art
Rival discourses of art and Bildung
Oakeshott and the conversation of mankind
Bildung and the conversation of mankind
5 Conservatism, Perfectionism and Equality Christine Sypnowich
Oakeshott’s theory of education
Oakeshott’s conservatism
Conservatives and progressives – antagonisms
Conservatives and progressives – affinities
Autonomy and equality
Conclusion
Notes
6 Oakeshott, Bonnett, Derrida and the Possibilities of Thought Emma Williams
Introduction
Bonnett’s critique of Oakeshott
A traditional subject
Thinking beyond representation with Derrida
Oakeshott and the possibilities of thought
Notes
7 A Turn in the Conversation Paul Standish
Acknowledgement
8 A Phenomenology of Listening Paul Fairfield
Notes
9 Conversation and Processes of Recognition Shaun Gallagher
Interaction as a dynamical process of sense- making
From recognition to responsiveness
Conversational imperialism and the real dynamics of conversation
Notes
10 Old Directions for New Minds Nancy Salay
The metaphor
Conversation and the brain
The conversation of mankind
Conclusion
Acknowledgement
Notes
11 Education and Autonomy Sebastian Rödl
Introduction
Autonomy: what it is
Education: the kind of passion it is
The idea that education turns the child from an animal into a person, its inconsistency with the idea that the end of education is autonomy
The idea of changing into a person, its incoherence
Education as self-activity
Notes
12 Getting to Hogwarts – Michael Oakeshott, Ivan Illich and J. K. Rowling on ‘School’ Babette Babich
Oakeshott and the language of appetite
Ivan Illich
The university and the twelfth century
Getting to Hogwarts
Monastery and greenwood
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Education and Conversation

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ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Education, Dialogue and Hermeneutics, edited by Paul Fairfield Education After Dewey, Paul Fairfield Michael Oakeshott, Edmund Neill

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Education and Conversation Exploring Oakeshott’s Legacy

EDITED BY DAVID BAKHURST AND PAUL FAIRFIELD

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC 1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © David Bakhurst, Paul Fairfield and Contributors, 2016 David Bakhurst, Paul Fairfield and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN :

HB : PB : ePDF : ePub:

978-1-4725-8433-5 978-1-4725-8432-8 978-1-4725-8435-9 978-1-4725-8434-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bakhurst, David, 1959– editor of compilation. | Fairfield, Paul, 1966-editor of compilation. Title: Education and conversation: exploring Oakeshott’s legacy / edited by David Bakhurst, Paul Fairfield. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015044758 | ISBN 9781472584335 (hardback) | ISBN 9781472584328 (pb) Subjects: LCSH : Education, Humanistic. | Oakeshott, Michael, 1901-1990—Criticism and interpretation. | BISAC : EDUCATION / Philosophy & Social Aspects. | EDUCATION / General. Classification: LCC LC 1011. E395 2016 | DDC 370.11/2--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044758 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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Contents Acknowledgement vi Notes on Contributors

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Introduction David Bakhurst and Paul Fairfield

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Education and Conversation David Bakhurst 5 2 Experience in Experience and its Modes Barry Allen 27 3 Oakeshottian Pragmatism – Conversation or Inquiry? Cheryl Misak 47 4 Bildung, Post-Kantian German Idealism and the Conversation of Mankind James Scott Johnston 61 5 Conservatism, Perfectionism and Equality Christine Sypnowich 77 6 Oakeshott, Bonnett, Derrida and the Possibilities of Thought Emma Williams 95 7 A Turn in the Conversation Paul Standish 111 8 A Phenomenology of Listening Paul Fairfield 127 9 Conversation and Processes of Recognition Shaun Gallagher 143 10 Old Directions for New Minds Nancy Salay 159 11 Education and Autonomy Sebastian Rödl 181 12 Getting to Hogwarts – Michael Oakeshott, Ivan Illich and J. K. Rowling on ‘School’ Babette Babich 199 References Index 239

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Acknowledgement David Bakhurst gratefully acknowledges the support of the Spencer Foundation and the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain.

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Notes on Contributors Barry Allen is Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University, Canada. He is the author of Striking Beauty; Vanishing into Things; Artifice and Design; Knowledge and Civilization; and Truth in Philosophy. He is also Associate Editor at the interdisciplinary journal Common Knowledge. Babette Babich is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, USA and Editor of New Nietzsche Studies. She is the author of The Hallelujah Effect and the forthcoming Un politique brisé. Le souci d’autrui, I’humanisme, et les juifs chez Heidegger. Her other books include La fin de la pensée? Philosophie analytique contre philosophie continentale; Words in Blood, Like Flowers; and Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science. David Bakhurst is Charlton Professor of Philosophy, Queen’s University, Canada and a Visiting Professor at UCL Institute of Education, UK . He is the author of The Formation of Reason and Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy, and co-editor of The Social Self (with Christine Sypnowich), Jerome Bruner (with Stuart Shanker) and Thinking about Reasons (with Brad Hooker and Margaret Olivia Little). Paul Fairfield is Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Canada. He is the author or editor of several books in philosophy of education, hermeneutics and existential phenomenology, including Death; Philosophical Hermeneutics Reinterpreted; Education After Dewey; and Teachability and Learnability (forthcoming). Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis, USA. He also has a secondary research appointment at the University of Wollongong. His areas of research include phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, especially topics related to embodiment, self, agency and intersubjectivity, hermeneutics and the philosophy of time. James Scott Johnston is Associate Professor of Education and Philosophy at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. He is the author of several

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books, including John Dewey’s Earlier Logical Theory; Deweyan Inquiry; and Inquiry and Education, and many articles on philosophy and education. Cheryl Misak is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her work focuses on American pragmatism, epistemology, ethics and philosophy of medicine. She is the author of Truth and the End of Inquiry; Verificationism; Truth, Politics, Morality; The American Pragmatists; and Cambridge Pragmatism (forthcoming). Sebastian Rödl is Professor of Philosophy at the Universität Leipzig, Germany. He is the author of Self-Consciousness; Categories of the Temporal; and numerous essays in epistemology, philosophy of mind, action theory and ethics, as well as on Kant and Hegel. Nancy Salay is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Canada. Her research focuses on cognitive science, particularly the embodied mind. Her work has appeared in Theoria and Inquiry. She is currently writing a book titled How Thought Co-Evolved with Language. Paul Standish is Professor and Head of the Centre for Philosophy at UCL Institute of Education, UK . His research focuses on language and meaning as these bear on education, democracy and human transformation. He is the author or editor of some fifteen books, including, most recently, Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups and Education and the Kyoto School of Philosophy, both co-edited with Naoko Saito. He was editor of the Journal of Philosophy of Education from 2001 to 2011. Christine Sypnowich is Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Canada. Her research focuses on political philosophy, jurisprudence and feminism. Her publications include The Concept of Socialist Law, and the edited collections The Egalitarian Conscience and (with David Bakhurst) The Social Self. Her work has appeared in such journals as Political Theory; Oxford Journal of Legal Studies; Praxis International and New Left Review. She is presently at work on a book entitled Equality Renewed. Emma Williams is Assistant Professor in the Centre for Education Studies, University of Warwick, UK . Her work explores themes of rationality, thinking, language and subjectivity within the context of education. She is the author of The Ways We Think and of articles in such journals as the Journal of Philosophy of Education and Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Introduction David Bakhurst and Paul Fairfield

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ecent decades have witnessed a growing trend in educational thinking toward the empirical and the technological, the vocational and the managerial. Policymakers, administrators and a great many educators themselves increasingly subscribe to a conception of education in which the core mission of educational institutions is to equip students to succeed in the workplace, now understood not in terms of an array of familiar vocations but as a fluid, rapidly evolving and global ‘knowledge economy’. The current watchwords of this trend include transferable skills, content delivery, evidencebased practices, evaluation metrics, learning objectives and outcomes, active and experiential learning, accountability and, of course, cost-effectiveness. In such a context, the once-hallowed ideals of ‘liberal education’ seem to have gone the way of the typewriter, the public telephone, and the seven-inch single – at best the object of affectionate nostalgia, at worst dismissed as obsolete. While it is true that education must equip students for life, and equally true that, for the vast majority of people, the means of life are secured by work, it is a mistake to infer that education should serve such instrumental ends alone. Plato’s cave allegory affords a classical articulation of the view repeatedly expressed in the history of philosophy that there is a higher purpose to education that must be conceived in ontological, not utilitarian, terms. This is the idea that many of the characteristics we recognize as aspects of a distinctively human life come to us through education. To be an educated person is to be someone who has attained a certain intellectual and emotional maturity by having her eyes opened to her cultural inheritance and who is, thereby and to that degree, at home in the world. To be educated means to be initiated into something that lies beyond our immediacy, something that resists straightforward conceptual articulation, but which forms and fashions our very identities by opening up to us avenues of self-understanding. On such a view, the educational process cannot be understood as merely a means 1

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to something distinct from itself. This is so, first because education is of intrinsic value – being educated is something of value for its own sake – and second, because education has no natural terminus: to be an educated person is to be one who continues to learn. Michael Oakeshott began to speak of human culture or civilization as ‘the conversation of mankind’ some fifty years ago, and since that time the idea has gained currency particularly among philosophers of education. Oakeshott’s metaphor inspired the influential philosophers of the London School in the 1960s and continues to be invoked today by thinkers seeking to resist the influence of managerialism and narrow instrumentalism in educational policy and practice. Oakeshott himself described education as ‘an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation’ (Oakeshott 1991f: 490–91). Behind the metaphor lies a larger view of the human condition that resonates in powerful ways with ideas in a number of philosophical traditions. Oakeshott writes that: Education . . . is the transaction between the generations in which newcomers to the scene are initiated into the world which they are to inhabit. This is a world of understandings, imaginings, meanings, moral and religious beliefs, relationships, practices – states of mind in which the human condition is to be discerned as recognitions of and responses to the ordeal of consciousness. These states of mind can be entered into only by being themselves understood, and they can be understood only by learning to do so. To be initiated into this world is learning to become human; and to move within it freely is being human, which is a ‘historic’, not a ‘natural’ condition (Oakeshott 2001d: 103). It is hardly surprising, then, that Oakeshott’s ideas have appealed to philosophers of education, for his is a view that recognizes the centrality of education in making human beings what they are. Oakeshott makes a powerful stand for the value of a liberal education, understood as the enterprise of ‘learning to respond to the invitations of the great intellectual adventures in which human beings have come to display their various understandings of the world and of themselves’ (2001e: 22). This is education focused not so much on the acquisition of knowledge, information, skills and values, but on the cultivation of judgement, wonder and imagination, of powers of thinking and routes of feeling. Such an education is ‘liberal’ in at least two senses. First, for Oakeshott, human beings are free precisely because we fashion ourselves in light of our self-understandings – as he puts it, we are in ourselves what we are for ourselves – and self-understandings

INTRODUCTION

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are the be-all and end-all of liberal learning. In this way liberal education fosters our formation as free beings. Second, liberal education is ‘liberal’ because it ‘is liberated from the distracting business of satisfying contingent wants’ (15). It is therefore best undertaken in ‘a place apart’, in a place of learning that can offer ‘the invitation to disentangle oneself, for a time, from the urgencies of the here and now and to listen to the conversation in which human beings forever seek to understand themselves’ (34). This notion is central to Oakeshott’s conception of the school and the university. For Oakeshott, it is a disastrous mistake to attempt to replace liberal learning by modes of education preoccupied with relevance, training and instrumental means to useful outcomes. This is not only because the death of liberal education would mean the loss of something profoundly valuable. (Oakeshott goes so far as to speak of ‘the abolition of man’ (20), which might be a tad overdrawn.) It is also the case that the learning of any useful art, craft or skill presupposes understanding the meaning and broader significance of the practice in question, and that in turn presupposes the kind of selfunderstanding to which liberal education aspires (13). The same is true of the contingent wants that the practice seeks to satisfy. They are not just given to us as such. In so far as they are human wants, they are possible objects of self-understanding, which may in turn modify or transform them. An education focused on the instrumental alone cannot be self-sufficient, just as merely instrumental value cannot be, for we cannot avoid the question of what is worthwhile in and of itself and for its own sake. The essays in this volume pursue the implications of Oakeshott’s metaphor of the conversation of mankind and its significance for education. Oakeshott would have us see formal education, from elementary grades to university, as a process of initiation into a conversation that began roughly three millennia ago and that encompasses both the oldest disciplines and the newest. Philosophy and rhetoric, history and religion, art and science may be understood as specialized tributaries of a conversation that exhibits an underlying unity of themes and questions regarding what there is, what is good, and where meaning lies. The student stands to this conversation not only as learner, but more specifically as initiate, as Aristotle was initiated into the world of ideas by Plato, who was initiated by Socrates, and so on. Though students today are situated at considerable remove from the conversation these thinkers began, in a fundamental sense they appropriate habits and concerns, questions and methods that have their origin in the world of the ancients. The students’ task is to come to appreciate the origins of the conversation to which they are now party, to acquire an understanding of some of the many directions it has taken on its way to the present, and, if possible, to find their voice in the dialogue and take the conversation forward in one way or another. This is a vision that demands much of students, for

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although Oakeshott’s conversational ideal of education stresses the student’s relation to others, to teachers and the broader culture, ‘learning is something which each of us must do and can only do for ourselves’ (6). Thus individualist and communitarian themes are strikingly co-present in Oakeshott’s picture. The principal question before us is the extent to which this Oakeshottian vision succeeds in capturing the nature and significance of education in a way that illuminates contemporary debates and furthers our understanding in fruitful ways. The contributors to this volume do not belong to a common school of thought, be it Oakeshottian or any other, but represent diverse philosophical traditions and offer a variety of perspectives. Some of our authors focus directly on Oakeshott’s contribution, concerning themselves not just with the cogency and contemporary relevance of his thought, but with its own place in the conversation of humanity and its relation to other styles and schools of thought. Among the issues they discuss are the roots of Oakeshott’s thinking in his early philosophical work, the relevance of his ideas to the concept of Bildung or self-formation, and the significance of his political conservatism in evaluating the seemingly progressive potential of his educational ideas. Other contributions are less preoccupied with Oakeshott’s writings, but take up key concepts that figure in his work and bring them to bear on contemporary philosophical discussions about education, learning and development, including the nature of initiation, the phenomenology of listening, and the value of the liberal arts tradition. In a variety of ways the diverse essays show how the idea of conversation illuminates both the character and the ends of education, yielding insight into the scope and limits of the philosophy of education and the character of philosophical inquiry more generally. There is no doubt that Oakeshott’s ideas are out of step with much of the prevailing ‘wisdom’ about education and its value, purpose or ends. However, it is precisely when imperatives of managerial efficiency and scientistic rationality reign supreme in many an institution of learning, and when qualitative matters of intellectual virtues, habits of reflection and thoughtful inquiry are placed a distant second to quantifiables such as test scores, information retention and marketable credentials, that it is salutary to return to Oakeshott’s writings to remind us of what philosophers since ancient times have in one fashion or another maintained: that educational practice has a profound orientation and purpose that transcends the order of the utilitarian. How we are best to understand and realize these grand aims will remain, of course, an essentially contested question. That is how, in the nature of the case, things must be. But what is vital is that we do not lose sight of the question itself. This volume is a contribution to a conversation that aspires to keep it firmly in view.

1 Education and Conversation David Bakhurst

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n his 1959 paper ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’, Michael Oakeshott writes: Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation [the conversation of mankind – DB ] in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation (Oakeshott 1991f: 490–91).

Oakeshott’s striking image of the conversation of mankind has appealed to many philosophers of education. In the mid-1960s, Paul Hirst used Oakeshott’s phrase to convey ‘precisely what it seems . . . a liberal education is and what its outcome will be’ (Hirst 1972: 413).1 And some forty years later, we find Paul Standish regularly invoking Oakeshott’s image to challenge instrumentalism, managerialism and technologism in educational thinking (see, e.g., 2000: 168; 2003: 222; 2005: 61; 2007: 161). The image of ‘conversation’ evokes a worthwhile and pleasurable activity, freely entered into for its own sake, by interlocutors seeking a fruitful exchange of ideas in the course of a common intellectual adventure, listening attentively and speaking intelligibly to one another as equal partners in the discourse. Small wonder this should strike a chord among theorists of education.2 Yet although it is often celebrated (and sometimes derided), Oakeshott’s metaphor has rarely been subjected to sustained scrutiny.3 I propose to remedy that in this chapter.

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Voices In speaking of ‘the conversation of mankind’, Oakeshott deploys an expression with an eighteenth-century resonance. But where Richard Steele and Dr Johnson use the phrase to evoke the idea of human fellowship or society,4 Oakeshott has something different and more abstract in mind. He starts from the idea that not all human utterance is in the same mode or idiom. Human culture or civilization involves the interplay of different ‘voices’ and Oakeshott proposes we use the metaphor of conversation to understand this: [I]t may be supposed that the diverse idioms of utterance which make up current human intercourse have some meeting-place and compose a manifold of some sort (1991f: 489). This meeting-place or manifold is what he calls the conversation of mankind. Each voice contributes something distinctive, and an educated person is able to understand and appreciate the history and character of each voice, evaluate what it is saying, and contribute in some way to the conversation, if only as an informed listener. Oakeshott tells us there is ‘no fixed number’ of voices in the conversation (491), but his famous paper identifies three, which he describes as ‘most notable’: the voices of practical activity, science and poetry. He also mentions history, which he says ‘also has acquired, or has begun to acquire, an authentic voice and idiom of its own’ (488), and philosophy, which he represents as a ‘parasitic activity’ that reflects upon the conversation but ‘makes no specific contribution to it’ (491). There is no mention of religion. The emphasis, here at least, is squarely on science, practice and poetry.5 This may simply result from Oakeshott’s specific aim in this paper: to prevent the voice of poetry from being drowned out by the loudest voices in our culture, science and practice. I suspect, however, there is something deeper at work. Oakeshott’s thinking in this paper seems to reflect a broadly Kantian distinction between theoretical reasoning, practical reasoning and aesthetic appreciation. This is the contrast between seeing the world (i) as a unity of facts, states of affairs and events to be described and explained; (ii) as a site of action, of the satisfaction of the will; and (iii) as an object of aesthetic contemplation. That tripartite distinction is reflected in specific forms of reasoning (which Oakeshott calls ‘manners of thinking’ (492) or ‘modes of imagining’ (497)), namely the mode of theoretical reasoning that is natural science, with its aspiration to provide what Bernard Williams (1978: ch.10) called the absolute conception of reality (see Oakeshott, 1991f: 505); practical reasoning in the form of instrumental (political, managerial, bureaucratic) and moral reasoning; and the poetic (which embraces all of poetry, literature,

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music and the arts). These respective styles of thinking produce utterances of contrasting kinds (or in Oakeshott’s terminology, they produce different ‘literatures’ or ‘texts’): scientific theories; political pronouncements and actions; works of art, and so on. This conceptual framework, I think, explains why it would be inappropriate to speak of the voices of architecture, therapy, celebrity culture, the media, social classes or genders – inappropriate, that is, if we wish to remain faithful to Oakeshott’s idea. The three voices Oakeshott delineates are fundamentally diverse. Each speaks with a different purpose. Science is governed by the ideals of inquiry and truth: to discover, describe and explain how things are. The voice of practice seeks satisfaction rather than truth; its governing ideals are expediency, on the one hand, and justice or right conduct, on the other. In contrast, the poetic is distinct from both theoretical and practical reasoning in being neither theoretical, nor practical, nor reasoning. Poetry, Oakeshott tells us, is contemplation where ‘there is no problem to be solved, no hypothesis to be explored, no restlessness to be overcome, no desire to be satisfied, or approval to be won, there is no “This, therefore, That”, no passage from image to image in which each movement is a step in an elucidation or in the execution of a project’ (513). Its object, rather, is ‘delight’.6 But it is not just that the voices have different ends. They represent different ways of ‘imagining’ the world, as Oakeshott puts it. Each voice presents the world under a different aspect. They manifest the difference between the world seen as the totality of facts, or an arena of action, or an object of beauty and delight. Those ways of seeing bring with them different modes of experience, description, explanation and appreciation, and there exists no universal currency into which they all can be converted.

Conversation The voices have their respective idioms, but their utterances are said to meet in ‘conversation’. Oakeshott distinguishes conversation from inquiry or debate. Conversation can involve argument, of course, but this is not its essence. More important to Oakeshott is the play of ideas, the way in which ‘[t]houghts of different species take wing and play around one another’ and connections are found between apparently remote ideas. This is a source of creative instability. In conversation, ‘ “facts” appear only to be resolved once more into the possibilities from which they were made; “certainties” are shown to be combustible’ by being laid alongside ideas of another order (489). In this, the voices stand in no hierarchy and the conversation is a means to no end: ‘It is with conversation as with gambling’, Oakeshott writes memorably, ‘its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering’ (490).7

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What Oakeshott says here certainly fits at least part of our everyday notion of conversation. We do typically contrast conversation and argument (‘What are you two arguing about?’, ‘Nothing, we’re just having a conversation’). And though acquiring knowledge and arriving at a shared conclusion might be outcomes of conversation, they do not have to be. The idea of ‘making conversation’ evokes a mutual exchange of views, where there is reciprocal recognition among the participants, who give and take, speak and listen, in the common activity of conversing, an activity properly entered into for its own sake rather than for its results. As with friendship, you do not participate in conversation for what you can get out of it, short of the pleasure of conversation itself.8 However, the more Oakeshott’s notion of conversation converges with our everyday conception, the less obvious it is that the three voices he delineates can be said to converse. If voices in a conversation are to engage one another, they must have something in common. There must be a common subject, something the voices are conversing about. There must be a common will to discuss it, and the discussion must not be irreconcilably at cross purposes. But, as Oakeshott portrays them, the voices of science, practice and poetry look to be speaking languages too different for conversation between them to be possible. Since Oakeshott implies these languages construct the ‘worlds’ they enable us to ‘imagine’, the prospect of finding a common subject matter looks remote. Consider the implications of Oakeshott’s claim that the ‘ “natural” world of the scientist is an artefact no less than the world of practical activity; but it is an artefact constructed on a different principle and in response to a different impulse’ (506). Doesn’t this constructionist moment undermine the very idea of conversation across idioms?9 Even if we set aside such philosophical obstacles, the fact remains that in a real conversation, the participants address one another – maybe they talk past one another, maybe they are not on one another’s wavelength, but there is conversation only where there is an attempt at mutual address. Gadamer (1989a: 367) writes that ‘conversation is a process of coming to an understanding’ and that ‘the first condition of the art of conversation is ensuring that the other person is with us’ (385). But that is not how it is with science, politics and art. Scientists do not address their theories to politicians, policymakers, artists, or to humanity at large. Nothing like that is going on in ‘the conversation of mankind’, if that image is supposed to relate to the real practice of science, politics and the arts. Clearly, Oakeshott’s conception of the conversation of mankind is a construction. We are to imagine the voices as if in conversation, regardless of whether their actual pronouncements are made in that spirit. But is this a helpful way of envisaging a culture or civilization? Some critics think not. John White (2007: 26), for example, comments dismissively that ‘Oakeshott’s

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“conversation” evokes the wide-ranging, unfocused atmosphere of an upper class dinner party’. White’s remark, however, does not strike the right chord. It fails to countenance the fundamentally educational dimension of Oakeshott’s picture. The perspective from which the voices in the conversation of mankind are perceived to be in conversation is that of the learner. It is the perspective of the pupil, the student, the scholar – the intellectual historian, say, or the philosopher – that is, a person who seeks to apprehend and understand the currents that compose her intellectual culture and how they, broadly speaking, hang together. To parody the Kantian idiom, Oakeshott’s manifold depends on a transcendental unity, not of apperception, but of curiosity. Its unifying principle is the ‘I wonder’ that accompanies all my imaginings. In accord with this, Oakeshott’s view of the practice of conversation is modelled, not on the dinner party, but on the life of an academic community, such as a British public school or an Oxford or Cambridge college.10 Oakeshott’s vision expresses an ideal of fellowship embodied by those colleges, where scholars and students in many different disciplines are expected to be able to converse with one another. This is an ideal of academic community where everyone, scholars and students alike, is a learner, and there are opportunities for informed conversation between thinkers who occupy very different walks of academic life.11 Oakeshott’s critics will likely respond that my defence only brings out that Oakeshott has too idealist or intellectualist a conception of culture or civilization. Not all human intercourse involves the exchange of ideas. But Oakeshott is so enraptured by the life of the mind that he is interested only in the play of ideas and the quest for understanding. As a result, he models the human condition itself on the situation of the pupil at Winchester or a student at Balliol engaged in the ‘intellectual adventure’ of the search for understanding and self-knowledge. But this, it might be countered, is an extraordinarily parochial position, and moreover one that grotesquely idealizes college life. Here is an alternative picture. Wittgenstein, Karl Britton (1967: 59–60) tells us, expressed a very strong dislike of academic life in general and of Cambridge in particular . . . He had, he said, been only once to high table at Trinity and the clever conversation of the dons had so horrified him that he had come out with both hands over his ears. The dons talked like that only to score: they did not even enjoy doing it. He said his own bedmaker’s conversation, about the private lives of her previous gentlemen and about her own family, was far preferable. It is no great distance from these observations to a number of predictable objections that Oakeshott’s conception of the conversation of mankind is elitist and ethnocentric; he has an uncritical confidence in the notion of

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civilization; he fails to consider questions of which voices are included and which excluded; and so on. And once these issues are introduced, Oakeshott’s famous metaphor starts to look rather less attractive.12

Many voices, one subject One way to respond to these objections is to sidestep them by advancing a reading that captures significant truth in Oakeshott’s contribution but does not invite such criticisms. After all, at the core of Oakeshott’s position is the thought that a subject matter can be illuminated in contrasting ways by different voices exhibiting contrasting styles of thinking. He illustrates this by observing that we can take scientific (or quasi-scientific), practical or aesthetic approaches to the idea of democracy (1991f: 518). Each voice presents the subject under a different aspect, enabling us to see it from a distinct point of view. Hence to think of the voices as in conversation is to consider how the deliverances of one mode of experience can be complemented or challenged by the deliverances of another. A person who is well educated is alive to this conversation, and understands how the subject matter in question is open to illumination in diverse ways from different perspectives. This seems a thought worth retaining, whatever shortcomings there may be elsewhere in Oakeshott’s vision. To develop this idea, we must set aside the sceptical concern raised above about whether the voices construct their respective subject matters so differently that discourse between them is impossible. Let us assume there is no a priori obstacle to conversation. From this, of course, it does not follow that the voices are always given a common subject matter. This is obviously not so. Conversation is often about finding or creating something in common rather than discoursing about some subject matter shared in advance. And where a common subject can be identified, it does not follow that the voices will all have something worthwhile to say about it. Let me illustrate the basic idea with a case where Oakeshott’s three ‘most notable’ voices come to bear on a common subject. ‘Asperger’s Syndrome’ is a term that was coined to denote a kind of autism, initially characterized by the Viennese psychologist Hans Asperger in his 1944 paper ‘ “Autistic Psychopathy” in Childhood’ (Asperger 1991). Asperger’s contribution was largely neglected until a 1981 paper by Lorna Wing sparked interest in the idea that his work could be used to identify a distinctive form of autism, exhibited by individuals typically of normal or above-average intelligence, and distinct from the ‘classic autism’ characterized by Asperger’s contemporary, Leo Kanner, in 1943. The idea gained momentum and was endorsed by the contributors to an influential collection of papers,

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Autism and Asperger Syndrome, edited by Uta Frith and published in 1991. Since that time, interest in autism has grown exponentially and discussion of Asperger’s Syndrome has been an important part of the burgeoning conversation about ‘the autistic spectrum’. That conversation includes contributions from all three of the voices that figure in Oakeshott’s paper. It was the voice of science that first brought the syndrome into view and sought to articulate clear diagnostic criteria. Gillberg and Gillberg (1989) offered six: (1) severe impairment in reciprocal social interaction; (2) all-absorbing narrow interest; (3) imposition of routines and interests (on oneself and/or on others); (4) speech and language problems (which might include delayed language development, formal/pedantic language, odd prosody); (5) problems in non-verbal communication (which might include clumsy body language, limited use of gestures and limited or inappropriate facial expressions); (6) motor clumsiness.13 In addition to characterizing diagnostic criteria that define the syndrome in terms of characteristic behaviours, science looks to identify core cognitive-developmental factors that unify and explain the behaviours and to examine whether they can be explained neurologically and whether they are the outcome of genetic or environmental influences. The voice of science asks: What behaviours define the syndrome? What explains these behaviours? (What mechanisms underlie them?) One answer, already influential when Asperger’s came to prominence, is that autism is linked to problems in ‘mind reading’; that is, autistic people have special difficulties attributing mental states to others. They do not naturally develop a ‘theory of mind’ to understand and interpret other people’s behaviour, and this accounts for their difficulties with social interaction, facial expression, figurative language, and so on. There are, of course, many more avenues of scientific inquiry, such as the relation of Asperger’s to other conditions and disorders both within and beyond the autistic spectrum, and the ways in which our understanding of autism illuminates the minds of so-called ‘neurotypicals’ (see, e.g., Frith 2003; Baron-Cohen 2008). In addition to utterances in the scientific voice addressing scientific questions, the voice of practical activity grapples with questions about how to cope with Asperger’s Syndrome, that is, how parents, siblings, teachers and caregivers can best assist those with Asperger’s.14 What strategies can they adopt to promote learning, to help children and adults with Asperger’s understand their strengths and weaknesses, cope with the anxiety and distress that can accompany living with the syndrome, and painstakingly develop abilities that naturally develop in neurotypical people? (And whilst we’re on the subject of ‘normality’, the person with Asperger’s must learn to cope with the cruelty that can be exhibited by neurotypicals, especially children, with their preoccupation with conformity and propensity to tease or ridicule those they perceive as deviant and abnormal.) Part of the practical

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literature is written for, and sometimes by, those with Asperger’s or highfunctioning autism, and sometimes with the objective of affirming an identity and celebrating ‘neurodiversity’.15 To have Asperger’s – to be an ‘Aspie’ – is to be a certain kind of person, different from the norm, but not, for that reason lesser or ‘handicapped’ as such. And of course there is more than just literature at issue here. There are practices, learning strategies, educational and social policies, the reality of life on the autistic spectrum, not just its representation in articles or books. And then there is the voice of poetry, which has recently produced some striking representations of individuals on the autistic spectrum. Here we have Mark Haddon’s best-selling The Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime, which provides a remarkable introduction to the perspective of Christopher, a troubled fifteen-year-old boy with Asperger’s Syndrome (or something like it: Haddon denies he was writing about Asperger’s or autism as such).16 There are also the movies Adam, starring Hugh Dancy, as a thirtysomething man with Asperger’s Syndrome and Snow Cake, in which Sigourney Weaver portrays a bereaved mother with autism; the biopic Temple Grandin, starring Claire Danes; and Max Burkholder’s outstanding portrayal of Max Braverman in the TV series Parenthood, which follows the character from the time he is diagnosed with Asperger’s at age eight until his midteens. Burkholder’s character is brilliantly complemented by Ray Romano’s portrayal of Hank, an adult who becomes aware of his own Asperger’s in middle age. These poetic representations are revealing, especially Haddon’s book, which, being written in the first person, requires the reader to identify with the perspective of its hero. It is tempting to conclude, therefore, that to understand the phenomenon properly, we need to appreciate the insights available from all three voices, and see how they are modulated by laying them alongside one another, as Oakeshott’s image of conversation recognizes so well. So one thought worth retaining from Oakeshott’s metaphor is the idea that different disciplines, or styles of thinking, bring insights of different kinds to the table. It follows that tendencies to specialization and the insulation of different disciplinary perspectives should be resisted to enable students to see the bigger picture and to encourage the cross-fertilization of ideas. Oakeshott’s notion of conversation helps consolidate this idea. However, to leave the matter here would be to embrace too smooth and detached a conception of conversation. A proper view needs to countenance three further thoughts. First – and this is an idea uncongenial to Oakeshott – our example shows how difficult, indeed impossible, it can be to delineate the three voices in the way Oakeshott suggests, since many of the scientific specialists in the field are also clinicians and so the voices of science and practice are inextricably interwoven. This is obvious if we consider the status

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of authoritative diagnostic manuals, such as the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association), which are simultaneously scientific and practical texts. Second, we need to do justice to the drama of conversation, to the antagonism it can contain and the surprising turns it can take. In the case before us, it may be that the three voices are sometimes in harmonious interplay, with scientific insights suggesting therapeutic advances, the experience of practitioners informing research, and the insights of literary works inspiring, and being inspired by, science and practice. But sometimes there is discord within and between the voices. Questions may be raised about the framework in which the science has been conducted, the definition of diagnostic criteria, whether the current theories of autism are cogent, and so on. There is also the issue of how the different voices represent people – as objects of scientific scrutiny, of action and of aesthetic contemplation – raising the matter of how each voice succeeds or fails in conveying the humanity of the people involved, so that they appear not just as objects of discussion but as agents, as subjects of their own lives (see Hacking 2007, 2009a, 2009b). All this is nicely illustrated by the fact that in 2013 the conversation about Asperger’s took a very dramatic turn when the DSM , in its fifth incarnation (American Psychiatric Association 2013) deleted the syndrome as a diagnostic category, folding it and two other disorders into the broad category of ‘autistic spectrum disorder’ (ASD ). With this, Asperger’s was ‘abolished’.17 Third, we must acknowledge that, at least sometimes, the subject matter under discussion does not exist independently of the conversation about it: the conversation itself is at least partly constitutive of it. That is, whether there is a syndrome to converse about at all is something that itself depends on the turn of the conversation. This is not a blanket concession to Oakeshott’s idealist assertion that the voices construct their own worlds, for it pertains to the conversation as a whole and then only to specific kinds of subject. But it does seek to illustrate further the human drama of the conversation. The ‘abolition’ of Asperger’s was met with expressions of considerable concern, and not just because social benefits and educational accommodations were linked to the diagnosis. As Hacking’s writings have brought out so well, the categories we deploy to characterize human beings make available to them ways of being human. As we noted above, Asperger’s had become an identity, a mode of self-understanding, which now, it seemed, had been made somehow obsolete.18 Any reconstruction of Oakeshott’s idea of conversation must be wary of presenting too detached a view of the interplay of voices. If you are in the midst of the conversation like this – if you are its subject – then what is said speaks to who you are. Before we leave the discussion of autism, I want to note a further way it provides a significant test for Oakeshott’s metaphor. The notion of conversation

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is relevant not just to how to model the relations of voices talking about autism. It is also relevant to understanding one of the principal obstacles faced by those on the spectrum, for they typically struggle with conversation in the everyday sense of that notion.19 This is because of their difficulties in understanding the perspective and interests of others. This circumstance in one way amplifies the relevance of Oakeshott’s image to educational issues, for helping people with autism cope with conversation is undeniably an important objective in their education. At the same time, we must recognize that poor conversation skills, combined with insensitivity to the utterances in certain voices, are perfectly compatible with a high degree of learning. However much we deploy Oakeshott’s image of conversation to express the ideal of an educated person, we must not embrace it uncritically, as if fluency in conversation were a mark of the human condition. It is not, though we hardly need talk of syndromes or disorders to make the point: there is nothing unusual or abnormal about inarticulacy and awkwardness.

Truth Our discussion of Asperger’s Syndrome suggests there is one further aspect of Oakeshott’s position that needs to be adjusted: Oakeshott’s apparent commitment to something like relativism. When he distinguishes conversation from inquiry, Oakeshott writes that in conversation, ‘there is no “truth” to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought’ (1991f: 489).20 This does not seem to fit the conversation about autism just considered. For even if Oakeshott is right that conversation as such is not a method of discovery, we typically engage in conversation to gain insight. But insight is a concept that cannot be elucidated without essential reference to truth. Insight is insight into how things are, into how to live, into what is aesthetically revealing, moving, arresting, and so on. It will not do to imply that conversation requires us merely to listen to different voices and find inspiration in their interplay. That imposes too aesthetic a perspective on the conversation itself. If the voices illuminate their subjects then what they say can be evaluated for its truth. Oakeshott’s more relativistic pronouncements are no doubt intended to counter the hegemonic tendencies of certain voices. Some voices would rather be in monologue; they try to muscle out others (492). One concern is scientism; another is the predominance of bureaucratic or managerial thinking; another, the most threatening, is an alliance between the two. Oakeshott’s famous article is all about resisting positivistic philistinism and encouraging us to listen to the voice of poetry. With this in mind, he denies that conversation has truth or any practical objective as its end, thereby subsuming the voices of science and practice into a wider enterprise of which poetry is a part. At the

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same time, he attempts to protect poetry from the other voices by affirming that ‘poetry has nothing to teach us about how to live or what we ought to approve’ (540). If poetry does not provide information or instruction, it is not in competition with science or practice, so it cannot be made irrelevant by them. This strategy is a mistake. Oakeshott wants to say that the voice of poetry is indispensable for understanding certain things, such as love, friendship and childhood.21 But this is to admit that the conversation is one in which the voices have to assert themselves against one another. In that confrontation, truth is a relevant criterion. Oakeshott embraces relativism to insulate the beleaguered voice of poetry, when he ought to have argued that if you neglect the poetic you will miss something worth seeing. Your conception will be impoverished; it will be distorted, one-dimensional and false to its object.

Initiation In response to concerns that Oakeshott’s conception of conversation is confused, idealist, ethnocentric and elitist, I have been expounding a version of his position, focused on the idea that an educated person is able to discern how diverse voices can illuminate a common subject matter in contrasting ways, so long as we heed the fact that the voices may not be as clearly distinguishable as Oakeshott maintains and acknowledge the drama of conversation, together with the ways in which conversation can constitute its objects. Finally, I argued that we must not disparage truth as an ideal of conversation, as Oakeshott seems to. I want now to set this position in the context of other significant Oakeshottian ideas about what it is to become educated. Human beings, Oakeshott argues, ‘inhabit a world of intelligibles’ (2001d: 63), a world ‘composed not of “things”, but of “meanings”; that is, of occurrences in some manner recognized, identified, understood and responded to’ in light of how they are understood (65). Human beings are not born at home in the world of intelligibles, for ‘meanings have to be learnt’. We cannot decide how to live ex nihilo. Each of us must draw on an ‘inheritance of human achievements’: an inheritance of feelings, emotions, images, visions, thoughts, beliefs, ideas, understandings, intellectual and practical enterprises, languages, relationships, organizations, canons and maxims of conduct, procedures, rituals, skills, works of art, books, musical compositions, tools, artifacts and utensils – in short, what Dilthey called a gestige Welt (Oakeshott 2001c: 37).22 This inheritance is both part of our world and the means by which the world is disclosed to us, for although the world cannot be reduced to the movement of ideas, everything in it confronts us as something to be understood. To

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accept this inheritance is to acquire, not a set of doctrines or ‘ready-made ideas’, but intellectual virtues, conversational aptitudes and powers of critical reasoning, that permit ‘another’s thoughts to re-enact themselves in one’s own mind’ and facilitate understanding (Oakeshott 2001d: 69). This is Oakeshott’s view of the human condition, and the reason he gives so much prominence in his writings to education, the situation of the learner, and the duties of the teacher. This comes out well in the following quotation: Education . . . is the transaction between the generations in which newcomers to the scene are initiated into the world which they are to inhabit. This is a world of understandings, imaginings, meanings, moral and religious beliefs, relationships, practices – states of mind in which the human condition is to be discerned as recognitions of and responses to the ordeal of consciousness. These states of mind can be entered into only by being themselves understood, and they can be understood only by learning to do so. To be initiated into this world is learning to become human; and to move within it freely is being human, which is a ‘historic’, not a ‘natural’ condition. Thus, an educational engagement is at once a discipline and a release; and it is the one by virtue of being the other. It is a difficult engagement of learning by study in a continuous and exacting redirection of attention and refinement of understanding which calls for humility, patience and courage. Its reward is an emancipation from the mere ‘fact of living’, from the immediate contingencies of place and time of birth, from the tyranny of the moment and from the servitude of a merely current condition; it is the reward of a human identity and of a character capable in some measure of the moral and intellectual adventure which constitutes a specifically human life (Oakeshott 2001d: 103–4). No discussion of Oakeshott can properly ignore this dimension of his thought, with its emphasis on adventure and emancipation, and on education as the source of our humanity. This idea brings Oakeshott’s thought into dialogue with a number of diverse thinkers on whom I have written in the past – the Russians Lev Vygotsky and Evald Ilyenkov, Jerome Bruner and Wittgenstein, and John McDowell (see Bakhurst 2011). It was also taken up by those directly inspired by Oakeshott, notably R. S. Peters. Whatever the limitations in Oakeshott’s presentation of his view, nothing in this position need embrace an over-intellectualized or idealist view of culture, an ethnocentric view of civilization, or educational elitism. So we should not let those bugbears prevent us from developing this picture. The picture also introduces a crucial element of Oakeshott’s thought I have neglected so far, namely the personal character of education as expressed in the relation of student and teacher.

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In the rest of this chapter, I shall focus on the central notion of education as initiation. Oakeshott uses the term ‘initiation’ frequently, and without much commentary. The term can be used, of course, to refer to the acquisition of a body of knowledge. The child begins with no knowledge of, say, history or science, and education gradually initiates her into some part of the historical and scientific wisdom of her day. This is clearly part of what Oakeshott means by initiation into the conversation of mankind. But it is also important that Oakeshott invokes the idea of initiation to capture a specific kind of teaching and learning. In many cases, a person can acquire knowledge, theoretical or practical, by observation, reasoning, testimony or some combination thereof. She may see what to think or do, or work out what to think or do, or understand what to think or do by being told so or shown. In the classroom, a student typically learns by observing and reasoning for herself in combination with receiving instruction from her teacher. Such learning presupposes the student has a degree of familiarity with, and competence in, the ‘knowledge domain’ in question. To learn by observation, she must know what to look for and how to interpret what she sees, and this presupposes she possesses a range of relevant concepts. To learn by reasoning, she must be familiar with relevant kinds of argument and explanation and appreciate the norms that govern the domain. To learn by instruction, she must have the competence to understand and act upon what she is told. What, then, of a student who lacks the requisite familiarity and competence? If you lack the basic concepts in a domain, if you do not have a feel for the kind of explanation and argument employed there, you will not be able to learn by observation, reasoning and testimony since you will not know what to look for, how to work things out for yourself, or how to take instruction. In such a situation, you need to be ‘initiated into’ the domain in question, so that you ‘grasp’ the relevant concepts, ‘pick up’ the forms of thinking or ways of acting that are characteristic of the domain. Only when you have the necessary background can you begin to navigate for yourself, acquiring new knowledge by observation, reasoning and overt instruction. Prior to that the learning process is a matter of finding your way – or being led – into the domain in question, and the relation of teacher and learner is akin to master and apprentice, rather than one between epistemic equals. There are a number of different contexts where talk of initiation seems obviously apt. One is the development of the child’s first concepts. McDowell (1996), for example, argues that the distinctive character of human minds resides in our responsiveness to reasons. Human children, however, are not born ‘inhabitants in the space of reasons’, but become so as they acquire conceptual powers in the course of learning a first language. With language come powers of intelligent experience, intentional thought and action. On this view, we cannot portray the child as learning her first concepts by using

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observational or reasoning abilities that themselves presuppose conceptual competence, since this would be to attribute to her the very powers we are trying to explain. Hence McDowell talks of the child as ‘initiated into’ the space of reasons in a process of formation or Bildung. McDowell gives pride of place to language learning in the process of the formation of reason. But he is not interested merely in the early stages of first language acquisition, important though they are. In a way rather reminiscent of Oakeshott, McDowell argues that to acquire a language is to enter a tradition of thinking. The child learning her first language gains more than a means to say things: she learns what to say. She thereby gradually acquires the beginnings of a conception of the world and facility with certain styles of thinking and reasoning. This process continues as the child attains sufficient linguistic and conceptual powers to receive instruction and to learn for herself. For as she becomes literate, attends school, and so on, so she becomes exposed to new areas of knowledge and styles of thought within which she must find her way. You can be taught history or physics, but you cannot acquire the ability to think like a historian or physicist by following instructions. You need to develop a ‘feel’ for the subject, and this you acquire through initiation.23 Along with initiation into the conceptual repertoire and styles of thinking of the diverse voices that compose our intellectual culture, Oakeshott also speaks of the cultivation of ‘intellectual and moral habits’. As he puts it, education ‘is not acquiring a stock of ready-made ideas, images, sentiments, beliefs and so forth; it is learning to look, to listen, to think, to feel, to imagine, to believe, to understand, to choose and to wish’ (2001d: 67) and to develop ‘the indispensable habits of attention, concentration, patience, exactness, courage and intellectual honesty’ (69). Here Oakeshott invokes distinctively conversational virtues: the ability to listen attentively, to discern what is of relevance, to express oneself clearly and engagingly, to respect one’s interlocutor. These skills must be cultivated; they cannot be conveyed by formal instruction, they must be ‘imparted’. They are acquired through being in the company of those who already possess them. The idea at the heart of this discussion is reasonably intuitive: certain kinds of learning involve a ‘catching on’ that, though it may be encouraged or elicited, cannot be taught head-on, either because what needs to be learnt is a precondition of formal instruction or because the skills in question are essentially uncodifiable, or codifiable only in a form intelligible to the already initiated. For Oakeshott, this is a crucial insight with far-reaching ramifications. For example, in his essay ‘Rationalism in Politics’, Oakeshott draws a distinction between the two sorts of knowledge that inform human activity: what he calls ‘technical knowledge’, which can be formulated in propositions, rules and procedures, and ‘practical knowledge’, which cannot be so formulated but

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‘exists only in use, is not reflective and (unlike technique) cannot be formulated in rules’ (Oakeshott 1991b: 12; see also Oakeshott 2001c: §3). Technical knowledge can be taught by overt forms of instruction but practical knowledge, Oakeshott tells us, can only be ‘imparted’ through ‘apprenticeship to a master’; that is, ‘it can be acquired only by continuous contact with someone who is perpetually practising it’ (1991b: 15). Oakeshott uses this distinction to attack the rationalistic assumption that all genuine knowledge is technical knowledge and to argue that genuine political understanding presupposes initiation into a tradition of political thinking understood as a repository of practical knowledge. This underlies Oakeshott’s distinctive vision of political education and his critique of political ideology as an expression of misbegotten belief in the sovereignty of technique. I am not entirely comfortable with Oakeshott’s sharp distinction between the technical and the practical as kinds of knowledge. Better to argue, as Oakeshott sometimes seems to (e.g. 13–14) that all human activity, whether informed by codified rules or procedures, presupposes an element of uncodifiable know-how. This we can maintain on the grounds that it is perfectly possible to understand a set of instructions about what to do without being able to put them into practice. Suppose we can codify into a set of propositions what someone knows when they know how to ride a bicycle. A person might learn this set of propositions and yet still not be able to ride a bicycle (he might know that he must keep his balance without knowing how to). All technical knowledge that x is to be done rests upon know-how about how to get x done (cf. Ryle 1972: 436). Any formulation of that know-how is going to fall short of the actual ability to act, which must simply be grasped. Later in his paper, Oakeshott makes a similar argument with respect to moral knowledge (1991b: 40–41). We may, of course, formulate rules of conduct in the form of moral principles, but only someone who grasps the spirit of the moral outlook that informed the formulation of the principles will know how properly to apply them, especially in hard cases. The principles do not obviate the need for judgement, for the principles are merely sedimentations of a living view that must be brought to bear on the particularities of the case before us. Practical wisdom cannot be turned into a book of rules.24 One might try to take this position further, arguing that all forms of thinking and reasoning, whether purely contemplative or expressed in bodily action, involve elements of uncodifiable know-how. Thinking is, after all, a form of action. Even entertaining the propositional thought that such-and-such is the case involves the deployment of conceptual powers, and deciding what to believe involves the exercise of judgement. This cannot be entirely mandated by rules because any putative rule must be followed and that cannot be decided by the application of a further rule on pain of a regress. Here we are in the territory of Wittgenstein’s famous remarks on rule following

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(Wittgenstein, 1953: §§138–242). Wittgenstein’s arguments show that all normative judgements – that is, all judgements to the effect that an utterance or action is correct or incorrect, right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate – rest upon a form of understanding that cannot be instructively codified but is simply manifest in action. It follows that a precondition of all teaching is that there exists a fundamental accord in perspective between teacher and pupil. Wittgenstein (§185) gives a fictional example where that accord is missing. A teacher asks a pupil to continue the mathematical series ‘+2’. The pupil begins, ‘2, 4, 6, 8 . . .’ and continues up to 1,000, whereupon she continues ‘1,004, 1,008, 1,012, 1,016 . . .’ When asked to explain herself, the student replies that she did what she thought she was meant to do. As far as she is concerned, she was just going on the same way as before. What has gone wrong? It is tempting to say that the pupil gave the rule the wrong interpretation. There are, after all, infinitely many ways of construing the teacher’s instruction that can be made out to fit the rule. What the pupil needs to grasp, we might conclude, is the correct interpretation. But how can we convey the correct interpretation when any instruction is itself open to multiple interpretations? This looks devastating: if any course of action can be made out to be determined by the rule then the rule determines nothing and there is no such thing as correctness or incorrectness and no such thing as meaning anything by what one says. Wittgenstein’s response is to argue that ‘what this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call “obeying the rule” and “going against it” in actual cases’ (1953: §201). It follows that teacher and pupil must be, or must get themselves, on the same wavelength. All normative assessment rests on this fundamental accord (see Cavell 1969: 52). Some of what is shared between pupil and teacher must be absolutely primitive, basic to our humanity or our ‘form of life’, but other dimensions of accord must be awakened in us, nurtured and cultivated. Hence the significance of ‘initiation’.

Conclusion I began this chapter by expounding Oakeshott’s conception of the conversation of mankind. After raising a number of objections, I defended a version of Oakeshott’s view that took off from the idea of conversation among diverse voices illuminating a common subject matter, supplementing and revising that basic insight in a number of ways. This reading preserves Oakeshott’s account of an educated person as someone who has a facility with the different styles of thinking constitutive of our intellectual culture. I then considered Oakeshott’s view of initiation into an intellectual inheritance, a conception central to his idea of the human condition and of what it is to

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become educated, to acquire the capacity to orientate oneself in the conversation of mankind. I said that Oakeshott’s conception of initiation can be separated from the idealist notion of culture, the ethnocentric view of civilization, or the educational exclusiveness that some find in his work. However, though it can be so separated, Oakeshott’s view does rather lend itself to elitism and narrowminded intellectual conservatism. R. S. Peters, for example, argues that educating children is initiating them into the norms that govern the disciplines they study so that they can come to appreciate what is so compelling and uplifting about what it is they are learning. So far so good. But Peters (2003: 65) proceeds to portray children as ‘barbarian[s] outside the gates’ who must be got ‘inside the citadel of civilization so that they will understand and love what they see when they get there’. Oakeshott’s stress on intellectual adventure and habits of mind that facilitate expansive conversation is transmuted by Peters into a hymn to ‘the generalized Puritan virtues of enterprise, orderliness, thoroughness, and perseverance’ (67), and teachers are implored to hold up standards of achievement to prevent children being lured ‘along less exacting paths’ by popular culture and advertising (66). And this is not just Peters’s interpretation. Oakeshott himself constantly laments what he sees as the ‘corruption’ of schools and universities and the ‘abolition of education’ proper in favour of vocational or practical pursuits, for which he blames Francis Bacon, the rise of the social sciences, and the idea that educational institutions should ‘socialize’ children to play a productive role in society, among other developments (see e.g. Oakeshott 2001d: 78–9). But if we exhibit some of the conversational virtues Oakeshott valued so highly, and listen carefully and critically to what he is saying, there is still a lot we can learn from him. It is no longer meaningful to express scepticism about the way natural science or modern languages have been included in the school curriculum or about the existence of business schools in universities. Those ships have long sailed. But there is much to Oakeshott’s idea that schools and universities should be places of seclusion from the mundane, where intellectual adventures may be pursued unencumbered by the demands of everyday life. I believe that this idea should remain central to our conception of formal education, even though we can no longer think that that is all that a school or university should be. It is enough that we defend the idea of education as an intellectual adventure undertaken for its own sake, without thinking that to prepare students for life is a corrupting ideal. Initiation into the conversation of humanity can remain a primary goal of education, even if we take a different view from Oakeshott about what this must entail, and even if we recognize that equipping students to participate in that conversation is not the only legitimate educational imperative. Or so I believe.

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Notes 1 Oakeshott describes liberal education as ‘ “liberal” because it is liberated from the distracting business of satisfying contingent wants’ (2001e: 15). 2 And not only of education: Richard Rorty ends his provocative masterpiece, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979: 319), by calling for philosophy to stop thinking of culture as an edifice of knowledge (the foundations of which it is philosophy’s business to secure), and understand it instead as a conversation (which philosophers have a duty to foster and sustain). In this, Rorty is explicitly inspired by Oakeshott’s reflections on the conversation of mankind. 3 Of course, Oakeshott has many followers, and the idea of conversation is much discussed in the literature on his work. For recent commentary on all aspects of Oakeshott’s contribution, see the collections Franco and Marsh 2012 and Podoksik 2012. Each volume contains an essay on Oakeshott on education, by Paul Franco and Kevin Williams respectively. Williams is also the author of a book-length treatment of the topic (2007). Oakeshott develops some of the pedagogical dimensions of his vision of conversation in the lesser known, posthumously published essay, ‘The Voice of Education in the Conversation of Mankind’ (2004). See Williams 2014 for thoughtful discussion of relevant themes. 4 Steele in The Spectator, Thursday 28 June 1711 and Johnson in The Adventurer, No. 126, Saturday 19 January 1754. 5 In a slightly later essay (1991g), though one he incorporated into the same anthology as ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’, Oakeshott takes a somewhat looser view, writing that ‘a civilization (and particularly ours) may be regarded as a conversation being carried on between a variety of human activities, each speaking with a voice, or in a language of its own; the activities (for example) represented in moral and practical endeavour, religious faith, philosophic reflection, artistic contemplation and historical or scientific inquiry and explanation’ (187). Oakeshott’s conception of contrasting voices is a descendent of the idea of different ‘modes of experience’, presented in his first and most overtly philosophical book, Experience and its Modes (1933), a work with roots in the tradition of British idealism. In that book, Oakeshott devotes a chapter to the nature of historical experience and he returned to the nature of history and the character of historical understanding at various points in his career, including a paper (1991e) pretty much contemporaneous with ‘The Voice of Poetry’. The relative neglect of history in his 1959 essay is likely merely strategic, so as not to complicate the main argument. As for religion, Oakeshott never saw it as an autonomous mode of experience or voice. In his writing, religion is often treated in relation to the world of practice, though, as Elizabeth Corey has recently argued (2012), Oakeshott’s appreciation of the poetic as an emancipation from the practical could be seen as a religious sensibility. 6 In this sense, ‘delight’ is a mode of aesthetic appreciation that can be appropriate to representations of the tragic or horrific. In such cases, we delight in the manner of the representation, not in what is represented.

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7 Oakeshott describes the relations between voices in a conversation as ‘not those of assertion and denial but the conversational relationships of acknowledgement and accommodation’ (1991f: 187). 8 Of course, someone promising to set a person straight about something might say, ‘Let me have a conversation with him’, but this use is arguably ironic and only confirms the Oakeshottian view. 9 Oakeshott makes an effort to address this issue towards the end of his famous essay. There he considers and rejects the view that poetry may contain lessons about how the world is to be understood and about the conduct of life. Such lessons are not genuine parts of the poetic content of a work of art or literature. Oakeshott argues instead that certain aspects of our practical lives, such as friendship, love and the aspiration to moral goodness, include ‘intimations of contemplative imagining capable of responding to the voice of poetry’ (1991f: 536). Friends, for example, though bound up in our practical lives, are objects of enjoyment and delight to us, and here the practical and the poetic interweave. Oakeshott’s reflections are insightful, but his discussion of how the voices come together presupposes they can be intelligible to one another rather than establishes this. Perhaps we should treat Oakeshott’s suggestion that the voices are incommensurable as hyperbolic. 10 It is noteworthy that Kevin Williams (2010: 237) quotes Oakeshott as saying, ‘In most of what I have written about education I have had my own schooldays in front of me.’ Oakeshott was a pupil at St George’s School, Harpenden, a progressive co-educational boarding school (at the time St George’s was a private school, now it is a comprehensive, voluntary-aided school). Oakeshott was then a student at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was later a fellow for twenty-two years, from 1929 until 1951. In White’s defence, once we have Oxford and Cambridge in view, the idea of erudite conversation over dinner is not far away. Stephen Miller (2006: ix) observes that ‘Oakeshott himself was a good conversationalist’ and cites John Casey’s remark that Oakeshott in his late eighties ‘regularly attended a dining society, now named after him, where he stayed half the night “enchanting undergraduates with his conversation” ’. 11 It is important to distinguish this ideal from a commitment to interdisciplinarity, which is often conceived as transcending the limitations of traditional disciplinary perspectives by combining the approaches of two or more academic fields to create a new ‘voice’. An Oakeshottian vision of academic community does not look to conversation to sublate or transform existing disciplines but simply to attend to what emerges from the interplay of their utterances. 12 Williams (2007: chs 10–11) and McCabe (2000) review these and other objections and come to Oakeshott’s defence. 13 I paraphrase from the elaborated diagnostic criteria set out in Gillberg 1991: 123. ICD -10 and DSM -IV offer somewhat different criteria (see Leekam et al. 2000). (ICD -10 is the tenth edition of the International Classification of Diseases, published by the World Health Organization. DSM -IV is the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,

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published by the American Psychiatric Association in 1994 and in revised form (DSM -IV-TR ) in 2000. On DSM -5 (2013), see below). Other attempts at specifying diagnostic criteria are found in Szatmari, Brenner and Nagy 1989 and Tantam 1988. 14 The literature is vast. Tony Attwood’s contributions are particularly worthy of note (e.g. 1998, 2015). 15 The most celebrated author in the autism community is, of course, Temple Grandin (see e.g. Grandin 2006, 2011, 2013). I should also mention Luke Jackson’s insightful Freaks, Geeks and Asperger Syndrome: A User Guide to Adolescence (2002). 16 See the entry for 16/07/09 on Haddon’s blog at markhaddon.com, where he writes that he knows little about autism and Asperger’s and expresses scepticism about ‘labels’: ‘good literature is always about peeling labels off. and treating real people with dignity is always about peeling the labels off. a diagnosis may lead to practical help. but genuinely understanding another human being involves talking and listening to them and finding out what makes them an individual, not what makes them part of a group’ (Haddon 2009). Haddon maintains this view in the theatrical programme for the National Theatre’s production of the stage play based on his book, where he writes, ‘I’ve always regretted that the phrase “Asperger Syndrome” appeared on the cover of Curious Incident when it was first published’, because Christopher, in whose voice the book is written, does not use the term but refers to himself only as ‘someone who has Behavioural Problems’. However, Haddon’s article is paired with contributions by Simon BaronCohen, who asserts that ‘Christopher is a 15-year-old with Asperger’s Syndrome’, and by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, who states, ‘Christopher probably has Asperger’s’. Another novel with an insightful portrayal of an adolescent with some autistic traits is Nick Hornby’s About a Boy, made into an outstanding film with Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Grant, and Toni Collette (though again, Asperger’s and autism are not explicitly mentioned). 17 Although Asperger’s was removed from DSM -5, it remains in ICD -10 (though the 2015 version refers to Asperger’s as ‘a disorder of uncertain nosological validity’ (http://apps.who.int/classifications/icd10/browse/2015/ en#/F84.5; accessed 22 May 2015). The DSM ’s decision might seem a significant departure from the approach of Frith and her colleagues in the 1980s and 1990s, who sought to establish Asperger’s Syndrome as a distinct form of autism, but in fact they made the case for Asperger’s largely on pragmatic grounds, recognizing the difficulty of drawing sharp boundaries between it and other conditions on, or associated with, the autistic spectrum and acknowledging that the category might at some later stage be transcended (see Wing 1991: 117–18). Wing and Gillman, in a 2011 paper written with Judith Gould responding to proposals for DSM -5, admit that they have long held that ‘the concept of a spectrum of autism fitted the facts better than any of the sub-groups’ but argue for retaining the sub-group labels on pragmatic grounds: ‘Many people with the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome object very strongly to the possible loss of their label, which they much prefer to that of autistic

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spectrum disorder or just “autism”. They also worry that their current diagnosis of Asperger syndrome will make them ineligible for medical or social services if DSM -V comes into use in the future’ (Wing, Gould and Gillman 2011, 771; cf. Attwood 2015). 18 Of course, it was argued that the removal of the syndrome as a diagnostic category did not entail that the term ‘Asperger’s Syndrome’ could or would not continue as a category naming a social identity. Only time will tell whether and to what degree it continues to have such a life. 19 If Michael Fitzgerald (2000) is right that Wittgenstein had Asperger’s, this may cast light on Wittgenstein’s flight from high table and his difficulties with college life. 20 Oakeshott’s denial that truth is the currency of conversation is among the features of his view that Rorty found so attractive. 21 ‘Everybody’s young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a miraculous confusion of poetry and practical activity in which nothing has a fixed shape and nothing has a fixed price’ (Oakeshott 1991f: 539). 22 Or what Ilyenkov, with Hegel in mind, calls ‘humanity’s spiritual culture’ or the realm of ‘the ideal’, and McDowell (at least as I suggest we read him) calls ‘the space of reasons’ (see Bakhurst 2011: 109–16). 23 We should note that initiation need not involve a teacher. Someone can initiate herself into some domain; for example, a person can learn to appreciate a musical genre that she previously knew little about and felt nothing for – jazz, for example. Self-initiation, however, presupposes that learners possess a range of relevant perceptual, conceptual and inferential resources they can employ to ‘find their way in’. 24 A similar argument is nicely made by David Wiggins (2012).

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2 Experience in Experience and its Modes Barry Allen

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ichael Oakeshott’s Experience and its Modes is a beautifully written, beautifully thought-out book. There is certainly nothing like it these days, and we are the poorer for it. Appearing in 1933, the book seems to have attracted little attention, then fallen into a hole between the Second World War and Oakeshott’s emergence after the war as a teacher at the University of London. He never mentions it in later work, and one rarely sees it referred to at all. Nevertheless his editor, Timothy Fuller, says that Experience and its Modes is ‘the foundation from which all his subsequent thought develops and to which he has remained faithful in spirit, if not always in detail’ (Oakeshott 1991a: xxiii). If the book had few readers when it was new, it has fewer now. It does not fit anything in English-speaking philosophy today. It is metaphysical, but in the wrong way for today’s metaphysicians. The author’s idea of moral philosophy would mortify our moral philosophers, and what he says about truth would make logicians gnash their teeth. The book argues all the wrong things about history, science and philosophy. Untimely then and now – what more could you ask of a masterpiece in philosophy? The work is nothing less. Experience and its Modes is perhaps the last great work of British Idealism, a movement at its height in the closing decade of the nineteenth century, especially in the work of F. H. Bradley. For Oakeshott, as for Bradley, experience is reality: it is all we know and all there is. This experience takes the form of ideas and judgement; even sensory perceptions are ideas and judgements. Experience at its fullest, which is reality at its most concrete and individual, is an entire world of ideas, coherent, systematic and satisfying. Oakeshott develops this argument with consummate skill, avoiding paradoxes that have hindered attempts to formulate a thesis in this neighbourhood. At 27

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the level of philosophical systematics, his master is Bradley, whose book Appearance and Reality Oakeshott acknowledged as influential. His voice is most his own in the details, especially what he says concerning the modes of experience, which comprises his philosophy of history, his theory of science and his understanding of conduct and civil society. His details in these discussions are always excellent, his criticism still pertinent and the exposition luminous. ‘The universe is one’, writes Bradley, explaining that ‘its differences exist harmoniously within one whole, beyond which there is nothing. Hence the Absolute is, so far, an individual and a system.’ Yet there must be more, some material that is so harmonious. A harmony of what? What gives it weight and makes it real? ‘We can reply in one word, that this matter is experience. And experience means something much the same as given and present fact . . . Sentient experience, in short, is reality, and what is not this is not real’ (Bradley 1897: 127). That is identically Oakeshott’s idea. ‘The end in experience . . . is a coherent world of ideas, a world or system of ideas which is at once unitary and complete; and it is difficult to know to what, if not to this, the word absolute might be appropriate.’ He explains that ‘absolute’ means ‘that which is absolved or emancipated from the necessity of finding its significance in relations with what is outside itself’. The absolute, the finally and fully real, ‘is self-complete, whole, individual, and removed from change’. Nothing, he says, fits that description except ‘the world of experience as a coherent unity’ (Oakeshott 1933: 47). ‘A single and all-inclusive experience’, Bradley had said, embraces ‘every partial diversity in concord’ (1897: 129). On Bradley’s account, experience is shot through with illusive appearances. Almost anything we think we experience is a mere appearance and must disappear in the unconditioned Absolute. Oakeshott never uses the word ‘appearance’ this way, or much at all. The problem with experience is not the veil of appearances; it is rather modalization. Oakeshott makes the concept of ‘modes’ of experience precise. Bradley’s use is less formal. For instance, he writes of two principal modes of experience: thought and will. Each is incomplete and one-sided. They imply one another and ‘point to a unity which comprehends and perfects them’. ‘None is primary, or can serve to explain others or the whole’ (1897: 414, 429). This is the idea of ‘modes’ that Oakeshott will systematize, but instead of opposing thought and will – a mistake, since will is thought – Oakeshott’s argument formalizes ‘modes’ as genres of abstraction, broad general ways in which experience is subjected to abstraction, meaning arrest and falsification by a concept. Modes are manners of arrest in experience. They arise when something is overlooked or elided, when some generality is abstracted from concrete, individual reality to formulate a concept. Experience becomes abstract, hypothetical and confused by an extraneous purpose.

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Experience is, it seems, congenitally afflicted by modalization. Modalization means arrest, a freeze-frame, an abstraction from the totality mistaken for the whole from the perspective of its most essential attribute. Oakeshott sets no number on these modes and has nothing vested in a catalogue. He analyses three: History, Science and Practice. These are selected for their prominence in philosophical discussions, each having had large claims made for it, a claim for that particular mode as the most real, the foundation of all the rest. Historicism and hermeneutics made such large claims about history, positivism made them about science, and utilitarianism and pragmatism made them for practical experience. Considered at their own game, history, science and practice are all right and have nothing to learn from philosophy. But when we run them together – asking whether history is a science, for example, or expecting practical wisdom from historical knowledge – and especially when we try to make one of them the foundation of knowledge and the source of value for all the rest, the result is confused and fallacious irrelevance (ignoratio elenchi). Nothing in history, science or practice is more than a mode of experience, an abstract facet of a totality indifferently designated ‘experience’ or ‘reality’. What is true with respect to one mode’s ideas and experience is merely irrelevant for the others. A practical attitude in science or a scientific attitude in history is a confused and nonsensical farrago. Oakeshott’s point is not to discredit these modes or their knowledge but to establish that each is a mode, hence abstract, and consequently must be overcome if experience is to realize its purpose. For experience has a purpose. I will come back to that.

Experience Experience is not the same as sensation or perception. Experience is judgement and thought. Its content is not given in impressions or sense data but in ideas, which may be true and can be known to be true. Sensations and sensory perceptions are so completely woven into a fabric of ideas, judgements and thought that we cannot categorically separate them, as if they were output from different modules, as they were for Aristotle and Kant. Sensation is a grade of thought and every thought is to a degree sensuous. A sensation uncontaminated by thought would have to be a bare this is, immediate, unique, and without name or character. To characterize it would require concepts and acts of recognition. Yet such a bare incomprehensible this-ness is not what sensation is like. No sensation is without some consciousness, which means some determination, some recognition, involving inference and judgement, bringing present awareness into some degree of harmony with a totality of experience. Sensation is always sensation of something, something

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meaningful. There is no sensation without apprehension, felt as part of a system of experience, a self. For instance, pain as actually felt is characterized by connection to previous experience and recognized as similar or different in kind or degree. Oakeshott therefore drew Bradley’s conclusion, which was already Hegel’s, that ‘the attempt to remain within the boundary of the mere “this” is hopeless’ (Bradley 1897: 221). The obvious conclusion is that all experience is mediated. There is no simple, immediate form of experience. It is all or nothing. Experience is a simply given totality, an entire world, or it is nothing at all. ‘To be a world is the form of every experience.’ The given, then, is not the primordial sense-datum. Sensation is thought and judgement if it is experience at all. The given is nothing less than an entire world. It may be argued that judgement requires material, and if experience is judgement, experience cannot be the source of that material, which must lie in sensation, supplying the data judgement judges. The answer to this argument is that something wholly without determination offers no starting place for thought. The only starting place for thought is thought. There is no cognitive raw material. Oakeshott throws out the whole distinction between immediate and mediated experience as something ‘vicious and misleading’ (1933: 324–25, 17). He is also unimpressed by the distinction Bertrand Russell set so much stock in between propositional knowledge and what he called ‘knowledge by acquaintance’, a kind of direct sensuous encounter with meaningful reality. For Russell, this reality of sensuous acquaintance is the condition of possibility for propositional meaning and truth. ‘Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted’ (Russell 1968: 32). From Oakeshott’s perspective, so-called knowledge by acquaintance is not categorically different from propositional judgement or thought. Acquaintance cannot be immediate and non-conceptual because no knowledge is like that. The only thing that seems special about acquaintance is sensuous vivacity, yet ‘to see, to touch, to taste, to hear, to smell is, always and everywhere, to judge and to infer’ (Oakeshott 1933: 51). Intensity of affection is irrelevant to the content of experience and the truth of thought. Acquaintance adds nothing new to knowledge judged and thought. What is given in experience is always a whole – a whole world, yet never a satisfactory world. The attitude of experience toward the given (meaning the ideas one is obliged to take seriously) is always critical, seeking a satisfaction that is intimated but inadequately present. We judge to be true (fallible truth, Oakeshott insists) what is satisfactory in experience. Acceptance or rejection of an idea is always a question of the result to a whole world of ideas. Experience is movement from a given world of ideas to one that is more of a world, a profounder unity. Unity means coherence. ‘In experience the given is simultaneously given and transformed, and the principle everywhere is

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coherence’ (37). Plurality, that is, diversity ultimate and unconditional, is characteristic of a world insufficiently known. The more perfect our knowledge, the more clearly we understand that difference and multiplicity are abstractions, and all things are one. The ‘truth’ of ideas is their service to coherence. Some ideas are truer than others, and only a singular ‘unlimitedly individual’ Idea is finally and completely true (45). In the world of conduct we share, in the world of the past as history reconstructs it, and in the world as shown to us in scientific theory, there is much truth, much knowledge, but also blunders, errors, ignorance and folly. Even the falsest idea may have some truth, and even the truest idea is not true forever. Accomplished, known truth concerns only a world of ideas and is conceivable only as a totality of experience. Particular ideas (propositions) are abstractions and none are simply or finally true. Furthermore, what is true – a coherent world of ideas – remains an abstraction until we add that this coherent world is real. The real and objective is not absolved from interference by experience but completed by it. Truth and reality come to the same: the coherence of experience at the largest scale. A world of experience is certainly not a world of mere mental events. ‘So soon as ideas are recognized as belonging to a world they have ceased to be mere psychical states’ (55). ‘My’ experience is an abstraction. To be mine is to be coherent, and to be coherent is to be more than merely my psychical state. If you tell me that it is not a chair but rather my psychical state that I am sitting on, that is simply incoherent and cannot be thought, cannot be true. To say reality is a world of ideas is not to say that it is a world of mere ideas and nothing more. Mere ideas, ideas never asserted, ideas without reality, are abstractions never found in experience. All experience is somebody’s experience, but no experience is merely mine. It is mine because I accept it, and I accept it because it appears coherent. ‘Thought’, ‘judgement’, ‘idea’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘reality’ are for Oakeshott convertible terms. They redescribe experience from different centres of emphasis. He explains ‘thought’ as the explicit, conscious qualification of existence by an idea. I understand him to say that thinking is affirming an idea, asserting it, referring it to reality as true. Even hypothetical or negative thought would have to involve such an assertion, though Oakeshott does not explain how that would work. He does say that conscious qualification of existence by an idea is a rather abstract conception of thought’s essential accomplishment. ‘In its full character’, he says, ‘thought is not the explicit qualification of existence by an idea, but the self-revelation of existence’ (24). That is his most metaphysical, most neo-Hegelian, most British-idealist statement. It appears in this work exactly once, and we never hear it again in Oakeshott’s later work, which is not to suggest that he retracted it, but that he perhaps preferred to let it speak for itself.

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I take ‘the self-revelation of existence’ to mean the becoming of being, or the actualization of the actual, which is ‘revelatory’ because being and experience are not finally different. The becoming of beings is the same event, the same happening to be, as experience (Heidegger called this event das Ereignis). A categorical distinction between being or reality and experience is abstract and untenable. It is, as Oakeshott says, almost a tradition in philosophy to postulate a gulf between experience and reality. For idealists to situate reality within experience ‘appeared to offer it an affront’. Experience and reality are correlatives. If experience is not real then nothing is real, and if reality is categorically different from experience then it is an empty notion without significance. ‘Reality is experience, not because it is made real by being known, but because it cannot without contradiction be separated from knowledge’ (49, 50). The difference we assume between reality and experience, the distinction we feel pressure to respect, is an abstraction that cannot be asserted philosophically, that is, unconditionally, without contradiction. Reality is nothing if it is not experienced, therefore the becoming of being is also a revealing of being in experience. Thought, which is another word for experience, is therefore ‘the self-revelation of existence’. Experience comes to us as a whole, a world, though always problematic and to some degree incoherent. That is because experience is modalized, subject to modalization. A mode of experience is not a specific kind of experience. There are no such kinds. Nor is it a separable part of experience, a facet. It is the whole of experience from a limited standpoint, a limited view of the whole, not partial but abstract. ‘A mode of experience is experience with reservation, it is experience shackled by partiality and presupposition.’ Experience is arrested, then, though not merely an arrest because it is also the construction of a whole from the standpoint of an arrest. ‘When I speak of a mode of experience as abstract,’ he explained, ‘I mean . . . that it is the whole of experience arrested at a certain point and at that point creating a homogeneous world of ideas.’ Each such mode so far as it is coherent ‘is true for itself’. Yet ‘so long as the mode is insisted upon, experience must remain incoherent’ (74, 74–5, 75, 79). The modality of a mode like history or science is its character as a homogeneous whole. As if reality, or experience, were finally nothing more than a historical past, or quantitative mechanical interactions, or the struggles and urging of practical affairs. Experience is that, all of that, and more. Reducing all experience (reality) to one of these modes, as somehow more real and fundamental for the rest, is a mistake. A seductive one though. No matter how much we resist modal deformation, we shall not easily forget what Oakeshott calls ‘the sweet delight which lies in the empty kisses of abstraction’ (356). In asserting its character as a homogeneous whole a mode asserts its own abstractness, and it is impossible for a mode not to assert

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itself absolutely and so to sink into error. Every mode of experience asserts its coherence and demands to be judged as concrete reality, thus continually setting itself in futile competition with the concrete totality of experience. Homogenization is the abiding defect of modalization. We will not find full satisfaction in the organization or intelligibility of experience until we overcome this impulse to homogenize, or reduce reality to a philosophical concept like history or mechanism. But why is experience modalized at all? Oakeshott says that the specific modes he discusses are not inevitable and that others may be identified. But why does experience undergo modalization in the first place? He says that wherever there is a modification there must be a totality (77). The question is whether wherever there is a totality there must be modalization. Why does this happen at all? I see the hint of an answer in his choice of the word ‘purpose’ when he explains the defect in modalization as introducing ‘a divergence from the concrete purpose in experience’ (71). That ‘concrete purpose in experience’ is the continuous elucidation of the implications of a world of ideas. That is the purpose, the purposive reality, of experience. I think we have to connect this with the idea of thought as the self-revelation of existence. That is not a mechanical process. Oakeshott apparently wants to say that experience is a purposive process, a development, a growth in coherence. As individuals our satisfactions are partial, unstable and temporary, and Oakeshott thinks we have to accept that. Imperfection is not a mere appearance, and whatever Hegel may have thought, the virtual intimation of coherence is a normative criterion of satisfaction only. It cannot undo the damage of abstraction, and is not a final cause of the perfected coherence it posits. But it is enough to intimate an ideal tendency to experience. Becoming is not just one damn thing after another. There is order, purpose, system in it. It is hard to make out, and the appeal of the modes may be to allow us the delusion of thinking we have found the key to the universe. But the difficulty of discerning this purpose does not make it unreal or ineffective. It is the energy, the intelligence, the Heraclitean fire, the Logos evinced in the coherence with which beings come to be. Oakeshott never explains himself that way. Let me look at some of what he does say. He says modalization ‘must be avoided or overcome if experience is to realize its purpose’. Experience has a purpose. It does not merely happen, but happens purposively. It has a goal, an end, a telos, norm or ideal. Oakeshott says this end is logical, not historical, meaning a norm or ideal implicit in experience and not a final cause. But it is enough to impart purposiveness and make actualization, or the becoming of beings, a phase in an ideal, virtual, merely intimated whole. Oakeshott many times invokes ‘what is satisfactory in experience’. It is forgivable for readers to take that personally. What is your experience of satisfaction, what makes your experience more satisfactory? I

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think we have to understand, however, that just as no experience is merely mine, so is no satisfaction. Ultimately, there is a satisfaction of experience that is not ‘yours’ or ‘mine’ at all. It is apparently the satisfaction of experience, the self-contained satisfaction of an absolute experience. ‘Truth is the condition of the world of experience in which that world is satisfactory to itself’ (85, 27–8; my emphasis). This virtual whole that makes each actuality partial and problematic is experience’s ‘character’. ‘Wherever in experience there is at any point an arrest . . . experience has fallen short of its full character.’ Modalization results in experience ‘impotent to achieve the full character of experience’. Discussing practical experience, he distinguishes ‘the character of practical experience of which we are conscious’ and ‘the character of practical experience which is implied in our actual experience’ (36, 218, 300). Implied, implicit, ‘there’ but not actually present. These are descriptions of the virtually real, the reality proper to a character, a tendency, a disposition, ideal or norm. The ‘full character’ of experience is what experience tends to become, the tendency in unlimited becoming. It is only a tendency because it can be hindered, deflected, arrested by abstraction. That is what modalization does. It stops the becoming that would, unimpeded, be the self-revelation of existence.

Philosophical experience ‘It is important to understand that there is, in the end, only one experience’ (Oakeshott 1933: 81). That was Bradley’s thought too: ‘Everything is experience, and also experience is one.’ This is an experience of which we have no direct knowledge. ‘We never have, or are, in a state which is the perfect unity of all aspects . . . The whole diversity must be attributed as adjectives to a unity which is not known’ (Bradley 1897: 405, 415). Oakeshott’s term for this one experience is philosophical experience. ‘Wherever in experience the concrete purpose is pursued without hindrance or distraction I shall call it philosophical experience.’ That means ‘experience without reservation . . . unsatisfied with anything short of a completely coherent world of ideas’. Philosophical experience is not the experience of philosophers. It is experience in a philosophical sense, experience philosophically considered, meaning considered absolutely, without limitation or condition. That ‘philosophical’ quality is ‘the goal or realization of experience’. Such experience is not merely a comprehensive collection. Its completeness is ‘a unity of valid, absolutely irreducible experience’. There may be irreducible differentiation within the totality. ‘On that point I have ventured no opinion’ (Oakeshott 1933: 81–2, 349, 348, 348n). The formal differences of Duns Scotus or the differentiation of finite

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modes in Spinoza are examples of how real difference can combine with monism and unconditional unity. It is because experience at the largest level has this philosophical quality that the familiar practice of philosophy can exist. Philosophy ‘is merely experience become critical of itself, experience sought and followed entirely for its own sake’. It is inquiry satisfied with nothing less than a completely coherent experience, absolved from the defects of partiality, and it ‘begins with the renunciation of all abstraction whatsoever’. Philosophical coherence is ‘the actual, operative test and criterion of every experience’. Philosophical experience ‘is the actual life and nourishment of every abstraction, every modification of experience. It is not something to come; it is the ground, not the hope of experience’ (82, 310n, 350). Experience qualified as philosophical is not one special kind of experience, like mystical experience. ‘It is experience itself undistracted and unhindered’, ‘the determination to assert reality absolutely’. To participate by the practice of philosophical criticism in this experience does not enhance one’s life but is rather in contradiction to it and denies it. Oakeshott cites Novalis: ‘He who regards life as other than an illusion that annihilates itself, is still entangled in life,’ and ‘Der echte philosophische Akt ist Selbsttötung’ (351, 352, 355, 310). He acknowledges something decadent, even depraved about the mood philosophy calls for. It requires renunciation, at least for the nonce, of everything that can be called good or evil. It is fraught with seductive opportunities to misunderstand everything, and destined to incompleteness. We will always backslide into the comforting generality of a concept, never easily forgetting those delightful albeit empty kisses of abstraction. I asked the question, why modalization at all? Oakeshott’s answer, as best I make out, is that it is a necessity of the self-revelation of existence. Why existence is not already revealed to itself and has to be subject to the process of experience, I do not know. However, I have suggested that experience is for him the becoming of beings, and as such is the actualization of something whose full character exceeds any actual, present experience. ‘A concrete whole of experience is implied in every experience whatever’ (351). Implied: ‘there’ but not present, real but not actual, which is the definition of the virtual.1 To ask ‘Why modes at all?’ is in effect to ask, ‘Why something rather than nothing at all’? Henri Bergson, a thinker Oakeshott never considers, regarded this question as a fallacious pseudo-problem, and I like to think that with that, if with little else in Bergson, Oakeshott could agree. Bergson thought the source of pseudo-problems in philosophy was the mistake of reading more into concepts than instruments for the organization of experience. Instead, we take them for insights into true being, though they never are and never will be when they are cut to our capacity and shot through with abstraction.

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That is the price we pay for the clarity and generality of a concept. Empty kisses, the comforting illusion of mastery. Bergson thought that intellect or intelligence was an evolutionary adaptation, and that concepts, as fruits of modalization, serve adaptation. A world without modes is a world where, in effect, concepts have no application. Modalization is another name for conceptualization; modes are conceptual genera. Oakeshott’s modes are not at all like what Spinoza called ‘modes’, which are the finite things of nature. Oakeshott’s modes are closer to Spinoza’s attributes, abstract aspects of a divine coherence. He identifies his modes as in each case reality under one of its aspects, or in Spinoza’s language, attributes: historical experience is the world sub specie praeteritorum, practical experience is the world sub specie voluntatis, and science is the world sub specie quantitatis. These modalizations serve thought and intelligence, and while it is not a point Oakeshott makes, conceptualization, intellectual knowledge, also serves human survival. It is hard to see how we could exist without it. A Darwinist would perhaps suggest that modalization is an adaptation, or at least that it began as an adaptation, which may have broken free of its earlier commitment to adaptation, as art and knowledge have. Oakeshott is unlikely to welcome this intrusion of Darwinism, and may regard it as a mere ignoratio elenchi. ‘Philosophy must begin by rejecting alike the method and results of the arrest in experience called science.’ More specifically, ‘to argue from the establishment of some kind of scientific “law” of evolution that the same or a similar law is relevant in philosophical thought involves the grossest confusion of mind’ (219, 193n). But I cannot escape the impression that there is more to Darwin than a still not very quantified science, and something specially for philosophers. What Oakeshott calls philosophical experience is unconditional. Darwinism would find that a difficult thesis to accommodate. Experience may not be merely mine, but is it not human, a quality of life, an engagement with a human brain and its evolved suite of cognitive powers? Apparently that would be an abstraction. Experience is not an effect of evolution. Evolution is itself an idea in the timeless whole of experience. Well, yes, but as Oakeshott said an idea is not merely an idea. A Darwinist might even reply that Oakeshott’s ‘experience’ is a fantasy. Nothing of our experience is unconditioned by the ultimately contingent history of evolution, and the unconscious, arbitrary constraint it places on what we feel as a satisfying ‘coherence’. Nothing human is unconditional in that way, not even ideally. Even our norms appeal to us because of what evolution has made us, and not by what the Stoics called a kataleptic phantasy, progenitor of the clear and distinct idea. Such ideals are abstractions or just imaginary and unrealistic. For Oakeshott, unconditional philosophical experience is possible. Ideal, yes, but thinkable, a criterion. A Darwinist might contradict both the claimed

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thinkability and its competence as a criterion. Oakeshott calls science an abstraction. But empirical science suggests that unconditional experience is a fata morgana. It seems so logical, and that is the problem. Logic appears unconditional, when in fact it is utterly conditioned, as is everything else that is alive, a power of life, and has evolved. Oakeshott excludes Darwinism from philosophical conversation, and he is wise to do so. For were it allowed to speak it would say that experience evolved, that it is contingent, and completely lacks the wholeness Oakeshott finds intimated and implied as its true character. ‘There is no such superstition’, wrote William James, ‘as the idolatry of the Whole.’2 Evolved experience cannot be ‘philosophical’ as Oakeshott understands it. There is no escaping in philosophy from the ultimately meaningless conditions that are for us a fateful accident. Some things could be different if we changed them, others could be different but cannot be changed; for example, having been born, or born in such and such a time and place, born male or female, born Homo sapiens. These are fateful accidents.3 They sound a death-knell for philosophy as Oakeshott practises it. Were experience in any respect really, ultimately contingent then the unconditional coherence that defines ‘philosophical’ experience is impossible. I think that is the conclusion a Darwinist must draw. An experience that is completely different and discontinuous with human experience is dangerously close to a ‘thing-initself’, which it was the service of Oakeshott’s kind of idealism to have discredited. Any experience that is not human is nothing to us and, by Oakeshott’s argument, is nothing at all. But if experience is human then experience evolved, and if experience evolved then experience cannot have the ‘philosophical’ quality with which Oakeshott endows it. His ideas of completeness, totality and unconditional coherence are imaginary and, in his terms, merely designated, like El Dorado and Eden.

Present experience ‘Philosophical’ experience is experience unqualified. It is what experience tends to become when not deflected by abstraction. It is actuality, reality at its most complete and concrete, undefiled by modal disfiguration. The ‘character’ of experience is everything that is virtual and merely tending about the actual present. Not what it is, but what it tends to and what it would be were it not for modalization, the mother of all qualification inflicted on experience. Oakeshott says this philosophical fullness is the criterion, the norm, experience as it ought to be, unimpeded by abstraction. This involvement of norm, ideal, character and counterfactual determination – all indicia of virtual reality – may be in tension with a second theme of Oakeshott’s

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argument, which is the priority of the temporal present. Because whatever virtual reality is, whatever a norm or character is, it is never actually present. Only a present world can be completely coherent and satisfactory: ‘All reality is essentially present’; ‘All fact is present’; ‘No fact, truth, or reality is, or can be, past’; ‘What is past is, as such, an abstraction’ (Oakeshott 1933: 306, 263, 146, 147). These seem to be assertions rather than the conclusions of an argument I can make out, and they are not implausibly refuted. Bergson thought that the past was a moment of every present experience. Experience is retrospective, noticed in passing and as past. In some form this point goes back to Aristotle. ‘Sense perception gives rise to memory, as we call it; and repeated memories of the same give rise to experience (emperia); because memories though numerically many are a single experience’ (Aristotle 1941: 99b–100a). The thought was still current for Hobbes, who defined experience as ‘much memory, or memory of many things’ (Hobbes 1946: 10). But Bergson takes time seriously in a way Aristotle and Hobbes do not know how to do. It is impossible to distinguish categorically between past and present. There is no present so full that it is nothing but now and does not include any past. There is no present that is not passing, that is not already divided and related to a past. ‘Perception and recollection always interpenetrate each other’, Bergson writes. ‘There is for us nothing that is instantaneous. In all that goes by that name there is already some work of our memory.’ The most concrete quality of experience is ceaseless heterogeneity, with no two moments qualitatively identical; the mere passage of time is itself a qualitative difference. Bergson explains this qualitative heterogeneity of experience as the result of each perception in itself extending ‘over a certain depth of duration’, into which memory condenses ‘an enormous multiplicity of vibrations [that] appear to us all at once, although they are successive’ (Bergson 2004: 72, 76–7). Bergson wrote that in Matière et Mémoire, a work of 1896. A similar argument appeared two years later, apparently independently, in a work by Shadworth Hodgson, an unaffiliated British philosopher and founding president of the Aristotelian Society. He is not much considered these days, though William James described him to Charles Renouvier as ‘the most robust of English philosophic writers’, and placed him beside Socrates, Aristotle, Locke, Berkeley and Hume as the forerunners of pragmatism.4 Hodgson’s magnum opus is The Metaphysic of Experience, in four volumes, from 1898. In this work he explains experience as at once content and process, meaning temporal extension, not just the present but the present’s past. Time and feeling, duration and quality or intensity, are ultimate elements of experience. ‘Each moment of consciousness contains, besides its own content, a retrospective perception of one or more prior moments.’ All perceiving, he

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says, ‘is in fact retrospective, and the perceiving . . . looks back upon the simple perception of which it is the continuation, and sees it presented in retrospect in order of knowledge’. So far from the past being an abstraction (as Oakeshott said), temporally extended experience ‘is the only thing from which we can abstract’. ‘Whatever [one] perceives he perceives in retrospect, or as we may express it, from end to beginning, that is, as having been.’ Our ‘whole experience lies in retrospect only’ (Hodgson 1980: vol.1, 74, 75, 118, 83, 88). On this account, the historical past is not a modalization, not an abstraction. It is the intensification or intensive qualification of the pastness that belongs to original, unqualified, ‘philosophical’ experience. The idea of a real experience which is wholly past, or what is the same thing, of a time wholly past with a real content, arises not by inference, but without any conscious activity, sense of effort, question, or purpose, inevitably and spontaneously, from facts which are wholly contained in an actually present experience . . . The idea [of the past] is in no way founded on the assumption that the experience now called past was real, but on the contrary is itself the first intimation we have of the possible reality of a past experience, the first arising of a knowledge of experience as past, or with the marks of belonging to the past about it (Hodgson 1980: vol. 1, 150). James liked this idea so much – which he knew from Hodgson’s earlier Philosophy of Reflection (1878) – that he included a quotation compressing more than five pages in the fine print of a long footnote in his Principles of Psychology (1890). He remained impressed twenty years later, writing in A Pluralistic Universe: ‘Mr Shadworth Hodgson showed long ago that there is literally no such object as the present moment except as an unreal postulate of abstract thought’ (James 1987: 758–59). The temporality of experience is of course essential to James’s idea of the stream of consciousness. ‘Our consciousness’, he says, ‘never shrinks to the dimensions of a glow-worm spark. The knowledge of some other part of the stream, past or future, near or remote, is always mixed in with our knowledge of the present thing.’ These ‘lingerings of old objects . . . [and] incomings of new are the germs of memory and expectation, the retrospective and prospective sense of time. They give that continuity to consciousness without which it could not be called a stream.’ There follows a very long quotation from Hodgson, in which he makes the argument we have seen: ‘A former and a latter are included in the minimum of consciousness’ (James 1950: vol. 1, 606–7). Reading Bergson, Hodgson and James makes me wonder whether there is not something ‘abstract’ about what Oakeshott calls present and therefore even something ‘abstract’ about what he calls experience. Present satisfaction

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is an abstraction, because the experience of satisfaction is always a memory, not a present quality. Satisfaction is intrinsically virtual and referring to the past, even if only the immediate past. I tend to agree with Bergson that there is no present that is not passing and really related to the past. ‘Present’ experience, ‘presence’ and ‘the present’ are abstractions from primordial duration. There is always a lag, a delay, in experience, which as Aristotle said is more remembered than present. Present experience is always somewhat past, so how can the past be abstract and only the present concrete? Some of the most laboured pages of this elegant work concern the explanation of value and the difference between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’. This ‘ought to be’ does not mean ‘I ought to do so and so’. We may feel no obligation to act, and we may say of what already is that it ought to be; that is, that it is valuable. Oakeshott’s challenge is to define the mode of being of ‘what ought to be’. He seems to think there has to be a being that ‘what ought to be’ is. An actual being, meaning an idea in a coherent world of ideas, and an attribute or mode of experience. To judge ‘this ought to be’ and assert its discrepancy from fact is to assert ‘what ought to be’ as real, as fact, in its own world. When we say ‘this ought to be’ we imply that in that world it is. To be valuable is to be worthy of being practical fact, and already actual fact in some other world abstracted from philosophical experience. This argument highlights Oakeshott’s actualism. To be is to be actual. If what ought to be is, is a positive reality, then it is actual, but obviously only in another world from our practice, where what ought to be is often not actual. What practical activity attempts to realize is both ‘not here’ and valuable as such, and Oakeshott considers a world of value, of ‘ought to be’, a presupposition of practice (Oakeshott 1933: 289). But does this ‘ought to be’ really have the determination of an actuality, a complete individual? Is there in practice an invariably determinate fact of the matter about what ‘ought to be’? Or is this not rather virtual and indeterminate and changing with wider experience, or the mere passage of time? What Oakeshott calls ‘philosophical’ experience seems to be a case of ‘ought to be’. He says philosophical experience is a norm, an ideal, a criterion for how experience should be and would be were it not for the obstructions of abstraction. If experience has a character that can be deformed by abstraction then there is something in each experience (assuming that experience is always to some degree abstract) that ought to be but is not, and what is (what is present) is not always what ought to be. There is a more that cannot be equated with actual fact in any world. No ‘world’ ought to be. Ought to be is not de facto being in a special world. It arises with change from the virtual matrix, the unformatted plasma, the antagonism of multiple tendencies that eventually becomes the being of beings.

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If philosophical experience is what ‘ought to be’ then philosophy becomes practical in a way that Oakeshott denies that it can be. ‘To turn philosophy into a way of life is at once to have abandoned life and philosophy.’ He confronts practice with the accusation of modalization, meaning abstraction and partiality. The very principle of practice – changing the world so as to enhance its coherence – is a contradiction. ‘The modification or change of reality is a meaningless conception.’ If that is meaningless then so too ‘ought to be’ and therefore also experience in Oakeshott’s ‘philosophical’ sense. Reality itself is neither valuable nor worthless. Every belief in value or worthlessness is ipso facto an arrest in experience, including the belief that value is an arrest in experience and should not be valued. How can philosophical experience be a criterion if it does not discriminate, and therefore evaluate and so, if Oakeshott is right, abstract and hinder coherence? ‘Philosophical experience . . . is the concrete and complete whole implied and involved in every modification of experience’ (355, 305, 349–50). This wholeness, this unity, this all-in-oneness that is ‘implied’ and ‘involved’ in all experience is what James called the idolatry of the Whole. It is merely designated, merely hoped for, merely ‘ought to be’. Because we can criticize abstraction does not mean a non-abstract totality really exists. The antithesis of Oakeshott’s philosophy of experience is the pluralist philosophy of, for instance, Bergson, James or Nietzsche, and in our time Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour and Manuel DeLanda. On these accounts, experience is contingent, conditioned, adventurous and really creative. Tendencies and their differences are truly multiple, not reducing to the angelic coherence of a completely intelligible present experience. Ontological pluralism correlates with a seriousness about time antithetical to Oakeshott, as to his master Bradley, who averred that ‘if time is not unreal, I admit that our Absolute is a delusion’ (1897: 182). James explains pluralism with the observation that ‘we humans are incurably rooted in the temporal point of view’, and that time is ‘as real as anything’ (1987: 648, 651). Taking time seriously compels a pluralistic ontology because time is nothing if not differences, many, infinitely many, infinitely different differences. To affirm the reality of time is to affirm the reality of change and development. They are not flickering shadows distorting eternal forms. Neither are they abstractions from a completely present totality. They are the creation of novel differences, real relations stretching across time, binding all things in the matrix of time. ‘Universe’ is one word but not one thing, not one individual. Nothing real is so absolute as to lack an environment or relations, including a past. Pluralism smashes the idol of the Whole. ‘Who knows if the world is actually one?’ asks Bergson. ‘Experience alone can say, and unity, if it exists, will appear at the end of the search as a result; it is impossible to posit it at the start as a principle’ (Bergson 2007: 19; see also Wahl, 1925).

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From modes of experience to the conversation of mankind I wish there were a text in which the later Oakeshott frankly recounted what to his mind is viable and what untenable in Experience and its Modes. One wants to know, for instance, what he eventually came to think of his erstwhile metaphysical idiom. In his first book, the idealism is explicit. Reality is experience, experience is reality, any distinction between these is a reversion to the discredited idea of the thing-in-itself, and makes a mystery of knowledge. We never hear this argument again but also never hear anything against it. ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’ seems to be the later text most resonant with Experience and its Modes, though it appeared some twenty-five years later. ‘As I understand it’, he says there, ‘the real world is a world of experience within which self and not-self divulge themselves to reflection.’ He also remarks, ‘I do not myself know where to place an experience released altogether from modality’ (Oakeshott 1991f: 495, 512). These remarks, made in passing, may sound bland and non-committal, but looked into more closely these statements would, I think, lead back to the earlier Bradleyan or British-idealist identification of reality and experience. However, if these later remarks have metaphysical implications, they are passed over in silence. Where the later title is ‘the voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind’, the earlier book might have said ‘the mode of poetry in the experience of mankind’. Except poetry is not acknowledged as a mode and ‘experience’ is never qualified as human. Experience is unconditional, absolute, ‘philosophical’ experience. ‘Mankind’ is either a scientific species-name, irrelevant beyond the mode of biological science, or a confused, pseudo-philosophical ignoratio elenchi. The ‘Voice of Poetry’ essay reaffirms the ensemble of modes theorized in the earlier book, the practical, scientific and historical modes, with the addition of the poetic, a thought unhinted at in Experience and its Modes. In ‘Conversation’ the modes are modes not of experience but of speech. It is not evident to what extent ‘speaking’ is what he formerly called ‘experience’, nor why he prefers to speak of speech, and we should bear in mind that these modes of speech are also identified in the essay as modes of imagining and images, which connote abstraction. The earlier book criticized philosophers who want to subordinate the modes – positivists drawing everything out of the mode of science, and pragmatism doing the same for conduct. Twenty-five years later, we are told that philosophers there are who see the multiplicity of modes as a curse of Babel ‘from which it is the business of the philosophers to deliver us’. They want to ‘impose a single character upon significant human speech’, one authentic voice, be it science or practice (1991f: 489). The picture

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we get, then, is approximately this: voices, languages and idioms are new names for the modes, while the embracing, all-contextualizing matrix of which these are a modalization, specialization or abstraction is ‘the conversation of mankind’. The idea of conversation seems a very substantial addition to the thought of Experience and its Modes. There is no hint of it in the earlier book. There, whenever modes mix the result is confusion, a fallacious ignoratio elenchi or fallacy of relevance. History has nothing to say to conduct; conduct has nothing to say to science. Science is no truer than history. That is why Oakeshott could dismiss Darwin so lightly. Whatever is true in Darwinism is true science, and therefore necessarily irrelevant to any other mode of experience. With the idea of conversation Oakeshott has a new philosophical concept and a new view of relations among modes, which are now voices in a conversation. Also, in the earlier book, it was experience – unqualified, ‘philosophical’ experience – that was the matrix from which all the modes arose, and back into which they all settle when in a philosophical moment we manage to dampen our ardour for those empty kisses of abstraction. There is nothing to say about this ‘experience’ except that it is absolute reality. In place of that rather abstract view of experience, which is after all always our experience and even my experience, we now have the concept of conversation, with its specific moral habits, its avowed historicity, and its identification with what we used to call human nature. What he says of idioms and voices in ‘The Voice of Poetry’ is almost exactly what he said about modes of experience in the earlier book. The different voices are different universes of discourse, oblique and unassimilable. No one mode is the distinctive human utterance. What is distinctive is precisely the multiplicity. ‘Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation.’ The concern with education is new, as is the point about ‘moral habits appropriate to conversation’. That is not an idea from Experience and its Modes, where we are left instead with the sense that modes mix to no good result. The words ignoratio elenchi occur so many times that they become almost a motto. A trace of this thinking remains in ‘The Voice of Poetry’; for instance, when he says that ‘every mode of imagining is activity in partnership with images of a specific character which cannot appear in any other universe of discourse; that is, each mode begins and ends wholly within itself’, but also that ‘each voice is prone to superbia’ (1991f: 490–91, 492, 514). To give in to it has become something more than a mere logical fallacy, however. Oakeshott calls it barbarism.

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The moral habits appropriate to conversation strike the right balance between seriousness and play. Seriousness promotes attention and commitment, but learning to understand oneself conversationally means learning to play along with other voices despite being unsure of what they are saying. This is Oakeshott’s variation on what Keats called negative capability. ‘Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’5 Keats thought poets had to have this capacity. Oakeshott is now building it into the moral habits appropriate to a conversation. The conversation of humankind is ‘play’ in the sense that a good conversationalist is good at playing along with other voices despite not knowing (in the full technical sense) what they are saying, and being able to learn something from the exchange. To participate in that conversation is the human meaning of ‘learning from experience’. Hence too a philosophy of education unhinted at in Experience and its Modes, when in his later work he explains ‘the invitation of liberal learning’ as ‘the invitation to disentangle oneself, for a time, from the urgencies of the here and now and to listen to the conversation in which human beings forever seek to understand themselves’ (Oakeshott 2001c: 41). We are left to guess why the shift from metaphysical experience to historical conversation appealed to Oakeshott. Writing in 1948, he described postwar Europe as having been devastated by a morality of abstract ideals. Morality should know itself to be habit. Dominated by the pursuit of ideals, morality becomes ‘prone to obsession and at war with itself’. He attributes the plague of moral ideals to a ‘Christian moral ideology’ that ‘swamped’ a ‘Christian habit of moral behavior’ at the early beginning of the European Middle Ages. ‘The perception of the poetic character of human conduct was lost.’ Conversation, and the need to play along with a dialect you do not completely understand, works like an antidote to abstraction. It does not eliminate it from thought, something surely not possible, but it does break its grip on the mind. There is nothing like a conversation with one who does not mimic your assumptions to make apparent the abstractions under which you unthinkingly labour. To be in the grip of abstraction is to be prosaic. Your concepts are not merely yours or mere images but the best, the only ones that deliver an unvarnished truth without imaginary distortions. This prosaic mentality denies ‘the poetic character of all human activity’ (Oakeshott 1991h: 486, 485, 479). The belief that this prose view of the world contributed to a climate of vicious abstraction that seemed to have something to do with how Europe found itself after the Second World War may have played some part in transforming the last British idealist into the one and only Michael Oakeshott.

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Notes 1 This is the position of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. For a helpful introduction to these matters, see DeLanda 2002. 2 William James to Shadworth Hodgson, 30 December 1885, in James 1920: vol. 1, 247. 3 On fateful accidents, see Marquard 1991. 4 William James to Charles Renouvier, 1876, in James 1920: vol. 1, 188; see also his Pragmatism in James 1987: 508. 5 John Keats to George and Thomas Keats, 21 December 1817, in Keats 1899: 277.

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3 Oakeshottian Pragmatism – Conversation or Inquiry? Cheryl Misak

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ichael Oakeshott came up to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge to read history in 1920, and stayed on as a fellow. Almost in lockstep, Frank Ramsey arrived up the street, to read mathematics at Trinity, and soon after graduation became a fellow of King’s. Both young men were deep into an allied subject matter – philosophy – which then was abuzz with the ideas of Russell and Wittgenstein. Oakeshott went on to live to a grand old age and eminence. Ramsey died just shy of his 27th birthday, but not before making a wide and deep mark on Cambridge philosophy and economics. They were two of the cleverest men of their generation, coming of age during what might have been the most fruitful time in the history of Cambridge humanities and social science. Cambridge philosophy in the mid to late 1920s was absorbed by a sparring match between Ramsey and Wittgenstein over whether one can aim at truth in questions of religion, ethics and policymaking, or whether these are areas in which rationality runs out and emotions, preferences and brute politics rule. While Oakeshott was not one for acknowledging the debts of others, it would be very difficult to believe that the debate did not form the landscape in which he staked his own position. In this chapter, I shall first outline that debate, then show how both sides can be seen as putting forward a kind of pragmatism. Along the way, I show that Oakeshott is allied with Wittgenstein and suggest that he would have done better to side with Ramsey. The upshot will be that Oakeshott’s brand of pragmatism in education as ‘the conversation of mankind’ ought to undergo a shift in orientation.

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Oakeshott and classical pragmatism Charles S. Peirce was one of the founders of pragmatism, along with William James, in that other Cambridge – Cambridge Massachusetts. As with all pragmatists, Peirce was set against rationalism and the quest for certainty, calling instead for a view of belief and truth focused on the best that we humans could do. Our beliefs are habits, he argued, and we judge them in terms of whether experience bears them out. A belief is in part ‘that upon which a man is prepared to act’. Our ‘habits of mind’ are ‘good or otherwise’, or ‘safe’ or otherwise (CP 5.12; 1902).1 Peirce’s account of truth is often taken to be that truth is what the community of inquirers is destined to believe. While he did on occasion use such language, I have argued that his considered and more subtle view is that truth is what we would eventually come to, were we to be able to keep inquiring into the indefinite future (see e.g. Misak 2004 and 2013). The beliefs that would forever stand up to experience, the beliefs that would be as good as they could be, would be true. In this way, truth is linked to what the community of inquirers would discover: Logicality inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited. They must not stop at our own fate, but must embrace the whole community. This community, again, must not be limited, but must extend to all races of beings with whom we can come into immediate or mediate intellectual relation. It must reach, however vaguely, beyond this geological epoch, beyond all bounds (W 3: 284; 1878). Peirce argued that we begin with an inherited set of beliefs, theories, policies and practices, and from within that corpus of settled belief we try to make sense of ourselves and our world. Our background beliefs are not subject to Cartesian, ‘paper’ or ‘tin’ doubts. Such doubts are not genuine and cannot motivate inquiry. An inquirer has a body of settled belief that is not in fact in doubt, against which to assess new evidence and hypotheses, and on which to act. Peirce was a fallibilist in that he thought that any belief is in principle susceptible to real doubt. But the mere possibility of being mistaken about what one believes is not a reason to express a living doubt. He says: There is but one state of mind from which you can ‘set out’, namely, the very state of mind in which you actually find yourself at the time you do ‘set out’ – a state in which you are laden with an immense mass of cognition already formed, of which you cannot divest yourself if you would . . . Do you call it doubting to write down on a piece of paper that you doubt? If so, doubt has nothing to do with any serious business (CP 5.416; 1905).

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Our body of background belief is susceptible to doubt on a piecemeal basis, so long as that doubt is prompted by ‘some positive reason’ (CP 5.51; 1903) – a surprising or recalcitrant experience. We must regard our background beliefs as true, until experience throws one or some group of them into doubt. The inquirer is under a compulsion to believe just what he does believe . . . [A]s time goes on, the man’s belief usually changes in a manner which he cannot resist . . . [T]his force which changes a man’s belief in spite of any effort of his may be, in all cases, called a gain of experience (MS 1342: 2; n.d.). What we aim for is a belief that will stand up to the experience and argument of the ongoing community of inquirers. That means that our beliefs must be responsive to the way things are. One of his primary arguments against the rationalist is that he makes of inquiry something similar to the development of taste; but taste, unfortunately, is always more or less a matter of fashion . . . [And] I cannot help seeing that . . . sentiments in their development will be very greatly determined by accidental causes. Now, there are some people, among whom I must suppose that my reader is to be found, who, when they see that any belief of theirs is determined by any circumstance extraneous to the facts, will from that moment not merely admit in words that that belief is doubtful, but will experience a real doubt of it, so that it ceases to be a belief (W 3: 253; 1877; emphasis added). Peirce thinks that the scientific method captures the essence of his pragmatist epistemology. It is the method that pays close attention to the fact that beliefs fall to the surprise of recalcitrant experience. This is all he means by ‘the scientific method’: it is the method which takes experience, whatever it is like in a particular domain of inquiry, seriously. Peirce was a resolute holist who argued that even mathematics and logic are connected to experience in the requisite way. We expect certain things to be the case if they are true. Not only might we have practical expectations using applied mathematics (we expect our calculations to result in bridges that do not fall down), but even hypotheses in pure mathematics have consequences. They have consequences in diagrammatic contexts. When we manipulate diagrams, we can find ourselves surprised. Peirce developed a quantified logic (with modality) at the same time as, but independently of, Frege. It was based on experimentation with diagrams. While Peirce himself did not write much about how we could have experience in domains such as

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ethics or politics, his successor C. I. Lewis (e.g. 1971) developed a sophisticated account of how such ‘valuations’ could be responsive to experience. Oakeshott implicitly agreed with much in the classical pragmatist tradition. His primary opponent was also the rationalist; even the ‘near-rationalist’ was enough to spark his disdain (1991b: 5). The rationalist ‘is fortified by a belief in a “reason” common to all mankind, a common power of rational consideration, which is the ground and inspiration of argument’ (6). With the pragmatist, Oakeshott argues that there are no secure foundations, and the rationalist who seeks them is on a fruitless mission. Oakeshott, it seems, is attracted to something very much like Peirce’s account of truth, on which we give up on certainty and aim at something more human. The resonances with pragmatism are perhaps strongest in his famous characterization of education as an initiation into the conversation of mankind: Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation, in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation (Oakeshott 1991f: 490–91). Experience, for Oakeshott, as it was for Peirce, is the driver of this conversation. His earliest book, Experience and its Modes, presents a thick conception of experience. On that view, experience cannot be pulled apart from thought and judgement (1933: 26). Oakeshott remained interested in ‘political deliberation and utterance’ all his life (1990: 175). At the very core of his political and legal philosophy is the idea of setting up the conditions for interaction and deliberation, utilizing a conception of experience that is amenable to such domains. He is a classical liberal, one whose primary aim is that of identifying conditions for individual freedom (conceived as non-interference). This idea is central to his ideal of ‘civil association’ in On Human Conduct, for example. But as we shall see, Oakeshott suggests that argumentative discourse should properly be seen as only one voice among others. The classical pragmatists all put forward such a view, on which interpretation is part of experience. Such accounts of experience oppose the view that there is something untouched by human capacities which is given to us in experience. They are opposed to views such as those on offer from the Vienna Circle, the early Russell, and the Tractarian Wittgenstein, which postulate a language of sense data that hooks us to the world. Thus far, Oakeshott sounds very much like the classical pragmatists. But he was dead set against the idea of inquiry aimed at the truth. He warns against taking any one kind of human utterance as the authentic kind of utterance, saying:

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We are urged . . . to regard all utterances as contributions . . . to an inquiry, or a debate among inquirers, about ourselves and the world we inhabit. But this understanding of human activity and intercourse as an inquiry, while appearing to accommodate a variety of voices, in fact recognizes only one, namely the voice of argumentative discourse, the voice of ‘science’, and all others are acknowledged merely in respect of their aptitude to imitate this voice (Oakeshott 1991f: 489). In his view: In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no ‘truth’ to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another (489). What is of interest, he insists, is ‘not an inquiry or an argument, but a conversation’ (489). In that conversation, poetry is just as important an experience as that which is delivered by observation or by argument. Sometimes ‘there is no problem to be solved, no hypothesis to be explored, no restlessness to be overcome, no desire to be satisfied, or approval to be won’ (513). Rather: Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, nor is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering (490). Oakeshott was first and foremost interested in politics. In politics, he thought that the rationalist mission was dangerous, as well as fruitless. In this domain, it can seem especially hazardous to think of deliberation as inquiry. For an ‘inquiry’ can seem to suggest that human reason can come up with a final blueprint for social order. It can seem to be all about finding those certain, final answers that the rationalist is after. For Oakeshott, those dangers were found primarily on the left. Only if we think there is certainty to be had will we fall prey, he thought, to the evils of socialism and party ‘despotism’ (Oakeshott 1947/8). He insists that we must not hope to get at the truth, and in policymaking we must not aim to plan or guide. All we have is our history and local practices. He loathes ‘the consciously planned and deliberately executed’. We must not aim at anything, but rather be content with what has ‘grown up and established itself unselfconsciously over a period of time’ (Oakeshott 1991b: 26). Of course, no one would deny what Oakeshott emphasizes – that history

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is central to understanding and reflecting upon politics. But Oakeshott goes further and thinks that since there is no ahistorical, definitive guide to take us forward, all we have is the ability to look at how things have come to be like this and not otherwise. Oakeshott’s idea about the conversation of mankind and his stance against truth and inquiry was picked up by the neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty, who in some moods also argued that we should drop the idea of inquiry and replace it with the idea of conversation. We do not aim at getting things right, but at solidarity or agreement with our peers. Perhaps Oakeshott and Rorty’s version of pragmatism resonates more with some of the things that Dewey said. Indeed, Rorty (1979: 368) takes Dewey as one of the three most important philosophers of the twentieth century, along with Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Oakeshott certainly knew about Dewey’s naturalist conception of experience and its relationship to politics.2 But Oakeshott would also think that Dewey was over-focused on a method for acquiring knowledge. In Experience and its Modes, Oakeshott briefly discusses pragmatism. He sees that it might be aligned to his own view and notes that ‘we are still waiting for an unambiguous statement of the pragmatist position’. He concludes that there are too many variations of pragmatism around to be sure that pragmatism gives us what Oakeshott wants: not a theory of knowledge, but a theory in which practice is ‘itself the totality of experience’ (1933: 318ff). Dewey did not go quite that far. Perhaps the first pragmatist to do so was Rorty. The question for the pragmatist, and for Oakeshott, is whether we need to go that far in order to oppose rationalism. Even our brief account of Peircean pragmatism should alert us to the fact that Peirce was also set against the kind of calculus for human flourishing that so worried Oakeshott. We are led to ask just what is the substance of the dispute here. We can illuminate it, I suggest, by looking at the debate that was raging in Oakeshott’s Cambridge. That debate was between two titans of philosophy, each attracted to one or another brand of pragmatism: Ramsey and Wittgenstein. Oakeshott implicitly sides with Wittgenstein’s pragmatism rather than Ramsey’s, but they were all endeavouring to put some distance between their own positions and that being promoted by the science-centred logical empiricists.

Cambridge pragmatism I have argued at length elsewhere that philosophy in Cambridge, England during the 1920s was taking a turn towards pragmatism.3 Ramsey had discovered Peirce and was putting forward a view on which beliefs are habits

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of action, to be evaluated in terms of whether they work and whether they are responsive to how things are. He was setting that Peircean pragmatism against the quietist pragmatism of his friend and colleague Wittgenstein. While Oakeshott took much of his inspiration from German thought, it was this Cambridge intellectual air that he breathed on a daily basis. If we are to understand Oakeshott’s aversion to the inquiry-centred kind of pragmatism, we need to understand the debates that were swirling around him. Russell, Wittgenstein, Ramsey and the Vienna Circle4 were in different ways exploring whether there is a fact-stating language of logic and sense data, on the one hand, and non-fact-stating discourses of theories, generalizations, causal laws, ethics, etc. on the other. Russell and the Tractarian Wittgenstein were, on the whole, on the side of the Vienna Circle in taking there to be a boundary between these kinds of statements, a boundary that is sharp and, in different ways, important. Ramsey was not so sure, and towards the end of his short life he was in the midst of breaking down the wall between fact-stating discourse and non-fact-stating discourse. They all had pragmatist leanings. They all took a belief to involve a habit of expectation, or a disposition to act or behave in certain ways. Once one characterizes belief in this way, the natural question is to ask how we evaluate beliefs, and the natural answer is that we evaluate such habits in terms of whether or not they are successful, in some robust account of ‘success’. This account of belief and its evaluation played out in different ways. The Vienna Circle adopted a reductionist account of belief and truth, and argued that we must be able to reduce a complex sentence, via formal logic, to a simple, primary language in which sentences can be verified by observation. All sentences of religion, ethics, metaphysics and politics that cannot be reduced in this way are literally meaningless. In the end, they saw that much of science (such as causal laws) cannot be so verified. But in the 1920s they were putting forward a view on which everything but science and logic either fell to the axe of their verificationist criterion or became a part of science and its empirical methodology. They did not characterize experience and observation as broadly as Peirce, so their view of ethics and politics simply fell to the axe. This view of ethics and politics was repugnant to many, including Ramsey, Wittgenstein and Oakeshott. The Tractarian Wittgenstein also put forward a theory of meaning, on which a genuine proposition has to be statable in an elementary or primary language that hooks onto the world. But unlike the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein thought that what is really important is not to be found there. Statements of ethics are inexpressible in such a primary language, and hence nonsense, but are somehow more profound than what can be said in the fact-stating

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language. Religion and ethics are nonsense, but more important than that which is meaningful. Ramsey translated Wittgenstein’s Tractatus when he was still an undergraduate, and although he was deeply influenced by it, he from the outset rejected the position he found there. His quip about the Tractarian view of ethics and the like has become famous: ‘what we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either’ (Ramsey 1990: 146). He also thought that philosophy cannot start from first premises of ordinary thought and language, as much of the Tractatus seems to encourage. The task of philosophy cannot be merely to clarify thoughts by setting out the rules of our language: ‘The standardisation of the colours of beer is not philosophy, but in a sense it is an improvement in notation, and a clarification of thought’ (Ramsey 1991b: 55). By 1924, Ramsey was deeply influenced by Peirce, and he was putting forward an alternative view on which our beliefs are habits of action, evaluable in terms of whether they lead to successful action. By 1929, he was exploring the idea that we can evaluate beliefs in ethics and aesthetics as well as beliefs of science. He was working out what a pragmatist, ‘human logic’ would look like. Like Peirce, Ramsey regarded logic, ethics and aesthetics as ‘normative sciences’, indeed, as part of ‘natural science in its widest sense’ (1991a: 4), but not to be reduced to the empirical sciences. He says: in regard to the primary logical value of truth, all the logician can do is to determine its meaning; it is for him [alone] to tell us what truth is, but which opinions are true we shall learn not merely from logic but from all the sciences, each in its own domain (1991a: 81). This project of seeing how genuine norms might come out of natural human practices is at the very heart of pragmatism. Of course, the big question, to slightly modify Hume’s point, is whether we can really get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Can the naturalist, who eschews transcendental concepts such as God, the Rational, Platonic Forms, etc., make sense of the genuinely normative? Ramsey attempts to show how the genuinely normative sciences can indeed be natural phenomena that can be studied by an appeal to experience. Anyone who is familiar with Peirce will straightaway recognize the following thought from Ramsey’s unfinished book manuscript: The three normative sciences: Ethics, Aesthetics and Logic begin . . . with psychological investigations which lead up, in each case, to a valuation, an attribution of one of the three values: good, beautiful, or rational, predicates which appear not to be definable in terms of any of the concepts used in psychology or positive science. I say ‘appear’ because it is one of the

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principal problems of philosophy to discover whether this is really the case [whether, that is to say, ‘good’, ‘beautiful’, ‘rational’ (or for that matter ‘true’) represent undefinable qualities . . . ] (Ramsey 1991a: 4; bracketed portion in original) Ramsey notes that we might get different answers for the different sciences of value, but this does not appeal to him. He thinks that values of any kind ‘are definable in natural terms’, as long as we do not take ‘natural terms’ to lead us to a reductive or ‘insane’ behaviourism. He does not want to reduce normative notions away, so that they are obliterated. He does not view questions of what we ought to do as answerable simply by reference to what we happen to do. Ramsey died in the middle of the project of showing how we might evaluate beliefs in these different domains. Its broad outline was known only within his small Cambridge circle. In 1929, Wittgenstein, largely under the influence of Ramsey’s criticisms, was in the process of transferring his interest from the primary to the secondary, ordinary language. The later Wittgenstein, that is, became concerned with human belief, rather than with the purely formal relation between thought and the world. Against his old Tractarian view, he became concerned with the diversity of propositions and the full range of our ‘actual language’: We see that what we call ‘sentence’ and ‘language’ is not the formal unity that I imagined, but is the family of structures more or less related to one another. – But what becomes of logic now? . . . The preconceived idea of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole examination round (PI : §108). It is only within the terms of a particular way of thinking – what he later was to call a ‘form of life’ – that our questions arise and get answered. There is no explanation or theory that rises above this contingency. But while Wittgenstein might have abandoned the Tractarian position because of Ramsey’s criticisms, he did not accept Ramsey’s alternative view. He thought that Ramsey was too ‘materialistic’, too much in search of ‘scientific explanation’, and not ‘reverent’ enough. Philosophers, Wittgenstein insisted, should not seek scientific explanations; ‘our considerations must not be scientific ones’ (PI : §109). That is, he (mistakenly) took Ramsey to be more or less in the same camp as the Vienna Circle. But what he was not mistaken about is that Ramsey was putting forward a theory of belief and how to evaluate it. Wittgenstein was dead set against that kind of project as well:

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[w]e may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place (PI : §109). If we add these admonitions together, one might ask what could possibly be left as a task for philosophy. Wittgenstein’s answer is that it must adopt a therapeutic approach, on which the philosopher advances no theses (PI : §128) but assembles ‘reminders for a particular purpose’ (PI : §127), namely, to attain ‘a perspicuous representation’, ‘a clear view of the use of our words’ (PI : §122). Once we have that clear view, no problems remain for us to solve. We ought to be ‘capable of stopping doing philosophy’ (PI : §133), despite the ongoing yearning to keep at it. The idea that survives from the Tractarian position is that there is nothing to say about philosophy, ethics and politics. The philosopher must be quiet and just let ordinary forms of life unfold as they will. Ramsey, like Peirce, wanted philosophy to play a role in solving problems and figuring things out.

Pragmatism: inquiry or conversation? By the time Oakeshott’s Experience and its Modes came out in 1933, Ramsey was dead, and Wittgenstein was settling into his later view. But in order to understand Oakeshott’s position, we must recognize that it was set against the background of the dispute between Ramsey, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle about whether we can aim at truth, or whether all we have is our conversations, language games or forms of life. This dispute is emblematic of a deep set of questions within the pragmatist tradition. Do we aim at getting things right or at agreement with others? Are we engaged in an inquiry or in a conversation? Is there a truth about the matter which presses in on us or only what wins the day? Oakeshott in effect sides with Wittgenstein and against Ramsey. The Wittgensteinian idea that we can say nothing by way of a metaphilosophy about our language games or forms of life – or, perhaps more accurately, we can say whatever we like, but it will be nonsense – turned out to be attractive to Oakeshott. We have seen that Oakeshott argued, like Wittgenstein, that science is but one mode of experience – one language game, we might say – and we must not elevate it to the neglect of others. The conversation of mankind really is a discussion, one that takes place along multiple lines, not an inquiry or deliberation that abides by any strictures we might find in logic or science. There is also a deep connection between Oakeshott and Wittgenstein regarding quietism. As Duncan Kelly has shown, in Oakeshott’s first course of lectures in Cambridge, he spent

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three quarters of his time explaining just how difficult it is to think philosophically about anything and finally concluding that political philosophy itself is literally impossible as philosophy, even though the most coherent and profound attempts to think about a philosophy of politics come from those writers who entertain general philosophical explanations of our practice (Kelly 2015: 201). Oakeshott, like Wittgenstein, was insistent that, in politics (Wittgenstein would have used the term ‘ethics’), there is no rationality to be sought. He argued that there can be no independent scale which converts . . . specific misliked situations, or . . . specific sought-for satisfactions, into commensurable fractions of a single general condition (e.g. amounts of ‘pain’ or ‘pleasure’) in terms of which all situations may be measured (Oakeshott 1990: 53). There is a fact-value gap, according to Oakeshott, with the realm of value not admitting of independent scales or commensurable weighings. When Rorty picked up on Oakeshott’s metaphor and argued that conversation is all there is, he was right also to take Wittgenstein as his hero. All three are set against rationalism in a more fierce way than Ramsey and Peirce. All three – Wittgenstein, Oakeshott and Rorty – think that rational argument is out of place in ethics and politics. A problem arises for this position – a problem that must be addressed by its proponents. When anti-rationalism is this fierce, one wonders whether its upholders have the wherewithal to advance any reasons whatsoever for their beliefs, or to advance an argument against anyone else, or to disagree with anyone else. I have argued that Rorty is in just this position (see Misak 2000, 2010). He has, as it were, taken away his own ability to say anything against the likes of Carl Schmitt, the authoritarian philosopher of law who jumped on the Nazi bandwagon. Schmitt, like Wittgenstein, Oakeshott and Rorty, held that there is no truth or rationality in politics. All we have is the hurly-burly of first-order politics, for the political is a realm where rationality runs out. Schmitt went on to argue that our aim is to get substantive homogeneity in a population and win out over weaker groups. We know what this view’s horrific practical implications are. The epistemological implication is that a democratic liberal like Rorty or a classical liberal like Oakeshott has an impossible time in giving us – and himself – reasons for opting for his view rather than his opponent’s. Once you abandon aiming at truth – aiming at something that goes beyond the standards of your own community – then you give up the tools required to argue against the view that might is right. This is what is wrong with taking the contingency of

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historical circumstance to entail the contingency of standards. While all pragmatists see that standards are human standards, not all of them think that this entails that there are no facts about the matter at hand. Oakeshott is as susceptible to this objection as Rorty. For Oakeshott helps himself to normative notions – notions that he is not entitled to on his own account. Recall that he thinks that we need to ‘learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation’. The notions of learning, of distinguishing, of appropriateness make sense only if we see ourselves as aiming at getting things right. They are normative notions that require some kind of objective backstop. Indeed, Oakeshott’s idea that in politics we are not aiming at winning or losing an argument, but we are wagering, employs the idea of a wager either paying off or not. It too is normative. It should also be clear, however, that Wittgenstein’s reading of Ramsey and the pragmatist tradition is tendentious. Although the focus of Ramsey and Peirce was on inquiry, and on revising our beliefs in light of experience, they had an extremely broad conception of inquiry and were also thinking about how we evaluate the diversity of our beliefs in a non-reductive manner. Oakeshott’s alignment with Wittgenstein here would be better described as being set against the Vienna Circle, not against Ramsey and Peirce. For Ramsey and Peirce (and all the pragmatists) were also set against the idea that there is one general condition that all our valuations can be measured by. The reasons for right action are not going to be as tidy as that. The pragmatist epistemology of Ramsey and Peirce is not a moral theory, if by that we mean a theory that identifies a calculus or a general condition or measure or standard. It does not say that the good or the right can be reduced to the maximization of utility, or the upholding of universal rights, or the contract that idealized agents stripped of their contingent characters and situations would enter into. Their pragmatist epistemology tries to explain how we aim at getting things right, despite the fact that we are fallible inquirers, working within situations that are uncertain and demanding, sometimes impossibly so. Inquiry, Peirce said, ‘is walking upon a bog, and can only say, this ground seems to hold for the present. Here I will stay till it begins to give way’ (CP 5.589; 1898). We are unable to step outside of our practices and system of belief so that we might figure out first principles, but that does not entail that we are cast into a sea of relativism, where any answer is as good as any other. One need not say that ‘anything goes’ – that in the absence of certainty there is a void of norms in which one can assert one’s will or hold one’s belief, not subject to criticism. While we can never say, with certainty, that we have the absolute truth in hand, we can, on this kind of pragmatism, make sense of better and worse answers, and of improving our beliefs. For we can expect that, as more

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experience and reasons come to light, we may well make further revisions in our evolving web of belief. On this low-profile conception of truth, truth is the best that human inquirers could do. What we aim at here and now is arriving at a belief or policy that will stand up to the evidence and reasons currently available. Thus, the pragmatist need not be a sceptic about truth. She is simply sceptical, with Oakeshott, that any one moral theory will give us the right answers to our ethical questions, as if a black box/great book/true moral theory could be found with all the answers contained within it. The pragmatist of the sort I am describing argues that inquiries or deliberations that are aimed at getting the right answer need to take account of as much experience and reasoning as they can. In moral inquiry these will include reasons based on rights, on utility, on the importance of relationships, on facts, on resource constraints, and so on. Thus, the conversation of mankind can be construed as an inquiry, in a thin sense of inquiry, aimed at truth. To pick up on and modify a pragmatist insight made by P. F. Strawson, there would be no point in educating children if we were merely educating them into a closed conversation (2008). The very idea of teaching them that things are thus-and-so makes sense only on the assumption that our conversations aim at something more than mere solidarity. Oakeshott would have been better off paying more attention to Ramsey’s careful account of what we are doing when we evaluate our beliefs than to Wittgenstein’s account that we ought to say nothing in philosophy about those evaluations. He would have been better off saying that there are different kinds of inquiry, each with its own standards (but standards nonetheless) of getting things right.5

Notes 1 A note on in-text citations: references to the works of C. S. Peirce in this chapter take the following form: The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition: (W n: p; year), where n is the volume and p is the page number. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: (CP n.m; year), where n is the volume number and m is the paragraph number. References from the microfilm edition of Peirce’s papers, at Houghton Library, Harvard University are cited as (MS n; date) where n is the manuscript number. References to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953) take the form (PI §m), where m is the remark number. 2 Steven Fesmire drew my attention to the fact that in 1954 Oakeshott supervised a PhD thesis on Dewey, experience and politics. See ‘A. H.

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Somjee to Herbert W. Schneider’, in the John Dewey papers (1954.07.08 [#21807]). 3 See Misak (forthcoming), which contains a much fuller history of the debate than is possible in this chapter. 4 Russell was tempted in The Analysis of Mind (2005) towards a behaviourist account of belief, which he saw as a pragmatist view, though in the end his aversion to William James’s idea that truth is what works led him to shy away from pragmatism. 5 I thank Michael Bacon, David Bakhurst, David Dyzenhaus, Duncan Kelly and Steven Fesmire for helpful discussion.

4 Bildung, Post-Kantian German Idealism and the Conversation of Mankind James Scott Johnston

T

he theories and practices of Bildung have had a remarkable effect on the pedagogical histories of Europe and North America. Arising in the late eighteenth century, concomitant with the waves of progressivism flowing over Western Europe, Bildung connoted an education of the self – a selfformation that took on various guises in the work of different thinkers as these theories and practices spread throughout Europe and to the United States and Canada. Thinkers as various as Pestalozzi and Rousseau, von Humboldt and Kant, and Schiller and Hegel are associated with this novel conception of education. Bildung spread through the exhortations of Coleridge and (later) John Ruskin, T. H. Green and R. S. Haldane in Great Britain, and William Torrey Harris and (early) John Dewey in the United States. Today, remnants of Bildung remain in our various school systems, and particularly in the way we venerate the self and the dynamic of self-in-world. Of course, there are those who did not – or in any event, did not seem to – venerate Bildung. Among those, I will suggest, is Michael Oakeshott. This might seem odd, for in a famous passage, Oakeshott maintains: Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation [the conversation of mankind] in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance (Oakeshott 1991f: 490–91). 61

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However, Oakeshott complicates our understanding of conversation by insisting that some discourses remain incommensurable to others. The discourse of science and practical matters (including morals), for example, must remain apart from the voice of poetry, as the modes of experience of science, history and practical affairs remain apart from the mode of poetry. Poetry is irreducible to, and inexhaustible by, science or morals. This might seem counterintuitive. For Oakeshott is not only often portrayed as a proponent of freedom, personal autonomy and individuality, he is also seen as a thinker in the style of Matthew Arnold and the British idealists, and both drew on the earlier German tradition of Bildung (see Williams 2007: 10– 11, 170, 175). Oakeshott insists that poetry is separate from the language of practical affairs and is not to be conflated with the other modes of experience (Podoksik 2002: 726). Oakeshott has also been characterized as an opponent of the Enlightenment ideals of (moral) subjectivism, transcendentalism and the thesis of freedom as autonomy of the will, to which he contrasts his own notion of individualism, rooted in tradition (Tseng 2003: 179). This further complicates the issue of Oakeshott’s allegiance to Bildung, since many of its earlier proponents held to these tenets. Thus, on the face of it at least, Oakeshott is no celebrant of the earlier German tradition of Bildung, or a champion of its tendency to bring science, morals and art together. My thesis directly confronts Kevin Williams’s claim that Oakeshott draws heavily on the earlier German tradition of Bildung (Williams 2007). To be sure, there are elements of this earlier Bildung in Oakeshott’s work; however, the turn against subjectivism, the will, the transcendental understanding of autonomy and his general scepticism toward the role of the state in matters of practical affairs militate against the wholesale integration of the earlier tradition of Bildung into Oakeshott’s philosophy and politics. Williams himself recognizes these limitations, but nevertheless holds to his claim. In what follows, I want to probe Oakeshott’s sense of education through an examination of ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’ and essays dealing with rationalism and politics. It will be my contention that a commonly accepted understanding of Bildung as autonomous self-formation is inimical to Oakeshott’s characterization of education. However, by examining rival understandings of two thinkers who privileged accounts of Bildung, we can see that at least one variant – Kant’s – comes closer than another – Hegel’s. More specifically, whereas Hegel attempts to unify judgements of cognition, morals and ethics, and taste (art), Kant views judgements of beauty in nature as distinct from cognitive and moral judgements in a way that bears similarities to Oakeshott’s insistence on the separation of the discourse of poetry from the discourse of science and morals. Whatever else is combined with science and practical matters in Bildung, it will not be – for Kant –

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judgements of beauty (in nature), and – for Oakeshott – poetry. I will finish by saying a few words about what I think Oakeshott’s idea of conversation means for education, particularly aesthetic education.

Bildung and the conversation of beauty Bildung is not simply a term for education: the idea of Bildung is a philosophicalsocial-political thesis about the nature of the self in society, nation and culture. It connotes self-formation, though this is not to be thought of as a one-sidedly individualistic enterprise (Beiser 2002: 286; Biesta 2002: 345; Oelkers 1999: 26; Bruford 1975). Those who developed the notion of Bildung – thinkers from Kant through von Humboldt and Schiller to Hegel and beyond – take the role of culture (Kultur) seriously. Gemeinschaft or the social community was certainly important to these thinkers as well, as was the broader Gessellschaft of German–Prussian values. Most of these thinkers saw Bildung as culminating in an allgemeine Freiheit, or universal freedom of humanity. Bildung was thus a normative conception of the human being set in the context of her culture and with consequences for a liberalizing politics. In terms of the politics of education, the stress on Lehrfreiheit or ‘academic freedom’ was made manifest, especially in von Humboldt’s writing on the universities (von Humboldt 1963: 126). Within a generation this was extended to Lernfreiheit or the ‘freedom to learn’. But if diverse thinkers could agree on the overall aims and purposes of Bildung, there was still much variation in particular understandings. To take two examples for my purposes: though Kant and Hegel both broadly endorsed central commitments of Bildung, their respective philosophies differed enough that their respective conceptions of Bildung did as well. This is particularly the case in respect of beauty and the role of the beautiful. What this role is for each, and what each of these accounts means for Bildung, I elucidate in the following. Thereafter, I will turn to Oakeshott and see what, if anything, he can draw from the tradition of Bildung in his conception of poetry and its role in the conversation of mankind.

Kant, Bildung and the education of taste Kant was a vigorous proponent of Bildung, in both his writing and lectures. In the 1770s he was engaged in supporting the Philanthropinum, a private school using progressivist techniques and materials in Dessau (Kant 2007b). Bildung, understood as the moral cultivation of the species, and thus conceived as an aim not only of education but of humankind as such, was championed in

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works as varied as his lecture notes on ethics, his ‘Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View’ and his ‘Lectures on Pedagogy’ (Kant 2007c; Kant 2007d). For Kant, Bildung connoted autonomy and self-cultivation; but it also and always encompassed the moral development of the species – the leading task of education. Part of this task included aesthetic education. Kant rigorously distinguishes the aesthetic judgement of the beautiful from an education (Bildung) in taste. Though he agrees partly with Hume on the importance of cultivation of the fine feelings of taste, he insists that making a judgement of beauty is both immediate and subjective (Kant 2000: 5: 25). Moreover, Kant holds that judgements of the beautiful in nature are resistant to cultivation; that is to say, we can cultivate our sense of what is agreeable or disagreeable (as Hume thought), but we cannot cultivate the specific judgement of the beautiful we make upon encountering a beautiful object of nature. The ground for the judgement of the beautiful is in the ‘sensus communis’ – our common sense. Kant famously calls this a subjective transcendental ground to distinguish it from the objective transcendental ground of the categories in the first Critique. This ground is common to all human beings, suggesting that if anyone has the power to make judgements of beauty, everyone must. The ground of beauty lies in a subjective a priori judgement, even though what is beautiful is commonly shared and discussed and we can openly discourse about when, where and why we think something beautiful. It is rather that our powers of imagination and understanding harmonize in beholding the beautiful object and this, rather than formal initiation into and cultivation of what is deemed beautiful (the Humean delight in being affected), constitutes the judgement. Kant has a complicated argument linking beauty as a symbol to morality (e.g. Kant 2000: 5: 353). While this is interesting and important, it does not detract from the two points I am making here: 1) Kant’s judgement of the beautiful in respect of nature is ‘self-contained’; 2) Kant can still talk profitably of the education of taste in a Humean manner, mindful of the fact that this talk does not apply to the immediate judgement of the beautiful object in nature. If this is right, then judgements of taste will play a great role in Bildung – in the process of self-formation. For Kant instructs us to cultivate ‘the beautiful arts and sciences’ as artefacts of culture (5: 353), as it is culture that is nature’s highest aim (5: 433). Beautiful arts and sciences please us; indeed, there is even an imperfect obligation, Kant maintains, to disseminate what is beautiful (5: 353). But what we cannot disseminate is the judgement of beauty in respect of nature. We can disseminate the judgement of taste inasmuch as we learn to find things agreeable and disagreeable through education and habituation, but not beauty. And though we cannot disseminate the judgement(s) of beauty in respect of nature, we can disseminate beautiful objects (arts and sciences). I will return to this when I discuss Oakeshott below.

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Hegel, beauty and the end of art Hegel also held Bildung in high regard. It is a central focus in one of the few texts to be published in Hegel’s lifetime – Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Hegel 1991). Whereas Kant focused on the importance of moral selfcultivation of the human species, Hegel quite characteristically focused on the development of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) through social institutions such as family, civil society and state. Their goal was presumably the same: social and cultural self-formation. But the context was different. For Hegel, aesthetic education had a particular role to play, for it dealt with the shared historical past in symbols. This contrasted with the presentism implied in the ‘beautiful arts and sciences’ of Kant. Hegel famously contests Kant’s claim that only disinterested judgements of beauty are proper to natural objects, arguing that there are no pure or disinterested judgements of beauty and that works of art have a higher standing than things produced by nature (Hegel 1993: sec. xlvi). This remains the case, Hegel argues, even if one holds that natural objects are works of God (xlvii). Works of art are the creation of minds and arise from a need to reach out to other minds, to others’ consciousness (xlviii). This is a ‘universal and absolute need’, in which, Hegel says, one reduplicates oneself and, in so doing, achieves self-realization (xlix). Art is thus the product through which a human being recognizes herself in and through others; it is a medium of social recognition in which a human being recognizes herself as herself (l). Hegel also deviates from Kant in another way: whereas Kant holds that feelings of agreeableness are to be cultivated and shared, Hegel downplays and even denigrates feelings, which, he maintains, derive from ‘the indefinite dull region of the mind’ and remain ‘wrapped in the form of the most abstract individual subjectivity’ (li). Feeling is an empty form of subjective affection and ought not to be taken seriously in the judgement of works of art. The path of feeling leads us to see the judgement of beauty as a mere matter of taste – a view that is one-sided – and to competing undertakings to educate the sense of taste (li–lii). But taste, and the notion of beauty that follows from it, are merely subjective; our focus in regards to the work of art should be elsewhere. Not that it should lie in mere didactics or the instruction of the people in their ways of feeling (Hegel is here criticizing the Romantics) (lxix); where the focus should be, Hegel claims, is in scholarship (liii). Scholarship is science; but it is also the dissemination of knowledge, of Bildung. When scholarship is engaged in, art is seen to be a product not of mere feeling or taste, but (echoing the Phenomenology) desire. This is a particular relationship between human beings and works of art, in which the work of art is seen both in terms of its aesthetic value, but also in terms of Wissenschaft or knowledge regarding history, society and culture (lvii). The interest of art is seen to be distinct from

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the interest of inquiry. Whereas inquiry (Forschung) has instrumental value, art is seen as an external object in its immediate determinateness, and does not go beyond this. It subsists freely and in independence (lvii/lxiv). Art is spiritualized in this freedom; for freedom is recognition (Hegel 1977: ch. iv). It remains an immediate, sensuous spiritualization (unlike philosophy, which is mediate and synthetic). But (and again unlike philosophy) there is no compulsion to educate through the sensuous, immediate features or desire of the work of art. Art is therefore an incomplete or underdeveloped shape of Spirit. It is at its end, insofar as it remains sensuous, immediate desire. True, it involves and invokes (social) recognition, and this is how and why we can say that it manifests Spirit (through Bildung). But it must pass over into philosophy for it to shed its one-sided sensuous nature and become Absolute. At that point, it becomes a symbol of freedom or Spirit, and is no longer a bona fide shape of Spirit in its own right. Seen from the vantage point of philosophy, the point of art is not as a symbol for morality (as Kant thought) but truth – truth in the form of the ‘sensuous artistic shape’ of freedom, or absolute knowledge (Hegel 1993: sec. lxxiv; Hegel 1977: ch. viii). This truth is multifaceted; it no longer needs or permits the segregation of faculties or realms (art, science, morality). It contains these multitudes.

Rival discourses of art and Bildung We have two rival discourses of art in regards to Bildung. On the one hand, we have a view of beauty that issues in a judgement of taste, itself grounded in a common sense or sensus communis. This judgement of beauty is pure and disinterested in regards to nature, though not so in regards to works of art. Works of art and the feelings of agreeableness that accompany them should be cultivated. This cultivation of ‘the beautiful arts and sciences’ proceeds by way of education. Though judgements of the beautiful in respect of nature are subjective and self-contained (they are impervious to sharing), judgements of the agreeable are not, and ought to be nurtured and shared. On the other hand, we have a view of beauty belonging to a particular historical period, one in which sensuous feelings are given pride of place in judging matters of the beautiful and works of art. Art and judgements about art become a matter of taste – whether of pleasure (as with Hume and Hutcheson) or reflective judgement (as with Kant). But, for Hegel, these views are subjective and one-sided attempts at getting at the nature of the work of art. While art is certainly a matter for taste, the shapes of taste are manifest for Hegel as desire. Desire only fully realizes its goal when it reaches beyond itself – in this case through social recognition. This is the spiritualization of art,

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art in quest of freedom. When it becomes this shape of Spirit, it has completed itself and takes its place as a moment in an even greater, because absolute, configuration of Spirit: philosophy. Kant’s path for art is a path of divergence; Hegel’s is one of convergence. For Kant, agreeableness is something to be cultivated and taught, and agreeableness, as with Hume, applies to works of art (the ‘beautiful arts and sciences’). But there is an element of taste that cannot be taught: judgements of disinterested and pure beauty, which Kant claims are restricted to nature and natural objects, and involve the free harmony of the imagination and understanding. True, they have their ground in the sensus communis – but this ground is not taught or cultivated. It is presupposed. It is a thoroughly regulative and reflective ground. Judgements of the beautiful in respect of nature are to be distinguished from other judgements, and particularly from judgements of the agreeable which are amenable to cultivation and education, or Bildung. Hegel’s path leads to absolute knowledge. Fine art emancipates itself from sensuous desire only by surrendering itself to philosophy. As it is, it is onesided, subjective. It includes the cultivation and education of works of art, but these merely ensure its continuing one-sidedness. Art is distinct only when it remains in its particular shape of Spirit – that is to say, aesthetic, sensual and ultimately indeterminate. When it gains freedom through recognition, it surrenders its indeterminacy, but also its distinctness. It is no longer distinguishable from philosophy. Thus, art becomes a moment in the historical development of Spirit, but is no longer a viable shape of Spirit in its own right. The role for education, given that absolute knowledge is completed, seems to be primarily historical: what were the moments that went into making up Spirit? This of course includes the history of art. If we were to press further, we could say that a distinction between Kant and Hegel’s view of works of art concerns the role not only of judgement but of Bildung. Kant’s judgement of the beautiful in respect of nature is restrictive; it cannot be passed by one to another. (Of course, judgements of the beautiful in regards to works of art can be made and can be passed on, but only in terms of their sensuous features, and not the actual harmony or free play of the faculties of imagination and understanding). Judgements of the beautiful can be discussed, but not intersubjectively shared; they are off limits to others. This is a transcendental-subjective necessity for Kant and is obviously a limit to Bildung. In contrast, for Hegel, the judgement of taste seems entirely predicated on the ability to have and share sensuous desires. Indeed, this is the purpose of art. This is entirely a matter of cultivation or Bildung – this sharing of sensuous desires through formal and informal education, through media, through exhibitions, so that social recognition ultimately takes hold. It is social recognition or sociality that constitutes the need for Bildung (as the

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synthesis of individual and community, community and society, society and state) and it is the recognition of the role of art in the greater whole of philosophy which ultimately brings an end to fine art, though not to Bildung itself. To reiterate: we have two rival discourses on Bildung in regards to art. In the case of Kant, we have a semi-closed discourse in which taste and agreeableness are open to communication, cultivation and instruction, and in which a judgement of beauty in respect of nature is entirely subjective and communicable only in terms of its sensuous features (what did it feel like?) and results (i.e. ‘This is beautiful’). In the case of Hegel, any discourse of judgements of the beautiful (nature) are ex post facto; even judgements of works of art have pre-discursive aspects. Discourse or communication, broadly understood, fashions the judgement of the beautiful and of taste generally, in particular by bringing it out of its subjective and isolated beginnings to a state of sociality. ‘Beautiful’ becomes not a transcendentally subjective ground that we all must agree on, but a movement of Spirit from individual to social and from social to universal.

Oakeshott and the conversation of mankind It might seem that given Oakeshott’s avowed conservatism and his affinity to Hobbes as well as the tradition of political thought emanating from Edmund Burke, he would be inimical to Bildung, with its emancipatory political pretensions (Oakeshott 1990). After all, Bildung was championed by largely liberal proponents, particularly in Germany and France. But, of course, Bildung was also championed by conservatives and romantics (the Schlegels, Schelling and, in England, Coleridge), so we ought not to rush to judgement here. There are elements of Bildung that Oakeshott does integrate into his ‘programme’ on education, albeit without identifying with the liberal political agenda Bildung is often thought to embrace (Løvlie and Standish 2002: 318). These include robust individuality and personal autonomy, negative freedom, and of course a strong sense of community, rooted in tradition, and maintained by and through ‘conversation’. What is truly notable, though, is not what Oakeshott draws from Bildung but what he resists. In particular, Oakeshott’s divisions between the discourses, and particularly the discourse of poetry in regards to science and practical affairs, are reminiscent of Kant’s distinction between judgements of the beautiful in nature and judgements of mere agreeableness. In the case of poetry, the discourse is impervious to education or cultivation, and this (from the perspective of a thoroughgoing Bildung that would integrate the discourses in the act of Bildung) is a strong limit to the project of cultivation.

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But let us begin with Oakeshott’s criticism of rationalism. The ‘rational’ in rationalism is largely equated with the ‘instrumental’, though the target here is both instrumental reason and a sort of perfectionism practised by those of an intuitionist bent – a holdover of the Enlightenment that is found is Leibniz, Wolff and Kant, and consists in unswerving obedience to transcendental rules or principles (Oakeshott 1991b: 35). To these, Oakeshott contrasts knowledge and activity of mind (1991c: 109). ‘Knowing how’ is stressed over ‘knowing that’, and ‘knowing how’ can only be partly reduced to propositions and statements (110). Of course, mind is a discursive activity at bottom; the knowledge and the rules for acting are only ever enacted in a larger context of practice. Rationality therefore has its modus operandi in the activity (Oakeshott gives us examples of the carpenter, the scientist, the painter, etc.), and not in mere propositions that are distilled from that activity (111). Indeed, propositions are only one (and not even the most important) part of what it means to learn an activity; though they can be taught (and are often the focus of educators) they are ‘never more than the meanest part of education in an activity’ (112). Oakeshott talks more of education in his inaugural lecture to the London School of Economics (1951), republished as ‘Political Education’ (Oakeshott 1991d). Among the various characteristics of a political education, this one stands out: political education is an invitation to a conversation (1991d: 62). Given that politics is a proper subject matter for academic study, what should a political education consist in? It should not, Oakeshott advises, be a mere induction into a tradition. Rather, it is learning how to participate in a conversation: it is at once initiation into an inheritance in which we have a life interest, and the exploration of its intimations. There will always remain something of a mystery about how a tradition of political behaviour is learned, and perhaps the only certainty is that there is no point at which learning it can properly be said to begin (62). Oakeshott contrasts this conception with an ideological education – one designed to equip us to ‘expound, defend, implement, and possibly invent a political ideology’ (50). An ideology, he maintains, is ‘an abstract principle’, or set of principles, supplying in advance ‘of attending to the arrangements of a society a formulated end to be pursued’ (48). Oakeshott comes out against ‘rationalism’ and rationalist principles, which operate outside of some context of activity. He favours political education in which practical matters are dominant, and principles, although players in that education, are not hypostatized. Much of what education typically provides, unfortunately, is the principle (or proposition as Oakeshott likes to call it) but not the context or practice – the conversation – which alone gives principles their sense. This is a central failure of rationalism and its styles of education.

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Prima facie, this position seems to have traits in common with the earlier tradition of Bildung. For it lauds the conversation, the practice, the context – all thought highly important by the leading thinkers of Bildung in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Given Oakeshott’s positive comments on Hegel in Experience and its Modes, one might think it comes close to Hegel’s understanding of the importance of concretizing rules and principles – the idea that no principle is complete until it is worked through in practice (1933: 26). Yet, as I will discuss, Oakeshott is not in league with Hegel or with the general tenets of Bildung, with perhaps the exception of one belief which he shares with Kant. Let us turn now to ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’. I have already mentioned Oakeshott’s declaration that education should be seen as initiation into a conversation that ‘in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance’ (1991f: 491). This seems to have traits in common with the earlier tradition of Bildung: it emphasizes context and practice; the social elements of morals and intelligence; and activity and speech. This conversation also seems to imply some sort of unity, as conversation draws the otherwise disparate modes of experience together, and this seems to accord with Hegel’s synthesis of earlier forms of life (or shapes of Spirit) into higher ones. Presumably, almost all of the philosophers of Bildung could get behind this. But this is not true of crucial elements of Oakehott’s philosophy, particularly his treatment of the voice of poetry. As we saw, Oakeshott, following his Experience and its Modes, distinguishes the discourse of poetry from that of science, history and practical activity. Science is not so much a conversation as an inquiry, a set of skills, habits and aptitudes (Oakeshott 1991f: 489). Of course, it uses discourse; but often enough it uses propositions in the context of methods quite distinct from what Oakeshott calls ‘conversation’. In conversations, participants do not inquire, debate or discover truth (489). Indeed, conversations, Oakeshott says, are ‘the appropriate image of human intercourse’: ‘We of course communicate in the conversation, but we do not try to discover the world, or make it better’ (490). Pace Hegel, philosophy is merely parasitic on this conversation, and makes no specific contribution to it (491). Philosophy enlarges our (poetic) understanding; thus, the consideration of poetry, Oakeshott maintains, can become philosophical but only when poetic imagining has a specific place ‘in the manifold of human activities’ (494). Poetry rather than science or practical activity qualifies as the most contemplative mode of discourse. We experience through modes (history, science, practical affairs, poetry), and we do so through imagining. The sorts of images we have correspond to the modes or manner of our experience. The self makes and rearranges images. These images are not sense perceptions or Kantian Vorstellungen; they are the not-self, non-material,

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vague and indefinite in appearance. In our encounter with them, we become active (1991f: 496–97). The important point here is that these modes and images are distinct from one another. To have a scientific image (e.g. an image of cause and effect) is to have a different image than of fine art. To imagine is itself a mode among modes; it is the mode, Oakeshott characteristically claims, that is associated with art and with poetry. When we have conversations about poetry we are having conversations about images, and images are a mode of thought. This is to be distinguished especially from the conversations of science and practical activity. Whereas in science we concern ourselves with appearances and methods, and in practical activity with morals and politics, these are no concern of poetry. The conversation of poetry is a great deal removed from the spheres of science and practical activity; and whereas in practical activity one person can be beholden to another through the discourse of sovereignty, rights, duties, and the like, this is not the case in the conversation of poetry. Likewise, the behavioural dimensions of animals and human beings so prevalent in sciences such as biology and psychology have no place in the conversation of poetry. In the conversation of poetry, we do not recognize images as fact, as we do in science. Nor do we recognize the moral implications of this or that image as we do in practical activity. We ‘contemplate’ or ‘delight’. This involves moving images around in an ‘appropriate’ manner (Oakeshott 1991f: 509). These are not historical images, nor are they used as tools to some further end or aim. They are not Platonic essences (Oakeshott takes pains to distinguish these images from Plato’s forms), but they are wholly unique qualities arising and existing nowhere else (512). These images are selfcontained; they arise, Oakeshott claims, when practical activity (including moral activity) is blunted, largely through the ‘lessening of the urgency of desire’ (515). When a desire has failed, the mind is ready, as it were, to ‘be superseded by an image of contemplative delight’ (515). Presumably, this image that delights contemplatively can be communicated. But Oakeshott does not say what that process looks like. We can ascertain from his description of the mode of thought that it cannot be treated as factstating in the context of a conversation (for then it would become science), and it cannot be treated as practical activity, involving pleasures or pains (including most forms of desire). We cannot discuss poetry with others and have it be reduced to a set of facts or propositions, nor can we discuss poetry and have it reduced to wants, desires, pleasures, pains or moral conventions, rules, and the like. (The delight of contemplation in practising poetry, on the other hand, must be of a different kind than the delight we usually associate with the fulfilment of desire for poetry to remain separate from practice.) On the face of it, it looks as if this would be a difficult conversation – one that is so delicate as to be easily railroaded by ‘outside’ concerns – in spite of the fact

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that Oakeshott tells us the images that go into making up this conversation begin where desire leaves off. It seems very unlikely that poetry could be the conversation that draws other conversations (as modes of experience) together. There is a related issue for education and particularly teaching. It is often the case that the sorts of conversations teachers have regarding poetry (to say nothing of other subjects) are didactic; teachers lecture, often using points to get across material they wish to emphasize. This appears to be the conversation of literature in terms of its mechanics – what Oakeshott calls ‘technical knowledge’ (1991b: 15), not poetry, and it becomes difficult to imagine a class carrying on a non-didactic conversation of poetry and meeting any sort of objectives. One wonders where, if at all, systems of education could make room for such a conversation. In any event, we must turn to the question of the place of Bildung in this conversation.

Bildung and the conversation of mankind There is no doubt that Oakeshott has what appear to be elements of Bildung in his various understandings of politics, poetry and education. Indeed, the very idea of education serving a human being who is bound through participation in a particular tradition is redolent of a line of thinkers stretching from Aristotle through Hegel to Gadamer. More specifically, the understanding of education as initiation into practices that include conversation captures a great deal of what eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century thinkers understood as self-formation. Of course, Oakeshott’s particular emphasis on images as modes of experience is unique, but nevertheless it is not so far from Hegel’s own peculiar understanding of experiences inhabiting shapes of Spirit. On the face of it, then, there is a convergence of themes between Bildung broadly characterized and Oakeshott’s articulation of education. But there is a crucial difference that must not be overlooked. Oakeshott insists on the incommensurability of poetry in the conversation of mankind, and this contrasts with the earlier German tradition of Bildung. If we think of Hegel’s articulation of Spirit, for example, we see that it consists in individual shapes of Spirit (think of art prior to the development of philosophy) which are unique and differentiated from other shapes (science and everyday knowledge). These have their own internal rules and concrete manifestations (particular works of art). Furthermore, these rules and practices can be articulated, disseminated and taught. Artists learn the craft of art in their particular context and time, and with this Oakeshott would doubtless agree. But in Hegel there is a sublation/integration of art with Spirit (philosophy) that shifts the discourse within art so that it becomes something else. Hegel says this shift of discourse (in our words) brings art to an end, meaning its raison d’être is no longer art

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itself but a larger shape of Spirit: philosophy. Oakeshott could not abide this in regards to poetry. There is no integration and no sublation of poetry to science, or to practical affairs. There is no integration with philosophy either, since philosophy is properly the product of conversing and not its impetus. Bildung tends toward integration. It tends toward a view of the world in which various themes and discourses are brought together (science, morals, practical matters, literature and art, etc.). They are seldom exhausted in one another (even Hegel doesn’t see art exhausted by its sublation in philosophy). The connections between otherwise disparate disciplines are made manifest, partly for the purposes of cultivating a humane, cosmopolitan individual with a breadth of knowledge and partly to emphasize the essential interconnectivity of all knowledge and knowing. Oakeshott will have none of this. Science is a discourse distinct from practical affairs, and poetry is distinct from both of these. There are limits to self-cultivation and one of these – the greatest perhaps – is the essential distinctiveness of discourses. In this regard, Oakeshott comes closest not to Hegel and the integrative tendency among philosophers of Bildung, but to Kant. For it was Kant who claimed that judgements of the beautiful in respect of nature were in principle private and unshareable. To have a judgement of beauty in respect of nature was to align one’s faculties of imagination and understanding, bringing them together in harmony – a private act of reflection. Though the ground for the judgement was itself the sensus communis, the act of reflection remained private. The articulation of this judgement ex post facto had no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the judgement, or on the actual harmonizing of the faculties. No discussion of the scientific or aesthetic merits of the beautiful in nature has a bearing on the capacity to judge. Likewise in the conversation of poetry, no presence of scientific or practical discourse is wanted; and presumably, no further scientific or practical discourse will have an effect on the delight and contemplation of poetic images. There are undoubtedly limits to bringing Kant and Oakeshott together in this way. To begin with, Kant’s notion of reflective judgement was subjective, notwithstanding its appeal to the sensus communis as a transcendental ground. Oakeshott could certainly not get behind this, for his appeal to poetry in the conversation is discursive. Regardless of the genesis of the images, poetry’s contribution to the conversation is generated through delight in contemplation. While Kant certainly thinks delight in discourse is important, this discourse belongs to ‘the beautiful arts and sciences’, and not the act of reflective judging of the beautiful in nature. While it may seem correct to say that Kant and Oakeshott’s aim was to expand discourse to as many as possibly can be accommodated, this is in fact not true. Oakeshott did not have this aim, particularly with respect to poetry. It was rather a carefully crafted discourse for the initiated, and certainly did not include the many subjects Kant thought

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essential under the rubric of ‘the beautiful arts and sciences’. However, the undeniable claim of Oakeshott that poetry is formed in a discourse of imagination that has no bearing upon science or practical affairs is comparable to Kant’s claim that a judgement of the beautiful in nature is made with no interest of science (cognition) and no direct interest of morality (practical reason). In both cases, science and practical matters do not intervene. Oakeshott’s particular political views notwithstanding, on the basis of his claims regarding the conversation of mankind, I do not think we can develop from him an account of Bildung that pays heed to its eighteenth-century originators. But I do think an account of education that nevertheless respects his comments on poetry could be developed. (Remember that Kant too had an account of both Bildung and education (Erziehung) and did so with his judgement of the beautiful central to his claims in the third Critique.) It is worth saying a few words about this Oakeshottian alternative and how it differs from Bildung. Education as it is understood in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philosophers – as self-formation and/or self-cultivation – would have to be loosed from its liberal moorings. If we take Oakeshott’s emphasis on conserving existing social-political structures and tradition seriously, it does not seem as if the establishment of something like an allgemeine Freiheit on the part of civilization can be a feature of an Oakeshottian education. The ‘end’ or ‘aim’ of education would doubtless need to be scaled back, likely to involve only the particular tradition(s) in which students are to be educated. Moreover, the contemplative discourse of poetry notwithstanding, schooling for Oakeshott could presumably only apply to scientific and practical discourses. This extends to literature didactically presented. Education for Oakeshott plays the role of initiator into a craft or practice, including of course the practice of politics (very important for Oakeshott) but, more generally, adult living. This education is an education in and for a particular craft, having as its backdrop a particular tradition. It plays a conserving function. The conversations that figure in this education will doubtless connect to the broader factual/scientific and practical conversations taking place outside and beyond, and a sort of ‘fusion of horizons’ will take place. I end this chapter with a pedagogical caution Oakeshott points us to that I think is well worth considering. (There is a similar caution in Kant, with regard to the judgement of beauty in nature.) We ought to think deeply about conflating our poetic conversations with our scientific and practical ones. What is at stake here, for Oakeshott, is the imagination. (The imagination is at stake in Kant as well, though in a different way.) Specifically, conflating these conversations, or what amounts to the same thing, conflating poetic with scientific and/or practical images, risks denying the contemplative ability of mind. Though this obviously turns on Oakeshott’s peculiar understanding of mind, it bears noting because it underlines the importance of having and

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providing for a contemplative activity that is free from fact-building, instrumental use, and the pull of specific desires and impulses. This would be a sort of letting-be, in which students are first introduced to poetry (or other works of art) but with the attempt to draw lessons from, or even sympathize with, the material forestalled. With Oakeshott in mind, we might say education should try hard to carve out a space where just the sort of contemplative activity that he suggests is important actually takes place.

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5 Conservatism, Perfectionism and Equality Christine Sypnowich

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hilosophers of education have embraced the writings of Michael Oakeshott, discerning in him a humanist commitment to the idea of initiation into a life of value. As such, Oakeshott is thought to figure as a bulwark against current pressures to construe education instrumentally, as a means of preparing students for the demands of the market. Oakeshott might seem an odd bedfellow for these largely left-wing critics, as he was an avowed conservative, whose conception of politics was both traditionalist and hierarchical. However, the Left’s relation to conservative thought is both complex and fascinating. There is much that divides the two political perspectives, but there are also some strong points of affinity. In particular, they share a critique of the market and an interest in perfectionist approaches to social institutions. In this chapter, I investigate the relation between perfectionism and conservatism in order to argue that some of the core principles of Oakeshott’s moral and political views can in fact be rendered compatible with egalitarianism in the theory of education, and in political philosophy more generally.

Oakeshott’s theory of education For Michael Oakeshott, education has intrinsic value as a process wherein the person becomes a participant in the intellectual and moral legacy of society. He famously used the idea of a ‘conversation of mankind’ to encapsulate this non-instrumentalist approach to learning. Education should be understood as an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation, in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of 77

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utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation (Oakeshott 1991f: 490–91). Oakeshott contends that the conversation initiated by education involves three different voices – practical activity, science and poetry – each making its special contribution. The scientific voice describes the world and explains how it operates. The practical voice directs us how to engage successfully with the world with expediency and justice. The poetic voice is distinctive for its interest in contemplation where its object is simply ‘delight’. Oakeshott insists that, in poetry, ‘there is no problem to be solved, no hypothesis to be explored, no restlessness to be overcome, no desire to be satisfied, or approval to be won, there is no “This, therefore, That . . .” ’ (1991f: 513). Poetry best represents the spirit of the conversational model, which, he says wittily, resembles gambling: ‘its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering’ (490). Education is a matter of immersing people in the ideas that shape humanity, aiming for no particular payoff or result. Thus education is not to be reduced to a vehicle for accreditation, market-ready skills or the imperatives of managerial success. Education is a unique social practice that enculturates individuals into the ideas and values that have developed in the community over time. This conception of education as the basis for ‘participation in human life’ is manifest in Oakeshott’s idea that education helps us enter our ‘cultural inheritance’, the public world of others and our community; it is a process in which one makes the most of oneself by ‘learning to recognize’ oneself in the ‘mirror of this inheritance’ (Oakeshott 2001c: 41–2; cf. White 1972: 113, 129). The inheritance, he stresses, is not akin to ‘a chain of village stores’, or a ‘villa in Venice’, an object of possession that can be conveyed with no activity on the part of the recipient. Rather, it is a legacy of ‘human achievements’, and includes canons, books, skills, ideas, emotions and works of art. The components are ‘a whole of interlocking meanings’ appropriate to ‘an intelligence capable of choice and self-direction’ (Oakeshott 2001c: 35–7). Educational institutions at all levels have been subject to two quite different kinds of pressure that are at odds with Oakeshott’s approach: one is the selfexpression ideal of child-centred learning, in which the learner is unfettered by any canon of literature or thought, and in which book-learning is replaced by educational styles that purport creatively to unleash the imagination.1 This movement had its origins in John Dewey’s pragmatist conception of inquiry, where the individual learns by confronting concrete tasks that demand solution, but the subtleties of his approach were perhaps inevitably lost in the 1960s enthusiasm for revolutionary changes to schooling as expressed in the Plowden Report in the UK (1967), which advocated experiential learning, personalized approaches to teaching children, and the displacement of formal instruction by group work and projects that enable learning through play and

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creativity. ‘At the heart of the educational process lies the child’ was the core principle of the new approach (Central Advisory Council for Education 1967: 9). The other, quite different, trend conceives of education as a vehicle for accreditation that delivers market-ready skills according to the imperatives of managerial success, and where education is measured by ‘learning outcomes’ that must be specified in advance and tallied with audit-like diagnostic tools. This trend to a large extent marks a reversal of the experimental approach. Indeed it was initiated by right-wing politicians hostile to the ‘free-for-all’ of the 1960s pedagogues. As Derek Gillard (2004) remarks: Plowden’s philosophy played no part in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s educational agenda. Her Conservative governments, from 1979 onwards, sought to turn the public education service into a market-place. The culmination of this process was the 1988 Education ‘Reform’ Act, which, with its imposition of a subject-based National Curriculum and associated regime of testing and published league tables, forced schools to train pupils to get good test results so as to compete for pupils. Yet, however unlike each other, both the child-centred and technocratic trends undermine the idea of a liberal education where the individual is initiated into a tradition of thought, so in this context, Oakeshott’s message is doubly subversive. Oakeshott thus has many admirers in educational circles among those who resist both these trends. In the 1960s there was some backlash against the child-centred approach on behalf of the values of liberal education. Philosophers of education like P. H. Hirst railed against trends towards an emphasis on the ‘transfer of skills’, and commended the idea of education as based ‘fairly and squarely on the nature of knowledge itself’, as exemplified by Oakeshott’s idea of learning as conversation (Hirst 1972: 398, 413). More recently, educationalists have decried the exclusive focus on training for marketable skills, arguing, Oakeshott-style, that technocratic education deprives students of the opportunity to ‘ponder the large questions’ and moreover, has hindered rather than helped disadvantaged students (Davis 2000: 191). Paul Standish laments how educational policy has been subject to ‘a vogue for “skills” and “competencies” with a declining reference to the acquisition of knowledge and understanding’, citing Oakeshott’s ideas as an important bulwark against such trends (Standish 2007: 161, 164, 167). In all these critiques of current themes in education, Oakeshott’s voice, radical in its stalwart refusal to be cowed by market trends, administrative buzzwords and managerial imperatives, comes through loud and clear.

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Oakeshott’s conservatism Oakeshott’s role as an inspiration to resistance to the pedagogical mainstream might seem hard to square with the other part of his intellectual contribution, in particular his political philosophy that is both pro-market and anti-egalitarian. For Oakeshott, the modern age is afflicted with a dangerous political mindset that he calls ‘rationalism’. This indictment reflects Oakeshott’s general antipathy to the norms and institutions of his time, and what he thought was its overconfidence in ‘abstract systems of ideas’. Rationalism is evident, he argues, in revolutionary doctrines of various stripes, be it the American War of Independence, the Bolsheviks or the postwar welfare state in Britain. All are guilty of preferring ‘the consciously planned and deliberately executed’ over what has ‘grown up and established itself unselfconsciously over a period of time’ (Oakeshott 1991b: 26). Socialist planning, in particular, is faulted for attempting to control and legislate economic decision-making, a process best conducted by individuals to control in light of their own concerns. As for political institutions, Oakeshott contended that governance is best left to an elite; it is something acquired in a ‘family tradition’ with at least ‘two generations of practice’, rather than a technique or training that can be learned by anyone (39). Statesmanship is concerned not with ‘felt need’ but with ‘concrete knowledge of the permanent interests’ of society, something which cannot be discerned by ‘an individual or social class rising not fully prepared’ like ‘jumped up kitchen porters deputizing for an absent cook’ (27, 31). On Oakeshott’s narrow model of governance, as Bikhu Parekh (1979: 505) complained more than a generation ago, any prospect that elected representatives might pursue public policy to remedy social ills is dogmatically rejected. Here we can see echoes of Oakeshott’s conversational model, where learning involves the gradual assimilation of wisdom, and judgement can be taught only obliquely. Oakeshott’s focus on tradition also marked him as a conservative. Among the hallmarks of the conversation of mankind is that it is of long duration: ‘begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries’ (Oakeshott 1991b: 199). Small wonder that his views are often compared to those of Edmund Burke, who counselled against radical change and the overthrow of hierarchy, and spoke of society as bound by a partnership between ‘those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’ (Burke 2009: 94). Oakeshott’s right-wing politics thus mark him as hierarchical, snobbish and regressive, and therefore as an unlikely comrade for progressives. His reactionary credentials affirmed, Oakeshott became the darling of American conservatives. The Liberty Fund press republished his writings, his opposition to radical ideas was captured in the epithets ‘Cold War liberal’

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(Smith 2012: 139) and ‘Burkean conservative’ (Devigne 2012: 269), and his ideas were linked to the elitist views of the political theorist Leo Strauss. Even Oakeshott’s views about education as a conversation were read through this lens. As Dana Villa puts it, though lacking Strauss’s ‘Plato-flavoured elitism’, Oakeshott’s complaint against the modern age – that it rejected the practical wisdom of established institutions and traditional forms of life – bore an ‘eerie resemblance’ to Strauss’s indictment of universal education (Villa 2012: 324–25).

Conservatives and progressives – antagonisms Might it be possible for progressives to extricate the cultural critique of conservatives like Oakeshott from their right-wing political views? I should first note what I mean by ‘progressive’. Here I intend a general outlook common to a variety of views – egalitarian, Marxist, socialist and left-liberal – which share a commitment to social change that brings about greater equality. The question of how these thinkers might orient themselves to Oakeshott is bound to be complicated. The Left has long been wary of nostalgic and conservative forms of utopianism, distinguishing its revolutionary stand on market society from conservative critiques. There are many facets to this, but I will distil three arguments. First, Marxists contend that the cultural malaise of contemporary society is to be addressed by radically changing economic relations. We must transform society’s material basis, what Marx calls ‘the real foundation’, as opposed to repairing its ‘superstructural’ effects such as law or culture. The conservative position, according to Marxists, is idealist in both the philosophical and everyday senses of the word. Conservatives focus on the cultural, tackling only the epiphenomena of more basic, material and structural problems, and thus offer regressive and ‘unscientific’ exhortations. People are expected simply to change their minds about their circumstances, without the circumstances themselves undergoing significant change. In other words, conservatives bemoan the anti-humanism of corporate society, but they fail to understand the materialist basis for the values they reject. After all, as we noted above, Oakeshott in fact commended the market for avoiding the ‘rationalist’ conceit of the planned economy, at the same time as he lamented the values the market promotes. For the Left, this is politically naive, as well as philosophically unsound. Second, certain values central to conservative thought are uncongenial to the progressive on a number of grounds. Let me mention two: they are elitist and they are repressive. The latter objection is especially interesting, though it is often overlooked. Indeed, the interest in personal liberation has been a part

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of the progressive tradition since the English Civil War when radical sects called for free love as part and parcel of their demands for communal property against the enclosures (Hill 1985: 306–23). The Marxist critique of capitalism in the Communist Manifesto also offers a paean to the bourgeoisie and its revolutionary accomplishments, precisely for its contribution to overthrowing the values of the old order, so that ‘all that is solid melts into air, everything sacred is profaned’. Marx and Engels note that ‘ancient and venerable prejudices’ are ‘swept away’ with the end of feudal society, and they dismiss ‘reactionary’ and ‘feudal’ forms of socialism that decry the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary purpose to ‘cut up root and branch the old order of society’ (Marx and Engels 1978: 492). The conservative revulsion to market society, they argued, was: half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history (491). In the 1960s the New Left and the student movement amplified this theme of the revolution in manners necessary for political revolution, targeting society’s coercive imposition of traditional values about sexual morality and personal expression. Thus, although ‘free enterprise’ was rejected, the freedom of the individual was not, and it was the idea of personal liberation that was attractive to many 1960s critics of the alienation of capitalism, and many old-style Marxists were drawn to a New Left that would celebrate youth culture and the values of the student movement in its fight against ‘the establishment’. This was particularly marked in the American variant of the New Left and its heady claim that ‘the postwar generation’ should be ascribed a special role in ‘history’s permanent showdown between fatality and will’ by seeking the ‘negation of contemporary Western life’ (Oglesby 1969: 5, 19). Herbert Marcuse, for example, lamented not just material deprivation but the cultural repression wrought by the ‘one-dimensional’ ideology of postwar capitalism, where even sexuality is ‘a vehicle for the bestsellers of oppression’ (Marcuse 1964: 78). The British New Left embraced not only the traditional socialist critique based on issues of class and property, but also popular movements with a more implicit ‘anti-capitalist’ agenda, including issues of sexual politics, culture and the liberation of the young. As Raphael Samuel put it, ‘we came to think that there was an elective affinity between protest politics and generational revolt’ (Samuel 1989: 47; see also Hall 1989: 32–3). They thus found common cause with sexual liberationists who were the target of the puritanical strictures of figures such as Patrick Devlin, the high court judge who defended a ‘public morality’ that would continue the criminalization of

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homosexuality and prostitution (Devlin 1996). All this forms the background to the shifts in theories of education, where the emphasis on creativity, self-expression and liberation from traditional institutions was manifest in the move to less formal teaching methods. The rejection of conservative values as elitist is a well-known reaction among left-wing critics of traditional institutions. After all, as Marx and Engels noted, the aristocracy’s revulsion at the values of commerce was premised on the idea of a hierarchical order in which the ‘better born’, free of financial need, were the custodians of society’s values. This revulsion is intimated in Oakeshott’s choice of words in criticizing the Rationalist: His knowledge will never be more than half-knowledge and consequently he will never be more than half-right. Like a foreigner or a man out of his social class, he is bewildered by a tradition and a habit of behavior of which he knows only the surface; a butler or an observant house-maid has the advantage of him (Oakeshott 1991b: 36). Here Oakeshott’s remarks recall the snobbishness of Nancy Mitford’s ‘UpperClass English Usage’, where people give away their social position through certain forms of speech, and true cultivation can only come with birth (Mitford 2002). That Oakeshott impugns a certain style of thinking as having less authority than the perspective of domestic servants who, in contrast, appreciate that their expertise requires them to ‘know their place’, is revealing indeed. It has long been the case, particularly in Britain, that social class has been assumed to be a marker of, not just learning, but affinity for learning. Consider the wicked diatribe of Evelyn Waugh, who warns that equality is no mere ‘present craze’, precisely because it has infected education. He laments that the Butler Education Act ‘provided free university degrees to the deserving poor’, with the result that instead of splitting atoms and that kind of thing . . . many of Mr. Butler’s protégés choose, or are directed into, ‘Literature’. I could make your flesh creep by telling you about the new wave of philistinism with which we are threatened by these sour young people who are coming off the assembly lines in their hundreds every year and finding employment as critics, even as poets and novelists. L’Ecole de Butler are the primal men and women of the classless society (Waugh 2002: 58).2 Is the critique of rationalism in politics simply a variant of the ‘noblesse oblige’ of old Tories who regard education as inherently exclusive? We might worry that Oakeshott’s ideal of education as inculcation in the traditions of thought is tied to the idea of education as the preserve of certain kinds of

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people. Small wonder that John White (2007: 26) complains that ‘Oakeshott’s “conversation” evokes the wide-ranging, unfocussed atmosphere of an upper class dinner party’, as if only toffs have the luxury of conversing in a noninstrumentalist way. Moreover, the model of conversation has been criticized for excluding, by its very nature, sharply dissenting voices. Kevin Williams (2012: 122) notes that the metaphor ‘hardly implies a robust critical enterprise’ given the expectations in conversation of ‘congenial social intercourse’ where starkly opposing views might be construed as ‘bad manners’. The concern about elitism means that some progressive educational theorists, particularly in Britain, have long been suspicious of the appeal to ‘tradition’. The move towards comprehensive education and the elimination of grammar schools in state-funded institutions, initiated in the 1970s, was designed to eliminate not just the advantages of an economic elite but also those of an intellectual elite, even if its ranks might include members from lower socio-economic groups. It was thus deemed important to rid society of all educational institutions, even state-funded ones like grammar schools, which perpetuated, as one socialist put it, a ‘training in caste assumptions’ (Samuel 1989: 39).3 In response, those wary of progressive education policy, such as some of the writers of the infamous Black Papers on education in the early 1970s, took themselves to be defending the principle of education as the initiation into tradition against ‘the egalitarian threat’ (Maude 1971).4 It is hardly surprising that those who mistrust traditional educational institutions should also mistrust the idea of education into a tradition, and thus that Oakeshott’s conversation of mankind draws criticism as an inherently exclusive enterprise. All this suggests that a conservative like Oakeshott is a highly problematic ally for progressives in education.

Conservatives and progressives – affinities In our post-Soviet age, we should be wary of old left–right dichotomies that might thwart the possibility of a fruitful line of inquiry. I propose that certain ideals of conservatism, properly understood, can contribute to an egalitarian philosophy that seeks to improve human flourishing, particularly in the domain of education. In what follows, I explore this in two ways: first, in the progressive impact of conservative cultural criticism, and second, in the conservative themes to be found among some progressives. One of the first examples of the progressive impact of conservative ideals can be found in the thought of John Ruskin, art critic and mentor of William Morris, himself an aesthete-cum-socialist. Ruskin’s politics are complex. He contended that ‘I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school’ (Ruskin 1903–12, vol. 35: 13). His Tory sensibilities were such that he

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held that human government was simply the ‘executive expression of Divine authority’ (Ruskin 1968: 80), a hierarchical model of paternal rule. A ‘wellorganised nation’ should be like a father and his sons, where ‘all acts and services were not only to be sweetened by brotherly concord, but to be enforced by fatherly authority’ (10). For Ruskin, natural inequalities should be replicated so that the superior should have the power ‘to guide, to lead, or on occasion even to compel and subdue their inferiors’ (160). However, Ruskin’s conservatism also included a sense of obligation to preserve relations of community and benevolence, in opposition to the market-driven imperatives of self-interested individualism. The origins for this lay in his aesthetic views. As an art critic Ruskin stressed that well-designed and original works of beauty could not be separated from the social conditions in which they were made. It was these social conditions – characterized by ‘degradation and deathfulness to the art-intellect’ (20) – that increasingly became his focus. Thus society should reject the competitive values of the market and the political economy that justifies it, and instead seek fulfilling conditions for labour and the ‘careful preservation and just division’ of the riches that are produced by humanely organized work (137). Ruskin’s influence on Morris is well known. Morris’s egalitarian ideals also emerged from aesthetic convictions, and he found Ruskin’s social philosophy inspiring, notwithstanding its paternalism. Thus Morris also contended that ‘a very inequitably divided material prosperity’ meant that people ‘work as laboriously as ever they did’, but have ‘lost the solace that labour once provided’ (Morris 1966a: 193), that is, ‘the opportunity of expressing their own thoughts to their fellows by means of that very labour’ (Morris 1966b: 14). Morris drew egalitarian conclusions from this critique, and turned to socialism as the political model best able to further Ruskin’s conservative ideal of preserving relations of community and fellowship in the production of society’s wealth. This mingling of the conservative and the radical is exemplified again in Alasdair MacIntyre’s work. MacIntyre’s thought evolved from a Marxist approach in his early writings to a more conservative one. In After Virtue he took aim at the ‘science of human behaviour’ that purports to be neutral about value in order to secure ‘manipulative power’, a critique informed by the philosophies of Aristotle on the one hand and Marx on the other (MacIntyre 1981: 78–83). Another example is Marcuse, whose radical social theory involved comparing American capitalism to fascism, and who noted the paradoxical role played by aristocratic privilege: The fact that the transcending truths of the fine arts, the aesthetics of life and thought, were accessible only to the few wealthy and educated was the fault of a repressive society. But this fault is not corrected by paperbacks, general education, long-playing records, and the abolition of formal dress in

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the theatre and concert hall. The cultural privileges expressed the injustice of freedom, the contradiction between ideology and reality, the separation of intellectual from material productivity; but they also provided a protected realm in which the tabooed truths could survive in abstract integrity – remote from the society which suppressed them (Marcuse 1964: 58). For Marcuse, the cultivated European refugee transplanted to southern California, there was a genuine loss in mass culture’s suppression of aristocratic values, even if he had no truck with the inequality those values presupposed.5 He recognized that egalitarians find common cause with conservatives in their critique of the commodification of value. Most recently, in an essay on ‘Rescuing Conservatism’, the Marxist G. A. Cohen defends the conservative attitude that seeks to preserve ‘that which has intrinsic value’, explaining that ‘some things must be accepted as given . . . not everything can or should be shaped to our requirements’ (Cohen 2013: 149). Elsewhere Cohen argues for a socialist system of distribution based on ‘communal reciprocity’ that rejects the mutual provision of market society which is ‘only a by-product of an unmutual and fundamentally nonreciprocating attitude’ (2009: 45). Cohen’s argument maintains that traditional conservatives and socialists find common cause against ‘market mania’. This mania, he contends, is deeply anti-conservative and thus those ideologies that profess it, like ‘Thatcherite Toryism’, stand as ‘a great betrayal of conservativism’, in their failure to recognize what Marx saw so well: that ‘capitalism so comprehensively transforms everything’, including itself (2009: 168). Cohen complains that, in contrast to traditional conservatives, British large-C Conservatives since Thatcher ‘blather on about warm beer and sturdy spinsters cycling to church and then they hand Wal-Mart the keys to the kingdom’. This is why workingclass communities will find that, as Cohen puts it (perhaps with Ruskin in mind), ‘small-c conservatism is a buffer against inequality’ (173). Interestingly, Cohen was aware of his connection to Oakeshott though he decried the latter’s ‘tendency to put truth in the service of antidemocratic reaction’ (170). Cohen’s views are almost an exact re-articulation of the idea that human beings need to have a connection, a ‘conversation’ with their past: We do not keep the cathedrals just because they are beautiful, but also because they are part of our past. We want the past to be present among us. We do not want to be cut off from it. We rejoice in the culture of our past (Cohen 2009: 168).6 Thus the progressive who seeks to reject market-driven imperatives in our public institutions, the destruction of sources of value by both business and

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bureaucrats, the corruption of education by managerial practices and instrumental objectives, can legitimately look to conservative critiques such as that of Oakeshott. This means, of course, a critical appropriation that puts to one side the hierarchical and the anti-democratic. It also means rendering Oakeshott more consistent with his own ideals. The idea of conserving the valuable practices and institutions of our cultural inheritance is an inherently perfectionist theme. Thus Oakeshott may be marshalled, as David Bakhurst puts it, to a project of education that promotes ‘autonomy and the opportunity to live a worthwhile life, to engage in productive work, to benefit from satisfying leisure and to enjoy happy relationships with others’ (Bakhurst 2011: 159). This involves the community identifying the valuable, and taking steps to preserve and transmit it through public policy, by establishing strictures against unfettered development, and providing public access to cultural forms. Those followers of Oakeshott (e.g. Smith 2012: 139) who applaud what they perceive as his anti-perfectionism thus choose to overlook his explicit commitment to the idea of a life well lived and his wariness of market forces that might seek to undermine it. Oakeshott took aim, after all, not just at central planners, Fabians, social democrats and socialists, but also at Thatcher’s and Hayek’s neoconservatism. He decried the embrace of ‘productivity’, and rejected Hayek’s ‘plan to resist planning’ (Oakeshott 1991b: 26; see the discussion in Gamble 2012: 166–67; Villa 2012: 323–24; and Galston 2012: 224). Oakeshott did not fully appreciate how the scrupulously neutral liberal state that restricts itself to overseeing the play of market forces in determining value is likely to risk the sale of culture to the highest bidder. Nonetheless, there are certainly intimations of this in his work.

Autonomy and equality The conversation of mankind, for all its potential as an egalitarian bulwark against the destructive forces of the market, remains vulnerable to what I call the ‘old fogey’ critique, which detects an old-fashioned, snobbish or elitist conception of value or ‘taste’ in the perfectionist idea of the good.7 Liberal critics of perfectionism have certainly played up this stereotype. Ronald Dworkin (1985: 191–98) offers examples of expensive tastes such as plovers’ eggs and champagne, and of ‘inherently more worthy’ pursuits such as books and opera, to argue that where expensive tastes are satisfied, or so-called worthy activities given priority, the liberal principle of treating people as equals is infringed. This is because perfectionism involves giving some people’s conceptions of value priority over others, and, in the case of expensive tastes, calling upon the costly pursuits of the few to be subsidized by their fellows.

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Such arguments contribute to the sense that perfectionism esteems highbrow values at odds with treating persons with equal concern and respect. But must perfectionists be anti-egalitarian? The essence of ‘old fogey’ perfectionism is a disapprobation of certain values and ways of life and a respect and esteem for other, contrasting ones. It is unabashedly prepared to endorse and promote worthy ways of living. But this is consistent with progressive values such as equality, pluralism and non-coercion. Take the value of equality: perfectionists can insist their aim is that as many people as possible disavow the bad and avow the good, rather than that the good be preserved for the privileged and well off. This is an egalitarian position, which aims to make human flourishing more equal. A flourishing account is particularly germane in the domain of education. A focus on human flourishing in education is important as a means to render children more equal, to offset the disparities in wealth and advantage that distinguish them in their family life. Thus some avowedly liberal theorists – who in much of their other writings are staunchly neutralist – are prepared to acknowledge the influence of perfectionist arguments in the realm of the philosophy of education. For example, Harry Brighouse, who elsewhere warns against the state directing people how to live with such policies as funding for the arts, heeds the arguments of perfectionists when he contends that education should be ‘for flourishing’, to ‘prepare children to live flourishing lives’ (Brighouse 2006: 42 and passim; cf. Brighouse 1995). Public education is an inherently egalitarian project that aims to provide opportunities that students’ diverse social and economic backgrounds might otherwise deny them. This means, according to Brighouse, taking a stand on what is a valuable life and seeking to promote it in the classroom. Schools’ curricula should develop children’s capacity for well-being, by nurturing their intellectual and critical faculties, enabling them to form meaningful personal relationships, to find value in nature and works of beauty, to become physically fit and enjoy physical activity and recreation. Moreover, the idea that the pursuit of equality should attend to human flourishing can find inspiration from some prominent egalitarian positions, particularly the capabilities approach of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum has ventured a list of capabilities that is ambitious in its scope, wisely noting that well-being involves more than the satisfaction of biological needs. People need food, shelter and health, but they also need education, friendship and love, participation in public life, play and sport, experiences of nature, culture and opportunities for intellectual reflection.8 Indeed, it may be that improvements in well-being derived from cultural, aesthetic and social pursuits are more important than improvements in physical well-being, once a threshold of some kind has been met (Griffin 1986: 52–3).9

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Curiously, Nussbaum disavows perfectionism, construing it as espousing a unitary conception of how to live: ‘we understand that respect for one’s fellow citizens as equals requires not building the state on the ascendancy of any one particular comprehensive doctrine of the purpose and meaning of life, however excellent’ (Nussbaum 2011: 22). But the idea that perfectionism commits us to promoting a single conception of the good is hard to take seriously. Debates about perfectionism have been ill served by the phrase ‘the good’, which implies that the alternative to neutrality is a single conception of well-being, or, as the liberal neutralist Jonathan Quong writes (2011: 15), ‘some particular ideal’ of what constitutes a good life. Well-being takes diverse, sometimes incommensurable forms. One can disavow value-nihilism without eschewing value-pluralism (Wall 1998: 18). And rejecting neutrality about the good does not involve what Dworkin (1995: 118) castigates as an ‘ethical intolerance’ of all conceptions of the good but one’s own.10 It is because complete moral perfection is beyond our reach that, as Joseph Raz argues, pluralism and tolerance are necessary features of a perfectionist view. Whatever path we take, there will be ‘virtues which elude one because they are available only to people pursuing alternative and incompatible forms of life’ (Raz 1986: 395–6). ‘Unity in diversity’ captures the idea that well-being is a universal goal that can be pursued in a multitude of ways. Marx notes that the variety of individuals means that human needs will vary from one individual to another. Likewise, our inclinations and talents are diverse, and thus there will be many different paths to human flourishing. Pointing to the need for a pluralist approach to flourishing does not wholly address the concern that choice might be restricted, since egalitarian perfectionists might still insist on a ‘shortlist’ of permitted forms of flourishing. But the restriction of choice is a complex matter and can take a variety of forms. First, freedom is clearly infringed in cases of explicit coercion in the form of punishment or the threat of punishment. Second, individuals can be induced by means of non-rational methods of persuasion. Incentives are a third way of influencing choice. And finally, there are efforts to institutionalize, promote and enable worthwhile pursuits (Sher 1997: 61). Of course, most critics of paternalism in public policy assume that children are the exception that proves the rule; the word ‘paternalism’ explicitly invokes the idea that the state is inappropriately treating adults like children when it seeks to influence human actions. This general idea of liberty for adults/ paternalism for children has been the standard for liberal political philosophy since John Stuart Mill made the argument for individual liberty: ‘the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant’ (Mill 1966: 13). Mill,

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however, expressed a caveat to this view when it came to children: ‘it is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties’ (14). Similarly, in their work on the family, liberals Brighouse and Swift unabashedly take a paternalistic approach to the rearing and instruction of children whereby, as they state baldly, ‘adults have a duty to manipulate and coerce children into doing what will be good for them’ (Brighouse and Swift 2014: 70). Oakeshott, with his emphasis on conversation and inquiry, would likely eschew coercive means to education which involve force or manipulation. But the other forms of influence are far less problematic. It is undeniable that individuals live in communities with a host of social influences, many of which are pernicious, unaccountable and non-transparent. The idea of guidance and encouragement towards the good, pluralistically understood, would seem essential to any idea of education as conversation, understood as initiation in the values of the community, and quite compatible with liberal ideals of selfdirection and liberty. Indeed, once we purge our flourishing account of any hint of coercion or manipulation, the idea of influencing people’s plans of life to enable them to engage with things of value seems as apt for adults as for children. What is it to live autonomously? Freedom from the control of other people is a necessary condition, but there is also the more demanding idea of self-determination, a freedom that is moral in character. The latter consideration suggests that we are not autonomous beings if our lives are without purpose or empty, or if our characters are afflicted with ignorance and lethargy, even if no one has interfered with our choices. On this view, autonomy involves self-realization, something not guaranteed by unimpeded choice. The idea that choice itself is not valuable as such emerges in Thomas Scanlon’s ‘value of choice’ theory. He contends that choice has value because our self-respect and dignity is served by being able to direct our own lives, and because individuals are best placed to understand how their lives should go. However, according to Scanlon, some of us are bad choosers, and so society should seek to improve the conditions under which choices are made, to help us make choices that have value (Scanlon 1995: 73–8, 84). Raz goes so far as to say that if one chooses the bad, the fact it was chosen is no consolation; indeed, it is all the more tragic that, rather than being forced, one chose the bad (Raz 1986: 318, 412). This strongly suggests that the more benign ways of affecting choice, such as incentives and the promotion of the valuable, are not so problematic. It is poor sociology to insist that our ways of life must be either immune to influence or putty in the hands of others. Contra this simplistic dichotomy, agency does not mean being untouched by social influences. Neutralists speak of how one’s life goes better if one is ‘leading it from the inside,

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according to my beliefs about value’ (Kymlicka 2002: 216), or how one cannot ‘make people’s lives better against their own convictions’ (Dworkin 1995: 118). But the brainwashing model here is a crude parody of what is at stake in the promotion of flourishing. A life cannot be lived any other way but from the ‘inside’; however, who one is ‘on the inside’ is shaped within a social context, moulded by a myriad of influences. Thus the debate about choice must take account of a modest ‘social thesis’ wherein persons at all levels of maturity are inevitably influenced by their environment. The choosing self is not pure will, but a being responsive to external sources of information. The autonomous person is responsive to reasons, and therefore adduces grounds for choice outside the self. When we consider how to live, whether we are children or adults, we are influenced by external factors, ranging from the tastes of friends, the values of parents and those with authority or influence, to formative experiences in one’s life, or superficial factors such as the symbolic value of different pursuits. In this we must, as David Bakhurst puts it, ‘wean ourselves off the idea that the self is something purely inner and psychological’ (Bakhurst 2011: 64; see also the essays in Bakhurst and Sypnowich 1995). In market societies, our choices can be manipulated by a host of devices from advertising to packaging to ‘imaging’ – hardly conducive to the idea of choices made on the basis of reasons. What Quong (2011: 83) calls ‘the paternalizee’s capacity to effectively advance his or her own interests’ is certainly undermined by the manipulation of consumption undertaken by profitable enterprises in the market. Indeed, the market, touted for supporting the neutralism of the liberal state because its exchanges are conducted according to the supposedly contentless measure of profitability, in fact makes for significant consequences for the kinds of values one can pursue. The effects are often deleterious for human flourishing, even measured on a simple scale of expressions of satisfaction.11 Moreover, market actors who influence choices are not held to public account or democratic control. It is thus mystifying why neutralists insist on evoking the ‘marketplace of ideas’ in making their case for respecting individual freedom. Beyond some general guidelines, what counts as a source of well-being will of course be subject to lively debate in a democratic society, among fogeys and hipsters, conservatives and progressives. Societies will, however, nonetheless aim to inculcate an appreciation for the worthwhile and the valuable, to forge some kind of common understanding of what constitutes the good, and this will inevitably involve an appreciation for ways of life passed on from the past. However, this also requires that we be pluralists about the good, assigning inherent value to a variety of traits, activities and practices. The idea of education as conversation takes as its premise the give and take of debate and critical scrutiny. Heeding Mill’s call for liberal toleration of human

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diversity, Sher claims that perfectionist policies should ‘leave ample room for “experiments in living”’ (1997: 138). Society will respect people’s freedom to make their own choices, even if it will also seek to provide a framework within which choices are made to ensure that all modes of inquiry are protected and encouraged. Enabling us to flourish requires ‘an especially uncompromising commitment to freedom of thought and expression’ (138). The conversation metaphor enables a conception of human engagement where, not hectoring and proclaiming, but listening and attending to others’ points of view is crucial (see Williams 2012: 125). And in education in particular, we must tailor our practices to students’ diverse dispositions and abilities. In short, human flourishing necessitates an appreciation of our cultural inheritance, but also critical reflection on, and lively debate about, the ‘conversation of mankind’. In this, conservative ideas such as those of Oakeshott have a crucial role to play and are ultimately, however surprisingly, in harmony with progressive aspirations to promote equality and freedom.

Conclusion This chapter has considered the paradox of Michael Oakeshott, on the one hand a snobbish critic of egalitarian social policy, on the other hand, a defender of humane values against the forces of the market. I have sought to resolve this paradox by pointing to Oakeshott’s genuine contribution to, first, the critique of the commodification of value and its deleterious effects on education, and second, a progressive politics that seeks to promote equal human flourishing by inculcating ways of life with intrinsic value. My argument is exploratory, and much more could be said about how the conservative impulse can inform progressive thought. Certainly there is no disputing that some of Oakeshott’s commitments – for example to a hereditary ruling class or to laissez-faire economics – sit uneasily with any attempt to cast him as an exponent of emancipation. Egalitarians are right to reject such views and to be averse to any unqualified acceptance of Oakeshott’s position. However, I contend that some of his views can inform an egalitarianism that seeks to make a life of value possible for all. Conservative ideals can play a vital role in our understanding of how public education and public access to cultural artefacts can contribute to the amelioration of economic disadvantage, to enable equality of human flourishing. Oakeshott’s philosophy of education, married to his critique of instrumentalism of all kinds, and his dedication to the ideal of sharing in, whilst critically assessing, our cultural inheritance, is thus quite properly a source of inspiration for those who want to ‘keep the conversation going’ in our schools, and in our communities, about how we should live as equals.12

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Notes 1 The most famous of these is the Summerhill experiment where childcentred learning means the child literally dictates the learning that should take place (Neill 1995; see also Curle 1973). 2 In the same volume Peter Fleming, writing as ‘Strix’ (2002: 85), comments that it would ‘impoverish our extraordinary national life’ if a ‘clear, classless idiom of communication’ came to prevail in England. 3 In How Not to be a Hypocrite (2003), Adam Swift contends that grammar schools do not ‘neutralize all the effects of class background’, but he also concedes that grammar schools are ‘doubtless ladders of opportunity for some bright working class kids’ (51–2). However, the ideal of levelling education continues to inform debate about social justice and schooling, in which grammar schools are often lumped together with private selective schools more generally (see Edwards 2002: 109). 4 Of course, not all British progressives were enamoured of comprehensive schooling. Some lamented the ‘levelling down’ wrought by the abolition of grammar schools, while others complained that, by dividing their students from the outset into O level and GCE streams, comprehensive schools simply reproduced the class character of the old system. The Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, ruffled feathers in his 1976 speech at Ruskin College, in which he worried about declining standards. Interestingly, Callaghan was at pains to distinguish his progressive, pro-comprehensive school position from that of other critics: ‘My remarks are not a clarion call to Black Paper prejudices. We all know those who claim to defend standards but who in reality are simply seeking to defend old privileges and inequalities’ (Callaghan 1976). 5 A similar sensibility can be found in postmodern ruminations about culture and institutions of learning. In The University in Ruins, Bill Readings argues that universities are ‘trans-national bureaucratic corporations’ where the administrator has replaced the professor as its central figure, and where, instead of transmitting culture, the focus is on performance indicators, globalization, the pursuit of excellence (1996: 3, 21–43). Steven Lukes’s dystopian satire, The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat (1995), makes fun of the research maximization strategies of contemporary universities when the hero is asked for the weight, in kilos, of his academic contributions. 6 This argument can apply to school buildings too, as is evident in the recent unsuccessful fight in my community to save Ontario’s oldest public high school, Kingston Collegiate, housed in a ‘Collegiate Gothic’ building for which heritage designation is being sought. Those calling for closure of the school invoked the buzzword ‘twenty-first-century learning’, what one critic has scorned as ‘semi-literate, evidence-free gibberish’ and ‘warmed-over romantic progressivism – think Summerhill mixed with a jolt of Future Shock’ (Wente 2014). 7 For further exploration of these issues see Sypnowich 2012 and 2014. 8 Nussbaum’s list of capabilities certainly confirms the idea that a ‘fully human’ life involves more than physical survival. See Nussbaum 2000: 75.

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9 G. A. Cohen’s ideal of community, where justice requires that individuals be prepared to contribute for the sake of the satisfaction of needs other than their own, suggests individuals care not just about who has what, but how they are doing with their respective shares, whether they are able to derive fulfilment from their share of resources. See Cohen 2008, ch. 1. 10 Brian Barry (1995: 72–9) uses the extreme of a Thomist way of life as a foil to his idea of impartiality; again, the deck seems somewhat stacked. 11 This is borne out by interesting recent work by economists (see Frank 1999; Offer 2006; Victor 2008) and psychologists in the field of ‘happiness studies’ (see Gilbert 2007; Nettle 2006; Layard 2005). 12 A version of this essay was presented at the Fiftieth Anniversary Conference of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain at New College, Oxford in March 2015. I am grateful to the audience on that occasion for comments, criticisms and lively discussion.

6 Oakeshott, Bonnett, Derrida and the Possibilities of Thought Emma Williams

Introduction

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he claim that education should involve the development of children’s thinking is a familiar one. What is more contentious is what we actually mean when we talk about the ‘development of thinking’. That controversy exists is not all that surprising when we note, with Gilbert Ryle (2009: 272), the ‘polymorphous’ nature of the concept thinking. Yet what is surprising, to me at least, is that the multifaceted nature of thought is often overlooked in education today in favour of a broadly reductive picture of thinking that everywhere dominates discussion. I will not dwell further on the reductionism at work here. What I will attempt in this chapter is to develop a more adequate account of thinking, taking as my point of departure Michael Oakeshott’s conception of education as the ‘conversation of mankind’, or rather, Michael Bonnett’s critique of Oakeshott in his book Children’s Thinking. Bonnett sees Oakeshott’s views on education as embodying a number of positive features. Nevertheless, Bonnett raises some key anxieties pertaining to ‘questions about individuality in thinking’, arguing that Oakeshott’s account risks submerging the freedom and individuality of thought, thereby turning education into the passive reception of ideas rather than a space for human beings to become the ‘originators and authors of [their] own thinking’ (Bonnett 1994: 120). My purpose in introducing Bonnett is not primarily to assess whether his assessment of Oakeshott is valid. Rather, I want to use Bonnett’s critique as an illustration of a certain problematic account of thinking and of what thinking can be in education today. In the later sections of this chapter, I will seek to offer a better account. Central to this will be an attempt to move beyond a 95

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traditional view of subjectivity. I argue that Bonnett himself retains such a picture, and that this commitment is evidenced most clearly in the anxieties he raises regarding Oakeshott. In order to get beyond such a position, I will turn to the analysis of language in Derrida’s philosophy which, as we shall see, leads to a conception of human thought as essentially (not just contingently) mediated, open and productive. In the final section, I will consider how this account might find expression in education today. Interestingly, such a realization might not, in the end, be so completely far removed from Oakeshott’s picture of education. I will hence conclude by raising the question of whether there are resources within the ‘conversation of mankind’ for practising the ways of thinking that my argument will, I hope, have brought into view.

Bonnett’s critique of Oakeshott Let us begin by considering the way Bonnett characterizes Oakeshott’s philosophy of education. One of the positive features Bonnett acknowledges is the way Oakeshott construes the development of human beings as ‘basically a matter of an on-going transaction between an individual and the human world’ and hence portrays the development of an individual’s thinking as inextricably linked to ‘his or her culture’ (Bonnett 1994: 41). For Oakeshott, we are ‘born into a culture, but not with a culture’: thus to become a human being we must first learn how to participate in a set (or sets) of historically shared conventions and practices that structure our social forms of life (43). Another feature Bonnett highlights is the way that Oakeshott conceives culture, not as a rigid or fixed system, but as one that is ‘on-going’ and ‘living’ (42). Culture invites an engagement on the part of the individual, through which culture itself is re-formed and re-shaped. This is one of the reasons that Oakeshott favours the ‘conversation’ metaphor: it captures the way education is conceived as an initiation into inherited-yet-fluid transactions between individual and world. Despite this initially positive estimation, Bonnett proceeds to raise a number of ‘anxieties’ regarding Oakeshott’s account. In the background of Bonnett’s concerns is a question regarding the apparent pre-determination of the conversation of which Oakeshott speaks. If, in order to participate in the conversation, a human being first needs to be equipped with the relevant ‘tools’, then is there not the risk that the way their participation will subsequently unfold is already determined in advance? By giving people the means to participate, do we not thereby limit in advance the potential directions and possibilities of the conversation? The way Bonnett develops this concern is to suggest that Oakeshott’s account risks submerging ‘individuality’. As Bonnett puts it, on Oakeshott’s view, ‘individuality’ comes onto the scene ‘only on

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the back of the acquisition of culture, and in the form of relatively minor modifications to it which its established procedures permit’: hence a person’s individuality gets reduced to relatively trivial activities and preferences (46–7). Those who subscribe to a broadly liberal conception of education will likely be sympathetic to Bonnett’s concern. Yet I would argue that the particular way Bonnett pursues his case reveals a philosophical commitment that is profoundly problematic. To see why, let us unpack what Bonnett means when he speaks about the submergence of the individual. What does the term ‘individual’ refer to here? Bonnett hints that ‘individuality’ pertains to the way each human being is an ‘individual centre of consciousness exhibiting personal agency’ (47). This point is developed more fully when Bonnett articulates his own account, arguing that education must accord space for the ‘subjectivist’ dimension of thought; something that he links to the ‘subjective structure of the individual mind’. Here we should note the strong influence of existentialist philosophy upon Bonnett’s work. For him, Sartre’s account of ‘radical freedom’ brings into view the idea that human beings are ‘agents in their own right’ and thus ‘no matter what the external situation there is always some room for choice as to how we will respond to it’ (100–1). Bonnett argues that an adequate account of thinking must attend to the ‘affective structure’ of thought, to the way individuals respond to, or take a stance towards, what is being learned. Bonnett anticipates that his account might be interpreted as somewhat ‘self-centred’. To counteract this, he employs the phrase ‘self-referencing’ to bring out that what he seeks to foreground is understanding ‘what one learns in terms of one’s own experiences’ (119). This, he continues, respects the ‘inwardness’ that is essential for adding ‘depth’ to the learning experience. For Bonnett, such self-referencing is essential if we are to prevent thinking becoming a matter of ‘hearsay’: the passive reception and ‘mimicking’ of other people’s words and the mere ‘stockpiling’ of facts. It is through selfreferencing that we become ‘originators and authors of our own thinking’. Invoking another existentialist theme, Bonnett depicts such practices as ‘authentic’ forms of thinking: thinking that is self-determined and self-directed ‘as against merely reflecting the thoughts of others’ (120).

A traditional subject The principal problem in his critique of Oakeshott lies in Bonnett’s commitment to the traditional conception of subjectivity. Let us examine that conception in more detail. The etymology of the term ‘subject’ can be traced to the Latin subjectum, a translation of the Greek hypokeimenon, which referred to the substratum

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that preserves a substance’s identity through change in its attributes. Interestingly, in its original Greek sense, this term did not have the connotations with mind, selfhood, identity or consciousness that we associate with the notion of subjectivity today. Such a connection is usually said to have originated in the early modern period, in Descartes’s philosophy in particular. As Timothy Clark (1992: 21) describes, Heidegger gives a helpful account of this transition in volume IV of his Nietzsche texts. Here Heidegger suggests that the Cartesian cogito is properly understood as representation. A crucial upshot, as Clark points out summarizing Heidegger, is that acts of the cogito involve the ‘presentation to oneself of what is presentable’; in other words, representation for Descartes involves both the representation of an object and also the representation of a self (there is a ‘to me’ dimension to representation). This is not to suggest that the self is given in the manner of an object – as that which ‘stands opposite’ my cognitive act – rather, the self is given as a necessary condition for the representing act itself. The self is thus involved ‘not subsequently, but in advance’ in any act of representation (22). In this sense the Cartesian cogito is the ground of all thought and experience, and hence the term subject (subjectum) comes to be synonymous with the thinking thing and its correlates: representation, mind, intellect, cognition. A number of thinkers in the early modern period and beyond inherited and developed such a conception. One worthy of mention is Immanuel Kant, who embraced a somewhat weaker sense of the ‘I think’-as-ground in his account of the transcendental unity of apperception: ‘it must be possible for the “I think” to accompany all my representations, for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all’ (2007a, §16, B 131–32). For Kant, employing the concept of a self that exists over and above our representations is a formal necessity, a transcendental condition of the unity of the stream of experience. A century or so later, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, which sought radically to break with the tradition instigated by Descartes while at the same time jettisoning the ‘empirical ego’ (that is, the notion of a personal self with innate traits of character), nevertheless posited an ‘ego-ray’ within intentional consciousness. For Husserl, such a notion was a pure and formal principle: for in any act of conscious attention, there must be both an object aimed at and a subject that achieves the act of attending. For Descartes, the having of a representation involves, at the same time, the knowledge that one is having it. A key corollary is that what goes on in our minds is self-evident and known with clarity and immediacy: the mind, our mental life, is an entirely transparent sphere. This is another notion that has been inherited in different ways since the early modern period. One example is Husserl’s discussion of subjectivity as involving an interior monologue. This suggests that, in the sphere of our own conscious experience, what is given

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is presented immediately, directly and without signification. I need not indicate to myself that I am having a particular thought within the immediacy of my own consciousness, because the meaning of what is being intended is directly present to me. When I communicate, I must signify via language to make thoughts that are within my mind accessible to others. But in interior monologue I am both speaker and hearer at the same time. The traditional conception of subjectivity embodies distinctions – between subject and object, self and world, the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ – that continue to be commonplace in many areas of our thinking today. While the ‘inner’ sphere – our self – is known intimately, with certainty and immediacy, the ‘outer’ world is only known in indirect fashion and is open to question and doubt. The outside world (which includes other people, objects, and for some thinkers our own bodies) stands over and against us, as something we run up against. As Charles Taylor (1997a: 169) puts it, we must make ‘contact’ with this outside world by means of representations we have ‘within’: hence representation comes to mean the ‘inner depiction of an outer reality’. Representation also takes on connotations of having a ‘grasp’ on something. This is contained in the very notion of an ‘idea’ or ‘concept’ (Descartes substitutes the term cogitare for percipere at a number of points, and the notion of ‘ideas’ permeates the empiricist tradition that succeeded him). The root of ‘conceptualize’ is capere, which means to arrest/take hold of/seize/ capture/occupy. What emerges is an image of a kind of mastery of the subject (inner) over the object (outer). Simon Glendinning (2007: 158–59) suggests there are at least two ways we might understand this mastery; first as an appropriating power over things (possession of the thing), and second as a cognitive hold of things (knowledge of the thing). My idea allows me to take possession of the object insofar as it no longer retains its status as a being-in-itself but is caught up in human structures of significance and open to being used and manipulated by me. My idea also enables a complete cognitive grasp of the thing if it is fully adequate to the external object that has caused it.1 Let us sum up the picture of the subject that has begun to unfold. The subject is portrayed as in possession of a rich internal life, more immediately and directly known than the external world, from which it stands radically apart. It is an abstracted being or, to use Taylor’s term, a being ‘disengaged’ from the world (which includes other people and the subject’s own body). As a result, the subject comes to be seen as self-sufficient: as a being in full possession of itself (recall the transparency of its internal life), and it comes into contact with the outside world from this complete, already established position. Furthermore, the particular way the subject makes contact with the external world is understood in terms of representation. A key upshot is that the internal life of the subject comes to be cast in intellectualistic and

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mentalistic terms: our relation to the world becomes, as David Wood (2002: 16) puts it, ‘in a real sense . . . a priori’. The mental enables a certain mastery over reality: acts of representing and conceptualizing are ways in which the subject extends its power over objects, bringing them into its possession and gaining knowledge of them. In Wood’s words, the subject stands to objects in the world ‘like a god enthroned, surveying its territory’ (47). This mastery reinforces the self-sufficiency of the subject, and grounds a sense of autonomy and freedom, namely the freedom of self-preservation and the self-affirmation of identity: ‘the feat of remaining the same despite the unknown lands into which thought seems to lead’ (Clark 1992: 16, quoting Levinas 1987: 48). Let us return now to Bonnett’s argument that Oakeshott’s conception of education as initiation into the ‘conversation of mankind’ fails to accommodate ‘individuality’ and freedom of thought. It is not difficult to read Bonnett as echoing a traditional conception of subjectivity here. The key insight that leads him to emphasize notions of individuality and freedom is his idea that ‘no matter what the external situation there is always some room for choice as to how we will respond to it’ and that human beings are capable of ‘taking a stance’ towards what is being learned (100–1). This implicitly portrays a human being as in possession of her own, individual, inner world, something that individuates her from other people and conditions how she understands and interprets the ‘external’ world outside her. Bonnett works firmly within the subject–object model of experience, where the subject is a being with its own inner world, of which it is in full possession and which is there prior to any engagement with the world that stands apart from it. Such a commitment is further demonstrated by Bonnett’s notion of ‘self-referencing’: the way we come to appreciate the ‘subjective weight’, ‘inwardness’ or ‘depth’ of what is learned. Self-referencing reinforces the image of the priority of the self. Bonnett’s idea that human beings remain free to choose how they respond to the ‘external situation’ they face invokes the theme of self-sufficiency: rather than see our relation with the world as one of mutual dependency, or one in which the selves might be disturbed or interrupted, Bonnett invokes a subject which ultimately keeps its hands free and thus has a choice in how it decides to respond.2 In such acts of choice, the subject affirms its mastery, relating what it encounters to its own projects, meanings and interpretations. The normative justification he gives for including a space for ‘self-referencing’ in the classroom – it encourages children to become ‘agents in [their] own right’ and ‘the originators and authors of [their] own thinking’ – further cements this idea. Here Bonnett comes close to talking of autonomy and self-determination, key notions in the traditional conception of the subject. How does this square with Bonnett’s interest in Sartrean existentialism? In some ways, Sartre himself wanted to get beyond traditional ways of thinking

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about the subject. He wanted to transcend the idea that our ‘selves’ were given to us in advance (by God, or nature), hence his well-known assertion that ‘existence precedes essence’. Moreover, inspired by Husserl’s phenomenological turn, Sartre wanted to overcome the abstract conceptions of the subject that had arisen from the foregrounding of epistemology and recognize our affective states – ‘hatred, love, fear, sympathy’ – as ‘ways of discovering the world’ (Sartre 1970: 5). If Bonnett’s account is steeped in this existentialist framework, can it be as committed to the traditional picture of subjectivity as I have suggested? After all, Sartre’s emphasis on the affective is in tension with the traditional conception’s mentalistic image of thought as representation. Nevertheless, serious questions can be raised about the extent to which existentialism itself succeeds in overcoming the traditional picture of subjectivity and the representational account of thought associated with it. A number of ideas within Sartre’s philosophy reflect this: (i) his casting the relation between human beings and the world as one between ‘being-foritself’ and a ‘being-in-itself’; (ii) his account of our concrete relations with others as always involving a desire for mastery and domination; (iii) his view of ‘authenticity’ as life lived as a self-directed and self-chosen project; (iv) his insistence on the transparency of conscious life (even ‘bad faith’ is not characterized as a Freudian act of repression, but as a lie in which we have ourselves always already colluded). It is not difficult to see how these ideas connect with the traditional account of subjectivity, and hence how Bonnett’s account, with its self-confessed assimilation of Sartrean thematics, gets caught up in a similar picture. Bonnett turns to Sartre’s existentialism as a counterweight to rationalistic accounts of education that threaten to narrow the space for ‘independent’ thinking and turn education into the passive reception of already established views. But this is misguided because existentialism is itself committed to the same framework as the traditional accounts. It cannot offer a better reading of the learner’s engagement in what is learned, because it continues to work within the traditional idea of the subject as always already disengaged. Let us take stock. My aim is to use Bonnett’s treatment of Oakeshott to provoke a discussion of the nature of thinking. We have now seen that Bonnett complains that Oakeshott’s account fails to accord a space for individuality, and risks turning the educational experience into the passive reception of ideas, rather than a space for human beings to be the source of their own thinking. But Bonnett’s criticism only makes sense within a certain conceptual landscape, one committed to a traditional conception of subjectivity, in which human beings are cast as disengaged, self-sufficient, self-determining subjects. In what follows, I will open up an alternative picture of thought which steps beyond the traditional conception of subjectivity, and explore where this

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stepping beyond might lead: a task that will return us to Oakeshott’s conception of education as the ‘conversation of mankind’.

Thinking beyond representation with Derrida The alternative picture that I develop in this section can be articulated in a number of ways. Elsewhere, I have sought to reconsider human being-in-theworld in order to do justice to the actual ways we think (Williams 2013, 2014, 2015). The present chapter will proceed in a similar fashion. However, I shall focus on Derrida’s philosophy, and his account of language in particular. This might seem a peculiar entry point, but there are two reasons for adopting it. First, the focus on language serves as a useful point of connection to Oakeshott’s ‘conversation of mankind’. Second, and chiefly, Derrida’s ‘patient and painstaking’ analysis of language profoundly challenges the traditional picture of the thinking subject. For Derrida’s analysis is not, of course, merely intended to make a linguistic point. Rather, as Simon Glendinning puts it (2007: 203), his account constitutes an ‘attempted specification or clarification of the structure of world-inhabitation that marks the life and history of human beings, or, more precisely, that marks a life with language’. Derrida thus opens up a new account of the conditions of human thought. Derrida’s account is best understood in contrast to what Taylor (1997b) calls the ‘representationalist’ view of language. On this traditional picture, language (signification) is wholly subordinate to the thing signified. Since the ideal would be to contemplate thought or thing directly, language is said to work best when it is as transparent as possible: when it clearly communicates or represents thought or thing in a true and faithful manner (like a realist painting – a picturesque landscape, say – that faithfully depicts a genuine state of affairs in the world). Derrida is profoundly dissatisfied with the one-to-one relation between thought-and-word and world-and-word implied by this account (which suggests that there are exact equivalents between words and thoughts and words and things), and with the subordination of the sign to the thing signified that arises in result (the ‘ideality’ of the signified). Derrida’s main contention – and here, of course, he is not alone – is that language does not simply fulfil this utilitarian, representational function but is, rather, a productive and generative force. It is important to appreciate the gestalt switch needed to understand the productivity of language. If we follow the traditional view of language as the signification of a signified then we think the signified is out there already – some predigested material or meaning that exists, in preformed state – and all

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we need do is translate this into language. Following Derrida’s view, conversely, the signified comes into being through language – meaning is generated via the process of signification itself. How should we understand the way words get their meaning, if not through a representative relation they have to something in the world? It is important that we do not misinterpret Derrida as implying the constituting subject can create meaning any old way she likes. It is not as though, freed from its representational function of depicting things in the world (or thoughtcontent going on in our heads), what we mean becomes a free-for-all of subjective interpretation. There are two reasons why Derrida cannot be suggesting this: (i) because it clearly makes language use descend into nonsense (and, pace his detractors, Derrida’s philosophy does not lead to an obscurantist or relativistic position) and (ii) because, as we shall come to see, one of the key consequences that does follow from Derrida’s thinking is that the traditional image of the ‘constituting subject’ is itself challenged; there is no wilful subject creating meaning ex nihilo in Derrida’s system, just as there is no ‘transcendental signified’ out there waiting to be translated into language. What is Derrida’s account of signification, properly understood? Derrida builds upon a key insight of Saussurean structuralism: signs get their meaning not by being attached to things like labels, but in virtue of their relations to other signs. Two examples help illustrate this point. First, consider what gives the word ‘day’ its meaning. It cannot be the material form of the sign (a certain configuration of sound waves) since I could pronounce ‘day’ in numerous ways, in a loud or soft voice, in a high or low pitch, and still be understood. An alternative answer is that what allows the sound sequence produced when I say ‘day’ to function as a signifier is that it can be distinguished from the sound sequence made when I say ‘way’ or ‘lay’ or ‘bay’. Thus, when I say ‘day’ and am understood, part of this understanding is constituted by the fact that I am heard as not saying ‘way’ or ‘lay’ or ‘bay’.3 Hence a sound sequence functions as it does by and through its structural relationships with other sound sequences, or what we might call the system of differences within which signs are always already inscribed (insofar as there is always more than one word in operation). Of course, this is not only the case for phonetic signs. Consider as our second illustration the letter ‘b’. Once again, it is not the particular material form of the letter that enables it to have the significance it does. Its physical form can differ greatly and yet the letter can still be recognized and understood. For example, I can write ‘b’ in a number of different ways, using different fonts, and different sizes:

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What is crucial to recognizing a mark as an instantiation of the letter ‘b’ is, of course, its ability to be distinguished from other letters: a, c, e and so on. Hence, we can say, in a way that echoes what we said about phonetic signs, that what allows each of these instantiations to signify the letter ‘b’ is the differential relation it bears to marks signifying other letters. As long as ‘b’ remains distinct from other letters, it functions as a sign. Saussure’s point is that all signs, written or spoken, are what they are by virtue of their ‘differential’ character. Derrida’s account builds upon this insight, but introduces a key addition. For Saussure, the differential structure of signs formed a fixed and static system. In contrast, Derrida argues that language is not a static structure, but a flux of shifting relations. This brings us to Derrida’s notion of the ‘iterability’ of the sign: signs can be circulated and put to use in new and different contexts. This is not just a contingent feature of signs: for anything to function as a sign it needs to be repeatable and available for use elsewhere. Indeed, as Derrida himself puts it (1988: 12), ‘what could be a mark that could not be cited and put to use in other contexts?’ Reusability is precisely a condition of a sign functioning as a sign: but, and this is crucial, part and parcel of this reusability is that signs are marked by an openness beyond themselves. There is, we might say, a ‘slipperiness’ to language: words contain a host of meanings and connotations that can vary depending on the individual speaker and context. For example, a simple word like ‘shoe’ can refer to a whole variety of footwear, ranging from a flip-flop to a ballet slipper, and things become even more complex when we consider words like ‘love’ or ‘justice’ and the changes their meanings have undergone in different historical situations. Crucially, for Derrida, the relations between signs are fluid; they are constantly moving and shifting. Language is a web of connections, a system that is continually on the way to being formed and re-formed, woven and unwoven. As Derrida puts it, ‘every sign is related to something other than itself, it retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element’ (1973b: 142). It is this insight that Derrida attempts to capture with the term différance, a term he creates to acknowledge how signs get their meaning through difference, the differential structure recognized by Saussure, and deferral, the fluidity and movement that results from iterability – the way any term always refers beyond itself, and we slide between signs in endless chains of deferred signification. Thus Derrida’s account of language does not offer a challenge to meaning per se, but a reinterpretation of how meaning is possible – one that recognizes that its possibility is based on the impossibility of meaning being fixed and fully under our control. Deferral and iterability are not occasional characteristics of language use, but structurally necessary features of language. Derrida has described this structure as a ‘double movement’; the iterability that is the

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condition of possibility of language, that is, of doing all the things we ordinarily do with words, is at the same time the condition of its impossibility; that is, of its never functioning mechanistically, fully under our control, in the ways we are inclined to imagine. The upshot is that language is constituted essentially by openness and indeterminacy. This is why, following Derrida, we can no longer see meaning as static or fixed; as Jonathan Culler (1983: 188) puts it, ‘there are no final meanings that arrest the movement of signification’. Notably, Derrida suggests that the openness and indeterminacy he brings into view in no way warrants a negative or sceptical conclusion that bemoans the impossibility of meaning. Rather, there is the sense of a furtive and subtle slipping away from grasp, of a withdrawal that occurs despite the solidity of the thing, which, in Derrida’s words, ‘steals away’ (1973a: 107). Thus the elusiveness brought about by this structural openness (which Derrida also describes in terms of ‘non-saturation’ and ‘dehiscence’) constitutes signs and their meaning. What resources are there here for the alternative picture of thinking and thinkers I promised to develop? To answer this, we must consider what it might mean to think and experience the world from within the horizon of différance, that ‘determined textual system’, as Glendinning puts it, in which we necessarily live our lives (2007: 201). First, Derrida’s account challenges any simple bifurcation between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ so central to the traditional account of subjectivity and which reigns supreme in the traditional account of language insofar as the word (signifier) is posited as an outward representation of an ‘inner’ thought or ideal meaning (signified) already directed at the world. After Derrida, the sign is liberated from its subordinate status as a mere supplement to some already present meaning. As we have seen, signs themselves generate meanings; there are signs ‘all the way down’. Hence, on this view, to modify a phrase from Glendinning (201), anything that ‘accompanies’ the sign – i.e. that which is traditionally thought to animate ‘dead’ signs and give them their life – is in fact just a further sign. At this point we come to understand Derrida’s seemingly enigmatic phrase, ‘there is nothing outside the text’. Thinking itself is not ‘outside the text’, but takes place in language. Thus, to use David Wood’s phrase, there can be no ‘pure interiority, unsullied by language, signs, [and] mediation’. Thought does not take place in some internal realm, in the privacy of our subjective experiences. Rather, it takes place by way of language, and rather than our being the ‘masters’ who use language as a tool for communicating thoughts and meanings that are already there, it is language itself that ‘gives, provides, [and] supplies ways of thinking’ (Wood 2002: 21). In another work (Williams 2015), I have given this thought a more Heideggerian expression. There I argue that, insofar as language opens up or ‘discloses’ (Heidegger’s phrase) the world, and insofar as human beings are

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linguistic beings, human thought should itself be understood as a site of disclosure. Crucially, however, in view of the nature of language, this should not be understood as the wilful act of a constituting subject, for insofar as ‘language speaks’, our processes of world disclosure operate in ways beyond our control. This is why Heidegger employs the notion of the Lichtung. The Lichtung is a space in a dense forest created by foresters in the course of doing their work, rather than as a result of some self-directed or intentional project. Human beings, like the foresters, open up the world in and through what they do, in and through their thinking, speaking and acting. This productive, generative conception of thought is far removed from the representational picture that holds sway over the traditional conception of subjectivity. Derrida’s account of language leads us to a similarly productive conception. Such a conception also has important consequences for the ways we understand the human being who thinks. For we can no longer view ourselves as self-determined, autonomous beings who seek to master the ‘external’ world by means of the appropriating grasp of representation or conceptualization. As I noted above, Derrida’s account casts doubt on the picture of the self-determined, constituting subject – the subject that remains constant ‘despite the unknown lands in which thought seems to lead’ (Levinas 1987: 48) – just as it casts doubt on ideality simply waiting to be translated into language. In its place is a picture of human beings, language and world, as engaged in a relationship of mutual dependency, in which we are not abstracted from the world, or from language, but are always already woven into it and woven by it. Thus, as Christina Howells (1998: 23) puts it, ‘subjectivity is constituted rather than constitutive’; the subject, just like meaning, is not a primary ‘given’ but a produced effect. As opposed to the autonomous, selfsufficient individual foregrounded by the traditional conception of subjectivity, we approach a notion of a human being as conditioned or mediated by something other than him- or herself. No doubt much more could be said, but let us move on to consider how this conception bears on the discussion with which we commenced this chapter.

Oakeshott and the possibilities of thought In conclusion, I want to consider some implications of the alternative picture just articulated. I shall focus on two issues: (i) the possibilities opened up for educational thought once we step beyond the representational picture; and (ii) the way those possibilities might be realized within Oakeshott’s conception of education as the conversation of mankind.

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On the view I have outlined, thinking should not be seen as charged with getting a handle on a world already out there, arriving at knowledge through a store of predefined concepts or rules. Rather, thinking must aspire to do justice to the openness, ambiguity, undecidability and excesses of meaning. Of course, this does not constitute an outright rejection of any attempt to know the world in a formal sense, but does force us to admit that any putative grasp will always be provisional and conditional. We must recognize partiality as an essential rather than contingent feature of experience; that is, partiality is not just the result of not having enough information, or not knowing things fully as yet, as though we might come to move beyond partiality and gain a total knowledge of the thing. The ways of thinking that emerge will frustrate and interrupt the will to finally know, conclude or bring about closure. Such remarks may feel too abstract, so it will be useful to offer a more concrete illustration. Reflecting on the qualities that marked the writings of Shakespeare, Keats (1817) praised Shakespeare’s capacity for ‘negative capability’; that is, the ability to remain within ‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. What Keats has in mind is the way that Shakespeare creates multifaceted characters that keep us guessing about the elusive nature of their psychic identities.4 This is evident in the fact that Shakespeare’s characters have been portrayed in a multiplicity of ways and in how, throughout his plays, our judgements about key characters are often interrupted and disturbed. Notably, these feelings of ambivalence and complication are as much manifest amongst the characters in the play as the audience members. Consider Hamlet’s perpetual questioning, or the way the characters in Coriolanus constantly debate the principal protagonist’s character. What Shakespeare discloses to us is a vision of human psychology as profoundly layered. Human beings are not two-dimensional, static characters, but possess a rich and fluid psychology that is shaped by multiple factors.5 By doing justice to such complexity, Shakespeare creates the space for endless debate, interpretation and reinterpretation of his characters and their motives. Rather than voicing his opinions through his characters so that the ‘moral’ is clear to the audience, Shakespeare’s plays exude a sense of openness, ambivalence and indeterminacy that make us question and requestion their meaning. It is perhaps not accidental that we have turned to literature to illustrate our alternative conception of thinking. A number of philosophers, Derrida included, have noted the resources within the literary for revealing ways of thinking that cease to strive for fixed and final meanings (that ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’). Timothy Clark has examined such a connection in a similar context, exploring, as he puts it, the question of how thought might ‘practise a heteronomy’ and welcome the ‘unforeseen, the incalculable, or that in relation to which any concept is inadequate’ (1992: 16). Clark points to the way

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Derrida and others appeal to types of literature that work ‘around the limits of our logical concepts’ to embody ‘new forms of coherence’, moving away from logico-systematic forms of reasoning (16–17). Of particular interest is the way that literary uses of language break up assumptions about a pre-shared signifier, and thus interrogate the possibility of meaning itself.6 Finally, let us consider whether Oakeshott’s conception of education as initiation into the conversation of mankind might open up space for similar ways of thinking. Certainly, some contemporary ways in which conversational thematics have been utilized in education do not seem promising to this end. For example, the uses made of discussion and debate in critical thinking programmes often appear to enact precisely the kind of closure to thought that our account seeks to leave behind. But such uses are a long way from Oakeshott’s style of thinking. For him, conversation is a constant source of the movement of ideas. Selves are not static representers of a given reality, but active principles, sites of pure activity. In his early work, the activity in question is imposing structure on the flux of experience, but in his later writings the emphasis is on interpretation, on making sense of things, on discourse. Conversation is the medium of this never-ending activity, a practice in which settled thought is constantly disrupted and established belief unsettled. Hence, for Oakeshott, dialogue is employed, not in the mode of the ‘exposition of arguments’ but rather as the medium for, as Clark puts it, ‘the midwifery of new, unanticipated ideas in the very course of the dialogue itself’ (1992: 19).7 It is easy to cast Oakeshott as a conservative traditionalist, enamoured of the transmission of received wisdom. While there is an element of this in his philosophy, which invites Bonnett’s criticism, there is also recognition of the very opposite – a longing for creativity, the unexpected and the unbounded play of ideas. These two themes can coexist precisely because Oakeshott sees an intellectual inheritance not as a gift of established truth, but as a precondition of thinking, and he recognizes that thinking will in its nature always strive to go beyond. Oakeshott is thus best read not through the lens of the traditional conception of mind and meaning that informs Bonnett’s reflections but in light of an alternative conception, of the kind I have sought to outline, that embraces the endless activity of the self in the making of meaning. It may seem extravagant to bring Oakeshott into dialogue with Derrida, but those who seek to leave traditional conceptions of subjectivity behind, as so many theorists of education say they do, will find much to admire in Oakeshott’s vision of the ‘unrehearsed intellectual adventure’ that is the movement of thought in conversation.8 If there be any doubt, let Oakeshott’s own words lay it to rest: In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no ‘truth’ to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no

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conclusion sought . . . Of course, a conversation may have passages of argument and a speaker is not forbidden to be demonstrative; but reasoning is neither sovereign nor alone, and the conversation itself does not compose an argument . . . In conversation, ‘facts’ appear only to be resolved once more into the possibilities from which they were made; ‘certainties’ are shown to be combustible, not by being brought in contact with other ‘certainties’ or with doubts, but by being kindled by the presence of ideas of another order; approximations are revealed between notions normally remote from one another. Thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each other’s movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions . . . Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, not is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering (Oakeshott 1991f: 489–90).

Notes 1 The view that our ideas enable us fully to know and possess objects finds radical formulation in the empiricism of Bishop Berkeley, whose idealist philosophy ultimately makes the entire existence of the external world depend upon the representing, perceiving mind. 2 In Existence and Existents, Emmanuel Levinas uses the phrase ‘keeping one’s hands free’ to depict a kind of relation with the world in which the subject remains at a distance from things and maintains an ‘attitude of reserve’ (2003: 39). 3 I have used these examples elsewhere; see Williams and Standish (forthcoming). 4 I am indebted to Joe Sutcliffe of Rugby School for discussion of this point and the subsequent analysis. 5 Shakespeare was reportedly influenced by Montaigne, whose Essais (1560) explored the multifaceted nature of human psychology. Derrida cites Montaigne approvingly in a number of his later political essays, such as Politics of Friendship. 6 Clark uses a number of examples to develop this argument, such as George Trakl’s ‘A Winter Evening’ (analysed by Heidegger in his essay ‘Language’) and Mallarmé’s Mimik. 7 Clark does not have Oakeshott in mind when he says this. His examples include Heidegger’s revival of the dialogue form in the 1950s, Blanchot’s notion of récit or narrative, and texts by Derrida such as Pas and Signsponge. 8 I am grateful to David Bakhurst for his help in developing this section.

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7 A Turn in the Conversation Paul Standish

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t is a block, and sometimes a stumbling block, for many educators committed to egalitarian policies that Michael Oakeshott’s idea of a liberal education is expressed in terms whose substance and style smack of privilege and elitism. This is a pity because his views constitute one of the most prominent and powerful expressions of the idea from the second half of the twentieth century, and ‘the conversation of mankind’ has become a shorthand for its central features. I say ‘central features’, but it will be necessary to acknowledge that the term ‘liberal education’ is inevitably given a range of inflections, and in some respects the distinctive emphasis of Oakeshott’s version is less familiar than it was. First, however, let me say something about the ways that his phrase gained currency in education. The rise of progressive (or child-centred) education in the mid-twentieth century is an important expression of the world order that emerged in the decades following the Second World War. It would be a mistake to overgeneralize here, for child-centredness had made an impact well before this time. Its rationale can be traced back most obviously to the thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey, with the sometimes eccentric experiments that followed the work of the former and the more mainstream practical changes initiated by the latter. Ideas of Reformpädagogik, originating in Germany, had extensive influence, while in Scandinavia Ellen Key’s The Century of the Child (Barnets århundrade, 1900) became a landmark text. The pattern of change varied from country to country, of course, and in some ways the advent of progressivism in the UK was more dramatic than was the case elsewhere. After the austerity of the 1950s, the prosperity of the 1960s created economic conditions and readiness for change in which progressive reform would flourish, and by 1970 advocacy for child-centredness had become the orthodoxy in teacher education, corresponding with widespread changes in elementary schools and more piecemeal curricular changes brought about through the comprehensive school movement. This rapid 111

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growth, however, soon encountered an equally rapid reaction. The oil crisis of 1973 drastically worsened the faltering economy, and the degree of social unrest and disgruntlement that ensued made it opportune for politicians to blame the teachers. From the late 1960s to the mid-70s a series of ‘Black Papers’ on education had been published, whose ironic title indicated their authors’ indictment of the new progressive methods and their call for a return to traditional approaches. While at the time these publications seemed eccentric, they undoubtedly reflected broader currents of opinion that in turn were exploited by Margaret Thatcher and helped to lay the way for her landslide win in the 1979 general election. The 1980s then saw drastic changes to public education. A little over a decade later, Prime Minister John Major could say: ‘The progressives have had their say, and they have had their day.’ In the public eye, however, the contours of this political story can easily obscure another line of thought, which is expressed precisely in the idea of a liberal education. It was partly in response to the seemingly unqualified enthusiasm for progressive education that R. S. Peters, Paul Hirst and Robert Dearden attempted what they characterized as a restatement of this idea. This was not a wholesale rejection of the new thinking but a critical examination of some of its key tenets. Ideas of creativity, imagination, play, happiness, the interests of the child and above all growth had become sacrosanct in the new orthodoxy, yet they were rarely subjected to critical scrutiny. There might indeed be much to be said for some of the innovations motivated by these values, but they were often not clearly thought through, tinged with sentimentality, and – most significantly – interpreted in terms of method rather than substance. Progressivism attended too much to the manner, insufficiently to the matter of education. Such was the abiding criticism made by Peters and his colleagues, and it was in attempting to redress this balance that they sought to reaffirm the substantive commitments of a liberal education. But what exactly did this mean? It would be fair to say that the position they developed was a blend of ideas. On the one hand, there was the commitment to education as initiation into those forms of enquiry and understanding that have been passed down through the ages and that are our common cultural heritage. This tradition reaches back to a conception of education as exit from the Cave, with the freeing of the mind from illusion; or, as Matthew Arnold (1983) has it, given that the aim is ‘to know ourselves and the world, we have, as the means to this end, to know the best which has been thought and said in the world’. This needs to be affirmed with the important qualification that these are traditions of critical thought, understood as dynamic, evolving and contested. On the other hand, there was the commitment to liberalism in political terms and as more conventionally understood. The most robust element in the background

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to this was Kantianism, and this found expression in the idea of rational autonomy as a central aim of education, as expressed particularly by Dearden (see especially Dearden 1972). I shall return to autonomy late in this discussion, but for present purposes, the point is that this orientation in the exposition of the idea of liberal education tilted towards the development of liberalism in the work of John Stuart Mill and, a century later, in that of John Rawls. To some extent, it is true that the development of this latter strand in the work of some authors (for example, John White, Eamonn Callan, Harry Brighouse) has lost touch with the former – to the detriment, in my view, of the idea of a liberal education. (I do not question the importance of the issues these authors address, but the general trend has been towards preoccupation with access to educational opportunity rather than with the substance of education.) Moreover, the elastic nature of the term ‘liberal’, and its availability to connection with a range of ideas in education, including (ironically perhaps) progressivism, has exacerbated this trend. Clearly these are ways of losing sight of what most mattered to Oakeshott. Nevertheless, a key moment in the original restatement came with the publication in 1965 of an essay by Hirst entitled ‘Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge’, in which he set out to provide a rationale for the substance of the curriculum. In some respects the argument presented related more obviously to the curriculum of secondary schools, and the position he developed became influential in policy reform. But Hirst’s purpose was broader in that he was attempting to examine the logic of education in the light of questions that he took to be fundamentally epistemological. Before we consider this in greater detail, however, it is pertinent to draw attention to the manner in which he closes his discussion – not with his own words but with an extended quotation from Oakeshott’s ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’: As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. Of course there is argument and inquiry and information, but wherever these are profitable they are to be recognized as passages in this conversation, and perhaps they are not the most captivating of the passages . . . Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, nor is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure . . . Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual

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and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance (Hirst 1972: 413–14). These are indeed moving words, and they were undoubtedly an important factor in the widespread influence of this paper and the impact that Hirst’s work was to have. There is a good chance, however, that readers of the present volume will notice Hirst’s surprising rearrangement of the sequence of thoughts here (originally in Oakeshott 1991f: 490–91). Rearrangement may seem presumptuous, though this would be entirely uncharacteristic of its author. In any case Hirst’s paper, with its appropriation of these lines, remains an important acknowledgement and celebration of Oakeshott’s thought. It has become something of a locus classicus, and without it the phrase ‘the conversation of mankind’ would surely not have enjoyed the currency it has had among those who theorize about education. Hirst’s ideas were taken up by policymakers especially because they seemed to provide a rationale for divisions of knowledge in the curriculum. Hirst tried to show that knowledge is not all-of-a-piece but comes in distinct forms, which have their own characteristic kinds of reasoning and tests for truth; for example, reasoning in mathematics is different from reasoning in history, which again is different from literary appreciation. Moreover, it is initiation into these public forms of reasoning and enquiry that not only develops but, in a sense, constitutes the mind. Such initiation is liberal in that it frees the mind to function according to its own nature. Without some initiation into each of these forms, a person’s education will be constrained; they might become specialists, even experts, in one form, for example, but, without some informed awareness of the others, their education would be truncated, a facet of mind being closed off to them. Hirst equivocated a little over the nature and number of these forms, but his position was clear enough to underwrite curriculum reforms of various kinds and to provoke an extensive secondary literature. The more hostile elements in this attacked Hirst for rationalizing the grammar school curriculum and for shoring up the barriers of social class in the interests of privilege. Hirst’s division in the forms of knowledge thesis surely takes its lead from the opening of ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’, the first line of which runs: ‘There are philosophers who assure us that all human utterance is in one mode’ (Oakeshott 1991f: 488). But the divisions that Oakeshott goes on to elaborate are not merely fewer in number but of a different order. Practical activity is complemented by ‘poetry’ and ‘science’ as different ‘voices’; ‘history’ (488) and philosophy (491) are also mentioned as candidates for addition, but this is almost in passing, and the central focus of the account is plainly not there. The early remark against excessive fear of

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Babel indicates that this is an assertion of diversity, but the sense of ‘voice’ that dominates the discussion refers not to the voice of the individual but to a shared way of thinking or reasoning, to a shared activity. This much at least seems to accord with Hirst. Furthermore, when Oakeshott introduces the thought that the ‘diverse idioms of utterance which make up current human intercourse have some meeting-place and compose a manifold of some sort’ (489), the manifold seems to parallel Hirst’s conception of education as comprising the several forms of knowledge. Oakeshott’s specification of the meeting-place as an arena not of argument but of conversation, however, opens in a direction slightly different from the reasoning and enquiry that Hirst brings to the fore. It is time to say more about the three ‘voices’ and about where the idea of their conversation leads. But it is also appropriate, before moving on, and to anticipate a little, to acknowledge that, in Oakeshott’s ‘voice’ and ‘poetry’ especially, we are dealing with terms of art. While the sense they carry in Oakeshott’s account is stipulated in a manner that is reasonably clear, this does not exempt them from coincidences of use, and the range of connotations thereby raised. In fact, some of these, as we shall later see, may cast fresh light on matters with which Oakeshott is most concerned. The conversation brings together the three ‘voices’, and its vitality would seem to depend upon their interaction (‘Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices’ (490)). But it is the quality of this interaction that Oakeshott seems most to want to evoke. It is important that this is an interaction with no symposiarch and no winner: In conversation, ‘facts’ appear only to be resolved once more into the possibilities from which they were made; ‘certainties’ are shown to be combustible, not by being brought in contact with other ‘certainties’ or with doubts but by being kindled by the presence of ideas of another order; approximations are revealed between notions normally remote from one another. Thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each other’s movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions (489). It is difficult to read this without inferring that what are being described here are qualities that emerge not only in the interaction but within the ‘voices’ themselves – and such an inference is surely at work in the power of the passages interwoven in Hirst’s quotation. These are moving intimations of what enquiry within a subject can be like. As Oakeshott allows, seemingly inviting such a thought, ‘in its participation in the conversation each voice learns to be playful, learns to understand itself conversationally and to recognize itself as a voice among voices’ (493).

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Oakeshott’s initial approach to his topic is to differentiate practical activity from ‘science’ and then to invoke the distinctive voice of ‘poetry’. This is presented at one point even as a historical progression. But the implication is surely that these three types are abstractions and that in real life they are encountered in interwoven ways. There is surely an Aristotelian echo in this delineation, though at times it seems almost as though different grammatical modalities are being described. Such modalities may have their distinctive logical forms, but they do not typically occur in isolation. But what exactly does Oakeshott mean by ‘poetry’, and what turns on his use of this expression? The impression given at times, and especially through the examples towards the end of his discussion, is that he does indeed mean poetry as ordinarily understood. But on the whole it seems that the term functions as a metonym for the arts more generally: ‘By “poetry” I mean the activity of making images of a certain kind and moving about among them in a manner appropriate to their character. Painting, sculpting, acting, dancing, singing, literary and musical composition are different kinds of poetic activity’ – provided, that is, that these are undertaken in a certain manner (509). That manner requires that one speak in the appropriate idiom. The ‘contemplating’ or ‘delighting’ that characterizes the poetic involves making images that one recognizes as images. While practical activity and science also involve forms of imagining, it is distinctive of poetry that its images do not reveal themselves as ‘fact’ or ‘not-fact’. Whereas the former make use of images that have a temporary and provisional nature, are tools of enquiry, and are in effect instrumental, the latter, contemplation, rests in its images. Oakeshott anticipates the fact that his reader may be on the verge of assimilating this account of contemplation to a Platonist notion of theoria, an idea that he believes can no longer survive. What he affirms, by contrast, is that there is no exit from the play of images: ‘what impels the activity and gives it whatever coherence it may possess, is the delight offered and come upon in this perpetually extending partnership between the contemplating self and its images’ (513). It is crucial, then, to Oakeshott’s account that the contemplative attitude that typifies the voice of poetry involves a kind of imagining that is different from the voices of practical activity and science: It is an activity of making and entertaining mere images. In practice and in science ‘activity’ is undeniable. In the one there is a need to be satisfied, a thirst to be quenched, and satiety is always followed by want; there may be weariness, but there is no rest. And in the other there is a corresponding restlessness appropriate to its idiom; every achievement in the exploration of the vision of a wholly intelligible world of images being merely a prelude to fresh activity. But since in contemplation there is neither research for

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what does not appear nor desire for what is not present, it has often been mistaken for inactivity. But it is more appropriate to call it (as Aristotle called it) a non-laborious activity – activity which, because it is playful and not business-like, because it is free from care and released from both logical necessity and pragmatic requirement, seems to participate in the character of inactivity. Nevertheless, this appearance of leisureliness (σχολη´ ) is not an emblem of lethargy; it springs from the self-sufficiency enjoyed by each engagement in the activity and by the absence of any premeditated end (513–14). Powerful though these reflections are, however, it is difficult to see how they fare against currents of thought discernible in apparently contrasting traditions of philosophy, in which the sense of the poetic force of words and other signs takes on a different hue. On the one hand, J. L. Austin painstakingly explores what he will call the ‘force’ of utterances, exposed initially in such seemingly marginal aspects of language as promising, marrying and naming ships, but then developed in such a way as to be revealed to be a dimension of the use of signs in general. On the other, Heidegger’s powerful and highly influential writings on the poetic exploit the sense of it as production (poiesis), which he characterizes with the provocative assertion that it is not the case that human beings use language to code and transmit thoughts, as Aristotle more or less says, but that ‘language speaks’ or ‘language speaks man’ (see Heidegger 1950). Words are less the vehicle than the wellspring of thought. Apart from its laying of the way for so much in poststructuralism, this is an insight that coheres with Wittgenstein’s demonstration, especially via the so-called private language argument, that our thoughts depend upon and in a sense originate in the public circulation of signs to which, as children, we are exposed. What these lines of thought together help to reveal is the extent to which the quality of our words affects the substance of what is said, and this is in turn to say that they affect the substance of thought and practice. The more or less categorial distinctions upon which Oakeshott builds his case tend to muffle this aspect of our world. Yet these are dimensions of the conversation of human beings. While Hirst and Peters may be said to have appropriated and adapted Oakeshott’s ideas, their own adoption of Wittgenstein is closer to a misappropriation. Hirst’s epistemological pluralism may appear to have chimed well with Oakeshott’s several ‘voices’, but the attempt to align it with the later Wittgenstein’s notion of language-games involved a severe distortion. The implication was that the forms of knowledge that Hirst believed he had identified, each with its own characteristic kinds of reasoning and tests for truth, were something like language-games. There may be an initial plausibility to this in that the language-game is not merely a matter of words but connotes

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a coherent practice, with its own grammatical autonomy, and further that there is no hierarchy between language-games – hence, Wittgenstein’s epistemology (if that term is still appropriate) needs to be seen as pluralistic. But the picture that Hirst and Peters were working with was clearly intellectualistic and systematic in significant respects – qualities that pull sharply against the attention to the circumstances of our everyday lives that typifies Wittgenstein’s later writings. The upshot of this misappropriation was a kind of metaphysical distortion. It was metaphysical in that it remained trapped within a version of the ‘intellectualist legend’, in Gilbert Ryle’s phrase (1949), and quite failed to realize the radicality of Wittgenstein’s achievement (for criticism, see Standish 1992; Smeyers and Marshall 1995). In particular it failed to understand the patient and critically important examination of the relations between subject and object that Wittgenstein undertakes. As with Austin, Wittgenstein is at pains to show what we do with words. The language-game has its foundation not in a logical principle (or, pace Hirst and Peters, form of reasoning) but in what we do: ‘the term “language-game” is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, a form of life’ (Wittgenstein 1953: §23). And we do a great many things. That variety means that when Wittgenstein tries to explain what he means by ‘language-game’, he offers a non-systematic, uneven, and openended list: Review the multiplicity of language-games in the following examples, and in others: Giving orders and obeying them – Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements – Constructing an object from a description – Reporting an event – Speculating about an event – Forming and testing a hypothesis – And so the list goes on, ending, most surprisingly perhaps, and most openly, with the religiously inflected ‘Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying’ (§23). Whatever the implications are for education here – and there are many, as Wittgenstein’s initial preoccupation in this text with Augustine’s account of learning a first language and his recurrent recourse to examples of what it is to be initiated into a language-game should make clear – it is apparent that this is not a means of underwriting categories of the curriculum in the way Hirst and Peters imagined. Nor, as I have indicated, does it sit well with Oakeshott’s threefold division. Yet there is reason to believe, I suggest, that in the development of his

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division, Oakeshott’s purpose may have been somewhat different from what Hirst and Peters imagined. This can be brought into relief if we think first about what they understood themselves to be doing. The revitalization of the philosophy of education with which they are credited was based in part upon their introduction of the supposed rigour of the conceptual analysis dominant in mainstream philosophy into a field that had been characterized, somewhat pejoratively, as the history of the ideas of the great educators. A part of their expressed purpose was to use conceptual analysis to uncover the ‘logic’ of education. Although this methodological affiliation was never relinquished (indeed, its espousal became something of a badge of honour), it is in my view very much to their credit that they complemented this with a more speculative approach. This sought to inspire a vision of the good of education, and it was in this respect especially that they drew from Oakeshott. In fact, Oakeshott had little time for the conceptual analysis that Peters and Hirst championed, which brings a degree of irony to the prominence given by them to his ideas, but which is hardly surprising in light of his background in Hegelianism and British idealism. The difference in purpose to which I alluded at the start of this paragraph has to do with this different lineage of thought, and with the possibility that Oakeshott is developing his account in a dynamic way – that is, as a means of moving thought forwards, with the categories assuming a more heuristic purpose. Whether or not this is accurate, the complexity of Oakeshott’s account presents a more nuanced position than the one to which Hirst and Peters aspire. Yet this is still significantly different again from Wittgenstein, whose fine-grained and piecemeal investigations avoid the abstraction and generalizing tendencies of Oakeshott. Yet to the extent that a connection can be sustained within the pluralism of voices and the diversity of language-games, there is reason to raise questions of a different order. This is a line of criticism that does not exactly contest the pluralism but asserts a unity of language of a different order – which, on the face of it, must be at odds with Oakeshott’s opening salvo against philosophers ‘who assure us that all human utterance is in one mode’ (1991f: 488). It was raised against Wittgenstein by his student and friend, Rush Rhees. In order to make headway with this criticism, we need to take a step back and recall Wittgenstein’s early exploration of the idea of a language-game in the fable of the builders (Wittgenstein 1953: §§2–21). This will incidentally draw attention to the significance of the imagination, albeit that the accent here falls differently than in Oakeshott’s account. Wittgenstein asks the reader to imagine the language of the builders and to conceive this as a complete primitive language. Certainly one begins by doing this, perhaps picturing these two primitives spending all day giving and receiving orders, fetching and carrying building-stones. But quickly the picture becomes problematic. What, for example, are they building? Building normally

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requires a complex context, framed by beliefs of multifarious sorts, and embedded in practices of diverse kinds. In short it presupposes life as a whole. Similarly the meaning of words is never uni-functional in the ways the builders’ terms appear to be. The builders cannot refer to their words in any way; they can use them only as commands. Even these commands cannot be the same as the commands we ordinarily know and use, embedded in natural language. The builders cannot make a remark. They cannot tell a lie. They cannot have a conversation. What we quickly find is that the builders must be conceived not even as primitive human beings but more as robots, and even this does not work, because robots have their place within the full-blown purposes of human life. What we imagined, in response to Wittgenstein’s prompt, was a scene in which something of that full-blown purpose was tacitly presupposed. Once that background is excised, it is difficult to see how the builders can be imagined or conceived at all. In 1960, in ‘Wittgenstein’s Builders’, Rush Rhees pursues the argument in the following way. He is concerned, in particular, that the prominence of the idea of the language-game and the concomitant emphasis on what it is to follow a rule fall short of showing what it is to speak a language. This is not to deny the variety of language-games but to show that over-emphasis here can hide the idea of a common language or, as Rhees sometimes puts it, the ‘unity of language’ (Rhees 1960). Furthermore, accounts of language acquisition that focus on correct usage – on knowing how to follow a rule – may obscure what is most important in learning to speak. So what is it to speak, if it is not just a matter of using words and structures correctly? This is a matter that occupied Rhees in much of his work, and he frequently returned to the topic of the builders. In thinking of the learner of language, he writes: When he can speak, we may be delighted because ‘He can say things himself now – not just repeat.’ But what is important is that he can say things: not just that he can construct new sentences – as it were in an exercise. You can set him exercises if you want to test his vocabulary. But this is not how you find out whether he can speak. You might test his knowledge of a foreign language by setting him exercises. And it would be something the same if you wanted to see whether he had mastered a particular notation; or again, if you wondered whether he could do arithmetic. Wittgenstein used to speak of teaching a child to multiply by going through examples of multiplication for him, then getting him to go through these and through other exercises while you corrected his mistakes, and then saying ‘Go on by yourself now.’ But if you said anything like this about teaching a child to speak, you would have left out the most important thing. (It would be like training a very intelligent

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parrot.) The point, roughly, is that if he can speak he has got something to tell you or to ask you. In arithmetic it is different. ‘Telling you things’ is not part of his achievement when he learns to multiply, whereas it is his principal achievement in learning to speak (Rhees 2006: 159). Rhees emphasizes the idea of a common language (or the unity of language) because he takes this to be critical to the notion of intelligibility. The notion of the language-game is apt, in its relativization of meaning, to hide the fact that, in principle at least, explanation can be given to other speakers of the language. It is also inclined to encourage the idea that the acquisition of language is comparable to initiation into a variety of institutions, in which one learns how to go on, and in which, in some cases, one learns one’s role. Once again, this foregrounds the importance of correctness to the neglect of whether one has anything to say. But it is a major breakthrough for the child when, in taking her first steps in language, she discovers what it is to have something to say. This is the discovery simultaneously of the possibility of speech and of what the world is. The world is what we speak about, and it comes into view through what we say. In a sense this is a resolutely anti-naturalist view that jars with contemporary scientific naturalism. But it is of course fundamental to Heidegger, as to the Hegelianism that was so influential for Oakeshott. I take Rhees to be implying not that it contradicts Wittgenstein exactly but that it is a thought that at best remains recessive and unarticulated in his account. On the face of it the idea of the unity of language stands opposed to Oakeshott’s voices and the conversation between them, but to the extent that this articulation can be seen to be dynamic and complicated in the way I have suggested – through bringing Oakeshott’s notion of the poetic closer both to Heidegger’s conception of the productive nature of language (in poiesis) and to Austin’s emphasis on the performative, both characteristic of language as a whole – some bridging of these apparently divergent ways of thinking may be possible. In fact such moves are necessary, in my view, if the political ambitions of Oakeshott’s thought are to be realized. It is clear that Oakeshott is concerned with various dangers of reductionism, and of these the most striking is the way that politics has become reduced to the realm of practical activity – a reduction that he takes to have advanced inexorably in the history of modern Europe. In ancient Athens, by contrast, ‘politics’ was understood as a ‘poetic activity’ in which ‘speaking (not merely to persuade but to compose memorable images) was pre-eminent and in which action was for the achievement of “glory” and “greatness” ’ (Oakeshott 1991f: 493–94, n.2). The turn to this more explicitly political region of thought opens the way to the conclusion I wish to develop.

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An easy segue is provided by a chapter title from Stanley Cavell’s Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (1990): ‘The Conversation of Justice: Rawls and the Drama of Consent’. The essay is a further step in a critique Cavell has sustained over virtually half a century, during most of which period he and Rawls were colleagues in the Philosophy Department at Harvard. Cavell is inclined to stage his critique in terms of Rawls’s resistance to the perfectionism found, for example, in Nietzsche – which in Cavell’s judgement involves a misunderstanding of what such perfectionism is about, to the detriment of politics and philosophy as a whole; Nietzsche’s perfectionism is, in significant respects, taken to be derivative from the Emersonian moral perfectionism that has been prominent in Cavell’s writings since The Claim of Reason (1979). For present purposes, however, I shall highlight two distinctive features of what Cavell has to say, regarding the nature of conversation and the place of reproach. It is important that we are talking about conversation and not dialogue, which can (though it need not) leave the subjectivities involved too secure in themselves, related too contingently to the thoughts that they exchange, and insufficiently exposed to the fate of the words to which, in speaking, they commit themselves. It is also important that we are not talking of this interaction simply in terms of communication and cooperation. Cavell criticizes Rawls’s emphasis on cooperation, albeit that this is commonly understood as a central democratic virtue at the heart of justice. In a comparatively recent iteration of this, he writes: ‘Cooperation’, as a general state of social interaction, suggests the idea of society as a whole either as having a project or, at the other extreme, as being a neutral field in which each can pursue his or her own projects. Intuitively these extremes are analogous to aspects of the interesting institution of competitive games . . . The idea of ‘conversation’, in contrast, emphasizes neither a given social project nor a field of fairness for individual projects. (Nor, as I have insisted, does it deny the importance of these ideas.) Conversation is then the field within which I might discover what my projects might be. Cavell continues: What it emphasizes is, I might say, the opacity, or non-transparence, of the present state of our interactions, cooperative or antagonistic – the present seen as the outcome of our history as the realization of attempts to reform ourselves in the direction of compliance with the principles of justice. The virtues most in request here are those of listening, the responsiveness to difference, the willingness for change. The issue is not whether there is a

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choice between the virtues of cooperation and of conversation. God forbid. The issue is what their relation is, whether one of them discourages the other (Cavell 2004: 173–74). A refinement in this defence of conversation is achieved when Cavell draws attention to the embedded significance of the second syllable of ‘conversation’ – which we find again in ‘reversal’, ‘diversion’ and ‘aversion’. There is here the suggestion of a turning of thought such that it cannot proceed solely, and in many respects does not proceed best, when it travels along straight, systematic lines: openness to conversation, a readiness to be turned (to be shaped, fashioned, sometimes diverted, sometimes rebuffed), requires that I do not seek to shore up my own identity but rather am ready for new possibilities – that is, ready to become. We might think here of Coleridge’s clinamen, that swerving of thought in which one writer responds to another, in which meaning finds its course, and speakers their inclination, sometimes in response to invitations or provocations they will decline. And we might also think, with Emerson, of conversation as a game of circles, where speakers take turns, each doing ‘a turn’: ‘When each new speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker, to oppress us with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men’ (Emerson 1983: 408). He could be describing jazz. Plainly this is not to take conversation as any kind of verbal exchange between people but to idealize it as something to be aspired towards. And just as plainly, given that Emerson is never far from Cavell’s account, the readiness to be fashioned by such exchange is never a mere acquiescence in conformity. Emerson (1961: 292) says of conversation that its laws are ‘analogous to the laws of society’ and that it is the ‘first office of friendship’, where the friend is not someone who merely reinforces my identity, who secures me where I am, but rather someone ready to challenge me towards my next, best possibility. Transformative rather than informative, conversation requires a listening through which, as Branka Arsic´ puts this, I forget ‘the texts, codes, and judgments that constitute the conversing “I”; it happens only as self-abandonment’ (Arsic´ 2010: 196). It is in this spirit that Emerson advocates a kind of self-reliance, not as individualistic autonomy but as the kind of receptivity, openness and resourcefulness that is achieved in the act of abandonment (see, for example, Saito 2005: 147). But this elaboration of conversation must lead in due course to what I identified as a second distinctive feature of Cavell’s response to Rawls – in fact, one might say, to the nub of his concerns. This is located specifically with reference to the attempt in A Theory of Justice to find ways in which society might be constructed so as to ‘insure that our conduct is above reproach’

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(Rawls 1971: 422). The experiment of the ‘veil of ignorance’, with the moral exemption its successful adoption would effect, encourages a denial of the actual circumstances of human lives and a sanitizing of the notion of consent. But what is consent? When did I consent to the society I live in? When did the social contract take place? The answer cannot be that this is none of my doing, so that somehow my hands are clean: I am consenting in every moment I stay in this society, for as long as I do not walk away. The depth of this compromise and the necessity of consent are themes that Cavell persistently plays out. It is crucial to his account that the tensions here are manifest not merely in an overtly political arena, but in the circumstances of our everyday lives. The performative, productive force of language means that our city is indeed a city of words, with the political at stake in our ordinary interactions and in the goods we realize (or fail to realize) together – not in the sense necessarily of their raising ‘issues’, though of course they may do that, but in the sense that the quality and timbre and substance of those interactions are part of the realization of our world, factors, that is, in its constitution (see Cavell 2004). A further segue presents itself in a still more surprising coincidence, which itself involves a further turning of the idea of conversation, specifically towards its involving of moments of aversion, of turning away, as was hinted at above. In the first of the Carus Lectures (1990), Cavell speaks of Emerson’s ‘Aversive Thinking’, the title recalling remarks from the essay ‘Self-Reliance’: ‘Society is a joint-stock company’, Emerson scathingly remarks, ‘in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs’ (Emerson 1961: 261). Cavell speaks sometimes of this aversion in visceral terms, as though the question of my relation to others, in my seeking community with them, will be a matter of what I can stomach in my conversation with them. The violence of not being able to stomach something, turning away in disgust perhaps, suggests something quite different from the equation we find in Oakeshott: ‘Death,’ he writes, ‘the cessation of desire, is the emblem of all aversion’ (1991f: 499). This remark comes in the course of explaining what it is that motivates and shapes the voice of the practical, where desire sits in a polar relation to aversion. But how could the power of aversion equate with the insensibility of death? The problem emerges once again that what Oakeshott means by conversation is more remote from the way it is commonly understood, whereas the realism of Cavell’s and Emerson’s working with the term catches something of the complexity of our relations with others and of the precarious, provisional nature of our constitution – of the polis and of ourselves. Wrestling with the intimacies he finds between conversation, community and consent, in the earlier text, The Claim of Reason, Cavell ponders what

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consent to the social contract might mean. He considers two implications: first, that I recognize the principle of consent itself and recognize others to have consented with me, in a relation of political equality; and second, that I ‘recognize the society so constituted as mine; which means I am answerable not merely to it, but for it . . . citizenship in that case is the same as my autonomy: the polis is the field within which I work out my personal identity and it is the creation of (political) freedom’ (Cavell 1979: 23). Powerful as this thought is, however, matters cannot simply rest here, for it turns out that my relation to those others with whom I seek community is subject to a kind of repression: while in principle we acknowledge those others in this relation of equality, we are apt, in our habitual failures of acknowledgement, to ‘hallucinate the meaning of others to us (e.g. as equals) or have the illusion of meaning something to one another (e.g. as free fellow-citizens)’ (26). This not quite letting things rest there gives breathing space to a range of negative political emotions, allowing, for example, the articulation of resentment – which is surely, the syllables suggest, a close cousin of consent, and which once again the veil of ignorance would excise – as well as such less unattractive negative emotions as anger, disgust and contempt. Consideration of a final coincidence around conversation, in the use of ‘voice’, will further illuminate the interplay of these thoughts. Whereas Oakeshott’s stipulative use of the term refers, as we saw, to the three forms of imagining that structure his essay, in Cavell its usage comes closer to home – that is, to its everyday sense. For without doubt in conversation one must exercise one’s voice. The bigger story Cavell wishes to tell is again of repression – of the human voice at the hands of philosophy, where the impersonality of third-person utterance is preferred in principle, and where this might be contrasted with a voice of confession. Cavell will hold to the idea of philosophy as a kind of autobiography, as, so he argues, is intimated by Wittgenstein’s opening of the Investigations with the quotation from Augustine’s Confessions, surely a supreme and pointed example of the genre. But I must set aside here the substantiation of this argument in order to attend more directly to what it is to offer one’s voice in conversation. In the light of this, then, let us consider Cavell’s words in what follows: To speak for oneself politically is to speak for the others with whom you consent to association, and it is to consent to be spoken for by them – not as a parent speaks for you, i.e., instead of you, but as someone in mutuality speaks for you, i.e., speaks your mind. Who these others are, for whom you speak and by whom you are spoken for, is not known a priori, though it is in practice generally treated as given. To speak for yourself then means risking the rebuff – on some occasion, perhaps once for all – of those for whom you claimed to be speaking; and it means risking having to

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rebuff – on some occasion, perhaps once for all – those who claimed to be speaking for you. There are directions other than the political in which you will have to find your own voice – in religion, in friendship, in parenthood, in love, in art – and to find your own work; and the political is likely to be heartbreaking or dangerous. So are the others. But in the political, the impotence of your voice shows up quickest; it is of importance to others to stifle it; and it is easiest to hope there, since others are in any case included in it, that it will not be missed if it is stifled, i.e., that you will not miss it. But once you recognize a community as yours, then it does speak for you until you say it doesn’t, i.e., until you show that you do. A fortunate community is one in which the issue is least costly to raise; and only necessary to raise on brief, widely spaced, and agreed upon occasions; and, when raised, offers a state of affairs you can speak for, i.e., allows you to reaffirm the polis (27). This extended quotation, with which I shall end, points to a more fully developed sense of the poetic activity of political association that was Oakeshott’s sustained concern, as well as to what we might take forward – for education, for the polis, and for our lives as a whole – in the idea of the conversation of humankind.

Acknowledgement The quotation from Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, p. 27, appears by kind permission of Oxford University Press, USA.

8 A Phenomenology of Listening Paul Fairfield

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hether we are speaking of the conversation of mankind in Michael Oakeshott’s grand sense or of the ordinary conversations of daily life, the process of conversing involves rather more than the uttering of propositions. The act of speaking is often awarded primacy and oddly abstracted from the larger process that is someone saying something to someone about something. But once the act of speaking is put into context, it is clear that the conversational process contains two dialectical poles. The first is speaking while the second is a matter about which philosophers and educationalists traditionally have had remarkably little to say: It is the act of listening.1 As two scholars have recently articulated this seemingly elementary point, ‘Communication is at least a two-way street and cannot exist in the absence of listening. This is one reason why listening is so central to efforts to become educated and to participate in the education of others’ (Rice and Burbules 2010: 2729). Even the Cartesian meditator, one supposes, anticipates that someone is listening to its otherwise private ratiocinations. Descartes himself was after all not only a thinker but an author and a highly skilled rhetorician – so skilled in fact as to lead us at times to forget a few elementary particulars about the very project of thought in which he was engaged. Even the Meditations, that quintessentially modern tribute to pure reason, was no private soliloquy but a literary work written and published with the anticipation that someone might read it and respond with a reasoned argument. That the reader responds is just as vital to the project as whether Descartes has hit upon the truth or beheld a clear and distinct idea. We speak to be heard, but in what sense? To be heard often means to win a convert, bring low our critic or reassure ourselves that our hypothesis is less precarious than we may have feared. But these senses of being heard ignore the other pole of the conversational process. What is it to listen, given that this modest act is no less vital to conversation, and to education, than its more celebrated dialectical counterpart? This is the topic of this chapter. Oakeshott 127

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himself was certainly alive to the educational importance of listening, understood as one of the intellectual virtues. The argument that follows is consistent with the spirit of an educational philosophy that speaks of ‘an education in imagination’ as a vital component of ‘an initiation into the art of this conversation’. ‘Liberal learning’, as he characterized it, is an ‘invitation to disentangle oneself, for a time, from the urgencies of the here and now and to listen to the conversation in which human beings forever seek to understand themselves’ (Oakeshott 2001e: 30, 34). Students are listeners. ‘Listen and learn’ is a logical pairing in a way that ‘speak and learn’ is not. The latter phrase strikes us as incongruous, even while it has long been implicit in the practice of many educators to esteem speaking over listening. If the latter point requires any evidence, consider the phenomenon of the class participation grade. What manner of participation is it that this grade recognizes and sets about to quantify, perhaps with a number between zero and ten? The zero is the no-show or, what amounts to the same, the student who is present in body but not in mind. He is not, as we say, ‘in it’. He is neither ‘with it’, where ‘it’ presumably is the subject matter, nor ‘with us’, the other human beings in the room. Above all, the non-participant is not speaking. But what if he is listening, and in the sense that the logical pairing ‘listen and learn’ connotes? This student is taking his chances where the participation grade is concerned and is not surprised to find it relegated to the no man’s land that is five out of ten, or thereabouts. Five out of ten, and quite possibly less – why is this? One reason may be that the act of speaking makes the student’s level of engagement with the subject matter visible to the teacher in a way that listening does not, or not as clearly. I suspect, however, that there is more to it than this. What is this student failing to do when he is failing, as it is said, to participate? The answer is clear: he is failing – or, if we prefer not to prejudice the matter, electing not – to speak. For what reason? The possibilities here are several. The one most often cited by teachers is that he has not been paying attention and consequently has nothing to say, but there are others. The student may be more interested in others’ opinions than his own; he may have not decided what his opinion is and opted to weigh others’ arguments a while longer; he may be under-confident or simply modest; he may sense that something is amiss in the conversation and perhaps cannot put his finger on it; he may fear that others will not welcome what he has to say; he may be sceptical of the educator’s competence. This is a short list of possibilities only, but the larger point concerns the meaning of participation. If the structure of conversation is the dialectical or dialogical one of speaking and listening, why would either moment in the dialectic have primacy over the other? That the primacy of speaking over listening is implicit in the standard practice of many educators must be borne in mind in what follows. My aim is

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not to effect a simple reversal but to provide a phenomenology of the listening act, which will in turn make a case for it. If part of the explanation of why this case needs to be made is the age-old association of the listening act with obedience, in contrast to the commanding posture of the speaker, I suspect that a larger part is the temperament of many educators themselves, most of whom, if I may venture a speculation, are natural talkers rather more than natural listeners. On what I am tempted to call the standard view, it is the speaker who participates in the sense of offering a positive contribution while the listener more or less passively absorbs it. Listening, on this view, is valued mainly or solely as a prelude to speaking.2 How has it come to pass that the act of listening has been not only assigned a secondary place relative to speaking but relegated to passivity, as if the mere listener is suffering from a kind of intellectual, psychological or even moral failing? The speaker, on the standard view, is participating in earnest, exhibiting creativity and critical capacity as well as courage, while the listener simply sits there, dumb in more than one sense of the word. It is the speaker who advances the conversation while the listener at best is dragged along in the wake of others’ ideas, on the model of master and disciple. It is the former we admire; the latter is at best an enigma but at worst an unoriginal and docile mind. ‘Passive listening’ is a curiously common phrase in a good deal of the educational literature, rather as if listening were not in fact a kind of act at all. University students in particular, we increasingly hear, should not passively listen to professors lecturing in the traditional fashion but engage in ‘active learning’ (in this discussion, ‘active listening’ is not an often-heard phrase). Wherein lies the error in the standard view? In my view, the underappreciation of listening is rooted in a profound misunderstanding of its significance. Listening, it must be stressed, is a highly complex act. It is an act of receptivity to be sure, and receptivity has long been associated, if not conflated, with passivity. But to receive is not to surrender the will and be acted upon; it is a mode of engagement. If it appears as pure passivity, this is an illusion. Its salient feature is openness, but this is not the openness of an empty container waiting to be filled. It rather resembles an active hospitality, a gesture of welcome to an anticipated guest. Listening is an out-going – not a withdrawal into the self or a frightened retreat, but a venture beyond one’s private convictions and toward a meeting of minds. While it is a distortion to describe this act, as psychologist Carl Rogers did, as one in which ‘you lay aside yourself’ while ‘entering the private perceptual world of the other’, it remains that here one’s attention can be fully absorbed by the other, or by the claim the other is addressing to us, in a process that demands a kind of selfforgetfulness (Rogers 1980: 142–43). To listen is to acknowledge that we are being addressed, that someone is not only speaking, but speaking to us. Our interlocutor is claiming something in the sense of making both a statement

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and a claim upon our attention and capacities. It falls to us to listen and respond, where the former must be understood with constant reference to the latter. As Oakeshott expressed it: [L]earning to read or to listen is a slow and exacting engagement, having little or nothing to do with acquiring information. It is learning to follow, to understand and to rethink deliberate expressions of rational consciousness; it is learning to recognize fine shades of meaning without overbalancing into the lunacy of ‘decoding’; it is allowing another’s thoughts to reenact themselves in one’s own mind; it is learning in acts of constantly surprised attention to submit to, to understand and to respond to what (in this response) becomes a part of our understanding of ourselves (2001d: 69–70). Let us distinguish listening in a genuine sense from a phenomenon that we may call ‘listening in’ or ‘tuning in’. We may while driving a car tune into a radio station to distract ourselves from the ennui of watching the road and dealing with traffic. Perhaps we turn from station to station until a song comes on that we enjoy and that the radio picks up clearly. After a short time we turn to another station and then later to another. Today this kind of surfing is a commonplace phenomenon not only with radio but with television, the internet and other technologies. It is also a habit. Tuning in to the radio in this way is profoundly different from what anyone with a proper appreciation of music would call listening to music. The latter calls upon us to stop what we are doing, avoid distraction and impatience, turn the volume up, and allow ourselves to be fully absorbed by, even to lose ourselves within, a musical work. It demands we attend to details and subtleties, allow our passions to rise and fall with the music, catch its rhythm, and follow where it leads. We do not always love what we hear, but to listen means to put aside all else and allow ourselves to be taken up, to be addressed viscerally, and to be moved. We have been addressed, and we are called upon to respond in mind and body. None of this is possible, except in a preliminary way, in the act of tuning in. Here the music is a useful distraction from the tedious but main task of reading the road – useful since it aids concentration necessary for this purpose. We tune in in the fashion of an outsider, not an addressee, rather as one might listen in or eavesdrop on a conversation in the room next door. Someone who listens in is holding herself back, not preparing a response. She may be sitting in judgement, but she has placed herself outside what we might call the economy of conversation. She has not been, and is not prepared to be, addressed, and her response is at best muted. Let us consider for a moment the paradoxical phenomenon of ‘background music’, where again the response is muted but this time by design. The oddity here is that music is being played not to be listened to but to serve a purpose,

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perhaps to create an atmosphere that is conducive to a separate activity such as dinner conversation or exercising in a gym. The activity occupies the foreground of thought, music the background. The music may be tuned into for a brief time but not properly heard. The paradox is that music qua art issues a claim and makes demands of us which as background must be suspended, tuned out for the purpose of directing attention elsewhere. What happens when a piece of music that we love is encountered as background, in a restaurant perhaps or a shopping mall, at low volume or on remote and poorquality speakers? We are affronted; this is not background music, we say, but music meant to be listened to in earnest. With the exception of that genre of music written for the explicit purpose of forming a soundscape (the ambient music of Brian Eno comes to mind), composers and songwriters do not sit down to write something that is not to be listened to, a kind of musical counterpart to muttering. Singer-songwriter Don Henley (2000) once quipped, ‘You haven’t lived till you’ve heard the muzak version of “Desperado” in the frozen food section of your grocery store.’ The humour is good form, but one senses a serious point being made. One speaks in order to be heard, and in this case to be heard is to be listened to. Film music would appear to be intermediate between background music and music that is meant to be heard to the exclusion of everything else. Sometimes it remains a backdrop for what is happening in a scene while at other times it is foregrounded. This kind of music can be crucial to a film’s atmosphere, but what is salient here is the phenomenon of divided attention. We listen to this music with one ear while the other focuses on the course of the narrative. Film and soundscape composers do not write with the same intention as composers and songwriters of the more usual variety. Let us consider further the phenomenon of eavesdropping. This act is generally frowned upon and for reasons that we ought to consider. The eavesdropper listens in on a conversation but is no more listening than a peeping Tom is participating in what he sees. The eavesdropper is holding himself back, not entering into a dialogue or preparing to respond, but merely gathering information or entertaining himself. The basis for disapproval is not only that he is violating privacy but that he is a non-participant, neither addressee nor respondent. He is in a dialogical sense irresponsible, where this means neither invited nor disposed to respond to what another has said. Rather he gathers information for a purpose of his own. Listening in is a selfregarding act and refuses the kind of self-forgetfulness that a conversation demands. To get further clarity consider the bad listener. This person’s failing is specific; it is not that she does not understand what is being said or has no reply, cannot discern what is important or cannot pay attention (there are separate descriptions for each of these things). The problem concerns her way

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of listening; it is a question of disposition rather than capacity. The bad listener may comprehend perfectly the propositional content of an utterance while still missing the point. What manner of listening, then, is this? It is a fundamentally self-regarding act in the sense that her orientation is not toward a claim another has addressed to her, but toward herself. What her interlocutor has to say will not be permitted to undermine her knowledge, call her into question, or lead her down a path she had not planned to travel. It is she alone who sits in judgement, not the speaker. What the bad listener fails to heed is that she is being addressed and thereby called upon to enter into a kind of economy or transactional engagement. To listen, then, is to recognize that we are being addressed, that the speaker is an interlocutor who has directed toward us a claim regarding what is true, what is good, or what something means. A ball has been thrown to us, and it falls to us to catch and return it in kind. The metaphor of catching is apposite. We catch a ball as we catch a rhythm or the spirit of a conversation or artistic performance. Already in the act of catching a baseball we are poised to return it. Likewise in hockey, one receives a pass and shoots the puck ideally ‘all in one motion’, as hockey commentators say. Regarded in abstraction, catching and throwing are separate acts, but in practice one already anticipates the other. The shortstop who fields a grounder by standing motionless but for a movement of the glove-hand is making a bad job of it. As one receives the ball so one should initiate a movement of throwing it with an eye to making a play. We catch a rhythm in the same way. The sound of the drumming is not encountered as an object outside us but resonates within and engenders an immediate response. We may respond this way or that, but what is essential is the response and its preparation, that we are poised in one way or another in a manner that is by no means passive. As Oakeshott (2001c: 35) characterized learning in general, listening ‘is doing and submitting at the same time’. We prepare a response in the way we prepare for a guest. Receiving guests is hardly a passive matter. If one is to be hospitable there is work to be done. So too listening is a form of work, and of no less creative a kind than speaking. We may speak of the art of listening. He who practises it not only opens himself to what another has to say but ventures himself. It is a question of risk, and of a kind comparable to the risk of speaking. It is well known that to speak or write is to risk oneself, to venture a hypothesis or an idea, and expose one’s point of view to the scrutiny of others. This partially explains the fear many have of public speaking; we fear being exposed, criticized in open debate, and badly thought of. We do not think badly of the listener, or not in the same way. At worst we might believe the listener has nothing to say or lacks the courage to venture something. But if we do not fear listening in the way that we fear speaking, the question we must ask is why there are so few

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good listeners. My belief is that this is especially true of intellectual culture, where one might least expect to find this particular failing, and that it is often exhibited by those who are especially skilled in, or especially habituated to, the art of speaking. Listening requires that we stop speaking, a seemingly elementary (perhaps even non-) act which appears to require no skill or judgement. Yet it is not uncommon that someone has not mastered this ability, an odd and fascinating phenomenon. A common expression has it that such individuals are in love with the sound of their own voice, yet it is less a matter of love than dread. They fear not silence but that someone else might speak, that they might be addressed and obliged precisely to risk their point of view. In such a case, we should therefore ask whether it is the speaker or the listener who ventures more of themselves and which of the two is more active. The work of listening, in any event, is to risk being called into question and to have to respond to a claim we may not have anticipated. It is the unfamiliar guest who puts us to work most, the strange and unexpected claim that calls on our resources. This form of work requires something additional of us. Hans-Georg Gadamer spoke of the anticipation of truth as a vital precondition of interpretive understanding in general. We must anticipate, at least in a preliminary way, that what the text or speaker has to say is true. As he expressed it, ‘To conduct a conversation means to allow oneself to be conducted by the subject matter to which the partners in the dialogue are oriented. It requires that one does not try to argue the other person down but that one really considers the weight of the other’s opinion’ (Gadamer 2013: 373).3 To see this, let us imagine what it is like to listen without this anticipation. Somehow we know – or, if this is impossible, expect – the speaker to be mistaken even before she has begun to speak. Why, then, are we listening, and what manner of listening is this? If we anticipate that our interlocutor’s claim lacks either truth, value or meaning then we need not listen at all, and this is precisely what characterizes the bad listener: not that he is incapable of doing so (for this is a failing of a different kind), but that he feels he need not. He needs, as he imagines, only gather evidence that he was correct all along and may accordingly settle back in his knowledge. The bad listener values above all the intellectual comfort of which Friedrich Nietzsche spoke, his conviction being that most human beings, and especially philosophers, value this far more than truth. In intellectual culture we tend to imagine that we are good listeners, perhaps because we are continually reading, but here as well it must be asked whether we are listening or merely listening in, preparing not to change our views, but to demonstrate a mastery of the literature or to demolish an adversary. For all the reading one does, and the conferences one attends, how often does one change one’s mind about something of consequence? If this is the exception rather than the norm, perhaps we may venture an observation reminiscent of Martin

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Heidegger’s claim that ‘we are still not thinking’ and that if we imagine otherwise it is ‘because we are incessantly “philosophizing” ’ (Heidegger 2004: 4, 5). We are unremittingly tuning in and tuning out, reading either inattentively or with a view to confirming our prior beliefs, and consigning to the background that which calls for thinking. We listen at cross purposes when the speaker’s purpose is to say what she believes while our own is simply to gather information about how someone else thinks, to form some clever retort, or to reassure ourselves of the correctness of our beliefs. A related claim of Heidegger’s is that ‘questioning is the piety of thought’ (2008: 341), and one might say something analogous about listening: that it is the piety of conversation. If one is partial to religious language one might also say that listening involves a Kierkegaardian ‘leap to faith’ – if not in the direction of the divine then in our anticipation regarding the other’s claim that there is something here that is important and true. Listening is an act of faith, and its salient feature is active and creative receptivity. Only under this condition are we in a genuine sense with the speaker. ‘The first condition of the art of conversation’, as Gadamer remarked, ‘is ensuring that the other person is with us. We know this only too well from the reiterated “yes” of the interlocutors in the Platonic dialogues’ (Gadamer 2013: 373). ‘Are you with me?’ connotes not only ‘Do you understand?’ but ‘Are you listening?’ and, inseparable from this, ‘Are you preparing some manner of response?’ Are you prepared to change yourself or change your mind in some way? In all listening there is invention and a judgement of confidence that the claim to which one is attending is worth the effort. This is readily seen in an aesthetic context. In listening to music we are anticipating that there is something in this, not merely a pleasure to be derived but something far more interesting: some meaning to be glimpsed, something to be shown, and in a way that resonates and potentially transforms us. We do not listen, or not for long, to pop music of the more vapid kind precisely because there is nothing in it. Even while it entertains in a certain way it issues no claim, makes no statement and holds no meaning. It is a singularly frustrating experience to listen to such music, resembling as it does trying to interpret a blank page, or earnestly listening to someone who has nothing to say. When the anticipation of meaning or truth is suspended, listening is at an end. To listen is not yet to speak, but it is to be on the way – to use another Heideggerian phrase – to speaking or responding in one fashion or another. This is the basis for describing listening as an act of invention. Someone has addressed us, and since conversation has the structure of a dialectic it behoves us to fashion a response. As the musical example again illustrates, listening is a responsive activity, as well as a complex and learned one. We learn how to listen, what to listen for, and the art of discerning increasingly subtle qualities. We learn to listen by habitually directing our attention in a sustained and

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increasingly differentiated way, by repeating what has been said, allowing it to resonate within. We may learn it by following the example of a good listener, who is able to tell us what we ought to be paying attention to and what is less significant. As Oakeshott said of the intellectual virtues in general, listening ‘may be acquired by imitating a teacher who has this habit’ (2001c: 60). Listening invariably has a purpose, but if we are listening authentically our purpose is the speaker’s purpose. This is part of what it means to be with the latter, that we are not conversing at cross purposes, as when we listen with an eye to ‘knowing thine enemy’. The conversation of mankind may be agonistic, but a life-and-death struggle it is not. We are led from the outset by the speaker’s purpose – to convey some meaning or say what she believes – even if our purpose may change when it comes our turn to speak. Listening in a critical spirit still requires an anticipation of truth and a shared purpose. To cite Gadamer once more, ‘A person skilled in the “art” of questioning’, or of conversation more generally, ‘is a person who can prevent questions from being suppressed by the dominant opinion. A person who possesses this art will himself search for everything in favor of an opinion. Dialectic consists not in trying to discover the weakness of what is said, but in bringing out its real strength’ (2013: 374). The most critical form of listening remains a thinking together with the interlocutor with whom we disagree, however vehemently. We are not lying in wait as a prelude to attacking an enemy but participating in a conversational economy that itself is a shared inquiry into what is true. The purpose of listening in an educational context is no different. The point is to listen and learn, where to learn means to be transformed. The student not only understands what has been said but is able to respond in an intelligent way, which always means with a thought of her own. She is able to participate in the back-and-forth of dialogue and at times to move the conversation in a different direction. Consider the kind of distortion that happens when a professor, of philosophy let us say, in the course of lecturing on a certain text is asked by a student whether what the professor has been saying is going to be on the exam. The professor sighs, and for sound pedagogical reasons. The listener’s purpose, in an educational setting or any other, is properly the speaker’s purpose. The same holds in the case of the music critic who listens only to have something clever to say or to meet a deadline; they are properly reminded that they are not really listening. The music has been heard and the text has been read when we have followed their lead, unhurriedly, from beginning to end, and responded in some manner. In the case of a philosophical text this is impaired by the unfortunately common practice of carving it up into excerpts, surrounded perhaps by brief textbook commentary. Listening is a habit, and it is not cultivated when students come to believe that texts may be cut up in this way without missing anything essential. When students are given to believe that complex ideas artfully conceived can be distilled into

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preselected informational chunks, they learn not to listen. Listening is a learned capacity, but it is a learned disposition still more. The bad listener, I have suggested, is less incapable of hearing than he is simply not inclined to. He is not habituated to taking what another has to say seriously. Similarly with the student whose sole aim is to acquire information and pass an examination; reading short excerpts and skimming surfaces will do. Education crucially bears on habit formation, and we ought not to regard it as a success when students are taught to glean information by quickly tuning in and out of the subject matter rather than slowly allowing it to affect their thinking. The capacity and inclination to hold one’s attention for an extended period of time is a habit that can be learned and unlearned, as is the ability to speak and respond. To listen is to take seriously what another has to say, and this is inseparable from questioning. Conversation involves a questioning that runs in two directions; as the speaker calls into question the standpoint of the listener, the latter must actively examine, interpret and judge what is being said. Where there is interpretation there is interrogation, classification, a search for connections, a negotiating of the hermeneutical circle, an estimation of importance, and what Nietzsche called falsification – essentially simplification and an imposition of order.4 The interpretive function of a question is to bring a phenomenon into the open and to reveal it as this or that kind of thing. No rule governs how we do this, how we formulate the question that allows the thing to be shown. This is a creative act, and it belongs as much to listening as to speaking. It is only when regarded as abstractions that listening, discerning what is questionable and fashioning a productive question are separate acts. Phenomenologically, listening already anticipates the latter. The educational significance of listening may be illustrated with any number of examples, but let us consider the disciplines of history and philosophy. The student of history is charged with acquiring and committing to memory large quantities of information with the ostensible purpose of knowing what happened in the past. Yet she must develop capacities of analysis and interpretation that transcend the mere retention of information, and included in this is cultivating ‘a sense of history’. An educated historical sense is precisely an inclination and ability to listen to the past, or listen with understanding. To listen to the past is a different operation of thought than amassing information. It presupposes the latter but is no more limited to this than listening to music is mere sensory stimulation. One develops a musical sensibility, an ability and a will to listen. There are people who need music in a profound sense, for whom listening is no mere entertainment or source of aesthetic pleasure but a condition of their existence. ‘Without music’, Nietzsche wrote, ‘life would be a mistake’ (Nietzsche 2003: 36 (‘Maxims and Arrows’, §33)). These are the words of someone with a cultivated will to listen and to go on listening. So too one learns to listen to the past – to the Romans, for instance. In listening to the

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Romans one learns, in whatever measure this is possible, to think as they did, to perceive what they perceived and make contact with their world. We learn how things stood with them, who were their gods, their heroes and enemies, what was their self-understanding and to what they aspired. We learn the art of discernment and to judge, for instance, who were ‘the good emperors’ and who the bad. In listening to the Romans we need to know who their rulers were and on what grounds we judge Augustus, Trajan or Marcus Aurelius great and Caligula, Nero or Commodus failures. What was it that made Julius Caesar outstanding while Vespasian – surely also a man for his times – was merely good? What of lesser figures such as Nerva or Septimius Severus? Would we judge them successes given the conditions they faced, or mediocrities? Life would perhaps not be a mistake were we to lack answers to these questions, but it is only someone who has not given the Romans a serious listen who would see this as a matter of indifference. Listening to history also means granting the past the right to question us. On what basis, for instance, are we convinced that our time or way of life is in some sense preferable to theirs? Were Roman tyrants worse than the tyrants of our era, their economy so much less stable, their religion less insightful? Was Cicero a lesser political thinker than John Rawls? Was their architecture less well designed than ours? The Romans can and must question us in the same manner that we interrogate them, as indeed we must. Cicero’s ideas continue to demand a response from us. The model of conversation applies here as well. It is within this conversation that the sense of history is learned and that our capacity and will to listen are cultivated. What the student of history understands is that we do not ‘know better’ than the Romans and they are on the judgement seat with us.5 Let us consider also our own field of philosophy. The student of this discipline must learn to listen to ideas, but in what sense? This is a complex operation of thought which includes but also surpasses a basic or ‘informational’ interpretation of the philosophical system of a Kant or a Hegel. Listening to an idea goes beyond what philosophers call ‘analysis’ or ‘critique’ and involves a higher-level interpretation that listens for a concept’s resonance in a living language. ‘Art’, ‘truth’, ‘reason’ and ‘democracy’ are not only technical concepts but words with histories, the interpretation of which calls not just for powers of abstraction, but for the contrary ability to regard ideas as part of a lifeworld. Democracy is an ethos and a way of thinking; it names an aspiration and a sense of justice. Reducing it to a technical term with an ostensibly deep core of meaning can be attempted, but let us not imagine that when we behold the bare bones we behold the substance. Ideas resonate as music does; before they are flattened out into essences they are words that reverberate with a meaning that is inexhaustible, and listening to them means listening beyond their tidy definitions.

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The student of philosophy is habituated to listening in this sense, both to ideas and to the texts in which they have been interpreted. To listen to a text is to enter into a conversation, to appropriate it, to give it a hearing in a sense that surpasses grasping its argument and inspecting its logical credentials. We do an injustice to Locke’s Two Treatises, for example, when we abstract a few premises and conclusions, list them on a blackboard, perform a ‘critical analysis’, and decide that our work is done. Locke had an idea and a project that made sense of his times. His text still speaks to us, whatever the vagaries of its particular arguments. His questions are our questions, and he questions us just as we do him. If we do not share his moral passions, his worries and his aspirations, it falls to us to say why not. Was his worry about the freedom of the individual unfounded, a mere reflection of eighteenth-century Europe with no relevance to us? Texts speak and ideas resonate across generations, and the task of the student is to hear how they speak to the present and to prepare a response.6 It is the constant tendency of educators, and educational policymakers still more, to undervalue the intangibles of education, and this is especially true of the act of listening. It is not a mere means to the end of being ‘informed’. The current reign of instrumental rationality, with its continual emphasis on mastering information and training the next generation of producers and consumers, leaves little room for what Gadamer (1992: 48) called ‘living with ideas’ or learning to participate in the conversation of mankind. To live with ideas means to listen and to go on listening until it comes the student’s turn to participate in that other sense of advancing views of their own – and then to resume listening to our interlocutor’s response. The will to listen is taught by professors lecturing on texts without skimming surfaces and hurriedly moving on. Listening is, or is capable of becoming, a felt need and a habitual turn of mind, rather than merely a means of gathering information. It is no exaggeration to say, as Oakeshott did (2001d: 64), that ‘to listen is to think’. Finally, let us reflect once more on the often-repeated claim that in the name of active learning students must curtail passively listening and professors must stop lecturing. The scenario we are often asked to imagine, if not to regard as paradigmatic, is a somewhat pedantic figure standing imposingly behind the rostrum and making a bad job of lecturing to an excessively large audience of bored students, taking few or no questions while the students impassively sit and take notes. With this unhappy scenario is often contrasted the online course which, its advocates tell us, is not only active but engaging, stimulating, personalized and continuous with students’ extracurricular experience. Both scenarios are caricatures, yet one encounters them repeatedly in the current literature. I do not know whether the average university professor of today makes a poorer show of lecturing than the average lawyer of presenting evidence in court or the average carpenter of

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building a house. Yet even if there is truth (as seems likely) in the charge that professors often make a bad job of lecturing, I doubt that there is any necessity behind it. It does not follow from the very nature of a lecture. What a lecturer or any educator ought to be doing is not ‘talking at’ an audience but initiating students into the conversation that is a given field of knowledge. The students should experience a performance in which a knowledgeable and reasonably engaging human being – and we can still expect professors to be this – not only ‘delivers content’ but initiates students into a discipline in a way that is formative and not merely informative. Education happens when minds come into contact with each other and the subject matter, and pursue in common a particular line of questioning. The lecturer is, or ought to be, inquiring, exhibiting the same mode of thinking into which the students are being initiated, performing that which needs to be learned in a way not unlike a parent demonstrating to a child the proper way to skate or a tradesperson demonstrating to an apprentice how to perform a given range of tasks. One teaches by showing, enacting or performing – by doing something far more complex and more human than handing over information. This kind of performance becomes impossible as the number of students in the classroom grows excessively large, but the phenomenon of the overcrowded lecture hall is a consequence of economics, not the lecture format itself. A musical performance before a crowd of tens of thousands does not compare to one before a moderate number. Professors are not rock stars, but what the two kinds of performance have in common is that those witness to them, assuming the number is moderate, are part of the performance. Their experience ought to be (and undoubtedly too seldom is) that something is happening here that is removed from the everyday; something that compels attention, not because it is entertaining, but because it is, or may be, true, insightful or important; and one is called upon to respond, ask a question, form a judgement or a criticism, change one’s mind or in some way become a part of what is taking place. Listening is preparatory to participation in its other, more easily recognizable, forms such as speaking or writing. One does not speak in a conversation before one has had time to listen to what has been said, learn what it is about and what is at stake. Critics of the lecture format often commit the error of regarding listening in isolation from the conversational process of which it is a vital part. Let us give pause, then, before speaking quite so hastily of passive listening. Is it only students in lecture halls who do this? What of professors attending an academic conference, judges hearing evidence or an audience at a musical performance? The listening act exhibits the same structure in every case. Heidegger emphasized that to think is always to be on the way, and this is the salient quality of listening. We are on the way to speaking, attending to what matters, discerning and judging, searching for connections, anticipating

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truth, and preparing to give way or resist depending not on any prior disposition but on what another has to say. In the listening act we are placing ourselves in the open and endeavouring to maintain ourselves there, searching continually for what Calvin Schrag has called ‘the fitting response’. ‘The task’, as he puts it, ‘then becomes that of determining that which is fitting or appropriate in responding to the discourse, thought, emotions, and actions of the other.’ For Schrag, the notion of a fitting response carries particular implications for ethics since ‘[e]thical responsibility resides in responding to the needs, the joys, the sorrows, the hopes, the anger, the friendship, and the hatred that issues from the other’, yet the implications for education are no less significant (Schrag 2013: xxxii). It is not any response that will do; in every case we must craft an appropriate response, whether this involves overt acts of speaking (questioning, agreeing, criticizing), some form of ethical or aesthetic response, or simply taking in with due regard what is being said, seeing something for what it is, or allowing it to resonate within us so that we emerge from the experience in some way changed. No less than in the act of speaking, here we venture ourselves, catch hold of what is said and undertake to take it further.

Notes 1 One prominent exception in the current educational literature is a special issue of Teachers College Record on listening published in 2010. The editors’ introduction begins: ‘The articles in this special issue . . . address listening – a topic that has been largely neglected in the literature on teaching and learning’ (Haroutunian-Gordon and Waks 2010: 2717). 2 The verb ‘to educate’ is now often used in precisely this way: essentially to speak and inform, perhaps to pontificate. When the government undertakes a ‘public education campaign’ around smoking or bullying in schools, it is no campaign of listening that it is undertaking. To educate here means to announce what one knows, to an audience that does not know and that must therefore listen and learn in a sense intimating compliance. From the state’s or public educator’s point of view, of course, they are not indoctrinating or manipulating but precisely educating – saying what they know – and if it should come to pass that people change their behaviour as a consequence, still this does not constitute indoctrination so long as what is said is true. If the doctrine is true, all is well, or so the story goes. 3 ‘ “By hermeneutics,” Gadamer explained in 1996, “I understand the ability to listen to the other in the belief that he could be right” ’ (Grondin 2003: 250). 4 Knowing, Nietzsche maintained, in every case simplifies and involves an imposition of stability and a call to order, an appropriation that captures the dimension of the thing that serves us. It is a fundamentally interested and artificial arrangement that comes into view, one that includes no small

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element of ‘forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, investing, falsifying, and whatever else is of the essence of interpreting’ (Nietzsche 1969: 151 (III , §24)). 5 Oakeshott distinguished three attitudes that we can take to the past: the practical, the scientific and the contemplative, each of which corresponds to the ‘voices’ he identified in the conversation of mankind (see Oakeshott 1991e). On his view, none of these is a properly historical attitude. The last understands the past for its own sake and as constituted by ‘facts’ that are independent of subsequent events. The historian does not seek to identify meaning, teleology or necessity in history or to pass normative judgements. Whether one agrees with Oakeshott here or not, it remains that historians cannot understand the past without first learning to listen to it. One may also distinguish the work of the historian from that of the student, who is being initiated into a field of investigation and thus entering into a conception of how things were. 6 The educational significance of listening is also illustrated by an expression commonly used by athletes that one must ‘listen to the body’. What does this mean? Becoming an athlete requires a particular form of listening, although here again we are using the word metaphorically. The athlete must listen to the body in the sense of learning to discern, for example, when physical pain is to be pushed through and when it constitutes injury. Does one seek medical attention or continue to play? In many cases this is not self-evident but calls for a kind of discernment that the concept of listening well captures. One listens with questions in mind: should one play through the pain or exit the field? Has the pain made one a liability to the team? Beyond the question of pain, how is the body faring? What is its energy level, and how can this be regulated so that one can endure the remainder of the game? Is the body being pushed beyond its limits? This is part of an athlete’s education and is inseparable from learning how to execute a set of manoeuvres. The body speaks, and what it communicates must be both understood and responded to. The question in this form of listening is, what is to be done? Does the body require rest, nourishment or whatever it might be? Here again, the response is already a part of the listening act.

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9 Conversation and Processes of Recognition Shaun Gallagher

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arious thinkers have appropriated the idea of conversation as a metaphor of socio-political discourse and/or hermeneutical experience. As such it has been tied to Romantic conceptions such as the universality of language, ‘linguistic heritage’ (Angeborenheit der Sprache), and to what von Humboldt (1985) called ‘the common denominator of human nature’, the universal and spiritual humanity that we all share (Schleiermacher 1985). Gadamer, as is well known, characterizes reading as a conversation or dialogue with a text. This is more than metaphor, he tells us; interpretation means bringing the text ‘into the living present of conversation’ (1989a: 368). As metaphor, however, it is too easy to idealize and to describe conversation as it ought to be. Thus, for Michael Oakeshott (1991f), the ‘conversation of mankind’ ideally conceived is composed of a plurality of voices, each with its own idiom and each in relative emancipation from the others – a conversation free of hegemony, lacking hierarchy, and without the requirement of credentials for participation. In real terms, however, conversation is imperfect and often political. In the nitty-gritty of everyday life there are real processes that make real conversations possible or impossible. And yet, there is something that even real conversation promises, or even produces – something that outstrips realistic expectations. To give an account of what this is, and how it works, I propose to bring together analyses from a number of discussions that are not usually integrated: insights from developmental studies about the dynamics of primary and secondary intersubjective interaction, an analysis of the concept of recognition from critical theory, and hermeneutical insights about the dynamical processes involved in conversation.

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Interaction as a dynamical process of sense-making In this section I’ll take some time to lay out the details of early-developing processes that are intrinsic, not only to intersubjective interaction, but also to everyday conversation. The scientific and theoretical details are important for later considerations, but also more generally to indicate that the model of conversation that I will argue for is grounded in real processes. Standard models of social cognition (so-called theory of mind [ToM], ‘theory theory’ and simulation theory) take their point of departure from the idea that we do not have access to the other person’s mind and that understanding others is really a case of trying to explain or predict their behaviours by ‘mindreading’, i.e. inferring or simulating their mental states. On these accounts, specialized brain processes (activation of a ToM module or mirror neuron system) within the individual operate as the mechanism that makes social cognition possible. In contrast to this methodological individualism, interaction theory argues that our understanding of others is not reducible to individualist mechanisms, but is rather based on embodied encounters in highly contextualized social and cultural situations, and on conversational and narrative practices. On this view, conversation is a continuation of pre-verbal communication processes that start in infancy. Thus recent work in the area of social cognition has emphasized interaction models, in contrast to observational models. The claim is that our understandings of others arise primarily in participatory, second-person encounters rather than in third-person attempts to explain their behaviour based on observation. These interactive processes have been described by developmental psychologists under the title of ‘primary intersubjectivity’ (e.g. Trevarthen 1979; Reddy 2008). Primary intersubjectivity consists of the innate or earlydeveloping sensory-motor capacities that bring us into relation with others and allow us to interact with them. These capacities are manifested at the level of action and perceptual experience; we see or more generally perceive in the other person’s bodily movements, gestures, facial expressions, eye direction, etc. what they intend and what they feel, and we respond with our own bodily movements, gestures, facial expressions, gaze, etc. in a way that is dynamically coupled with the other. On this view, in second-person interactions, the ‘mind’ of the other is not entirely hidden or private, but is given and manifest in the other person’s embodied comportment. The basis for human interaction and for understanding others can be found already in early infancy in certain embodied responses that are emotional, sensory-motor and perceptual. Infants already have a sense of what it means to be an experiencing subject-agent from their own proprioception and

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movement. They can sense that certain kinds of entities (but not others) in the environment are indeed agents like themselves, and that in some way these entities are similar to and in other ways different from themselves. Infants from birth are capable of perceiving and responding to facial gestures presented by another (Meltzoff and Moore 1977, 1994). These ‘neonate imitation’ studies show that infants less than an hour old are capable of imitative responses, and that they can improve their performance with practice, which suggests that they are able to register the difference between their own gesture and the gesture of the other. This kind of interaction depends not only on some kind of minimal differentiation between self and non-self, and a proprioceptive sense of one’s own body, but on a minimal sense that the other is in fact of the same sort as oneself (Bermúdez 1996; Gallagher and Meltzoff 1996). Infants are able to distinguish between inanimate objects and animate agents. They respond to human faces in a way that they do not respond to other objects (Legerstee, 2005; Johnson, 2000; Johnson, Slaughter and Carey 1998). As Husserl (1973) suggested as early as 1907, and as recent research on mirror neurons confirms, our perception of the other person induces a sensory-motor process that reverberates kinetically and kinaesthetically with their intentions. As Gopnik and Meltzoff put it, ‘we innately map the visually perceived motions of others onto our own kinesthetic sensations’ (1997: 129). Primary intersubjectivity can be specified in more detail. At two months of age infants are already following the other person’s attention – their head movements and gaze direction (Baron-Cohen 1995; Maurer and Barrera 1981). Around the same time, second-person interaction is evidenced by the timing and emotional response of infants’ behaviour. Infants ‘vocalize and gesture in a way that seems [affectively and temporally] “tuned” to the vocalizations and gestures of the other person’ (Gopnik and Meltzoff 1997: 131). At five to seven months, infants are able to detect correspondences between visual and auditory information that specify the expression of emotions (Walker 1982; Hobson 1993, 2002). At six months, infants start to perceive grasping as goal-directed, and at ten to eleven months infants are able to parse some kinds of continuous action according to intentional boundaries (Baldwin and Baird 2001; Baird and Baldwin 2001; Woodward and Sommerville 2000). They start to perceive various movements of the head, the mouth, the hands and more general body movements as meaningful, goal-directed movements (Senju, Johnson and Csibra 2006). Buckner et al. (2009) have referred to these different capacities as a ‘weakly integrated swarm of first-order mechanisms’. But we should not think of these as capacities or mechanisms belonging strictly to the individual. It is important to highlight the interactive nature of the infant’s relations with others. Imitation, for example, is not an automatic or mechanical procedure; Csibra and Gergely

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(2009) have shown that the infant is more likely to imitate only if the other person is attending to it. The quest for underlying social-cognitive mechanisms, which motivates much of the cognitive science literature, is misguided insofar as it often overlooks the essential contribution of interaction itself in order to focus on individual capacities (Schilbach et al. 2013). Developmental studies show the very early appearance, and the significance, of dynamic coordination in the intersubjective context. Murray and Trevarthen (1985), for example, have shown the importance of the mother’s live interaction with two-month old infants in a double TV monitor experiment where mother and infant interact by means of a live television link. The infants engage in lively interaction in this situation. When presented with a recorded replay of their mother’s previous actions, that is, precisely the same actions that they saw before, they quickly disengage and become distracted and upset. These results have been replicated, eliminating alternative explanations such as infants’ fatigue or memory problems (Nadel et al. 1999; Stormark and Braarud 2004). Likewise, in still-face experiments, infants between three and six months who are engaged in a normal face-to-face interaction with a caregiver become visibly discouraged and upset during a period when the caregiver assumes a still (unexpressive) face (Tronick et al. 1979). The importance of interactive touch has also been demonstrated in the still-person effect (Muir 2002). The key idea is that in some cases interaction itself plays an essential role in constituting social cognition (De Jaegher et al. 2010). Importantly, primary intersubjectivity is not something that disappears after the first year of life. It is not a stage we leave behind, and it is not, as Greg Currie suggests, a set of precursor states ‘that underpin early intersubjective understanding, and make way for the development of later theorizing or simulation’ (2008: 212; emphasis added; cf. Baron-Cohen 1991, 1995). Rather, these embodied interactive processes continue to characterize our everyday encounters even as adults. That is, we continue to understand others in strong interactional terms, facilitated by our recognition of facial expressions, gestures, postures and actions as meaningful. The analyses of social interactions in shared activities, in working together, in communicative practices, and so on, show that agents unconsciously coordinate their movements, gestures and speech acts (Issartel, Marin and Cadopi 2007; Kendon 1990; Lindblom 2007), entering into synchronized resonance with others, with slight temporal modulations (Gergely 2001), in either in-phase or phase-delayed rhythmic covariation (Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009). In this regard, the processes of primary intersubjectivity continue into secondary intersubjective contexts. Sometime during the first year of life infants go beyond the person-toperson immediacy of primary intersubjectivity, and enter into social and pragmatic contexts of joint attention – shared situations – in which they learn what things mean and what they are for (see Trevarthen and

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Hubley 1978). Peter Hobson nicely summarizes this notion of secondary intersubjectivity. The defining feature of secondary intersubjectivity is that an object or event can become a focus between people. Objects and events can be communicated about . . . [T]he infant’s interactions with another person begin to have reference to the things that surround them (2002: 62). Dyadic interaction is supplemented by joint actions through which children develop further capabilities. A young child comes to understand not only that another person wants food or intends to open the door, that the other can see him (the child) or is looking at the door, but he now begins to share interactions directed at objects in the world. In joint attention, the child alternates between monitoring the gaze of the other and what the other is gazing at, checking to verify that she is continuing to look at the same thing. Infants around this time learn to point and between nine and eighteen months look to the eyes of the other person to help interpret the meaning of an ambiguous event (Phillips, Baron-Cohen and Rutter 1992; Reddy 2008). More generally, in joint attention, not only the direction of gaze, but also the emotional expression on the face of the other has a measurable effect. In studies of object evaluation, for example, the gaze of the other person towards an object is shown to draw one’s evaluative attention to the object. Subjects presented with a face looking towards (or away from) an object evaluate the object as more (or less) likeable than those objects that do not receive much attention from others. When you add an emotional expression to the face, the effect is stronger (Bayliss et al. 2006, 2007). In addition, the quality of the other person’s movement is important. Seeing another person act with ease (or without ease) toward an object will influence one’s feelings about the object (Hayes et al. 2008). Indeed, my awareness of the gaze of others towards objects or in joint attention influences my perception of objects in regard to motor action, significance and emotional salience (Becchio, Bertone and Castiello 2008). Hornik, Risenhoover and Gunnar (1987) showed that when infants of twelve to eighteen months saw a parent’s negative emotional expression directed toward a particular toy, they later, and in a different context, avoided playing with that toy. In addition, Repacholi and Meltzoff (2007) showed that the emotional expressions of one person while watching the action of another (who is showing anger or a neutral facial expression) will influence an eighteenmonth old infant’s inclination to imitate the actions of the second person (see also Repacholi, Olsen and Meltzoff 2006; Repacholi, Meltzoff and Olsen 2008; also Walden and Ogan 1988). Secondary intersubjectivity thus involves our abilities to understand the world (and not just others) through our interactions with others. In this regard,

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joint attention forms the basis of participatory sense-making (PSM ) (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007; De Jaegher, Di Paolo and Gallagher 2010; Gallagher 2009), that is, our ability to co-constitute (with others) meaning in different contexts and environments. Like social cognition, where we attempt to understand others, PSM also involves social interaction, as well as joint attention and joint action. It also reflects affective engagements with the motoric and emotional attitudes of others (Hobson 2011). Our engaged interactions happen between two or more embodied individuals, and in some cases can take on a certain autonomy that multiplies and sometimes magnifies the emotional aspects of our experience. In other cases, the emotional content remains subtle and nuanced, yet is still capable of affecting our intersubjective life. In still other cases the emotional dimension seems to be embedded in social practices and contexts and can have a contagious character, for instance at an athletic event when the music of the national anthem plays. On this view, these embodied and contextualized practices constitute our primary way of understanding others, and continue to do so through adulthood. In most of our ordinary and everyday intersubjective situations we have a perception-based understanding of another person’s intentions and emotions because their intentions and emotions are implicitly or explicitly expressed in their embodied actions and expressions. This kind of primary understanding does not require us to postulate some belief or desire hidden away in the other person’s mind that would explain their behaviour. What we might reflectively or abstractly call a person’s belief or desire or mental state is, with respect to intersubjective interaction, expressed directly in their contextualized behaviour, their actions and communicative practices. Continuous dynamic movements between synchronized, desynchronized, and the states in-between, drive the process of social interaction (De Jaegher 2009). Attunement, loss of attunement and re-established attunement maintain both differentiation and connection. Importantly, the effect of interaction goes beyond each participant; it results in something – the creation of meaning – that goes beyond what each individual qua individual can bring to the process. There may be just two individuals if there is no interaction; but if two individuals interact, there is something more, just as when two people dance the tango something dynamic is created that neither one could create on their own. In this regard interaction has a certain kind of autonomy (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007), and neither of the participants is able to control completely the interactive process, if it is truly interactive. In cases where one person is totally in control of the other person, there is no interaction in this specific sense. The autonomy of the interaction process itself makes the autonomy of the individual participants a relational autonomy. Within the process, one has a degree of autonomy relative to the other agent, and vice versa, in each case limited or enhanced by the interaction.

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Interaction, in this sense, can be defined in more technical terms as a mutually engaged co-regulated coupling between at least two autonomous agents where the co-regulation and the coupling mutually affect each other, and constitute a self-sustaining organization in the domain of relational dynamics (De Jaegher et al. 2010). Indeed, this reflects a basic hermeneutical aspect of interaction; interpretation of the other person, or of the world with or through the other person, always extends beyond the control of the agent. At the same time, sustained and repeated interactions build ‘implicit relational knowledge’ and improve possibilities for greater fluency, flexibility and further successful interactions (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007: 496).

From recognition to responsiveness Critical theorists have recently returned to the idea that recognition is an important principle in regard to how we live our everyday lives, as well as in regard to philosophical questions of justice. Axel Honneth especially makes this a central theme of his work (2008a, 2012). Almost all contemporary discussions of this concept take their bearings from Hegel’s discussion of recognition (Anerkennung) in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), with references to his early Jena manuscripts, and his late Philosophy of Right (1820). What Hegel shows in the Phenomenology is that when social or intersubjective interaction in the strict sense is eliminated, as in slavery, recognition is too, and this is destructive not only for the victim, but selfdestructive for the victimizer. In Hegel’s well-known master–slave dialectic, not only is the autonomy of the slave explicitly denied, the autonomy of the master is compromised because the master refuses to recognize the other, the slave, as an autonomous subject. The slave, who is denied status as a subject, and is therefore treated as a reified object, is, as non-subject, from the perspective of the master, in no position to recognize the master’s status as master, and that status depends on just that possibility of recognition. Like the infant in the Murray and Trevarthen contingency studies, the lack of interaction dynamics between infant and the videotaped mother registers, in the infant, as a lack of recognition of the infant by the mother, and causes emotional consternation. The failure of the ‘external’ relation translates immediately into an ‘internal’ decline. External and internal are here abstractions from a general failure of dynamic coupling at the level of the intersubjective system constituted by the interaction, or in this case, the lack of interaction. Honneth’s analysis borrows heavily from Hegel. But he also appeals to recent work in psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. Here, I think, Honneth gets some things wrong, although he rightly starts with Trevarthen’s

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concept of primary intersubjectivity. Honneth, however, associates the concept of primary intersubjectivity with a classic psychoanalytic notion of undifferentiated oneness: ‘one can plausibly assume that every human life begins with a phase of undifferentiated intersubjectivity, that is, of symbiosis’ (Honneth 1995: 98, emphasis added). He takes this idea from the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott.1 This is precisely how Honneth understands the notion of primary intersubjectivity. This initially experienced behaviour unit, for which ‘primary intersubjectivity’ has established itself, raises the central question that occupied Winnicott during his life: how are we to conceive of the interactional process by which ‘mother’ and child are able to detach themselves from a state of undifferentiated oneness in such a way that, in the end, they learn to accept and love each other as independent persons? . . . Since both subjects are initially included in the state of symbiotic oneness in virtue of their active accomplishments, they must, as it were, learn from each other how to differentiate (Honneth 1995: 98–9). On this view, primary intersubjectivity implies that mother and child ‘are incapable of individually demarcating themselves from each other’ (99) – or, at least, during ‘the first months of life, the child is incapable of differentiating between self and environment’ (99). Moreover, Honneth characterizes this ‘phase’ as something that the child gets over – something that finally comes to an end when the child gains the capacity for ‘cognitive differentiation between self and environment’ at around six months of age (100; emphasis added). At this point there begins a transition to secondary intersubjectivity. There is a clear contrast between this view of primary and secondary intersubjectivity and the one outlined in the previous section, based on the empirical research of Trevarthen, Reddy, Hobson and others. First, even in primary intersubjectivity there is a very basic self–other differentiation, and that is the only way there can be genuine interaction between mother and child. Interaction per se depends on differentiation. Second, the embodied (sensory-motor) processes of primary intersubjectivity do not constitute a phase or stage that a human goes through and leaves behind; they continue as an important part of social interaction throughout one’s lifetime. Thus, secondary intersubjectivity does not replace primary intersubjectivity but is integrated with it, opening up social perspectives on the lifeworld. Honneth’s understanding of primary intersubjectivity is important for his conception of recognition. Recognition, he contends, is something that can be accomplished only after struggling through the phase of primary intersubjectivity, that is, only as the child gets beyond the undifferentiated

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oneness. This is precisely a ‘struggle for recognition’ (Honneth 1995: 101) – a concept that Honneth takes from Hegel. Recognition is something that the child comes to as she transitions from the first stage of primary intersubjectivity to the second stage of secondary intersubjectivity. In later works Honneth revises his view of undifferentiated oneness; he qualifies it, claiming that it is not absolute, and there are always moments when differentiation breaks through. Nonetheless he retains the idea that recognition begins as the child transitions out of primary intersubjectivity: ‘The starting point of these investigations consists in the . . . transition from primary to secondary intersubjectivity’ (2008a: 116); that is, he starts his analysis of recognition with joint attention and secondary intersubjectivity. Again, in this respect, Honneth overlooks, or at least heavily discounts, the embodied dynamics of social interaction that begins in primary intersubjectivity. He points to primary intersubjectivity as a necessary antecedent to recognition; again, something that simply transitions to what he takes to be primary in recognition – the disclosure of a world in secondary intersubjectivity: ‘it is through this emotional attachment to a “concrete other” that a world of meaningful qualities is disclosed to a child as a world in which it must involve itself practically’ (118). If we think of secondary intersubjectivity as the beginning of a fascination with the world, however, then recognition is, as Honneth suggests, from the very beginning, a struggle – a phenomenon that is born in a tension between interest in the world and interest in the other – a tension with reification. These tensions surely do exist, and emerge within the normative constraints imposed on intersubjectivity by aspects of social practices and institutions. One could conceive of these constraints as a kind of overlay that frames and shapes our intersubjective relations, although it is something that likely goes deeper, since such constraints are there from the very beginning (in primary intersubjectivity, on the side of the caregiver, and in the social practices that define child rearing). Nonetheless, I want to suggest that prior to and beneath this overlay, there exists and may continue to exist a primary intersubjectivity which is not an undifferentiated oneness, and even if in some sense we slip in and out of this primary intersubjectivity, it is not a slipping in and out of undifferentiation, as Honneth continues to suggest. Rather, it is characterized by a self–other distinction from the very beginning, and has the same dynamic character that later characterizes conversation. Let me say, however, that there is a great deal of complexity in Honneth’s concept of recognition. Under the influence of Hegel he distinguishes three different forms of intersubjective recognition, focusing his analysis more on the status of the self by distinguishing aspects that involve self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem (Honneth, 1995: 131, 1998, 2007, 2008a; see Varga and Gallagher 2012). In later texts (e.g. 2008b) he introduces the

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concept of ‘elementary recognition’ and presents a two-level account, in which elementary recognition is placed at a more fundamental level than the type of recognition that is involved in these three categories. Elementary recognition precedes both ontogenetically and conceptually those secondorder and more normative patterns of recognition in which the other person’s specific characteristics are affirmed (Honneth 2008a: 51, 90). The normative forms of recognition are expressions and further articulations of the elementary recognition involved in immediate self–other relations.2 Here the hint is that elementary recognition is really the emotional attachment to the other that precedes the secondary intersubjective processes. Whether this is an improved reading of primary intersubjectivity or another variation of undifferentiated oneness that the child has to struggle to escape is not clear. But it is clear that Honneth moves away from an overly cognitive interpretation of the transition to recognition to a more affective or emotional form of recognition. When responding to his critics, Honneth emphasizes the ‘non-epistemic’, non-cognitive and pre-normative character of elementary recognition, which involves a kind of existential affectivity (Honneth 2008b: 151–52). I do not want to make too much of the terminological difficulties with the word ‘recognition’. In English (and in the French reconnaissance) it clearly has cognitive associations (e.g. with memory), both in etymology and in its use in experimental psychology. The German word Anerkennung involves identification as a form of knowledge, and signifies being able to label something. Ricoeur, looking closely at the lexicon to discover all relevant meanings of reconnaissance, cites the Robert dictionary first of all: ‘To grasp (an object) with the mind, through thought, in joining together images, perceptions having to do with it; to distinguish or identify the judgment or action, know it by memory’ (Ricoeur 2005: 23). Honneth, in the end, wants to break free of this overly cognitivist connotation of ‘recognition’ – but I think it is difficult to do that and to retain the term. Making use of the concept of primary intersubjectivity outlined in the first section, I want to suggest a reformulation of Honneth’s concept of elementary recognition and to get some distance from the terminological issues, I propose to call it ‘elementary responsiveness’ rather than recognition. The term ‘responsiveness’ is meant to reflect the fact that it is more akin to emotive or agentive processes than to cognitive ones; elementary responsiveness is the beginning of interaction, and I mean to associate it with the kind of embodied interactive relation that we find in primary intersubjectivity, while again keeping in mind that we find primary intersubjectivity throughout the lifespan. Indeed, what I want to suggest is that this kind of responsiveness is what continues to structure the dynamic interplay of conversation.

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Conversational imperialism and the real dynamics of conversation In characterizing the concept of participatory sense-making, De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007) talk of an autonomy that belongs to the interactional process itself. This is meant to signify something that emerges over and above anything that the participants can bring, individually, to the process. In this respect one might think of interaction as a process that leads to a kind of transcendence (Gallagher 2014). Here, I want to suggest that this kind of autonomy or transcendence is captured by the hermeneutical principle of productivity – the idea that interpretation always goes beyond the interpreter, just as the text always goes beyond the author. The meaning that emerges from the interpretational process is irreducible to the interpreter’s idea, or to the other’s (text’s or author’s or interlocutor’s) thought, or to either of them as they engage in the hermeneutical dialogue (Gadamer 1989a). Following Gadamer, I suggest that this productivity, or transcendence, or emergence of meaning, is not a Romantic concept, akin to the shared or ‘common denominator of human nature’, but is something very real that results in and from everyday interaction – and that this also happens in conversation and makes conversation a form of edification. The fact that conversation takes place wherever, whenever, and with whomever something comes to language – whether this is another person or a thing, a word, or a flame-signal . . . – constitutes the universality of the hermeneutical experience. The fact that this experience contains its own limits within itself is in no way inconsistent with its universality. Quite the contrary, the universality of the hermeneutical experience fits perfectly well with the factual limitedness of all human experience and with the limits governing our linguistic communication and possibility for expression (Gadamer 1989b: 95). Conversation builds on the elementary responsiveness found in primary intersubjective interactions and shares in the same kind of embodied dynamics found in those processes. In conversation, as we listen to another person, we coordinate our perception–action sequences; our movements are coupled with changes in velocity, direction and intonation of the movements and utterances of the speaker. Just as Honneth (1995) uses Mead’s social psychology to explicate Hegel’s notion of recognition in more contemporary and empirical terms, one could also appeal to Mead’s notion of the ‘conversation of gesture’ to show that the kind of responsive interaction found in primary intersubjectivity continues into conversation.

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The ‘conversation of gesture’ just is this very basic, embodied, dynamic set of processes that underpins primary intersubjectivity and conversation, that maintains the autonomies of both participants and overall process, and that leads to a transcendence of the moment in a way that results in the production of new meaning. To be sure, conversations always take place within social structures and institutions that can either diminish their productivity (along with the autonomy of the interactive process) or enhance it. It is from this perspective that one needs to consider the notion of the ‘conversation of mankind’. For Oakeshott, the conversation of mankind is composed of a plurality of voices, each with its own idiom and each in relative emancipation from the others – a conversation free of hegemony, lacking hierarchy, and without the requirement of normative credentials for participation. On the one hand, it serves as an idealized measure of the real imperfection of everyday conversation and interaction. On the other hand, it is intended as a prescription to resolve normative limitations of those everyday conversations. A number of thinkers have understood the idea of the conversation of mankind as supportive of political liberation (e.g. Rorty 1979; Caputo 1987). In contrast to Gadamer, for whom conversations involve a degree of transcendence so that we do not control them, but rather they are the condition of possibility for continuing or discontinuing personal or social practices and discourses (Mitscherling 1989), for Rorty the conversation is something that we need to control. We need to make the effort to keep the ‘conversation of the West’ going – which seems to imply that it could stop at any moment. For Caputo too, ‘things get worked out in a way which is very much like what Rorty (following Oakeshott) calls the conversation of mankind (but with no Rortian illusions about the charms of bourgeois liberalism) . . .’ – yet still with the requirement of ‘vigilance about the subversion of discourse by a priori metaphysical schemes, by exclusionary practices, by a rhetoric systematically bent on sustaining the prevailing order’ (1987: 261). All three theorists (Oakeshott, Rorty, Caputo) prescribe this ideal conversation in the face of exclusionary social practices. I have elsewhere argued that the idealization of the conversation of mankind is itself another a priori metaphysical scheme, which operates in the same way as a metanarrative, and which despite the rhetoric of inclusion operates in an exclusionary way (Gallagher 2002). Like a metanarrative, it signifies the largest and most all-embracing of conversations, and it prescribes that attainable solutions must be adjudicated within the ongoing universal conversation. It prescribes against nonparticipation. Thus Rorty understands it ‘as the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood’ (1979: 389). Moreover, he regards the continuation of the conversation as a moral imperative; as Caputo puts it, this is where ‘things get worked out’; that is,

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this is where things get adjudicated, and the hope for adjudication is nonexistent outside of the conversation. In this regard, silence is always treated as a moment within the conversation rather than as a refusal to participate in it. Any protest to the conversation itself must be made within the conversation, which means objections to the conversation, which do not take the shape of the conversation itself, are not included. Abnormal discourse occurs only when it is voiced within the conversation, and is possible only on the basis of normal discourse; as Rorty maintains, it ‘is always parasitic upon normal discourse’ (1979: 365). The conversation of mankind, then, in contrast to the relational autonomy promoted by real conversations and interactions, reflects a certain form of hegemony – in Lyotard’s terms, a ‘conversational imperialism’ (1985: 581). Perhaps the clearest example of this can be seen in Rorty’s support for the idea of cultural literacy, an educational programme closely tied with the conservative hermeneutical principles of E. D. Hirsch. For Rorty and Hirsch education – ‘even the education of the revolutionary or the prophet – needs to begin with acculturation and conformity’ (Rorty 1979: 365). Rorty argues that the programme of cultural literacy supports a pluralistic democracy precisely because of the neutrality of the cultural knowledge required for democratic communication (Rorty 1988: 28–33). A voice is guaranteed to anyone as long as she adopts the basic non-ideological propositions that form the vocabulary or idiom of the conversation. But this solution to cultural and political exclusion remains problematic. Either (a) language is value-neutral and excluded groups need only become culturally literate to become included, while still retaining their own values, worldviews, and so on, or (b) language is not neutral but conserves established values and traditions, so that excluded groups, in becoming literate, must give up their own ‘un-common’ values, worldviews, and so on, and adopt the established common ones. In the first case, Hirsch and Rorty would have us believe that the original exclusion (which cultural literacy tries to correct) was based only upon a lack of literacy, and that power structures as well as prejudices and affective and attitudinal differences in values and worldviews were not relevant to exclusion or the original illiteracy. This seems a naively simple (and overly intellectualized) conception of political exclusion and communicative competence. In the second case, the excluded group would become included only by adopting the same vocabulary (and values) as everyone else (Hirsch 1987: 107). In this case, however, there is no pluralism, but only a non-pluralistic cultural levelling in which everyone would share and reproduce the same unchanging or slow-changing cultural meanings. There are numerous examples of how this expansive rule of conversation fails precisely the people it is meant to empower. David Ingram points to significant examples:

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For persons of African-American or Native-American descent who feel that their needs for freedom and dignity do not find adequate expression in the dominant language of formal rights, for women and gays who feel that their needs for self-identity do not find adequate expression in traditional gender roles, and for workers who feel that their needs for justice do not find adequate expression in the contractual language of a wage agreement, refusal to enter into the established discourse may well represent a principled moral stance against oppression and injustice (Ingram 1990: 130). Others make a similar point. Nancy Fraser, for example, has indicated that in legal considerations of marital rape there is an inadequacy of the established terms of discourse to recognize a claim made by the victim (1992: 369). Carole Pateman argues that ‘women find their speech . . . persistently and systematically invalidated in the crucial matter of consent, a matter that is fundamental to democracy. [But] if women’s words about consent are consistently reinterpreted, how can they participate in the debate?’ (cited by Fraser 1992: 369). Fraser, following Pateman, suggests that there is conceptual dissonance between genuine empowerment and the ‘dialogical capacity’ that seems central to the notion of a universal conversation (369). Recognition of others – across gender, racial, socio-economic and cultural lines – is thus not something that can be guaranteed by a large, overarching conversation. The alternative to the hegemonic conception of the conversation of mankind is already to be found at work in what we called above the elementary responsiveness intrinsic to everyday, imperfect conversations. Whereas ideas of cultural literacy and a universal conversation seem intent on stabilizing a uniform vocabulary, with the aim of facilitating communication, the real everyday conversations in which we actually participate are best conceived in terms of process rather than content. Indeed, whatever starts out as content, whether in agreement or disagreement, gets transformed in the conversational process. The latter reflects the same dynamical, embodied and affective interactions that already characterize primary intersubjectivity, now brought into the processes of everyday communicative practices. It is still important to acknowledge that all such practices are normative and are often twisted and distorted by social and institutional structures, as well as by personal and cultural misunderstandings and biases. Yet there is nothing more than more of the same conversations to address such misunderstandings and distortions, and to lead us to new forms of action and interaction. These are imperfect processes, and yet they are still productive of meaning; they still initiate a transcendence in their relational autonomy, and they are the processes that describe actual practice – the way it happens – and thus limit any prescriptions about what conversation ought to be.

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Notes 1 One can also find this concept of ‘syncretic sociability’ in Merleau-Ponty (1964, 2012) and Wallon (1963). 2 The use of the term ‘recognition’ to encompass both the elementary aspects of social interaction and the more normative aspects has confused some commentators, who have univocally criticized Honneth’s account, maintaining that the elementary level of recognition is depicted as a positively loaded condition, which involves an overly optimistic anthropology; see Butler 2008, Geuss 2008; and Lear 2008. Honneth’s (2008a) citation of Tomasello in this regard might reinforce this view (see Larsen 2014).

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10 Old Directions for New Minds Nancy Salay

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very few decades or so a new generation of educators and policymakers agitates for change. Today it is a push toward student-guided activity and away from instructor-led lecturing in the classroom. We should be wary of this increasingly vocal demand to overhaul what has for centuries been an extremely effective teaching tool. I will make some remarks about the lack of positive support for the push to use technology in creating more active classrooms, but I will spend the bulk of this chapter examining the charge, generally implied rather than explicitly argued for, that lecture-based teaching is passive and hence bad. To aid in this task I will call on Michael Oakeshott’s insightful analysis of liberal arts education. I will show in some detail that current findings in neuroscience bear out Oakeshott’s diagnosis that the traditional lecture as it unfolds in a liberal arts classroom, as a dialogue between instructor and student, is not only not a passive enterprise but is deeply cognitively transformative. Given the current climate of scientism, the hope is that this approach will have a wider appeal than a purely philosophical defence. ‘Active learning’ is the buzz in education today, but it is hardly new.1 As early as 1902, John Dewey (1966: 8) coined the phrase ‘learning is active’ and not long after Lev Vygotsky (1967; Vygotsky and Luria 1994) developed a theory of psychology that highlighted the role of social/environmental interaction in cognitive development. What is new is the pairing of technology and active learning: educators from kindergarten to the post-secondary level are being encouraged – sometimes badgered or even ordered – to inject technology into their teaching. Blended courses, real-time clicker surveys, IT assessments, computer games, web conferencing and glossier image-driven PowerPoint presentations are just a few of the ideas on offer. The rationale behind this push can be broken down into two claims: (1) learning must be active (active learning is better than passive learning); and (2) technology is a good way to achieve this increased activity. 159

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Immediately we are struck by a number of questions. Does it make sense to talk about learning or education in general? When we consider how many different kinds of learning there are, even when we restrict ourselves to the formal setting of institutions, we begin to see that the very word itself is a kind of suitcase term, to use Marvin Minsky’s phrase (2006) – a term that doesn’t pick out anything specific but rather contains many, possibly disparate, concepts. How do we know that current education practices are not already active? Are there empirical tests we need to perform in order to find this out? Or can we just see it is so by looking at the practices themselves? Is active learning manifested in the same way across disciplines? Or are there different ways in which one might be an active learner? For example, learning how to construct a building, sew a piece of clothing, design a computer program, or carry out a chemistry experiment are experiences that are best served by hands-on activities in which students actually perform the skills they are learning. Learning Descartes’s cogito argument, the many worlds interpretation for quantum physics, Aristotle’s theory of practical wisdom, or a new analysis of the causes of the First World War, on the other hand, are learning experiences that are best served by discussion. The former set is certainly active. Is the latter as well? Is discussion activity? If so, it is a different kind of activity from the physical activity of the would-be engineer or tailor. Listening too can be seen as a kind of activity – one very different, of course, from the activity of hammering a nail into a piece of wood or clicking a button on a computer. Is active learning better than passive learning? We certainly do not need studies to tell us that students who are falling asleep in front of a textbook or at a boring lecture are not learning much of anything.2 Since ‘better’ is both a normative and a relative term and so can be analysed in indefinitely many ways, it should come as no surprise that there are also studies (Mayer 2004; Kirschner, Sweller and Clark 2006) purporting to show that active learning is not in fact better after all, at least when ‘better’ is treated narrowly in terms of cognitive retention of material.3 Thus, it is not at all clear that we have one unified thing – ‘education’ – that is in need of change and a unified methodology – ‘increased activity’ – that should be applied. To say that learning must be active must mean something like this: ‘Learners ought to be engaged, emotionally and intellectually, with the material they are learning.’ As we just saw, this will be spelled out in radically different ways depending upon what is being learned and who is doing the learning. Nothing in the way of a general policy change could follow from this good piece of advice. Educators from as far back as ancient times no doubt knew from experience that students who were interested and emotionally engaged with the material they were learning retained more and benefited more than those who were not. Developing different ways of achieving this has always been something for which good educators strive. In

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the humanities, engaging classroom lectures during which students and instructor carry on a conversation about the ideas at hand is a tried and true way to achieve precisely this. The second aspect of the current call for change is the assumption that technology is a good way to increase classroom activity. At MIT, for example, the Technology-Enabled Active Learning project (TEAL ) funded the creation of two technology-infused classrooms. In these ‘active learning’ classrooms, rather than sit at individual seats or desks, students sit in groups of up to nine at large tables equipped with computers on which they watch lecture slides and research answers to group-collaboration questions while the professor moves around the room answering questions. Universities around the world are now developing active learning classrooms based on this blueprint and encouraging their faculty members to make use of them (see e.g. Drake and Battaglia 2014). It is trivially true that injecting technology into a classroom will increase the activity level: people will be punching keys, looking at screens, getting up to plug in cords, and so on. But this is not the kind of activity we want to be increasing in the classroom. We want to get students thinking, to get their neurons firing and laying down synaptic pathways that stick. We want students to feel the new conceptual connections they are making because we know that being emotionally engaged while learning leads to deep cognitive change. In short, we want to be increasing the intellectual activity in a classroom. Depending on what is being taught, this can be realized in different ways – sometimes by moving around actively, like hammering and sewing, and at other times by stationary activity, like listening and speaking and thinking. Technology certainly has some clear uses toward this end. But too often the use of technology leads to less, not more, intellectual activity in classrooms. I am thinking here of the overuse of PowerPoint presentations, of the idea that ‘content’ is to be ‘delivered’ to individuals outside the classroom instead of through lectures and discussion, and of the various technological gadgets that serve to fragment class time and distract students. Cognitive distraction, an epidemic of our age, is fostered by the endless stream of sound and image bites with which technology-users are inundated throughout the day. Its contrast, cognitive focus, an absolute requirement of learning, is consequently a real challenge for many of today’s youth. In our zeal to engage the brains of our students, we might end up achieving just the opposite result by creating yet another opportunity for cognitive distraction when we ought to be providing a space for cognitive focus. I turn now to an examination of the claim that lecture-based teaching is passive and hence something from which we should be steering away. This blanket indictment is insensitive both to the nuances of different disciplines better or worse suited to this format and to the way in which lectures can be

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delivered. We can all agree that lectures in which instructors speak at their students and never encourage conversational engagement are pedagogically unhelpful. Instead, I will focus my investigation on the kind of dialectical lecture style that we find most often in the liberal arts. Michael Oakeshott, a philosopher who is perhaps best known for his political writing, was also a vocal defender of the liberal arts tradition. After introducing Oakeshott’s view, I examine what learning looks like from the neural level, with an eye to showing why the dialogical approach exemplified in a liberal arts classroom is such an exceptional learning tool. I then explain why the content – the ideas of peoples past and distant – is a critical complement to the approach. From this discussion I will draw two conclusions: 1) lecture-based teaching, when it is done well, is active, intellectually engaging and cognitively transformative; and 2) we should reverse the general trend toward specialization at increasingly early ages and provide all students with a strong liberal arts foundation.

The metaphor Oakeshott described the ideal of a liberal arts education as an initiation into a conversation extending across the ages, ‘the conversation of mankind’: As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors . . . of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and made more articulate in the course of centuries. . . . Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation (Oakeshott 1991f: 490–91). The use of conversation here is deliberate; for Oakeshott it is the ideal learning activity, the central mode of engagement in a liberal arts education.4 Students critique the ideas of others and develop their own ideas in turn. Whether they are taking part in actual conversations in the classroom, in which positions are advanced and refuted in an ongoing give-and-take between instructor and student, or whether they are ‘conversing’ by critically assessing texts of the past, this dialogue is essentially where learning happens. But the image of an abstract conversation in which all of mankind participates is metaphorical. In fact it is doubly so: first, in the linguistic sense, not having an actual referent, the phrase ‘the conversation of mankind’ invites – indeed requires – reflection to be understood; second, in the reflexive sense, being a metaphor itself, it fosters new connections to old ideas in the same way that conversations create new associations between concepts.

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That Oakeshott invoked a metaphor to describe the activity of liberal education is no accident. Metaphors are tools for conceptual growth in the precise way that the dialectical give-and-take of a good classroom conversation is: they both yield new, often surprising, connections to old ideas, thereby deepening our understanding in unexpected ways. As with any metaphor, it is the process of uncovering the structural and conceptual similarities and differences between source and target that ultimately deepens our understanding. This is an especially rich metaphor and there are many avenues we could explore: conversations require that participants both speak and listen, that individuals engage voluntarily in the discussion, that people understand what kind of activity they are participating in, and so on. But, for Oakeshott, the salient feature of conversation is its open-endedness: ‘In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an enquiry or a debate; there is no truth to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought . . . [Conversation] is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure’ (1991f: 490). The open-endedness of conversation is critical because it is this feature that precipitates new connections to old ideas, which yield new ideas in their turn. While metaphors achieve this by offering up pairings that do not readily go together, which force listeners to make creative leaps of the imagination in order to make sense of them, conversations do it by leading participants into uncharted waters: the more our thoughts connect with other thoughts, the deeper and richer the concept-base, the more thinking we become capable of. From an introspective perspective, engaging in philosophical discourse certainly seems to be a cause of deeper thinking; such conversations reward us with understanding that feels broad in scope. As someone who spends a good deal of time thinking about human cognition, I am especially interested in how this reflexive, we might say ‘second-order’, aspect of the metaphor plays out in our brains. In what way is the conceptual growth elicited by reflection on metaphors, on the one hand, and by engaging in conversation, on the other, the result of similar processes? How do these activities underwrite the cognitive capacities we want our graduates to possess? Explaining this from a neural vantage point, and thereby providing a different level of support for Oakeshott’s defence of liberal arts education, will be the focus of the rest of this chapter. There is no small irony in appealing to science in order to lend weight to Oakeshott’s particular view of liberal arts education since he himself did not think much of the ability of scientific inquiry to illuminate us on humanistic questions: ‘the learning in which we may become human is very different from this process of organic adaptation to circumstances’ (Oakeshott 2001e: 7). There is an obvious sense in which this is right: ideas are born from other ideas and one can attain a full and rich sense of self without knowing a thing about the processes out of which this sense of self emerges. Oakeshott’s

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dismissal notwithstanding, I contend that we deepen our understanding of what it is to be a human being when we learn how ideas beget ideas, when we gain an understanding of what the underlying processes are. Today we have a detailed picture of what constitutes the human organism through the scientific lenses of microbiology, neuroscience and physics. This new conception is gradually fusing with our introspectively founded picture of who we are as human beings. Questions about legal and moral responsibility, for example, are now irrevocably intertwined with questions about whether neurons play a causal role in human agency, a stance that was not even possible in the last century (Churchland 2002). As our knowledge deepens, so too will this connection.

Conversation and the brain The very idea that neuroscientific descriptions of the brain, the primitive terms of which include neurons, neurotransmitters, synapses and long-term potentiation, can be related in some systematic way to psychological descriptions of our minds, which trade in thoughts, desires, moods and conceptual schemas, is hotly debated. Some cognitive scientists think that psychological-level concepts such as beliefs and desires will eventually be eliminated from our scientific vocabulary altogether, to be replaced by neuroscientific or dynamic systems ones that have no folk-psychological correlates,5 while others think that any comprehensive neuroscientific understanding of the brain will necessarily be neuropsychological, complete with bridging principles (Horgan and Woodward 1985; Fodor 1987; Jackson and Pettit 1990; Lahav 1992). But there are some bits and pieces of the neuropsychological story that elicit less controversy. Neurons are special cells found in the brain and central nervous system that, in addition to their standard cellular functions, process and transmit electrochemical signals across synapses, connections with other neurons. There are many different kinds of neurons and consequently a variety of cellular processes that neurons engage in, but it is the idea that widespread networks of neural connections function to encode organism-level experiences that is of special interest to cognitive scientists. Given that an individual neuron has between 100 and 10,000 connections with other neurons and that there are upwards of 100 billion neurons in an average human, the number of possible synaptic connections between them is truly astronomical, over 100 trillion. Although there is still a great deal of controversy over the role that individual neurons play in encoding experiences – some thinkers hold that individual neurons can represent complex objects such as individual people, while others think that representation is, for the most part, distributed over clusters of neurons6 –

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there is general agreement that it is the connections between neurons that hold the key to understanding how psychological-level phenomena such as emotions, occurrent thoughts and memories arise. Unravelling precisely what aspects of neural activity contribute to these encodings is a central research project in neuroscience today. One suggestion that is gaining purchase in contemporary cognitive science is the idea that thoughts and concepts are best understood as the emergent properties of neural networks. In the same way that a convection roll, the familiar rolling pattern we see when a pan of water or oil heats to a boil, is a stable state that emerges out of the self-organized activity of liquid molecules when consistent heat is applied to the bottom layers, thoughts and concepts can be seen as stable patterns that emerge out of the self-organized activity of neurons when certain conditions obtain. A convection roll, from a top-down perspective, appears as a distinct visual pattern. From a bottom-up perspective, however, from a molecular vantage point, there is no pattern at all: there is only the local activity of individual liquid molecules. In order to account for the pattern, indeed to be aware of it at all, we need to recognize molecule groups that act as systems whose overall behaviour is influenced by outside factors, in this case the mean kinetic energy of the molecules that constitute the surrounding pan. A similar top-down approach is needed, on this view, to study emergent cognitive phenomena such as concepts, thoughts and moods. Dynamical systems theory is a mathematical framework developed for modelling and studying the behaviour of non-linear, complex systems such as these, ones for which factors outside the system have a surprising and difficult-to-predict influence on the behaviour of the system as a whole. In dynamical systems approaches to understanding cognition, the aim is to locate the internal and external parameters and variables that drive the emergent patterns, the system-level behaviour. The more variables and parameters to take into account, the less predictable the high-level phenomena will be. This is why only very short-term weather predictions are reliable: weather systems are open systems and consequently a very large array of variables must be taken into account. For the same reason, pinpointing the bases of our own high-level brain/mind patterns has been elusive. The task of a comprehensive cognitive account is to unify the neuroscientific (bottom-up) and the dynamical systems (top-down) approaches into a framework that explains folk-psychological phenomena. The task is daunting for a host of reasons. The variables that can influence an individual’s cognitive states are likely idiosyncratic, making generalizations tenuous, if not entirely untenable. The number of potentially affecting variables is so large that any one method for picking out the salient ones is difficult to justify. Finally, while on the one hand, the neural picture of the brain, and on the other, the systems picture of mental

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state space, each illuminate a sphere of the cognitive terrain, they differ from one another so radically that theoretical cohesion seems a very long way off. Indeed, the received view is that the two approaches represent rival theoretical frameworks, not potentially complementary perspectives. But without this unification, can we ever really understand how brains make up minds? One tool that will play an increasing role in this task7 is the artificial neural network (ANN ).8 The ANN s are small networks of interconnected units, standins for simplified versions of neurons, which can be used to study the conditions under which patterns emerge. In effect, they make experimental controlled cognitive environments possible. Most importantly, as small, partial models of the incredibly complex neural networks of a real human brain, they are easier to comprehend and consequently can serve as a segue toward a deeper understanding of the nervous system and how it supports higher-level cognitive activity.9 The work of Rumelhart and McClelland, both separately and together (McClelland and Rumelhart 1985; Rumelhart and McClelland 1986) has pioneered this field. Here I will briefly describe one of these networks, Rumelhart’s neural net adaptation of Quillian’s concept hierarchy (Quillian 1968), because it is particularly helpful in explaining how, on the one hand, concept-like structures can emerge out of neuronal connections and how, on the other, they can constrain them.10 Note that this example should not be taken as an endorsement of a connectionist account of human concept formation. As I have explained, a comprehensive cognitive theory will be one that integrates embodied top-down perspectives with bottom-up discoveries. But we can gain insights from the models of each vantage point. The Rumelhart network is useful for this discussion because it provides a tool for thinking about connections between concepts, in particular about their density and how far-reaching they are. Quillian-style ontologies, ‘semantic networks’ as they are called today, are essentially category hierarchies that leverage and extend Aristotelian principles of class organization. They are very popular in AI programming because, as structures, hierarchies improve storage efficiency and consequently reduce inference costs. By representing the category ‘robin’, for example, as a subcategory of ‘bird’, any feature that all birds share ‘robin’ simply inherits. As models of human conceptual thought, there are deep problems with such category hierarchies. As Wittgenstein (2009) argued, human category concepts are not based on necessary and sufficient feature lists; category members may share characteristics to greater or lesser degrees or even not at all. Even a cursory reflection on some of our more common concepts illustrates this fact: baseball and solitaire are both games, but in spite of being members of the same category, they do not share any features at all. By representing the categories in Quillian’s hierarchy in terms of a neural network structure, Rumelhart was able to model this fluid, overlapping aspect of human concepts without the need for hard-coding feature sets. Most importantly

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from our perspective, his network demonstrates how increasingly subtle category concepts emerge out of underlying unit connections and why introducing new concept-level terms necessitates new unit connections in turn. The network is a multi-layer, feed-forward ANN consisting of two input layers – eight basic entity terms (‘Pine’, ‘Oak’, ‘Rose’, ‘Daisy’, ‘Robin’, ‘Canary’, ‘Sunfish’, ‘Salmon’) and four relation terms (‘ISA’, ‘IS ’, ‘CAN ’, ‘HAS ’) – a hidden layer combining the entity and relation information, another hidden layer that

FIGURE 10.1 The complete set of input, output and hidden nodes of Rumelhart’s network as depicted in McClelland and Rogers 2003, Figure  3, adapted with permission from Rumelhart and Todd 1993. Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4 (4): 310–322, copyright 2003.

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Rumelhart called the representation layer, and finally an output layer consisting of a mix of entity terms and attribute terms (e.g., ‘Robin’, ‘Pine’, ‘Pretty’, ‘Tall’, ‘Grow’, ‘Move’). Activation of different nodes spreads forward through the network from input to output via connections between nodes. The activation value of a given node, which is a value between 0 and 1, is a function of the activation value of each node it is receiving from plus the connection weight between them, a positive or negative number. Once an input is given to the system, by activating one or more of the input nodes, the consequent activation pattern for the entire system can be calculated. The goal of the system, as it was initially set up, was to represent the knowledge in Quillian’s hierarchy by learning appropriate one-term completions of a three-term proposition. For example, for the input ‘robins can ____’, indicated by activation of both the ‘Robin’ and ‘CAN ’ nodes, an appropriate output would be ‘fly’, indicated by activation of the ‘Fly’ output node. A backward propagation algorithm was used to train the network. In backward propagation, the starting connection weights between nodes are set randomly. The network is then presented with many iterations of a training set, a set of inputs and a set of corresponding desired outputs, {‘Robin’, ‘Can’, ‘Fly’}, for example. When a training input is presented and activated through the system, an output is obtained and an output error, the difference between the obtained output and the desired one, is calculated. Initially, since the connections between nodes are randomly set, output error is typically high. Beginning at the output node, the connections in the network are all slightly adjusted back to the input in such a way that the output error is reduced slightly. The training is repeated in this way, with slight adjustments to reduce error each time, until the obtained output is the desired output. The system is then said to be in equilibrium with respect to the training set. The real test, of course, comes when the system is given a novel set of input pairs: will it consistently give an appropriate output response? If yes, then the system is said to have learned the domain for which it was trained. Back to the Rumelhart network: we might ask, after successful training and testing on novel pairs of input words, has the network acquired any concepts? The input and output nodes do not themselves stand for concepts; they represent terms such as ‘robin’ and ‘fly’. We can think of activation of an input node as akin to a human being hearing or reading an instance of a word. Concepts, thoughts and the like are the result of a complex interchange between our environments and ourselves and are certainly not locatable solely in a series of network connections. But the concept-supporting structures that emerge out of these connections, as patterns of activation over an entire network, play an important role. If the network has acquired any concepts at all, those concepts are encoded in some way, even if only partially,

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in those activation patterns, which themselves reside implicitly in the connections between the nodes. Because the number of connections between the nodes in a network increases exponentially, 2n for every n nodes, even small networks such as this one are extremely difficult for us to make sense of.11 In order to identify the emergent concepts of the system, we need a tool for analysing the network data that makes the higher-level patterns stand out. Graphing is a helpful, visual way of picking out the patterns that result from node connections. Figure 10.2 shows bar graphs of the activation values of the individual nodes in the representation layer, one of the hidden layers, at different times during the network’s training. The graphs uncover some interesting patterns. In the early stages of training, when the connections between nodes are relatively undifferentiated, we see a broad distinction between plants and animals: ‘Pine’, ‘Oak’, ‘Rose’ and ‘Daisy’ inputs yield higher activations over the middle three representation units while ‘Robin’, ‘Canary’, ‘Sunfish’ and ‘Salmon’ inputs yield higher activations over the outermost representation units. With more training we see more subtle distinctions: within the plant and animal groupings, trees and

FIGURE 10.2 A bar graph of the activation values of the individual nodes From McClelland and Rogers 2003, Figure  4a. Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4 (4): 310–322, copyright 2003.

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flowers are now distinguished from one another, with ‘Pine’ and ‘Oak’ spiking in the first two units (reading from the top down) and ‘Rose’ and ‘Daisy’ spiking in units four and five. Similarly, fish are distinguished from birds with ‘Sunfish’ and ‘Salmon’ spiking in units one, two, six, seven and eight and ‘Robin’ and ‘Canary’ spiking in units three, four, five and six. As the network approaches its training equilibrium, during which some connections are weakened to the point of elimination, the distinctions become increasingly differentiated until there is a distinct pattern of spikes over the representation units for each input unit. We can see the increasing differentiation of terms more clearly by calculating the similarity between spikes in the representation units and graphing the result. Figure 10.3 shows such a cluster analysis graph: there we can see that as representation of individuals becomes more distinct, members of subcategories become more tightly clustered and super-ordinate categories, such as ‘Plant’ and ‘Animal’, become better defined. What makes neural network knowledge encoding so nuanced and flexible, in contrast with the traditional hierarchy schema implemented by Quillian, is not what is explicitly stated via direct connections, for example Oak CAN Grow, but what emerges as a result of these connections. The nodes ‘Oak’ and ‘Pine’ are not directly connected in the network and yet, as a result of other connections they uniquely share (HAS Bark, HAS Roots, IS Tall, and IS A Tree), they become conceptually clustered in the network. The result is that

FIGURE 10.3 A cluster analysis graph of the representation layer. From McClelland and Rogers 2003, Figure  4b. Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4 (4): 310–322, copyright 2003.

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‘Oak’ activation contexts will also be ‘Pine’ activation ones, and vice versa. The more far-reaching and interconnected the nodes in a network, the richer and more nuanced the consequent emergent concepts will be. In contrast, the fewer the connections, the fewer possibilities for this kind of conceptual clustering there will be. In human neural networks, we call the laying down of new connections ‘synaptic proliferation’ and the fine-tuning of those connections, the weeding out of unused ones, ‘synaptic pruning’. Whether or not these are correctly identified as ‘stages’,12 there are periods in human development during which there is a marked increase in synaptic proliferation and other periods during which there is an increase in pruning. One of the hallmarks of early childhood is learning to communicate with words. This milestone is supported by a very rapid proliferation of synaptic connections. During this time it is usual for children to overextend their terms; for example, they use ‘dad’ to refer to all adult males or ‘ball’ to refer to anything that can be thrown, or they over-apply grammatical rules as in ‘he swimmed’ and ‘I eated’ (Chapman and Thomson 1980; Naigles and Gelman 1995). Rumelhart’s network illustrates why this period of overextension is likely to occur before correct usage is finally acquired. During the initial epoch of training, when the individual entities are still largely undifferentiated, but the general super-ordinate distinction between plants and animals is beginning to emerge, we also see overextension. At this early stage, ‘Pine’ has already been grouped with the plants and differentiated from the animals. ‘HAS Leaves’, at this point, is a correct pairing for each of ‘Oak’, ‘Daisy’ and ‘Rose’, and incorrect for any of the animals. Since ‘Pine’ is more closely linked with ‘Oak’, ‘Daisy’ and ‘Rose’ than it is with the others, the system overextends ‘HAS Leaves’ to ‘Pine’ as well. After more training, however, when there is increased differentiation between the subcategories in the ‘Plant’ grouping, ‘HAS Leaves’ is no longer a correct pairing for ‘Pine’: the system has pruned the misleading connections and, as a consequence, refined the concept. Whether or not there are distinct proliferation and pruning phases in human development, we know that on a smaller scale proliferation and pruning are happening all the time. Whenever we learn something new, connections proliferate; when we become increasingly adept in a circumscribed area, connections are pruned. When we have an experience very frequently – for example, if we listen to a favourite song repeatedly – the synaptic encoding of it becomes exceptionally strong. The more a synapse is strengthened, the more sensitive it becomes to a given trigger; that is, the more even a tiny part of the experience, for example, the first note of the song, will trigger the entire encoding. The psychological manifestation of such triggers might be the playing out of the song in one’s head or a feeling of positive emotion that has

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been associated with the song. Neural networks, as we saw with the Rumelhart network, are pattern completers: if one node is active, it causes the nodes immediately connected to it to become active too.13 Just thinking about an experience, in this case about the song, is enough to trigger the entire underlying synaptic pattern of activity and, as a result, further strengthens the association. Connections that have crossed a certain threshold of strength are self-reinforcing in this way; they become active on very minimal cues and tend to dominate. The opposite is true of weak connections: being weak they will rarely become active; consequently, they will continue to weaken until the connections disappear altogether. In closed systems in which no new connections are being made, the connection weights will eventually settle into a fixed pattern; the strong ones will dominate and the weak ones disappear. As we saw with the Rumelhart network, once a network has achieved a state of equilibrium, new connections are no longer made and connection weights stabilize. As humans age, unless concerted effort is made to acquire new experiences, the tendency is for pruning to dominate. At the psychological level, people who have excessively pruned become stuck in routines of behaviour, are what we would call ‘close-minded’, are often fearful of and angry about change, and might even be at increased risk for certain kinds of dementia.14 But even learning can be a pruning rather than a proliferating activity. When it is enacted in a structured way, as it is in most educational institutions, learning is something we become adept at; we learn how to learn. We expect the teacher to give us information of a specific sort, in a particular way, and we expect other students around us mostly to listen and ask only the occasional question. Indeed, learning environments are generally so circumscribed that when a teacher or student behaves differently – for example, when the teacher stops speaking and encourages students to ask questions – many people become uncomfortable. Not all instances of learning, then, are underwritten by synaptic proliferation; indeed, in many cases the opposite, pruning, is the dominant result. The brain, of course, is much more complex than the correspondingly simple ANN models we have been looking at, and the strength of the connections between neurons is not the only factor relevant to whether one pattern of neural activity overrides another. The chemicals that are produced and passed around the brain are another. When the electrical activity within an electrochemical neuron reaches a certain threshold a neurotransmitter is released and any adjoining neurons capable of uptaking that particular chemical do so. Neurotransmitters play a role in the emotional aspect of our experiences; they determine whether we see an experience as positive or negative (McGeer and McGeer 1980). One of the factors that, in turn, trigger neurotransmitter release is the degree to which a given path of neural activity

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follows along well-established synaptic highways: does the pattern of activation travel on the expressway, as expected, or does it try to blast a path through the mountainside? Of course, for a given stimulus, say a sound, there are often many possible pattern completions: a favourite song, a doorbell, a barking dog. Some completions will be stronger, more expected, than others – a favourite song, for example, might be more familiar to someone who spends little time with animals than a barking dog – and activity along these pathways will begin spreading as soon as the initial stimulus is experienced. When our expectations are met, when the actual world unfolds more or less along the lines of our well-worn experiential pathways, we are rewarded by a surge in the neurotransmitter dopamine; we feel a flush of positivity.15 We feel good when we get things right, even when we are not conscious of having any expectations at all. On the other hand, when patterns are not completed, when the world presents a dog instead of our favourite song, and our expectations are not met, the result is a negative balance of ‘feel-good’ chemicals16 and we feel mildly or even extremely disappointed (Beninger 1991; Bozarth 1991; Phillips et al. 1992). As we noted earlier, human beings are non-linearly complex systems. Consequently, many variables will influence the degree to which negative feelings arise from thwarted expectations. Individual factors such as whether a person is already experiencing anxiety, how risk-averse he is disposed to be, what specific experiences he has had in the past, and so on, will have an impact. External context will play a pivotal role as well. In most situations, expectation fulfilment causes positive emotions, but in some just the opposite occurs. Part of the thrill of a roller coaster is the anxiety of the unknown, but the overall mood is positive because if you have voluntarily gone on the ride, you are open to the adventure. In such circumstances it is predictability that leads to disappointment. Listening to a piece of music is similar. If a musician follows the rules of our musical culture too closely, her compositions will be simple and boring; on the other hand, if she thwarts our expectations, her music will be engaging and will bring listeners pleasure (Berlyne 1971). Why do some unexpected experiences elicit anxiety and others excitement? There seems to be a second-order facet of some situations that dampens or reverses the first-order desire, an expectation of the unexpected. Note that this effect only occurs when the situations in question are also perceived as non-threatening. If not, the unexpected, even when expected, will evoke a negative emotional response. Think about how it would feel to take part in a battle, for example. Here is the punchline: conversation, as a situation type, evokes the same reversal of expectation effect that listening to music and going to amusement parks does. As Oakeshott points out repeatedly (e.g. 2001b: 109–10), the only rule in a conversation is that there are no rules. As soon as the mode of

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engagement becomes prescribed, the conversation has stopped and something else – perhaps an interview or a test – has taken its place. There are, of course, more or less threatening conversations one could have. A conversation with one’s partner is generally anxiety-free, unless it is about the relationship. A conversation with a person one admires might evoke anxiety, if there is a concern that one is being judged. But conversation, as Oakeshott intends it, which liberal arts students experience in the classroom, is ideally open and safe. Consequently, the more these conversations challenge our expectations, the more they open us up to new ideas, the more rewarding they feel. Unfortunately there are (as yet) no empirical studies of the neural effects of enriching classroom conversations of this sort, but if our neural picture is on the right track, we can make some well-grounded speculations. First, as Oakeshott points out, conversations are non-threatening situations in which the unexpected happens. People engaging in conversation are typically open emotionally; that is, unexpected neural connections do not trigger anxietyinducing neurotransmitter activity. The upshot of this is that new synapses forged will be marked with a positive emotional tag and will, as a consequence, be more likely to last (Ashby, Isen and Turken 1999). Second, because people engaging in conversation are more attentive to the possibility of a new idea, their brains are primed for synaptic proliferation rather than pruning. This focus of attention is a prerequisite of neural encoding: we can’t learn something if we don’t notice it. In contrast, the student who is passively listening to a lecture will retain little of it. We now have a plethora of studies that support this claim (Stroop 1935; Averbach and Coriell 1961; Rensink, O’Regan and Clark 1997; Scholl 2000; Irwin and Zelinsky 2002; Wolfe, Reinecke and Brawn 2006). Finally, because conversations are unscripted and often entirely unpredictable, the conceptual associations made in a particularly rewarding one will be novel and thus will yield fresh synaptic connections. In contrast with the conceptual narrowing that results from specialized learning situations, then, this kind of learning is underwritten by synaptic proliferation. Oakeshott’s injunction that in the classroom the hallmark of good liberal arts teaching is the give-and-take of a prescription-free conversation between teacher and student reveals a rich and important result: not only are conversations intellectually fulfilling, but they are foundationally transformative as well. Quite literally, they expand our brains by increasing and strengthening our neural networks.

The conversation of mankind If conversation as a learning tool is so beneficial, we should advocate its adoption by other disciplines as well. This would be a hasty response. What

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our conversations are about and how we engage in them play a critical role as well. Conversations about certain topics are certainly possible. One might have a discussion about whether one proof is more elegant than another, about whether a certain business practice will lead to monetary success, or about whether one bridge is structurally superior to another. These are excellent ways of reinforcing ideas in the minds of students because, as we now know, in conversation students are especially receptive to new ideas; they are neurally primed. But what happens when the business student begins to question whether the practice is something they ought to be using, or when the math student asks about what constitutes elegance in a proof, or when the engineer wonders why structural integrity is important? In these topicspecific contexts in which conversation is being used to reinforce a particular concept, the further afield the conversation strays, the less helpful it will be with respect to the instructor’s aims. The use of conversation in a liberal arts classroom, in contrast, is not prompted by this kind of topic-focused agenda – students must learn this. A question or reading might get the ball rolling, but the conversation is allowed to flow. The instructor, far from being concerned to bring it back to a particular topic, is pleased when particularly far-reaching associations have been made. The methodology of the liberal arts classroom is not just the conversation, then; it is the unfettered conversation, the conversation that is free to roam. While there are not specific pieces of knowledge that must be learned in such contexts, there is fuel for the activity: the wide range of readings and philosophies with which the students are asked to grapple. These ideas are held together by a common theme: individually and collectively, they teach us what it is to be human. As biological organisms, human beings learn and grow and adapt to their surroundings. Our lived experiences make us who we are, quite literally, by altering us at the molecular and neural levels. But any animal with a nervous system learns in this way, by changing and adapting in response to its environment. Human beings, however, have the capacity to communicate complex ideas across space and time with the aid of language, written, recorded and recounted. This is a truly remarkable fact, one that we often take for granted: we can learn from the experiences of others, both present and past, just by reading and hearing their words. To the extent that we do, we are not only the products of our own lived pasts but that of others as well. The more we experience what others have lived through and take into consideration what they have thought and felt, the broader our understanding of our own human condition and consequently the more fully human we become. This is what Oakeshott meant when he said that being a human being was not a natural condition: we must learn to become human beings.

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Yet clearly the learning in which we may become human is very different from this process of organic adaptation to circumstances. Indeed the latter is not a recognizable description of the learning by means of which the biologist himself came to discern and to understand the organic process . . . The learning we are concerned with is a self-conscious engagement. It is not an induced reaction to a fortuitous environmental pressure but a selfimposed task inspired by the intimations of what there is to learn (Oakeshott 2001e: 7). There are important neural correlates of this special kind of learning. As we saw in our model ANN , knowledge refinement engenders pruning and the strengthening of local connections. In contrast, gaining new skills and learning in unknown domains results in potentially far-reaching synaptic proliferation. Quine’s web of belief metaphor (1970) is especially illustrative when we apply it to the neural substrate. A web that has only a few isolated clusters connected to one another by single strands is more difficult to traverse; there are fewer paths than in one that is filled with densely interconnected knots. The richer the network of connections, the more resilient it will be to damage and the more material there will be for new threads to hook into. From a psychological level, people who work with sparse, flimsy webs will be less able to see relations between disparate situations, will find it difficult to dream up novel solutions to problems, and will gain only a shallow understanding of their own life experiences. In contrast, people who have dense, strongly interconnected webs will be sensitive to a wide array of perspectives and needs, will be creative and flexible, and will have good judgement when facing challenging life situations. Unfortunately, the current vocational focus in post-secondary education is ultimately cognitively diminishing rather than enhancing. A young person who has had a limited range of life experiences still has a relatively spartan web of connections, and consequently lacks a broad foundation in which to ground new learning. The result of becoming expert in a particular field will be the neural silos typical of the weak web; such a person will know a great deal about a certain subject, but will be poorly equipped to relate this expertise to novel situations. We can see an extreme version of this kind of isolated neural clustering in savants, people who are extraordinarily skilled in a narrow sphere, but who cannot exercise that skill outside of a tightly circumscribed domain (Treffert 2009). In contrast, people with a firm grounding in general human experience, either because they have lived through a wide range of varied situations or because they are well versed in the texts of the humanities, will have a broad and rich foundation of ideas, a highly interconnected, expansive neural network. Specializing in a particular area will yield a deepening of those associations. Such a person will be adept at seeing beyond her local field of expertise and will be capable of solving a wide range of problems.

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Liberal arts teaching, then, is invaluable not just because of the brainexpanding effects of the unfettered, in-class conversation, but also because, in immersing students into the rich tapestry of lived human experience, it makes them generalists and, in so doing, it quite literally broadens their cognitive reach.

Conclusion Good conversations do for our brains what rich metaphors do for our minds: they broaden our web of concepts by deepening and extending the connections between them. The focus of this analysis has been on showing in some detail what this actually means. But the larger goal of this chapter has been to undermine the popular assumption among policymakers and administrators that lecture-based teaching as a model for education needs to be replaced. On the contrary, engaging lectures in which students encounter new ideas and are encouraged and guided in the development of their own should remain the cornerstone of educational practice, at least in the humanities. The discussion lends support to a further claim, that a strong grounding in the liberal arts should play a critical role in education at all levels. Instead of asking students to specialize as soon as they enter college or university, we ought to be doing just the reverse: at least one compulsory liberal arts year should precede any decision to major in a specific field. Not only will this maximize the money we spend as a collective on education – such students will be better equipped to excel in their chosen areas of specialization – but we will gain a more thoughtful, well-rounded populace, better prepared for making good decisions for our shared future.17

Acknowledgement All figures were reproduced with kind permission of Macmillan Publishers Ltd from James L. McClelland and Timothy T. Rogers, ‘The Parallel Distributed Processing Approach to Semantic Cognition’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4 (4), 2003, license number 3744820156058.

Notes 1 Other popular monikers include ‘constructivist learning’, ‘student-centred learning’ and ‘learning-centred paradigm’.

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2 There are many studies that compare active and passive learning techniques by evaluating outcomes. It is very difficult to control for active/passive effects for the reasons I have been giving, but here is a smattering of such studies and relevant papers: Guthrie et al. 2004; Kim 2005; Dog˘ru and Kalender 2007; Hmelo-Silver, Duncan and Chinn 2007. 3 There are many reasons why we might not want to have this as our educational goal at all, but there is no room in this chapter for such a digression. 4 This is also the central reason why today’s increasing classroom sizes, while perfectly suitable for STEM subjects that require a large amount of rote learning, are a death knell for classes in the humanities. 5 Historically this eliminativist position was defended by a small group (P. M. Churchland 1981; P. S. Churchland 1986), but today with the growing number of embodied-cognition theorists, those who tend towards an antirepresentationalist view of cognition agree that our ultimate theory of cognition will likely not make reference to psychological concepts (Brooks 1991; van Gelder 1995; Freeman 2000; Keijzer 2002; Ramsey 2003; Chemero 2009). 6 Most neuroscientists begin with this assumption. 7 See Eliasmith 2003 for a helpful overview of a suite of tools useful for exploring cognition. 8 In computer science, the vast majority of ANN s are not used to model cognitive phenomena. Mostly they are alternatives to classical algorithmbased programs, better and more efficient at handling tasks such as speech and object recognition. 9 As full-bodied individuals we are much more than our neural networks. The way in which our bodies respond and adjust to the dynamically changing environment we live in is a central determinant of what we do. Neural net models, isolated and idealized structures, can only give us a piece of this picture. 10 Originally described in Rumelhart and Todd 1993 and re-presented with new discussion in McClelland et al. 2010. In this discussion I draw a great deal from McClelland and Rogers 2003, a paper that describes in depth and with wonderful clarity how ANN s can help us gain a deeper understanding of our cognitive processes. 11 A network of just ten nodes has 2,048 possible connections. 12 There is ongoing controversy about whether we can sensibly divide human development into different stages and further, if we can, what those stages are (Thelen and Smith 1996). 13 Unless the pattern is disrupted by a competing and stronger one. 14 Evidence for this is drawn from the famous ‘Nun Study’, an ongoing study of 678 American nuns of the School Sisters of Notre Dame. Findings seem to support the hypothesis that diverse cognitive activity can slow down or reverse the degrading effects of degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s (Snowdon 1997; Riley et al. 2005).

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15 As with the ANN , this is an idealized description of reality. The idiosyncrasies of a given brain will determine the level to which this dopamine surge occurs. 16 There might also be an increase in CRH , a hormone that plays an important role in anxiety. 17 Many thanks go to Julia Romano for her helpful research assistance.

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11 Education and Autonomy Sebastian Rödl

Introduction Oakeshott suggests that mankind is a conversation. This seems to entail that coming to be, for a human being, is to be included in this conversation. It is to be addressed by those who converse, to be called upon to participate in their free exchange. This thought is prominent in Fichte’s Grundlagen des Naturrechts (1796). Fichte there asserts that a human being – a finite subject of reason – comes to be as she is summoned by another such subject: she is called upon by another subject of reason to exercise her freedom (1796: §3). Fichte derives this idea – the idea that, for a finite subject of reason, coming to be is being summoned to be – from the freedom of the subject of reason. A subject of reason is free as her form is not a given nature; rather, her nature is her own deed. Hence the coming to be of a subject of reason cannot be understood as a given nature’s reproducing itself in a further individual. Nor can the development of such a subject be comprehended as the maturation of natural capacities. As Fichte explains (§3, Corrolarium 1), the summons that he is speaking of is nothing other than education (Erziehung). Conversely, the process of education is a sustained act of summoning to freedom. The end of education is the autonomy of the subject who is summoned. The finite subject of reason, then, comes to be through education, in which she is summoned to participate in the free interaction of subjects of reason. Conversation is a paradigm case of free interaction of subjects of reason. Indeed, it is natural to extend the use of the term ‘conversation’ in such a way as to signify any form of free interaction. A human being is free; she has no given nature. Therefore she comes to be through education: coming to be, for a human being, is being summoned to 181

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participate in the free interaction, in the conversation, that is humanity. We said: coming to be, for a human being, is being educated. It may seem an insignificant change to say instead: coming to be a human being is being educated. However, this change is momentous. For the changed formulation suggests, as the original does not, that there is something there that then, being summoned, being educated, becomes a human being. Now this latter notion has been affirmed by many authors, specifically authors joining Fichte in their concern to do justice to the freedom of the human being and the character of this freedom as free interaction; that is, as essentially social and historical. Thus David Bakhurst (2011) has argued, following John McDowell (1996: 125), that a child is born a mere animal. As such it is endowed with a first nature, which is biological and individual; it equips the child with animal powers: feeling, desire, perception. Receiving education, the child becomes a subject of reason. As such it possesses a second nature, which is social and historical; it equips the child with personal powers: thought and reasoning, intellect and will. The social and historical second nature that a human being acquires through education is the form that mankind determines through itself, in free interaction, or conversation.1 I want to suggest that this fails to appreciate how radically the human being differs from mere animals. It underestimates the depth to which freedom – and that is, free interaction, or conversation – defines humanity. In fact, the idea of a change from animal to person is incoherent. Consequently, education is not the agent of such a change. Reason is not impressed on the child as a second nature; it is always already present as a character of its first nature. Education, instead of being the source of reason in the child, is the source of habits of reason in the child. This not only does not exclude, it entails that reason is actual only as a socio-historical form. For reason is actual only in its habits. I proceed as follows. I begin by raising suspicion of the idea that education turns an animal into a person by observing that this could not result in autonomy. Then I explain why there is no such change. To this end, I consider what kind of concept the concept of person is: as the concept of plant and animal, it signifies a character of the form of an individual, a character of the principle of its being, being one, being good. It follows that no species and no living being spans the difference of animal from person. Hence we must reconsider the role of reason, the personal power, in education. As reason is not brought about by education, it may be its condition. Indeed, when we consider the consciousness that constitutes education, we realize that in this transaction reason is in act in both terms: in her who educates as well as in him who is being educated. (Indeed, this is why Fichte represents education as a summons: a summons actualizes reason in both her who summons and

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her whom she summons.) This will let us see how autonomy can be the end of education. I end by showing that this does not detract from, but on the contrary enforces the insight that the human being, the finite subject of reason, is the social and historical reality of free interaction: the conversation, as we may put it.

Autonomy: what it is The end of education is autonomy: the power to determine what to think and do in the light of reasons.2 As is traditional, ‘light’ here signifies knowledge: acting in the light of reasons is not just acting in accord with reasons, but from recognition of those reasons. In Aristotle’s words, it is acting not just kata logon, but meta logou. We see that the power to act and think in the light of reasons is autonomous, when we reflect on this notion: acting ‘from a reason’, meta logou. A paradigm of thinking something in the light of reasons is judging one thing on the basis of another, or inferring one thing from another. Joining judgements in an inference, I judge one thing because I judge another. But I may judge one thing because I judge another without judging the one on the basis of the other. I do the latter only if I recognize the premises as providing sufficient grounds for the conclusion. Moreover, this recognition cannot be a separate act from the judgement that is the conclusion. If it were, there would need to be a further act that conjoins the conclusion with this recognition, and so on ad infinitum. Hence, the conclusion of an inference is a consciousness of itself as resting on the premises, and its resting on the premises is nothing other than this consciousness. We can generalize this: a reason in the light of which one thinks or acts is a cause of thought or action in the manner of being comprehended to be its cause in that very thought or action. Thought or action in the light of reasons has a cause in virtue of, and only in virtue of, its conceiving that cause as its cause. Thus thought and action resting on reasons are not determined by a cause outside them. The causality of the cause, its efficacy, is an act of the very thought or action that it causes. This structure extends to laws: laws that apply to judgement as judgement govern a judgement in the manner of being known in this very judgement to govern it; and laws of action, practical laws, govern an action in the manner of being thought in this very action to govern it. Laws of judgement and action do not govern from the outside. They are laws in the manner of being legislated in the very acts that they govern. Intellect and will are autonomous; they are self-legislating. Bakhurst is right: to act in the light of reasons is to be autonomous.

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Education: the kind of passion it is Autonomy is the end of education. It is easy to fall into puzzlement regarding the possibility of education so conceived. For, representing autonomy as a condition that she who educates brings about in him whom she educates, we think of education as falling under the category of a transaction that yokes together an agent and a patient. Indeed, for Aristotle, teaching and learning is a primary example of this category. One may feel confounded by the notion that an autonomous power could result from suffering something from another, from being acted upon by another. It would be worthwhile to articulate the source of the puzzlement at length. I shall be brief. We said that an act of the will or the intellect, an intention or a judgement, represents the ground on which it rests, which is its ground in virtue of being so represented. Moreover, it represents the laws according to which it joins ground and grounded; the laws of an autonomous power are its own deed. An autonomous power determines itself, with respect to both its laws and its particular acts. Education, then, if it is to determine someone as a subject of an autonomous power, must, while involving someone’s acting on her who is being educated, at the same time be the latter’s self-determination. It is difficult to hold these two characters of education together in one concept. The difficulty of comprehending how teaching and learning, educating and being educated, are possible given that their end is autonomy, which, it seems, cannot be something received from someone other, has long been felt. Plato’s idea that learning is recollecting responds to it. From then on until today, the difficulty has informed thought about education. Bakhurst touches upon it when he contemplates the relation of active and passive elements in learning (Bakhurst 2011: 140f). Let us consider more closely the passion in education, with a view to framing a concept that conjoins passion with autonomy. The first thing to note, in Aristotelian fashion, is that ‘passion’ is said in many ways. In De Anima (B 5, 417a21–b16), Aristotle distinguishes ways of speaking of passion as does St Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologiae (Ia, qu. 79, art. 2). The fundamental distinction is this. In one kind of passion, a determination of the patient is destroyed by an agent that exhibits the contrary determination. As the agent acts upon the patient, the patient’s determination is driven out and replaced by its contrary. In a second kind of passion, a potential of the patient is actualized by an agent in whom the same potential is actual. Here, the patient does not lose a determination, but is perfected with respect to the relevant determination: the same determination was present potentially, imperfectly, and now is present actually, perfectly, as it was all the while in the agent. In the first case, then, something is made other by something contrary; in the second, something comes to be itself by the action of something like. It is evident that learning must be a passion of the

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second kind. Only then can learning, while involving the teacher’s acting upon the learner, be the learner’s self-determination.3

The idea that education turns the child from an animal into a person, its inconsistency with the idea that the end of education is autonomy However the concept of education is further articulated, it must signify a passion of the second kind. Following John McDowell, Bakhurst maintains that education turns a mere animal into a thinker and agent (cf. McDowell 1996: 125). This entails that education is not a passion of the second kind. A newborn child is an animal; she becomes a person by the agency of him who educates her, initiating her into a social and historical form of life. This aligns animal and person with first and second nature: the dispositions and powers with which we are born, being born animals, are provided by our first nature; the powers and dispositions that govern us as thinkers and agents are provided by second nature. First nature provides sensation and feeling, making us animals; second nature provides thought and reasoning, making us persons. ‘Mind’, writes Bakhurst, ‘is a gift of nature, but it is second, rather than “first”, nature that is the provider’ (Bakhurst 2011: 150). There is a transition from animal to person, from unminded to minded, from pre-rational to rational;4 this transition is the deed of education, through which the child internalizes a social and historical form as its second nature. This conception of education places it outside the second kind of passion distinguished above. A human being is said to have a first nature and a second nature, being an animal in virtue of the first, a person in virtue of the second. He has no nature that embraces his first and his second nature, making them one nature. In consequence, the change that a child undergoes as a second nature is impressed upon him by a parent or teacher is not a transition in which one and the same determination, present in child and teacher, is raised from potentiality to actuality. Education and learning cannot be the child’s perfecting itself; education and learning then cannot be, in Aristotle’s word, the child’s growth into itself.

The idea of changing into a person, its incoherence The idea that a human being is born an animal and turned into a person by the agency of a socio-historical form is not compatible with the idea that the end

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of education is autonomy. This encourages us to scrutinize this idea: the idea of a change into a person. Indeed, as we shall see, this idea is incoherent. It disrespects the depth to which reason defines the human being. McDowell maintains that there is a species, the human being, which spans the difference of animal from person: some human beings are animals, the very young ones; others are persons, the older ones. He asserts that the individual child spans this difference: being an animal, she becomes a person. As Bakhurst’s habit of opposition rightly indicates, the concept of a person is of the same kind as the concept of an animal. Both are of the same kind as the concept of a plant, as these concepts appear in Aristotle’s De Anima and henceforth in any thought on the matter. It may be helpful to consider the analogous claims one step further down. Let us imagine a species that spans the difference of plant from animal, and an individual that, being a plant, becomes an animal. This may appear a digression; I hope it to be an effective way to dislodge the conception of reason as a power that attaches, or not, to an independently constituted substance. An animal is a perceiver, aisthetikon, in the broad sense: a subject of sensory consciousness. A perceiver possesses a threefold system of powers: aisthesis or sense perception in the narrow sense, sensory desire or epithumia, and the feeling of pleasure and pain. If there is to be an individual that, being a plant, becomes an animal, the change will have to consist in its acquiring the animal powers. Let us imagine a kind of cat, much like a lion; we call it a mion. All cats are born blind. So is the mion. It is not that a newborn mion does not open its eyes. It does, but when it does, it does not see. The same holds of all its senses. After a few weeks, its powers of sense perception awake. During this time, the mother and father lick the newborn mion incessantly. When the parents have a psychical disorder and do not lick, the mion remains in the numb state of its birth and dies after a few more weeks. Shall we say that a mion is born a plant and transformed into an animal, the transformation being effected by the licking of its parents? This seems absurd. Why? We might try saying that an individual is an animal according to its species. As consciousness belongs to the species mion, the newborn mion is an animal. The analogous assertion has been made for the concept of a person: this title, it has been said, must be bestowed on any human being, irrespective of whether she has – not yet, or no more – the power of thought and reasoning, on account of her belonging to a species to which this power belongs. This answer may be fine, but it must be developed. If we go no further, it may appear merely to propose a convention for using words as opposed to conveying metaphysical knowledge. This requires that we inquire what the species has to do with the individual. I want to suggest that either the species is the form of the individual or else the individual belongs to a species according to its form. (I leave this open because the question is difficult and

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we need not resolve it.) The form of an individual is the ground of its being, its being one, its being good. That is: it is that to which we refer in explaining the existence of the individual, it is that through which we conceive its unity, and it is that by reference to which we judge its perfection. The concept of an animal attaches to the individual according to its species because the concept of an animal signifies a character of the individual’s form: a character of its being, being one, being good. Obviously, an adequate exposition of this thought would take us too far afield. I try to convey the idea, limiting my attention to the form of an individual as the ground of its being one, the principle of its unity. Life in general is an activity that exhibits a teleological order. Changes caught up in it are joined together in this way: one thing happens for the sake of another; one thing happens so that another may happen. This teleological order returns to itself; it does not hang on an ultimate end outside the totality of the changes that constitute the activity. Any vital change is for the sake of the life activity of which it is an element and thereby for its own sake. The roots of a tree take in nutrients for the sake of the life of the plant, and the life of the tree is nothing other than, among other things, its roots’ taking in nutrients. The teleology of life is an internal teleology, internal purposiveness, and a living being is an end in itself. We give an account of a species of life as we describe in general terms the form of a living being, as we articulate its activity, showing how it sustains itself. We comprehend what is happening here and now and its purposive order as we refer it to this general account of the relevant life activity. Let this suffice as a description of the plant. A first mark of the animal of which we may take note is this: there are acts of the animal that exhibit a teleological structure, in order to comprehend which it does not suffice to refer what is happening to a general account of the animal’s life activity. Rather, we must make reference to a principle of the act in the individual. Such is the case when the animal goes after something. For example, a generic representation of its form relates lions to antelopes; but representing this individual lion as being after this individual antelope, we join the lion to the antelope not only through this general notion, but through a principle that resides in the individual lion, namely its desire for antelopes, which is specified to this individual antelope by perception. This provisional observation already suggests that an animal, a subject of desire, perception, locomotion, is an individual in a different – we dare say, more intense – way from that of a mere plant: teleology, freedom, spontaneity, which are characters of the living in general, belong to the animal not only as exemplifying something general; they belong to it as individual. While there is a general nexus of lion to antelope, its specification to an individual involves the animal powers; it involves desire and perception.

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Conversely, without animal powers, in the plant, what is other figures in its life activity not as an individual, but generically; that is, as stuff: water, nitrogen, etc. The heightened individuality of the animal resides in this, that it relates in its life activity to individuals as individuals. It is an individual toward individuals. Its higher individuality comes to the fore in the character that the concept of food acquires in its application to the animal. In this application, the concept is double: what nourishes is both external and internal, both other and alike. On the one hand, it is an individual – the antelope, say – from which the lion distinguishes itself. On the other hand, it is the nutrients, stuff provided by the flesh of the antelope. The animal distinguishes nourishment as other from nourishment as alike, thereby circumscribing itself as an individual. No such distinction applies to the nourishment of the plant, and this is the ground of a certain impotence, in plant life, of the whole in relation to its parts. For example, we may conceive the branch of a tree to relate to its trunk as to the earth: providing it with the stuff that nourishes it. (This conception is put into practice in grafting.) By contrast, as Aristotle remarks in a stunning passage, each animal carries an earth inside it: its stomach (Aristotle 1912: 650a, 20–25). As the whole is powerless perfectly to subordinate its parts, growth and reproduction are not clearly distinct in the plant. Considering a branch as a tree, the trunk as its earth, we see the growth of the tree, its growing a branch, as the coming to be of a tree. A tree grows into a tree of trees (of trees of trees, and so on). We consider the same point from the opposite direction when we say that the nutritive activity of the plant does not perfectly return to the individual plant. By contrast, the growth of an animal does not give rise to more animals. Its nutrition perfectly returns to it as individual, sustaining it as individual. As an animal is an individual toward individuals, it exhibits a twofold articulation into parts: one defines it in relation to the other, another in relation to itself. On the one hand, the animal is articulated into members, or extremities. The principle of this articulation is its power of self-movement: describing the articulation is describing the animal’s ways of locomotion. On the other hand, the animal is articulated into organs, entrails, intestines, through which it relates to stuff. We recognize the higher unity of the animal when we consider what can be predicated of the whole animal, as opposed to its parts, namely any act of consciousness, desire, perception, pleasure, and any action whose principle is consciousness. By contrast, the only act that can be said of the plant as a whole is growth. Its growth realizes itself in manifold changes, but none of these is attributed to the plant as a whole. The same holds for vital changes in the animal that do not depend on consciousness. This is no accident; it follows from the nature of the animal powers as we have laid it out: consciousness, animality constitutes the animal as the unity that it is, individual toward

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individual. Therefore, the animal powers and their acts are originally said of the individual, the whole animal. That is their logical nature. Perhaps we may allow ourselves a polemical aside. There is a notion that we can further our understanding of the animal powers, of consciousness, and its specific shape in specific species, by investigating suitable parts of the animal and their operations: sense organs, say, the nervous system, the brain. This notion rests on a failure to grasp the logical nature of the animal powers in distinction to the vegetative power. We deepen our understanding of the nutritive activity of a living being by investigating changes whose subject are parts of the living being. For the nutritive activity consists in these changes, ordered as they are in a system of internal purposiveness. There is no parallel relationship of acts of consciousness to changes in parts of the animal. The sole object of the study of animal powers is what the animal, the whole animal, does.5 There is a bitter irony in the fact that this latter approach attracts the reproach of being behaviourist, which is meant to imply that it attends only to the outer manifestation of consciousness, as opposed to its inner source, while a study of happenings in nerves and the brain is supposed to get at this inner reality. In truth, the latter study is debarred from so much as making contact with its alleged subject: the inner of the animal.6 The form of an individual is the principle of its being, its being one, its being good. The concept of animal, signifying sensory consciousness, the threefold animal power, signifies a kind of form, which we sought to display as a manner of being one. We apprehend the newborn mion through its form and thereby through the concept of this kind of form, the concept of this kind of unity: the unity of an individual toward individuals, which is articulated into members externally and organs internally, whose reproduction as individual is strictly distinct from the reproduction of its species, and so on. That is, we apprehend the newborn mion through the concept of consciousness. Consciousness is present in the mion as a character of its form. The newborn mion is a perceiver: such is its being, such is its being one, such is its being good. This is so even while its animal powers have not yet been awakened, even as it is blind and deaf and numb. This is how deep consciousness, animality, reaches into the individual animal. Hence, when the animal powers of the mion awake after a few weeks, this is not a transformation of a plant into an animal. It is the growth of an animal into itself. Consequently, even though the young mion’s consciousness will not awake unless its parents lick it, this licking does not cause a change of form. Rather, it is a condition of maturation, which maturation is the mion’s self-activity and has no cause outside it. I wish to suggest that what I said about animality equally holds of personality, or rationality. As the concept of animal, so does the concept of person signify a kind of form: it signifies a character of the individual’s principle of being, being one, being good. Boethius (1973: 85) defines a person as an individual

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substance of a rational nature. I am suggesting that he is right when, in this definition, he represents reason not as a power an individual may acquire – in which case the being, the unity and the goodness of this individual would have to be conceived independently of this power – but as the inner character of the individual’s nature, or, as I have been saying, form. Again, it would be a most worthy enterprise to undertake to develop this thought, and again, I shall only give a sketch, perhaps even less than one. We saw that the animal is an individual toward individuals, since its vital movements are governed by sensory consciousness, by feeling, desire and perception. A person is a subject not only of sensory consciousness, but of rational consciousness. A person is a subject of concepts. Thus its self-movement is of a different character, which we indicate by calling it intentional action. Acting intentionally, a person is not only conscious of the individual it desires, but is conscious of itself as acting in pursuit of it; he not only takes the apple, but does so with knowledge that this is what he is doing. His action is as such an application of the concept of his action. As a person’s self-movement involves the concept of this movement, his powers of self-movement involve his possession of the corresponding concepts. His powers of self-movement are as such understood by the person. But now, the articulation of powers of self-movement is nothing other than the articulation of the self-mover into members. It follows that the articulation of a person into members includes the person’s possession of the concept of this articulation. The concepts we possess of our own members, of arm and leg, hand and foot, do not relate to their objects from the outside as to something given in experience, not even the experience of action. The acquisition of these concepts is nothing other than the acquisition of the powers of self-movement that define the members of which they are the concepts. We said of the animal: sensory consciousness is the principle of its members, even as its animal powers have not yet been awakened. An animal is articulated as a perceiver, even as it does not yet perceive. The mion’s legs are animal legs, they are legs of consciousness, we may say, even as the mion lies still and numb during its first days of life. We must say the same of the human baby. Reason is the principle of his members, even as the power of concepts has not yet awakened in him. He is articulated as a mover-accordingto-concepts, even as he cannot move according to concepts yet. The legs of a human newborn are rational legs, personal legs, we may say, even as he moves them randomly during his first weeks of life.

Education as self-activity Let us return to education. It cannot be the office of education to turn an animal into a person, for there is no such transformation. No species spans

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that difference, nor is there a change of an individual that spans it. For the concept of person signifies a character of the individual’s form, its principle of being, being one, being good. This is as well, for if there were such a thing as a change from animal to person, it would not be a passion of the second kind; the child’s being educated could not be its growing into itself; it could not be its self-determination and its end could not be autonomy. The child is a person from birth, for reason is the character of its form. Let us inquire into how conceiving of the human being in this way enables us to see education as the child’s own deed. As a child is a person, an individual of rational nature, from birth, we are free to consider the possibility that, while reason in the child is awakened only through education, it is the basis and condition of education. Kant writes in the introduction to the Kritik der reinen Vernunft: There is no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience. For what else should awaken the power of knowledge into exercise, did this not happen through objects that affect our senses . . . Hence, in us, no knowledge precedes experience in time, and with the latter, all knowledge begins. However, even while all our knowledge begins with experience, it is not on that account the case that all knowledge originates from experience. For it may well be that even our empirical knowledge is a composite of that which we receive through impressions and that which our own power of knowledge (merely occasioned by experience) supplies from itself (Kant 1787: B1). The power of knowledge is awakened by sensory affection, Kant says. It may yet be that any act of the power includes and thus presupposes knowledge, which on that account cannot originate from experience, but must be supplied by the power from itself. Of course, this knowledge, which the power supplies from itself, will be actual; it will itself be awake, only in acts of the power that in their turn depend on sensory affection. Let me vary Kant’s words. There is no doubt that all activity of reason begins with education. For what else should awaken the rational power into action, did this not happen through other human beings who engage it. Hence, in the human child, no act of reason precedes education in time, and with the latter, all rational activity begins. However, even if all use of reason begins with education, it is not on that account the case that all originates from education. It may well be that the education is a composite of that which is provided by him who educates and that which the child, its rational nature, supplies from itself. The power of reason is awakened by education. But education includes and presupposes an act of reason on the part of the child, which therefore the child must supply from herself.

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Kant’s thought and ours are more than analogous. What defines reason and is supplied by it as a condition of education is a form of representation that acquires content in education. This representation, which the child supplies from herself, is nothing other than the formal representation of the power. This power is autonomous; its acts accord with laws through representing those laws. Hence, the a priori representation provided by the power – which is nothing other than a representation of this power – is the representation of a law, a general representation, and of specific acts as in accord with, through springing from, this general representation. The representation the child supplies from herself is the formal representation of what one does and how and why, subsuming a representation of what she is doing as grounded in the former. When this form of representation arises, at some time between one and two years, education can begin. In its turn, this form of representation is not brought on by education, which, on the contrary, presupposes it, but arises in the process of maturation, which is the child’s own deed and has no cause outside it. Education acts through this formal rational representation of the child, and insofar as it does so, it is the self-determination of her who is being educated. This holds of all forms of rational activity; as an example, I consider teaching and learning of a form of poiesis or production. Education in large part proceeds through the parent providing an example that the child seeks to imitate. This involves a certain kind of consciousness on the part of him who acts in such a way as to follow someone’s example. In order for A to follow the example set by B, it does not suffice that A be doing what B did, nor that A be doing that thing because B did it. During the 1950s, a certain behaviour, namely washing potatoes in a nearby stream, was observed slowly to spread in a group of Japanese macaques. One individual began to wash; three months later, the behaviour was observed in its mother and two playmates; within three years, forty per cent of the group washed potatoes. One macaque begins to wash, then others take to doing the same, and as those are at first close associates, it is natural to suppose that there is some causal relation. However, there is no reason to suppose that any macaque was following the example of another. It may have been like this: one macaque begins to wash. Another is thereby positioned to observe that dirt comes off potatoes in water. Desiring that the dirt be off its potatoes, it puts them in water. In this way, the second macaque comes to do the same thing as the one that provided for this observation; this identity, however, their doing the same thing, does not enter the consciousness of the macaque (see Tomasello and Call 1997: 267ff). The macaque wants its potato clean. The act of a conspecific provides it with an observation that makes it aware of means to this end. The identity of its act with that of the other is external to the consciousness that underlies and is realized in its action. It is the reverse in the case of a child imitating a

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parent or sibling. A human child, one year old, takes an acute pleasure in doing what a parent or sibling is doing, asking for and rejoicing in the shared recognition of that sameness. An arbitrary example of such a thing: parent and child sit at the table, and, with much laughter and excitement, they alternate in putting their heads down on the table. Here it is out of the question to explain the child’s action by her interest in a result achieved by putting her head on the table. There is no such result. The sole interest of the child is this: to do what the parent is doing in mutual recognition of this identity. I should not speak of education in relation to such a scene. But the scene shows the germ of the consciousness that is at work in education and underlies its possibility. For in this scene the child is conscious of something to do: putting one’s head on the table. It is a consciousness of something that is here and is there, may be there again and again, in indefinitely many places an indefinite number of times. That is to say, it is the germ of a consciousness of something general as general. Moreover, the child recognizes this consciousness to be shared, even, incipiently, to be shared generally: she may allow her brother into the fun, and now there are three people putting their heads on the table, enjoying the community of consciousness they have established. There is no such behaviour among animals, in no species. This can be established empirically; it can also be known a priori. For such behaviour is not intelligible as an isolated thing, but only as belonging to the development of a being that is such as to be conscious of the general and to act from this consciousness. That is to say, it belongs to the development of a being whose form is reason; it is to be explained by this form. The above scene is not one of education. But education is only a small step away. Consider a child, three years old, let us say, learning to carve a stick. The child wants to carve his stick; however, his intention is indeterminate, as he has no distinct idea of what it is to carve. He knows it involves a knife and somehow applying the knife to the wood. But that is about it. Yet he wants to do it. His intention has a determinate content and thus is capable of governing action as it contains a reference to his parent’s consciousness: wanting to carve, he wants to do what she, the parent, is doing or does. This consciousness of the general, of the action form, carving, is a shared consciousness; and it is comprehended to be shared by child and parent. Therefore, the parent’s conception of how to carve governs the child’s action not from the outside, but rather as giving determinate content to the child’s own consciousness, which is a shared consciousness. The shared consciousness of the general, which we saw emerging in our scene of heads being put on the table, the form of which the child supplies from himself, allows a content to figure in the child’s will that he cannot supply from himself. In this transaction, or interaction, therefore, the child is not moved by something outside and extraneous, but by himself, by his own rational consciousness. In due course, the child’s

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dependence on the parent for content will diminish. But throughout the process, it is the child’s own will that rules, joined together as it is with the will of the parent in a shared consciousness of the action form. Consciousness of the general begins to emerge in the forms of joint consciousness that mark what Michael Tomasello calls the nine-month revolution. In the year following this revolution, consciousness of the general quickly acquires a more determinate shape. Consider pretend-play, which is in full bloom at two years of age. A child and a parent, or two children, pretend that an object has a function that in fact it does not have. A function is something general: it is a general use of the object. In pretend-play, then, the representation of how to use this and that is separated from the representation of its instrumental efficacy. The aim of doing what it is that one is doing, the aim of satisfying a concept, of acting from a concept, is separated from the aim of achieving whatever result is the result of so acting. The children engaged in pretend-play are conscious of this separation. I said above that, while the macaque wants the potato clean and, perceiving suitable means, ends up doing what another macaque does, the one-year-old wants to do what another is doing, potential results being irrelevant. In pretend-play, at two to three years of age, this logical distinction is inside the child’s own consciousness. In our culture, objects are made specifically for pretend-play: toys. In fact, it is much more fun to take objects that have a real use and pretend that they have another. A two-year-old may take a pencil and pretend that it is a toothbrush.7 Doing this, she may look at a parent and laugh, expecting that the parent agrees with her in finding this comical. Reflecting on the consciousness involved in this, we see that there is a consciousness of how the thing is used, which is a general thought; there is a consciousness of the particular, of what is happening here and now as in disagreement with the general; there is an understanding of the significance of this disagreement; and there is a consciousness of this understanding as shared. Or again, children, as soon as they have any facility with words at all, around two years of age, take the greatest pleasure in mispronouncing and misusing words. Again, here is reflective consciousness of the general in its relation to the here and now. There has been striking systematic research on pretend-play, which bears out the point. In relation to something touched above, the rational nature of the human body, I report an anecdote. At the age of one and a half years – he was barely able to walk – my oldest son observed an older child who had a stiff leg and could not walk properly. He imitated this walk, for his own amusement and for mine; that is, he showed it me and desired me to find it funny as he did. What is noteworthy about this scene is that it shows that, at this age, he walked according to a concept, he possessed the idea of how one walks, and he recognized this concept as shared among us. Indeed, when our

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third child, twelve months old, began to walk, she exhibited beaming pride, not only at being able to walk, but at joining us, the walkers. These considerations make us wary of a claim originating with Wittgenstein, that education in general, and learning a language in particular, involves what Wittgenstein calls abrichten. The word signifies the impression of a habit upon another being in a manner that does not involve a consciousness on the part of the latter of the rule that is being impressed upon it. Bakhurst appears to subscribe to the idea when he writes: ‘This account represents learning as a movement from a non-rationally secured conformity with correct practice, through increasing knowledge of correct practice, to a state of rational command of the grounds of correct practice’ (Bakhurst 2011: 138). As animals are not conscious of the general, abrichten is the only manner in which it is possible to inform their behaviour. If children were born animals, the first act of education would have to be abrichten. Indeed, the metaphysical conviction that the child is an animal that becomes a person through education seems to be the only possible source of the notion that abrichten plays an essential role in the development of children. Observation surely does not suggest it. However, a child is a person in virtue of its form. Through the causality of this form, the child grows into the form of consciousness that makes education possible. Education begins with shared consciousness of doing the same, which arises at around nine months of age and is incipient consciousness of the general. From then on, abrichten is no longer possible; the form of the child’s consciousness excludes it. Before that time, there is a logical possibility of abrichten a human child. In point of empirical fact, it seems very difficult, if not impossible. In any case, such abrichten has no inner relation to the education that comes later. We distinguished a form of representation, which reason supplies from itself and which is presupposed in and underlies education. It is likely that its development in maturation depends on interactions of parents and children. As the licking in our mions, such interaction will be a condition of undistorted maturation, not a cause. This need not occlude the fact that the formal representation of reason is awakened only in education. A mere form of representation is not actual on its own, but only insofar as it is the form of representing a suitable content. This content reason, the form of the child, does not supply from itself. Therefore the power of reason can only be awakened into act in interactions of the kind we described, in which the formal representation that constitutes the power of reason is provided with a content in a joint consciousness of parent and child. In this resides the necessity of education upon which Bakhurst insists. It is a mistake to seek to establish this necessity by representing the power of reason as second nature. As we saw, if reason were acquired from someone else in education, education could not be an act of reason in the child, and then it could not be the child’s self-activity.

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Distinguishing power and habit, and insisting that the power becomes actual only in the formation of habit, we recognize the formation of habit in education as the self-activity of the child: the activity of reason, which is the child’s form. Then the end of education can be autonomy, which, after all, is not capable of being brought about by something other. What the child receives in education is not the power, but a determinate shape of the power, a habit. This is selfdetermination, even while someone else is acting on her who is being educated. This is how the concept of second nature has been used in the past: signifying habit, which follows power.8 Second nature is habit, power, first. Second nature is not something other than first nature; it is its perfection; habit is the perfection of power. As the child is educated, it is not transformed; it does not acquire a new form; it grows into its own form. Education is the child’s growth into itself. I represented a certain form of representation as the condition of education: consciousness of a general way of acting. It may seem as though I thereby represent reason as a given nature of the individual human being, who then, in a second step, happily encounters other human beings who call this form of representation into act. However, when we reflect on the fact that the actuality of this form of representation essentially bears the form of education – that is, a transaction in which teacher and learner relate each other to each other – then we realize that the form of representation itself already places the finite subject of reason in relation to finite subjects of reason. The power of reason, then, is a universal relation of subject to subject, a free transaction of humanity with itself.9 Hence, far from turning reason into an animal instinct, the conception of education that I delineated insists that reason, humanity, is nothing but the conversation, and so we return to the Oakeshottian thought from which we began.

Notes 1 There are echoes of this view in Oakeshott. See, for instance, Oakeshott 2001d: 103–4, which Bakhurst quotes in his contribution to this volume. 2 Cf. Bakhurst 2011: 124: ‘Autonomy is a power: the power to determine what to think and do in the light of what there is reason to think and do.’ 3 It follows that while teaching and educating may involve the destruction of a state and its replacement by its contrary, as when error is replaced by knowledge and evil by good, this is not essential to the transaction and not contained in its original concept (as St Thomas Aquinas remarks in his commentary on De Anima, sec. 370). Developing this original concept, we consider teaching as leading from ignorance to knowledge, rather than from error to knowledge, and education as effecting a transition from indeterminate character to virtue, rather than from vice to virtue.

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4 See Bakhurst 2011: 10 for this series of oppositions. 5 This is the significance of the observation that it is the animal that sees, not its eye, an observation that cannot be understood without reflection on the manner in which an animal is one. The same observation applies to thought: it is the human being who thinks, not her brain (see Bakhurst’s illuminating discussion of what he there calls ‘personalism’ in Bakhurst 2008). In this case, the confusion is more extreme yet. It is right to think of metabolism as consisting of a series of changes in the organs, in a broad sense, of the living being. It is wrong to think that, in parallel, sense organs supply something in whose changes acts of sensibility may reside. However, it is right, indeed it is essential to the concept of a sense, that there are sense organs. By contrast, the ostensible idea of an organ of thinking is no idea at all (see Rödl 2014a). So there is not even something of which one might wrongly think that the study of the changes it undergoes may provide a more thorough comprehension of what thinking is. 6 A further irony: the relevant insight can be gathered from reading De Anima, B5. And Myles Burnyeat (1992), who had a glimpse of this insight, drew the inference that therefore De Anima must be junked as it is incompatible with contemporary ideas, while in fact reading De Anima may save us from the rubbish that comes in the train of those ideas. However, it is not necessary to read De Anima to this end. One may be led on by the truth, as Aristotle is fond of putting it. 7 See the discussion of this example, and of pretend-play in general, in Tomasello and Rokazcy 2003: 130–32. 8 The distinction of power and habit, and thereby of first and second nature, is occluded by the habit of Bakhurst, and McDowell, to speak of conceptual capacities, as opposed to, say, the power to think, or the power of concepts. Conceptual capacities are habits: determinations – self-determinations – of the power to think. 9 I develop the idea of self-consciousness as a universal relation of subject to subject in ‘Intentional Transaction’ (Rödl 2014b).

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12 Getting to Hogwarts – Michael Oakeshott, Ivan Illich and J. K. Rowling on ‘School’ Babette Babich

Oakeshott and the language of appetite It was characteristic of Michael Oakeshott that he was seemingly unable to suffer the elevation of the less learned into the place where, as he saw it, scholarship should be. Adding to this idealism, he was also inclined to expose the nakedness of the latest trends. For Oakeshott, as for Ivan Illich, what Nietzsche would have named the ‘decadence’ of our ‘educational institutions’ was an almost unavoidable consequence of absorption in the ‘spectacle’ suffusing society. I use the term as Illich spoke of the ‘age of the show’ (1995: 48), and also to echo Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, as the Situationists’ provocative reflection on the aesthetic life of the image (including the Lacanian ‘Imaginary Register’) influenced many thinkers, from Jean Baudrillard to Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek. Oakeshott, unlike Žižek or Rancière, does not seek to theorize ‘the show’ for the sake of either cinema (art) or society (politics). Thus Oakeshott writes that even ‘from a very early age children now believe themselves to be wellinformed about the world’ (2001e: 33). The conviction is common coin, as is evidenced in any number of Hollywood films foregrounding the child as expert, in contrast with clueless adults (and the Harry Potter example to which I will turn in my discussion of Rowling’s Hogwarts below is a variation on this same salvific, or (we used to say) Fisher King, thematic). These days, as Oakeshott points out, modern children have their own confident knowledge of the world as they suppose it to be 199

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only second-hand in the pictures and voices that surround them. It holds no puzzles or mysteries for them; it invites neither careful attention nor understanding. As like as not they know the moon as something to be shot at or occupied before ever they have had the chance to marvel at it. This world has but one language, soon learned: the language of appetite. The idiom may be that of the exploitation of the resources of the earth, or it may be that of seeking something for nothing; but this is distinction without a difference. It is a language composed of meaningless clichés (Oakeshott 2001e: 33). For Oakeshott, as for Ivan Illich but also for Friedrich Nietzsche, there is only a semblance of novelty. Listening to those same children speak (and Oakeshott, like Nietzsche, is careful to listen), one notices ‘the ceaseless repetition of slogans which are embraced as prophetic utterances. Their ears are filled with the babel of invitations to instant and unspecified reactions and their utterance reproduces only what they have heard said’ (33). Such programmed repetitions (or priming or branding, which I detail as the ‘Hallelujah Effect’ in Babich 2013 and (for a more concise summary, 2015), entails a frightening prospect for the child: ‘There is little chance that his perceptions, his emotions, his admirations and his ready indignations might become learned responses or be even innocent fancies of his own; they come to him prefabricated, generalized and uniform. He lurches from one modish conformity to the next’ (33). In this way, Oakeshott breaks with many conventions about the popular mind – e.g. kids today are smarter – just as he looks past the claims of current debates, observing (2001d: 98–9) that in ‘times past English universities have often been indolent guardians of the engagement to educate and as often they have recovered, but for a generation now they have anticipated almost every design of governments to transform them into instruments of “socialization”, hardly needing to be bribed to undertake this destruction of themselves’. For his part, Ivan Illich shares Oakeshott’s sense of education as a legacy to which the student is the rightful heir, that is as ‘the transaction between the generations in which newcomers to the scene are initiated into the world which they are to inhabit’ (103). This initiation is far from automatic, and Oakeshott concludes with a metaphorical allusion to Aristotle (recollecting Nietzsche’s characterization of Aristotle as a dancing master, and not only as a contrasting call to authenticity): ‘It is now about two centuries since our educational engagement began to be corrupted by having imposed upon it the character of a school of dancing’ (104). If we have by and large failed in this challenge, it is salutary that Oakeshott yet leaves the responsibility and the hope for ‘the future’ of ‘our educational institutions’ in the hands of ‘relatively uncorrupt schools’ (if any such remain today) and (with this latter I

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am even less sanguine) in the care of those rare ‘teachers who refuse to become dancing masters’ (104). It is Oakeshott’s scholarly breadth and independence of mind that draw me to link The Voice of Liberal Learning (2001a) with Illich’s writings on learning, not only Illich’s famous Deschooling Society (2000), but also his less well-known 1995 essay on media aesthetics which he called ‘the age of the show’, as well as his writings on the alphabet and ultimately his lyrical study of the Didascalicon of Hugh of St Victor, In the Vineyard of the Text (1996). If it seems that Oakeshott, advocate of liberal learning in its highest and ideal form and old-school defender of ‘school’ as such, could have little in common with the iconoclastic priest who advocated against ‘school’, this appearance, like many, is misleading.

Ivan Illich Illich is a standard reference in education if only as a foil. His work is often upsetting to today’s reader, both by its tone and no less by a rhetorical style that requires that one pay closer attention than one is, in English, inclined to do. Illich wrote contra education as ‘institution’ or ‘establishment’. If Illich, almost as much as Oakeshott, focused on the relationship between society and education and the tendency to substitute, as Oakeshott frequently writes, ‘’‘socialization” for education and instruments of “socialization” for school’ (2001d: 85), we vastly prefer, as Foucault put it, to undertake to ‘defend’ society and thereby, as Jacques Rancière argues, to advocate on behalf of socialization, not school (flipped classrooms and a focus on social media along with digital humanities/sociology are only the most recent instantiation). Illich’s signal work, Deschooling Society (2000), assesses the value and limitations of school qua social institution. School is, just as Philippe Ariès (1965) and other scholars of the childhood of days gone by have shown, a distinctively Western phenomenon, as exemplified by our talk of ‘school’, of ‘pedagogy’. If some recent scholars content themselves with Illich’s easy or ‘convivial’ self-critique,1 suggesting that Illich did not quite mean the negative things he wrote about the schooling of society, one ought to beware of missing the world circumstance Illich never bracketed. Once again: we who live in the age of what Illich presciently named ‘the show’ remain captivated by the spectacle that is modern social media, no longer a matter of a connection to a screen in a movie theatre, no longer a matter of a social imperative to watch television – ‘same time, same station’ – we are instead absorbed by our phones, for some of us already on our wrists: self-illuminating silent status changes, chirping subliminally, twittering community.2

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Oakeshott refers – and it is significant that Illich does not – to Nietzsche. Nietzsche matters not only for his overt reflections on education and culture but also for his notion of ‘grand style.’ Nietzsche’s language, and here he does accord with Illich, is architecture: ‘The architect has always been influenced by power. Pride, victory over weight and gravity, the will to power, seek to render themselves visible in a building. Architecture is a kind of rhetoric of power, now persuasive, even cajoling in form, now bluntly imperious’ (Nietzsche 2003: IX (‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’), §11).3 We tend to read the sentence forgetting all context, rather as if Nietzsche had not made his aphorism tight enough, small enough to keep our focus, and in consequence we shatter against it, and the next sentence complicates things even if it is also more familiar: ‘The highest feeling of power and security finds expression in that which possesses grand style.’ This is the Nietzsche we know, the Nietzsche of ‘great politics’, even the Nietzsche of ‘Nietzsche’s war’, as journalists described the First World War. While Oakeshott refers to Nietzsche, Illich cites Erwin Panofsky’s reference to architecture, which he offered at the Warburg Institute in Hamburg not three decades after Nietzsche’s death, as well as in a later retrospective where Panofsky explicated the relationship between the art and the philosophy of the twelfth century: ‘Like the High Scholastic Summa, the High Gothic cathedral aimed, first of all, at “totality”’ (Panofsky 1951: 44). I mention Panofsky and Nietzsche in the same breath because the former’s insight was significant for Illich, who was not only a critical theorist of an engaged or hands-on kind, as well as being himself an agent for the change he sought, but also someone who, rather like Nietzsche, thought about antiquity from its inception through to the scholastic – and that, for Illich, is to say the monastic era – in terms of aesthetic order and intellectual expression. As Illich observes,4 the connection between thought and form is written into the cathedral itself. Likewise, Hans-Georg Gadamer writes of the traditional name for the cathedral or the church as the Biblia Pauperum, explaining the visual arts, and this for Gadamer included the architecture of the church as a whole, ‘as a kind of script for the illiterate’ (Gadamer 1986: 152).5 For Panofsky, A man imbued with the Scholastic habit would look upon the mode of architectural presentation, just as he looked upon the mode of literary presentation from the point of view of manifestatio. He would have taken it for granted that the primary purpose of the many elements that compose a cathedral was to ensure stability just as he took it for granted that the primary purpose of the many elements that compose a summa was to ensure validity (Panofsky 1951: 58).

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Today we hardly seem to need such scripts. Thus Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator begins by citing his earlier book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991): Joseph Jacotot, a French professor who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, unsettled the academic world by asserting that an ignorant person could teach another ignorant person what he did not know himself, proclaiming the equality of intelligences, and calling for intellectual emancipation against the received wisdom concerning the instruction of the lower classes (Rancière 2011: 1). Illich’s Deschooling Society relates to Rancière’s emancipatory project, on the one hand, as well as to Oakeshott’s ‘liberal education’, on the other. For Illich was rather less occupied with overturning ‘received wisdom concerning the instruction of the lower classes’ (Rancière 2011: 1) than with showing that schooling was itself the very formative institution that instituted society. Jacotot’s claim, so remarkable and so fruitful for Rancière, would have been neither surprising nor dissonant for Illich. The function of school works, as Illich wrote, to equalize the classes (not to enfranchise them equally and not to offer them the same advantages – that, as it turns out, would require not more school, but a revolution). For Illich, more radically than Rancière, not only education but social reality itself has become schooled. It costs roughly the same to school both rich and poor in the same dependency. The yearly expenditure per pupil in the slums and in the rich suburbs of any one of twenty U.S. cities lies in the same range – and sometimes is favorable to the poor. Rich and poor alike depend on schools and hospitals which guide their lives, form their world view, and define for them what is legitimate and what is not (Illich 2000: 10). Thus the emancipation of which Rancière writes is (already) the core idea of modern, Western liberal society: if we are to be emancipated, and this is what Oakeshott takes as the legacy and the ideal of a ‘liberal education’, we must have school. But Illich reminds us that thereby we subscribe to an explicitly institutional vision of authority and process, eliminating self-reliance simply because the individual is no expert; that is, not a doctor, not a scientist. Illich’s word, prescient today in the common conviction concerning the need for increased social surveillance, is that the individual is ‘suspect’. Illich underlines our current culture of casting suspicion not only on every airport traveller (or visitor to a museum or library) but also even the scholarly expert who questions authority, by supposing as we do today that they must

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subscribe to a conspiracy dedicated to overthrowing our worldview with all its benefits, benefits almost always associated with our achievements in medicine and science, benefits given in exchange for unquestioning submission to standard expertise, without questioning authorities of the ‘right’ kind.6 For Illich, no matter one’s class, no matter one’s disposable income, no matter one’s racial or ethnic background, it is significant that both the haves and the have-nots alike ‘view doctoring oneself as irresponsible, learning on one’s own as unreliable, and community organization, when not paid for by those in authority, as a form of aggression or subversion’ (2000: 10). The liberal ideal of medicine, like that of education, is not liberation but submission to authority (the good ‘patient’, the ‘A student’), authorized treatment, authorized ‘instruction’. The liberal ideal is not about being ‘initiated’ into an educational ‘legacy’ as Oakeshott saw this or coming into one’s own powers and capacities (this is Kant) but the contrary. Today the liberal ideal is the standard or state-of-the-art ‘reliance on institutional treatment’, meaning in the case of health that one has ‘access’ (provided one submits to them) to the best doctors, the best medical technology, as indeed in the case of education (and the medical parallel is one Illich means to draw – he is of course also the author of Medical Nemesis (2002) where he makes this point more directly), access to the best school, and that necessarily means to the best educational technology. For Illich we find ‘independent accomplishment suspect’ (2000: 10). In medicine what must be forsworn is self-treatment; in education it is independent thinking.

The university and the twelfth century It is no brief against education that Illich offers, and it is not the case that he revises his earlier views, as several commentators imply. But it is the case that he sometimes attends to one focus and sometimes to another, and always has a set of concerns broader than one supposes. In addition, and as a testament to his ideal of conviviality, Illich often co-wrote essays with his friends, which had the result, especially true of his later work, that their concerns and level of understanding could be uneven and not always identical with his own. Illich did not mind this, but the scholar might. So we need to focus carefully on the content of his position. In general, Deschooling Society is a book about getting an actual education as opposed to contenting oneself with the formality, the certificate, the grade, the diploma that often substitutes for the same.7 Hence Illich’s concern is the letter, literally the text, likewise literally as the ‘vineyard’ that concerns him in his book on Hugh of St Victor’s Didascalicon, the famous guide to the medieval

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arts of learning. For Illich, the lover of wisdom, the friend of learning is to follow the path indicated by Dionysius the Areopagite, as Illich renders Hugh’s Amicitia in his reflections on the crown of reflection: ‘through the visible things of the world, the true reader rises to the invisible’ (Illich 1996: 28). A historian by training, a priest by vocation, Illich undertook to recall for the reader what he had learned from his own teacher, Gerhart Ladner,8 rare as that level and quality of instruction was – exceptional then, arguably lost to us today. The definition of a teacher for Illich (and Pierre Hadot would concur) follows Oakeshott’s and seems to contradict Rancière’s ‘ignorant’ ideal. For Oakeshott, a teacher ‘has something of which he is a master to impart (an ignorant teacher is a contradiction) and he has deliberated its worth and the manner in which he is to impart to a learner whom he knows’ (Oakeshott, 2001d: 71). Ladner, an expert on Patristics and the establishment of the scholarly discipline that is the subject of Illich’s study, was exemplary in Oakeshott’s sense.9 In the same way that Illich focuses on Hugh of St Victor’s Didascalicon and writes there and elsewhere about Panofksy’s miraculous century, Oakeshott foregrounds the twelfth century, and not by coincidence. Thus, as Oakeshott writes, all of us are implicated: ‘You and I were born in the twelfth century and although we have travelled far we still bear the marks of our birth-time’ (2001e: 18). The adventure of liberal learning thus looks back to the past, to ‘the Greek and Latin culture of antiquity’ (18). The whole value of the effort, for Oakeshott, is the chance (here I quote Shelley): to ‘Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth, Ashes and sparks’. For Oakeshott, ‘We do not yet live in the ashes of a great adventure which has burnt itself out’ (19). When Oakeshott writes that the ‘only indispensable equipment of “School” is teachers’ (Oakeshott 2001d: 71), his claim reflects the experience to which Illich attests and which Illich put into play in his own teaching ‘experiment’. Oakeshott was responding to a problem that was already immensely problematic for him and which has only worsened over time: the current enthusiasm for MOOC s (Massive Online Open Courses), for online learning, for the stunningly unthought-out notion of the flipped classroom (presupposing twice the time demand of the student’s passive visual attention while adding no time at all for active reading, not to mention what is presupposed of the instructor’s time and energies) and so on, are only examples of this kind of worsening. As Oakeshott writes, the current emphasis on apparatus of all sorts (not merely ‘teaching’ apparatus) is almost wholly destructive of ‘School’. A teacher . . . has something of which he is a master to impart (an ignorant teacher is a contradiction) and he has deliberated its worth and the manner in which he is to impart it to a learner whom he knows. He is himself the custodian of

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that ‘practice’ in which an inheritance of human understanding survives and is perpetually renewed in being imparted to newcomers (Oakeshott 2001d: 71). Again: Oakeshott’s parenthetical point – ‘an ignorant teacher is a contradiction’ – opposes the Rancière/Jacotot conventionality, yet only to the extent that Oakeshott concurs with Rancière’s reframing of the ignorance of ignorance and the role of the spectator as active or engaged learner. Oakeshott’s way of putting this is to point to the study presupposed for the leisure that is school or schole. Intriguingly. Rancière’s focus on the spectator stresses the aesthetic (and medieval) agency that Illich emphasized as crucial to the ‘gaze’ in the ‘age of the show’. Illich has a beautiful illustration of the non-neutral look of cupidity or desire, the covetous gaze that commands and degrades, recalling both the medieval Islamic theorists of active force of vision and the remonstrations of his Jesuit teachers that certain looks would count as sins, aggressions against the one so contemplated, despoiling acts, assaulting and invading the object so exposed (Illich 1995: 49). For Rancière, not dissimilarly, ‘looking is also an action that confirms or modifies that distribution, and . . . “interpreting the world” is already a means of transforming it, of reconfiguring it’ (Rancière 2011: 277). Where Rancière concurs with Oakeshott and Illich (all of them drawing on Kant’s ideal of Mündigkeit or maturity) is in the ideal of emancipation as such: ‘This is what emancipation means: the blurring of the opposition between those who look and those who act, between those who are individuals and those who are members of a collective body. What those days brought our chroniclers was not knowledge and energy for future action. It was the reconfiguration hic et nunc of the distribution of Time and Space’ (Rancière 2011: 19). Key for Illich and Oakeshott, if to a lesser degree for Rancière, is the relevance of attending to the arts of learning: this is the subject of Hugh’s Didascalicon. This focus corresponds to the same attention that would inspire the younger Illich in his insight into solving a problem, in the middle of the last century, in New York City’s need to produce the requisite abundance of teachers of Spanish in a city newly committed to the value of bilingual education. Needed were effectively ‘ignorant’ schoolmasters: teachers who could teach teachers to teach in Spanish. The core story of Deschooling Society includes an account of that social achievement in New York City, in the mid-1950s through to the early 1960s in Washington Heights and the Bronx. It is unclear that it could happen again in today’s era of privatization and charter schools which is somehow all about form (and forms) rather than practice. The key to success was the effective irrelevance of school techniques and school technologies (lesson plans) and the essential relevance of memorization, rote attention and focus: ‘Most

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people who learn a second language well do so as a result of odd circumstances and not of sequential teaching. They go to live with their grandparents, they travel, or they fall in love with a foreigner’ (Illich 2000: 12). The above does not describe Illich’s personal technique for second-language acquisition,10 but the method developed together with Gerry Morris for an experiment that used native speakers to teach people to teach what they knew best: In 1956 there arose a need to teach Spanish quickly to several hundred teachers, social workers, and ministers from the New York Archdiocese so that they could communicate with Puerto Ricans. My friend Gerry Morris announced over a Spanish radio station that he needed native speakers from Harlem. Next day some two hundred teenagers lined up in front of his office, and he selected four dozen of them – many of them school dropouts. He trained them in the use of the U.S. Foreign Service Institute (FSI ) Spanish manual, designed for use by linguists with graduate training, and within a week his teachers were on their own – each in charge of four New Yorkers who wanted to speak the language. Within six months the mission was accomplished (Illich 2000: 13). As Illich concludes: ‘No school program could have matched these results’ (2000: 13). Without the institutions, the rules, the regulations, the restrictions, people learned. In the midst of all that, in the same year of 1956, Illich himself would become Vice-Rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, and travel to Guernevaca, Mexico, while continuing to pursue his writing and his broad reading. The life of an itinerant scholar. What was crucial in his reflection (and it matters to note that he was away from his own native language here) on the impotence of so much second-language instruction is not that it lacks technique but that it is intended to provide no more than certification. For Illich, it was not enough to have a certificate; what was needed was bilinguality, the linguistic competence that is itself an admission to another world – a world that is, as Oakeshott would emphasize, one of letters, of literature, of culture, a world requiring a certain amount of immersion and even more memorization and the ‘work’ that Oakeshott emphasizes as the key to the ideal of school as a place apart and dedicated to a world in which others, past, present and future, live and communicate. This place for Oakeshott is characterized, intriguingly enough, by the same conviviality Illich made one of his other concerns, among all the concerns of his variegated and rich, multifaceted, deeply insightful and always unsettlingly provocative life.11 The education Illich enjoyed included Vienna (where he was born) and Rome as well as Princeton. It was also a classically Thomistic education, one that a recent biographer (Bruno-Jofré 2012) has linked to Illich’s studies with

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Jacques Maritain (while and in the process overlooking the influence of Ladner on Illich’s thinking). In Illich’s own later text on ‘the age of show’, cited earlier, which offers one of the finer explications of aesthetic theology, Illich turns to Panofsky and his illumination of architecture and the philosophical mind. The key difference between Illich and other expositors of scholasticism ‘and the arts’, notably Étienne Gilson (1966), as well as Maritain’s Art et Scolastique (1930), is Illich’s understanding of the technology of the book qua book (a technology that accords with Panofsky’s insight cited above). To the technology of the text, the summa, the handbook, the guide, corresponds the technical skill to the explication of which Illich turns in his discussion of what Hugh of St Victor calls ‘the art of reading’ (Illich 1996: 8). Illich’s study is thus a contribution to the philosophy of technology in the era of modern technology, and, among other things, this may be why medievalists, philologically, historically or philosophically minded, have yet to take up his work. Hugh, as Illich writes (and he has his ‘master’ as he calls him, Jacques Ellul, as much as Heidegger in mind), ‘provides for the twentiethcentury thinker a unique way to address the issue of technique or technology. Reading, as Hugh perceives and interprets it, is an ontologically remedial technique . . . I analyze what Hugh has to say about the techniques used in reading in order to explore the role that alphabetic technology played around 1130 in the shaping of these techniques’ (1996: 11). This focus on technology means that when Illich discusses Hugh of St Victor’s reading as a lesen, an auslesen, one should not miss the physicality of the metaphor in German, a word for selectivity but also for harvesting, as Illich titles his section: ‘The page as vineyard and harvest’ (57). Illich explains this metaphor with respect to the Didascalicon: ‘When Hugh reads, he harvests, he picks the berries from the lines’ (11). I have elsewhere argued that it is important to catch Illich’s references to the physical dimension of language, i.e. to rhythm and gesture, and that is due to the further influence, today largely forgotten, of the Jesuit anthropologist, Marcel Jousse, SJ.12 Jousse founded a specific anthropology of the gesture which he tracked physiologically as ‘psychomotor techniques’. These acts are embedded literally in our bodies: we live them, we are them. Jousse, as Illich explicates this, has shown that for many people, remembrance means the triggering of a well-established sequence of muscular patterns to which the utterances are tied. When the child is rocked during a cradle song, when the reapers bow to the rhythm of a harvest song, when the rabbi shakes his head while he prays or searches for the right answer, or when the proverb comes to mind only upon tapping for a while – according to Jousse, these are just a few examples of a widespread linkage of utterance and gesture (Illich 1996: 61).

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Jousse, who celebrated the ordinary or common country man, the paysan, not unlike Illich,13 also embraced, as Illich likewise did, the polyglot as such: the multifarious differences between languages as ways of being in the world and hence the wealth of differences between peoples in Jousse’s ‘anthropology of gesture’ and lived rhythm.14 It is understandable that critics and admirers alike foreground Illich’s Catholicism. After all, he remained a priest throughout his life, but for Illich the priesthood had everything to do with the heart of scholasticism, which in turn had everything to do with the book, the text. Writing of philosophy, of the love of wisdom, Illich explains that just as for ‘Augustine, wisdom was for Hugh not something but someone’ (1996: 10).15 But he refers to his earlier work in the same instant: ‘Since the book has ceased to be the ultimate reason for their existence, educational institutions have proliferated. The screen, the medium and “communication” have surreptitiously replaced the page, letters, and reading’ (1). There is a provocative point here against media studies or communications and Illich reflects on our eagerness to find ourselves at home in the digital world and what that tells us about ourselves.

Getting to Hogwarts The attention to school links Oakeshott, Illich and J. K. Rowling. Where Illich’s ‘vineyard’ is edifying, as is his account of the monastic life of the student, still more significant is the conscientiously non-literary effort that has been lauded as restoring ‘reading’ to public consciousness by the creator of a fictional schoolboy, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. School is here the key. As Oakeshott quotes Sir Ernest Barker: ‘Outside the cottage I had nothing but my school; but having my school I had everything’ (32). Just such a ‘place of learning’, Hogwarts is almost as essential as any of the other characters in Rowling’s work. To see this, consider Professor Severus Snape, for reasons having to do with that same place, qua teacher. Precisely owing to his rigour: ‘A teacher is one in whom some part or aspect or passage of this inheritance is alive’ (Oakeshott 2001d: 70). Oakeshott’s emphasis on the importance of the teacher as particularly learned is as key to Oakeshott’s thinking as it was to the Illich who praised his own teacher Gerhart Ladner, like Pierre Hadot in his Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995), remembering his own teacher Pierre Courcelle, when Hadot was elected to his nation’s highest academy: the teacher ‘has something of which he is a master to impart’ (Oakeshott 2001d: 70). What is key to the particular teacherly personality of Snape, and to the way that Harry and the rest of Snape’s students interact with him, has everything to do with the legacy, la vie humaine itself, to which the student is, if we recall

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Oakeshott’s understanding, the rightful heir.16 Snape’s excellence as a teacher has nothing to do with whether his students do or do not like him or whether they aspire to his friendship. Rather it has everything to do with the subject matter, about which, as Snape dramatically and drily lets his students know – to their collective horror – there can be no grading curve, no leniency. This is less because Snape says so, though he does (and of course it matters that Alan Rickman’s Snape speaks in such a way that his students hang on his every word), than because of the material to be learned. That is rigour, and that rigour is, as Oakeshott writes, embodied in the teacher as one who ‘is himself the custodian of that “practice” in which an inheritance of human understanding survives and is perpetually renewed in being imparted to newcomers. To teach is to bring it about that, somehow, something of worth intended by a teacher is learned, understood, and remembered by a learner’ (Oakeshott 2001d: 70). This statement is also a perfect description of the way Snape teaches. Hence, he singles out Harry (and Ron) and Hermione, but in different ways: Harry and Ron, the two wizard boys, are incompetent, while Hermione, despite being a Muggle, is decidedly not. Interestingly, although much is made of Snape’s persecution of Harry, far from favouring Hermione, Snape, half Muggle himself, effectively ignores her. In this way, he dedicates his attention and his most severe criticism to the weaker students. Just this inattention appears to inspire Hermione to go further, learning independently (literally on time she learns to borrow for the purpose) rather than falling prey to the seductions of being a teacher’s pet (granting special favours was not Snape’s style). In our society, girls are punished for being clever and Hermione is far from being an exception to that rule in the Harry Potter series, but all the evidence suggests that Snape’s critical balance advances her abilities. Snape’s brilliance as a teacher also has nothing to do with the storyline’s ultimate denouement. He was capable of the kind of love that endured ‘always’ (and it is certainly relevant that only this kind of love matters), but what matters most is that Snape is deeply passionate about his subject. Rickman’s Snape thus gives us a hard or difficult teacher who teaches difficult topics and who does not simplify them for any of his students. And who, because of that, saves them. Rowling herself obviously perpetuates a pre-existing ideal: school as such. But her reference point also corresponds to Oakeshott’s specification of place when he speaks of the apotheosis of school as a ‘place of learning’. For Oakeshott, the idea of such a place is applicable to the university par excellence. What makes a place of learning singularizes it by its exception: ‘what is special about such a place or circumstance is its seclusion, its detachment from what Hegel called the hic et nunc, the here and now, of current living’ (2001e: 13). Thus, in the first of Rowling’s Harry Potter books, the point at which everything changes is not the thunderous moment when Hagrid comes to collect Harry from his erstwhile life beneath the stairs,

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ensconced in an aesthetically unappealing family, a family who seem to have little love for him and the members of which he does not love in turn. It is Hogwarts itself that changes everything for Harry. And just getting there takes a bit of magical doing. Travelling through several non-spaces to a non-space named by a number apart or between (no little debt to Sherlock Holmes and his own fictional address: 221B Baker Street), Harry Potter is directed to Platform 9¾ at London’s King’s Cross Station, from which he vanishes into the non-place from which to board the non-train, the Hogwarts Express to Hogsmeade Station, towards another non-place, the magical Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Yet Harry also gets to Hogwarts by conventional means – beginning (never mind the owls and the cascade of envelopes) with a letter of admission, which entitles him to membership in a cohort and coterie (there’s more to say about cliques and sorting hats, pomposity and exclusions). Directly related to the privilege of this election is the heretofore (for Harry) unimagined experience of the ‘new’ friends who outfit him for his adventure (the getting of books, and in Harry’s case, also the getting of an owl and the love of a similarly owl-like protector-mentor; wisdom is a ‘someone’, as Illich says), along with the seamless acquisition of an adoptive family of friends: ideal parents and siblings, both aesthetically and affectively (this leads to a touch of incest at the end, but there’s nothing for it; the hero never wants the smart girl his own age, but always chooses the youngest sister); all to replace the unloved family Harry begins with. Harry – and I have elsewhere written (Babich 2012: 15) that every girl and boy, man and woman who reads this tale takes themselves to be Harry; this is emblematic of transhumanist aspiration no less – is an outsider, a quintessential foundling (thank you Charles Dickens) with blood that will out, who carries the obvious sign of being of ‘the’ blood in the form of a scar. But to say this is to say that he does not belong at his familial home. Instead, the one place he finds himself at home, the place where he literally (rather than figuratively as in the case of Sir Ernest Barker cited above) ‘has everything’ is the school. Harry’s Hogwarts is thus, rather exactly as Oakeshott says, a place ‘apart, where a declared learner is emancipated from the limitations of his local circumstances and from the wants he may happen to have acquired, and is moved by intimations of what he has never yet dreamed’ (Oakeshott 2001e: 13). In Harry’s case, there, as Oakeshott puts it, he ‘finds himself invited to pursue satisfactions he has never yet imagined or wished for’ (13). I am hardly saying that Oakeshott is explicating Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997), avant la lettre, as it were, to use Rowling’s original English (as opposed to the American) title with its own, different, sorcerer’s alchemical allusion. It is a small irony that philosophers wish to have so little to do with alchemy that they utterly misunderstand it both philosophically and historically.17 Yet it is the language of the adept that makes all the difference

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here. Thus in his 1935 book, which is also a study of scientific discovery and the sociology of educational kinds, The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, Ludwik Fleck also wrote of what he called the esoteric circle (Fleck 1981: 111) in order to explain the otherwise ‘secret’ (or, using Michael Polanyi’s metaphor, ‘tacit’) knowledge of this same acquisition. Fleck thus distinguishes between what is taught and what, in effect – and this is Polanyi’s point – cannot be taught. This is the ‘Aha!’ phenomenon that Fleck describes using scholastic, even Jesuitical terminology: ‘The Holy Ghost, as it were, descends upon the novice, who will now be able to see what has hitherto been invisible to him. Such is the result of a thought style’ (104). Oakeshott likewise attends to the ‘adept’, which I propose to understand in a precisely alchemical sense, the same sense in which Isaac Newton has been called the last of the magicians. I do not think this is too distant from Oakeshott’s own sense when he writes of the distinct achievements of the magicians, the personages of inventive or technical genius: ‘a Prometheus, a Vulcan, a Bessemer or an Edison’ (2001e: 12). For Oakeshott, the adept is the teacher, like Severus Snape (note: not like Dumbledore), and everything that is exceptional and extraordinary about the ‘place of learning’ may be found in the teacher’s ‘understandings’.18

Monastery and greenwood The link between Oakeshott and Illich is their attention to the place that is the school or university and their focus on its history. Both saw these institutions as instituted in a particular way, by particular individuals for particular purposes. Yet no institution can remain unless it draws participants. The university must have students who come to learn. The Oakeshott who focuses on the teacher also emphasizes the learner, which he precisely specifies as pupil. The learner is crucial not only because, as my teacher, the Canadian Jesuit philosopher, Bernard Lonergan SJ, was fond of repeating to us in class, ‘nobody teaches if nobody learns’, but also because learning is done, as both Oakeshott and Illich argue, by taking the time for study. This is a difficult undertaking; it calls for effort. Whereas playful occupations are broken off whenever they cease to provide immediate satisfactions, learning, here, is a task to be persevered with and what is learned has to be both understood and remembered. It is in this perseverance, this discipline of inclination, that the indispensable habits of attention, concentration, patience, exactness, courage and intellectual honesty are acquired, and the learner comes to recognize that difficulties are to be surmounted, not evaded (Oakeshott 2001d: 68).

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Oakeshott tells this well-known tale when he writes that the ‘wandering scholars who, in the twelfth century, took the road to Paris, to Bologna, to Chartres or to Toulouse were, often unknown to themselves, seeking within the notions of the time a “liberal” education’ (2001e: 17–18). I find Oakeshott in this sense more relevant for a reflection on the future of our educational institutions, in Nietzsche’s terms, than Illich. The reason is less his proximity to us than his inability to suffer fools or their reforms. Oakeshott lived through a revolution in the idea of the university that has been successful where the thing about successful revolutions, as Nietzsche pointed out, is their effective invisibility. Thus we fail to see the triumph of the polytechnic over the university in the university itself and at its highest level. It is the now almost automatic conviction that a university education is of no use unless its graduates, sometimes tellingly called its ‘products’, are able to find employment. Relevance to the market is foregrounded already in Oakeshott: ‘To open a school of Business, to undertake the training of journalists or corporation lawyers seem harmless enough concessions to modernity; they may be defended by the specious argument that they certainly entail learning; they give a place of liberal learning an attractive image of “relevance”, and the corruption involved may be written off as negligible’ (2001e: 19). For Oakeshott, however, the current preference for the ‘new’ is also part of this, and when it comes to evaluating a text, ‘The book “which verbalizes what everyone is thinking now” comes to be preferred, on that account, to anything else’ (20). The sacrifice of tradition for market relevance, the demand that ‘education should recognize and promote’ uniformity, is already observed, Oakeshott argues, in ‘those wonderful lectures of Nietzsche on the Future of Our Educational Institutions delivered in Basel a century ago’ (20).19 Thus in a centennial allusion (speaking at a university centennial in Colorado in 1974), Oakeshott invokes Nietzsche’s lectures ‘in which he foresaw the collapse which now threatens us’ (20). It is customary to brush off talk of collapse among those who have learned the tradition of unlearning, but here as elsewhere, Oakeshott is blunt: what is at stake is not merely an attack on ‘the heart of liberal learning, it portends the abolition of man’ (20). One would think that anything that ‘portends the abolition of man’ would tend to get wide attention. But this has not turned out to be the case. Oakeshott returns to the theme of the ‘place of learning’, focusing on the specific character of school, the university, classically understood, in which the student is ‘not only liberated from the here and now of current engagements but liberated from an immediate concern with anything specific to be learned’ (21). By definition, ‘relevance’ has to do with very specific tasks; the test of success that is available to assessment and measure is the getting, or the not getting, of a job in the same society that defines ‘relevance’.

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Oakeshott refuses the illiterate language of a supposed double vision and it is not clear that he would have thought that speaking of digital humanities would attest to a difference that made a difference and hence regarded and named the idea of two cultures (as C. P. Snow speaks of these) ‘silly’. In the same way, I submit, he also opposed the almost wholesale deference to the supposed sciences, at least as the popular mind understands ‘science’, i.e. as the physical sciences and particularly physics (and here the philosophy of science itself does not depart from the popular mind). Oakeshott argues that science itself is to blame to the extent to which the sciences (and here he could include both natural and social sciences) exhibit ‘relics of a disposition to value themselves in terms of the use which may be made of the conclusions of their inquiries’ (22). Still more pernicious for Oakeshott, hard on the heels of practical utility in the sciences, ‘is the claim that they represent “the truth” (so far as it has been ascertained) about the world; and the claim that they constitute the model of all valid human understanding’ (22). Oakeshott reserves his strongest critique for the social sciences, reflecting that ‘the word “science” in this context is intended to denote a natural science of human conduct’ (25). The idea of a ‘natural science of human conduct’ seems blameless enough, even something that could still merit funding – neuroscience and cognitive psychology and behavioural anthropology – yet Oakeshott elaborates that what that means is ‘the investigation of human actions and utterances and the practices and relationships to which they subscribe as if they were nonintelligent components of a “process”, or the functional constituents of a “system”, which do not have to learn their parts in order to play them’ (25). To pursue these observations further would lead to another essay. To conclude here it is enough to return to the language of ‘voice’ in the title of the collection, The Voice of Liberal Learning. Today ‘voice’ is popular for a number of reasons. There are, after all, both Gilligan and Cavell, and Clément, Gadamer and MacIntyre, and there is also Derrida. Like Gadamer, Oakeshott draws on a very Hölderlinian notion of ‘conversation’, and, like Gadamer and Hölderlin, this is ultimately what we are. It is this modality of becoming that echoes in the reference to Pindar that Oakeshott expresses.20 Conversation for Oakeshott is the model of liberal learning, exhibiting the same openness to possibility that Gadamer invoked as ‘play’ (see the third part of Gadamer 1986). In this sense, what is key to ‘the pursuit of learning’ is its exclusion of the agonistic and the gamer’s values of winning and domination allowing for an exchange between the faculties which is exactly not a race in which the competitors jockey for the best place, it is not even an argument or a symposium; it is a conversation. And the peculiar virtue of a university (as a place of many studies) is to exhibit it in this character, each study appearing as a voice whose tone is neither tyrannous nor

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plangent, but humble and conversable. A conversation does not need a chairman, it has no predetermined course, we do not ask what it is ‘for’, and we do not judge its excellence by its conclusion; it has no conclusion, but is always put by for another day. Its integration is not superimposed but springs from the quality of the voices which speak, and its value lies in the relics it leaves behind in the minds of those who participate (Oakeshott 2001b: 109–10). In a refrain reminiscent of Beauvoir’s formula in The Second Sex – ‘one is not born, one becomes a woman’ – underscoring her claim by broadening it, Oakeshott writes: ‘None of us is born human: each of us is what he learns to become’ (2001e: 6). Oakeshott, the political author, echoes Hannah Arendt’s attention to formation, Bildung, in her book, The Human Condition (1958).21 In this way, Oakeshott’s editor, Timothy Fuller, cites this theme as Oakeshott recasts it throughout his lecture, framed, didactically or pedagogically, with emphasis in his introductory words: ‘A man is what he learns to become: this is the human condition’ (Oakeshott 2001e: 1). To my mind this Pindar-style becoming is for Oakeshott (as also for Arendt) to be understood culturally, in a fashion closer to the Nietzsche who invoked Schopenhauer in his reflections on liberal learning in ‘giant’s’ terms, as Newton spoke of giants, as Plato did before him, and as Heidegger likewise spoke of giants as of Plato and of Newton. These giants are those who echo the ‘spirit converse’, to use Nietzsche’s language, each calling from his own mountaintop and each eager to join the conversation Oakeshott names liberal education an ‘endless unrehearsed intellectual adventure in which, in imagination, we enter into a variety of modes of understanding the world and ourselves and are not disconcerted by the differences or dismayed by the inconclusiveness of it all’ (2001e: 9). In this sense, Oakeshott regarded liberal learning as nothing less classical than ‘an education in imagination, an initiation into the art of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices; to distinguish their different modes of utterance, to acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to this conversational relationship, and thus to make our début dans la vie humaine’ (2001e: 30).

Notes 1 This is vastly more complicated, as the author herself knows, than is suggested by the sub-title of Bruno-Jofré 2012, ‘I Was Largely Barking Up The Wrong Tree’.

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2 This is the same spectacle that it takes a Rancière to call to our attention if we have (and most of us have) managed not to read Debord. Still this is the strength of a Rancière, and we are minded to pay attention to Foucault, to Bourdieu and to Rancière himself (one tends to bypass, pace Althusserians, Althusser these days), along with de Certeau and Marcel Jousse, student of Marcel Mauss and an ethnographer in the spirit (today largely channelled by Bruno Latour) of the enterprise of turning anthropology no less on others but on the observer: ourselves. 3 Here Nietzsche follows not his teacher Friedrich Ritschl, who also taught Werner Jaeger, influential author of the 1933 Paideia (Jaeger 1939), but his other teacher, Otto Jahn, a specialist in what Nietzsche distinguished as physically, literally ‘monumental’ philology and history (along with the life and educational times of those such as Mozart). I discuss the relationship between Nietzsche’s understanding of antiquity in connection with Jahn in the context of an overview of science in Babich 2014a and with reference to the opposition between science and religion (which Nietzsche regarded as ahistorical) in Babich 2014b. 4 Illich discusses this in a lecture he originally presented in Hamburg (Illich 1995) and which is elaborated with respect to, not Panofsky, but Hugh of St Victor (Illich 1996). 5 Gadamer writes of the ‘pictorial narration of the Bible designed for the poor, who could not read or knew no Latin and who were consequently unable to receive the Christian message with complete understanding’ (Gadamer 1986: 4). 6 See my discussion of the disciplining of the philosophy of science, including Lewontin 1993, in Babich 2015. 7 ‘The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new’ (Illich 2000: 1). Illich’s point is that it is not the individual student who is thereby hoodwinked but an entire social order dependent upon such confusions. 8 Illich was not the only one to acknowledge Ladner; see Wolfram 1995. 9 In an age before Google, one reviewer details the achievements of Gerhart Ladner’s The Ideas of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (1960), a 553-page study including ‘a sixty page index’, noting that reform, which the reviewer seems to have taken as an exclusively Protestant invention, is ‘actually shown to be a conception centrally important in patristic Christianity’ (Grant 1961: 140). 10 Illich was said to have spoken at least nine languages, largely without an accent. I have only heard one person dispute that claim and that person was a Parisian, Luce Giard, friend of Michel de Certeau. Per contra I spoke both his native German and my (native) English with Illich and his English – and his accent had nothing (or everything) to do with it – was beautiful. 11 Illich always marched to his own drum, even to the point of ignoring the Vatican itself. This is not the whole of it, if it is certainly the upshot. For a discussion, see Hartch 2015. Hartch is not concerned with the broader

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scholarly interests that were the largest portion of Illich’s life. But he is concerned with his role in American Catholicism, as well as his advocacy for American Puerto Ricans and his work in Puerto Rico and Mexico, with respect to missionary involvement and the ‘Crisis of the West’. Hartch begins the preface to his book by quoting one of Illich’s remonstrations to dedicated American do-gooders, qua missionaries in potentia, ambassadors, or anthropologists or journalists (or indeed researchers researching Ivan Illich’s impact in Guernevaca) that it is ‘incredibly unfair of you to impose yourselves on a village where you are so linguistically deaf and dumb that you don’t even understand what you are doing or what people think of you’ (Hartch 2015: 3). 12 See Babich 2015 and Jousse 1969. A more contemporary articulation of the tradition inaugurated by Jousse may be found in the work of the scholar and poet Henri Meschonnic (e.g. 1982). See also Kremer-Marietti 1992. 13 Illich learned to love the country, not only visiting his Croatian grandfather’s Adriatic island home (without running water or electricity) during his summer vacations, but also smuggling cattle in Italy to protect them during the resistance, rescuing them by hiding them in rough country, cow by individual cow. 14 For discussion, see Sienaert 1990. Also in 1990, Sienaert and Richard Whitaker translated Jousse’s Oral Style, which is now available in a very costly ‘library’ edition (2015). 15 Thus Illich, who pays attention to beginnings in his own writing, tells us on the very first page of In the Vineyard of the Text, that ‘Western social reality has now put aside faith in bookishness as it has put aside Christianity’ (1996: 1). 16 It is unclear that the Slytherin master could have been conveyed by anyone other than the actor Alan Rickman, not only because Rickman is that good – he is – but also because Harry Potter is more film than book, in the genre of summer sequels in the Hollywood tradition, a tradition which also happens to dovetail with the school calendar. 17 Only scholars of economics seem to have known better – I am thinking of John Maynard Keynes and the rarely or badly read Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Frances Yates, who have almost no successors in the increasingly triumphalist field of the history of science, and none at all in the similarly presentist philosophy of science, such that only historians like Peter Dear or, better still, Lawrence Principe have anything to say about alchemy that is not a simple repetition of misconception. I thus refer to Rowling’s Harry Potter because it is fiction but also because the usual scholarly reception of alchemy tends to suppose alchemy as of a piece with fiction or at least confusion. 18 Oakeshott uses the masculine pronoun although his meaning is not limited. This is clear where he writes, almost but not going so far as to cite Simone de Beauvoir on becoming a woman, ‘There is no such thing as “human nature”; there are only men, women and children responding gaily or reluctantly, reflectively or not so reflectively, to the ordeal of consciousness, who exist only in terms of their self-understandings’ (2001e: 15). 19 Though it is not to be found in the more obvious locus of Nietzsche’s ‘untimely’ reflections on Schopenhauer as Educator – where the focus is

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less on Schopenhauer ‘as’ educator than, as Nietzsche says, on Schopenhauer as exemplar of the reception of tradition, in this case of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where the contrast for Nietzsche corresponds to the contrast between Kuno Fischer’s stock reception of Kant’s critical philosophy and the utter philosophic life-transformation that is for Nietzsche central to a reading of Kant as exemplified by Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation. 20 I discuss this in a different direction with respect to Nietzsche’s notional ideal of the friend, as this is also an educational ideal, in Babich 2009. 21 Among others, such as Margaret Canovan, Luke Philip Plotica (2015) is only one of the most recent to draw parallels between Arendt and Oakeshott.

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Index Text in italic refers to publications, numbers in italic refer to figures. abrichten (Wittgenstein) 195 absolute knowledge 66–7 academic communities 3, 9, 21, 23 n.11 see also places of learning; schools; universities active learning 129, 138, 159–61 actualism, of Oakeshott 40 aesthetics 6, 54–5, 64–5, 85–6, 201, 206, 208 alchemy 211, 217 n.17 anthropology of the gesture 208–9 Appearance and Reality (Bradley) 28 Aquinas, St Thomas 184 architecture 202 Arendt, Hannah 214 Ariès, Philippe 201 Aristotle 38, 117, 183, 184, 186, 188, 197 n.6, 200 Arnold, Matthew 62, 112 Arsic´, Branka 123 art 65–8, 71, 72–3, 85, 115, 137 Art et Scolastique (Maritain) 208 artificial neural networks 166–72, 167, 169, 170 ASD (autistic spectrum disorder) 13 Asperger’s Syndrome 10–14 attributes (Spinoza) 36 Austin, J. L. 117 autonomy 62, 87–92, 148–9, 153–6, 181, 183–6, 191, 196 Bakhurst, David 87, 91, 182–6, 195 Barker, Ernest 209 beauty 63–8, 73, 74, 85, 88 Beauvoir, Simone de 214

becoming 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 Bergson, Henri 35–6, 38–41 Bildung 18, 61–8, 70, 72–4, 214 Boethius 189–90 Bonnett, Michael 95–7, 100–1, 108 books 208, 209, 213 Bradley, F. H. 27–8, 30, 34, 41 Brighouse, Harry 88, 90 British Idealism 27, 31, 42, 62, 119 Britton, Karl 9 Buckner, Cameron 145 Burke, Edmund 68, 80 capitalism 82, 85, 86 Caputo, John D. 154 Cavell, Stanley 122–6 child-centred education 78, 79, 83–4, 111–12 Children’s Thinking (Bonnett) 95 choice 89–92, 97, 100 Claim of Reason, The (Cavell) 122, 124–5 Clark, Timothy 98, 107–8 cognitive distraction 161 cognitive science 146, 164–5 Cohen, G. A. 86, 94 n.9 coming to be, of humans 181–2 conceptualization 28, 29, 32–7, 39, 41, 43 Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Cavell) 122 consciousness in animals 186, 188–90, 192 in children 192–6 and individuality 97–9 Oakeshott on 2, 16, 130 and time 38–9

239

240

conservatism of Oakeshott 68, 77, 80–1, 87–92 conversation Asperger’s Syndrome example 10–14 in Cavell and Rawls 122–6 dynamics of 153–6 in Emerson 123–4 Oakeshott on 7–10, 14–15, 18, 51, 173–4, 214 voices (see voices) conversation of mankind Bildung and 72–5 liberal arts teaching 174–7 metaphor of 162–3 and modes of experience 42–4, 56 Oakeshott on 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 8–9, 68–72 and Rorty 52, 154–5 Courcelle, Pierre 209 Csibra, Gergely 145–6 Culler, Jonathan 105 cultural inheritance 1, 78, 87, 92 culture 64, 86, 96 Currie, Greg 146 Darwinism 36–7, 43 De Anima (Aristotle) 184, 186, 197 n.6 Dearden, Robert 112–13 Debord, Guy 199 De Jaegher, Hanne 153 Derrida, Jacques 96, 102–8 Descartes, René 98–9, 127 Deschooling Society (Illich) 201, 203, 204, 206 Devlin, Patrick 82–3 Dewey, John 52, 61, 78, 111, 159 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM ) 13, 24 n.17 Didascalicon (Hugh of St Victor) 201, 204–5, 206, 208 Di Paolo, Ezequiel 153 Dworkin, Ronald 87, 89 education and autonomy 181–96

INDEX

Bonnett’s critique of Oakeshott 96–102 and egalitarianism 88, 92 Hirst and 113–15, 117–19 Illich and 201–9 listening in 127–40 meaning of 1–2 Oakeshott on 2–3, 16, 43, 50, 61, 77–9, 212–13, 215 Rowling and 209–12 thought in 106–9 see also Bildung; child-centred education; liberal education; political education egalitarianism 77, 84–9, 92 elementary recognition 151–2 elementary responsiveness 152, 153, 156 Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Hegel) 65 elitism 9, 16, 21, 81, 83–4 Emancipated Spectator, The (Rancière) 203 emancipation 16, 92, 203, 206, 211 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 123–4 emotions and learning 144, 145, 147–9, 152, 164–5, 172–4 see also feelings equality 81, 83, 86, 87–92, 125 ethics 47, 53–5, 56, 57, 140 existentialism 97, 101, 152 experience modes of 7, 10, 28–9, 32–3, 40, 43, 56, 62, 70, 72 in Oakshott 29–34, 50 philosophical 34–7, 39, 40–1, 42, 43 present 37–41 Experience and its Modes (Oakeshott) 27–8, 42–4, 50, 52, 70 fallacy of relevance 29, 36, 42, 43 fateful accidents 37 feelings 65, 66, 107, 147, 171–2, 173, 182, 185, 186 see also emotions and learning Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 181, 182 first nature 182, 185, 196 Fleck, Ludwik 211

INDEX

Foucault, Michel 201 Fraser, Nancy 156 Fuller, Timothy 27, 214 Future of Our Educational Institutions (Nietzsche) 213 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 8, 133–5, 138, 143, 153, 154, 202, 214 Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, The (Fleck) 211 Gergely, György 145–6 German Idealism, see Hegel gestures 208–9 Gillard, Derek 79 Gilson, Étienne 208 Glendinning, Simon 99, 102, 105 Gopnik, Alison 145 Granger, Hermione 210 Grundlagen des Naturrechts (Fichte) 181 Hadot, Pierre 205, 209 Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling) 211 Hegel, G. W. F. 30, 62–3, 65–8, 70, 72–3, 149, 151, 153, 210 Hegelianism 31, 119, 121 Heidegger, Martin 98, 105–6, 117, 121, 133–4, 139 Henley, Don 131 Hirsch, E. D. 155 Hirst, Paul H. 5, 79, 112, 113–15, 117–19 history (discipline) 18, 29, 136–7, 141 n.5 history (mode) 29, 32, 43, 62, 70 history (voice) 6–7, 22 n.5, 114 Hobbes, Thomas 38, 68 Hobson, Peter 147 Hodgson, Shadworth 38, 39 Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry 209–12 Honneth, Axel 149–52, 153 Howells, Christina 106 Hugh of St Victor 201, 204–5, 206, 208, 209 Human Condition, The (Arendt) 214 human development 185–90 Husserl, Edmund 98–9, 101, 145

241

Idealism, see British Idealism; Hegel, Georg ideological education 69 Ignorant Schoolmaster, The (Rancière) 203 ignoratio elenchi 29, 36, 42, 43 Illich, Ivan 199–212 images 42–4, 70–4, 116, 121 imagination 64, 67, 73–4, 78, 112, 119, 128, 163, 215 imitation 145–6, 192–4 individuality 62, 68, 95–7, 100, 101, 188 infants 144–7 Ingram, David 155–6 initiation 15–20, 21, 25 n.23, 72, 96, 112, 114, 200 inquiry 50–2, 56–9, 65–6, 70, 78, 92, 163 interactive processes 143, 144–54 interpretation 20, 108, 136, 137, 143, 153 In the Vineyard of the Text (Illich) 201, 217 n.15 James, William 37, 38, 39, 41, 48 Jousse, Marcel 208–9 judgement of beauty 62–3, 64–8, 73 experience as 29, 30, 40 and laws 183 Wittgenstein on 19–20 Kantianism 6, 9, 70–1, 112–13 Kant, Immanuel 62–70, 73–4, 98, 191–2, 204, 206 Keats, John 44, 107 knowledge and activity of mind 69 in education 79, 114–15 Hegel and 65–7 and initiation 17–19 Kant and 191 and rationalism 83 Russell and 30–1 technical 72 Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Kant) 191 Ladner, Gerhart 205, 209 language and Derrida 102–6

242

INDEX

language-games 117–20 language learning 17–18, 120–1, 171, 195 language of appetite 199–201 lecture-based teaching 129, 138–9, 161–2, 174, 177 Lewis, C. I. 49–50 liberal education classroom methods 174–5 defence of 79, 84, 176–7 definition of 2–3, 111–13 Illich on 203–4 Oakeshott on 5, 44, 162–3, 212–13, 215 listening 127–40 art of 132–4 in an educational context 134–9 and learning 128–32 Locke, John 138 logic 37, 49, 53, 54, 55 logic of education 113, 119 Lonergan, Bernard 212 Lyotard, Jean-François 155 macaques cleaning potatoes 192 MacIntyre, Alasdair 85 Major, John 112 Marcuse, Herbert 82, 85–6 Maritain, Jacques 207–8 Marxism 81–3, 85, 86, 89 mathematics 49 Matière et Mémoire (Bergson) 38 McClelland, James L. 166 McDowell, John 17–18, 182, 185, 186 Medical Nemesis (Illich) 204 medicine 204 Meltzoff, Andrew 145, 147 memory 38, 39–40, 208 Metaphysic of Experience, The (Hodgson) 38 Mill, John Stuart 89–90, 113 Minsky, Marvin 160 Mitford, Nancy 83 modalization 28, 29, 32–7, 39, 41, 43 modes of experience 7, 10, 28–9, 32–3, 40, 43, 56, 62, 70, 72 modes of imagining 6, 42 modes of speech 42

MOOC s (Massive Online Open Courses) 205 Morris, Gerry 207 Morris, William 84–5 Murray, Lynne 146 negative capability 44, 107 neural networks 164–72, 167, 169, 170 neurons 164–5 neurotransmitters 172–3 neutralism 88, 89, 90–1 New Left politics 82 Nietzsche, Friedrich 122, 133, 136, 200, 202, 212–13 normative sciences 54–5 Nussbaum, Martha 88–9 Oakeshott, Michael on consciousness 2, 16, 130 conservatism of 68, 77, 80–1, 87–92 on conversation 7–10, 14–15, 18, 51, 173–4, 214 conversation of mankind 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 8–9, 68–72, 162–3 on education 16, 43, 50, 61, 77–9 education of 23 n.10, 47 on experience (see experience) on initiation concept 15–20 on knowledge 18–19 and the language of appetite 199–201 on liberal education 2–3, 5, 44, 162–3, 212–13, 215 on teachers 205–6 voices 5, 6–8, 10–15, 22 n.5, 43, 114–16, 117, 121 and Wittgenstein 47 On Human Conduct (Oakeshott) 50 Panofsky, Erwin 202, 208 Parekh, Bikhu 80 participatory sense-making 147–8, 153 passage of time 38–9, 41 passions in education 184–5, 191 Pateman, Carole 156 paternalism 89–90

INDEX

Peirce, Charles S. 48–50, 52–4, 56–8 perfectionism 69, 87–9, 92, 122 Peters, R. S. 16, 21, 112, 117–19 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 149 philosophical experience 34–7, 39, 40–1, 42, 43 philosophy of education 44, 88, 96, 119 Philosophy of Reflection (Hodgson) 39 Philosophy of Right (Hegel) 149 Philosophy as a Way of Life (Hadot) 209 philosophy, practice of 35–7, 41, 54–7, 70, 72–3, 137–8 philosophy (voice) 6, 114 places of learning 3, 209, 210, 211–12, 213 see also academic communities; schools; universities Plato 1, 71, 116, 184 Plowden Report 78–9 pluralism 41, 89, 117–18, 119, 155 Pluralistic Universe, A (James) 39 poetry (voice) Asperger’s Syndrome example 12, 24 n.16 definition of 6–7, 62, 116–17 use of 14–15, 23 n.9, 70–2, 78, 114 Polanyi, Michael 211 political education 19, 69 political philosophy conservatism of Oakeshott 68, 77, 80–1, 87–92 Marxism 81–3, 85, 86, 89 New Left 82 politics 51–3, 56–8, 121 positivism 14, 42 Potter, Harry 209–11 practical activity (voice) Asperger’s Syndrome example 11–12 definition of 6–7, 8, 116 ‘ought to be’ 40 use of 70–1, 78, 114 practical knowledge 18–19 practice (mode) 29, 41, 62 pragmatism at Cambridge 52–6

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classical 48–52 and Hodgson 38 and Oakeshott 42, 47, 50, 52, 56–9 present experience 37–41 pretend-play 194 primary intersubjectivity 144–6, 149–54 Principles of Psychology (James) 39 productivity 153–4 progressive education 78, 79, 83–4, 111–12 progressive philosophy 81–7 quietism 53, 56–7 Quillian, M. Ross 166, 168, 170 Quine, W. V. O. 176 Quong, Jonathan 89, 91 Ramsey, Frank 47, 52–5, 56, 58, 59 Rancière, Jacques 201, 203, 205, 206 rationalism Oakeshott against 19, 50, 51, 57, 69, 80, 83 Peirce against 48, 49 Rawls, John 113, 122, 123–4 Raz, Joseph 89, 90 reading 133–4, 143, 208–9 reality 27–8, 31, 32, 33, 36, 38, 41, 42 reason 50, 137, 181–3, 186, 190–3, 195–6 recognition 149–52, 156 reductionism 53, 121 relativism 14–15 religion 47, 53, 54, 126 religion (voice) 6, 22 n.5 Repacholi, Betty 147 Rhees, Rush 119–21 Rickman, Alan 217 n.16 Ricoeur, Paul 152 Rogers, Carl 129 Rorty, Richard 22 n.2, 25 n.20, 52, 57, 154–5 Rowling, J. K. 209, 210 Rumelhart, David 166–8, 167, 171, 172 Ruskin, John 84–5 Russell, Bertrand 30, 53, 60 n.4 Ryle, Gilbert 95, 118

244

INDEX

Samuel, Raphael 82 Sartre, Jean-Paul 97, 100–1 Saussure, Ferdinand de 103–4 Scanlon, Thomas 90 Schmitt, Carl 57 scholarship 65, 199 schools 3, 21, 79, 84, 88, 201, 203, 205–7, 209–13 Schrag, Calvin 140 science (mode) 29, 62 sciences 54–5, 64–7, 73–4, 213–14 science (voice) Asperger’s Syndrome example 11 definition of 6–7, 8, 116 and discourse 51 use of 70–1, 73, 78, 114 secondary intersubjectivity 143, 146–7, 150–2 second nature 182, 185, 195, 196 second-person interaction 144, 145 Second Sex, The (Beauvoir) 214 self-determination 90, 100, 184, 185, 191, 192, 196 self-referencing 97, 100 self-revelation of existence 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 semantic networks 166 Sen, Amartya 88 sensation 29–30 sensory perceptions 27, 29, 38, 70, 186 Shakespeare, William 107 Sher, George 91–2 signification 102, 103–5 Snape, Severus 209–12 social cognition 144, 146 social interaction in Asperger’s Syndrome 11 cooperation as state of 122 process of 146, 148, 149, 150, 151 Society of the Spectacle (Debord) 199 Spinoza, Baruch 34–5, 36 Spirit 66–8, 70, 72–3 Standish, Paul 5, 79 Strauss, Leo 81 subjectivity 97–101, 105–6, 108 Summa Theologiae (St Thomas Aquinas) 184 synaptic proliferation 171, 172, 174, 176

taste 49, 64–8, 87 Taylor, Charles 99, 102 teachers 17, 20, 21, 72, 200–1, 205–7, 209–12 teaching methods 129, 138–9, 161–2, 174–5, 177 technical knowledge 18–19, 72 technology and learning 159, 161 Theory of Justice, A (Rawls) 123–4 thought and conversation 123, 163 and experience 29–33 language and 117 in the light of reason 183 and neural networks 165, 166, 168 possibilities of 95–109 time, passage of 38–9, 41 Tractatus (Wittgenstein) 53–4 Trevarthen, Colwyn 146, 149–50 truth anticipation of 133–5 and art 66 and Hirst 114 and Oakeshott 30–1, 34, 50–2, 70, 86, 108, 163, 213 and pragmatism 48, 53, 54, 56–9 and relativism 14–15 universities 3, 21, 63, 129, 161, 200, 210, 212–14 Vienna Circle 53, 56, 58 Villa, Dana 81 virtual reality 36–7 Voice of Liberal Learning, The (Oakeshott) 201, 214 Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind (Oakeshott) 5, 42, 43, 62, 70, 113–14 voices 5, 6–8, 10–15, 22 n.5, 43, 114–16, 117, 121 see also history (voice); philosophy (voice); poetry (voice); practical activity (voice); science (voice) von Humboldt, Wilhelm 63, 143 Vygotsky, Lev 159

INDEX

Waugh, Evelyn 83 ‘what ought to be’ 40 White, John 8–9, 84 Williams, Kevin 62, 84 Winnicott, Donald 150 Wittgenstein, Ludwig abrichten 195 category concepts 166

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dislike of academic life 9, 25 n.19 and Hirst and Peters 117–18 language-games 118–20 and Ramsey 47, 55–6 and Rorty 52, 57 rule following 19–20 Tractatus 53–4 Wood, David 99–100, 105

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