In 1863, John Henry Newman wrote: “From first to last, education … has been my line.” The same can be said about Michael Oakeshott, and about his foremost American protégé, Timothy Fuller. Fuller arrived at Colorado College as a young man in 1965, and since then he has taught political philosophy to generations of students. Many of those students, in turn, have become professors and public intellectuals who continue to write and teach in the Oakeshottian tradition, which is to say, in the classical liberal tradition of political thought. Now, at last, we have a volume of Fuller’s essays about Oakeshott, aptly titled Michael Oakeshott on the Human Condition. 

Not every essay in this book will appeal to the new reader of Oakeshott, but many of them are lucid introductions to Oakeshott’s intellectual world, much like the sober but brilliant forewords Fuller has written as editor for other collections of Oakeshott’s essays. The beginner would do well to start with “The Poetics of the Civil Life,” “The Achievement of Michael Oakeshott,” “Memorial Service at the London School of Economics” and “On the Character of Religious Experience.” 

Part of what makes this collection of essays special is that Fuller and Oakeshott were longtime friends. They first met in 1974, when Oakeshott visited Colorado College to deliver an eloquent lecture about liberal education, “A Place of Learning.” They remained close until Oakeshott’s death in 1990, and throughout those sixteen years had ongoing conversations about everything from politics and religion to history and literature. Fuller therefore writes not just with academic insight but with concrete knowledge of the man himself.

A Philosopher

Like Oakeshott, Fuller is interested not “merely” in politics but in the entirety of human experience. In this book he considers history, science, the problem of time, skepticism, what it means to be conservative, and religion seen through the lens of Oakeshott’s idiosyncratic Augustinianism, among other topics. One topic that is not explicitly present in the book is Oakeshott’s view of liberal education, though Fuller has written about it elsewhere. But Oakeshott’s deeply humane understanding of teaching and learning was nevertheless foundational to everything he wrote. As Fuller remarks, “I believe [Oakeshott’s] writings on political philosophy will survive long into the future, but it is his remarkable impact on students that we must sustain through our recollection.” Oakeshott “always thought of himself, first, as a learner, but those of us who saw him at work lecturing or in seminars knew that here was an extraordinary teacher.” 

In 1933, Oakeshott wrote that “thinking is not a professional matter.” It is “something we may engage in without putting ourselves in competition; it is something independent of the futile effort to convince or persuade.” An education that equips us to think well, and to live well, is therefore of the greatest importance. Oakeshott believed that the principal task for human beings was to discover who we are, given that each of us is born at a unique time and place, “lapped round with locality.” The challenge (and opportunity) is to cultivate and enjoy a satisfactory personal identity or, borrowing the famous phrase of Montaigne, to know “how to belong to oneself.” This is certainly easier said than done.

In our day, identity is often thought to consist of ascriptive characteristics such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation; and perhaps it may even extend to one’s choice of career. But for Oakeshott identity was never determined by such things. One had to learn how to become a fully-functioning, even excellent human being, embracing individuality by making meaningful choices. The entire first essay of Oakeshott’s magisterial final work, On Human Conduct, concerns the “self-disclosure” and “self-enactment” involved in acquiring this satisfying identity. Political activity plays a part in this, but only at the periphery. Oakeshott saw politics as meaningful insofar as a stable political order facilitated other significant human activities.

The scholar who examines Oakeshott’s work must therefore be willing to suspend the notion that Oakeshott was solely a “political philosopher,” though he certainly was that. Oakeshott was a philosopher simpliciter, a person who thought deeply about all human experiences, from science and history to love, mortality and religion. Timothy Fuller knows this well, and his essays reflect it. “[F]ascinated though he was by the study of politics,” Fuller writes, “Oakeshott found the heart of life elsewhere. [He] is the pre-eminent antagonist of all those today who wish to reduce the meaning of life to political action.” Given the constraints of space, I want to consider, with Fuller, just a few of aspects of Oakeshott’s thought: modality, politics, and religion. Perhaps this will whet the appetite of readers to explore the entire Oakeshottian corpus, quite remarkable in its depth and breadth and ranging over seventy years, from about 1920 until his death in 1990. 

Modality

Sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, the idea of modality lies beneath everything Oakeshott wrote. In 1933, Oakeshott published his first major work of philosophy, a book entitled Experience and its Modes. There he explained that our experience of the world could never be understood unmediated but only in certain discrete “modes.” He identified the primary (though perhaps not the only) modes as history, science, and practice. In history, human experience is understood sub specie praeteritorum or “under the aspect of past experience.” Put another way, in this mode, history is studied for the sake of the illumination that past events provide, not to offer “lessons” for the present or future. Something similar goes for science: the scientific mode sees the world in terms of quantity and number. Science, understood modally, does not aim at producing clean water or a cure for cancer; it is purely explanatory.

In contrast to both history and science, the “practical” mode is where we live most of our lives. It is by far the most dominant mode, because it encompasses desire, will, morality, and religion. In practice, people complete the day-to-day tasks of life and sometimes attempt extraordinary achievements. The self-making I spoke of takes place here. Yet despite its dominance, Oakeshott found the mode of practice to be both tyrannical and ultimately unsatisfying, for it could never escape its focus on an imagined future. In Fuller’s formulation, “[t]he always-to-be-sought, never-quite-to-be-achieved unity of experience as a whole is the driving force of human life; in this all human beings, qua human, participate.” But it isn’t everything.

Why was the idea of modality so important to Oakeshott? Because, as Fuller explains, “each mode will tend to explain all of experience in terms of its own assumptions” and therefore will deny or ignore other kinds of experience. The clearest example of this comes in considering the character of practice. Those who are enmeshed in practice (many or, perhaps, most of us) see life as a list of tasks. There is school and then career, marriage, children, and accumulation of wealth, then old age and death. But where are enjoyment, rest, and fulfillment? If all of life is “practical,” then there would seem to be no escape from what Oakeshott calls the “deadliness of doing.” 

Both Oakeshott and Fuller advocate a different way of thinking about this human predicament. If we accept the idea that experience has “modes,” then practical life need not necessarily be “the foundation of other activities.” The modes, writes Fuller, are actually “revelations of the multidimensional character of human experience” or, expressed differently: “every way of knowing is a way of being in the world.” In such a modal understanding, “play counters work, enjoyment moderates ambition, [and] conversation restrains debate.” Thus are we freed from the idea that everything must be put into the service of practical ends, and freed into seeing that life’s most rewarding activities consist in things that are often seen as “purposeless.” These purposeless things—like love, friendship, conversation, and liberal learning—are all liable to be diminished or disparaged in our modern age of utility and progress. 

Politics 

The crux of the problem in our day, even more than in Oakeshott’s, is that this practical mode, in the form of careerism, politics, and, increasingly, political activism, has swallowed up everything else. This political activism is often justified as progress or reform, and its scope is nearly limitless. Politics now encompasses not just voting and office-holding, lawmaking and public funding, but extends into religion, social life, academia, and even the family. The assumption of those who advocate this extension is that all such institutions can be reformed or made better by the application of “reason.” I put reason in quotes because what Oakeshott really wants to say is that a particular understanding of reason is problematic.  

Here we have arrived at the aspect of Oakeshott’s work for which he is most famous: his identification and criticism of the “Rationalism” that has infected politics, most fully in the twentieth century, but begun centuries before. Readers of his essay, “Rationalism in Politics,” will recall that Oakeshott argues forcefully that politics can never be an activity governed by a set of precepts for action (an ideology), precepts that supposedly emerge out of thin air or are concocted in the minds of very smart people. Rather, political activity—like any valuable practice—develops among people who engage politically with one another, trying and sometimes failing to achieve compromise as they “attend to the arrangements” of a given group of human beings living in proximity to one another. An ideology emerges only later, when certain favored parts of the practice are isolated and (mis)understood to function as drivers of future actions.

Oakeshott also understands that not every political problem is amenable to solution and that perhaps, in fact, we ought not think of political life as a set of problems to be solved, one after another, until we arrive at perpetual peace. As Fuller writes, Rationalism is “a perversion of the medieval quest.” Instead of “slaying the dragons that cross one’s path,” Rationalists define “the world as a single great dragon to be put right.” Oakeshott follows Hume in seeing the falsity of the idea that “philosophers could change the world in accordance with an abstract idea of how it ought to be.” 

Rationalism is the politics of the guidebook, the sovereignty of technique, an exaggerated faith in planning and human effort: in sum, it is an ideological politics that imagines everything can be figured out in advance. But Oakeshott possessed a deep though gentle skepticism about all such grand plans. The liberal tradition, of which he was a part, is “constituted in opposition to the politics of uniformity and perfection,” writes Fuller. Moreover, Oakeshott thought that the fundamental political choice was constituted “in a dialectic between those who are skeptical of the power of governments to reconstruct and perfect social life, and those with faith in our power to do exactly that.” This dialectic seems to be a permanent feature of modern political life, although those with “political faith” now seem to be in the majority. They are certainly the loudest and most assertive political actors.

In “The Sceptical Disposition,” Fuller places Oakeshott squarely into the tradition of Montaigne and Hume. “With regret,” Fuller writes, “the philosopher puts aside the possibility of superhuman wisdom, but with relief points to the traditions without which we would fall into a morass of equalized choices.” What a person can do is pursue the “intimations” that actual experience provides, knowing which way to turn his feet even without knowledge of a final destination. “It is a pervading theme in his work,” writes Fuller, “that one need not understand everything that is going on in order to find an intelligible place for oneself.” Oakeshott was not afraid of, and even embraced, mystery. He understood Keats’s “negative capability,” and welcomed the “poetic intimations of life” that appear amongst an otherwise “drab activism.”

Religion

One aspect of Oakeshott’s thought that readers often find perplexing, even frustrating, is that he frequently redefines familiar terms for his own purposes, imbuing them with meanings that are not their common ones. He does this with “poetry,” in a long essay from 1959 called “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind.” He also explains “religion” in an unusual and counterintuitive way. Though Oakeshott was a Christian as a young man, he fell away from orthodox faith in his twenties. This fact, paired with his somewhat sporadic essays and comments about religion, has caused people to conclude that after all he simply was not a religious person.

Timothy Fuller sees it differently. A somewhat simplistic view of Christianity (which may influence us more than we would like to admit) holds that “worldly” life is to be endured as a trial. The Christian has faith that after death—only later, in the future—he will inherit “eternal” life. Thinking in this way, the religious person might be inclined to renounce the enjoyments of life in favor of a strict asceticism, rejecting the world with all its beauty and pleasure. 

This was not Oakeshott’s approach. His fundamental question, as formulated by Fuller, is whether we are “irreligious if we continue to take life in the world seriously.” And his answer is no. A person may continue to live in the world, loving it for what it offers, without being “of” the world. The difference between religion and worldliness is a difference in “scales of value” or, in keeping with what we have already observed, in kinds of self-understanding. The worldly man invests himself in a career and a contribution to something larger than himself; he is relentlessly future-focused in his search for “material prosperity, awards, memorials, descendants—immortality through our works,” writes Fuller. The gains here are clear enough; but the sacrifice is the life itself lived in the present.

In contrast, the “religious man” lives without regret for the past or anxiety about the future. He cultivates insight and sensibility, not the “external achievement of the reputation behind which [he] may have been able to hide [his] lack of actual insight,” observes Oakeshott. Such a life takes courage and a significant measure of self-assurance (and maybe faith?), because its rewards are not honor, money and approbation from others. But it is, for Oakeshott, an infinitely more satisfying life. As “we pursue the intimations of experience,” writes Fuller, “with more or less imaginative insight, and we live, more or less attentively, toward the mysterious fullness of experience” we thereby “live more or less ‘religiously.’” As Fuller understands it, Oakeshott has reinterpreted Augustine’s two cities as “alternative self-understandings within a single world of experience.”

Now some will say this is a far cry from traditional Christianity, and perhaps it is. But I also think it does not preclude a more traditional Christian faith. In other words, one can accept all Oakeshott says, and even live according to it, while also remaining open to the possibility that much more is going on around us than we can see, touch, or apprehend. I have often thought that Oakeshott’s skepticism about human power and knowledge makes room for the possibility of religious faith. Perhaps his claim that the self is the most “permanent and stable thing in life” quietly presupposes the immortality of the soul. And even if religious creeds and doctrines stand as abridgments of experience, as Oakeshott might have said, we still must work to penetrate to the truths that they embody and the essential experiences that caused them to be written in the first place. 

Conclusion

Timothy Fuller’s essays in this book are the culmination of a life of reflection, a life constituted by teaching and learning over the better part of a century. Now in his mid-eighties, Fuller still teaches a full load of courses at Colorado College, and what he has said of Oakeshott might also be said of him: “I have not personally known anyone who could feel the beauty of youth more intensely, even at the end of his days, than Michael. The sense of his being alive to the possibilities of existence was with him even to the end, and it was the secret of his effect on students.” Fuller himself talks to college students as if they were his equals, and he continues to inspire many to embark on their own intellectual pilgrimages.

The question that faces students of Oakeshott now, as it does those who are deeply influenced by any other great thinker, is how we ought to appropriate that thinker’s insights for our own time. The danger—or the banality—lies in simply repeating what someone has said or turning a person’s work into endless fodder for scholarly papers and nitpicky arguments about interpretation. Certainly there is a place for careful scholarly investigation. But with a thinker like Oakeshott we have passed far beyond the “merely” academic into questions of how we ought to live. 

More than thirty years have now passed since Oakeshott’s death, and the revolutions that had begun in his own lifetime—in morals, customs, technology, academia, and government—have continued unabated. What does his life of reflection convey to us, now? What should we think and do? As Fuller has expressed the predicament: “In our moment, the responsibility is ours. It is not likely to be the final moment, and in any case, we cannot act as if it were. We do not and cannot know that. Nor can we unmake the inheritance we have. History cannot be taken back. Thus we must go on.” Anyone who has been deeply influenced by Oakeshott is likely to take from him equanimity, an appreciation of intrinsic goods, skepticism about the promises of politics, the desire for a significant intellectual life, and a disposition to value the most human things, like conversation, friendship, and love. Such things offer a most adequate way of going on.