A Companion to Michael Oakeshott

Chapter 6: The Religious Sensibility of Michael Oakeshott

6 the religious sensibility of michael oakeshott Elizabeth Corey I have often thought that one of the best introductions to the philosophy of Michael Oakeshott is a children’s book by Arnold Lobel. Grasshopper on the Road describes the journey of a remarkably even-tempered grasshopper who meets various other insects on his way down a pleasant country lane. Each of these insects displays some modern pathology. Grasshopper first encounters the members of the “I Love Morning” club, who raise placards extolling the virtues of morning while shouting such slogans as “Morning Is Best” and “Hooray for Morning.” Grasshopper is welcomed into the club when he reveals that he, too, loves morning. But when he remarks that he also loves afternoon and evening, the other insects turn on him in disgust and order him out of their ranks. A bit later, he meets “The Sweeper,” a housefly who has noticed a speck of dust on her rug. Her effort to sweep it away has made her aware of the dust that has collected on the floor next to the rug, and also on her front stoop and sidewalk. She realizes, in despair, that there is also a great deal of dust on the road in front of her house. It is here, as she attempts to sweep clean a gravel road, that she meets Grasshopper. The book is full of subtle political commentary of this sort. It playfully lampoons the vanity of attempts to control the world, the desire of people to find purpose in life by joining a movement, and the general human inability to enjoy life as it happens . It is a wonderfully Oakeshottian book.1 Grasshopper is a poetic image, a book for children. But it serves as an emblem of Oakeshott’s thought in a number of ways, not least because of its curious mixture of moral admonition and poetic delight. Oakeshott’s writing displays both of these qualities. On the one hand he warned against political ideology and moral dogmatism in his more polemical essays such as “Rationalism in Politics.” On the other hand he often employed religious and poetic images to point toward an alternate mode of existence in the world. In such the religious sensibility of michael oakeshott 135 images Oakeshott evokes a way of living that can at times escape the moral and practical concerns with which human beings are almost always preoccupied . This “religious” or “poetic” dimension of Oakeshott’s thought is fascinating to trace from his youth onward. Early on he explicitly called it the religious life, while later he tended to call it a poetic disposition. But however he labeled it, Oakeshott continually returned to this theme of an alternative way of orienting oneself in the world, and it stands at the center of his work. In other words, the two sides of Oakeshott’s writing, the practical/moral and the religious/poetic, are related in a certain way. His practical essays, which aimed always at placing some limits on our hopes and ambitions (especially in politics), can be understood as written in the service of a religious or poetic ideal. Oakeshott particularly wanted readers to see that politics is limited in the satisfactions it can offer, and he illuminated a range of experiences that proved more complete in themselves. In the paragraphs that follow, I consider a religious image that Oakeshott employed to illuminate the corruptions of modern political and social life: the myth of the Tower of Babel. I then turn to an examination of one of Oakeshott ’s central concepts, the mode of practice, and consider what Oakeshott thought were its possibilities as well as its unavoidable limits. For despite the fact that he thought much of importance might be achieved in the practical world, Oakeshott ultimately found it insufficient as a way of explaining the entirety of human experience. Thus I end with a discussion of his view of poetry, a view that seems to have permeated every aspect of his thought. It is a poetic view of life, a sensitivity to all that might fall under the aspect of the aesthetic, that Oakeshott saw as giving human experience both poignancy and meaning. the tower of babel As a young man Oakeshott was quite interested in religious questions, although this preoccupation seemed to recede over the course of his career. In a number of early essays, published posthumously as Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life, Oakeshott took up issues such as the relationship of religion...