A Companion to Michael Oakeshott

Chapter 7: Whatever It Turns Out To Be: Oakeshott on Aesthetic Experience

7 whatever it turns out to be: oakeshott on aesthetic experience Corey Abel Orbaneja, a fictional painter from a real town, is criticized by Don Quixote for painting so badly that he produces only “whatever emerges,” so that he must append a sign to his work. He paints a cockerel “so unlike a real cockerel that he had to write in capital letters by its side: ‘This is a cockerel.’” Cervantes uses the tale twice in the second part of Don Quixote, in which our hero confronts a literary representation of himself published almost simultaneously with his own adventures. Its representational accuracy concerns him, as does the disturbing possibility that his own “history” could be like Orbaneja’s painting, “needing a commentary to make it intelligible.”1 In “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” (1959), Oakeshott uses Orbaneja to introduce beauty, friendship, and the “delightful insanity” of childhood. In Don Quixote, the tale of Orbaneja introduces a discussion of the relation between poetry and history. When Oakeshott’s discussion turns to poetry in “The Voice of Poetry,” the first footnote in the section cites passages in Aristotle’s Poetics, differentiating poetry from “medicine or natural science” and from “history.”2 Orbaneja, the painter Oakeshott says all poets are like, allusively introduces us to Oakeshott’s themes—creativity and imitation , signs, beauty, love and friendship, childhood, Aristotle, the relation of poetry, science, and history. Commentators agree that “The Voice of Poetry” is important but disagree on whether Oakeshott wrote a theory of aesthetics. Most think “The Voice of Poetry” establishes poetry’s distinction from practice, as it does, forcefully.3 But in his remarks on childhood, friendship, and love, Oakeshott seems to rejoin poetry and practice. He also seems, in On Human Conduct, to rejoin poetry and practice in claiming that a religion’s dignity resides, in part, in the “poetic quality” of its images.4 152 the conversation of mankind There are some problems with this approach. First, the remarks in Experience and Its Modes about art and practice might not be the only foolish sentences . Second, most assume history is a voice, but in “The Voice of Poetry,” Oakeshott does not discuss history as a “voice.” This needs to be explained. Third, some deny that Oakeshott intended to contribute an aesthetic theory.5 Others call his effort “unsatisfactory.”6 It would be strange for Oakeshott to publish a lengthy essay as a book, titled as it is, if it was not on poetry. A count of pages, references, footnotes, and points made shows it to be undoubtedly about art. Those who find Oakeshott’s aesthetics unsatisfying criticize him for not doing what he never tried to do. The first and third problems are obviously related. Any “retractions” would have to relate to his aims in the essay. But the place of history is crucial. History’s quality as storytelling, its grounding on invention, and its abstract relationship to the past make it seem akin to poetry. Throughout the twentieth century there has been sustained interest in narrative , myth, and poetry on the part of thinkers such as Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, who were trying to understand meaning and truth in a way that might preserve humane values and challenge science’s dominance.7 The resultant critique of rationalism is quite different than Oakeshott’s. They insist that the one authentic voice of human experience is a blend of history, practice, and poetry. With the narrativists Oakeshott has what has been called a “hermeneutic” stance against scientism.8 Against the narrativists Oakeshott defends the integrity of science as a universal system of knowledge and of history as a disinterested inquiry.9 Aesthetic theories often seek criteria for good art. The tendency is to blend empirical description, psychological observation, and ethical counseling. But Oakeshott never tried to tell scientists or historians how to proceed. In aesthetics he is not trying to dictate norms, analyze the participants’ psychology, or describe the appearances but—as elsewhere—indicate the postulates of the experience.10 This is what he means by saying “neither the poet nor the critic of poetry will find very much to his purpose in what I have to say” (RP, 495). While avoiding legislating, he believed philosophy could expose false views, such as the view that science is constituted in a method of examining the real world. In aesthetics he disposes of “false beliefs” and expresses certainty that these beliefs must fail if his theory has merit (521...