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Michael Oakeshott rejected the philosophical dominance of scientism and called for a complete understanding of human nature, in all its complexity, by an examination of imaginative qualities of the human mind. A review of Roy Tseng's book, The Sceptical Idealist.Â

By Dr. Roy Tseng
Imprint Academic
London, UK
Hdbk, 302 pgs., Bibliography, Author index, Subject index
ISBN: 0-907845-22-3

THE PRIVILEGE OF ABSURDITY; TO WHICH NO LIVING CREATURE IS SUBJECT BUT MAN ONLY.
– Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

Arguably Michael Oakeshott was the most significant philosopher of the twentieth century and perhaps the past two hundred years. For too long he labored in the ivy covered castle of academia, unknown to the public, though his work and ideas were often discussed and critiqued among contemporary philosophers. Today, however, his books, criticisms of his philosophy, and biographies of his life have either been published or are in the pipeline. Michael Oakeshott has become something of a cottage industry.

Perhaps, the reason for Oakeshott’s newfound popularity lies in the fact that his philosophical pronouncements lay well within the realm of commonsense and are discernable and applicable to everyday, practical, life. Also, Oakeshott authority and fellow academician, Noel O’Sullivan of the University of Hull (U.K.), points out in his essay, Why Read Oakeshott?, that this philosopher has a singularly different perspective than “his contemporaries such as Heidegger, Sarte, Camus, and Beckett,” in that he eschews the raging nihilism that has consumed the declining years of “The Age of the Bourgeoisie.” O’Sullivan points out that Oakeshott was determinedly modest, both in his life and work, and “he was almost unique in achieving a fundamentally positive and affirmative outlook.”

Among a plethora of books on Oakeshott’s philosophy, the most thorough and efficacious I’ve read, in examining, reviewing, and critiquing Oakeshott’s work is Dr. Roy Tseng’s book, The Sceptical Idealist: Michael Oakeshott as a Critic of the Enlightenment. The leitmotif of Tseng’s work is Oakeshott’s criticism of the Enlightenment project. Accordingly, Dr. Tseng applies a distinct exegetical prowess in reviewing the philosophical pronouncements of Enlightenment notables: John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and the Utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill; his primary emphasis being on foundationalism in philosophy, formalism in ethics, and naturalism in historiography. Anyone reading Chapter II, "The Enlightenment Positions," will find a skillfully rendered overview of Locke’s Natural Right Theory, Kant’s The Categorical Imperative, and John Stuart Mill’s The Utilitarian Principle that is easily understood, even by this layman.

Tseng’s position is that the Enlightenment succeeded in placing scientism at the core of modern rationalism, defined as objective thinking, while ignoring “traditions and institutions.” Descartes, Liebniz, and Spinoza typify the rationalistic principle that philosophy was “the formulation of an orderly system of objective knowledge by means of mathematical deductions.” Liebniz elucidated his belief in the triumph of scientism in his Principle of Sufficient Reason; “There cannot be any true or existent fact, and any true proposition, without there being a sufficient reason why it should be so and not otherwise.” Truth, then, for these philosophers, was the product of “objective description of the world, indifferent to the particular experience of any observer.”

The author reviews Kant’s “unification of Human Reason” via the juxtaposition of Scientific Reason (a pure knowledge of things) with Practical Reason (the moral law within), offering a number of substantive observations. Dr. Tseng also illustrates that modern natural philosophy is an “integral philosophical system” comprised of scientific certainty (the infallibility of scientism), a foundationalist theory of knowing (the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity), and the superiority of Universal Reason (the inherent dominance of Scientific Reason to “art, politics, morality, and history in the sense that it is the guarantor of their validity and the guidance of their practices.”).

By applying the principles Oakeshott defined in his major works (Experience and Its Modes, 1936, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, 1962, On Human Conduct, 1975, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Sceptism, 1996), Tseng describes Oakeshott’s criticism of the Enlightenment position that there exists an Absolute Knowledge. Human experience, the foundation of knowledge, for Oakeshott is conditional, predicated on the “modes” of experience that are particular and vary according to the individual (i.e. scientific, historical, or practical).

The failure of the Enlightenment then was its “obsession” with the accumulation of observable data (the dominance of scientism) and the near complete rejection of the intellects’ imaginative capabilities. We all bear witness today of the results: an accumulation of material wealth, the massive reduction of labor in favor of electro-mechanical devices juxtaposed against a moral and ethical breakdown that has produced a dramatic increase in psychological maladies, eroded civility, and threatens civilization. For Oakeshott, imagination in historical inquiry offered a substantive replacement to modern philosophy (and all its pretensions) in determining a “way of life” that is intrinsically human and humane.

For the sake of brevity and Dr. Tseng’s mastery of the subject material, I’ve mentioned only a few of the Enlightenment positions he explains. Tseng’s review of the Enlightenment Project, alone, is worth the price of the book!

Chapter III, "Philosophy and Modes of Experience," begins his exegetical examination of Michael Oakeshott’s Experience and Its Modes (1933) by “deciphering” it with reference to “rationalism, empiricism, and the Kantian 'thing-in-itself.'" For Oakeshott, “modality (the modes of experience) is human experience recognized as a variety of independent, self-consistent worlds of discourse, each the invention of human intelligence, but each also to be understood as abstract and an arrest of human experience.” Thus, human experience, knowledge, is conditional, and constantly changing, and perceived from different (and infinite) individual modes of experience. Oakeshott has revealed the flaw in the essential element of Enlightenment thought, i.e. the notion of “Universal Reason,” and, in so doing, has reduced Rationalism to the mutterings of philosophers tied to a flawed system that not only rejected God but also eliminated humanity’s ability to engage His mystery.Â

For Oakeshott philosophy was not a “master discipline” and did not stand as a “tribunal of pure reason that judges others, according to the Kantian tradition.” Indeed, Oakeshott wrote, “We should listen to philosophers only when they talk philosophy.” Thus, Oakeshott’s philosophy is established on the grounds of skepticism. Dr. Tseng writes, “…Oakeshott basically argues the case for skepticism on two grounds: One is the rejection of Universal Reason and the consequent claim for the diversity of human reasons; another is the notion of concrete whole as the given in thought which teaches that every abstract mode of understanding must speak from a certain point of view about the world but none is complete, and thus knowing is ‘an engagement to abate mystery rather than to achieve definitive understanding.’”

Michael Oakeshott observed that modern philosophy had devolved into a crisis of ethics predicated on the dominance of Rationalism — “the sovereignty of technique and certainty over human conduct.” And Rationalism spawned a “politics of faith” which is, interestingly enough, the opposite of a traditional religious faith; rather, it is a secular religious faith predicated on the notion that governing can be perfectible and unlimited in scope given the knowledge “of what the common good is.”

Dr. Tseng’s overview of Michael Oakeshott’s work is definitive and brilliantly rendered. He brings to the fore Oakeshott’s skepticism of the Enlightenment project and in so doing details the crisis of modern philosophy and provides the reader with a deeper and more meaningful understanding of modernity’s precipitous decline. He also discusses at length Oakeshott’s substantive reply to this crisis in his appeal for a re-examination of “traditional knowledge, conversation, intimation, the politics of skepticism, and civil association.”

Oakeshott rejects the philosophical dominance of scientism and calls for a complete understanding of human nature, in all its complexity, by an examination of imaginative qualities of the human mind – qualities often excluded from philosophical discourse. But, in accepting Oakeshott’s challenge modern philosophy opens the door to mystery where atheists and agnostics alike will rub up against God Himself.

The Sceptical Idealist is available on Amazon.com.