Religious and Poetic Experience in the Thought of Michael Oakeshott
by Bob Cheeks | View comments |
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In his recent book, Dr. Glenn Worthington characterizes Michael Oakeshott’s work as a re-telling of the myth of original sin, a caution against the folly of pride, and a contribution to the collective dream.
Religious and Poetic Experience in the Thought of Michael Oakeshott
By Glenn Worthington
Published by Imprint Academic, 2005
Exeter, U.K., Charlottesville, Va.
Hdbk, 179 pgs., bibliography, index
A CONVERSATION FOR THE HEART: THE SEARCH FOR GOD!
Michael Oakeshott is a challenging philosopher to read and to understand; consequently those of us who enjoy Oakeshott are ever so grateful that the British publishing house, Imprint Academic, has seen fit to publish a series of books, British Idealist Studies, wherein the very first series is dedicated to Dr. Oakeshott. These studies, then, are executed by highly qualified and skilled exegetes, who provide illumination into Dr. Oakeshott’s work.
The book in review, Religious and Poetic Experience in the Thought of Michael Oakeshott, by Dr. Glenn Worthington, is a close examination, in Oakeshottian terms, of “what it is to live well.” Specifically, Worthington applies C.S. Lewis’s definition of morality as his guide, to wit:
Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonizing the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of life as a whole: what man was made for.
Dr. Worthington clearly elucidates his purpose, his explication of Oakeshott’s examination of the morality of human beings, by declaring,
The following exercise, then, consists in an effort to identify Oakeshott’s characterization of conduct in terms of each of the three aspects of morality outlined by Lewis and it does so by attending to his writings on religious and poetic experience together with the better known of his tracts on moral association and political activity.
The book is well ordered and systematic, following an outline consisting of four chapters that consider Oakeshott’s first principles of metaphysics (experience), religious experience, poetic experience, and moral association. The author is kind enough to warn the reader that it is of paramount importance to grasp the significance of Oakeshott’s description of experience in “terms of absolute and abstract formations” because of the meaning of their application in terms of “eternity and infinity and their relation to the temporal and finite.”
Dr. Worthington insists that Oakeshott’s writings “are silent on questions of the existence and character of super-human powers or the relation of God to his creation;” however, as Professor Elizabeth Campbell-Corey pointed out in her book, Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics, “The question this (the lack of hope) raises is whether there is some equivalent of the Christian idea of transcendent fulfillment in Oakeshott’s thought. Sometimes he seems to hint at such a condition, most notably when he observes that poetry offers a certain kind of permanence and ‘rest.’” Professor Corey also coins the term “presentness” as a dialectical referent to Oakeshott’s definition of the “practical mode,” the constant conceptualization of the future. She considers this dichotomy between the practical mode and “presentness” a significant Oakeshottian insight since the condition of presentness implies the opportunity to examine the proposition “that man does not exist out of himself but out of the divine ground of all reality.”
Another offering related to the question of human “experience” is found in the Winter, 2006 issue of Modern Age, in an article by Professor Robert McMahon titled, "Augustine’s Confession and Voegelin’s Philosophy." Here Professor McMahon argues that the literal translation of an element of the first chapter of Augustine’s Confession, “because thou has made us toward thyself and our heart is restless until it rests in thee,” describes Augustine’s intrinsic understanding of human nature, i.e. the phrase “implies an innate inclination in human nature: by our very nature we are drawn toward God.”
Professor Corey describes this “restlessness,” a primary consideration of both Oakeshott and Augustine, as “the frustration and lack of completeness that people are likely to feel as they go about their daily lives.” It should be noted that Professor McMahon goes on to expand his thesis, writing that, “The divine presence, however, constitutes the human being as such, as the creature made 'toward (God’s) image,' and thereby enables human experiencing in the first place.”
Thus, Worthington, Corey, and McMahon are commenting on an interesting problem addressed by Voegelin, Oakeshott, and St. Augustine: the question of “restlessness” within the “experience” of the structure of being. While Augustine and Voegelin point toward the divine ground (God), Oakeshott does not move beyond the immanent, the structure of being in world-reality. Dr. Worthington’s response is:
That Oakeshott was concerned with understanding experience in its own terms and not as a product of some super-human force does little to disqualify consideration of his account of religious experience. Experience in its religious idiom remains for him human experience.
While Dr. Worthington's book accurately explicates Oakeshott’s thoughts, it does not satisfy! Why would a great mind, such as Oakeshott’s, refuse to examine the tapestry of eternity? Perhaps, the answer lies in his youth and the influence of the British Idealists who were “challenging the empiricist philosophy and utilitarianism which had until then been the dominating voice in British philosophical life,” or perhaps in some personal experience. Worthington’s exposition of the Oakeshottian concept of salvation is examined with the eradication of man’s inherent tension toward the divine ground, arguing that Oakeshott “put to one side” the question of a divine being and his relationship to man and addressed the question from the perspective of “a self to live its life as if eternity were at stake.”
Oakeshott’s interests lie, then, in the apparently utilitarian concept of religion and the application of its principles to the conduct of self within community. However, there rises a certain ambiguity that may be the result of the philosophical “illumination” that irrupted in Professor Oakeshott when he wrote in his essay "Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life," “In religion we achieve goodness, not by becoming better, but by losing ourselves in God.” Is it possible that Oakeshott confuses the generic “religion,” a system of belief and practice designed by man to please (the) god(s), with Christianity, expressed as the salvific relationship between self and God through the atonement of Jesus Christ.
Thus, Christianity fulfills the requirement of “completion” within the world of conduct, defined by the Oakeshottian desideratum, by offering a relationship that enables the self to participate in the perfection of man established by the perfect sacrifice of Christ at testament to the love of God. “Be ye therefore perfect,” Christ says in Matthew 5:48, “even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”
The author differentiates the concepts of a “worldly” system and a “religious” system of value, within his explication of the “individual” and the “anti-individual,” concluding that Oakeshott preferred the religious system of value because, “A religious system of value gives a more concrete account of the life of a self than a worldly system of value by providing a more certain referent for a self seeking salvation in life.”
Dr. Worthington also explicates a number of brilliant Oakeshtottian insights: authority and desirability as principles of association and in civil association; the politics of faith and skepticism whereby the “politics of faith” (i.e. faith in the state) in extremis inevitably leads to the prohibition of the question, the breakdown of the order of being, and the rise of Gnostic man. The author’s chapter on the Poetic Experience is erudite and enriched by an incisive examination of Oakeshott’s disquisition on Hobbes’s Leviathan, arguing that Oakeshott’s interpretation of the classic called to our attention that Hobbes had “recast the myth (of original sin) in terms that it endured as a . . . 'passage in the common dream.'”
In his conclusion Dr. Worthington addresses the contemporary intellectual placement of Oakeshott’s corpus referenced by his “characterizations of religion and poetry,” while declaring that these considerations combined with Oakeshott’s “characterizations of the terms of moral association” provide for the reader a “fuller appreciation of his account of the good life” referenced against C.S. Lewis’s definitions. He alerts us to the idea that the Oakeshottian “individual” and “anti-individual” are not located on the “periphery of his work;” rather, “the modes of association now occur as one among a number of defining features that each of these characters imply about the character of conduct.”
He concludes with a succinct appreciation of the English Don, “Oakeshott’s work is itself a re-telling of the myth of original sin,” Dr. Worthington writes, “and a caution against the folly of pride — it is a contribution to the collective dream.” Indeed, and while we may sense a lack of completeness in the structure of being of Oakeshott’s “religious” man, it may well be that philosophy, religion, aesthetics, etc.; as well as the concatenation of experiences that provide a noetic and pneumatic existence in reality, unique to the self as he dwells in the tension between the immanent world-reality and the divine ground, are not apperceived in the immanent but rather within the “heart” of the concrete human being.
Religious and Poetic Experience in the Thought of Michael Oakeshott is available on Amazon.com.
robertcheeks@core.com
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