ANOTHER VOICE

The sea-captain who threw his coat into the stormy sea and said, 'Take that!'

CHARLES MOORE

Sometimes the lack of recognition of a great mind or a great spirit fills one with anger. How could people have ignored Blake or rejected Hopkins? Why were the lives of so many geniuses blighted by failure while the wicked flourished like the green bay tree? But there are some spirits whose lack of recognition is almost pleasing to them, almost expressive of their way of thinking about the world, people without the post-romantic egotism which is so often mistaken for artistic inspiration.

Michael Oakeshott was not a failure — he pursued a successful academic career — but he was never famous, never honoured, never publicly recognised for what it is rea- sonable to think he was — the greatest political philosopher writing in English since the 18th century. When he died, just before Christmas, his funeral in Dorset was attended by a few dozen friends. He would, as is so often (and often untruthfully) said of the dead, have wanted it that way. When Sartre died, thousands thronged the streets of Paris to mourn the old charlatan. He would have wanted it that way.

So I hope I am not being unOakeshottian in feeling that The Spectator, at least, should take some notice of his death which, because of the deadline of the Christmas double issue, it could not mark at the time.

The human mind seems in most individu- als to display the vices of its virtues. A mind capable of conceiving a grand philosophic system, with all the energy, determination and architectural power that that requires, tends to be charmless, harsh, even inhu- man. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in its philosophy. The mind capable of nuance, wit, 'negative capability' tends to be too idle or fey or slight, too prone to dreaming to be capable of constructing a philosophy at all. In Oakeshott, the two married. He was sinewy enough to be a philosopher, and imagina- tive enough to make his philosophy poetic.

'An "intellectual", he wrote, 'is a person who is governed by a false conception of the relation between ... explanation and action, explaining and doing. His forte is explanation, and on the strength of this he claims to be the custodian of morality.'

And he also wrote: 'To be a poet is to be lost in wonder.' He lived in the light of these beliefs. In conversation, it was easy to prompt him into expressions of regret for good things lost, and possible to draw him into amused deprecation of the attitudes of

others, but it was impossible to get him to condemn individuals or to hold forth about what was right in the world. If one expressed some sweeping view (as I all too frequently did), saying 'I think this or that . . .', Michael would only say, 'Do you, do you, do you?' and the reproach would, in retrospect, seem all the greater because it was undesigned.

Oakeshott was what he meant by a dreamer: The dreamers are those who let the world form itself around them, en- chanted with whatever appears. They have no problems, they live in a world of hap- penings. Those who imagine the world dif- ferent from what it is and who try to impose their imaginings upon the world as it is — are those we call dreamers. But they are not, they are incapable of dreaming.'

All the quotations above and those which follow I heard for the first time at the Memorial Meeting which the London School of Economics held for its former professor (despite inexplicable resistance by some in Gonville and Caius, the college of which Oakeshott was a fellow, there will be a memorial service there as well). They come from unpublished notebooks which Oakeshott began as an undergraduate and continued irregularly throughout his life. Here he is on politics: 'The most successful politicians are those who do not pretend to be serious: no undertaker is a success in a music hall.'

'The real grievances of mankind are incurable; politics consists in manufactur- ing curable grievances.'

And here on achievement:

'Achievement' is the 'diabolical' element in human life; and the symbol of our vulgarisa- tion of human life is our near exclusive con- cern with achievement. Not scientific think- ing, but the 'gifts' of 'science': the motor car, the telephone, radar, getting to the moon, anti-biotics, penicillin, telstar, the bomb. Whereas the only human value lies in the adventure and the excitement of discovery. Not standing on the top of Everest, but get- ting there. Not the 'conquests' but the bat- tles; not the 'victory' but the 'play'. It is our non-recognition of this, or our rejection of it, which makes our civilisation a non-religious civilisation. At least, non-Christian; Chris- tianity is the religion of 'non-achievement' This has to be combined with an under- standing of art as non-achievement.'

But Michael could conceive of a laudable ambition: `To be a wonderful old lady of 95 and to have been the mistress of Robert E. Lee.' I am sure it helped his admiration for Lee (and the mistress) that the Confeder- ates lost.

If anything made Michael Oakeshott angry (and it was much more likely to make him wrily amused) it was the desire to impose a false order on things, to put the world to rights, to dehumanise. He noted the thoughts of an eminent psychiatrist:

• The observation of species so close to our own throws serious doubts as to whether the way we rear our infants in the West is the best possible. Contact between mother and infant is vital for security in monkeys and apes; yet we are content to let our infants lie out in prams for large portions of their early lives.

Oakeshott comments only; 'What rot. .. . We're not apes but good Christians.' (Which, by the way, he was not. One of his former pupils told me that in his Christiani- ty he seemed he was like one of those mad- dening students who does no work at all for the final exam, and then gets a first.)

Everything that he thought was an attempt to understand, and his means of understanding was love. He did not sloppily say that there was no morality, but because all people are in the same boat (he liked the metaphor of the boat), there was a great danger in moral condemnation:

Some people talk as if they thought desirable a world without nostalgia, ennui, indolence, a world of normal people, a world without frus- trations, a world of 'virtue without vice'. But this is both impossible and undesirable. We should acknowledge our debt to the 'vicious': they suffer, we benefit. Only an army is better without vice because (unlike 'life') it has a function to perform — victory.

You could only be happy in the world, Oakeshott believed, if you knew that you were lost in it: The world being what it is, we must know what to give up to it in order to keep it quiet — the sea-captain who threw his coat into the stormy sea and said, "Take that!"' A year ago, Michael Oakeshott showed all his notebooks to his literary executor at his cottage in Dorset. She intended to pub- lish them after his death. When she visited the house at the time of the funeral, she found that all those written in the last 20 years had vanished (the quotations above are from the 1960s and earlier). Michael Oakeshott was modest, as I say, but even he would not have wanted that. For the world which he loved and has now left, the loss is enormous.