Oakeshott’s Idealist Conception of Historical Experience
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Wednesday 11 December 2024 is the 123rd anniversary of the birth of Michael Oakeshott (11 December 1901–19 December 1990), who was born in London on this date in 1901.
Oakeshott is primarily remembered as a political philosopher, but his first book, Experience and Its Modes (1933), doesn’t prima facie appear to be about politics, and it explicitly engages with some of the problems of philosophy of history. What is a mode of experience?
“…experience is a single whole, within which modifications may be distinguished, but which admits of no final or absolute division; and that experience everywhere, not merely is inseparable from thought, but is itself a form of thought.”
He goes on to say that it’s fine to analyze experience, but the abstractions we obtain through analysis are not the same as experience. Also, these abstractions only give us a fragmentary view of the world, and there is a natural response to re-integrate these abstractions into a coherent whole. This is my gloss on Oakeshott and not how himself Oakeshott explains it. One of the problems of avoiding long quotations, which is something I’ve been trying to do, is that the avoidance of quotation means a lot more paraphrase, and paraphrase is effectively a filter that tells you more about how I interpret Oakeshott than what Oakeshott himself said. But if you wanted to know what Oakeshott himself said, you’d read his books and papers, so in lieu of that I am communicating to you some small fragmant of Oakeshott, and trying to make it stand on its own as a coherent statement. This is, as I understand it, what Oakeshott took to be a mode of experience. So my presentation of Oakeshott’s ideas is a mode of experiencing Oakeshott, and it’s not the same thing as a direct experience of Oakeshott. Now that I’ve made that point, here’s another quote:
“In experience there is the alternative of pressing forward towards the perfectly coherent world of concrete ideas or of turning aside from the main current in order to construct and explore a restricted world of abstract ideas. The full obligations of the character of experience are avoided when (as so often) the attempt to define, the attempt to see clearly and as a whole, is surrendered for the abstract satisfaction of designation.”
So what I am attempting here is the abstract satisfaction of designating Oakeshott. Part III of Experience and Its Modes explicitly takes up historical experience, so that we find philosophy of history in Oakeshott’s first book. At the beginning of Part III he explains his intention in taking up the problem of historical experience:
“My intention… is to consider the character of history in order to determine whether it be experience itself in its concrete totality or an arrest in experience, an abstract mode of experience; and further, to determine the general character of the relationship between history as a world of experience and other worlds of experience.”
In the next paragraph he partially answers his own question by further elaborating his theoretical intention:
“…while my plan is to consider the truth of history, the validity of history as a world of experience, the historian is engaged in the attempt to establish truth or coherence in the world of history itself. And it will be said that, whatever else there is in favour of such a discussion, it cannot be contended that it will give us an adequate view of history.”
Oakeshott’s interest, then, isn’t in the concrete totality of experience, but in some arrested fragment drawn from the concrete totality. Oakeshott is setting up world history as though it were a self-contained universe, and he openly says that this isn’t about giving an adequate view of history. His aim is to give an account of history as a mode of experience. As it turns out, history seems to be especially suited to give an exposition of a mode of thought that draws from the concrete totality of experience but has its own method of re-constituting a totality:
“What is given in history, what is original from the standpoint of logic is a system of postulates. But secondly, the mind of the historian, even where it is free from mere prejudice and preconception about the course of events (even where it is free from the most crippling of all assumptions in history, that the past is like the present), contains not only a system of postulates, but also a general view of the course of events, an hypothesis, governed by these postulates. No historian ever began with a blank consciousness, an isolated idea or a genuinely universal doubt, for none of these is a possible state of mind, He begins always with a system of postulates (largely unexamined) which define the limits of his thought, and with a specific view of the course of events, a view consonant with his postulates.”
And further along he emphasizes that, “…the work of the historian consists in the transformation of this world as a whole, in the pursuit of coherence.” We find again, as we have seen in other philosophers of history who have fallen under the spell of idealism, a willingness to conflate res gestae with historia rerum gestarum, or past actuality with the record of past actuality:
“…history is experience, and not a course of events independent of experience. There is, indeed, no course of events independent of experience. History is not the correspondence of an idea with an event, for there is no event which is not an idea.”
This is entirely consistent with idealism, as most idealist philosophers employ some variation of the coherence theory of truth, according to which truth is how well a given proposition coheres with accepted propositions, while most naturalistic philosophers employ some variation of the correspondence theory of truth, in which truth is correspondence to fact. This isn’t all that different from what we saw in the previous episode on Johan Huizinga, who argued that history synthesizes a multiplicity of forms, but history itself is also a form. For Oakeshott, history is a mode of experience, but we have nothing but experience, so history is merely a subdivision of our experience. In both there is a reflexivity such that history is self-referential. We can easily see how this is the case. It would be possible to write a history drawing exclusively from the historical mode of experience, never touching on what Huizinga called other forms of life. In fact, historians often do write histories that draw only on other histories as their primary source material and on nothing but histories, so history is a particularly good example of the kind of reflexivity noted, if only implicitly noted, by Oaskeshott and Huizinga. An historian is the exception who, in studying an age, actively enters into other modes of experience, non-historical modes of experience, such as art or food preparation or building traditions, and so on. However, historians often do draw on political and military modes of experience, since political history is the most familiar form of history, and is probably the source of the idea that history is a dull and dreary recitation of names, dates, and places. Other historians, reacting against this, have sought to draw more widely on modes of experience, and here again I can cite Huizinga, or, in the American tradition, Will and Ariel Durant, who began their story of civilization saying that they would address a wide range of human experiences, and I think they were mostly successful.
A couple of passages from Oakeshott’s posthumously published notes, in the posthumously published volume What is History? and Other Essays, give an interesting glimpse of the man at work. Of Plato he said:
“Books II–VII of the Republic may be regarded as a philosophy of history. But it is in no sense an ‘historical’ account. And for this reason all account of the reaction from without, which plays so great a part in actual societies, is omitted.”
Rare is the philosopher who claims to find a philosophy of history in Plato, but here we are with Oakeshott attributing a philosophy of history to Plato’s Republic, which we typically think of as a work of political philosophy. This is significant for Oakeshott, whose ouvre is primarily political philosophy, inviting us to find a philosophy of history in Oakeshott’s political philosophy, though he has already been more explicit about this than Plato. In another posthumous note, this time on Hegel, Oakeshott wrote:
“Hegel’s philosophy of history is great history, but often poor philosophy. Hegel had that purely historical-literary interest in his work as well as the philosophical, & sometimes it gets the upper hand.”
Both of these passages represent views somewhat out of the mainstream of philosophy, and so highlight Oakeshott’s independence of mind. I know of no other philosopher who thought that Hegel’s philosophy of history was better history than it was philosophy.
Oakeshott wrote two essays titled “The Philosophy of History,” one from 1928 and one from 1948. Oakeshott gives a sketch of his reading of Spengler in his 1928 “The Philosophy of History,” when, in the 20s, it was almost obligatory for philosophers of history to make some mention of Spengler, and then he comments as follows:
“In this view of things there seem to me to be three entirely false assumptions. First, there is no single fact of history the nature and meaning of which is or can be finally settled. And in consequence the material to build our general laws is wanting… Secondly, these laws are not in point of fact abstract and universal (like those of physics) because they are concerned with transitory, essentially non-recurrent events… And thirdly, this philosophy of history ignores the most fundamental characteristic of facts as viewed historically — their individuality. For history, events are not instances of a law, they are unique facts, happening at a particular time and in a particular place; and it is their uniqueness, the fact that these events never happened before and can never happen again, which is significant.”
Here, Oakeshott seems to be entirely on board with an idiographic conception of history, in which there are and can be no patterns or regularities, only unique particulars. If that were all there were to Oakeshott there wouldn’t be much new here, although his argumentation is interesting, since he supplements the conventional argument with the observation that history offers of nothing from which to construct general laws. But there is more.
Oakeshott follows through with an idealist conception of history more systematically than most philosophers of history. Not content merely to conflate past actuality with the record of past actuality, Oakeshott goes Karl Popper one better in denying the role of causality in history. Preston King in his 1981 paper Michael Oakeshott and historical particularism compared Oakeshott to Popper:
“Popper, then, asserts with Oakeshott that history involves ‘the appreciation of the unique.’ But, unlike Oakeshott, he does not repudiate what he calls ‘causal explanation’ in history.”
According to King, Oakeshott goes farther than Popper in repudiating causal explanation in history. In Three Essays on History (included in On History, and Other Essays; II Historical Events, section 7), Oakeshott gives his argument against “the claim that the significant relationship between historical events sought in an historical enquiry must be a causal relationship.” Oakeshott identifies two kinds of ways in which historians attempt causal explanation:
“There are two distinct versions of this contention. In the first an historical enquiry is said to be an engagement to explain reported bygone occurrences or situations by understanding them as examples of the operation of universal ‘laws’ or regularities which it is the task of the enquiry to ascertain and formulate… The second version of this claim is more circumspect: it has nothing to say about an ‘historical process’ or about ‘laws’ of historical change or development. It is an undertaking, first, to spell out exactly the logical structure of causal explanation; and secondly, to sustain the thesis that an historical enquiry, as an engagement to establish a past composed of significantly related antecedent and subsequent events, must be an enquiry of this kind.”
We can see, implicit in this distinction between two kinds of causal explanation, an earlier distinction that appears in Three Essays on History, in part I, “Present, Future and Past,” where Oakeshott distinguishes between “the notional grand total of all that has ever happened in the lives of human beings,” and, “a certain sort of enquiry into, and a certain sort of understanding of, some such passage of occurrences; the engagement and the conclusions of an historian.” This is the familiar distinction between past actuality and the record of past actuality that we have found in many philosophies of history, but Oakeshott seems to have adapted this familiar distinction to causal explanation.
In Three Essays on History art II, section 8, Oakeshott observes that “causal” has been used very loosely in history, meaning that his criticism of causal explanation does not necessarily apply to every historical claim of causal explanation, and then he goes on to identify comparison, correlation, and analogy as what is actually going on in history, rather than causal explanation. At the end of section II Oakeshott gives something of a summary to this argument, though it must be read in full to be appreciated:
“An historical event, then, has no necessary or essential character. It is a conflation of accessories which, here, have no exclusive characters but are the difference they made in a convergence of differences which compose a circumstantial historical identity. Such identities may differ in magnitude and in complexity, but they are alike in being the conclusions of enquiries and themselves answers to historical questions about the past which admit of no other kind of answer. An historical enquiry is not an explanatory exercise, nor is it a concern to solve a problem; it is an engagement to infer, to understand discursively and to imagine the character of an historical event. It begins in a present-past of survivals, and at each stage it is necessarily sustained only in terms of a reading of the circumstantial evidence it invokes. To seek the authentic utterance of a survival from the past, to anatomize a situation which has not survived, and to understand the character of an historical event which could not have survived, each are enquiries concerned to understand what has been somehow identified but the character of which is not yet understood. An historian is never in a position to look back from an already understood historical situation or event and to conclude what must have been its components or significant antecedents. And the conclusion of an historical enquiry cannot be confirmed or falsified by comparing it with the conclusions of any other kind of enquiry, and it cannot be tested against independent criteria of credibility — those of a current common sense or of a reading of so-called ‘human nature.’ As nothing here is necessary, so also nothing is impossible. Historical writings differ greatly in the perceptiveness they exhibit in the consideration of the circumstantial evidence they employ, in the quality of the imagination they display in the construction of an historical event, and in the idiosyncratic deviations of their authors from this engagement, but somewhere in every genuine historical enquiry there is an undertaking of this sort, and this is what constitutes it an historical enquiry.”
This is refreshingly distinct from the usual run of ideographic formulations of history, and it implies a refreshingly distinct formulation of the philosophy of history, as the discipline that would philosophically examine this distinctive conception of history. This comes from late in Oakeshott’s life, but we can see in his earlier writings that he was working toward a distinctive conception of history, and therefore a distinctive conception of philosophy of history.
In other areas of his thought, Oakeshott can be relative conventional. For example, in the other “Philosophy of History” essay, from twenty years later (1948), prepared for a broadcast talk, distinguishes three intellectual exercises that have all gone by “philosophy of history,” which are 1) “the study of the course of past events in an attempt to detect some general principle or principles which would make the whole thing hang together,” 2) “a study of… the problems and methods of historical research, with what may be called methodology,” and 3) an inquiry into “the nature and presuppositions of this enquiry called ‘history’. And the aim of the study is to reach some conclusions about the nature of historical truth and the validity of historical knowledge.”
We will recognize this tripartite distinction as a distinction among speculative philosophy of history, historiography, and analytical philosophy of history. We usually encounter a distinction only between speculative and analytical philosophy of history, but there is a more philosophical form of historiography that could also count as a form of philosophy of history. It is worth noting that Oakeshott can take familiar and conventional ideas and transform them into something unexpected, as we saw above in his use of the distinction between past actuality and the record of past actuality. Thus Oakeshott could similarly make creative use — or someone working from Oakeshott’s philosophical template could make creative use — of this familiar distinction between speculative and analytical philosophy of history. Oakeshott’s idiographic conception of history may not be conventional in every way, but it’s conventional in the sense that it is a well-established position in the philosophy of history, and Oakeshott only makes it interesting by pushing it further than others have.
I could call this a non-cognitive philosophy of history, since Oakeshott has effectively forbidden us any way of understanding history through the exclusion of general concepts and the denial of causality in history, but this isn’t quite right. Experience and its Modes lays out Oakeshott’s way of understanding history, and his careful breakdown of the various enterprises that have been called philosophy of history implies a willingness to engage in an analysis of the problem. A truly non-cognitive philosophy of history wouldn’t take the trouble to erect this elaborate conceptual framework for the analysis of history. Analysis implies some degree of cognition of the object of analysis.
I could say instead that Oakeshott is a more consistent idealist in the philosophy of history than was Collingwood, and it’s intrinsically interesting that Oakeshott pursues his idealist reasoning about history as far as he does without getting entrapped in an Hegelian position. This is as surprising in its own way as the Annales school historians not throwing in with the Marxists and historical materialism. We have to reckon with the fact that, despite England’s tradition of empiricist philosophy, both Oakeshott and Collingwood, who made philosophy of history respectable in the English speaking world, were both idealists, and they gave an idealist impetus to Anglophone philosophy of history that often goes unremarked and unrecognized.
Finally, I could say that Oakeshott, like all idealist philosophers, gives us a non-naturalistic philosophy of history. Oakeshott’s non-naturalism is something like Husserl’s non-naturalism, since it doesn’t present itself as we might expect of non-naturalism to present itself. I tend to get non-naturalistic philosophies wrong because I’ve thought myself so deeply into naturalistic presuppositions that it’s difficult to appreciate the non-naturalistic view as it was intended. I have this same difficulty in reading Husserl, when I have to engage in my own suspension of judgment and bracketing my assumptions to try and enter into his presuppositions to the point that they begin to make sense on their own terms.
Since Oakeshott learned his philosophy in England, his idealism and his non-naturalism have a very different flavor from those more orientated to continental thought, and that was as true a hundred years ago as it is true today. Significantly, Oakeshott attended J. M. E. McTaggart’s lectures at Cambridge, and McTaggart was one of the great British idealists, as I discussed in my episode on McTaggart. McTaggart must have left a deep impression on Oakeshott, since Oakeshott retained these idealist modes of thought throughout his life. There is even a sense in which I could say that Oakeshott’s philosophy of history was the philosophy of history that McTaggart never wrote, and so with Oakeshott we have a distinctively British idealist philosophy of history. Oakeshott’s argumentative framework is more subtle than McTaggart, and from this we get a subtle but pervasively idealist conception of history.
