Michael Oakeshott vs. Allan Bloom
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In his introduction to Oakeshott’s The Voice of Liberal Learning, Timothy Fuller elaborates upon MO’s symbol of education as a conversation:
The word ‘conversation’ evokes the manner of the ‘conversationalist,’ taken by Oakeshott as one who is the agent of a flow of sympathy, not the utterer of a truth. The conversationalist is neither a lawgiver nor a prophet, much less a revolutionary reformer choosing to live for a future age. At any rate, if an entrant to a place of learning is inclined to be any of these things, he should know enough to check his guns at the door.
Fuller writes that Oakeshott might agree with some of the critical observations on the state of higher education in Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. But there’s a world of difference between Bloom’s desire for reformist action and Oakeshott’s confidence that the practice of education itself gives us the means for educational regeneration:
There can be no doubt that Bloom’s call to construct a strategy for preserving our civilization rests on persuading us that we are encountering a unique moment of threat (and opportunity) in which it is clear what needs to be said. Oakeshott characteristically resists all apocalyptic formulations, seeing in them recipes for suspending conversationality in favor of a politicizing counterrevolution that will define education as the carrying on of war by other means.
If conversationality is the essence of liberal learning, anti-Left agitation against the universities is just as pernicious as left-wing agitation within them. What has to be cultivated is generosity of spirit and a distance from polemical concerns. You won’t get that from David Horowitz. Even many paleo-populists who turn their attention to the universities are really the children of Bloom. In the education wars, this country doesn’t have a Right, we have a Left and a counter-Left. That’s more or less true in politics as well.
“…anti-Left agitation against the universities is just as pernicious as left-wing agitation within them.” ‘Liberal learning’ in whatever form does not justify an explication by juxtaposing ‘anti-Left agitation’ with ‘left-wing agitation’. You have interposed a petitio principii. David Horowitz has done liberal learning a huge service by identifying boldly the non-liberal learning of the Left. His agitation is an antithesis to the thesis of a particular totalitarian knowledge base that denies conversationality, and hence denies liberal education. To hold up, therefore, that to oppose this aporia is ‘just as pernicious as left-wing agitation’ exposes not only a blind moral relativity, but a position that would welcome the anomie of the autocrat. Professor Fuller correctly identifies, it is respectfully submitted, conversation as Oakeshott’s foundation of liberal education, a pre-eminently Oakeshottian notion, and anathema, in truth, to the totalitarian Left.
[...] some thoughts on the differences between Oakeshott and Allan Bloom’s views of education in The American Conservative magazine [...]
Might we look to someone like Patrick Deneen as a rare model of generosity of spirit combined with a balanced view toward polemical concerns?
Good point, Casey — absolutely.
Mr. Laubscher’s post must be satire, right? From the misuse of ‘petitio principii’ to trotting out the tired old cliche of ‘moral relativity’, which is used whenever someone condemns some right wing sin, which condemnation depends precisely on morals NOT being relative, his comment reads like an ad for what is wrong with Horowitz et al.
It is strange to find Oakeshott intermingled with Horowitz in this way. Mr. McCarthy does not say, but lets Timothy Fuller say, that Oakeshott doesn’t agree with Bloom, since the latter is too political (2d block quote). Presumably the far more polemical Horowitz would also be too polemical for Oakeshott’s taste. The peculiar thing about Oakeshott is that he could at times make withering and harsh comments against opponents, but he never became a polemicist in the style of Horowitz (or many others). He tends not to identify his opponents by their political affiliation. For example, the last lines of “A Place of Learning” identify the problems to be faced as “the current aversion from seclusion, the now common belief that there are other and better ways to become human than by learning to do so, and … the impulsive longing to be given a doctrine or to be socialized according to a formula rather than to be initiated into a conversation.” Nothing there about the Left. He asks how a university might respond to all this, and his answer is “Not … by seeking excuses for what sometimes seem unavoidable surrenders, nor in any grand gesture of defiance, but,” — and this is the most telling of Oakeshotttian lines, in education and also in politics — “a quiet refusal to compromise which comes only in self-understanding. We must remember who we are: inhabitants of a place of learning.” Quiet refusal to compromise. Remembering who we are. Not seeking excuses.
Oakeshott, as I understand his position, was less inclined to advocate a particular content of a conversation than simply having one (a conversation). Thus form is not content (substance) if you like or esse not essentia, if that does not stretch the metaphor out of bounds. Thus to refer to right wing or left wing biases misses the point. And illuminates the difficulty of Mr Danger who conflates the content of a particular moral position (e.g. the misplaced confidence in the Left being right that is allegedly ‘non-relative’ and presumably a ‘right wing sin’ being wrong) with the process of arriving at what some may find morally acceptable, whether ‘relative’ or ‘non-relative’. That process is for Oakeshott liberal conversation, truly creative, not a closed attitude toward creativity wherever it may lead or to potential differences in kind which David Horowitz has tried to highlight in his identification of the closed mentality of those who blindly refuse to entertain even the expression of other views at our universities. Mr Danger may profitably consider HLA Hart’s incomprehension that understanding another’s position does not imply its acceptance, a point that escaped R Dworkin. Oakeshott would have agreed with Hart since liberal conversation is not limited by a preconceived position. As for the incorrect use of petitio principii, I respectfully beg to differ. I am of the view that ANY position is relational to ANY other. ‘Relative’ is possibly a poor term to express such relationality since there is no constant against which to compare either. By judging one position to be ‘just as pernicious’ as another is to make a judgment that begs the question as to why that is the case. It is in fact a nonsense. But I preferred the lesser charge of it committing a petitio principii.
Please read “incomprehension that understanding another’s position does not imply its acceptance” as “incomprehension that understanding another’s position implies its acceptance”. My apologies.
“…anti-Left agitation against the universities is just as pernicious as left-wing agitation within them.” ‘Liberal learning’ in whatever form does not justify an explication by juxtaposing ‘anti-Left agitation’ with ‘left-wing agitation’. You have interposed a petitio principii. David Horowitz has done liberal learning a huge service by identifying boldly the non-liberal learning of the Left. ”
However, when it comes to Horowitz, the ex-commie, eternal activist’s campus indoctrination of Israel Propaganda, along with a desire to supress any university criticism of Israel and Zionism is not doing “liberal learning a huge service .” And unmasks as well the whole neocon’s endeavor as something other than classically liberal.