POETRY AND THE VOICE OF MICHAEL OAKESHOTT

Transcription

1 POETRY AND THE VOICE OF MICHAEL OAKESHOTT Howard Davis THEORIES OF art proliferate; definitions of the meaning of art abound. In the pursuit of clarity and distinction it is worth considering what is at stake in these theories besides the views for themselves or for the tradition of aesthetics and criticism. Some views suggest ethical and political positions to which they have a justifying, extending or illuminating relationship, and to indicate these can be significant. This may be epistemologically controversial if, as elements in the theory of ideology suppose, the relationship is unconscious. However, some theories of art are related explicitly to broader ethical and political positions or implicitly through appropriate reference to the whole of a writer's work. Such links can usefully be made in analysing, for example, the attempt to create an authentically Socialist aesthetic. Michael Oakeshott's essay The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind can be seen in this light through its interrelations with his philosophical work and, significantly, with the ethical and political dimensions of what he calls 'the conservative disposition'. In terms of the history of philosophy Oakeshott has developed a specific position within a general Idealism, and from time to time his writings have generated considerable critical discussion. His views on art and aesthetics, however, have tended to receive only a passing reference. 1 Politics and Experience 2 is a festschrift devoted to Oakeshott, but apart from an essay by Donald Davie, 3 which is mainly concerned with two instances, it does not contain any full discussion of Oakeshott's view of the aesthetic experience and its relations with other forms. The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind has been published separately 4 and is also included in the volume Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. 5 The essay stands in its own right as an assertion of the autonomy of the aesthetic experience an assertion which can be situated within a tradition, of course. But Oakeshott is probably best known as a philosopher and a political theorist, and for this reason alone the special 59

2 POETRY AND THE VOICE OF MICHAEL OAKESHOTT significance of his view of art lies in its interrelation with a coherent philosophical, political and ethical argument. There are nine other papers in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays and they are concerned with a variety of political and ethical themes. It is interesting to note that Oakeshott himself'feels' a general relationship between them:... they seem to me to go together well enough to be put together And although they do not compose a settled doctrine, they disclose a consistent style or disposition of thought. 6 It must be noted that the view of art Oakeshott puts forward in The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind represents a complete shift from the position indicated in his major philosophical work Experience and Its Modes." 7 As Professor Greenleaf has shown, it is a change that can be traced through references in a number of Oakeshott's essays. 8 However, this shift is only of passing interest since Experience and Its Modes does not contain any fully worked out argument on the subject of art, and indeed the quotation from Rilke that he uses to reinforce his point is obscure. 9 In the book Oakeshott seems to suggest that art is no escape from Practical life, but rather its apotheosis. Just as the form of Practical life is characterized by desire and aversion, approval and disapproval, so too is art and with heightened or especially focused meaning. To escape adequately from the tedium of Practical life it is necessary self-consciously to enter alternative, internally coherent, Modes of Experience. Prime among these is Philosophy. 10 Science and History also offer such havens: In them we hope to find a more radical and complete escape from life than that which art, music and poetry can offer. For in these, in the end, we are wholly taken up with practical life. 11 The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind is in specific contradiction to this view of art. Oakeshott calls it a 'belated retraction' of the above 'foolish sentence'. 12 Early in The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind there is a summary of The Theory of Modes. This is the philosophical view fully developed by Oakeshott in Experience and Its Modes. In the later essay Oakeshott changes his terminology and expresses the relationship of subject and object in 'the real world' as an activity of'imagining' 'images'. But, as Professor Greenleaf has noted, this 'affects rather the way in which the epistemology is described than the essence of the doctrine'. 13 Oakeshott uses the term 'poetry' to express the activity of a particular form of imagining. This is 'contemplation': 60

3 HOWARD DAVIS I do not mean that poetic imagining is one species among others of contemplative imagining; I mean that the voice of contemplation is the voice of poetry and that it has no other utterance. 14 A work of art, then, is a particular, but as I shall suggest a significant instance of a poetic image. The image can be simple or it can be complex, but it remains an image of this certain kind and one for which there is an appropriate form of imagining. To repeat, it is an image in contemplation. But certain images scenes, shapes, poses, movements, etc. are more readily and more unmistakably recognised as poetic images because of the circumstances in which they appear: they positively provoke a contemplative attitude rather than any other because of their resistance to being read symbolically. Such images we call works of art.... A work of art is merely an image which is protected in an unusual degree from being read (that is: imagined) in an unpoetic manner, a protection it derives from its quality and from the circumstantial frame within which it appears. 15 This attitude towards art presupposes Oakeshott's general philosophy, his Theory of Modes. 'Mode' is an expression used by Oakeshott to describe the nature of experience. Experience, activity in the world, is the seeing of 'the whole' from a particular point of view. Experience, therefore, is always partial in this sense, it is always experience as a Mode. Each Mode is internally coherent and complete, and is absolutely distinguished from any other. Activity always occurs as a Mode, and the definition of the Mode describes the real limits of the experience or activity. The images are distinct, therefore, only in the appropriate Mode of imagining. The 'whole of experience' itself is the standpoint of the philosopher, and 'philosophy' is all it can be. 'Philosophy' is parasitic upon the Modes of experience and defines the limits of the Modes with regard to each other. Thus from the point of view of 'philosophy' each Mode appears as an 'arrest' or 'abstraction' in the 'whole of experience' at that point at which it is distinct from, cannot contain, each of the others. Oakeshott identifies four primary Modes of Experience: the Practical, the Scientific, the Historical, and the Contemplative. Each, in that it is defined in terms of its basic form, is distinct from the others. 16 Oakeshott's argument is more than formal, and particular qualities or characteristics are attributed to each of the Modes of Experience. Being concerned with Oakeshott's view of art, we are concerned with the Contemplative Mode of Experience. A work of art, as has been said, is an image in contemplation. The characteristics of contemplation, therefore, define Oakeshott's sense of the locus of the appropriate experience of art appropriate, that is, in the sense that works of art are images which 'positively provoke' a contemplative attitude. 61

4 POETRY AND THE VOICE OF MICHAEL OAKESHOTT In outlining the characteristics of contemplative activity it is necessary to distinguish, as does Oakeshott, his meaning of the word from its Platonic context. Contemplation does not refer to a perception through to 'Reality', nor to the Universal Forms of earthly representations. 17 For contemplative imagining the reality of the image, its status as 'fact' or 'not-fact', is irrelevant. An image in contemplation has no further purpose or point that would make such a distinction meaningful. Likewise to refer to art as the expression of the 'possible' or the 'probable', or to seek the general meaning of 'illusion' or 'fantasy' as the existential context of art, is to misunderstand the nature of a poetic image. One of Oakeshott's underlying purposes in The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind is to drive a wedge between the experience of art and, specifically, the nature of experience in the Practical Mode. Therefore, as an image in contemplation is not a means to an end, the criterion of 'usefulness' or 'uselessness' is quite simply inappropriate and it has no meaning. The same is true with regard to the other central characteristics of the Practical Mode of imagining a poetic image, a work of art, can be subject neither to desire or aversion, nor to approval or disapproval. Oakeshott goes further in this disassociation of art from the Practical Mode than any definition of 'realism', for instance, could allow. Any critical judgement as to 'truth' or 'falsehood' is, again, irrelevant. Oakeshott goes on: As I understand it, the poet is not saying anything about 'things' (that is, about images belonging to a world of discourse other than that of poetry). 18 For Oakeshott an image in contemplation is 'merely present': such images do not provoke speculation or enquiry into their causes or consequences. In the same sense it is a 'mere image'. It is its own purpose, and the totality of its significations is the 'delight' in its having appeared. Not that 'delight' is the consequence of poetic imagining, but rather that contemplating is delighting. The picture, then, is clear, at least in general terms. If art is related to the Contemplative Mode of imagining, this represents a contradiction of the view implied in Experience and Its Modes. Art, in that it is 'poetic imagining', is seen as a 'withdrawal' from Practical life which for Oakeshott is pictured as the continual straining and striving of the effort to contrive a more pleasurable world and to defend oneself, in the Hobbesian sense, against death. In contemplation:... there is no problem to be solved, no hypothesis to be explored, no restlessness to be overcome, no desire to be satisfied or approval to be won.., 19 62

5 HOWARD DAVIS As a withdrawal from purposive activity contemplation can only be an intermittent achievement; it is a 'simple' activity that can be entered into and broken off at leisure. The relationship between contemplation and the other Modes of Experience is, therefore, negative, a relationship simply of irrelevance. This is explicitly stated by Oakeshott but it is also a 'necessary' condition, given regard to the Theory of Modes. Nevertheless there are some instances where a certain common ground may be said to exist. Oakeshott gives examples of where there is an ambiguity of experience between the Contemplative and the Practical Modes, and these are familiar themes to aesthetics: architecture, friendship, love, 'moral goodness', childhood reminiscence, and so on. 20 In the same vein the source of contemplation can, typically, be attributed to an 'interruption' in Practical imagining. Contemplation is invited, for instance, when an object is discovered in unexpected surroundings which seem to contradict and invalidate its normal, practical, purpose 'a house no longer habitable, or a ship no longer seaworthy... a loaf of bread in paint, a man in stone...' 21 Or again contemplation may become appropriate in circumstances of failure, disillusion or fatalism, when the normal energies of Practical life, of desire, of the determination to possess and achieve, simply fade away and are not replaced by their opposites. The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind represents an affirmation of'contemplation' as a Mode of Experience. This project has ethical and political significance in the sense that the essay makes frequent reference to the tendency in modern times for the voices of Practice and Science to claim a monopoly over human discourse. Indeed the refutation of this view at the very beginning sets the essay in its context and also relates it in a general way to the arguments that Oakeshott makes in, for example, Rationalism in Politics. More specifically, one of the purposes of The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind is to affirm that 'the appropriate image of human intercourse' is not a 'project' but, rather, a 'conversation'. 22 In the 'conversation' the different Modes can meet. Each can listen to, accept, understand and appreciate, the authentic voice of the others, and that is the nature of the exercise. There is no element of persuasion, of competition, or of an underlying political or scientific project. Fundamentally there should be no attempt by one voice to seek, by conscious activity and intellection, the reduction of the others to itself. An adequate life, which is not deluded and which can enjoy stability and quiet change, will recognize the satisfactions and the limits of all activities, and live their real value and inadequacy. Oakeshott's metaphor is of the journey rather than the destination. The value of the 63

6 POETRY AND THE VOICE OF MICHAEL OAKESHOTT 'conversation' is clearly enhanced if contemplation can be adequately affirmed as a Mode of Experience. However, although works of art are only instances of poetic images, it would be naive to assume that the relationship of contemplation to art is, for Oakeshott, merely felicitous and inessential. In the first place a general relationship has been asserted that works of art 'positively provoke' a contemplative attitude. Also Oakeshott details a number of widespread and common forms of response to, specifically, art as irrelevant, and thus implies a definite, general view of the nature of art. In the second place it is the relationship to art that affirms contemplation as an important and unavoidable value, for it is only as such that it can 'challenge' Practice and Science and thus effectively re-establish the desired heterogeneity of human discourse. The Contemplative Mode of Experience is affirmed by being attached to a significant 'object' to art. If this is true, if this is a necessary implication, then The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind can also be read as a theory of art in its own right. The appropriate form of the experience of art is described. For the audience, the reader, the spectator, it is to give oneself over to contemplative activity. For the artist it is to be, not a person of feeling or emotion, but rather a person whose success is in making images of a certain kind. Images whose 'presence' is contained in how they are in themselves, and how they may be so construed and arranged that the poet and his audience may delight in them. A poet does not 'express' a thought or a feeling, 'he does one thing only, he imagines poetically'. 23 A poet does not use words or shapes or sounds as signs or symbols, he does not take over and reiterate the prior meaning of these 'things'. On the contrary, a poet eliminates this sort of meaning in the creation of the poetic image. What, therefore, has to be 'dissolved' before poetry can appear is... the authority of the symbolic language of practical activity and of the even more precisely symbolic language of science. 2 * Historically, the inspiration for the poet was neither from the desire for wisdom nor from the desire for entertainment. For the poet:... the totem was neither an object of fear, of authority or of reverence, but an object of contemplation; (he was) the man for whom myth and magic spell and the cryptic utterances of the seer were not images of power or of wisdom, but of delight. 28 Oakeshott even has some words for the critic, whose job is to distinguish one poet from another in terms of what is the only relevant, poetic, difference: 'the character of the images he is apt to delight in and... the manner in which he is disposed to arrange them'

7 HOWARD DAVIS Quite obviously and explicitly Oakeshott's view contrasts with and contradicts many commonly held beliefs regarding the form of meaning in art. 27 For example: he argues against the view that art is concerned with the communication or expression of emotion, or the view that art is concerned with the representation of some other reality that is not art, or the view that art has some relevant status as 'truth' or as 'falsehood', or that art can instruct us in the moral virtues. Such views are not in themselves 'wrong', but simply irrelevant to poetic experience. If these or others are the presuppositions behind a form of response to art, then it is Oakeshott's point that the critic, or audience, is merely involved in a different Mode of Experience from the Contemplative; involved, that is, with what is non-poetic. 28 This may be put in another way. A work of art can, in a nominal or abstract sense, refer to the languages of emotions or ideas, etc. However, an irrelevant or nugatory inference is made if this is understood in the Practical Mode of Experience. In art, emotions or ideas arc solely images of the work of art, images in contemplation alone. The views that Oakeshott criticizes have a long history in aesthetics and criticism, and it can be said that he does not represent these positions altogether in their strongest aspect. He sees the relationship of art to emotion as one in which the artist first experiences, then contemplates and understands, and then expresses or communicates. But the argument for the 'expression of emotion' is more powerfully described as an undifferentiated 'feeling' which is 'raised' to an exact and unique emotion only through the activity of expression itself. In the same vein he obscures the argument for 'representation' or 'realism' by presenting it in absurd terms: 'Of Hamlet we might enquire: what was his normal bedtime?' 29 And by referring to 'truth', to testable propositions, he mystifies the notion of 'fiction' in its relation to 'ideology', or 'Weltanschauung' or, more simply, to such notions as 'insight' or 'understanding'. 30 In the sense that Oakeshott is affirming a form of response to art, defining the 'poetic', so that other forms of response arc therefore 'nonpoetic', his view can be simply accepted or rejected. Nevertheless, there arc some points outstanding that should be noted. I have suggested that for Oakeshott a work of art can be related to a 'world' of emotions, ideas, representations, etc., but only in a nominal or abstract sense, only if these are images in contemplation. The question is posed, therefore, whether contemplation itself is sufficiently 'stable' a Mode of Experience; or whether in the face of such images, images which are obviously present in works of art, the Contemplative Mode is not bound to 'break down'. If the latter is the case, this would be to assert that the 'interest' or 'fascination' of art lies in the plurality of possible forms of meaning, and that a single E 65

8 POETRY AND THE VOICE OF MICHAEL OAKESHOTT form of meaning cannot be sustained beyond the invitation to look or to read or to hear. The claims of 'realism' or 'representation' or 'expression', etc., even that as doubtful as the desire to understand some idiosyncrasy in terms of the artist's biography, are likely to assert themselves as relevant to the appreciation of art. To these assertions the obvious answer from Oakeshott's position would be that nevertheless such concerns are not poetic in the real sense. But here a problem in the argument can be suggested. Contemplation must now be understood as a learnt response to art, a form of appreciation that must be continually reinforced by a 'theoretical' concept of art; the 'poetic' and the 'non-poetic' have to be continually separated from each other. This seems to undermine the degree of unselfconsciousness that is appropriate to the idea of contemplation. It also means that Practical imagining is, at the least, on the edges of artistic judgement in the sense that it is dependent upon the 'desired' and 'approved' concept of art. From this sense of the likely instability of contemplation when works of art are its object two more fundamental points arise. Oakeshott gives no evidence for the claim that works of art 'positively provoke' a contemplative attitude. (The examples of poetry he provides must be considered as special pleading.) Indeed, on the contrary, one of the recurring themes of the essay is how assumptions in the Practical Mode have taken over the experience of art: Thus since it is now commonly believed that practical enterprise and moral endeavour are the pre-eminently proper occupations for mankind, we are not surprised when we find that the commonest apology for poetry is a vindication of it in respect of these occupations. 31 He writes eloquently of the remoteness of contemplative imagining for the modern world. It is as if there is 'a revulsion from what is for us, historically, a comparatively new and still imperfectly assimilated experience'. 32 It is the case, therefore, that the crucial relationship between contemplation and art is not in any way proven. It is unnecessary to specify the traditions of criticism and aesthetics, and the intentional statements of artists, to which reference might be made if Oakeshott's view were to be contradicted. But this is not to say that Oakeshott's view of art is to be replaced by another. One of the problems is precisely that Oakeshott seems to be imposing a single form of experience on to such a heterogeneous and expanding 'object' as art whose 'meaning' cannot be considered chronologically specific, anyway, but will change with general sensibility. Therefore in terms of the 'philosophy of art' his view is likely to be considered inadequate. 33 There is a second, related point that continues this line of criticism. 66

9 HOWARD DAVIS Throughout his essay Oakeshott, as has been noted, is concerned to isolate the principles of the 'poetic', and not necessarily to describe works of art in terms of general characteristics. However, as a close link between the 'poetic' and the 'meaning' of a work of art is claimed, it is legitimate to ask if Oakeshott's view provides a perspective for considering works of art in their interesting or significant aspects. Perhaps the most that could be said is that Oakeshott's view focusses on only one of the interesting or significant aspects of art, and is a positive inducement to disregard or not to seek for others. In general terms, therefore, the effect of Oakeshott's view is to drive a wedge between the 'poetic' and what might be called the 'meaning' of a work of art as an object in a culture or in individual experience. Under what conditions, therefore, are these two terms, the 'poetic' and the 'meaning' of a work of art, to be brought together? That they are to be brought together is, I think, clear from the two points already raised that to affirm the Contemplative Mode of Experience a significant 'object' is necessary, and that works of art are characterized as 'positively provoking' a contemplative attitude. It is interpretatively reasonable to suggest that the conditions under which poetic imagining and the experience of art are congruent can be found with reference to Oakeshott's more general ethical and political standpoint; though this interpretation must necessarily rest on the implied rather than the stated. Oakeshott writes elsewhere of the 'conservative disposition'. 34 Clearly the value given to contemplation and the affirmation of the 'conversation' as the desired form of human discourse fit appropriately with this general attitude towards the world. For those of a 'conservative disposition' a high value is placed on delight as a form of activity, on the pleasure in the thing for itself, the pleasure in activity without ulterior purpose, which seeks no other reward, and on the value for its own sake of a wide variety of experience. To the 'conservative disposition' contemplation will have a relatively elevated place in the hierarchy of values, and is likely to be easily 'entered' and easily sustained as a form of experience. Therefore it is from this situation that the crucial relationship, works of art positively provoking contemplative imagining, is more likely to be immediately, unselectively and unselfconsciously, understood. It will be the obvious form of artistic experience; the 'simple' view, distinguished from the energetic complexities and contrivances of those who seek, even from art, to create a Practical meaning and to direct understanding always towards a more purposeful, a more 'dynamic' world. It is within these ethical and political dimensions that Oakeshott's view of art is most appropriately understood. 67

10 POETRY AND THE VOICE OF MICHAEL OAKESHOTT REFERENCES 1 See, for example: Falck, C. 'Romanticism in Polities'. New Left Review, No. 18, Jan/Feb, 1963; Raphael, D. D. 'Professor Oakeshott's "Rationalism in Polities'", Political Studies, Vol. 12 (1964). 2 Ed. King and Parekh (1968), C.U.P. 3 'Politics and Literature', op. cit , Bowes & Bowes , Methuen. 6 Op. cit., Preface, p. vii , CUP. 8 Greanleaf, W. H. Oakeshott's Philosophical Politics (1966), Longmans Green, pp Experience and its Modes, p Op. cit., p Op. cit., p Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, Preface, p. vii. 13 Oakeshott's Philosophical Politics, p Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, p Op. cit., pp Oakeshott's position has been well summarized by Professor Greanleaf. 17 Op. cit., pp Op. cit., p Op. cit., p Op. cit., pp Op. cit., p Op. cit., pp Op. cit., p Op. cit., p Op. cit., p Op. cit., p Op. cit., pp ; pp E.g. op. cit., p Op. cit., p See, for example, Raymond Williams's definition of 'culture'. Williams, R. Culture and Society (1958), Chatto & Windus; and Penguin (1961), p Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, pp Op. cit., p Ref. Wolheim, R. Art and Its Objects (1970). See his arguments against the 'Ideal' and 'Presentational' theories of art, and also his discussion of Wittgenstein's remarks concerning 'transitive' and 'intransitive' usage. 34 Ref. 'On Being Conservative' in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, pp