Michael Oakeshott's Review(1949), O.S.Wauchope, Deviation into Sense, 1948

The following is a review of Michael Oakeshott in Times Literary Supplement(15 January 1949), 45.

Oswald Stewart Wauchope, Deviation into Sense: the Nature of Explanation.
London: Faber and Faber, 1948.

The genuine amateur in philosophy, the unprofessional philosopher who yet is neither a crank, nor impatient of discipline, nor a man who comes to philosophy carrying all the apparatus of a foreign profession (such as politics or natural science), is a rarity. But when he appears he is usually worth listening to. Mr. Wauchope is a philosopher of this kind. He is by no means ignorant of what other philosophers have thought, nor is he as independent of the history of philosophy as he sometimes suggests; and he is certainly not an incurably informal philosopher, a stranger to the rigour of the game. But it is not on account of its learning or its logical acuteness that his book will be read with excitement and delight by those interested in philosophy, but because it reflects unmistakably an anima naturaliter philosophica. It is at once simple and profound, clearly the fruit of many years of quiet reading and reflection, written not tentatively but with the modest dogmatism which belongs to all bold and lucid thinking, yet written with a freshness and grace uncommon in the too often tortuous literature of philosophy.

 ‘The business of philosophy,’ he writes, ‘is, as it always has been, to find a standpoint from which all the variety of reality could be viewed as parts of a comprehended whole. It is to say something such that, if it were true, everything would be as it is.’ Unfortunately, he continues, the business has been a failure because philosophers have fallen into the error of supposing that intellectual operations (such as understanding the world) would give their best results if the ‘subjective factor,’ the person who thinks, could be eliminated from the conclusion. The project of finding a world at once intelligible and ‘absolutely objective’ has been the evil genius of philosophic enterprise. This condemnation, fully merited by only the cruder forms of positivism, is perhaps a trifle too sweeping. And the notion that if this error were abjured, and philosophers made an entirely new start, we human beings would be in a position to ‘settle for ourselves once and for all what we are and what we are about’ is perhaps a trifle too Roman in its philosophical optimism. But when Mr. Wauchope begins the exposition of his own doctrine we soon leave behind the amateurish eccentricity of these early exaggerations.

 ‘The stuff of reality is mind /matter, Self/not-self, subjective/objective’ ? is, in short, experience. Matter per se is unintelligible because it is no-entity; there are only ‘events’, mind and matter in union. And the aim of philosophic explanation is to hold fast to this union and to make it intelligible. The Self in experience is ‘alive.’ The meaning of ‘being alive’ has, however, been restricted to its ‘logical’ meaning, ‘not being dead’; the activity of living has been confined to the rational, purposeful, defensive activity of avoiding or delaying death, and the communal tactics of death-avoiding activity have (under the name of morality) engaged the main attention and loyalty of mankind. This is unfortunate because the ‘logical’ meaning of ‘being alive’ is not the most significant meaning. ‘Living’ is primary; ‘dead’ does not mean merely ‘non-living’, it means ‘having ceased to live’. This suggests that the activity of the living Self is not merely death-avoiding, but is twofold: to ‘live’ and to avoid death. And if we turn to our personal experience we shall find this confirmed; much of our activity cannot be explained in terms of avoiding death. And what is more, purposeful, defensive activity is, properly speaking, subordinate to purposeless ‘living’ activity; we avoid death, not for its own sake, but in order to ‘live’. In other words, ‘living activity’ is the soul’s primary activity, and rational, defensive activity －sense－ is a deviation from it.

 Now, if we prepared to follow Mr. Wauchope to the top of this hill ―and his talk on the way up is most persuasive― we shall find spread out in front of us a world, not unlike that which Blake offers us, in which the values of the ‘subjective-Self’ (e.g., spontaneous affection) are primary and the death-avoiding values of rational and moral behaviour are secondary and derivative. But Mr. Wauchope is not a Manichee; matter in union with mind is not evil, and the deviation into death-avoiding activity is legitimate so long as it is recognized as deviation. The problem of human life is not how to survive, or how to emancipate the Self from death-avoiding activity, but how to preserve a proper balance between the two activities of the Self. And the handicap from which we suffer in solving this problem is the erroneous assumption that death-avoiding activity is primary and that ‘living’ is secondary. In the hands of Mr. Wauchope all this blossoms into a political theory for which ‘the fretfulness of modern civilization, and its vulgarity, its constant plundering of the realm of spontaneity and individuality for the “general good,” its bullying sociality, are the consequence of its unbalance, its morbid preoccupation with good reason and death.’ He rarely refers to other writers, but as one reads one becomes conscious of certain affinities, and among philosophers it may be supposed that Hobbes has had some influence upon his thought. Indeed, this is a philosophy such as Hobbes himself might have conceived if the fear of death had not stood in the wat of his developing a more positive doctrine of Felicity. The book ends with an allegory, subtle, charming, and profound, and able to stand beside the great myths of philosophic literature.

 This brief description of Mr. Wauchope’s argument does much less than justice to its variety and power, and the excitement with which the reader follows it. But when it is finished it will not be surprising if some doubts make their appearance. The general metaphysical position is a form of what used to be called objective idealism ? a very respectable doctrine. But it is difficult to be certain that the ethical doctrine presented to us here avoids some of even the cruder errors of naturalism. The conception of ‘life’ and ‘living behaviour’ remains indistinct. There is room also for doubt whether the conception of the ‘subjective Self,’ the Self insulated from the not-self, upon which so much of this argument is based, is not reached too simply and too rapidly; an absolutely ‘subjective’ subject is as indefensible as an absolutely ‘objective’ object. Indeed, the ‘subjectivity’ of the Self, upon which so much of his argument depends, is assumed rather than demonstrated or even argued. But whatever error or incoherence in detail the reader may find to deplore, this is not the sort of book to which such error is fatal; it has enough genius, and more than enough vitality, to survive error far more gross.

※See also, pp.280-2
The concept of a philosophical jurisprudence : essays and reviews 1926-51/ Michael Oakeshott ; edited by Luke O'Sullivan
（Selected writings Vol.III / Michael Oakeshott）, Imprint Academic, 2007

This volume brings together for the first time over a hundred of Oakeshott's essays and reviews, written between 1926 and 1951, that until now have remained scattered through a variety of scholarly journals, periodicals and newspapers. A new editorial introduction explains how these pieces, including the lengthy essay on the philosophical nature of jurisprudence that occupies an important position in Oakeshott's work, illuminate his other published writings. The collection throws new light on the context of his thought by placing him in dialogue with a number of other major figures in the humanities and social sciences during this period, including Leo Strauss, A.N. Whitehead, Karl Mannheim, Herbert Butterfield, E.H. Carr, Gilbert Ryle, and R.G. Collingwood.