Below is a review by Michael Oakeshott published in the Times Literary Supplement (15 January 1949), p. 45.
Reviewed Book:
Oswald Stewart Wauchope, Deviation into Sense: The Nature of Explanation.
London: Faber and Faber, 1948.
[Japanese Translation: O.S. Wauchope / Translated by Motohiro Fukase, Mono no Kangaekata: Gōrisei e no Itsudatsu, Kōbundō, 1951 / Kōdansha Gakujutsu Bunko, 1984.]
Annotations by the Blog Author:
Michael Oakeshott, one of the most important political philosophers of the 20th century, was an avid bibliophile and left behind an enormous number of reviews throughout his lifetime. Among them, remarkably, is a review he wrote for the Times Literary Supplement about the original English edition of Deviation into Sense by O.S. Wauchope—later translated into Japanese by the late Motohiro Fukase and published by Kōbundō in 1951 (and later reprinted by Kōdansha Gakujutsu Bunko).
This book was published by Faber & Faber, one of the most prestigious publishers in London at the time, where T.S. Eliot served as the director of its literary division. Given this, the book may have attracted some attention within London’s intellectual circles, yet it was largely ignored and left no significant intellectual traces. At the height of analytic philosophy in the Anglo-American world, books of this kind found little reception.
It was likely Eliot himself who made the decision to publish the completely unknown Wauchope instead of Animal Farm by George Orwell, which had been submitted four years earlier but was rejected. Choosing to reject Orwell—whose book would have undoubtedly sold well—while approving Wauchope’s work, which was unlikely to sell, seems to symbolize both Eliot’s eccentricity and his intellectual insight.
That being said, thanks to this decision, a remarkable Japanese translation of the book was produced, which later influenced Japanese psychiatry through the works of the late Hiroshi Yasunaga, ultimately contributing to the development of Yasunaga’s "phantom space theory." This may serve as another example of Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) in Max Weber’s sense.
In his review, Oakeshott recognizes the intriguing and significant arguments presented by Wauchope, yet he appears somewhat hesitant. Even Oakeshott, for all his intellectual rigor, does not offer an unequivocal endorsement of the book’s profoundly countercultural greatness. The review concludes with the following words:
"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."
Given that the book argues that Western civilization and its intellectual traditions have "deviated into rationality," it is understandable that even today, many Westerners might find this claim uncomfortable. However, for non-Westerners, this book is well worth a thorough read. If this blog post serves as an introduction to the book for new readers, nothing would bring me greater joy.
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