Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Here John Gray does it : "or a sceptical view of the power of human reason (as in David Hume and Michael Oakeshott), conservatives distrusted any attempt to remake the world according to the dictates of high-minded ideals and abstract models." This is a common mistake made by people who do not understand Oakeshott was an idealist philosopher. Oakeshott was not "sceptical" about human reason. He did not say that rationalism is good reasoning , but still even the best reasoning comes up short of the mark. To the contrary, what he said was that rationalism is irrational . It is an attempt to replace concrete thinking with reasoning that is abstract, and therefore partial and defective. An analogy: imagine that some people's image of top notch free throw shooting was formed by watching Andre Drummond . They tell everyone, "The way to shoot free throws is the Andre Drummond way." Now Oakeshott comes along and says, "No, that way is nonsense: he...

It is well known that perhaps only 10% of the significant manuscripts of the Greco-Roman intellectual world are available to us today: the rest were lost over the intervening couple of thousand years. But such losses can still occur today. I have mentioned this before, but the single manuscript I most miss from the modern epoch is from Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott's thought does not seem particularly Augustinian on its surface, and yet, he called Augustine the greatest mind who ever lived. But what's more, he had apparently written an entire book on Augustine, which was not published during his life. And the thing is, no one has any idea what happened to the manuscript! His papers are in the LSE library (I have been through them), but not this manuscript. What became of it?

Anyone using this term assumes we are in the end stage of "capitalism," however they define that word. But history gives us no knowledge of the future, and thus, no knowledge of how far along we are in some process. History is precisely the discipline, as Oakeshott would put it, that views the world sub specie praeteritorum , through the lens of its "pastness." In history, the present world is seen as laden with artifacts that tell us what came before it. Those artifacts, understood as evidence of a past that has vanished, cannot possibly tell us what is to come. Thus, "late capitalism" is always an ideological construct, not an historical one.

Michael Oakeshott sometimes referred to the rationalist attitude to politics as "politics as the crow flies." As I understand his meaning here, he is criticizing the notion that, if in political life we detect some problem, we must immediately enact the first legislation that comes to mind that seems to correct the problem. The flaw in this approach is that it ignores the complexity and inter-connectedness of social life. The direct fix for problem A may easily create problems B and C, and they may be worse than problem A. Police personnel being drawn from the neighborhood in which they are to serve can create problems, since they may tend to favor their friends or relatives from the neighborhood. And police may not want to live in a troubled city. So states have moved to strike down residency laws , and some cities, like New York, forbid officers from serving in the precinct where they live.* But such moves may solve one problem at the expense of creating even worse ...

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But this does not mean that all thought, coming under the general head of economic thought, is scientific in character nothing: indeed is clearer than that economics as a science is hindered by extraneous interests and led astray by false pursuits. But in this respect, also, it is not unique among sciences. If economic science is not yet free from the concepts and requirements of so-called Descriptive Economics, a kind of natural history such as is found in the infancy of every science, the same is true of biology and scientific psychology. Natural history and science are, of course, not inimical to one another; but a science must be more critical of its friends and relations, with whom it may become entangled, than with its enemies from whom it is well and securely enough distinguished. Descriptive economics, because of its connexion with the world of practice, is a dangerous companion for an economic science. And it is, perhaps, on account of this connexion that economic scie...

"If economics is to be a science of man, it must certainly show that its concern is with a scientifically conceived man, a scientifically abstracted man. But the economic man of the older economists was never scientifically conceived; he was a pseudo-ethical abstraction. And instead of offering economics an escape from ethical and psychological postulates, this conception ratified the connexion. However, the way out of the difficulty is clear, and economic science has already taken it. ' Man', a man of any sort, is not an appropriate subject-matter for any science ; and economics has now come to conceive its material not in the human terms of behaviour, action, desire, satisfaction, etc., but in such quantitative terms as those of cost and price, utility and disutility. Economics is not a science of man for 'man' is not a scientific concept. It is a science of measurements. Its generalizations do not refer directly to a 'human' world, a world of desires, f...

"Science may announce the probability of the recurrence of a certain measurement within the system of its own observations, but to demand more than this, to demand that a science of economics should predict categorically a slump or boom in trade, is to demand what, indeed, some economists have promised, but what an economic science could never afford." -- Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes , p. 228

"It is not because the particular observations of economics refer to living things, or to human beings, or to voluntary actions that their character is complex and obscure and their behavior variable; complexity, obscurity, and variableness are the characteristics of every particular observation by reason of its particularity... Moreover, although many economists assert economics to be concerned with man, and voluntary human actions, when we turn to their actual observations and generalizations we shall, I think, find not only that economics need not be concerned with these things… but also that economics actually is not concerned with them." -- Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes , p. 225 What Oakeshott goes on to argue is that scientific economics deals with abstract quantities such as price, cost, utility, and disutility, where human beings as such play no part -- scientific economics could just as well treat exchanges between robots as between humans.

"Whatever cannot be conceived quantitatively cannot belong to scientific knowledge." -- Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes , p. 221 Thus, the critics of ID are quite correct: there is no way to quantify the idea "X designed Y to be so," and thus "design" is an idea excluded from scientific discourse. That truth in no way implies that "design" is a nonsense idea: it just means that, in the world of science, which seeks to establish mathematical relationships between measured quantities, "design" has no place. As objections to this fact, I often have seen two cases offered: 1) Archaeologist detect design in their research. Yes, they do, but archaeology is an historical, and not a scientific, discipline. 2) SETI researchers look for evidence of intelligent design. OK, while this search has been conducted by scientists, is there any evidence it is scientific? I think not.

"Economics is a name which covers a variety of intellectual interests, and it may be doubted whether many of these have anything in common beyond this name. But to centre thought upon a mere name not only will never produce a homogeneous world of ideas, but it will also tend to establish in our minds a pseudo-relationship between sets of ideas which do not and cannot belong together; it will encourage argument to pass inconsequently from one world of ideas to another... Moreover, this is not merely the condition of things we might expect from such a haphazard bringing together of different sets of ideas, it is the actual condition of much economic thought at the present time. Economics, as we find it in the books of many of its most distinguished professors, comprises a meaningless miscellany of scientific, historical and practical ideas and arguments." -- Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes , p. 220 This paragraph is about the best thing ever written to enable us ...

I believe I was the first person to note in print just how Aristotelian Oakeshott's analysis of rationalism is, although I must credit Noel O'Sullivan for dropping the hint that got me going in that direction. Here is the kind of thing I was getting at: "At the start of the Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle observes that moral action does not arise from deliberation. In order to think clearly about virtue, one must first already have a virtuous disposition formed by good habits. Aristotle drily remarks that the endless ethical debate of some philosophers is really just a sophisticated way of doing nothing. You become virtuous – and thus able to understand virtue – by acting virtuously. Nobody ever reasoned their way into right living." "...the endless ethical debate of some philosophers is really just a sophisticated way of doing nothing": Peter Singer springs instantly into my mind!

Reader Ken B. is puzzled : "I don't see how you can deny that without denying the use of historical counterfactuals in toto." First of all, to be very clear, no one is "denying the use" of anything in what follows, or in what went before. When I noted Fukuyama's remarks about "hijacking" the course of events, I was not trying to say he can't write like that: I was saying he is not writing as an historian when writing like that. And in what follows, I draw heavily on Michael Oakeshott. He was once asked, by my PhD advisor, David Boucher, if his ideas meant it was illegitimate for historians to write certain things. Oakeshott responded that he had no interest in telling historians what to put in their books. What he was (and I am) interested in is conceptually identifying a certain attitude to the past we can term "historical." And this is a very important point: Oakeshott made clear that there are pasts besides the historical p...

Blackadder is flummoxed : "I confess I find Oakeshott's statement mystifying. What is self-contradictory about the idea of there being a world of existence outside experience?" This is a tricky question to answer. To an extent, I view it as similar to one of those trick pictures, where you can see either a lady or a rabbit. If someone just doesn't see the rabbit, there is no "argument" you can make that will convince them it is there. (And once they see it, they need no argument.) But perhaps you can give them hints that can lead them to the viewpoint where they do see it for themselves. In any case, no harm in trying. So let us begin by assuming that there is an objective world standing totally apart from experience. If we can imagine that there is such a world with many objects in it, it is surely even easier to imagine such a world with only one object in it. So let us do that: we posit a world containing only one, solid sphere of "stuff" ...

Once the subject-object distinction is taken as absolute, then, as we have mentioned, epistemology becomes a pressing, indeed, I would say, insoluble, problem. Given that situation, it is natural for anyone who has made such a move to think that anyone doing fundamental philosophy must be trying to solve the epistemological quandary in which they find themselves. Therefore, when an idealist claims "Reality is a world of experience," the dualist quite understandably thinks he is encountering an epistemological argument along the lines of, "I can't know about the existence of things I can't know about; therefore, what I can't know about doesn't exist." (This is pretty much how Stove interpreted idealism, and how several commenters here have understood my posts.) But look at (a small part) of Oakeshott's argument: "The view that objectivity signifies independence of experience must be rejected because the notion (which it implies) of a worl...

David Stove famously rejected idealism as being based on the "worst argument in the world." He said this argument runs as follows : You cannot have trees-without-the-mind in mind, without having them in mind. Therefore, you cannot have trees-without-the-mind in mind. Now, it is not really that Stove's case against the above is bad. It is that no idealist (that I know of) ever made the above argument. All Stove as demonstrated is that he does not understand Berkeley or idealism. Here is a version of an actual idealist argument for the interdependence of mind and reality: The view that objectivity signifies independence of experience because the notion (which it implies) of a world of existence outside experience is self-contradictory. If what is real is what is objective, what is objective must stand for something other than merely what is not subjective -- that which is untouched by consciousness, that from which experience has been withdrawn. For, in the first ...

As idealists, we start with undeniable reality: the concrete whole of experience. We note that within that concrete whole, we can distinguish, say, 'experiencing' and 'what is experienced'. But we remember that 'Experiencing and what is experienced are, taken separately, meaningless abstractions; they cannot, in fact, be separated.'* But many people forget this: they take what is an analytical distinction to be a real difference: there are subjective experiences, and there is the objective world, and they are two truly separable realms. Once that has occurred, epistemology rears its head as a terrible difficulty: given the belief in this ultimate separability, how can we be sure our subjective experiences have anything to do with the objective world at all? How do we know we are not just "brains in a vat"? It is as though, in thought, we had created a gulf between the head of a coin and the tail, and are now puzzling over how we can ever rejoin the tw...

"The distinction between a general category of action—a mode of social life—and a particular sort of act falling within such a category, is of central importance to the distinction between non-logical and illogical behaviour. An il logical act presumably involves a mistake in logic; but to call something non-logical should be to deny that criteria of logic apply to it at all. That is, it does not make sense to say of non-logical conduct that it is either logical or illogical, just as it does not make sense to say of something non-spatial (such as virtue) that it is either big or small. But Pareto does not follow through the implications of this. For instance, he tries to use the term ‘non-logical’ in a logically pejorative sense, which is like concluding from the fact that virtue is not big that it must be small. A large part of the trouble here arises from the fact that he has not seen the point around which the main argument of this monograph revolves: that criteria of logic a...

"The embarrassment in which [Pareto] is thus placed illustrates what I wanted to emphasize in maintaining that the type of problem with which he is here concerned belongs more properly to philosophy than it does to science. This has to do with the peculiar sense in which philosophy is uncommitted enquiry. I noted in the first chapter how philosophy is concerned with elucidating and comparing the ways in which the world is made intelligible in different intellectual disciplines; and how this leads on to the elucidation and comparison of different forms of life. The uncommittedness of philosophy comes out here in the fact that it is equally concerned to elucidate its own account of things; the concern of philosophy with its own being is thus not an unhealthy Narcissistic aberration, but an essential part of what it is trying to do. In performing this task the philosopher will in particular be alert to deflate the pretensions of any form of enquiry to enshrine the essence of intell...

Jonathan Finegold Catalán notes that Mises seemed to dismiss Keynes without even really bothering to read him, and wonders why. I suspect the answer is that Mises was done learning new things by the time The General Theory appeared. We see a similar reaction to the emergence of game theory, where the only thing I am aware he ever said about it was the rather dismissive remark: "'Patience' or 'Solitaire' is not a one-person game, but a pastime, a means of escaping boredom. It certainly does not represent a pattern for what is going on in a communistic society, as John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern assert." (As if a pastime might not have a similar pattern in it as some serious activity! Solitaire would still have the exact same game pattern if it was played as part of a death match, but it would hardly still be a pastime!) I don't think there is really even anything wrong with the fact he was not interested in these new avenues of research, except...

My friend Leslie Marsh and veteran Oakeshott scholar Paul Franco have released A Companion to Michael Oakeshott , a collection of essays by various authors (including my PhD adviser David Boucher) with Penn State Press. I'm reviewing it for Collingwood and British Idealism Studies , and so, as usual, I will post about it here as I prepare my review. The first essay I will discuss is the first one in the book, Robert Grant's "The Pursuit of Intimacy," which details Grant's findings on Oakeshott's love life. Now, I have known for some time that Oakeshott had been a womanizer, but what is described in this essay is far more extreme than anything I had imagined. It turns out that during the late 1940s and the 1950s, Oakeshott was almost never sleeping with fewer than three women at once. A typical "courtship" technique for him was basically to stalk women until they gave in: he would, for instance, sit outside of their workplace all day, or stand outs...