Michael Oakeshott Quotes on Knowledge
Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990), the British political philosopher whose Experience and Its Modes (1933), Rationalism in Politics (1962), and On Human Conduct (1975) supplied twentieth-century conservative thought with one of its most rigorous philosophical statements, defended the fundamental distinction between two modes of knowledge: technical knowledge, which can be formulated in rules and communicated in books, and practical knowledge, which is acquired only through the lived participation in a tradition of activity and is irreducible to any rule-following procedure. The diagnosis of "rationalism in politics" treats the modern political pathology as the systematic confusion of the second with the first, with the consequent attempt to operate institutions whose actual intelligence resides in inarticulate traditional practice by means of explicit ideological formulas alone.
Quotes
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Attributed to Michael Oakeshott:
“Political education is learning how to participate in an arrangement.”
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Attributed to Michael Oakeshott:
“A tradition of behaviour is a tricky thing to get to know.”
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Attributed to Michael Oakeshott:
“The conduct of life is a conversation, not an inquiry.”
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“Chap. 2 : Experience and Its Modes”
Whatever is satisfactory in experience is true, and it is true because it is satisfactory. -
“Chap. 2 : Experience and Its Modes”
Experience to be experience must be reality; truth to be true must be true of reality. Experience, truth and reality are inseparable. -
“Rationalist politics, I have said, are the politics of the felt need, the felt need not qualified by a genuine, concrete knowledge of the permanent interests and direction of movement of a society, but interpreted by 'reason' and satisfied according to the technique of an ideology: they are the politics of the book.”
Wikiquote -
“Rationalism in politics, as I have interpreted it, involves an identifiable error, a misconception with regard to the nature of human knowledge, which amounts to a corruption of the mind. And consequently it is without the power to correct its own short-comings; it has no homeopathic quality; you cannot escape its errors by becoming more sincerely or more profoundly rationalistic.”
Wikiquote -
“A philosophical essay leaves much to the reader, often saying too little for fear of saying too much; its attention is concentrated, but it does not stay to cross all the ts of the argument; its mood is cautious without being defensive; it is personal but never merely 'subjective'; it does not dissemble the conditionality of the conclusions it throws up and although it may enlighten it does not instruct. It is, in short, a well-considered intellectual adventure recollected in tranquility.”
Preface