What there is, Oakeshott believed, is conversation—unending conversation about the complexities of life and life’s proper ends. This conversation, he held, ought never to lapse into argument. Nor is it hierarchical. Every thoughtful person can participate. In “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” he wrote that “conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, nor is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure.” Life, for Oakeshott, as he put it in “A Place of Learning,” is “a predicament, not a journey.” The predicament is how to make the best of it and get the best out of it.
Friday, June 05, 2015
Continuing dialogue …
… The Conversationalist | The Weekly Standard. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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Very glad to be introduced to Oakeshott - but I'm not sure what "although" is doing in this sentence:
ReplyDelete"Although he declared himself a conservative, Oakeshott suggested no programs, advocated no policies, and worked with no specific ends in mind."
I'd have thought a genuine conservative, by their very nature, never suggests or advocates programmes or policies
Very glad to be introduced to Oakeshott - but I'm not sure what "although" is doing in this sentence:
ReplyDelete"Although he declared himself a conservative, Oakeshott suggested no programs, advocated no policies, and worked with no specific ends in mind."
I'd have thought a genuine conservative, by their very nature, never suggests or advocates programmes or policies