'Of the Mind As Well As the Heart'

“[T]he main furnishings of the cottage were Oakeshott’s books. He had disposed of most of those he considered merely informative and retained a consummately civilized library.” 

Inevitably I asked, “Is my library ‘consummately civilized’?” What does that mean? No junk, no bestsellers, I suppose, though some volumes that are “merely informative” – dictionaries and other reference books. Emphasis on the obvious essentials – Dante, Montaigne, Melville, et al. Books that, in their absence, might diminish the respectability of the remaining volumes. Nothing to be ashamed of. A lifetime’s accumulation of books that made us who we are – that is, reasonably civilized.   

 

Josiah Lee Auspitz’s “Michael Oakeshott: 1901-1990” was published in the Summer 1991 issue of The American Scholar. The philosopher had died on December 19, 1990, and Auspitz had attended the funeral in Dorset. The essay begins with an account of that event and goes on to examine Oakeshott’s thought. The passage above continues:

 

“In his later years he took to giving away some of his more cherished volumes, but still there remained shelves upon shelves testifying to years of enjoyment of history and fiction, philosophy and poetry, memoirs and essays, and pleasant hours of browsing in used-book stores. In his last year, he reread the works of one of his favorite Americans, Willa Cather.”

 

I read Oakeshott as a literary writer with an excellent prose style, not a quality often associated with philosophers, professors of political science or academics in general. He is a rare writer able to make even politics interesting, mostly because he isn’t writing strictly about politics. There’s a bigger, more interesting dimension to his work, a literary resonance. The reader is struck by the simplicity and lack of pretension in Oakeshott’s home, as described by Auspitz, and in his work. Such clarity is rare among writers in general. Auspitz writes:

 

“Though a gracefully bookish man, Oakeshott, as a philosopher, put little trust in the printed word. ‘A philosopher is not, as such, a scholar; and philosophy, more often than not, has foundered in learning. There is no book which is indispensable for the study of philosophy. And to speak of a philosopher as ignorant is to commit an ignoratio elenchi [“ignoring refutation” – an irrelevant conclusion]; an historian or a scientist may be ignorant, philosophers merely stupid.”

 

One concludes from reading Auspitz’s profile – and from reading his work -- that Oakeshott was a gentleman of thought: “[W]hen it came to suggesting an apt title, he was like a wise old herbalist dispensing time-tested remedies. If one were working on a problem, he had just the volume to advance one's thinking. If one were going on a trip, he would present the perfect travel memoir of that place. As a houseguest, he would rummage around for hours in used-book stores until he found just the right volumes to leave as a present for each member of the host family.”

 

At the conclusion of his final visit to see Oakeshott, Auspitz writes: “He also put in my hands Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs, a memoir of Maine that he joined Willa Cather in admiring. Its words about hospitality applied to Oakeshott as well:

 

“‘Her hospitality was something exquisite; she had the gift, which so many women lack, of being able to make themselves and their houses belong entirely to a guest’s pleasure,-- that charming surrender for the moment of themselves and whatever belongs to them, so that they make a part of one's own life that can never be forgotten. Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading, and my hostess the golden gift. Sympathy is of the mind as well as the heart.’”

 

[Auspitz also wrote about Oakeshott here.]