Shoring Up Foundations 147experience, then, I take to be experience without presupposition, reservation, arrest
or modification’ (Oakeshott 1933: 2). In his later work, he describes philosophy as
‘an unconditional adventure’ (Oakeshott 1975: 11). Philosophy might therefore be
described as unconditional experience.
Oakeshott contends, however, that there are multiple modes through which
experience takes place. He suggests, though, that there are certain more system-
atic modes; three such modes are indicated in his first work: practice, science, and
history. He later added poetry. Each of these modes is, what he refers to as, an ‘arrest
in experience’ or ‘abridgement of meaning’, that is, they are abridgements from the
totality of experience. Each arrest is a discrete moderately coherent world of ideas.
There are direct parallels here between Oakeshott’s modes and Wittgenstein’s much
more diverse conventionalism (in terms of ‘forms of life’ or ‘social practices’). Each
mode also has its own sense of the past, its own understanding of truth and its own
distinctive postulates. Each, though, is an abstraction from the totality of experience.
For Oakeshott, the whole of experience, ‘is not made of abstractions, it is implied
in them; it is not dependent upon abstraction, because it is logically prior to them’
(Oakeshott 1933: 79). The standpoint of totality therefore tolerates no arrest. This
view of the totality of experience is equivalent to one reading of the Bradleian or
Hegelian absolute. In this sense, philosophy isnotto be considered a mode. It is
undiluted experience.
It is important to realize that the various modes arenotsimply lenses through which
we see the real world. They are, literally, all there is. There is nothing outside, external,
or beyond these experiences. The mode is the reality. The truth of the mode hangs
upon the coherence of its postulates. This implies that the sense we have of the truth
of a mode is not something that is to be tested by looking outside it to some purported
external reality or some body of fact. Oakeshott also indicates that there cannot be
any profitable mixing of modes. History, for example, has nothing to contribute to
poetry or practice, and vice versa. Further, in this context, concepts and words will
alter both between modes, and also, at points, within modes. Meaning is contextual.
One other point which follows from this argument (and is still adhered to in his later
works) is that one should not confuse theorizingaboutethics, history, or politics with
the ‘knowing how’ to subscribe or perform such practices. As Oakeshott comments,
‘a theoretical understanding cannot itself be an engagement in the conduct being
theorized: to theorize a ‘comic’ performance (i.e. to understand it in terms of its
postulates) is not itself to make a joke’ (Oakeshott 1975: 34).
In later work, particularlyOn Human Conduct, Oakeshott indicates that the rela-
tion of modes is more fluid and open and can be re-characterized in terms of a
conversation in which each voice has a say, but none is dominant. There is also the
hint of a more sceptical shift in his thought. Philosophy moves from being experience
without arrest to ‘the impulse to study the quality and style of each voice, and to
reflect upon the relationship of one voice to another’ (Oakeshott 1962: 200). This
subtle movement of thought continues inOn Human Conduct, where the voices
or modes become idioms of discourse or platforms of understanding. The uncondi-
tional engagement with understanding appears now as ‘theorizing’ (Oakeshott 1975: 1