Shoring Up Foundations 149a language of self-enactment, through which the agent (reflectively) communicates
and participates in a practice. The language thus ‘permits those who can use it to
understand themselves and one another’. It is also, at the same time, a language of
self-disclosure. Self-disclosure is used by agents ‘in diagnosing their situations and in
choosing their response’ (see Oakeshott 1975: 63).
All human conduct therefore evolves, initially, as a conventional ritual. Children,
for Oakeshott (as for Hegel), are simply a ‘helpless subject’ of conduct. Conduct is
something that has to be learned by being spoken and gradually assimilated from
within practices. Like Hegel again, Oakeshott contends that we come into a world
‘already illuminated by moral practice’ (Oakeshott 1975: 63). The moral and political
language is, however, a shifting body of conventions. Oakeshott notes, qua morality,
that ‘its abstract nouns (right and wrong, proper and improper, obligation, dueness,
fairness, respect, justice,etc.), when they appear, are faded metaphors’. Oakeshott adds
here, with no doubt a weather eye on many contemporary political theorists, ‘it is only
the uneducated who insists that each must have a single unequivocal meaning indif-
ferent to context’. Moral language, embodied in conduct, is never fixed or finished. It
has no settled meaning. Echoing again a Wittgensteinian theme, he claims that such a
language isonlylearned in usage. He comments that moral language ‘isits vicissitudes,
and its virtue is to be a living, vulgar language’ (Oakeshott 1975: 64). A language of
moral conduct ‘has rhythms which remain when the words are forgotten’. Thus, there
is a sense in which such language is an embedded substrate of actions. Agents will, in
fact, often lose any sense of its genesis and ‘ideal character’, consequently, ‘expressions
in it harden into clichés and are released again; the ill-educated speak it vulgarly, the
purists inflexibly, and each generation invents its own moral slang’ (Oakeshott 1975:
65). We might call this argument a strong version of conventionalism.
This strong version can be highlighted more clearly by contrasting it to rule-based
theories of morality and politics, which insist on theoretical justification. To focus on
‘rules’—as a large number of contemporary moral and political theorists do—is, for
Oakeshott, to engage in a total distortion of moral and political conduct. Rules are
just ‘abridgements’, passing contingent snapshots of fluid and restless phenomena.
Rules suggest a rigid and abstracted expression of such conduct. Thus, rules are
notthe reality of morality and politics. Further, to place excessive attention on the
justificationof rules is also utterly misplaced, since it again cuts into the living flesh
of a moral and political language.^7 Moral and political rules ‘are not criteria of good
conduct, nor are they primarily instruments of judgement; they are prevailing winds
which agents should take account of in sailing their several courses’ (Oakeshott 1975:
70). Thus, morality cannot be just about observed rules or obeying injunctions. It is
also not concerned with justification. It is a much more complex contingent process
used for both exploring one’s own self and also one’s interaction with other agents.
Rules can be elicited as representations of a moment, but morality is emphatically not
the same as that ‘one moment’, nor it is the creation of moralists or grammarians (as
Oakeshott phrases it). It is made in and through ordinary conventional usage.
It is worth noting here that this ‘usage’ theme links up with his thoughts about
tradition and practical reason explored inRationalism in Politicsin the 1950s.