Education as an Initiation Into the Conversation of Humankind Michael Oakeshott

One aspect of conversation that particularly intrigues me is its history. I’ve spent considerable time reading about the 17th-century and 18th-century  Coffeehouses of London and the Paris Salons. Still, the history of conversation goes back much further to the Renaissance and the philosophers of ancient Greece.

At the moment, I am reading a fascinating book Conversation – a history of a declining in art by Stephen Miller.

In the book, Stephen introduced me to all sorts of exciting people and ideas. One person, in particular, is Michael Oakeshott.

Michael’s writing style is challenging, and I sometimes have difficulty figuring out his meaning or the implications he is implying.

In some ways, this is good as it forces me to think more deeply and come to my own conclusions.

I rather like his view that education is an initiation into the conversation of humankind – an enormous, never-ending conversation that started when we first learned to speak.

As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries.

It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.

Credit: Michael Oakeshott

He also sees real conversation as purposeless. Something that I have long thought myself.

In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no 'truth' to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought.

They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing.

Of course, a conversation may have passages of argument and a speaker is not forbidden to be demonstrative; but reasoning is neither sovereign nor alone, and the conversation itself does not compose an argument.

Credit: Michael Oakeshott

If you are as intrigued by his thinking as I am, the above quotations are taken from one of his essays, The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind — well worth reading.

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