The Conversation of Mankind Michael Oakeshott

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.

A girl, in order to escape a conclusion, may utter what appears to be an out­ rageously irrelevant remark, but what in fact she is doing is turning an argument she finds tiresome into a conversation she is more at home in.

In conversation, ‘facts’ appear only to be resolved once more into the possibilities from which they were made; ‘certainties’ are shown to be combustible, not by being brought in contact with other ‘certainties’ or with doubts, but by being kindled by the presence of ideas of another order; approximations are revealed between notions normally remote from one another.

Thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each other’s movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions.

Nobody asks where they have come from or on what authority they are present; nobody cares what will become of them when they have played their part.

There is no symposiarch or arbiter; not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials.

Every entrant is taken at its face-value and everything is permitted which can get itself accepted into the flow of speculation.

And voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy.

Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a win­ner gets a prize, not is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure.

It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering.

Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another.

 

This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse – appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances.

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.

Of course there is argument and inquiry and information, but wherever these are profitable they are to be recognized as passages in this conversation, and perhaps they are not the most captivating of the passages.

It is the ability to participate in this conversation, and not the ability to reason cogently, to make discoveries about the world, or to contrive a better world, which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilized man from the barbarian.

Indeed, it seems not improbable that it was the engagement in this conversation (where talk is without a conclusion) that gave us our present appearance, man being descended from a race of apes who sat in talk so long and so late that they wore out their tails.

Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation.

And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance.

I say, ‘in the end’, because, of course, the immediate field of moral activity is the world of practical enterprise, and intel­ lectual achievement appears, in the first place, within each of the various universes of discourse; but good behaviour is what it is with us because practical enterprise is recognized not as an isolated activity but as a partner in a conversation, and the final measure of intel­lectual achievement is in terms ofits contribution to the conversation in which all universes of discourse meet.

Credit: Michael Oakeshott