Life as a Conversation

Wilfred McClay muses on the thought of British philosopher Michael Oakeshott:

This is where the concept of conversation, so central to Oakeshott, comes into play, and is very illuminating and useful. The “conversation of mankind” is not merely a transitional state to which we have to accommodate ourselves temporarily; it is the human condition, at least the condition of civilized men and women. Our participation in that conversation is to be regarded as an end in itself, not the means to some other end, and not an activity incidental to our human nature, let alone as a reluctant accommodation to an imperfect world. And it is by its nature something that requires a certain freedom and spontaneity to thrive. It is, as Oakeshott says in the “Voice” essay, and in other places as well, “not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit,” but rather is “an unrehearsed intellectual adventure.”

There is, for me, nothing better in life than conversation that approaches this ideal of unrehearsed intellectual adventure. I am also much attracted to the ideal of liberal education advanced by McClay: education that equips people to participate in meaningful conversation.