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PARTISAN REVIEW
always two. Technical knowledge, the knowledge that can be ex–
pressed in rules and formulae, that can be deliberately taught and
learned and remembered and "as we say, put into practice" receives
the admiration and commands the undivided attention of the Ra–
tionalist: whereas practical knowledge, the knowledge that exists
only in action and is the heir of tradition, is not merely underrated
or ignored by him but has its existence denied, is counted as mere
nescience. The Rationalist takes up this attitude in the first place
because he is "the man of the book,"- the man who believes that
what can't go into words and propositions is nothing and technique
is by definition that which is verbalizable; and secondly, because he
is in quest of certainty, and technique being something that can be
written down in a self-contained, self-explanatory form, holds out
hope of indubitability. But- and here we come up against the Ra–
tionalist's second characteristic error- not merely does he hold tech–
nique in ludicrously high esteem, but he does not correctly understand
the nature of that which he admires so inordinately. For technique
can never be the independent, self-sufficing phenomenon that he
thinks it is. Everything that we learn, we learn on the basis of what
we know already: all education is a move from
comparative
ignor–
ance to
comparative
knowledge.
If
this is so, then even the most
seemingly autonomous technique depends upon, and is nourished by,
beliefs and hypotheses, fragments of acquired or inherited knowledge,
that lie outside itself. And so the ideal of certainty, which depends
for its satisfaction on the possibility of imprinting upon the
tabula
rasa
of the mind an isolated independent body of doctrine, must
remain unrealized.
Now it might seem from this resume of Oakeshott's critical doc–
trine that, on account of the reference it contains to a higher kind
of knowledge, it can only improperly be regarded as an instance of
the Argument from Ignorance. But a closer examination of this su–
perior knowledge-particularly as described in "Political Education"
-will show such suspicions to be unfounded. For, in the first place,
practical knowledge is not, in the ordinary, doctrinal or theoretical
sense of the word, 'knowledge' at all: that is to say, it does not and
in its very nature cannot issue in a set of verbalizable beliefs and
opinions.
It
expresses itself in and only in practice. It is like a craft
or skill that cannot be taught, only imparted, and that is handed
