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PARTISAN REVIEW
Enlightenment stream of thought beginning with Vico - a tributary,
really - that treats the genesis of knowledge as being at the root of
philosophical inquiry.
Within contemporary continental philosophy, it is Hans-Georg
Gadamer, following his teacher Heidegger, who sees this most clearly,
and who has made the issues of "the given" and tradition central to
his work. With contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, only Brit–
ish thinker Michael Oakeshott, beginning with his much neglected
Experience and its Modes
(1933), has tried to fully account for the
genetic character of human knowledge. Oakeshott and his concep–
tion of philosophy seem especially relevant to the work of Goodman,
Putnam, and Rorty . For example, in 1933 Oakeshott wrote, in
almost Goodmanesque fashion, that philosophy begins when one
recognizes "the given," where "the given in thought is the complex
situation in which we find ourselves in the first moments of con–
sciousness." We soon learn, however, that "the conditions of the
given world is never such that it may merely be acquiesced in";
rather, we actively acquire knowledge through "the creation of a new
world by transforming a given world." And this new world is "more
of a world."
Not only are the artifacts of the world in which we are born
given, he argues, but so are our mentalities: language, logic, sci–
ence, history, morals, religious practices, and, yes, even philosophy.
The very faculties with which we "carve up" the world we seek to ex–
plain are themselves a part of, and derive their meaning within, a
tradition rooted in time . Oakeshott put it quite beautifully in one of
his later essays:
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 prime–
val forests and extending and made more articulate over the
course of centuries.
This is not to belittle human knowledge; it is to see it in
perspective, to see that it is ours and that we are responsible for pass–
ing it on. Philosophy, in Oakeshott's view, stands within this frame–
work, and is the self-conscious attempt to encompass and explain
critically, without arrest, the conversation as a whole: "... the main
business of philosophy [is
1
to determine its own character .. . it is at
