Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Friedrich --

Oh, am I in a quoting mood this evening.

Here's a passage I love from Michael Oakeshott's The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind. Oakeshott uses the image of a conversation to suggest what participation in a field is -- what a field may indeed be. Art, for example.

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 ...

In conversation ... 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.

Have I mentioned recently how enjoyable and rewarding the conversation that we've found in the blogosphere is?

Best,

Michael

Aww, well, we like talking to you guys too! :)Now...please pass the mustard.

Posted by: annette on September 28, 2003 10:15 AM

Sniff. Sorry, I get a little moved by it all sometimes.

Now, hey, how about that Canadian art?

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on September 28, 2003 12:52 PM






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