'Of the Mind As Well As the Heart'

“[T]he main furnishings of the cottage were Oakeshott’s books. He had disposed of most of those he considered merely informative and retained a consummately civilized library.” Inevitably I asked, “Is my library ‘consummately civilized’?” What does that mean? No junk, no bestsellers, I suppose, though some volumes that are “merely informative” – dictionaries and other reference books. Emphasis on the obvious essentials – Dante, Montaigne, Melville, et al. Books that, in their absence, might diminish the respectability of the remaining volumes. Nothing to be ashamed of. A lifetime’s accumulation of books that made us who we are – that is, reasonably civilized. Josiah Lee Auspitz’s “Michael Oakeshott: 1901-1990” was published in the Summer 1991 issue of The American Scholar. The philosopher had died on December 19, 1990, and Auspitz had attended the funeral in Dorset. The essay begins with an account of that event and goes on to examine Oakeshott’s thought. The passage above continues:…