On The Poetry And The Construction Of Michael Oakeshott’s Poetry Philosophy

Oakeshott is an ideologist who believes in the supremacy of freedom. Then how is "the supremacy of freedom" reflected in his poetry works? Some research on the question is inadequate. The research mainly focuses on conservatism and critical-rationalism of Oakeshott’s thought, but ignores a dimension of freedom in poetry. In order to make up this pity as well as to explore a possible dimension in freedom, we investigate his ideas in poetry in the two backgrounds of "modernity of labor" and "humanities of rise". Through the investigation and a research method of hermeneutics. the poetry philosophy aimed at freedom is constructed. The poetry philosophy is achieved after mental conversation.His poetry philosophy is divided into two parts:spiritual philosophy and political philosophy. The former aims to explore the intrinsic freedom of people and look for a refuge for the spiritual rovers in modern vision, which is dated back to1940s and is conducted in the relationship of philosophy, poetry and substance. He believes that the research on substance can provide final meaning for people. The final meanings will also be present in the understanding of politics, the country and the society of people. It is poetry overflow from "sprit" to "politics" based on "substance". However, he turned to external freedom in the1940s. He believes the admiration of closed meaning system is dangerous in a time of epidemic rationalism, so he turned from spiritual philosophy to political philosophy in an exoteric way. The political philosophy tries to solve the multielement dilemma in modern vision which is caused by valuable conflicts between the subjects with multielement. In the understanding of poetry self-sufficiency, he finds self-sufficiency political philosophy. The political philosophy is poetic, and its logic way is "imagination". It finds the way that individual achieves freedom and self-legislation in the appreciation of the beauty in poetry, conversation and myth respectively. Also, in the logic overflow from individual to collectivity to cultural dimension, poetry, conversation and myth have the same structure in logic and finally the involution in dimension is achieved.However, after the exoteric political philosophy and the esoteric spiritual philosophy are confirmed, we find that his poetry philosophy still has a problem. That is, the problem of nihility still exsits because of "closed" sprit and "open" politics. Then did not he give the answer indeed? When we investigate his two dimensions more carefully, the subjectivity features of poetry philosophy are revealed. The revelation of the features makes us realize that his poetry philosophy has a dialectical process back to practice. It is the process that makes us believe his poetry philosophy is conservative and middle-ground. The nature of "closed" in sprit and "open" in politics is relative. Therefore, he gave us an answer of "being carefree" and "salvation" in the road to delivering faced with his poetry philosophy.