Philosophical Review

Persons in Relation by John MacmurrayReview by: Errol E. HarrisThe Philosophical Review, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Jan., 1963), pp. 108-110Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2183068 .

Accessed: 25/06/2014 09:13

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Duke University Press and Philosophical Review are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to The Philosophical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.150 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 09:13:08 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BOOK REVIEWS

of course, so excessively vague that it is hard to see what their discovery amounts to.

The book is written mainly for nonphilosophers, and philosophers will find that any philosophical issues that are raised are quickly dropped again or else are patched up with noncommittal or question- begging formulas (the external world "impinges" on the observer; value is "subjective-objective"; "signs," "symbols," and "meanings" are hopelessly confused).

It must be added that there are several illuminatingly suggestive, even insightful, remarks about art, and others about religion. But their value is largely obscured by the opacity of the synoptic vision. There is a revealing, unintentional confession on page 283: the ideal of the "'existential unity of knowledge in the person" is "much easier to illustrate negatively than positively." If Reid could only have seen the efforts of education workers in the modest light of particular needs and deficiencies, rather than in the seductive glare of the Platonic One, we might have had a more readable book. Only it could not then have masqueraded -as philosophy.

BERNARD MAYO

The University of Birmingham, England

PERSONS IN RELATION. The Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of Glasgow in I954. By JOHN MACMURRAY. New York, Harper, i96i. PP. 235. $5.00.

Professor Macmurray continues and develops, in this book, the thesis he propounded in his first series of Gifford Lectures that the form of the personal is essentially that of agent rather than that of thinker. Thinking, he maintained, is integral to action, which would otherwise be mere event, but it is not the primary character of human personality. On this foundation, Macmurray proceeds in this second volume to elaborate a theory of morals, politics, and religion, all of which he traces back to the original personal relations between members of a family, particularly those between mother and child, which display the form of personal relationship at its simplest. The personal relation is resolved into a negative and a positive element described as "with- drawal and return," and this structure is reflected in all more developed relationships between persons-in moral categories, in political forms and theories, and in religious ceremonies and beliefs.

The problems left unsolved in the earlier book have not been resolved in this second series of lectures. Particularly the problem of freedom

io8

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.150 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 09:13:08 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BOOK REVIEWS

is still left in an unsatisfactory and ambiguous situation. Macmurray puts forward an argument for the reality of freedom which is cogent and, in its way, unanswerable; but he does nothing to make the fact of freedom intelligible, rather the reverse. As action is the specific form of human personal existence, and as action necessarily involves knowing what one is doing, it is self-contradictory to deny that one acts-if only because the denial is itself an act. But the denial of freedom is the denial of action, for unfree movement is not act but mere event. Moreover, such denial is in these days most frequently made on the alleged evidence of the sciences for the ubiquitousness of physico- chemical determination. But, Macmurray points out, science itself is a personal activity on the part of the scientist, and while it is necessary in science to treat all objects as impersonal and all happenings as mere events (and so not as actions), the activity of the scientist himself cannot be so regarded. The very truth claim of a scientific theory is dependent on its being a freely formed judgment (or system of judg- ments) and disappears if the theorizing is regarded as no more than the determined behavior of a physico-chemical mechanism. If freedom is thus undeniable, it still has to be made intelligible. Macmur- ray admits that it is preposterous to allege that action is completely undetermined. If it were, he recognizes, human relations would be incapable of rational regulation. Yet what sort of determination con- trols action, how this is related to its freedom or compatible with it, and what the actual relation is between physico-chemical deter- mination and the sort of determination to which action is subject, are matters left in complete obscurity.

Macmurray, in fact, holds that science is not a true account of the nature of the real but only an imaginative construction useful for theoretical purposes. The real world is one of persons, not of mere organisms or of merely physical events. But it is at the same time not denied that persons inhabit bodies which are organically constituted and operate upon and with instruments which are physical objects obeying physical laws. How are we to understand the nature of free action in relation to these subordinate levels of existence (if such they are) ? It is not easy to extract any intelligible answer from Macmurray's book.

A similar difficulty arises in Macmurray's moral theory. He asserts that the full character and ultimate condition of human action is the positive relation between (at least two) persons, and this is expressed in love and symbolically in the rite of communion in religious ritual. But in any wide society involving large numbers of persons such direct

I09

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.150 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 09:13:08 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BOOK REVIEWS

positive relationship, with the best will in the world, proves to be impossible. Indirect, negative relations are inevitable in such a society, which always contains elements of community (positive relationship) but can never, as a whole, be a community. The logical implication of community, however, is universality of scope. It cannot, by its very nature, exclude anybody. Clearly then, universal com- munity, which would be the condition of the full realization of per- sonality, is impossible. On the other hand, the negative motivation implicit in impersonal relations generates conflict and distorts and frustrates both action and consequently personality, to which positive motivation is maintained to be essential. It should follow that true human personality, like true community, is an unrealizable ideal and the religion which symbolizes this ideal calls for devotion to an imprac- ticable idealization of what is actual in life. Macmurray, however, places the reality in the positive personal relation, without which personality cannot be realized. Yet he criticizes adversely those philos- ophers who find the reality in what is admittedly merely an ideal and who reduce the actual to the status of appearance. He disapproves likewise of "otherworldliness" in religion. It is not clear how his own doctrine avoids these defects.

It is perhaps the function of a reviewer to find fault, but such criti- cism must not blind us to the impressive merit of this work. It has a freshness and originality that is most welcome in an age when both the dominant forms of philosophy are so stale and unfruitful. Analytic philosophy is now self-confessedly in decline and has repudiated its own, hitherto unacknowledged, metaphysical foundations as a texture of superstition. Existentialism with its antirationalist trend forces the philosopher to abdicate in favor of the playwright and the novelist. Here, in Macmurray's work we have a form of personalist philosophy which remains within the jurisdiction and acknowledges the authority of reason, while it avoids, on the one hand, the excesses of intellectualism and, on the other, the intractable dualisms between theory and practice, subject and object, reason and emotion, that create perennial difficulty for so much of traditional philosophy. It is an original contribution to philosophical thought, the very defects of which stimu- late exploration of new avenues and are likely to be productive of new advances.

ERROL E. HARRIs

Connecticut College

I0O

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.150 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 09:13:08 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions