This essay is part of a publication in progress (as of August, 2000) entitled New Foundations For A Post Modern World: Essays on John Macmurray’s Revolution in Philosophy, ed. by Harry A. Carson. Dr. Carson has graciously consented to its presence on this website.
Edmond La B. Cherbonnier
Professor of Religion Emeritus, Trinity College, Hartford
John Macmurray was keenly aware that his philosophy required a radical shift in outlook from that of the dominant philosophical tradition. Yet he would hardly have called it “his” in any proprietary sense. Whereas some philosophers offer a vision of the world which another person can share only if he/she is willing to exchange his/her own universe for theirs, what Macmurray offers is more like a scientific hypothesis. Others are free to confirm (or refute) his thesis independently, and to pursue its ramifications into areas which he himself may not have had time fully to explore.
One such area is the field of ethics. The great merit of the philosophical framework which he proposes is to provide a way out of the impasse which has dogged ethical theory since the days of the Greek philosophers - an impasse not always acknowledged, lest it issue in ethical skepticism, as in fact it is doing today. But a word of caution is in order: Despite the originality of Macmurray’s thought, some of his conclusions nevertheless coincide with traditional religious views which are now widely perceived as obsolete.
Lest anyone imagine that he is merely parroting outmoded formulae, it is important to remember that he was a fiercely independent thinker who refused to join any church until he retired, and when he did finally join the Quakers, he did so, he said, because they alone did not want him to subscribe to any creed. A single chapter can do no more than hint at his reasoning. But the interested reader can turn to Macmurray’s books for the broad erudition and rigorous logic which undergird his thought.
It is also worth recalling that just as tradition is no guarantee of the truth, the converse also holds: an idea is not necessarily false for being traditional, or even for being unfashionable. One of the striking aspects of Macmurray’s philosophy is his ability to breathe new life into conceptions that have been prematurely written off, such as belief in God and the centrality of love. He provides new bottles for old wine.
Two Half-Truths
The discipline of ethics seeks to establish an objective criterion by which to distinguish “good” from “bad,” right actions from wrong ones. Historically it has divided into two types in competition with each other, neither of which can win, because each can make valid criticisms of the other. They may be briefly summarized as follows, in over-simplified and schematic fashion:
To the first type it has seemed self-evident that the criterion of goodness or rightness must consist in some law or principle of behavior, such as the natural law propounded by the Stoics or the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant. To give a name to this school, it could be called “legalism” or “formalism”- the view that without strict rules of conduct, people will be governed by private preference or personal advantage. Its watchwords are obedience, duty, responsibility, obligation, and so on.
The main objection to an ethic of laws is that it disregards the consequences of the actions it prescribes. Provided only that an act conforms to the rules, it is good, regardless of the harm that may result. The legalist’s motto is, “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall” - to which the obvious reply is that if the heavens fell, it would hardly be justice.
Life is sufficiently complex that a circumstance can always arise in which to obey the law does more harm than to suspend it. The classic example is Kant’s insistence that even if a murderer asked him the whereabouts of his/her intended victim, he would still be obliged to answer truthfully, regardless of the consequences.
A more technical objection to legalism is that it undercuts the very freedom which gives rise to ethics in the first place. Without free choice, human conduct would present no problem. It would automatically conform to the laws of nature. And this is precisely where the legalist’s logic leads. Herbert Spencer admitted as much when he declared that, were he offered the opportunity to surrender his freedom on the guarantee that all his subsequent actions would be right, he would instantly close with the bargain. Though most formalists decline to follow the logic of their position that far, in the last analysis their role model is the robot.
The second type of ethic, currently much in fashion, takes departure from the human freedom which the legalist finds embarrassing. In the name of humanity, it tries to establish an ethic not based on the straightjacket of inflexible moral codes, but one that takes account of human needs and aspirations. Its watchwords are humanistic ones like fulfillment, tolerance, creativity, and of course freedom - all indisputably desirable, and all of which are stifled when the highest good is conceived as obedience to law. The trouble with this school is that all these goods are so difficult to pin down. In the end they turn out to be subjective; that is, relative to the individual or to a particular society.
Until recently, its advocates tried to avoid this conclusion. Today, however, it is either very thinly disguised by such names as multiculturalism, or pluralism, or existentialism, or permissiveness, or “do your own thing”; or else it is frankly proclaimed in its true name: relativism, pure and simple - the doctrine that everyone decides for himself/herself what is good, or authentic, or pleasurable, or fulfilling, unconstrained by any external standard. Yet that is precisely what ethics sets out to avoid: it tries to establish a standard of judgment irrespective of my own private interests or preferences, so that I can no longer justify whatever I do merely by saying, “I feel good about that.” Although advocates of this school would rather call themselves humanists, “relativism” would seem to be the more accurate designation. And once that point has been reached, there is no logical way to rebut the charge that the end justifies the means.
Such is the stalemate between the two main schools of ethical thought. Historically, each one generally fudges its position in order to escape the criticisms of the other. Stripped to their bare essentials, when equivocations are removed, the position boils down to this: Because we are free agents, we need a criterion of choice; to that extent the formalist is right. Yet whichever criterion we choose seems to become a taskmaster. Relativism, on the other hand, by whatever name (such as post-modern or New Age), in order to preserve freedom, must do away with all objective standards, and therefore with ethics itself in the proper sense.
The Primacy of Intention
Enter John Macmurray. Within the framework of thought which he provides, the two schools of ethics turn out to be half-truths. Within traditional philosophy, they are doomed to perpetual combat, in which each is vulnerable to the other. Once transposed into Macmurray’s categories, however, the two halves become whole. A firm criterion of good and evil is established without becoming a tyrant; and human freedom is preserved and enhanced, -without issuing in relativism or caprice.
The logic by which Macmurray makes his case would require a separate essay. It must suffice to show how his philosophy does provide a way out of the ethical impasse. He anchors his thought in the reality of human freedom, which he establishes by the strictest reasoning. Where he differs from both the legalist and relativist is in his relentless pursuit of the logical implications of freedom. Chief among these is the primacy of intention or purpose, and how it differs from the teleological processes of the organic world:
All natural processes...are teleological, and are defined by reference to the end of the process. Human action is not teleological, because it is intentional... We do not have to wait till the end is reached to know what the intention was.1
Macmurray also distinguishes an intention from an ideal:
An ideal of life is inherently reflective and contemplative ,...an idea of how life might be lived or ought to be lived .... It is concerned with judgment, not with action... If we are to realize our ideals, we shall first have to form an intention to act in a way that we believe will realize them. The ideal itself is not an intention.2
If in reality human life is constituted by intentions and goals, which may or may not reflect an ideal, then the principal question for ethics is not, as the formalist would have it, “What rules should I obey?” but rather, “What intentions should I adopt?” This is a point scored for the relativist, who, in the name of freedom, does pursue goals, rather than live by rules. But he or she cannot recommend any particular goal; that is a matter for the individual to choose for himself/herself. Aristotle spoke for the relativist when he said that it is only possible to argue about means, but not about ends.
Macmurray does argue about ends, using freedom as his criterion. Freedom, he points out, consists in the ability not merely to choose a goal, but also to realize it. It follows that wrong intentions are those which either fail outright or, if they do succeed, fail to deliver the satisfaction they promised.
Action is frustrated by error, and the frustration of action is the absence of freedom.3
If I choose the wrong end, I shall find, if I achieve it, that it is unsatisfactory; that it is not what I really intended, though it appeared to be.4
The true object of the ethicist’s quest can therefore be clearly stated: an intention which, in the long run, has the best chance of success, and thereby of sustaining and enhancing human freedom.
To the skeptic, there is no such intention. If the human enterprise has not been a conspicuous success, the reason is that life is inherently tragic. Human beings can aspire, but are doomed to fail. Defeat is integral to the human condition, and the quest for an intention that might succeed is a quixotic fantasy.
Macmurray draws a different conclusion. If human history has not been a success story, the reason must be that too many people have adopted the wrong intention. The tragic view of life ignores the possibility of there being an intention of first priority which does not issue in frustration: “Man lives by intention; that is his nature. Yet his intentions are continually frustrated. This must mean that he intends wrongly.”5
How could there be an intention which did stand a chance of succeeding, and thereby of preserving human freedom? Macmurray answers: only if the world as a whole, including human nature as a part of it, were itself imbued with an over-arching intention. In that case, the solution to the human problem would be to become conscious of this master plan and to adopt it, thereby aligning oneself with the dynamic of history and at the same time expressing one’s own innermost nature.
His (man’s) salvation can lie only in discovering and willing that intention which ...brings him into harmony with the reality in which he has his being. Only such an intention can be realized. Any other will necessarily lead to frustration, because it is an attempt to live against the structure of the world; and since he is part of the world, in defiance of his own nature.6
Can the existence of such an innate intention be established? Apart from the careful reasoning behind it, Macmurray’s answer may seem not only familiar, but out of date as well. Since an intention can only be ascribed to a free agent, and not to things, the world would have to be the creation of a Purposer; that is, God. The ethical question thus leads in the end to the quest for God.
Macmurray is not in the least embarrassed, as a philosopher, to use such an unfashionable term. He does not introduce it as a deus ex machina to rescue an otherwise malfunctioning philosophy; nor does he presuppose it, by an act of faith, as an unproven first premise. On the contrary, he arrives at this conclusion only at the end of an exhaustive analysis, whose logical steps are spelled out in the two volumes of his Gifford Lectures. At the conclusion he asks: Have we any reason to support the belief in God? And he replies, “We have the best of reasons.” If the philosopher’s aim is to formulate a coherent and comprehensive view of the world, there is but one way to accomplish this:
There is, then, only one way in which we can think our relation to the world... We must ...conceive it as the act of God the Creator of the world, and ourselves as created agents, with a limited and dependent freedom to determine the future, which can be realized only on the condition that our intentions are in harmony with His intention and which must frustrate itself if they are not.7
For a philosopher to appeal to the idea of God is often suspect, on the ground that it is only an expedient introduced gratuitously to shore up a philosophy that would otherwise collapse. Macmurray would simply reply to the effect that no God worthy of the name could be disregarded with impunity - not even by philosophers. He might have added, “The evidence is clear: Without God, nothing works whether in life or in philosophy.”
Old Wine, New Bottle
What then is this over-arching intention which alone can enhance freedom? The answer is again familiar and out of fashion. But it is arrived at and supported in ways that have rarely if ever been used before. The argument proceeds in two stages.
The first step departs radically from the main philosophical tradition, which posits the individual thinker in isolation from the world, and which therefore constantly teeters on the brink of solipsism. Macmurray argues to the contrary, by an analysis of human freedom itself, that an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms. He or she is inevitably related to others, not merely by circumstance, but by logical necessity.
Personal existence is constituted by the relation of persons... The agent-self is a logical abstraction and can only exist as a community of personal agents.8
There can be no man until there are at least two men in communication.9
For some philosophers, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, this is bad news indeed. For him, we are indeed chained to one another, and that is precisely why we can never become truly free. Hence his famous conclusion, “Hell is other people” - a hell which one can never escape.
At the second stage, Macmurray reminds Sartre that the fact of inter-dependence, which defines the human condition, can be experienced not only negatively, but also positively. The same dependence upon others which fills Sartre with existential loathing and constitutes a kind of damnation, can also become the medium of salvation. It need not necessarily be a source of hostility, frustration, and resentment; it can also be liberating, the source of the highest fulfillment.
In ourselves we are nothing... it is only in relation to others that we exist as persons; we are invested with significance by others who have need of us, and borrow our reality from those who care for us. We live and move and have our being not in ourselves but in one another; and what rights or powers or freedom we possess are ours by the grace and favour of our fellows. Here is the basic fact of our human condition, which all of us can know if we stop pretending, and do know in moments when the veil of self-deception is stripped from us.10
If, then, I exist as an individual only in personal relations to other individuals, and if at the same time it is other individuals who thwart my freedom, then I can only become truly free with their help; that is, if we share and affirm a common intention.
I need you to be myself. This need is for a fully positive personal relation in which, because we trust one another, we can think and feel and act together. Only in such a relation can we really be ourselves.11
Here at last is the intention that is built into human nature and which alone fulfills it. It is sometimes glimpsed by members of athletic teams. Long after their playing days are over, they still look back on the days when they were “all for one and one for all” as one of the high points of their lives. The same is often true of former comrades in arms, who continue to come to reunions in the hope of recapturing the old camaraderie. That some such relationship, in which each person affirms the other, should become universal, is the intention behind creation. Macmurray calls it friendship, raised to the highest degree. “It is only in friendship that persons are free in relation.”12 And conversely, hostility is indeed a kind of bondage. “The root of frustration and unfreedom is the existence of enmity and estrangement between us.”13
Friendship, however, involves more than merely cooperating for the achievement of a particular goal, such as creating a winning team (though it may begin there). Friendship endures with or without a goal, for it is sustained by emotional ties. It is in fact a voluntary creation of the kind of natural relationship that unites the members of a family. “It is neither established by force nor maintained by a sense of duty. It is established and maintained by natural affection.”14 Like a family, friendship is an end in itself.
Macmurray does not shrink from calling this emotional component by its right name: love. He reclaims the word from the tortured and rarefied meaning which it has often received at the hands of theologians, and restores it to its natural sense. “Love,” he declares, “is the way of behaving that is determined by affection.”15 In another step toward common sense, Macmurray also maintains that love is not complete until it is reciprocated - a fact to which any lover could testify, but which has often escaped theologians: “Love is fulfilled only when it is reciprocated... The refusal of mutuality is the frustration of personal existence absolutely.”16
Mutual affection, then, is what human beings are made for. As such, it is the fulfillment of freedom and the answer to the ethicist’s quest. As Macmurray puts it:
Morality is the expression of personal freedom. That freedom is grounded in our capacity to be real and to love reality. The supreme reality of human life is the reality of persons, and of persons in personal relation with one another. Friendship, therefore, is the essence of morality.17
Should anyone object that this sounds suspiciously like the biblical Kingdom of Heaven, where everyone loves his/her neighbor as himself /herself, but with a new philosophical underpinning, Macmurray would reply that the validity of an idea is not affected by its antiquity. If one nevertheless insists on using age as a standard, he might also add that vintage wines, after all, are the best.
Ends versus Means
To test Macmurray’s position, consider his solution to a problem over which the two traditional camps, each with its own half-truth, have been trapped in a deadlock: the problem of ends and means. As already noted, the logic of humanism, when pushed to its conclusion, leads in the end to the cynical proposition that the end justifies the means. “End,” in this context, refers to a person’s end in view, as distinct from a second meaning which appears below. The objections to this position are obvious. In the first place, it legitimates any action, no matter how destructive its outcome, provided only that the doer meant well. Even a Stalin could justify his purges on the ground it was a necessary step toward his declared goal of a society in which no one lived at anyone else’s expense, and the state would wither away.
Stalin is an extreme case of what everyone must have experienced dozens of times. To justify any action by appealing to lofty motives is no more than a doctrine of expediency. The doer has only to cite benign intentions in order to evade responsibility for his/her actions. The doctrine provides him/her with an all-purpose alibi.
Of course one suspects that Stalin’s actual motives were not quite what he said. That is the second objection to allowing the end to justify the means: it is notoriously easy to be deceived about intentions and motives, particularly one’s own.
Macmurray cites the hypothetical example of a young woman who uses her considerable influence to help another get a scholarship in a foreign country. She is quite proud of her altruistic motives, but her friends all realize that both women are interested in the same man, and that it serves the first one’s interest to get the second out of the way.18 Similarly, a parent can sincerely believe that he or she wants only the best for a child without recognizing the possessiveness or ambition which can distort the child’s development. As the prophet Jeremiah says, “The heart is deceitful above all things ...Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)
The best test of one’s true motives is generally (though not always) the outcome of one’s actions. It is true that, even with the best of intentions, an action sometimes does miscarry. More often than not, however, the “law of unintended consequences” only affects the person who has not taken sufficient care to anticipate the possible results of an act which is to say that the intention was only half-serious in the first place. Or rather, as Macmurray would say, it may not really have been an intention at all, but only an ideal. The bureaucrats who have poured billions of dollars into third-world countries were doubtless acting from humanitarian ideals. But that does not absolve them from failing to foresee that the money would surely end up in the pockets of local tyrants. Ideals, Macmurray declares, can mask a hidden motive: “the desire to know the truth without having to live by it... It is the secret wish to escape from moral commitment, from responsibility.”19
To close off that escape route, and to hold the doer accountable for his actions, the legalist concentrates not on the end in view, but on the means. He constructs a set of inviolable rules which may not be broken, “though the heavens fall,” no matter how lofty the declared motives. In effect, what he/she actually does is to make the means themselves into ends, inasmuch as he/she is restricted, in theory, at least to obeying moral laws. Macmurray points out that even though such an ethic might prevent some of the excesses of a Stalin, it is, in its own way, likewise irresponsible. It too enables the doer to wash his/her hands of the consequences of an action, not by claiming lofty motives, but by sticking to the letter of the law, regardless of the outcome. That is the same psychology that enabled the wardens of Nazi concentration camps to plead that they were only following orders. Fortunately, many legalists, like many humanists, often hesitate to follow consistently the logic of their position. Both need an ethic they can live by, which they can practice as well as preach.
Macmurray proposes one. His point of departure is the one assumption which humanist and legalist hold in common. Both tacitly accept Aristotle’s dictum that de finibus non disputandum - it is not possible to argue about aims and intentions, but only about the means of achieving them. Each person adopts his own by an act of choice that is, in the last analysis, opaque to the reasoning process. Though it may be susceptible to emotional appeals, there is no way logically to establish the superiority of one goal over another.
This Macmurray denies. Aristotle to the contrary, he argues compellingly, on the basis of both fact and logic, for the priority of one particular goal over all the rest: friendship. An action is judged by whether or not it nurtures friendship. How does this differ from saying that the end justifies the means? The answer turns upon the second meaning of the word “end.” Failure to distinguish it from the first can lead to interminable confusion and misunderstanding. In Macmurray’s context, “end” signifies, not a person’s end in view, his or her intention, but rather an action’s end result, its outcome. He is not saying that the means are justified by admirable motives, but by whether they lead to one and only one result: the conditions which foster friendship. What else, he might well ask, could possibly justify the means - or condemn them?
Rules as Guidelines
If that still makes the legalist uncomfortable, Macmurray confronts him with a choice. Either one can make the rules absolutely binding, without regard to their consequences; or one can give the highest priority to the end result, in Macmurray’s case friendship, and use the rules insofar as they enhance it. There is no other alternative.
If any means are acceptable provided that they do in fact (and not just in intention) promote friendship, is there then no place for traditional ethical rules and moral teaching, such as the Ten Commandments? There is indeed, for several reasons. If, as Macmurray maintains, the intention of friendship is implanted in everyone’s human nature, no matter how deeply buried, then it is not surprising that the human race has accumulated, however haltingly and ambiguously, a store of prescriptions and admonitions which serve as guidelines to that end.
That such rules are instrumental only, rather than ends in themselves, was affirmed by Jesus himself. After reciting the two love commandments, he added: “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” That is, the laws depend for their validity on their being the means to creating and sustaining an environment in which love can flourish. Theoretically, a situation might arise in which to observe them could do more harm than good. Hence, St. Paul’s dictum, “All things are lawful, but not all things are expedient;” that is, they do not all facilitate love.
It is difficult, however, to imagine a circumstance in which friendship would be advanced by murder, or stealing, or committing adultery, or bearing false witness, or covetousness. Anyone who violates these rules takes upon himself/herself the burden of proving that his/her particular case really is an exception to the rule. Given the endemic human tendency to rationalize one’s personal desires, for practical purposes certain rules are perhaps best considered all but inviolable, even on the unlikely assumption that everyone had consciously adopted Macmurray’s intention.
Friendship’s Allies
Specifically, what conditions would make the world less inhospitable to friendship? Macmurray emphasizes two in particular: freedom and equality. If one person puts constraints upon another, whether physical or psychological, friendship is to that extent inhibited. Love is a function, not of coercion, but of freedom. Macmurray avails himself of the insights of psychiatry to illustrate the invisible cords with which one person can curtail another’s freedom. Likewise, if society as a whole is so structured as to hold some of its members in subjection, to that extent it prevents community. It follows that in principle, though by no means always in detail or tactics, the intention behind history is furthered by liberation movements.
A second condition of mutuality is equality. If people do not enjoy the same rights, or if one exercises power over the other, love between them is inhibited. “Any relation in which one party acts as the superior and the other as the inferior is not a friendship.”20 At the personal level Macmurray maintains that they can partly counteract this handicap by intending equality between them, notwithstanding their unequal circumstances, though this remains an unsatisfactory expedient.21 On the level of society as a whole, however, this is hardly possible. It must be restructured wherever it institutionalizes inequality. Macmurray’s philosophy thus has a strong social component, which he himself sought to implement by helping to found a (short-lived) political party in England, known as the Commonwealth.
Macmurray also mentions two other prerequisites of friendship, both fairly obvious. The first is trust, and its counterpart trustworthiness. Without it, persons can hardly become friends, nor can institutions function. Almost daily, when newspapers try to explain why a company or a marriage, an athletic team or a church congregation is falling apart, they cite lack of trust among its members. Everyday life is upheld by mutual trust - or poisoned by betrayal. A confidence man’s first move, as the name implies, is to persuade his quarry that he is trustworthy. Without trust, not even fraud will work. For good reason, the devil is the father of lies, for lying destroys trust, after first exploiting it. Some truths go unappreciated precisely for being so obvious.
The second prerequisite is respect. The Oxford Dictionary defines the verb as “to avoid degrading or insulting or injuring or interfering with or interrupting” a person; in other words, to treat him/her with courtesy. Courtesy also includes the willingness to apologize and to forgive, since even the best of friends can hardly avoid occasionally giving offense, if only inadvertently. Today such amenities are not only falling into disuse, but are widely under open assault. Where discourtesy prevails, people will be emotionally and psychologically on the defensive. Though they might still call each other friends, without mutual respect they would hardly understand the full meaning of the word. Courtesy is respect in action. Everyone has it in his/her power either to spurn or revitalize it.
An Ethic of Creative Imagination
By not absolutizing rules, Macmurray frees himself to choose, and indeed to devise or invent, whatever line of action the occasion requires. His is very much a “hands on” ethic: he is obliged to become an ethical tactician, to develop an expertise in foreseeing what action will nourish friendship - in short, to become a connoisseur of consequences. For by its consequences is a means justified, and by its consequences is it condemned.
Such an ethic summons each individual to the continual use of his/her creative imagination. Blind obedience to moral rules is for automatons. Human beings have a higher vocation. They are challenged to inject into each new situation as it arises the innovative word or act that defuses hostility and fosters friendship. For this no rulebook by itself will suffice. It was the rulebook that led Immanuel Kant to advocate betraying the victim to the murderer. Macmurray’s ethic might have liberated him from “the letter that killeth” in favor of the intention behind it -“the spirit that giveth life.”
An example of how an inspired word can transform an emotionally charged situation is Jesus’ response when they brought before him the woman taken in adultery: “Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.” By this remark he defused the situation, and, if the woman is indeed to be identified as Mary Magdalene, her life was transformed at a stroke.
A memorable illustration from literature is the episode in Les Miserables, where Jean Valjean, the escaped galley slave, embittered by the injustice of his sentence, is offered hospitality by an abbé whom he planned to rob. In the dead of night, he steals the abbé’s silver candlesticks and flees. Apprehended the next morning by the police and brought back to confront his host, Jean Valjean is already visualizing the torments reserved for escaped galley slaves, when the abbé says to the gendarmes, “I gave him the candlesticks, you can let him go.” Jean Valjean was never the same again.
In both these examples, a brilliant comment by-passes the letter of the law to transform a tense and threatening situation into a constructive one. Obviously, such master strokes follow no rule. They are the inspiration of the moment.
The same is even more true when there is no casualty to avert; when circumstances are positive, or at least neutral. In such an encounter, it is often difficult even to describe exactly what it was that created or cemented friendship - whether a subtle gesture, or playful banter, or some other spontaneous initiative. The secret is elusive, as in humor. It has to be experienced. As the biblical scholar T.W. Manson once remarked, an ethical life has much in common with a work of art.
The Philosopher’s Stone
Macmurray provides the legalist with an ethical touchstone by which to judge an action: the extent to which it encourages friendship. And he provides the humanist with scope for creative innovation by endorsing any means to that end. He provides both with a fixed star by which to live: the intention to establish mutual affection. Thus are the two half-truths reconciled at last.
His is not primarily an ethic of moral injunctions, but an understanding of who we are and how we can stop tormenting ourselves and each other. The root problem is therefore not human wickedness in the first instance (though there is plenty of that subsequently), but ignorance and stupidity, which in turn result from the fear of facing up to reality and the risks that involves: “Men resist the discovery of the truth through fear of the demands it makes on them.”22 The corrective is therefore not moral strictures, but confrontation with the truth about oneself.
Surprisingly, Macmurray finds corroboration for this thesis in an unexpected place, the gospels themselves, once they have been rescued from the legalistic and censorious tone that has been projected onto them. Jesus, he points out, rarely criticizes his followers for anything but fear and lack of trust, which perpetuate the cycle of self-defeat.23
It is the stupidity of this process of self stultification which Jesus recognizes and condemns - the folly of the man who built his house upon sand, refusing to look to the obvious consequences of his behavior; the folly of the virgins who ignored the consequences not taking enough oil for their lamps.24
Accordingly, Jesus generally speaks in the indicative mood, not the imperative. When he does use the imperative as in “Turn the other cheek,” he is using middle-eastern hyperbole to indicate the extent to which one should be prepared to go if (but only if) the consequence might be the melting of a hardened heart. One is exhorted to use creative imagination to transform a negative situation into a positive one.25
Because Macmurray’s ethic enjoins one not to “be good” but to wake up, it also provides an answer to the wistful question posed by Immanuel Kant. It is one thing, he said, to know what one ought to do; but what will motivate a person to do it? (In his own terms, “How can pure reason become practical?”) Whoever could answer that question, he added, would have discovered the legendary philosopher’s stone. Macmurray provides the motivation that Kant sought in vain:
The discovery of what I really am is also the discovery of what I really want... “Why should I do the will of God? Why shouldn’t I do as I please?”... Because you want to, because the real impulse of your nature, the real desire of your proper self, is precisely to fulfill the will of God... What you call ‘doing as you please’ is the product of your own ignorance of what you really are doing.26
To discover one’s own essential nature includes the discovery of what one really wants... It also provides in the individual a sufficient motive for making that intention his own. Part of the transformation which self-discovery produces is a transformation of motives.27
The Clue to History
Not all philosophers put their thesis at risk by stating it as unambiguously as Macmurray does: “The intention of this creation is known-a universal community of persons, with freedom and equality as its structural principles of relationship.”28 In so doing, he invites the skeptic to ask for proof, or at least for evidence. He replies with a remarkable tour de force to show that, despite the rough and tumble of the historical process, Western history, from ancient times to the present, has in fact evolved, however haltingly, in the direction of the two main components of friendship: freedom and equality. The advance has by no means been smooth or unbroken, but despite setbacks and detours, the broad trend is discernible.29
Surprisingly, the trend is still discernible in the present century, for all that it has witnessed: genocide, the Holocaust, the horrors of two world wars, and now renewed ethnic, racial and religious strife. For Macmurray, however, the significant fact is that, side by side with these catastrophes, there has also been a surge of liberation movements - of women and other minorities - accompanied by a proliferation of egalitarian crusades and democratic regimes throughout the world.
At this point proponents of the tragic view of life challenge Macmurray to account for all the destructive aspects of history, which appear at least to compromise his theory. He replies that, horrendous though these are, they are not necessary, as the tragic view would have it, but contingent, and therefore avoidable, the result of people’s refusal to accept consciously the intention imbedded in human nature: “Men destroy themselves by their refusal to live by their own nature. They will not be themselves, so they destroy themselves.”30 And why do they continue to do this? Macmurray answers simply: “Because we are afraid.”31 And why are we afraid? Because in friendship there is a risk, the risk of rejection and betrayal. Rather than run that risk, people are tempted to seek security in either of two ways.
The first option is that of withdrawal. A person can choose to sit on the sidelines of life and try to master it by comprehending it, to become, with Plato, “the spectator of all time and existence.” Alternatively, one can choose the aggressive option and try to control and dominate life by amassing power, whether economic, political, or military. Macmurray shows in some detail how both these options end in frustration, then in the search for a scapegoat, and finally ...Auschwitz and Bosnia. Though saddened by such disasters, he is neither so naive nor so optimistic as to be surprised by them.
To take the collapse of a civilization as a proof that things are going badly is to misunderstand the process of history. It is a sign that things are going according to schedule.32
This unblinking realism prompts Macmurray to make an audacious assertion: that once in possession of the dynamic of history, one can not only comprehend the past and the present, but also make some confident prognostications. “The truth of the ethic is manifested, and can only be manifested, in the realization of the prediction which it makes possible.”33
Macmurray specifically links this bold claim to the biblical conception of prophecy. The prophets were not clairvoyants or seers, he declares, but realistic interpreters of the facts of history. By sharing their grasp of reality, anyone can attain a single unity of ...understanding with a prediction of the future course of history as an integral part of it. We shall discover, as in all real understanding, an insight which is also foresight.34
The greatest recent challenge to this claim was the stubborn endurance of the Soviet Union. By 1989 it had lasted seventy years, and to all outward appearances would continue indefinitely to menace the free world in defiance of Macmurray’s thesis. A year and a half later, however, it had vanished with scarcely a trace, in dramatic confirmation of it.
Macmurray’s ethic, in short, includes the prediction that even the mightiest empire will eventually collapse if it is based upon exploitation and oppression, undermined from within by the resentment and antagonism they engender. And conversely, a society founded upon mutual care and support can withstand the worst catastrophes, as the Jewish people, uniquely in history, have in fact done, even without benefit of a land of their own.
At the personal level Macmurray makes a similar prophecy, which is at the same time a warning to an increasingly cynical generation. To oppose the intention immanent in history contravenes one’s own innermost desire, however, deeply hidden it may be, and will therefore result in gnawing dissatisfaction and frustration. And conversely, to align oneself with this intention, while it can hardly guarantee individual survival, at least not on an earthly plane, nor even immunity to adversity and affliction, nevertheless offers the prospect of a fulfilling life, described by Macmurray in a memorable sermon delivered at Oxford University, and appropriately entitled, “The Kingdom of Heaven”:
There is one thing and one only, in human experience, which is the meeting place of our highest pleasure and our highest value..., fused into one complete perfection in the very absoluteness of joy. In it the reality of life has reached its climax and cannot be surpassed... It is nothing unusual or mystical, but the most open and universally free of human experiences, the communion of two persons in the unity of friendship.35
That is Macmurray’s retort to Sartre: Heaven, too, is other people. In the preface to his Gifford Lectures, he summarizes the purport of his entire philosophy in an epigram: “All meaningful knowledge is for the sake of action; all meaningful action is for the sake of friendship.” The next logical step is to put his conclusions to the final test by acting upon them, threatening though that can be. In his own words, his claims “can be verified only by persons who are prepared to commit themselves intentionally to the way of life they describe.”36 The stakes are high, but the prize is worth the risk. And the odds are favorable, for one is running with the grain of human nature, 37 and ultimately with the tide of human history.
1. John Macmurray, The Clue to History; London: SCM Press, 1938, p. 16. Referred to in subsequent notes as CH.
2. CH, p. 8.
3. CH, p. 16.
4. CH, p. 82.
5. CH, p. 82. It is worth remarking that Macmurray was writing some years before the feminist movement, and consequently still used conventional words like “mankind,” “man,” and “men” to refer to the whole human race. However, he articulated the main principle of feminism in many writings, particularly in The Clue to History.
6. CH, p. 82.
7. John Macmurray, Persons in Relation; London: Faber & Faber, 1961, p. 222. Abbreviated in subsequent notes by PR.
8. John Macmurray, The Self as Agent; London: Faber & Faber, 1961, p. 12. Abbreviated in subsequent notes as SA.
9. PR, p. 12.
10. PR, p. 221.
11. PR, p. 150.
12. PR, p. 151.
13. CH, p. 72.
14. PR, p. 156.
15. CH, p. 69.
16. PR, p. 73.
17. John Macmurray, Freedom in the Modern World; London: Faber & Faber, 1932, p. 209.
18. John Macmurray, Reason and Emotion; London: Faber & Faber, 1936, pp. 27-30.
19. Ibid., pp. 27-30.
20. CH, p. 80.
21. CH, pp. 74-81.
22. CH, p. 82.
23. CH, p. 90.
24. CH, p. 99; my italics.
25. Macmurray’s interpretation is corroborated by the Israeli scholar Pinchas Lapide in his book The Sermon on the Mount; New York: Maryknoll, 1986, Chapter 13.
26. CH, p. 61.
27. CH, pp. 59-60.
28. CH, p. 100.
29. See CH, especially Chapter 4. Karl Popper, in his seminal - The Open Society and its Enemies (New York: Harper Torchbooks, Harper and Row, 1863, Vol II, pp. 269ff.), refers to Macmurray as a historical determinist, on the basis of certain passages in The Clue to History that give the impression that human self-frustration could not go on forever. However, Macmurray makes it quite clear that freedom and equality will eventually triumph only if humankind freely chooses them (see especially Religion, Art and Science (Liverpool University Press, 1961), p. 78: “The end of our transformation must be a universal community, unless - as is indeed possible - the story of humanity is nearing its end.”
30. CH, p. 100.
31. CH, p. 62.
32. CH, p. 92.
33. CH, p. 87.
34. CH, p. 92.
35. From the sermon published under the title The Kingdom of Heaven; Oxford: The Oxonian Press, 1929.
36. PR, p. 223.
37. I owe the expression to my friend and former colleague, Professor Frank G. Kirkpatrick.