JOHN MACMURRAY: A BIOGRAPHY

An inspiring teacher and professor at the universities of Oxford, London and Edinburgh, John Macmurray (1891-1976) claimed that his life had been too ordinary to be written about. Despite this - and despite the deplorable holocaust of letters that he and his wife engaged in every time they moved house - including those of Martin Buber! - here we have this first biography, and a very interesting overview it is of a life that was high-minded, inspiriting and a force for good. Macmurray had a powerful and charming personality. Charmed too, for, at the Front in 1918, he was the only member of his company to survive. Reared in a Scottish family who mingled the views of the Plymouth Brethren with those of the evangelistic mission-hall, but who also believed (in time-honoured Scottish fashion) in the salvationary function of education, John's initially strait-laced views gave way in his twenties to a belief that Christian dogmas are not timeless and absolute, and need to be tested by experience. He was driven to further change by his experiences in the War, initially in the ambulance corps. In 1917 (briefly back at home), preaching a sermon in favour of post-War Christian reconciliation between Germans and British, he felt his congregation, as they listened, turn cold and angry against him. After this experience he became wary of institutional religion, and refused to belong to any Christian church — till late in life when he and his wife joined the Quakers. . What did he stand for, then? The biographer takes us on a tour of his evolving views, of which here are a few glimpses. His philosophy was not "pure" and "abstract". Like Sartre, he believed that philosophy should impinge upon life, and have a political dimension. He believed in God, though not in any God of dogmatic definition. Unlike most philosophers he did not think that the only defensible source of morality must be emotionless ratiocination. He turns this more or less upside down, saying "Love is the core of rationality." Moreover he did not believe that the world is fundamentally mechanical. The world is fundamentally "personal" for Macmurray. "Personal" is a tricky word, but he means this in something of the way that we talk of "personal relationships" or of "God as a person". Relationship between people is the way to knowledge. Relationship is in some way fundamental. Cold truth is not truth. Reason, he thought, emerged from love of one's fellow men. But if the world shows unmistakable signs of the personal — and it does — then the Universe must be personal too. There must be a God. All this takes him well away from any ivory tower, for it leads to the problematic world of action; it has a political dimension and this is trickiest of all. Macmurray belonged from time to time to small, energetic social and political movements. In the period between the Wars he made for some time the usual mistake of thinking that Communism had, post-Lenin, anything at all to do with such views! He was part of the period's fertile mill of ideas - "free love", D. H Lawrence, socialist, liberal and humane ideals, the longing for community, the dangerous flirtation with Communism, and with pacifism. Nonetheless his stance was firmly against fascism, and he saw quite clearly that the defence of liberal principles required also the rejection of pacifism. This ideological turmoil lies of course behind our modem selves. Our biographer performs on the whole an excellent grand tour of Macmurray's viewpoints. He leaves however one nagging obscurity. It seems that Macmurray rejected both "idealism" and "mysticism", but Costello does not make it clear just what Macmurray meant by these terms. (The former is a particularly slippery word, and easy to confuse with Macmurray's own youthful puritanical "idealism".) It seems however that it was the "idealism" of post- Kantian philosophy which he rejected along with the "mysticism" of Indian religion. He had a poor opinion too of ancient Greek thought, and neither the present biographer nor your present reviewer is happy about this. Above all I would have welcomed some account of Macmurray's motives for rejecting them. Let us take it however as an encouragement to turn to his books. We shall find his essence in his Gifford Lectures, published as The Self as Agent and in Persons in Relation. Reading these makes us realise how far he is from the concerns of British philosophy of his time — those figures like Ryle and Ayer who sought to reduce all human understanding to the rules of language — though they had no linguistic training, presumed that 'what we all say" is what Oxford dons say, and invented their own English grammar as they went along. Macmurray does not seem to have engaged in controversy with his fellow-philosophers, and increasingly less so as the years went by. The connexions he might have made — and abortively did sometimes make — were with continental thinkers — above all with Gabriel Marcel and Martin Buber. It was with these that he had dialogue, and one must bitterly regret that he destroyed his side of the correspondence. The special Scots tradition of philosophy - humanist, independent-minded (in the sense that our philosophers were expected to think for themselves) — was already dying when Macmurray retired from his Edinburgh professorship in 1959. By this time "Analytical Philosophy" had taken over in England, and was invading Scotland — shortly to suppress any independent tradition north of the Border. This is an excellent book and a pleasing celebration of a great teacher — one of those who radiate humanity and make one think. And not only think, but feel too. For should that not also be a philosopher's vocation?