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Persons In Relation
By John Macmurray
235 pp. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1961. $5.00.

The appearance of Persons In Relation will be welcomed by all who remember the stimulating effect of The Self As Agent, Professor Macmurray's admirable first volume of Gifford Lectures, to which the present work is a companion. In the earlier work Macmurray challenges the foundations of modern philosophy, proposing a substitution of "I do" for the "I think" of traditional philosophic inquiry. By this shift of premises, Macmurray hopes, the two fatal defects of philosophy on his diagnosis, its theoretical slant, and its egocentric bias, may be overcome. The first volume, while moving the angle of vision from theory to action, deliberately stands within the traditional context of an isolated self, thus remaining incapable of interpreting essentially social phenomena like morality, political theory, and religion. It is to the latter cluster of subjects that Macmurray now turns in Persons In Relation.

First the author establishes his fundamental categories through an examination of the essentially bipolar character of the personal in its simplest (but paradigmatic) manifestation in the human infant. Equipped with this model, the author turns to the philosophic task of giving, with its help, an account of his subject matter. All morality, for example, is interpreted as either basically "negative," based dominantly on the personal pole of fear, or "positive," grounded in love. Political theory is seen as reflecting the same far-reaching ambivalence. And religion is described as primarily concerned with community founded on the pole of love. Religion's functions consist, on the one hand, in sym-

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bolically celebrating community in so far as it has been actually achieved and, on the other hand, in strengthening the will to further community by helping to overcome negativity-substituting the motive of love for the drives of fear in social relations. As the reflective activity of the fulfilled personal life, religion is identified as the primary form of reflection from which both art and science are derived. The book closes with a brief defense of the intellectual right of the religious person to represent the universe in personal terms.

Macmurray's second volume, it is clear, matches in breadth and ambition the earlier work. And yet the reader is liable to put down Persons In Relation with less enthusiasm than that with which, remembering The Self As Agent, he had picked it up. The author requests that evaluation of his work be focused on the extent to which his reformulation actually succeeds in providing significantly greater consistency and adequacy than alternative philosophic approaches, and precisely at these points criticisms need to be made.

First, with respect to the "consistency" of the position, one is puzzled by an unresolved tension between the view that "my knowledge of myself has priority over my knowledge of the Other" (1, p. 116) and the central doctrine that "the first knowledge . . . is knowledge of the personal Other. . . . The knowledge of the Other is the absolute presupposition of all knowledge, and as such is necessarily indemonstrable" (II, pp. 76-77). Also disturbing is the multiplicity of meanings given to "positive" and "negative" in Macmurray's discussion. These words are given so many functions that they become radically equivocal. Their repeated use for quite different jobs provides the illusion of far greater systematic consistency in the over-all position than is revealed by careful analysis. One is struck also by the inconsistency between Macmurray's stress on the legitimacy of the genetic method in philosophy and his refusal to take its results seriously when inconvenient to his position. He readily admits that the negative (fear) pole in an infant's personal life comes first, "the negative phase [is] genetically prior, since it expresses a need for the mother's aid, while the positive expresses satisfaction in the supply of its needs" (II, p. 61), but the rest of his discussion is based without argument or apparent embarrassment on the view that "the negative pole, in the child's behavior as in the mother's, falls within and is subordinated to the positive" (II, p. 63). Theologians, further, will be unhappy to find an inconsistency in Macmurray's treatment of "God" at first as a descriptive symbol representing and supporting universal human community but later as a proper name for a real Being, ontologically independent of any human community. The grounds for such a

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shift are not provided, and it would appear that the radical logical transformation goes unnoticed.

Second, with respect to the "adequacy" of Macmurray's developed position, the reader may be disturbed by the continuing failure of the author to show, rather than merely to assume, the comprehensiveness of his discussion. To choose only significant examples, one is never shown that all important (or possible) ethical positions are reducible to the three basic ones considered by the author, and, indeed, one may legitimately suspect that such a reduction would leave much to be desired; and one is likely to object to the assumption that all the varieties of political philosophy have been adequately covered by a discussion of Hobbes, Rousseau, and the Judeo-Christian tradition. In all this, and elsewhere, there is the strong flavor of the "bloodless dance" of categories to which Macmurray himself strongly objects. Further difficulties are found in the author's too brief discussion of the way in which metaphysical beliefs are tested in action and (strikingly) in the final two paragraphs of the book devoted to the reduction of philosophical inquiry to "undogmatic theology." The unsatisfying nature of this concluding remark is compounded by apparent inconsistency. How, the reader asks, can theology be "undogmatic" in this sense, given Macmurray's analysis of religion and its discourse as essentially connected to active rituals, to symbols, and to communities? The reader lays down the book with the conviction that almost as many questions have been raised by Macmurray's application of his approach as were initially the motivation for trying out his position.

Macmurray's specific way of working out implications of his proposed shift of perspective from solitary subject to agents in relation has not, then, resolved at one stroke the present crisis in philosophy. But from this it does not necessarily follow that his general enterprise is doomed. On the contrary, his position is well worth much further exploration by philosophers and theologians alike. Even if, as seems unlikely, these explorations should reveal that Macmurray's recommended starting point is somehow radically misconceived, Persons in Relation and its earlier companion will be profitably studied; for in them, in addition to expounding his central thesis, Macmurray has shown his readers a fertile mind at work, has thrown a fascinating new light on old problems, and has in this genuinely pioneering venture opened new territories in which every reader will find much of interest.

Frederick Ferré
Mount Holyoke College
South Hadley, Massachusetts