Customer Reviews

Guides for the Journey: John MacMurray, Bernard Lonergan, and James Fowler

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I read a review elsewhere on the Web that said that this book had one of the clearest, most succinct introductions to Bernard Lonergan's thought ever written, and I was not disappointed - this book opened up the whole world of Lonergan's thought for me, and provided a great foundation for exploring it further. (If you haven't discovered Lonergan's thought yet, let me encourage you to do so - whet your appetite at the Bernard Lonergan Web Site...by reading the Introduction to 'The Lonergan Reader' - and then buy Guides to the Journey).

Even more exciting was discovering the thought of John Macmurray, the first thinker that Creamer profiles. (The book consists of two chapters for each thinker - one an introduction to their life, and the second to their ideas, and concludes with a chapter exploring common themes).

Macmurray firstly proposes action, and not thought, as the fundamental basis for understanding what it is to be human. When Descartes says "I think", he is then already divorced from the world. One can ONLY exist in interaction with others and other things, it is absurd to imagine a person as existing in a universe where there is nothing else whatsoever. Action is the full state of the human being, and thinking is a lesser, abstracted state. As Creamer puts it, "Action is a full concrete activity of the Self employing all our capacities whereas thought is constituted by the exclusion of some of our powers and a WITHDRAWAL into an activity which is less concrete and less complex... a theory of knowledge is derived from and included in a theory of action."

Secondly, Macmurray proposes another enormous paradigm shift for Western philosophy by saying that we cannot fully understand individuals in isolation, but only in relation to others. "Relationship is constitutive of human living for Macmurray: 'We need one another to be ourselves. This complete and unlimited dependence of each of us upon the others is the central and crucial fact of personal existence.' The idea of an isolated agent is self-contradictory; any agent is necessarily in relationship."

These two central tenets are explicated respectively in Macmurray's two major works, "The Self as Agent" and "Persons in Relation" (also published together as "The Form of the Personal") which I immediately went out and bought and read after reading this book. Macmurray's writing is crystal clear, and filled with other fascinating points, such as his distinction between intellectual and emotional representations, in chapter 9 of "The Self as Agent", that I found immensely valuable for my own work...

The book also contains a well-written introduction to the much more widely known James Fowler and his theory of stages of faith. The concluding chapter lays out fascinating parallels between the works of these three thinkers. Each chapter is also followed by extensive footnotes, which I found to be extremely useful as well.

Highly recommended.