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Persons in Relation

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John MacMurray offers a view of human life that could change us all, exploring with great care the nature of human relationship. His view (offered fifty years ago) points toward the social constructionism that was to follow, but without slipping over the edge into moral relativism. In fact, taken seriously, his view of community provides a philosophical basis for a morality that could work for all of us.

One of the things I love about this book is that you can find yourself in it and it becomes clear how you can be a better human being--and not in the pointless, self-focused mode of contemporary self-help literature. MacMurray is a philosopher and you have to be willing to deal with his careful categories and sometimes slightly cumbersome language, but it is worth the effort.

This is a very ambitious book based on Macmurray's Gifford lectures of the 1950s which also gave rise to his Self as Agent (1957). These are the culmination of Macmurray's work which he takes to embody a new philosophical form of the personal that will supplement the mechanical and organic forms that he thinks operate as assumptions in social theory to the detriment of modern society.

This second volume builds on the standpoint of agency established in the first volume. It addresses the features of personal relationships, starting with that of mother and child, which are characterised by reciprocity, openness and a rhythm of the withdrawal and return of affection that typifies what Macmurray calls the "form of the personal". The mutual play of actions that compose such relationships aim at friendship and this purpose extends ultimately to all experience and is the basis for religious fellowship.

Macmurray draws ideas from Hegel and Gabriel Marcel amongst others often without acknowledgement and this gives his work an aura of greater originality than it perhaps deserves. That said, these books are a wide-ranging synthesis of trends that have been unjustly overlooked in much recent philosophy. Those who admire him think Macmurray simply ahead of his time. Those who wish a more popular and self-contained introduction might try the earlier Freedom in the Modern World (1932) based on radio talks. I would strongly recommend these books to anyone interested in the nature of personal relations at a philosophical level or in the reception of Continental philosophy in the English-speaking world. The book was originally published by Faber in 1961 and is now reissued with a new introduction by Frank Kirkpatrick.