Persons In Relation by John Macmurray
Introduction
by
FRANK G.
KIRKPATRICK
1998
Persons
in Relation is the second
book published from John Macmurray's 1953‑54 Gifford Lectures, delivered
at the University of Glasgow under the title "The Form of the
Personal." The first volume was The Self as Agent, first published
in 1957 and reissued in 1991 by Humanities Press. Persons in Relation
was not published until 1961.
The Gifford Lectures on
natural theology are among the most prestigious in the world. The invitation to
deliver them usually goes to distinguished scholars toward the end of their
careers. The occasion is often one on which the lecturer sums up his life's
work. In accepting the invitation for 1953‑54, Macmurray joined a long
line of major philosophers that had included, in the early 1920s, Alfred North
Whitehead, whose metaphysical scheme Macmurray's "form of the
personal" rivals, though with far
less complexity. In fact, it is written in such a straightforward and simple
style as to have apparently persuaded many professional philosophers at the
time that it contained little in the way of a comprehensive metaphysics and
little that would advance the contemporary debates in philosophy at mid
century. It is true that as Macmurray worked out the details of the Gifford Lectures,
he did not so much break new ground in his own thought as he summarized the
work of a lifetime. Nevertheless, he believed that this particular expression
of his thought and its contribution to philosophy were still in the nature of
what he called "a preliminary and tentative reconnaissance."1 He
seemed to know that the overriding philosophical project of his
ix
life had not yet found the
reception he had hoped for from either the philosophical community, which was
then in the grip of narrowly focused analyses of language, or the religious
community, which was caught between the fideism of Karl Barth and the
existentialism of Paul Tillich.
The published volumes of the Gifford
Lectures were among the last of Macmurray's life and culminated a forty‑five‑year
period of published articles and books that began with an essay on art for a
journal in philosophy in 1925 and ended with the publication in 1965 of his
only semiautobiographical book, Search for Reality in Religion (the
Swarthmore Lectures of 1965) and, just prior to his death in 1976 at age 85, a
short essay published by the Friends Home Service Committee on The
Philosophy of Jesus (1973). Over that forty‑five‑year period
Macmurray wrote philosophical articles in professional journals on such
subjects as action, epistemology, linguistic analysis, phenomenology, and
political philosophy; religious reflections on freedom, sexual ethics, the
nature of religious experience, and Jesus; reflections on education and the university;
a whole series of works on the relation between religion and Marxism/communism,
including occasional pieces for the Christian Left on events in the Soviet
Union; analyses of the economic situation in post‑Second World War
England; major books on the relation of religion, science, and art, the boundaries
of psychology, the meaning of God's action in the world as found in the Bible,
reason and emotion, freedom in the modern world, the epistemologies of physics,
biology, and psychology, the nature of religious experience, democracy,
communism, and fascism; and, of course, the Gifford Lectures summarizing the
form of the personal.
Despite
the diversity of forums through which Macmurray expressed his philosophy (which
included broadcasts on the BBC as well as many popular lectures and pieces in
the commercial press in England), at the heart of all his work was his attempt
to reverse modern philosophy's commitment to an "egocentric" starting
point, by which he meant the self understood primarily
x
as thinker withdrawn from
action and participation in the world. Long before the term became common,
Macmurray was a "postmodern thinker" in the sense that he believed
modern philosophy since Descartes had been dedicated to the proposition that
the self not only thinks of itself as essentially characterized through its
reflective or cognitive activity, but also understands itself, as a result, to
be essentially isolated from the world about which it reflects.2
From
this starting point, Macmurray argues all relation, with other persons
necessarily become problematical. If the self is primarily a thinker, then the
existence of other persons as beings with whom one is in relationship at
something other than a theoretical level becomes primarily and essentially a
problem for thought. They become objects to be known rather than persons
whom one already knows because one is immersed in complex forms of relationship3
with them that go far beyond the cognitive relation of thinker to object of
thought. While rejecting much of contemporary postmodernist infatuation with
subjectivism and deconstruction. Macmurray's postmodernism was an attempt to
reestablish our knowledge of other persons in the immediacy of the lived
experience of personal relationships that make it whole.
He
did not reject the work of philosophy as a reflective activity. Instead, he
tried to recast its role in the service of more fulfilling and more basic
personal communion with others, with the world, and, ultimately, with God.
Philosophy, by rethinking its starting point, would be able to articulate the
essence of the self as an agent in action, rather than a thinker in thought.
Thinking would become one activity among many,4 an activity withdrawn from fuller forms of practical action
and interaction with real "others." The purpose of thinking would
become one of conceptually clarifying the appropriate relation between thought
and action and providing the "eyes" for action. To the extent that it
was successful, thinking would guide action toward more effective fulfillment
of its intentions, especially those having to do with relations with other
persons. In this respect,
xi
while sharing a common
starting point with many post-modernists, Macmurray decisively departs from
them in his conviction that there are ultimate values and objective realities
that must be understood and integrated into action if human life is to be as
fulfilling as it is capable of being.
By
developing the form of the personal Macmurray intended to end "the solitariness
of the ‘thinking self’, [to set] man firmly in the world which he knows, and so
(to restore) him to his proper existence as a community of persons in relation
.... to show how the personal relation of persons is constitutive of personal
existence.”5 At the heart of this project was Macmurray's conviction
that by reversing the priority of thought over action, one would arrive at the
truth that, as he said in The Self as Agent, “All meaningful knowledge
is for the sake of action, and all meaningful action for the sake of
friendship”6 And friendship, for Macmurray, meant community, the
fullest possible form of relationship between persons, fulfilling each and
every participant to the greatest possible degree. In truth, it can be said
that his philosophy is really a philosophy of community, a term now much in
vogue in contemporary philosophy as well as in religious thought. The rising
interest in community is a reflection of the felt need to turn away from the
alienation of the self inherent in self‑centered thinking and toward some
form of mutuality and companionship with others, including, for many, the whole
environmental, global context in which persons live.
This
concern for community, or persons in relation, has become one of the major
preoccupations of many of the cutting‑edge debates in contemporary philosophy
and religion. It is the informing image behind one of the most popular historical/sociological
critiques of contemporary American society, Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of
the Heart.7 It can be found at the center of the current debate in
many philosophical and political science journals regarding the merits of what
has been called liberalism (or individualism) versus
xii
communitarianism. It is
inspiring new directions in moral theory, both within philosophical and
religious circles. It is very much at the heart of feminist theological and
philosophical critiques of what feminism regards as male‑inspired
individualism and autonomy based upon the exercise of physical force. It seems
to be an element in the rethinking of post-Marxist democratic socialism in the
wake of the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and its decline in
the Soviet Union. It is present in new ways of thinking about the underlying
themes of the Bible as being constituted by the search for community. And it
has decisively informed the most important metaphysical alternative to
traditional modernist thinking, the process philosophy based on the work of
Alfred North Whitehead.
Except for Whitehead's
sweeping vision set forth in the dense and often cryptic Process and
Reality: An Essay in Cosmology 8 and Macmurray's “form of the personal,” all the
approaches to the issue of community are characterized by somewhat narrow
specialized foci. Part of the legacy of modernism has been a suspicion of grandiose
metaphysical system‑building. For decades philosophy had been degenerating
into ever‑more detailed analyses of language as a more accurate (and
conceptually safer) way of articulating "truth" than the premodern
tendency to try to capture all of reality in and through metaphysically
comprehensive concepts. Only with the growing realization that analytic
philosophy was becoming increasingly sterile and unrelated to the wholeness of
actual experience in which even philosophers participated did there emerge a
renewed interest in metaphysics. Macmurray's form of the personal speaks
directly to this new interest.
The rediscovery in the 1960s of Whitehead's work, the bulk
of which had been published before the end of the 1920s, was due to the
dissatisfaction many felt with the fragmented, piecemeal,
xiii
tatterdemalion of unconnected thoughts that linguistic
analysis had produced. Whitehead had identified the source of the modernist
problem (even before most philosophers acknowledged that it was a
problem) as the cognitive dualism or "bifurcation" between parts of
reality such as thought and action. This dualism could never be overcome,
claimed Whitehead, until philosophy adopted a standpoint from which all of
reality could be seen as a single, organic, interdependent, and interrelated
whole. Whitehead introduced into much of contemporary philosophy a complex,
deep, comprehensive, and often obscurely articulated feeling for community,
the union of the many into one.
Macmurray accepts the metaphysical
impulse, as had Whitehead, but he tries to articulate its fulfillment in
different, though sympathetic and occasionally compatible, controlling images
than those used by Whitehead (for example, action instead of process, persons
in mutual relation instead of organs functionally interdependent within an
organism). While Macmurray's criticism of process philosophy is muted and in
direct, its underlying premise is that the process model of reality cannot satisfactorily
account for the uniqueness of the initiating and controlling intention behind
those movements (acts) that
only agents are able to perform and that do not occur at
the level of organisms. Process philosophers would argue that the insistence on
the uniqueness of an agent's intention tends to fall back into dualism.
Macmurray would argue that process thought has chosen the wrong initial
controlling model (organism) for understanding the unity of reality through agency.9
While there is enormous potential in exploring the more precise parallels and
divergences between the form of the personal and process philosophy, the fact
is that both are driven by their own vision of the need to reestablish a sense
of the metaphysical and ontological ultimacy of community. And given that both
are committed to the metaphysical enterprise,
there is much to be said for a new conversation between
Macmurray and process thought.
xiv
A
perennial theme in American history has been the tension between the pursuit of
individual autonomy and a commitment to the common good. The American belief in
individualism is shaped by the political philosophy of John Locke and the
economic philosophy of Adam Smith, in both of which the individual pursues
primarily his or her own self‑interest and society emerges as the
necessary evil that controls the worst excesses of the multitude of self‑seekers
clashing with each other. A commitment to the common good, which stands
opposed to individualism, is shaped by the religious philosophy of the Jewish
and Christian traditions and the political philosophy of republicanism, in both
of which the individual often chooses to subordinate his or her own interests
in order that the community might prosper. The tension between the pursuit of
self interest and a concern for the larger community was articulated with
extraordinary clarity by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s in his Democracy
an America.10 There he noted the essence of American individualism as
a "calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate
himself from the mass of his fellows and [to] withdraw into the circle of family
and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the
greater society to look after itself."11 Recently a number of commentators, represented by
Robert Bellah and his colleagues in their revisitation of Tocqueville in Habits
of the Heart, have expressed their concern that this kind of individualism
"may have grown cancerous ‑ that it may be destroying those social
integuments that Tocqueville saw as moderating its more destructive
potentialities, that it may be threatening the survival of freedom
itself."12 The traditional American emphasis on self-reliance
"has led to the notion of pure, undetermined choice, free of tradition,
obligation, or commitment, as the essence of the self."13 This essentially modernist, Cartesian self tries to
become radically unencumbered by freeing itself from confining and restraining
ties to anything or anyone that it has not itself
xv
freely chosen to relate to.
While Bellah and his colleagues are not particularly
interested in a metaphysical or theological framework into which to put their alternative
to radical individualism, it is clear to them that it will be constituted by
some form of community. Their term of choice is a "community of
memory."14 These communities have a history, a set of stories and
traditions into which they initiate the new members. These stories and
traditions "carry a context of meaning that can allow us to connect our
aspirations for ourselves and those closest to us with the aspirations of a
larger whole and see our own efforts as being, in part, contributions to a
common good."15
In many ways Bellah's vision of communities of memory
echoes Macmurray's notion of fellowship and friendship. Bellah seems to be
reaching for a larger, more comprehensive notion of community but his sociological
focus limits him to an analysis of specific, and often local, communities,
whose relation to the larger human community is obscure. Nevertheless, there is
much in Macmurray's working out of the essential elements of the full mutuality
of persons in relation that would supplement and deepen the work of Bellah and
those who are as troubled as he is by the insidious effects of radical
individualism in American life.
Bellah's work is paralleled and supplemented by new
emphases in moral philosophy on the importance of community and tradition, on
what might be called the positive dimensions of the "encumbered" as
opposed to the radically individualist self. Alasdair MacIntyre,16 for example, laments what he calls the
"emotivist" or "democratized" self (the modern Cartesian
self that is its own source of valuation, without criteria or objective grounding),
because it has "no necessary social content and no necessary social
identity . . . no rational history in its transitions from one state of moral
commitment to another."17
xvi
This self
winds up having “a certain abstract and ghostly character.”18 For MacIntyre the only alternative to such a sterile
isolationism is a recovery of the social virtues that ultimately constitute
what is good for the fulfilling human life (and that are not simply to be
created out of whole cloth by radically autonomous individuals making their
choices essentially independent of each other). Now these virtues are inseparable
from some form of human community that is, in turn, shaped by and grounded in
the vitalities of a living community with operative traditions and historical
memories. This community and completes
the life of that self who, without community, would be alienated, isolated,
lonely, and valueless. This is exactly the claim that Macmurray made in Persons
in Relation when he argued that the individual can only become fully real
(that is, realize his or her full potential) within the mutuality of a
community in which "each cares for all the others and no one for himself.”19
The relevance of community may be nowhere more present
than within the debate between liberalism and communitarianism now swirling
through the academy of moral and political philosophers. In its simplest terms
it is a dispute concerning "the relative merits of private, hedonistic,
consumption oriented lives and lives involving such ‘communal’ elements as
civic participation, shared experience, and fraternal concern."20 At its heart is the question of how the human self is
morally constituted: is the individual morally prior to the community that he
or she chooses (or rejects), or is the individual to some important extent a
moral product of his or her community, with all its traditions and
encumbrances? In the liberal, or individualist view, the moral agent appears before
society and, alone with his or her Cartesian rationality, determines what
constitutes the good. Society is then formed in order to permit the greatest
possible latitude for other free selves to choose their own
xvii
conceptions of
the good with the least amount of interference from others. In this view, there
is no objective and universally valid conception of human nature as such,
except as a being who chooses. Even if one chooses to relate to others, that
choice is not made on the basis of something intrinsic to human nature that
requires fulfillment in loving and being loved by others. In the words of one
of liberalism's critics, “we are barren subjects of possession first, and then
we choose the ends we would possess.”21
The
criticism of liberalism argues that it is naive in not sufficiently appreciating
the degree to which human beings really are constituted communally prior to their
withdrawal into rational reflection. There are, the communitarians insist,
values (virtues) and objective realities to which the self must conform if it
is to be harmonious with and fulfilling of its deepest reality. Individuals are
made for relationship and any individually chosen values that negate or
undermine personal relationship are out of touch with the inner reality of the
self and with objective reality as such. At the present much of the
communitarian/liberalist debate revolves around the epistemological questions
of how one grounds or knows what is or is not the nature of the self as chooser
of ends. Where Macmurray's work would begin to make a contribution to the
discussion is where it begins to appreciate the need for a metaphysical context
into which to place the nature of the self in relation to reality as such and
to God. Part of this search is trying to determine just what kind of
community is most fully harmonious with the person‑in‑relation. As
it turns out, there are many different conceptions of community implicit in
much of the communitarian literature, and many of them are rather indistinct
and undeveloped, perhaps even incompatible with each other. It is often argued
that persons are communal, but what the exact forms of community are or ought
to be is usually left obscure. Macmurray's more developed work on persons in
relation, especially as it works out the nature of friendship, fellowship, and
mutuality within a "personal"
xviii
universe, could make a major
contribution at this point.
This
is also true, though to a lesser extent, for the work of a number of feminist
scholars who are trying to resurrect images of mutuality and interdependence that
they claim are more reflective of women's experience than of men's. Their criticism
of male‑dominated societies and forms of thought is aimed at the same individualistic
assumptions about human selves and their relations with each other that one
finds in liberal societies. These societies, feminists argue, have put a
premium on the negative exercise of power as a way for autonomous, self‑reliant
individuals to protect themselves from the self‑interested actions of
others aimed at defeating potential competitors for scarce goods. In the
societies that emerge from this individualistic understanding, women have
historically been subordinated since they do not wield the kind of overt,
dominating power that men have been able to exercise through physical prowess.
Women nurture and reconcile; men compete and vanquish. As a result many
feminists are exploring the nature of communities in which caring, compassion,
nurturing, reconciling, and simply being in relations of mutual interdependence
prevail. Some feminist scholars in the field of moral philosophy have even argued
that traditional forms of morality, such as Kantianism, have placed a premium
upon male‑centered criteria of moral maturity. Carol Gilligan, for
example, has argued that men evaluate moral thinking by its ability to create
hard‑and‑fast rules, objectively and impartially imposed, for
determining the rightness of a moral act.22 Women, she argues, are much more likely to transcend
such objectively neutral (and impersonal) forms of moral judgment in favor of
empathy and sense of connection with the one being judged. Interestingly,
Gilligan draws heavily upon the relationship between child and parent, just as
Macmurray does in the second chapter of Persons in
xix
Relation.23 She argues that the “capacity for engagement with others
for compassion and for response to another's pleasure and distress has been
observed in early childhood” but is not represented in traditional Kantian
accounts of human moral development because it is at odds with the prevailing
concept of the self as rationally autonomous and self‑sufficient.24 Gilligan wants to replace this concept with one in which
the "values of care and connection, salient in women's thinking, imply a
view of the self and the other as interdependent and of relationships as
networks created and sustained by attention and response."25 This is a vision very much at the heart of Macmurray's
own work on persons in relation. It leads Gilligan, as it had Macmurray, to
claim, against the dominant view of the self and its relations, that being
dependent on others in a relationship of mutuality does not mean being helpless
and powerless. Rather it means, as Macmurray suggested in his development of
the notion of heterocentrism, that, in Gilligan's words, "one is able to
have an effect on others, as well as the recognition that interdependence of attachment
empowers both the self and the other, not one at the other's expense."26
Macmurray
had been quite interested in the thought of Karl Marx's early, more humanistic
writings. He based much of his writing about communism and Marxism in the 1930s
on this aspect of Marx's work. Later he became very critical of the Marxist
experiment in the Soviet Union, believing it had betrayed much of the vision of
the early Marx. He also was convinced that Marx had fundamentally misunderstood
both Judaism and Christianity and the positive role they could play in shaping
a just and humane society (though he admitted much of organized religion had contributed
to that misunderstanding by its betrayal of its own Biblical insights). In addition,
he believed that Marx was too tied to the organic/functional model of
xx
human relationships to have
seen the potential for and the superiority of his own personal model, which subsumed
(in Hegelian/Marxist fashion) both the mechanical and the organic models of
relationship. To the extent that we are now seeing the end of Marxism in its
most virulent form, as it had become associated with totalitarian, nondemocratic
political systems, there may be some revival of interest in those parts of Marx
that preceded (and some say remained alive if implicit in) his later, more
strictly economic works. Macmurray always rejected the deterministic Marx,
though he appreciated his materialism in the sense that he believed matter was
part of the human condition and demanded appropriate moral attention (which he
felt could be amply found in the Biblical narratives of God's intentions being
worked out in the material world). As Marxism's alliance with nondemocratic,
materialistic systems comes to an end in much of Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union, Macmurray's insights into the relation between socialist ideals and
democratic capitalism may well become relevant again. And at the heart of those
insights is Macmurray's transcending vision of what a human community of
persons in relation can be through human cooperation with the intention of God
for a universal community. But Macmurray's work on community goes beyond
political and economic engineering. It speaks to the intimacies and subtleties
of the deepest kinds of personal mutuality and, in so doing, remains
transcendent of (while integrally tied to) political and economic institutions.
Macmurray's philosophy
was an attempt to spell out the nature of what he often called
"friendship" or "fellowship." It involved such things as
mutuality, love, heterocentrism, compassion, and sharing. It was, ultimately,
constituted by the sheer delight of simply being with and for other persons.
In making that claim Macmurray captures
something much
xxi
closer to a
Biblical and Christian view than one can find in the areligious references of
political and moral philosophy. While not a conventional believer (he had
rejected church membership until late in life, when he joined the
noninstitutional Friends), Macmurray remained profoundly religious and always
sought to place his notion of community in the context of a Biblical view of
God's intention to create community through divine acts that sought human
cooperation in the world.27 Recently, the Biblical emphasis on the building of
community has been remarkably demonstrated by Harvard scholar Paul D. Hanson in
his majestic The People Called: The Growth of Community in the Bible.28 Hanson has organized the Biblical narrative around the
unifying theme of a community of faith “unfolding in response to and as
participant in the creative, redemptive acts of God on behalf of all creation.”29 God's purpose, through all God's acts, has been the
creation of a loving human fellowship. This fellowship is the fulfillment of
all that God intended in the creation of life itself.
Naturally,
the universal community God intends will take shape in history along the way
toward its final realization as specific communities with specific traditions
and memories. Here the link with the work of MacIntyre and Bellah in calling
for a return to communities of memory becomes compelling. The specific
religious communities that emerge in response to the Biblical narratives carry
the meaning of and point toward the work of God in history.30 These communities proclaim themselves to be "the
truest possible for human community"31 because they live out, ideally, the reality of
responding to God's acts in history as told in the stories of the Bible and the
shared memories of those people living in and from the Biblical tradition. In a
very real way I think this is the vision Macmurray also shared. He was committed
to the claim that God was at work in history and that God had created the ontological
structures of reality such that, in the end, if we conformed ourselves to them,
a universal community would come into existence. Reality is ultimately personal
and a personal God is the ultimate reality.32
xxii
In
the end, Macmurray's work, and especially Persons in Relation, provides
the metaphysical grounding for a religious view of reality in the context of
God's actions in history. It makes contact at any number of points with
Biblical scholarship and attempts at developing living religious communities.
While it also shares a great deal in common with the work of political, moral,
feminist, metaphysical, and sociological scholars, at its most profound it is
squarely rooted in a religious vision of reality as constituted by a universal
community of “persons in relation.”
1. John Macmurray, Persons in
Relation (London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1961; reprint, Atlantic Highlands,
NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1991), p. 13.
2. Interestingly, Macmurray
devotes a great deal of attention to the work of Immanuel Kant, the
quintessential modernist thinker, to whose work a great deal of contemporary
philosophy is also directed for essentially the same reason.
3. Macmurray
called the kind of knowledge that is present in such relationships the
knowledge of "immediate experience." It is prior to theoretical
knowledge and is characterized by unity, completeness, and feeling, all fused into a single whole.
He worked out the first development of this notion in his first book, Interpreting
the Universe (London: Faber & Faber, 1933).
4. Macmurray often called it a
“negative activity,” meaning that it occurred only as the self drew back from the
more comprehensive activity of full personal engagement (immediate experience)
with the world.
5. Macmurray, Persons
in Relation, p. 12.
6. John
Macmurray, The Self as Agent (London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1957; reprint,
Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1991), p. 15. For
a fuller development of Macmurray's
notion of community, in particular how it relates to contemporary
philosophies such as individualism,
Marxism, process thought, systems philosophy, and recent Christian
thinking about communities of agape or koinonia, see my own Community: A
Trinity of Models (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1986).
xxiii
7. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986).
8.
Corrected edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New
York: Free Press, 1978).
9. Macmurray early on developed a fairly elaborate
tripartite schema for interpreting reality in Interpreting the Universe,
in which he subordinated two less‑than‑inclusive models of reality
(the mechanical, material, or atomistic
and the organic or functional) to a third, most‑inclusive model, that of
persons‑in‑relation. The fullest expression of this latter model
is, of course, to be found in Persons in Relation.
10.
Translated by George Lawrence, ed., J. P Mayer (New York: Doubleday, Anchor
Books, 1969).
11. Ibid., 506.
12. Bellah, et al., Habits
of the Heart, p. viii.
13. Ibid., 152.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 153.
16. See
especially his After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
17. Ibid., pp. 30‑31.
18.
Ibid., 31
19. Macmurray,
Persons in Relation, p. 159. This approach to relationship, in which the
other person is the primary center of my attention (and I of his), Macmurray
calls “heterocentrism,” to contrast it to the egocentrism characteristic of
individualism.
20. George
Sher, "Three Grades of Social Involvement;" Philosophy and Public
Affairs 18 (Spring 1989), p. 133.
21. Michael J.
Sandel, Liberalism and Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 133.
22. In a
Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). ‑
23. This
reliance upon parent‑child relationship as an indicator of and basis for
moral virtue is also present in the work of Laurence Thomas, who develops a
strong case for altruism, or other-directed morality, as more basic than one
that assumes the primacy of self‑interest. Self‑love, he argues,
follows from being loved by others, especially our parents. Only through the
“realized capacity to love” is life
itself “just that much richer.” Laurence Thomas, Living Morally: A
Psychology of Moral Character (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press,
1989), p. 195.
24. Carol
Gilligan, "Remapping the Moral Domain: New Images of the Self in Relationship,"
in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in
Western Thought, ed.
xxiv
Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna and David E. Wellbery.
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1986). 1), p. 240.
25. Ibid., 242.
26. Ibid.,
249. Nell Noddings develops this idea in her book Caring: A Feminine Approach
to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984). Noddings argues for an ethic of caring,
in which one is both served and serves through the caring relationship. In
caring one becomes joyful. One is both able to sacrifice for others and to
receive their sacrifices for oneself so that a community of mutual joy is built
up. This, too, is a central insight of much of Macmurray's work on mutuality.
27. This is
spelled out in compelling detail in his The Clue to History (London: Student
Christian Movement Press, 1938).
28. (San Francisco, CA: Harper
& Row, 1986).
29. Ibid., 522.
30. See
especially Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive
Christian Ethic (Notre Dame. IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
31. Ibid., p. 2.
32.
Macmurray, Persons in Relation, p. 224.