At
the heart of both feminist and Christian- Marxist liberation theology is a
concern for community or personal relationship. 'In the beginning is the
relation', claims Isabel Carter Heyward in her book The Redemption of God: A
Theology of Mutual Relation. God and humanity, she argues, need to be
understood in radically new categories, many of which arise out of women's
experience of relation, as ‘relational and co-operative, rather than as
monistic (synonymous) or dualistic (antithetical) ... The experience of
relation is fundamental and constitutive of human being.’1
At
the heart of much Marxist thought, and especially of Karl Marx's own work, is a
concern to overcome not only the dualism of western philosophy and religion,
but also the separation and independence of individuals which have become
characteristic of advanced capitalism and the contract models of association
which have influenced it. Marx was especially concerned to develop an
understanding of the relation between persons which would stress their
interdependence. and reciprocal relationships. To some extent he did so under
the guidance of an organic model of association.
In
this respect, then, both feminist theology and the forms of liberation theology
that are influenced by various strands of Christian-Marxist thought have a
fundamental desire to develop a philosophy of relationship which can guide the
way toward non-alienating relationships between men and women and between
persons generally. There is a correlative desire on the part of Christians who
share feminist and liberation concerns not to exclude God from the field of
relationship.
Atomism and dualism
I
believe there are two essential characteristics of the philosophy which has (to
one degree or another) shaped the world-view of capitalism and of its
understanding of the relation between persons. These characteristics can be
called atomism and dualism. When lived out, they manifest themselves in
relations built upon power and
1 Washington, D.C.: University
Press of America, Inc., 1982, p. 1.
565
566 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY
dominance and the preservation of individual, not mutual,
rights and possessions. It is these kinds of relationship which have
perpetuated the subservience of women to men and have justified the kind of
social behavior in which self-interest and individualism have taken priority
over community and mutuality.
There is a
neglected but important Christian philosopher of the twentieth century who
specifically addressed the concerns of Marxian thought, long before the
emergence of liberation theology, specifically on the issues of dualism and
atomism. And he did so on the basis of a metaphysics grounded on the primacy of
persons in relation, or mutuality. The work of John Macmurray is slowly
becoming better known after an unfortunate hiatus of about 30 years. Although
he was known in Great Britain during the 1930s (primarily for his writings on
the relationship between Christianity and Communism, along with a series of
essays on the early work of Karl Marx) and then again for his Gifford Lectures
in the mid-50s (published as The Self as Agent and Persons in
Relation), Macmurray's reputation went into an eclipse during the 60s and
70s.
His thought,
however, is perhaps more relevant today than at any time in the past. He was
the only philosopher of his generation to place the category of community,
mutuality, or persons in relation at the very center of his metaphysical
system. Many philosophers and theologians deal, of course, with persons. But
Macmurray made their relationship the starting point for understanding reality
and the terminus for human fulfilment. In addition, he made these metaphysical
claims consistent with what he believed to be the heart of the Gospel, or God's
own intention for the world he had created.
Recreating the metaphysical enterprise
Part of the reason
for Macmurray's lack of influence in the mid-part of the century was his
resolute adherence to the importance of metaphysics, even while philosophers on
both sides of the Atlantic were abandoning the metaphysical enterprise in order
to chase the meaning of sentences and the grammar of discourse. Even today,
many feminist and liberation theologians are highly suspicious of the
metaphysical task. For many Christian Marxists, metaphysics is the work of
abstraction: it leads in their opinion to the distancing of the real world (the
empirical world of living human beings) from an allegedly superior,
transcendent world, and thus siphons off the kind of praxis needed to make life
in this world more whole and less alienating.
TOWARD A METAPHYSIC OF COMMUNITY 567
Metaphysics, for
many liberationists, is tantamount to dualism.
Feminists also tend to reject metaphysics on the ground that it is
both sterile and static. It tends to enclose reality in boxes which do not
allow for the dynamics and fluidity of life. Besides, they argue, static,
categories tend to perpetuate the status quo: they preserve the fixed labels
which men have attached to women and thus serve as instruments for the
continuation of male hegemony and discrimination. Carter Heyward speaks for
this rejection of metaphysics when she says, ‘I do not want to lose the
relational quality of what I experience by stuffing pieces of reality into
conceptual boxes and concocting a stasis of differentiation by labels and
definitions.’2 -
But this rejection of metaphysics overlooks the fact that while
some metaphysical schemes are static and tend to lose ‘the relational
quality’ of life, metaphysics as a discipline is indifferent to which
scheme is adopted. That is, metaphysics is simply the attempt to understand
reality as it is. What Macmurray claims is that the metaphysical schemes of
stasis or rigidity are, in fact, inadequate to our experience of personal
relations. What he attempted to do was to provide an alternative, and somewhat
novel, descriptive metaphysics based on the ontological primacy of ‘the
relational quality of life’. If metaphysics is the attempt to reflect in
thought what reality is really like, then if reality is relational, a
metaphysics of relation, or of mutuality, will not only represent reality
without distortion; it will become, as Marxists and feminists both desire, an
instrument of liberation if it is used self-consciously to inform a praxis of
liberation.
I
believe that a conversation with John Macmurray's philosophy can not only
ground many of the claims made by feminists and liberation theologians in a
defensible metaphysical system, but can also point the way beyond some of the
weaknesses and incompleteness found both in Marx's own thought and in some of
the rhetoric used by contemporary liberationists who have drawn upon his work.
In particular, I think Macmurray has linked his metaphysics of relation with
the central claims of the Christian faith in such a way that he has made the
reality of God and his intention for the world indispensable for the successful
achievement of a full liberation agenda.
The fundamental premise on which Macmurray builds his model of
community as persons in mutual relation is that the essence of human nature
‘is to live in communion with a world which is independent of us’, in
particular with a world of other persons. ‘We are only persons at
2 ibid., p. 26.
568 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY
all through our relations with other persons. We are real
only if our personal relations are real. We are free only in and through the
reality of our friendships . . . . 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 . . . . We live and move and have our
being not in ourselves but in one another.’3
The task set for
philosophy in our time, Macmurray declares, ‘is the exploration of [the]
personal world, and the discovery of the categories through which it may be
coherently conceived'.4 These categories,
which Macmurray calls ‘the form of the personal’, are to be
distinguished from the categories of relationship that mark human social life
in liberal, individualistic, capitalistic societies. These latter categories
are those of atomism, mechanism, and contract relationship. But a second set of
categories, developed especially by Marx and implicit in a number of liberation
schemes, must also be distinguished from the categories of mutuality. The
second set of categories Macmurray calls the organic or the functional. They
are so hostile to the isolation, independence, and antagonism of the
atomistic/contract category that they are almost universally taken to be the
categories which alone can provide an alternative to the deficiencies of
atomism and individualism. Macmurray's genius, I believe, is in having
discovered a third category of relationship (the form of the personal) which
takes up the same task as the organic category (that is, to stress
interdependence, reciprocity, and interrelationship), but does so in a way that
preserves the uniqueness of personal relationship and the integrity of
intention and action unique to persons. His quarrel with the organic category
of relationship found in Marx and many others is that it does not adequately
represent what distinguishes persons from the organisms of nature. But he
develops his quarrel not by repudiating the organic dimension found in all
persons but rather by incorporating it in a higher, more inclusive whole which
we know as ‘persons in relation’.
Atomism and contract relationship
Although he used
the word ‘mechanical’ to describe the form of relationship which
prevails in capitalistic individualism, I think a more accurate description
would be ‘atomistic/contractarian’. The
3 John Macmurray, Persons in
Relation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), p.12.
4 ibid., p.12.
TOWARD A METAPHYSIC OF COMMUNITY 569
essence of relationship in such a system is
that of independent monads or atoms contracting for the terms of relationship.
The fundamental stance of each atom to the others is one of fear and
defensiveness. The contract is resorted to since they are forced to live with
each other. The contract preserves the possessions and rights of the
metaphysically basic and primary individuals. Society is seen essentially as a
necessary evil. The guiding principle of the social order is always the
priority of the individual to the group. In the state of nature men (and in
most contract theories from Hobbes to Rousseau they were almost always men, not
men and women) ‘were originally free and equal, and therefore independent
and isolated in their relation to one another’.5
Community, on this atomistic/contractarian view, was reduced, in
the last analysis ‘to the level of an insurance society for securing the
liberty and property of individuals'.6 As
Ferdinand Tonnies has said, this kind of association is one in which each
individual has a relationship to others solely through a rational contract
based on his own self-interest, and the contribution he makes to the
association as a whole is ‘reckoned in atomlike units’.7 Like Macmurray, Tonnies declares that such a
society is a mere ‘mechanical unity’,8 precisely because the movement of its parts is
the movement of atoms in collision with each other. It is not simply
coincidental that the architects of the liberal political philosophy which
rested on this atomistic view of human nature (such as Hobbes and Mill) were
obsessed with the idea of creating a vision of society on a mathematical or
mechanical model. As Sabine has said of Hobbes' work, the world was a
mechanical system in which all that happens may be explained ‘with
geometrical precision by the displacement of bodies relative to one
another’.9 And as Dorothea Krook has
pointed out, for Hobbes (and I think the atomistic tradition generally),
reality ‘is composed exclusively of discrete or mutually disconnected
particulars or singulars’.10
If
the social order, what there is of it, is based upon contract and the defense
of the freedom and possessions of fundamentally isolated
5 Otto Gierke,
Natural Law and the Theory of Society 1500 to 1800, translated with an
introduction by Ernest Barker (Cambridge: The University Press, 1934), p. 96.
6 ibid., p. 113.
7 Ferdinand
Tonnies, Community and Society, translated and edited by Charles P.
Loomis (East Lansing: The Michigan State University Press, 1957), p. 69.
8 ibid., p. 173.
9 George H.
Sabine, A History of Political Theory (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
c. 1927), p. 457
10 Dorothea
Krook, Three Traditions of Moral Thought (Cambridge: The University
Press, 1959), p. 100.
570 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY
atoms, the dominant characteristic of relationship, within
the contract, will be that of power, because power will be necessary to ensure
the enforcement of the contract. But if power is the form of relationship, then
the powerful (economically, politically, and physically) will dominate those
less powerful in the ways of defense, competition, and war. That is why
Marxists and feminists are motivated by a deep concern for women and working
people within a male-dominated, capitalist system. They speak for the
powerless, for those who have had to succumb to the greater power of the men
who controlled the economic resources of society and through that control
determined the political and legal structures through which women and working
people were discriminated against and oppressed.
One result of life
within individualistic capitalism is the experience of a dualism between the
private individual and the public or social order. All social obligations are
carried out within the structures of a mechanical order. People are not
expected to express their deep, subjective feelings or desires in politics or
economics. These are to be kept safely behind the locked doors of one's
possessions, the realm of inviolable freedom which has not been contracted away
by necessary evil of social responsibility. In the public sphere, cold,
calculating rationality is put at a premium. The result is an increasingly
alienating split between the emotional and the rational dimensions of the self.
Subjectivity is restricted to the emotions and kept at home. Objectivity
becomes synonymous with rationality and is used as an instrument in the
calculating war of competition which makes up the pursuit of self interest in
the public order.
A significant
consequence of this dualism is the elimination of religion, and especially the
activity of God, from the public order. Deism or quasi-deism characterized most
liberal political philosophies built upon the model of atomism/contract. God
was a remote, no longer active being, or more often simply a principle of
explanation. Religion was the field of emotions or sentiments. It was not
expected to have any influence upon the ‘real’ world of combat,
competition, and calculation. Its objective claims were dismissed and it
retreated into an emotional subjectivity which could find no expression in the
structuring of judgment of the public realm. Religion became separated from the
material dimension and shut away in the spiritual realm which was assumed to be
superior to it. What freedom remained to the individual was equated with
spiritual and mental pursuits. The public world of objectivity was left to the
statisticians and scientists.
TOWARD A METAPHYSIC OF COMMUNITY 571
Macmurray on Marx's rejection of atomism
When Marx rejected the individualism, competition, and atomism of
liberal theory, he also wound up rejecting its God. Because God had become so
remote from everyday life, especially from the determination of social
structures, Marx believed that he had become either nothing but an abstraction
useful in sanctifying the capitalist status quo, or a symbol of a heavenly (but
illusory) alternative to the pain and suffering of empirical life. Thus, while
Marx develops a philosophy of praxis geared to changing the actual conditions
in which persons live alienated and incomplete lives, he has no place for God
either in the process of change or in the life to come after change has
produced the reintegration of society in the communist future.
Macmurray certainly shared Marx's deep hostility to individualism
and to the alienating conditions of late capitalism. Most of his writings in
the 30s were devoted to an analysis of Marxian thought and the possibility of
some kind of Christian-communist dialogue. He was among the very first British
philosophers to read Marx's early works (including the seminal 1844
Manuscripts) and to note the continuity between his earlier humanistic work
and his later economic writings.
Macmurray's interest in Marx and in the communism of the 1930s was
subsequent to the development of his own religious and philosophical principles
(which would remain essentially unchanged up to and including his major work in
The Self as Agent and Persons in Relation). Macmurray insisted
that his own interest in the principles of communist theory ‘arose through
the discovery of these principles in the Gospel in the first instance, and the
subsequent discovery that they reappeared in different but recognisable form in
the philosophy of Karl Marx’.11
Never an orthodox Christian (at least as orthodoxy was defined by
Barthianism in the 40s and 50s), or a Marxist, Macmurray evaluated both
world-views through a deeply informed philosophical mind. He tried to
understand the fundamental congruences and differences between Christianity and
Marxism. It eventually became his conviction that:
Communism presupposes Christianity, and its denial merely isolates
it from its own conditions. Christianity implies Communism, and the denial of
this merely isolates Christianity from its
11 John
Macmurray, Creative Society: A Study of the Relation of Christianity To
Communism (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1935), p. 91.
572 SCOTTISH ,JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY
own reality. The problem that faces us is the synthesis of
the two, not in theory merely but in prac-tice.12
One element in this synthesis must be Christianity's reformation.
It must come to see that dualisms between theory and practice, spiritual and
material, individual and community, natural and supernatural, and between ideal
and real, are fundamentally a betrayal of the message of Jesus and the
prophets.
But to complete the synthesis, communism must also reform itself.
It must come to see that it is naive and utopian (in the bad sense) to believe
that ‘the sum total of the conditions responsible for the frustration of
human reality will be removed once and for all by the socialisation of the
means of production .... The Communist is too apt to think that the form of
social organisation is the whole of human reality, whereas it is not even its
substance.’13 Only religion, Macmurray
insists, can adequately handle the fundamental human problems of community,
love, fear, and especially fear of death. And only a philosophy of persons in
relation which understands the uniqueness of persons (i.e., that they alone can
form and enact intentions, that they alone are fulfilled by living for each
other rather than using others for self-fulfilment, and that they retain their
individuality only in relationship) can be adequate to human nature. The
organic conception of persons is not, in Macmurray's opinion, sufficient for a
completely adequate view of persons, a view which he believes his form of the
personal has provided. If mutuality is basic to human being, both for feminist
and liberation agendas, then it will be found not in organic terms but in terms
that acknowledge its metaphysical primacy and authenticity.
Macmurray's religious philosophy
Macmurray's religious convictions reveal how close his
understanding of Christianity is to a non-dualist, materialist, and dialectical
view of reality which is at the core of Marx's own thought. God, for Macmurray,
is an Agent whose initial act was the creation of a material world. Into that
world God placed co-agents (persons) and created them such that they could be
fulfilled or realize their nature only by entering into a community of love
with other persons. Jesus is
12 ibid., p.
144.
13 John
Macmurray, ‘Christianity and Communism: Towards a Synthesis’, in
Christianity and the Social Revolution, edited by John Lewis, Karl
Polanyi and Donald Kitchin (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1935), p. 518.
TOWARD A METAPHYSIC OF COMMUNITY 573
regarded by Macmurray as a special act of
God, a person who came, as the prophets had earlier, to proclaim the truth that
when persons act so as to undermine or negate community, they necessarily,
whether they know it or not, act in opposition to their own ultimate fulfilment
and against their very nature.
Part of that nature, however, is the capacity to make choices, to
decide freely whether or not to act in conformity with one's own essential
nature. Human beings chose to act against community, and thus started a long
history of acts that would frustrate their own nature and God's intention for
them (as that intention was realized in the created conditions of human
nature). Macmurray's insistence upon the co-creatorship of community (persons
and God) makes clear that for him God cannot be in an unrestricted sense the
determiner of history or even of individual lives. History becomes the
interaction of God and human beings. God seeks cooperation but cannot coerce it
without destroying the very freedom which he had made part of the original
creation.
The result, in Macmurray's religious philosophy, is a dialectic
between human and divine action. God's intention for the world (a community of
persons in loving relationship) is part of human nature and therefore to act in
opposition to it is to act in self-frustration and against one's own nature.
But at the same time the freedom to act against one's own nature is part of
that nature and God cannot and will not override it. So, while God's intention
is for a universal community of persons, with freedom and equality as its
structural principles of relationship . . . such a relation is not possible
unless Man wills it, because the structure of human relationships is the
expression of human intentions ... God's action in history must then be the
creation in Man of the effective intention to realize universal freedom and
equality.14
The dialectic of freedom between human beings and God is the basis
for the dialectic of freedom between human persons. There is no freedom if
there is no mutuality. Only in the atomistic view does freedom entail
separation and independence. In the mutual view of Macmurray, the freedom of
one person is realized (paradoxically from the point of view of atomism) only
when it is exercised on behalf of another person. To enter into relation,
therefore, is what Macmurray
14 John
Macmurray, The Clue to History ( London: Student Christian Movement
Press, 1938), p. 100.
574 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY
calls the condition of freedom, not its denial. Only if this
dialectical understanding of freedom is maintained can we avoid the atomistic
trap of regarding interdependence as an obstacle or restriction on our freedom
to be full persons.
Part of the action
of God in relation to his created co-agents is the inspiring of prophets and
ultimately of Jesus to convey this dialectical, truth. And a very significant
part of this truth is that persons belong to and can be fulfilled within the
world as it was created, not by an escape from the world into an illusory
supernatural realm. Macmurray is just as insistent as Marx that the overcoming
of alienation and suffering, and the completion of human nature, is a
this-worldly affair and can occur only within the conditions of the empirical
world.
This is a
thoroughly non-dualist view of salvation. Macmurray claims repeatedly that he
has support for non-dualism not only in the prophets of the Old Testament, but
in Jesus as well. There is no dualism between this world and another or between
material and spiritual in the Judaism in which Jesus was nurtured. When Jesus
came to inaugurate the Kingdom of God it was as an earthly kingdom restructured
in conformity with God's intention for community.
So
long as we are dualists, we cannot understand Jesus . . . . A religion which
was not concerned with the re-creation of society, or an effort to reform
society which was not the expression of a religious purpose, would have been
equally meaningless to him . . .. The distinction made by the dualist between
Heaven and earth could not occur to Jesus. 15
The material conditions of equality
In practice, the
non-dualism of Jesus which Macmurray adopted led him to accept the Marxian call
for the political and economic restructuring of society so as to provide the
material conditions of equality. This unity of theory and praxis was essential
to Macmurray's understanding of the preconditions for the community which was
God's intention for mankind. To have believed that a genuine community of
created persons could occur despite material conditions of sexual and economic
inequality would be to fall back into a dualist way of thinking. We can escape
from dualism, therefore, ‘only by intending an integrity of life which is
only possible through the
15 John Macmurray, ‘The
Nature of Religion’, Report of St. Asaph Conference, August, 1938,
p. 6.
TOWARD A METAPHYSIC OF COMMUNITY 575
destruction of the class structure of our society’.16 And this means that we must intend the
‘disappearance of dualism in practice . . . the end of our claims to
superiority and the achievement of equality and freedom. This is the meaning of
[Jesus' statement that "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the
doctrine."’17 Jesus himself, according
to Macmurray, attacked the class structure of society built upon wealth. As
‘essentially class-conscious’, Jesus interpreted the social problem
in economic terms and was a ‘materialist in the sense that the Communist
is a materialist . . .’18 ‘He felt
that the possession of wealth in society which was not a true community was
itself necessarily accompanied by a spirit which isolated its possessors from
true community.’19
Macmurray did not
believe that a new economic system would in and of itself provide the complete
content of the Kingdom of God. To the extent that Marxists came to believe that
a revolutionized secular community could be fulfilling in and of itself without
further development of the relations between persons, Macmurray clearly parted
company with them. Nevertheless, he did believe that the class issue and its
economic foundation was the central practical task facing Christianity
in the modern age. Jesus had known that only a society in which ‘property
is held in common for the needs of all, and in which brotherhood, equality and
freedom are the governing principles of social organization’20 could provide the basis for a community of
mutuality.
In this sense,
both contemporary feminists and liberationists would find in Macmurray strong
support for their commitment to building an egalitarian society along
democratic socialist lines. By insisting on the unity of theory and practice
and the non-dualist relation between matter and spirit, Macmurray links the
practical, material concerns of liberation with a religious vision that puts
liberation into God's intention for the created order. As long as women remain
trapped within the structures of an economic order in which their labor is
unpaid or recompensed unfairly, as long as their labor is menial and
unfulfilling, as long as they have no access to the means of material
enjoyment, their liberation is not complete. The concerns of Marxian Christian
liberationists and feminists necessarily coincide at precisely
16 Macmurray, The Clue to
History, p. 85.
17 ibid.
18 John Macmurray,
‘Challenge of Communism’, Christianity and Communism, with H.
G. Wood ( London: Industrial Christian Fellowship, Jan. 30, 1934), p. 23.
19 John Macmurray, Creative
Society, p. 78.
20 ibid., pp. 72-3.
576 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY
this point: a point made possible only on the
basis of a non-dualist understanding of reality.
But the key to liberation cannot be found within the
atomistic/contractarian model. It is not sufficient simply to equalize the
power among men and women so that women can fight their lonely battles in the
pursuit of self-interest with the same potential for success as other women and
men. Feminists who embrace the liberal presumption ‘that all values, ends,
and purposes are simple private values or compounds of such values’21 will inevitably fall into the false view that
political life is ‘dominated by a self-interested, predatory
individualism’.22 Such a view places the
premium in personal relationships on the distribution of power and the rational
calculation of self-interest in the competitive market place.
Reason and emotion
If
feminists accept this view of how to redress their present oppressed status
they might well, as Jean Elshtain has put it, ‘enjoy the terrible equality
of the silenced and subjected’.23 It is
necessary, she argues, to find a new philosophy ‘that repudiates the old
dualism with which we are still saddled in favor of an account that unites mind
and body, reason and passion . . .’24
The dualism to which she refers, between reason and emotion, is a corollary of
the dualisms between theory and practice and material and spiritual which
trouble both the Marxists and Macmurray. In an atomistic world of power
relations, reason is regarded as the objective instrument for determining what
power relations have to be taken into account in the pursuit of self-interest
Emotion is regarded as ephemeral, subjective, and untrustworthy.
But Macmurray went a long way toward reuniting reason and emotion.
In his book of that name (Reason and Emotion) he argued that both reason
and emotion are ways of relating to objects or persons external to us. In order
to be in the most fulfilling kind of relation with them, we need to discern as
accurately as we can what they are really like (and not just what we would like
them to be). But emotions toward others can be just as appropriate or
inappropriate as ideas. ‘Feelings can be rational or irrational in
precisely the same way as thoughts,
21 Jean Bethke
Elshtain, ‘Feminist Discourse and Its Discontents: Language, Power, and
Meaning’, Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1982, vol. 7,
no. 31, p. 617.
22 ibid.
23 ibid., p.
610.
24 ibid., p.
612.
TOWARD A METAPHYSIC OF COMMUNITY 577
through the correctness or incorrectness of
their reference to reality.25 In fact, he
contends, emotion is the primary orientation of the self toward others since it
provides the initial motivation for relationship. Reason is in the service of
emotion, being the instrument for its satisfactory expression in relation to
the other with which it is concerned. In this sense, it is as indispensable to
develop a proper emotional attitude toward others (one that feels toward them
appropriate to their nature) as it is to form correct ideas about them. For
feminists to abandon the emotional quality of women's lives in favor of the
traditional masculine reliance upon ‘cold’ or ‘calculating’
reason is to abandon a unity of reason and emotion which is essential to the
fullness of human life and relationship.
If
men and women are to establish relations of mutuality they must move from
fearful or defensive postures, out of which only power can secure their
interests, and into relations based upon trust and love. Virginia Held,
combining both Marxist and feminist concerns, has argued that ‘women and
men must learn new habits of dealing with one another in different terms, the
terms of cooperation, of trust, of openness, of genuine mutuality - in short,
of love’.26 She cautions that women
‘should not reconcile themselves too soon to a policy that relegates the
objective of transcending relations based on power to the distant future, and
aims seriously only to achieve the stage of equal power for women. To achieve
equal power in the structures of western capitalism or communist bureaucracies
as they now exist would be. . . a shallow transformation of society.’27
Why then not simply embrace the Marxian vision of a communist
society? What does Macmurray's Christian vision add to the notes of liberation
already sounded in the secular call of the Marxist? There are two basic
responses Macmurray makes to this question and which suggest his contribution
to the dialogue between Christians, feminists, and Marxists. First, while
agreeing fully with the Marxist insistence that religion must not ignore the
material needs of persons (‘the economic integration of humanity
determines in large measure what forms of personal life are possible. As a
result it is no longer possible to maintain or extend the personal life that
Christianity demands of us
25 John
Macmurray, Reason and Emotion (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1962),
p. 25.
26 Virginia
Held, ‘Marx, Sex, and the Transformation of Society’, in Women and
Philosophy. Toward a Theory of Liberation, edited by Carol C. Could and
Marx W. Wartofsky (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1976), p. 180.
27 ibid., pp.
178-9.
578 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY
without a transformation of the existing
political and economic structure of human life as a whole’),28 Macmurray insists that economic justice is only
a prerequisite for, not the substance of, fully satisfying personal
relationships.
The organic model of relationship
His second response is closely related to the first one. Marx and
many Marxists have failed to develop a model of community which can do justice
to the nature of personal relationships in the post-capitalist society. They
have labored for the most part under the dominance of an organic model of
relationship. Now it is quite clear that in comparison with the
atomistic/contractarian model, the organic is a major advance toward
recognizing the interdependence of persons. But as a metaphor or category for
understanding relationships it runs the risk of treating persons as nothing
more than organs within a larger organic whole and thus of reducing their
individual significance and uniqueness.
It
is not clear how much Marx was aware of his own indebtedness to an organic
model of relations. Certainly his mentor, Hegel, had used the organic metaphor
to describe the individual's relation to the State. For Hegel, persons were
only moments or organs in the larger life of the Whole. Such a view could
easily lead to a totalitarian notion in which the interests of the self, even
of many selves in relation, could be subordinated to the interests of an
abstract but powerful whole into which they are absorbed. Many recent
commentators have pointed out how much Marx uses organic language.29 Ollmann, in fact, goes so far as to argue that
for Marx all relations were nothing but internal, that is, not relations
between unique persons, but relations within one larger and more basic whole.
It is the whole which has fundamental identity and individual persons attain
their significance only to the degree that they contribute to or constitute a
part of the whole. Individual persons tend to lose their individuality and to
become simply organs whose worth is dependent solely on their productive
functioning within the larger organism. While these organs are clearly
interdependent, such a view of personal relationship can hardly do justice to
what we normally mean by mutuality. In a mutual relation,
28 John
Macmurray and Irene Grant, ‘The Provisional Basis of the Christian
Left’, The Christian Left, Feb. 1938, p. 6.
29 See Bertell
Ollmann, Alienation, Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1976) and Melvin Radar, Marx's Interpretation of History (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
TOWARD A METAPHYSIC OF COMMUNITY 579
the persons are not simply moments or aspects
of something greater, called ‘the relation’. They alone are the
essential entities: the relationship is not something over and above them: it
is only their free intention and ongoing action to relate that gives the
relationship any reality at all.
Nevertheless, the organic model is potentially so close to the
mutual model of relationship that it is very easy to fall into its language
while intending to convey mutuality. I think Augustine Shutte comes close to
this in his otherwise very fine article on ‘Indwelling, Intersubjectivity
and God’.30 While Shutte admits that he
uses the language of an organic model to express an ‘essentially personal
relation’,31 he also admits such
language is inadequate. However, the language he finds more adequate is
language of ‘coinherence’ or ‘indwelling’. This is
ultimately the language of participation, in which the human person somehow
participates in the being of God. He and Christian theology generally have
resorted to the metaphor of indwelling or participation because nothing can be
‘outside’ God who is infinite. But I believe the image of
participation is still essentially an organic one. It regards God as the
totality in which persons are constituent members. Shutte insists that this
does not mean that persons are absorbed into God. They do retain their
distinctness. My only objection to this is that the preservation of
distinctness between persons, including the person of God, does not require
even this kind of organic imagery and can be better handled metaphysically by
Macmurray's attempt to move beyond organic thinking, while not repudiating it
as long as it forms a subordinate part of a more inclusive model of
relationship.
Macmurray, I believe, promises to take the organic model of the
Marxist beyond its limitations and potential totalitarian dangers without
betraying its essential insight into the interdependence of persons. The form
of the personal is a model of relationship which recognizes both a mechanical,
material dimension in persons (that part of persons which can legitimately be
understood in terms drawn from the disciplines of physics and mechanics) and an
organic dimension (which is most appropriately studied by the sciences of
biology and psychology). But the whole person is these dimensions and more. The
whole person is inclusive of mechanics and biology. The whole person is a free
agent whose nature is not complete or fully expressed until it has utilized its
material and organic ‘infrastructures’,
30 Scottish Journal of
Theology, Vol. 32, 1979, pp. 201-16.
31 ibid., p. 206.
580 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY
its material conditions, in the service of a
loving, intentional relation with other persons. It is only the whole person
who can love others in the fullness of mutuality (and not simply respond to
them reciprocally as would be appropriate to organisms).
Macmurray avoids what might appear to be a subtle revival of
dualism in his claim that the person is organic and more by insisting that the
‘more’ is an inclusive whole. The inclusive nature of persons
must be the starting point, not the result, of reflection on what it means to
be a person. Macmurray claims that the views which hold the self to be
essentially an aggregate of atoms, or simply a complex organism, are in fact
abstractions and reductions from a more basic, more authentic,
ontologically prior whole: the living person. By starting with the inclusive
person, Macmurray therefore avoids dualism and goes beyond the limitations of
more restricted concepts of the human person.
But in stressing the inclusive, whole nature of persons Macmurray
does not fall back into the trap of the atomistic view. Persons are not, as
that view holds, essentially isolated monads who contract for relationship with
others out of defensiveness or fear. The very essence of what it means to be a
person, for Macmurray, is to be in relation to other persons. This relationship
is not simply one in which one partner exploits the other for
self-satisfaction. Macmurray's radical claim is that it is part of our created
nature that we can be fulfilled only by living for other persons. There is a
profound but very real truth in Jesus' claim that one must first lose oneself
before one can find oneself. Only in a philosophy of mutuality in which the
partners live for each other in love (in what Christians call agape),
can true fulfilment be found. On an atomistic view such a claim must be the
height of absurdity.
Conclusion
Macmurray has said that ‘ideas are the eyes of
action’.32 While praxis may be the
fulfilment or realization of our nature and our intentions, it must be guided
by intelligent forethought and some idea of where it is going and why. Both
feminist theology and the Christian-Marxist dialogue have historically been
suspicious of too much speculation or metaphysical meandering. But Macmurray's
metaphysics, I believe, reveals this suspicion to be unfounded, at least when
we are dealing with a metaphysics which is grounded in the centrality
32 John Macmurray, Creative
Society, p. 151.
TOWARD A METAPHYSIC OF COMMUNITY 581
of mutual relation. But as a metaphysics, Macmurray's
philosophy pushes us beyond the rhetoric of liberation and toward a fuller
understanding of what kind of relations will constitute the liberated life.
Marxists need to
understand the importance of developing a model of relationship that goes
beyond the equalization of power. Feminists need to understand the importance
of recapturing, where it is in danger of being lost, the emotional and
subjective dimensions of experience rather than trading them in for a larger
role in the game of rational calculation and the pursuit of self-interest.
Love, as a heterocentric way of being in relation to other persons, must be
resurrected from the bin of distracting and compensatory rhetoric and seen to
be the essence of fulfilling human relationships, that to which all liberation
from unjust economic and political conditions is a means. Religion must be seen
not as an illusory panacea for ‘too much reality’ but as the
quintessential human activity struggling for the enjoyment of community as an
end in itself. And God must be seen, not as an abstraction or distraction, but
as a living Agent whose actions contribute to and whose intention guides the
labor of men and women to achieve the realization of their created nature: the
realization of reconciliation and community.
The metaphysical
form of the personal, I believe, provides a way by which the above agenda can
be significantly advanced. Macmurray's own personal enthusiasm for the
communism of the 1930s can, I believe, be understood in the context of the
time. It was a bit overdrawn and naive. But the deeper, metaphysical principles
on which his dialogue with communism was carried out remain unaffected by the
passage of time and are as valid and relevant today as they were 50 years ago.
If feminist and Christian-Marxist theologians are to explore the potential of a
metaphysics which is dedicated to the development of the conditions for
mutuality, they should begin with the work of this eccentric Christian
philosopher whose time may finally have come.
FRANK G. KIRKPATRICK
Department of Religion
Trinity College
Hartford ford CT 06106
USA