Restoring Our Humanity with John Macmurray

Colin Stott contemplates Macmurray’s reunifying thinking.

- Colin Stott

John Macmurray (1891-1976) was a widely respected Scottish philosopher who gained a certain notoriety for his attacks on the philosophical establishment and for single-mindedly promoting a new approach to the subject. He also commanded popular acclaim for his accessible, jargon-free writing, and for his pioneering, wide-ranging radio broadcasts. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell managed between them to match Macmurray for the radicalism of their ideas, and they have secured permanent reputations as leading philosophers of the twentieth century. The same cannot be said of Macmurray, who is now a largely forgotten figure beyond a small devoted following. That is regrettable, because his relevance to major philosophical issues is undiminished, and his insights profound.

Macmurray contended that Western academic philosophy had dug itself into a hole. It had taken fundamental conceptual pairings, such as subjective/objective, thought/action, individual/society, theory/practice, and severed them: divorced subject from object, extracted thought from action, segregated individual from society, removed theory from practice. In doing this, philosophers had created chronically imponderable problems for themselves, such as ‘What is objective reality?’, ‘How does the mind control the body?’, and ‘Why should I not act selfishly?’. Macmurray argued that such problems need never have arisen, and that philosophers should have realised from the outset that each opposition is inseparable: mind and body and so on are different but inextricably linked. Moreover, each pairing manifests aspects of some simultaneously more complex and yet more fundamental phenomenon. But as long as they contemplated these severed polarities, philosophers were wasting their talents on “epistemological problems” founded on “nothing but delusions”. According to a memorable Macmurray phrase, they’ve been practising “dead philosophy” (The Self As Agent, 1957).