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Restoring Our Humanity with John Macmurray

Colin Stott contemplates Macmurray’s reunifying thinking.

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).

John Macmurray by Gail Campbell 2025

Contra Descartes

Had he needed a scapegoat, Macmurray might have blamed René Descartes (1596-1650) for this impasse. Descartes sought absolute certainty, and believed he could find it by retreating from the world and contemplating his own thinking. His conclusion ran something like this: ‘I cannot doubt my own existence without contradiction. Nor can I doubt that I think. What I cannot doubt about my existence must be my essential character. Therefore, my essential character must be thinking itself.’ This and other Cartesian conclusions set the philosophical agenda for generations to come, including making the individual’s consciousness central to the philosophical enterprise. The relationship between experience and reality, mind and body, and so on, became philosophy’s central focus. Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant all tackled problems arising from Descartes’ reasoning. Beginning with an individual self directly examining its own private experiences, each strove to explain our knowledge of ourselves, of the world, and of each other.

But Macmurray in The Self as Agent dismissed this programme as egocentric, thereby challenging a three-hundred-year-old philosophical tradition. His principal objection to the egocentric approach was that it made philosophical scepticism unassailable.

Take sceptical doubt concerning the existence of the external world. The sceptic affirms that all knowledge is founded on the certainty of our experiences. Since the external world by definition lies outside the realm of those experiences, it follows that there’s no certain foundation to our belief in its existence. Macmurray further objected to Cartesianism for forcing us into ‘the theoretical point of view’ – whereby abstract (or theoretical) reasoning becomes our sole means of breaking out of the certainties of experience inside our minds to reach a wholly unknowable world outside. But this escape has proved hopeless, and so scepticism has flourished in a discipline that has become dominated by cynics.

Macmurray’s Alternative Vision

Macmurray’s alternative begins with perception and the external world. His central contention is that human knowledge is not grounded in applying reason to experience. Rather, the source of knowledge is embodied activity. Basic human experience is not divorced from the world, and every sense, including sight, is a form of ‘touch’, in that it engages its objects directly. So perception is not a process of contemplating experiences in here then speculating about an inaccessible reality out there. Rather, it is a single, active, embodied process, interacting directly with the world. There is no gulf between experience and reality for reason to bridge. When exploring perception, philosophy has focused excessively on vision, and has presumed a gulf between every perception and its object that needs to be bridged somehow. But Macmurray’s contention is that in discovering the world, we immerse ourselves in it.

The example of gazing at a river may help convey his idea. Macmurray would have resisted the suggestion that the perception consists in contemplating an experience and speculating upon the nature of its object from afar. Rather, the river is accessible directly. We can dangle an arm in the water, or immerse ourselves in its flow. Even with vision, the retina connects with the river through the flow of photons.

From birth we’re inundated by stimuli. In interacting with this pressing environment, we meet resistance to our endeavours: we navigate towards our objectives in a sea (or river) of conflicting currents that either oppose or assist our own initiatives. But this is, according to Macmurray in The Self as Agent, a practical rather than an intellectual process of negotiation. Moreover, discovering the world takes place simultaneously with discovering ourselves as participants within it. Macmurray rejects the view that self-discovery is achieved via the inner contemplation of a Cartesian soul. Instead, self-discovery takes place within the world, as we recognise our successes and failures as functions of our powers and limitations. Also, the subjective and objective are not segregated realms which perception strives to synthesise. There is just the one world, in which we distinguish our own subjectivity, and the objectivity of the material we perceive, but both are correlated aspects of our embodied entanglement with it.

Macmurray dismisses the sceptical argument from this pragmatic perspective, since we can’t discover even our own selves except through an active engagement in the world. So without a world, scepticism cannot even establish the truth of its first affirmation, that we can know our own experience. Sceptical doubt regarding the external world is therefore entirely spurious.

Other Selves

Macmurray moves on to consider other persons. Descartes’ divorce of subject from object polarised debates on the nature of the Self. Materialists subsequently maintained that the universe is comprised only of physical particles and events, and that thoughts and feelings are, in some yet-undisclosed way, merely neural events. This reduces the Self to nothing more than the actions of a collection of physical particles. Against materialism, dualists and idealists insisted there must be something more to the Self: what it is like actually to have the experiences – the inside view.

Macmurray represented this as a debate between the third person outer perspective of materialism (‘it’), and the first person inner perspective of anti-materialism (‘I’), and rejected both parties outright. He dismissed materialism with the assertion that material events are incapable of action or agency; and countered anti-materialism with the charge that it subordinates all other persons to my conscious standpoint. It fails to explain the parity each person shares with every other person: “As different instances of the same concept, they must be similarly conceived. i.e., neither can be subordinate to the other” (The Self as Agent). Macmurray proposed an alternative second person (‘you’) perspective, and argued that our experience of other persons, like our perception of the world, is direct, or one-to-one, since, “The resistance through which the self can exist as agent must be the resistance of another Self” (p.145).

Discovering other selves is a twofold process. We discover our selves generally through meeting resistance in the external world, and individually through a characteristic resistance in our encounters with other selves: “The distinction of Self and Other is the awareness of both; and the existence of both is the fact that their opposition is practical, and not a theoretical opposition” (p.109).

The example of a locked door can illustrate this. The door’s resistance is constant, and opposes our efforts to pass through it. Here we’re interacting with (and in) a purely material world. But imagine yourself as a child trying to pass through the now open doorway, past an elder brother bent upon teasing you and resisting your every attempt to squeeze through. The nature of this resistance is entirely different from that presented by the door itself. It is flexible, yet with the single purpose of anticipating your every move and denying you admittance. This is a direct encounter with another agent. It simultaneously alerts you to the opportunity of discovery, not just of another’s presence, but also of self-knowledge, through a practical engagement on the same shared level.

From this position of parity between self and others, Macmurray could dismiss the sceptical argument that doubts the existence of other persons. Radical scepticism affirmed the certainty of my own existence and the impossibility of having experiences that are not mine, although the existence of another person depends upon the existence of experiences that are not mine. This creates the problem of solipsism: I cannot be certain of the occurrence of experiences that are not mine, so the existence of other persons is doubtful. Macmurray’s counter to solipsism is that we cannot even recognise our own selves except by encountering the characteristic resistance of others and recognising them as other agents. Again, only through my consciousness of other persons can I know myself as a person.

Macmurray’s second-person account, of you as an agent, gives us a Self that is neither exclusively material nor immaterial, nor even a coupling of the two. Rather, the material body and the immaterial consciousness are derived abstractions from our more fundamental practical engagement with the world and with each other in the purposeful conduct of our lives.

Materialism is Not a Fact

Macmurray continues his attack on materialism and the view of science that sustains it. Scientific knowledge can result because we recognize and separate the subjective and objective aspects of our everyday investigations. By suppressing the influence of emotions or feelings, we may arrive at disinterested scientific knowledge. Macmurray, is seeking to establish scientific knowledge as the extended, more rigorous analysis and distillation of ordinary practical enquiry. In Chapter One of his 1933 book Interpreting the Universe, he maintained that the scientific statement ‘Water is H₂O’ would be merely a meaningless noise unless we knew what water is by drinking it and washing in it and boiling it in our kettles. He therefore felt he could reject materialism wholesale, since materialist descriptions of the world omit the human agency that’s essential to all empirical enquiry.

Many might consider this a weak argument. Everybody accepts that personal psychological preconditions, such as imagination, inquisitiveness, and powers of observation, are necessary for scientific investigation, but even if there has never been life on Earth, they might say, water would still be H₂O. Facts are facts after all.

Nonetheless, I think it’s possible to strengthen Macmurray’s position with a head-on assault on materialism. My contention would be that science deals directly only with facts, not with the objects the facts are about, but that facts are not material things. Material objects such as chairs and tables have material properties. Chairs may be wooden, tubular, or upholstered. But facts about chairs have no such material attributes. We cannot sit on facts, or pick them up. Facts are not primary or fundamental features of the world, but rather the outcome or upshot of exercising our investigative powers within it, and so depend on agency. But facts are still facts, of course; meaning, they are true independent of us. So, what makes them objectively true?

Macmurray can provide a crucial insight here. Facts are not outside and beyond our perception of them. They are objective simply because their objects characteristically behave independently of us, and our efforts to influence them encounter resistance.

If materialism attempts a rejoinder here, it can only offer more facts. This should not deter Macmurray. He could keep replying that human agency is necessary to produce or discover those facts. And facts can only be understood in this way – as what we obtain from purposeful investigation.

Motivating Macmurray

Macmurray was not so much interested in the philosophical ideas for their own sakes; his primary concern lay with their application to issues concerning human welfare. He contended that egocentric philosophy infects many common concepts, such as mind, body, individual, society, and religion, and that this is to the detriment of the way we view ourselves since it devalues us as human beings. So he believed it was important to begin redefining self, society, religion and other concepts to reflect a more inclusive philosophy. (It’s interesting to compare Macmurray with Wittgenstein here. Wittgenstein insisted that philosophy begin with the examination of ordinary language, and believed philosophical questions only arise when we misuse language. Yet for Macmurray, philosophical assumptions are already embedded in ordinary language before any examination of language begins.)

Macmurray’s ethical philosophy aimed to re-define the self as a full person. The egocentricism of Cartesianism has encouraged the adoption of self-regarding ethical values, alienating us from our true selves, which are sociable. Just as for Aristotle, ‘friendship’ is a key concept in his thought, and the hallmark of the fully-developed human. In friendship we realise our full potential as individual persons. Therefore, in acting selfishly, we dehumanise ourselves.

The effect has been twofold. Firstly, egocentric views of consciousness have alienated the individual from society. Our individuality is not formed independently of society; instead, we create and discover ourselves through engaging sociably with others. Sociability is a necessary condition for personal fulfilment, then, but Cartesianism has instead directed us towards introspection and isolation. Secondly, Cartesian Dualism has denigrated the human body since it has fostered a bias in our thinking towards the mind. In Freedom in the Modern World (1932), Macmurray expressed this as the feeling that there’s something ignoble about the body just because it is the body, and that bodily desire is somehow disreputable. Organised religion has only exacerbated this alienation.

Materialism goes further than Cartesianism and has devalued the whole human person. Macmurray thought that its cynical mechanical model of humanity erodes ties of friendship and community. It offers only a partial model of human beings, reducing them to material objects, thereby encouraging us to regard each other competitively, as objects for exploitation, which perspective ends in wars and disaster.

Although Macmurray was a Christian, he could be scathing in his criticism of the church, or of organised religion generally, since he believed it exacerbated this alienation from our true natures. Organised religion, he maintained, falsely projects qualities we ourselves possess onto an alien supernatural God.

Macmurray believed Christianity’s true meaning had been perverted. In marked contrast to the official version, his own version of Christianity has no apparent supernatural content. Instead, for him, the Christian religion was a way of life – of love, etc – which made no scientific claims, so could not be challenged by science. Indeed, Macmurray brings the divine down to a level he believed resides within us all, as a capacity to act on the essential teachings of Christ, enabling us to achieve our full humanity through a shared life founded on friendship, love, trust, and fellowship.

Macmurray evidently valued friendship very highly; but he ventures too far in attempting to derive that value from this humanist philosophy. In fact, his arguments only support the conclusion that association is necessary for full individual development. Calling it ‘friendship’ makes it sound more attractive, but there are other types of association – such as those formed by gangsters and terrorist groups. Association is not good in itself. Associations are good only if they promote human welfare. So Macmurray is probably naïve in placing so much trust in the innate goodness of human beings – a goodness that’s presumably somehow corrupted by the innate sinfulness of society.

Conclusions

Despite him having a successful career teaching it, philosophy per se never seems to have been Macmurray’s principal interest. The need to build a better society based upon Christian and Marxist principles took precedence, and he devoted his philosophical writings largely to serving that end. But what’s interesting in his work is the way in which his philosophical underpinnings bring together distinct strands from rival schools in the Western tradition. This synthesis amounts to an original initiative that has bequeathed us a compelling, comprehensive philosophy which challenges the assumptions underlying many of the subject’s longest standing problems. It excises those problems using the idea of human agency, and in doing so sets out to repair some of the damage ‘egocentric’ philosophy has done to human dignity and personal fulfilment. If he has succeeded in this enterprise, then perhaps he is worthy to stand alongside Russell and Wittgenstein as a leading philosopher of the twentieth century.

Colin Stott studied philosophy at the University of York, and runs the Wells Philosophy Society in Somerset.