What is the task of philosophy? This metaphilosophical question drives John Macmurray in his slim volume Interpreting the Universe (1933) and it is this question that gives shape to his conclusions. One cannot discuss Macmurray’s central conceptualization of the “unity-pattern” without first considering his metaphilosophical concern, which means that one cannot discuss Macmurray without first understanding the prejudices (in the Gadamerian sense), the oughts, that inform his philosophy. For Macmurray, philosophy is an “essential process in the development of life itself” (2), and so the philosopher is he “who has grasped the significance of human life” (2). Philosophy is always concerned with reality, and for Macmurray this reality is readily equated with life, the meaningful being-in-the-world of human creatures. So, put succinctly, Macmurray’s philosophical prejudice is that philosophy be practical. How does one live well? This is the basic question of philosophy, at least in Macmurray’s view, and it is from here that Macmurray’s inquiry begins. If philosophy is concerned with living, what does the philosophical act, or even just the philosophical proclivity, indicate about our being as humans? Can something deeper be said about the nature of the relationship between man, philosophy, and the world? Macmurray would say yes. The question that is thus opened up is how? How does man think the world? How does man interpret the universe? Driven by his metaphilosophical angst, this is the question Macmurray tackles, and it is to this question that we, too, must respond. How does man think the world?
I use this phrasing, thinking the world, to put some distance between us and Macmurray, allowing an approach to his thought with somewhat of a critical perspective. What does Macmurray mean when he says “interpret” and “universe”? For Macmurray, interpretation is the outcome of a process, namely the process of reflection, which is in turn a response to experience. “When we reflect,” Macmurray writes, “we are seeking to become fully conscious of something that is already present and felt to be present in our experience” (2). Philosophy is thus the “determined effort” to become “fully conscious” of that which is “implicit in the activities of human life” and so “to express in words through thinking that on which our reflection is directed” (2). Macmurray would hold, then, that thinking the world, “interpreting the universe,” is also speaking the world, the putting into language of things. The relationship between thinking and speaking I will discuss more later. But for now, to abstract from his view, “interpreting the universe” is an act of symbolic representation. After sketching his theorization of immediate experience as unified and complete, Macmurray moves in chapter two to his understanding of reflective experience, that mediation (“interpretation”) of the unity (“universe”) that is immediate experience through symbolic schemata. Philosophy is concerned with the whole of experience, but philosophy is a finite tool employed by finite creatures and so the “whole” or “infinite” that is in question must be represented in finite terms. Thus, to think, interpret, or mediate “the world” (that is, life as it meaningfully occurs in reality) is to symbolize and entextualize it, and so cause the infinite contiguity of immediate experience to terminate in language. In this way, then, interpreting the universe is not an aesthetic, purely subjective “sense” of reality, but a mediation of immediate feeling with definite, articulated thought.
This definition is key for Macmurray. Because, as we discussed above, philosophy should be, above all, a practical endeavour concerned with living in the world, reflection must, necessarily, come to terms. Without terms, the initial break in immediacy that led to reflection upon reality (some problem or challenge—always the impetus for thought in Macmurray’s view) cannot be resolved. Once terms are attained the return to presence can occur. As Barthes claims in Mythologies (1957), citing Sartre, the feeling of experience, so distinct in one’s emotions, is, nevertheless, a “tautology” in which “one takes refuge” (Barthes, 267). Feelings of “fear, or anger, or sadness” are pure states of immediacy that occur “when one is at a loss for an explanation” (Barthes, 267). Such feelings are thus “accidental failure[s] of language [that are] magically identified with what one decides is a natural resistance of the object” (Barthes, 267). It is from such immediate, felt states that myths are born, leading to an acceptance of a problem or circumstance as given. Macmurray would concur with Barthes on this point. Philosophy can only occur when reality is thought, when the world is spoken, or in Barthes’ language, when the exnominating force of myth is counteracted by the denominating force of language at degree zero. Barriers in immediate experience throw us out of experience and into reflection, but one can only return to experience when one denominates the barrier, which is to say, when one speaks it.
This speaking of the world, in which thinking is expressed in language, is where Macmurray’s philosophy of the “unity-pattern” is introduced. Unity-patterns are symbolic schemas of meaning, articulations of patterns and relations that are mapped onto the unity of experience so as to organize and understand it. So, through thought—symbolic interpretation—doubt is “resolve[d]” (19). Beginning in chapter four, Macmurray goes about detailing the unity-patterns that he perceives to have shaped philosophy, and human knowledge more broadly. The first of these is the mathematical/mechanical unity-pattern, which represents reality as “stuff to be used,” as “material” (48). This unity-pattern represents the world “as the field in which we exercise constructive activity, as that which we use for productive purposes” (48). Thus, the mathematical unity-pattern is concerned with “utility-value” (48), is ordered by “causal properties” and “relation” (48, 49), and structures reality in terms of “units” (50). Problematically, the mathematical pattern cannot account for growth. It can imagine change wherein matter is acted upon but the basic “identity” of the unit is preserved. It cannot, however, account for the sort of change that is growth, change from within that actually transforms the identity of the unit into something else. This is where the biological/organic unity-pattern comes in. Where the mathematical pattern represents reality as matter, the biological pattern represents reality as life. For this reason biological thought can indeed account for the “increase in differentiation and coordination” that is growth, which mathematical thought cannot compute. However, biological thought also encounters difficulties. Biological thought is ordered around “teleology” (63), and so a life, the basic structure of the unity-pattern, must be conceived in terms of this telos: the biological thinker must “represent the process as governed by the final stage in which it completes itself” (64). For Macmurray this way of thinking lends itself to such idealized philosophies as Hegel’s in which all differences are harmonized and all persons are reduced to functions of the One, the organic All or Whole. Nevertheless, in both modes of thought Macmurray’s chief concern, how one should live as a human in the world, is left unresolved. The personal is not analyzable as a unit or as a telos, and neither is it a fusion of both, but “something beyond” (69).
The self is neither a “substance” nor an “organism” (69). Neither unity pattern is “adequate for our purpose” (70). Because we encounter infinity “in the immediacy of living” (70), and because each person we encounter represents an infinity of potentiality that cannot be expressed in finite terms (one might hear echoes of Levinas, here), the need for a different unity-pattern is pressing. Human living is living with other humans, and so philosophy, for Macmurray, must attempt to answer this most banal yet most challenging of questions: how do we get along? “The experience of other persons has an essential quality which makes it different from any other kind of experience” (71), Macmurray writes. There is a “consciousness of mutual relationship, of the meeting of like with like, for in it we find a response from the object at our own level” (71). Units and teleologies do not speak. Humans do. And so where the mathematical or biological thinker stands over against the object of his thought, rendering it a “closed system” (72), the personal or psychological thinker is actively involved in what he contemplates—his “thought is, for the first time, about [him]self” (70). Indeed, for Macmurray, in reflecting upon another person the experience of reflection itself, in which experience is thrown back upon thought, reveals the most pristine vision of reason, “the capacity to stand in conscious relation to that which is recognized as not ourselves” (72). Rationality is, in fact, an outcome of human relation. It is relation that makes rationality possible in the first place, the acknowledgment of the gap between observer and observed. Moving toward an explanation of this gap or relation is the aim of Macmurray’s final chapter.
Here, however, Macmurray’s intent encounters some difficulty. He still purposes to express the infinite in finite terms, because he still believes that a unity-pattern is necessary for thinking about the personal. Certainly, if we accept Macmurray’s reasoning this must be the case. Philosophy is concerned with the whole of experience, and the need to interpret this whole sparks the act of reflection. But if all reflection is symbolic action, reflection is therefore bounded by the finitude of its terms, and we are left to discuss infinity within such a boundary once again. His psychological philosophy seems tenuous in light of the rest of his thought. Though there is not space here to dissect his argumentation to the degree that it requires, further inquiry into two notions of his, in particular, would be beneficial.
First of all, Macmurray’s understanding of words and ideas as outer and inner manifestations of the symbolic is limiting. An idea is not “the image of a word” as Macmurray claims (25). He affords the word a concrete reality that it does not have, prejudicially inclined toward the world of action as he is. Having said already that the “image” is the abstraction of the “percept” and thus a “symbol” (23), Macmurray goes on to claim that the idea is “the symbol of a word” (25). Somehow, Macmurray imagines the word to be less of an abstraction than the image, the idea. And yet if we consider the symbolic capacity of infants, for instance, we cannot say that the word “milk” precedes the idea of it that is desired. The word follows the idea, and is the abstraction of it that the infant learns to invoke so as to get his relations to satisfy his need. Macmurray affords words a material existence they simply do not have, and is limited in his discussion of language by his wrong-footedness. Secondly, and more briefly, a fleshing out of Macmurray’s conception of the “infinite” would perhaps provide a way forward in actually reckoning with it. If immediate experience, and the personal which condenses it, is truly infinite, then we are out of luck, forever relegated to our partial interpretations. But if instead this infinite is conditioned, if we take a pragmatic approach such as Charles Sanders Peirce does, or recognize the absence which always accompanies presence as Derrida does, then perhaps we might be able to chart a new path forward. Regardless, Macmurray’s motivation stands: philosophy should be concerned with life and living. It is for us who follow him to attain to that “something beyond” that he imagined but could not quite reach.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Richard Howard & Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 2012.
Macmurray, John. Interpreting the Universe. Amherst: Humanity Books, 1996.