ABSTRACT
My reasons for starting this part of the argument with a discussion of John Macmurray are best explained in terms of the various paradigms that I enumerated in the last chapter. To anticipate, I think Macmurray gives one of the best accounts of position 5, the Spinozist account, but nevertheless often slips into 3 (romanticism), perhaps because he is reacting so strongly against 2 (Stoic or Kantian rationalism). He is upgrading emotion by pointing out that reason is inherent in emotions, which can consequently have qualities which have often been attributed only to reason conceived as an independent faculty. But every now and then he attributes to emotion as distinct from reason, qualities that emotion can only have as inclusive of reason. This ambivalence about reason is characteristic of existentialism, to which tendency of thought Macmurray can be seen as belonging. He does not call himself an existentialist, of course-who does?—but he is closer to the other three major existentialist thinkers (Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre) than to any other modern philosophers, and in many ways closer to each of them than they are to each other.1 One aspect of his existentialism is this simultaneous rejection of the head/heart dualism and partisanship of the heart within it, and I shall shortly make an immanent critique of his thought with a view to refuting paradigm 3 and defending paradigm 5. But with this warning, I pass to Macmurray’s excellent account of the place of reason in human emotional life. He defines reason as follows:
reason is the capacity to behave in terms of the nature of the object, that is to say, to behave objectively.
