1. •Does the distinction between enjoying yourself in your friend’s company and enjoying your friends seem a too subtle philosopher’s distinction?
   

1. •You shall not use a person for your own ends, or indeed for any ends, individual or social.
   

1. •When you live to please people you destroy emotional sincerity.
   
   

2. •Men and women must enter into relationships not as male and female but as human beings equally.
   
   

3. •The husband and the wife are specialised in their own directions. The further each develops in his or her own function the wider the gulf. They come to depend upon each other and so lose their integrity.
   
   

4. •When any fellowship becomes exclusive it ceases to be a real fellowship and becomes a mere defensive alliance to safeguard common interests.
   

These are quotes from John MacMurray’s book ‘Reason and Emotion’ which is a book of transcripts from lectures he gave back in the 1930s. I’m grateful to him. He articulates so well what I have been clumsily trying to say about relationships. Discovering his work right now is more than a little helpful.

His central theme is the emotional life and how it is in such a bad state. He argues that reason is just as common to emotion as it is to intellect. He talks about emotional rationality and emotional sincerity (defined by him as ‘chastity’) suggesting that there is a reasonableness and an appropriateness, a moral order even, to emotions. The consequences of being insincere emotionally, of not being chaste, and by and large we aren’t according to him, are disastrous. Although our culture is extremely clever intellectually, emotionally it is retarded. He thinks sincerity in our emotional and relationship lives is very much needed.

This man’s subject matter feels modern, in particular regard to the need for equality of the sexes as well as the need for emotional intelligence (the contemporary term). As an intellectual he has been prescient given he was writing in the 1930s before the full horror of the Nazis had emerged. That a very short while later Europe would bring itself close to destruction would probably not have surprised him.

Interestingly, Tony Blair was introduced to MacMurray and his philosophy as a student at Oxford in the 1970s. It has been said he was something of a philosophical mentor to the PM and turned him to socialism. Despite Blair being about as far from socialist as you might imagine, there is something quite synchronistic about that, given I found Reason & Emotion in a charity bookshop just round from Fettes College where I had been walking. That was where Blair was educated and I had been thinking about him.