William Ernest Hocking
William Ernest Hocking | |
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American idealism | |
Institutions | Harvard University |
William Ernest Hocking (August 10, 1873 – June 12, 1966) was an American
Early life and education
William Ernest Hocking was born in 1873 to William Hocking (1839–1903) and Julia Pratt (1848–1936) in
In 1899 he entered Harvard, where he also studied with Josiah Royce in philosophy, earning his master's degree in 1901. From 1902 to 1903 he studied in Germany, at Göttingen, where he was the first American to study with Edmund Husserl, and in Berlin and Heidelberg. He returned to Harvard and completed his PhD in 1904.[4]
Career
Hocking began teaching as an instructor in comparative religion at Andover Theological Seminary. In 1906 he and his wife moved to the West Coast, where he joined the philosophy faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, under George Howison. In 1908 he was called to Yale, where he served as an assistant professor and published his first major work, The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912).[4]
In 1914 Hocking returned to Harvard, where he eventually became Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity. During World War I, in 1917 he was among the first American civil engineers to reach the front in France.[4] In 1918 he was appointed as an inspector of "war issues" courses in army training camps. His experience led him to write his second book, about morale.[4] Returning to Harvard after the war, Hocking made the rest of his career there. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1921.[5] From 1920 to the late-1930s, Hocking was a regular lecturer at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, where he lectured on "Morale," "Psychology," and "Leadership."[6] Influenced by his visit to China, Hocking published a characteristically open minded study of the twelfth-century Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi. He argued that Zhu Xi's thought was "scientific," which not all European philosophers could claim, and therefore had something to teach westerners about democracy.[7]
In 1936, Hocking was invited to give the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford and Cambridge universities in England.[4] These reflected his thinking about the relation of Christianity to other world religions, as he had begun to support a universal religion. According to a review in TIME of the book containing his lectures, Hocking thought the important elements were
a belief in obligation, in a source of things which is good, in some kind of permanence for what is real in selfhood, and in the human aspect of deity." He pins his hope more on the common people throughout the world than on the
theologians, finds in them a "universal sense of the presence of God, and the intuition of the direction in which the will of God lies.[8]
Hocking was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1943.[9] That same year, he retired to Madison, New Hampshire and lived there until his death 23 years later.
Study of missions
In 1930–1932, he led the Commission of Appraisal, which studied the foreign
The commission's report, entitled
Philosophical work
In political philosophy, Hocking claimed that liberalism must be superseded by a new form of individualism in which the principle is: "every man shall be a whole man."[12] He believed that humans have only one natural right: "an individual should develop the powers that are in him."[13] The most important freedom is "the freedom to perfect one's freedom."[14] He considered Christianity to be a great agent in the making of world civilization. But he believed that no dogma was the route to religious knowledge; rather, it is developed in the context of individual human experience.
He followed many German philosophers of his time, who were very influential. While studying in Germany, he had attended lectures by Wilhelm Dilthey, Paul Natorp, Edmund Husserl, Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. A staunch defender of idealism in the United States, Hocking was critical to thought about its meaning for "religion," "history" or the "superpersonal." In many regards he agreed with Wilhelm Luetgert, a German critic of idealism; however, he did not abandon his position. Hocking believed nothing that "could be" was ultimately irrational. He declared that there was no unknowable in "what was."
Negative pragmatism
Perhaps Hocking's most important contribution to philosophy is "negative pragmatism," which means that what "works" pragmatically might or might not be true, but what does not work must be false. As Sahakian and Sahakian state, "... if an idea does not work, then it cannot possibly be true, for the reason that the truth always works ...".
Hocking's criterion was corroborated in the mid-20th century by Richard Feynman, a physicist who won the Nobel Prize. Feynman states that anything described as true "... could never be proved right, because tomorrow's experiment might succeed in proving wrong what you thought was right ..." and, "... if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong."[16] Finally, Sahakian and Sahakian note inadequacies and limited application to all of the other criteria of truth they present, but they do not denigrate negative pragmatism. To find an inadequacy in any criterion is to invoke negative pragmatism. To denote a failure in any criterion is to show how it "disagrees with experiment" (Feynman) and/or "does not work" (Hocking). By this means, they use negative pragmatism as the de facto criterion by which all other criteria are judged.
Marriage and family
Hocking married Agnes O'Reilly on June 28, 1905.[4] She was the Irish-American daughter of the journalist and poet John Boyle O'Reilly and his wife Mary Murphy, also a journalist. They had three children: Richard (1906–2001), Hester (1909–1998) and Joan (1911–2000). After they returned to Cambridge, Agnes Hocking started an open-air school at their home, which she developed as the Shady Hill School. It continues near Harvard Square.
Richard became a professor of philosophy and his daughter Hester became affiliated with the St Augustine movement for civil rights and in April 1964 Hester along with three other woman (including Mary Parkman Peabody the mother of then Massachusetts governor Endicott Peabody) were arrested for protesting in a segregated lunch bar in the town, the event made front-page news at the time. Joan's husband Edward A. Kracke Jr. was a historian of China.
Final years and death
In 1955 Hocking's wife of 50 years Agnes died at the age of 78, Hocking published his final book The Coming World Civilisation in 1956.
On June 12, 1966, Hocking died at his farm in Madison, New Hampshire aged 92.[17] He was survived by his three children and eight grandchildren.
Cultural references
William Hocking's life, work, his predecessors, his colleagues, and especially his surviving personal library, West Wind, is the inspiration for John Kaag's American Philosophy: A Love Story.[18]
Selected works
- 1912, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, online text at Internet Archive.[19] The book went through 14 editions.
- 1918, Morale and Its Enemies, online text at Internet Archive
- 1926, Man and the State, Yale University Press
- 1929, Types of Philosophy, (NY: Charles Scribner and Sons). This book went through three editions.
- 1932, William Ernest Hocking, Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen's Inquiry After One Hundred Years (report of Commission of Appraisal), online electronic text at Internet Archive
- 1938, Living Religions and a World Faith, publication of his 1936 Hibbert Lectures at Oxford and Cambridge in England.
- 1956, The Coming World Civilisation, which Hocking described as "a conspectus of a life's thought," was still in print in the 1980s.
See also
References
- ^ Daniel Sommer Robinson, The Self and the World in the Philosophy of Josiah Royce, Christopher Publishing House, 1968, p. 9: "Josiah Royce and William Ernest Hocking were the founders and creators of a unique and distinctly American school of idealistic philosophy."
- ^ William Ernest Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912), Preface, p. xxiii
- ^ Rowse, A.L. The Cousin Jacks, The Cornish in America, 1969
- ^ a b c d e f g h William Ernest Hocking, Encyclopedia of World Biography, at BookRag
- ^ "William Ernest Hocking". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. February 9, 2023. Retrieved April 14, 2023.
- ^ John B. Hattendorf, B. Mitchell Simpson III, and John R. Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars: The Centennial History of the Naval War College (Newport: Naval War College Press, 1984), p. 157.
- ^ William Ernest Hocking, "Chu Hsi's Theory of Knowledge," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 1.1 (1936): 109-127.
- ^ "Religion: One Religion for All", TIME magazine, September 2, 1940, accessed April 16, 2011
- ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved April 14, 2023.
- ^ William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987): 158-175.
- ^ William Ernest Hocking, "Conclusions", Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen's Inquiry After One Hundred Years (report of Commission of Appraisal), online electronic text at Internet Archive
- ^ William Ernest Hocking, A William Ernest Hocking Reader, With Commentary
- ^ "Book Reviews". Columbia Law Review. XXVII (2): 230. February 1927. Retrieved May 4, 2023 – via Google Books.
- ^ Hocking, William Ernest (1947). Freedom of the Press. University of Chicago Press. p. 70. Retrieved May 4, 2023 – via Internet Archive.
- ^ Sahakian, W.S. & Sahakian, M.L., Ideas of the Great Philosophers, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966, LCCCN 66-23155
- ISBN 0-679-60127-9
- ^ Written at Madison, New Hampshire. "William Hocking, Philosopher, Dies". The Berkshire Eagle. Pittsfield, Massachusetts. UPI. June 14, 1966. p. 3. Retrieved May 4, 2023 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ Kaag, John, American Philosophy: A Love Story, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016
- ^ "Review of The Meaning of God in Human Experience by William Ernest Hocking". The Athenaeum (4436): 515–516. November 2, 1912.
Further reading
- John Kaag, American Philosophy: A Love Story, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016
- Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001
- Milligan, Charles S. "William Ernest Hocking's philosophy of religion revisited". American journal of theology & philosophy (1996) 17#2: 185–209.