Hocking, William Ernest

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HOCKING, WILLIAM ERNEST (1873–1966), was an American philosopher of religion and metaphysician who also wrote on the philosophies of law, education, selfhood, and civilization. His magnum opus, The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912; 14th ed., 1962), combined Josiah Royce's idealist concern for meaning and the Absolute with William James's pragmatist commitment to science and experience. Hocking's original contribution was his solution to the problem of solipsism. One shares the mind of another, he argued, through the common perception of, and mutual concern for, a particular object. Mind is its content. One cannot simply think (pace Descartes); one must think something. This particular object of common concern is the content of eveyone's common mind.

The experience is articulated dialectically. Natural realism regards the world as objectively "outside" one's self. Subjective idealism responds that people know only their own individual reality "within" the mind. A dialectical synthesis discovers a world made objectively real by common perception. Hence science assumes public verifiability, and hypothesis becomes fact only when various individual experimenters acknowledge a common perception.

Empirical minds come and go, however, and yet one experiences particular objects as real even when one is alone. How so? One intuits the presence of a nonempirical mind that is constantly a co-observer. One is never absolutely alone. Objective reality is thus grounded in the attention of an Absolute Mind. As personal reality, this caring presence of the Absolute is the meaning of God in human experience.

Hocking relates this natural theology both to Christianity and to the problem of world religious pluralism in three later books: Re-Thinking Missions (1932), Living Religions and a World Faith (1940), and The Coming World Civilization (1956). There is a natural religion of humankind, shared by ordinary believers the world around. The substance of this religion is compatible with Christian faith. A life lived out of this natural perception will be different from one lived in the light of Christianity's supernatural revelation, but the relation is a natural one. So, in Human Nature and Its Remaking (1918), Hocking argues that the natural human will to power finds fulfillment in the evangelism of the Christian world mission, because, ideally, mission seeks to confer power on others, rather than gain power over them.

Nevertheless, the Christian missionary movement has historically been insensitive to non-Western cultures; and Christian theology has been exclusivistic in relation to other world religions. The integrity of the Christian message can be maintained without violence to other religious traditions through a relational model that is neither the indiscriminate amalgamation of synthesis, nor the exclusivism of radical displacement. Encounter causes each religion to rethink basic positions. The world's living religions will not die, nor will the emerging world faith necessarily be called Christian. This way of reconception will, however, lead to a future in which the natural religion of humankind and the substance of historic Christianity will be conjoined, providing the binding ingredient for cultural and religious pluralism in the coming world civilization.

Hocking's The Meaning of God in Human Experience (New Haven, Conn., 1912) was the first of his twenty books. Other major writings on religion include Human Nature and Its Remaking (New Haven, Conn., 1918); Living Religions and a World Faith (New York, 1940); The Coming World Civilization (New York, 1956); and The Meaning of Immortality in Human Experience (New York, 1957), originally published as Thoughts on Death and Life (New York, 1937). For evaluations of Hocking's work see my festschrift for Hocking, Philosophy, Religion and the Coming World Civilization (The Hague, 1966), and my Within Human Experience: The Philosophy of William Ernest Hocking (Cambridge, Mass., 1969).