William Ernest Hocking (August 10, 1873, Cleveland, Ohio – June 12, 1966 Madison, New Hampshire) was an American idealist philosopher at Harvard University. He continued the work of his philosophical teacher Josiah Royce in revising idealism to integrate and fit into empiricism, naturalism and pragmatism. He said that metaphysics has to make inductions from experience: "that which does not work is not true." His major field of study was the philosophy of religion, but his 22 books included discussions of philosophy and human rights, world politics, freedom of the press, the philosophical psychology of human nature; education; and more. In 1958 he served as president of the Metaphysical Society of America.
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William Ernest Hocking was born in 1873 in Cleveland, Ohio. He was of Cornish American heritage.[1] He attended public schools through high school. He worked first as a mapmaker, illustrator and printer's devil, before entering Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts in 1894, where he intended to be an engineer. Reading William James' Principles of Psychology made him decide to go to Harvard to study philosophy, but he first worked for four years as a teacher and high school principal to earn the money for his studies.[2]
In 1899 he entered Harvard, where he also studied with Josiah Royce in philosophy, earning his master's degree in 1901. From 1902-1903 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.[2]
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 Howson. 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).[2]
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.[2] 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.[2] Returning to Harvard after the war, Hocking made the rest of his career there.
In 1930-1932, he led the Commission of Appraisal, which studied the foreign mission work of six Protestant Christian denominations in India, Burma, China, and Japan.[2] Protestant missionaries had been active in Asia since the latter nineteenth century, but several groups noted falling donations and the times suggested that changes might be needed. The Commission's report, entitled Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen's Inquiry After One Hundred Years (1932) and released under Hocking's name, reflected changing ideas about the role of western missionaries in other cultures, and generated debate. Commission members traveled to Asian cities to meet missionaries and local people. The Commission recommended a greater emphasis on education and welfare, and less on evangelizing, with respectful appreciation for local religions. A recommended related goal was the transition of local leadership and institutions. The Commission also recommended reorganization in the US to coordinate and focus missionary efforts by creating a single organization for Protestant missions.[3]
In 1936, Hocking was invited to give the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford and Cambridge universities in England.[2] 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." [4]
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" and we have only one natural right: "an individual should develop the powers that are in him." The most important freedom is "the freedom to perfect one's freedom." 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, and had attended their lectures while studying in Germany; Wilhelm Dilthey, Paul Natorp, Edmund Husserl, Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. A staunch defender of idealism in the United States, Hocking was critical in terms of what that entitled in meaning anything definite about "religion," "history" or the "superpersonal."
In many regards he agreed with Wilhelm Luetgert, a German critic of idealism, however without abandoning its position. Hocking believed nothing that could be was ultimately irrational, while declaring equally that there was no unknowable in what was.
Hocking married Agnes O'Reilly on June 28, 1905.[2] 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, Joan and Hester. 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.