This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
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This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
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American philosophy is surprisingly rich in its efforts to understand religion and God. American studies of religion include the pragmatist William James' famous book, "The Varieties of Religious Experience". The Varieties of Religious Experience James' idealist friend and colleague Josiah Royce wrote a less well-known but highly valuable study in partial response to the "Varieties", "The Sources of Religious Insight". The Sources of Religious Insight An important American philosophical study of religion which is almost forgotten today is this 1912 book by William Ernest Hocking, "The Meaning of God in Human Experience: A Philosophic Study of Religion". Hocking (1873 -- 1966) studied with both James and Royce and was an early American student of Edmund Husserl. Hocking was the successor at Harvard to Josiah Royce where he taught and wrote for many years. Hocking's "Meaning of God" is heavily indebted to both James and Royce and perhaps to Husserl as well. While writing an independent work, Hocking tries to combine elements of pragmatism with the absolute idealism he finds in Royce. The pragmatist/idealist combination is not the usual course of current philosophy but it continues to draw attention.
Hocking's book was influential in its time and went through 14 editions between 1912 and 1963. (My own copy acquired many years ago dates from January 1939.) The book is still available in off-print editions and online. The final edition dates from 1963 and commemorates the 50th anniversary of the book. It includes a Foreword by John Smith, a well-known scholar of American philosophy, and a new Preface by an aging Hocking. Smith described Hocking's book as "one of the serious philosophical treatments of religion in the 20th century" which both attempts to synthesize pragmatism and idealism and to combine them with a radical philosophy of experience.
Hocking wrote his new Preface against the background of the analytic and continental schools of philosophy which had largely eclipsed his own systematic, idealistic approach as well as pragmatism. Hocking found the heart of his book in its effort to broaden the philosophic concept of experience which in 1912 still tended to be limited to sense-data and to certain ideas of introspection. He found this limited view of the nature of experience led to solipsism and to the philosophic problem of "other minds". Hocking tried to combat this view in "The Meaning of God" arguing that knowledge of God and of other minds stood roughly on the same footing and that both were immediately present to an understanding of experience.
Hocking described 20th century philosophy as a "turning away from the sense-data-mental-data pattern of admitted experience." He wrote:
"The very vitality of the twentieth century is due
to its rejection of that pattern, its appeal to experience
neither physical nor ego-centered. Beside the vast fields
of social enquiry, the experience of values aesthetic and
ethical, there is a new recognition of the immense importance
of our central and inarticulate awareness of
existence which I have ventured to call "nuclear experience",
rich in structure and meaning."
Hocking's "Meaning of God" is lengthy and complex. The book takes many turns and seems as if Hocking was working out what he was going to say as he wrote. The writing style tends to be elaborate and ornate which makes for heavy reading interspersed with striking turns of phrase. The book is much more suggestive in style than it is clearly and rigorously argued. On a first reading, portions of the book are moving and insightful while other sections are windy and unconvincing. A certain coherence of approach comes through the diffuse sections of the book.
In a long Preface (to the original edition) Hocking sets out the many broad goals of the book in trying to understand religion and religious experience. Hocking finds a strong skepticism about whether religion can properly be understood in terms of reason. He finds a tendency to approach religion as a matter of "feeling" as he believes pragmatism does. The tendency to view religion as a matter of feeling or as a matter for subjectivity or narrative for example
remains current. Hocking wants to provide a religious alternative to, say, both naturalism and to existential angst.
Hocking deals explicitly with the pragmatism of James. In an important passage of the book, Hocking supports what he describes as a "negative pragmatism" which teaches "That which does not work is not true". He argues that pragmatism cannot be used positively as a criterion of truth and seeks, under pain of contradiction, to go beyond itself to a recognition of truth and reality independent of pragmatics.
The body of the book consists of six long parts. In the first, Hocking discusses religion as seen in its effects on human life. He argues that these effects show the importance of religion while they show as well that religious understanding cannot be limited to non-transcendental reality. In Part II, Hocking discusses efforts to describe religion solely in terms of feelings and subjectivity and he argues that objectivity and reality are included in all feelings and need to be unpacked and understood. He offers the following challenging definition of "religion" which is developed in the course of the study.
"Religion .... is the present attainment in a single experience of those objects which in the course of nature are reached only at the end of infinite progression. Religion is anticipated attainment."
Part III of the book, "The Need of God" defends the role of the Absolute -- a staple of idealism -- in concrete, finite human experience. Hocking's idealistic commitments account for the lack of attention his book receives but they are critical to his presentation. In the fourth part of the book, Hocking describes "how men know God". As suggested above he offers an approach to the "other minds" question which has a parallel in Wittgenstein's "private language" argument together with a restatement of the "ontological argument" beloved of philosophical idealists as a proof of God's existence.
For me the most eloquent and interesting section of the book was the long, sympathetic discussion of mysticism in Part V as critical in the human experience of God. Hocking develops what he calls the "Principle of Alternation" which tries to show how the human mind alternates -- between whole and part or between work and play -- and how this alternation brings a sense of the divine into everyday life. The final part of the book describes the fruits of religion which culminate in what Hocking calls the "Prophetic Consciousness". Hocking tries to find an activist approach for religious thought in issues of individual and social life. Hocking concluded his Preface to the 1963 edition of his book with a discussion of the "Prophetic Consciousness" and its importance. He drew parallels between certain parts of his book and Martin Buber's "I and Thou" which was and continues to receive a good deal of attention. Hocking wrote in discussing what he saw as the continued significance of his book of 50 years earlier:
"For with the certitudes of truth there are also certitudes
of action, possibilities of rising beyond futility to
control of the opening issues. In the inquiry into the
conditions of the "prophetic consciousness" we have an
answer to Angst and to despair, perhaps the most
pertinent contribution of the book to the disturbed
morale of an age of conflict and bent-to-death."
Hocking's book remains out of fashion for reasons which are not hard to find and requires patience to work through. I found much to be learned from the book. American pragmatism has strong ties both to realism and to idealism. In trying to articulate and show the necessity for a rational approach to religion as opposed to an exclusively subjective approach, Hocking's work remains challenging and important.
Oneiric
Aug 2, 2007
A Very Near Miss, But Interesting
Hocking?s book is wide-ranging, and though the argument, as a whole, is always focused on God, frequent side excursions are made to establish points in support of the overall argument (such as the relation of ?idea? to feeling). These discussions could be of scant interest to theologians but may delight the philosopher of religion. Hocking?s argument is built from first principles without reliance on tradition or holy writ. The book was written in 1912, when idealism was the dominant perspective in philosophy. As writers of this persuasion are difficult to find now, the book is important, first of all, as a counterweight to a currently dominant, and rarely seriously questioned, philosophical materialism. Hocking was a student of William James and Josiah Royce at Harvard. (I have read that he worked his way across the Atlantic on a cattle boat to do postgraduate work in Germany. My wife says he could probably recognize bullsh*t when he got there.) I was impressed with the scope of Hocking?s imagination; fascinating ideas are a frequent occurrence in this book. Unfortunately, many of these are implications of a theory?that direct perception of God is our earliest and most basic perception (the ?experience? of the book?s title) and, being so fundamental and pervasive, is therefore difficult to disentangle from all other perceptions and, so, make explicit?that Hocking, in the first half of the book, seeks to establish and which, after a long and difficult argument, made somewhat more difficult by his lack of clarity as to the meaning of the key term ?idea,? he fails to establish. This rather spoiled the second half of the book for me, for Hocking went blissfully on, assuming he had made his point. (His student, Charles Hartshorne, wrote in his autobiography, The Darkness and the Light, that he and another student with whom he discussed the matter wished that Hocking would give them better arguments. So do I.) Still, I intend to keep the book, put aside my disappointment, and at some future time, reread my by-now rather heavily annotated copy. I?m sure there is much gold there in the ruins of his argument. And there remains a lingering faint hope that his philosophical justification of mystical experience may be rehabilitated. He did come very close, I think.
