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William Ernest Hocking on our Knowledge of God and Other Minds1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Carroll R. Bowman
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, Memphis State University

Extract

To me the decisive reason in favor of our minds meeting in some common objects at least is that, unless I make that supposition, I have no motive for assuming that your mind exists at all.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

page 45 note 2 Temple, William, Nature, Man and God (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1960), p. 57.Google Scholar

page 46 note 1 Hocking, William Ernest, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, Foreword by Smith, John (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. xii. Hereafter ‘a’.Google Scholar

page 46 note 2 The topic of this paper ‘is the basis of my first book (1912), and all my subsequent work’. Strength of Men and Nations (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1959), pp. 910.Google Scholar

page 46 note 3 The Coming World Civilization (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1956), p. 35. Hereafter ‘b’.Google Scholar

page 47 note 1 Lewis, C. I., Mind and the World Order (New York, Dover Publications, 1956), p. 410. Here-after ‘c’.Google Scholar

page 48 note 1 Basic Writings of William James, ed. by McDermott, John (New York, Random House, 1968), pp. 209–10. Hereafter ‘d’.Google Scholar

page 48 note 2 ‘The dogma that A cannot literally feel B's feeling begs the essential question. I experience what it denies.’ Hartshorne, Charles in Philosophy, Religion and the Coming World Civilization: (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 75.Google Scholar This volume hereafter referred to as ‘e’.

page 49 note 1 The Self, Its Body and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928), p. 137.Google Scholar Hereafter ‘f’. Donald Carey Williams argues ‘that the personal existence of each of us is just as private as on the average we should like it to be, a bit more private than Hocking was urging and that lovers, idealists, and behaviorists would sometimes prefer, but perhaps a bit less private than is any longer safe’ (e, p. 82).

page 50 note 1 Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce, ed. by Hartshorne, Charles and Weiss, Paul, Vols 1–6 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 134. Hereafter ‘g’.Google Scholar

page 50 note 2 ‘From the Early Days of “Logische Untersuchungen”,’ Edmund Husserl 1859–1959 (The Hague: Martins Nijhoff, 1959), p. 7.Google Scholar The triad is that of Royce when discussing ‘a special instance of the category of the between. It leads to the triad: My fellow and Myself, with Nature between us.’ The World and the Individual, Vols. 1–2 (New York, Dover Publications, 1959), vol. II, pp. 165–66. Hereafter ‘h’.Google Scholar

page 50 note 3 Experience and God, Smith, John (New York, Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 8687. Hereafter ‘i’.Google Scholar

page 51 note 1 Hegel, , The Phenomenology of Mind (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1955), p. 229.Google Scholar

page 52 note 1 ‘A fact is for me’, Royce writes, ‘that which I ought to recognise as determining or limiting what I am here consciously to do or to attempt’ (h, p. 30).

page 52 note 2 ‘Buried in my books, oblivious to my opportunities, living in another space-time world, I am disloyal to my comrades. The shame of living in drug-dreams or intoxication is not its pleasure …: it shame is the subjectivity, the abandonment of the common task in the real world of common objects, the abandonment of these my others’ (f, pp. 134–5).

page 52 note 3 Marcel and the Ground Issues of Metaphysics’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, (June, 1954), p. 459.Google Scholar

page 54 note 1 ‘Comments on Professor John Howie's Paper’, unpublished paper read before the Personalist Discussion Group meeting in conjunction with the Sixty-eighth Annual Meeting of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association, St. Louis, Missouri, May 7–9, 1970. The main address had been given by Professor Howie on ‘Metaphysical Elements of Creativity in the Philosophy of W. E. Hocking’. Reck's ‘Comments’ hereafter referred to as ‘j’.

page 54 note 2 Royce's Metaphysics (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1956), vii.Google Scholar Hocking's essential disagreement with Royce is as follows: ‘As every interpretation, including a theoretical first one, presumes the existence of the minds addressed by the interpreter, the belief in the existence of minds beyond my present self cannot be a product of interpretation.’ Review of Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity. Harvard Theological Review, 7 (January, 1914), p. 111.

page 55 note 1 The Problem of Christianity, Vols. 1–2 (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1968), vol. II, p. 138. Hereafter ‘k’.Google Scholar

page 56 note 1 See especially Royce's Logical Essays (Dubuque: W. C. Brown Company, 1951), pp. 379441.Google Scholar

page 59 note 1 The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, ed. by McDermott, John J., 2 vols. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 447–48.Google Scholar

page 59 note 2 Process and Reality (New York, Humanities Press, 1957), p. 83.Google Scholar See especially Hocking's paper, ‘Whitehead on Mind and Nature’, in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. by Schilipp, Paul A. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1941), pp. 383404.Google Scholar

page 60 note 1 See Hocking's, ‘Foreword’ to Hartshorne's Reality as Social Process (Glencoe: Free Press, 1953), pp. 1116.Google Scholar

page 60 note 2 Rouner, Leroy, Within Human Experience: The Philosophy of William Ernest Hocking (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 90. Hereafter ‘I’.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 61 note 1 Macmurray, John, Persons in Relation (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), pp. 78–9.Google Scholar Hereafter ‘m’. Reck is quite right in saying that the ‘early view of the non-existence of the world except as dependent on the existence of God does not square with Hocking's later view of the obdurate existence of Fact’ (j).

page 61 note 2 See Fact and Destiny (I, II)’. Review of Metaphysics, 4 (September, 1950; March 1951), pp. 112; pp. 319342.Google Scholar See also, Fact, Field and Destiny’, Review of Metaphysics, II (June, 1958), pp. 525–49.Google Scholar

page 61 note 3 See especially the Preface to The Meaning of Immortality in Human Experience (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1957), ixviii.Google Scholar

page 61 note 4 Mareel and the Ground Issues of Metaphysics’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, June 1954, p. 459.Google Scholar

page 61 note 5 Op. cit., pp. 461–5.

page 62 note 1 Royce, Josiah, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1967), p. 353.Google Scholar

page 62 note 2 Selected Writings: George Herbert Mead, edited with an Introduction by Reck, Andrew J. (New York, Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964), p. 313.Google Scholar

page 65 note 1 Types of Philosophy (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959), p. 187. Hereafter ‘n’.Google Scholar

page 65 note 2 Ross, James F., Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (London: The Macmillan Company, 1969), p. 109.Google Scholar

page 65 note 3 ‘The Thou’, Buber writes, ‘meets me through grace—it is not found by seeking’. The Writings of Martin Buber, ed. by Will Herberg (Meridian Books, p. 45).

page 66 note 1 ‘Ernest Hocking once mentioned to me, rather causally’, Rouner reports, ‘that the comrade referred to is Agnes Hocking’ (1, p. 44). ‘Their marriage [the Hocking's] in 1905 was one which, as the world reckons, should have ended speedily on the rocks. For Agnes Boyle O'Reilly was the Catholic daughter of a fiery Irish poet and revolutionist, and Ernest Hocking was a devout, business-like, middle-western Methodist, who had an ancestor on the Mayflower. But the two were wholly devoted to each other; no one who heard Agnes Hocking's adoring way of citing “Ernest Hocking,” in or out of his presence, as the ultimate earthly authority could doubt how she felt about him, and his own feeling is recorded in the dedication of his greatest book to “A. B.O'R.H., an Unfailing Source of Insight.”’ Blanshard, Brand, ‘William Ernest Hocking,’ Year Book of the American Philosophical Sociey, 1966, pp. 149–50.Google Scholar The report to Royce is, I now believe, an intensely autobiographical account of persons in love—an experience which Hocking turned into a passport to a philosophical career. My criticism of Hocking's argument in no way vitiates the integrity of the inter-subjectivity between the Hockings. What it shows is that no member of the personal nucleus can be replaced with a variable and that knowledge claims about such intersubjectivity must remain gnostic in character. ‘It is characteristic of individual personality’, Scheler writes, ‘that we only become acquainted with it in and through the act of loving, and that its value as an individual is likewise only disclosed in the course of this act. Persons cannot be objectified, in love or any other genuine act, not even in cognition. The moral core of the personality of Jesus, for example, is revealed to one man only: His disciple. This is the only path which can lead to such a disclosure.’ The Nature of Sympathy, translated by Heath, Peter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), pp. 166–7.Google Scholar