Abstract
Nature or the entire physical cosmos is God manifesting Himself creatively. Such creative manifestation is to be understood as a communication. This immediately implies someone towards whom the communication is being directed, someone able to understand or grasp what is being given. This “someone” is, of course, man. But before considering man himself as a person, and his personal relations with other men and God, his initial or primordial status within the physical cosmos will be considered. Before man is himself, he, as well as the physical cosmos, is a concrete manifestation of God’s creative will to power. For this reason the emphasis in this chapter will be on the presence of God, as it was in the last. The extension of God’s creative power to man brings that power to a situation in which there is someone able to recognize the power.
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References
In La Pensée, sect. II, para. 72, Pascal speaks of the world as an infinite sphere with a centre everywhere and a circumference nowhere. Cf. also Leibniz: The Monadology, trans. R. Latta (Oxford University Press, 1925), 420, n. 54.
W. E. Hocking, “Man’s Cosmic Status”, Search for America, ed. H. Smith (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1959), 158.
Hocking, Types of Philosophy, 245–46.
W. E. Hocking, The Self its Body and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928), 128.
W. E. Hocking, The Self its Body and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928), 192.
Hocking, Types of Philosophy, 192.
Hocking, The Coming World Civilisation, 37.
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Hocking, Types of Philosophy, 193.
W. E. Hocking, “Lectures on Recent Trends in American Philosophy”, Scripps College Bulletin, Vol. XVI (1941), 16.
W. E. Hocking, “Lectures on Recent Trends in American Philosophy”, Scripps College Bulletin, Vol. XVI (1941), 18.
Hocking, Preface to Philosophy: Textbook, 53.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 549. The discussion of value-experience of which pleasure is an example runs from 546-551. Cf. also the important note in Human Nature and its Remaking, 147, n. 2.
Hocking, Human Nature and its Remaking, 147, n. 2.
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Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 130. The union of feeling and idea is taken by Richard Gilman in his thesis, The General Metaphysics of William Ernest Hocking (Boston University, 1952), to be the clue to Professor Hocking’s view of the experience and knowledge of ultimate reality. There is a reciprocal implication between man and ultimate reality. Because man exists as a con-scious freedom he responds naturally to the whole reality in which he is involved. This initial response finds a terminus in knowledge. Yet even before the knowledge-object is specified, the response is guided; it has a cognitive aspect. The end is anticipated in the first movements of tending.
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Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 96. “In the beginning was at least the Loom; and always remains, the simple-total frame of things. Huge, inevitable, abiding Loom, loom-motion and loom-law; these, we may say, are given; stuff also to weave with, and withal the command to weave.”
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Hocking, Types of Philosophy, 132.
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Hocking, The Meaning of Immortality in Human Experience, 195. In an article published in the Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 55 (1958), 265-75, entitled “Hocking and the Dilemmas of Modernity”, Y. Krikorian criticizes Professor Hocking’s use of dialectic to arrive at an idea of a whole as a final synthesis overcoming the dilemmas of subjectivity and objectivity. He rejects Professor Hocking’s view that intersubjectivity involves sense experience and a universal Other Mind; that intuition is necessary to reach qualities and values in the common world; that reality is a Whole. Professor Krikorian criticizes Professor Hocking from a naturalistic point of view. Professor Hocking replies to Professor Krikorian in the same Journal, 275-80. His answer clarifies the double boundary of Nature. I have referred to this point in chapters one and four.
Hocking, The Coming World Civilisation, 31–2.
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Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 231–32.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 235.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 236.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 250. Cf. also The Coming World Civilisation, 35.
Hocking, The Coming World Civilisation, 33.
W. E. Hocking, “Marcel and the Ground Issues of Metaphysics”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. XIV (1954), 439–69.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 255.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 261.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 261.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 263.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 280.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 288. D. C. Macintosh discusses Professor Hocking’s approach in “Hocking’s Philosophy of Religion: an Empirical Development of Absolutism”, Philosophical Review, Vol. XXIII (1914), 27-47. He believes that Professor Hocking supports Absolutism by accepting mystical experience as a valid source of verification. Professor Macintosh describes Professor Hocking’s general dialectical argument in this way: thesis — natural realism; antithesis — subjective idealism; synthesis — some idea of some other mind. The idea of some other mind then becomes a new thesis; the new antithesis — the fact that men are empirical knowers; the new synthesis — the idea of an absolute knower creating the finite self and its object in one and the same act of knowledge. Professor Macintosh rejects the first thesis and antithesis, and mystical experience as valid knowledge. He views the empirical dimensions of Professor Hocking’s thought as an advance over Hegel.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 294.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 296.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 309.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 311. John Russell questions Professor Hocking’s argument in “Professor Hocking’s Argument from Experience”, Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XII (1915), 68-71. He believes that Professor Hocking does not follow the distinction between experience and what experience means. Professor Hocking must interpret experience. This indicates that thought is a mediator, thus, making alternatives possible. For this reason he suggests that Professor Hocking’s argument shows only that his interpretation is not incompatible with experience. It seems to me that Mr. Russell fails to consider the fact that Professor Hocking’s experience is not arbitrary. In Husserlian terms the structure of experience is a noetic-noematic correlate. The noetic aspect is not purely creative but uncovers reality as it reveals itself. The uncovering and revealing are simultaneous.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 313.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 315.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 336. In an article entitled “Is the Group Spirit Equivalent to God for all Practical Purposes?”, Journal of Religion, Vol. I (1921), 482-96, Professor Hocking answers no. The social spirit is not identical with what God means. It is not a Thou who responds to individual persons. Moreover, society is de-pendent; God is independent.
Roland Rice, Mysticism in the Philosophy of W. E. Hocking (Boston University, 1954). Dissertation.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 388.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 391.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 410.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 418.
Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 423.
E. A. Burtt, Points out in Types of Religious Philosophy (New York: Harper Bros., 1939), 409–48, that worship is a self-conscious attempt to gain a heightened sense of reality as a whole. Worship is a vivid sense of the Divine which alone renews the enthusiasm for productive work. The realms of work and worship are not separate. They are points of attention. Parts are not other than the whole, nor is the whole other than the parts, nor is there a radical identity between them. They are terms of a dialectical relation which is fundamentally a unity.
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Luther, A.R. (1968). God and Man. In: Existence as Dialectical Tension. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9074-9_3
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