Philosopher of Hope

At 84, William Ernest Hocking is--as he himself has said--something of a "solitary fighter" among philosophers. Since the death of his wife in 1955, he has lived in his farmhouse in Madison, N.H. with only a housekeeper to help him. A courtly man who is seldom without a pocketful of seed for the birds about his place, he works by himself from 8:30 each morning to 10 at night in a spacious stone library, takes time out only to do a little painting, putter about the grounds, play on his electric organ, or chop a stack of firewood. But out of this solitude has come a philosophy that offers a hopeful vision of the unity of the universe.

Last week Hocking tore himself away from his farm and journeyed to Manhattan to receive a prize that is highly coveted among scholars--the LeComte du Nouey Award, named after the late French biophysicist who tried so eloquently to reconcile the conflicts between science and religion. The award is given alternately in France and the U.S. each year for the book that most successfully points the way to "the greatest development of the spiritual thought of our epoch.'' The book Hocking won it for: The Coming World Civilization (Harper; $3.75).

"In the ripeness of years," says Hocking at the beginning of the book, "I am inclined to a moment of prophecy." What, he wants to know, will be the future roles of church and state, "our two institutional interpreters of total human nature''? In exploring that question, he not only pins down the basic-malady of what he calls modernity; he also suggests a cure in the form of a more positive search for a universal religion.

In the past three or four centuries, says Hocking, the world has been engaged in two great experiments. One is the "rejection" of "religion as a factor in political life." The other is the experiment in modernity which, "in begetting a secular science and secular arts, has also incidentally promoted a secular interpretation of state and law." As a result of this secularization, the state has been assigned tasks it cannot properly perform, for the state "depends for its vitality upon a motivation which it cannot by itself command."

The state's impotence, Hocking insists, is increasingly obvious. It cannot alone effectively deal with crime, for "only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished; the others can only be hurt."

Nor can the state of and by itself protect legal rights. "There is no moral right to property, to liberty, to life itself, in the absence of good will. The dilemma of the state is that this condition, as a moral condition, cannot be legally administered." The power of the state must come from a law higher than itself. "It is clearly not the destiny of the secular state to render the functions of a religious community superfluous. On the contrary, with the advance of a technical civilization, a church in our broad sense . . . instead of tending to wither away, becomes increasingly necessary."

Assumed Certitude. Just as religion is necessary to the political life, so is it necessary to the intellectual life of modernity, which "has largely lost the way to ripen the fruit of its own genius." When Descartes announced his famous Cogito, ergo sum as the basis for a philosophy, neither he nor his successors realized that he actually was assuming that "his private certitude was everyman's certitude in kind." Modern men, taking him at face value, not only plunged "into his subjective depths"; they also tended to accept his belief that the physical universe is merely a mathematical process devoid of purpose and quality or any rapport with man. "With this abandonment of man's native rapport with the whole, the nerve of worth in his own living and acting silently ceases to function. Here, I venture to think, is the root of our malady. For this is the first principle of human motivation: that the meaning descends from the whole to the parts."

The major question confronting philosophy is: "How can we keep the treasure of subjective depth, and at the same time retain hold on universal validity in our experience?" Man cannot simply abandon modernity--it represents too valuable an advance; he must somehow find a way to pass beyond it.

The solution to the problem, says Hocking, can be found in carrying the whole "I-think" subjectivism to its logical conclusion. Since man cannot think nothing, I-think implies an object or experience. But every object and experience can be shared by others, and so I-think implies the notion of Thou-art. Science itself reveals this sense of ''inter-subjective reality" every time "the lonely experimenter, wherever he is, knows he has discovered truth as unquestionably a truth for everyman . . . Modernity has thus held to its own type of certitude, its science, its humanistic confidence in human thinking--in brief to its 'I-think'--until on its own empirical ground it sees its incomplete truth. What religion may say, and truly say, is that this inter-subjective reality is nothing other than its own eternal and unswerving doctrine of God."

Leadership & Maturity. Indeed, says Hocking, this "broader empiricism" is the "potential friend of religion.'' And of all religions. Christianity is most at home with it, for it was in the Christian West that it grew up. That does not mean that Christianity must be solely Western: its commitment is not to any society or institution, but to the simple precept of love of God and neighbor. The closer it stays, to that commitment, the more universal it becomes. At the same time, its very "travail through the western passes of modernity has qualified it, and requires it, to take a certain leadership in meeting the religious problems of the coming civilization."

In taking that leadership towards a universal religion for a world that is becoming scientifically one, Christianity need not replace other religions. Since in their basic concepts--e.g., the idea of dying to gain life, the idea of renunciation as a condition of insight--the great religions are already "fused ... at the top," they can continue to exist within the framework of an overall world view which will "necessarily be Christian in substance." But to achieve leadership, Christianity must first recapture the "spiritual iron" that the East has never lost.

"This call to learn from the East," says Hocking, "will be taking us nearer to the spirit of an earlier Christianity! There is no stronger endorsement of the lasting significance of the message emanating from Galilee than the fact that in moving forward past modernity we arrive at a better comprehension of its changeless demands."

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