Anderson, Douglas R. "William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966)." Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought Vol. II. Edited by Michel Weber and Will Desmond. Heusenstamm, Germany: Ontos Verlag, 2008. 597-603.

Abstract

When Alfred North Whitehead arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1924, Harvard University's Philosophy program began its second "golden era." The department by this time had distanced itself from James and Royce, and was turning in the direction of what is now called analytic philosophy. Among its members, however, was a lone remianing metaphysician, William Ernest Hocking, who had studies with both Royce and James. Hocking is often cast as the last representative of American idealism, but one should remember that James was one of Hocking's mentors, for Hocking always retained James's sense of the practical importance of philosophy. The Meaning of God in Human Experience, perhaps his most important book, shows how his thought blends idealism and pragmatism. As Hocking himself writes: "Pragmatism has given us back the problems of idealism in our own terms" (Hocking 1941, 16). Hocking began attending Whitehead's lectures in the fall of 1924, and their intellectual interaction continued to the end of their careers. In terms of overt influence, ideas flowed more from Whitehead to Hocking than vice versa, and so I will focus on this influence. However, if Peirce is right in claiming that we live in ideas, not they in us, then no doubt some of Hocking's ideas and inflections made their way into Whitehead's thinking. Unfortunately, within the scope of this article, one cannot hope to trace all these lines of influence. Let me begin, then, by backtracking. Hocking was raised in the American Mid-west snd was led to philosophy by his reading of the works of Herbert Spencer. Since his father disapproved of such reading as a waste of time, Hocking used to sneak off to the barn with his Spencer text in hand and carry on hi philosophical quest in private. His success in technical school and his ability to play organ helped to gain him admittance to Harvard. There he excelled, and as a graduate student in 1902-1903 received a fellowship to study in Germany. While there he made the aquaintance of the young Husserl with whom he later corresponded. Like Husserl and many other contemporaries, Hocking was interested in bringing science into step with philosophy. Thus, his idealistic metaphysics had an empirical orientation. In Whitehead, Hocking found a kindred spirit, a speculative scientist, "the first since Spencer" to propose "a cosmology comparable with that of Hegel in its synthetic range" (Hocking 1959, 289). It is hardly surprising, then, that Hocking's work would be affected by Whitehead at Harvard. After finishing his doctorate, Hocking began teaching at Yale, but then returned to Harvard in 1914.