The Primal Roots of American Philosophy: Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Native American Thought

8. Passion for Meaning: William Ernest Hocking’s Religious-Philosophical Views

8 Passion for Meaning William Ernest Hocking’s Religious-Philosophical Views William Ernest Hocking is a major thinker unjustly forgotten. The reasons for this neglect are several, and throw light on our current situation: His addresses and publications, spanning the first years of this century to the 1960s, are of great subtlety, complexity, and variety; we live in the age of the fast read. We are as much driven as our European ancestors who colonized this continent and who—compulsive, acquisitive—disgusted and terrified indigenous people. If one were forced to play the labels game, one might call Hocking a rationalist and a mystic and a genuine public servant. With the neglect of all these roles in our secular, hyperspecialized, often cynical age, it is not surprising that a thinker who somehow combines them should be dismissed as eclectic and consigned to the dustbin of history. Hocking seems to be one of those old-fashioned thinkers who had the temerity to feel responsible for assessing and maintaining the fabric of civilization. But what knowledgeable person in the fast lane of today’s multi-laned relativistic world would even use the singular, “civilization” (but probably without much understanding of other civilizations)? Finally there is his great hospitality to the world, the many powerful philosophers East and West whom he received gratefully, and whose influence is clearly evident (his ego is not fragile): For example, both William James and Josiah Royce (!), and in about equal degree, and Edmund Husserl and Gabriel Marcel. All these get woven into a tapestry that is huge, original , distinctly American, and hard to take in at even several glances. Trying to get an initial fix on the whole pattern, I will employ at crucial junctures a phenomenological lens. Even without knowing that Hocking spent three months of his formative years studying with Edmund Husserl, we could see a version of phenomenology in his works themselves.1 But Husserl is a German philosopher, and the word “phenomenology” has a distinctly continental flavor (though Charles Peirce used it or a cognate term). What does this have to do with this book, which is entitled The Primal Roots of American Philosophy? A lot. First, the classic American philosophers with whom we deal are greatly influenced by continental thinkers of the nineteenth century, particularly the identity-philosophies already mentioned. This is true even though they interweave these influences with distinctly American concerns and enthusiasms. Second, and even more important, phenomenology responds to a crisis of meaning and living felt throughout “advanced” North Atlantic culture. The crisis arises over the very successes of science and technology. So totally do they take over our lives that the vast prescientific matrix without which life cannot be meaningful and vital is eclipsed and begins to crumble. Indeed, without prescientific meanings and practices to supply a matrix for living, science and modern technology would themselves be impossible. Very simply, phenomenology is the attempt to see clearly what we typically take completely for granted, what we feel we can ignore. In other words, it is theattempttoseetheprimalandpragmatic:themeaningofbeingselvesthatare bodies, selves ineluctably in situations or circumstances, selves ecstatic or depressed, gripped by responsibilities and enlivened thereby or wayward and listless; selves often very different from moment to moment, yet ones who remember what they’ve been through, and what they’ve promised, and know theywilldie.Itiscompletelyunderstandablethatindigenouspeoples,tornfrom their land and their lives, send up a lament that mingles achingly and strangely with the lament of thoughtful Europeans or Euro-Americans who, caught in vast tides of history, also feel dispossessed, alienated, uprooted, desiccated. 138 Further Reclamations The connection between phenomenology and existentialism, on the one hand, and primal or indigenous life, on the other, is deep and direct. These ways of thinking aim to see deeper into the life we actually lead, to unmask what seems to be obvious and evident. Particularly clear in the later work of the existential phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger, is the connection to indigenous lifeways. Heidegger writes of “the play of the fourfold ,” of thinking as thanking, of dwelling as being open to the sky; of the pouring out from the jug of wine as a giving that echoes the giving which is Being itself; of the spring from which the water is drawn for the wine, which reflects the sky; of the earth into which the wine grapes root.2 Earlier than Heidegger—or Marcel—Hocking’s unique phenomenology opens the way...