Teachers: The People's Philosopher

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To the sober, analytic-minded pro fessionals who today dominate the na tion's philosophy departments, William Ernest Hocking would hardly be con sidered a philosopher at all. A courtly old man who puttered about his 650-acre hilltop farm near New Hamp shire's White Mountains, carrying bird seed in his pockets, Hocking customari ly listed his occupation on income tax forms as "writer-farmer." Unfashionably, he dealt with the grand intellec tual themes that have traditionally pre occupied those who love wisdom: God, the nature of man, the meaning of life. Indeed, when he died last week at 92, in the rude stone house he had built largely with his own hands, one learned American philosopher said, not unkind ly, that Hocking had always thought "more with his heart than his head."

Hocking might not have quarreled with that description. He proudly con curred in Poet John Masefield's con tention that love and beauty are uni versal gateways to truth and agreed with Existentialist Gabriel Marcel that all of experience is a divine summons, exalting passion. He never wavered from the tenet of his first book, The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), that "the world, like human self, has its unity in a living purpose. It is the truth of the existence of God."

Moonlighting with Workingmen. A student of William James and Josiah Royce, Hocking was the last of the great American Idealists. He was a thinker who persistently denied that philosophy was simply an armchair pur suit. "If the teachings of a philosopher seem esoteric or divorced from reality," he once said, "it's the fault of the phi losopher." Hocking himself vigorously applied his vision to the realm of pub lic debate. He championed the Arab cause against Israel and criticized the cold-war policy of John Foster Dulles as being too negative. He was unafraid to prophesy: he once predicted that "we shall see in the Orient the rise of a Christianity far outpassing that which we of the West have conceived;" long before the Sino-Soviet split, he argued that history was pushing the U.S. and Russia closer together.

Born in Ohio, Hocking took up philosophy at the age of 13, after a reading of Herbert Spencer shattered the Methodist faith he was born to. He taught for seven years at Yale before beginning a 29-year tenure on the Harvard faculty, retiring in 1943. He liked to moonlight from university teaching by lecturing at labor-union schools, because "workingmen don't pull their punches."

A Command of the Cosmos. Philosophical fashion may have passed Hocking by, but there is an unmistakable aura of living truth about many of his ideas. "Democracy," he declared in 1946, "is the most difficult and perilous form of government because it calls for unselfishness on the part of officers and voters alike. To sustain this high morality against the tide requires religion, because it is only religion that makes morality a command of the cosmos."