Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3072

Hocking Correspondence – To, from and about William Ernest Hocking, Alford Professor Emeritus, Harvard University, and Madison, New Hampshire..

1957-1960

 

 

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Archival Item 2665, letter from William Ernest Hocking,

Alford Professor Emeritus, Harvard University

Madison, New Hampshire

July 31, 1957

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

For two months I have been enjoying your letter and your book, and a sense of fellowship in a common cause, which is on my part rather undeserved. Undeserved, for I cannot command the width of well-ordered experience and research that has gone into CITADEL MARKET AND ALTAR. But fellowship, after all, because we have come through experience, not pure speculation, on some of the same ingredients of any durable civilization for the future.

      My type of experience – for my metaphysics is founded on experience, and conversely I consider experience metaphysical in the sense that day-by-day facts inhere in a “real” – is partly that of getting into scrapes and having to get out of them. I get angry about some public abuse, ferret out the principle of my wrath, and find a place for that principle in my theory of state, or history, or civilization, or law – my next job. Pugnacity keeps me fairly young at 84, but also gets me into “coronary” upsets, so I face the sad alternative of early demise or acquired serenity. I hope you do better.

                          With cordial thanks,

/s/ Ernest Hocking

 

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Archival Item 1641, carbon of letter to Hocking at Madison, New Hampshire, August 3, 1957

Dear Dr. Hocking:

I can boldly express to you my gratification upon receiving your very gracious letter of July 31st. For I have long looked upon you as at the forefront of modern philosophical thought and am therefore most happy to have you recognize something of my own unpro­fessional adventures in that direction as underlying my attempt to analyze from the “natural science” point of view the evolving societal integration of mankind. For this I am profoundly grateful to you and much en­couraged in my hope for early recognition and applica­tion of creative principles in public as well as private affairs.

Again thanking you and wishing you every “serenity” you require, I am

Sincerely yours,

SH/m

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2770

Pencil notes by Heath on notepad paper

for two letters to William Ernest Hocking

No dates

 

Dear Dr. Hocking –

Re-reading your _________, I am moved to drop you a line or two of admiration and appreciation.

 It is a rare thing to have intellectual communion with a mind so richly furnished with the data of human experience in all its hard-won glories out of long and dark vicissitudes. And this latest book of yours is a joy to peruse, for you have imported what to me are new vital and dynamic conceptions into a field of extreme human interest and experience all too long coarsened under irrelevant /?/ and barren dogmatism or depressed to inaction under a supine fatalism. What is called religion, taken in its broadest sense and including its pervasive sub-conscious role, both west and east, has been the dominant culture-forming influence, on the one hand imposing, however rudely, the human dream of enduring heterogeneous order and beauty upon its “natural” world, and on the other tending towards a static homogeneity without any interrelationships, as does the whole non-living world. As you so truly point out, the vital and universal element in all authentic religion is not any bondage of the spirit of man to any ineluctable common necessity but the freedom and the power of diversity and creative synthesis in the outward forms, the ever “more stately mansions” that the Spirit builds.

 This contrast in the unconscious ideology of East and West, pagan and Christian, I believe is what accounts for their respective differences in all that is requisite to the human ideal of individual life abundant in its ever-increasing length of days. This Christian (and Western) realization of its ideal, it seems to me, is what sets the Christian religion apart from being only another or / “a” religion and accounts for the present day Eastern aspiration towards the Western mode of life seems /Words missing? check original./ only a further manifestation of its little recognized yet uniquely pervasive power.

 Every defeatist, negative and _______ “religion” sets its glories (if any) in some future nirvannic world to come — denies the unity of life and the continuity of time. The Christian is the affirmative and creative, and its potentialities for a world-civilization have as yet been little realized and even now are but little dreamed. Yet they are all implied in the words (the logos) of the Christ for this and all future worlds.

_______________________________

Dear Dr. Hocking

I am afraid I have not until now given you any sign of the pleasure and appreciation with which I received the generous comments concerning my CM&A that were contained in your letter of /July 31, 1957/.

 My delay has been occasioned in part by my hope of being able to expose to you somewhat of the gratification I have derived from my frequent preoccupation with your The Coming World Civilization for a number of weeks past.

 It was indeed a principal object with me to show something of the religious and aesthetic implications that are indispensable to any great social advance. Your volume is a beautiful exposition of this — far beyond any power of mine to do it justice. For, thanks to such as you (and including Sinnott and Lillie and their kind), philosophy need no longer rest alone in the straitened logic of a barren materialism or take its stand on any superstitious mysticism. The true significance of each is realized in the wholeness in which you have united them. By your warmly compelling presentations I am both illuminated and reassured.

 I think you will be happy to note

 

With my best wishes for many happy and fruitful New Years,

Sincerely,

 

 

_____________________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1856

Extract from Heath’s letter to William

Earnest Hocking at Madison, New Hampshire regarding

his The Coming World Civilization. Not dated but

transcribed May 13, 1960, possibly never sent.

Copy pasted into the back of the book.

 

 

It was indeed a principal object with me to show something of the religious and esthetic implications that are indispensable to any great social advance. Your volume is a beautiful expression of this — far beyond any power of mine to do it justice. For, thanks to such as you (and including Sinnott and Lillie and their kind), philosophy need no longer rest alone in the straitened logic of a barren materialism or take its stand on any superstitious mysticism. The true significance of each is realized in the wholeness in which you have united them.

_____________________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3072

Letter from Heath to William Earnest Hocking

at Madison, New Hampshire

May 13, 1960

 

Dear Dr. Hocking:

Having had a happy acquaintance with your mind for a number of years, and having enjoyed some generous communications from you on several recent occasions, it would be a great pleasure to me to make you a personal visit sometime in early June if that would be agreeable and convenient to you. There are many exciting things of common interest to us about which I would enjoy talking with you — including Charles Hartshorne’s ideas in his Reality as Social Process, which seemed largely drawn from you.

      Admiring and hoping to emulate the piquancy of your spirit with advancing years,

Sincerely,

Spencer Heath

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3072

Letter to Heath from William Earnest Hocking

May 25, 1960

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

      It will be a pleasure to see you on this rather off-the-beat hilltop sometime in early June, if you are journeying this way. Routes 16 and 113 come within hail; then a telephone message would be prudent, or an enquiry at the local post office.

Sincerely

/s/ W E Hocking

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3072

Letter from Heath to William Earnest Hocking

June 16, 1960

 

Dear Dr. Hocking:

I am writing to express to you something of the wonderful delight experienced by myself and my grandson in our recent visit to you in your mountain-top home. Your published ideas have been an inspiration to me for many years, and this personal contact more than bore out the bright expectations of having sometime a personal acquaintance with you. It has indeed been an inspiration and a joy. I only regret that time and distance do not allow of periodical or not infrequent visits with genial communication and exchange. Beyond the realm of philosophy, your technical proficiency in the arts was a happy surprise (with apologies to Mr. Johnson).

      We are both very happy to have received permission from you

to include your name along with that of Dr. Pound on the Board of Directors of The Science of Society Foundation, Inc.

      With many good wishes for your long continued good health and serenity.

Sincerely yours,

 

   Spencer Heath

SH/m

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3072

Letter from Heath to William Earnest Hocking

August 24, 1960

 

Dear Dr. Hocking:

Pursuant to your kind consent to me and my grandson on the occasion of our delightful visit with you some two months ago, you were elected a member of the Board of Trustees of The Science of Society Foundation at a meeting called especially for that purpose on August 18^th. We feel highly complimented by your willingness to serve (without any obligation further than perhaps some advisory participation). It is indeed an honor to have your association and your sympathy with the general purposes of our organization.

                               Cordially yours,

Encl: Statement of Purposes

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3072

Note from Heath to William Earnest Hocking

September 19, 1960

 

Dear Dr. Hocking:

Lately I came across the following undated letter to you which appears never to have been transcribed. So I am sending it along to you for what it may be worth.

      With every best wish,

                                Cordially yours,

                                Spencer Heath

SH/m

Enclosure

________________________________________________  

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Letter from Heath to William Earnest Hocking

Undated — Transcribed September 19, 1960

 

Dear Dr. Hocking:

 

I am afraid I have not until now given you any sign of the pleasure and appreciation with which I received the generous comments concerning my Citadel, Market and Altar that were contained in your letter of July 31, 1957. My delay has been in part because of hoping to find adequate expression of the pleasure I have found during my past several weeks companionship with your The Coming World Civilization.

 

      It was indeed a principal object with me to show something of the religious and esthetic implications that are indispensable to any great social advance. Your volume is a beautiful exposition of this —far beyond any power of mine to do it justice. For, thanks to such as you (and including Sinnott and Lillie and their kind), philosophy need no longer rest alone in the straitened logic of a barren materialism or take its stand on any superstitious mysticism. The true significance of each is realized in the wholeness in which you have united them. By your warmly compelling presentations I am both enlightened and reassured.

     

      With my best wishes for many happy and fruitful new years,

 

                               Sincerely,

 

                               Spencer Heath

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Pencil notations by Heath in William Ernest Hocking, The Coming World Civilization. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956.

20/

Only the normal can have defect. It is only life that death can infect. Every negative depends on a prior positive.

23/  (Opposite second line of last paragraph)

Hocking: “From this is the first principle of human motivation: that meaning descends from the whole to the parts.”

The potentiality of the parts is realized in the whole. The subjectivity of the cells is realized in the higher organism.

The individual realizes himself in the voluntary society.

 

25/                                                                                                 Hocking: “Deprived of its natural and

responsible objectivity, our individualism begins to show its capacity to disintegrate, even in youth.” (Emphasis by Heath)

 

Re-ligion: outward binding, objective other-ness. Loss of this allows disintegration.

88-89/

Love, subjective, is sentiment. When objectified, it is service. To be enduring (real) and to become universal (divine), it must be contractual. The subjective is limited and admits servitude. The contractual can be universal and realize equality in its creativity.

When love is contractual — reciprocal — it springs from both self-regarding and from other-regarding.

90/

The less-than-perfect is no standard. It may be acceptable but cannot be wholly ideal.

96/

Joy is, in nature, dominant over pain, integration over disintegration, creation above destruction — else how should nature evolve? Order is more enduring than disorder — hence more real.

The temporal and passing are but the finite elements of the eternal.

 

176/                         Hocking: “I cannot join in the dream either of Freud or of Marcuse that a nonrepressive social order — if that means a nondisciplinary order — is either achievable or desirable.”

 

Contractually interfunctioning men constitute a non-coercive, functioning society. If any practice violence he is alien and outlaw. He must be mastered or banished (like any mere animal) until he resume membership.

_______________________________________________________________

 

/Pencil notes on pieces of lined   notepad paper, inserted between pages 60-61/

 

Perdition is the Doom of

Any Political Regime

1. Violence always destroys.
2. Thus any Political Regime is foredoomed.
3. The ALTERNATIVE — Proprietary Administration — must

        evolve.

4. Time is running out.
5. Secure civilization will dawn when the OWNERS of communities combine and publicly serve — for the property values they will create and right profits enjoy.

Knowledge is power.  For understand — and opportunity — see CM&A by S.H. — A book of the first importance.

_________________________________

 

Hocking: Study I and Study II

He, Hocking, allows a certain de-facto legitimacy to the political state and then dwells on its universal impotence.

Instead of turning away toward society as the truly potent human institution, he makes his attack on the state negatively from the rear.

“Political faith” (Shklar) rested on a presumed social contract — “this minimal political morale” (p.19). “Modernity” now has abandoned this in favor of the individual ego in place of a collectivized general will and consent.

“Beyond modernity” (study II) — The “non-solitude of the ‘solitary’ ego.” “Rights” become not singly and separate but collective “interests.”

A “false metaphysics” has engendered “empirical malaise.” Calls for a new work of thought.

The parts are meaningful only in the whole, (page 23-24). “Beyond modernity” conceives how the “private purposes” simply “interweave” in a calculus of common interests.

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