Robert Richardson - Emerson, James, and the American Soul

In the often underappreciated history of American philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James are legendary. Their groundbreaking philosophies—Emerson’s transcendentalism and James’s pragmatism—inspired generations of influential writers, artists, philosophers, and poets and set into motion two philosophical movements that significantly shaped the American mind and soul over the next century.

In this interview, EnlightenNext’s director of education, Jeff Carreira, speaks to biographer Robert Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995) and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006), about why he believes that understanding the ideas of these two nineteenth-century revolutionary thinkers continues to be important for anyone interested in spiritual evolution today. To help alleviate the contemporary conflict between science and spirituality, Richardson offers James’s solution, “radical empiricism,” which says that both matter and spirit are real and measurable dimensions of reality. And for those interested in transcending our postmodern cultural milieu of hyperindividualism, Richardson calls attention to the frequent misinterpretation of Emerson’s “self-reliance” as meaning “rugged individualism.” He says that for Emerson, self-reliance was a constant practice of placing trust in the deepest part of himself, which was but one aspect of a universal World Soul.

BIO

Robert Richardson is a distinguished historian and the author of several biographies of great American philosophers, including William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006), Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995), winner of the Frederic G. Melcher Book Award, and Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986). Richardson is the recipient of the Francis Parkman Prize and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, among many other honors. He has taught at Harvard University, University of Colorado and Wesleyan University.