I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty. I am ready to die out of nature,
and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience”

 THE AMERICAN WISDOM PROJECT
A Re-Collected Wisdom of Thought and Spirit

A Pilot Curriculum of Cultural Renewal
By The Innermost House Foundation
At the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at William & Mary

In the beginning, all the world was America.
John Locke, Second Treatise on Government

Program Description: 

Is there a compelling tradition of wisdom in American life, a culture complete from beginning to middle to end? The American Wisdom Project is a pilot research and teaching curriculum of the Innermost House Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization based in California and Virginia. The Project exists to bring an American Wisdom Tradition of “plain living and high thinking” into focus, through which to illuminate the great wisdom traditions of the larger world. It focuses on Williamsburg and early Virginia as a crossroads of Old and New, North and South, East and West, Native and Colonist. It develops from Williamsburg in the 18th century to Concord and Walden Pond in the 19th century, to the Far West in the 20th century, and beyond to their roots in the cultures of Native America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. It comprehends nature, art, thought, and spirituality as humanistic disciplines of the individual person, drawing upon local and national resources for class instruction, team-teaching, and off-site learning. Like its ancient forebear at Oxford University, Literae Humaniores, the American Wisdom Project is a laboratory for the cultivation of a "more humane learning."  

Courses

Introduction to The American Wisdom Tradition, Part I: Williamsburg, the Laws, and the 18th Century

Is there a compelling tradition of wisdom in American life? The world looks to the example of America for many things—for independence, for ideals of freedom and equality, for industry, wealth, and opportunity—but seldom for wisdom. Yet through the length of American history runs a current of “plain living and high thinking” that draws upon the world’s many wisdom traditions, at last to reflect that ancient light back to the world as something radically new. In this Part I, we examine the revolutionary wisdom of the 18th century American Enlightenment by focusing on the republican ideals of Williamsburg, Virginia.

Introduction to The American Wisdom Tradition, Part II: Walden, the Prophets, and the 19th Century

Is there a compelling tradition of wisdom in American life? What began as an experiment in political wisdom, public life, and citizenship-by-conversation centered in Virginia in the 18th century, in the 19th century migrated north to an intellectual center in Massachusetts. There the radical propositions of the Declaration of Independence and the compromise solutions of the Constitution were put to the test of individual conscience. In this Part II, we examine the transcendental wisdom of the 19th century American Renaissance by focusing on the transcendentalism centered in Concord, Massachusetts.

Introduction to The American Wisdom Tradition, Part III: Far West, the Baptist, and the 20th Century

Is there a compelling tradition of wisdom in American life? The prophetic call to inwardness and conscience that emanated from Walden in the 19th century would echo at last off the final frontier of the Far West in California. There the wisdom tradition that had its origins in the encounter between Old World civilization and New World Native cultures would go to earth in a new epoch of repentance and the ideal of wilderness. In this Part III, we examine the environmental wisdom of the early 20th century American West by focusing on the preservationist and artistic ideals pioneered in Yosemite Valley and Carmel, California.


A Shorter Introduction to the American Wisdom Tradition

The world looks to the example of America for many things: for the high road to opportunity, industry, progress and wealth; for ideals of freedom and equality; yet also for the low, solitary road of personal independence, self-reliance, and the wisdom of Life in the Woods. Progress and wisdom appear to run on parallel paths through American history, each defined by its own conception of the individual, on courses that seldom intersect. In this brief introduction to a complex tradition, we offer a highly visual introduction to the single-file “road less traveled” of “Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture.”

Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture

What if there were an American history altogether different from the larger history we all study in school, a history at once familiar in its thoroughly American landmarks and personalities, yet unrecognized as a whole? What if there were, for every step taken on the high road to Progress, a step taken on an inner road to Wisdom? This course examines the American Wisdom Tradition in its larger and more various context as the Road Less Taken through four hundred years of American history. Based upon the classic history by IHF Founding Advisor, Dr. David E. Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture.

What is Called High Thinking

The ethic of “Plain Living and High Thinking” lay at the historical heart of the present work of the Innermost House Foundation. The phrase has its origin in the lament of Wordsworth: “No grandeur now in nature or in book/ Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense/ This is idolatry; and these we adore:/ Plain living and high thinking are no more.” What is called “Plain Living” may be understood as a response to the excesses of early modern material culture. This course examines a manner of thinking called forth by the succeeding excesses of late modern intellectual culture. What and wherefore is called “High Thinking”?

Birth in the Forest: A Philosophical Walk through the Woods

In his beautiful essay, “Walking,” Henry Thoreau describes the true art of walking as “saun-tering,” that is, as “Holy-Landing,” a crusade undertaken to reclaim the paradise of our beginnings. “We should go forth on the shortest walk,” he says, “in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return.” In this field trip to the ancient woods of Surry County, we seek out the sources of American home in the “Virginia House,” an impermanent building form now largely lost to history. Admixed of European, Native American, and African elements, this Temple of Remembrance is now taking renewed form in the forests of our first minglings.

The City of God: A Philosophical Town and Garden Tour of Palace Green

This ninety-minute walking tour of the town and gardens along Palace Street at the heart of the Historic Area in Williamsburg, Virginia examines the city through the philosopher's eyes. Do gardens have meaning? Is architecture more than shelter and decoration? Do cities serve purposes beyond the housing of people and the forming of communities for worship and trade? Is there a difference in Williamsburg and what difference does it make to us? This course asks questions about the nature of the built environment, about the Baroque town plan of Williamsburg in particular, and about the architectural enterprise through history.

The Idea of a University: A Philosophical Tour of Old Campus at William & Mary

Of all conceptions born of medieval Europe, the most powerfully charged and widely adopted is the mind-altering idea of the University. Arising a thousand years ago in Italy, France, and England, this revolutionary idea has spread to nearly every nation in the world and to all seven continents. The ancient campus of William & Mary centers upon the oldest academic buildings in the United States. The university preserves in brick and mortar the ancient human aspiration to universal knowledge, the ultimate object of which is the unity of the individual soul. In this walking tour we examine our unique local inflection of a universal idea. 

Revisiting the Revival: A Philosophical Walk Through Merchants Square

In anticipation of 2026 and the celebration of Colonial Williamsburg's 100th anniversary, we offer this philosophical walking tour through Merchants Square as the epicenter of a nationwide movement to seek America's way forward in what was best about its past. What was being revived in the Colonial Revival period, and to what end? What has it to do with our lives today? In this class we examine the relationship between knowledge and happiness, between the use and abuse of history. We position ourselves in the midst of an historical moment to reclaim, if we can, what remains of our precious "link among the days." 

The Wisdom of Hands: A Philosophical Walk Through the Traditional Trades

“The hands are the cutting edge of the mind,” cultural historian Jacob Bronowski once observed. In this series of reflective walks through the Historic Trades at Colonial Williamsburg, we seek to regain the wisdom of skilled hand work to a world where it has almost wholly disappeared. Why did the “tools of his trade” once qualify a man for the vote? How does the human mind suffer when the hands have no voice? Moving from labor to craft to trade and from apprentice to journeyman to master, we inquire of the past for guidance in piecing back together a sense of how our hands make us human.

Living the Innermost Life

What would it mean to live even one day of your life illuminated by the Inner Light? What is inward even of innerness? What is the Innermost Life? The ways of love and light and life are mysterious, yet their mystery lies not so much in themselves as in the dark glass through which they are viewed from the remove of our modern lives. In this shared journey of images and words, we seek to find our way back to the beginning, and from that beginning, forward to a new way of seeing the everyday places amidst which we live. The Innermost Life is nearer to us than we think, if we could once see with new eyes.

Gone Without a Trace: The Virginia House and the Beginnings of American Architecture

Seventeenth century Virginia would see the development of the first forms of American building practice to stand fully distinct from English precedent. From the founding of the Jamestown settlement in 1607, with its English-framed, wattle-and-daub structures; to the innovation of an American vernacular in the form of the “Virginia House” throughout the Chesapeake region; to the newly “polite” architecture of the Williamsburg flush-frame house, Virginia is a study of emerging Americanness. What can a history of early Virginia architecture tell us about the ways our building technologies express the state of the national soul?

Washington’s Farewell Address and the Wisdom Tradition

George Washington’s Farewell Address was first published in 1796 as a parting letter to “friends and fellow citizens,” and has been reprinted innumerable times since. It is still read aloud from the floor of the United States Senate each year on Washington’s birthday. The Address is among the most important and personal of our founding documents, yet its deeper meanings today remain largely unexplored. What would it mean to read these last public words of the first president, not as a political testament, but as a moral valediction addressed to the private individual? How does it propose to found more than a new nation, but a new man?

From Williamsburg to Walden: Two Ways of Wisdom

Two very small, very early American towns stand out from all others in the cultural impact they have exerted on American life: Williamsburg, Virginia and Concord, Massachusetts. Both were founded in the 1630s, both were centers of revolutionary life, both were barely one tenth the size of Philadelphia, Boston or New York. Yet both would give birth to new forms of public and private life that would revolutionize and come to characterize America. This course will examine the special character of these two microcosms of Americanness, and seek the meaning of the cultural migration from Williamsburg to Walden.

"The Wisest American": Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Wisdom Tradition

Through the formative century of American letters and beyond, Ralph Waldo Emerson was "the wisest American.” Among the wider circle of Americans we remember as Transcendentalists, such individuals as Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, John Muir, William James, Robert Frost, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ansel Adams are practically unimaginable without the influence of Emerson. This course will seek to recover the special wisdom of the "Sage of Concord" as a means of bringing America's larger wisdom tradition into focus, from the founding period to the closing of the western frontier.

Links Back to the Beginning: The Wisdom of Walden

The central riddle of Henry Thoreau’s Walden lies in the famously enigmatic line, “I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am still on their trail.” Readers and scholars have wondered at those wistful words since their first publication in 1854. What kind of book is Walden? Why does the urgency of its message continue to grow as it survives into circumstances ever more distant from those of its birth? In this short course we examine Thoreau’s riddle to understand his great book, and his book to understand the wild heart of American Transcendentalism. Where would those links to a lost world lead us today?

Triangulating Walden: The Primitive Hut in America

What we remember as Henry Thoreau’s experiment at Walden is as inseparable from the small house he built there as it is from Walden Pond itself. But what was the meaning of the house at Walden? What is it to us today? In this course, we take the Walden hut as our central compass point in a triangulation of positions spanning the Wisdom Tradition from before the beginning to after the end. We examine the Virginia House of the 17th century, the Walden hut, and the Innermost House of 21st century California in order to locate an archetypal form central to the New World culture of philosophical simplicity: the Primitive Hut in America.

A Transcendentalism of Power: Emerson, Lincoln, and Douglass

“The true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.” Through the middle of the 19th century, Transcendentalism was a name applied to a radical form of individualism centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson. But from the beginning, Emersonian individualism had social and political aspects which acted powerfully through such self-relying persons as Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, whose transcendentalism we examine in this course. Based on John Stauffer’s brilliant dual biography, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

American Transcendentalism for a 21st Century World

Transcendentalism is the central American wisdom, about which tilts and turns the rest of American thought. Yet as a spiritual wisdom it is so little recognized today that it is often reduced to a prefiguring of modern environmentalism and social reform. How can something once so near to us be now so distant? How can wisdom once gained be so entirely lost again? In this straightforward course, we go back to the beginning—back to Emerson and Thoreau and Walden—as a way of moving forward toward a livable future. What would Transcendentalism look like if it were new and positive and useful to the world today?

The Soul of the Indian and the Foundations of American Wisdom

Charles Eastman, born in 1858 as Hakadah and later named Ohíye S'a, was of Santee Dakota, English, and French ancestry. He is considered the first Native American Indian author to write American history from the Native point of view. Now, a century later, his books still offer us some of the most beautiful and compelling accounts of traditional American Indian life we have. In The Soul of the Indian, Eastman brings to life the rich spirituality and morality of the Native Americans as they existed before contact with missionaries and other Europeans. It is a rare firsthand expression of the foundations of American wisdom.

Wisdom Gone Wild: John Muir and the Ideal of Wilderness

When we think of wilderness in America today, we think of John Muir. When we see beauty in wilderness, even holiness in it, we are seeing through John Muir’s eyes. No one figure in American history urges us so powerfully with his words and example to restore ourselves with a walk in the wild. It is said that John Muir rediscovered America. But did he discover the wilderness we know, or did he create it? Please join us for this exploration with words and pictures into the California inflection of the American Wisdom Tradition, and its roots in a new vision of wilderness and the nation’s wild soul.

Sunset in the West: Robinson Jeffers and the End of the Wisdom Tradition

Robinson Jeffers was the great poet of California's golden age, celebrated with T.S. Eliot as our greatest poet and with Eugene O'Neill as our greatest tragedian. His haunting lyrics and tragic dramas immortalized the wild Big Sur coast south of Carmel-by-the-Sea, his home for half a century. More than any one figure, he speaks for the collision between the American Wisdom Tradition and exploding modernity. His poetry asks the great questions of modern environmentalism: What are we in relation to nature? Where do we belong? What is the best life for human kind?

Ansel Adams: Wisdom Through a New Lens

Now a century after Ansel Adams took his first photograph, we almost cannot see nature except through his eyes. Yet those photographs showed the world a nature it had never seen before: a revolutionary, brilliant refocusing on the Wilderness, the Whole Wilderness, and Nothing but the Wilderness, so help him God. Ansel Adams’ art was a radical act of the human imagination, to which we are all heirs today. In this course of striking masterworks and commentary, we shall seek to regain that radical vision of a world made new, to see afresh through the lens of our greatest photographic artist.

An Innermost Way of Seeing: A Wisdom of Light and Shadow

Have you ever longed for life in the woods? It is a longing that takes us back to our American beginnings and to our human origins on earth. The woods are more than trees and earth and sky. The woods are a way of seeing. In this class we draw on seven years of solitude lived in the woods at the Innermost House in California to examine our lives in Williamsburg and the larger world. What beginnings lay just beneath the surface of our ordinary lives, hidden in the plain sight of home? What meanings exist to be read just behind our everyday experiences, illuminated by an Innermost Way of Seeing?

Making Room for Wisdom: A Short History of Private Spaces

“Small rooms or dwellings discipline the mind, large ones weaken it.” So observed Leonardo da Vinci from the height of the Italian Renaissance. In all ages of high literate civilization, a certain kind of room takes shape around the individual human nature: a space for one’s highest self. Such rooms are at once the seed from which those ages arise, and the fruit of their highest flowering. From ancient Africa, Asia, and Europe, from the Old World to the New, from medieval to modern times, these private spaces have given focus to the individual’s highest aspirations. What does the disappearance of such rooms teach us about our lives?

A Gallery of Golden Ages: The Italian Renaissance to the American West

In this course we examine five “Golden Ages” to ask what constitutes the circumstances of human flourishing, and what such flourishing means to the individual today. The revolutionary idea of the whole, free, and flourishing individual shines as a golden light through the length of modern times, from the Italian Renaissance to Elizabethan England to the American Revolution, and from thence to the American Renaissance and its last frontiers in the American West. Like an enfilade of open doors that leads from room to room, we follow an unfolding architecture of Golden Ages that concludes in the Wisdom Tradition.

The Ideal of the Gentleman and the Wisdom Tradition

The period between the Revolutionary War and the First World War would see a radical democratization of the ideal of the “complete gentleman” on both sides of the Atlantic. Over the course of this “long 19th century,” that ideal of human individuality would be transformed by the frontiers of industrialism in England and the frontier wilderness in America. We examine how this central Anglo-American ideal evolved in American culture through the persons of George Washington, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Muir, eventually emerging as the American Everyman in the 20th century, at last to disappear into history.

In Vino Veritas: Wine Culture and the Wisdom Tradition

Wine is as ancient as civilization, and pursues a course that rises and falls with the shifting balance of high culture from the ancient Middle East to the opposite side of the globe in California. In this class we ask what wine is and why it has played so important a role in the West. In particular, we follow the development of viniculture from its American beginnings in Jamestown, to its flowering in Concord, to its full fruit in California, as it moves across the New World landscape in place and time. Wine is more than drink. It is culture and civilization, wisdom and sacrament. It is a way of understanding the nature of Westernness.

The World in a Bowl of Tea: Tea Culture and the Wisdom Tradition

As the Wisdom Tradition drew toward a close in the years before the First World War, the Japanese scholar Okakura Kakuzō published his English language classic, The Way of Tea, in New York. There are few Asian customs so incomprehensibly strange to Americans as the Japanese Tea Ceremony. Yet teaism represents the very heart of traditional Japanese culture, and perhaps a useful guide to finding peace amidst chaos today, of healing a broken world such as our own. In this brief course we shall seek in tea ceremony a universal practice of the spiritual life, a counterpart to the Western culture of wine, and a way to wisdom.

The Three Teachings and the Wisdom Tradition

The Three Teachings is a concept with origins in classical Chinese culture. It originally referred to three teachings or “ways” of religious and ethical life that merged as one spiritual consciousness during the cultural renaissance of the Song Dynasty: Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. We examine these three teachings in their historical context and as universal modes of ethical understanding with profoundly modern and personal applications, all as seen through the prism of the American Wisdom Tradition. What do the Three Teachings of ancient China have to teach us as individuals in America today?

Preserving the Wisdom Tradition: John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the 20th Century

Through the first half of the 20th century, the wealthiest man in America would dedicate his resources to preserving the American Wisdom Tradition. Beginning in the 1920s, John D. Rockefeller Jr. simultaneously undertook to preserve hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness as state and national parks, to restore 18th century Williamsburg as the world’s largest living history museum, and to build the Rockefeller Center in New York City as America’s most complete living monument to cosmopolitan culture. This class explores how each of these “ideal projects” sought to harvest and preserve the Wisdom Tradition.

Instructors

Diana Lorence is the creative founder of the Innermost House culture as the conclusion of a lifelong search for unified origins. Michael Lorence is president of The Innermost House Foundation in San Francisco, director of the American Wisdom Project, the Virginia House Project, and the Old Growth Initiative in Williamsburg, Virginia, and a past director of the Thoreau Society in Concord, Massachusetts. He has for forty years provided cultural guidance to leaders in the worlds of industry, state, and the professions. Many courses also include co-instructors representing special bodies of knowledge and experience.

“The only gift is a portion of thyself.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

We express our abiding gratitude to all our generous colleagues for their voluntary contributions of time, experience, knowledge, resource, and wisdom:

Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture: Dr. David Shi
American Revolutionary and Renaissance History: Dr. Robert Gross
American Women in 19th Century Transcendentalism: Dr. Phyllis Cole
Environmental Philosophy in America: Dr. Marianne Patinelli-Dubay
American Transcendentalism in Practice: Rev. Dr. Barry Andrews
African and African-American Cultural History: Dr. John Stauffer
Native American Cultural History: Dr. Glenn Aparicio Parry
English Literature and the Environment: Dr. James Engell
American Wilderness Culture: Dr. J. William T. Youngs
Liberal Education in America: Mr. Christopher Nelson
American Vernacular Architecture: Dr. Jeffrey Klee
Hand Craft in America: Mr. Miguel Gómez-Ibáñez
Monasticism in America: Br. George Van Grieken
Japanese Culture in the West: Rev. Ulrich Haas
Hellenic Studies in America: Dr. Gregory Nagy
Chinese Culture in America: Dr. Michael Puett
Perennialism in America: Dr. Nikita Pokrovsky


Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
College of William & Mary
St. John’s College
Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

Suggested General Readings