Leading 1950s thinkers on the search for happiness in trying times

Huston Smith (1919-2016) was one of the preeminent US scholars of religion and comparative philosophy during the 20th century. His distinguished career, which included being appointed MIT’s first professor of philosophy in 1958, also comprised stints as a presenter on public access television, creating a series of programmes that interrogated questions of spirituality, meaning and belief. Among these was the 1959 programme The Search for America, in which Huston interviewed prominent thinkers to discover ‘moral answers to 16 of the most basic public and private issues that Americans face’.

In this episode centred on vast, evergreen questions of human fulfilment, Huston interviews the Pulitzer Prize-winning US writer and poet Mark Van Doren (1894-1972), who was then a professor at Columbia University, and the influential German-born theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich (1886-1965), who was then a professor at Harvard University. In rich discussions, Van Doren explains what he sees as the wisdom of happiness, and Tillich, who left Germany amid the rise of the Third Reich, explores his vision of a loving and just world. While these conversations, as relevant as ever today, of course carry themes that transcend national borders, they also capture a moment of ‘searching’ in the US, which was at the peak of its power in the wake of the Second World War.