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William Irwin Thompson (born 1938) is known primarily as a social philosopher and cultural critic. He is also a poet. He has made significant contributions to cultural history, social criticism, the philosophy of science, and the study of myth. He describes his writing and speaking style as "mind-jazz on ancient texts". He is an astute reader of science, social science, history, and literature.

"Wissenkunst" is a German term that Thompson coined to describe his own work. Thompson defines Wissenkunst as "the play of knowledge in a world of serious data-processors"

Biography

Thompson was born in Chicago and grew up in Los Angeles. Thompson received his Ph.D. at Cornell University and was professor of humanities at MIT and then at York University in Toronto. He has held visiting appointments at Syracuse University, the University of Hawaii, University of Toronto, Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, and the California Institute of Integral Studies.

He left academia to found the Lindisfarne Association, a group of scientists, poets, and religious scholars who met in order to discuss and to particpate in the emerging planetary consciousness, or noosphere. Thompson lived in Switzerland for 17 years. His recent long poem, Canticum Turicum, is in part about the history of the city of Zurich.

More recently, Thompson has been on the board of the private K-12 Ross School in East Hampton, New York and, with mathematician Ralph Abraham, has designed a new type of humanistic curriculum based on their theories about the structure of the human mind.

Work

Influences

Thompson is influenced by the Vedantin philosopher Sri Aurobindo, British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, Swiss cultural historian Jean Gebser, and media ecologist Marshall McLuhan.

Thompson engages a diverse set of traditions, including esoteric Christianity of Rudolf Steiner, the autopoetic epistemology of Francisco Varela, the endosymbiotic theory of evolution of Lynn Margulis, the Gaia Theory of James Lovelock, the complex systems thought of Stuart Kauffman, the novels of Thomas Pynchon, and mystic David Spangler.

Writing

Since the 1960s, Thompson's work appears to have been motivated by the idea that the various intellectual and artistic disciplines have similar epistemic standing:

The concept of performance is central to Thompson's work. It seems to be his view that an integral thinker shouldn't create yet another philosophical theory. Instead, one's work is a performance that occurs in a particular time and place. Performances either open new horizons for the future or close them down, and should be judged on that basis.

In his recent books, Thompson analyzes various texts, works of art, and intellectual movements using the vocabulary of contemporary cognitive theory and chaos theory, as well as theories of history.

Interests

Thompson weaves interest in Sumerian epics, including How Inanna brought the mes from Eridu to Uruk, Inanna's descent to the Netherworld, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. He sees these epics as formative of Western Civilization. He has also written on Venus figurines and the Upper Paleolithic Great Mother goddess cult, artifacts from Çatal Hüyük, and the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish; on Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, and the Hebrew Book of Judges; on the Hindu Rig Veda, Ramayana, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita; and on the Tao te Ching. He has written book-length treatments of the Easter Rising of 1916 and of Quetzalcoatl.

Thompson considers fellow Irishman James Joyce's stylistically experimental novel Finnegans Wake to be "the ultimate novel, indeed, the ultimate book," and the climactic artistic work of the modern period and of the rational mentality. Thompson is fascinated by Los Angeles, where he grew up, and Disneyland, which he considers to be LA's essence.

Outlook

Thompson founded the Lindisfarne Association in an attempt to help usher in what Jean Gebser referred to as the integral structure of consciousness, and to help humanity avoid a potential dark age. (Lindisfarne takes its name from a Viking-threatened Irish monastery which kept writing and knowledge of the classics alive during the European dark ages.) In recent books, he has expressed doubt that a dark age has been avoided.

Or could it also be Wallace Stevens'
necessary angel of our ashen earth--
the tragic angel of a new Dark Age.
Between the ancient and the classical
came the archaic Aegean Dark Age.
Between the classical and medieval
arose the Eurasian Gothic Dark Age.
Now between the global and the Gaian
comes the Dark Age of dying religion.
Whatever it is we spend on Klieglights,
American movies are played in the dark.
— from "Cambridge Rant"*

Critical stance

Thompson has critiqued postmodern literary criticism, artificial intelligence, the technological futurism of Raymond Kurzweil, the contemporary philosophy of mind theories of Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland, and the astrobiological cosmogony of Zecharia Stichin.

He has also critiqued the Bush Administration:

Quotations

  • "That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth." (The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, 87)
  • "A myth is never known; it is a relationship between the known and the unknowable" (TTFBTTL, 87)
  • "At the edge of consciousness, there are no explanations; there are only invocations of myth." (TTFBTTL, 94)
  • "If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you"

Works

  • The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916: A Study of an Ideological Movement. New York: Harper and Row, 1967.
  • At the Edge of History: Speculations on the Transformation of Culture, NY: Harper and Row, 1971. Nominated for National Book Award.
  • "The Individual as Institution: The Example of Paolo Soleri." Harper's. 1972.
  • Passages about Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture, New York: Harper and Row, 1974.
  • Evil and World Order
  • Darkness and Scatterd Light
  • The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1981. ISBN 0312805128.
  • Blue Jade from the Morning Star: An Essay and a Cycle of Poems on Quetzalcoatl. West Stockbridge, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1983.
  • Islands Out of Time (fiction)
  • Pacific Shift
  • Gaia, A Way of Knowing (ed)
  • Selected Poems, 1959-1980
  • Imaginary Ladndscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science
  • Gaia Two: Emergence, The New Science of Becoming (ed)
  • Reimagination of the World: A Critique of the New Age, Science, and Popular Culture (co-author, David Spangler). Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Company, 1991.
  • The American Replacement of Nature: The Everyday Acts and Outrageous Evolution of Economic Life, NY: Doubleday, 1991. ISBN 0385420250.
  • Worlds Interpenetrating and Apart: Collected Poems, 1959-1995
  • Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, NY: St. Martin's, 1996, 1998. ISBN 0312176929 LoC BF311.T484 1996. (Dedicated "For Laurance S. Rockefeller in profound gratitude for more that twenty-two years of friendship and support for the Lindisfarne Association")
  • Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Culture, Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic, 2004. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2004. ISBN 0907845827.

External links

By Thompson

Essays

Poems

About Thompson

1938 births | Living people | American historians | American novelists | American poets | Cornell University faculty | Integral thought | Irish-Americans | Mythographers | New Age

 

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