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William Irwin Thompson | |
|---|---|
 At theBrooklyn Bridge (1996) | |
| Born | (1938-07-16)July 16, 1938 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Died | November 8, 2020(2020-11-08) (aged 82) Portland, Maine, U.S. |
| Occupation | Social philosopher |
| Spouse | Gail Thompson |
| Children | 2[1] |
William Irwin Thompson (July 16, 1938 – November 8, 2020) was an Americansocial philosopher,cultural critic, and poet. He received theOslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. He described his writing and speaking style as "mind-jazz on ancient texts". He was the founder of theLindisfarne Association, which proposed the study and realization of a new planetary culture.[2]
Thompson was born on July 16, 1938[3] inChicago, Illinois, and grew up inLos Angeles, California. He graduated fromLos Angeles High School in 1957.He received his B.A. atPomona College in 1962 and his Ph.D. atCornell University in 1964. He was a professor ofhumanities at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology and then atYork University inToronto, Ontario. He has held visiting appointments atSyracuse University (in 1973 - where he taught "Resacralization and the Emergence of a Planetary Culture"), theUniversity of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, theUniversity of Toronto and theCalifornia Institute of Integral Studies (1992).
In 1973, he left academia to found theLindisfarne Association. The Association, which he led from 1972 to 2012, was a group of scientists, poets, and religious scholars who met in order to discuss and to participate in the emerging planetary culture.[4] Thompson lived in Switzerland for 17 years. He describes a recent work,Canticum Turicum in his 2009 book,Still Travels: Three Long Poems, as "a long poem onWestern Civilization that begins withfolktales and traces ofCharlemagne inZürich and ends with the completion of Western Civilization as expressed inFinnegans Wake and the traces ofJames Joyce in Zürich."[This quote needs a citation]
Thompson was a Founding Mentor to the privateK-12Ross School inEast Hampton, New York. In 1995, with mathematicianRalph Abraham, he designed a new type of cultural history curriculum based on their theories about the evolution of consciousness.[5] Thompson lived his retired years in Portland, Maine.
Thompson did his Master's Essay at Cornell on applying theprocess philosophy ofAlfred North Whitehead to poetry; he did his doctoral dissertation on the Easter Rising in Dublin 1916. While serving on the faculty at MIT in the 1960s, Thompson met famedmedia ecologist Marshall McLuhan, who would influence Thompson's writings on cultural history. Thompson engaged a diverse set of traditions, including the Swiss cultural historianJean Gebser, the Vedic philosopherSri Aurobindo Ghose, theautopoeticepistemology ofFrancisco Varela, theendosymbiotic theory of evolution ofLynn Margulis, theGaia Theory ofJames Lovelock, thecomplex systems thought ofRalph Abraham, the novels ofThomas Pynchon, and the daimonic transmissions of mysticDavid Spangler.
Performance is central to Thompson's approach. Performances either open new horizons for the future or close them down, and should be judged on that basis. Thompson thought that with the emergence of the integral era and its electronic media expressions that a new mode of discourse was required. He sought "to turn non-fiction into a work of art on its own terms. Rather than trying to be a scholar or a journalist writing on the political and cultural news of the day, I worked to become a poetic reporter on the evolutionary news of the epoch".[6] He espoused the notion that one must express an integral approach not just in content but in the very means of expressing it. Thompson did this in the way he approached teaching: "The traditional academic lecture also became for me an occasion to transform the genre, to present not an academic reading of a paper, but a form of Bardic performance–not stories of battles but of the new ideas that were emerging around the world...The course was meant to be a performance of the very reality it sought to describe".[7]
"Wissenskunst" (literally, "knowledge-art") is a German term that Thompson coined to describe his own work. Contrasting it withWissenschaft, the German term for science, Thompson definedWissenskunst as "the play of knowledge in a world of serious data-processors."
As fiction and music are coming closer to reorganizing knowledge, scholarship is becoming closer to art. Our culture is changing, and so thegenres of literature and history are changing as well. In an agricultural-warrior society, the genre is theepic, anIliad. In an industrial-bourgeois society, the genre is the novel, aMoll Flanders. In our electronic,cybernetic society, the genre isWissenkunst: the play of knowledge in a world of serious data-processors. The scholarly fictions ofJorge Luis Borges, or the reviews ofnon-existent books byStanisław Lem, are examples of new art forms of a society in which humanity live, not innocently in nature nor confidently in cities, butapocalyptically in a civilization cracking up to the universe. At such a moment as this the novelist becomes aprophet, the composer amagician, and the historian abard, a voice recalling ancient identities.[8]
In his acclaimed 1981 workThe Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, Thompson criticized what he considers thehubristic pretensions ofE. O. Wilson'ssociobiology, which attempted to subsume thehumanities toevolutionary biology.[9] Thompson then reviewed and critiqued the scholarship on the emergence of civilization from thePaleolithic to the historical period. He analyzed the assumptions and prejudices of the various anthropologists and historians who have written on the subject, and attempted to paint a more balanced picture. He described the task of the historian as closer to that of the artist and poet than to that of the scientist.
Because we have separated humanity from nature, subject from object, values from analysis, knowledge from myth, and universities from the universe, it is enormously difficult for anyone but a poet or a mystic to understand what is going on in the holistic and mythopoeic thought of Ice Age humanity. The very language we use to discuss the past speaks of tools, hunters, andmen, when every statue and painting we discover cries out to us that this Ice Age humanity was a culture of art, the love of animals, and women.[10]
Thompson saw theStone Age religion expressed in theVenus figurines,Lascauxcave paintings,Çatal Hüyük, andother artifacts to be an early form ofshamanism. He believed that as humanity spread across the globe and was divided into separate cultures, this universal shamanisticMother Goddess religion became the variousesoteric traditions andreligions of the world. Using this model, he analyzedEgyptian mythology,Sumerian hymns, theEpic of Gilgamesh, the cult ofQuetzalcoatl, and many other stories, myths, and traditions. Thompson often referred tokriya yoga andyoga nidra throughout these analyses.
In his 1996 workComing into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, Thompson applied an approach that was similar to his 1981 book to many other artifacts, cultures and historical periods. A notable difference, however, is that the 1996 work was influenced by the work of culturalphenomenologistJean Gebser. Works and authors analyzed include theEnuma Elish,Homer,Hesiod,Sappho, theBook of Judges, theRig Veda,Ramayana,Upanishads,Bhagavad Gita, and theTao Te Ching. Thompson analyzed these works using the vocabulary of contemporary cognitive theory andchaos theory, as well as theories of history. An expanded paperback version was released in 1998.
The phrase "Coming into being" is a translation of the Greek termgignesthai, from which the wordgenesis is derived.[11]
In his 2004 bookSelf and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness, and in collaboration with the mathematicianRalph Abraham, Thompson related Gebser's structures to periods in thedevelopment of mathematics (arithmetic, geometric, algebraic,dynamical, chaotic) and in thehistory of music.
Thompson consideredJames Joyce's stylistically experimental novelFinnegans Wake to be "the ultimate novel, indeed, the ultimate book," and also to be the climactic artistic work of the modern period and of the rational mentality. He was fascinated byLos Angeles, where he grew up, andDisneyland, which he considered to be Los Angeles' essence. He also wrote a book-length treatment of theEaster Rising of 1916.
Thompson critiquedpostmodernliterary criticism,artificial intelligence, the technologicalfuturism ofRaymond Kurzweil, the contemporaryphilosophy of mind theories ofDaniel Dennett andPaul Churchland, and theastrobiologicalcosmogony ofZecharia Sitchin.
Thompson's second book,At the Edge of History was reviewed inThe New York Times byChristopher Lehmann-Haupt in March 1971.[12]
Thompson's 1974Passages About Earth was reviewed inTime. The reviewer wrote:
From ample but largely gloomy evidence of rapidsocial change —future shock,ecological disruption,population explosion,proliferation of information — Thompson draws a startling conclusion: "We are the climactic generation of humancultural evolution." Man, he asserts, will now either slide back into a new Dark Age or evolve into a higher, more spiritual being.
Which way will we go? The author opts for evolution. While such optimism is as welcome as it is rare these days, it is largely based on mysticism and intimations of a "new planetary culture," which Thompson shares with PhilosopherTeilhard de Chardin and Science-Fiction WriterArthur C. Clarke. This is thinepistemological ice even for a skater as fast as Thompson. Indeed, incredulous readers may drop the book after the first reference to "our lost cosmological orientation." That would be a mistake. Agree with it or not, Passages is always fascinating, amagical mystery tour of man's potential.[4]
Thompson's 1981 bookThe Time Falling Bodies Take To Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture was reviewed in theNew York Times Book Review byChristopher Lehmann-Haupt. Lehmann-Haupt concluded:
InThe Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, William Irwin Thompson has gone part of the way toward rescuing mysticism from its Western friends. But only part of the way.[9]
