William Irwin Thompson

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William Irwin Thompson
William Irwin Thompson on Brooklyn Bridge, 1996
Born(1938-07-16)July 16, 1938
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
DiedNovember 8, 2020(2020-11-08) (aged 82)
OccupationSocial philosopher
SpouseGail Thompson
Children2[1]

William Irwin Thompson (July 16, 1938 – November 8, 2020) was an American

cultural critic, and poet. He received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. He described his writing and speaking style as "mind-jazz on ancient texts". He was the founder of the Lindisfarne Association, which proposed the study and realization of a new planetary culture.[2]

Biography

Thompson was born on July 16, 1938

(1992).

In 1973, he left academia to found the Lindisfarne 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 on Western Civilization that begins with folktales and traces of Charlemagne in Zürich and ends with the completion of Western Civilization as expressed in Finnegans Wake and the traces of James Joyce in Zürich."

Thompson was a Founding Mentor to the private

K-12 Ross School in East Hampton, New York. In 1995, with mathematician Ralph 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.

Work

Thompson did his Master's Essay at Cornell on applying the

complex systems thought of Ralph Abraham, the novels of Thomas Pynchon, and the daimonic transmissions of mystic David Spangler
.

Style

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 with Wissenschaft, the German term for science, Thompson defines Wissenskunst 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 the

cybernetic society, the genre is Wissenkunst: the play of knowledge in a world of serious data-processors. The scholarly fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, or the reviews of non-existent books by Stanisław Lem, are examples of new art forms of a society in which humanity live, not innocently in nature nor confidently in cities, but apocalyptically in a civilization cracking up to the universe. At such a moment as this the novelist becomes a prophet, the composer a magician, and the historian a bard, a voice recalling ancient identities.[8]

Works

The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light

In his acclaimed 1981 work The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, Thompson criticized what he considers the hubristic pretensions of E. O. Wilson's sociobiology, which attempted to subsume the humanities to evolutionary biology.[9] Thompson then reviewed and critiqued the scholarship on the emergence of civilization from the Paleolithic 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, and men, 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 sees the

Yoga Nidra
throughout these analyses, and this seems to be the spiritual tradition with which he is most comfortable.

Coming Into Being

In his 1996 work Coming 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 cultural

Rig Veda, Ramayana, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, and the Tao Te Ching. Thompson analyzed these works using the vocabulary of contemporary cognitive theory and chaos 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 term gignesthai, from which the word genesis is derived.[11]

Self and Society

In his 2004 book Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness, and in collaboration with the mathematician

dynamical, chaotic) and in the history of music
.

Interests

The Lindisfarne Fellows House in Crestone, Colorado

Thompson considers

Disneyland, which he considers to be LA's essence. He has also written a book-length treatment of the Easter Rising
of 1916.

Thompson has critiqued

.

Reception

Thompson's second book, At the Edge of History was reviewed in The New York Times by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in March 1971.[12]

Thompson's 1974 Passages About Earth was reviewed in

magical mystery tour of man's potential.[13]

Thompson's 1981 book The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture was reviewed in the

New York Times Book Review by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. Lehmann-Haupt concluded:

In The 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.[14]

Selected works

Notes

  1. .
  2. ^ "Evan Thompson's 'Waking, Dreaming, Being'"
  3. ^ Thompson, William Irvin (29 July 2008). "An Interview with William Irwin Thompson, Part 1" (Interview). Interviewed by Bruce Clark. Archived from the original on 22 August 2022. Retrieved 18 September 2022.
  4. ^ Philip Herrera, "Waiting For Godlings", Time Monday, April 8, 1974
  5. ^ "Founding Mentor William Irwin Thompson Visits"
  6. ^ Thompson, "The Cultural Phenomenology of Literature", 89 http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/ltonword/complete.pdf Archived 2006-09-06 at the Wayback Machine
  7. ^ Thompson, "The Cultural Phenomenology of Literature", 89-90 http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/ltonword/complete.pdf Archived 2006-09-06 at the Wayback Machine
  8. ^ The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, 4
  9. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved 2023-02-17.
  10. ^ The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, 102
  11. ^ "G | Search Online Etymology Dictionary".
  12. New York Times
  13. ^ Philip Herrera,"Waiting For Godlings", Time Monday, April 08, 1974
  14. ^ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt review of The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light. Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture. January 22, 1981 [1]
  15. ^ The Language of "Finnegans Wake"

External links

By Thompson

Essays

Poems

About Thompson

Citations