Thompson did his Master's Essay at Cornell on applying the
process philosophy of
Alfred 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 famed
media ecologist Marshall McLuhan, who would influence Thompson's writings on cultural history. Thompson engaged a diverse set of traditions, including the Swiss cultural historian
Jean Gebser, the Vedic philosopher
Sri Aurobindo Ghose, 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
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". 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". "
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 defined
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
genres of literature and history are changing as well. In an agricultural-warrior society, the genre is the
epic, an
Iliad. In an industrial-bourgeois society, the genre is the novel, a
Moll Flanders. In our electronic,
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.
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. 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. Thompson saw the
Stone Age religion expressed in the
Venus figurines,
Lascaux cave paintings,
Çatal Hüyük, and
other artifacts to be an early form of
shamanism. He believed that as humanity spread across the globe and was divided into separate cultures, this universal shamanistic
Mother Goddess religion became the various
esoteric traditions and
religions of the world. Using this model, he analyzed
Egyptian mythology,
Sumerian hymns, the
Epic of Gilgamesh, the cult of
Quetzalcoatl, and many other stories, myths, and traditions. Thompson often referred to
kriya yoga and
yoga nidra throughout these analyses.
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
phenomenologist Jean Gebser. Works and authors analyzed include the
Enuma Elish,
Homer,
Hesiod,
Sappho, the
Book of Judges, the
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.
Self and Society In his 2004 book
Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness, and in collaboration with the mathematician
Ralph Abraham, Thompson related Gebser's structures to periods in the
development of mathematics (arithmetic, geometric, algebraic,
dynamical, chaotic) and in the
history of music.
Interests Thompson considered
James Joyce's stylistically experimental novel
Finnegans 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 by
Los Angeles, where he grew up, and
Disneyland, which he considered to be Los Angeles' essence. He also wrote a book-length treatment of the
Easter Rising of 1916. Thompson 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 Sitchin.
Reception Thompson's second book,
At the Edge of History was reviewed in
The New York Times by
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in March 1971. Thompson's 1974
Passages About Earth was reviewed in
Time. The reviewer wrote: From ample but largely gloomy evidence of rapid
social change —
future shock,
ecological disruption,
population explosion,
proliferation of information — Thompson draws a startling conclusion: "We are the climactic generation of human
cultural 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 Philosopher
Teilhard de Chardin and Science-Fiction Writer
Arthur C. Clarke. This is thin
epistemological 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, a
magical mystery tour of man's potential. 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. ==Selected works==