So, just how much of a nerd can I be about Patrick Gunkel and ideonomy?
You’re about to find out.
During my research into ideonomy, at some point I realized there was a missing page in Gunkel’s Orange ideonomy volume.
Specifically, a copy of the January 1987 letter that Gunkel wrote to Alan McHenry, President of the Lounsbery Foundation, was missing page 14.
How irritating! I really wanted to know what was in there.
Conspiracy theories swirled through my head.
What if Om Gnawali, the MIT undergraduate student who initially scanned in Gunkel’s work, had intentionally left the page out?
What if there was some great secret knowledge in there?
Well, imagine my delight when I visited the MIT Distinctive Collections archive back in 2024, and I found that Professor Dyer had donated to the collections an original copy of Gunkel’s ideonomy manuscript, including the missing page.
Although I can’t be sure there’s no conspiracy, I’m relatively confident it was just an oversight, as I can’t precisely identify anything that seems like a super top secret thing Gunkel didn’t mention elsewhere.
I’ve appended the missing page below for accessibility purposes, given that not all future ideonomy scholars will be able to visit the MIT Distinctive Collections archive and find out what’s on this page themselves.
The rest of this post will be a bit of a ramble—starting with the McHenry letter and branching out into Gunkel’s personality, his failure, and how I’m trying to change things for the better.
How Important Is the McHenry Letter?
Something remarkable I’ve noticed about Gunkel is that he rarely, if ever, repeated himself in writing.
Looking through his writings, you don’t see him articulating the same thing five times with slight variations.
This is unusual for a writer.
Often, writers will summarize the material they are building on in various ways, or they will at least refer back to their own ideas and describe how they have evolved. Gunkel didn’t do that. Nor did Gunkel like to rewrite or revise his work. I’ve never experienced this personally as a writer—I’ve always been able to revise—but it seems like when Gunkel got hit with inspiration, he put it all down and then walked away.
Gunkel often drafted out his ideas long-hand with a pen and then made various revisions and highlights, but you don’t find first and second drafts on the typewriter.
After Gunkel put something into writing, he moved on to something else and let whatever he’d written stand as the final testament to that particular concept and its framing.
He also didn’t often bother to summarize important context.
If you don’t understand all the multitudinous connections he’s making inside his head, in other words, that’s your problem—not his. At least that seems to be his attitude.
With all of this in mind, the letter to Alan McHenry, Director of the Lounsbery Foundation, is a very important document for students of ideonomy.
No other document like this exists.
For the McHenry letter, Gunkel was forced, or decided he wanted, to put down in writing the massive scope of his project.
Over a period of 18 pages, Gunkel details all the various facets and components that he envisions as part of a science of ideas.
The letter also reveals something related to Gunkel’s disfunction, a certain unbounded grandiosity regarding his human capacity.
He didn’t understand the relationship between time and product, for one thing. When he was wrapped in an intellectual ecstasy, which was quite often, he failed to realize that the more comprehensive a project was in scope, the longer it would take to finish. His projects thus kept growing bigger and bigger while the time to complete them continued to grow shorter and shorter. As a result, he rarely finished his written projects at the same time he was absolutely convinced that they were manageable when he began them.
For someone who was laser-focused on discovering the existence of fundamental principles about the universe, Gunkel ironically didn’t accept the existence of such principles when it came to his daily life.
So What’s In the Letter?
Reading the McHenry letter, the first thing you’ll grasp is a timeline of Gunkel’s work on the Ideonomy Project in a way that is not recorded anywhere else.
The next thing you’ll grasp is the massive scope of ideonomy.
It’s almost like Gunkel has entered a vast cave where nobody has ever been before.
The landscape and the features inside the cave are connected to the external world that we’re familiar with almost as a mirror-image, an upside-down or inverted space, and yet it’s so big that we can’t really understand the total vision of what we’re looking at.
Inside this vast space, Gunkel is shining his flashlight around illuminating all the incredible features inside the cave, but he doesn’t have any time to explain them in any detail. On an intuitive level he knows what they are and how they fit the contours of the outside world we’re all familiar with. But all these other marvelous things are catching his attention, and so he can’t be bothered to stop and tell other people exactly what he’s seeing.
Every aspect of Gunkel’s vision could represent in and of itself an entire research paper, an entire book, the life’s work of scholars, and perhaps an entire segment of academia.
This was recognized by Gunkel’s friend Charles van Doren, who told Austin writer Jo Zarboulas in an interview in the early 1990s:
“More and more people are going to fall in behind him, and realize that whatever he has in his mind, whatever that vision is…the things that he leaves behind, like a swimmer leaving waves behind him, those waves, each one of them is valuable…”1
With ideonomy, Gunkel is proposing to found new methodologies and entirely new sciences that would operate within the rules of ideonomy, such as a science of analogies. He’s proposing new kinds of computer software and new kinds of reference books.
Like great science fiction writers, Gunkel has imagined a future technology and he’s been able to spin out all the many ramifications of that technology on human life.
But it was the articulation of the frame, the touchstone, the “so what?” where Gunkel was constantly getting tripped up.
Francis Bacon: A Gunkel Analog
In one of the books I’m working on about Gunkel, I go into a lot of detail about the English philosopher Francis Bacon and his original vision for science, which he articulated in a series of influential books between 1605 and 1626. Other parts of Bacon’s vision were published posthumously.
Bacon’s future vision for science was laid out in a 6-book plan that he called the “Great Instauration.”
The word “Instauration” is French for “foundation.”
The work was never finished, however.
Only the first two books were completed with any substance.
Some of this was not intentional, as Bacon died before he could finish parts of it, and yet one important part of the “Great Instauration” was left unfinished deliberately—Book 6, the last book, a placeholder for future generations who would be able to figure out this whole science thing that was being proposed.
In several places in his writing, Gunkel acknowledged that he was not pretending to present ideonomy in its final form, and that he didn’t know what the future would hold for his science.
But unlike Bacon, Gunkel wasn’t able to present ideonomy in a structured way.
Gunkel had the vision—a grand vision that was similar to Bacon’s—but he didn’t have the organizational ability to break that vision down into chunks and connect it to what had come before.
He couldn’t figure out what part needed to come first and what part could wait for later.
He tried to bring the whole thing out all at the same time.
Perhaps this was a product of Gunkel’s lack of formal education; he was used to skimming things for general content and the structure of knowledge, but he didn’t have a good understanding of how this knowledge could be steadily built from one project to the next.
In my own research, this construction process is something I’m trying to focus on.
You can see this emerging in the “Ideonomy Explainer” on the Gunkel Global Renaissance Project website, which I manage.
In this newsletter, I’ll be breaking Gunkel’s science down into eight parts.
Over the coming months and years I will take each of these pieces and write about them.
Gunkel wouldn’t have liked this, but when you look at the massive gap that existed between his ambitions and his achievements, something needs to give.
Ultimately, as Gunkel would have agreed, seeing an idea differently is what ultimately leads to a breakthrough.
And on this principle, I’m proceeding.
Page 14 of the McHenry Letter:
(1) The interview between Zarboulas and Van Doren was obtained during my original research.