William Blake’s Prophetic Epistemology
“In Blake the criterion or standard of reality is the genius; in Locke it is the mediocrity.”
—Northrop Frye
If Blake isn’t wrongly dismissed as mad, his system of belief is too often held at arm’s length and treated as the quaint product of a bygone era. His artistic genius earns him a free pass for his beliefs, which are all too often excused with a condescending pat on the head.
But — religious beliefs aside for now — what if Blake’s epistemology wasn’t as outlandish as people think?
What if, on the whole, he actually got it right?
§
A yellow maple leaf, big as a map, falls somnolently through sun streaks, blazing into a saucer
of light.
A branched skeleton dark inside it.
The sunlit saucer lands in a child’s outstretched hands.
§
Blake’s epistemology is inseparable from his metaphysics.
The material, or “vegetated,” world we inhabit — Ulro — is the fallen world created by a lesser deity, a gnostic demiurge. Entirely beyond Ulro lies Eternity, created by the one true God.
Here’s Blake’s account of this division in “A Vision of the Last Judgment.”
[The] world of Imagination is the World of Eternity it is the Divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the
Vegetated body This World <of Imagination> is Infinite & Eternal whereas the world of Generation or Vegetation is Finite &
Temporal
Blake is an Idealist (in the philosophical sense) because the ultimate nature of reality is imaginative. As he writes in “The Ghost of Abel,” “Eternity is Imagination.” Hence why Yeats called Blake a “literal realist of the imagination.” For Blake, that which is of the imagination is what’s most real.
§
Blake’s metaphysics determines his epistemology.
In order to perceive beyond the fallen world, we must use more than just our sensory faculties. And for Blake, it is imagination alone that can take us beyond this world and allow us to access the Eternal.
In “There Is No Natural Religion,” Blake writes, “Man’s perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception. He perceives more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover.” Later in the same poem, Blake credits the imaginative capacity of “the Poetic or Prophetic character” with allowing us to surpass “the ratio of all things.” Without the imagination, we would be doomed to “repeat the same dull round over again.” Near the conclusion, he adds, “He who sees the infinite in all things sees God.”
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Perhaps the best encapsulation of Blake’s epistemology lies in the marvelous ending of “A Vision of the Last Judgment.”
What will it be Questiond When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of Fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an
Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty I question not my Corporeal or
Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a sight I look thro it & not with it.
If we look with our eyes, we are limited to Ulro — the Corporeal, Vegetative world. By looking through our organs of sensory perception, however, we see the Eternal, the Infinite.
Or as Blake puts it in “Auguries of Innocence:” “We are led to Believe a Lie / When we see not Thro the Eye.”
§
Here’s Northrop Frye’s sketch of Blake’s epistemology.
[For Blake,] all knowledge comes from mental experience. Mental experience is a union of a perceiving subject and a
perceived object; it is something in which the barrier between “inside” and “outside” dissolves. But the power to unite comes
from the subject. The work of art is the product of this creative perception, hence it is not an escape from reality but a
systematic training in comprehending it.
So when Blake sees the innumerable company of heavenly host, he does not abandon his eye. Rather, he looks through it, perceiving creatively, which is to say that he sees the heavenly host in an act of mental experience that unites sensory (ocular) perception and imagination. His mind looks through his bodily eye.
•
For Blake, not only does knowledge come from mental experience, but the nature of reality is mind-dependent.
In The Gates of Paradise under the heading of “What is Man!,” Blake writes, “The Suns Light when he unfolds it / Depends on the Organ that beholds it.” He later adds, “Perceptive Organs closed their Objects close.”
In “Auguries of Innocence,” Blake writes, “If the Sun & Moon should Doubt / Theyd immediately Go out.”
In the first night of The Four Zoas, Los says, “…in the Brain of Man we live, & in his circling Nerves. / … this bright world of all our joy is in the Human Brain.”
§
I do not see the yellow maple
with eyes alone —
mind looks
through
eyes, so seeing
is imaginative
•
Saying the leaf exists independently of my seeing turns the leaf into less than a cloud. Says not how it is.
•
the leaf’s textures — where,
for instance, shadows
fall across it, where it catches sun
— and small portions
along the edges where something has
cut into the leaf, the outline
of which is singed red
— greenish-brown splotches
— the pinkish hue
within the red veins
— the minuscule veins you have
to strain your eyes to see
are without a color different
from the leaf’s predominate yellow
— and the yellow? it is the yellow
of a field of goldenrods,
of a November sun breaking
over a snowcapped peak
§
Perhaps our greatest Idealist is Immanuel Kant. (Though Blake has more in common with Bishop Berkeley, whom he had read and loved.)
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues against Transcendental Realism (i.e., the commonly held notion that “outer appearances … [are] things in themselves” that “exist independently of us and our sensibility”).
In contrast to such realism, Kant offers Transcendental Idealism, which contends that “everything intuited in space or in time, hence all objects of an experience possible for us, are nothing but appearances (i.e., mere representations, which, as they are represented, as extended beings or series of alterations, have outside our thoughts no existence grounded in itself”).
•
Kant can be sure he sees a yellow leaf lit up by streaks of sun. (And he can know that there is some mind-independent object affecting him and producing the leaf’s appearance in his mind.)
But he cannot know the ultimate nature of the leaf’s reality outside of its appearance to him. He cannot know, for instance, that the yellow leaf is yellow. Or that the leaf is, in fact, a leaf.
Our senses condition everything we seem to experience externally.
Kant seeing a yellow leaf is a representation of an outer appearance.
•
between strata of sunstreaks,
the leafsaucer flickers
out and ablaze, out
and ablaze —
when lit up,
a dark
branched skeleton
flashes — helioxray —
something numinous
§
Friedrich Nietzsche gives a different spin on the inaccessibility of the noumenal world.
In “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense,” he writes:
Already it costs [one] some trouble to admit to himself that the insect and the bird perceive a world different from his own, and
that the question, which of the two world-perceptions is more accurate, is quite a senseless one, since to decide this question
it would be necessary to apply the standard of right perception, i.e. to apply a standard which does not exist.
•
That the bright yellow maple leaf is not otherwise and leaves little else to observe is the consensus of “normal observers.”
Unified experience gives the illusion of right perception.
•
If there is no right perception, how can imaginative perception that differs from common consensus be wrong? Who could say that Blake was wrong to see a company of the heavenly host rather than a disc of fire?
§
Two weeks ago (at the time of writing), the unit of the kilogram was defined by a physical object — a platinum alloy cylinder — stored in several nested, air-tight bell jars held within a vault in the basement of the International Bureau of Weights and Measurements in the Sèvres commune of Paris.
The cylinder, nicknamed “Le Grand K,” was occasionally taken out, cleaned, re-weighed, and put back. Over time, the object’s precise weight dropped by an infinitesimal degree of about 50 micrograms. So experts devised a new definition.
Today, the kilogram is defined by a mathematical formula based on Planck’s constant.
Le Grand K is now a relic. A funny reminder of our obsolete, arbitrary methods.
§
After the French Revoultion, the Académie des Sciences wanted to standardize measurements in physical terms so that they could not be altered to suit various purposes.
The Standard Metre was created in 1791 and is still visible today on the façade of 36 rue de Vaugirard, 6th arrondissement of Paris, near the Palais du Luxembourg.
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In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein contends, “There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris. — But this is, of course, not to ascribe any extraordinary property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the language-game of measuring with a metre-rule.”
To say that Le Metre Étalon is a meter long is tautological because the metrical unit is defined by its length.
•
In Naming & Necessity, metaphysician Saul Kripke considers the standard meter as having a paradoxical nature in that its length of one meter is both logically unnecessary and yet true a priori.
It is a priori because “if [one] used Stick S to fix the reference of the term ‘one meter’, then as a result of this kind of ‘definition, … he knows automatically, without further investigation, that S is one meter long.” And yet, it is also arbitrary because “the metaphysical status of ‘S is one meter long’ will be that of a contingent statement [since] … under appropriate stresses and strains, heatings or coolings, S would have had a length other than one meter.” He thus dubs it a “contingent a priori” variety of truth.
•
A standard of right perception based off of our perceptions and the world that appears to us is a tautology.
We agree upon “right perception” as a standard because it is right, and it is right because we agree upon it.
But it could be otherwise, and so long as we agreed, it would nevertheless still, to us, be “right.”
§
the triangular park
is dewy, tall maples
lining its edges, damp leaves
mostly covering the grass —
the maples are all bright
yellows, deep reds, burnt oranges
a young girl across the park
catches falling leaves,
her arms outstretched
not with but through
my eyes I see
a falling leaf blaze up
into a saucer of light
that lands into her
outstretched hands
for a moment,
looking at the lit-up leaf
in her hands, I feel
myself being seen
§
In an April 2016 article for Quanta Magazine, Amanda Gefter interviewed UC Irvine cognitive science professor Donald D. Hoffman about his recent research in “perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory, and the brain.”
Hoffman’s theories debunk the old argument that organisms seeing the world more accurately have a competitive advantage over those seeing it less accurately. Hoffman calls that common notion “utterly false.” He says, “The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.”
So, for Hoffman, humans have evolved to perceive according to what kinds of perceptions are apt to make us more suitable for survivability — even if that means our perceptions tell us next to nothing about reality as it is, independent of our perceptions.
The central lesson of quantum physics is clear: There are no public objects sitting out there in some preexisting space. As the
physicist John Wheeler put it, “Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent
of us, that view can no longer be upheld.”
Cutting-edge science has arrived at philosophical idealism.
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Hoffman offers a metaphor for understanding how our perceptions can be simultaneously wrong and helpful.
There’s a metaphor that’s only been available to us in the past 30 or 40 years, and that’s the desktop interface. Suppose
there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is
blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are the only things that
can be asserted about anything on the desktop — it has color, position and shape. Those are the only categories available to
you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. They couldn’t possibly be true. That’s an
interesting thing. You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was
confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a
complex reality that I don’t need to know. That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to
survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s
pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be … Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view … It’s
conscious agents all the way down.
Blake’s Los puts it: “… in the Brain of Man we live, & in his circling Nerves. / … this bright world of all our joy is in the Human Brain.”
§
In his Tractatus, Wittgenstein argues that philosophical thought figures itself forth in an imperfect medium — language, which falls short of an ideal standard of logical perfection. Thus: “Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless … (They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.)”
If, however, we confine ourselves to the realm of pure logic, there is very little we can assert about the world. What might appear to be perfectly rational claims do not hold: “We cannot therefore say in logic: This and this there is in the world, that there is not. For that would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case since otherwise logic must get outside the world.”
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To affirm the world is to take a leap beyond the realm of reason. Or as Wittgenstein puts it: “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”
§
The yellow maple leaf blazing into a saucer of light lands in a child’s outstretched hands.
•
Saucer of light on the wall
the hand of god
—C.D. Wright
•
A farther reach into the real.
•
Except in rare flashes, I cannot sustain a belief in God.
But the only way I know how to say what I see is this:
The girl is catching God.
ξ
Geoffrey Babbitt’s first book, Appendices Pulled from a Study in Light, was released in 2018. His essays have appeared in Pleiades, North American Review, Essay Daily, DIAGRAM, The Collagist, Entropy, Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Utah and teaches at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, where he also co-edits Seneca Review.
Notes from the author: Some of the language in sections 3-5 previously appeared in my essay “The Real Sun No One’s Ever Seen: New Blakean Gnosticism in Donald Revell,” published in The California Journal of Poetics. And section 13 previously appeared in my essay “By Faith, the Eye Stays Open,” published in Entropy Magazine.