Paying Attention To The Sky

Blake's Newton (1795) demonstrates his opposition to the "single-vision" of scientific materialism: Newton fixes his eye on a compass (recalling Proverbs 8:27, an important passage for Milton) to write upon a scroll that seems to project from his own head.

Blake’s essential topic is the unhappiness of the subject within its own subjectivity, or to use a more plangent idiom, the loneliness of the soul. This unhappiness is very often expressed in dualism, either of mind-body or of subject-object; both imply that subjectivity is anomalous in a material world and that each subject is isolated from others. Blake seeks to repair this deep ontological wound.

He starts from the premise that consciousness intrinsically experiences the intuition of soul and its loneliness in the world (its failure to fit in), or at least consciousness in what he would have called the “six thousand years” of Western history. The major religions and philosophical movements of the West have built on this intuition and also strengthened it. Sacrificial religion, Judaism, orthodox Christianity, Aristotle, and the Stoics all conspire to diminish the ontological status of the human being in its own eyes by representing the soul as “an atom in darkness,” a mere spot of consciousness engulfed by all-powerful external forces. The most recent avatars of this error can be found in empiricism and the New Science.

Blake’s critique of empiricism is usually described in philosophical terms as an objection to its ontology, its treatment of Nature and natural man as final realities. But Blake’s more profound objection to empiricism is psychological: the New Science is “a Science [of] Despair.” It encourages the center of consciousness, or “I,” to regard itself as passive and helpless. The “I” has been thrust into a material world whose power and influence over it are disproportionate; it is invisible and intangible where the world is solid and real.

The world was there before it, and so its “life” is largely reactive. It floats about, an immaterial node, embedded in its disturbing private experience. It can master neither the stimuli to which it is exposed nor the effects of stimuli in its interior. The “I” finds the self to be dark and strange, occupied by things it does not acknowledge as its own — hidden processes and extrinsic “impressions” the world has forced upon it.

In empiricist psychology, personal identity; or the unique “I,” is stranded. Because it is immaterial, it is isolated in the material world, and because it is an atomic or unique existence, it is isolated in itself. Blake summarizes this plight in The Four Zoas in the opening lament of Tharmas, who complains of having a troubling and contradictory sense of self:

I am like an atom
A Nothing left in darkness yet I am an identity
I wish & feel & weep & groan Ah terrible terrible
The Four Zoas, William Blake

Tharmas says he feels like an “atom” because he is experiencing his subject-life in the terms that empirical science suggests. He must figure the “I” as a thing because the spiritual terms have been debarred.

So he describes the “I” as a little node of consciousness adrift in a dark and alien world of matter. It is a like an atom: single, essential, small, opaque. And yet it is not material after all. Consciousness is not comparable to matter, but once matter is stipulated as the prevailing reality, consciousness loses definition. What place in a material world can that have which is immaterial, and hence wispy and spectral? So Tharmas pessimistically revises his formulation; his “I” is less than an atom, it is ‘A Nothing left in darkness.” But that description does not seem quite accurate to him either, and he has to revise again. “I am… A Nothing left in darkness yet I am an identity.”

Dwarfed by the dominance of matter, the “I” feels that it is nothing, and yet it also has the opposite intuition: it knows itself as the one reality it is sure of (as Descartes would say), the one true being, an “identity” How to explain this contradiction? The word “identity” takes over here from the word “atom”: it is still reductive, it still suggests thing-ness.

Blake no doubt alludes to the chapter of Locke’s Essay in which he defines “personal identity,” or continuity of the self, in minimal terms as present consciousness plus its continuous memories of itself. This is a narrow definition, befitting a materialist psychology, and to Blake’s mind it deserves parody. Blake counters empiricist definition in this passage by using the word “identity” in a subtly: ironic sense, intimating its perverse inadequacy. Tharmas clearly feels no better once he has defined consciousness as “identity” because he right away dissolves into incoherent emotional protest: ‘Ah terrible terrible.”

Thus he characterizes himself as an “identity” insofar as he “wish[es] & feel[s] & weep[s groan[s]” in vain. Tharmas finds that selfhood seems on the one hand insignificant, cant and on the other, absolutely central. Even in an empiricist, the inter life reasserts its urgency, but it cannot assign a meaning or purpose to either its tumults or their bearing on anything without. A Nothing left in darkness ought not to be burdened with a vain but engulfing internal life, and that is what seems so “terrible.”

Empiricism’s reductive accounts of identity fail to address the urgency the inner life. Blake’s point is not that philosophy remains irrelevant to our daily practice, but rather something much deeper. He perceives that the subject cannot possibly conform to the proscription on selfhood implicit empiricism; it cannot live peacefully with the contradiction between the conclusions of naturalism and the intuition of selfhood.

The place of the subject in a material world has become a vital issue with the rise of the New Science amid the New Science, Blake says, has imposed on the subject an untenable view of itself. One cannot live with the bracketing of subjectivity; it creates a form of psychological division too agitating to be ignored. The transcendent intuition pursues you even if you disavow it. It must be owned, but possibly the worst way to own it is through orthodox cosmology, theology, or eschatology in which the divinity of the soul is referred to the noblesse oblige of a tyrannical creator-god and to fulfillment in another life. Blake recommends instead identifying it with a creative power that is your own possession in the here and now. Above all, he says, how the self thinks and feels about itself must be taken into account. A descriptive psychology like his own, he asserts, speaks directly to the self’s intuitions and fictions about itself.

When Tharmas adopts the empiricist view of the subject — when he defines himself as Natural Man — he falls into a revealing state of confusion. His bafflement reminds us that although empiricism and the scientific materialism to which it is related claim to present an objective or “neutral” view, they are themselves ideological, forcefully “interpellating a subject,” [the process by which ideology addresses the pre-ideological individual and produces him or her as a subject proper]as we would say now, rather than leaving the domain blank, as it purports to do.

Peter Otto forcefully remarks: “Blake is not suggesting that Locke, Bacon, and Newton are wrong in their descriptions of fallen humanity. In fact they are correct.”  That is how we live now. Any body of knowledge that gives an account of human nature automatically “interpellates a subject,” and it perpetrates bad faith when it claims that it does not. Blake makes this argument in his address “To the Deists,” where he insists “Man must & will have Some Religion; if he has not the Religion of Jesus, he will have the Religion of Satan” (J 52, Ezot).

Consciously or not, everyone holds some concept of the human and the divine and their interrelation. There is such a view hidden in empiricism, precisely insofar as it denies that anything meaningful can be said about the divine and the relation of the human to the divine. For embedded in this notion is an assertion of the subject’s helplessness. If we must have a view, says Blake, let us have a more constructive one. Let us have Blake’s own, in which there is neither a distant nor a punitive God and the human subject does not have to look upon itself as a poor thing abandoned to darkness.