Eros, Dialectic, the New Order: Wm. Blake Blazed the Way
…What is less well known than the triumph of Hegel through his Marxist-Sociologist and Positivist brethren is that the brilliant, eccentric “prophetic books” of English poet-philosopher William Blake (1757-1827) predated Hegel by several decades. Blake’s statement of an all-pervasive, universal dialectic is emphatic and precise: ”without contraries there is no progression,” with energy/desire and reason/oppression being the “contraries,” the thesis and antithesis. Moreover, Blake’s dialectic operates on many levels, — individual psychology, social and erotic relationships; national integrity and global harmony via the reconciliation of Albion with his alienated emanation, Jerusalem in a cosmic marriage that also should occur within each person.
thus Blake fully articulates the erotic aspect of politics that dominates the post WW II world, that emerged strikingly in the “cult of sensibility” in the third quarter of the 18th century (the dominion of Rousseau), and that is clear in the feminism and worship of a goddess “humanity” in Marx and Comte. These social programs and theories build on a cultural compost of English feminism (its founding text, by Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792) that traces back ultimately to pagan Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece with their worship of the “Queen of heaven” (cf. Jeremiah’s warning in 44-5). In the Greek version this is a violently transgendered and magical pardigm. All these forces are vigorously and elaborately described and depicted by Blake in the poetic books that he illustrated with androgynous figures in dramatic conflict that have explicit socio-political, theological and relational aspects. Erotic and, as we have learned to say, psychological torment, outburst and consummation figure strikingly in his work that goes beyond Hegel and his followers.
Let’s consider Blake’s statement and illustration of the dialectic in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790).
The title immediately alerts a post-Hegelian and Nietzschean reader to the dialectic and revolutionary purpose, including shocking of the middle class inherent in the work. But Blake will not leave the center of his change-agency to allusion but spells it out in a series of propositions that neither Hegel nor twentieth century sages like Wittgenstein bettered.
“Without Contraries is no progression. Love and Hate are necessary to Human existence.
“From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.” And now he adds the shock of transvalued terms and synthesis or “marriage” to his dialectic. “Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.
“Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.”
[Here is the essay from the beginning]
Many literate people associate the idea of dialectics, specifically, an inevitable dialectical progress in history with Georg W. F. Hegel. Denoting this theory as “Hegelian” is commonplace. Fewer people know that Hegel considered the State to be “the march of God through history,” that is that the State would integrate and direct all social forces toward shaping the “truth,” the realization of the intangible light of truth in daily forms.
Thus the State and the cognoscenti that run it displace G-d as those who create reality and displace or control free-will individuals and choices toward a pre-selected outcome.
This schema fed into what Auguste Comte described as all people, bereft of freedom and individuality ruled by the “High Priest of Humanity” in “the true Universal Church” of Positivism in which “the religion of science is inaugurated and man will confide in the ‘sociologians’ just as Catholics once did in priests” (Comte, System of Positive Polity, 1851-4, IV, 224-49; R.L. Hawkins, Positivism in the US, 1938). Indeed, just as Hegel’s dialectic was the core of Marx’s derivative Manifesto, so Comte insisted that “the fundamental principle of Communism [subordination of the individual to the State and of thought to group-think] is one which the Positivist school must adopt” (op. cit. I. 124).
These are the theories, long since crystallized into dogma, institutions, and professions that shape and direct our era to this day. “The only real life is the collective life” and the purpose of education is “to make us all alike” (ibid. I. 292; R.L. Finney, A Sociological Philosophy of Education, 1929, p.416).
What is less well known than the triumph of Hegel through his Marxist-Sociologist and Positivist brethren is that the brilliant, eccentric “prophetic books” of English poet-philosopher William Blake (1757-1827) predated Hegel by several decades. Not only is Blake’s statement of dialectic universal and precise but the erotic element that dominates the post WW II world, sketched in the feminism and worship of a goddess “humanity” in Marx and Comte, itself building on English feminism is vigorously and elaborately described and depicted by Blake in the poetic books that he illustrated with androgynous figures in dramatic conflict. Erotic and, as we have learned to say, psychological torment, outburst and consummation figure strikingly in his work.
Let’s consider Blake’s statement and illustration of the dialectic in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790).
The title immediately alerts a post-Hegelian and Nietzschean reader to the dialectic and revolutionary purpose, including shocking of the middle class inherent in the work. But Blake will not leave the center of his change-agency to allusion but spells it out in a series of propositions that neither Hegel nor twentieth century sages like Wittgenstein bettered.
“Without Contraries is no progression. Love and Hate are necessary to Human existence.
“From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.” And now he adds the shock of transvalued terms and synthesis or “marriage” to his dialectic. “Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.
“Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.”
To the last proposition readers would say ‘of course’ except that Blake has just inverted the categories of moral and existential value and of the social order.
With succinct, defiant jauntiness Blake redefines Heaven and reason as fearful and oppressive and Hell as vital. The view that Jews were exclusive, cruel, patriarchal and possessive was a cornerstone of Theosophy and all the cults it influenced. The heart must dominate the intellect, as Comte later was to write; the female must dominate the male for “the Great Being is the realization of a feminist utopia and “the great family the offspring of a spouseless mother” like Gaia in the pagan Greek Theogeny of Hesiod (Comte, ibid. I. 285-7, 359, 244). Regarding this resurgence of a goddess cult and its modeling for Humanity as a whole, Blake surmounts the engraved page on which his credo appears with a muscular nude woman reclining on and surrounded with flames that play around her limbs and stream from her crotch. Her breasts are like the pectoral muscles of a highly ‘buffed’ athlete today. Pictured below the propositions of endless dialectic strife and progression, “Good is Heaven, Evil is Hell,” a female of more womanly form sprawls on her back, legs spread in the act of giving birth. The emerging infant raises an arm skyward; it reads distinctly as a phallus and the head as a scrotal sack. Fleeing energetically, perhaps joyously from the fleshly prison (this is how Blake described it often), from the result of the “marriage,” a running youth covers a flying maiden, their arms, torsos and crotches aligned as they kiss on the fly.
This is a moral, social, and philosophical visual-statement of unique intensity. The woman above in flames is the superintendent goddess of the marriage and its erotic synthesis of new male (thesis) and female (antithesis; see also “the Everlasting Gospel”). But the redeemer, the human imagination, “he who dwells in flaming fire” also is often pictured as a male rebel whose frustrated energy becomes rage and, with the fearful, possessive resistance of the female may chain the world in conflict that preempts union and synthesis. Yet his energy, and woman’s inner drive for “the moment of desire” makes the youth the potential champion as in the very next plate, 4, that elaborates Blake’s dialectic statement of transvalued morals. But here Blake lets the Devil speak for, by his antithesis to tradition, this “is the active, springing from Energy” and is “Good.”
The Voice of the
Devil
All Bibles or Sacred Codes have been the causes of the following Errors:
1. That Man has two real existing principles, viz. a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body and that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these [statements] are True
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of the Soul discerned by the Five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight
Below the two pairs of propositions, thesis and antithesis sets leading to what Blake hopes to be a new synthesis, an age when there will be additional or new “chief inlets of Soul” he engraved and colored an image of dialectic conflict: striding on the sea, a nude woman holds a child away from a man in flames, balanced on one foot and reaching balletically toward them with a stunned and angry face. An embodiment of synthesis and the Good Energy of the Devil with his flames on the waters he is thwarted from further marriage by her possessive withholding in an uncanny image of the picture of society promulgated by positivist science. This is a mutually torturous separation that Blake’s characters struggle to resolve in new unity (cf. Jerusalem and Milton) where the lonely, frustrated male maker and creator must persist in his “mental fight,” image making and love till he is received by his female emanation in an integrated, fertile and joyous consciousness. But in plate 4 of “the Marriage” the stress of the contraries is highlighted with the woman holding a flaming red sun as a weapon and withheld prize. It is the sun, the symbol of imaginative and loving fire that Blake identifies with the lonely and yearning male creator, threatened by despair and persisting in his “mental fight.”
To herald the proclamation of the new antithesis to the old repressive thesis in plate 4, Blake surrounds the title, “The voice of the Devil” with graceful, flying robed angels pointing and sounding trumpets to the sky. His boldness and lack of ‘good’ humility was part of the ‘devilishly’ good, indeed salvational point he felt he was asserting. Here, in 1790 we had not only Hegel, Marx, Comte, Nietzsche and modernism in all the areas of life but a look ahead to “Sympathy for the Devil” and the celebration of the rebel and revolution, of ostensibly therapeutic and erotic social and spiritual upheaval. Blake was not modest or ‘good,” he brought the redeemer of imaginative and political energy.
Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or Reason usurps its [Desire’s] place & governs the unwilling. And being restrained it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of Desire…and the Governor or Reason is call’d Messiah. Here is the ideological and metaphysical basis of ‘free love’ and the glorification of spontaneity and passion that forms modern culture. It is the Romantic displacement of the G-d and code of Scriptures with a new twist on ancient pagan worship of the senses and sensate. The radical paradigm shift is summed by Blake in plate 6 where he writes that “the Father sends the comforter, or Desire that Reason may have ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he who dwells in flaming fire.” So the traditional Creator and Father is the Devil, by the old terms and values and a kind Devil in Blake’s new “Bible of Hell.” “Desire, the comforter” that enables reason with substance is a pattern dramatized in all Blake’s epic books. And the inversion is doubled by the statement, “that after Christ’s death he became Jehovah.” Here is the Hellenist subversion of the father by the son overlaid on the new truth that the fire of Hell is the saving, comforting desire of the Father and the Son, the “devils” by traditional misreading, as Blake sees it. After all, “Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion” (plate 8). As a “Proverb of Hell,” this is a liberating, redemptive truth. As one would expect, for all the conceptual and moral revolution, aspects of the traditional Christian paradigm remain. If only it wasn’t for the cruel stone of law there would be no sin, crime or misery. It would be ‘freedom now’ for us all. The lonely, weeping, frightened, oppressive “Nobodaddy” (nobody’s daddy”) clutching his stones of Law is the G-d of the Jews, the precursor of dearth Vader. The youth flaming with desire and Los (loss, also called Orc), hammering discrete words and images of desire from a rock is the potential redeemer, if only he does not cease articulating his new vision. For this too, Blake is our rock. The Scriptures are perverted: Eve was right to take, eat and share the apple of the knowledge of good and evil whose ‘real’ meaning Blake here presents.
Hegel called for a mythology of reason and a synthesis of mythology and philosophy. Blake preceded him in time and profundity in providing this synthesis that is a synthesis of art, politics, pscyhology and theology; a comprehensive mythology of desire as the core vital principle of soul that articulation in art enables the union of all opposites and reconciliation of all conflicts in an unending dialectic of hammering out “minute particulars” to be critiqued, resisted but ultimately welcomed as a pathway to spiritual, physical and political embrace. Blake’s model of dialectical conflict and resolution, as noted produces the marriage of Albion with his alienated wife, the emanation Jerusalem.
Here one could say is the ultimate synthesis and appropriation of the West’s essentially synthetic and dynamic, fissionable character, working by successive dialectic conflicts with its own composite roots and striving endlessly to re-define and absorb the Scriptures, Land, name and teachings of Israel. No one did it more radically than Blake.
This core pattern of his thought epitomizes Blake’s appropriation of Jewish Scriptures and sense of historical purpose; and anticipates deconstruction too. No post-Modernist, save perhaps in geopolitics shatters and re-shapes the writings, land, and people of Israel more radically than Blake who absorbs Jerusalem into England, as it’s called in its Modern iteration, the Oceanic commonwealth of English speaking peoples. This all is part of Christianity’s Gnostic re-fashioning of the Hebrew Scriptures that has been working out its logic for 1800 years in ways ever more sensate and productive of panic and terror, the offspring of Aphrodite born of a son and mother’s castration of a father… Aphrodite herself, embodying her father’s members being the hermaphroditic synthesis of violent strife and Hellenistic-Modern symbol of “love” in the new order.
Percy Shelley, who did not know of the cockney Blake, based both the structure of his major works, their action and characters on this erotic-political-psychological dialectic. A current crisis or sterile stasis of spirit and society prompt introspection and recall of hopes and desires; the resulting contraries produce thawing, new hope, joy or at least insight that allows life to proceed. In his epic Prometheus Unbound (1818-20) the fearful tyranny of Jupiter, emblem of empire provokes the intense hatred and rebellion of Prometheus. This thesis and antithesis sparks pain in the young rebel that activates the redemptive voyage of “the Child of Light,” the goddess Asia (from the Hebrew word, isha, for “woman”) that thaws the frozen world, bringing social and creative liberation, joy and life. Blake studied Hebrew and Kabbala and it is noteworthy that the Hebrew wordsboth women and man (isha and ish) both derive from their subroot, fire (aish). Blake drew extensively, as above in the symbolism suggested by the etymology.
“A new world is emerging in which the social structure will be of a different shape, the social resources of a different scope and caliber than anything that history records. It is a new deal…and we who are now alive are privileged to witness its beginning…and for a new age, a new school.” These words might be from Shelley’s Defence of Poetry” (1821) and are in truth their ideological offspring. They were penned by Ross L. Finney, Asst. Professor Educational of Sociology (A Sociological Philosophy of Education, New York, 1928). As the title of the author and his book indicate, we should follow the radical exaltation of dialectic transformation of people and society through Comte and Hegel’s twentieth century students, intent on creating the world he and Positivism envisioned the new world that Blake foresaw and helped form notwithstanding that he would in some ways decry; indeed it would crush him and Shelley. As Comte wrote, “we must get rid of personality if we wish to found an enduring discipline in the name of Humanity for everything comes to us from her,” emphasis added, IV. 249; the Catechism of Positive Religion, 1852, p. 213).
No, Shelley and Blake abhorred repression of individuality. But their glorification of the senses in the service of the imagination and its goal of love led to dogmas that demanded “the organization of feeling” to achieve “the new world” (Dynamic Sociology, Lester F. Ward, 1833). Shelley rolls in his grave to discover that “the splendors of the firmament of time,” the great poets he celebrated in Adonais, his elegy for John Keats would lead to a “spiritual hierarchy of sociologists” (System of Positive Polity, IV. 224-5 and R. L. Hawkins, 1938). This is what results from mingling Adonis with the L-rd and Creator, “the One, the Unborn and the Undying” as Shelley wrote in his later epic, Hellas which itself is filled with startling appropriations from Scripture (eg. the merging of the figure of “the wandering Jew” as a wise seer with Ahasuerus, the emotional Persian tyrant (cf Book of Esther).
But the myth of redemptive imagination for psychic integration and free love described by the quintessential Romantics as a dialectic of struggle would lead to a coercive, therapeutic utopia beyond the means of former Empires. Their seductive appeals to freedom and nature prepared the ground for Hegel, Marx, Comte, and the managers and Darwinists of a New World Social Order. Thus an appreciative twentieth century reader of Shelley wrote, “the task before UNESCO is to help the emergence of a single world culture.” And he described the path to the world state as dialectic: “individualism versus collectivism; Christianity versus Marxism. Can this antithesis be resolved in a higher synthesis? through the inexorable dialectic of evolution it must happen” (Julian Huxley, UNESCO: its Purpose and Philosophy, 1947, NY). Blake, Shelley and Hegel put the concept of dialectic progress into cultural discourse and a generation and two later, Darwin and his popularizer Thomas Henry Huxley, Julian’s grandfather it produced a theory that put its stamp on education, psychology, politics, and morals. The self-generating processes of dialectic imply evolutionism and its synonym, progress or, as the Romantics said, “Perfectibility.” What the Romantics did not realize and their followers promote is that progress consists of regression of human beings to animals, to machines as Positivism, Psychology and psychologized education, media and politics have demonstrated. Love is lust; imagination is group-think, the suppression and drowning of thought; individual desire and identity (a sine qua non for Blake) yields to the suppression of personality, of the masses, anyway. The hierarchy answers to no one but “the High Priest of Humanity.”
There we are, in a few generations, back to Shelley’s Jupiter, to Aldous Huxley’s Mustapha Mond (Brave New World, 1931); to whoever is secretary General of the UN and the New World Social Order for which it fronts and prepares. The dialectic lives; it rules. Terrorism must be enabled, never defeated or clearly defined. It rationalizes the antithesis of “security measures” that will bring on a multicultural World State which selects and molds its human resources with a precision the Ariosophists and their Nazi successors only dreamt or, in the latter case, began in horribly brutal industrial centers of population control and scientific research for “eugenics.” As Jacques Cousteau said, “we must eliminate 350,000 people a day to stabilize the world population.” The Club of Rome was more specific in the purpose of the modern priests of dialectic: “humanity itself is the enemy” (1991).
The Romantic revolution has itself undergone a dialectic that has changed its freedom and desire to coercion, reductive uniformity and punitive homogenization of the genders. “I believe that the New World Order will not be fully realized unless the United Nations and its Security Council create structures authorized to impose sanctions and use methods of compulsion” (Mikhail Gorbachev, to the United World Religions [see the worship of the goddess, Humanity, above], 1992). “Women will be rendered independent of men…a female friend would in most cases do better than the father himself” (Comte, System for Positive Polity, IV. 244, 195). And so we have the end to the dialectic of desire elaborated by Blake and the fruitful, ordered dialectic of the sexes created and established by the Almighty. The new sociology of science imposes itself as the “mythology of reason” Hegel and the Romantics stirred and an ice age of stilled souls increasingly overspreads the world. Management and control put all processes into fewer and fewer hands; borders, thought, discussion and disagreement, people as human beings all disappear. “The Security Council of the UN is the management committee of our fledgling global security state” (Kofi Anan, 12/11/06).
The regressive thrust of progressivism has revealed itself as yet another form of self-idolatry, arrogance and imperial will and the Hebrew Scriptures that Blake, like so many rewrote for their own purposes look better than ever as they recede beneath the noise.
What a great and terrible irony that Shelley may have been on target in his memorable conclusion in the Defence that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” He ranked high among those who initiated passage to a world in which poetry is all but impossible, a world of slogans, clichés, and the terror and cowardice that uses them in place of thought and eloquence; a world of ‘wonder women’ and crushed fathers. Beneath the torrent of information, the crushing sludge of instructions on therapies and security the still small voice is heard ever more faintly and by few. The deadening, living dead world of Plato’s Republic, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Comte’s Positivism and the World Security State buries the flickering outposts of humanity. Perhaps toward evening, there will be light…
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford U. Press, 1975, Sir Geoffrey Keynes notes, from Fitzwilliam Museum copy)
Quotes on Positivism from studies by Erica Claire