I made a more than passing reference to William Blake – specifically his “America: A Prophecy” in my previous housekeeping post, and made mere passing references to Jacob Bronowski and Robert Pirsig.
An amazing tangle of threads coming together, that serve to reinforce my #NothingNewUnderTheSun angle that everything that needs saying has already been said before and, apart from branding and marketing – ie attention seeking – there is very little need to re-write or re-invent anything.
The subject of the reference was a new paper by Daniel Ari Friedman ‘Before Pragmatism Had a Name: William Blake’s “America: A Prophecy” Anticipates American Anticipatory Epistemology’
Apart from very encouraging introductory sections (quoted in that earlier reference) I’ve not read the paper itself yet, but I have been picking up the threads I referred to, before I do actually read it.
As the techie / geeky / engineer type long before my conversion on the road to Damascus, I was nevertheless a fan of the humanity in Bronowski’s (1973) “Ascent of Man”. It was much later I picked-up on his prior Blake scholarship in (1943) “Man Without a Mask“. What I hadn’t noticed until today, is there are a handful of Blake references already in his Ascent of Man. (He also did his research and teaching at Hull University, home of the Centre for Systems Studies – footnote here – but I digress.)
Anyway in “America: A Prophecy” – Plate 8 – there is of course a reference to Blake’s “Urizen” – the Americans were rebelling against what Urizen emboied in terms of rational codification of rules whether based on science or religion and enforced by the authority of a monarch.
The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,
What night he led the starry hosts thro’ the wide wilderness:
That stony law I stamp to dust: and scatter religion abroad
To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves
But they shall rot on desart sands, & consume in bottomless deeps
Ditto Milton. Ditto Shelley. Clearly also the same “Church of Reason” Pirsig was warning against, and providing an alternative in his Metaphysics of Quality. It’s the enforced codification that drives the life out of humanity.
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