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, and repeated below) 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 embodied in terms of rational codification of rules whether based on science or religion and enforced by the authority of a monarch or church.
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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Opening extract from
Daniel Ari Friedman – Before Pragmatism Had a Name: William Blake’s “America A Prophecy” Anticipates American Anticipatory Epistemology. Daniel of ISSS 2025/DC Systems Knowledge Base etc AND of the “Active Inference” Institute – incidentally based on the work of Solms’ collaborator Karl Friston. The best current systems thinkers are pragmatists in the respectable sense of the word. I’ve ordered the Blake originals (America & Europe) and started on Daniel’s paper – all 83 pages(!) – it starts:
The Unlikely Dialogue Between Prophecy and Empiricism
At first glance, William Blake (1757–1827)—the visionary poet-painter who conversed with angels, denounced Newton, and declared “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s”—seems utterly remote from the hard-headed philosophy of action and inference that Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and
John Dewey launched in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an ocean away and a half-century after Blake’s death. Blake was a Romantic mystic; the pragmatists were post-Darwinian naturalists. Blake attacked empiricism as “Newton’s sleep”; the pragmatists embraced “the empiricist attitude.”[Peirce, 1877] Blake prophesied in illuminated etchings; Peirce formalized in symbolic logic.And yet the distance collapses under examination. Both Blake and the pragmatists mount a sustained assault on the same philosophical target: the spectator theory of knowledge—the Cartesian-Lockean picture of the mind as a passive mirror or dark chamber receiving impressions from an external world. For Blake, this is the sin of Urizen, the tyrannical Reason-God who “closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”[Blake, 1790] For Dewey, it is the core error of Western philosophy from Plato to positivism, the assumption that knowing is contemplating rather than doing. For Peirce, it is the fatal conceit of Cartesian foundationalism—pretending “to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”[Peirce, 1877]
This manuscript argues that Blake’s visionary epistemology and American Pragmatism share not merely superficial affinities but deep structural convergences across six qualitative dimensions:
- Inquiry as Active Engagement
- Truth as Living Process
- Experience as Transaction
- The Social Constitution of the Self
- Anti-Representationalism
- Synergetics and Pragmatic Geometry
[Pirsigians see ourselves as following the James / Dewey / Peirce US pragmatist tradition – against that “church” of the “tyrannical god of reason”. I’ve got my earliest enlightened modern reading of Blake from Jacob Bronowski. Fascinating.]
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Topical? Today in IAI news: Heisenberg meets William Blake: The danger of science’s “single vision” by Mark Vernon, previously one of my goto’s on Dante and Barfield … and now Blake – “The need for poetic science”.
Wonder if Mark Vernon has read Daniel Friedman’s piece?
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