Division, fragmentation, bloody strife: the watchwords of our times. People of many persuasions are growing increasingly troubled by the tension. Many are striving to grasp what is going on and opinions abound, even as the possibility of reconciliation seems to slip further over the horizon.
The British poet and painter William Blake offers an alternative analysis. He combines poetry, imagery and reason, which means that his diagnosis of human ills is also an antidote; he transmits fresh vision as well as deep insights. Moreover, he, too, knew the dire need for wider perspectives and renewed horizons. In short, he offers an understanding of the active role played by the imagination in our lives, for good and ill. His insights into this powerful human capacity is what I want to unpack here. I think it is key.
Blake (1757-1827) was born in the Georgian period, an era of endemic violence that frequently tipped into outright war. He witnessed the American War of Independence and its aftermath, the French Revolution and subsequent Terror, and the Napoleonic Wars that wrecked Europe for over a decade. Millions were killed, more displaced.
However, Blake recognised and accepted something crucial about the human condition and people’s feelings of fear, hate and destruction, which pertains as much now as then.
Human beings live in a world shaped by oppositions. These struggles show up as moral conundrums, political conflicts, psychological tensions. Blake called them “contraries” and was sure they are an inherent feature of human existence. Where there is love, there will be fear; where longing, hate; where desire, destruction. The stress arises because we are creatures driven by our imaginations. We yearn for novelty, pleasures, understanding and also what Blake called “the all” and “the infinite”.
In other words, the human species seems uniquely evolved to be both excessive and insatiable, generous and pernicious. Blake expressed as much in wonderfully vivid phrases. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”, he wrote, as well as suggesting, “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”. Such paradoxes frame our genius and vulnerability.
[Plate of the poem “London”, in which the verse expresses the “marks of weakness, marks of woe” and the pictures capture scenes of kindness and warmth]
The question, then, is how to live that imaginative power, for it drives people of all times as much as they drive it. Blake was clear about one option: curbing the desires that can stoke social and personal trouble is not the route to take. “Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained,” he concluded. He had spotted that trying to control and imprison the energies of the human soul is inclined to dehumanise people, which in turn produces more despair and rage, not less. But there is another way – a way that by Blake’s light had become obscure though not, in fact, lost.
In short, we have become imaginatively trapped. “For man has closed himself up, til’ he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern,” Blake explained – observing materialistic ways of perceiving the world and relating to life that were developing in his times, which have become the norm in ours. The modern imagination has become constrained, making the perennial tensions of existence intolerable. This cultural flatness emerges periodically in history. “When nations grow old, the arts grow cold, and commerce settles on every tree,” Blake noted, and we are in such a moment now. The result is social strife and personal distress that strains established political institutions.
That said, a diagnosis of imaginative inertia as a root cause of contemporary troubles might seem odd, given the seemingly pervasive presence of innovation in our lives. Think entertainment, design, distraction: barely a surface in the modern city or home is without a flashing image or clever enticement. But Blake’s point is not that this age is without imagination. Rather, it is the ends to which our imaginative endeavours are aimed that matters – which Blake explored visually in one of his best known images, “Newton.”
A heroic figure, reminiscent of a statuesque nude by Michelangelo, sits on a large rock; he gazes through his legs at a scroll. This is Isaac Newton and Blake is, in part, celebrating the famous physicist. Newton is concentrating hard, examining an inscribed arc and triangle with a pair of compasses. But darkness also envelops him. Blake paints him submerged in an ocean, also turned from pink sea anemones and green polyps that flourish on the rock that is his seat. Newton looks down, oblivious to the vitality behind and above him, absorbed instead by geometric abstractions on paper.
This mentality, which Blake calls “single vision and Newton’s sleep”, defines our age and has trapped us. But there is a paradox. Its development is also immensely productive and is itself a tremendous act of imagination. For Newton made a remarkable discovery. Simple laws, represented by elegant equations, can describe the movement of everything from falling apples to the rotation of the Moon around the Earth.
Newton excited his fellow natural philosophers and intellectual successors. The activity now called science was launched. Numerous discoveries followed, revolutionising how humanity seeks knowledge and, more subtly, also how things are perceived. Regularities mattered more than revelations; measurements more than meaning – not only in physics but in other domains of knowledge, too, including ethics and psychology, politics and economics. Utilitarianism was one result, the idea that the good is not a transcendental goal but simply what brings the most happiness. Evidence and observation were also stressed – or as Blake parodied it: “By demonstration man alone can live and not by faith.”
That said, faith did play a crucial part in the emergence of science because underpinning this re-imagining of the world was a distinctive theology. Deism views God as a great legislator and engineer. The cosmos is no longer felt to be a living organism, shaped by spirits and other agencies, but instead is imagined having been intricately designed. The universe, at the largest scales and the smallest, could now be treated as if it were composed of parts, each fitted to the other, like cogs in a great machine. All these elements, from atoms to stars, were said to obey laws – and that includes human minds, too. The world had become “a mill with complicated wheels”, as Blake put it. However, as Blake knew, every advance has a shadow.
Deism gave tremendous confidence to early modern scientists but it also drove the conflicts of the time, both personal and political. Figures who championed the revolutions in France and America claimed the rule of God for their cause. But so did the Ancien Régime that sought to suppress the revolutionaries.
[Plate from America A Prophecy, which depicts Paine in the midst of the flames of revolution.]
Take Thomas Paine, whom Blake personally knew as a friend – though spiritually they were at odds. Like many of the Founding Fathers, Paine was a deist. He believed in reason rather than revelation and that Christianity should be promoted primarily as a powerful moral creed.
Blake, on the other hand, loathed this rationalistic spirituality with a passion. He felt it was a product of how people’s imaginations had become enamoured with the power of scientific perception, but thereby become constrained. The stress on ethics is a case in point. Before the modern age, moral philosophy had taught virtues: the habits and qualities that shape people. Now, though, the focus is on what is right and wrong, who is in and who is out, and people inevitably become divided. The tragedy is that the aim of modern ethics is good: to live well personally and foster a society that might flourish. But the result is bad.
Blake repeatedly talks of “the Wastes of Moral Law”, noting how politics collapses into a never-ending series of issues. This obsession with specific erodes any overarching vision, causing not only conflicts but forcing opponents into a zero-sum game. Think of abortion, guns, immigration. When moralising becomes the main feature of religious and civic discourse, defeating opponents becomes a prime aim. “The moral virtues are continual accusers of sin and promote eternal wars and domineering over others,” Blake wrote. “As a man is, so he sees,” he grimly observed.
Today, the fragmentation is exacerbated by social media – or rather, the appeal of much social media is that it reflects the prior assumption that everyone can and should be categorised according to whether they are right or wrong, liked or disliked, friend or foe. The algorithms have a hold on us because moralising has already become a way of life, itself the legacy of deism. Similarly, democratic politics, particularly in America, has evolved to reward the politicians who appeal most to their base. That tendency embeds differences and narrows the kind of imagination required to reach across divides.
“I sought pleasure and found pain unutterable.”
So Blake’s point is that the problems of today are symptoms of a wider cultural issue: the imprisoned imagination is one that fails to see alternative ways forward. But his analysis also points a way forward: to return to the fundamental issue and address ways of re-expanding the imagination. Without that restoration, we will be stuck fighting fires, ignorant of the causes of conflagrations. With it, though, we can once again see the world anew.
The word “imagination” itself needs to reclaim its depth, from implying something made up to the capacity to see how things are wonderfully made. “To the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself!” Blake declared. Similarly, Blake’s God is not an engineer but a supreme artist: the divine source of the inspiration perceived as active in all things. Further, Blake stressed that we humans are at our best when collaborating with this divine activity, which, moreover, God wants. That is why we have an insatiable desire for more.
To this extent, Blake might be called a Romantic. Poets that followed him, like John Keats, protested that science was “unweaving the rainbow” in the way that it prioritises explanations over meaning, the logical over the symbolic. Others poets, like William Wordsworth, addressed the issue of ethics, finding guidance not in rules that divide but the “life of things” that unites: the beauty of the natural world and the emotions that inspire.
However, Blake had something crucial that the Romantics who followed him were inclined to forget. He was not against science per se, often talking of a “sweet science” that helps illuminate the beauty of things, and he was also never nostalgic for an era of meaning and connection now deemed lost or past. Rather, he was aided by his stress on contraries. It is possible to move through a period of narrowed perception, which of course brings many goods, if we can recall the soul and spirit alive within us that materialism, for all its benefits, is inclined to occlude. “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite,” Blake wrote. We can recover that further horizon – the infinity that the human creature needs to satisfy its insatiable desire.
In other words, contraries needn’t lead to bloody conflict. Instead, they can be embraced like the north and south poles of a magnet. These opposites hold between them a field: the energy of a magnet. Similarly, human contraries are really the products of the tension inherent in life and can energise us to become sources of dynamism and creative vitality, not destruction. “Without contraries [there] is no progression,” Blake wrote, “Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence.”
The freed imagination knows how to love this exuberance and embrace its tensions. When the imagination is trusted, and not dismissed as mere fancy, it is known to be a bearer of truths that elude reason alone, which reason can help discern and discover. Human beings and even the cosmos are not fundamentally shaped by rules, but sympathies; not by constraints, but abundance. This awareness grows as the contraries of art and science, imagination and reason, revelation and deduction work together. “What is the life of man but Art and Science?” Blake affirms, adding that “Arts and Sciences are the Destruction of Tyrannies or Bad Governments.”
A renewed imagination can see this is so and the divine imagination, in fact, never really left us. There is, therefore, good news, even amidst the fragmentation of today. In fact, especially so.
