The Outer History
William Blake was born on November 28th 1757 in Broad Street, off Golden Square, Soho, on the site of the current Blake House, in today's Marshall Street. His parents were of a lower Middle Class background, his father being a successful hosier. Both were Protestant dissenters of a very liberal hue. More significantly the father was a disciple of the mystic visionary Emmanuel Swedenborg.

Encouraged in his art since childhood, from the age of ten Blake was sent to a drawing school just off the Strand, near Charing Cross, where he took to engraving copies of Classical Greek Art. After demonstrating some skill at this he became, at fourteen, an apprentice to an engraver in Covent Garden, where he served the traditional seven years apprenticeship. Following which he took up a place at the Royal Academy studying painting.

It was during his time at the Royal Academy that the earliest elements of his philosophy emerged. Here he clashed with the art establishment of his time, and particularly Joshua Reynolds, declaring his opposition to the Baroque movement, which felt tended to self indulgently exaggerate emotion, and glorify egoism and power. At the same time he also rejected basic Platonism, by denying the reality of the universal and ideal, in favour of the particular and natural. Though he continued to affirm the reality of the Pythagorean universal ideals of harmony, beauty, and morality. He developed a love of Gothic religious imagery and architecture. While his ideas would evolve over time these basic assumptions would remain central to his philosophy.

After leaving the Academy in 1782 he met both his devoted wife, Catherine, and his first financial patron, the successful sculptor and draughtsman John Flaxman. He could thus begin a career as an engraver and painter. Shortly afterwards he also self published a book of poems, Poetical Sketches, followed in 1789 by Songs of Innocence, which was itself continued in Songs of Experience in 1794. But it was his aphoristic masterpiece, the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, of 1790, that would best affirm his paradoxical philosophy. Unfortunately at the time few read these works, and those who did tended to dismiss them.

One thing that did draw attention to his books was the revolutionary new printing technology Blake used, a form of acid plate engraving that allowed images and words to be combined for the first time since the Middle Ages. Various names existed for this process, but perhaps the most accurate was Illuminated Printing. Blake was as practical and down to earth as he was mystical and prone to flights of imaginative fancy.

After 1790 Blake moved to Lambeth, where he established his famous private garden, encircled by its 'unpuned grapevine', in which he and Catherine practised their early form of Naturism. It was from here he also produced most of his 'prophetic works', such as the Visions of the Daughters of Albion, which called for an end to the evils of the Industrial Revolution, for Social Justice, and for a liberational struggle for Freedom against the oppressions of Reason, Religion and Materialism. At the same time he was associating with leading political revolutionaries, such as Tom Paine, William Godwin and Mary Wolstonecroft, in the weekly meetings above Joseph Johnson's radical book shop in St Paul's Churchyard, to where he regular walked from Lambeth.

In 1800 he briefly moved to the Sussex seaside village of Felpham, under a new patron, William Hayley, a wealthy man but a poor poet, whose books Blake would illustrate and publish. It was here he also wrote and illustrated his poem Milton, the preface of which, later abandoned, became the basis of the song Jerusalem. Today ironically hijacked by quite unsuitable people.

Returning to London in 1802 he continued writing and painting, and for the first time gathered a small group of followers, the so called Ancients, who were fascinated by Blake's mystical paintings.

He spent his last days in modest lodgings in rooms over the Fountain Tavern (now the Coal Hole) in the Strand, overlooking the Thames. Here on August 12th 1827 he died, his last act being a portrait of his wife who had done so much to support him. He was buried in a unmarked communal grave in the dissenters graveyard at Bunhill Fields, near the Barbican.

He died in relative obscurity, not achieving much fame till later during the Romantic period, when he was catapulted to stardom. His star shining again in the 1960s when he was championed by a new generation of poets, notably Allen Ginsberg.

The Inner History
That was a conventional outer biography of Blake, but it ignores the most important part of Blake's life, his subjective experiences and visions. This is because I think these things need closer scrutiny than is possible in a potted biography. So now lets look a little deeper into Blake's life.

As a boy Blake developed a love of nature, spending much time in the tiny villages around London, such as Peckham, and surrounding countryside. Though he also enjoyed swimming in the Thames and the social life of the City. At this stage he took nature at face value, and regarded it not only as a domain of recreation and freedom, but as a source of wonder and creativity. Later he would rationalise this into his philosophy of nature, which contrasted an ideal natural world with that of an artificial civilisation. Blake regarded nature as essentially good, though recognised such moralistic terms were not really applicable to a creative, natural dynamic, especially one that had its wilder, and potentially destructive, aspects, which he affirmed in his poem Tyger. He was not a dogmatic primitivist however, as while he denounced the technological domination of nature, typified by the Industrial Revolution, he affirmed its technological enhancement.

But for Blake nature contained more than was apparent to most people. Nature was both material and spiritual for the young naturalist, and while most people filtered out a good part of it from their sensory experience, especially those of a scientific inclination, whom he despised, he claimed to be aware of it in its fullness.

From an early age he was both plagued and enthused by the most vivid visions of a broader reality, which many today might dismiss as hallucinations. These ranged from fantastic beings of fairy tales, through historical figures, to the dead, and phantoms such as a ghostly monk that haunted his childhood. All of which Blake was able to communicate with. Overtime these entities took more of a religious form. He discovered the prophet Ezekiel sitting under a tree, conversed with the angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary, and saw a host of angels in a tree in Peckham. It is likely this shift of context was attributable to his religious upbringing, as such phenomena as this has been shown to be malleable to expectation and culture.

Such phenomena are relatively common, in ancient cultures they were attributed to magical abilities and valued, people like Blake becoming Shamans. While in modern cultures they are usually devalued and dismissed as mad, a definition that often becomes self fulfilling. Blake was fortunate perhaps that his parents were influenced by the mystic Swedenborg, who claimed similar visionary experiences, and so accepted his claims rather than dismissed them. Both explaining them in terms of religious experience and encouraging him to express this in art. Hence his early encouragement in that area.

Blake's visions were not simply flights of fancy, for instance he claimed to have received the idea for his revolutionary printing technology from his dead brother in a dream. They were also inspiring, in one instance Blake tired after a long walk and sat down to rest, only to experience a vision of the angel Gabriel, who lectured him on the importance of perseverance and determination and energised him enough to carry on. Today we might regard his visions as eruptions from the unconscious, but he saw them as psychic revelations.

The psychological theory is well evidenced from the life of his parents mentor, Swedenborg. The famous mystic initially came from a passionately religious background, before rejecting this for a career as a materialistic scientist. However soon after this he began to have disturbing religious dreams, which became hypnogogic apparitions and finally daytime apparitions. This drove Swedenborg back to religion and he spent a lifetime attempting to reconcile science and religious mysticism. The obvious explanation for this was that he was suppressing elements of his psyche that later erupted from his unconscious. The fact these took religious forms being no doubt informed by his cultural background, in reality they were simply that part of his reality denied by a strict scientific materialism.

Blake's psychology too was typified by an internal conflict, though one he attributed, rightly I think, to the actual nature of the world. Blake's visions also often seemed to impart to him knowledge that he could not have easily obtained elsewhere, and involved deep conversations with other personalities, though this doesn't exclude a psychological explanation. Ultimately whether these kind of experiences are psychic or psychological is largely irrelevant in a wider context, I think, as the results are usually identical.

The important feature of such experiences is whether they are enlightening or disturbing, a factor largely dependent on a persons background psychology and whether they accept the experience or fear it. Those who are accepting of enlightening visions are called mystics, while those traumatised by disturbing apparitions are called mad and quickly degenerate. Blake was broadly in the former category, though admitted that some of his visions did indeed plague him.

It was such experience that Blake channelled into his creativity, sketching fantastic images from the age of eight, and writing poetic descriptions from twelve.

Religion and Metaphysics

As has been said all of Blake's works were contextualised in a religious form, derived from his visions. But this doesn't necessarily imply that he was religious, in fact there's ample evidence he wasn't, at least in any conventional sense.

He certainly opposed organised religion, calling it the 'direful web', and saw the Christian Church, both Protestant and Catholic, as an oppressive puritanical institution, affirming himself a more personal and naturalistic spirituality verging on paganism. Like the Gnostics, who appear to have indirectly influenced him, he often denounces God as a tyrant, and seems to prefer the Devil. Moreover he doesn't really seem to believe in God at all, demonstrated not only by his derision of him as Old Nobodaddy, but in the famous verse 'those who envy or calumniate great men hate God; for there
is no other God.'

Yet despite this he regarded himself a Christian, and Christ as the world's greatest religious teacher. Though his Christ is rather different to the common conception, being opposed to all religious laws and moral codes, in favour of conscience, as well as a thief who associates with prostitutes, all backed with scriptural reference of course.

He also declared to orthodox Christians, 'Thy heaven's door is my hell's gate', as well as apparently privately believing the inverse. And when asked what his Christianity really was declared it to be 'the liberty of body and mind to exercise the divine arts of the imagination'.

He did however have what could be called a spiritual philosophy however that was tied to the metaphysics he derived from his visions. It was too loose to be called a doctrine however and was closer to a set of constantly evolving interpretations in response to an ongoing series of visionary experiences.

His original position was informed very much by the mystical philosophy of Swedenborg that he had inherited from his parents, but he gradually moved away from this, declaring that his former mentor was too religious because he had conversed to be much with angels, who were always religious, and not enough with devils who never where. Likewise he moved on from his favourite poet, Milton, though maintaining he was a true poet, and therefore of the devil's party without realising it.

Blake's mature spirituality seems to have simply been of a divine, creative power that manifested through Nature and specifically Mankind. A divine power that could be equally described as God or Satan depending on context. Some argue this makes him a mystic, while I would argue he was far too worldly and anti-religious to be so slandered.

The metaphysics that underlay his spirituality are just as controversial.

Beginning as an Idealist he believed that all of Nature was nothing more than perception shaped by human imagination. And more generally that the collective imagination of Mankind was God or Divine Imagination, if not the other way around. The world was held stable by our consensual faith in reality and perceptual habits he claimed. Christ was a man who escaped this consensus and became superhuman, able to shape the world through his own imagination, Blake thought. From a philosophical perspective this is quite naïve of course. But there is evidence that Blake moved on from this simplistic position to a more complex one, in which Imagination shaped the World, but a World was more than just Imagination, having a corporeal reality of its own. bAs he put it in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 'Body is the portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, Soul is ultimately Energy, which was Eternal Delight, the only Life, and from the Body, while Reason was the Limit of Energy'. A statement not that much at odds with some theories of modern physics. The whole of existence for Blake was a fiery chaos of energy, from which everything emerged. He differed from Physics - which he sometimes saw as a true, though excessively narrow worldview, 'Newton's sleep', but more often totally rejected - in regarding this vast ocean of energy to be a conscious being, or perhaps a 'becoming', shaped by its own imagination, an entity which was ultimately us. For Blake the objective and subjective
were both real, but ultimately the same.

Though critical of logical reasoning, and often equating it with a tyrant deity responsible from oppressive order, he was not anti-rational, but rather viewed reason as requiring a coupling with its opposite, imagination, to be truly functional. Though it should be remembered that Blake was not deriving this view intellectually, as a rational hypothesis, but experiencing it intuitionally in visions, and then attempting to rationalising this, so he does not elucidate his views in a way a philosopher might expect.

These views lead us to another aspect of Blake's philosophy, his Theory of Contraries. For Blake, ultimate reality was originally a neutral Totality beyond rational conception, which on manifestation, as the divided world we now experience, fragmented into a number of polarised opposites, in tension with each other. Thus the manifest world was essentially a dualistic one - positive / negative, objective / subjective, mind / matter, light / dark, rational / non-rational etc etc, pairs of contraries that were incompatible, and in conflict, but ultimately derived from the same source, and in need of resolution. This was the only way we could rationally experience the world. This view is obviously very similar to Taoism, or more exactly the Pre-Socratic philosophy of Heraclitus. Blake's vision of the resolution of these opposites was very much like the modern idea of dialectical process. The constructive, oppositional conflict of the two leading to their deeper resolution in some way, rather than the repression of one by the other that was usually the case in negative opposition. The first he calls contrariness, the second negation.

Of course Blake never put this in such a philosophical way, he was a poet who dealt in metaphor, usually of a religious kind. Often for instance using the image of Satan for both the kinds of opposition just mentioned. Moreover he utilises several different mythological schemes to explain all this, as he himself struggles to rationalise his visions. But the message is clear enough.

His most interesting metaphysical scheme, from Milton, describes the World in typical Blakean style in terms of Fall and Redemption. The World here begins as a Totality of Pure Light, which is simultaneously the primal Cosmos, as potential reality, and the ground of all human consciousness. Sometimes Blake calls this God. In an act of self reflection this Primal Being looses its unity and Falls into fragmented state of Fiery Chaos, in which opposition and conflict reigns, this Blake regarded as Hell and its ruler Satan, who could be seen in a positive or negative way. Beneath this Chaos was nothing but Darkness, the antipode of the Light. But it was within this Darkness that Order manifested from Chaos as shadows projected onto a cave wall from the fiery chaos. This was our World. The Cave and the Darkness were our ignorance, and our interpretation of the forms that appeared in it was our attempts at knowledge of a partially glimpsed reality. A process that actually created manifest reality according to Blake. These imaginings could be false ones, such as Religion, Blake often used the terms God and Heaven, to describe the fantasies used to try to impose Order on the World, partly true ones, such as Science, or attempts at truth and the reconciliation of oppositions in acts of Poetic Imagination. Within this manifest World Blake imagined its basic conflicting principles of Imagination, Reason, Passion and Instinct, as anthropomorphic entities, Urthona, Urizen, Luvah and Tharmas. However the conflicts of the manifest world could never be totally overcome and an ideal rational reconciliation of opposites was ultimately impossible (though perhaps he is being over pessimistic here?). Thus for Blake the only answer was that the poetic imagination ultimately had to combine opposites into a non-rational transcendental unity and rise up out of darkness through the Fiery Chaos, and ultimately reunite with the Primal Being, achieving perfect union. He thus retained an essentially mystical goal. The entertaining part of this however is Blake's iconoclastic teaching that the Man must put aside false Heavens and Gods in order to ascend into Hell, before reaching some higher Nirvana through the action of a rebellious Satan. This is a perplexing picture, but it is not put forward as a rational thesis rather as a struggle to make poetic sense of his visions of an inexplicable reality. It is a mystery to be interpreted by the reader not an explanation imposed on them as in religion or philosophy.

This is also what distinguishes Blake's poetic visions from religious mysticism they are not doctrines but rather imaginative creations meant to inspire rather than inform, what's more they are Blake's creations, a liberation from religion rather than an imprisoning by it. 'I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man's' he stated. Ideally we should probably all be engaging in such visions and creating own system in Blake's perfect world, but failing that he offers us his own, in a variety of forms, and in a way open to our own interpretation.

Politics

Finally in this section I should add a crucial element of Blake's philosophy that I've yet to touch, on his political Utopianism. Although Blake sounds like a mystic in his ultimate transcendental aims, on my reading this seems to have been a long term goal. His more immediate aims are not to escape the world but to attempt to transform it, much in the way the alchemists wanted to turn lead into gold in the works of Paracelsus and Fludd that he later devoured. In this context he argued for his process of oppositional conflict, much like Marx or Hegel, but again used mythological language and metaphysics to expound it. Principally through both the archetypes of Satan, as the principle of rebellion, progressive conflict and destruction, and Christ, as the principle of the Creative Imagination, that recreates the world. A rising up into a fiery chaos and a descent into a purer imaginative order. The current state of the world, the place and situation we were in was called Albion by Blake, not in a nationalistic sense, but in immediate experiential sense of the place where we, his readers, who he assumed would be mostly English, were in the here and now. The future transformed world he called Jerusalem, drawing on religious metaphor, but in truth meaning simply liberty and justice. Both these figures were given anthropomorphic form in Blake's works of course, and Albion in particular is often represented as a fallen giant who symbolised the past perfect Cosmos as a whole, degenerated into the fragmented state of the everyday reality we experience directly and desire liberation from.

Blake also rejected all laws in the name of liberty, typically arguing against generalisation, he believed all individuals and situations were unique, and that, as he put it, one law for the lion and the ox was oppression. His psychological insights into the contraries and their paradoxical nature also produced the gems of social wisdom found in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, such as 'prisons are made with the stones of law, brothels with the bricks of religion', and 'opposition is true friendship', again prefiguring the dialetical perspective.

Initially Blake seems to have seen this in primarily political terms, actively supporting the French Revolution in terms of it and frequently wearing the red bonnet. Earlier he had taken part in the Gordon Riot that burnt down Newgate prison. But following the Terror, he turned his back on a purely Social Revolution and developed his famous concept of the Mental Fight. This was an internal revolution in which inner psychological forces were the most important dialectical oppositions and resolving them, through mental effort, in psychological integration was the key to the psychological transformation that had to proceed social transformation. Without this mastery of our internal conflicts and resolution of our inner duality first part of us is repressed and projected outwards onto others, Blake argued, creating eternal, counterproductive conflicts, violence and oppression. The Terror had been born from this error he suggests (and this is also why he recruits Satan as a helper in his mythos, rather than opposing him as in traditional Christianity, which Blake believes is another repression of elements of self and so the road to outer oppression). However he never gave up on genuine political struggle, seeing this in part as an outer manifestation of the inner revolution. The two for Blake being inseperably entwined.

More than just a revolutionary libertarian Blake was also a great egalitarian. One of the first to oppose slavery and racial prejudice in his poems, he was also an early champion of feminism, perhaps following his association
with Mary Wolstonecraft, having been her illustrator. He is sometimes criticised for being supported by his wife
in a traditional manner, however he also taught her to read and write and taught her a trade that would have made her independent. Ironically it was her gratitude for this that seems to have been the cause of her single
devotion to this unworldly man.

In conclusion Blake could be seen equally as a transcendental mystic, a proto psychologist and a worldly revolutionary, but really transcended all of these narrow positions. The more rational materialistic might also regard his visions as a sign of insanity, and to be truthful it is hard from a modern position to avoid that perspective. However can a man who produced such lasting works of art, and elaborated such a profound and basically coherent philosophy, truly have been completely mad? I would argue his success mitigates against this. Even Wordsworth, who had indeed like many concluded his insanity, said after his death 'there was no doubt the poor man was mad, but there was something in the madness of the man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron or Walter Scott'.