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C
HAPTER FIVEThe God of reason
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6
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Blake believed that the abstract, rationalising “Gods”
of human culture were powerful instantiations of this power within
the human brain, which he also termed “the Holy Reasoning Power”
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Perhaps Blake’s equation of the orthodox God and the “Rational
Power” may be of some succour to religious traditions that for centuries
h
ave had to defend their theism against an opposition which tends to pride itself on being uniquely rational, scientific, and logical. Perhaps
B
lake’s depiction of the Urizenic deity as a compelling and compulsive law-making, ordering, abstract God who values obedience, purity, and
adherence to strict moral codes will make sense—that is to say, will
seem reasonable. Indeed, such a “Power” may be familiar to both reli-gious and scientific acolytes. On the other hand, by rooting such a God
so clearly and cogently within the networks and processes of Urizenic
(left hemisphere) brain activity and values, Blake radically and effec-t
ively collapses traditional theistic belief onto what would today be termed neurological circuitry. He locates the origin and source of such
a deity, indeed all deities, within—
within the human body and brain—and he does this, in my opinion, much more persuasively and precisely
than many modern atheistic neuroscientists. If this identification of the
traditional “God” with specific brain activities and functions presents a
challenge to orthodox theistic belief, however, then even more provoca-tive is Blake’s suggestion that the very “God” worshipped throughout
much of recorded history is an embodiment—indeed a deification—of
Reason itself, “your-reason”. Not only is such a God presented as being
grounded in the human brain but he is also revealed as being a pow-e
rful instantiation not of divinity as such but of the “Holy Reasoning Power”: the Logos with neurological vengeance.
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But if Blake’s arguments undermine the basis of popular religion,
t
hey also challenge the metaphysical foundations of popular science. Indeed, his arguments are even more damaging to the prevailing sci-entific ideology than to traditional theistic belief. Blake presents the
materialistic and functionalist programs of contemporary rationality
as a self-serving and self-reflecting interpretation of reality, one which
distorts and conceals as much as it explains and reveals. Blake treats
this aspect of Urizenic interpretation as essentially “religious” precisely
because of this inability of reason to get beyond its own programs
o
r conceptual parameters: it is compelled to see existence in its own graven image, that is to say, according to its own indwelling and inher-ent processes and compulsions. It is self-deifying: the world according
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to a machine program. Blake draws attention to the Urizenic basis of
the arguments supposedly used to rationalise and challenge belief in
religion, and suggests that that such a critique of theistic belief, whilst
valid, is itself founded on the very same Urizenic (left hemisphere)
processes and programs and is therefore trapped within its own cir-cularity—it is merely looking at itself, a confabulation or self-reflexive
ratiocination. Moreover, it fails to apply this critique to itself. What we
need, as Sheldrake has more recently noted, “is an enlightenment of the
E
nlightenment” (Sheldrake, 2012, p. 328). Blake was one of the first to d
o just this: to apply the Enlightenment critique to mechanistic belief s
ystem
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“The left hemisphere’s world is ultimately narcissistic,” therefore, “in
the sense that it sees the world ‘out there’ as no more than a reflection
of itself” (M&E, p. 438). The reference to the myth of Narcissus is appro-priate as an image of left-hemispheric science, enamoured of its own
reflected processes (although, as Edinger acutely points out, “Narcissus
yearns to unite with himself just because he is alienated from his own
being” and as such represents not so much “self-love but rather just the
opposite, a frustrated state of yearning for a self-possession which does
not yet exist”—the yearning for “Ahania”, in Blake’s terms; Edinger,
1972, p. 161). In this way, the left hemisphere constructs not so much an
“
objective” world view but rather a world of “objects”: of conceptual, q
uantifiable “pieces” (usually called “building blocks”), and everything which it encounters it interprets solely in a language of function, use,
and discrete quantity, reflections of itself. It is impelled to impose these
categories and imperatives onto whatever it observes, and into what-ever information it processes. This “essentially self-referring nature”
of the left hemisphere constantly and severely compromises the claims
to veracity and objectivity that its mode of operation seeks to deliver.
“There is a reflexivity to the process, as if trapped in a hall of mirrors: it
only discovers more of what it already knows, and it only does more of
what it is doing” (M&E,
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R
ationality is, it seems, necessarily and fatally trapped within its own ratios. As Blake similarly noted, “Reason or the ratio of all we have
already known” is not the same as it will be “when we know more”
(NNR, p. 2). Rational knowledge works by looking back and by isolat-ing (i.e., altering) systems, and by filtering out. Abstraction is all about
forgetting things, about leaving things out. As if these cognitive limita-tions weren’t constrictive enough however, reason is not even aware
of the constrictions. Precisely because it is trapped it does not know
it is trapped: hence the “hall of mirrors” in which it finds itself, in
McGilchrist’s analogy.
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These features of the dominant rational operating system were noticed
and recorded by Blake two hundred years ago: “Man by his reason-ing power”, he observed, “can only compare & judge of what he has
already perceiv’d. From a perception of only 3 senses or 3 elements
none could deduce a fourth or fifth” (NNR, p. 2). And if all knowledge
were simply rational, he adds, man would be necessarily and forever
i
mprisoned within the ratios of his existing knowledge, like a hamster in a mill. Thus, “if it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character. the
P
hilosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over
again” (NNR, p. 3). Like Shelley, Blake realises that imagination actually
runs the operating system, which is why new knowledge is possible.
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The “mill”-like aspect of rationality was repeatedly alluded to by
Blake. As he notes in his poem Milton, in a passage referring to the
dominance of Urizenic systems of control within the psyche of man,
“To Mortals thy Mills seem every thing” (Mil
4:12, p. 98). Blake observes that man by his reasoning power increasingly becomes bound to (and
locked into) these systems, intended to liberate him, as reason becomes
increasingly dominant and imperious and severed from imaginative
reality, denying even the existence of the “Poetic or Prophetic charac-t
er”, upon which new discoveries depend.I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire
Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton. black the cloth
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In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs
t
yrannicM
oving by compulsion each other[J
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Blake draws our attention here to the political and social dimension
o
f Newtonian mechanics. These enormous cognitive “wheels without wheels” gradually materialise as literal machinery, the “dark Satanic
wheels” of industrialism within which Urizen itself becomes increas-i
ngly fixed and contained, as do of course all the humans compelled to work at these wheels (J 12:44, p. 156). And the same process of increas-ing Urizenic and mechanistic domination of humanity, which happens
within each human brain, correspondingly happens within each nation
a
nd economy: if one can’t sense it happening in one’s own brain one can perhaps see it “outside”.
And all the Arts of Life. they changd into the Arts of Death
in Albion … .
A
nd in their stead, intricate wheels invented, wheel without w
heel:To perplex youth in their outgoings, & to bind to labours
i
n AlbionO
f day & night the myriads of eternity that they may grindAnd polish brass & iron hour after hour laborious task!
K
ept ignorant of its use, that they may spend the days of w
isdomIn sorrowful drudgery, to obtain a scanty pittance of bread:
In ignorance to view a small portion & think that All,
A
nd call it Demonstration[J 65:21–28, p. 216; cf. FZ
vi
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As Damon notes, “the ‘starry wheels’ of Albion’s Sons represent their
materialistic thought and consequently the mechanical Newtonian uni-v
erse” (Damon, p. 445): in Blake’s poetry even Urizen complains at his inability to leave these self-generated, self-referential mechanisms. Thus
for example, in The Four Zoas
Blake suggests that the “Rational Power” itself ca
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mechanistic programming (FZ vi:196, p. 349). Reason recognises that
the world it has created is not only useful, but also completely joyless.
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68
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Indeed, as Blake’s earliest prose pamphlets attempt to set out, reason
c
an only work by limiting itself: by establishing a closed, finite system, and then analysing and distinguishing its parts (NNR,
pp. 2–3). This is, after all, its modus operandi, and part of its hugely successful ana-lytical capacity. Its evolutionary and epistemological basis is built on
its ability to focus on only a small portion of reality in order to be able
to retrospectively analyse and then manipulate it. In many ways, this
“
limiting” capacity is one of the most valuable and defining aspects of what reason actually is: as Blake remarked, “Energy is the only life and
is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of
Energy” (MHH 4, p. 34). This limiting or bounding function, however,
e
ntails that its own vision or mode of cognition, its claim to objectivity and veracity, is paradoxically comprised. It sees its mill-like systems,
i
ts “many Wheels … wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic/Moving by compulsion each other” everywhere because rationality, not real-ity, is mechanistic (J 15:18–20, p. 159). But through an unfortunate and
in-built combination of intransigent and profound literalism, and an
inherent desire to dominate, it wants and is compelled to claim more.
It claims and aspires to know “reality” itself: whereas in reality it is
simply confined to imposing and constructing its own mode of know-ing on whatever experience or new data it comes across. The further it
explores its vision of the world, the more, curiously, it ends up seeing
itself. As Blake observed, succinctly contrasting the two (the imagina-t
ive and the rational) modes of attention available to the human brain: “
He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only” (NNR, p. 3). Interestingly, McGilchrist cites this
passage from Blake in order to illustrate hemispheric difference, pro-viding a useful neuroscientific interpretation of it in brackets: “He who
sees the Infinite [looks outward to the ever-becoming with the right
hemisphere] in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only [looks at
the self-defined world brought into being by the left hemisphere] sees
himself only [the left hemisphere is self-reflexive]” (M&E, p. 379). Rea-son discerns and measures the ratios of things: it constructs a virtual,
s
elf-enclosed system for itself, and then applies itself to analysing and m
anipulating this system. In this it can be magnificently useful: it can provide highly complex, valuable fictional models through which we
can navigate and utilise the world around us. But the reality, as they say,
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is not the map. In so examining and quantifying the universe the irony
is that the purely rationalistic left hemisphere ends up measuring itself,
seeing its own automatic (or unconscious) processes reflected back, and
ultimately therefore knowing only itself: it only sees the sort of universe
that it is constructed to see. Reason, like a one-eyed myopic deity, can-not see itself as a way of seeing, only as the
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Blake does not deny the reality of Urizenic brain
processes or their usefulness for certain operations: he was (as we shall
see in the concluding chapter) not against reason or science at all per se,
but he profoundly objected to the usurpation by reason as the sole and
primary mode of attention and knowledge that the human body pos-sesses. This, in his vocabulary, is not science or reason, but “fallen” or
divided reason (i.e., post-Newtonian science)—reason completely sev-ered from its imaginative and contextual origins, trapped within its
narcissistic matrix and blithely but blindly unable even to understand
its own mode of exegesis or operation. For Blake, this is not real sci-ence but “Bad Science” (LJ 94, p. 565). As Damon notes, for Blake “True
Science is eternal and essential, but it turns bad when it cuts lose from
Humanity and runs wild, abstracting, generalizing, and domineering”
(Damon, p. 359). Severed from reality, it is therefore perhaps unsurpris-ing that the mechanistic programs of the Urizenic left brain should pro-duce a “science” which interprets everything according to its pre-set
functions, and a world that seems to justify its methodology. How else
could a machine programmed to abstract and divide existence and then
recombine it into a myriad of artificially separated “parts” and neatly
ordered linear, logical sequences,—how else could it possibly see the
universe? Of course it sees it like this. In a hall of mirrors, everything
looks like a reflection—or, in McGilchrist’s apposite image, “to a man
with a hammer everything begins to look like a nail” (M&E,
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Once we are attuned to this feature
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of the rationalistic program, however, we can become aware of this
unconscious tendency. Useful markers to spot this program at work are
references to such concepts and fictions as “building blocks”, “systems”,
“machines”, and “atoms”—these are the trails of its cognitive conver-sion of reality into its own image. And they permeate scientific dis-course. Most scientists are probably not even aware that the use of a
“machine” model to describe some specific feature of being, is
a model: their levels of unconsciousness with respect to their own use of meta-phor often seem to be completely hidden to them. Just as many scien-t
ists berate earlier peoples for “literally” believing in wood sprites or river nymphs, so those same scientists fail to see the internal combus-tion engine in their own eye.
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what Urizen loves to concep-tualise about are “atoms”—fictional, finite “units” of thought, “bits”,
upon which it can then base its subsequent systems. Indeed, it more
than “loves” to conceptualise about these: it absolutely needs
them, and is compelled to deliver them. Without this belief—and, as we shall
see, it is a belief (or as a scientist would say, it is “only” a belief)—in
something “substantial” and “rock-like” upon which to construct its
elaborate rationalistic edifices, the left brain becomes prey to the most
paranoid and destabilising uncertainty. Without its precious (fictional)
“building blocks” it feels to the rationalising program that its immense
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computational and evaluative processes have nothing to stand on,
therefore no “under-standing”, no “sub-stance” (and therefore no sub-stance), and therefore as if they were immaterial, “base-less”—well,
y
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There is, of course,
a way of looking at it, if one wants to impose that way, in which it can
b
e said to be “like” a machine, for certain purposes. But, (and this is “really” my point), this is not what these scientists are saying. They are
trying to convince us that they are describing reality, not describing a
model. As McGilchrist has acutely argued, “the model we chose to use
to understand something determines what we find”: “There is always
a model by which we are understanding, an exemplar with which we
are comparing, what we see, and where it is not identified it usually
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means that we have tacitly adopted the model of the machine” (M&E,
p. 97, p. 29). And as he also notes, this tacit adoption has consequences:
the model we use actually alters what sort of reality we find, or uncover.
In “tacitly adopting” the machine model, science and the Urizenic left-brain rationalistic programs upon which it is constructed, deftly employs
a
cognitive, self-justifying sleight of hand. This has ramifications for the whole of the post-Newtonian scientific project, as McGilchrist also
notes. For the modern “scientific” stance is itself, he points out “value-l
aden”: “It is just one particular way of looking at things, a way which p
rivileges detachment, a lack of commitment of the viewer to the object v
iewed. For some purposes this can be undeniably useful. But its use in such cases does not make it truer or more real, closer to the nature of
things” (M&E, p. 28). One can see the world in a detached and function-alist way, or in an engaged and imaginative way: the detached mode is
not “truer or more real”. Indeed, it is perhaps not even “scientific”, as
we have come to understand the word—it is simply “detached”. Such
s
cience has a point: it is not so much concerned with understanding the w
orld as about how to exert power over it. Its mode of attention to the world, its cognitive programs and processes are geared to this agenda,
to this emotional quest for certainty and control. Science allows us this
control and power, and has produced many useful and remarkable
results as a consequence of its “lack of commitment of the viewer to
t
he object viewed”. But especially since Newton and Bacon and Locke, i
t has made additional epistemological claims to “know”, to know how things “really” are. This is perhaps unfortunate as it seems that cogni-tive limitations are built into its very neurological circuits, and what
allows it to manipulate also prevents it from recognising the walls of
its own prison. “If we assume a purely mechanical universe and take
t
he machine as our model,” McGilchrist concludes, “we will uncover the view that—surprise, surprise—the body, and the brain with it, is
a
machine” (ibid., pp. 97–98). The mechanical model of the universe is at best, like religion, simply a useful fiction. It is the default mode of
o
peration (or metaphor) of the left brain: a utilitarian way of analysing t
hi
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T
he left-hemispheric way of operating, McGilchrist also notes, is “to s
tep outside the flow of experience and ‘experience’ our experience in a special way: to re-present the world in a form that is less truthful,
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but … more useful for manipulation.” “From this world we feel
detached,” he acknowledges, “but in relation to it we are powerful”
(M&E, p. 93). Under this rather Medusean stare of modern science, the
relation (or “betweenness”) between subject and object, is however not
absent, he adds: “The betweenness is not absent, just denied, and there-fore of a particular—particularly ‘cold’—kind”.
The relationship implied by the left-hemisphere attention brought
to bear through the scientific method, with its implied materialism,
is not no relationship—merely a disengaged relationship, imply-ing, incorrectly, that the observer does not have an impact on the
observed … When science adopts a view of its object from which
everything ‘human’ has as far as possible been removed, bringing a
focussed, but utterly detached attention to bear, it is merely exercis-ing another human faculty, that of standing back from something
and seeing it in this detached, in some important sense denatured,
way. There is no reason to see that particular way as privileged,
except that it enables us to do certain things more easily, to use
things, to have power over things—the preoccupation of the left
hemisphere. [M&E,
p. 166]T
his is a formidable analysis of the scientific mode of attention. It points out that a detached stance still involves and requires a relationship with
t
he subject: it is not “objective”, at least not in the sense that it would like to make itself out to be. And neither is it a “non-human” mode
of enquiry: rather, it is a peculiarly cold, human mode of enquiry. Its
great value, and virtue, is use: “it enables us to do certain things more
easily”. Its great limitation and defect is its unreality. This understanding
of the nature of left hemisphere cognition is useful for grasping Blake’s
own critique of these abstracting and rationalising processes within
the human brain. The peculiarly “cold” nature of Urizenic attention is
repeatedly emphasised by Blake and is one of Urizen’s most striking
features. As the divided Spectre of Urizen, rising “like a hoar frost &
a Mildew” over Albion, pompously declares: “I am God O Sons of Men!
I
am your Rational Power!/Am I not Bacon & Newton & Locke who teach Humility [i.e., self-doubt] to Man!”. “So spoke the hard cold con-strictive Spectre” (J
54:15–25, pp. 203–04). Blake shows Urizen claiming a
uthority and legitimacy for the whole cognitive understanding of the human brain and therefore human experience. Its “hard cold constric-tive” mode of attention brilliantly captures the detached and peculiarly
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frosty nature of the left-hemispheric stance, as McGilchrist remarks.
Coldness and opacity are constantly associated with the Urizenic mode
and activities. Blake urges man to become aware of these unconscious
processes within Urizenic reasoning, lest we fall prey or submit to their
metaphors: “Awake Albion awake! Reclaim thy Reasoning Spectre”
(Mil 39:10, p. 140). For Reason’s attempt to disengage its own body, to
sever and mechanise its own humanity, to conceal its own metaphors
a
nd its own values, lies for Blake at the heart of contemporary Urizenic d
ominance. It is a particularly powerful and equally particularly myopic mode of attention, one geared,
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95
(PubA
46, p. 575). Blake was writing at the very start of the machine age, and indeed Ackroyd has described
his work as “one of the most important and perceptive accounts of the
industrial and commercial systems that were changing the very prac-tice of art in his lifetime” (Ackroyd, 1995, p. 307). In 1809 Blake was
becoming increasingly marginalised and even considered “mad”—an
“unfortunate lunatic” according to The Examiner—
for opposing these processes (ibid., p. 304). It is perhaps fitting in this respect to note that
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recent neurological research into a variety of pronounced and highly
disturbed mental conditions are now being linked with forms of dissoci-ated and hyper-rationality itself. As McGilchrist remarks, “‘to lose one’s
reason’ is the old expression for madness. But an excess of rationality
is the grounds of another kind of madness, that of schizophrenia.” And
h
e makes the additional point that “it is significant that the ‘normal’ scientific materialist view of the body is similar to that found in schizo-phrenia. Schizophrenic subjects routinely see themselves as machines—
often robots, computers, or cameras—and sometimes declare that parts
of them have been replaced by metal or electronic components” (M&E,
p. 332, p. 439). This connection between literalist belief in the mechani-cal mode and seriously disturbed mental states such as schizophrenia
(and also, as we shall see later, certain forms of psychopathy) is a fas-cinating and disturbing aspect to what is going on within the contem-porary scientific community, and “the ‘normal’ scientific materialistic
v
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The phrase which Blake most commonly uses to describe the self-reflective and myopic way of looking at things, so characteristic
o
f Urizenic left-brain attention, is “Single vision” (Letter to Butts, 22 November 1802, p. 722).
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76
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1
972, pp. 220–246.) What Blake calls “Single vision” seems to be the only mode of perception available to Urizenic consciousness. It is not
so much what hyper-rationalising science sees that is the problem—
though this is a problem—but what it does not see: “In ignorance to
view a small portion & think that All,/And call it Demonstration”
(J
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B
eing the mode of attention, or knowledge, of only half of the brain, the dissociated rational mode of enquiry is not only “single” in a lit-eral sense, but also refers in itself to the “literal” nature of rational con-sciousness, perhaps resulting in part from its pronounced detachment
from context (contextual understanding being a right hemisphere trait)
as well as from emotional and imaginative frameworks which might
make it less literalist. These latter concerns are all right-hemispheric
qualities, qualities that the left-brain reason seeks to detach itself from
in order to make it more “rational”. As Bolte Taylor observes, “without
the right hemisphere’s ability to evaluate communication in the context
of the bigger picture, the left hemisphere tends to interpret everything
literally.” She illustrates this literalisation (or lateralisation) hazard with
a
useful instance of typical left-brain hermeneutics:For example, if I am playing blackjack at a party and I say, “hit me!”
a person with a damaged right hemisphere may think I am asking
him to physically strike me rather than understand that I am sim-ply asking for another card. [JBT,
p. 34]L
eft-hemispheric science sometimes feels like a whole series of such “hit me!”s. Everything it sees is literal. Everything it sees, it sees literally.
When confronted with imaginative and poetic texts far more sophisti-cated and complex than itself, such as the Book of Genesis, it interprets
those literally too. And of course it interprets bodily existence—this
world—more literally than anything else. As Blakeslee has observed,
commenting on this intriguing feature of left-brain information
processing, “removal of the right hemisphere (left brain intact) leaves
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language basically unimpaired but somewhat computer-like. While
the precise literal meaning of words is understood perfectly, metaphor,
inflection, and emotional tone are not. Personality, insight, imagination,
and initiative also suffer greatly” (Blakeslee, 1980, p. 17).
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The focus of modern science can sometimes resemble this form of
hemispherectomical “single” vision: as we have seen, textbook sci-ence tends to represent the world both literally and mechanically,
functionally—a world without emotion, nuance, metaphor, inflection,
personality, insight, or imagination. Or, as science calls it, “objectively”.
T
his is the disengaged “Single vision” that Blake noticed and challenged so directly in contemporary rationalistic discourse, and he consistently
linked it with the mode of enquiry established and developed through
post-Newtonian science. “May God us keep/From Single vision
& Newtons sleep” (Letter to Butts, 22 November 1802, p. 722). Left-brain rationality interprets reality this way not because reality is like a
machine but because the left brain is. As Howard Gardner observes, in
right hemispherectomies, the (remaining left-brain) patient “resembles
a
kind of language machine, a talking computer that decodes literally w
hat is said, and gives the most immediate (but not necessarily the implicitly called for) response, a rote rejoinder insensitive to the ideas
b
ehind the questions, the intentions or implications of the questioner” (cited in Blakeslee, 1980, p. 141). Or indeed of the reality.
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One of the most striking examples of single vision in our times
is the work of Richard Dawkins. This, for instance, is how he interprets
reality: “To a survival machine, another survival machine (which is not
its own child or another close relative) is a part of its environment, like
a rock or a river or a lump of food. It is something that gets in the way,
or
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is that of course Dawkins has to see the nature of being (of the body, of
non-left hemisphere reality) this way: this is what experience looks like
to an information processor, which is also, of course, how he under-stands his own brain. So again we have the predictable appearance
of machines, parts, and building blocks, and a purely functionalist or
manipulative way of interpreting things. As Blake commented two
hundred years ago, “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees”:
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only
a Green thing that stands in the way. Some See Nature all Ridicule &
Deformity & by these I shall not regulate my proportions, & Some
Scarce see Nature at all” (MHH 5, p. 35; Letter to Trusler, 23 August
1799, p. 702). But actually to see a tree with the eyes of imagination,
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and to experience that perception as real rather than as subjective,
Note: does this not contradict everything you just said
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is, he
noted, “incomprehensible/To the Vegetated Mortal Eye’s perverted &
single vision” (J 53:10–11, p. 202). Blake railed against this dying of the
imaginative light because so much of reality was becoming lost in sin-gle vision. And this, as he also saw, has important consequences not
o
nly for the development of “bad science”, but for how each individual human life is diminished by such myopia. To see a tree as a functional
entity, or a survival machine, is to see pitifully little of it.
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As McGilchrist more properly notes, the
mode of attention favoured by science “can be undeniably useful”, but
this “does not make it truer or more real”. Blake believed that not only
would science be strengthened by recognising this, it would actually
be liberated. But in the meantime we are left with the rather one-eyed,
cyclopean commentators such as Pascal Boyer, Nicholas Humphrey,
and Richard Dawkins, with their “lumbering robots” and building-block science. The imaginative paucity of this project, as well as its
i
ntellectual fatuousness, was famously challenged by Blake in one of h
is most memorable images:W
hat it will be Questiond When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innu-m
erable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative
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Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight
I look thro it & not with it. [LJ
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82
103
Contemporary commentators such as Boyer, Humphrey, and Dawkins,
whilst providing effective critiques of theistic systems of belief, sel-d
om apply these critiques to their own materialistic systems of belief. Thus, for example, Lewis-Williams and Pearce argue that “religion
is, ultimately, embedded in neurology, as is pre-scientific cosmology”
(Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005, p. 285). But in what is scientific
cosmology embedded then, if not also neurology? Similarly Pascal
Boyer argues that “the explanation for religious beliefs and behaviours
i
s to be found in the way all human minds work”, and by “minds” of course he means the brain—“the bits that control body machinery”
(Boyer, 2001, p. 3). What these commentators never ask though is what
the neurological basis is of their own belief in materialism. What are
the neurological foundations of their need to believe in reason and
mechanical models? As McGilchrist points out in a cogent critique of
m
aterialistic faith:Karl Vogt proclaimed that thought, the secretion of the brain, could
be changed, like other bodily secretions, by diet: ‘since belief is only
a property of the body’s atoms, a change in beliefs depends only on
the way in which the atoms of the body are substituted’. He seems
n
ot to have noticed that this applies to the belief in materialism, too. [M&E,
Note: thoughts are not made of atoms, they’re made of thought!
103
“He seems not to have noticed that this applies to the belief in mate-rialism, too.” This is a striking and formidable rule to apply to all
critiques of systems of beliefs. Perhaps Vogt’s belief in materialism,
like Scrooge’s ghosts, may have been the result of an undigested bit of
beef or a fragment of an underdone potato. The rather equine argument
that
104
ideological construct, involving loaded epistemological terms such as
“matter”, subject and object, and the employment of a whole raft of met-a
phors such as those of the machine and the building block: one can put men into space according to any number of such ideological systems.
There are, moreover—as Sheldrake has recently pointed out—many
instances where materialism signally does not “work”, or works only in
very limited contexts (see for example his chapter ‘Is Mechanistic Medi-cine the Only Kind that Really Works’, in Sheldrake, 2012, pp. 260–290).
I
n a salient point McGilchrist notes that “one cannot believe in nothing and thus avoid belief altogether, simply because one cannot have n
o disposition towards the world, that being in itself a disposition. Some
people choose to believe in materialism; they act “as if” such a philoso-phy were true” (M&E,
104
83
104
By identifying the figure of Urizen with both the rationalistic, law-making programmer of post-Newtonian science and
the abstracting and ordering deity of orthodox religion, Blake challenges the assumptions
and metaphysical infrastructure employed by both, apparently
opposite, systems of thought. He questions the historical and psycho-logical character of the God of state religion, and equally undermines
105
the sacrosanct dogmas of the recently institutionalised and state-spon-sored scientific project. But if both orthodoxies derive from this shared
Urizenic base, rooted in the neural networks of the left hemisphere
(“Where Urizen & all his Hosts hang their immortal lamps”) then
why isn’t this more obvious? Why has there been so much conflict not
only between religion and science but between different religions, and
indeed between different scientific approaches and methodologies
(Catholic versus Protestant, Einstein versus Bohr). And why do reli-g
ious people tend not to experience their worship as rational? In his o
wn day Blake used the metaphor of mills and machinery to convey the s
ystemic, self-enclosed, (self-perpetuating), and rationalising activities of Urizen. Perhaps a more modern analogy would be a computer, and
i
n the following chapter I use this model, so endemic to contemporary scientific discourse, to explain this apparent contradiction.
106
C
HAPTER SIXU
rizenic religion and Urizenic reason: R
107
86
107
In the following discussion I refer to the earlier, and more apparently
“religious” operating system of Urizen as “R1” (“Religion”), whilst “R2”
w
ill denote the post-Enlightenment or updated version (“Reason”). As we have seen, Blake does not recognise or uphold this popular myth
of their opposition. In his poem Jerusalem
he draws our attention to the deep links between the two through Urizen’s remarkable declaration:
“I am God O Sons of Men! I am your Rational Power!” (J
54:15, p. 203). Urizen’s emergence and deification amongst many cultures as the pow-erful, ordering, dividing “God” of popular religion is similarly alluded
t
o by Blake as “The Net of Religion” which Urizenic consciousness casts over the brains of men (Ur 25:22, p. 82). Thus, according to Blake’s cog-nitive schemata, the God of the orthodox churches (R1) has historically
been portrayed as an abstract and abstracting figure, imposing order
o
nto a supposedly chaotic universe, dividing day and night, good and bad, establishing rigid moral codes, imposing laws (both on “nature”
and the society), generating the concept of abstract linear time (from the
creation to the apocalypse), establishing a coherent, ordered universe in
which, as Blake puts it “the passive who obey Reason” are deemed “reli-gious” and holy and acceptable to this Urizenic model of God. All of
these ways of thinking about and interpreting the world are, as the first
p
art of
107
The early “R1” religions (such as the belief structures of Judaic,
Mithraic, Nordic, Vedic, Druid, neo-Platonic, Apollonian, Egyptian,
and post-Constantine Christian culture) established a remarkably
coherent, ordered picture of the cosmos in the evolving human con-s
ciousness, and have given subsequent generations a formidable and, in many respects, still highly useful framework within which to operate
a
nd to understand certain aspects of existence. Most of these systems of thought have deified a powerful, ordering power or principle, one usu-a
lly linked with “light” (i.e., rational or “enlightened” consciousness), the creator and maintainer of order, laws, and natural equilibrium in the
cosmos. In other words they have provided the initial mainframe for
m
odern consciousness, which can be seen as a later “updated” version, although one which similarly relies on the notions of law, order, coher-ence, binary systems, and linear time. Within R1 itself though there were
clearly many variants, many different sects and disputes both between
and amongst religions and creeds (perhaps such as Windows and
Linux which offer rather different modes of accessing the main operat-ing system), but historically, in terms of the major cultures, established
108
87
108
churches, and religions, there has been a remarkable convergence of
outlook. Indeed, this convergence, as we have seen, has led many mod-ern commentators such as Lewis-Williams, Dawkins, and Humphrey to
argue for their common neurological source.
108
But by the seventeenth century a more rigorous, more quantifiable,
and above all more user-friendly methodology was emerging. Such
a
n update was needed not only for the sake of intellectual consistency but also as a result of the requirements of increasingly powerful new
mercantile, industrial, and financial interests who, as Jacob, Golinski,
Cohen, and others have shown, were to become the sponsors for this
new mechanical and functionalist project for science (Cohen, 1980;
Golinski 1992; Jacob, 1976). Utilisation and the desire for power were to
b
e key to the new scientific enterprise. “Knowledge is Power” became the brand slogan for this enterprise, providing a useful trademark
d
eclaration for the main aims and marketing strategy of the new R2 enterprise. The saying, widely attributed to Bacon, brilliantly encapsu-lated the left hemisphere’s program for the modern era and succinctly
set out the agenda for the R2 programmers. In the development of R2
as the modern successor to R1 perhaps no one encapsulates this shift—
or the nature of the competition and the distinctions between the rival
U
108
Galileo and the Church: Between a rock and a hard place
108
Many people today believe that Galileo was put on trial by the Church
for suggesting that the earth moves round the sun. But this, as Profes-sor Brian Cox might say, is completely wrong. It is a sign of the reach
a
nd potency of the homogenous dogmas of contemporary science that its hagiographic presentation of Galileo as science’s first martyr, suffer-ing for defending the “truth” against a backward Church, is so widely
accepted and so routinely trundled out. Michael White, a recent biogra-pher of Galileo, captures and extends this canonising trend within mod-ern science in his representation of Galileo as “a symbol of the struggle
for freedom of thought, the epitome of the enlightened individual fac-ing down institutionalised ignorance, and winning.” According to this
version of events, Galileo’s is “a story in which our hero was defeated
by the power of the Church but has been proven right posthumously”
(White, 2007, pp. xiv–xv). This is certainly a story, but unfortunately it
is not history.
109
88
109
It was not the hypothesis that the earth moves round the sun that
was the problem. Copernicus had suggested this and provided a model,
seventy-three years before Galileo, to which the Church raised no objec-t
ion (ibid., p. 153). Galileo was put on trial not for changing the position o
f the earth but for changing the position of hypotheses. He asserted that the scientific model of the heliocentric universe was not a scien-tific model, but the “literal” truth. As a matter of interest, Galileo also
affirmed that the sun was the centre not merely of our solar system but
of the whole universe, a “literal” truth that is today widely thought to
be incorrect. Similarly he seems to have been mistaken in his belief that
the tides were caused by the movement of the earth—something else
he thought was objectively true, rather than just a useful hypothesis.
As White observes, Galileo was in fact incorrect on several points (ibid.,
p. 249, p. 251). However, this did not stop him from maintaining that
the heliocentric model of the universe was not merely a hypothesis but
actually true, and in this he forged a new position for both literalism
and science. In his dispute with the Church, Galileo became even more
dogmatic and literalist in his view of the universe than was his opposi-t
109
In 1632 Pope Urban VIII created a Special Committee of Inquiry to
investigate the precise nature of Galileo’s work: “we think that Galileo
may have overstepped his instructions by asserting absolutely the
Earth’s motion and the Sun’s immobility, thus deviating from hypoth-e
sis” (cited in White, p. 186). This Special Committee of Inquiry was an extension (or ideological arm) of the Inquisition and provided much
of the evidence later used against Galileo. Interestingly, this body still
exists today, although since 1965 it goes by the slightly more user-friendly name of “Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”
and was headed by Cardinal Ratzinger until his election to Pope in 2005
(ibid., pp. xiii–xiv). So was Galileo right to deviate from hypothesis?
In some respects, four hundred years later, we are still trying to answer
the question raised by that Committee.
110
89
110
It evidently suits the interests of the architects and proponents of
the current R2 system to rewrite scientific history in order to portray
Galileo as a rational martyr at the mercy of an intransigent, backward,
and they would probably say “stupid” Church. In the Urizenic words
of Steven Weinberg: “one of the great achievements of science has been,
if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then
at least to make it possible for them not to be religious” (cited in White,
2007, p. xv). Such commentators seem blissfully unaware of how they
resemble their presumed opponents in this. The figure of Galileo might
more usefully be seen in this context as an effective advertisement for
the new programming, recasting history in order to sell a product or in
this case to rebrand science as the home of (Urizenic, left-brain) intel-lectual and moral superiority: with Galileo the heroic Defender of the
Reason, battling the evil dragon of the Church. But it is hard to see in
his story a “martyr”. Nor was he anti-religious. His dispute with the
Church is certainly not one which he would have understood as a clash
between reason and religion, or logic versus the Church. “I render infi-nite thanks to God,” he declared in 1609, “for being so kind as to make
m
e alone the first observer of marvels kept hidden in obscurity for all previous centuries” (cited in Sobel, 1999, p. 6). It is hard to doubt the
sincerity of this statement, which reveals both his faith in God and his
own curiously egocentric nature: “to make me alone the first observer”;
even when ostensibly thanking God he cannot refrain from drawing
attention to his own role. But what his statement also discloses is the
nature of his belief in God and the particular sort of God he believed in:
it was a God of reason, in particular a God of Mathematics. His was a
r
ational universe, made by a rational God, and observable by a rational mind. “It is written in mathematical language,” Galileo affirmed, “and
the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, with-out whose help it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word,
and without which one wanders in vain in a dark labyrinth” (from Dia-logue,
1632, cited in White, 2007, p. 182). Mathematics was the rational revelation of this secret language of God. If Galileo’s “rationality”
coincided with his belief in God—in his “reason”—this also presents
problems for those later “rationalists” seeking to make some hard dis-tinction between faith and science, R1 and R2. Equally problematic for
their “martyr” hypothesis is the role of the Church in the dispute with
111
Galileo. It might be a shock for many modern readers to discover that
the Church had frequently and publicly supported Galileo’s scientific
researches. As McGilchrist remarks,
One might think that odd in view of, for example, the received ver-sion of Galileo’s dispute with the Church—a piece of hagiography
t
hat suits the dogma of our own age, that Galileo must have been the champion of reason in the face of irrational bigotry on the part
of the Church. In fact his ideas were certainly not dismissed by
either the pope or his cardinals, who indeed let him know that they
admired his work; and, if it had not been for Galileo’s personality,
he would not have found himself placed under house arrest, which
led to his canonisation in the chronicles of science. [M&E,
111
M
cGilchrist’s observation is particularly acute in its use of terminology usually more commonly deployed by scientists and rationalists against
the Church in order to describe this curious rewriting of history, a sort
of intellectual precession perhaps. Note for example the subtle and
effective references to hagiography, dogma, canonisation,—referring
not to the appearances of religion but to the “received version” of
today’s purportedly secular and enlightened interpretation. This shift
towards an increasingly dogmatic and literalist understanding of rea-son and science is key to understanding the shift from R1 to R2 that
was occurring during this time: not so much a change from religion to
secular, rational Enlightenment (another hagiographic, self-canonising
m
ove by the Holy Reasoning Power of the left brain), but rather a hardening and rewiring of the earlier rationalising processes. Indeed,
as McGilchrist suggests, both Pope Paul V and his successor, Urban
VII, had been admirers of Galileo’s work. Galileo had met Pope Paul in
Rome in 1611, where the Pope had given his blessing to the telescope
and Galileo’s discoveries. As Galileo excitedly recounted it in a letter
the next day, “His Holiness would not let me say a word kneeling but
i
mmediately commanded me to stand up” (cited in White, 2007, p. 125, p. 124). Paul V’s successor, Urban VIII, famous now for being the Pope
presiding over Galileo’s trial, had also been both a friend and advocate
of Galileo. In 1623 Galileo was welcomed to the Vatican, and Galileo was
immensely flattered by this attention, as of course he would have been,
writing back proudly that the Pope “bore me the greatest goodwill”,
something which he clearly felt was intended honourably and sincerely
112
(
cited in White, p. 169, p. 158). The new pope saw the Copernican theory as “an interesting notion that might lead to some practical benefits” and
was noticeably less keen than his predecessors to suppress the opinions
o
f Copernicus’s supporters. “Urban could claim with honesty that he had never felt comfortable with the enthusiasm with which the Inquisi-t
ion had muzzled science,” since he had publically objected to the 1616 verdict when he was Cardinal Barberini (ibid., p. 170). Indeed the two
men shared much in common, both being adherents of a rather dog-matic and literalist interpretation of the universe, with a mutual belief
in the powerful and ordering, rational God who had made it.
112
91
112
Galileo’s arrest and punishment by the Catholic Church, brutal and
unnecessary as it was, was not therefore primarily about his defence
of heliocentrism but rather about a clash of operating systems. And at
the centre of this dispute was not the status or position of the sun, but
the status or position of hypotheses. Galileo is a particularly interest-ing figure in this discussion as he both embodies and illustrates the
s
hift between R1 and R2. R1 rationality had always maintained that its models and hypotheses concerning the universe were only that: highly
useful, beautifully constructed maps or models of reality that enabled
their users to do many extraordinary and practical things. They were
considered as provisional, useful, and historically embedded. This all
changed with Galileo, who was perhaps the first scientist to declare that
his metaphors were literally true.
112
The repercussions of the dispute between the Church and Galileo
can be felt to this day. In 1990 a declaration by the then Cardinal
R
atzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) concluded: “At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo him-self. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just” (cited in
White, p. 246). Whilst anyone who has read the final transcript of the
I
nquisition (given in White almost in full, op cit., pp. 218–224) must challenge both the reasonableness and justness of the latter (the process
was anything but reasonable, unless by reasonable one means authori-tarian, manipulative, and based on the need for power and control),
Ratzinger does have a point regarding the status of rationality and
hypotheses. His statement also suggests that the Vatican itself is con-cerned with “reason”—it still sees itself as defender of the Reason, the
Holy Logic and the Holy Logos. Ratzinger’s statement reveals the fas-c
inating insight, one that powerfully supports Blake’s contention of the Urizenic nature of both religion and science, that being “faithful to
113
reason”, as Ratzinger so illuminatingly puts it, was—and is—a cardinal
concern for the Holy Roman Church.
113
92
113
G
alile
113
unconscious need
for order and predictability.
113
the appeal of
m
athematics, as Burtt adds, was that its conclusions seemed to such men as Galileo to be “absolutely true and necessary, not at all depend-e
nt on human judgment” (ibid., p. 75). This is a curious statement, if one decodes it. It sets up as opposites “absolutely true and necessary”
on the one hand, and “human judgment” on the other. The implication
is that to be human is to be hopelessly untrue and unnecessary. Blake
deconstructed the stance of Newtonian science as implying exactly this:
it is a stance which aspires to the status of machinery, to the non-hu-man. More than that, it covertly wants to erase or sever humanity from
i
ts science, just as it wants to turn the body into a machine. Of course t
his is in some ways a curious want, as mathematics is one of the most artificially contrived systems ever constructed, and therefore in some
ways the most human. Galileo might claim that the book of Nature “is
written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles,
circles, and other geometrical figures” (ibid., p. 75), but this language is
also one that is always only retrospectively read back into nature. This
i
s why Blake constantly emphasises how much this science is based n
ot on immediate knowledge of the world but rather on “memory”: mathematics for him is a retrospective language, laboriously worked
out behi
114
a
t the world. He explicitly contrasted “mathematic form” with “living f
orm”: “Mathematic Form is Eternal in the Reasoning Memory”, he noted. “Living Form is Eternal Existence”. And to underline the vital
difference between the rational or Platonic and the spiritual or imagina-tive he added, “Grecian is Mathematic Form. Gothic is Living Form”
(On Virgil, p. 270). For Galileo though, these ratios of memory were
the Divine Wisdom. And the less alive something was, the more it resem-bled God. “As to the truth, of which mathematical demonstrations give
us the knowledge, it is the same which the Divine Wisdom knoweth;
but … the manner whereby God knoweth the infinite propositions,
whereof we understand some few, is highly more excellent than ours,
which proceedeth by ratiocination, and passeth from conclusion to
conclusion, whereas his is done at a single thought or intuition” (cited
in Burtt, 1924, p. 82). Note that the “Divine Wisdom” here again points
to the Logos, the “High Church” end of left-hemispheric worship.
114
93
114
Blake angrily wrote
in his copy of Reynolds: “God forbid that truth should be Confined to
Mathematical Demonstration!” (Laoc, p. 274; On Reynolds, p. 659). And
in his wonderful and atypical prose satire, An Island in the Moon,
Blake has some fun satirising this sort of figure, spoofing “the Mathemati-cian” as “Obtuse Angle”, who always understands better “when he
shuts his eyes” (IslM, p. 450).
114
The real clash was not, for Blake, between
religion and reason, which he regarded as similar systems competing
for whose God was more internally consistent, abstract, and inhuman
than the other, but between rationality and imagination.
114
Galileo’s
mathematical and geometrical studies were not distinct from his
“religious” beliefs: since geometry was the word (or at least the Platonic
form) of God, to study the mathematical universe was an inherently
115
religious pursuit, a revelation of the “Divine Wisdom”. Galileo shared
this view of the nature and underlying programs of the universe with
t
he Pope. Indeed Pope Urban VIII encouraged Galileo to write a book on the subject, a work that is known as the Dialogue Concerning the Two
Chief World Systems.
These two chief world “systems” in some ways encapsulate the shift from R1 to R2. And this “dialogue” has been going
on ever since, with Richard Dawkins as perhaps its best-known con-t
emporary mouthpiece—cast either as Galileo, if one believes him to be a champion of free, critical, and enlightened thinking, or else as the
Pope, if one regards him as a pontificating and a close-minded adherent
of only one way of understanding reality.
115
the evidence of the senses is margin-alised and replaced by the purportedly absolute certainties of math-ematics and geometry. This is really at the heart of Blake’s objection to
t
he systems of “Rational Philosophy and Mathematic Demonstration” (J 58: 13, p. 207): they remove the human perceiver from perception.
N
ot only is the post-Newtonian system based on abstract and invisible p
rinciples and entities rather than the evidence of the senses, but it is also a system that constantly prioritises repetition and generalisation
o
ver the particular and living.For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized
p
articularsAnd not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational
Power.
The Infinite alone resides in Definite & Determinate
I
dentityEstablishment of Truth depends on destruction of Falshood
c
ontinuallyOn Circumcision: not on Virginity, O Reasoners of Albion
[J
55:62–66, p. 205]Blake effectively psychoanalyses Newton. On an epistemological level,
Newton’s methodology works in the wrong direction, by claiming
that the more you remove yourself from actual, real, particular expe-riences—the more you generalise—the truer things are; but also on a
116
psychological level, this drive towards the purity and abstraction of
“Mathematic Demonstration” is essentially, Blake points out, a bloodless
and rather sexless drive. Truth, for Blake, comes with and through the
body, through the interconnections and participation with particular
living, breathing forms of being. It does not depend on lines of math-ematics and QEDs. It depends on engagement, not on “Virginity”.
(Perhaps it is no coincidence that Newton himself was apparently a vir-gin, though whether Blake was aware of this is not known). But Blake’s
p
oint concerns the fundamentally dehumanising and cold, purifying stance of the Urizenic brain: as we saw in Part I, the left hemisphere is
profoundly anti body, anti sense. This antipathy towards the body, and
the reality of the immediate senses, is historically true both of traditional
religions and of Newtonian and Galilean science. It is these tensions
between the claims of the body (empiricism) and the claims of the left- hemispheric mind (“pure reason”) that Galileo’s story also highlights.
The Church’s problem with Galileo lay not only in his presentation of
the heliocentric universe as a literal—one might say “Gospel”—truth
r
ather than a hypothesis, but also with the lack of empirical evidence supporting his hypothesis. This lack of contemporary empirical proof
for the heliocentric universe has been explored by Burtt, who asks the
fundamental, and provocative, question: “Why did Copernicus and
Kepler, in advance of any empirical confirmation of the new hypothesis
that the earth is a planet revolving on its axis and circling round the sun,
while the fixed stars remain at rest, believe it to be a true picture of the
astronomical universe?” (Burtt, 1924, p.36). This question is provoca-t
ive because the new sciences—the new Reason (R2)—was supposed, retrospectively at least, to have been based on empiricism (rather than
belief). So, Burtt asks, why did these scientists defend the new hypoth-esis “in advance of any empirical confirmation”? As he points out,
t
he existing Ptolemaic method accounted for the phenomena with “as great accuracy” as its new rival: “The motions of the heavenly bodies
could be charted according to Ptolemy just as correctly as according
to Copernicus” (ibid., p. 36). Copernicus had reduced the number of
epicycles from the eighty of the Ptolemaic system to only thirty-four,
b
ut this seemed to be the only major advantage of the new theory—not something you would risk being burned at the stake for perhaps.
116
T
he lack of empirical evidence for the heliocentric universe in Galileo’s day is significant in understanding the reasons for the appeal
of the theory. In this feature of the dispute we can see again the antith-
117
esis between reason and the body. Reason has always distrusted and
disliked the senses. In Plato’s day, this was conveyed by portraying the
b
ody as a prison (for the rational soul); in Pope Urban VIII’s day by the demonisation of the body as a sinful, lustful, and unholy charnel. And
today it is shown by the attempt to portray the body as a machine, infor-mation processor, or computer. This assault on the body is particularly
evident in the story of Galileo. As we have seen, for him the universe is
not written in the language of the senses, but in “triangles, circles, and
other geometrical figures.” For him, the evidence of the senses might
be used, but only selectively, and they are more usually considered to
be unreliable and deceptive: according to the senses, after all, the sun
appeared to move around the earth. Indeed this, for Galileo, was one
o
f the appeals of the Copernican system: it was, as Burtt notes, “the supreme example of the victory of mathematical reason over the senses.”
As Galileo himself observed, or, perhaps I should say, reasoned:
I cannot sufficiently admire the eminence of those men’s wits, that
have received and held it to be true, and with the sprightliness of
their judgments offered such violence to their own senses, as that
they have been able to prefer that which their reason dictated to
them, to that which sensible experiments represented most mani-festly to the contrary … I cannot find any bounds for my admira-tion, how that reason was able in Aristarchus and Copernicus, to
commit such a rape on their senses, as in despite thereof to make
herself mistress of their credulity. [Galileo, Two Great Systems,
cited i
n Burtt, 1924, p. 79]“That reason was able … to commit such a rape on their senses”: this is
very much the Galilean spirit and project, and in this he is clearly and
demonstrably continuing the historical Urizenic drive of the left hemi-sphere. Galileo’s admiration for scientists’ ability to commit “violence
t
o their own senses”, and to upturn and invert “sensible experiments” themselves, shows the appeal that the dogmatic certainties and abstrac-t
ions of mathematical and geometrical science (the basis of mechanics) h
119
From R1 to R2: The new scientific priesthood
119
98
119
Galileo Galilei, as one of the architects of the new R2 operating sys-tem of the left brain, introduced a more internally coherent and con-sistent rationality, made it even more literalistic and mathematical in
nature, changed the status of scientific models from being metaphors
and useful hypotheses into being statements of absolute “truth”, and
helped to introduce a new tone into the scientific project: intellectually
120
superior, dogmatic, intolerant of alternative modes of knowledge and
a
ttention, and sanctimonious. Many of these innovative applications were unfortunately merely refinements and continuations of the medi-eval Church’s default operating system: dogmatic, literalist, and uncon-s
ciou
120
99
120
This
h
istorical development was to alter the character of both science and religion: science became increasingly more like a religion (dogmatic,
pontificating, and literalist), and theism became increasingly rational-i
stic (philosophical and naturalistic) in a rather desperate attempt not to appear too redundant and obsolete. This latter trend culminated in
the mechanical deism of the eighteenth century, which repelled Blake
so much. The newly invigorated scientific investigators of the nine-teenth century took all of the absurdly literal, fundamentalist, and
pedestrian statements and beliefs of the traditional orthodox Church
at face value—creation in seven literal days, actual virgin births, and so
on—and declared, unsurprisingly enough, that they could not be taken
as objectively true. This literalist “critique” of an even more literalist
Church seemed to many nineteenth-century scientists to be radical.
121
100
121
100
121
model, such defenders of the scientific faith as Boyer, Humphrey, and
Dawkins, take evident glee in exercising this essentially “religious”
neurological or judgmental and sanctimonious program. As we saw in
Part I, one of the most recognisable features of Urizenic programming
is its desperate superiority complex: its compulsive need to feel supe-rior, to gain power, to brook no other ways of seeing or interpreting.
This drive for moral and intellectual superiority—traditionally a preoc-cupation with priests—became, increasingly, a defining characteristic
of post-Newtonian science. “There is no point in disputing someone,”
wrote Galileo, “who is so ignorant that it would require a huge vol-ume to refute his stupidities.” And in a self-admiringly reflective pas-sage he informed Cosimo de’ Medici that “of all the hatreds, none is
greater than that of ignorance against knowledge” (White, 2007, p. 133,
p. 156). This is not quite true: the hatred of supposed “illuminated” peo-ple against supposed ignorant people seems to be greater. Like many
apparently “enlightened” thinkers, Galileo believed that most humans
were stupid. He thoroughly disliked teaching for similar reasons, as
White observes: “teaching novices was something he could barely tol-erate and his distaste for the profession increased as he grew older”
(
ibid., p. 74). This elitist and self-admiring concept of intelligence was to remain with science. Blake brilliantly satirises this profoundly unem-p
athic aspect of science (what today might be diagnosed as a rather autistic tendency) in the character of “Obtuse Angle” in A
n Island in the Moon, who regards every one as a “fool”, especially if they fail to obey
the most basic and literal rules of logic: “Pray said Aradobo is Chatter-ton a Mathematician. No said Obtuse Angle how
How could you think he was not, & ask if he was said Obtuse Angle”
(IslM p. 453).
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The implicit, although it seems almost entirely unconscious, nature
of this superiority complex is prevalent within much popular sci-entific discourse. The rational deconstruction of arguments for the
122
existence of God in such modern works as Dawkins’ T
he God Delusion and Boyer’s Religion Explained—their titles are indicative of the sledge-hammer approach—suggests the adversarial nature of this rivalry
between competing versions of the same Urizenic program. Typical
section titles in Boyer’s work are: “How the supernatural can be tested
in the lab”, “Rituals are indeed meaningless”, and “Religion is less than
you think” (subtlety was never a very strong point for the left brain).
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Equally typical is Nicholas Humphrey’s manipulative and rather con-descending mode of analysis in Soul Searching, a book that seeks to
explain “why so many people still cling, like children seeking reassur-ance, to belief in supernatural forces.” Given his own need to uphold
the childish certainties of science, this accusation is ultimately again
rather self-reflexive. He claims that his interpretation of the infantile
basis of religious faith is not disparaging—he says he does it “certainly
with no intention to disparage. There is no shame in people having
childlike needs nor in their seeking familiar childish ways of satis-fying them”, a position, if it is intended sincerely, that is rather hard
to maintain given his subsequent references to religious beliefs and
practices as similar to “theatrical farce” and “psychological illusion
or human deceitfulness”. Or indeed to his comparisons of Jesus and
Moses as being like Houdini and Uri Geller, or his supposition that
“Jesus was regularly using deception and trickery in his public per-formances like any common conjuror” (Humphrey, 1995, p.12, p. 73,
p. 70, p. 62, p. 99).
Note: notice how unseriously they take children and their capacity for creativity
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102
123
Boyer’s discussion is different in so far as he accepts that there may
i
n fact have been a rational basis for many early systems of belief and religions. Thus in surveying, as he puts it, “the rich tapestry of human
folly” that is religion, he explores the possible contending grounds for
belief in God (as if they were features on a car to be sold to the masses)
a
nd notes that these claims to belief must in fact be of a specific kind to warrant popular adoption. “The sleep of reason is no explanation for
religion as it is. There are many possible unsupported claims and only
a few religious themes.” Not any old unsupported claim will do, appar-ently, even for the religious. For example, one possible criterion for a
belief in a God, he says, might be the following proposition: “There is
only one God! He is omnipotent. But He exists only on Wednesdays”
(Boyer, 2001, p. 2, p. 35, pp. 59–60). This, he notes, has some features
going for it but as a general proposition it is not immediately compel-l
ing. Why is this, he asks? This question, I think, is the key one—and also one that Boyer curiously seems to have difficulty answering. He
admits that some propositions or contenders for belief seem to be, as
he puts it, “better” or “worse” than others: “They may be bad in dif-ferent ways”, while some “new propositions sound much better”. This
is still tautological though: why are they better? Well, he conjectures,
certain propositions seem “strange” or “surprising”, and some might
be more “workable” than others, and so on (ibid., p. 64). What he really
means to say, of course, is that these claims and propositions would
not be rational. That’s the reason why God existing only on Wednes-days is a “bad” proposition. It did not become a widely accepted tenet
of any religion because it was not rational: there must be reasons to
believe in God, and these reasons must conform to some degree to
p
eople’s experience of life—to evidence, to empiricism—or else to an ideological state apparatus (ISA). Boyer himself seems curiously una-ble or reluctant to see this—for him religion must be an intuitive
thing (this is perhaps one of the “childlike needs” or assumptions of mod-ern science), so he puts the rational rejection for possible theistic beliefs
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d
own to “intuitive feelings” about some claims for God being somehow “better” than others. Boyer however notices that what makes religious
propositions plausible or not is often to do with things like “ontologi-cal categories” (i.e., concerning classification, ordering, and syllogistic
reasoning) and “inference systems”. “Our inference systems may be
there because they provide solutions to problems that were recurrent
in normal human environments for hundreds of thousands of years”
(ibid., p. 112, pp. 132–33). Isn’t this a rational thing? To develop infer-ence systems that provide “solutions to problems”? Isn’t this, indeed,
w
124
REASON
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The process of apparently primitive and religious accumu-lated inference, as he also notes, constantly involves reconstitution,
d
eduction, and evaluation (ibid., pp. 132–133, 135). This might suggest a
t least a rational element to these supposedly childlike and intuitive religions. As Nicholas Humphrey has similarly observed, there must
be an “explanatory principle” in religions, providing “a reasonable
explanation of the present” (Humphrey, 1995, p. 16). Thus, the puzzling
l
ongevity and hold of such “supernatural belief systems”, it turns out, has to do with their “reasonableness”, their “logical connections”, and
their syllogistic and inferential structures. This seems to be another
case of the pot calling the kettle the perfect absorber of light. Similarly,
a tenth of Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion, is taken up with reviewing
a whole series of apparently rational “Arguments for God’s existence”.
He examines a priori arguments, a posteriori arguments; he explores
the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments, the argu-ments of Aquinas, Newton, Pascal—without ever seeming to notice the
accumulated evidence he has just provided for an immense amount
of rationalising going on within the apparently irrational Church, and
indeed within western thought throughout the last two thousand years.
Surely this suggests, if anything, a striking preoccupation in all previ-ous monastic and theological circles with argument, disputation, aca-d
emic distinctions, laws, divisions, moral codifications—indeed with all of the Urizenic left hemisphere concerns that, as Blake pointed out,
have formed the basis of the Holy Reasoning Power’s world picture.
Dawkins points out the limitations of Aquinas’s postulation of an
U
nmoved Mover and Uncaused Cause, which the scholastic theologian had advanced in order to try and explain the rational conundrum of
what caused causation. But all Aquinas had done was to identify a
problem with the R1 operating system.
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104
125
The emotional and comforting nature of religion
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By exposing the Urizenic nature of human thought-construction,
including both the earlier religious and later scientific systems, Blake
suggests their common roots within the structure of rationalising
processes within the human brain. But the history of religion, as of
reason, is not simply the development of inference systems, logical
syllogisms, a posteriori arguments, and evaluative deduction. Urizenic
systems are powerful because they appeal to and draw on other aspects
of human experience. The modern adherents of R2, such as Dawkins,
Boyer and Humphrey, point to two particular aspects of R1 which they
claim clearly distinguishes their own methodology and science from
the “religious” project of their predecessors.
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Firstly, they claim that religion has an emotional, comforting aspect to
it, and that this therefore might help explain its otherwise baffling and
unlikely longevity, given the far superior operating speeds and func-tional parameters of R2. For Humphrey, the appeal of religion is that
it offers “reassurance”: that the belief in souls and in God makes one
feel “less lonely and more cared for” (Humphrey, 1995, p. 62). Indeed
this has become something of a doctrinal cliché: religion is somehow
all about beliefs, and things you can’t prove, and feelings, and stands
for comfort; whereas science is all about being objective, and hard, and
empirical, and wearing white coats.
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REASON
126
As Blake astutely countered, it is actually belief in Reason and “the
Law” that many people have found so comforting about “religious
worship”—the passive who obey Reason. Traditional religions offered
not so much comfort, as certainty and potential security (if one obeyed).
This deep need for certainty also drove Galileo—as we have seen—and
many other “left-brain” scientists and philosophers, such as Descartes
and Locke. According to this view, the real secret of the immensely pow-erful hold of R1 for so long was its cogent and coherent portrayal of a
highly disciplined, ordered universe, controlled by an unswerving and
objective set of Laws, usually embodied in some sort of personalised
or personified Lawmaker. (“I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!”, as
Shelley summed up this continuing piece of ISA in The Mask of Anarchy,
Reiman & Powers, 1977, p. 302). It is these laws which stabilise the Urizenic
operating system, and produce the basis—the “rock”—for its believers:
the illusion of certainty and solidity that provides the comfort for belief
both in science and in religion. Thus Urizen declares, in a statement that
is almost a declaration of the fundamental program of the Urizenic OS
(ordering, quantifiable, uniform, systematic, and hierarchical):
L
o! I unfold my darkness: and onThis rock, place with strong hand the Book
O
f eternal brass, written in my solitude ….One command, one joy, one desire,
One curse, one weight, one measure
One King, One God, one Law.
[Ur
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This was and is, I believe, the source of its “comfort”: early Urizenic
religious codes (R1) provided a clear and fairly logical set of rules and
prescriptions to be followed, and an abstract and invisible Law-maker
to enforce them. And this is perhaps also the main, if rarely stated,
p
sych
127
106
127
This brings us to the second response to Humphrey’s point that a key
difference between religion and science is that only religion provides
comfort. The search for grand unified theories, supersymmetry, under-lying mathematical harmony, and, above all, order,
still drives much of contemporary physics. This is not merely an intellectual preoccupation
or an aesthetic imperative, as Einstein famously intimated; it is a pro-foundly emotional and deep-seated psychological need within scien-t
ists (as the later discussion on autistic ways of thinking also suggests). And R2 excels in this area: it offers its certainties, its belief in an even
more rigorously controlled and deterministic universe than R1—its
absolute “laws” which not even God can alter—its utter predictability,
its rather simplistic materialistic credo (as articulated, as we have seen,
by Dawkins, Humphrey, Boyer et al.). And it has even removed the fear
of the afterlife from its picture. Its users are offered the reassurance that
w
hatever they do in this lifetime will have no consequence in the next. If anything is comforting, it is surely this.
127
B
elie
127
The second critique of “religion” by the modern scientific proponents
of R2 is that not only is it supposed to be a reassuring credo but it is
a
lso a system based on the supernatural, the intuitive, and the irrational rather than on the hard-nosed logical, empirical, and demonstrable
methodology of reason. But this again fails to understand the nature
of Urizenic reasoning. Reason may be rational, but the belief in reason
is not. And it is a belief: and beliefs are not rational. It is this aspect of
reason-worship that has been so misunderstood and enlarged upon by
the “religious”, and so vilified by their more literalist R2 opponents.
A
s McGilchrist has noted:There is one problem that attacks the very root of logos.
Although constitutive for science and much of philosophy, because of its
being based on argumentation and the provision of proof, it cannot
constitute—cannot ground—itself according to its own principles
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of proof and argumentation. The value of rationality, as well as
whatever premises it may start from, has to be intuited: neither
can be derived from rationality itself. All rationality can do is to
provide internal consistency once the system is up and running.
[M&E,
p. 330]R2, like all rational programs, provides a useful operating system once
it is “up and running”, but it cannot look beneath its own feet. It can-n
ot do this—will not do this—because it has nothing to stand upon. Archimedean scientists have been looking for a place to stand since the
scientific world began, and the further they look, the more the ground
itself seems to be involved in how they are looking at it. In fact it requires
f
aith to believe in anything, as we shall see later in a discussion on the ontological status of fiction and belief. If one regards “God” as Reason,
f
128
REASON
128
C
onclusio