William Blake vs The World Chapter 10. APPEARD AS ONE MAN
Author: John Higgs Publisher: New York, NY: Penguin Random House. Publish Date: 2021 Review Date: Status:📚
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Blake believed that there was no separation between the body and the soul. Instead, the body was part of the soul. Again, he is clear about this in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. ‘Man has no Body distinct from his Soul’, he wrote. ‘The notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged.’ This is a distinct break from the dualism which has coloured Western thinking from Plato onwards, in which the immaterial and material aspects of the universe were thought of as separate and incompatible.
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The way we thought about our bodies was starting to change in Blake’s era. Flesh was previously seen as something corrupt, weak and foul. Diets and standards of hygiene were poor and sores, insect bites and potent body odours were considered normal. Diaries and letters of the period reveal the deep repugnance many people felt about both their own flesh, and about that of others. The elaborate wigs and powders worn by the upper classes may now seem comical, but they reflected the desire for refinement and elegance over physical reality.
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Our view of the body started to change in the second half of the eighteenth century. A culture that previously saw plump fleshiness as a sign of status and vitality began moving towards more narcissistic ideas of exercise and controlled diets, such as those favoured by Lord Byron. But this was still a long way from viewing the body as being on a par with the soul.
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Many early Christian thinkers saw the material body as the prison of the immaterial soul, and hence something to be despised. The practice of self-flagellation which runs throughout Christian history is a product of ideas such as this, although thankfully few took it to the lengths of the third-century Christian theologian Origen of Alexandria, who is said to have castrated himself for God.
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The teachings of Augustine a couple of centuries later softened these ideas. He argued that original sin was the cause of all our woes, and not simply the flesh itself. This shifted the spiritual battleground from the body to the will, and argued that we had the ability to resist physical temptation. Augustine’s excuse for bodily sins was in agreement with the Gospel of Matthew: ‘the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.’
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None of these developments questioned the centuries-old idea that body and soul were two different things. As we’ve noted, this dualism is central to Western thought, so to find alternatives you need to look outside of Europe. Western, Chinese and Indian Vedic thought all differ in how they conceptualise the fundamental nature of the universe, and hence all have very different perspectives on the subject.
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In Europe, by contrast, philosophers after Pythagoras insisted on a dualist position in which soul and matter were two entirely separate things. In his dialogues, Plato talked of physical objects being poor reflections of perfect immaterial forms which existed elsewhere, in some unreachable heaven. The distinction between soul and matter has since been reframed as the distinction between mind and matter, but the general principle of a fundamental separation remains.
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Here, then, are three very different starting points for the foundation of culture and philosophy. If your idea of the fundamental principle of the universe was Brahman, you would expect to find this deep inside an object. If your fundamental principle was the Tao, then the object itself would be part of the Tao, and there would be no need to look inside to find it. But if your fundamental principle was dualist, and you considered matter and soul to be separate, then the thing you would be looking for would not be part of the physical object. It would be away somewhere in an unreachable immaterial realm. This is the idea that sits at the heart of the European worldview.
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For Blake to insist that the body was part of the soul was to go against centuries of Western assumptions and philosophy. His contemporaries and peers educated at Oxford and Cambridge placed great authority in ancient Greek and Christian ideas. With a dualist education, they were always going to struggle to understand his worldview. The assumptions that lay at the heart of Western philosophy were buried so deeply in their mental models of the world that they had become invisible, and as such could not be questioned. In those circumstances, Blake’s baffling position was never going to make any sense. To the classically educated, it could only be categorised as madness.
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But Blake was not bound by their categories or habits of thought. He was free of those particular ‘mind-forg’d manacles’, which are adopted early in Western education. He was able to describe the universe as he perceived it, rather than how he was taught it should appear. His perspective offered a radical new framing of the relationship between man and God.