I know you're all waiting with baited breath re: the new series.
I've been asked to deliver a lecture on another topic which is consuming most of my mental energy, so I'll get back to this in a serious way after I've delivered it. I might even post a few on the way.
Suffice to say of the Blake/Dawkins article, the skeleton runs thus:
- Dawkins says Blake's mysticism from the same drive as a scientist
- Dawkins says that Blake "hates and fears" science which is "a waste."
- SIDETRACK - a bit of an old Dawkins trick going on here. Blake is one of, if not the, greatest mystic to ever write in the English language. Dawkins kind of dismisses him off-the-cuff, then proceeds to prove mysticism wrong but grappling with snake charmers. But it doesn't really properly address the very advanced and thorough work produced by Blake.
- Fact is, Blake's mysticism does not cloud his mind here. Blake's criticisms of science run on two primary fronts his best known passages 1) the notion of Euclidean space 2) the use if scientific apparatus to represent space as ordered and in harmony.
- Blake's criticism of science has actually been vindicated by modern science. So it's a bit rich of Dawkins to call his poetic gift "a waste" simply because he has been critical of science.
- More than that, what Dawkins worries about here is the three-fold notion of Truth, Beauty and Order.
- Dawkin's complaint that poets should write with scientific input runs along the same theme. As he puts it, there is great meaning and beauty in an ordered, causal universe (which he opposes to ad hoc mysticism).
- This is the beauty of the Enlightenment method. It should come as no surprise, since he mentions Locke and Newton so frequently, that he is quite wedded to these ideas of order, category, inherent structure. And, for him, beauty is the discovery of the underlying structures.
- But for Blake, beauty is the destruction of structure - it is striving within the imagination to discover the limits of the believable, the understandable, the liminal. This is the truest work of a scientist - both radically subjective and striving for the universal.
- An example of Dawkins really misunderstanding Blake, and it is Dawkin's that forms the waste here.
BUT ON THE FLIPSIDE
Blake is just as petty about Newton, Locke and Voltaire.
