part 2

Transcribed by sweetly (http://www.raypeatforum.com/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=2625)

John: He certainly had an incredibly productive lifespan and both in art, I don't know if everybody out there has seen his paintings and etchings and drawings but they're certainly astounding to look at. And addition to the artwork, he writes an immense amount of poetry to go with and some of it's prose too I suppose, but he, he's an amazingly accomplished person from somebody who never, from our point of view these days, from somebody who never went to school. Maybe you could comment a little bit on his education, such as it was.

Peat: He went to drawing school, I think when he was 10 then was an apprenticed to an engraver when he was 15, he started associating with the educated people through the engraver when he was an apprentice and was writing poetry in his late teens and early twenties but as a simply a craftsman, he was not really at the center of their movement, which was educated writers who were getting published and having people illustrate their books, he knew these people and became friends with some of them like William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft and Joseph Priestley, the oxygen guy who was also the founder of Unitarianism or one of the founders and these people were the radicals and progressives who were actual in danger of being imprisoned or killed by the government for their opinions. Some of Blake's acquaintances were tried for treason in 1795, the atmosphere among the people was such that all 3 of the first ones tried were acquitted by the juries and the government had other, I think 30 other people were indicted, they dropped the cases against them because it was getting so embarrassing because the transcripts of the trial were being published and it was hurting the government to lose the cases and get all of this publicity for the anti-government view and they had had a list of about 500 they intended they prosecute if they were winning with the juries.

John: And these people were all accused of treason against the king?

Peat: Yea, high treason for belonging to the corresponding society which stayed in touch with revolutionaries in America and France, it was treason to express opposition to monarchy, the law actually said they had to lead armed rebellion but the prosecutors were bending the interpretation and saying that having a bad attitude was treasonous.

John: Yea, a rebellious, violent rebellious attitude. Haha.

Peat: Yea. Haha.

John: It sounds like Blake was doing a lot of reading and he was right in the thick of whatever cultural movements were happening at that point. Did he read science also?

Peat: Yea, his parents were for a time, attending the Swedenborg church, Swedenborg was a real scientist, did some very 100 years-premature nerve research and so Blake knew a lot about nervous anatomy, biology in general, knew all of the science in London really, at least to the extent of reading things that the publishers had and because so many of them were radicals in opposing monarchy, he was friendly with them politically but he didn't accept their rationalist stylish way of thinking about reality. Priestley had some ideas that Blake found scientifically justifiable, such as energy, Priestley believed that matter was made up of energy and Blake saw energy as being the essence of human life, once referred to being so inspired that sparks were coming out of his fingers.

John: Heh, wow.

Peat: The main scientific mood of those deists and rationalists was that reason was where attention should be put rather than on appearance and that matter some sort of inert something, not having intrinsic energy, an idea about matter that a lot of people still have, that consciousness can't possibly come out of matter, because matter is something that has to be pushed around by extrinsic forces like billiard balls.

John: So the mechanistic view?

Peat: Yea. So Blake was doing better thinking about the philosophy of science even than Joseph Priestley, especially the worst mechanists, he not only was putting, energy into matter but he wanted to see experience as a part of the nature of matter that everything was following the same principles, whether it was a piece of sand or a bug or a person. The energy and interaction were the essential properties of matter and of life.

John: So it's a building, aspect of matter, that it actually gains complexity.

Peat: He sometimes calls the principal of life or of knowing the poetic genius, this he saw as being a universal thing that a plant or an animal, its form was expressing its poetic genius. So it was kind of a lively version of Spinoza's pantheism. He didn't see any separation between matter, energy and consciousness and believed that experience was, even said that experiment was the true form of knowing and that the experiencing person couldn't derive anything new from previously learned knowledge and this sort of offended the university-educated people who believed that they had learned something important at the university and Blake was saying that every moment we're experiencing something new that is changing something we did know. And so the canonical knowledge that you get at university is always necessarily in doubt but Blake said if you can't doubt from what you experience, you have to doubt everything that people tell you is true. But experience can't be doubted because that's what it is.

John: I see.