William Blake and Gerrit Gong

[USU78]

18 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Where exactly is "there"??? 

If it ain't "in here," I have no idea.  As Mr Emerson said to Miss Honeychurch, while pounding his chest one-handed:  "Here is where the bird sings!  Here is where the sky is blue!"

[USU78]

On 11/28/2018 at 9:59 AM, mfbukowski said:

So what the Sam Hill have we been arguing about?

Maybe it's the same problem I have with @hope_for_things in even keeping that word "reality" for the underlying unknowable causes of experience - as per Rorty below.

If "reality" is what is experienced then it cannot be something unknowable "manifesting" itself.

That gives two opposite meanings to the word

I know you turn off siggys so I will re-quote my siggy Rorty quote.

But this is a beautiful thread- let's take Rorty to another one if you want to take this up yet again for the billionth time.

This thread is for Blake.

But here is the Blake in Rorty, and I only mention it to point out Rorty's link to Romanticism found of course throughout pragmatism, and to show how Rorty speaks of human intelligence creating the world as we know it

In short one cannot speak of "reality" as that which "is not in experience" as you have above  and then you turn around and use the same word to say it is "by definition knowable" because it IS in experience

That's a pretty strange "definition" for something which is both knowable and unknowable!

That's why Rorty speaks of the "effects of causes which do not include human mental states" for what is unknowable because humans cannot experience it.

One does not call "reality" unknowable !

That is the purpose of his distinction here

Some of Blake's best sentences:

Quote

 

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 

In the forests of the night; 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 

 

In what distant deeps or skies. 

Burnt the fire of thine eyes? 

On what wings dare he aspire? 

What the hand, dare seize the fire? 

 

And what shoulder, & what art, 

Could twist the sinews of thy heart? 

And when thy heart began to beat, 

What dread hand? & what dread feet? 

 

What the hammer? what the chain, 

In what furnace was thy brain? 

What the anvil? what dread grasp, 

Dare its deadly terrors clasp! 

 

When the stars threw down their spears 

And water'd heaven with their tears: 

Did he smile his work to see? 

Did he who made the Lamb make thee? 

 

Tyger Tyger burning bright, 

In the forests of the night: 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

 

The "fearful symmetry" of G-d's creations are fearful precisely because we lack the tools to take them in  ...  they are too vast, too complex, too holy, and G-d's workplace too fearful.  Enoch feared what he saw there.  The Tyger, you see, is holy,  too.  It was fashioned in the same holy, fearful place.  And Blake, I think, saw that.  Even idiots like Ginsburg see that everything made by G-d in his fearful workplace is holy.

We are incapable of achieving the same quality of holiness in here, and what's out there in all its fearfulness we can at best approximate, I think.  It would burn us up if we tried, I fear.  But our rude, rural, inadequate tools in here were fashioned out there, so they're good for something.

Sorry.  Babbling.

Edited November 29, 2018 by USU78

[Kevin Christensen]

Fearful Symmetry also is the name of Northrop Frye's seminal study of Blake, the book that rekindled and expanded appreciation of Blake.  And of course,  that line resonates powerfully with 2 Nephi 2 and insights of the Endowment.

Don't we all babble  bit.

Best,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

[clarkgoble]

On 11/28/2018 at 4:58 PM, mfbukowski said:

I have asked you before not to characterize my position because you never get it right and still have not.  I do  not make that distinction in experience either way- experience just is. There is nothing to be said about it.  It is Dasein.

I'll try not to do so in the future. I'll just say that's how it comes off but we seem cursed to forever misunderstand each other.

As to dasein, that's the there-being. The clearing is the there where being manifests. If we're following Heidegger anyway. More or less he's trying to explain consciousness as a place where things manifest themselves. He's still focused on Husserl's description of phenomenology as focused on the things. So dasein is a replacement for Cartesian mind and is just a "place" where things manifest but as the things themselves. So we don't make a distinction between reality outside of me and the appearance of reality. An other way of putting this is that there's no appearance/reality dualism. Both are manifest as an appearing there. So being is this giving of things as well as the clearing of the clearing so things can appear there.

It's not really idealism proper - at least not idealism that still participates in the Cartesian split between ideas and things. So it's different from Kant or Berkeley. It's more akin to the old neoplatonic and kabbalistic idea of God as pure being constricting himself to make a clearing where his being can manifest in limited ways.

This may seem like I'm going down a tangent, but it's actually relevant for Blake since Blake was deeply influenced by the kind of neoplatonism in gnosticism and kabbalism. Heidegger sees the failing of society as interpreting everything through a technological framing. That is things are seen as complete, fully manifest, and fully discrete entities that can be counted and treated economically. As raw material for thinking in terms of atoms of entities. He wants to emphasize things as finitude. Instead of a thing fully revealed (either as a pure idea in idealisms or a pure spatial thing as in scientific realism or many materialisms) we have a clearing where things manifest but to manifest they only show part of themselves. And to show one part they always must hide an other part. We never see completely. Blake has something similar. Heidegger replaces technological thinking with a strife or conflict where we take the things of the earth (reality) and try to form them with things of heaven (language, ideas). This then is manifest in this clearing. Blake sees the role of the unconscious and creativity in a similar way. Blake is pushing back at the Newtonian model of meaning and existence to get at this more creative, strifeful imagination. Albion, or fallen man, is this kind of type for this existence of finitude. (And of course Albion also represents Britain in Blake's odd dualism)

 

 

[mfbukowski]

On 11/29/2018 at 5:26 AM, USU78 said:

Some of Blake's best sentences:

The "fearful symmetry" of G-d's creations are fearful precisely because we lack the tools to take them in  ...  they are too vast, too complex, too holy, and G-d's workplace too fearful.  Enoch feared what he saw there.  The Tyger, you see, is holy,  too.  It was fashioned in the same holy, fearful place.  And Blake, I think, saw that.  Even idiots like Ginsburg see that everything made by G-d in his fearful workplace is holy.

We are incapable of achieving the same quality of holiness in here, and what's out there in all its fearfulness we can at best approximate, I think.  It would burn us up if we tried, I fear.  But our rude, rural, inadequate tools in here were fashioned out there, so they're good for something.

Sorry.  Babbling.

Ah but there is holy babbling and mindless babbling.

This is holy babbling, a litany or rosary from the inside that could start a fire.

More

Por

Favor.

Not a bad chant.  I see a March of hundreds chanting "More Por Favor" again and again!

"Insatiably da capo" on the other hand, not so much.

No rythmn to it.

But yes, this "babble" could do it

And then we have the unending babble of encyclopedia readers and Wikipedia cut- and -pasters, hereabouts as well, and they, not in the heart.

They will never see Holiness because the cacaphony of words gets in the way.

 

 

Edited December 1, 2018 by mfbukowski