Poetry Fetter’d Fetters the Human Race! William Blake on an antidote to the mechanistic imagination

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

Why is the mechanical view of reality so strong? Why does billiard-ball atomism remain the default popular metaphysics?
William James was horrified by such “nothing buttery” and the way it substituted bare concepts for rich phenomena.
A.N. Whitehead famously – or perhaps not famously enough – described the problem as the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”.
William Blake is another critic. “General Knowledge is Remote Knowledge. But General Forms have their vitality in Particulars. It is in Particulars that Wisdom consists & Happiness too.”
We should care about what Blake called “single vision and Newton’s sleep”. The antidote is to reestablish a relationship with presence. Poetry and imagery evoke the lived moment of experiencing and the fluid dynamics of that perception. Regain contact with that, regain contact with life.
This is the promise of Blake and others.
For more on Mark’s book, Awake!, and more of his work see - www.markvernon.com