#on blake

[Blake] asserts that the spirits, wonders and beauties that are found in nature all ultimately come from the human heart. [...] There is, for Blake, no means of describing nature apart from the human perspectives that we have on it, and nature is therefore something interior to humans rather than exterior to them: its only perceivable life lies within us. [...] Thinking of nature as having a 'real' external existence outside of humanity is, for Blake, just another return to abstraction.

Contraries are necessary to the existence of the world, but individuals and societies use contraries as a way to split the world in two morally. This moral splitting and categorizing is what Blake calls 'negation'. Negation is the process whereby one half of a pair of contraries is labelled as inferior to the other half and consequently dismissed. [...]  A negation is a zero-value or devaluated contrary, which for Blake does not actually exist, because it is an abstract image of the world that no longer corresponds to reality itself.