Can art instruct science? William Blake as biological visionary
By Raymond Peat
Can art instruct science? William Blake as biological visionary
“As the true method of knowledge is experiment, the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences.”
“Seest thou the little winged fly, smaller than a grain of sand? It has a heart like thee; a brain open to heaven & hell….”
“Energy is the only life, and is from the Body…. Energy is eternal delight.”
“Then tell me, what is the material world, and is it dead?” He, laughing. answer'd: “I will write a book on leaves of flowers, if you will feed me on love thoughts & give me now and then A cup of sparkling poetic fancies; so, when I am tipsie, I'll sing to you to this soft lute, and shew you all alive The world, where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.” (1794)
艺术能指导科学吗? 威廉·布莱克是生物学上的空想家
“因为知识的真正方法是实验，真正的认知能力必须是经验的能力”
“你看见那比一粒沙子还小的长着翅膀的小苍蝇吗?它有一颗像你的心;一颗通往天堂地狱的大脑….“
“能量是唯一的生命，它来自身体….精力充沛是永恒的快乐。”
“那么告诉我，物质世界是什么?它死了吗?”他笑了。回答说:“我愿意写一本关于花叶的书，如果你用爱情的思想来喂养我，请不时地给我一杯闪闪发光的诗一般的幻想;所以，当我喝得醉醺醺的时候，我要用这支柔琵琶为你歌唱，让你看看这个活生生的世界，在那里，每一粒尘土都在呼吸着它的欢乐。”(1794)
When I started studying William Blake in the 1950s, it seemed that only English majors knew who he was, but today, I think more people might recognize The Tyger as Blake’s than would be able to identify poems by Keats, Byron, Shelley, or Wordsworth. After 200 years, his writing seems contemporary, while other poets’ works have become dated, and are valued mostly as cultural background. But I don’t think this means that his work is any easier to understand than it was when he wrote it. It means that other poets tied their writing to frameworks which have receded into the background, while Blake’s words were chosen in a way that allowed them to travel across the centuries without loss. Even though such universality is a goal of science as well as of art, most of what passed for science in the 18th century is today of only historical interest.
当我在20世纪50年代开始学习威廉·布莱克时，似乎只有英语专业的学生知道他是谁，但今天，我想更多的人可能会认出《老虎》是布莱克的作品，而不是能够认出济慈、拜伦、雪莱或华兹华斯的诗歌。200年后，他的创作似乎是当代的，而其他诗人的作品已经过时，大多被视为文化背景。但我不认为这意味着他的作品比他写的时候更容易理解。这意味着，其他诗人将他们的写作与框架联系在一起，而这些框架已经退居幕后，而布莱克的文字选择的方式，使他们能够穿越几个世纪而不会丢失。尽管这种普遍性是科学和艺术的目标，但大多数在18世纪被视为科学的东西在今天只具有历史意义。
Everywhere in our culture, authoritarian ignorance has disproportionate influence. Most of the published work in our culture treats the succession of authoritarian academic/scien- tific/political cults as if this were simply the way history and human nature work, and must work. But this mechanical historical process is only superficial, and below this surface, individuals and groups have always lived as though time behaved very differently for them. William Blake was a person who investigated this discrepancy between official cultural progression, and real human possibility, and his ideas might be able to do essentially what he suggested they could do: Provide a way to by-pass the officially established mechanistic view of reality, into a more fully human reality. Since Blake ridiculed established doctrines in medicine, chemistry, mathematics, and Newtonian physics, many people have dismissed him as a religious nut, but the way in which he criticized them indicates that he simply believed that they were bad science; he also criticized conventional art and morality, because he believed that they were destroying art and morality.
在我们的文化中，专制的无知有着不成比例的影响。在我们的文化中，大多数已出版的著作将威权主义的学术/科学/政治崇拜的继承视为历史和人类本性的工作方式，而且必须如此。但这种机械的历史过程只是表面的，在这个表面之下，个人和群体一直生活着，仿佛时间对他们的表现是非常不同的。威廉·布莱克研究了官方文化进程和真实人类可能性之间的差异，他的观点可能能够做他认为可以做的事情:提供一种方法，绕过官方建立的机械论的现实观点，进入更完整的人类现实。自从布莱克嘲笑医学、化学、数学和牛顿物理学的既定学说以来，许多人把他斥为一个宗教狂人，但他批评这些学说的方式表明，他只是认为它们是糟糕的科学;他也批评传统艺术和道德，因为他认为他们正在破坏艺术和道德。
A group that was active in the 1950s, called Synectics, developed several mental procedures that they found to be useful in teaching people to solve problems creatively. These included ways to improve thinking by analogy, to get people out of the ruts of conventional thinking. Personification, fantasy, biological imagery, “making the familiar strange,” they found, seemed to tap into natural biological and mental processes to increase the ability to direct energy toward valid solutions to practical or artistic problems. They found that experts had to overcome their special knowledge before they could usefully solve problems in “their field,” and they showed that much of the mystery could be removed from the creative process. Simply putting aside dogmatic mental frameworks was crucial.
一个活跃于20世纪50年代的组织，叫做Synectics，开发了一些心理程序，他们发现这些程序对教人们创造性地解决问题很有用。这些方法包括通过类比来改善思维，使人们摆脱常规思维的陈规。他们发现，人格化、幻想、生物意象，“把熟悉的事物变得陌生”，似乎可以利用自然的生物和心理过程，增加将能量导向实际或艺术问题的有效解决方案的能力。他们发现，专家们必须克服他们的特殊知识，才能有效地解决“他们的领域”的问题，他们还表明，许多神秘的东西可以从创造过程中消除。把教条的思维框架放在一边是至关重要的。
When you believe that you have adequate, expert knowledge, a passive, logical, deductive form of mental activity seems appropriate. Deduction always goes from a higher level of generality to a lower level of generality. Mental passivity therefore is likely to be associated with the belief that we have the decisive knowledge already stored in memory. If we believe that we create higher degrees of generality, as appropriate solutions to novel problems, then we are committed to an active mental life. Perception, combined with the discovery and invention of new patterns in the world, will be actively oriented toward the future, while the deductive, merely analytical, manner of thought will be tied to the past.
当你相信你有足够的、专业的知识时，一种被动的、逻辑的、演绎的精神活动形式似乎是合适的。演绎总是从更高层次的普遍性到更低层次的普遍性。因此，心理被动性很可能与这样一种信念有关，即我们已经在记忆中储存了决定性的知识。如果我们相信我们创造了更高程度的通用性，作为新问题的适当解决方案，那么我们就致力于积极的精神生活。感知与世界上新模式的发现和发明相结合，将积极地面向未来，而演绎的，仅仅是分析的思维方式将与过去联系在一起。
Blake’s work, I think, is of continued and increased interest because he discovered something of great importance, namely, how to avoid dogmatisms of all sorts. Many students who are assigned to write about a poem of Blake’s are puzzled, and ask what it means. When they find out that they understand the words and the syntax, it turns out that the only problem was that they were taught that they had to “interpret” poetry. And that they don’t think he could have meant what he said. Most twentieth century students are too stodgy to accept Blake’s writing easily. In the 1950s, some people couldn’t understand Alan Ginsberg’s poetry, because they didn’t think anyone was allowed to say such things. That is the kind of problem students have with Blake.
我认为，布莱克的工作，是持续和不断增加的兴趣，因为他发现了一个非常重要的东西，即，如何避免各种各样的教条主义。许多被要求写一首布莱克的诗的学生感到困惑，并问这是什么意思。当他们发现自己理解了单词和语法时，唯一的问题是他们被教导必须“诠释”诗歌。他们认为他说的话可能不是真心的。大多数二十世纪的学生都太古板，无法轻易接受布莱克的写作。在20世纪50年代，有些人无法理解艾伦·金斯伯格的诗歌，因为他们认为任何人都不允许说这样的话。这就是学生们对布莱克的看法。
But it’s not just high school and college students who can’t believe that Blake meant what he said. I recently reviewed the comments on The Tyger that have been published in the forty years since I wrote my MA thesis on Blake, and it seems that these academic experts are having the same kind of problem. Dostoyevsky wrote about this problem in The Double—it is the problem of self-assertion, of seeing oneself reflected everywhere in the world. In Dostoyevsky’s story, Dream of an Odd Fellow, the theme is stated even more clearly—the world is very boring, and everything seems the same as everything else, until you can escape from a certain interpretive framework, to see what is really present to you. In Blake’s phrase, if the many become the same as the few when possessed, “more, more,” is the cry of a mistaken soul; Blake said, over and over, that the many do not become the same as the few, that we are always moving into a new world as we learn more, except when we find ourselves in the mental manacles of interpretation.
但不只是高中生和大学生不相信布莱克说的是实话。我最近回顾了《老虎》的评论，这些评论是我写布莱克的硕士论文40年来发表的，似乎这些学术专家也有同样的问题。陀思妥耶夫斯基在《双面人》一书中提到了这个问题——这是一个自我主张的问题，一个看到自己在世界各地的反映的问题。在陀思妥耶夫斯基的故事《怪客之梦》中，这个主题讲得更清楚了——世界非常无聊，一切似乎都和其他一切一样，直到你能够逃离某种解释框架，看到真正呈现在你面前的是什么。用布莱克的话来说，如果多数人和少数人被附身后变得一样，那么“更多，更多”就是一个错误的灵魂的呼喊;布莱克反复说过，多数人并不会变得和少数人一样，当我们学到更多的东西时，我们总是在进入一个新的世界，除非我们发现自己处于解释的精神枷锁中。
It’s easy to forget how pervasive philosophical interpretation is in everyday life and in the so-called sciences, and how much the sciences owe to long-standing theological commitments. Within the last generation, many influential people have said that facts don’t matter (and I suspect that their favorable reception has owed everything to that attitude.) In the early 1960s, there was a controversy going on between two schools of thought in linguistics and the philosophy of science, the Katz and Fodor controversy. I think Fodor was in the minority at that time, at least among the most prestigious professors in the United States. Fodor said that if we wanted to know about language, we should find out how the language is used, by watching a variety of people using it. His opponents said that, if they were competent to speak the language, they didn’t need to do anything except to think, to understand everything about the language. Fodor was an empiricist, his opponents were rationalists. In mathematics, most people are still rationalists. A large school of contemporary thought about computers, called “Artificial Intelligence,” is operating within a rationalistic framework. Chomsky’s “generative grammar” was ultra-rationalistic, and was easy to set up in computers, though it was perfectly useless in itself. Some physicists hold a philosophy of science that is essentially rationalistic. In Plato’s time, all knowledge could supposedly be derived by introspection and the analysis of innate ideas, and education consisted in “drawing out” the knowledge that was innate. (Aristotle, who didn’t subscribe to Plato’s rationalism, has nevertheless been blamed for holding opinions that weren’t sufficiently supported by observation. This was probably because he occasionally relied on the opinions of others, rather than because of any serious defect in his philosophical-scientific method.)
我们很容易忘记，哲学解释在日常生活和所谓的科学中是多么普遍，而科学又是多么依赖长期以来的神学承诺。在上一代人中，许多有影响力的人都说事实不重要(我怀疑他们之所以受到欢迎，完全是因为这种态度)。在20世纪60年代早期，语言学和科学哲学两大学派之间发生了一场争论，即卡茨和福多之争。我认为Fodor在当时属于少数，至少在美国最有声望的教授中是这样。Fodor说，如果我们想了解语言，我们应该通过观察各种各样的人使用语言来发现语言是如何被使用的。他的反对者说，如果他们有能力说这种语言，他们不需要做任何事情，除了思考，了解关于这种语言的一切。福多是经验主义者，他的对手是理性主义者。在数学方面，大多数人仍然是理性主义者。一个被称为“人工智能”(Artificial Intelligence)的当代计算机思想大学派，正在一个理性主义框架内运作。乔姆斯基的“生成语法”是极端理性主义的，而且很容易在计算机中建立，尽管它本身是完全无用的。一些物理学家持有一种本质上是理性主义的科学哲学。在柏拉图的时代，所有的知识都可以通过内省和对内在观念的分析而获得，而教育就是“提取”内在的知识。(亚里士多德不赞同柏拉图的理性主义，却因为持有没有充分观察支持的观点而受到指责。这可能是因为他偶尔会依赖别人的意见，而不是因为他的哲学科学方法有什么严重的缺陷。
It’s important to remember that Rationalism, as used here, isn’t simply a “love of reason,” which is what is often meant when people speak of “rationalism.” In its historical use among philosophers, rather than being just a devotion to rationality, it is a specific doctrine which denies that experience is the source of knowledge. Historically, Rationalism has been closely allied with mysticism, as an affirmation that knowledge comes from a source beyond the ordinary world of experience and beyond the individual. At the present time, it serves authoritarian science rather than authoritarian theology, though the basic doctrine is the same.
重要的是要记住，这里使用的理性主义不是简单的“理性的爱”，这是人们经常谈论的“理性主义”的意思。在哲学家的历史使用中，它不仅仅是一种对理性的奉献，它是一种否认经验是知识来源的特殊学说。历史上，理性主义一直与神秘主义紧密相连，作为一种肯定，知识来自于一个来源，超越了普通的经验世界和个人。在目前，它服务于权威科学而不是权威神学，尽管其基本教义是相同的。
Several contemporary schools of literary theory, sociology, anthropology, even biology, trace their ideas back to Ferdinand de Saussure’s analysis of language, reading into it a highly rationalistic doctrine for which there is no actual basis. Saussure’s most important idea was that it is impossible to analyze language into its structural units without simultaneously seeing its use in relation to the world of meanings. Without its meanings, it just isn’t language. This is a profoundly anti-rationalist insight, since it shows that symbols take their existence from the experience of communication. But once the symbols exist, they function by the ways they establish distinctions, “this” being defined by the ways it has been used in distinction to “those,” “that,” etc. Every time a word is used, its meaning changes a little, since every use occurs in a new communicative situation. The contemporary rationalistic academic trends prefer to isolate only the principle of “meaning through opposition,” since it supports the rationalistic illusion of operating strictly on the symbolic level. The “symbolic level” is only an abstraction, and doesn’t exist independently.
当代的一些文学理论流派，包括社会学、人类学，甚至生物学，都将他们的观点追溯到费迪南德·德·索绪尔(Ferdinand de Saussure)对语言的分析，将其解读为一种没有实际基础的高度理性主义学说。索绪尔最重要的观点是，如果不同时看到语言与意义世界的关系，就不可能把语言分析成其结构单位。没有了意义，它就不是语言。这是一种深刻的反理性的见解，因为它表明符号是从交流的经验中获得存在的。但一旦符号存在，它们就会以它们建立区别的方式发挥作用，“这个”被定义为它被用来区分“那些”、“那”等等。每一次使用一个词，它的意思都会发生一点变化，因为每一次使用都是在新的交际场合中发生的。当代理性主义的学术思潮倾向于孤立“通过对立的意义”原则，因为它支持严格在符号层面上运作的理性主义幻想。“符号层面”只是一种抽象，并不是独立存在的。
A few decades ago, there was a movement called General Semantics that tried to make people more conscious of the way symbols relate to reality. Their ideas were based on a distinction between the “concrete” use of symbols, and the various levels of abstraction. These distinctions, however, made sense only within a certain theory of how language works, which I think was wrong: It asserted that, if time and space were divided into sufficiently small units, symbols and language could be precise and factual. It ignored the distinction between reality as experienced, and reality as represented in theory. If you keep subdividing a person, John Smith, into smaller moments, you find that there is nothing that represents the known person. The person that you are really referring to is actually a summation of many moments—the summation is the only “concreteness.” The person you know is a synthesis, and it is that imaginative synthesis of facts to which the concrete symbol refers. Generality exists in our knowledge of the world, and the distinction between concrete and abstract is likely to create confusion, and reinforces a specific ideological system. Incidentally, the word “concrete” derives from the roots “grown” and “together,” so it is very close in its core meaning to “synthesis.” A well constructed generalization can be concrete, and a seemingly simple term, such as “electron,” can be “abstract.” (Blake said that a line, no matter how finely divided, was still a line; a line exists in our imaginative synthesis of the world, and it is only a denial of that synthesis that can divide its unity into “infinitesimals.”)
几十年前，有一场名为“通用语义学”的运动，试图让人们更加意识到符号与现实的联系方式。他们的想法是基于对符号的“具体”使用和不同层次的抽象之间的区别。然而，这些区别只有在语言运作的特定理论中才有意义，我认为这是错误的:它断言，如果时间和空间被划分成足够小的单位，符号和语言就可以是精确和真实的。它忽略了经验的现实与理论所代表的现实之间的区别。如果你继续把一个人，约翰·史密斯，细分成更小的时刻，你会发现没有什么能代表这个已知的人。你真正所指的那个人其实是许多时刻的总和——而总和就是唯一的“具体性”。你认识的人是一个综合，它是具体符号所指的事实的想象性综合。普遍性存在于我们对世界的认识中，而具体与抽象之间的区别很可能会造成混淆，并强化一个特定的意识形态体系。顺便说一句，“混凝土”这个词来源于“生长”和“在一起”，所以它的核心意思非常接近“合成”。一个构造良好的概括可以是具体的，而一个看似简单的术语，如“电子”，可以是“抽象的”。(布莱克说，一条线，不管划分得多细，它仍然是一条线;一条线存在于我们对世界的想象性综合之中，只有否定了这种综合，才能将世界的统一性划分为“无穷小”。)
Mathematics has its value in representing certain relationships or patterns, but the rationalistic illusion that the meaning is independently contained and fulfilled by the “algorithm,” has led many people into dogmatisms and serious errors. “Coefficients of reality” are often neglected. In practice, you are not very likely to be mistaken if you assume that mathematical descriptions of physical states are always erroneous.
数学的价值在于表示某些关系或模式，但理性主义的错觉认为意义是由“算法”独立包含和实现的，这导致许多人陷入教条主义和严重的错误。“现实系数”常常被忽略。在实践中，如果你假设物理状态的数学描述总是错误的，那么你不太可能出错。
In the 17th and 18th centuries, progress in technology and industry was already making rationalism seem inadequate, but it still served the social purpose of allowing the ruling class to claim that the doctrines it wished to enforce had the support of timeless, innate and universal principles. There was supposed to be a Great Chain of Being, a hierarchy in which the king and the lords were just below the angels, and Reason was a mathematically clear description of the way things were, and should be. As the chain of being finally broke up at the end of the 18th century, the king brought in the Rev. Malthus to explain how war, poverty, and disease served the divine, or kingly, purpose, by controlling population growth, justifying misery and social antagonism in a new way.
在17和18世纪，技术和工业的进步已经使理性主义显得不够充分，但它仍然服务于社会目的，允许统治阶级声称，它希望执行的学说有永恒的、固有的和普遍的原则的支持。人们认为存在着一种巨大的生命链条，在这个链条中，国王和王公们都位于天使之下，理性是对事物现状和应该是什么的清晰的数学描述。随着这条链条在18世纪末最终被打破，国王让马尔萨斯牧师来解释战争、贫穷和疾病如何通过控制人口增长，以一种新的方式为苦难和社会对立辩护，为神圣或国王的目的服务。
There were philosophers, such as John Locke and David Hume, who argued that much of our knowledge is gained through the senses, and there were satirists, such as Henry Fielding, who ridiculed the supposedly divinely sanctioned class system, but Blake took a much simpler, but more radical position, in saying that “Reason isn’t the same that it will be when we know more,” and that reason is only the ratio of things that are presently known, and not the source of new knowledge. Blake kept the idea that experience is the source of knowledge, without reducing “experience” to the “senses.” Blake didn’t deny the existence of some innate ideas; he didn’t think we were born as a “blank slate,” but there is more to the mind than what we are born with. Imagination and invention and mental striving were able to generate new forms. This commitment to experience as the source of knowledge, rather than just analyzing a stock of “innate ideas,” made Blake’s world one that was oriented toward the future, toward invention and discovery, rather than to memory, established knowledge, and tradition. In its essence, it was antidogmatic.
有哲学家，如约翰·洛克和大卫·休谟，他们认为我们的很多知识都是通过感官获得的，也有讽刺家，如亨利·菲尔丁，他们嘲笑被认为是上帝认可的阶级制度，但布莱克的立场更简单，但更激进，他说:“当我们知道得更多时，理性就不再是原来的理性了。”理性只是目前已知事物的比例，而不是新知识的来源。布莱克坚持经验是知识的源泉的观点，而没有将“经验”简化为“感觉”。布莱克并不否认先天观念的存在;他不认为我们生来就是一张“白纸”，但我们的头脑比我们生来就有的更有意义。想象力、发明和精神努力能够产生新的形式。这种将经验作为知识来源的承诺，而不仅仅是对“固有想法”的分析，使布莱克的世界面向未来，面向发明和发现，而不是面向记忆、既定知识和传统。从本质上讲，它是反教条的。
Rationalism is a system of symbols, in which each symbol is demonstrated to have its own proper place and status. To the extent that reason is held to be “innate,” the system will be prescriptive and judgmental, rather than simply descriptive, explanatory, and illuminating. When an alternative system is proposed, it may be considered a “heresy,” if the system from which it dissents is both rationalistic and authoritarian.
理性主义是一种符号系统，在这个系统中，每一个符号都被证明有其适当的位置和地位。在某种程度上，理性被认为是“天生的”，系统将是规定的和判断的，而不是简单的描述性、解释性和启发性的。当提出一种替代系统时，如果它所反对的系统既是理性的又是专制的，那么它可能被认为是“异端”。
Except for the dangers involved in committing a heresy, it is very easy to follow the implications of the system that one finds in one’s own mind, since self-assertion contains no principle of corrective contradiction.
Essentially, rationalism consists of thinking something is true because you thought of it.
除了从事异端邪说的危险，很容易遵循一个人在自己的头脑中发现的系统的含义，因为自我主张不包含纠正矛盾的原则。
从本质上讲，理性主义包括认为某件事是真实的，因为你想到了它。
I think of the philosophical Rationalists as being the bureaucrats of the mind, making everything tedious and boring and repetitive. Eliminating Rationalism, then actual individualized full mental life can begin.
我认为哲学理性主义者是思想的官僚，让一切都变得乏味、无聊和重复。消除理性主义，才能开始真正个性化的完整的精神生活。
Even a heresy, if it is based on rationalism, is past-oriented, and dogmatic. Over the years, scholars have ascribed most of the important heresies, as well as mainstream religious ideas, to Blake. Whatever interpretive system the scholars favor, they are able to find it in Blake’s work. Calling Blake “a mystic” is especially useful when the goal is to claim that the critic is getting at the deepest levels of meaning in Blake, even though there is no clear meaning for the word in contemporary English, and Blake didn’t use the term in a way that suggested he would approve of having the word applied to himself.
即使是异端邪说，如果它是建立在理性主义的基础上，也是面向过去的，教条的。多年来，学者们把大多数重要的异端邪说和主流宗教思想都归咎于布莱克。不管学者们喜欢哪种解释系统，他们都能在布莱克的作品中找到。布莱克称“神秘”是特别有用,当目标是声称评论家越来越在布莱克的最深层次的意义,尽管没有明确意义的词在当代英语,和布雷克没有使用术语的建议他会批准这个词的应用。
Blake’s notes written in the margins of books make it clear that he wasn’t simply adopting anyone’s doctrinaire opinions, and that he was able to find useful ideas in the thoughts of others even when he disagreed with them on important issues. Blake was not a rationalist, but he agreed with Bishop Berkeley’s understanding of the importance of distinguishing thought from language. He recognized that Descartes, Locke, Hume, Newton, had inadequate ideas about the nature of “matter,” but he didn’t accept the simplistic doctrine of extreme rationalism that matter doesn’t exist.
布莱克在书的空白处写的笔记清楚地表明，他不是简单地采纳任何人的教条主义观点，他能够从别人的思想中找到有用的想法，即使他在重要问题上与他们不一致。布莱克不是一个理性主义者，但他同意伯克利主教关于区分思想和语言的重要性的理解。他认识到笛卡尔、洛克、休谟和牛顿对于“物质”的本质的观点是不充分的，但他不接受极端理性主义的过于简单的学说，即物质不存在。
When people consider Leonardo de Vinci, they usually make the point that he had mastered every field of knowledge, and so the question of “sources” and “influences” doesn’t come up. In the 18th century, London was the cultural center of the world; European, Asian, and ancient cultures and ideas were discussed in books, magazines, and conversations. Being an engraver, a painter, a poet, and a political activist, Blake’s circle of acquaintances was as wide as anyone’s could be. England has had, probably since the 17thcentury or earlier, a counter-culture of opinionated dissenters. I suspect that the people who spent several years studying the classics for a university education were somewhat culturally deprived, relative to the people who participated in the rich unofficial culture, where new ideas in art, science, and philosophy were being discussed. London was also the center of a world-spanning empire, a tyrannical class-system, and an industrial-commercial revolution. The past and the possible futures could be seen from Blake’s vantage point.
当人们想到列奥纳多·达·芬奇时，他们通常认为他已经掌握了每一个领域的知识，所以“来源”和“影响”的问题就不会出现了。在18世纪，伦敦是世界文化中心;书籍、杂志和对话中讨论了欧洲、亚洲和古代文化和思想。作为一名雕刻家、画家、诗人和政治活动家，布莱克的社交圈比任何人都广。英格兰可能从17世纪或更早的时候就有了一种由固执己见的异见者组成的反主流文化。我怀疑，那些花了几年时间在大学里学习古典文学的人，相对于那些参与丰富的非官方文化的人来说，在这些文化中，艺术、科学和哲学的新思想被讨论。伦敦还是一个横跨世界的帝国、专制的阶级制度和工商业革命的中心。从布莱克的有利位置可以看到过去和可能的未来。
Among all the published opinions about things that influenced Blake, I have seen only a few discussions of his treatment of scientific ideas, mainly his rejections of Newton’s mathematical and physical assumptions, and very few comments on Blake’s position on the major philosophical controversies of his time. A biologist, Jacob Bronowsky, wrote a book about Blake, but Bronowsky’s own biological, historical, and linguistic ideas were relatively conventional. Even though Blake’s work is full of images from biology, the critics ignore the fact that Emanuel Swedenborg published very advanced biological research in the middle of the 18th century, and that Erasmus Darwin was known for presenting his ideas on biological evolution in poetry (especially Zoonomia). The title of Blake’s book, The Four Zoas, has apparently never led scholars to ask whether it had anything in common with Zoonomia. Even though Blake made many disparaging remarks about Swedenborg’s religious books, many people have claimed that Blake was influenced by Swedenborg’s religious doctrines, while ignoring the possible influence of the scientific work.
在所有出版的关于影响布莱克的事物的观点中，我只看到了一些关于他对待科学思想的讨论，主要是他反对牛顿的数学和物理假设，很少评论布莱克在他那个时代的主要哲学争议中的立场。生物学家雅各布·布朗诺夫斯基(Jacob Bronowsky)写过一本关于布莱克的书，但布朗诺夫斯基自己的生物学、历史学和语言学观点相对传统。尽管布莱克的作品充满了生物学的图像，但评论家们忽略了一个事实，那就是伊曼纽尔·斯维登堡在18世纪中叶发表了非常先进的生物学研究成果，而伊拉斯谟·达尔文以在诗歌(尤其是《动物志》)中提出他的生物进化观点而闻名。布莱克的书名《四个Zoas》显然从未让学者们质疑它与《Zoonomia》是否有什么共同之处。尽管布莱克对斯威登堡的宗教书籍发表了许多轻蔑的评论，但许多人认为布莱克受到了斯威登堡宗教教义的影响，而忽略了科学工作可能产生的影响。
Although the idea that “contradiction produces change” is associated with Hegel’s “Dialectic,” it was an old and well known theme in philosophy. When Blake’s idea, that “without Contraries there is no progression,” is seen in context, I think it is appropriate to think that to a great extent, Blake derived the idea from a consideration of the sexes. “Generation,” so often discussed in relation to the biblical “fall of man,” always leads to the issue of the productive interaction of the sexual contraries. The issue of sexual love permeates Blake’s work. I suspect that Blake produced even more explicitly sexual work, but since most of his work wasn’t really published, when his wife died in 1831, the bulk of his manuscripts and paintings were subject to the whims of their unsophisticated owners. But on the basis of his existing work, it is reasonable to say that sexual and imaginative energy was the motor that Blake saw producing intellectual advancement. This male-female principle of change was more fully explored by Blake than by anyone previously, since he made it concrete and personal, rather than abstract. Working in history, human energy ran into the constrictive, limiting elements, the tyrannies of policy, philosophy, and commerce. For Blake, the interaction of energy with those limits became a philosophy of freedom and revolution.
虽然“矛盾产生变化”的观点与黑格尔的“辩证法”有关，但这是一个古老而著名的哲学主题。当我们把布莱克的“没有对立就没有进步”的观点放在上下文中看时，我认为我们可以恰当地认为，布莱克的这一观点在很大程度上是出于对性别的考虑。“世代”常常与圣经中的“人的堕落”相联系而被讨论，总是导致性矛盾的生产性互动的问题。性爱问题渗透在布莱克的作品中。我怀疑布莱克创作了更直白的性作品，但由于他的大部分作品并没有真正出版，当他的妻子在1831年去世时，他的大部分手稿和画作都受到了不成熟的主人的心血来潮的支配。但基于他现有的工作，我们有理由说，性和想象力的能量是布莱克认为产生智力进步的发动机。布莱克比以往任何人都更充分地探索了男女变化的原则，因为他把它变得具体而个人化，而不是抽象。在历史工作中，人类的精力遇到了政策、哲学和商业的压迫和限制因素。对布莱克来说，能量与这些极限的相互作用成为了一种自由和革命的哲学。
While Blake discussed the importance of perception in understanding the world, he was remarkable in the care he took to make it clear that he saw the world “all alive,” in which grains of dust or sand, birds, worms, ants, flies, etc., perceived and experienced in ways that were not different from those of human life. Bishop Berkeley, who said that the material world outside the philosopher’s mind doesn’t exist, added as an afterthought that it exists in the mind of God. If consciousness is the only guarantee of existence, there was no problem in the existence of Blake’s world, in which everything was alive and conscious.
而布莱克讨论知觉理解世界的重要性,他非凡的照顾他说清楚,他看到世界“活着,”这粒灰尘或沙子,鸟类、蠕虫、蚂蚁、苍蝇、等,感知和经验的方式并不不同于人类的生活。贝克莱主教曾说，哲学家心灵之外的物质世界是不存在的，但后来又补充说，它存在于上帝的心灵中。如果意识是存在的唯一保证，那么布莱克的世界的存在就没有问题，因为在布莱克的世界里，一切都是活着的，都是有意识的。
Everyone finds it almost obligatory to describe The Lamb as a symbol for Jesus, but then they find the Tyger’s symbolic meaning more problematic, and—from Coleridge in the early 19th century down to the newest publications at the end of the 20th century—people are boggled by the “obscurity” of The Fly. But in that poem, Blake makes it clear that there is no obscure symbolism, when he says “then am I a happy fly, if I live or if I die,” etc. The animal poems are expressions of Blake’s evolutionary, vitalistic, cosmology. The tyger, at least, would be too much for a creationist doctrine to handle. If worms and flies and ants are conscious and in the same situation as human beings, the bonds of sympathy and forgiveness are universal.
几乎每个人都发现它必须描述羔羊作为耶稣的象征,但后来他们发现双柄陶制大酒杯的象征意义更多的问题,并从柯勒律治在19世纪早期的最新出版物的20世纪,人们由“默默无闻”的惊飞。但在那首诗中，布莱克明确表示，没有晦涩的象征主义，当他说，“那么我是一只快乐的苍蝇，如果我活着或死去，”等等。动物诗歌是布莱克进化论、活力主义和宇宙论的表现。至少，这只老虎对于神创论来说是难以应付的。如果蠕虫、苍蝇和蚂蚁都有意识，并且和人类处于同样的处境，同情和宽恕的纽带就会是普遍的。
In a world that’s alive and developing, new knowledge is always possible, and imagination has the prophetic function of reporting the trends and processes of development, illuminating the paths toward the future. Reason is subordinate to invention and discovery.
在一个生机勃勃、不断发展的世界里，新知识总是有可能出现的，而想象力具有预测的功能，可以报告发展的趋势和过程，照亮通向未来的道路。理性从属于发明和发现。
The dualistic conception of matter as distinct from energy and consciousness is a constrictive illusion put in place by the forces of empire, and the living reality would be freed from the inert husks of the wrongly conceived natural world, when in the future the world was freed of tyranny. After Blake, it would be nearly another century before others would see that the crude materialism of Newton and the Natural Philosophers was essentially a life-denying culmination of the worst trends of official religious dogma.
物质的二元论概念有别于能量和意识，这是帝国势力强加于人的一种狭隘的幻觉，当未来的世界摆脱了暴政时，有生命的现实将从错误设想的自然世界的惰性外壳中解放出来。布雷克之后，差不多又过了一个世纪，人们才会看到牛顿和自然哲学家们粗糙的唯物主义本质上是官方宗教教条最糟糕趋势的否定生命的顶点。
A complete survey of Blake’s references to Christianity would be voluminous, and not all of them are immediately clear, and require a careful placing in the context of the ideas that were being discussed in London at that time. But it’s hard to reconcile the common description of him as a mystic with his reference to “Old Nobodaddy aloft,” or with his comment that Jehovah gives us a knock on the head, and Jesus soothes it. He always defines god in human terms, so from the conventional viewpoint, he would probably be considered as an atheist or pantheist, but he didn’t describe himself or his friends as atheists. When people called Tom Paine an atheist, Blake defended him against the charge. Other friends, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, were sometimes called atheists, but in their writings, they never expressed very unconventional religious ideas. When we recall that in the early 1990s, George Bush expressed the idea that atheism should be illegal, it is easy to imagine that people in 18th century England wouldn’t have felt that it was safe to be called atheists.
关于布莱克对基督教的引用的全面调查将是大量的，并不是所有的都是立即清晰的，并且需要在当时伦敦正在讨论的思想的背景下仔细地放置。但是，他作为一个神秘主义者的常见描述，与他提到的“高高在上的无名老人”(Old Nobodaddy aloft)，或者与他说耶和华敲了我们的头，耶稣安抚我们的评论，很难协调一致。他总是从人的角度来定义上帝，所以从传统的观点来看，他可能会被认为是一个无神论者或泛神论者，但他没有把自己或他的朋友描述为无神论者。当人们称汤姆·潘恩为无神论者时，布莱克为他辩护。玛丽·沃斯通克拉夫特(Mary Wollstonecraft)和威廉·戈德温(William Godwin)等人有时被称为无神论者，但在他们的作品中，他们从未表达过非常非传统的宗教思想。当我们回想起在20世纪90年代早期，乔治·布什表达了无神论应该是非法的观点时，很容易想象，18世纪的英国人会觉得被称为无神论者是不安全的。
In 1803, Blake apparently said something like “damn the king,” while getting a drunk soldier out of his yard, and was tried for sedition or treason. He was acquitted, because his far more scurrilous written comments hadn’t been published, and it didn’t occur to the government to look for documentary evidence to support their case. The fact that he printed his own work, and sold only a few copies of his books to affluent friends, probably saved his life, but it accounts for his obscurity during his own lifetime.
1803年，布莱克在把一个喝醉的士兵赶出院子时，显然说了类似“该死的国王”之类的话，因此被以煽动叛乱或叛国罪审判。他被判无罪，因为他的更下流的书面评论还没有发表，而且政府也没有想到要寻找书面证据来支持他们的案件。事实上，他印刷了自己的作品，只卖了几本给富有的朋友，这可能救了他的命，但这也是他一生默默无闻的原因。
Tom Paine’s writing was published and widely read in prerevolutionary America, but he was considered a criminal in England, and Blake was credited with saving his life by helping him escape to France. Politically and ethically, Blake’s writing is similar to that of Paine, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft (often called the “first feminist”), but his language is usually more vivid. It was probably the clarity of his political opposition that made his work unpublishable during his lifetime. The first “complete” collection of his work was published in 1927, and until that year, very few people had seen more than a few of his most famous poems.
汤姆·潘恩的作品在革命前的美国出版并被广泛阅读，但在英国，他被认为是一名罪犯，布莱克帮助他逃到法国，救了他的命。在政治和伦理上，布莱克的写作与潘恩、戈德温和沃斯通克拉夫特(常被称为“第一个女权主义者”)相似，但他的语言通常更为生动。可能是他明确的政治反对立场，使他的作品在有生之年无法出版。他的第一本“全集”于1927年出版，在那之前，很少有人看过他最著名的几首诗。
Blake printed his work by hand, without a press, by writing the text backwards on copper plates, surrounded by his drawings, and then etching away the surrounding copper, so that the image remained elevated, and could be inked and printed as if it were a wood-block. If he hadn’t devised this method for printing a few copies of his books, it isn’t likely that much of the work would have survived.
布莱克在没有印刷机的情况下，手工印刷他的作品，他把文字写在铜板上，周围是他的画，然后蚀刻掉周围的铜，这样图像就保持了高度，可以像一块木块一样被油墨和印刷。如果他没有发明这种方法来印刷几本他的书，那么他的大部分作品不太可能幸存下来。
Shortly after the French Revolution, William Wordsworth was associated with the Blake-Wollstonecraft-Godwin group’s defense of the revolution, but he moved away from the ideals of that group, and adopted more socially acceptable ideas. He finally became England’s poet laureate. Liberty, equality, and brotherhood were replaced by blandly conformist ideas.
法国大革命后不久，威廉·华兹华斯被认为是布莱克-沃尔斯通克拉夫特-戈德温集团为革命辩护的代表，但他离开了那个集团的理想，而采用了更能被社会接受的思想。他最终成为英国的桂冠诗人。自由、平等和兄弟情谊被温和的墨守成规的思想所取代。
The type of individualism that Wordsworth came to advocate was interesting because it was a rejection of exactly that part of Blake’s belief that Blake considered to be the essence of Christianity, namely, forgiveness, brotherhood, and bonds of sympathy connecting all beings. In its place, Wordsworth adopted a memory-centered doctrine. During Wordsworth’s lifetime, his ideology was exceedingly successful, but its rationalistic overtones have kept it tied to the past; it had nothing to offer the future. I think we can get some insight into Wordsworth’s mind by considering that, on the basis of reading Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, he decided that they were written by an insane person. (Blake was aware that slow-witted people, who couldn’t follow unconventional thoughts, often considered him to be crazy.}
华兹华斯所提倡的个人主义很有趣，因为它拒绝了布莱克的信仰，而布莱克认为这是基督教的精髓，即宽恕，兄弟情谊，以及连接所有生命的同情纽带。华兹华斯采用了以记忆为中心的学说。在华兹华斯的一生中，他的意识形态是非常成功的，但它的理性主义意味使它与过去联系在一起;它没有为未来提供任何东西。我想我们可以通过阅读布莱克的《纯真与经验之歌》来了解华兹华斯的思想，他认为这是一个疯子写的。(布莱克意识到，那些头脑迟钝、无法遵循非常规思想的人常常认为他疯了。)
Everywhere in Blake’s work, it is clear that he never underestimated the possibilities of the future, and never imposed false limits onto anything, but he didn’t tolerate vagueness or empty abstraction. Sharp definition was essential, and unique particulars were the basis for beauty and knowledge.
在布莱克的作品中，很明显，他从未低估未来的可能性，也从未对任何事物强加错误的限制，但他不容忍模糊或空洞的抽象。清晰的定义是必不可少的，独特的细节是美和知识的基础。
For Blake, the dialectical principal was a feature of the world itself, but it also informed his method, his technique, and his “rhetoric.” One of Blake’s powerful insights was that intellectual clarity is achieved by contradiction, opposition, contrast, making distinctions as well as comparisons. The principle of intensification through opposition had special features when it was developed in his painting and writing. Blake gave much of the credit for his style of thinking to the process of spending thousands of hours in the practice of etching. The image you create in the conventional etching technique is made when acid “bites” into the lines that will be inked; in Blake’s new technique, the image is made permanent by the acid’s corroding away of everything except the sharply defined image. The decisive, dividing, line is essential. Anyone who has spent even a few hours of intense effort working in dry-point or etching understands that, when you stop, the appearance of the world is altered by changes that have taken place in your eyes and brain. Often, his “metaphors” are literal imaginative insights that have great generality. This kind of knowledge distinguishes the work of a craftsman from that of an academic. The probability is that Blake’s art led him to appreciate compatible ideas when he found them, and it doesn’t seem likely that he was “influenced” by them the way an academic is influenced by books, since Blake had his own “sources” that are generally neglected by intellectuals.
对布莱克来说，辩证原则是世界本身的一个特征，但它也影响了他的方法、技巧和“修辞”。布莱克有力的见解之一是，理性的清晰是通过矛盾、对立、对比、区分和比较来实现的。对立强化原则在他的绘画和写作中得到了发展，具有自己的特点。布莱克把他的思维方式归功于他花了数千个小时在蚀刻练习的过程。你在传统蚀刻技术中创造的图像是当酸“咬”进将要被墨水着色的线条时产生的;在布莱克的新技术中，图像是永久的，因为酸腐蚀了一切，除了清晰的图像。决定性的分界线是必不可少的。任何在干点或蚀刻上花了几个小时的紧张工作的人都知道，当你停止工作时，世界的外观会因你的眼睛和大脑发生的变化而改变。通常，他的“隐喻”是字面上的富有想象力的见解，具有很大的普遍性。这种知识将工匠的工作与学者的工作区分开来。很有可能是布莱克的艺术让他在发现相容的思想时欣赏它们，而他似乎不太可能像学者受书籍影响那样受到这些思想的“影响”，因为布莱克有自己的“来源”，而这些“来源”通常被知识分子所忽视。
Blake found that contrasts made meanings clear, and made language vivid. Heaven and Hell, Clod and Pebble, Lamb and Tyger, Angel and Devil, Greek and Jew, Innocence and Experience, presented contrasts that encouraged the reader to think about the range of possibilities Blake had in mind. He was always consciously trying to energize the reader’s mind to get out of dogmatic ruts, to look at things freshly, so he often used the polarities in ways that would surprise the reader, ironically reversing familiar references. A pious commonplace would be contrasted with the disturbing realities that it normally hid. Both in his writing and in conversation, Blake was often playful and teasing, and over-serious people have usually taken him too literally.
布莱克发现，对比使意义清晰，使语言生动。天堂与地狱，土块与卵石，羔羊与老虎，天使与魔鬼，希腊与犹太人，纯真与经验，呈现出对比，鼓励读者去思考布莱克脑海中的各种可能性。他总是有意识地试图激励读者摆脱教条的陈规，以新鲜的眼光看待事物，所以他经常以让读者惊讶的方式使用两极，讽刺地颠倒熟悉的参考。虔诚的陈词滥调与它通常掩盖的令人不安的现实形成了鲜明对比。在他的写作和谈话中，布莱克经常是戏谑和挑逗的，而过于严肃的人通常会把他太当真。
Academic commentators are so often attached to their erudite pieties that it seems that they can’t read English. In the 18th century, a clod meant just what it means in the 20th century, either a lump of dirt, or a lunkhead. In the Clod and the Pebble, when the Clod speaks the properly sanctimonious phrases, justifying its oppressed misery with a dogma, we have a clue regarding Blake’s attitude, but then he makes it perfectly clear by speaking of Heaven’s despite, literally, Heaven’s malice (a concept that appears many times in different forms in other parts of his work). Either the commentators assume that the word “despite” had a different meaning in the 18th century (it didn’t), or they assume that Blake made an error of diction, because they choose to alter the meaning to “despite Heaven.” Just as judges aren’t allowed to change the wording of the laws that they interpret, literary experts aren’t allowed to rewrite texts to make them better suit their interpretation.
学术评论家们常常对他们博学的虔诚念念不忘，以至于他们似乎连英文都不懂。在18世纪，一个clod的意思和它在20世纪的意思一样，要么是一团泥土，要么是一个笨蛋。在《土块与卵石》中，当土块说了一些很虚伪的话，用一种教条来为它受压迫的痛苦辩护时，我们对布莱克的态度有了一些线索，但是他通过说到天堂的蔑视，天堂的恶意(这个概念在他的作品的其他部分以不同的形式多次出现)。评论家们要么认为单词“尽管”在18世纪有不同的意思(其实并没有)，要么他们认为布莱克的用词错误，因为他们选择把意思改成了“尽管天堂”。正如法官不允许修改他们所解释的法律的措辞一样，文学专家也不允许重写文本以使其更适合自己的解释。
The same insensitivity to the world of concrete experience that has allowed so many commentators to read their own ideas into Blake, ignoring what he said in plain English, makes satire and irony and sarcasm inaccessible to many people who otherwise seem intelligent; this is especially apparent when scientists comment on literature. Forming an imaginative synthesis of the writer and his meaning requires mental flexibility and energy, rather than just analytical acuity.
正是这种对具体经验世界的麻木，使得如此多的评论家能够从布莱克身上读到自己的想法，忽视他用直白的英语说的话，这使得许多本来看起来很聪明的人无法理解讽刺、讽刺和讽刺;这在科学家评论文学作品时尤为明显。对作者和他的意思进行富有想象力的综合分析需要思维的灵活性和精力，而不仅仅是敏锐的分析能力。
Everyone who described Blake’s physical appearance remarked on his large head. Blake commented that he didn’t like to travel or undergo physical strain, because of its effects on his health. The brain is an energetically expensive organ, which consumes large amounts of glucose. A very large brain puts a special burden on the liver’s ability to store energy, and is likely to make a person conscious of physiological processes. Blake’s descriptions of the process of seeing show that he was integrating his experience into his knowledge, describing brain physiology, incorporating his perceptions and the best scientific knowledge that was available to him, into a philosophical description of the place of conscious life in the world. The pulsation of an artery was the unit of time, a red blood corpuscle was the unit of space, enclosing eternity and infinity, eliminating arbitrary and abstract entities, and placing human life within cosmic life, while revealing cosmic life within the individual.
每个描述布莱克外貌的人都称赞他的大脑袋。布莱克评论说，他不喜欢旅行或经历身体紧张，因为这对他的健康有影响。大脑是一个能量消耗很大的器官，它消耗大量的葡萄糖。一个非常大的大脑会给肝脏储存能量的能力带来特殊的负担，并可能使人意识到生理过程。布莱克对视觉过程的描述表明他将自己的经验整合到自己的知识中，描述大脑生理学，将他的感知和他所能获得的最好的科学知识，整合到对世界上有意识生命的哲学描述中。动脉的搏动是时间的单位，红血球是空间的单位，它包围着永恒和无限，消除了任意和抽象的实体，将人类生命置于宇宙生命之中，而将宇宙生命置于个体之中。
The idea of a “biological cosmos” seems strange only when it is considered against an ideology which maintains that life is alone in an immense dead universe. The assumption of a dead, unintelligent, randomly moving physical world is the creation of a series of theological ideas, which Blake perceived as essentially Satanic. Blake used the language of these theologies, but inverted them, showing the ways they were used to obscure reality, and to impose a perverse way of life onto the living world.
“生物宇宙”的概念只有在与一种认为生命在巨大的死亡宇宙中是孤独的意识形态相抵触时才显得奇怪。假设一个死亡的、无智慧的、随机移动的物理世界是一系列神学思想的产物，布莱克认为这些思想本质上是撒旦的。布莱克使用了这些神学的语言，但将它们颠倒过来，展示了它们是如何被用来掩盖现实，并将一种反常的生活方式强加给活着的世界。
Fred Hoyle, the astronomer, said “If this were an entirely scientific matter, there is little doubt from the evidence that the case for a fundamentally biological universe would be regarded as substantially proven.” (1989)
天文学家弗雷德·霍伊尔(Fred Hoyle)说:“如果这是一个完全科学的问题，毫无疑问，从证据来看，从根本上说，生物宇宙的存在是被充分证明了的。””(1989)
Over the last few decades, biologists feel that they have established the “biochemical unity of life,” in which biochemical cycles and genetic codes are widely shared. The idea of ecological interdependence has come to be recognized as an essential part of life, or (as demonstrated by Vernadsky, and suggested by Hoyle) a cosmic principle. Blake often called himself a Christian, and defined Christianity in many novel ways, as art, love, politics, science, but specifically, in his version of Christianity, forgiveness was an essential idea, and nothing lives for itself only. Blake’s Christianity as Art was a concrete part of living, and he ridiculed some of the abstract theosophical definitions of god that were common in his time. When his remarks are considered against the background of Spinozistic pantheism, it is the intensification and personalization, the avoidance of abstractions that could permit the attribution of passivity or inertness to any part of reality, that stand out. When he said that the world is alive, he meant that it is a defect of perception that makes Newton’s world seem passive, empty, and dead. A few years ago, a movement that called itself “deep ecology” tried to absolutize the ideas of ecology; Blake’s view of the interactive unity of life was as well thought out as any that preceded Vernadsky’s cosmology.
在过去的几十年里，生物学家认为他们已经建立了“生命的生化统一性”，在这个统一性中，生化循环和遗传密码被广泛共享。生态相互依存的思想已经被认为是生命的一个基本部分，或者(如沃尔纳德斯基所证明，霍伊尔所建议的)是一个宇宙原则。布莱克经常称自己为基督徒，并以许多新颖的方式定义基督教，如艺术、爱情、政治、科学，但具体来说，在他的基督教版本中，宽恕是一个基本概念，没有什么是只为自己而存在的。布莱克的基督教作为艺术是生活的一个具体部分，他嘲笑一些抽象的神论定义，在他的时代很常见。当他的评论被认为是在斯宾诺莎泛神论的背景下，它是强化和个性化，避免抽象，可以允许归因被动或惰性的现实的任何部分，这是突出的。当他说世界是有生命的时，他的意思是，正是感知的缺陷使牛顿的世界显得被动、空虚和死亡。几年前，一场自称“深层生态学”的运动试图将生态学的概念绝对化;布莱克关于生命相互作用的统一性的观点和沃尔纳德斯基宇宙论之前的观点一样，都是经过深思熟虑的。
Rather than elevating any of the ideas of Christianity to an absolute doctrine, Blake used them as parts of an organic whole. The principle of forgiveness was presented as the appropriate response to a world which is always new. The desire for vengeance comes from a delusive commitment to the world of memory. Virginity is constantly renewed in the world of imaginative life. While Blake said that you can’t forgive someone until they stop hurting you, the desire to be forgiven indicates that there is an opportunity to resolve the problem.
布莱克没有把基督教的任何思想提升为绝对的教义，而是把它们作为一个有机整体的一部分。宽恕的原则被提出，作为对一个总是新的世界的适当回应。复仇的欲望来自于对记忆世界的一种虚幻的承诺。童贞在想象生活的世界中不断更新。布莱克说，除非一个人不再伤害你，否则你不会原谅他，而被原谅的渴望表明存在解决问题的机会。
Although most mathematicians and computer-so-called-scientists are committed to a rationalistic, past-oriented view of their mental operations, and some scientists accept that ideology along with mathematics, the valid, discovery-oriented sciences have to be future-oriented. A first step in avoiding dogmatic assumptions might be phrased as “remembering what you are,” a living being, and asking how you know things: The interaction with other beings, exchanging energy and information with the environment, experiencing yourself in the world.
尽管大多数数学家和所谓的计算机科学家对他们的心理活动持一种理性主义的、以过去为导向的观点，一些科学家也接受意识形态和数学一样，有效的、以发现为导向的科学必须以未来为导向。避免教条主义假设的第一步可能是“记住你是什么”，一个有生命的生物，并问你是如何知道事情的:与其他生物的互动，与环境交换能量和信息，在这个世界中体验自己。
Holistic medicine and holistic psychology came into existence as attempts to overcome the dogmatic compartmentalization of reality that is endemic. Whenever rigidity is a problem, looking for ways to create new patterns that by-pass the petrified pattern can lead to a solution. Parkinson’s disease and other physical problems have been approached using techniques of intensified or varied stimulation. Increased stimulation–even electromagnetic stimulation– appears to open alternative patterns. Music, dance, and swimming have been used successfully to improve fluidity in various neurological diseases. Kurt Goldstein (The Organism) worked with brain injuries, and found that the brain has a variety of ways to restore a new balance. Raising the amount of energy that’s available can allow natural processes to create a better synthesis. Political and social problems that are culturally determined may follow rules similar to those of organic brain disease.
整体医学和整体心理学的产生是为了克服普遍存在的对现实的武断划分。当僵化成为一个问题时，寻找创建新模式的方法可以绕过僵化的模式，从而找到解决方案。帕金森氏症和其他身体问题已经被使用强化或多种刺激技术来解决。增加刺激——甚至是电磁刺激——似乎打开了另一种模式。音乐、舞蹈和游泳已经成功地用于改善各种神经系统疾病的流动性。Kurt Goldstein(《有机体》)研究过脑损伤，他发现大脑有多种方法来恢复一种新的平衡。增加可用的能量可以让自然过程创造出更好的合成物。由文化决定的政治和社会问题可能遵循与器质性脑疾病类似的规则。
Optimal assumptions, when assumptions are necessary, are those that don’t commit you to undesirable conclusions. For example, in the 1950s, some people made the assumption that nuclear war was inevitable, and made large investments in “fallout shelters,” which were conceived in terms of world war II bomb shelters, and so resources were diverted from other investments, such as education, which didn’t in themselves foreclose future possibilities. Self-fulfilling prophecies and self-limiting assumptions are often built into supposedly practical activities.
当假设是必要的时候，最优假设是那些不会让你得出不受欢迎的结论的假设。例如,在1950年代,一些人认为核战争是不可避免的,并进行了大量投资的“防空洞”,如二战的炸弹庇护所，所以资源从其他投资转移,如教育,本身并没有排除未来的可能性。自我实现的预言和自我限制的假设常常被建立在所谓的实际活动中。
The assumption that cancer is genetically determined, and the assumption that regeneration is impossible in the heart or brain, are self-limiting assumptions that have been immensely destructive in biology and medicine. There was no reason to make those assumptions, except for the rationalist culture. Physics, biology, and cosmology are manacled by many unnecessary assumptions. The limits of adaptation, the extent of life’s potential, can’t be discovered unless you look for them, but the sciences have built many artificial limitations into their systems.
癌症是由基因决定的假设，以及心脏或大脑不可能再生的假设，都是自我限制的假设，在生物学和医学中具有极大的破坏性。除了理性主义文化之外，没有理由做出这些假设。物理学、生物学和宇宙学都被许多不必要的假设所束缚。适应的极限，生命的潜力，除非你去寻找它们，否则是无法发现的，但科学在它们的系统中建立了许多人为的限制。
Avoiding unnecessarily limiting assumptions, looking for patterns rather than randomness, looking for larger patterns rather than minimal forms, avoiding reliance on verbal and symbolic formulations, expecting the future to be different—these are abstract ways of formulating the idea that the world should be seen with sympathetic involvement, rather than with analytical coldness.
避免不必要的限制性假设，寻找模式而不是随机，寻找更大的模式而不是最小的形式，避免依赖于语言和符号的表述，期望未来是不同的——这些都是抽象的方式来构建这个想法，即世界应该以同情的方式参与，而不是分析性的冷淡。
Almost everything which has been denounced as “teleological” has turned out to be much closer to the truth than the mechanistic views that were promoted as “more scientific,” and many horrors have been committed by people who have said that nature shouldn’t be “anthropomorphized,” that subjective feelings shouldn’t be attributed to “the experimental material.” The surgeons who operate on babies without anesthesia are operating on the assumption that any being which can’t say “I’m going to sue you” is unable to experience pain.
几乎所有被谴责为“目的论”已经被证明是更接近事实比机械的观点,被晋升为“更科学,”和犯下的许多恐怖的人说,自然不应该“人格化”,主观的感情不应该归因于“实验材料。”外科医生在没有麻醉的情况下给婴儿做手术，他们的假设是，任何不会说“我要起诉你”的生物都无法体验疼痛。
When we analyze the ideas of chemical reaction equilibrium (burning something, for example), or biological adaptation or growth or learning, and see that they are strictly directional in time (which is the basic meaning of “teleological”), and consistent with Aristotle’s description of causality, we can see the mysticism that has been imposed on our culture with the idea that “teleological explanations are unscientific.”
当我们分析化学反应平衡(例如燃烧某物)，或生物适应、成长或学习等概念时，发现它们在时间上具有严格的方向性(这是“目的论”的基本含义)，并与亚里士多德对因果关系的描述相一致，我们可以看到神秘主义被强加在我们的文化上，认为“目的论的解释是不科学的”。
Blake was clearly aware that the reason for making limiting assumptions was to maintain control, and to profit from another’s suffering. Seeing that the sadistic assumptions that were put in place to regulate human life rested on a dichotomizing of soul from body, Blake’s correction was to replace them with a unity of consciousness and substance, a living world rather than a dead world.
布莱克清楚地意识到，做出限制性假设的原因是为了保持控制，并从他人的痛苦中获利。看到规范人类生活的虐待假设是建立在灵魂和身体的二分法之上的，布莱克的纠正是用意识和物质的统一取代它们，一个有生命的世界而不是一个死亡的世界。
An imaginative study of his work has the potential to rouse one’s abilities and to open an unlimited world of possibilities. “I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate, Built in Jerusalem’s wall.” Blake knew that his work, like anything new in the world, could be understood only by an active mental process.
对他的作品进行富有想象力的研究，有可能激发一个人的能力，并打开一个无限可能的世界。“我给你一根金线的末端，只要把它缠绕成一团，它就会引导你进入天堂的大门，建造在耶路撒冷的城墙上。”布莱克知道，他的作品，就像世界上任何新事物一样，只能通过一个积极的心理过程来理解。
Every communicative act is original, and understanding it is an invention, a projection, an imaginative synthesis. We can sometimes finish another person’s sentence, the way we anticipate the notes in a melody; we predict the intended meaning. If the symbols carried the meaning in a passive rationalistic way, the person receiving the symbols would receive nothing new. Intellect is a process of imaginative synthesis, or it is nothing.
每一个交流行为都是原创的，理解它是一种发明，一种投射，一种富有想象力的综合。有时，我们可以完成另一个人的句子，就像我们期待旋律中的音符;我们预测其意图。如果符号以一种被动的理性的方式承载意义，接受符号的人就不会得到任何新的东西。智力是一个充满想象力的综合过程，否则就什么都不是。
Blake devised “a system” that would make it possible to think about the world without unconsciously making a commitment to the false limits. He showed, by working within this new philosophical synthesis, that Art, Science, and Politics are structurally and substantially interdependent. The question I asked in the title, “can art instruct science?” isn’t the right question once you see the world from Blake’s perspective, since Science is Art, and both must be based on experience and imagination.
布莱克设计了一套“系统”，使人们能够思考这个世界，而不会无意识地对错误的极限做出承诺。他通过在这个新的哲学综合体系中工作表明，艺术、科学和政治在结构上和本质上是相互依存的。我在标题中问的问题，“艺术能指导科学吗?”一旦你从布莱克的角度看世界，这就不是正确的问题了，因为科学就是艺术，两者都必须基于经验和想象。
Blake used, in a new way, the things that were available in his culture, to reveal the process of creation, on all its levels. He consciously used language in a new way, to free the reader from the stereotypes of conventional language. His methods are relevant, as he knew they would be, for other times and situations.
布莱克用一种新的方式，用他的文化中可以得到的东西，在所有层面上揭示了创造的过程。他有意识地以一种新的方式使用语言，把读者从传统语言的刻板印象中解放出来。正如他所知道的那样，他的方法与其他时间和情况有关。
NOTES AND QUOTATIONS
笔记和引用
I happened to read Swedenborg's scientific work just as I was getting interested in concentrating on becoming a biologist, and I realized that it was his scientific knowledge that shows up in Blake's imagery, far more than his theology, which Blake obviously despised. By chance, just after I finished my master's thesis on Blake, I got a job at a Swedenborgian college (Urbana University), where I saw in traditional form the small minded theologism that Blake had seen in Swedenborg. As a result of those experiences, I greatly appreciated the book, The Heaven and Hell of William Blake, by Gholam-Reza Sabri-Tabrizi, which apparently hasn't been very well received academically.
我碰巧读了斯威登堡的科学著作，就在我对专注于成为一名生物学家产生了兴趣时，我意识到，在布莱克的形象中，是他的科学知识，而不是他显然鄙视的神学。一个偶然的机会，就在我完成了关于布莱克的硕士论文之后，我在瑞典堡大学(Urbana University)找到了一份工作，在那里我以传统的形式看到了布莱克在瑞典堡看到的狭隘的神学家。由于这些经历，我非常欣赏Gholam-Reza Sabri-Tabrizi所著的《William Blake的天堂与地狱》一书，这本书在学术上显然不是很受欢迎。
Blake’s imagery indicates that he had a great interest in the physical and biological sciences, and he apparently had some direct contacts with the leading scientists in London, some of whom are lampooned in Island in the Moon. Some of Swedenborg’s discoveries were probably discussed in these groups.
布莱克的图像表明，他对物理和生物科学有极大的兴趣，他显然与伦敦的主要科学家有一些直接的接触，其中一些人在《月之岛》中受到了讽刺。斯韦登堡的一些发现可能在这些小组中讨论过。
Although Swedenborg’s original works in anatomy and physiology were probably his most impressive contributions, he was also a pioneer in paleontology, cosmology (the nebular hypothesis, in particular), magnetism, crystallography, metallurgy, and endocrinology.
虽然斯维登堡在解剖学和生理学方面的原始著作可能是他最令人印象深刻的贡献，但他也是古生物学、宇宙学(尤其是星云假说)、磁性学、晶体学、冶金学和内分泌学方面的先驱。
E. P. Thompson’s Witness against the Beast is an extremely valuable source for clarifying Blake’s vocabulary.
e·p·汤普森的《对抗野兽的证人》是澄清布莱克词汇的极有价值的来源。
Synectics, W. J. J. Gordon, Harper & Row, 1961. Describes how metaphorical thinking was used for solving practical problems, in the Synectics Research Group in Cambridge, Mass.
Synectics, W. J. J. Gordon, Harper Row, 1961。马萨诸塞州剑桥的Synectics研究小组描述了隐喻思维是如何用于解决实际问题的。
In the “scientific” philosophies of Blake’s time, it was common to speak of matter and its primary and secondary qualities. Blake understood that this view of matter was a derivative of awful theologies:
在布莱克时代的“科学”哲学中，谈论物质及其首要和次要性质是很常见的。布莱克明白这种物质观是可怕的神学的衍生:
“And this is the manner of the Sons of Albion in their strength
They take the Two Contraries which are calld Qualities, with which
Every Substance is clothed, they name them Good & Evil
From them they make an Abstract, which is a Negation
Not only of the Substance from which it is derived
A murderer of its own Body: but also a murderer
Of every Divine Member: it is the Reasoning Power
An Abstract objecting power, that Negatives every thing
This is the Spectre of Man: the Holy Reasoning Power
And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of Desolation”
[Jerusalem, 10]
“这就是不列颠之子的力量所在
他们有两种相反的东西，这就是所谓的品质
所有的物质都披上了衣服，他们称其为善与恶
他们由此形成了一个抽象，这是一个否定
不仅仅是源于它的实体
一个谋杀自己身体的凶手:但也是一个谋杀犯
每一个神圣的成员:它是推理的力量
一种抽象的反对力量，否定一切事物
这是人类的幽灵:神圣的推理力量
荒凉可憎之物在神圣中被关闭”
(耶路撒冷,10)
What is a Church and What Is a Theatre? are they Two & not One? can they Exist Separate?
Are not Religion & Politics the Same Thing? Brotherhood is Religion
O Demonstrations of Reason Dividing Families in Cruelty & Pride! [Jerusalem plate 57]
什么是教堂，什么是剧院?他们是两个不是一个吗?它们能独立存在吗?
宗教政治不是一回事吗?兄弟会的宗教
哦，理性的展示，残酷地分裂家庭，骄傲!(耶路撒冷板57)
And he who takes vengeance alone is the criminal of Providence;
If I should dare to lay my finger on a grain of sand
In way of vengeance; I punish the already punishd: O whom
Should I pity if I pity not the sinner who is gone astray! [Jerusalem plate 45]
只有复仇的人是天意的罪人;
如果我敢把手指放在一粒沙子上
以报复的方式;我惩罚已受惩罚的人
如果我不怜悯误入歧途的罪人，那我还可怜他吗?(耶路撒冷板45)
“Imagination has nothing to do with memory.” (comment on Wordsworth). “Knowledge is not by deduction, but Immediate by Perception or Sense at once.” (comment on Berkely).
“想象与记忆无关。(评论华兹华斯)。“知识不是通过推论得来的，而是通过直观或即时的感觉得来的。(对伯克利的评论)。
With Demonstrative Science piercing Apollyon with his own bow! J12.14; E155
Generalizing Art & Science till Art & Science is lost. J38.54; E185
“For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars”
演示科学用他自己的弓刺穿阿波罗!J12.14;E155
把艺术科学推广到艺术科学消失为止。J38.54;E185
“对于艺术来说，科学只能存在于精细组织的细节中”
Since the difference between a Rationalistic view of the world and a creative view is largely a question of the reality of time, it’s worth mentioning the work of an astronomer whose cosmological view was based on the reality of time:“Possibility of experimental study of properties of time,” N. A. Kozyrev, Russian, September 1967, USIA document in English, 49 pages, 1971. J. Narlikar more recently did similar work, including his collaboration with H. Arp, described in Arp’s Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology, and Academic Science, Apeiron, Montreal, 1998.
以来的理性主义的世界观的区别和创造性的观点在很大程度上是一个现实的问题的时候,值得一提的是一位天文学家的宇宙的观点是基于时间的现实:“实验研究的可能性的属性的时候,“n . a .科济列夫俄罗斯,1967年9月,美国情报机构英文文件，49页，1971年。J. Narlikar最近做了类似的工作，包括他与H. Arp的合作，描述在阿佩隆，蒙特利尔，1998年的阿佩隆的《看到红色:红移，宇宙学和学术科学》中。
