Higgs, John. _William Blake vs the World_. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021. --- # Progressive Summary # Key Points ## Without Contraries is no progression Blake advocates for [[Philosophy is 'all-sided wisdom']]. He doesn't take sides, but tries to embrace opposites, the way Taoism does. He introduces Beulah in *Milton* and *Jerusalem* with the line: "There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True." (Contrarieties are defined as opposition or inconsistency between two things.) This is possible because as ideas, everything can be equally true. The world that we experience is mostly a model that we have created in our heads, a model filled with all sorts of different ideas. It is only Urizen, or Reason, that mistakes the model for all of our reality. Blake depicts Urizen as an architect-God wielding a compass. Urizen is not only the source of our perceived reality, but also the source of our moral judgments - our [[Enemy Images]]. > Urizen is the personification of reason. He is the intellect that creates law, he is controlling and associated with language, and it is he who constructs the human-scale world of rationality and logic in which contrary positions cannot both be physically true. (p. 61) > Deeply insecure, Urizen is the aspect of our minds that needs not just to be right, but to be thought of as right. (p. 71) Blake also thought that the Bible was a product of poetic genius, and that it captured Urizen perfectly in the figure of the Old Testament God. Contrarieties are also equally true at the quantum level (for instance, in the way Schrodinger's cat can be both alive and dead.) Again, it is Urizen as the observer who collapses all the possibilities into one reality. # Resonances # Oppositions # Questions / Comments # Quotes