William Blake & Jacob Boehme:
Imagination, Experience & the Limitations of Reason
Kevin Fischer
William Blake & Jacob Boehme:
Imagination, Experience & the Limitations of Reason
Kevin Fischer
William Blake & Jacob Boehme: Imagination, Experience & the Limitations of Reason*
KEVIN FISCHER
This essay will examine how Jacob Boehme and William Blake understood and valued imagination, and how imagination is quite distinct from fantasy. Both men saw it as rooted in living experience, and as such necessary for a fuller knowledge and understanding of reality. For both, abstract reasoning alone gives only a partial view, one that can distort and limit our understanding and the world that we do experience. By contrast, the creative embodied imagination places us more fully in existence, in ourselves and in the world; it makes possible true Reason; it reveals all the profound potential that is too often unexplored and unrealised in us; and by doing so it affords us a vital living understanding of and relationship with the Divine.
While I am not here directly concerned with the extent of Boehme’s influence on Blake, a few points are worth making in this regard. As with many of the forces that play a role in forming and directing a life, the nature of influence can be complex. Often it works subtly, gradually, and at a level beyond immediate recognition. Blake himself drew important distinctions between ‘imitation’ and ‘invention’, and wrote that ‘The Man Either Painter or Philosopher who Learns or Acquires all he Knows from Others. Must be full of Contradictions’.1 In this he was in agreement with Boehme, who said
I teach, write and speak out of what has been wrought in me. I have not scraped my teachings together out of histories and so made opinions. I have by God’s grace obtained eyes of my own.2
It is through such assertions of independence that a sense of the value of tradition can become significant. Blake’s and Boehme’s view
1. Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Discourses’, from David V. Erdman, ed., The
Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), p. 639. Citations from this edition below will use the siglum E followed by page number, e.g. ‘E639’.
5:50.