The Philosophy of William Blake

Mark Vernon looks at the imaginative thinking of an imaginative artist.

- Mark Vernon

The painter, poet, and engraver, William Blake (1757-1827) is not usually categorized as a philosopher, but I think otherwise. He engaged with the great thinkers of his day — particularly the three he regularly references as an intellectual triumvirate: Bacon, Newton, and Locke. Moreover, I reckon his ideas could be transformative now.

Blake was born in Georgian England. The era was politically and socially tumultuous, witnessing Britain losing thirteen of its colonies in North America, developing its empire in India, and spending decades at war with France. During the same period men stopped wearing stockings in favour of trousers, and the words ‘nihilism’, ‘objective’, ‘regular’, and ‘history’ were either coined or took on the meanings they have now.

Shifts in language are a sign that much was happening philosophically as well. Blake knew the work of Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, and illustrated one of Erasmus’s protoevolutionary works, The Botanic Garden (1791). Evolutionary ideas were in the air, and empiricism was one of the watchwords of the times, alongside the phrase ‘trial and error’. Blake joined in with that spirit, being a great experimenter with materials. His workshop, in which he engraved, printed, and coloured with his wife Catherine, must have looked like a chemist’s laboratory — and smelt like one, too. Acids washing over metals left an arid tang in the air.