Papers by Kevin Fischer
William Blake and Jacob Boehme saw true imagination as rooted in living experience, as quite dist... more William Blake and Jacob Boehme saw true imagination as rooted in living experience, as quite distinct from fantasy, and as such necessary for a fuller knowledge and understanding of reality. Both perceive the significant limitations of reason; that of itself it gives only a partial view, one that can limit and distort our understanding and experience. These limitations have too often extended to the study of Blake and Boehme. Through a close and imaginative engagement with their work, this paper looks at how both addressed the shortcomings of our usual, conditioned and habitual modes of perception and understanding, and how a different kind of engagement with and understanding of the world is necessary. Both saw just how constraining reason can be when it is too prominent and disconnected from our other vital faculties and capacities; how it can enclose and isolate, alienating us from both the world and ourselves. By contrast, for Boehme and Blake imagination is essential, a means of breaking out into that which is other than and beyond our habitual selves. It has a creative relationship with the world, one in which reality is not fixed and finished, but inexhaustible. As the mind expands, so does the world. This paper shows how for both visionaries, the creative embodied imagination places us more fully in existence – in ourselves and in the world – makes possible true reason, reveals all the profound potential that is too often unexplored and unrealised in us, and as such affords us a vital, living understanding of and relationship with the divine. It thus also demonstrates how vital imagination is to any study of William Blake and Jacob Boehme.
William Blake and Jacob Boehme saw true imagination as rooted in living experience, as quite dist... more William Blake and Jacob Boehme saw true imagination as rooted in living experience, as quite distinct from fantasy, and as such necessary for a fuller knowledge and understanding of reality. Both perceive the significant limitations of reason; that of itself it gives only a partial view, one that can limit and distort our understanding and experience. These limitations have too often extended to the study of Blake and Boehme. Through a close and imaginative engagement with their work, this paper looks at how both addressed the shortcomings of our usual, conditioned and habitual modes of perception and understanding, and how a different kind of engagement with and understanding of the world is necessary. Both saw just how constraining reason can be when it is too prominent and disconnected from our other vital faculties and capacities; how it can enclose and isolate, alienating us from both the world and ourselves. By contrast, for Boehme and Blake imagination is essential, a means of breaking out into that which is other than and beyond our habitual selves. It has a creative relationship with the world, one in which reality is not fixed and finished, but inexhaustible. As the mind expands, so does the world. This paper shows how for both visionaries, the creative embodied imagination places us more fully in existence – in ourselves and in the world – makes possible true reason, reveals all the profound potential that is too often unexplored and unrealised in us, and as such affords us a vital, living understanding of and relationship with the divine. It thus also demonstrates how vital imagination is to any study of William Blake and Jacob Boehme. Kevin Fischer is the author of Converse in the Spirit: William Blake, Jacob Boehme & the Creative Spirit (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 2004)
Conference Presentations by Kevin Fischer
Jacob Boehme repeatedly stresses that we must elevate our minds ‘in the spirit’ if we want to und... more Jacob Boehme repeatedly stresses that we must elevate our minds ‘in the spirit’ if we want to understand the spirit that animates his work. William Blake was profoundly engaged with this understanding, similarly distinguishing between lower and higher forms of mind, and which he found embodied in Boehme’s three principles. This paper looks at how Blake’s reception of Boehme was very much in this inspired, elevated sense. For both visionaries the dark world of the first principle and the light world of the second are of necessity separate; the first of itself shut off, self-enclosed, the second free and sacred. Perception is key. Blake found in Boehme a creative, dynamic representation of how the mind can look – or move – into the lower, dark world or the higher, light world – that what it sees it makes – and how the mind shrinks or expands accordingly. At the same time it is vitally important that these principles are interrelated and interdependent, existing within one another in an indissoluble ‘band,’ one that is animated by a potent energy and which, transforming the lower into the higher, brings about the marriage of darkness and light, of heaven and hell. Contrariety is essential to life. This understanding marks out Boehme and Blake as particularly kindred spirits. For both, the place where this dynamic, ongoing drama takes place is within the individual and in this world. The world of the third principle is thus particularly vital in the work of both, a form of mercy. Here again the fact that the principles are at once distinct and interdependent highlights the sublime paradox that Blake found in Boehme’s vision. Although separate from the created world, eternity works through time, paradise in the earth, and God through the individual. The divine is and is not in the world. This paper shows that for Boehme and Blake these are not abstract intellectual notions, but living realities; and as such that any study of their work must likewise elevate itself ‘in the spirit,’ with the light of the second principle, the higher mind, in and for which ‘The true heaven is everywhere, even in that very place where thou standest.’ (Aur 19:26)
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Papers by Kevin Fischer
Conference Presentations by Kevin Fischer