Discipline of Philosophy Speakers Series

Throughout his life, the artist, poet and visionary William Blake sought to show how the nurture of the imagination is essential to the flourishing of reality, human and more-than-human alike. For Blake, it is imagination that allows us ‘to see a world in a grain of sand’, as he famously writes, ‘and a heaven in a wild flower’. Rather than a disembodied power of human cognition or a fantastical escape from the world, Blake understands imagination as a crucial component in our participatory belonging to reality, one whose nurture and flourishing is essential in living artfully and responsively. Artistic productions, for Blake, do not merely fulfil an aesthetic, representative or symbolic function but work as ways of opening out the senses to encounter the infinite in all things and beings, as well as eternity within ‘the productions of time’. Accordingly, nature is not the stable background to human life nor the brute given of ‘matters of fact’; rather, as he puts it ‘to the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself’.

This talk explores these themes through Blake’s philosophy of imagination as it arises within his art and poetry, specifically looking at the themes of luminosity and ‘descent’ in his illuminated book Milton A Poem and reflecting on his visionary confrontation with the figure of Isaac Newton.

Bio: VALENTIN GERLIER Scholar and musician, is Lecturer and Head of Creative Cultures at Schumacher College, UK, where he teaches at the interface of Philosophy, Ecology and the Arts. He is Fellow of the Temenos Academy and Research Associate at UR-CERES, Toulouse. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Grace of Words (Routledge, 2022) and his forthcoming book is entitled Heaven’s Wilfdlowers: A Blakean Theory of Nature, Culture and Imagination (Routledge, 2027).