Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A note on texts and abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Spectre and the logic of error
- 2 The Spectre as Kierkegaard's concept of dread
- 3 The Spectre and the line of life
- 4 Mastered irony as the ground of human community
- 5 Irony and authority
- Conclusion. Los and the Spectre: master and slave in the labor of the negative
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - The Spectre and the line of life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 January 2010
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A note on texts and abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Spectre and the logic of error
- 2 The Spectre as Kierkegaard's concept of dread
- 3 The Spectre and the line of life
- 4 Mastered irony as the ground of human community
- 5 Irony and authority
- Conclusion. Los and the Spectre: master and slave in the labor of the negative
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; … Leave out this line and you leave out life itself …
Blake's Exhibition and Catalogue of 1809… what the ancients regarded as positive, the passion for distinctions, has now become a childish folly.
Johannes Climacus, Philosophical FragmentsMy argument has been that at Felpham Blake came to see the true enemy of life not as division / Urizen but as mediation / the Spectre of Urthona, who is really a disguised form of division. This is why the Spectre is identified with Beulah, the delusive paradise “Where Contrarieties are equally True” (M, II, 30:I; 129). It is significant that this “married land” of mediation disguises at once truth or eternity where contraries are absolute and not equally true, and error or Ulro, where contraries again are absolute. Ulro is the negative state of true division, the profound alienation from life which really underlies Beulah's (and the Spectre's) appearances of mediation.
Blake ultimately calls Beulah the land of negation, where “the Contraries of Beulah War beneath Negations Banner” (M, II, 34:23; 134).
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- Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre of Dialectic , pp. 84 - 108Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991
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