UC Berkeley

What does William Blake mean when he writes, "[a]s the true method of knowledge is experiment the true faculty of knowing is that which experiences"? For Blake, experience is always bodily experience, rooted in the interoceptive awareness of "sensing turned inward." My dissertation blends creative non-fiction with critical analysis to explore how Blake prophetically anticipates the discoveries of twenty-first century neuroscientists by insisting that the activities of thinking, feeling, and perception which assembles knowledge occur neither in some disembodied mental sphere, nor in the insular interiority of authentic selfhood. Rather, they are located in the body: in the nerves, the brain, the digestive system, in each "pulsation of the artery." Like many neuroscientists today, Blake reminds his readers to mind the gap between how sensory-perception "intuitively" yet inaccurately appears to our consciousness (as if the world is simply out there when we open our eyes) and the astonishingly complex and intricate mediations by which our nervous systems and brains edit, predict, and construct experience. But Blake also goes beyond the descriptive agendas of most neuroscientists to attribute that gap to our deeply engrained cultural habits of disembodiment. Diagnostically, he observes that modern, Western human beings—immersed in cultural milieux that denigrate and ignore signals arriving from our visceral bodies in favor of ideas attributed to our disembodied minds—have cut ourselves off from interoceptive sensitivity. This schism between body and brain (in which Blake locates his version of "the Fall") is not a mythic event but an ongoing habitus that entails catastrophic consequences for our brains, our bodies, and our body politic in ways that psychologists and medical researchers are just beginning to explore. Blake offers his own poetry, prose, and art as an aesthetic prescription for healing and a corrective curriculum for our poor habits. My dissertation recovers his crucial but long misunderstood concept of immanent genius. Far from it demarcating an exceptional individualism that shakes off all rules (as the word widely connotes now), Blake locates our relationship with genius in cultivating the perceptive keenness of interoceptive awareness, including learning to inhabit states of physiological and emotional discomfort. For the "improvement of sensual enjoyment" that he recommends inverts our habitual relationship to our bodies. Blake is ruthlessly candid: rather empowering our sense of self-possession, naturalized by musculoskeletal portions of the body that respond to our volition, learning to obey genius plunges us into the interoceptive body as the mind learns to feel and follow bodily dictates that are indifferent to our will. Yet, as Blake suggests in his ecological vision of communal being, learning to inhabit this interoceptive body may offer intimate and subtle access not only to our own bodies, but to other bodies and beings, and to the only world that truly exists.