Maslow's Dichotomy

Angels and Devils in Blake's Marriage

Maslow's Dichotomy

Maslow makes a distinction between “peakers,” or people who have emotional and personal experiences of transcendence, and “non-peakers,” who either ignore or repress their transcendent experiences because they reject them as irrational. He points out that both peakers and non-peakers may have affinities toward either religion or science, and that peak experiences often enter into the horizons of both. He also points out that the distaste for personal experience is a negative factor evident in both science and religion. Pure positivists, people who rely solely on confirmable (or seemingly confirmable: in the case of religious positivists, this refers to philosophical and theological theory) information to construct their worldview, tend to reject peak experience regardless of their religious or scientific mindset. Freud considered the spiritual life to be “defenses against the instincts.” Says Maslow: “The pure positivist rejects any inner experiences of any kind as being ‘un-scientific,’ as not in the realm of human knowledge.” Maslow accuses both institutionalized religion and science of perpetrating this flawed conception, and understanding Maslow's distinction between peakers and non-peakers might help clear up Blake's intention in Marriage.

Peakers and Non-Peakers in William Blake

The famous work of late 18th Century poet and religious visionary William Blake, entitled The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, has always been of great personal interest to me despite much confusion concerning its rather elliptical and cryptic message. In it, Blake explains his discomfort with the contemporary religion of his time as being overly rationalized, which he denounces as a cult of reason. Blake considers desire, the impulse of energy and emotion, to be wrongly characterized as evil by the institutionalized religion of his time, which he viewed as overly oppressive of personal spiritual experience. This is a passage from Maslow regarding the materialistic or overly scientific viewpoint in religion with which he has a problem: “…such a view of life tends to make the person regard his peak- and transcendent experiences as a kind of insanity, a complete loss of control, a sense of being overwhelmed by irrational emotions, etc.” Immediately it reminded me of this passage from “Marriage”: “As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their Proverbs.” Blake also displays distrust in pure reason in the same way that the positivists show distrust in pure experience. He calls the peakers Devils (seemingly to voice his opposition to organized religion) and the non-peakers Angels. His descriptions of Angels seem to match Maslow’s description of the positivist: “I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.”

Blake contends that all religions originally sprung from the Poetic Genius, which is his term for the Holy Spirit, and to Blake, an entity of energy and delight. In diluting religion to a merely one-sided and rationalistic endeavor, Angels have alienated Devils and thus caused a rift in religion. In Blake's use in Marriage, Devils do not represent evil, but the repressed energetic side of the human experience that the instutions mislabel as evil.

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via: homoplasmate