Did Aldous Huxley and Jim Morrison really dig what William Blake was saying? Mark Vernon thinks not

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Thus wrote William Blake, making the doors of perception one of his best known metaphors. Jim Morrison named a band after it, Aldous Huxley a book, and nowadays it is cited in contexts ranging from game theory to psychedelics.

But what did Blake mean by said “doors”? Wouldn’t “windows of perception” have made more sense, for who ever thought they might see through a door?

As is often the case with Blake, his writing feels elusive, though of fundamental importance, and he is in fact being entirely precise. The doors of perception refer straightforwardly enough to the organs by which we receive sensations: eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths. Through these apertures we receive information about the outside world. So, Blake seems to be saying: if these doorways admitted sensations unimpeded, we would see the cosmos as it is – infinite: all finite things radiating with the divine.

This abundance is the fullness with which the world might be experienced by “man” – and his use of that word is also telling. He doesn’t mean “man” in the generic sense of “humanity”. He is drawing on the etymology of “man”. The root of the word is the same as “mental” and “mind”; thus “man” means a creature who possesses intelligence.

The inflection unpacks the doors phrase further. Cleansing is not a reference to an occasional peak experience or psychedelic trip, in spite of Huxley’s pleading, but something of the opposite. The doors are cleansed when someone perceives reality intelligently – which is to say, recognising that their intelligence is a sharing in the wider intelligence that shapes and permeates the whole cosmos. Perception grows with acknowledging that the world is charged, is meaningful, is active. Know that in yourself; know that everywhere.

But still: why “doors”? Here, Blake is injecting a twist into his call. He himself did not regard eyes, ears and nostrils as door-like – as if portals through walls that otherwise barricade us in. Indeed, he referred to that privatised notion of personhood as being “cavern’d”. So, his calling the sense organs “doors” is a dig at the philosophy of perception which does think of them in that way. It was becoming the default thinking in his time, and has remained so into ours.

The originators of this view were thinkers such as John Locke, Adam Smith and David Hume. Each invoked the novel idea that perception is a form of data reception. Sensory information lands on what Locke called the tabula rasa of the mind. There it is formed into an experience by the isolated person concerned, like a byte brought to life. But fundamentally, we are locked in our psyches, our skulls. And that imprisoned predicament, as Adam Smith continues, “never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person.”

Modern individuality was being born. Your consciousness is precisely that: yours. Others probably have awareness too, it seems reasonable to presume. But the cosmos as a whole isn’t conscious and to treat your wakefulness as a reflection of the alertness of the many finite things that fill the infinite whole is as foolish as hoping to swim in a dried-up sea.

Blake rejected that understanding; the doors philosophy itself needs cleansing. Much of his work can be read as an invocation to reawaken the older view, that we participate in life like melodies in a piece of music or gusts in a great circulation of air: distinct but not separate. Hence, to reference other famous lines: a world can be seen in a grain of sand, a heaven in a wild flower. Each reflects the all.

So he uses the metaphor of doorways to repudiate it, as is made explicit in the section that comes before, as found in his tremendous pamphlet, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Here is the full citation:

“The notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, til he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

The closing up is a result of the new understanding. A reversal, an unclosing, can happen in two steps. First, Blake says, the presumed distinction between the body and the soul must be rejected. The body is not an inert meat machine animated by a ghostly spirit. No: the only time you meet a body is when you encounter a corpse. But to meet someone is to come face to face with a person, alive through and through.

Further, you and they and we all are participating in the great flow of vitality that is the existence of things. Human beings are not odd exceptions in the world, as if in a subcategory of inert entities that somehow awoke; the truth is that energy is the fundamental reality.

The realisation is expressed in Blake’s printing method, which he references next. Relief etching, as it is called, applies acid-resistant fluid to acid-prone metals, so that the exposed metal can be melted away, leaving the printing surface exposed. The method models the antidote to the alienating philosophy: dispelling what obscures so as to reveal the truth once more. The infinite is real; the dispiriting delusory.

Blake likes the practical as well as the philosophical dig, and so here is his advice in summary. Follow your feelings, your intuitions. The Sun warms you because its light enlivens you. The birdsong delights you because its music is yours. Your friend loves you because you share a common soul. You perceive the world around you because you are part of it, as it is of you. “If the Sun & Moon should Doubt, they’d immediately Go out!” Blake writes in another place. Dare to believe!

This article is from Idler 103.

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