著者

竹森 修

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 (ISSN:00393649)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.47, no.2, pp.179-198, 1971

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Modern society with its materialist standard of values is now plunging back into the chaos from where it was supposed to have emerged. The materialist civilization has now brought to light its own irrationalities and contradictions, which will prove to be fatal to mankind, if they are left unchecked. From behind its neon-sign brightness a shadow of negative nihilism is looming so overwhelmingly that most of us are in great anxiety about the future of mankind. We are beginning to suspect that this threatening shadow might betray the true character of our civilization, that it might be self-destructive. However, while deeply concerned about the phenomenal aspect of social miseries, we still remain unaware of their spiritual connotations in relation to ourselves, for we take it for granted that they came from the outside. Our spiritual crisis lies in the ever-growing neutralization of human relationships in society. It has its root in our unrestricted self-complacency. Human consciousness is by nature self-complacent, that is, self-centred or self-attached. We are attached to ourselves like a spoilt son, or we spoil ourselves like an indulgent mother. That is what Blake calls 'Maternal Humanity'. It is a spoilt-child mentality which is domineered by a kind of possessive false maternity, false because it is essentially different from true maternity that sets an example of selfless love by its self-devoting, self-annihilating acts. It is a mentality in which paternal severity to oneself remains shadowy, 'silent and invisible', on account of the exclusive mother-child relationship. That is the inherent structure of human consciousness, root of all misery. If there are any authentic possibilities within us, they will be realized only when we expose ourselves constantly to a critique of self-satisfaction. However, the problem is that we have now lost sight of the critique which we saw embodied in religion. As a result, that individual mentality was left to prevail without check so widely that it has come to constitute a kind of climate of opinion in society. It is a spoilt-child society, or we might say a foundling society, for the critical principle of self-satisfaction which is its true parents seems nowhere to be seen. Self-complacency has extended even to the world of ethical and religious values, and is changing it into another hot-house for that mentality. It is most dangerous for humanity, for religion is the only exhaustive critique of self-satisfaction. If religion should cease to be that, it would cease to mean anything for us. And that would lead to mental suicide of mankind. On this point Blake is prophetic. Like other romantic poets, his concern is 'transformation', that is, to transform the cold, inanimate world into a world full of light and life. But he is radically different from them in his severest view of human consciousness, that is, of his own selfhood. He is well aware that the dualism of subject and object created by the discriminative faculty of consciousness implies in itself discrimination against other beings, that our consciousness itself constitutes unauthentic selfhood as self-love. And his greatness lies in his conviction that poetic vision is possible only through self-annihilation, and that 'transformation' is, first of all, the problem of self-transformation, which will ultimately result in the transformation of society. Blake's ontological approach to Reality is really suggestive about the problem of the reinstatement of religion as the one critique of self-satisfaction as well as about the relationship of religion and art.