Ray Peat article, 1999. From The Collected Works of Ray Peat.

Ray Peat, "Political Science of Sciences", p. 1449

M aybe the political right, the Nazis, etc., are the only ones who take art seriously, and can see that it is political work of the most effective sort. Science, when it is approached in the same way, is Art and Politics, and participates in intellectual war. Acadamic obtuseness has always made it possible to ignore ironic and dialectical language, so I suspect that Ralph Dumain’s riddles won’t ignite many mental fires.

The wretched state of the Arts in this Country & in Europe originating

in the Wretched State of Political Science which is the Sci ence of Sciences

Demands a firm & determinate conduct on the part of Artists

to Resist the Contemptible Counter Arts

…Strength to form the golden armour of science

For intellectual War The war of swords departed now

Are not Religion & Politics the same thing? Brotherhood is religion.

Good & Evil are Riches & Poverty, a Tree of Misery,

propagating Generation and Death.

A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect:

the Man Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian.

The Unproductive Man is not a Christian, much less the Destroyer.

You must leave Fathers & Mothers & Houses & Lands

if they stand in the way of Art.

Prayer is the study of Art.

Praise is the Practice of Art.

Fasting &c., all relate to Art.

The outward Ceremony is Antichrist.

Without Unceasing Practice nothing can be done.

Practice is Art. If you leave off you are Lost.

Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists.

Their Works were destroy’d by the Seven Angels

of the Seven Churches in Asia, Antichrist Science.

The Old & New Testaments are the Great Code of Art.

The Whole Business of Man Is The Arts, & All Things Com mon.

No Secresy in Art.

Christianity is Art & not Money. Money is its Curse.

From a previous post: I don’t think anybody is playing arbitrary games with definitions or willfully stretching the definition of the political beyond recognition. Notice your key word above, “working”, (my emphasis added): the im plication seems to be that working is acting, engaging in overt political activity, not writing. But Blake was a writer and artist, who took definite positions as a writer if not as an activist on issues of hunger, poverty, tyranny, imperialism, slavery, and much more besides. How you could

interpret this as indifferent to improvement of the human condition in the material world is beyond me. This is where a productive discussion should begin, rather than end. I hope I am not remembering something different than you are, but what comes to mind is the question of Blake’s attitude towards the literal: is the sun a flaming disc that looks like the size of a guinea or the heavenly host screeching holy holy holy? Such symbolic acts of defiance of material reality have yet to be properly analyzed by anyone on this list, including me, esp. in conjunction with some more down-to-earth statements such as “we eat little we drink less/this earth breeds not our happiness.” There is an issue of psychological resistance to material conditions in the face of which one is powerless, but these gestures of psychological resistance, that come from real, material, palpable suffering and the will to endure, cannot be reduced to New Age suburbanite hippy-dippy drivel that changing your interpretation changes what’s happening, tiptoeing through the tulips as if one gets a free ride to live in a fantasy world. I would be interested to know whether the scholarly Blake literature addresses all these questions, because I’ve not seen any that has to date. Rather than continue explicating my own views, let me pose a series of riddles to advance the discussion onto the next level: (1) How are we to analyze Blake’s statements of resistance in defiance of material conditions? (2) How are we to analyze the political claims of Blake’s vague and symbolic descriptions of apocalyptic conditions which somehow result in redemption, the new Jerusalem, in the light of how social change takes place and was taking place in front of Blake’s eyes? (3) When Blake says it was a mistake for Jesus to get involved in politics, and otherwise excuse his own disengagements from the political realm (including the statement Tim cites about how an educated citizenry would be immune to tyranny, and the statement that creation burns up when people cease to behold it), what kind of claim is actually being made? Is Blake advocating that everybody is wasting their time trying to change the political, material conditions of their lives, or merely that prophets like Jesus and himself are ill-advised to get mixed up in potentially life-threatening political situations in which they cannot possibly win? By pursuing questions such as these, which all follow a similar pattern, I think we can progress much further through this murky character of Blake; symbolic politics relates to material societal conditions.