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

Ray Peat, "Re: For Raymond Peat", p. 1455

I think the ramifications of that insight are very far-reaching and important. It’s hard for many intellectual types to see that whole idea-complexes, as well as particular words, can be “used” creatively or for oppression and manipulation. From a previous post: And was Blake as much of a “Christian” as much as used the religion that his country-men and women understood, and which also happened to be conquering the world, for more subversive themes, himself?

The reason I jumped from Blake to Lenin is that I think Marx was only abstract and sketchy in the way he revealed the theological idealism hidden in the various philosophies, but Lenin in his notebooks prophetically and concretely showed the fallacies that were repeated endlessly in 20th century philosophies of science, positivism, language philosophy, etc. Either people don’t read Lenin’s philosophical work, or they are so trapped in their theologies of “pure science” and other abstract systems that they can’t respond in any way to his powerful analysis. I think that’s why people don’t talk about Blake’s highly analytical revelations of the philosophical self-contradictions of the big-shots, it’s the deep neokantianism that rules the official mental life at present. As a biologist, I think Blake “used” the images of “a world all alive” as a fiendishly clever way to by-pass the dogmatic abstractions that ruled philosophy then as now. I think this philosophical condition accounts for the horrifying oppression that “vitalism” and “Lamarckism” have suffered. With Vernadsky and Hoyle, et al., I am inclined to believe that at least in an abstract and general sense, the universe is alive, but the “use” that Blake made of that idea was, I think, possibly the most intelligent philosophical act ever.