William Blake was an English visionary, engraver, poet and mystic in the 18th and 19th centuries. His most famous works are collections of poems such as "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" and "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", and his paintings/engravings. Major themes in his work include the exaltation of the imagination above that of Reason/Rationality and his unorthodox, perhaps even Gnostic, religious beliefs. He is known for his innovation in the field of engraving called "Relief Etching", which he utilized to create highly textured prints in a style unlike any contemporary artist. In part due to the difficulty involved in reproducing his works, but also due to the often radical subject matter, his art was never mass produced and distributed and as such he was never particularly financially successful, dying in poverty, and remained largely unrecognised during his lifetime.

Perhaps his most famous work is The Ancient of Days setting a Compass to the Earth, it is part of his "prophetic works" and is a demiurgic character named "Urizen" ("your reason") who creates the universe and laws in an effort to force conformity upon humanity. It is also a reference to a very interesting chapter from the bible, Proverbs 8, in which the Divine Wisdom (Sophia) states that she was there before and during God's creation of the universe, when he prepared the heavens and "when he set a compass upon the face of the depth" (8:27).

This placing of a compass appears again in Blake's depiction of Isaac Newton. Note the caption there stating "Blake's Newton (1795) demonstrates his opposition to the "single-vision" of scientific materialism: Newton fixes his eye on a compass to write upon a scroll that seems to project from his own head". This can be read as a criticism of the rationalism/empiricism of the Enlightenment as it was being championed in the the British Empire and the United States - the scroll which Newton is applying his compass to is a projection of his own mind. As human beings we naturally forget that any given empirical measurement is not an objective one, but is necessarily measured and expressed within a framework which is itself a social convention and is therefore self-referential.

In opposition to this tendency is Imagination and feeling. Blake states that "The imagiation is not a state: it is the human existence itself." While the products of rationality are narrow, sterile and can only consist of variations on what is already known and what can already be measured, to Blake, the imagination has the capacity to transcend what is already established and was an infinite source of beauty.

Aesop's lyrics bring up this opposition to between sterile rationalism vs the depth of feeling and imagination in several places, and might be said to be one of his core criticisms of existing society.

One of the more obvious examples is the back and forth between "grown-ups from opposing clans" in Shrunk. Aes is here critical of modern psychiatry, with the therapist as a stand in for rationalism. When he "get's all expressive and symbolic" she cannot make him conform to that rationalised framework of existing ideas and therefore cannot diagnose him. He on the other hand criticises that approach entirely saying that when she "get's all exact and algabraic" he feels skeptical of the approach perhaps thinking that the main concern is to put him through a system rather than to rehabilitate him as a human being with any real care.

And again, a very similar setup to this can be found in 1 to 10, where Aes is asked by a doctor to "rate his pain level on a scale from 1 to 10", thereby reducing how he feels to a discrete rationalised quantity that lacks any of the real quality of the sensation. Aes responds by completely rejecting the scale all together, saying "well doc, I tell ya, I fell like I lost a friend". It's worth noting that these scales are often employed in psychiatry as a means to measure whether a person is getting better or not, which can give the sentiment that they care more about the numbers going down that the lived experience of the human being.

For another example at the end of Side Quest, there are a few bars of a pretty ecstatic mood in which Aes says he is figure 8-ing in the moon and celebrating in the road, and says both

"Never let him know the odds, it isn't part of how I move"

"Never let him know the count, it isn't part of how I go"

This appears as well in "All the Smartest People", although it isn't my favourite of his because I feel it is too on the nose. There is explicit reference to the limits of science and the statement that it isn't the only player in the network, and a critique of knowledge in "You can know it all and never know you haven't actually departed point A".

These are the 4 which come to mind immediately, but there are probably many more examples throughout his discography. Let me know if any come to mind