Date: Sat, 2 Mar 1996 17:53:53 -0800
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: RAHUL: CLUTCHING YOUR PEARLS


I just realized I may have been missing something.  Rahul, are you
the physicist who was trying to explain particle physics to us a
year ago?  Were you one of the participants in a discussion-debate
that included Lisa Rogers, Juan Inigo, and me?  If you have been
around for awhile, you will know that I am not anti-science, but
just the opposite.

My point in condescending to your youth and inexperience was to
suggest that it takes a rather narrow and obtuse notion of
scientific rationality to simply dismiss Blake's thought processes
as mad and irrational.  The fact is that Blake was a highly
systematic and rationalistic thinker, and not the a-logical and
gloriously mad figure that you suggest.  I am a highly
rationalistic type myself, and I do not waste my time with
meaningless drivel.  I do not think it is true that nobody can
come close to really understanding Blake, however it does seem
that it takes a certain type of person to do so, not a mad,
irrational, type, mind you, but a highly critical type who tends
to dig beneath the surface of human character.  I think that few
have delved to the level of Blake in understanding the roots of
human motivation and ideology.  I don't think you are a
superficial person, but it may be that you have not been exposed
either to Blake or to life in the proper way so as to "get it".

I personally don't see art and science as all that different, if
it's a matter of digging beneath surface appearances to uncover
deeper structures and mechanisms.  This reputation of Blake as mad
mystic is just a way of dismissing the real thought that went into
the construction of his symbolic philosophic system.  It is a way
of reducing Blake to random meaningless subjectivism, i.e. to a
pre-modern mystical obscurantist or to a postmodern linguistic
masturbator.  Blake was neither.

Could there be some connection between this discussion and the
flap over "purity of intellect"?  Could it be that the terms of
the debate purity-impurity reflect the two inevitable and
inseparable stages of bourgeois reason: from confident ascendant
rationalism to cynical decadent irrationalism?


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