Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 09:35:17 -0800 (PST)
Subject: TO VIC PAANANEN: BLAKE, MARX, LENIN, POETRY, PHILOSOPHY


Vic Paananen, thanks for the helpful information.  I shall have to
look up your book on my next library trip, which won't be for
awhile, alas.  In fact, my ranting here will have to go on hiatus
after a couple of days, because I have other pressing obligations.
Perhaps that will be a blessing, regardless of the overheated
enthusiasm with which I pusruse my endeavors, as no list should
become dominated by one overbearing online personality.

I imagine your book would be a bibliographic overview of Blake
scholarship, with one section on Marxist intperatations.  Could I
be right?  I will have to put your book on my list, but if you
care to upload the Breines reference here, that would be welcome.

I can't say I'm heartbroken about Thompson not turning his
Pantheonic stars Blake and Marx into a constellation, though I too
am curious as to the possible outcome.  The obvious parallels are
sweet, but the covert ones are even sweeter, and the differences
sweetest of all.

I've avoided any overview of Marxist literature on Blake for a
number of reasons, though I've been through a few willy-nilly.  I
suffered through Sabri-Tabrizi's awful book many years ago.  I
liked Fred Whitehaed's appraoch to the subject, which was mine
also, though I sense that Blake scholarship has since advanced
beyond the dichotomies of mystical and political criticism.  (I
read a lot of stuff up through the early 1980s, and then I dropped
the subject for ten years, so I have much to catch up on.)  I
can't even remember Jack Lindsay's bio, except that he annoyed the
hell out of me by wringing his hands over Blake's political
inaction.  Lucky for us Thompson got out of the Communist Party
when he did, though Lindsay was always a cultural dissident long
before Thompson.

I hope that Lukacs proves to be helpful in relation to Blake.  I
don't know how this might be, but I'll hope for the best.  I would
imagine a theoretical framework for analyzing Romanticism would
help, but I'm somewhat skeptical that a treatment of "Romanticism"
will tell us enough about Blake, who stands head and shoulders
above all the other Romantics put together, including Shelley.
And I am congenitally suspicious of continental philosophers.  We
shall see how they deal with English Blake.

>but maybe the Lenin will be almost as helpful although there is
>only one piece of his that I draw on. (Like Shelley, Lenin
>started as a crude materialist but came to see that too is
>"metaphysics.")

Lenin?  What exactly do you mean?  I forced myself to read through
the entire PHILOSOPHICAL NOTEBOOKS as winter approached a few
months back, mainly to see how Lenin responded to Hegel.  I find
the summation of the cognitive insight Lenin gained in the
concluding three paragraphs of his 1915 manuscript "On the
question of dialectics" (COLLECTED WORKS, vol. 38, Moscow,
Progress Publishers, 1981, pp. 357-361):

"Dialectics as _living_, many-sided knowledge (with the number of
sides eternally increasing), with an infinite number of shades of
every approach and approximation to reality (with a philosophical
system growing into a whole out of each shade) -- here we have an
immeasurably rich content as compared with "metaphysical"
materialism, the fundamental _misfortune_  of which is its
inability to apply dialectics to the Bildertheorie, to the process
and development of knowledge.

"Philosophical idealism is _only_ nonsense from the standpoint of
crude, simple, metaphysical materialism.  From the standpoint of
_dialectical_ materialism, on the other hand, philosophical
idealism is a __one-sided_, exaggerated uberschwengliches
(Dietzgen) development (inflation, distension) of one of the
features, aspects, facets of knowledge into an absolute,
_divorced_ from matter, from nature, apotheosized.  Idealism is
clerical obscurantism.  But philosophical idealism is ("_more
correctly_" and "_in addition_") a _road_ to clerical obscurantism
_through_ _one of the shades_ of the infinitely complex
__knowledge_ (dialectical) of man.

"Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but
a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a
spiral.  Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be
transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent,
complete straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood
for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism
(where it is _anchored_ by the class interests of the ruling
classes).  Rectilinearity and one-sidedness, woodenness and
petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness -- voila the
epistemological roots of idealism.  And clerical obscurantism
(=philosophical idealism), of course, has _epistemological_ roots,
it is not groundless; it is a _sterile flower_ undoubtedly, but a
sterile flower that grows on the living tree of living, fertile,
genuine, powerful, omnipotent, objective, absolute human
knowledge."

This is the closest Lenin ever got to poetry, and poetical it is,
though expressed in raw, unedited form.  And it doesn't even begin
to touch -- though it could -- what is to be learned from symbolic
poetical communication, which involves subtleties going far beyond
the genre where you find the discursive expositions of idealist
philosophers.  To focus merely on the bric-a-brac in Blake's
symbolic universe -- a little Plato here, a little Berkeley there,
some Kabbalah up yonder  -- is to miss what is special and unique
in Blake, what puts him far and above not only traditional
religion and mysticism but above "philosophy" as well.  Being a
"philosopher" is a very small thing, smaller now than ever.  Since
childhood when I had this crap rammed down my throat by alcoholic
McCarthyite old biddies in public school, I've had nothing but
contempt for the stolen and perverted writings of Homer and Ovid
and the silly Greek and Latin slaves of the sword.  Plato filled
me with abhorrence.  They create allegorical riches.

I insist that one has to dig beneath surface appearances to grasp
the nature of Blake's engagement with science or to make any
possible comparisons to anybody else's ontology.  One will get
nowhere if one thinks Blake has engaged science in a way
comparable to Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Whitman, or, least of
all, the infantile mystification of quantum mechanics.  It would
be a mistake to think of Blake as just another philosopher.  As
secular critics, we cannot express our views of the world in
symbolic terms only; we cannot be content to translate one
mythology into another mythology.  In the process of translating
Blake's "sacred" into "secular" language (for want of better terms
right now), we establish the commonality, while respecting the
difference, by analyzing the motivational logic in Blake's
conceptual universe, which is not the conceptual universe of
traditional "philosophy" or what most people get through formal
education.  (Whoever thought I was interested in turning Blake
into a cog in the croaking machine of Western philosophy was not
paying attention.)  Becuase Blake was so radically other to what
"philosophy" was doing, he is invisible in its discursive world.
To translate him into the discursive terms of our conceptual
universe requires a level of depth and subtlety which has been
barely scratched.


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