Date: Sat, 30 Mar 1996 22:00:08 -0800 (PST)
Subject: BLAKE AND MARX COMPARED


BLAKE AND MARX: IN REVIEW:

Doskow, Minna.  "The Humanized Universe of Blake and Marx", in:
WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE MODERNS, edited by Robert J. Bertholf and
Annette S. Levitt; Albany: State University of New York Press,
1987; pp. 225-240.

Doskow starts out with this claim: "Both William Blake and Karl
Marx address themselves to the central philosophical problem of
their times, the relation of human subjectivity to the external
world."  Further down the author states: "... both attempt to
bridge the gap between subject and object posited by their
Enlightenment predecessors by proposing an extension of the
subject outward through consciousness and activity thereby
creating a humanized universe as well as a fully developed self."
Both Blake and Marx are concerned with the self-objectivication of
human beings through productive activity.

Doskow sees Blake's epistemology as a total reversal of Locke's,
so that human consciousness is active rather than passive.  Blake
opposes his own sensuality -- activity of the senses -- to Locke's
notion of the senses (p. 227).

Imaginative activity for Blake is not one faculty divorced from
the others: it is not just intellectual, scientific, artistic, and
perceptive, but it is all of these, and very importantly,
_physical_.  Blake's poetry is filled with images of human labor
(pp. 228-229).

Marx's GRUNDRISSE is cited once (on work as positive, creative
activity), but virtually all of the Marx material comes out of the
1844 Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, quite aptly, I would say,
as these manuscripts represent the highest point achieved by Marx
as Young Hegelian, indeed the highest point of social integration
achieved by philosophy as philosophy.

Marx's own comments on the history and labor of the senses are
delineated with the similarity to Blake in mind (p. 231).

Now we come to the causes of man's wretched state:

"For Blake, the answer lies in man's loss of imagination, while
for Marx it lies in the alienation of his labor under capitalism.
Yet these answers are not as different as they may at first
appear, for the causes, evidences, and consequences of each are
almost identical.  Both writers see a distortion of human
subjectivity which extends outward to encompass the world and
results in distorted practices and a distorted world which are
further reflected by the subject." (p. 232)

Further:

"For Blake, the subject-object distinction underlies and
exemplifies the lapse of human imagination which destroys the
unity of the world and is responsible for man's unfulfilled,
limited, and oppressed condition in it.  This arbitrary division
by the subject within himself prevents the extension of the
subject outward, limits man to only objective perceiving and
thinking, cuts him off from everything else in the universe, and
proclaims universal reification." (p. 232)

Moreover,

"But nature too is limited by this process,  As other opposed to
self, the dehumanized universe is left in dead objectivity cut off
>from its subjective essence, which is man." (p. 232)

This of course is the world according to Newton and Locke.

There are some technical problems I have with this
characterization, but I am most concerned about the overly
bloodless characterization of Blake's view.  The subject-object
distinction and the loss of imagination by themselves are not
sufficient explanations, even within a mythological universe.
Blake is not operating with the reactionary feudal objective
idealist notion of Universal Mind to be found in Hinduism or
neo-Confucianism, according to which there is no disharmony in the
order of things save in the illusion of individual existence.  No,
the division has already occurred within the Eternal world itself,
the From owner-marxism2  Mon Apr  1 09:39:40 1996