Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 18:56:23 -0700 (PDT) From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org> Subject: WILLIAM BLAKE & INTELLECT, REASON, SCIENCE, EMPIRICISM To begin to untangle Blake's attitudes towards rationality, science, etc., we ought to be aware first of all of his use of terminology. If he had but one word for human thought processes, we could go by that, but it is not so. The word "science" is sometimes used positively and sometimes negatively, as is "experiment." The word "reason" is used pejoratively, but words such as "intellect" and "thought" are always positive. Hence, like many other thinkers, Blake is discriminating between different levels and operations of reasoning processes. In Blake's terminology, "intellect" stands at a higher level of thought than "reason", which means the mechanical or most superficial logical operations of the process of thought. Though his use of words is unlike that of some other thinkers, the distinctions he makes are familiar ones. Reason for Blake means the most mechanical operations of thought, where intellect refers to a grasp of the whole, which proceeds not by gradual accumulation of particular data, but by sudden leaps and re-organizations of the conceptual relationships among particular data. Blake was not a trained philosopher, and so he struggled with the limitations of empiricism in his own peculiar manner, but he was struggling with the fundamental tensions within the conceptual universe of his time. And because Blake was not trained to distinguish between the conceptual content of the science itself and the ideological clothing and social functions in which science was embedded, and because Blake was concerned primarily with the imagination and not literal, material things (the one aspect of Blake that Albright has got right), Blake could not discriminate between the literal conceptual content of chemistry or Newtonian physics and the philosophical/ideological role that "science" was playing in his society. This is a flaw in Blake as a conceptual thinker. But what is not understood is that this flaw is much less of a flaw in Blake than the same flaw to be found in contemporary anti-scientific social studies of science, which also cannot distinguish between the conceptual content of science and the ideological and social relations in which it is embedded, but which _does_ operate on the literal plane to demonstrate that we can't know anything. Blake was not anti-intellectual nor was he interested in proving that nothing can be known in order to glorify his own alienation; his fight is on another level entirely. Blake's opposition to empiricism, as expressed in "There is no Natural Religion" and elsewhere, is not just opposition to the positive empiricist conception of science and cognition; it is equally in opposition to Humean skepticism. --- from list marxism2-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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