File spoon-archives/marxism2.archive/marxism2_1996/96-07-10.220, message 213


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.


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