Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 08:28:36 -0700 (PDT)
To: blake-AT-albion.com
Subject: Re:  Scaffolds of the mind
Cc: marxism2-AT-jefferson.village.virgininia.edu,


Gloudina Bouwer wants to know many things, starting with:

>you will explain what in your thinking is new. A lot of what you
>have said so far has been like preaching to the converted.

Not being a Blake scholar, I cannot answer this question.  It is
possible that I am reinventing the wheel as autodidacts often do.
I'll leave it up to others to answer this question.  However, if I
clarify what I am attempting to do, perhaps that can at least
clear up misconceptions and make things a little easier.

>I sense that you have Marxist sympathies. However, if your only
>agenda is to persuade me of  how similar Marxist thought is to
>what Blake was saying, Jackie Di Salvo and others have already
>convinced me.

To try to prove at this late date that Blake has affinities with
Marx is almost as banal a project as the usual approach to
comparative studies altogether.  A more interesting question is,
given the similarities of any two thinkers, why did they turn out
differently?  My ad hoc intervention on "There is no Natural
Religion" is meant to contribute a small part of the answer to
that question.

So what am I aiming at?  Most generally, there are two points, one
of which I brought up a couple of months ago.  First, I am
interested in locating Blake in the universe of knowledge, trying
to position Blake as a way of knowing amongst others.  Since I'm
not Blake, and since I'm more of a scientific rationalist type
than he is, I cannot stop with Blake's self-conception, but have
to locate him somewhere to explain how other people and myself
respond to him.  And criticism in general must be "secular", in
that it provides an explanatory framework for what it studies, and
thus must translate even prophetic language into more or less
rational terms so that it can be analyzed.  To understand where
Blake fits into the scheme of things is to unravel the problems
posed for example by Albright, who pops question after question in
diarrhea-like fashion but can't sit still two seconds for an
answer.

I believe there are a number of aspects of people's response to
Blake which must and can be answered.  People react very
differently to Blake than to many other writers, including other
so-called Romantics.  Blake speaks directly to many people of the
human condition.  He doesn't read like the usual mystic or
dogmatic systems of reasoning -- by which I mean theology not
science.  Just compare Blake with Swedenborg and you will see what
I mean.  Blake isn't trying to prove anything to you that
contradicts your autonomous sense of what's real and what is not.
He is not trying to put over a doctrine in the manner of
Catholicism.  Blake is unique and we should analyze why that is.
Also, Blake appeals to many rationalist and atheist types in a way
that other authors don't.  Either we are all fooling ourselves in
order to justify Blake's appeal or there really is an objective
reason for this.  I have stated, though have not yet fully
explained, that Blake's anti-scientific attitude operates on an
entirely different plane that other forms of irrationalism which
plague us nowadays.  Blake's attitude toward science does not
offend me in the way that anti-science generally does (e.g. in the
form of postmodernism).  Am I fooling myself or is there a reason
for this?  The irony in these discussions is that I am ordinarily
a militant defender of scientific rationality, but in this forum I
find myself defending Blake against the likes of .... Albright(!),
who is crazy as a loon yet bellyaches over Blake's hostility to
science and the Enlightenment.  There must be some explanation for
this oddity.

The point of comparing Blake to Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, or anyone
else is not to make Blake more respectable by associating him with
the philosophical canon or by putting him next to Marx.  Precisely
because Blake was not a product of mainstream education or the
philosophical canon, because his trajectory was so different, it
is instructive to compare what he accomplished with his resources
with what everyone else accomplished with theirs.  Now in some
ways Blake was handicapped by his background and proclivities.  He
was not a technical philosopher.  He was not interested in
investigating ideas in the literal fashion of philosophers who
elaborate logical systems.  This is why he could not differentiate
the scientific content of the physical sciences from the
philosophical, ideological, and contemporary social content.  But
others who do the same thing today have far less excuse, and are
not visionaries.  As time permits, I shall elaborate on the
notions I introduced in my posts on "There is no Natural
Religion", since there are some out there too obtuse to get it.

Now the other side of the coin is, what did Blake positively
accomplish?  Though handicapped on the logical side (by
proclivity, not ability -- Blake is a very logical and rational
thinker -- another time for this), Blake is ideologically far in
advance of the entire western philosophical tradition.  I spit on
philosophers in comparison with Blake except for Marx, Spinoza,
and a few others.  Blake could not elaborate the type of logical
system that Hegel did, but he was far in advance of Hegel
ideologically, as he was of the rest.  However, since he expresses
himself in the language of prophetic Christianity, not to mention
his own private mythology, it is not obvious to some how this is.
I have only hinted at the solution of this puzzle so far.  My
method in the thread on "There is No Natural Religion" is to
translate Blake's prophetic language into mundane philosophical
language, so a logical comparison of Blake with "philosophy" can
be more easily made, _not_ because I intend to reduce him to the
terms of philosophy of science.  I believe that "translations" of
a number of his texts into secular language will illuminate how
his ideas are structured and function and the social and
ideological tensions to which they responded.

Let me give one more brief example.  Hugh Walthall states that
Blake was so frightened by the world of Ulro he could not give up
his Jesus crap.  Nobody hates Christianity and Christians more
than I do, but I urge people to take a closer look at the role of
Jesus in Blake's system.  (I hate them because I have the spirit
and they don't, and because I practice benevolence and
righteousness and get murdered time after time, by them.)  Jesus
annuls all the moral virtues of the heathen, great and small,
enumerated by the silly Greek and Roman slaves of the sword --
i.e. the metaphysical basis of all ruling class morality.  The
forgiveness of sins is a load of crap which Blake himself never
practiced, but to set that up in opposition to aristocratic
morality is a revolutionary act.  Sure, the ancient Hebrews were a
bunch of useless, smelly genocidal savages.  The scientific and
cultural achievements of the Greeks were far superior.  However,
in the war between Hellenism and Hebraism, there is more to be
said.  For Hellenism represents the ethos of the "natural man" and
the ruling class, and Blake's form of Hebraism -- revolutionary
Christianity -- is a radical negation of the world as it is, and
hence is critical and revolutionary, however backward and insipid
the Judaeo-Christian heritage is as a whole.

To recapitulate, the first order of business is to locate Blake in
the universe of knowledge overall.  I am not the first to deal
with Blake's critique of empiricism, for example, and I can claim
no originality (at least not without checking the scholarly
literature) for any specific points I make.  Time will tell
whether my overall project is something original.  I originated it
without plagiarizing it from others, and that's good enough for
me.

Now, the second major point of my agenda is to explain what kind
of "intellectual" Blake was, how his thought and self-conception
relate to the social totality.  My working hypothesis is, Blake
did not seek to set himself up in a separate realm called
"Culture", as did Coleridge and Wordsworth, for example, or
fascists like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound later on, to proclaim the
superiority of Culture over the brute everyday world.  Nor do I
believe that Blake was interested in bragging about his
superiority to the dumb ignorant herd.  To be sure, anyone whose
thinking is light years beyond his neighbors is likely to bang his
head against the wall day and night in exasperation at the
backwardness and ignorance of everyone around him.  Ask me how I
know this.  But this is not elitism.  Reactionaries are interested
in setting off Culture from the rest of life.  Revolutionaries
defend the values of culture as a moment in the revolutionization
of society as a whole.  So culture and intellect in relationship
to the social totality is the topic.  I aim to show how Blake
differs from other Romantics, and from pretentious egomaniac
philosophers from Bruno Bauer to Nietzsche.
>What I need explained to me, is why so many people can find
>their pet systems so clearly delineated in the work of Blake.
>Why the writings and pictorial art of Blake is like this big
>Rohrshach  of the  mind, used  increasingly by more and more
>people as a scaffolding for their thinking about a wide variety
>of subjects.

Yes, this reminds me of a recent post of yours, in which you
called out for an explanation of why Blake stands on his own even
after the myriad comparisons with Hegel, Marx, etc.  I meant to
respond to this post, but I can't remember my intended response.
My point was never to make Blake out to be the English Hegel or
Marx.  I'm not sure how to answer your question, for is it not the
case that all great writers, not just Blake, are rich enough to
support whatever interpretations are read into them?  What makes
Blake different in this respect?  Blake tests you as other writers
do, perhaps more so since he has more to say.  How you deal with
someone like Blake reflects what level of consciousness you happen
to be on.  No matter how many PhDs you have, you can only rise as
far as your own level of consciousness will take you.  You can't
see beyond the type of person you are and the resources you have
to perceive reality.  That's why so much criticism is such crap.
You cannot fully appreciate any thinker unless your genius is
equal to his.  Hero worship is useless.  You've got to have what
it takes yourself or you will never be able to fully appreciate
the object of your study.  You've got to be able to look someone
in the eye as an equal; otherwise, you are useless.  Life, not
academic credentials, has taught me that.  Mark well my words.

>So far, Northrop Frye's idea of the Great Code seems to be the
>best line of thinking.

Surely you can do better than the likes of him.  Really.

>I am how-ever, waiting for somebody with no Christian leanings
>to explain the Blake-phenomenon to me.

How can you learn anything by conversing only with angels and not
the devils who do all the work and suffering?  How can one fully
understand Blake without understanding what enables him to appeal
to people who hate Christianity and religion in general?  That is
precisely what most demands explanation.  And that is part of my
project.  I give you the end of a golden string ...



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