By Laura Quinney
It's been transparent from the start that William Blake was once either a political radical and an intensive psychologist, and in William Blake on Self and Soul Laura Quinney makes use of her delicate, remarkable readings of the poet to bare his leading edge rules concerning the adventure of subjectivity. Blake’s crucial subject, Quinney exhibits us, is a modern one: the discomfiture of being a self or topic. The larger the lack of confidence of the “I” Blake believed, the extra it attempts to swell right into a fake yet amazing “Selfhood.” And the bigger the Selfhood bulks, the lonelier it grows. yet why is that so? How is the appearance of “Selfhood” created? What harm does it do? How can one holiday its carry? those questions lead Blake to a few of his most unique considering. Quinney contends that Blake’s hostility towards empiricism and Enlightenment philosophy relies on a penetrating mental critique: Blake demonstrates that the demystifying technology of empiricism deepens the self’s incoherence to itself. notwithstanding Blake formulates a treatment for the bewilderment of the self, as he is going on he perceives larger and bigger stumbling blocks to the remaking of subjectivity. via exhibiting us this development, Quinney exhibits us a Blake for our time. (20100702)
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Extra info for William Blake on Self and Soul
Example text
The Book of Thel dramatizes the experience of consciousness finding itself to be an anomaly in the material world, and attempting to rationalize its predicament in purely naturalistic terms. These turn out to be quite inadequate. The poem demonstrates, in other words, that the empiricist subject is bound to be an unhappy subject, unable to reconcile itself to “reality” as it is represented in an empiricist framework. ” She separates herself out in solitude, as Urizen withdraws from the Eternals, and the Gnostic Sophia disengages herself from the Aeons.
This is where Blake comes in. Of all the Romantics, Blake was keenest and most systematic in his critique of materialism; more to the point, he was the one who insisted in the most explicit terms that the intuition of selfhood does not dissipate just because it has been renounced. For Blake the intuition of selfhood includes the intuition of its transcendence—its superiority to the material world—and he maintained that if this intuition is simply discounted as an illusion, it will not die down but rather rankle and torment.
With her first utterance Thel laments her transience, classing herself with other short-lived natural phenomena: “Ah Thel is like a watry bow, and like a parting cloud / Like a reflection in a glass, like shadows in the water” (1:8-9, E3). She does not explicitly distinguish herself as a mind—in fact, she compares herself to phenomena that are distinctly unaware—but her sense that she is different emerges in the last lines of her speech, where she wishfully imagines an easy dissolution of consciousness.