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3 - Blake: Removing the Curse by Printing for the Blind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

Edward Larrissy
Affiliation:
Queen's University Belfast
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Summary

Empiricism and the Blind

In Blake's work, the imagery of blindness and the blind is normally related to his debate with empiricist epistemology, although there are some exceptions to this rule. Since the publication of my study in 1985, there has been further support for the idea advanced therein, that Blake's attitude to empiricist theories of knowledge, chiefly as represented by the Locke tradition, is quite ambivalent, and that it cannot be described as one of simple rejection. In any case, his response to that tradition is closely bound up with his attempts to define his own point of view, which means that the aim of analysing the latter can go in tandem with that of analysing the former. The links between blindness, the critique of empiricism, and the analysis of the growth of tyranny are strongest in the 1780s: in ‘An Island in the Moon’ (c.1784), All Religions Are One and There Is No Natural Religion (c.1788), and ‘Tiriel’ (c.1789). Indeed, it seems that some of Blake's most characteristic themes were first developed in close relationship with the imagery of blindness and in the light of philosophical debates about it.

As it happens, one of the earliest uses of the imagery of blindness, ‘Blind Man's Buff’, is one of the exceptions to the rule proposed above. Nevertheless it could be seen as implying a lighthearted critique of Locke's theory of government and civil society, if not of his epistemology.

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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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