Ruskin and the Later Radical Visionaries

Paul L. Sawyer, Professor of English, Cornell University

Footnote 15, Chapter 8, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

At this point Ruskin's social vision matches certain ideas of later radical visionaries. To Norman O. Brown, for example, "rigorously economical thinking" is a "morbid" impulse: "Abstraction from the reality of the whole body and substitution of the abstracted impulse for the whole reality are inherent in Homo economicus. In contrast, what would a non-morbid science look like? It would presumably be erotic rather than (anal) sadistic in aim. Its aim would not be mastery over but union with nature. And its means would not be economizing but erotic exuberance" (Life against Death [Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959; reprint, Vintage Books, n.d.] 236). And Herbert Marcuse, to cite a second example, maintains that the system of repressive sexuality is inherent not in the order of reality but in certain present conditions in social reality that he calls "surplus repression." He foresees an immense liberation of libido in the release of man from unnecessary labor and in a conception of labor as erotic bonding, and he proposes new cultural heroes to take the place of Promethean striving -- Orpheus and Narcissus, the type of a new erotic relationship to the world. "These archetypes envisioned the fulfillment of man and nature, not through domination and exploitation, but through release of inherent libidinal forces.... the representative content of the Orphic and Narcissistic images was the erotic reconciliation (union) of man and nature in the aesthetic attitude, where order is beauty and work is play" (Eros and Civilization [1955 reprint, Vintage Books, n.d.], 160). Ruskin, of course, rejects any structural reorganization of the bourgeois class system, and the erotic content of his economics of the affections remains only implicit, but his symbolism does adumbrate a union of the human and natural worlds through procreative and productive energies and the sensuous enjoyment of human works. For Ruskin's view of scientific rationality as inherently aggressive and exploitative, see Chapter l0.

Last modified December 2000