ABSTRACT
Blake and Kierkegaard share a reaction against the dominant paradigm of their historical moment: the privileging of "objectivity", which they believed was being promoted at the expense of evaluative attention to subjective experience, and thus, at the expense of increasing the subject's despair. Blake's prophetic books launch a sustained critique of what he called the "Six thousand years" of Western philosophy, history and culture for worsening the paranoid isolation of the subject, and he criticized the scientific and philosophical consensus of his own time for deepening the problem still further. Kierkegaard mocked the trivialization of Christianity over the centuries and what he found to be the wrong-headed "scienticism" of the Danish Hegelian's system-building, the philosophical consensus of his own time and place. As James Rovira argues, Kierkegaard, like Blake, saw himself as contending against "the objectification of the human".
