The Way We Think Now: Protocols for Deprivation

Abstract

T HE nouvelle vague of system-prepensive criticism has been flowing from Europe to the accommodating American shore long enough to have become itself a period phenomenon deserving systemic examination. And the rubric for this number of New Literary History offers a convenient occasion, for it fixes on one of the great fighting issues critical history. That literature and the arts general do not represent a debasement or trivialization of what the philosophic intelligence recognizes as but instead embody another kind of thinking which is not less valuable--a kind not immediately prized or practiced by the stricter schools but indispensable to cultural health-is the foundation of their defense against philosopher-kings and temple priests all ages. Sidney's Apology renewed this defense at the beginning of our era by affirming the poet's power to articulate a finer truth than the reconstructions of historians and a more full-bodied and humanely influential truth than the reasonings of philosophers. This is very nearly the first article any humanistic faith, so it is that one which needs to be most carefully and continuously reexamined. Writing around 1580, Sidney had less to show immediate proof, from works by English contemporaries, than would have been the case twenty or thirty years later. But he could argue that England (so hard a stepmother to poets) was a sort of accidental odd nation out a period abounding prospects of renewal, and seems to have written from a lively confidence that he and certain friends were process of inaugurating a national renaissance of their own. Certainly he thought them fortunate being native speakers of English, a tongue capable, before any vulgar language I know, of the most flexible and diverse uses-a mingled language, Sidney described it, meaning that it was trustee to more than one linguistic inheritance (and therefore was supplied, as we would say, with a built-in surplus of signifiers); a language blessed with a relatively unencumbered grammar and so planted popular use that no one had to go to school to learn to speak it well; yet nearest Attic Greek of any currently spoken, and far beyond Latin, its combinatory power, its expressiveness in compositions of two or three words together. Might it be said that the first fact about critical thinking during the