504
WILLIAM PH ILLIPS
or objective, however, sympathetic critICS. To put it bluntly, we
cannot be an avant-garde. But we can recognize, encourage, make
discriminations about an avant-garde. In this respect, there is an
important difference between a writer and a magazine: a writer
whose ideas and sensibility were formed in his youth, in an earlier
period, can afford to ignore trends and figures he does not like; a
magazine, however, must be responsive to the current scene. This
is why
PR
seems both to uphold tradition and to be open to new
trends and ideas.
Hence the problems we face in the magazine are very much like if
not identical with those of the humanities in general. I don't want
to
.propose another definition of the humanities at this moment, but for
the purposes of this discussion we can surely agree that one of the
chief aims of the humanities is the study and teaching of the arts and
of culture generally in such a way as to relate the present to the past,
to look at the past through the eyes of the present, to make the history
of art and culture part of the process of creating it. The humanities
are the institutionalization of what we generally think of as critical and
historical thinking. (I am, of course, talking mostly about literature
and art, though other fields in the humanities, like history and
philosophy, obviously have parallel functions.)
In this sense, the problems of the humanities, like those of a
magazine, are the problems of criticism. And the main problem-if
not
the
problem-of criticism is the relation of the old to the new.
But this relation cannot be arrived at simply through theorizing; it
must be conquered, so to speak, through judgment and discrimina–
tion. This is why academic criticism, moral criticism, sociological criti–
cism is bad criticism; it is criticism without judgment, which means it is
based on other people's judgment.
The plight of the humanities is a complex matter. But briefly, it
might be said that the trouble is the study of culture has been cut off
from the creation of culture, and has become a professionalized, au–
tonomous enterprise. If this were to happen to a literary, cultural
magazine, we would say immediately that it had gone academic, it had
lost its touch, it had nothing to do with what was going on. But I guess
we are more charitable toward the pursuit of the humanities in the
universities, because we are less clear about their purposes and
methods.
