TERRENCE DES PRES
275
Philoetetes
or
Paradise Lost.
And quite possibly those who continue to read
Shakespeare will delight as much in the critical activity his works inspire :
books like Barber's
Shakespeare 's Festive Comedy
or Brower's
Hero and
Saint .
Without intending to , and often half in guilt , we find ourselves
preferring works of criticism- Auerbach's
Mimesis
or Benjamin 's
Illumina–
tions
or even , God knows, Fiedler's
Love andDeath-despite
sure knowledge
that everything in these matters depends on the text .
Spinoza defined philosophy as " the intellectual love of God ," by which
he meant the never-finished approach to reality through thought . Recently
Lionel Trilling has applied this definition to criticism , describing it as "the
intellectual love of literature ." Behind Spinoza lay the gnostic belief in
mystical ascent to Godhead . No such faith animates Trilling's claim, and yet
the case is similar. The problem is one of
approach ,
a term to be taken in its
double sense : method , nearing . And central to both Spinoza and Trilling is
the idea ofabsence and motion- a movement of the ardent mind perpetually
toward and around that which it
has not
but
knows of,
toward some distant
plenitude which , apart and in itself, seems all but out of reach .
Aesthetic objects tend in any case to generate their own mediation .
Works ofart complete their existence in the world, come finally to contain the
consciousness which views them , by this capacity to surround themselves with
concepts . So sure is this process, that Wellek and Warren could define "the
total meaning ofa work ofart" as ' 'the result of a process of accretion , i.e. the
history of its criticism by its many readers in many ages ." There is something
decidedly Hegelian in all this , Hegel being the fust (as I shall suggest in a
moment) to attempt a solution to the problems of Romantic and
Post-Romantic consciousness . Which is to say that the relation of criticism to
art , or of thought to essence , is a specifically "modern" problem . Criticism
has always flourished , yes , but the rise of criticism as an occupation with its
own discipline and methods, as a universal and in some sense
necessary
activity, has assumed its definitive form within the last two centuries .
To be " critical" means to turn from immediate to mediated response ;
and this has been the mark and burden ofWestern thought since Kant , who
brought the thrust of the Enlightenment to a head when he decided no longer
to do philosophy , in the old ontological sense, but rather to examine the
limits of that doing . The range of consciousness, Kant argued , was narrower
than commonly supposed . Mind could account for surfaces , for the
phenomenal aspect of things , but it had no formal access to numina or
essence. In consequence , surface and depth split apart , and the world's
substantial presence began to recede.
It
faded into the famous
ding an sieh ,
a
realm apart , to be known by faith alone , And
there ,
rather than
here ,
everything of ultimate concern-God , freedom , the ground ofselfhood-was
