Sidney's Poetics: Imitating Creation

7. Creativity and the Origins of Modernity

  CREATIVITY AND THE ORIGINS OF MODERNITY A lthough the idea of human creativity reaches its full flourishing in the romantic period, it is the Renaissance that bears witness to its birth. With the birth of creativity situated in this earlier period, the necessary context for understanding the development of the theory is not the subsequent shift in epistemology that Meyer Abrams so persuasively illustrates; it is rather the shift in anthropology that preceded, and indeed enabled, the later change in epistemology. In this anthropological awakening, human beings largely replaced God as the fixed point on which the intellectual and moral universe was thought to turn. Despite the limitations of the often-told story of the “Renaissance discovery of man,” it is indisputable that something equivalent to a Copernican Revolution took place during the period. It was a fundamental reorientation in which the larger questions of meaning tended to be answered in terms of human rather than divine realities. In the face of life’s troubles, for example, human beings increasingly took upon themselves, for better or worse, the burden for finding meaning and happiness in life, the burden for their own salvation. It was in the context of this shift, of this secularization of religious categories of thought and modes of behavior, that the creature became a creator. If one believes, with many philosophers of history, that modernity is built on the ruins of a previously dominant Christian culture, Sidney ’s humanistic claims seem to be part of the reconfiguration of the  God-centered universe of the previous age. Sidney’s conception of the poet as a creator looks like one step along the road to the secular world of modernity. According to this line of thought, the question of the nature of human creativity is one specific aspect of the larger and much-vexed question of the transition to modernity. Focusing on this connection between creativity and the birth of modernity, William Bouwsma examines the metaphoric nature of “human creativity” and argues that metaphor, and specifically the metaphor of human creativity , is a mechanism by which the culture comes to attribute what was previously considered divine power to human beings.1 In a simple and powerful narrative of the historical development of a metaphor, he traces the broad contours of the history of the idea of human creativity . The narrative has three stages: first, that human beings can create is denied; then, the claim is made, but understood hyperbolically; finally , the term is used more widely and with less precision, and human beings come to believe that they do in fact create.2 Quickly forgetting that creativity was borrowed from God, people came to regard it as a quality proper to human beings—which clearly is the case today, when not only artists but everyone from fashion designers to tax planners are thought to be creative. According to this theory, creativity was predicated of human beings first metaphorically and then properly; once “man creates” was no longer denied, it rapidly went from being a far-fetched metaphor to a simple fact, so that now human creativity is, like the legs of a table or the light of reason, a dead metaphor. This narrative is, on its face, persuasive—especially for audiences who already understand the power of language to shape consciousness . That the transfer of power has been successful is obvious from present usage, where even though many would still say that God creates , few really think of him as “creative.” No doubt his immutability and his omniscience have become a liability, implying for the modern mind a lack of the spontaneity now associated with creativity. But de-  Creativity and the Origins of Modernity . “The Renaissance Discovery of Human Creativity.” See also the earlier but related studies of Panofsky, “Artist, Scientist, Genius”; Nahm, Artist as Creator; and Tigerstedt , “Poet as Creator.” . “The Renaissance Discovery of Human Creativity,” ff. spite the obvious explanatory power of Bouwsma’s theory of metaphoric transfer, certain questions arise under closer examination. If the metaphor of human creativity was originally denied and then thought of only as hyperbolic or far-fetched, why did it catch on? And why was it later considered just and proper—indeed, no longer metaphoric ? To answer such questions Bouwsma falls back on the same accounts of secularization with which he implicitly started. There are basically two major versions of this secularization thesis. The first, set forth by Karl...