Ivory tower

The ivory tower is the metaphor of a spiritual place of solitude and wildness of the world.

Term origin

It has its origins as a tower of ivory in the biblical Song of Songs 7.5 EU: Thy neck is a tower of ivory. Because Ivory is a symbol of noble purity in the Christian tradition, you call the Virgin Mary in the Litany of Loreto with the attribute "You ivory tower " to.

The now common understanding of the ivory tower as an intangible place of seclusion and untouched, at which writers and scholars residing primarily arose in the 19th century in Europe. The earliest evidence for this in the French literary critic and writer Charles -Augustin Sainte -Beuve approximately in the middle of the 19th century, who refrained it with the speech of the tour d' ivoire on a literary-critical description of a possible author standpoint. In German, the ivory tower in this sense appeared in the early 20th century for the first time. In the 1950s and 1960s he served in particular as a symbol of the need for reform of German universities. So set about the Association of German student bodies the 6th German Student Day 1960 under the programmatic motto farewell to the ivory tower.

Today's understanding of the term

Research and production of art in the ivory tower called an intellectual who lives only for his job and does not care about the social consequences of its activities, but only searches for scientific and artistic truth. In this use (hence Ivory ) mixes in the expression mockery of a cloistered scholar with admiration for a man who with all his might a noble task is being tackled.

Today, the negative connotation of the term predominates. This refers to an academic habitus of researchers or scientists of any discipline that consists in the fact that the ruling within the disciplines of extreme specialization in relation to the non-academic outside world does not want to be recognized as a communicative problem.

With simple words, in many fields, scientists have developed a highly specialized language that is hardly or not at all understood by the uninitiated; and yet this terminology will be used in communicating with the public, despite - or perhaps because - you know that you remain misunderstood as a scientist in this way.

Rather, this fact that even an above-average educated citizen the subject area in question can not understand is, as inevitable - sometimes welcome - fact (see also fatalism ) accepted. The search for communicative solutions to overcome communication problems between science and society is either rejected or dismissed with appropriate proposals by arguing "popular scientific presentation " as inferior.

The so-called self-reference is made to the ivory tower in conjunction, so try to name sources and references as objective substantiation of the point, but in the end, directly or indirectly come from his own pen.