CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Abstract Most of the existing studies assume that, owing to the predominantly evolutionary nature of the development of science, collaborative rhetoric is intrinsic to academic discourse and criticism is an exception rather than the rule. This is most probably the reason why there is relatively little research done on the topic. At the same time, the issue has become extremely relevant and worth exploring in the era of globalization and the ensuing constantly increasing competition and struggle for power and high esteem among scholars from all over the world, whose number is not only greater than ever, but they also represent countries and academic cultures that have remained hitherto isolated from the mainstream (Western) academia.
The question has been approached from disciplinary, cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural as well as historical perspectives, but practically all investigations have been based on socio-pragmatic theories and discuss the problems within speech act and politeness strategies frameworks. The expression of criticism may take various forms and may be based on different premises—theoretical assumptions, methodological failures, relevance of data, practical application of research results, terminological problems, etc. With the development of a long-lasting confict, however, the argumentation strategies and, respectively, the language used, tend to sharpen and to change their orientation from purely content-centred to personality-centred and to move away from truly scientifc debates.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
I. Vassileva, Confrontation in Academic Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32736-0_1
Keywords Academic communication • Academic criticism • Confrontation • Book review
Although nobody would deny that academic criticism and confrontation are inherent features of academic communication, most of the existing studies assume that, owing to the predominantly evolutionary nature of the development of science, collaborative rhetoric is intrinsic to academic discourse and criticism is an exception rather than the rule. This is most probably the reason why there is relatively little research done on the topic. At the same time, the issue has become extremely relevant and worth exploring in the era of globalization and the ensuing constantly increasing competition and struggle for power and high esteem among scholars from all over the world, whose number is not only greater than ever, but they also represent countries and academic cultures that have remained hitherto isolated from the mainstream (Western) academia.
The question has been approached from disciplinary, cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural as well as historical perspectives, but practically all investigations have been based on socio-pragmatic theories and discuss the problems within speech act and politeness strategies frameworks. Thus, linguists have tried to fnd out what linguistic means are used in order to exercise or avoid criticism—vague language, hedging, boosting, among others (i.e., Knapp-Potthoff, 1992; Pagano, 1994; Pätzold, 1984; Hyland, 2004, 2005, 2008; Hunston, 2005; Hyland & Diani, 2009; Tse & Hyland, 2009; Wang & Nelson, 2012). Sociologists, on the other hand, regard academic criticism mainly as an expression of the ever-increasing competitiveness for professional recognition in the modern world (Hutz, 2001; Wiegand, 1983).
Basically, there exist two contradictory views on the role of academic confrontation, which I would like to dwell on here in short without siding with any of them:
Firstly, confrontation in academic communication is considered to be dangerous and unproductive:
Ventola (1998, p. 290), in one of the frst contrastive studies on the issue, criticizes viciously the employment of dismissive rhetorical strategies: “Confrontative strategies are dangerous games, just as wars are. This kind of dialogue is as destructive as bombs.” Further in the same article (ibid., p. 292) she also maintains that:
Often we hear the claim that it is the issues, not the people that are in confrontative positions in academic writing. In my view, however, it appears that in our writing at least we very frequently seem to forget this, and our writing about the theories of others often becomes extremely personal and attacking.
Another strong proponent of this view, Tannen (2002, p. 1655), claims that disagreement in academic discourse is supported by certain standard requirements of modern scientifc communication: “A common framework for academic papers […] prescribes that authors position their work in opposition to someone else’s, which they then prove wrong” and further explains that the ideology behind this requirement is ‘critical thinking’ that, in spite of its much wider scope, tends to be interpreted as a necessity to resort to “exclusively negative criticism” (p. 1658).
Her position is:
There is much wrong with the metaphorical assignment of research to warring camps. It obscures the aspects of disparate work that overlap and can learn from each other. It obscures the complexity of research. […] Most scholars are not wrong in what they assert but in what they deny. (Ibid., p. 1661)
Secondly, confrontation in academic communication is regarded as providing impetuses for advance and further development:
Following Wunderlich (1972, p. 318), confrontation and collisions should not be viewed as exclusively negative communication strategies on the part of authors aiming only at playing down the achievements of others in order to gain more power and prestige, but should also be treated as a necessary prerequisite for the evolutionary development of science.
Besides, Knapp-Potthoff (1992, p. 203) points out that in international scientifc communication “more so than in other types of communication, face-threatening acts and their redress do not operate on the interindividual level alone, but – by process of attribution and stereotyping –tend to have consequences for higher levels of social organization as well.”
As will be seen later in this study, the latter statement holds true for whole groups of scholars or ‘schools’ consisting of followers united by their adherence to the same theoretical and/or methodological framework, who form subject-related discourse communities, so that if one scholar is attacked, the others feel themselves threatened as well and react immediately in defence of the ‘victim,’ which on its part provokes a
I. VASSILEVA
‘counter-attack’ from the other party. In some cases, such confrontative exchanges go on for decades and eventually turn into ‘a static battle of attrition’ where ‘victory’ seems to be equally unapproachable for both parties involved.
The expression of criticism may take various forms and may be based on different premises— theoretical assumptions, methodological failures, relevance of data, practical application of research results, terminological problems, etc. With the development of a long-lasting confict, however, the argumentation strategies and, respectively, the language used, tend to sharpen and to change their orientation from purely content-centred to personality-centred and to move away from truly scientifc debates (see Chap. 5).
All these features have brought about the necessity to make use of military terminology in order to best describe the state of affairs, of course, in metaphorical terms.
It has to be pointed out here that confrontation in academia is not a new phenomenon at all; it used to be even more pronounced at the onset of modern science sometime in the seventeenth century. Without going into details, I should note, however, that the type of confrontation to be discussed in the present study is basically typical of the soft disciplines where, in contrast to the hard ones, argumentation is predominantly of verbal character, since experiences and phenomena are rarely strictly measurable, and their analysis is thus of a much more interpretive nature. Therefore, as Hyland (2005, p. 188) puts it,
Writers are far less able to rely on general understandings and on the acceptance of proven quantitative methods to establish their claims and this increases the need for more explicit evaluation and engagement. Personal credibility, and explicitly getting behind arguments, play a far greater part in creating a convincing discourse for these writers.
Hence, soft disciplines scholars are forced to rely much more on language and rhetoric than on other (for instance visual) semiotic means containing data, respectively evidence, such as graphs, tables, charts, etc., for the presentation of their results, views, and convictions, which on its part leads to exploitation of rhetorical resources that may sometimes go beyond the generally accepted boundaries of what is considered to be ‘ethical’ in academic communication.
This is the main reason why I opted to take a closer look at the language of linguists who are, moreover, expected to be fully aware of the
effects of their writing and argumentation strategies on their discourse community and on the further development of the feld as a whole.
Following this short introduction, I shall briefy summarize the structure of the book.
Chapter 2 explicates the aim and methodology of the study, namely, to elucidate the argumentation strategies employed by linguists in voicing criticism, to look for some explanations for confrontation in academic discourse, and to evaluate the positive and/or negative effects it has on international academic communication. Issues such as the role of intertextuality, cross-cultural variations, the notion of ‘academic discourse community,’ among others, are also touched upon. Special attention is paid in this chapter to the modern developments in contrastive rhetoric studies, as well as to the controversial issue of the use of context-based versus corpus-based methods.
Chapter 2 also describes the corpora the investigation is based on, namely academic book reviews in English and German, and a series of publications in English interrelated by the fact that they discuss a common group of problems but from two fully confrontative points of view. They illustrate what I have called an ‘academic war.’
Chapter 3 deals with some theoretical issues related to the areas of interest of the study: the role of evaluation in academic communication, the relationship among criticism, critique, negative evaluation, and confrontation in academic communication, as well as the importance of culture, discipline culture, and community of practice.
Chapter 4 uses the methodology of contrastive discourse analysis where the languages envisaged are English and German. The methodological apparatus for the analysis of academic book reviews in the two languages is the classical Aristotelian theory of argumentation.
Chapter 5 focuses on the above-mentioned ‘academic war’ and deals with review articles only in English. Here, the modern theory of argumentation schemes is used, which makes both the results and the applicability of the different approaches comparable with those in the previous Chap. 4. The original idea of including German sources as well could not be realized since no such ‘academic wars’ could be found in that language and academic culture.
Chapter 6 servers as a conclusion and sums up the results of the study, at the same time bringing up some theoretical issues and putting them in new light in view of the obtained results.
I. VASSILEVA
RefeRences
Hunston, S. (2005). Confict and consensus: Construing opposition in applied linguistics. In E. Tognini-Bonelli & G. del Lungo Camiciotti (Eds.), Strategies in academic discourse (pp. 1–15). John Benjamins.
Hutz, M. (2001). “Insgesamt muss ich leider zu einem ungünstigen Urteil kommen.” Zur Kulturspezifk wissenschaftlicher Rezensionen im Deutschen und Englischen. In U. Fix, et al. (Eds.), Zur Kulturspezifk von Textsorten (pp. 109–130). Stauffenburg Verlag.
Hyland, K. (2004). Disciplinary discourses, Michigan classics ed.: Social interactions in academic writing. University of Michigan Press.
Hyland, K. (2005). Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies, 7(2), 173–192. SAGE Publications.
Hyland, K. (2008). Academic clusters: Text patterning in published and postgraduate writing. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 18(1), 41–62. Hyland, K., & Diani, G. (2009). Academic evaluation. Review genres in university settings. Palgrave Macmillan.
Knapp-Potthoff, A. (1992). Secondhand politeness. In R. J. Watts et al. (Eds.), Politeness in language (pp. 203–220). Mouton de Gruyter. Pagano, A. (1994). Negatives in written texts. In M. Coulthard (Ed.), Advances in written text analysis (pp. 250–265). Routledge.
Pätzold, J. (1984). Beschreibung und Erwerb von Handlungsmustern. Beispiel: Rezensionen wissenschaftlicher Publikationen. Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR. Reihe A. Arbeitsberichte 138.
Tannen, D. (2002). Agonism in academic discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 1651–1669.
Tse, P., & Hyland, K. (2009). Discipline and gender: Constructing rhetorical identity in book reviews. In K. Hyland & G. Diani (Eds.), Academic evaluation: Review genres in university settings (pp. 105–121). Palgrave Macmillan. Ventola, E. (1998). Meaningful choices in academic communities. Ideological issues. In R. Schulze (Ed.), Making meaningful choices in English (pp. 277–294). Gunter Narr.
Wang, Y., & Nelson, M. (2012). Discursive construction of authorial voice in English book reviews: A contrastive analysis. Hong Kong Journal of Applied Linguistics, 14(1), 1–24.
Wiegand, H. E. (1983). Nachdenken über wissenschaftliche Rezensionen. Deutsche Sprache, 11, 122–137.
Wunderlich, D. (1972). Zur Konventionalität von Sprechhandlungen. In D. Wunderlich (Ed.), Linguistische Pragmatik (pp. 11–58). Athenäum.
Aim and Methodology of the Study
Abstract This chapter explicates the aim and methodology of the study, namely, to elucidate the argumentation strategies employed by linguists in voicing criticism, to look for some explanations for confrontation in academic discourse and to evaluate the positive and/or negative effects it has on international academic communication. Issues such as the role of intertextuality, cross-cultural variations, the notion of ‘academic discourse community,’ among others, are also touched upon. Special attention is paid in this chapter to the modern developments in contrastive rhetoric studies, as well as to the controversial issue of the use of context-based versus corpus-based methods. It also describes the corpora the investigation is based on, namely academic book reviews in English and German (10 in each language), and a series of publications in English (12 – 70,771 running words) interrelated by the fact that they discuss a common group of problems but from two fully confrontative viewpoints. They illustrate what I have metaphorically called an ‘academic war.’
Keywords Aim and methodology • Contrastive rhetoric • Contextbased versus corpus-based methods • Corpora
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
I. Vassileva, Confrontation in Academic Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32736-0_2
2.1 Aim of the Study
The project is designed as a follow-up of my previous research on the rhetoric of cross-cultural academic communication (Vassileva, 2000, 2002, 2006, among others). The study aims to elucidate:
• The argumentation strategies and their surface linguistic expression used by English- and German-speaking scholars in voicing criticism.
• The degree to which this criticism is based on objective logic and/or on subjective personal evaluation
• The preference for certain argumentation schemes and topoi
• Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural differences
• Points of confict and misunderstandings that may result from the established differences
• Explanations of the reasons for confrontation in academia
• The role of intertextuality in confrontative academic exchange
• Considerations of the positive, as well as the negative effects of confrontation for the advance of scientifc thought
• A re-defnition of the notion of ‘academic discourse community’ in view of its constant expansion and the ever-increasing multiplication of voices within it due to the present-day process of globalization and the dominant role of English as a lingua franca
I shall argue that the predominantly pragmatic phenomena enumerated above fnd their surface realization in language, but explanations should be pursued by resorting to at least several extra-linguistic spheres, as well as by considering their intricate interplay and interdependence, namely:
• Dominant ideologies
• General attitudes to knowledge and understandings of its role in society
• Differences between the respective educational systems, for example, focus on content versus focus on form, written versus oral means of instruction and evaluation, etc.
• Understanding of the relationship between the individual (author) and society (academic community/audience)
• Rhetorical and stylistic traditions
• Cross-cultural infuences and their historical dynamics
• Intra-cultural social, political, and economic developments
The factors enumerated above do not, of course, constitute an exhaustive list, but even those are enough to demonstrate that studies in pragmatics should draw on research in philosophy, psychology (individual and social), political sciences, educational sciences, cultural studies, etc. What is more, the results of such studies, more often than not, boil down to issues such as language policy, linguistic and cultural imperialism, the use of language as an instrument for exercising power, and thus have direct impact on decision-making processes concerning current and future social practices.
The results of the study could further be used to sensitize scholars’ awareness of the functions and consequences of confrontation, as well as for the creation of teaching materials for scholars—non-native speakers of the two languages involved, who use them for international communication.
2.2 methodologicAl ApproAcheS
Since the investigation has a primarily contrastive character, frst I shall dwell upon some recent issues and new developments in the feld of contrastive rhetoric.
2.2.1
Contrastive Rhetoric: “Beyond Texts”
After her seminal study on “Contrastive Rhetoric” dating back to 1996, Ulla Connor (2004, p. 293) offers a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in intercultural rhetoric research. She emphasizes some changes in the paradigm and, respectively, the goals of contrastive studies, that have been “affected by two major developments, namely the expansion of genres under consideration and a [striving] to emphasize context of writing.” Regarding the latter point, she stresses the role of discourse communities in forming the disciplinary norms and expectancies of audiences in view of specifc social situations. Therefore, she concludes that:
Social construction of meaning as dynamic, socio-cognitive activities is a term used to describe this approach to texts. Instead of analyzing what texts mean, we want to understand how they construct meaning.
Besides, Connor (2004, p. 294) maintains that “contrastive rhetoric is not a specifc method, but […] employs various methods. These methods include text analysis, genre analysis, corpus linguistics, and ethnographic approaches.”
Concerning the establishment of tertia comparationis in contrastive investigations based on genre theory, she warns against a frequently occurring failure, namely: “in establishing tertia comparationes, we are often forced to fnd prototype genres, essentialize discourse communities, and belittle individual variation in the production and reception of the genres studied” (ibid., p. 298).
Canagarajah (2002a, b, p. 69) claims that genre analysis contrasts with intercultural rhetoric by searching for universal generic structures while contrastive rhetoric research “adopts the relativistic orientation that writers from different cultures relate to form variously and/or that form in the same genres is realized differently in different cultures.”
Swales (2004, p. 245), on the other hand,
believe[s] that the weight of current evidence, at least within the circumscribed realm of research genres, leans toward a sociological rather than cultural explanations. Rather than looking for essentializing traditions such as […], we might do better to focus on writer-audience considerations.
This point of view relates closely to Connor’s (2004, p. 292) suggestion that: “Instead of focusing on products, intercultural research needs to change its focus to the processes that lead to the products.”
I could not but agree with the proposal that it is necessary to concentrate on the process of knowledge creation and representation but the question arising here is: Is it possible to look only at the process and ignore the product? I believe that the two ‘ends’ of the route to the completion of the scientifc product need not and should not be kept apart but rather studied simultaneously.
2.2.2
Context-Based Versus Corpus-Based Methods
Commenting on the two major approaches to contrastive analysis, Connor (2004, p. 292) warns that they both have to take into consideration the variations in the defnition of ‘culture,’ ranging between “static (referring to ‘big,’ ethnic cultures) to […] dynamic (often referring to ‘small’ cultures, e.g. disciplinary, classroom, local).”
Swales (2004, p. 252) admits having been skeptical about the corpusbased approaches to genre analysis mainly due to the “strong incidentalist tendency in corpus work.” Later, however, he found out that corpora
“were excellent for validating or invalidating statements made by other scholars about the English language, and for exemplifying patterns or structures for pedagogical purposes” (ibid., p. 253).
One of the proponents and most active scholars investigating evaluation by using a corpus-based approach is Ute Römer (2008, p. 116–117, see also 2010), who claims that it is possible to investigate evaluative elements after having defned them. She admits, though, that such identifcation is highly challenging for researchers.
Her approach is a lexico-phraseological one, where evaluative lexical elements (mainly adjectives and their pre-modifers) are pre-defned and discussed in relation to their immediate co(n)text in the corpus.
Groom (2009, p. 127) fnds this deductive methodology, which “involves specifying objects for concordance analysis on an a priori basis,” “entirely feasible […] for studying some linguistic phenomena.” However, for other purposes he suggests “a more inductive, ‘corpus-driven’ approach, in which the initial process of selecting items for qualitative concordance study is delegated to a computer algorithm” (ibid., p. 128).
Thus, he selects for the purpose of his 2009-study so-called ‘keywords analysis’ that “centres on the qualitative concordance analysis of a set of words which have been identifed by a computational procedure as being statistically signifcant, or ‘key’, in a specialized corpus, when compared against a larger and more general reference corpus” (ibid., p. 128).
Hyland (2008, p. 18) employs a corpus-based analysis in order “to explore the extent to which phraseology contributes to academic writing by identifying the most frequent 4-word bundles in the key genres of four disciplines” and fnds out that there exist considerable differences among the disciplines in this respect.
2.3 methodology employed in the Study
One of the initial goals of the present research was to check the feasibility and applicability to contrastive studies of both methods briefy discussed above. While Chap. 4 employs the context-based method by looking at the similarities and differences in the expression of negative evaluation in English and German academic book reviews from the point of view of the Aristotelian argumentation theory, Chap. 5 represents a case study of an ‘academic war’ and is methodologically based on modern argumentation theory (Walton et al., 2008).
I. VASSILEVA
After a summary of the history of topics from Aristotle (1954) to the Amsterdam School, Walton et al. (2008, p. 307) come to the following conclusion regarding the relationship between ancient rhetoric and argumentation schemes theory:
Most argument schemes derive from the dialectal and rhetorical common places, the loci. Some of them are based on logical-semantic properties and are necessarily true; others are only plausible. […] Argument schemes stem from both dialectal and rhetorical topics. They include not only semantic inferences but also places from circumstances.
The detailed descriptions of each method are presented at the beginning of the respective chapters in order to facilitate the understanding of the analyses.
An attempt was also made to utilize a corpus-based method in order to compare the linguistic means of conveying negative evaluation in research articles in the two languages. However, as the examples in Chaps. 4 and 5 demonstrate, the surface expression of criticism takes various forms and may span over whole paragraphs and even longer stretches of discourse, which makes it impossible to identify key words or bundles that lend themselves to a corpus-driven analysis. Therefore, it was concluded that, at least for the time being, this approach is unable to cater for the examination of such complex discourse structures.
2.4 corporA
The investigation draws on data elicited from two types of corpora representative for the language of linguistics:
1. Academic book reviews with a defnite negative character in English and German—ten for each language
2. Review articles and book reviews, including replies to reviews (12) (70,771 running words) in English that are closely related to one another topically and represent two mutually exclusive, in the authors’ opinion, schools of linguistics, where outstanding representatives of both schools ‘attack the enemies’ and ‘defend their own positions’ by (sometimes at least) using razor-sharp linguistic means of expression
The reviews are analyzed in their entirety. The primary selection criteria were: (1) that the reviews are published in leading international journals or collections of articles (see Appendix) and (2) have a negative outcome, i.e., the reviewer concludes by not recommending the book to the readers. The practical problem encountered in the choice of the texts was the generally low number of reviews corresponding to the above criteria, as well as the fact that they had to be located by hand, combing a bulk of journals and the respective review sections, since an Internet search was not possible.
The materials for illustrating and investigating an ‘academic war’ were centered on one topic, namely the pro-CDA and anti-CDA debate, and were analyzed in their order of publication.
referenceS
Aristotle. (1954). Rhetoric (W. R. Roberts, Trans.). Random House.
Canagarajah, A. S. (2002a). Critical academic writing and multilingual students. University of Michigan Press.
Canagarajah, A. S. (2002b). A geopolitics of academic writing. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Connor, U. (1996). Contrastive rhetoric. Cross-cultural aspects of second-language writing. Cambridge University Press.
Connor, U. (2004). Intercultural rhetoric research: Beyond texts. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 3(4), 291–304.
Groom, N. (2009). Phraseology and epistemology in academic book reviews: A corpus-driven analysis of two humanities disciplines. In K. In Hyland & G. Diani (Eds.), Academic evaluation. Review genres in university settings (pp. 122–139). Palgrave Macmillan.
Hyland, K. (2008). Academic clusters: Text patterning in published and postgraduate writing. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 18(1), 41–62.
Römer, U. (2008). Identifcation impossible? A corpus approach to realisations of evaluative meaning in academic writing. Functions of Language, XV(1), 115–130.
Römer, U. (2010). Establishing the phraseological profle of a text type. The construction of meaning in academic book reviews. English Text Construction, 3(1), 95–119.
Swales, J. (2004). Research genres. Exploration and applications. Cambridge University Press.
Vassileva, I. (2000). Who is the author? (a contrastive analysis of authorial presence in English, German, French, Russian and Bulgarian academic discourse). Asgard Verlag.
Vassileva, I. (2002). Academic discourse rhetoric and the Bulgarian – English interlanguage. Tip-top Verlag.
Vassileva, I. (2006). Author-audience interaction. A cross-cultural perspective. Asgard Verlag.
Walton, D., Reed, C., & Macagno, F. (2008). Argumentation schemes. Cambridge University Press.
I. VASSILEVA
Confrontation in Academic Communication: Theoretical Background
Abstract This chapter deals with some theoretical issues related to the areas of interest of the study. First, the role of evaluation in academic communication is discussed by looking at two contradictory, even mutually exclusive assumptions as to the very existence of evaluation in language: (1) ‘Every utterance is evaluative’ and (2) ‘Not all utterances are evaluative.’ Various approaches to the investigation of evaluation have been critically examined. Second, in order to elucidate the essence and function of confrontation in academic communication, some basic notions closely related to it are clarifed, namely: criticism, critique, negative evaluation, and confrontation in academic communication, as well as the relationship among them. Finally, the importance of culture, discipline culture, and community of practice are addressed, and it is concluded that if one remains committed to the traditional understanding of ‘discourse community,’ one should either recognize the existence of a very large number of very small communities (of practice) or accept that the academic discourse community has disappeared. A more realistic point of view would be to speak at present of fuctuating communities united by temporary common goals.
Keywords Evaluation in academic communication • Criticism, critique, negative evaluation, confrontation • Culture, discipline culture, community of practice
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
I. Vassileva, Confrontation in Academic Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32736-0_3
3.1 Evaluation in acadEmic communication
Since the realization of confrontative strategies in academic communication is directly related to, and actually part of the realization of evaluation in general, I shall start with a short overview of the various understandings of this notion in recent linguistics literature. Without going into details and recounting all publications dealing with evaluation, I should still mention the fact that, like in many other cases in this ‘soft’ science, there exist two contradictory, even mutually exclusive assumptions as to the very existence of evaluation in language:
1. Every utterance is evaluative
Hyland and Diani (2009, p. 4) gives a succinct overview of the various approaches and terminological apparatuses used in the study of evaluation and concludes that:
The term ‘evaluation’ itself originates in the work of Hunston (1994; Hunston and Thompson, 2000). Despite differences among these terms, they all take up by Stubbs’ (1996, p. 197) point that ‘whenever speakers (or writers) say anything, they encode their attitude towards it.’
Thompson and Hunston (2000, p. 5) defne evaluation as a “broad cover term for the expression of the speaker or writer’s attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or propositions that he or she is talking about.”
This belief, however, dates back at least to Vološinov (1973, p. 105): “No utterance can be put together without value judgement. Every utterance is above all an evaluative orientation. Therefore, each element in a living utterance not only has a meaning but also has a value” [emphasis in original].
2. Not all utterances are evaluative
In his investigation of academic book reviews Shaw (2004, p. 121) states: “I am claiming that there are acts in book reviews which do not evaluate the book on this dimension, but describe it.” Further on, he maintains that there is a scale of explicitness for evaluation where it is not always clear whether a term is used positively or negatively. The interpretation is often based on “extratextual knowledge” (ibid., p. 128),
as well as on the examination of a wider context/co-text. As an example, Shaw (2004, p. 127) refers to “negated clauses or other constructions with grammatically negative markers [that] imply contrast and hence evaluation […], but this does not have to be negative evaluation […].” However,
in practice negated structures often carry negative evaluation. This is because grammatical negation is evaluatively asymmetrical, in that a negated sentence is dialogic […] and implies the possibility and absence of the positive equivalent, but a positive one does not imply anything and can be taken as purely descriptive. (ibid.)
Hyland and Diani (2009, p. 7) adheres to a similar position: “It is true, however, that a great deal of research writing is characterized by the absence of inscribed evaluation.” He attributes three central functions to evaluation, namely: “it expresses the speaker’s opinion”; “it helps to construct a dialogue and relations of solidarity between the writer and reader; and fnally, it helps structure a text in expected ways” (Hyland & Diani, 2009, p. 5). In an earlier publication Hyland (2005, p. 175) dwells in more detail on the use of evaluation:
Academic writers’ use of evaluative resources is infuenced by different epistemological assumptions and permissible criteria of justifcation, and this points to and reinforces specifc cultural and institutional contexts. Writers’ evaluative choices, in other words, are not made from all the alternatives the language makes available, but from a more restricted sub-set of options which reveal how they understand their communities through the assumptions these encode.
Hyland (2005, pp. 187–188) also introduces the terms ‘stance’ and ‘engagement’ to account for the way writers present themselves in their writings and in relation to their readers, and relates these to disciplinarity, where he makes remarkable observations that have provoked many follow-up studies of interdisciplinary character. More specifcally, he argues that scholars in the humanities and social sciences demonstrate a higher degree of personal involvement as compared to those in the hard sciences due to the high degree of interpretability of the discourses, the strong reliance on language for argumentation and the necessity to position their claims at the background of previous research by complying with it, refuting it, or by ‘establishing their niche.’ In the hard sciences, in contrast,
the background research and methodologies are clear and established, the results are tangible, reproducible, and speak for themselves, so that the expression of the researcher’s personality and attitudes are redundant and the role of language, especially in view of the affordances of modern technologies for visualization, is kept to a minimum.
Moreno and Suárez (2008, p. 765), on their part, focus on the necessity to “defne precisely what is meant by evaluation” in order to, among other things, be able “to delineate clearly their criteria of comparison (i.e., their tertia comparationis) to ensure that they are comparing comparable evaluation resources,” which is of vital importance in cross-linguistic investigations.
3.2 criticism: critiquE–nEgativE Evaluation confrontation in acadEmic communication
In order to elucidate the essence and function of confrontation in academic communication, it is necessary to frst clarify some basic notions closely related to it.
Starting with ‘criticism,’ the dictionary defnitions point to two main senses: (1) The act of criticizing, especially adversely. A critical comment or judgment. (2) The practice of analyzing, classifying, interpreting, or evaluating literary or other artistic works.
In the context of ‘critical thinking,’ however, “critical” connotes the importance or centrality of the thinking to an issue, question or problem of concern. “Critical” in this context does not mean “disapproved” or “negative.”1
It “has been described as ‘purposeful refective judgment concerning what to believe or what to do.’” The list of core critical thinking skills includes “interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation and meta-cognition” (ibid.) and thus comes much closer to the second sense of ‘criticism’ listed above.
‘Critique’:
The term critique derives from the Greek term kritike (κριτική), meaning “(the art of) discerning”, that is, discerning the value of persons or things. Especially in philosophical contexts it is infuenced by Kant’s use of the term
1 http://en_wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
to mean a refective examination of the validity and limits of a human capacity or of a set of philosophical claims and has been extended in modern philosophy to mean a systematic inquiry into the conditions and consequences of a concept, theory, discipline, or approach and an attempt to understand its limitations and validity. A critical perspective, in this sense, is the opposite of a dogmatic one. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique)
The online http://www.thefreedictionary.com/critique dictionary remarks, however, that:
Critique has been used as a verb meaning “to review or discuss critically” since the 18th century, but lately this usage has gained much wider currency, in part because the verb criticize, once neutral between praise and censure, is now mainly used in a negative sense.
In order to verify the statement above, I inspected 50 randomly selected tokens of critique out of altogether 748 in the British National Corpus (BNC-iWeb) consisting of more than 14 billion words. The word was in truth used in a non-negative sense only a couple of times, exclusively in philosophical texts referring to Emanuel Kant’s theory.
The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the largest freely available corpus of English containing more than one billion words, shows 10,139 tokens of critique, almost two-thirds of which are found in academic publications. Since the corpus claims to be balanced in terms of textual sources, this fact demonstrates the highly limited usage of the term that seems to be confned to the vocabulary of certain academic felds.
A search of the most frequently used adjectives pre-modifying critique showed, among the frst 100 tokens, that within the range of 2–37 possible tokens, 30 adjectives were negative, accounting for 175 (out of 512) of the usages. Both fgures account for about 30 percent of the cases of use of critique as a noun in a defnitely negative meaning. As a verb, the term is also used predominantly negatively, as even a cursory glance at the immediate context of the tokens in both corpora shows.
Following from the above, the term critique is directly related to and could be treated as a synonym of negative evaluation. Martin and White (2005, pp. 11–121) discuss negative evaluation under the term ‘disclaim’ which is defned as: “meanings by which some dialogic alternative is directly rejected or supplanted, or is represented as not applying” (p. 117). They distinguish two sub-categories of disclaim: ‘denial’ or ‘negation’ that
I. VASSILEVA
is “a resource for introducing the alternative positive position into the dialogue, and hence acknowledging it, so as to reject it” (p. 118), while ‘counter’ “includes formulations which represent the current proposition as replacing or supplanting, and thereby ‘countering’, a proposition which would have been expected in its place” (p. 120).
Modern argumentation theory goes much deeper into the various aspects of negation and distinguishes among ‘attack,’ ‘opposition,’ ‘rebuttal,’ and ‘refutation’ as different “fundamental logical notions basic to critical argumentation” (Walton et al., 2008, p. 221). Since this theory, however, will serve as a methodological basis for the analysis of ‘The academic war’ in Chap. 5, it will be discussed in more detail there.
‘Confrontation’ on its part is understood in two senses: (1) The act of confronting or challenging another, especially face-to-face; (2) A confict between armed forces. 2
The Merriam-Webster 3 online dictionary also adds the meaning of “the clashing of forces or ideas” which seems to be the best one applicable to the present discussion.
In relation to academic communication, Bourdieu (1999, p. 19) asserted that:
As a system of objective relations between positions already won (in previous struggles), the scientifc feld is the locus of a competitive struggle, in which the specifc issue at stake is the monopoly of scientifc authority, defned inseparably as technical capacity and social power.
I would add to Bourdieu’s statement that nowadays, at the time of ever-growing numbers of multidisciplinary studies, the struggle in question has already spread not only within but also among various scientifc felds.
Fröhlich (2003, p. 118) treats this state of affairs as a “Kampf um wissenschaftliche Glaubwürdigkeit” [Fight for scientifc credibility] that is directly related to a symbolic capital accumulated during a scholar’s career. This capital, following Bourdieu, consists of the capital of “strictly scientifc authority” and the capital of “social authority.” What is more, Bourdieu maintains that scientifc conficts are driven by individual or group interests and are realized by playing down the achievements of the ‘enemies,’ thus valorizing one’s own competence and success.
2 http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/confrontation
3 http://mw2.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scholarly
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
space the germs of every new discovery The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern science; for according to Prof. Jowett, the specific discovery that the blood flows out at one side of the heart through the arteries, and returns through the veins at the other, was unknown to him, though Plato was perfectly aware “that blood is a fluid in constant motion.”
Plato’s method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifthform boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato’s disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato’s translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of
mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato’s works, speaking of “the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole,” gives them the following credit: 1. “That the nebular theory was the received belief of the early physicists.” Therefore it could not have rested, as Draper asserts,[396] upon the telescopic discovery made by Herschel I. 2. “That the development of animals out of frogs who came to land, and of man out of the animals, was held by Anaximenes in the sixth century before Christ.” The professor might have added that this theory antedated Anaximenes by some thousands of years, perhaps; that it was an accepted doctrine among Chaldeans, and that Darwin’s evolution of species and monkey theory are of an antediluvian origin. 3. “ ... that, even by Philolaus and the early Pythagoreans, the earth was held to be a body like the other stars revolving in space.”[397] Thus Galileo, studying some Pythagorean fragments, which are shown by Reuchlin to have yet existed in the days of the Florentine mathematician;[398] being, moreover, familiar with the doctrines of the old philosophers, but reässerted an astronomical doctrine which prevailed in India at the remotest antiquity. 4. The ancients “ ... thought that there was a sex in plants as well as in animals.” Thus our modern naturalists had but to follow in the steps of their predecessors. 5. “That musical notes depended on the relative length or tension of the strings from which they were emitted, and were measured by ratios of number.” 6. “That mathematical laws pervaded the world and even qualitative differences were supposed
to have their origin in number;” and 7, “the annihilation of matter was denied by them, and held to be a transformation only.”[399] “Although one of these discoveries might have been supposed to be a happy guess,” adds Mr. Jowett, “we can hardly attribute them all to mere coincidences.”[400]
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding the arch of their philosophical system with a keystone at once perfect and immovable. If science has made such colossal strides during these latter days—if we have such clearer ideas of natural law than the ancients—why are our inquiries as to the nature and source of life unanswered? If the modern laboratory is so much richer in the fruits of experimental research than those of the olden time, how comes it that we make no step except on paths that were trodden long before the Christian era? How does it happen that the most advanced standpoint that has been reached in our times only enables us to see in the dim distance up the Alpine path of knowledge the monumental proofs that earlier explorers have left to mark the plateaux they had reached and occupied?
If modern masters are so much in advance of the old ones, why do they not restore to us the lost arts of our postdiluvian forefathers? Why do they not give us the unfading colors of Luxor—the Tyrian purple; the bright vermilion and dazzling blue which decorate the walls of this place, and are as bright as on the first day of their application? The indestructible cement of the pyramids and of ancient aqueducts; the Damascus blade, which can be turned like a corkscrew in its scabbard without breaking; the gorgeous, unparalleled tints of the stained glass that is found amid the dust of old ruins and beams in the windows of ancient cathedrals; and the secret of the true malleable glass? And if chemistry is so little able to rival even with the early mediæval ages in some arts, why boast of achievements which, according to strong probability, were perfectly
known thousands of years ago? The more archæology and philology advance, the more humiliating to our pride are the discoveries which are daily made, the more glorious testimony do they bear in behalf of those who, perhaps on account of the distance of their remote antiquity, have been until now considered ignorant flounderers in the deepest mire of superstition.
Why should we forget that, ages before the prow of the adventurous Genoese clove the Western waters, the Phœnician vessels had circumnavigated the globe, and spread civilization in regions now silent and deserted? What archæologist will dare assert that the same hand which planned the Pyramids of Egypt, Karnak, and the thousand ruins now crumbling to oblivion on the sandy banks of the Nile, did not erect the monumental Nagkon-Wat of Cambodia? or trace the hieroglyphics on the obelisks and doors of the deserted Indian village, newly discovered in British Columbia by Lord Dufferin? or those on the ruins of Palenque and Uxmal, of Central America? Do not the relics we treasure in our museums— last mementos of the long “lost arts” speak loudly in favor of ancient civilization? And do they not prove, over and over again, that nations and continents that have passed away have buried along with them arts and sciences, which neither the first crucible ever heated in a mediæval cloister, nor the last cracked by a modern chemist have revived, nor will—at least, in the present century.
“They were not without some knowledge of optics,” Professor Draper magnanimously concedes to the ancients; others positively deny to them even that little. “The convex lens found at Nimroud shows that they were not unacquainted with magnifying instruments.”[401] Indeed? If they were not, all the classical authors must have lied. For, when Cicero tells us that he had seen the entire Iliad written on skin of such a miniature size, that it could easily be rolled up inside a nut-shell, and Pliny asserts that Nero had a ring with a small glass in it, through which he watched the performance of the gladiators at a distance—could audacity go farther? Truly, when we are told that Mauritius could see from the promontory of Sicily over the entire sea to the coast of Africa, with an instrument called nauscopite, we must either think that all these witnesses lied, or that
the ancients were more than slightly acquainted with optics and magnifying glasses. Wendell Phillips states that he has a friend who possesses an extraordinary ring “perhaps three-quarters of an inch in diameter, and on it is the naked figure of the god Hercules. By the aid of glasses, you can distinguish the interlacing muscles, and count every separate hair on the eyebrows.... Rawlinson brought home a stone about twenty inches long and ten wide, containing an entire treatise on mathematics. It would be perfectly illegible without glasses.... In Dr. Abbott’s Museum, there is a ring of Cheops, to which Bunsen assigns 500 b.c. The signet of the ring is about the size of a quarter of a dollar, and the engraving is invisible without the aid of glasses.... At Parma, they will show you a gem once worn on the finger of Michael Angelo, of which the engraving is 2,000 years old, and on which there are the figures of seven women. You must have the aid of powerful glasses in order to distinguish the forms at all.... So the microscope,” adds the learned lecturer, “instead of dating from our time, finds its brothers in the Books of Moses—and these are infant brothers.“
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely “some knowledge of optics.” Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper’s Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; whenever talking of the knowledge of the ancients, he evidently sees things through concave ones.
It is simply worthy of admiration to follow in various modern works the cautious attempts of both pious Christians and skeptical, albeit very learned men, to draw a line of demarcation between what we are and what we are not to believe, in ancient authors. No credit is ever allowed them without being followed by a qualifying caution. If Strabo tells us that ancient Nineveh was forty-seven miles in circumference, and his testimony is accepted, why should it be otherwise the moment he testifies to the accomplishment of Sibylline prophecies? Where is the common sense in calling Herodotus the
“Father of History,” and then accusing him, in the same breath, of silly gibberish, whenever he recounts marvellous manifestations, of which he was an eye-witness? Perhaps, after all, such a caution is more than ever necessary, now that our epoch has been christened the Century of Discovery. The disenchantment may prove too cruel for Europe. Gunpowder, which has long been thought an invention of Bacon and Schwartz, is now shown in the school-books to have been used by the Chinese for levelling hills and blasting rocks, centuries before our era. “In the Museum of Alexandria,” says Draper, “there was a machine invented by Hero, the mathematician, a little more than 100 years b.c. It revolved by the agency of steam, and was of the form that we should now call a reaction-engine.... Chance had nothing to do with the invention of the modern steamengine.”[402] Europe prides herself upon the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, and now we are told that the astronomical observations of the Chaldeans extend back to within a hundred years of the flood; and Bunsen fixes the flood at not less than 10,000 years before our era.[403] Moreover, a Chinese emperor, more than 2,000 years before the birth of Christ (i. e., before Moses) put to death his two chief astronomers for not predicting an eclipse of the sun.
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is “the most important discovery of the present century,” as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this “important discovery” is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered in the dreamy speculations of Vedic theology, in the doctrine of emanation and absorption, the nirvana in short. John Erigena outlined it in his bold philosophy in the eighth century, and we invite any one to read his De Divisione Naturæ, who would convince himself of this truth. Science tells that when the theory of the indestructibility of matter
(also a very, very old idea of Demokritus, by the way) was demonstrated, it became necessary to extend it to force. No material particle can ever be lost; no part of the force existing in nature can vanish; hence, force was likewise proved indestructible, and its various manifestations or forces, under divers aspects, were shown to be mutually convertible, and but different modes of motion of the material particles. And thus was rediscovered the force-correlation. Mr. Grove, so far back as 1842, gave to each of these forces, such as heat, electricity, magnetism, and light, the character of convertibility; making them capable of being at one moment a cause, and at the next an effect.[404] But whence come these forces, and whither do they go, when we lose sight of them? On this point science is silent.
The theory of “force-correlation,” though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries “the greatest discovery of the age,” can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timæus the primary and secondary qualities of matter,[405] and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timæus say: “God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability.” We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Τὸ Ὀν the primordial point in the boundless circle, “whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere,” emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic “nothing”), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive
state, which is the absorption into Nirvana[406]—what else is this but correlation of forces?
Science tells us that heat may be shown to develop electricity, electricity produce heat; and magnetism to evolve electricity, and vice versa. Motion, they tell us, results from motion itself, and so on, ad infinitum. This is the A B C of occultism and of the earliest alchemists. The indestructibility of matter and force being discovered and proved, the great problem of eternity is solved. What need have we more of spirit? its uselessness is henceforth scientifically demonstrated!
Thus modern philosophers may be said not to have gone one step beyond what the priests of Samothrace, the Hindus, and even the Christian Gnostics well knew. The former have shown it in that wonderfully ingenious mythos of the Dioskuri, or “the sons of heaven;” the twin brothers, spoken of by Schweigger, “who constantly die and return to life together, while it is absolutely necessary that one should die that the other may live.” They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archæology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force—plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire—or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: “In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the
celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition.”
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of plants, minerals, and animals, all of which are well known to our naturalists, but none of which are explained. Such are the rotatory motion of the sunflower, of the heliotrope, of the lotos—which, before the rising of the sun, folds its leaves, drawing the petals within itself, so to say, then expands them gradually, as the sun rises, and draws them in again as it descends to the west—of the sun and lunar stones and the helioselenus, of the cock and lion, and other animals. “Now the ancients,” he says, “having contemplated this mutual sympathy of things (celestial and terrestrial) applied them for occult purposes, both celestial and terrene natures, by means of which, through a certain similitude, they deduced divine virtues into this inferior abode.... All things are full of divine natures; terrestrial natures receiving the plenitude of such as are celestial, but celestial of supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest [407] For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities.”[408]
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediæval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timæus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their
weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law—this was and is the basis of magic.
In his notes on Ghosts and Goblins, when reviewing some facts adduced by certain illustrious defenders of the spiritual phenomena, such as Professor de Morgan, Mr. Robert Dale Owen, and Mr. Wallace among others—Mr. Richard A. Proctor says that he “cannot see any force in the following remarks by Professor Wallace: ‘How is such evidence as this,’ he (Wallace) says, speaking of one of Owen’s stories, ‘refuted or explained away? Scores, and even hundreds, of equally-attested facts are on record, but no attempt is made to explain them. They are simply ignored, and in many cases admitted to be inexplicable.’” To this Mr Proctor jocularly replies that as “our philosophers declare that they have long ago decided these ghost stories to be all delusions; therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much ‘worritted’ that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence.”
“All this,” he goes on to say, “affords excellent reason why the ‘converts’ should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before ‘the philosophers’ can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!”
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of “Ghosts and Goblins.” She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, “was bullied into silence” by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. “The impertinent action of one of the members of the ‘American Scientific Association,’” says the authoress, “was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings.”[409] On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
“It would seem that a subject like this” (presented by Professor Hare) was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of ‘science.’ But the ‘American Association for the Promotion of Science’,[410] decided that it was either unworthy of their attention or dangerous for them to meddle with, and so they voted to put the invitation on the table.... We cannot omit in this connection to mention that the ‘American Association for the Promotion of Science’ held a very learned, extended, grave, and profound discussion at the same session, upon the cause why ‘roosters crow between twelve and one o’clock at night!’ A subject worthy of philosophers; and one, moreover, which must have been shown to effect “the well-being of the human race” in a very “important degree.”
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances
withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an “effect of the imagination;” the latter a “curious coincidence.”
Max Müller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler’s Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: “If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers ... or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man.”
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, “there is a lamentable departure of divinity from man, when nothing worthy of heaven or celestial concerns is heard or believed, and when every divine voice is by a necessary silence dumb.”[411] Or, as the Emperor Julian has it, “the little soul” of the skeptic “is indeed acute, but sees nothing with a vision healthy and sound.”
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony
with the divine nature, he says; “but their parts,” owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), “are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature.” When those circulations —which Eliphas Levi calls “currents of the astral light” in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the “superior natures,” and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these “inferior” ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of “superstitions,” customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, “Do not stir the fire with a sword,” as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the “head of the fire.” The Kamtchadal of North-eastern Asia consider it a great sin so to do. The Sioux Indians of North America dare not touch the fire with either needle, knife, or any sharp instrument. The Kalmucks
entertain the same dread; and an Abyssinian would rather bury his bare arms to the elbows in blazing coals than use a knife or axe near them. All these facts Tyler also calls “simply curious coincidences.” Max Müller, however, thinks that they lose much of their force by the fact “of the Pythagorean doctrine being at the bottom of it.”
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This “Dig not fire with a sword,” is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neoplatonist. “This symbol,” he says, “exhorts to prudence.” It shows “the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath—not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself.... Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, ‘It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.’ And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect.”[412]
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers—Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the “men of old” the primitive sages—we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled “Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers.” It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to
new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. “The religious world has been much startled,” the author proceeds to say, “and not a little excited by the utterances of men like Spencer, Tyndall, Huxley, Proctor, and a few others of the same school.” Admitting very cheerfully how much science owes to each of those gentlemen, nevertheless the author “most emphatically” denies that they have made any discoveries at all. There is nothing new in the speculations, even of the most advanced of them; nothing which was not known and taught, in one form or another, thousands of years ago. He does not say that these scientists “put forward their theories as their own discoveries, but they leave the fact to be implied, and the newspapers do the rest.... The public, which has neither time nor the inclination to examine the facts, adopts the faith of the newspapers ... and wonders what will come next! ... The supposed originators of such startling theories are assailed in the newspapers. Sometimes the obnoxious scientists undertake to defend themselves, but we cannot recall a single instance in which they have candidly said, ‘Gentlemen, be not angry with us; we are merely revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.’” This would have been the simple truth; “but even scientists or philosophers,” adds the author, “are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal ones.”[413]
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the “infallible popes” on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
“Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by
proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most ‘advanced’ of Baron Liebig’s works.”[414]
“Another recent utterance,” he says, “which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance, that scientist proclaims: “Physiology has sufficiently decisive grounds for the opinions, that every thought, every sensation is accompanied by a change in the composition of the substance of the brain; that every motion, every manifestation of force is the result of a transformation of the structure or of its substance.[415]
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig’s speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so pre-eminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder’s Philosophy of History.
“Priestley,” adds the author, “was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen.” It is in these works that “he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so ‘startling,’ ‘bold,’ etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers.”
“Our readers,” he proceeds to say, “remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new.” “An idea,” says Plutarch, “is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation” (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his “protoplasm,” but a rechauffé of the speculations of the Hindu Swâbhâvikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swâbhâva or their own nature?[416] As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: “The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man or brute, must die with its death.” Nevertheless, we would remind the reader that Epicurus is here speaking of the Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley’s “mutton-protoplasm” is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, “We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the ‘advanced’ thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is.”[417]
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul’s immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists—to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth—are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul’s immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preëxistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boëthius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, “who were no friends to the soul’s immortality,” as says Henry More, “Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence, and that “it does preëxist before it comes into the body.”[418]
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived, applies with still more justice to our period of utter skepticism. “I have heard,” writes this eminent man, “I have heard and read of myriads of good jokes on the ignorance of the ancients, who were always seeing spirits everywhere; methinks that we are a great deal more imbecile than our forefathers, in never perceiving any such now, anywhere.”[419]
