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Holy ivory
There never was an Ivory Tower. It was always a figure of speech. There are towers and there is ivory, both quite real; it is their combination in the idea of an Ivory Tower which is both imaginary and consequential. Physical towers had both mundane and symbolic aspects. Affording their inhabitants an overview, towers might be defensible fortified structures. Rising above the normal surface of things, they could also be spaces of contemplation, expressive gestures at closeness to the divine and practical ways of distancing inhabitants from mundane human affairs. Conceived as human-made sacred mountains, towers could be approved as concrete displays of religious aspiration or condemned as symbols of overweening human pride and folly. Ivory was, however, symbolic all the way through: it was always fantastically expensive, a luxury good from parts of animals themselves so rare and exotic that ivory has traditionally had its cultural being in the worlds of art, ornamentation and aesthetics: something real out of which you might make almost mythic real objects - layered myth. Ivory was so costly that virtually its only use was to be turned into art or aids to worship. Christian religious statues, the reliquaries holding sacred objects and the covers of codexes were often made of ivory.
The fact that we talk about Ivory Towers has a lot to do with old history, but the deep historical and the present-day references of Ivory Towers are very different. This essay charts those changing meanings: it tracks some consequential changes in how we think about the nature of knowledge; the conditions for the production, maintenance and transmission of knowledge; the proper agency of knowledge-making; and the relations between knowledge and virtue, both individual and political. These sorts of things could be, and have been, addressed abstractly and programmatically, but there is some interest in tracing change through the history of a phrase used to express ideas about the relationships between knowledge and value.1
The Ivory Tower can be tracked back to antiquity and to biblical sources. 'Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon' (Song of Songs 7:4).2 In the Odyssey (Bk 19, 560-569), Penelope, dreaming of the...