1. Critique, as a project of the intellect, is meant to be rational, not emotional. It is supposed to concentrate on a controversial subject matter rather than getting personal. One may be tempted to see these two requirements converge; yet they don't. People can get passionate not just about persons, but also about impersonal subject matters. At the same time, it is not to be ruled out that persons might, under some circumstances, be judged rationally.
2. Emotions do, however, figure in some sorts of critique, and in one sort particularly: the one that has been termed polemics. The emotions we expect in polemics are those of aversion: anger, wrath, rage, hatred, detestation, contempt, disgust. The question to be pursued here is: How are the emotions that show up in polemics to be conceptualized?
3. Polemics grow out from the rational endeavour of critique – and, as its sharpest form, they cut through the frame set for rational critique, breaking it. A polemicist should be capable of rational argument; those who polemicize because they cannot reason justly get under suspicion. But polemics can arise from a rightful dissatisfaction with the sobriety and objectivity of rational argument; there are matters that should stir us up, agitate and enrage us rather than be pondered calmly for their pros and cons.
4. The genre's name, polemics, derives from the Greek word for war, polemos. Critique may be harmless elsewhere; in polemics, as in armed conflict, critique becomes a matter of life, death – and honour. Like someone waging war, a polemicist intends to win, to dominate, perhaps to destroy.
5. Polemics are shaped by enmity. Enmity may be thought of, at its core, as a personal relationship. There can be enmity between individuals, but also between groups. Groups, however, are not natural kinds. They are already abstractions, ‘Gedankendinge’. Who are ‘the Germans’? Plainly not the carriers of a certain brand of blood. ‘The Germans’ are those of whom a sufficient number of people believes that they are German, a belief possibly – and in this case actually – enshrined in a law of citizenship and more such social constructs. Once on the level of abstraction, enmity has spread from there. There has been enmity towards institutions, systems, forms of thought, modes of action. And so polemics have been directed not just against persons, but also, i.a., against institutions, systems, forms of thought, modes of action.
6. The term ‘polemics’ is mostly a shorthand for: polemical texts. But can an emotion be ‘in’ a text? Usually, we attribute an emotion to a being that is or has a mind: a human being, an animal, or God (‘the love of God’, ‘God's wrath’). If there are emotions ‘in’ a piece of polemics, we must, apparently, be able to set out that those emotions, though somehow ‘stored’ in the text, ‘really’ relate to a being that is or has a mind.
7. Two such relations – relations, that is, between an emotion and a being that is or has a mind – appear relevant to polemics. On the one hand, authors of polemical texts could, through them, express emotions; on the other hand, such texts might arouse emotions in those who read them. Between the two, emotions expressed and emotions aroused, there can be a connection; yet there need not be one. An author perhaps expresses, for instance, scorn in a polemical treatise; the emotion aroused in readers, however, could be schadenfreude. And the emotion aroused may not just be different from the emotion expressed; quite possibly, an emotion on one side corresponds to no emotion at all on the other side. An emotion of spite, sharply expressed in a polemical text against the habit of keeping pets, may entirely fail to arouse spite in any of the readers as these continue to deem their cats' presence at home snug and cozy. And conversely: An analysis of the distribution of wealth in a particular economy, written in cold blood, might arouse rage in a mass of readers; the text would stir that emotion not because rage was expressed in its statistics but because the mass of its readers would compare their own standing to those few who have, as is to be seen from the analysis, privately appropriated the lion's share of general wealth.
8. The notion of expression presupposes a distinction between an outer manifestation and an inner source. In the case of polemics, the outer manifestation of the emotion would consist in the polemical text, whereas its inner source was a polemicistʼs state of mind. That state of mind is meant to explain why we find the emotion manifested in the text: The author expressed it. What evidence, then, do we have for the state of mind? We only have the emotional words of the text, the very manifestation to be explained. Thus the procedure is circular: Emotions in texts are referred back to emotions in minds whose existence is proven by nothing but the emotions in the texts.
9. Occasionally, we may have independent evidence. A writer, for instance, composes a polemic against the neighbouring nation. Shortly afterwards, he writes a letter to the head of state of his own nation, saying how angry he is at the neighbouring nation. Yet this statement, in truth, is not the sought-for ‘inner source’, but just a second outer manifestation alongside the first one, the polemical treatise. We never arrive at the ‘inner source’ – for as soon as we reach out at something, it must already be an outward manifestation rather than an inner source. We do not get on studying the role of emotions in polemical texts by speculating about their authorsʼ psychology. The logic of expression fails.
10. Contrary to the idea that passions are private inner states of an individual, David Hume claimed them to be contagious substances that circulate in society: ‘the passions are so contagious, that they pass with the greatest facility from one person to another, and produce correspondent movements in all human breasts.’Footnote 1 (A distinction between passions and emotions, useful as it may be in other contexts, is not at issue here.) ‘Hatred, resentment, esteem, love, courage, mirth and melancholy; all these passions I feel more from communication than from my own natural temper and disposition.’Footnote 2 A foremost genre communicating hatred is polemics.
11. To study the role of emotions in polemics may then mean to explore which emotions have in fact been aroused in those who read texts of that genre. Yet here once more the question applies: How do we know? For some polemical texts of the Christian church fathers against the pagans or against heretics, not a single reader's reaction, emotional or non-emotional, has come down to us in any form whatever. Yet this does not mean that inquiry into the role of emotions in these polemical texts is blocked. Even here, it is wide open. These texts often brim with emotionally loaded terms; along these, the texts can be explored. The emotionally loaded terms are directed at an implied reader; that anticipated figure is part and parcel of the text. Thus we can and should take it into account as we search into the role of emotions in polemics. Of readersʼ actual emotional reactions we cannot know unless they have been put down in writing. This is something critics do, a small fraction of readers and, as readers by profession, very much unlike the typical lay reader. Even just among critics those admitting their emotional responses may be a minority as against those many pretending to be objective. It does no harm to learn something about actual emotional reactions to a polemic, say a nun's cries of fury on reading Nietzsche's The Antichrist; but as a host of meaningful things can be said when no such facts are known, arousal cannot be the heart of the matter.
12. In one of the great polemical texts of German literature, Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend, composed between 1759 and 1766, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing attacks a claim drawn from the authoritative journal Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freien Künste:
‘Niemand, sagen die Verfasser der Bibliothek, wird leugnen, daß die deutsche Schaubühne einen großen Teil ihrer ersten Verbesserung dem Herrn Professor Gottsched zu danken habe.’ Ich bin dieser Niemand; ich leugne es geradezu. Es wäre zu wünschen, daß sich Herr Gottsched niemals mit dem Theater vermengt hätte.Footnote 3
‘Nobody’, the authors of the Library say, ‘nobody will deny that German theatre for its first improvement is much indebted to Professor Gottsched’. I am that Nobody; I deny it outright. It were to be wished for that Mr. Gottsched had never meddled with theatre.
At this stage, Lessing constructs and positions a polemical self, or ‘ego’, that, in due course, will be the bearer of certain polemical passions and desires. By constructing and positioning it the way he does, Lessing castigates the arrogance of the authors of the Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freien Künste who, by claiming what ‘nobody will deny’, meant to prescribe what everybody had to believe. To call oneself a nobody is normally a sign of extreme modesty; paradoxically, Lessing turns it into a sign of pride. He does so on the strength of the history that has been inscribed into the phrase. Odysseus gets the better of mighty Polyphemus through calling himself oudeis, ‘nobody’. Shaping the polemical self as ‘nobody’, Lessing describes both the power of Johann Christoph Gottsched in the sphere of German theatre at the time and how superior ingenuity would outdo him.
13. Polemical essays and treatises are just one genre of literature among others; and as in other genres of literature authors can take on one or the other emotional stance. Like the omniscient narrator in a 19th century novel, the persona issuing verdicts in a polemical essay or treatise is an artifact, a voice that has been made up and equipped with passions along or against rhetorical conventions known to author and audience alike.
14. Through a persona, a writer injects a dramatic element into either lyric poetry or narrative prose. Personae, after all, are the masks of classical theatre. Drama can be a key to understanding polemics – the most effective polemics aspire to comedy. The polemicist gets on stage, acting; he places his target on stage, too, using quotation. Skilful attribution and leading of the voices, one's own and that of the antagonist, looms large in the art of polemics. Yet what takes place between those two is a far cry from dialogue; the target of polemics is not welcome as an interlocutor. A polemical text typically emerges once dialogue has broken down; it tends towards monologue. The polemicist's soliloquy, however, does not just take place in front of an audience; rather, the polemicist must create a passionate ‘we’ between himself and the readers – a ‘we’ that excludes the person or the group against whom the polemic is directed.
15. This is not an easy task, and hence great polemics are rare – much rarer than, say, good novels. All polemics are jeopardized by a division into offender and victim. The polemicist can only escape the threat of being perceived as committing an offence on a victim that cannot defend him- or herself by raising the polemical target to a sort of presence, even showing signs of commiseration and pity with it. Yet as soon as the polemical targetʼs presence renders it impressive, the polemics have come to nothing. Again, as soon as the readersʼ pity with the polemical target deepens, the polemicist has failed. Whoever renders polemics fair, makes them boring; but if they turn grossly unfair, they put us off. Polemics must constantly balance between the contrary reactions of tedium and disgust, in order to entertain well-tempered schadenfreude in readers.
