Exemplarity and Singularity

Thinking through Particulars in Philosophy, Literature, and Law

Michele Lowrie, Susanne Lüdemann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317696391
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

This book pursues a strand in the history of thought – ranging from codified statutes to looser social expectations – that uses particulars, more specifically examples, to produce norms. Much intellectual history takes ancient Greece as a point of departure. But the practice of exemplarity is historically rooted firmly in ancient Roman rhetoric, oratory, literature, and law – genres that also secured its transmission. Their pragmatic approach results in a conceptualization of politics, social organization, philosophy, and law that is derived from the concrete. It is commonly supposed that, with the shift from pre-modern to modern ways of thinking – as modern knowledge came to privilege abstraction over exempla, the general over the particular – exemplarity lost its way. This book reveals the limits of this understanding. Tracing the role of exemplarity from Rome through to its influence on the fields of literature, politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis and law, it shows how Roman exemplarity has subsisted, not only as a figure of thought, but also as an alternative way to organize and to transmit knowledge.

CHAPTER	1
Introduction

La plupart des pensées et des sentiments profonds nous viennent, non pas directement et dans leurs formes nues et abstraites, mais à travers des combinaisons compliquées d’objets concrets.

Most thoughts and feelings of any depth come to us not directly and in the form of naked abstraction, but via complex combinations of concrete objects.

Charles Baudelaire, Un mangeur d’opium

Exemplarity in its many forms entails dialectical oscillation around an internal divide. Whether it comes as paradeigma or paradigm, as exemplum, exemplar, or mere instance, as Exempel or Beispiel, as (role) model or precedent, exemplarity mediates between the particular and the general, between a singularity and some larger cognitive framework by way of empirical observation and illustration, imagination and narrative. The two basic internal structures are the parallel expressed in the Greek prefix para- and the German prefix bei-, and an inside/outside relationship expressed in the in- or ex- prefix in words deriving from Latin, whether the item in question is conceived of as standing within the set (instance) or taken out of it (example) for the purposes of illustration. The example performs a discursive function, in Quintilian’s definition the “narrative recollection of a deed” (“commemoratio rei gestae,” 5.11.6).¹ Characteristically, it foregrounds the vivid particularity over its discursive, conceptual, or pre-conceptual work, which often remains latent. In common parlance, the example refers to the particular itself and not to its narrative recollection or conceptual subsumption, to the phenomenon and not to its capture in language. It is obvious, however, that “to take something as an example for something” already implies comparison and differentiation, that is, a linguistic structuring of perception, be it in the form of concepts or of narrative. The example unfolds its rhetorical, social, and epistemological power in the transitional space between perceived particulars and norms and rules, in the junction between observation and language. Different cultural techniques and disciplinary traditions bring exemplification and exemplarity into play.

There now exists much useful research on the manifold forms of exemplarity, their semantic fault lines and overlap, and the precise nature of how they relate the particularity or singularity in question to different frameworks across a wealth of languages and disciplines.² Our project is, however, in some ways broader in that we find structural commonalities between terms that tend anyway to blur – the difficulty in translating words for exemplification from German into English well illustrates the problem. It is also in some ways narrower, since we target an underlying exemplarity within disciplines that in various ways resist it. All forms of exemplarity turn in one way or another on an attempted integration, whose inevitable partiality becomes more or less apparent according to the disciplinary perspective adopted. Although some frameworks are hierarchically organized (e.g., the particular and the general), others entail a more horizontal relation, as in the paradeigma’s analogic movement from one particular to another described by Aristotle.³ Many of the disputes in the history of thinking about examples turn on the competition between flat and hierarchical methods of ordering, depending on whether the radical singularity of the thing or person exemplified or its conceptual subsumption is privileged.⁴ But this distinction is intrinsically unstable: no process of exemplification can eradicate some degree of hierarchy or some degree of flatness. Even Aristotle’s paradeigma implies an umbrella term, although it may never be named or otherwise marked.⁵ Quintilian’s self-explanatory use of examples to explain the example was a decisive model that governed the conceptualization of exemplarity until Kant’s turn away from given cases to a priori and transcendental “conditions of possibility.”⁶ Anselm Haverkamp stresses that much of the work done by examples is latent or, more exactly, it is the effect of structuring processes that pervade and eventually undermine the narrative surface of examples.⁷ Whether a discipline privileges hierarchy or a more horizontal analogy reveals much about its commitments, but also about its historical heritage, namely, the transmitted and determinant presuppositions of how a discipline understands the structures that constitute what phenomenology calls the life-world (Lebenswelt).

This volume starts from the premise that examples do not merely illustrate, but produce knowledge and condition its production. All forms of exemplification entail some model, however strong, diluted, or hidden. These arise outward from our perception and experience of the world, however much they may be preconditioned by already received organizing categories. We open with a translation of Hans Lipps’ classic analysis of the instance, example, and case from a phenomenological and a legal perspective. Beside its immediate interest, this text gives us the opportunity of a historical recuperation, since this seminal article has never found an English-speaking audience. A former assistant of Husserl and close friend of Edith Stein, Lipps inaugurated the development of what today, after Hans Blumenberg, Ian Hacking, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, goes by the name of “Historical Epistemology.” While Heidegger took phenomenology back to Aristotelian metaphysics and logic, Lipps’ rhetorical approach, grounded in Roman categories, anticipates speech act theory. Over against the existentialist pathos of Husserl’s other great intellectual heir, Lipps is pragmatic: he argues for the constitutive nature of examples in the construction of the life-world. He distinguishes between the active, grasping “concept” (Begriff) and language’s openness to the reception of experience in the “conception” (Konzeption), where examples are prior to definitions. His intervention provides the missing link between Roman rhetoric and the analytic turn in twentieth-century philosophy. Bernhard Waldenfels’ contribution, written to bring Husserl’s approach to the study of examples into the prominence it deserves and spurred by the clarity of Lipps’ proposed terminology, further disentangles the intricate overlaps and differences between example and instance, exemplum and Beispiel.⁸ Anselm Haverkamp’s complementary review examines the role examples play, together with metaphor, in the formation of concepts and analyzes the consequences of Lipps’ phenomenological invention for the tradition of thinking about exemplarity since Aristotle.⁹

What Lipps does for the law – namely recognize the constitutive role of cases to the law’s institution and to the process of judgment – applies to other fields. An example is never neutral: attempts at pure description founder on the speaker’s intentions, however open-minded or obscure, or the presuppositions of the discourse used (Gabriel 1998). Quintilian identifies the utility of an exemplum as its ability to persuade what you intend (5.11.6), but even beyond rhetoric’s overt recognition of how the material nitty-gritty of a parallel can condition an audience’s favorable reception of an argument, examples structure understanding pragmatically. Christiane Frey’s analysis of Francis Bacon’s exposition of scientific method demonstrates how the mediation between singularity and rule can be dynamic: in their interaction, each transforms the other. As Lipps emphasizes, the decision on a case does not merely apply the law, but produces it. Melanie Möller, Clifford Ando, and Peter Goodrich show in different ways that this generative capacity holds true equally for Roman law and English common law, although it is much more recognized for the latter than the former. Analogies have histories and their standardization in both content and structure informs disciplines.

The model implied by an example typically follows predominantly conceptual or predominantly moral lines, but again, these two axes cannot be kept radically distinct. The cognitive value of examples has a tendency to slide willy-nilly into moral evaluation. The descriptively normal becomes prescriptively normative, which in turn, reinforces the trend.¹⁰ Conversely, hot moral reasoning appropriates the tools of cool conceptual analysis. Our aim is to map a set of overlapping, but asymmetrical gray areas. The span from exemplification to exemplarity corresponds grosso modo to the tension between conceptualization and judgment, while that between singularity and the semantic field of exemplification and exemplarity taken together concerns the integration of individual elements within a broader framework. Disciplines seek legitimation according to where they set their methodological tipping point within these grey areas. The scientific culture of subsumption tends to reduce the example to an exchangeable instance, while the legal tradition of case law – common law – privileges precedent over general rules. We stress that these are tendencies on a sliding scale with no absolute at either end. At issue is the competition between the will to describe the world “objectively” and the development of prescriptive norms.

At first glance, modern philosophical and scientific cultures appear marked by a certain disdain for examples. Especially in philosophy, their use has often been demoted to the mere didactic illustration of general concepts for those unable to understand them without assistance from concrete cases or instances. “Examples are thus the go-cart of judgment,” as Immanuel Kant’s well-known dictum goes, “which he who is deficient in that natural talent cannot afford to dispense with” (CPR: B 174).¹¹ An equally well-known footnote to this passage specifies: “Deficiency in judgment is properly that which is called stupidity; and for such an affliction we know no remedy”¹² (CPR: B 173). Exemplification becomes a mere auxiliary to the business of knowledge, defined as the subsumption of particular events or appearances under general laws or rules:

If understanding in general be defined as the faculty of rules, judgment may be termed the faculty of subsuming under these rules; that is, of distinguishing whether something does or does not stand under a given rule (casus datae legis). (CPR: B 171)

This understanding of knowledge and judgment depends on several implicit presuppositions. First, that mankind’s “higher” faculties (understanding and reason) deal exclusively with laws and rules, not with particulars. Second, that the laws and rules of reason and understanding apply to all empirically discovered particulars and that they apply via subsumption. The particulars are, therefore, subordinate and submissive. Every particular becomes the case or instance of a general; in principle, the universe can be classified and knowledge can be organized by subsumption. Third, that exemplification intervenes in a sort of gray area between generals and particulars, where judgment does not come to terms with its business of subsumption right away and needs recourse or appeal to imagination (Einbildungskraft). Narratives or traditional models serve the process of “correctly” subsuming a given case by comparing it to former cases so as to detect similarities, analogies, and differences.

This concept of philosophy as a system of knowledge has hardly been left unchallenged. The critique of metaphysics since Nietzsche has contested the ability of general concepts to do justice to particulars in their singularity. The quest for an accurate system of description in phenomenology attempts to redirect the processes of knowledge formation and, in turn, judgment. Lipps’ analysis of the example starts with understanding before progressing to judging as a legal concern. Furthermore, the whole business of subsumption or...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Frontmatter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Instance, example, case, and the relationship of the legal case to the law*
• 3 For example
• 4 Equivalence unbalanced—metaphor, case, and example—from Aristotle to Derrida
• 5 Without example: Adorno
• 6 Roman exemplarity: mediating between general and particular
• 7 Between unique and typical: Senecan exempla in a list
• 8 Exemplum and Exceptio: building blocks for a rhetorical theory of the exceptional case
• 9 Exemplum, analogy, and precedent in Roman law1
• 10 Machiavelli's Agathocles: from criminal example to princely exemplum
• 11 The exampleless example: of the infinite particulars of early modern common law
• 12 Bacon's bee: the physiognomy of the singular*
• 13 The temper of exemplarity: Werther's horse
• 14 Stendhal: Julien Sorel in the footsteps of Napoleon
• 15 Beside oneself: parapraxis as a paradigm of everyday life (Freud)
• Index