Preface
This volume took its point of departure from the discovery by the editors of shared points of overlap and contrast in their research, particularly of asymmetrical intersections between modern case studies and Roman exemplarity. The issues in question revolve around the negotiation of the constitutive divide between particular and general, the normal and the normative, between the unique, the singular, and the type. The case and the model may operate according to different presuppositions about normativity, but both find themselves in relation to norms one way or another. We found that, despite the attempt of modern case study analysis to establish new disciplinary grounds based on the objective description of phenomena, the tradition of exemplarity with its implied moral code continually returns under new guises and exerts influence, often under erasure.
The path to publication has been indirect. Several conferences preceded this volume. Anselm Haverkamp organized an international conference under the title “Zum Beispiel” (Berlin 2008) as the second part of a series “The Practice of Theory.” The first part has been published as Metaphorologie: Zur Praxis von Theorie, A. Haverkamp and D. Mende (eds) Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 2009. Michèle Lowrie and Susanne Lüdemann organized two conferences entitled “Exemplarity/Singularity.” The first, coordinated jointly with Christiane Frey (University of Konstanz, 2011), concentrated on the relation between the exemplum and the case as vehicles for conceptualizing subjectivity. The second (University of Chicago, 2012) examined the Roman tradition of thinking through particulars and the reception of this tradition, particularly in Italian and German philosophy and literature. Although some papers from each event have been included here, a selection was made according to fit – many excellent papers were also given that have either appeared or will appear elsewhere. We have additionally commissioned the pieces by Peter Goodrich on common law and Robert Morrissey on Stendhal to round out the program.
A decision was made early on not to aim for coverage – the topic is too vast even within philosophy, rhetoric, law, or any given national literature – but rather to focus on paradigmatic approaches and telling instantiations. We are less interested in developing a linear history of thinking with examples than in exploring the pitfalls of their conceptualization or of the thinking about them that precedes full abstraction. This has posed a challenge, since our own procedure must work dialectically between examples of thinking with examples and the history of theorizing about them. We settled on three sections, each of which explores aspects of the relationship of exemplarity to singularity according to its own logic and sits at something of an angle to the others. “The Practice of Theory: A Historical Reminder” sets out the most abstractly theoretical modern approaches, ranging from the embrace of particularity within phenomenology to Adorno’s resistance to giving examples. “The Roman Practice of Exemplarity” shows that, contrary to the supposition that thinking with exempla is a conservative impulse reliant on inherited norms, the Romans and their heirs took advantage of the flexibility inherent in particulars to develop nuanced and responsive methods of moral, legal, and political reasoning. “Exemplarity/Singularity” ranges widely – historically between the Romans and twentieth-century theory, in discipline across law, science, literature, and psychoanalysis – in the exploration of the fault lines between conflicting desires: for individuality and for normative order.
CHAPTER
1
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 sublation of the individual under or in the general has come to appear as a highly ideological operation that must be dismissed or “deconstructed.” The ensuing critique of the general and appraisal and esteem of singularities (rather than particularities) in their unsubsumable uniqueness has not, however, led to a new appreciation of examples – disdain continues, although for different reasons. Whereas classical philosophical thought held examples in low esteem because they are, as it were, “too individual,” and therefore threaten the purity and clarity of general concepts and conceptual thinking by confusing it with too many irrelevant details (which then can also be rhetorically abused in order to pervert the concept or distort the order of knowledge), the critique of metaphysics, on the contrary, takes no stock in examples because they are “not individual enough.” Taken as a mere example for a general concept and thus as one instance among others, a singular event is deprived of its singularity and perceived only in terms of its comparability to others. Adorno ‘s resistance to examples in the Aesthetic Theory, for example, depends on his understanding of the work of art as a singular historical event. As Eva Geulen points out, it is in a sort of contra-motion to this that the philosopher’s singular fate, in Minima Moralia, becomes “the damaged life par excellence.” This is the flip side of the example as one instance among others. Adorno’s canon of unparalleled exemplars – another Latin word – demonstrates that the avoidance of exemplification can nevertheless foster exemplarity. The gray area between generals and particulars where imagination and judgment proceed by comparing and contrasting, grouping and regrouping “cases,” separating out what does not fit some overarching system, calls for further examination.
According to Michel Foucault, the emergence of modern disciplinary societies near the end of the eighteenth century fostered new “clinical” sciences that address “the problem of the entry of the individual (and no longer the species) into the field of knowledge; the problem of the individual description, of the cross-examination, of anamnesis, of the ‘file’ into the general functioning of scientific discourse” (1995: 191). With the help of these documentation techniques, disciplinary societies made “each individual a ‘case’ – a case which at one and the same time constitutes an object for a branch of knowledge and a hold for a branch of power.” The case would thereby “no longer (be), as in casuistry or jurisprudence, a set of circumstances defining an act and capable of modifying the application of a rule”; and it would also no longer be, as in the antique and medieval example, a model designed for imitation or deterrence. Instead, “the case” would be “the individual as he may be described, judged, measured, [and] compared with others, in his very individuality; and it is also the individual who has to be trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, etc” (ibid.). In Foucault’s account, the “case” represents the hinge that links the individual and society’s disciplinary authorities – the school, the hospital, the prison, and the barracks – while these, in turn, are undergirded by an all-encompassing dispositive of the human sciences: pedagogy, psychology, forensics, and the demographic sciences work together to “educate” the individual, to treat, rehabilitate, and to control his or her sexuality.
Beyond epistemology and its discontents, modern literature seems to accede to resistance to the example, mainly in the sense of taking the individual’s part in its fight against “the general,” be it incorporated by the state, law, or social expectations. On the other hand, literature also participates in the new discursive power outlined by Foucault in turning away from heroic achievements and affairs of state, interesting itself instead in what he calls the “lives of infamous men” (2000: 157–75). The tradition of exemplarity against which modern literature turns is, to be sure, different from the philosophical one. It depends less on the example as illustrating or supporting evidence to an argument than on the exemplar as the pinnacle of some characteristic. As in philosophy, the singular instance invites generalization in literature. The unique cannot be processed as such, but nevertheless invites universalization without comparability.
The emphasis on the incomparable may be characteristic of modern literature, but it is hardly unparalleled in antiquity. The chorus in Sophocles’ Oidipous tyrannos address the blinded Oedipus: “Having your paradeigma, the spirit of your fate (daimon), yours, O wretched Oedipus, I consider blessed nothing of mortals” (1885: line 1193). They infer on the basis of his singular, inimitable example that all of mankind cannot be blessed – not that we are Oedipal or that we should be warned against following his terrifying example. Mankind is assimilated to his wretchedness even if innocent of his actions. Oedipus is both unique and universal. No logical genos, whole, or common third term operates a subsumption here. There is no argument from singularity to singularity, from one man, Oedipus, to any other man, as there would be with brotôn oudena. But the Greek reads “nothing of mortals,” not “no one of mortals.” The chorus goes directly from Oedipus to the generality of being human without passing through other singularities. Mankind’s potential for misery is rather realized in Oedipus. Sophocles’ para-deigma is neither logical syllogism nor rhetorical enthymeme, but exhibits the drive to generalize the inimitable into an all-encompassing “human condition” based on incomparability – the opposite principle of the Oedipal desire that, according to Freud, unites us all.
Oedipal desire, however, could also be reframed in terms of exemplarity: at least according to René Girard (1979), the desire to sexually possess the mother arises from the mimetic desire to be like the father, that is, from taking him as an example in the normative sense of a role model. The Oedipus complex only “decays” when the imaginary identification with the father (where to be like him means to eliminate him in order to take his place) is transformed into the symbolic internalization of the cultural norms he represents (where to be like him means to accept the rules and norms he had accepted before, including the incest taboo). Considered from this point of view, the function of exemplarity is not only cultural and epistemological, but rooted in anthropological requirements. Human identity only evolves by way of imaginary and symbolic identification which, in turn, depends on the existence of incorporated examples within a given culture, whether in life or in literature. The distinction between imaginary and symbolic identification seems to be crucial for the way in which these examples are used.
In the standard narrative, up to around 1800, literature was bound to the tradition of the exemplar as the extreme that informs the type (Le malade imaginaire, L’hypocrite) and to the extraordinary exemplum that through its clarifying uniqueness nevertheless sets a normative role model (Cato as a Stoic hero). Although literature, in contrast to philosophical discourse, tells stories or stages events in a way that always deals with individual cases, whether historical or fictional, it used to go without saying that the individual case was interesting or worth examination only insofar as it could serve as a good or bad example, deserving of imitation or fulfilling the function of a cautionary tale. But whereas Sophocles offers a paradox, only with the rise of the modern culture of individuality has the individual in its unprecedented and unequaled singularity gained the center stage of literary attention. When Rousseau (1782/2004: 4) declares that “I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I am at least different [autre]”,13 his claim marks a rupture with traditional society, where personal identity was bound up with the imitation and even embodiment of transmitted models and exempla, as well as announcing a new program of literary writing. If, as Niklas Luhmann (1993) frames it incisively, modern individuality fashions itself no longer on the basis of inclusion, but of exclusion (“being different”), exemplarity loses its way even in literature.
The appraisal or eulogy of singularity, whether in philosophy or literature, can be described as the impossible desire not to be judged or compared, to be relieved of or discharged from the annoying hassle with the general altogether. “In the course of time one grows weary of the perpetual patter about the universal, always the universal, repeated to the most tedious extreme of insipidity”, as Søren Kierkegaard put it in his critique of Hegelian sublation: “There are exceptions” (1843/1983: 227).14 However, the scientific and philosophical desire for subsumption (the desire to be “sublated,” aufgehoben, to use the Hegelian term, which also means to be well-protected, to be in good hands) can also be interpreted as the equally impossible desire to be relieved of or discharged from (enthoben) the necessity of unsecured comparison and judgment, as the desire for an omniscient father, an infallible state, or an impeccable science that deliver the rules and norms through which the existence of every individual is always already mediated.
The whole psychopathology of the modern individual can be described as a dialectical desire for both radical singularity and normative exemplarity. Modern German literature in particular does not tire of staging characters torn between the delicious liberty of being unique and incomparable and the desire for “sublation,” between rebellion against and submission to the authorities in place (Lüdemann 2007), between melancholic or hysterical refusal or denial and obsessive self-subsumption. David Martyn situates Goethe’s the Sorrow of Young Werther at the inception of this tradition. Beyond the blatant manifestations of this “bipolar” condition of modernity, however, or between its poles, we can find ongoing cultures of exemplarity and practices of exemplification at work, cultures and practices that do not only avoid or subvert the bad alternative of the two impossible desires but open up different forms of organizing knowledge, of fashioning the self, of judging, and of philosophizing.
To better trace the dynamics undergirding the persistence of exemplarity in modernity, we reexamine the Roman tradition, less as a matter of citation or reception than one of an enduring problematic whose deep roots have become obscure.15 Beyond providing much of the vocabulary of exemplification, Roman texts offer insight into a robust cultural matrix through which to explore the exemplary articulation of normativity that elicits such modern resistance and desire in Foucault and Kant alike. The ancient practice of exemplarity starts from a set of values embodied in known figures that offer models to be imitated or avoided. Cicero’s tag, “historia magistra vitae” (“history is the schoolmistress of life,” De oratore 1881: at 2.36), captures this tradition and Livy articulates its didacticism:
This is especially healthy and fruitful in thinking (cognitione) about things, for you to examine the records of every exemplum that have been placed on an illustrious monument and from there to take for yourself and your commonwealth what you should imitate, from there to determine what you should avoid as foul in its beginning, foul in its end. (Livy 1974: at Praef. 10)
His history aids the reader in the formation of his (mostly his) self. Livy describes no artificial thought experiment by isolated individuals: his reader is a citizen, a fully fledged participant, whose deliberations consciously and willingly follow accepted social norms; the exempla presented undergird the proper functioning of Roman society. The interdependence of the republic, shared norms, and the men who represent them come together in the epic poet Ennius’ pithy line: moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque (“Roman affairs stand on ancient customs and men,” Annales 1985: line 156). The customs of the ancestors (mores maiorum) are continually re-embodied generation after generation in exemplary men who make society work. Stories about them, in addition to statute, provided the ground of the uncodified Roman Republican constitution (Lintott 1999: 26). Citizens learn from the example of their predecessors, which they internalize and transmit to their descendants in a performative process that reproduces inherited norms and sustains collective memory.16 The definition of the exemplum in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, an early first century BCE rhetorical treatise, underscores the emphasis on embodiment – an author needs to be named: “An exemplum is the setting forth of some past deed or saying with the name of a specified author (auctor)” (“Cicero” 1954: at 4.62). The name of the agent lends authority to the exemplum; its repetition fortifies the authority of the agent in a feedback loop. Although the extreme embodiment of a characteristic in a named individual stands out in isolated vividness, Matthew Roller shows how authority also dwells in repeated imitation, which generates lists: the unique becomes a singularity in a series. It is not just the Roman assumption of agency in understanding, judgment, and putting judgment into action that Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary societies will target as illusory, but also the moralizing appreciation for the entire process.
The basic assumptions underlying the Roman practice of exemplarity can be characterized, not entirely unfairly, as the value of authority over science, morality over knowledge, rhetoric over philosophy, assumed and informal cultural norms over formal rules, narrative over logic, the embodiment of virtues (or vices) in famous figures, argumentation by affect, and the casuistic and performative exercise of judgment. The Latin sources reenact the problematic: they offer little by way of abstract analyses of how to read exempla, but display their methods through praxis. Together, they articulate a set of regular cultural practices based not only on shared values but also on consensus about the procedures through which knowledge can be formed and judgments made. They cross lines of discipline or genre and reach deep into all realms of social and political life. Such practices hardly erase contestation, but provide a framework for structuring it. There was very little by way of debate about the rules of the game and the statement in Justinian, cited by Melanie Möller and Clifford Ando, that judgments should be made according to laws and not by way of examples (Codex Iustinianus 7.45.13) is a late and isolated plea for systematicity over against a more casuistic approach. From a Kantian perspective, such informal procedures appear too ad hoc and insufficiently systematic. The rule of law yields too much to individual judgment in specific cases. However, from a Foucauldian point of view, unspoken agreement about implicit norms hides and thereby reinforces social conventions to an excessive degree and forecloses the exercise of freedom beyond the purview of an elite who are in the know.
The Roman refusal to extricate knowledge from judgment and their assumption that one cannot analyze or deliberate about particulars without shared norms appear refreshingly honest in a post-Enlightenment age that has also grown weary of post-modernism. Even their superficially naïve worship of virtuous heroes responds to needs that have not been eradicated by the elevation of the i ndividual – simultaneously unique and average, precious and worthless – as the modern and impotent subject. The debunking of the participatory, reflective citizen has foreclosed avenues for imagining how even to begin to take action and has frozen subjectivity between radical isolation and largely unconscious and crushing disciplinary pressures. Robert Morrissey’s analysis of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black shows the lingering hunger for heroic models and distinction in the early nineteenth century at the same time as the devastating consequences of following them for aristocrats and social climbers alike. Today, the dominance of superheroes on the big screen, many of them social and species misfits, exaggerates the cult of individuality while pushing heroism beyond ordinary human capacities. The Romans will not lead us out of this paradox, although reconsideration of their procedures for negotiating the gap between the inimitable exemplary hero and the enactable norm will perhaps permit us to articulate its contours more clearly.
The example does things through stories.17 Quintilian’s formulation of the “narrative recollection of deed,” cited above, brings to light the underlying narr-ativity of exempla. As a pre-existing action, his res gesta provides material for what the Russian formalists call fabula, while commemoratio, as the narrating discourse, corresponds to sujet. An exemplum can be expanded into a longer narrative, but bare mention is the degree zero of narrativity (Roller 2004: 2, 10): it triggers recollection and sets up expectations of acceptance in a homogenous society where everyone is presumed to know the standard stories. The orator uses exempla as mini-narratives analogous to (and, therefore, in support of) the larger “story” he is trying to get his audience to buy. Collections of exempla from Valerius Maximus’ Memorable Deeds and Sayings (2000) to Karl Philipp Moritz’s Magazine of Empirical Psychology (1986) and beyond may group them under rubrics, but these rubrics can always be questioned (Lüdemann 2014), the stories can come into conflict with one another, and their explicit burden may be minimal (Langlands 2011). In Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, as Paul Fleming shows, the stories convey the theory with little by way of theorization.
Within the law and literature movement, there has been a call to recognize that narrative cannot be replaced as a tool for organizing certain kinds of meaning, particularly those that are time-dependent and sequential (Brooks 2006: 5). But like all storytelling or other discursive entities that speak to the imagination, examples resist rules, as in Gelley’s witty title Unruly Examples (1995). The dangers of exemplarity – or its advantages – go in divergent directions. On the one hand, the pressure to fit events into pre-existing story patterns can occlude understanding, can lead to false judgments and the condemnation of innocents (Grunewald 2013). In Melanie Möller’s explication of rhetorical status theory, even before reaching the point of argumentation, precedents conditioned the kind of case that could be argued and determined what kind of law the case could be tried under. The exception pushes against the typological pressure exerted by exemplary precedents: it can rectify and, when it becomes a new precedent, allows the system to adapt, but it can also distort. However, the meaning of examples exceeds their use: their resistance to subsumption allows for retroping. The ancients took advantage of their slipperiness and offered competing versions of known stories (e.g., Levene 2000). But with the fragmentation of shared canons, each discipline has quested for new and unparalleled examples, fresh evidence that speaks – as if it could – on its own terms.
The Roman tendency to embody concepts in representative exemplars as paragons of one or another characteristic allows many of their more original thoughts to be expressed not through abstract analysis, but through the medium of stories. Although the metonymic association of a characteristic with a person (stoic virtue with Cato) may look, at first glance, simplistic, such embodiment brings along a complex package of a whole person, a whole history, whose meaning is fuzzier than an abstraction and must be excavated through interpretation. Judgment is again needed not only to test analogies between exempla, but to determine where to draw the line against irrelevance, a skill similar to that needed for reading metaphors and extended similes. Anselm Haverkamp examines the structural similarity of metaphor and example in terms of latency.18 It is not only that the implicit subsuming category may not in fact, rise into view, but unintended associations cannot help but bubble up. If the grotesque imagine of Cato ripping out his own intestines occurs to an audience, it might cloud the virtuous picture the speaker attempts to convey. Historical and prior narrative contexts attach to the type and complicate its analogical transfer.
A contrary strand in Roman exemplarity, however, is emphasized by Rebecca Langlands: the practice of rational deliberation through situation ethics that reaches judgment comparatively, case by case. Likewise, Clifford Ando pushes back against the under-appreciation in Roman legal studies of the extent to which Roman imperial law judged by case rather than system. But we should not be deluded: the Romans created no Habermasian utopia, whether through the Republican political or legal deliberation championed by Cambridge School political theorists, much less under the social conditions of Empire, once citizens, at least in Foucault’s (1988) narrative, became free to devote themselves to care of the self when “relieved” of the necessities of agency.19 The Romans’ simultaneous embrace of the pragmatic exercise of judgment on a case-by-case basis and commitment to the normative package, assumed but not described, that goes by the name of the mos maiorum (customs of the ancestors), allows both for a conservative resistance to novelty and a flexibility that enables radical change, whose combination meant that innovation often went under the radar, wearing the disguise of convention. Möller’s location of the exception at the heart of the exemplum within Republican conceptions of legal practice identifies system instability from the get-go. As Lipps suggests in his treatment of “loopholes” in the law, where to draw the line in the system requires the same skills of comparative judgment as are exercised in individual cases: it is always a question of the “correct standards.”
Since at least the Renaissance, Roman practices of exemplarity have been preserved, whilst simultaneously resisted or even subverted. John McCormick’s analysis of Machiavelli shows how this keen reader of Livy and Plutarch used their methods, comparative case studies and a complex of exemplary types respectively, to avoid subsumption. By not spelling out his political theory but challenging the reader to derive it rather from the comparison of narratives, Machiavelli manages to substitute radically innovative political guidelines – we hesitate to say norms! – that would have otherwise undergone censure, while still working within a framework inspired by Livy. Lessing goes further in both preservation and subversion: when Emilia Galotti says that she “stands for nothing,” that she is “good for nothing” before enacting her suicide through her father’s hands along the lines of the Roman Verginia, she both invokes the Roman tradition of exemplarity and denies its validity at the same time (Lüdemann 2013).
The double rejection in modernity of the lack of systematicity in Roman procedures for knowing and judging on the one hand and excessive and surreptitious social control on the other pushed the Roman tradition off the horizon of many disciplines concerned with knowledge and judgment during the latter half of the twentieth century. Law has been an exception, precisely because Justinian’s recension converted a disorganized body of legal commentary into a coherent system; Rome has received continuous study as the ground of continental European law. Recently, however, Rome has been making a comeback in other disciplines. Besides and against the Cambridge School revival of Republicanism in Roman garb, which has attempted to rethink the virtuous and participatory citizen, the recognition of the role played by affect, persuasion, and rhetoric in Roman political thought has become attractive to political theorists with less confidence in virtue or reason.20 Although classical reception has become a booming field, the national literatures nevertheless have a tendency to isolationism that our selection of papers across languages, ages, and modalities of thought aims to correct.
Many of the assumptions underlying exemplarity make it attractive to thinkers today interested in understanding the boundaries of reason, embodied norms, the narrative organization of argument, thinking through imagination, and the various failures of systematicity. Our idea to bring expertise across fields together in this volume arose from the insight that here, as always, simple alternatives or oppositions (particular/general, particular/singular, singular/exemplary, normal/normative, individual/society, premodern/modern societies, etc.) do not adequately account for the subterranean but continuing effects of the deeply engrained traditions of exemplarity on modern thought.
Endnotes
1See (1976) and (2002) editions. French, Greek, and Latin translations are by Michèle Lowrie unless otherwise specified.
2Jonsen and Toulmin (1989); Forrester (1996); Harvey (2002); Ruchatz, Willer, and Pethes (2007) 7–59; Del Mar (2013).
3Aristotle Prior Analytics (69a13–14): the paradeigma does not function as a part with respect to the whole or as a whole with respect to the part but as a part with respect to a part; discussed by Agamben (2008) 20.
4E.g., Kant (1787) favors subsumption, Agamben (2008) radical singularity.
5Aristotle (1926) at Rhetoric 1.2.19 classifies the paradeigma as a kind of induction and (1938) at Prior analytics 1.24 specifies that it goes under some genos or kind, as aspect ignored by Agamben (2008).
6Haverkamp (2002) 80ff. and 129ff.
7Haverkamp (2011) 60ff. and 76ff.
8This piece was specially commissioned for the “Zum Beispiel” conference to offer a response to Lipps (above xii).
9See also Haverkamp (2007) 109–116.
10Link (2006); Fleming (2009).
11See Kant (1787). Translations from German are by Susanne Lüdemann.
12Lloyd (1995).
13Translated from French by Susanne Lüdemann.
14Translation modified by Susanne Lüdemann.
15Koselleck (1979) traces modern shifts away from Roman models, but also shows their persistence once transformed. For social historical approaches to Roman exemplarity, see Hölkeskamp (2004) and Wallace-Hadrill (2008) Ch. 5, esp. 225–339. More textually oriented approaches are Chaplin (2000), Roller (2004) and (2009), Kraus (2005), Lowrie (2007), (2008a), and (2008b). Langlands (2011) focuses on the processes of moral reasoning. Koselleck (1979) traces modern shifts away from Roman models, but also shows their persistence once transformed.
16An extreme of internalization is self-exemplarity; see Lowrie (2007).
17We nod here to Landy’s title, How to Do Things with Fictions (2012). He stresses equally the pragmatics of telling stories and their inability to be reduced to a moral.
18Beyond his piece in this volume, metaphor, exemplarity, and latency have been recurrent concerns: Haverkamp (2002), (2007), and (2011).
19For a critique of reductive uses of the Romans for contemporary political theory, in particular the Cambridge School, see Ando (2010).
20Hammer (2008) and (2014); Connolly (2007) and (2014).
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