CHAPTER

3

For example

Bernhard Waldenfels

Are examples nothing more than mere examples? This depends upon the role they play for us, in our thinking, speaking, acting and representing. The disdain for, and trivialization of, the example, which we encounter over and over again in philosophy, betrays something about the way we philosophize. This changes when we not only use examples, but also submit their use to phenomenological analysis. This will show how the general use of examples takes on specific forms, according to the constitution of the experience to be exemplified. We will make a clear distinction between normal experiences, those that repeat themselves, and surprising encounters, in which experience undergoes a change in pace and structure. This leads to the development of an opposition between exemplary experiences and unparalleled contingencies. Finally, it will be a question of how the two relate to one another.

The use of examples

Examples are characterized by their indirect nature; they serve to clarify and illuminate what they are not.¹ They show what one means when one speaks of something, the objective of an action or how one does it. What serves as an example is no example. This excludes a simple ontologization; examples don’t exist in gallery form, like a storeroom that would provide models or paradigms. Something is used, observed, or treated as an example. The Greek word παραδεικνύναι, from which paradigm derives, means accordingly “to indicate,” “to show incidentally” (ἐν παρέργῳ; literally: as accessory, accoutrement).² The incidental [das Beiläufige] has an echo in the German word for example, “Beispiel,” which derives from the Old and Middle-High German “bispel.” The example, along with images, signs and models, belongs to the intermediate instances that determine how we encounter something in experience. If phenomenology and hermeneutics both begin with the assumption that something appears as or is understood as something, this too takes place by means of examples, since every “as” is in need of explanation.

Here, two larger functional regions are to be distinguished. Examples are linked on the one hand with meaning; by means of examples, something can be shown (monstrare). Examples make visible, place before the eyes, illustrate what is meant. On the other hand, examples are linked to desire: they move towards something (movere). They stimulate, encourage or daunt. The phrase exempla trahunt is to be complemented through exempla terrent. Examples exert a surprising force, one that carries into the traces they leave behind and into their normative impact. Examples are as ambivalent [zwielichtig] as the proverbial fire with which one plays. This would also hold for models and paradigms, both of which aim at an ideal, albeit not only to elevate but also to demote.

As far as the impact of examples is concerned, it is noteworthy that they can appear both implicitly and explicitly—similar to quotes which, as implicit, enter covertly into speech before being declared or marked through quotation marks. Things are exempla sui, they illuminate themselves, just as images and signs initially merge with the image- and sign-like qualities of things. One learns from things before one learns something about them. The situation is similar with people, who act as living examples insofar as they embody general attitudes and opinions, and who, as “exemplary auctores,” (Critique of Judgment, B139) not only cause imitation but also leave a legacy. Thus, quite a bit has already happened when one looks explicitly for examples (or requests them as such), as in situations of incomplete understanding: “Give me an example so I can see what you mean!” But is it so simple to see what is meant, or to let it be seen? If I should point a finger at an apple, I might mean its redness, the spherical shape, its scent or the Biblical object of seduction. This conveys, as Wittgenstein notes in his Logical Investigations (N. 28), that “an ostensive definition can be variously interpreted in every case.” Pointers offer no solutions.

Examples can have real content or assume a fictitious “as-if” character. One illustrates a given state of affairs by means of known, repeated, rare or invented situations. Examples can be found or invented. They can impress themselves upon one, or can be quite far-fetched. Of course, they also betray something about the one who uses them. Examples are detectors. Husserl places particular emphasis on the role of phantasy, explaining fiction as the “vital element of phenomenology” (Husserl 1983: §70). In this, he refers to collections of scientific models and to history’s representations, but particularly to art and poetry, “which are, to be sure, imaginary but which, in the originality of their invention of forms [Neugestaltungen], the abundance of their single features and the unbrokenness of their motivation tower high above the products of our own phantasy” (ibid) and distinguish themselves through a particular “suggestive power.” The border between reality and fiction can, however, become blurred. When does the theatrical fire on stage become a real fire hazard? When does an indirect representation of the political pass into a direct political action? When does parody become blasphemy? Examples, once established, are not so easy to keep under control; they work not only when we want, but also when they want. Hence, the audience which laughs or applauds at the “wrong” time is a threat to every authority. Examples teach us something about the empirical situation in which they are played out.

The way that examples work their effects says little about how they come about. Behind the turn of phrase “for example” (par exemple, zum Beispiel) stands the question: How does something come to be an example? Discussion of this question will lead us down a double path. We will distinguish between an exemplarity that operates within the framework of a valid order, and an exemplarity without parallel that bursts the frames of this order, leading down the route of indirect description.

Exemplary experiences

The notion of exemplary experience moves primarily within the framework of traditional conceptions of order: something becomes an example when it is a matter of bridging the hiatus between the general and the particular.³ Such a hiatus is not self-evident. It presumes open horizons of experience, those that lend themselves to a concrete description but not an exact definition, which presupposes a “definite manifold” and an equally “definite system of axioms” (see Husserl 1983: §§ 71–75). With respect to attempts at bridging, these can begin in each case from either of the two sides. This results in two different constellations.

The first constellation (A) results from the ascent from the particular to the general— known in Aristotelian terms as epagoge—not to be confused with a generalizing inductive conclusion. Examples serve to reveal general traits in the particular. They function, so to speak, as generality filters, in that they teach us to abstain from the incidental, to abstract. This taking-away (ἀφαίρεσις) happens by analogy with perception, not in turning away from it. Accordingly, the goal is the eidos, the idea as visible form that can be elevated to an ideal model. The process of exemplification assumes the form of a clarifying act of illustration. This form was in place as early as the Socratic dialogues, when the question of justice moves from “this instance of the just man” via “being just” to “the just” as such. One shows what one is striving for in thought, and what one is speaking of.⁴ With Husserl, this takes place in the form of an eidetic vision, which runs through certain “stages of clarity” (Husserl 1983: § 68) and draws upon examples for clarification. The danger is always that one becomes lost in individual cases, answering the question of bravery with an enumeration of weapons techniques, or the question of political corruption with stories about Berlusconi. These evasive maneuvers correspond to a convenient form of casuistry, one that never advances beyond the level of cognitive aggregation. But the selection of one-sided examples can also have disruptive effects. As Wittgenstein remarks in the Logical Investigations (N. 593): “a main cause of philosophical disease—a one-sided diet: one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example.” A tendentious selection ultimately leads to a politics of examples that relies upon suggestive rhetorical means.

Examples that illuminate a general point of view are sought for and found. They may prove to be appropriate, but may also prove to be lopsided or inapt. Pithiness is a notable demand; examples must reduce the complexity of a state of affairs in such a way as to render the decisive aspects eye-catching. Examples are no material for reference works, which document common knowledge in alphabetical order. Examples prove to be inappropriate when they make an impermissible comparison, overlooking substantial differences, such as when a court verdict is mistaken for a statement of opinion, or an advertising slogan for product analysis. Examples, however, are not only found but also to a certain extent invented, in that one brings a specific point of view into play. Invented examples resemble those jokes whose effects of surprise elude any regulation. Fitting examples are not limited to using the word ‘or’ as an example of a conjunction, or to suggest “How do you do?” and “Grüß Gott” as examples of salutations. Examples with heft are not merely correct, but rather allow us to see and understand more. A similar thing takes place in parables and analogies, by means of a narration which invents scenes that lend themselves to comparison—such as the search for a lost pearl, or the act of waiting before an official’s door.

A second constellation (B) grows out of the descent from the general to the particular. Here it is a matter of practice, of application— although once again, in a manner not to be confused with deduction. Application is directed by its point of departure, rules or laws; but here it is a matter of open rules, not of axioms, as in a deductive system. Classical examples of this type are the so-called “case studies.” The selected cases are often extremely trivial; more than a few textbook examples in law or ethics prove nothing more than what one already knows. Some of them, however, are so defiant that the rules no longer suffice—take, for example, the case of injustice and revenge in the story of Michael Kohlhaas, or the proverbial Solomonic wisdom that makes a lie detector of motherly love. Solomonic wisdom is exemplary in the sense that it has to prove itself anew with every precarious situation. We also encounter productive examples in the domain of medicine, as in the form of patient Schneider, well-known to phenomenologists. In the wake of the First World War, Kurt Goldstein and Adhémar Gelb spent years observing how Schneider’s brain injuries affected various types of 'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times",serif;color:blue'>5 Example cases, like those we know from jurisprudence, art history or the philosophy of science, can develop into extensive case studies, leaving behind the path of mere application.

The decisive point, what it all comes down to in indirect and paradigmatic description, is that a gap opens up between the general and the particular that can only be crossed with a leap. It makes no difference for this leap if one is ascending from the particular to the general, or descending from the general to the particular. This problem emerges in Plato as chorismos, the separation of aesthesis and noesis. For Kant, who in contrast to the empiricists and rationalists neither begins exclusively from above nor from below, a gap opens in the middle of the transcendental system, a double lack: “Thoughts without content are empty. Intuitions without concepts are blind” (Critique of Pure Reason, B75). What role do examples play in these circumstances?

With the ascent, which initiates learning and cognition from below, examples are introduced ostensively (Critique of Pure Reason, B817). The individual thing becomes an example when more appears in it than just it. Hence Hegel’s remark in the beginning chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit: “An actual sense-certainty is not merely this pure immediacy, but an example of it” (Hegel 1971: 59; ❡ 92, trans. slightly modified). Here we see the excess of meaning, mentioned above, which may be unfolded through comparisons with similar things, through a dialectical antithesis or through an imaginative variation of the circumstances of experience. Examples find themselves in a sort of limbo; they do not themselves answer to “what is” questions, they do not define, nor do they explain. They perform a heuristic function that extends farther than all didactic use. They must fight back against the signs of wear and tear that appear in the form of clichés. This is where the value of counter-examples lies, like the proverbial black swan: these are examples that can be added on but not integrated in. The situation looks different when descending: here, examples are implemented tentatively, like supports and guide rails that provide stability on shaky ground or samples that one takes.

The two uses of examples, beginning on the one hand from below and on the other from above have different weights. The ostensive use, which operates in an open realm of experience, aims toward the discovery of the new, whereas the tentative use, which departs from a more or less definite order, submits existing forms to further testing. Accordingly, Hans Lipps distinguishes between exploratory instances and pragmatic exempla: “To take something as an instance of something [in the first sense] and to bring something to bear as an example [in the second sense] are thus two different things. The presentation of an instance of something [in the first sense] places me in a disposition of mood wherein I understand what it is that the instance instantiates. In the case of the example [in the second sense], on the other hand, I gain an insight that I can put to use, as in the way one learns from a fable” (Lipps 1977; trans. this volume 20). The knowledge that has been run through the filter of concrete experience finds its advocate in Aristotle, who opposes, in a number of practical disciplines (medicine, law, technology), an empirical know-how acquired through habituation to the epistemological knowledge of generalizing laws. Here, then, it is the case that the descriptive “that” precedes the explanatory “because,” even rendering it partially dispensable (see Nic. Ethics I, 4, 1095 b 6–7). Rousseau, as pedagogue, goes a step further. In his anti-modern faith in nature he pits sense experience against a knowledge derived from books, which are for children the “instruments of their greatest misery”: “Words, more words, always words–Des mots, encore des mots et toujours des mots”, as he writes in Émile (Rousseau 1969 IV: 346). This finds an echo in the parrot’s refrain in Raymond Queneau’s urban picaresque novel, Zazie dans le metro: “You prattle, you prattle, it’s all you know how to do – tu cause, tu cause, c’est tout ce que tu sais faire.”

Even taken together, these efforts cannot conceal that the gap between the particular and the general cannot be bridged. No matter which direction one tugs, the rope is too short at both ends. One tried and true countermeasure is the devaluation of examples. One regards examples as mere examples, capable of playing an auxiliary but never a constitutive role; they neither prove nor explain anything, nor contribute to systematization. An alternate, highly demanding solution exists in the sublation of examples in the course of a mediation between the general and the particular, in which only the cinder of contingency remains behind. In the “concrete particular,” what is only sensibility’s “accompaniment” (Hegel 1971: 67; ❡ 112) [Beiherspielende] elevates itself to the idea, without leaving the ground of experience – or so it seems. But a mediating approach conflicts with the contingency of how things are ordered—a contingency that appears as each order’s blind spot. If we take this contingency seriously, we are confronted with the question of how to conceive of examples with respect to this blind spot (on this see Waldenfels 1987; engl. Waldenfels 1996).

Unparalleled contingencies

Talk of unparalleled [beispiellos] experiences is no rhetorical superfluity. It imposes itself as soon as the axis “general/particular,” with which we have oriented ourselves up until now, crosses with a second axis, “ordinary/extraordinary.” Experience does not begin when something is given, but rather when something affects us, concerns us, occurs to us or stands out; it begins with a contingent encounter, a pathos.⁶ There are dark, indefinite things that “knock at the door of intuition,” to invoke the image Husserl uses (Husserl 1983: §69, trans. slightly modified). The base constellation thus becomes complicated when we take into account ruptures in experience. Singular encounters and affections, which precede the formation of meaning, do not coincide with the “singular givens” of perception (Husserl 1999: 69/50; trans. slightly modified) or with the “eidetic singularity” which Husserl places at the lower end of an essential order [Wesensordnung] (Husserl 1983: §75), comparable to the ἄτομον εἶδος of Greek ontology.

The breaking in (or seeping) of new types of experience brings the extraordinary with it; this exceeds the frame of the given order and is unparalleled in its singularity. Confirming instances of this can be found in public events as well as in the history of individuals and families. Thus, the outbreak of the First World War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the discovery of the x-ray, the invention of polyphony or the birth of a human being are more than an example that fits into a chain of events, not least because the integration of the event itself already stands under the effect of this event. This holds as well for the creation of new orders—as, for example, with the introduction of a time scale that, as terminus a quo, marks a historical caesura. Deism, which opposes a particular and nameless God to many iconic gods, also belongs to such an ordering logic, one that precedes any monotheistic doctrine. Not at all extraordinary but only a mere instance, the particular, from which all generalization begins or towards which it returns, resides alone.

The singular is neither contained as part within a whole (constellation A), nor does it form a case subjected to a general rule (constellation B). This is the sense in which it can be designated “formless (ἀνείδεον),” as is the One in Plotinus (Enn. V. 5.6.4), albeit with the condition that the form-lessness constantly remains in reference to forms [Gestalten]. The singular can equally be characterized as “ruleless,” just as for Kant, genius is exempted from following rules (Critique of Judgment, § 49) with the condition that the rulelessness constantly refers to existing rules. The lack of form or rule is not absolute; it emerges differentially and productively as a deformation of the normal, or a deviance from it. In the first case, in which it is a matter of imagined forms [Gestalten], we encounter monsters and chimeras as we know them from Greek myths, the capitals of medieval cathedrals, and visions of Hell. Similarly, Descartes allows them to emerge as marginal figures of reason in his treatment of doubt in the First Meditation. The impression such imagined forms makes oscillates between astonishment and horror.

In the second case, in which it is a matter of rules, we find ourselves dealing with exceptions. The Latin word exemplum, in which the verb eximere is concealed, implicitly refers to the exception. Exceptions presume rules without submitting themselves to them—as in Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Abraham as an exceptional figure who does not avoid the general but rather works his way through it.⁷ So-called laws of exception—which so often adorn themselves with all-too-willing Crown Jurists – are by contrast juridico-political chimeras; for here, both the juridical proposition “exceptions confirm the rule” as well as the transjuridical proposition “exceptions contest the rule” are in force. On a case-by-case basis, either the exception or the rule may be more interesting. Nietzsche takes both possibilities to their extremes, opposing to the “elite man,” who flees into a citadel of secrecy from crowds and “ordinary men,” the cynic who recognizes the animal-like “baseness” of the rule, without becoming indignant about the base as such (Nietzsche 2002: 27f.). Playing exception and rule over against one another ultimately makes no sense; one can understand the exception upon which the regulation turns as the zero point of the prevailing regulation—which is not to say that the regulation itself approaches zero.

We are left with the question of how an unparalleled encounter transforms itself into an exemplary event. This genesis can only take place in the form of an originary formation, an act that takes on creative features because it cannot find any sufficient fundamentum in re. A singularity becomes part of a whole, or the case of a rule, although it is more than this. This “making equal of the NotEqual,” (Nietzsche 1999: 145) one of the core elements of contingent ordering processes, has as a consequence that no example fits completely, but rather that every example “drags its foot” [hinkt]. This is not the result of some mere lack. An example that didn’t “drag” would, in fact, be a mere example, an instance that could be replaced at any time with a different one. The process of implementation which does not simply use examples, but rather creates them, is expressed in exemplary fashion in the poet’s confession from Goethe’s Tasso: “And for when man falls silent in his agony, a God gave it to me to say how I suffer.” At stake is the paradoxical attempt to put inexpressible suffering into words. Singularity of suffering does not mean that it is a matter of a unique diagnosis of an illness, for every diagnosis is, in principle, repeatable; singularity, instead, has to do with the sick person as sufferer, as patient. This does not, therefore, exclude unparalleled suffering from being submitted to a comparative diagnosis and a general course of treatment, such that it returns, in the form of re-entry, into the order without which the suffering would not even exist. We would have no medical science without this process of transformation, but this same science presents itself as being, genetically, a continual process of medicalization. Similar things are true of other processes of normalization (see Waldenfels 2008). This holds even for the historicization and juridicalization of singular acts of violence, be it the systematic extermination of Jews in the Third Reich, the killing of Armenians under the so-called Young Turks, or the murder of Bosnian citizens at the hands of the Serbian military in Srebrenica. The qualification of these events as genocide means that, for better or for worse, incomparables are being compared.

Thus, examples have a Janus-headed form, for in them, the unparalleled is joined to the exemplary. On the one hand, something transforms into an example by being subjected to the semantics and pragmatics of speech (and a corresponding treatment). On the other hand, however, the example functions as an original substitute in the Derridean sense, in that it replaces the irreplaceable. The unparalleled is precisely that which we are struck by, and which we respond to in an exemplary manner and through the express construction of examples. The ambivalent status of the example excludes the unparalleled and the exemplary from being definitively separated from one another. Ineffable suffering, which sinks into traumatic silence or even into the silence of death, approaches the extreme of an unparalleledness without any exemplarity. But even here there remains the possibility of appeal to a surrogate’s speech, which would testify to the foreign suffering of another. The concealment of violence would only further strengthen this. A similar thing could be said of joyful, elevating, or enlightening events. This holds in a particular way for the recounting of mystical experiences or the way one deals with mysterious vows of silence, as in the Masonic context of Mozart’s Magic Flute. A similar thing occurs in Plato: at the peak of the Politeia (509a), in the same moment that the idea of the good appears, Socrates commands his conversational partner (for whom this conjures only the image of pleasure) to be silent (εὐφήμει)⁸ before he directs our view along the route of the allegory of the cave and the divided line, that is, takes a detour through indirect, exemplary description. “Topoi of ineffability” cannot be taken at face value; they indicate that the words do not fully do justice to what is meant, not that nothing could be said (see Curtius 1963: 168–171). Were something to be entirely unparalleled, then there would be nothing at all that could be said; the unsayable would ultimately say nothing. What we encounter on the other side of the coin is more trivial. Here, we come across the extreme of an exemplarity without the possibility of it being unparalleled. If one were to take this result at its word, it would mean that everything was exchangeable, like the mere example. This would correspond to an overnormalization that extinguished all extraordinary qualities.

The place where something which was not already an example becomes an example forms an open position in a structure and process of ordering; it creates a space of transition, where the extraordinary and the ordered merge without unifying. Methodologically, the analysis of examples requires a specific ἐποχή, a suspension of or check on examples which serves to de-exemplify them. This makes it possible to grasp what is more than an example in what serves as example. The indirectness that adheres to the productive use of examples in this way joins itself to an indirect technique of description.

Endnotes

1For a lengthier account, see Waldenfels (2012) Ch. 6: “Indirekte und paradigmatische Beschreibung.” The present text is a lightly revised version of this chapter.

2In the philosophical tradition, which aims for the essential, the principle thing outstrips the minor one, the main work the auxiliary one. According to Aristotle, minor things [Nebensachen] (παρέργα) may not overshadow “proper” things [Sachen] (ἔργα) (Nic. Eth. I. 7. 1098a32f.); knowledge and perception are always directed towards something else, and only incidentally [nebenbei] (ἐν παρέργῳ) towards themselves (Met. XII. 9. 1074b35f.). On Kant’s account, the Graces, which as virtues of association “indirectly” serve the humanization of interpersonal interactions, are nonetheless “external components or accessory components (parerga)” of virtue (Metaphysics of Morals, § 48); in the elucidation of the judgment of taste by means of examples, on the other hand, Kant puts aside the image’s frame and all sorts of adornment – everything which does not intimately belong to the representation of the beautiful object – as mere “embellishment” [Zierate] (parerga). In contrast, Derrida sets out in La vérité en peinture [engl. The Truth in Painting] to restore the honor of the Parergon. Preceding him in this was Schopenhauer, with his Parerga und Paralipomena, as well as Kierkegaard in his Philosophical Fragments.

3See, in particular, Buck (1971) and Rentsch (1989).

4See von Fritz’s elaboration on the role of Eidos and Idea in Plato and Kant in the vein of conceptual history in von Fritz (1963) 40–52.

5See Goldstein (2014) and the new edition forthcoming with W. Fink. An American re-edition of this appeared with an introduction from Oliver Sacks, who owes much to Goldstein: see Goldstein (1995).

6On the deepening of intentional and rule-oriented phenomenology through a pathetic and responsive phenomenology, see the lengthy account in Waldenfels (2002) as well as in condensed form in Waldenfels (2006). In English, see Waldenfels (2011).

7See the concluding passages of Either/Or, the essay On Repetition, and the “Eulogy on Abraham” in Fear and Trembling. In his Journals and Notebooks, Kierkegaard notes with respect to his writings: “I am a voice. To prevent any mistaken identity and being taken for the extraordinary, I always withdraw myself, and the voice, that is, what I say, remains. But I always withdraw myself in such a way that I do own up to striving. Thus I am like a voice, but I always have one more auditor than speakers generally have: myself’ (Kierkegaard 1978: 268; #6561).

8The verb “εὐφημεῖν”, from which euphemism derives, actually means “to speak well or properly.”

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