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Lex van der steen

Exemplarity and the inexpressible life of contemplation



In The Prior Analytics, Aristotle elaborates what argument by paradeigma is, most often translated as ‘example’. This discussion is part of a larger discussion of different sorts of arguments, also including induction, reduction, objection, and probabilities. According to Aristotle, the paradeigma “represents the relation, not of part to whole or of whole to part, but of one part to another, where both are subordinate to the same general term, and one of them is known.” (Aristotle, 69a15-20). Plato also elaborates on the meaning of paradeigma in a similar manner, although Plato’s elaboration has the form of a dialogue. Interestingly enough, Plato recognizes that the only way to explain the example is by using an example. In The Statesman, Plato writes that “It’s a hard thing, my fine friend, to demonstrate any of the greater subjects without using examples”, and continues further on that “It has turned out, my dear fellow, that the idea of an ‘example’ itself in its turn also has need of an example to demonstrate it” (Plato, 277d1-2, 277d8-9). This is a clear indication of the fact that the example reaches a limit point for knowledge, a point that cannot be reached in general terms but only through the ‘demonstration’, or the ‘putting beside’, to use Plato’s terms, of particulars next to other particulars (the Ancient Greek para-deigma literally means something like ‘to put beside’).


I believe it would be fair to say that, what is implicitly expressed in these lines, is that Plato must have had a similar intuition to the one Frank Jackson must have had when formulating the famous ‘knowledge argument’ and elaborated the ‘Mary’s room’ thought experiment. The thought experiment basically goes as follows:


Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like 'red', 'blue', and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wave-length combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence 'The sky is blue'. (It can hardly be denied that it is in principle possible to obtain all this physical information from black and white television, otherwise the Open University would of necessity need to use colour television.) What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that. (Jackson, 1982, p. 130)


At a certain point, an example is needed to get to a certain type of knowledge, which Jackson calls qualia. And I even think Jackson’s argument is even too removed from everyday life. Never would it make sense for me to, when trying to explain to a child what ‘sweet’ is, give them all the knowledge about the physical processes that make the sensation of sweetness happen. No, I will simply have to let them experience several examples of sweet things, like cake, candy, banana, pineapple and perhaps even some homegrown carrots. As such we also ought to understand Aristotle’s explanation of argument by example: the example shows the relation of one part to another part, a relation that never enters the realm of the general (of abstract knowledge expressed in language).


Another place where Plato uses the term paradeigma is in his discussion of The Myth of Er, which concludes The Republic. The Myth of Er concerns the soldier Er, who died on the battlefield and returned to life in order to share what he has seen in the afterlife. After dying, Er is led to a place with four doors, an entrance and exit from the earth (that is, hell) and an entrance and exit from the sky (that is, heaven). Those that died together with Er were either send to the sky or to the earth, based on whether they had lived well or not. Er, instead, was told that he would witness what happens in the afterlife in order to share it afterwards with the living. From both the earth and the sky, souls arrive through the exit, and these souls are taken to Ananke, the goddess of necessity and the representation of fate. There the people are given the opportunity to choose their next lives. The souls are shown examples (bion paradeigmata) of all sorts of lives, much more then there are souls present, from animal lives to tyrants, from human lives with strong and/or beautifull bodies to lives with the opposite, from lives with fame and riches to poor lives, and everything in between. Once the souls have chosen, this will be their lives to live.


However, Plato does mention that “by contrast [to the necessity of the form of life they have chosen] virtue is free; each will possess it to a greater or less degree”. Plato also says that what we ought to do in relation to this situation is consider all possibilities in light of the virtuous life, and makes sure how to choose the “mean form of life” (mesos bios), that is, the life that avoids extremes.


The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben draws on the notion of paradeigma and reads in it an exposition of what he considers to be the happy life. Concerning The Myth of Er, Agamben emphasizes that “what the herald shows to the souls are not bioi, modes of life, but examples (paradeigmata) of modes of life” (Agamben, 2016, p. 259). Hence, Agamben seeks the virtuous that Plato mentions in the examplarity itself, and not in one particular mode of life. He writes that “to choose the mean does not mean to choose a bios but, in the bios that it has befallen us to choose, to be in a position to neutralize and flee the extremes through virtue ... It is not a bios but a certain mode of using and living bios” (Agamben, 2016, p. 259).


To fully understand this, it is necessary to look at Agamben’s comments on the paradeigma. Most important is the deactivating function that he designates in the functioning of the example (in the previous quotation this was expressed as the ‘neutralizing’ of the extremes): “its specific operation consists in suspending and deactivating its empirical givenness in order to exhibit only an intelligibility” (Agamben, 2009, p. 25, 26). Every example needs to deactivate its normal functioning in order to be able to function as an example. I think the clearest illustration of this can be given by referring to the linguistic category of performatives. If I want to give an example of performatives, which concerns a group of phrases that do not describe the world but act upon it, like the phrase ‘I do’ in a wedding ceremony (it does not describe something, it does something, it has a function in the ceremony), it first needs to be deactivated. The ‘I do’ that I now write and that you are now reading does not actually marry someone, despite still being the exact same phrase. It shows itself beside itself (para-deigma), in order to render the group to which it can be grouped intelligible (differently put, in this case, ‘I do’ does not refer to the content, to the desire of the speaker to marry this particular other, but to its ‘performativeness’, to a particular belonging).


In order to function as an example, the singular being in question needs to dispose of the everyday identity and the functioning that belongs to it (this could be compared to what Heidegger calls ready-to-hand) that it wants to render intelligible, in order to actually do so. In resisting the normal identity, in exactly always being more, it shows this identity or group (hence the limit of general knowledge that Plato signaled). In the case of Jackon’s thought experiment, we could say that Marry’s first experience of colour resists the totality of knowledge that Marry already had of colour.


According to Agamben’s interpretation of Plato’s The Myth of Er, virtue, then, is this exemplarity, this being a being that fully coincides with its own non-belonging to any identity exactly by showcasing its potential belonging, its own potentiality for a certain identity. 


The virtuous life is then demonstrated in Plato’s The Myth of Er by the Gods insofar they show all lives as paradeigmata, as exemplary. Virtuous life is never this or that form of life that we have to choose, but the way of living any form that involves contemplating its own exemplarity, its own potentiality. This contemplation is philosophy, the virtuous life is the philosophical life. The virtuous life takes place in the realm of inexpressible qualia, there were only examples can reach (but can never exhaust).


Sources:

Aristotle – Prior Analtyics

Plato – The Statesman

Plato – The Republic

Giorgio Agamben – The Use of Bodies

Giorgio Agamben – The Signature of All Things

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