The Example: The Implications of Exemplification

Posted on November 11, 2009 by admin

Sam Gill
I have been thinking about the implications of providing an example in service to academic writing, although I suppose it is relevant to other kinds of writing. An example shows or illustrates something by being a typical or model example of it. The focus of my attention is the “something,” the “it,” that must exist alongside the example. This “something” must exist and be known apart from its exemplification. So initially the example requires two separate things. But then there is the relationship between them, this is the “illustrate, typical, model” part of the relationship. “To illustrate” suggests that the something is not, on its own or in its own terms, adequate for us to be able to “see” it. “See” is the common sensory metaphor we use to indicate understanding. So we know this something, but we can’t really picture it, see it, or fully understand it on its own terms, so we then need an example of it to make this possible. “To be typical” implies that there may be a number of incidents of this “something” and that among these incidents some are more typical than others. “To model” suggests an iconic relationship between the “something” and the “example” paired with it. This suggests that they “look” alike yet the “something” is somehow not as accessible to our comprehension, for some reason, as is an exemplary model of it. Our ruminations on “example” now have us up to three parts: the something being exemplified, the example itself, and the relationship that is drawn between the two.
If we press on a bit, there is an implication that the “something” is more abstract, theoretical, propositional, general, formal, heady (thus not a thing at all) than is the “example” which carries attributes more concrete, specific, sensual, specific, and bodied than is the “something.” Each then needs the other to have some claim to meaning and value and understanding.
The magic is the relationship drawn between these two, that is, the movement, the vitality, the relationality, the processuality, the dynamics that interconnect the “something” with the “example.” Exemplification is the creation of a narrative of coherence that allows the oscillatory journey back and forth between “something” and “example” to look and feel like meaning and understanding and value. The proposed importance of the “something” is supported by the persuasiveness of the story we call exemplification providing concreteness, application, sensory grounding, and so forth. It seems fitting to call “exemplification” story because of the necessity of demonstrating coherence, the logical or aesthetic fit and significance of the connection of “example” to the “something” it exemplifies. “Examples” are never adequate on their own; indeed, on their own they can’t even be examples. They become examples only when they become characters in a story. Who makes up this story? Well, the writer/researcher who discovers, invents, or concocts the story, the narrative of coherence. Exemplification is not proof, an altogether much more systematic and rigorous process. No, exemplification is fiction, persuasion, satisfaction. The greatest and most impactful of our writers are those who can manipulate, translate, interpret, examples to create amazing fictive narratives that reveal the potential of the something through fictive narratives of exemplification. These narratives do not simply show that the example fits the something to be exemplified, but that the relationship between the something and the example is provocative, suggestive, rich in potential for further interconnection. These are artfully constructed narratives of suggested potential coherence. This potential too is a transcendence of exemplification by energizing subsequent applications/exemplifications of the something.
Exemplification is also necessarily transcendence; the stuff of the example, mundane and unremarkable on its own, transcends itself in becoming example, in meaning more than is apparent by being an example of something of a different order, the theoretical, the ideal, the abstract.
Exemplification also necessarily initiates the oscillatory playful process of comparison, the movement between the something exemplified and the stuff that is being presented as its example. Here the story of coherence becomes something of a conversation between something and its example. Exemplification seems to be build on the principal that the relationship between something and its example should be a case of likeness in some respect, that is coherence. The two are the same in some respects and the articulation of the samenesses in the story is the articulation of the definitive meaning and value being sought and communicated. There is then a reversibility between something and its example, yet it is an incomplete or lopsided reversibility for there is the implication that any something will have many possible examples and that an exemplification is a momentary limitation of this something to but a single instantiation. Other instantiations, it would seem, would be somewhat a lesser fit, not so coherent, not such a good story, as others since exemplification implies selecting the very best instantiation. Thus there is this odd thing about exemplification that suggests that the something is important in being broadly valued to many things more concrete, yet for most of them there is a sloppy fit, a fit whose narrative would suggest only a weak or awkward coherence.
Exemplification is rarely thought of as having a heuristic value, that is, a method of actually modifying or constructing the something, yet, it would seem, given that exemplification implies that much of the stuff in its concrete real of applicability are not so clear and coherent a fit as the exemplum. Seems that exemplification should be reflexive in initiating shifts and corrections and adjustments in the something. We’d need to invent another word that would capture the sense of playful oscillation between something and example. There is an interesting comparison of exemplification and metaphor: Metaphor is understanding something in terms of something else which it is not, while exemplification is understanding something in terms of something else which it is. Metaphor seems to me to be the richer since metaphor requires the distinctively human ability to hold two things as the same, as equal, while knowing that they are not at all the same, as equal. Example, on the other hand, as most commonly understood, is to understand something in terms of an instance of itself. Inspired by metaphor, example would improve its power by giving equal attention to the incompleteness of its reversibility.

Children, Imagination, and Philosophy[1]

Posted on August 11, 2009 by admin

Children, Imagination, and Philosophy[1]

Blog – August 2009

Sam Gill

Philosopher Anthony Gottlieb spoke about children and philosophy, as reported by an interviewer, “Philosophy is the human mind at play and we all have a deep hunger for it, Anthony Gottlieb believes. Just look at how children pose philosophical questions to the point of being tiresome, he says, confident any parent knows whereof he speaks. But children’s questions are tiresome in the way all philosophical questions are, Mr. Gottlieb contends. When we grow up, too many adults underestimate themselves, shy away from addressing those big questions.”[2] In a, to me, occasionally mean-spirited and insensitive, review in The New York Times[3] of Alison Gopnik’s The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life[4] he has more to say of children and philosophy, “perhaps children have been left out [of consideration by great philosophers] simply because they are on the whole not all that relevant.” And he ends the review with these words, “the notion that children’s minds have much to tell us about the meaning of life seems rather a fond exaggeration.” Speak of tiresome.

The review however got me to thinking about the role of imagination during a period of critical brain development. I have done a lot of reading lately about research that has demonstrated—contrary to long held views that the brain is fixed by the age of seven or so—that the brain continues to physically and neurologically develop throughout the teen and early adult years. I have also been interested in the studies of neuroplasty that show that throughout life the adult brain is capable of change and development. These studies have raised the question about the impact of environment on the continually developing brain. In other words, what is the best way to care for and feed the brain in its ongoing development? Jay Giedd at the National Institute of Health wrote, “What if we find out that, in the end, what the brain wants is play, that’s certainly possible. … What if the brain grows best when it’s allowed to play?”^{^[5]} As a long time student of play[6] I take this seriously.

But the question that Gottlieb’s review raised for me is the role of play and imagination in brain development.[7] Apparently Gopnik’s book (which I have yet to read) shows that “when children are playing, they know they are just playing. … that playful immersion in freely conjured hypothetical worlds is what teaches us how to make sense of the real one.” Gopnik discusses in this context the crucial role in human development of imaginary friends, pretend play, and active imaginations. I will be curious to see if Gopnik correlates the age range of the most active imagination, 2 to 6, with the traditional critical period of brain development. I wonder why after age six the playful imagination including make believe friends and pretend play gradually dissipates to become markers of pathology in adults? How remarkable! How awful really. Why don’t adults have imaginary friends or admit to them if they do? For adults pretend play and imaginary friends must be framed in terms of work rather than play. We produce novels, paintings, musical scores or recordings, movies or films, plays, and stuff. Jean Baudrillard made an important distinction between seduction (the pure play of signs) and production, arguing that the meaninglessness of seduction is always stronger and more enduring than production. Seduction aligns with play, the feminine, and children’s imagination.

The realization that there is a correlation between the level of imaginative play and physical brain development, may offer clues to the question regarding the most affective environment continuing brain and human development during the teen years and throughout life, that would be to cultivate and sustain the playful imagination. It is well known that our greatest and most creative people are those who continue throughout life to be childlike, by which I think we mean that they are open, imaginative, and allow themselves to ask those huge questions adults have learned are somehow inappropriate to ask or impossible to answer; or to ponder and delight in things that seem obvious to everyone, but are anything but obvious. As Gottlieb himself noted, children have an uncanny ability to come up with the most profound and confounding questions, the very sort of questions that endlessly occupy philosophers.[8] So too should the playful imaginations that characterize children’s minds perhaps hold a greater place in all adult minded bodies as well. There is much to ponder here.

What accounts for the origination of imagination in young children? It is not something that parents dutifully and consciously teach children. It is not something that children gain from adults by imitation. It seems a strong candidate for a natural process in the healthy developing child.[9] It would seem that it is of our nature to have an active pretend play imaginary-friend-creating imagination and, if this is so, how can it not be powerfully interconnected with not only brain, but our human development which is raging during this period. Is not then the imagination a key to what distinguishes us as human beings? Is not the very structurality of imagination and play—that is, knowing that something is not what we say it is—also the structurality that is essential for the acquisition and use of language, symbolism, metaphor, art, and ritual? Is not the question of how human beings are capable of living their lives in this reason-defying way, something of immense importance? Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s consideration of this structurality, which he termed “ontology of flesh,” in his study of perception, declared it to be “the ultimate truth.”[10] Isn’t this structurality is also what Jacques Derrida approached in his discussion of “différance” and Friedrich Schiller in his consideration of “play?”

[2] http://www.paulagordon.com/shows/gottlieb/index.html

[3] August 10, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/books/review/Gottlieb-t.html

[4] Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009.

[5] As quoted in Barbara Strauch, The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries about the Teenage Brain Tell Us about Our Kids (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 44.

[6] See a range of my writings on play at www.Sam-Gill.com.

[7] I find that much brain research tends to divide brain/mind from body and movement, a division that I think impossible and irresponsible, or at least narrow-minded.

[8] Given that Gottlieb’s recent book is titled “The Dream of Reason,” it makes sense that he might be motivated to put away childish things like imaginary friends.

[9] Gopnik apparently indicates that “autistic children almost never create imaginary friends or engage in any kind of pretend play.” Gottlieb’s review.

[10] For my further comments on such a declaration in the postmodern period see my “Play and the Future of the Study of Religion … and the Academy” www.Sam-Gill.com and other discussions of his work in my Brain, Body, Movement Lecture Series.

Crises and Opportunities[1]

Posted on August 11, 2009 by admin

Crises and Opportunities[1]

Sam-Gill.com Blog – August 2009

Sam Gill

Since last spring I have become increasingly passionate about crises and opportunities. First I have come to accept the inevitability that in the next half century (beginning sooner than we dare imagine) there will be unprecedented crises precipitated by climate change even if the current wide-ranging economic and political crises are somehow brought under control with some sense of a return to non-crisis state. Second, I am committed to seeing the inevitable crises more in the terms of opportunity rather than loss and decline. As a religion scholar for over thirty-five years I find my age peers increasingly deferring to our junior colleagues to make decisions about the future and I imagine that the same attitude pervades their classrooms as well. I appreciate the intention, but I can’t participate. I find my passions elevating when I think of the future of the study of religion, the future of the academy, the future of the education at every level. It appears to me that there is little discourse or concern about the shape and character of these various planes of education in a future that will demand revolution under crises. While I may not be present for the results, I certainly want to lend my experience and my imagination to a vision of the future, and the long future at that.

In south central Java is the Buddhist stupa, Borobudur. I have visited it two times. In fact, I returned to Java just so I could spend more time at this place. It is enormous … beyond our grasp actually … and of unfathomable detail. Seen from the air Borobudur is a perfect mandala. It was built in a seventy year period from approximately 1760 to 1830 AD. The unity and coherence of the structure as a whole requires a single vision, a single plan. Such a vision could not simply unfold over the several generations of builders that worked on this structure; it had to be conceived by someone at some specific time. And that person or group had to know that they would be long gone and forgotten generations before the completion of the structure … and they were. Borobudur is my persistent inspiration for taking the long view, for doing all I can to imagine what I will never see. Surely the impending imminent crises are the very product of our failure to have vision on the order of that Buddhist priest so long ago. Vision today on his scale would be more on the order of several centuries in the future; so surely we can work on a vision of the future 10 to 40 years ahead. Further, the way we envision the future is a way of making ourselves in the present.

Borobudur may serve as inspiration in another way. It seems to me that the approach to the present array of crises is based on “fixing” what went wrong and “returning” to the way things used to be (or our imaginary perception of what that was). Yet my sense is that few now believe that anything like that is going to happen and most of those I talk with express the sentiment that they are rather pleased that the world will not go back to the way things were. They are eager for fundamental change even as they fear what that might be.

An article on the front page of yesterday’s Sunday New York Times (August 9, 2009) has spurred me to write about crises and opportunity. The headline is “Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security.”[2] Here is a brief quote:

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades … to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say. …

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorists movements or destabilize entire regions, …

… over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, … will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that culd demand an American humanitarian relief or military response …

It is disconcerting that we persist in seeing everything in the frames of terrorism and the military; they front for their silent partners, economic powers and interests.

I frankly don’t even care how likely this particular scenario is to occur because I believe that the world is approaching a tipping point where we will need to radically reinvent everything about ourselves as human beings and most certainly what it means to be human. This is an opportunity and it may be aided by the pressure of crises.

Lately I have become increasingly frustrated at the polarizing partisan selfish narrow-minded approach that prevails as the dominant mood and method in politics and education and every aspect of the world. I’ve wondered what level of crisis it would take to force real conversation, real concern, a more selfless, a less selfish approach to governing and living. Would the imminent rise of sea level over the next 10 year by 10 feet be enough? I actually wonder. Might we simply allow ourselves to be swept into total ruin simply because we cannot listen, learn, compromise, see the greater good?

But I can’t go there either. We all, all of us who can, must bring our greatest experience and imagination to reinvent ourselves and all that we are and do. And we must do so in the timeframe of the next ten to forty years.

I have wrestled with some of these issues related to the future of the study of religion and the academy in a recent article and I invite others to join this conversation. www.Sam-Gill.com I need to do more, much more.

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/science/earth/09climate.html?hp