The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment

by Ferrara, Alessandro

• ISBN13: 9780231140720
• ISBN10: 023114072X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-06-25
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

During the twentieth century, the view that assertions and norms are valid insofar as they respond to principles independent of all local and temporal contexts came under attack from two perspectives: the partiality of translation and the intersubjective constitution of the self, understood as responsive to recognition. Defenses of universalism have by and large taken the form of a thinning out of substantive universalism into various forms of proceduralism.Alessandro Ferrara instead launches an entirely different strategy for transcending the particularity of context without contradicting our pluralistic intuitions: a strategy centered on the exemplary universalism of judgment. Whereas exemplarity has long been thought to belong to the domain of aesthetics, this book explores the otheruses to which it can be put in our philosophical predicament, especially in the field of politics. After defining exemplarity and describing how something unique can possess universal significance, Ferrara addresses the force exerted by exemplarity, the nature of the judgment that discloses exemplarity, and the way in which the force of the example can bridge the difference between various contexts.Drawing not only on Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgmentbut also on the work of Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Jürgen Habermas, Ferrara outlines a view of exemplary validity that is applicable to today's central philosophical issues, including public reason, human rights, radical evil, sovereignty, republicanism and liberalism, and religion in the public sphere.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Judgment as a Paradigm	p. 16
Making Sense of the Exemplary	p. 42
The Exemplary and the Public Realm: Reconstructing the Normativity of the Reasonable	p. 62
Exemplifying the Worst: Facing up to Radical Evil	p. 80
Political Republicanism and the Force of the Example	p. 99
Exemplarity and Human Rights	p. 121
Enforcing Human Rights Between Westphalia and Cosmopolis	p. 147
Europe as a Special Area for Human Hope	p. 164
Religion Within the Limits of Reasonableness	p. 185
Notes	p. 205
Index	p. 227
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Excerpts

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Introduction

Diverse and far apart though our cultures might be, the world that you and I inhabit is shaped by three great forces. The first and most powerful of them is the force of what exists, of what is already there, in place—the force of things. We experience this force in two fundamental ways. Sometimes we encounter it as the force of habit and routine, of tradition, of mores and custom, of culture, of convention, of usage, of established practice and received wisdom. Society as we know it would simply be impossible if we were to reinvent the terms of our cooperation each time anew, if we found chaos instead of order upon coming into the world or if the fabric of common meanings and shared expectations that we manage to create, often through laborious negotiations, were to vanish as soon as we disappear from the scene. At other times we experience the force of things in a symbolically less textured but no less objective mode, in the guise of an invisible hand or of a ruse of reason that shapes our destinies through the unintentional consequences of what we do intentionally: just think of the way we experience the oscillations of the market or the tidal tempo of historical efficacy at turning points such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. In either mode the force of what is manifests itself most obviously as the resistance met by our efforts to change the world -- natural, social, and internal. This is perhaps one of the reasons why—despite the evidence that no social or internal world could exist unless some originary free agency coalesced in persisting patterns, whether intended or unintended—the world would seem to us a prison, inimical to freedom, if the force of what exists or the force of things were the only force that shaped it.

The second force that concurs in turning the environment in which our life unfolds into a human world is the force of what ought to be the case—the force of ideas. Again, regardless of the culture or historical context in which we are thrown, we experience the world and its manifestations as subject to evaluation and susceptible of being assigned a positive or negative value. Helpless though at times we may feel vis-à-vis the powers of the world, we always retain the capacity to match reality against the normativity of what we think should be the case. This normativity may take diverse forms, and, [whenever we are able to identify them,] we experience it as the force of principles: the force of moral commands, of the moral point of view in general, of conscience, of the law, of faith, of cultural values as conceptions of the desirable, the force of the best argument, the force of justice, the appeal of the good life. Nowhere are these normative standards fully satisfied, but we do not consider them inadequate for this reason: it is our world that has to match up to them, ideally, and not the other way around. The picture begins now to convey a familiar scene in familiar nuances of coloring. For us to grasp or to gain an insight into the world shared in common by a group, a people, a religious congregation, a political party, a social movement, a generation or an entire civilization requires that we get a sense of these two things: namely, what the people in question take to exist and what they think should be the case.

If we took this picture to be exhaustive of the dimensions along which the world is constituted for us and conceived of the world as shaped solely by the force of what is and the force of what ought to be the case—the force of things and the force of ideas—the world would now no longer resemble a prison but would be the locus of an unbridgeable gap between these two realms, the locus of a fracture, the locus of a permanent clash between necessity and freedom.

Fortunately, the picture is not yet complete. Alongside the force ofCOPYRIGHT NOTICE: Published by Columbia University Press and Copyright © 2008 Alessandro Ferrara. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. For more information, please e-mail us or visit the permissions page on our Web site.