Thinking in Cases E-Book

John Forrester

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 348

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

What exactly is involved in using particular case histories to think systematically about social, psychological and historical processes? Can one move from a textured particularity, like that in Freud s famous cases, to a level of reliable generality? In this book, Forrester teases out the meanings of the psychoanalytic case, how to characterize it and account for it as a particular kind of writing. In so doing, he moves from psychoanalysis to the law and medicine, to philosophy and the constituents of science. Freud and Foucault jostle here with Thomas Kuhn, Ian Hacking and Robert Stoller, and Einstein and Freud s connection emerges as a case study of two icons in the general category of the Jewish Intellectual. While Forrester was particularly concerned with analysing the style of reasoning that was dominant in psychoanalysis and related disciplines, his path-breaking account of thinking in cases will be of great interest to scholars, students and professionals across a wide range of disciplines, from history, law and the social sciences to medicine, clinical practice and the therapies of the world.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Preface – Lisa Appignanesi

Introduction – Adam Phillips

1. If p, Then What? Thinking in Cases

Notes

2. On Kuhn’s Case: Psychoanalysis and the Paradigm

Notes

3. The Psychoanalytic Case: Voyeurism, Ethics and Epistemology in Robert Stoller’s Sexual Excitement

The Case History

Notes

4. On Holding as Metaphor: Winnicott and the Figure of St Christopher

Notes

5. The Case of Two Jewish Scientists: Freud and Einstein

Notes

6. Inventing Gender Identity: The Case of Agnes

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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By the same author

Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis

The Seductions of Psychoanalysis

Freud’s Women (with Lisa Appignanesi)

Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and its Passions

Truth Games: Lies, Money and Psychoanalysis

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freud’s Papers on Technique (translator)

Thinking in Cases

John Forrester

polity

Copyright © John Forrester 2017

The right of John Forrester to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2017 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0865-5

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Forrester, John, 1949-2015, author.Title: Thinking in cases / John Forrester.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references.Identifiers: LCCN 2016014378 (print) | LCCN 2016016002 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509508617 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 1509508619 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781509508624 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 1509508627 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781509508648 (mobi) | ISBN 9781509508655 (epub)Subjects: | MESH: Psychoanalysis | Psychoanalytic Interpretation | Collected WorksClassification: LCC RC504 (print) | LCC RC504 (ebook) | NLM WM 460 | DDC 616.89/17--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014378

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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book emerged from lectures and papers over many years and has had various manifestations. ‘If p, Then What? Thinking in Cases’ first appeared in History of the Human Sciences, 1996, 9(3): 1–25; ‘On Kuhn’s Case: Psychoanalysis and the Paradigm’, in Critical Inquiry,Summer 2007, 33: 782–819 – Special Number: On the Case: A Special Issue on Norms and Forms, ed. Lauren Berlant; ‘The Psychoanalytic Case: Voyeurism, Ethics and Epistemology in Robert Stoller’s Sexual Excitement’, in an earlier version in Angela N.H. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck and M. Norton Wise (eds) Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, pp. 189–211; ‘On Holding as Metaphor: Winnicott and the Figure of St Christopher’, in Val Richards and Gillian Wilce (eds) Fathers, Families and the Outside World, London: Karnac. My paper ‘A Tale of Two Icons’ (2005) was translated into German in Michael Hagner (ed.) Einstein on the Beach, Frankfurt: Fischer, 2005. Michael Hagner prompted me to work on the Einstein–Freud connection to commemorate the centenary of Einstein’s annus mirabilis, 1905.

A version of the final section on Agnes was delivered at the Max Plank Institute for the History of Science in Berlin on 26 June 2015 as part of a conference entitled ‘Towards a History of Epistemic Genres: Textbook and Commentary, Case and Recipe in the Making of Medical Knowledge’, and organized by Gianna Pomata (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore) and Yvonne Wübben (Freie Universität Berlin, Ruhr Universität Bochum).

My work has benefited over the years from the discussion and comments of many more than can be named here. I would like to single out Adam Phillips, Andreas Mayer, Michael Molnar, Elizabeth Lunbeck, Karl Figlio, the late Gerry Giessen, and Sybil Stoller, in particular for an absorbing and informative discussion on 23 May 1998 concerning her late husband’s work. I would like to thank Sarah Churchwell, Eduardo Duniec, Lars Falk, Ofer Golan, Gerald Holton, Diana Lipton, Christfried Tögel and Harry Trosman for their help in the research for my chapter on Einstein and Freud.

My wife, Lisa Appignanesi, has as ever provided insight and constant help, and together with the younger members of the family, Katrina Forrester, Josh Appignanesi, Devorah Baum and Jamie Martin, sustained me through difficult times. Little Manny has been such a boon that I sometimes dreamt that my next piece of writing could be entitled ‘thinking as a grandfather’.

PREFACE

John Forrester was working on this volume in the last months of a life he didn’t know was about to be terminated quite so abruptly. It brings together in one place the strands of some of his most influential thinking. Bar the last chapter, the book was largely complete.

But John was a man for whom neither ideas nor books ever altogether stood still. Near the end, he talked to me at some length about rejigging the volume’s order and making its final section over to the figure he teasingly liked to call the last or the latterday psychoanalyst, Robert Stoller. Stoller’s work had long fascinated him: in his writing of cases Stoller had all the verve and panache of a great American novelist of his period, say a Norman Mailer. He was direct and blunt-speaking, yet he kept alive a subtle and radical version of Freud that many of his contemporaries were blind to. Stoller also dealt with subjects which retain their ability to provoke and destabilize, always in a way that paid little heed to conventional wisdom and a great deal to his patients. He was arguably the first to split apart what we understand by sex and gender, along the way giving us one of the first major psychoanalytic cases of a ‘transsexual’. It was this material that John was pondering in his last months in relation to styles of reasoning and Thinking in Cases.

Although he and I once wrote a substantial book together, often enough edited each other and talked up many a storm in relation to our work, when it came to it, I didn’t feel able to ventriloquize him on the page and tease out the fullness of his perceptions about ‘the case of the last analyst and his cases’. Instead, I have left his section on Stoller’s Belle where he initially placed it; and have ‘constructed’ a final chapter using a combination of his notes and a lecture delivered in Berlin. Anyone who worked with or was taught by or listened to John’s interventions on any number of subjects knows that his was not a mind it is easy to imitate. The sources he brought to bear were always vast. Mimicking his agility in argument, let alone imagining a position he might arrive at, is a little like playing chess with a master when you barely know the rules of the game. Nonetheless, I have laid out the available signposts. They give an indication of the final adventure that thinking in cases took him on.

Lisa Appignanesi OBE FRSLLondon, January 2016

INTRODUCTION

Adam Phillips

It was always John Forrester’s gift not merely to put psychoanalysis – among other subjects in the history of science – in context, but to allow for the workings of the unconscious in the making of a sense of context. Since we contextualize in language, and with language, we are never free from a sense of dislocation. When we are trying to find a place for something, or are trying to put something in its place, something like psychoanalysis, say; when we recontextualize, or redescribe – which Forrester always does in his writing with such flair and panache – we are going to be at a loss, wherever else we are. It is not incidental that the epigraph to one of Forrester’s most striking earlier essays, ‘What the Psychoanalyst Does with Words’, is a question from Lacan: ‘Why is language most efficacious when it says one thing through saying another?’ The lucid, informed, rational coherence that is everywhere in Forrester’s writing is everywhere offset by his acute sense of what psychoanalysis brings to these Enlightenment ideals; of what Freud’s account of the unconscious does to the informing principles of science, which was Forrester’s first love (though not Freud’s, which was classical antiquity, romance languages and literature). And of what this account might do to the informing principles, if there are any, of erotic life. Chemistry – perhaps in both its senses – was Forrester’s first intellectual passion.

The calculated ambiguities of the titles of his books – The Seductions of Psychoanalysis, Freud’s Women, Lying on the Couch – which became Truth Games, Dispatches from the Freud Wars, and now, after his too-early death, Thinking in Cases (soon to be followed by Freud in Cambridge) – remind us that we are always in at least two minds when we speak and read and write. The enigmatic ambitions of language, in which we can make sense and something other than sense, in which we can desire and formulate our desire, was where Forrester began. His first book, Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis, was an unusually subtle enquiry into what sense it made to describe language as the origin of psychoanalysis; and it was, initially, as a translator and reader of Lacan that he found his own distinctive voice. But language interested Forrester in a particular way; that is to say, gossip was a key word for him. ‘The key notion’, he writes in Truth Games – in a commentary on Lacan, Austin and Searle, that is a commentary on his own work – ‘becomes circulation, rather than reciprocity or exchange’ (p. 151). If you privilege circulation over reciprocity and exchange you are living in a very strange, more impersonal, world; how things get round or get through matters more than what they are, or what they are for (what they are for is circulation). Or things – knowledge, desire and language being the things for Forrester – are defined by how they circulate (so pedagogy and psychoanalysis are at the heart of everything Forrester writes). What contributes wittingly and unwittingly to the ways our truths circulate, to what Forrester called our truth games – social practices, so succinctly defined in his book of that title – and especially to the truth game that is psychoanalysis, was Forrester’s abiding concern. What is in circulation in the name of psychoanalysis? What do we need to know to understand psychoanalysis? And what would it be to understand psychoanalysis? These were Forrester’s questions. But it was also Forrester’s gift to show us that questions about psychoanalysis could also illuminate the history and philosophy of science – that questions about psychoanalysis are questions about the history and philosophy of science – to which he devoted his professional life with such rigour and wit.

There was, then, always the more overt historical context, so thoroughly researched and so compellingly evoked in Forrester’s work: an interest, for example, in the doctors who, Forrester writes in Dispatches from the Freud Wars, ‘we find inhabiting the family dramas of Freud’s near contemporaries, Ibsen, Chekov and Schnitzler (the last two of whom were practicing physicians)’ (p. 201), and in the light this might shed on Freud’s practice, in what Forrester calls, ‘a crisis in the very idea of the doctor–patient relationship’ (p. 201). And then there was Forrester’s eye (and ear) for unexpected links; to the spoken and unspoken connections made but not always made explicit. And that psychoanalysis, of course, trades in. Forrester’s texts are strangely conducive to odd associations and questions, to associations as questions. He was increasingly interested in cases and collaborations, and always interested in teaching, and in the transmission of knowledge. He also seemed to have read everything. What is it then for him to refer to Chekov in an earlier book but not in this one when there is the fact that Chekov wrote a story translated as ‘The Man in a Case’ (with the pun on ‘case’ in English, not in Russian)?

And it is a story, significantly enough, about a teacher of Greek so confined in his own character and prejudices that he is unable to marry or have relationships; a man incapable of change; a man unable to circulate. Chekov’s Man in a Case is a man encased, constrained by the uniqueness of his character to be forbidding and censorious. To be a case – or even, in our sense, a man in a case – is to be at once unique but somehow exemplary, individual but representative. But of what is any case exemplary? What can any individual represent for others? These have become Forrester’s questions in Thinking in Cases. Chekov, that is to say, may have turned out to be more far reaching in his influence than Forrester was aware (or perhaps not). Chekov, as Forrester was aware, was a doctor, trained in cases. A short story is not a case history because it doesn’t deal in types; but we recognize the characters in short stories because they remind us of other people, including ourselves. Chekov’s title, in its English translation, in the context of Forrester’s book, does more than it says by saying more than it intends. Forrester’s talent – conscious and unconscious, staged and unwitting – for the finding and following of leads is contagious.

‘The Man in a Case’ is, like many of the stories in Forrester’s book (and Forrester’s books), about the crisis in a relationship. In this case, the crisis of a man who is unable to have the kind of crisis that Forrester is interested in – the crisis that is transformative. Belikov, Chekov’s anti-hero, can’t allow himself to be changed by anyone; he can blame whatever upsets him, but he can’t make anything of it, or transform it into anything useful to him. He can’t find what Christopher Bollas calls a ‘transformational object’, and that Bollas defines, in his paper of that title, as an object that, ‘is sought for its function as a signifier of transformation … pursued in order to surrender to it as a medium that alters the self’ (the precursor of this object is, of course, the mother). Whether he is writing, in Thinking in Cases, about Thomas Kuhn, or Freud and Einstein, or Winnicott, or Stoller – and indeed about Winnicott’s and Stoller’s case histories – it is the transformational moments (and objects), or their failure, that Forrester is preoccupied with. And whatever else they are, these are moments in which something new begins to circulate because something unpredictable happens between two people. Moments in which it may be unclear who is doing what to whom (in psychoanalytic language, when we can’t disentangle the patient’s transference from the analyst’s countertransference); but moments when we are, in Forrester’s words, ‘brought up short, by wondering at this moment’ – this particular moment being a significant shift in Stoller’s patient’s daydream in the case history presented here – whether this ‘is not also the moment when Stoller’s extra-analytic interest in sexual excitement was born’ (p. 80). We are invited by Forrester, in his engaged and engaging account, to wonder about, or even be slightly startled by, two overlapping moments in an analysis in which something also extra-analytic happens. The analyst’s so-called theoretical curiosity is aroused by a significant shift in the patient’s fantasy life (the idea of an ‘extra-analytic’ interest in ‘sexual excitement’ being ‘born’ keeps the humour in and out of the account, and is part of the artfulness of Forrester’s writing). An analysis can be mutually beneficial in complementary and incommensurate ways (like any relationship). A case history can be similarly beneficial to its readers. This is what Forrester is showing us in his writing about the writing of cases.

Once you start thinking in cases, what Forrester calls here ‘reasoning with shared examples’ (p. 52), as opposed to thinking in theory – discursively, more abstractly, less evocatively – new kinds of comparisons can be made, invidious and otherwise; not least, in psychoanalytic case histories, as Forrester makes abundantly clear, comparisons can be made between the patient and the analyst. Where there was abstraction there can be human drama. You get, to quote Clifford Geertz, one of Forrester’s intellectual touchstones, ‘thick descriptions’, descriptions both evocative and informative, rich in predictable and unpredictable context. Psychoanalytic cases then begin to sound more like short stories – they exceed and revise their genre – just as Freud feared his Studies on Hysteria did (this was Freud usefully wondering whose criteria he wanted to be judged by). Only if you look for family resemblances can you see the differences. Only by making categories can you see what doesn’t fit into them. By making a case for cases, Forrester allows us to think about what may or may not be case material. Thinking in cases means writing and reading (and thinking) differently. A working practice has been circulated, and made available for comment, which can then be circulated. And, of course, in the case of psychoanalysis a working practice that is by definition private and confidential becomes public and confiding. Circulation, as Forrester can’t help but intimate, can also enhance reciprocity and exchange.

Forrester’s remarkable book Thinking in Cases then is, as the title suggests, looking at the kind of thinking that goes on in cases, and what it is like to use cases as a way of thinking. And what kinds of circulation cases make possible. A case holds, confines, protects and travels; it also categorizes and exemplifies. Cases can be used to teach and to train, for discussion and for proof. And yet we never quite know, as Forrester continually suggests in this book, what any given case is an example of. Or, to put it more pragmatically, what any given case can be used to do (cases may not be quite as instrumental as they seem). So Forrester is wondering in this book in what way cases may be good to think with; and what we might be wanting, in law, or medicine, or that strange hybrid of both, psychoanalysis, by thinking in cases; and what we might get by thinking in cases that we can’t get by thinking in other ways. And this, Forrester knows, is all about reading and writing.

In ‘The Psychoanalytic Case’, the remarkable essay in this book, referred to earlier, on Robert Stoller’s case history Sexual Excitement, Forrester gives us an important clue about how we should read him, and about how we should read:

Psychoanalytic writing is not just writing about psychoanalysis; it is writing subject to the same laws and processes as the psychoanalytic situation itself. In this way psychoanalysis can never free itself of the forces it attempts to describe. As a result, from one point of view, all psychoanalytic writing is exemplary of a failure. Psychoanalytic writing fails to transmit psychoanalytic knowledge because it is always simultaneously a symptom. (pp. 65–6)

Psychoanalytic writing is a failure – as is all writing, from a psychoanalytic point of view – in the sense that it is always saying something other than it intends to. Its intentions are only a small part of its intention. There is a limit as to how much writing can know what it is about because it is subject to unconscious ‘forces’. Psychoanalytic writing fails to transmit psychoanalytic knowledge only because it succeeds in doing so much more, and so much less, than it wants to. What writing is about cannot be circumscribed because, as Forrester also knows, the writer and his or her writing can no more free themselves of unconscious forces than the reader can. What writing evokes can be at odds with what it is informing us of. What a writer brings to bear on his or her subject is his or her knowledge, and is beyond his or her knowledge. A collaboration, like a psychoanalysis or the writing of a case history, or the reading of a book – and Thinking in Cases is a book about collaboration, if it is a book about anything – is at once a shared project and an unconscious medium. ‘The aim of analysis’, Forrester writes in this book, ‘is to restore to metaphors their metaphoricity: their ability to carry’ (p. 104). And that means to restore language, and what Forrester calls its ‘strange epistemic status’. Thinking in Cases does no more and no less than this in its wondering what cases can carry for us.

1IF P, THEN WHAT? THINKING IN CASES

My research at present centres on a large and hence necessarily long-term project that I call, depending on the occasion, either ‘Thinking in Cases’, or ‘The History and Philosophy of the Case’. The project started, like most large, branching structures that threaten to get out of their author’s control, from small seedlings. Or perhaps, to alter the botanical metaphor, it started from three rhizomes, which have now intertwined, out of the public view, into a tangled network of themes and variations. I will attempt an exposition of my work in this field by describing the three rhizomes, which also necessarily involves some intellectual autobiography; I will go on to show how the network has become ever more complex and difficult to map; finally, I will ask your help in the task of managing, perhaps even pruning, the proliferation of the topics raised. So I will welcome enthusiasm for the project, but I will be even more eager to hear how paring, thinning out and even inhibiting of growth can be implemented. The three rhizomic structures I will call, for simplicity’s sake: the psychoanalytic case history; the historical sociology of the sciences; and the individual in the human sciences.

Most of my research in the last twenty years has been devoted to the history and philosophy of psychoanalysis. I am, by early love and by university training, an historian and philosopher of science; so I have often viewed psychoanalysis from that perspective, while becoming reasonably well acquainted with other approaches: those of sociology, of anthropology, of literature, of psychology. The first question people ask me when they hear that I study psychoanalysis and that I am interested in the sciences is: is psychoanalysis a science? I will not answer this question immediately, although what I have to say affects that question quite profoundly. But my initial response is always to be somewhat floored by the question. It is analogous to the question: is jazz serious music? What do you answer? Well, in one sense of ‘serious’, quite obviously not: it aims at something quite different from serious music. But the illocutionary force of the question prevents this from being an answer one would want to give to the question.

More pertinent might be a rephrasing of the question: was psychoanalysis a science in the early twentieth century? This rephrasing helps to remind us that the criteria of what counts as a science change: there is not one science for all time, but sciences in history, subject to the gains, losses and fortunes of history. In addition, there is not one method in science, established for all time, the eternal benchmark and guarantor of truth. There have been different methods, discovered and employed in different times and places. Method is, in any case, too restrictive a term to apply to the package of practices, reasoning procedures and ways of going on that are to be found in the sciences. I prefer to use a term that Ian Hacking has found useful in his studies of the rise of statistical thinking: styles of reasoning:

styles of reasoning are curiously self-authenticating. A proposition can be assessed as true-or-false only when there is some style of reasoning and investigation that helps determine its truth value. What the proposition means depends upon the ways in which we might settle its truth. (Hacking, 1990: 7)

So, not only are there sciences, in the plural, but there is a plurality of methods, some specific to a group of sciences, some more nomadic in character. There can be different styles of reasoning operative in different disciplines for different purposes.

Alongside the list of six styles of reasoning that Hacking proposes – postulation and deduction; experimental exploration; hypothetical construction of models by analogy; ordering of variety by comparison and taxonomy; statistical analysis of regularities of populations; historical derivation of genetic development – I propose a seventh: reasoning in cases. Part, but only part, of my motives for adding this mode of reasoning is an attempt to characterize the style of reasoning dominant in psychoanalysis and related disciplines.

Hacking’s work on the statistical style of thinking indicates one further element of reasoning in cases, although he does not emphasize this. According to Hacking and others, an entirely new way of thinking arose with the transformation of the science of the state into statistical methods in the social and biological sciences. Let me just run through some of those transformations. Hacking has been much concerned with the fate of the doctrine of determinism and its intertwining with the rise of probabilistic and statistical methods. Is probabilistic reasoning just like ordinary reasoning, but under conditions of uncertainty, as Laplace thought? Or are the probabilistic laws and theories that a whole variety of sciences started to produce from the mid-nineteenth century on truthful pictures of a probabilistic universe? There may be laws governing large numbers of electrons, or of a Frenchman contemplating suicide, but are these the only laws to be had? Is there true indeterminism – lack of any possible knowledge – at the level of the individual electron or Frenchman? James Clerk Maxwell thought that humans could only have probabilistic knowledge, but that God could have certain knowledge. That is what made him God. The space of indeterminacy left to humans by the probabilistic laws was also the space of free will. Even Einstein is quoted, famously, as saying: God does not play dice with the world.

The ideal of science as certain knowledge is of course Aristotle’s ideal. One version of how Aristotle’s vision was finally contested and overthrown focuses on Darwinian evolution. The pre-Darwinian Aristotelian theory of the natural world is founded, it is argued, on the category or species, arranged hierarchically in order of generality. Darwin’s fundamental break with the Aristotelian tradition was to see classes or species as constituted by populations of individuals which vary along an indefinite number of axes. Whether one is to attribute this revolution in biological (and social) thought to Darwin, or to his contemporary Quetelet (the inspiration for Maxwell’s probabilistic model of matter and for Buckle’s account of statistical laws in history), or for that matter to Francis Galton, founder of eugenics and pioneer of statistical studies of inheritance, the claim is that it is populations of independently varying individuals that constitute the base matter of the natural and human worlds. All categories or species are artificial, imprecise and ultimately misleading attempts to portray in the outmoded Aristotelian language of predication a fundamental dynamic reality which can only be represented statistically.

But is, then, the rise of statistical science one further thrust of nominalism in its attack on realism: only individuals exist, there are no species, no categories, no names? We are very familiar with claims that phenotypes (individuals) should always be distinguished from genotypes, which determine the fundamental biological realities – so is it the other way round, with individuals being entirely contingent expressions of an underlying reality, itself expressible only in terms of probabilities?

Let me leave these broad questions to one side, while extracting one feature of this indubitably fundamental transformation in our way of thinking about classes and populations: this feature is best portrayed at this stage as a suspicion that the rise of statistical thinking put in question the notion of the individual, through the very process of refining what it might mean to have knowledge of a number of individuals. To give this an immediate historical anchor: psychoanalysis has never betrayed any interest whatsoever in statistical knowledge, whereas its sister discipline, experimental psychology, has been, if anything, the discipline most in thrall to the exigency of statistical methodologies, in fact has been the parent of many of them. If experimental psychology has been the discipline most aware of this need, born at the beginning of the twentieth century, to frame its scientificity in terms both of the experimental framework and of statistically significant results, what did the psychoanalysts think that they were doing? My answer is simple: they were thinking in cases.

At this point, the Aristotelian starting point yields another direction for this enquiry. For Aristotle, there can only be knowledge of the universal and the necessary; what is individual and what is contingent cannot be an object of knowledge. The claim is always the same, although it is inflected in different arenas – in metaphysics, in rhetoric, in politics, in ethics. For instance:

none of the arts theorizes about individual cases. Medicine, for instance, does not theorize about what will help to cure Socrates or Callias, but only about what will help to cure any or all of a given class of patients: this alone is subject to technique – individual cases are so infinitely various that no knowledge of them is possible. (Aristotle [1984], Rhetoric, 1356b, 29–33, 2156)

In the mood of the Metaphysics, since there can only be a science of the universal and the necessary, the individual, which is ontologically prior, is also the horizon of non-intelligibility. In the Ethics, this horizon is what is crossed in action based upon deliberation by the wise man, who embodies practical wisdom, phronesis:

Nor is practical wisdom concerned with universals only – it must also recognize the particulars; for it is practical, and practice is concerned with particulars. This is why some who do not know, and especially those who have experience, are more practical than others who know…. That practical wisdom is not knowledge is evident; for it is … concerned with the ultimate particular fact, since the thing to be done is of this nature…. [P]ractical wisdom is concerned with the ultimate particular, which is the object not of knowledge but of perception – not the perception of qualities peculiar to one sense but a perception akin to that by which we perceive that the particular figure before us is a triangle. (Aristotle [1984], Nicomachean Ethics, 1141b, 14–17 and 1142a, 23–8, 1802–3)

There is a preoccupation with the distance between knowledge and practice, as if knowledge forever cuts itself off from the individual, to which, by necessity, action and practice are committed. Practical wisdom engages with the individual, with the contingent this-ness of things, but can only ever do so in blindness. Aristotle gives the name experience to the ground which allows this deliberation. But there can be no science of the individual.

So, Aristotle assumes not only must knowledge be of the universal and the necessary, but also that it is possible to have such knowledge, and that, as a matter of fact, we do. There are a number of critiques of this position; indeed, one might say that the history of epistemology is the history of the critique of this position. For my purposes and on the grounds of personal partiality, I have selected the critique by J.S. Mill of the Aristotelian deductive syllogism.

Mill argues that the major premise of a syllogism – the Aristotelian exemplar of universal and necessary knowledge – is itself inductively acquired from the examination of ‘particulars’, as Mill calls the individual objects of perception. ‘All men are mortal’ has the form of a universal proposition, but is only true because of the examination of a finite number of particular instances of mortality; if the mortality of Socrates was one of those instances, then our reasoning from ‘Socrates is a man’ to ‘Socrates is mortal’ is circular, only a sleight of hand. If Socrates’ mortality is still in question, we have no guarantee that the inductively derived major premise really does hold for Socrates; we certainly cannot deduce it. Think what would happen if, by accident as it were, the logician arbitrarily chose the example of Christ instead of Socrates. Hence syllogistic reasoning is always from an inductively derived generalization to further particulars; yet the inductively derived generalization is itself only a way of writing down our knowledge of particulars, a sort of shorthand, as Mill, that contemporary of Pitman, argued. So that having established an inductive generalization, ‘what remains to be performed afterward is merely deciphering our own notes’ (Mill, 1884: 122).

The successive general propositions are not steps in the reasoning, are not intermediate links in the chain of inference between the particulars observed and those to which we apply the observation. If we had sufficiently capacious memories, and a sufficient power of maintaining order among a huge mass of details, the reasoning could go on with any general propositions; they are mere formulae for inferring particulars from particulars. (Mill, 1884: 140)

Mill is peremptory in his anti-elitist advocacy of practical reasoning contra the humbug of the logicians (i.e. Aristotle):

Since the individual cases are all the evidence we can possess, evidence which no logical form into which we choose to throw it can make greater than it is, and since that evidence is either sufficient in itself, or, if insufficient for the one purpose, cannot be sufficient for the other, I am unable to see why we should be forbidden to take the shortest cut from these sufficient premises to the conclusion and constrained to travel the ‘high priori road’ by the arbitrary fiat of logicians. (Mill, 1884: 123)

However, having established the primacy of the individual cases over any possible generalization invoking them, he then begins to sound more like Aristotle, the Aristotle concerned with practical wisdom:

I believe that, in point of fact, when drawing inferences from our personal experience and not from maxims handed down to us by books or tradition, we much oftener conclude from particulars to particulars directly than through the intermediate agency of any general proposition. We are continually reasoning from ourselves to other people, or from one person to another, without giving ourselves the trouble to erect our observations into general maxims of human or external nature…. It is not only the village matron who, when called to a consultation upon the case of a neighbour’s child, pronounces on the evil and its remedy simply on the recollection and authority of what she accounts the similar case of her Lucy. We all, where we have no definite maxims to steer by, guide ourselves in the same way; and if we have extensive experience and retain its impressions strongly, we may acquire in this manner a very considerable power of accurate judgment, which we may be utterly incapable of justifying or communicating to others. (Mill, 1884: 123)

For Mill, then, reasoning is always from particulars to particulars, because the general form of a proposition, or the general class to which particulars belong, are simply names, or marks as he calls them, which we employ because of our fallible memories. Mill thus has come full circle from Aristotle: his exemplar of reasoning is practical wisdom, which he argues is not only adequate knowledge, but the only sort of knowledge we have. Anything else, including science, is simply mutton dressed up as lamb, or knowledge that is seduced by the metaphor of the ‘commanding view’ into believing that the only way from A to B passes via the logician’s impressive but ultimately useless vantage point of the mountain top.

There are a number of ways of aligning Mill’s critique of the syllogism with developments in the nineteenth-century sciences. His nominalistic attack on the reality of the general class is similar to the Darwinian attack on the reality of species, which I have already mentioned, together with the rise of statistical thinking. And there is nothing more characteristic of nineteenth-century statistics than the vast collation and organization of marks, of numbers, of names, of particulars, whose accumulation and subterranean movement one can almost sense behind Mill’s text. Hacking calls this the avalanche of printed numbers (Hacking, 1982). Before pursuing further historical questions raised by Mill’s critique, let me turn to another of my rhizomes: the historical sociology of the sciences.

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One of the most influential books of the last few decades has been T.S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962. The buzzword ‘paradigm’ came into general currency with Kuhn’s account of the development of the sciences and caused him considerable embarrassment, since his critics and his devotees both revealed to him how polyvalent the term as he used it in the book was. In the second edition of 1970, he clarified his concept of paradigm by introducing two further terms, the first, ‘disciplinary matrix’, to characterize the network of social relations in which the production and employment of scientific knowledge are embedded; the second, ‘exemplar’, to indicate more clearly the way in which shared examples are what ground the productive collective labour of a scientific community. Kuhn reflected on his revised, clarified concept as follows:

I … could not, when examining the membership of a scientific community, retrieve enough shared rules to account for the group’s unproblematic conduct of research. Shared examples of successful practice could, I next concluded, provide what the group lacked in rules. Those examples were its paradigms, and as such essential to its continued research. (Kuhn, 1977: 318–19)

Kuhn introduced the term ‘exemplar’ to highlight this feature of a scientific community’s way of going on; exemplars are the standard experiments that novice practitioners learn their science on, or the standard problems that figure in textbooks, the exemplary achievements that define and delimit a whole field of research and eventual body of knowledge. One learns how to do science not by learning the rules or principles or concepts and then applying them to concrete situations; rather, one learns how to do science by learning how to work with exemplars: extending them, reproducing them, turning a novel situation into a version of a well-understood exemplar. I myself learned how to think history with these exemplars, since I studied at Princeton in the early 1970s with Kuhn; when he set me a Generals Examination paper, one of the questions was: ‘“What we call the Scientific Revolution is the history of the theory of the pendulum.” Discuss.’ I knew what this question was all about: the pendulum was one of Kuhn’s principal examples of an exemplar – from Galileo observing the swinging lamps in the cathedral at Florence, via the dispute between Hooke and Newton over the trajectory of a body falling to the centre of the earth, through to Huygens’ technical advances in the manufacture of clocks.