Pierre Abelard is famous for his love story with Eloise, but his philosophical ideas and ethical perspectives have important value that bridges the Middle Ages and modern times. His positions on universal debates and ethics overcome the philosophical limitations of his time, and his ideas deserve to be reevaluated today.

Introduction

Born in France in 1079, Pierre Abelard is more famous for his love affairs and letters with his lover Eloise than for his identity as a philosopher and theologian. He was a medieval priest who fell in love with a woman 22 years his junior, a love that transcended their age and class differences and led to a life of decadence. But his philosophical thoughts and ideas go far beyond a simple love story. I wanted to know more about Abelard, a man we didn’t get to know very well.
From a young age, his mind was brilliant, and it seems that his intelligence made him feel the gap in understanding between others. He was a person who centered on reason and logic, ignoring other people’s feelings and sticking to his opinions to the end. Like the so-called “bad luck man,” many people praised his talent in front of him but wished he would be harmed behind his back.
Abelard gained fame by defeating his mentor in philosophical debates with his brilliant mind, but this led to political retaliation from his mentor, which narrowed his position. “If there’s no power, there’s humility!” comes to mind: a teacher who makes his pupil suffer with his shrewd political maneuvering is not unlike today’s malcontents. This anecdote symbolizes Abelard’s life. His reasoned and logical nature was at odds with the medieval world of authority, and like the proverbial square peg in a round hole, he was constantly tormented as an anomaly.
Abelard’s outspoken and logical nature made him eager to expose hypocrisy and lies around him. Even as a priest, he sought to expose the irregularities and contradictions around him, which led to assassination threats. Theology is a discipline of absolute faith, but for Abelard, logic and faith were inseparable. He constantly sought to apply logic to theology, and in doing so, he was the first to separate ethics from theology. He also influenced the methodology of scholastic philosophy.
History is the record of the winners. The words and actions that were accepted at the time would have been recorded. But what happened to the things that were wrong in the past and right in the present? In the past, people would have let them slide or deliberately erased them. As a medieval rebel, his ideas and philosophy would have been buried until the French Revolution, which is why he was chosen over Aquinas, Augustine, Ockham, and others. Now let’s take a look at the heretic’s ideas.

The universal argument

Let’s take a look at Abelard’s position in one of the most fierce debates of the Middle Ages: the Universal Controversy (between realism and nominalism).
The Universal Debate was at its height during the Scholastic period of philosophical history. Abelard studied under Roscelinus, a nominalist, and Guillaume, a realist. Realism holds that universal concepts exist prior to things (individuals), while nominalism holds that universal concepts exist after things (individuals). Abelard adopted Aristotle’s substantialism, explaining that universal concepts exist as essences within the individual things.
Guillaume argued that the common entity, or universal, that unites different things into a single concept is real regardless of the differences between them. For example, the concepts of species and genus, such as “human being,” exist as a single “entity” independent of “chulsu” or “yunghee. Abelard rejected the famous position that general concepts such as ‘species’ and ‘genus’ are merely products of language. If universal concepts were empty symbols, he argued, then sentences containing them would be meaningless or, if they were meaningful, unintelligible. He thus partially accepted Guillaume’s realism, but he refuted Guillaume by arguing that the reality of universal concepts is conceptual rather than physical. It is only by human thought that universals can be universal and general, but not that they are real.
According to Abelard, universal concepts are the result of human reason’s experience of concrete objects, from which it extracts similar properties of each. The concept of “human being” is established through the common properties found in all people, including Chul-Su and Young-Hee. Abelard sought to overcome the limitations of the medieval universal argument by going beyond the binary logic of realism and nominalism and emphasizing both the empirical and abstract aspects of human thought. His position is sometimes referred to as conceptualism.
It’s worth knowing how the medieval universal argument was received by others. This argument is one of the reasons why philosophy is considered boring. Concepts precede entities, and concepts are contained within things. For a long time, the philosophical debate has been an uninteresting topic.
We don’t know what Abelard was thinking, but I suspect he had similar thoughts: his teacher learned from both nominalists and realists, and his argument is a conceptualism that lies somewhere in the middle. “If it makes sense this way, and it makes sense that way, isn’t there enough room for both?” he asks.
The universal argument doesn’t mean much to me, but I mention it because it has an important place in the history of philosophy. Abelard’s conceptualization is not perfect, but I found it to be very much in line with my own.

Ethics

As I mentioned earlier, Abelard’s philosophical significance lies in his distinction between ethics and theology. In the realm of morality, Abelard emphasized intentions. It is not what we do that is judged by God, but the intention with which we do it. The condemnation and praise of an actor does not depend on his actions, but on his intentions.
Intention in this context refers to a state of mind that is closely related to knowledge. Since God is all-knowing, but we can perform a forbidden act without knowing anything about it, it was argued that the act itself is not evil, but only the intention is evil.
For example, in a society where incest is a sin, if a man and woman fall in love and marry with everyone’s blessing, but it is later discovered that they are brother and sister, are they evil? Abelard makes this point, emphasizing that there is nothing evil about the intentions of a person who does not intend to commit incest, and that the act itself is value-neutral.
Furthermore, evil intentions can ruin a good act. If a judge performs a good act that leads to the execution of a criminal, but tries to punish the criminal out of personal resentment and hatred for the criminal, the judge’s evil intentions spoil the good act and he commits a sin.
He argued that good intentions can justify evil actions. Lying is clearly an evil act. If an independence fighter is captured by the Japanese and forced to name everyone involved in the independence movement, then following Abelard’s argument, the fighter can justify the evil act of lying. If you have good intentions for the independence of your country and the safety of your comrades, lying, even if it is an evil act, can be justified.
Abelard also found evidence in the Bible to support his argument. There’s the story of God commanding Abraham to kill Isaac. God’s command to Abraham to kill Isaac is a command for an evil act. Commanding an evil act is evil in and of itself. But because God’s intention was good, to test Abraham’s faith, God’s good intention made the evil act right. Abelard argued that good intentions are just as praiseworthy as good acts, even if they are not carried out.
So far, we’ve seen Abelard’s argument. According to Abelard, evil intentions should be punished and condemned. But why do we punish acts and not intentions when punishing crimes? Why should acts alone be punished, even in the absence of criminal intent?
Abelard was an early proponent of strict liability, the theory that a person does not have to know that an act is a crime or intend to commit it to constitute a crime. If a baby’s mother sleeps next to her and crushes her to death in her sleep, she is punished even though she acted with the good intention of sleeping with her baby without intent to kill. This punishment is justified because it serves as a warning to others, even though she has not committed a sin.
Abelard saw this as a human limitation. Since we cannot see intentions, evil intentions are hidden within us, and we can only recognize evil acts that we can see clearly. Abelard pointed this out and argued that judgment in the celestial realm would be a judgment that would not be based on deeds alone.
There are a number of limitations to Abelard’s argument. First, if the intentions are good, can evil means be justified, such as the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan in World War II or the actions of the scientists who developed it?
Second, can an evil act be justified by a wrong conscience? If a madman takes pleasure in the suffering of others and causes them to suffer with the intention of pleasing many people, is the act right?
Third, there may be cases where intentions justify actions. For example, is it right for a vegetarian to walk into a butcher shop, pay a fair price, and prevent meat-eaters from eating in order to prevent killing?
Abelard’s ethics predates the ethics of the 8th and 9th centuries. Later, the 1960s hippie mantra “it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you mean it” and the Council of Sanssouci’s view that people didn’t sin when they killed Christians with good intentions are derived from Avellard’s argument.
There are three limitations to this argument. The first limitation is that evil acts are committed in the name of good intentions. This is the case with terrorism, reckless evangelism, and useless backwoodsmen. To address this, we need to take a perspective that prioritizes freedom above all else. While we are saddened by the tragedy of people committing evil acts because of their good intentions, we must ask ourselves, “Is this a significant infringement on the freedoms and rights of others?” before we act. This is what the range of freedoms, rights, and human rights codified in law today are meant to protect. No one deserves to die as a result of terrorism, and everyone has the right to freedom of religion. With so many ways to manifest good intentions, if the only way to realize them is through evil acts, one must ask whether one’s intentions are wrong, or whether the current laws are wrong, and this can only be resolved by taking into account the opinions of all walks of life and disciplines, not the dictates of any one person or group.
The second limitation is the evil act that comes from a wrong conscience. First of all, it is necessary to check whether the person is mentally or physically weak. Various medical and scientific findings may be sufficient to determine whether a person is suffering from a mental or physical illness, which may allow for lenient punishment, such as mitigating the crime. However, crimes committed while under the influence of drugs or alcohol should not be considered diminished mental capacity. If a person knows that they are unable to control themselves, they have acted with the expectation that their behavior will lead to a crime and should be punished accordingly. The ambiguity of the concept of a wrongful conscience is addressed by Abelard’s theory of strict liability, which requires punishment for the act and then correction through correctional institutions. Furthermore, if such a wrongful conscience is deemed to be the responsibility of society, then society would be required to mitigate the punishment of the act and take the educational responsibility of teaching the offender a universal conscience.
The third limitation is the issue of intent justifying the act. Intentions are always there to justify actions. In the past, justifications have been important to justify actions, but we need to make sure that these justifications are also justified by others. If the justification is only personal, the behavior is wrong. If the justification is acceptable to others, it is extenuating, and if it is accepted by all, it is the most justifiable. On the other hand, a justification for an action that is rejected even by yourself should be severely punished.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve discussed Abelard’s philosophical ideas. After researching various sources, I realized that Abelard’s ideas are not so far removed from our current lives. Is this similar to my feelings about his life? Today, when it is accepted as a virtue to stand up for one’s opinion, fight against evil authority, and pursue justice and reason, Abelard’s life is very much in line with the virtues of our time.
Since philosophy is a human endeavor, it reflects a person’s daily behavior and thoughts, so his philosophical ideas are as acceptable to us today as his life is to virtue, even if they are a thousand years old.
The only regret is that his ideas have not received much attention. His life and disastrous end were as much vilified by his enemies as his work, and the record of it has probably been obscured or distorted at times. Even the punishment of the time, or the act that crippled him, would have distorted his story. Shouldn’t he be treated with the same respect as Aquinas, Augustine, and Ockham? I was left with a lot of regrets.
He must have faced a lot of criticism for his love affair with a woman 22 years his junior, for his justifiable behavior that offended others, and so on. Nevertheless, I applaud him for not hiding his true nature and living according to reason, and I end this article by wishing for a society where living according to justice is the norm.