Human Nature by David Berlinski

Author:David Berlinski [Berlinski, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936599721
Publisher: Discovery Institute Press
Published: 2019-11-11T05:00:00+00:00

16. A LOGICIAN’S LIFE

PIERRE ABÉLARD (PETER ABELARD) WAS BORN IN WHAT IS NOW Brittany in 1079. The most important logician of the twelfth century, he falls evenly between the two great eras in the history of logic, the first taking place in ancient Greece, and the second, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe.

His family belonged to the minor nobility, and, as the eldest son, he was expected to become a soldier, a career that he rejected, he writes, because he preferred “the conflicts of disputations to the trophies of war.”1 Thereafter Abélard was introduced to late eleventh-century philosophy, chiefly by Jean Roscelin. With his education complete, Abélard wandered the Loire valley, “disputing,” as he says, “like a true peripatetic philosopher, whenever I heard there was keen interest in the art of dialectic.”

He was widely considered insufferable.

“At last I came to Paris.” Abélard when. Then as now, the city radiated waves of glamour and prestige, and with those waves returned, drew in troubadours and poets, logicians and philosophers, architects, artisans, stone-masons, gold-smiths, windy prelates, money-men eager for cathedral contracts, and a remarkable number of prostitutes, drifters, low-lifes, spongers, wastrels, petty criminals, jugglers, necromancers, astrologers, minor clergy, dissipated aristocrats, heretics, and, of course, hunchbacks.

Having drawn the circle of his own wanderings to their center, Abélard wasted no time in denouncing the views of his rural master Roscelin. Not very much is known specifically of the doctrines that Roscelin had preached. A nominalist in name, Roscelin believed in words, and so became a minimalist in philosophy. Where Plato, and so many others, saw in universal terms such as red, good, brave, loyal, and hirsute the names of universals or Platonic forms, Roscelin stopped at the water’s edge, seeing nothing in words beyond words. Condemned for heresy in 1093, he was exiled to England, the Catholic Church having correctly noticed that once a man is disposed to doubt the existence of universals, his doubts about the Trinity cannot be far behind. Abélard’s own criticisms followed the long boat or skiff that carried Roscelin across the choppy waters of the English Channel, the man’s sense of indignation mounting as he faced the English coast, with Abélard’s criticisms stinging at his buttocks.

“If you had savored only a little bit of the sweetness of the Christian religion,” Roscelin would later write, and there followed the usual complaints of a teacher making the pained discovery that teachers always make, namely that their students are no longer sufficiently mindful of the “great benefits” that they have received from their instruction.

No universities—not yet. No degrees. No committees. No chairs. No tenure. Teachers themselves established schools. They clambered onto hillsides and with their students arrayed before them, talked into the wind. Abélard considered his contemporaries perfect fools. “I began,” he writes, “to think of myself as the only philosopher in the world, with nothing to fear from anyone.”

His reputation owed much to a contrived encounter with an older, more established philosopher, William of Champeaux, “the supreme master of the subject,” as Abélard observes.

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