Metaphysics

Abelard’s work in metaphysics is heavily influenced both by Aristotle’s Categories and by his own immersion in Christian doctrine.

Nonetheless, his most characteristic metaphysical instinct derives from neither ofthese sources. That instinct is to emphasize the individuality of things that exist, and to oppose any theoretical approach which ambiguates claims of individuality.

This theoretical tendency arises against the background of a position that does just the opposite, now referred to as ‘‘Material Essence Realism.’’ Adherents of this position do not adopt an in voce reading of Aristotle’s logical writings, instead interpreting the universal terms appearing in ‘‘Every human is an animal’’ as the universal things humanity and animality. Boethius says of these universals that they are present as a whole in many individuals, and in such a way as to make each one of those individuals what it is. So the same animality is in many animals, which are differentiated from one another only by the different accidents they possess. A pivotal event in

Abelard’s career is his sustained attack on this theory. Individual animals cannot properly be differentiated from each other, he argues, if at base they are all the same animal - which they would be if animality were a universal in the Boethian sense. And if accidents did indeed differentiate substances from each other then they would be metaphysically prior to those substances, which makes no sense given how accidents are understood to relate to substances. So Material Essence Realism is rejected whole cloth.

We have already seen what universal terms are for Abelard. They are just words. And we have seen how they work. They denote classes because of the applicability of an abstracted intellectus to all members of a class. There need be no appeal to a single form simultaneously shared by all members. What animals have in common is not animality, the universal thing, but just this: being an animal, which Abelard refers to as a status, by which he seems to mean the condition or state that things are in. Other than to emphasize that it is not a thing, he gives little detail about what a status is, and so the word proves difficult to translate. The point of the notion seems to be that things are comparable without having in common a shared form, and that this irreducible comparability is what allows the same abstracted intellectus to be applicable to a plurality of things.

Abelard describes material objects as composites of matter and form, but the forms those objects possess are not shared with other objects. Each form is individual to its possessor, one animality to one animal, another animality to another. In fact these forms are simply the arrangement or composition of the matter in the object in which they are present. They have a purely material basis. So how matter is distributed into objects is, therefore, an issue of great metaphysical importance to Abelard, and he responds with a treatment of part/whole relationships that provides the outline of a mereology. Continuous wholes - where there are no intervals among parts - are the limiting case of individual physical objects. More complicated are discrete wholes. Some of these are mere pluralities, whose parts are spatially scattered. Some, like flocks of birds, have parts that are spatially proximate but unarranged. Others, like houses, have parts that are spatially proximate and arranged. A key point for Abelard is to define the distinct parts of this third kind of discrete whole; his claim is that they are the parts whose placement in the arrangement will have the immediate effect of bringing the whole into existence.

Various other features of the material world are canvassed in Abelard’s work, largely in response to the content of Aristotle’s Categories: the nature of relations, space, time, change, and so on. But Abelard’s theological interests focus his attention on two immaterial entities as well: the human soul and God. The souls of animals are material and thus perish when the animals die. The souls of humans are not material. Neither are they forms, since, Abelard argues, it makes no sense to say of a form that it has insanity, anger, or knowledge, although it makes perfect sense to say of a soul that it has those qualities. Indeed, if a soul were a form in a form/matter composite then it would be like other forms in such composites in having a purely material basis. Human souls are metaphysically distinct from the material order of the world, and hence can sustain thought independently of a physical body. Thus is a theological account of the special dispensation for human beings brought alongside a relentlessly materialist account of the properties of the world.

Abelard’s view of God is strikingly deterministic: God can only do the things he does, and only when and how he does them, and is likewise constrained in what he omits. This is presented as a consequence of God’s goodness. Divine acts and omissions are always the best among alternatives, none of which are better than, or even as good as, the acts and omissions themselves. In fact God never even has to choose between equally good alternatives because none such ever arise for him. Presumably this is because his goodness never allows him down a path where equally good alternatives would even be encountered; the path he is drawn to is without moral forks, where every good encountered is the decisively best one when set against alternatives. This means, in the end, that there is a reason for everything God does or omits, and that the world, which is the product of these absolutely reasoned acts and omissions, is a deterministic one. There is, of course, allowance for human freedom in this world, since the human soul is set apart by its immateriality. Humans can actually be free, even though God is not. But does this not compromise the dignity of God? Not at all, says Abelard. Being free is like eating, walking, or sinning - not properties we should expect to find in a divine being anyway and, therefore, not properties whose absence compromises the divinity of God.