Psychoanalysis is a science that attempts to explain normal and pathological states in the human mind, as well as a clinical practice of treatment for the latter. It began with Freud's rejection of hypnosis and shock therapy as cures for hysteria and his development with Josef Breuer of the “talking cure,” a technique of analyzing patients' free associations that was to become a central feature of the psychoanalytic session. In Freud's account, psychoanalysis did not truly come into its own until he began to analyze the network of associations that arise in dreams; this was the breakthrough of his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams. Describing dreams as the “royal road to . . . the unconscious,” Freud insisted that their images arise from the interaction between whole systems of repressed thoughts, as a result of which no single meaning can be affixed to any image.

Although this approach may seem reminiscent of the structuralist linguistics emerging around the time Freud was writing, nothing like it had existed before in the realm of dream interpretation.

When the young Benjamin finally decides, in 1917, to jettison Kant for the Romanticism of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis as the topic for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Berne, the choice reflects no arbitrary shift of interest. Benjamin had already been struggling to rescue Kant's thought from what he perceived to be its fatal slide into scientific positivism in the hands of the neo-Kantians of his time. Whether it was the failure of this rescue or another reason (according to a letter from Benjamin to Scholem, it was the “very unpleasant” experience of finally getting around to reading the philosophy of history expressed in Kant's essays on “Ideas for a Universal History” and “Perpetual Peace”), this shift toward the Romantics marks a clear break with the dominant philosophic thought of his day. Moreover, since this was a movement away from the various ideologies of progress espoused both by the neo-Kantians (and also used by one of them, Hermann Cohen, to justify the German war effort) and by the German youth movement with which Benjamin had been involved during the years preceding 1917, the stakes are immediately high.

If Benjamin’s renunciation of Kant during the war years is linked, at least in his own mind, to the conformism he sees implicit in the latter’s portrayal of history as an endless inexorable progress toward a pre-established goal – the “infinite task” – it is also crucially informs his rehabilitation of the Romanticism that flourished at Jena under the influence of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel in the late 1780s and early 1790s.

Languages of self-portraiture

There is nothing self-evident about the notion that we should have confessional and literary writings by Walter Benjamin. After all, the abstractness and rigor that readers associate with his texts do not, on the surface, appear to conform to the sinewy and personal cadences characteristic of autobiographical reflection, from St. Augustine via Rousseau and Goethe to Nietzsche and the modernists, or to the aesthetic demands of literary discourse. From this perspective, to think of Benjamin as having written autobiographical and literary texts is, to borrow a phrase from one of his readers, “at first blush as implausible as an anthology of fairy tales by Hegel, a child's garden of deconstruction by Derrida.” Yet, both his confessional and literary texts belong in essential ways to the ever-shifting contours of his variegated acts of self-portraiture. Benjamin's autobiographical and literary texts stage his theory of the writerly self as one whose identity is defined by the condition of not being himself, that is, as one who negotiates the construction and dispersal of selfhood in language. As one critic, Fredric Jameson, reminds us, Benjamin poses a challenge not least of all because he “seems to dissolve into multiple readings fully as much as he turns into a unique 'self' that remains to be defined.”

The extremes as points of orientation define the via regia of philosophical investigation for Benjamin. The first sentence that opens the main body of Benjamin's The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, after the epistemological preface, categorically states the direction as “the necessary direction toward the extreme” (Origin, 57). The extreme as point of direction and orientation, even as the “norm of conceptualization” (Origin, 57), is set off from a logic that defines the norm by the normal, the average, and the middle. It is in this direction toward the extreme that Benjamin finds his own intellectual procedure intersecting with that of Carl Schmitt, whose essay on the concept of sovereignty appealed to Benjamin above all because of this methodological intersection with his own mode of thought. When Benjamin, in his book on German tragic drama, explicitly quotes the one-sentence paragraph with which Carl Schmitt opens his book: “Sovereign is he who decides over the state of emergency,” his own epistemological preface has already articulated the logic of the extreme that underlies Schmitt's procedure. For Schmitt, the concept of the “sovereign” is a liminal concept (Grenzbegriff). “A liminal concept, ” he writes, “is not a confused concept as it is in the popular literature, but a concept of the extreme sphere. Accordingly its definition cannot be tied to the normal case, but to the liminal case.” At this point the intellectual worlds of Benjamin and Schmitt come to their closest encounter; from here they will move away from each other in opposite directions. Schmitt will become and remain a fundamentalist, Benjamin will remain a marginalist, being faithful only to the liminal border lines.

Reading this well-known entry from the “N” convolute of Benjamin's Arcades Project, even the most seasoned Benjamin expert might be forgiven a feeling of helplessness in the face of such a powerful and enigmatic array of claims. The breathtaking evocation of an alternative temporality that this quote contains in characteristically elliptical and compacted form, the glimpse at an entirely new conception of historiography that breaks with previous categories of interpretation, the notion of an image-based historical sensibility as the genuine mode of historical interpretation – these are as fascinating and compelling as any moment in modern philosophy. But, at the same time, one cannot avoid the feeling that this quote, and others like it in Benjamin's Arcades Project, is a theoretical promissory note that would prove difficult if not impossible to redeem. What possible philosophy of history could explicate the difference between the past and “what-has-been,” between the present and the “now”?

Abelard's philosophy is the first example in the Western tradition of the cast of mind that is now called nominalism. Although his view that universals are mere words (nomina) is typically thought to justify the label, Abelard's nominalism - or better, his irrealism - is in fact the hallmark of his metaphysics. He is an irrealist not only about universals, but also about propositions, events, times other than the present, natural kinds, relations, wholes, absolute space, hylomorphic composites, and the like. Instead, Abelard holds that the concrete individual, in all its richness and variety, is more than enough to populate the world. He preferred reductive, atomist, and material explanations when he could get them; he devoted a great deal of effort to pouring cold water on the metaphysical excesses of his predecessors and contemporaries. Yet unlike modern philosophers, Abelard did not conceive of metaphysics as a distinct branch of philosophy. Following Boethius, he distinguishes philosophy into three branches: logic, concerned with devising and assessing argumentation, an activity also known as dialectic; physics, concerned with speculation on the natures of things and their causes; and ethics, concerned with the upright way of life.

Abelard worked against an institutional and intellectual background that was complex and various not just because of his period - before the rise of the universities regularized the structure of academic teaching and learning - but also as a result of his own character and fortune. The aim of this chapter is to examine how Abelard fitted into these contexts and, in particular, to look at how his philosophical ideas relate to those of the thinkers who immediately preceded him. It aims also to show that Abelard was a changing, developing thinker.

In the first section, “Life and works,” I give a very brief sketch of Abelard’s life, and then of his works, and try to show the main direction of his intellectual interests in a career which, as I shall argue, falls into two distinct halves. In Section ii, I add a little detail to this bare account, by considering (in very roughly chronological order) the various cultural settings in which Abelard worked. Three of them are particular milieus to which he belonged: the logical schools at the beginning of the twelfth century, the world of twelfth century monastic thinking and reform, and the Paris schools, logical and theological, of the 1130s. One is a cultural setting in rather a different sense: Abelard’s reading. In Section iii, I have chosen two topics through which to examine more precisely, and very selectively, aspects of Abelard’s relation to earlier and contemporary medieval philosophers: Abelard’s nominalism, and his treatment of Plato’s idea of a World Soul. The discussions in Section ii are general and aim to introduce readers both to important aspects of Abelard’s intellectual life and, more widely, to the culture and education of the twelfth century. Those in Section iii are more detailed. They aim to put forward some new suggestions, and to give an idea of the sort of evidence the historian must sift and interpret in order to understand how Abelard’s thought developed within its intellectual context.

Abelard's investigations into the philosophy of language are of great interest not only with respect to the history of philosophy, but also with respect to systematic considerations. These investigations, however, are not readily accessible. They offer nothing to a reader who wants to glean information quickly from them. A thorough study is required, and this itself requires extraordinary patience. The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to the project of making Abelard's investigations into the philosophy of language accessible to the general philosophical community.

Unlike contemporary philosophers, Abelard does not conceive of philosophy of language as a distinct or separate branch of philosophy. Indeed, as he conceives of philosophy, it is a genus with just three species, namely, logic, physics, and ethics (LNPS 506.18–19). If we want to identify his contribution to what we now recognize as issues in philosophy of language, therefore, we must extract his views from his discussion of that branch of philosophy in which they are embedded, namely, logic or, as he also refers to it, dialectic (hereafter I shall use the terms “logic” or “dialectic” synonymously).

Peter Abelard had a great influence upon his contemporaries. As he himself reports, many students followed him, and, as is clear from what we know about the history of twelfth-century logic, his rivals could not neglect his innovating theories and discussions, feeling it necessary to develop their own theories in response to his. In the next century, however, his direct influence disappeared in logic as well as in theology. The census of Peter Abelard's works shows that very few manuscripts from the thirteenth century preserve his works, and that there are no manuscripts at all for his logical works. He did, however, leave a school - the so-called Nominales, named after his own commitment to nominalism - but it survives for only one or two generations after him. As a result, Abelard is known in the next century only in connection with the name, or rather the notoriety, of the school of the Nominales, together with a few distinctive theories associated with it.

Much of Abelard's philosophy, specifically his philosophy of language, rests on an account of cognition and philosophy of mind. Abelard recognized this dependence. His more famous discussions of universals and propositions each include a brief treatment of cognition and mind as essential groundwork. Around 1125 he wrote the Treatise on Understandings (Tractatus de intellectibus) to present his views in a single work and in a more coherent fashion than he had hitherto undertaken to do. The Treatise's stated purpose is to distinguish and explain the operations of the mind “necessary for the doctrine of sermones” (TI 1), and it reflects Abelard's somewhat ambivalent feelings about the philosophical importance of issues in cognition and philosophy of mind. The issues are important enough to warrant discussion in an independent work, but Abelard did not consider their study to be a philosophical end in itself.

Peter Abelard (1079-1142) is a philosopher and theologian whose reputation has always preceded him. Indeed, to this day he remains among the best-known figures of the entire Middle Ages. Although one can hardly overestimate the value of his intellectual legacy, his reputation owes at least as much to his flamboyant personality and to the sensational details of his biography. Very early on Abelard established his place as one of the most celebrated masters in Paris by challenging - and then defeating - his teachers and rivals in public disputation. In some cases, he literally drove these rivals out of business: he stole their students and set up his own schools (the first when he was only twenty-five) just down the road from them. He aroused the fiercest devotion in students, and the fiercest enmity in rivals. He also inspired the love and devotion of (some would say merely seduced) a seventeen-year-old Heloise. But when Heloise became pregnant and ran away with him to be secretly married, Abelard earned the hatred of her uncle and guardian, Fulbert, who was also the canon of Notre Dame.

Though the main concern of this volume is Abelard's work in philosophy and theology, he made important and original contributions in a number of fields. His substantial essays in apologetic and biblical exegesis are discussed in other chapters. Studies still in progress are revealing his extensive and wide-ranging activity as a liturgist, and seeking to recover concrete evidence of his work as a composer of music. But his most remarkable non-philosophical role is as a literary artist, a master of narrative and lyric form who produced art of a high order out of his own complex and tormented life.

Any account of Abelard the artist must begin with the Historia calamitatum, the narrative of his struggles as man, philosopher, and monk over thirty years. Ostensibly written to console an unnamed friend by inviting him to contrast his own misfortunes with the far greater sufferings of Abelard, the Historia seems clearly to have been designed to engage a wider audience. Whether viewed as an authentic apologia pro vita sua or as an astute exercise in historical romance, this unique document and the story it tells have inevitably defined our sense of the character and personality of Abelard. So compelling is the Historia indeed, so evocative of romance and hagiography in its framing of the crucial events of Abelard’s life, and so eloquent in the lessons it draws from these events, that it is hard to resist the suspicion that it is essentially a work of imaginative fiction. But it is unique too in that its historicity has been tested perhaps as rigorously as that of any comparable work. Its status as a work of Abelard, and as initiating the series of “personal” letters by Abelard and Heloise that accompany it in virtually all manuscripts, now seems to have been decisively established, while the exhaustive readings to which it has been subjected have greatly enhanced our ability to appreciate it as a literary text.

Peter Abelard's contributions to ethics are concentrated in two works, his Ethics (or Scito te Ipsum) and his Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian (or Collationes). There are ethical insights to be found scattered elsewhere in his works, but for the sustained presentation of an ethical theory, one can only turn to these two works. The Dialogue is actually two dialogues, one between a philosopher and a Jew, the other between the philosopher and a Christian, debating the relative merits of pagan philosophy, Judaism, and Christianity. The Ethics concentrates on the development of a distinctively Christian ethical theory. It was to have consisted of two books.

The unfinished second book of the Ethics begins with a description of what Abelard takes himself to have accomplished in the first book, namely, the provision of an understanding of what sins are, how they are rectified, and how they differ from vices (Sc. 128.1–4; Spade 1995, 226). The second book was supposed to have taken up the topic of what it is to do good, or, as he prefers to put it in his more careful moments, what it is to do well (Coll. 163.3229–3230; Spade 1995, 404). The text was abandoned after one page. The Ethics, then, consists of a rather elaborate and zestful account of wrongdoing along with the merest of gestures towards an account of right-doing. It is as if Dante had neglected to write Paradiso after finishing Inferno. But as the newspapers attest daily, accounts of wrongdoing fascinate us more than accounts of right-doing: how many more people have read Inferno than Paradiso?

“From time to time some of my friends startle me by referring to the Atonement itself as a revolting heresy,” wrote Austin Farrer, “invented by the twelfth century and exploded by the twentieth. Yet the word is in the Bible.” Farrer is referring to Romans 5:11 in the Authorized Version: “we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement.” Here the word “atonement” - literally, the state of being “at one” - translates the Greek katallage, which means “reconciliation.” The doctrine of the Atonement, then, is in its essentials the claim that the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ effects a reconciliation between God and human beings, who had been - and apart from Christ's gracious action would have remained - estranged on account of human sin. And that doctrine, far from being a twelfth-century innovation, is a prominent theme of the Pauline epistles and a matter of theological consensus from the earliest days of Christian thought.