College Sex - Philosophy for Everyone: Philosophers With Benefits (23 page)

With Heloise’s uncle toeing the line and acquiescing to Abelard’s demands, one of the most famous affairs between a student and teacher began. Yet, despite the constant attempts to idealize this famous affair

between a teacher and student in movies, books, and even scholarly articles, it is evident that Abelard epitomizes and parallels the stereotype of the lecherous professor preying on a young woman. As Abelard him- self admits when discussing Fulbert’s decision to let him care for Heloise’s education, “I was amazed by his simplicity – if he had entrusted a tender lamb to a ravening wolf it would not have surprised me more.”
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Realizing that he wielded a great power over his apparently naïve student, Abelard makes it clear that, unlike Socrates, he was far less concerned with lead- ing Heloise to the life of inquiry than to the bed. As Abelard describes, “We were united, first under one roof, then in heart; and so with our les- sons as a pretext we abandoned ourselves entirely to love.”
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Abelard haughtily admits that while their books were open and the lessons planned, nothing but romance passed between them. He confesses that, “more words of love than our reading passed between us, and more kiss- ing than teaching,” and famously concludes that his “hands strayed oftener to her bosom than to the pages.”
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Furthermore, like professors trying to avoid the admonishing eyes of university administration, Abelard spent a considerable amount of time trying to dissuade Heloise’s uncle Fulbert from suspecting their affair. In this, Abelard avoided the appear- ance of favoritism by making it look like he was harder on his beloved pupil. Yet, unlike a contemporary academic, instead of merely insulting his favorite in public lectures or giving her lower grades, Abelard pre- ferred to beat Heloise. He explains though that “these blows were prompted by love and tender feeling rather than anger and irritation.”
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Despite these “heroic” attempts at hiding their affair, eventually Heloise’s uncle discovered the couple. Strikingly, Fulbert did not imme- diately seek vengeance, as Abelard quickly decried his actions and offered to marry the girl.Yet – here’s the rub – Abelard wanted to keep the mar- riage a secret, since anyone who hoped to advance in the world of educa- tion administered by the Church had to uphold the pretense of chastity. Here, we recognize that Abelard, like most contemporary professors, had to secure a praiseworthy reputation beyond his scholarly activities and that, like university professors trying to achieve tenure, having relations with a student, regardless of whether they were being validated by mar- riage, would damage his career. Moreover, his obsessive care for his rep- utation, rather than a genuine concern for Heloise’s wellbeing, strikes a considerably more sober tone when we turn to Heloise’s response to the idea of their marriage. So devoted to Abelard’s success, and so seduced by the image of him as a great philosopher, Heloise adamantly disfavored their union and famously declared that she would rather be her teacher’s

whore than the wife of an emperor.
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She decisively cared not for her own reputation, but only for his.

In the end, the couple were wed, but despite Heloise’s and Abelard’s demand, Fulbert did not keep the marriage secret and when Heloise refused to admit her marriage to others, her uncle, like her teacher before him, beat her.
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In the guise of protecting Heloise from such a hot- tempered man, Abelard sent his beloved to a convent, disguising her in religious dress. Outraged by this seeming attempt to get rid of the girl, Fulbert took it upon himself to teach his employee an unforgettable les- son. In the middle of the night Fulbert had his henchmen sneak into Abelard’s bedroom and castrate him, thus effectively punishing him for his earlier transgressions and assuredly preventing him from ever playing such reindeer games again.

Strikingly, this horrific picture of retribution has an odd parallel to the contemporary university. Consider the fact that despite only being her uncle, Fulbert, believing, as many colleges do, that he had the right to act
in loco parentis
, or in the stead of a parent, takes it upon himself to meddle in his niece’s adult decisions and in this neglects to account for her active role in the affair. For Fulbert, like universities who draft sex- ual harassment policies denying consensual affairs between faculty and students, Heloise was merely a victim who was too young to grasp the consequences of her actions, too innocent to have had any real ability to say no to such a big bad wolf like Abelard. In other words, many univer- sities rely on the premise that the nature of the student-teacher relation- ship is asymmetrical because the power that professors wield is too great to confer legitimately upon students an equal responsibility for these affairs. Put otherwise, Fulbert denies Heloise her dignity, her free- dom to choose, and thus punishes only Abelard. In so doing, he displays how university administrators in similar positions exercise a far greater authority over the outcome of such affairs. While playing the self- appointed judge and jury of such relations, many universities try to nip this supposed problem in the bud by first implementing sexual harass- ment policies that discourage all forms of social contact, therein “puri- fying” the classroom from the dangers of erotic desire, while also rebuffing a group of adults, however young, their right to consent. In the end, these so-called objective arbitrators often deny some professors their tenure when they transgress the acceptable boundaries between students and teachers – perhaps a less sanguinary punishment than gelding, but a penalty that can ultimately destroy, as it did for Abelard, one’s entire academic career.

To be sure, universities, and even Fulbert, act out of concern for the young in their charge and, in the case of Heloise, Fulbert seems to have appropriately recognized Abelard’s insidious ability to manipulate his stu- dent, an ability that was not much deterred even after his loss of “tenure.” Soon after receiving his punishment, Abelard, hoping to repair the damage done to his reputation, quickly joined a monastery. Yet, more regrettably, Abelard did not advise his former student/lover/wife to move on, but, in stark contrast to her uncle’s hopes, he demanded that she too take reli- gious vows and turn what was originally a mere disguise into the authentic dress of a nun. In this he secured a lifelong hold over her, becoming her only source for guidance and comfort in a world in which she never felt she belonged. His dominant presence even infiltrated her thoughts during mass, leading her to replace prayer with “wanton” fantasy. As she admits to Abelard years after their affair, “It was not any sense of vocation which brought me as a young girl to accept the austerities of the cloister, but your bidding alone,” as “it was not [her] pleasure and wishes [she] sought to gratify,” but Abelard’s.
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Thus, regrettably, and regardless of her accom- plishments later in life, Heloise becomes the paradigm for the devoted student victimized by the myopic desires of a self-serving master.

Lesson 3: Heidegger and Arendt on Concealed Unconcealment

On the surface, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt’s affair in early twentieth-century Germany looks like another case of the lecherous pro- fessor syndrome, as Heidegger’s behavior toward then 19-year-old Arendt seems equally suspect. As her instructor at the University of Marburg, he went to great lengths to keep their affair a secret from his colleagues, wife, and children, which forced Arendt to submit to his schedule and proclivity for cooking up clandestine rendezvous. When the relationship became untenable for Arendt, she, clearly heartbroken, transferred to another uni- versity on the other side of Germany. Yet regardless of this self-imposed distance, like Heloise with Abelard, Heidegger continued to brandish a pervasive emotional grip on Arendt as even on the eve of her wedding to another man she wrote a letter to her former professor and lover confess- ing that their relationship was “the blessing of [her] life,” insisting that he never forget her, as she would never forget him.
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Eventually losing all contact with her, Heidegger most markedly ignored her internment in a

holding camp during World War II. In the end, he only appears to rekindle interest in his former Jewish student once she had gained her own promi- nence in the States and could be of some use in cleaning up the stain that his undeniable association with Nazism had done to his career.

Yet despite this persistent and deplorable picture of the philosopher’s behavior toward Arendt, when one takes a closer look at Heidegger’s phi- losophy of education as well as his early letters to Arendt it becomes unde- niably evident that the relationship cannot be so easily compartmentalized into the pigeonhole of the lecherous professor stereotype. First, it should be mentioned that, like Socrates and Abelard, Heidegger also desired rad- ical reformulation of the standard practices in higher education.Throughout his letters and early work, Heidegger repeatedly expressed his general dis- taste of the contemporary German university, where learning was divorced from everyday life, where programs carved up thinking into a multiplicity of abstract disciplines, where so-called teachers merely lectured on topics dispassionately and with little concern for their impact on human activity. This form of ossified or “sterilized” teaching characterized for Heidegger the “general stagnation” of the modern university. In contrast, he believed that the university should be a site of “genuine scientific consciousness and life-relationships” where radical inquiry must always merge with one’s contemplation on the perplexities of human existence.
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Thus, he writes to Arendt that he desired “to teach young ones” and to take risks in the class- room for the sake of stimulating philosophic investigation rather than “pulling students along and drumming something into them.”
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Completely uninterested in producing scholars, Heidegger hoped his classrooms would open a space were “thinking could be made possible again.”
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It should also be noted that Arendt, more than Heidegger, seems to have been the acting catalyst in their break-up and her subsequent trans- fer to Jaspers’ tutelage in 1926. In fact, Heidegger notably did not take Arendt’s decision well, but constantly sought Jaspers out to find out how she was doing.
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Finally, after some time, he accepted her decision and wrote that perhaps her transfer was the best thing for her education, while also deeming it a sign of her “freedom of instincts” that evidenced how, apart from all his other students, i.e., the “Heidegger disciples,” she had allowed herself to grow.
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Finally, in many of his letters to Arendt, Heidegger expresses something that is conspicuously absent in his magnum opus
Being and Time
: his thoughts on the nature of love, thoughts which suggest that the asymmetrical relationships between teachers and students merely mirror all human rela- tionships, thus making issues of power between students and teachers,

beloved and lover, man and woman, entirely irrelevant. Rather, for Heidegger, the context of the relationship, i.e., the fact that he was a teacher and she was his student, was merely the condition in which they found themselves, a condition that must be overcome if they ever wished to nurture an authentic dialogue. In other words, like his philosophy, which asserts that truth is not a mere correspondence to facts but a process of
unconcealment
or constant disclosure, Heidegger thought their relationship allowed for an honest and pure dialogue that would allow for a dynamic show of themselves where neither had to conceal anything from the other. He writes: “Dear Miss Arendt! I must come see you this evening and speak to your heart. Everything should be simple and pure between us. Only then will we be worthy of having been allowed to meet.You are my pupil and I your teacher, but this is only the occasion for what has happened to us.”
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Further along in this letter, Heidegger describes how he understands that she will never be his, he will never possess her as a mere object to appease his desire, but that her presence in his life will instigate a memorable and lasting growth in both of them. While alluding to the power of amorous relationships, Heidegger explicitly praises the mystery of love: “Dear Hannah! Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves.… That is how love steadily intensifies its inner- most secret.”
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For Heidegger, unlike Abelard’s mere bodily lust for Heloise, his affair with his young student created an intimacy that “opened up” a “great distance” between the “other” that allows the “other” a chance to “break into our life,” while also claiming that through love “a human fate gives itself over to another human fate, and the duty of pure love is to keep this giving as alive as it was on the first day.”
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For Heidegger, love was “to be forced into one’s innermost existence,” and quoting Augustine, the sub- ject of Arendt’s dissertation, “
Amo: volo ut sis
,…: I love you – I want you to be what you are.”
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In one letter, Heidegger explicitly analyzes the nature of love while suggesting how their affair has less to do with an asymmetrical power play than with a mutual care where each player takes a risk, learns to trust, and ultimately discovers themself in union with the other. He writes:

To belong in the life of the other – this is genuine union. And only such a union can be the source and guiding light for a truly joyous closeness….When I say my joy in you is great and growing, that means I have faith in everything that is your story. I am not erecting an ideal – still less would I ever be tempted to educate you, or anything resembling that. Rather, you – just as you are and will remain with your story – that’s how I love you. Only then is love strong for

the future, and not just a moment’s fleeting pleasure – only then is the poten- tial of the other also moved and strengthened for the crises and struggles that never fail to arise. But such faith is also kept from misusing the other’s trust in love. Love that can be happy into the future has taken root.
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