Books
Soul music. Edward Skidelsky enjoys a book that was a runaway bestseller in France
Published 28 January 2002
A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues: The Uses of Philosophy in Everyday Life
Andre Comte-Sponville, translated by Catherine Temerson William Heinemann, 352pp, £15.99
ISBN 0434009687
In philosophy, more than in any other academic discipline, an unfortunate gap has arisen between supply and demand. The demand for readable works of philosophy is perhaps higher than ever before. The decline of organised religion, with its ready-made solutions, has given rise to a widespread metaphysical curiosity. Yet academic philosophers - and almost all philosophers are now academics - are oddly reluctant to satisfy this curiosity. They take a Masonic pleasure in the esoteric nature of their discipline, in its impenetrable codes and rituals. The temptations of exclusivity are, it seems, stronger than those of fame and fortune.
The market for philosophy has thus fallen into the hands of cranks and charlatans. "Popular philosophy" has become synonymous with the peddling of cheap wisdom; its publications are stocked in the "mind, body, spirit" section of bookshops, next to feng shui and astrology. This, in turn, increases the reluctance of academic philosophers to enter the field. A vicious circle is created. Whereas bestselling works of history or science are written by leading experts in the field, bestselling works of philosophy are usually produced by writers whose sole qualification is a nice literary style. Sophie's World, Wittgenstein's Poker and Alain de Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy are all witnesses to the mediocrity of popular philosophy.
A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues is that rare thing: a work of philosophy that is both readable and good. It was 14 months on the French bestseller lists - a long time even in a country famous for celebrating its philosophers. Its popularity is easy to understand. Andre Comte-Sponville writes clean, lapidary prose, very much in the manner of the classical French moralistes. He manages to be precise, scholastic even, yet also passionate - a combination unfamiliar in England, where precision is associated with aridity, and passion with vagueness. This is the way French philosophy used to be written before it was corrupted by Derrida and the rest.
English-language philosophy has for many decades been familiar with something called "virtue ethics". This is the theory that morality consists not in the rigid application of an abstract rule, but in the cultivation of specific qualities of character known as virtues. Unfortunately, debate seldom moves far beyond this initial contrast. "The virtues" are always treated in the plural; they are never examined in their concrete variety. No doubt this owes something to the reluctance of modern academics to "sermonise". Talking about courage, humility, justice and compassion is felt to be the job of clergymen, not professors. Philosophy, if it is to preserve its status as a reputable academic discipline, can deal only with the general form, not with the specific content of morality.
Comte-Sponville, thank goodness, feels no such inhibitions. He represents an older, more amateurish tradition, which conceives of philosophy not as formal analysis, but as the pursuit of wisdom. His book has a homiletic flavour that will make professional philosophers wince. Too bad for them. Wasting no time on metaphysical preliminaries, Comte-Sponville gets straight down to the individual virtues. There are 18 in all, each one commanding a chapter to itself. Beginning with politeness - "which precedes morality" - and ending with love - "which exceeds it" - Comte-Sponville moves through fidelity, prudence, temperance, courage, justice, generosity, compassion, mercy, gratitude, humility, simplicity, tolerance, purity, gentleness, good faith and humour.
The glory of A Short Treatise lies not in its overall argument (it doesn't have one), but in its scattered insights. Important truths are unearthed from details of everyday linguistic usage. "There is no difference," writes Comte-Sponville, "between seeming to be polite and actually being so." Yet there is a difference between seeming to be good and actually being so, and this contrast suggests why politeness, although closely related to virtue, isn't itself virtuous. Or again: "To someone who is suffering - from a serious illness, for example - we can convey our compassion or our sympathy. But we wouldn't think of expressing our pity, which would be considered contemptuous or insulting." Compassion, in other words, implies respect; pity implies its absence. Or again: the love of art, truth, a person or a political cause can be described as either pure or impure, depending on whether these things are loved for their own sake or for some ulterior purpose. Yet the love of money is never described as pure - a fact, Comte-Sponville notes in passing, "that says much about both money and purity".
Yet this wealth of detail cannot allay a certain suspicion of arbitrariness. Why these particular 18 virtues? Do simplicity and humour really deserve to be included? Why not faith, pride, wisdom or magnanimity? Has Comte-Sponville really done any more than list those qualities he happens to like? It seems not. "I asked myself," he writes in the prologue, "what the dispositions of heart, mind or character are whose presence in an individual tends to increase my moral regard for him and whose absence tends to diminish it. The answers to that question resulted in a list of 30 or so virtues. Of these, I eliminated ones that seemed to be covered by some other virtue . . . and those that it did not seem absolutely necessary to treat." This procedure is charmingly simple, but it lacks philosophical rigour. The choice of virtues, if it is to be more than merely personal or conventional, must be guided by some ideal of human excellence. The virtues must exhibit a certain unity; they must cluster around a single centre. The job of the philosopher is to make this unity explicit.
The problem is that the western tradition recognises two very different ideals, each of which implies a different though overlapping set of virtues. The first is the classical ideal, exemplified by Aristotle's "great-souled man". The central virtue of the great-souled man is pride, a consciousness of his own strength and dignity. From this pride flow all his other virtues: courage, honesty, generosity and mercy. These represent, as it were, the outpourings of a rich and powerful nature. Christianity turns this picture more or less on its head. Pride, from being the chief virtue, becomes the chief vice. Virtue has its root not in the assertion of independence, but in the confession of dependence. Christianity recognises many of the classical virtues, but it adds to them its own particular virtues of faith, hope and charity - theological virtues, as they were called by Thomas Aquinas. From a classical point of view, the theological virtues are not virtues at all. Faith - if by faith one means believing on insufficient evidence - is actually a vice. And the classical tradition tends to be suspicious of that other Christian virtue of pity, which it sees as enfeebling and potentially even vicious.
Comte-Sponville draws his list of virtues from both Christian and classical sources, without acknowledging any possibility of conflict between them. Some, such as humility, simplicity and purity, have a distinctly Christian feel to them, whereas others, such as generosity, tolerance and humour, have a more classical air. Can a single individual possess all these qualities at once? Isn't there a potentially tragic conflict between, say, justice and mercy, or between tolerance and fidelity?
Comte-Sponville's purpose is conciliatory. He wishes to present the western ethical tradition as a unity, shorn of the excesses of both Christian self-abnegation and classical self-assertion. This is an admirable endeavour, but to bring it to fruition requires more than a mere enumeration of 18 different virtues. It requires something that this charming book does not attempt: a labour of synthesis.
Edward Skidelsky is a lead reviewer for the NS
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