Thinking Big

Philosophy, like wine, does not always travel well. If Hegel, for instance, is hard to swallow in German, he is totally indigestible in English (why else would some academics still swear that his wisdom is so delicious?). French philosophy, until very recently, was greatly influenced by Hegel and by that other master of higher windbaggery, Martin Heidegger; as a result, Sartre and his admirers wrote a great deal of verbosely grandiose nonsense, in which a mysterious entity called Being had, almost literally, a life of its own.

In Sartre’s world, since man was deemed always to be in a state of “becoming,” no suit of moral principles fitted him for long. To accept an established code of “virtue” was a symptom of “inauthenticity,” if not of being a salaud, or swine. It was, of course, an immense comfort for the rebellious postwar young to be told that behaving well, in the bourgeois sense, was really a way of behaving badly and that “good faith” consisted in breaking with antique forms of decency, honor and truth. As a result of revering the Dialectic, those who saw no merit in Western democracy found their ideal in Communism; despising the false freedom of liberal societies, progressive theory discerned true freedom in slavery. Who’s surprised that someone once said that it was hard to decide which had done more harm to the French character, the German army or German philosophy?

Andre Comte-Sponville is one of the younger generation of French academic philosophers (those who are not academic are journalistic self-promoters likeBernard-Henri Levy). His innovative style is declared by nicely phrased respect for what Shelley once called “antique courtesies.” The least of those, which Comte-Sponville includes in his tally, is Politeness. What Sartre despised, he praises: love--rather than revolutionary violence--is the culminating virtue without which the others lose their savor.

If Comte-Sponville is forthright in his declaration of the virtue of virtues, he is French enough to be wary of being unadornedly virtuous: not wanting to be taken for a coeur simple too naive for smart company, he likes to find a paradox among his truisms and to fashion a catchy phrase where the chance arises. However, you will find little mention of the paramount moral need to overthrow capitalism or of the Universal Rights of Man, which bears the label--among the French at least--”Made in France.” As for the Christian virtues, Fidelity (up to a point), Prudence and Purity are among those he endorses, but Christianity itself, like God, is taken to be a model, but never a revealed Truth. The morality of “as if” asks us to behave well for man’s sake, rather than for God’s. Tolerance trumps dogma, and I’m glad, but is it ever going to persuade us to behave well? The 21st century, if it lasts its full term, will tell.

The subtitle--”The Uses of Philosophy in Everyday Life”--honors its claim. At the same time, many well-chosen scholarly references (printed at the back of the book in English, but more usefully, I think, at the foot of the page in the French edition) testify to the author’s wide learning and incite further reading, especially when it comes to the moralizing philosophes--Rousseau to La Rochefoucauld, Descartes and Alain to, of course, Sartre--of his native land. French philosophy, like French cooking, admits only certain ingredients to be worthy of its mental kitchens. Plato, Spinoza and Aristotle, yes; a little chopped Vladimir Jankelevitch; et voila! Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Karl Popper? Connais pas!

If I am only somewhat very enthusiastic about this collection of homilies, it is fair to say that what I liked, I liked very much indeed and would recommend wholeheartedly. The virtue of Gratitude is not only praised but--as Byron once insisted--praised well. In a time of painful bereavement, I derived great comfort from the following: “Gratitude ... is this joy of memory, this love of the past--it neither suffers over what no longer is nor regrets what has been but joyfully recalls what was. It is time regained ... ‘the grateful recollection of what has been,’ says Epicurus--by which we understand that the idea of death is made immaterial, as Proust says, for even death, take us though it will, cannot take from us what we have lived.... Death deprives us only of the future, which does not exist. Gratitude frees us from death, through the joyous knowledge of what was. Gratitude is acknowledgment, which is to say, knowledge (whereas hope is merely imagination); this is why gratitude touches on the truth, which is eternal, and inhabits it. Gratitude is the enjoyment of eternity.” Crap, or wisdom? It depends now recent your pain is.

The main trouble with this book is that it is like eternity in Woody Allen’s dictum, which as Comte-Sponville cites with enthusiasm, “is a long time, particularly toward the end.” Nor are all of the essays of the same quality. When the best are so good, how could they be? Comte-Sponville’s skillful translator, Catherine Temerson, nearly always does a difficult job very well, but is she right, very early on, to translate mechancete as “meanness” and to say that it is “arguably the only true vice”? This is arguably--a worthless term which finds no source in the original French--a very silly statement. Mechancete would surely be better rendered as “malice” or “evil intentions.” “Arguably” simply concedes that the translator knows she is, as Plato seldom put it, spit-balling.

There is in Comte-Sponville an ill-controlled tendency (who will control the tenured, after all, especially if they are about to be translated into 19 languages?) to gild every lily and fashion cracker-mottos from ill-considered paradoxes which retain a certain tincture of soixante-huitisme--the intellectual recklessness of May 1968, when the French students, the author proudly among them, sought to overthrow the existing moral and social order. For instance:

“[T]he law protects private property, in modern democracies no differently than in Pascal’s day, and when it does so it guarantees inequality in wealth. Where equality and legality are at odds, where is justice?”

As the English used to say, “Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it.” Though we may deplore the rampant plutocracy that gives excessive, often corrupt, power to Big Bucks, the quoted paragraph is so full of fallacies as to be hardly more than a string-bag of absurdity. To assert with a straight face that the law of 17th century France, an absolute monarchy, is identical with that of today’s democracies is to bend the knee to the Sartrean radicalism which no longer dares to speak its full name. If, per impossible, there were no inequalities in wealth, the world would become economically static and soon poorer. Nothing that anyone owned would be worth anything, since its sales or use would make someone, somehow, more equal than someone else. Friedrich Hayek had taken care of this subject, I thought, for once and for everyone except Comte-Sponville: All leveling levels down; Justice is not, and cannot be, a function of financial equality, etc.

Part of the fun of reading these mainly bite-sized essays is that some are a lot easier to swallow than others. When an author incites you to send back some of his dishes while admitting that others are entirely to your taste, the chances are that his menu is varied, spicy and has something for everyone. I could, however, do without the protracted attention given to Simone Weil, whose theocentric masochism is not my bag. I also regret that, in the overlong concluding eulogy of Love in all its forms, no reference is made to Wittgenstein’s interesting remark that there is a lot more decision in loving than most people realize.

Comte-Sponville’s deification of Desire is Gallic cant; if, as he says, “[t]here is no virtue that does not partake of desire,” then we can, as Wittgenstein put it (in another context), “divide through” by desire and proceed to make useful, unconflating distinctions about each individual virtue. And, just for the record, Spinoza used no such Latin adverb as humanite, because the word doesn’t exist: it’s either humane or humaniter. Who cares? Well, it’s still a petty virtue in professors (and publishers) either to get such things right or to keep off the classy quotes altogether. N’est-ce pas?