A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues: The Uses of Philosophy in Everyday Life

By Andre Comte-Sponville

An utterly original exploration of the timeless human virtues and how they apply to the way we live now, from a bold and dynamic French writer.

In this graceful, incisive book, writer-philosopher André Comte-Sponville reexamines the classic human virtues to help us under-stand "what we should do, who we should be, and how we should live." In the process, he gives us an entirely new perspective on the value, the relevance, and even the charm of the Western ethical tradition.

Drawing on thinkers from Aristotle to Simone Weil, by way of Aquinas, Kant, Rilke, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Rawls, among others, Comte-Sponville elaborates on the qualities that constitute the essence and excellence of humankind. Starting with politeness -- almost a virtue -- and ing with love -- which transcs all morality -- A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues takes us on a tour of the eighteen essential virtues: fidelity, prudence, temperance, courage, justice, generosity, compassion, mercy, gratitude, humility, simplicity, tolerance, purity, gentleness, good faith, and even, surprisingly, humor.Sophisticated and lucid, full of wit and vivacity, this modestly titled yet immensely important work provides an indispensable guide to finding what is right and good in everyday life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Sep 1, 2002
• ISBN: 9781429922814

Andre Comte-Sponville

André Comte-Sponville is a professor at the Sorbonne and the author of five highly acclaimed books on classical philosophy. A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues was a bestseller in France and has been translated into nineteen languages.

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To Vivien, Fabien, and Louis

Table of Contents

Title Page

PROLOGUE

1 - POLITENESS

2 - FIDELITY

3 - PRUDENCE

4 - TEMPERANCE

5 - COURAGE

6 - JUSTICE

7 - GENEROSITY

8 - COMPASSION

9 - MERCY

10 - GRATITUDE

11 - HUMILITY

12 - SIMPLICITY

13 - TOLERANCE

14 - PURITY

15 - GENTLENESS

16 - GOOD FAITH

17 - HUMOR

18 - LOVE

Eros

Philia

Agape

Praise for A SMALL TREATISE ON THE GREAT VIRTUES

Notes - PROLOGUE

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Author

Copyright Page

PROLOGUE

If virtue can be taught, as I believe it can be, it is not through books so much as by example. In that case what would be the point of a treatise on virtues? Perhaps this: to try to understand what we should do, what we should be, and how we should live, and thereby gauge, at least intellectually, the distance that separates us from these ideals. A modest enterprise, but a necessary one nonetheless. Philosophers are like schoolboys (it is only the wise who are masters), and schoolboys need their books: that’s why they sometimes write them when the books they have in their hands no longer satisfy them, or crush them. Now, what book could we need more urgently than a treatise on ethics? And what aspect of ethics could be more deserving of our interest than the virtues? I don’t believe any more than Spinoza did in the utility of denouncing vice, evil, and sin. Why always accuse, why always condemn? That’s a sad ethics indeed, for sad people. As for the good, it exists only in the irreducible multiplicity of good deeds—too numerous for all the books in the world—and in the good inclinations—multiple, too, though less numerous—to which tradition has given the name virtues, which is to say, excellences (for that is the meaning of the Greek word aret e9781429922814_img_275.gif , translated by the Romans as virtus).

What is a virtue? It is a force that has or can have an effect. Hence the virtue of a plant or a medication, which is to cure, or of a knife, which is to cut, or of a human being, which is to will and to act in a human way. These examples, which come from the Greeks, say more or less what is essential: virtue is a capacity or power, and always a specific one. The virtue of hellebore is not that of hemlock; a knife’s virtue is not that of the hoe; man’s virtue is not that of the tiger or the snake. The virtue of a thing or being is what constitutes its value, in other words, its distinctive excellence: the good knife is the one that excels at cutting, the good medicine at curing, the good poison at killing …

Note that in this first and most general sense, virtues are independent of the uses to which they are put, of the ends to which they are directed or that they actually serve. The knife has no less virtue in the hands of a murderer than in the hands of a cook, nor does a healing plant have more virtue than a poisonous one. It’s not that this first meaning is devoid of normative intent: no matter whose hand it is in, the best knife—for most purposes, in any case—will be the one that cuts the best. Its specific capacity also determines its excellence. But this normative value remains objective or morally immaterial. The knife need only accomplish its function; it need not judge that function. In that respect, of course, its virtue is not like ours. An excellent knife is no less excellent for being in the hands of a wicked man. Virtue is capacity, and as far as virtue is concerned, capacity is sufficient.

But where man is concerned and where morals are concerned, that answer is not enough. If every being or thing has its specific capacity in which it excels or can excel (the excellent knife, the excellent medicine), we might well ask what man’s distinctive excellence resides in. For Aristotle, the answer is the rational life, which sets man apart from the animals.¹ But a rational life requires not only reason but many other things as well: desire, education, habit, memory, and so on. A man’s desires are not the same as a horse’s; nor does an educated person desire what a savage or an ignoramus does. All virtues are historical, as are all the qualities that make up what we call our humanity; and in the virtuous man, humanity and virtue inevitably converge. It is a man’s virtue that makes him human, or rather it is this specific capacity he has to affirm his own excellence, which is to say, his humanity, in the normative sense. Human, never too human. Virtue is a way of being, Aristotle explained, but an acquired and lasting way of being: it is what we are (and therefore what we can do), and what we are is what we have become. And how could we have become what we are without other human beings? Virtue thus represents an encounter between biological evolution and cultural development; it is our way of being and acting humanly, in other words (since humanity, in this sense, is a value), our power to act well. Nothing is so fine and so justifiable, wrote Montaigne, as to play the man well and duly.² To do so is virtue itself.

What the Greeks taught us in this regard, what Montaigne taught us too, we may also read in Spinoza: By virtue and power I understand the same thing; that is, virtue, with respect to man, is his very essence or nature insofar as he has the power of bringing about certain things, which can be understood through the laws of his nature alone (and also, I would say, through the laws of history, but for Spinoza human nature is part and parcel of human history).³ In the general sense, virtue is capacity; in the particular sense, it is human capacity, the power to be human. It is what we also call the moral virtues, those qualities that make one man seem more human—or, as Montaigne would put it, more excellent—than another man, and without which, as Spinoza says, we could legitimately be described as inhuman.⁴ Such a definition assumes that there lies within us a desire for humanity, a historical desire, obviously (there is no such thing as natural virtue), without which moral life would be impossible. To aspire to virtue means to try not to be unworthy of what humanity has made us, individually and collectively.

Virtue, it has been said ever since Aristotle, is an acquired disposition to do what is good. But that is saying too little: virtue is good itself, both in spirit and in actuality. But there is no Absolute Good or good-in-itself that can simply be known and then applied. Good is not something to contemplate; it is something to be done. And so with virtue, too: it is the effort to act well and in that very effort itself virtue defines the good. This particular formulation poses a number of theoretical problems that I have discussed elsewhere.⁵ The present book is entirely about practical morals, in other words, about morals. The virtues (I speak in the plural, for they cannot be reduced to a single one, nor would one of them alone suffice) are our moral values, but not in any abstract sense. They are values we embody, live, and enact—always singular, as each of us is, and always plural, as are the weaknesses in us that they combat or rectify. It is these virtues that I have chosen as the subject of the present book. I do not describe all of them or discuss any one of them exhaustively. My aim is simply to indicate, for those virtues that seem the most important, what they are, or ought to be, and what it is that makes them always necessary and always difficult.

How did I set about my task? I asked myself 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 thirty or so virtues. Of these, I eliminated ones that seemed to be covered by some other virtue (kindness by generosity, for example, or honesty by justice) and those that it did not seem absolutely necessary to treat. Eighteen virtues remained—many more than I had initially envisioned—without my being able to reduce their number any further. My treatment of each of them, I realized, would thus have to be even more succinct than I had planned, and that constraint, part of my project from the very beginning, has never ceased to govern its outcome.

That this book begins with politeness, which precedes morality, and ends with love, which exceeds it, is of course deliberate. As for the other virtues treated here, their order, though not absolutely fortuitous, owes more to something like intuition, to the demands of pedagogy, ethics, or aesthetics, as the case may be, than to any deductive or hierarchical scheme. A treatise on virtues, especially a small one like this, is not a system of morals; it is applied morals, not theoretical morals, and (to the extent possible) living morals rather than speculative morals. But with regard to morals, what could be more important than how they are lived and applied?

I have relied heavily on the writings of others, whom I cite. No one need read the notes; indeed it is best not to concern oneself at all with them at first. They are meant not to be read but to be used; they are there not for the reader but for the student—whatever his or her age or profession. As for the book’s content, I have tried to avoid the pretense that I was inventing what in fact the tradition offered me, and which I have merely taken up anew. Not that I have put nothing of my own into this work—quite the contrary. But we can make our own only what we have received or transformed or become, thanks to others or in opposition to them. It would be ridiculous for a treatise on virtues to strive for originality or novelty. Besides, it is braver and more honorable to confront the masters on their own ground than to avoid any comparison with them by somehow insisting on being original. For the last 2,500 years, if not more, the greatest minds have thought about the virtues; my desire was to continue their efforts, in my own way and with the means available to me, using their ideas to formulate my own.

Some will regard this enterprise as presumptuous or naive. The latter reproach I take as a compliment; as for the first, I’m afraid it is nonsense. To venture to write about the virtues is to subject one’s self-esteem to constant bruising, to be made acutely aware, again and again, of one’s own mediocrity. Every virtue is a summit between two vices, a crest between two chasms: hence courage stands between cowardice and temerity, dignity between servility and selfishness, gentleness between anger and apathy, and so on.⁶ But who can dwell on the high summits all the time? To think about the virtues is to take measure of the distance separating us from them. To think about their excellence is to think about our own inadequacies or wretchedness. It’s a first step—possibly all we can ask of a book. The rest we must live, and how can a book do that for us? I do not mean to say that thinking about the virtues is useless or of no moral consequence. Thinking about the virtues will not make us virtuous, or, in any case, is not enough in itself to make us so. But there is one virtue it does develop, and that virtue is humility—intellectual humility in the face of the richness of the material and the tradition, and a properly moral humility as well, before the obvious fact that we are almost always deficient in nearly all the virtues and yet cannot resign ourselves to their absence or exonerate ourselves for their weakness, which is our own.

This treatise on the virtues will be useful only to those lacking in them. Its potential readership thus being so large, the author may perhaps be excused for having—not in spite of his unworthiness but because of It—dared undertake this venture. Moreover, the pleasure I took in it, which was intense, seemed ample justification to me. As for any pleasure readers should happen to find in these pages, that would be a bonus: no longer a question of work for me but a matter of grace. To them, therefore, my gratitude.

1

POLITENESS

Politeness is the first virtue, and the origin perhaps of all the others. It is also the poorest, the most superficial, and the most debatable of the virtues, and possibly something other than a virtue as well. In any case, as virtues go it’s a small one, an easy virtue, one might say, as used to be said in reference to certain women. Politeness doesn’t care about morality, and vice versa. If a Nazi is polite, does that change anything about Nazism or the horrors of Nazism? No. It changes nothing, and this nothing is the very hallmark of politeness. A virtue of pure form, of etiquette and ceremony! A show of virtue, its appearance and nothing more.

Politeness is certainly a value, but it is an ambiguous one, insufficient in itself. It can clothe both the best and the worst, which makes it suspect. Such attention to form must be hiding something, but what? Politeness is artifice and we tend to be wary of artifice; it is an adornment and we tend to be wary of adornments. Diderot speaks somewhere of the insulting politeness of those on high; one might also mention the obsequious or servile politeness of those below. Unadorned contempt and crass obedience seem preferable.

But that’s not the worst of it. A polite bastard is no less vile than any other bastard and in fact may be more vile. Is it because he is also a hypocrite ? Probably not: politeness makes no moral claims for itself. A polite bastard, moreover, could just as easily be cynical without being any less polite or any less wicked for it. So what is it about him that shocks us? It’s the contrast, undoubtedly, but not the contrast between an appearance of virtue and virtue’s absence (which would be hypocrisy): our hypothetical bastard really is polite—besides, there’s no difference between seeming to be polite and actually being so. The contrast is rather between the appearance of one virtue (in the case of politeness, appearance is reality: what you see is all there is) and the absence of all others; or, better yet, between the appearance of virtue and the presence of vice—in this case meanness, arguably the only true vice. Yet, taken in isolation, the contrast is more aesthetic than moral, which would explain why we respond to polite villainy with surprise rather than horror, astonishment rather than disapproval. There is, of course, an ethical dimension to the contrast: politeness makes the wicked person even more hateful because it implies a good upbringing, in the absence of which the wickedness might have been somehow excusable. The polite bastard is no wild animal, quite the opposite, and wild animals we generally do not resent; he is anything but unsocialized, and those who are we tend to find excuses for. He is the very antithesis of the crude, coarse, ignorant brute, who may frighten us, to be sure, but whose native and shortsighted violence can at least be explained by his lack of education. The polite bastard is not an animal, or a savage, or a brute. On the contrary, he is civilized, educated, well bred; there is no excuse for him, you could say. With the boor, who can tell whether he’s ill-intentioned or simply ill-mannered? Genteel torturers, however, never leave us in doubt. Just as blood is more visible on white gloves, so horror is more apparent when it is also civilized. Nazis, at least some of them, are said to have excelled in this role. And, indeed, part of the ignominy we associate with the Nazis has to do precisely with this mixture of barbarism and civilization, of violence and courtesy; with this cruelty that was sometimes polite, sometimes bestial, but always cruel, and more blameworthy perhaps for its politeness, more inhuman for its human forms, more barbaric for its gestures of civility.

I have digressed, perhaps, but not so much by accident as out of vigilance: the important thing about politeness is, first of all, not to be taken in by it. Politeness is not virtue and cannot take the place of virtue.

In that case, why call it the first of the virtues, the origin of all the others? The contradiction is not as great as it may appear to be. The origin of the virtues cannot be a virtue (for if it were, it would itself require an origin, but then it could not be the origin it requires); it may be of the very essence of the virtues that the first one is not virtuous.

But why is politeness the first? The priority I have in mind is not cardinal but temporal: politeness comes before the other virtues in the sense that it serves as a foundation for the moral development of the individual. A newborn baby doesn’t have and can’t have moral standards. Nor does an infant or, for quite some time, a small child. What the small child does discover, however, and discovers quite early on, is prohibition. Don’t do that: it’s nasty; it’s bad; it’s not nice; it’s naughty … Or else, It’s dangerous. Very soon he comes to learn the difference between what’s simply bad (a misdeed) and what is also bad for him (a danger), between the hateful and the harmful. A misdeed is a strictly human evil, an evil that does no harm (at least not to the person who commits it), an evil without immediate or intrinsic danger. But then why is it prohibited, why must it not be done? Because. Because that’s the way it is; because it’s nasty, it’s not nice, it’s naughty, and so forth. For children, fact precedes right; or rather, right and wrong are simply facts themselves, like any others. Some things are allowed, some are forbidden; some things are done, some are not done. Good or bad? The rule suffices; it precedes judgment and is the basis for it. But then does the rule have no foundation other than convention, no justification other than usage and the respect for usage? Yes, it is a de facto rule, a rule of pure form, a rule of politeness! Don’t say bad words; don’t interrupt people; don’t shove; don’t steal; don’t lie. To the child, all these prohibitions appear identical (It’s not nice). The distinction between the ethical and the aesthetic will come only later, and gradually. Politeness thus precedes morality, or rather, morality at first is nothing more than politeness: a compliance with usage and its established rules, with the normative play of appearances—a compliance with the world and the ways of the world.

Now, a principle of Kantian ethics is that one cannot deduce what one should do from what is done. Yet the child in his early years is obliged to do just that, and it is only in this way that he becomes human. Kant himself concedes as much. Man can only become man by education, he writes. He is merely what education makes him, and the process begins with discipline, which changes animal nature into human nature.¹ What better way to say it? Custom precedes value; obedience, respect; and imitation, duty. Hence politeness (one doesn’t do that) precedes morality ("one shouldn’t do that); morality only comes into being little by little, as an internalized politeness that has freed itself from considerations of appearance and interest and focuses entirely on intentions (which politeness doesn’t concern itself with). But how could this morality ever come into being if politeness were not there to begin with? Good manners precede and prepare the way for good deeds. Morality is like a politeness of the soul, an etiquette of the inner life, a code of duties, a ceremonial of the essential. Conversely, politeness can be likened to a morality of the body, an ethics of comportment, a code for life in society, a ceremonial of the inessential. Paper money, Kant says, but it’s better than nothing and it would be as crazy to do away with it as to mistake it for real gold.² Small change, he also says, merely the appearance of virtue, yet that which renders it comely."³ And what child would ever become virtuous without this appearance and comeliness?

So morality starts at the bottom—with politeness. But it has to start somewhere. There are no natural virtues; hence we must become virtuous. How? For the things we have to learn before we can do them, Aristotle explains, we learn by doing them.⁴ Yet how can we do them if we haven’t learned them? There are two ways out of this circular causality: apriority is one way, politeness is the other. But apriority is beyond our reach; politeness is not. We become just, Aristotle continues, by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.⁵ But can we act justly without being just? Temperately without being temperate? Bravely without being brave? And if we cannot, then how do we become just, temperate, brave? Through habit, Aristotle seems to say, but that answer is obviously inadequate: a habit presupposes the prior existence of what we would be making a habit of and therefore cannot account for it. Kant provides a more helpful answer. For him, these first semblances of virtue can be explained in terms of discipline, in other words, as a product of external constraint: what the child cannot do on his own because he has no instinct for it others have to do … for him, and in this way one generation educates the next.⁶ No doubt. And in the family, what is this discipline if not, first of all, a respect for usages and good manners? A discipline that is more normative than restrictive, it wants not order so much as a certain amiable sociability—not police discipline but polite discipline. It is by mimicking the ways of virtue, that is, through politeness, that we stand a chance of becoming virtuous. Politeness, La Bruyère notes, does not always produce kindness of heart, justice, complacency, or gratitude; but it gives to man at least the appearance of it, and makes him seem externally what he really should be.⁷ Which is why it is insufficient in an adult and necessary in a child. Politeness is only a beginning but at least it is that. To say please or excuse me is to pretend to be respectful; to say thank you is to pretend to be grateful. And it is with this show of respect and this show of gratitude that both respect and gratitude begin. Just as nature imitates art, morality imitates politeness, which imitates morality. It is in vain to point out to children the meritorious side of actions, Kant says, and obviously he is right.⁸ But who for that reason would forgo teaching them to be polite? And what would we know about duty without having learned those lessons ourselves? If we can become moral (and for morality even to be possible—and immorality, too, for that matter—it must be the case that we can), it is not through virtue but through education, not for goodness’ sake but for form’s sake, not for moral reasons but for reasons of politeness. Morality is first artifice, then artifact. By imitating virtue we become virtuous. For when men play these roles, writes Kant, virtues are gradually established, whose appearance had up until now only been affected. These virtues ultimately will become part of the actor’s disposition.⁹ Politeness precedes morality and makes it possible. If politeness is the disposition to represent ourselves as better than we are, as Kant maintains, it is one that tends to make us moral.¹⁰ We must first acquire the appearance and manner of good, not because they are sufficient in themselves but because they can help us attain the thing that they imitate—virtue—and that is acquired only by such imitation.¹¹ Even the appearance of the good in others must have value for us, Kant also writes, because in the long run something serious can come from such a play with pretenses which gain respect even if they do not deserve to.¹² Without this play of pretenses, this make-believe, the transmission of morals and the development of a moral sense within each of us would not be possible. States of character arise out of like activities, says Aristotle.¹³ Politeness is that pretense, or semblance, of virtue from which the virtues arise.

Politeness thus rescues morality from circular causality (without politeness, we would have to be virtuous in order to become virtuous) by creating the conditions necessary for its emergence and even, to some extent, its flourishing. The differences between someone who is perfectly polite and someone who is simply respectful, kindly, and modest are infinitesimal; we end up resembling what we imitate, and politeness imperceptibly leads—or can lead—to morality. Every parent knows this; it’s called bringing up one’s children. I am well aware that politeness isn’t everything, nor even the essential thing. Yet the fact remains that, in everyday language, being well brought up means first of all being polite, which is highly revealing. Were it a matter of courtesy alone, who among us, apart from obsessives or utter snobs, would correct our children a thousand times (A thousand times? What am I saying? Much more than that …) so that they might learn to say please, thank you, and excuse me. But that’s how children learn respect, through this training. The word training rubs us the wrong way, I know; but who could do without the thing? Love is not enough when it comes to bringing up children; it’s not even enough to make them lovable and loving. Politeness isn’t enough either, and that is why both politeness and love are needed. Family upbringing is located, it seems to me, between these two poles, between the smallest virtue, which is not yet morality, and the greatest, which is already something more. Of course, education means more than moral education: children need to acquire language, too. But if politeness is the art of signs, as Alain claims, then learning to speak falls within that domain as well.¹⁴ The issue is still usage and respect for usage, usage being proper only to the extent that it continues to be respected. Le bon usage (in English, proper usage) is the title of Maurice Grevisse’s beautiful French grammar, and it could also be the title of a manual of social skills. To do as is done, to say as is said. It is revealing that in both cases we speak of correctness, which is nothing more than minimal and, as it were, obligatory politeness. Virtue and style come only later.

Politeness, then, is not a virtue but a simulacrum that imitates virtue (in adults) and paves the way for it (in children). Politeness in the child may not be different in nature from politeness in the adult, but it is different in its significance. In the child, it is essential; in the adult it is inessential. What could be worse than an ill-mannered child, except perhaps a wicked adult? We aren’t children anymore. We know how to love, how to will, and how to judge. And so we are capable of virtue, and of love, for which politeness is no substitute. Better a generous oaf than a polite egoist, an honorable lout than a refined scoundrel. Politeness, Alain says, is merely a calisthenics of self-expression; in other words, it is of the body, while the important things are of the heart and of the soul.¹⁵ There are even some people whose politeness disturbs us in its perfection. Indeed, consummate politeness smacks of insincerity, for honesty sometimes demands that we displease, shock, or offend those around us. We all know people like this, people who, for all their honesty, will remain prisoners of good manners all their lives, not revealing themselves to others except from behind a glazed screen of politeness, as though having once and for all confused truth and decorum. If taken too seriously, politeness is the opposite of authenticity. People preoccupied with decorum can be like grown-up children, too well-behaved, too rule-conscious, the dupes of custom and propriety. What they seem to have missed out on is that process by which we become men and women, namely adolescence—beautiful, marvelous, uncivil adolescence that relegates politeness to its proper insignificance, that has no use for usages and loves only love, truth, and virtue! Today’s adolescent will be tomorrow’s adult, more indulgent, wiser perhaps, and better behaved. Yet if one absolutely has to choose one kind of immaturity over another, better an overgrown adolescent—from a moral standpoint—than a child who is too obedient to grow up. It is better to be too honest to be polite than to be too polite to be honest!

There is more to life than good manners; and politeness is not morality. Yet it is not nothing. Politeness is a small thing that paves the way for great things. It is ritual without God; ceremonial without religion; protocol without monarchy. An empty form whose sole value lies in that very emptiness. A self-satisfied politeness, one that takes itself too seriously and believes in itself, is one that, taken in by its own manners, falls short of the very rules it prescribes. Self-satisfaction, always impolite, is particularly amiss in something as insufficient as politeness.

Politeness is not a virtue but a quality, and a purely formal one at that. Taken on its own, it is secondary, negligible, nearly insignificant; next to virtue or intelligence it is nothing, and that is what politeness, with its exquisite reticence, must know how to express as well. It is quite clear, however, that intelligent, virtuous persons are not exempt from its obligations. Even love cannot dispense with form entirely, and that it cannot is something children must learn from their parents, their parents who love them—even if too much, even if badly—and who nonetheless are forever correcting them with regard to form. Philosophers will argue over whether form isn’t really everything, whether the distinction between morality and politeness isn’t merely an illusion. It could be that usage and respect for usage is all there is—that politeness is everything. Yet I believe nothing of the sort. Love holds its own, and so does gentleness and so does compassion. Politeness is not everything; indeed it is almost nothing. Almost, but not quite: for man, too, is almost an animal.

2

FIDELITY

The past is no more; the future is still to come. Oblivion and improvisation are facts of nature. Is there anything more improvised, time after time, than spring? Is there anything more quickly forgotten? Its very repetition, striking as it is, is only an illusion: the seasons seem to repeat only because we forget them. This same forgetfulness makes nature appear always new to us, whereas in fact it rarely innovates. True invention, or true creation, presupposes memory. Bergson understood as much and therefore had to invent duration, which is for the world what memory is for man; memory of this sort, however, could only be God, which is why there is no such thing. If the universe has a history—and it does—then that history consists of a series of chaotic or chance improvisations, without a plan (not even the plan to improvise) and without memory. The opposite of a fashioned work, the universe appears as such only by chance. An improbable, never-ending jam session. For whatever endures or repeats inevitably changes; and nothing begins that does not come to an end. Inconstancy is the rule, oblivion the order of things. Reality, from moment to moment, is always new; and this complete, this perennial newness, is the world.

Nature forgets, and it is in forgetting that its materiality resides. Matter is forgetfulness itself; only where there is mind is there memory. Oblivion, therefore, will have the last word, just as it had and always will have the first word. A child’s kingdom, the material world, a realm of inconstancy, forgetfulness, innocence! To become is to become unfaithful; the seasons themselves are fickle in their flight.

Yet in the face of oblivion there is mind and there is memory, volatile and short-lived though the latter may be. This fragility is the essence of mind, which, no less mortal than we are, is yet alive within us, as mind, in remembering its mortality. The mind is memory and may be only that. To think is to remember our thoughts; to will is to remember what we want. Not that we can think only the same thoughts or want only what we have wanted before. But without memory, what would an invention be? What would a decision be? Just as the body is the present of the present, the mind, to use Augustine’s phrase, is the present of the past, in both senses of the word present: that which the past bequeaths to us and that which remains within us. It is also memory.¹ With memory, the mind begins. The concerned mind, the faithful mind.

Concern, the memory of the future, reminds us of itself often enough. Such is its nature, or rather such is ours. Who, other than the wise or the mad, would forget they have a future? And who, other than the wicked, would think only of their own? Of course human beings are selfish, but not as thoroughly selfish as we might sometimes think: look how people without children worry about future generations. Or how people who smoke with abandon fret over holes in the ozone layer. Giving no thought to themselves, they lose sleep over others. Who would hold this against them? The fact of the matter is that we scarcely ever forget the future (we are more likely to forget the present), and our ignorance of it makes it all the more difficult for us to put it out of our minds.

The future worries us, it haunts us; its strength lies in its nonexistence. The past has less power over us; it would seem we have nothing more to fear—or hope—from it. And there is some truth to this view. Epicurus sees it as a form of wisdom: in the tempest of time we find the deep haven of memory. But forgetting offers even safer haven. If neurotics suffer from remembering, as Freud says, then forgetfulness must in some way nurture psychological well-being. God save man from forgetting to forget, Aragon writes. Nietzsche, too, understands on which side life and happiness lie: "It is possible to live almost without memory, indeed to live happily, as the animals show us, but without forgetting it is utterly impossible to live at all."² A point well taken. But is life the goal? Is happiness the goal? At least this kind of life and this kind of happiness? Should we envy animals, plants, and stones? And suppose we do, should we then give ourselves over to this envy? What would be left of the mind? What would be left of humanity? Should we strive only for health and hygiene? François George, writing on Nietzsche, uses the term healthy thinking; its strength and its limitations are one and the same.³ Even if the mind is a disease, even if humanity is a misfortune, this illness and this misfortune are ours—for they are us, and we exist only through them. Let’s not make a clean sweep of the past. All the dignity of man resides in thinking; all the dignity of thinking resides in memory. Forgetful thought is perhaps still thought, but it is unmindful thought. Forgetful desire is certainly desire, but it is desire devoid of volition, it has neither heart nor soul. Science, which tends not to look back as it moves forward, offers a rough idea of what I mean by forgetful thought, and the animal world can help us understand what I mean by forgetful desire. Not all science, of course, and certainly not all animals (some are said to be faithful). No matter. Man is mind only through memory and he is human only through fidelity. Beware, O Man, of forgetting to remember!

The mind, by definition, is the faithful mind.

If I approach fidelity from so distant a perspective, it is because the problem is so vast. Fidelity is not one value or one virtue among others; it is the how and wherefore of all values and virtues. What would justice be if the just were not also faithful? What would peace be without the fidelity of the peaceable? What would freedom be if free minds were not also true? And what would truth itself be worth without the fidelity of the truthful? It would still be true, but it would have no value and thus could not give rise to virtue. There may be no health without forgetfulness, but there is no virtue without fidelity. Health or virtue? Health and virtue. For virtue does not ask that we forget nothing or be faithful indiscriminately. We must be more than healthy, but we don’t have to be saints. We need not be sublime, Vladimir Jankélévitch points out, only faithful and serious.⁴ Fidelity is the virtue of memory; it is memory itself as a virtue.

But what kind of memory? And of what? Under what conditions? And within what limits? Again, it is not a question of being faithful indiscriminately; this would no longer be fidelity but simply traditionalism, dogged small-mindedness, stubbornness, routine, fanaticism … Every virtue can be set against two excesses, an Aristotelian would remind us: fickleness is one, obstinacy is another, and fidelity rejects both equally. The golden mean? If you wish, but not as the halfhearted or frivolous might understand the term (we’re not talking about being a little bit fickle and a little bit stubborn). It’s more like hitting the bull’s-eye on a target than it is like staking out a middle-of-the-road political compromise. A summit, as I have said, between two chasms. Fidelity is neither fickle nor stubborn, and it is in being neither fickle nor stubborn that it is what it is.

Is fidelity intrinsically valuable? Valuable for itself? By itself? No, or not solely. What gives it value is, above all, its object. One doesn’t change one’s friends the way one changes one’s shirt, to loosely paraphrase Aristotle, and, similarly, it would be as ridiculous to be loyal to one’s garments as it would be reprehensible not to be to one’s friends—except, as the philosopher says elsewhere, when there is excess of wickedness on their part.⁵ Fidelity does not excuse everything;

Reviews for A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues

[neurodrew · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Although simple in outline, this was a book of some difficulty. The author is a philospher at the Sorbonne, and the book was a great bestseller in France. He goes through a list of 18 virtues, including items such as politeness, prudence, temperance, courage, generosity, and ending at love. Annoyingly repetitive in spots, repeating the same argument in different words, but very insightful in many areas. The Nichomachean ethics, and Spinoza are the main guides, but although an atheist, he has much to say about the christian religion. It was interesting that the author argues for a balance of justice with mercy, and is not in agreement with Kant and the categorical imperative, perceiving even truth to be subservient to charity and mercy. I was taken with his argument for three kinds of love, eros, philia, and agape, from possession of the lacking, to joy in its presence, to indifference to the object of the love. Difficult but worthwhile.