A review by John Cottingham

André Comte-Sponville, A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues: The Uses of Philosophy in Everyday Life (Heinemann) £15.99/$27.50 (hb)

In recent years philosophers (at least some of them) have finally started to address the complaint that our subject is becoming increasingly academicised, hypertechnical, and remote from that engagement with the fundamental questions of human life that used to form its core. Like his compatriot Pierre Hadot, whose acclaimed Philosophy as a Way of Life appeared in 1987, Comte-Sponville draws heavily on the classical Greek tradition to display the practical uses of philosophy.

Eighteen chapters, eighteen virtues. But anyone expecting a bland rehash of Aristotle, or a trendy Bottonesque tour d'horizon, will soon be pleasantly surprised. This is a work of great finesse and erudition, an exemplar of that extraordinary polish acquired by graduates of the Parisian Grandes Ecoles - hothouses that can make our Oxbridge system seem positively laid-back.

The book begins with politeness, that routine training in saying 'please' and 'thankyou' which can seem so small a thing from the moral point of view, but which is morality's essential base, "imitating virtue (in adults) and paving the way for it (in children)." There follows fidelity, then the classic quartet of cardinal virtues (prudence, temperance, courage, justice), and then a long parade of others, generosity, compassion, mercy, gratitude, compassion, tolerance . . . all displayed with panache, bolstered with personal anecdote, sensitive to the historical legacy yet updated to the modern predicament. Comte-Sponville's speciality is the elegant cross-connection: "Generosity, combined with courage, turns out to be heroism. Joined by justice, it becomes equity. Coupled with compassion, it becomes benevolence...". Yet despite the ingenuity of these finely honed contrasts, one finds the propositions sliding into the mind and quickly sliding out again: there is a temptation to counter in a blunt, Australian kind of way: "What's yer argument, sport?"

As the book progresses, an elegiac note begins to emerge, a kind of faint nostalgia for the past fused with gloomy uncertainty about the present. Our own age, Comte-Sponville observes, imposes on us the "fate that we must be moral though we no longer believe in the (absolute) truth of morality". Absent any universal rational validation of our duty to be virtuous, we simply have to try to be faithful to inherited tradition. Yet for one who sets such store by the virtue of fidelity in its collective or social mode, Comte-Sponville's account of the virtue on the individual level is distinctly slippery: "I swear to you, not that I will love you forever, but that I will remain forever faithful to the love we know now". One can only hope that a subsequently dumped partner whose spouse fobs them off with the claim to have been faithful in this tortuously redefined sense will give it the only reply it deserves: "Tell that to my lawyers!"

The last and largest chapter is devoted to Love, which somehow goes beyond morality as politeness falls short of it. Following the standard Greek trichotomy, Sponville distinguishes between eros, philia and agape. Of the first, sexual love, he follows Lucretius in drawing a bleak picture: a futile and tormenting quest for oneness, which inevitably yields only bitterness. For the second (intimate affection for family and loved ones) Sponville cites his enjoyment as he sits "in Brittany" with "a certain woman", "my children", "my best friends", "eating oysters as we gaze at the sea listening to Mozart". Parodying Marshal Bosquet's verdict on the charge of the Light Brigade, one is inclined to reply to Comte-Sponville's self-contented vision of philia "C'est agréable, mais ce n'est pas l'amour".

Finally we come to agape, the supreme Christian virtue of universal selfless love. Though Comte-Sponville jettisons faith and hope as virtues, on the grounds that "they have no plausible object other than God, in whom I do not believe", he cannot quite bring himself to abandon agape. Instead he admiringly traces out Simone Weil's brilliant account of 'decreation' - the divine, creative, self-emptying love that forbears, as a loving parent should, to fill all the available space. Here we seem on the verge of an absolute value. Yet at the last moment, Comte Sponville retreats to the bland suggestion that agape may merely be a species of philanthropy.

Comte-Sponville's struggle with the remnants of a lost faith he cannot validate intellectually, yet whose jewels of moral insight he would desperately cling to, is representative of much in the modern predicament. The book is a fascinating and richly textured read, which shows what a fertile and accessible subject moral philosophy can be.

John Cottingham is Professor of Philosophy at The University of Reading. His On the Meaning of Life is published by Routledge.