I found Comte-Sponville's explanations of politeness's inherent meaninglessness and relationship to the rest of the virtues to be rather thought-provoking and logically sound. I have never thought about politeness in terms of the virtues, and his first chapter definitely provides unique insight. As I thought about politeness, I found links or connections between the development of the virtues and development of the person.
Politeness does, in fact, serve as a foundation or framework for one's moral development. It is a foundation for one's moral world in the same way that utilizing sound, or the capacity to speak and listen to language, is necessary for any advancement in the world of interpreting language. Both developmental processes also seem alike since both are inherently meaningless yet have far-reaching implications on the human person.
Both sound utilization and politeness are centered around observation and imitation. I believe that Comte-Sponville would agree with this two-step process. He praises Kant's description of learning, "'Man can only become man by education." While formal education is not strictly observation and imitation, infants must learn through those means because they have no point of reference for anything in their world, in which to draw inferences. They must accept the world as they see it and learn it by committing it to memory. Evaluating and analyzing their world cannot happen until a child is able to identify with something in the world, with which to make future associations. Even before learning the letters of the alphabet, he or she has already been observing and experimenting in how to produce sound. The ability for locution, which includes properly using one's tongue and lips to form different sound types, must be attained before learning about letters. Letters are nothing more than visual representations for sounds. Later, a child learns how to use those letters in a way that is entirely his or her own to form sentences, paragraphs, and essays. However, it all starts with just learning how to identify sounds that are present in the environment. It just requires fine tuning through observing other people use their lips and tone to speak and experimenting sound production on their own. This same dynamic is true of politeness. Children enter the world without any point of reference for behavior. They learn behaviors by watching their parents, siblings, and others in society. In fact, politeness is more dependent on this dynamic than sound manipulation because the listening half of utilizing sounds comes biologically. Only speaking part requires learning via observation and imitation.
Both utilizing sound and politeness have no real value by themselves. Listening to sound and using it to speak are not often considered a part of learning language and writing and have no meaning. The garbled sounds from a baby do not constitute language. "Please" and "thank you," the simplest parts of being polite that a child learns, have no intrisic meaning. If somone would ask why they say "please" after saying "pass the salt," the answer would be because it is polite. It turns out to be a meaningless paradox.
Despite the concrete meaninglessness of being polite, both sound and polite gestures are required for further development in using language and being virtuous respectively. The random noises an infant puts that infant closer may be meaningless, but they are needed to make words that can be understood on a meaningful level. Comte-Sponville similarly states that politeness is not a virtue but is a prerequisite for virtue. If a child who never learned "please" or "thank you" or any kind of observable manner associated with being respectful, they cannot be respectful if someone told them to do it. As discussed in the beginning of the second paragraph, one cannot work with something without first knowing what it is they are supposed to be working with. In the same way, someone who is deaf has difficulty making coherent words without additional and personal instruction. They have never been exposed to sound before.
Comte-Sponville also says that while infants are praised for their politeness, adults who are simply polite on the outside and not virtuous on the inside are, in fact, perceived worse than those who are rude and rough. He contends that we are concerned less with the mean than the sinister or the manipulative. He believes that the contrast between between the virtuous exterior and foul interior makes the polite, corrupt person feared more. I agree with this assessment and roughtly fits the analogy. It is all about contrast, and constrast implies expectations between the differences. Someone who has the ability to process and produce sound is expected to change those sounds into understandable and usable language. Since they have the capacity to fully utilize sound, those sounds are expected to turn into language at a certain point in their development. Those who cannot utilize sound are not expected to use sound to learn language. In the case of the deaf, sign language or other mechanical means of communication is the expected means of language learning. The last point is that just as parents expect their child to begin using langauge at a particular time in their development, so it is with the transformation from politeness to virtues. We tend to expect a higher quality of intrinsically virtuous behavior from a twenty-three year old than a nine-year old.
