Of tomes, triads and tectonics MartinJohn Levi, The Good, the True, and the Beautiful: The Rise and Fall of an Architectonic of Action, Columbia University Press: New York, 2024; 1120 pp.: ISBN 9780231213127, US$50.00 (hbk)

What are ‘faculties’? Where do they come from? What do they do in the world? Most thinkers in the present would appear strange to the many thinkers in the past who grappled with these questions. We have forgotten the impetus behind their pursuits almost entirely. Inquiries into human faculties (‘will’, ‘judgment’, ‘reason’) form a long and proud tradition. John Levi Martin’s The Good, The True and the Beautiful not only recovers this tradition but also manages to revitalize it. The book’s largely subtextual dialogue with Nietzsche is, in this regard, Martin’s most interesting engagement and, as I argue, his most fraught, as it bears directly on the larger question Martin recommends that we urgently ask: How can one be the representative of a (e.g. in layperson’s terms, ‘on the’) faculty and not be singularly useless, morally egotistical, and cognitively authoritarian?