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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1799

In these great political dramas, few men are fit to invent a role; many are fit to play it.

In the Phaedrus, Plato places the souls of sophists and geometers only in the seventh and eighth ranks. (Vid. loc. — Oct. 28, hor. serota.)

From every well-made work there results a kind of incorporeal form that attaches itself easily to memory.

October 30.

They reach the point of perceiving or imagining with disgust everything shameful, and of treating disgusting things with modesty (without any other repugnance), so much is the mind master of the body!

October 31.

Things that inspire disgust or sensual pleasure. Why, then, do you display them? Is it to give us pleasure, or is it to horrify us?

November 1.

This part of divinity, having been separated from it and having experienced human errors and passions during its exformation, can no longer either perish or rejoin its principle to become part of it again. It has stains, imprints that can no longer be erased.

November 2.

To count among their good deeds the affection they have inspired in good souls.

November 4.

The old men, neglected, no longer had wisdom.

November 7.

Everything we see, everything we touch, is only the skin, the hide, the bark, in the end the outermost surface of another matter, impalpable, invisible, interior.

All these rules, these methods do teach us how to speak of them, but do not give them to us.

— and let old age be holy.

November 10.

Their analysis. — They are skilled carvers at table, then.

But is a skilled carver the one who cuts a piece—a fowl, for example—into a greater number of parts? Or is it not rather the one who separates what should be separated and leaves whole what should remain together? — Certainly the skilled one is the one you describe. — The skilled and knowledgeable cutter, then, is not the one who knows his knife and has a well-sharpened knife, but the one who, knowing well what he cuts, works according to the joints and qualities of the piece. — That is true. — For the same reason, the knowledgeable analyst is the one who knows the question, whether by instinct or study, and divides anything only along the intrinsic divisions among which the inmost essence of each thing is, as it were, distributed.

The others we shall call the flesh-snatchers of philosophy.

Truth in perspective, and peace in possession.

T85.Vid. loc.: “see the passage”; hor. serota: “at a late hour.” The parenthetical date and time remain inside Joubert’s paragraph.

T90.Joubert’s recollection differs from the hierarchy of nine lives in Plato’s Phaedrus, 248d–e. There, the seventh life is that of an artisan or cultivator, the eighth a sophist or flatterer of the people, and the ninth a tyrant; geometers are not listed. His statement is preserved without correction.

T1.Exformation retains the unusual printed term exformation. The passage associates it with separation from divinity and the acquisition of lasting impressions, but does not define the process more precisely.

T2.The things spoken of and given are not named within this fragment; the pronouns remain unspecified.

T3.Flesh-snatchers renders the literal components of happe-chair, preserving the contrast with careful carving. Historically the word could denote an officer who arrests people, and figuratively an avid person.