Diotimos Reading Desk

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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[On movement.]

An object’s surface is its skin

I call a line anything that can represent the shadow of a stretched thread or hair.

Time is a portion of duration, of a day, a month, a season, or a year. Number serves to express how many times the same thing is in the same state or place. Location, or place. Space, or void.

Descartes. Everything is so full in this system that thought itself can find neither light nor room in it. One is always tempted to cry out, as in the pit: air, air; emptiness! One suffocates, one is ground down.

March 15.

We have no idea of time without an idea of a course, that is, of succession and of one thing coming after another.

Through colors there is a more vivid manifestation of the existence of objects or of their proximity. Through pain there is a warning, almost an order to avoid. Dull pains warn us of danger’s approach, and sharp pains warn us of its invasion.

Whoever has the abstract idea of a thing understands it; but only he who can make it imaginable makes it understood. Yes.

Sunday, March 16.

Neither pain nor pleasure exists outside our soul, and yet these are realities more important and more existent than iron, than lead, than marble, and than all bodies together.

Number or enumeration does not exist: very well; but multitude, plurality, exists. There is the same difference here as between things that can be named and their names. Time exists wherever there is succession. Harmony does not exist outside the mind; but the equilibrium, the balancings by which harmony is produced, exist outside the mind. Order exists outside it in the existences, since they are.

He was right: most of our errors come from the words we use — above all, our learned errors.

March 17.

[Descartes.] He wanted his whole book to be read first as a novel, without straining the attention. — I would like mine to be read as a poem.

March 19.

Mathematics deals only with half-abstractions. For it operates only on shadows of realities: a line is the shadow of a stretched thread or hair, a point is the shadow of a tip, a circle is the shadow of a hoop. Just as we detach these bounding figures from flat objects to expose them alone to the eyes, so by abstraction we detach from realities the qualities or properties at work in them to expose them alone to the mind that considers them.

T141.The printed fragment has no terminal punctuation.

T68.The pit renders parterre, the audience area of the theater. The calls for air and emptiness, followed by suffocation and being ground down, retain the crowded physical image.

T70.The order to avoid has no expressed object in the French. Danger is named only at the end of the passage; the translation keeps the first infinitive open.

T71.The French has the irregular construction Ni la douleur et le plaisir n’existent point. The English gives its negative sense with neither/nor. More existent preserves the unusual comparison plus existantes.

T72.Existences remains a plural noun as in the French, followed by since they are. Balancings retains balancemens alongside equilibrium, rather than reducing the two terms to one.

S1.Source editor’s annotationJoubert is reading Dounot de Bar-le-Duc’s “Preface on Euclid.”

T73.Half-abstractions and shadows remain Joubert’s terms. Bounding figures renders figures terminales, the figures marking the limits of the flat objects.