Diotimos Reading Desk

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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[ON KANT.]

November […].

Newton. How ripe his pear was.

Conceit is contagious because it delights both the one who has it and the one who sees it.

Banish all ambiguity, all indeterminacy from words; make them, as they say, invariable ciphers: there is no longer any play in speech, and hence no more eloquence and no more poetry; everything mobile and variable in the affections of the soul will be left without any possible expression. But what was I saying, banish... I say more. Banish all misuse from words, and there are no longer even axioms. (See d’Alembert, Discourse on the Encyclopédie.) It is ambiguity, uncertainty, that is, the suppleness of words, that is one of their great advantages for making exact use of them.

November […]1.

God measures time as we do; but not by his successions, by ours. Are the time of repentance and that of wrongdoing the same in his eyes? the time of our corruptions and that of our innocences?...

Man paints himself in his works and succeeds in finding them beautiful only by giving them his own proportions or proportions corresponding to his, not always to those he sees in himself, but to those hidden there, which he makes visible to himself only in these imitations he makes of them without his own knowledge.

On imitation given as the chief foundation of the fine arts, and on this doctrine being truer and having a wider meaning than is believed: that man imitates himself.

November 12.

The tenderness that constantly satisfies itself, and that which moderates and restrains itself. The first exhausts itself through its own satisfactions, the second nourishes itself and grows through its very privations.

Matter. It is born of God as necessary to his power in order to act.

November 17.

To allow them to forget God, for habitual thought could not remember him.

November 18.

The jumble of thoughts has succeeded the jumble of words.

November 20.

Animals. Animated like Vulcan’s tripods. The latter were so for the convenience of the Gods and the delights of heaven. The former are so for man’s necessities and the good order of the world.

In the mechanism of speech, one can consider the human tongue as an arrow that itself launches the point fitted to it, the word that leaves it.

T145.Pear preserves poire; it has not been changed to the apple associated with Newton’s familiar story. How reads Que as exclamatory, while the source’s final period remains.

T316.Day numeral damaged at the scan’s left edge; no complete day is inferred. Clipped initial letters in the main text restored where unambiguous. Printed était and mure retained.

T146.Ciphers reads chiffres as numerical signs, not secret codes. Play and suppleness retain the spatial images of room for movement and flexibility. The interruption banish... and the stronger second claim about misuse remain.

T147.The title is translated as cited, Discourse on the Encyclopédie, without silently replacing it with a fuller bibliographical title. See translates Vid.

T148.His successions and ours remain unspecified. The unusual plurals corruptions and innocences are retained rather than reduced to two single states.

T319.Day numeral damaged at the scan’s left edge; no complete day is inferred. Clipped initial letters in the main text restored where unambiguous.

T149.The hidden proportions belong to the man, and the imitations make them visible to him. The repeated reflexive construction remains without introducing a conscious plan; the final phrase explicitly says without his own knowledge.

T150.Born preserves nait, printed without a circumflex. His power refers to God’s; the relation between matter, power, and action remains compressed.

T151.The infinitive and the unspecified them remain. Habitual thought is not replaced by a named faculty or group.

T152.Animals / Animated retains the word relation. The latter refers to the tripods and the former to animals, preserving the distinction of past and present.

T153.The tongue is the arrow itself, which launches its own fitted point. The translation does not substitute the more familiar image of a bow shooting an arrow.