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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1804

And philosophy itself has become a landscape painter, concerned in all things more with man’s abode than with his destination.

But does one remember naturally and easily what one learns so painfully and by artifice? For my part, it seems to me that what is learned only with the help of such instruments (as algebra) likewise serves only the arts or trades, those supplements to nature.

April 27.

Very few people know how to build a book, to put at the top what should be at the top, at the bottom what should be at the bottom, to place the doors, the windows, the columns, the capitals. In most books I see only their material heaped up, a crude and almost chance arrangement, no play of architecture, and only a few constructions the mason has needed in order to distinguish his materials.

April 28.

The mind satisfies itself with false reasons as imagination does with false appearances. Sometimes in the driest reasonings there is a subtlety of invention or an art of interlacing that arrests it and, through a kind of admiration, makes it approve what proves nothing.

Malebranche knew the brain not badly...

Fibers too easily agitated, receiving too many movements, hence a swift weariness. Remedies, slowness. Means, contemplation (moderate). Rule, little brilliance. To avoid perfection, to forbid it to oneself when one is (as I am) too ambitious for it. “Not to do all one can”: an important duty to impose on oneself when naturally afflicted with a kind of passion and mania for the better.

How mathematics had spoiled him. It had accustomed his brain to love only what resembled mathematics.

What I said above, that the word beautiful, used as a noun, does not occur even once in Malebranche. It appears that he had never had the idea of it and that, indeed, the beautiful being the good of imagination, and this faculty appearing to him essentially harmful, its good must have appeared to him a real evil.

He nevertheless admits that even mathematicians are obliged to “imagine a little.”

Mathematics, that half metaphysics (for in it the mind operates on relations it conceives, as in the first of these sciences on substances it imagines).

In this operation (of imagining God), the first means is the human figure; the final term is light. And in light, splendor. I do not believe imagination can go farther. But here the mind continues... Extent... finally infinity. One must begin again. A circle delightful to describe and always beginning again. One leaves it, plunges into it, comes out of it, takes it up again. Let us disparage no degree of it; let us not require everyone to complete it; our duty, our happiness are to hold to it and not to trace it.

He is a drawing master who disparages painting and to whom all colors appear to be rouge and lies. Which is true if one considers only their nature, but not if one considers their effect.

Vʳᵉ’s remark in his farewell to Holland: “farewell canals, farewell ducks, farewell rabble.” It seems that this last expression springs from play involuntarily, from a play of wit that was inevitable. It risked being offensive, and it is not. That makes it amusing.

April 29.

Malebranche. It seems to me that he knew the human brain better than the human mind.

T2.Paysagiste gives philosophy the occupation of a landscape painter. Abode retains séjour as the place or condition of man’s stay; destination can suggest an appointed end as well as a destination, and is left open.

T3.Doors, windows, columns and capitals remain parts of the book’s architecture. The mason’s constructions distinguish materials; the English does not replace that unusual purpose with a more familiar plan for a completed building.

T4.Se payer de means being satisfied with or accepting something here. Approve and proves retain the audible relation between approuver and prouve; the mind is arrested by the art of interlacing, not by a demonstrated truth.

T5.The fragment moves from fibers and weariness to Joubert’s own excessive ambition for perfection. Remedies remains plural beside singular slowness; the brief means and rule are not expanded into a treatment regimen. The better retains the comparative mieux instead of changing it into the best.

T6.English treats mathematics as singular. Its final explicit repetition preserves the unambiguous French leur, which refers to mathematics rather than to the brain. Brain remains distinct from mind in this sequence.

T7.The opening What I said above remains a fragment. The repeated good and evil follow bien and mal: its good is the good of imagination, not Malebranche’s personal good. The claim about the absent noun belongs to Joubert and is not a separately certified concordance result.

T272.The initial Ce que clause remains without a supplied governing clause. Only the first beau is italic. Clipped beginnings in ne, avoit, imagination, bien and d’ are restored from surviving portions.

T8.The first of these sciences is metaphysics in the comparison: imagined substances contrast with conceived relations in mathematics. The fragment supplies no further governing clause.

T9.Describe retains the geometric sense of tracing a circle beside its ordinary verbal sense. Means, final term, degree and extent remain spatial terms. The closing distinction between holding to the circle and tracing it is not resolved into a prescribed theological method.

T274.A black blemish damages cette and humaine on page 441; their obscured letters are contextually restored from visible fragments. Several clipped right-edge endings on page 442 are likewise restored. The three-dot interruptions and singular/plural movement in the metaphor remain.

T10.The coloring is treated as cosmetic rouge and as falsehood. The second sentence retains its opening Which; the judgment is qualified by the distinction between nature and effect.

T11.The English gives the meanings canals, ducks and rabble. It cannot reproduce the repeated French can- sounds which motivate Joubert’s explanation of the involuntary wordplay. The abbreviation Vʳᵉ remains unexpanded; the claim that the remark is not offensive is Joubert’s assessment.