Diotimos Reading Desk

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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[Malebranche.]

Polish and finish is to style what varnish is to paintings. It preserves them, makes them last, in some sense eternalizes them.

Indeed, the reward of all the good one can do and all the virtues one can have is hope. Add to it trust in men and in heaven.

June 10.

Plato. As in those gardens one enlarges to the eye by obliging it to turn and turn.

June […]6.

[Plato.] That metaphysics full of play and a kind of gaiety, in which the mind indeed swims, in some sense, and plays with light.

June […]0.

To the question: is he guilty? one should add another: is he incorrigible?

When one wishes to make what is very fine apparent, one must color it.

We are what those great men would have been if they had come after themselves.

June 23.

“Farewell, sun, I shall see you no more.” I shall indeed see another, and it will be more beautiful. The soul enters with horror into this moment of darkness, but it will be followed by an eternity of light.

The lights of philosophy itself must teach us that, indeed, the worst religion is worth more than the best philosophy. Among the things of man, what philosophy has assessed most poorly is religion. Plato’s was a wholly religious philosophy.

There was as yet neither chance nor nature, but everything was made by art, by will. We have called nature the movements of the machine God made by his art, and we call chance what happens without our participation and apparently without nature’s concurrence. So chance and nature are two ways of conceiving causes; ways that belong to our mind, so that one can say nature came only after man.

In this supposition (Newton’s), space is conceived outside God, whereas one must put it inside. Space is, properly speaking, God whom then, if I dare speak this way, we do not see in the face. Newton calls it his sensorium, not daring to call it his body. It is, properly speaking, his stature.

The beautiful is beauty seen with the eyes of the soul alone.

T91.Singular is follows the source’s est after the two nouns. The following it and them preserve the compact varnish comparison rather than assigning every pronoun an added noun.

T92.The eye is made to turn, thereby increasing the garden’s apparent extent. The fragment’s Plato is not converted into a title or a definite quotation from a dialogue.

S1.Source editor’s annotationFrom June 17, a quotation from Fiévée (Mercure de France of June 9, 1804), concerning Rousseau. And Joubert: “That rogue has good sense.”

T93.The source editor supplies [Platon.], given as [Plato.] in English. The mind’s swimming and playing remain images inside an unfinished noun phrase.

T113.The source editor’s June 17 record and the periodical’s June 9 date remain distinct. Drôle is rendered rogue in Joubert’s quoted remark, preserving the irreverent noun beside the acknowledgment of good sense.

T348.The annotation’s June 17 is a separate reported date, not a restoration of the damaged entry date.

T94.The counterfactual repeats the great men as their own successors. The English does not replace that strangeness with a comparison between named historical generations.

T95.The quoted farewell is followed by Joubert’s first-person confidence in another, more beautiful sun. The moment of darkness and eternity of light remain distinct; the speaker of the opening quotation is not named.

T96.The comparison remains Joubert’s strong judgment. Plato’s leaves the compact Celle de Platon without a newly supplied antecedent; the final predicate calls it a wholly religious philosophy.

T353.The fold obscures parts of qu’en, the continuation of philosophie, mal and toute; these are restored contextually. The spelling aprécié remains.

T97.The final sequence follows Joubert’s distinction between divine art and our ways of conceiving causes. Chance remains distinct from nature; the English does not silently turn the statement into a chronology of the physical universe.

T98.Sensorium retains the Latin term for a seat or organ of sensation. The face, body and stature remain bodily images. Joubert’s account of Newton’s supposition is preserved as his account, without supplying an exact Newton quotation.

T99.Le beau is consistently the beautiful, distinct from beauté, beauty. The distinction governs the later reflections on innocence, health and the artist’s soul and is not collapsed into one English noun.