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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[Malebranche.]

June 24.

Indeed, one fears souls more than the body. For one dreads men’s opinion more than their arm.

Beauty is born of accord; it is a harmony. People say beautiful features do not suffice to form beauty. They are then like sounds that are not joined closely enough.

Beauty is a harmony, the beautiful a perfection. The beautiful is the ideal of beauty. Innocence is a character inseparable from the beautiful. Remorse is innocence after crime. The beautiful is the beauty of the soul (in the artist and in his subject). Innocence is to the beautiful what health is to beauty. The beautiful can do without health, but beauty cannot. And beauty can do without innocence, but the true beautiful cannot.

June 30.

“The girl of the house.” This printing error is fortunate. The girl of the house is sensibility itself; imagination is its madwoman. Reason is its mistress, or “the lady of the place.”

He killed the duc d’Enghien, but the duc d’Enghien killed his glory.

June 29.

This man does not have the head of a man of wit, only his tongue. There is nothing lively and artless in his opinions, everything in them is reasoned. His metaphors are always cold and never arise from movement. He has neither the means to enter others’ ideas nor the means to make others enter his. Phrases come out of his head. He sees only phrases in the ideas that come out of others’ heads.

June 28.

[Montesquieu.] “Law in general (he says) is the reason of man.” Not so. Law properly so called, true law, is the reason of God. True law is what binds, even if the human legislator had not prescribed it.

Montesquieu (chap. 2, book II): “Libanius says that at Athens a foreigner who mingled in the assembly of the people was punished with death. That is because such a man usurped the right of sovereignty.” What constituted his offense was not usurpation, but adultery. Such a man, by his presence and his vote, could make the law’s legitimacy doubtful or false. I mean its civil legitimacy, which is the majority of citizens’ votes. That was a great disadvantage and a great crime, worthy of the ultimate punishment. Had one kept to Mr de Montesquieu’s reason, one would have punished him from a point of honor. Such pride had no part in the manners of the ancients.

“The people (says Montesquieu) are admirable at choosing.” They are perhaps more infallible in their esteem than in their preferences. Athens had its Cleon, and Rome its Varro. The people use their reason to assess men. But it is not always their reason, it is their passions that choose. Never did they choose so badly as in France, so long as their power lasted there. But two circumstances explain their errors. They could choose only among unknown men: they chose those who flattered them. The aim was to overturn everything: they chose the most violent, the wickedest, and the most hate-filled enemies of those they believed their enemies.

Montesquieu says of the people: “They need, like monarchs and even more than they, to be guided by a council or Senate.” Beautiful words, which, warning peoples and kings alike of their inability to govern themselves, urge them, through a fate they share and which belongs to mankind, to have recourse to wisdom in order to preserve authority.

Mr de Montesquieu said in his preface: “One will not find here those salient strokes that seem to characterize today’s works.” There are more of them in his work than in any other book. “If one views things at all with a certain [ ], the sallies vanish.” Mr de Montesquieu proved the contrary. “They ordinarily arise only because the mind throws itself wholly to one side and abandons all the others.” They sometimes arise from the need to make oneself understood, because the mind, after seeing all sides, quickly seizes the one it must choose to prick curiosity, attention, and leaves all the others to attention once alerted. Sallies are the resource of those impatient to be understood, who wish to show everything but not to say everything. They arise from a great need to be understood while explaining oneself very quickly. Extreme sagacity gives one the talent for them, because it makes that talent necessary to us. — All his strokes are goads that awaken intelligence. Such was Mr de Montesquieu’s mind, and such is the character of his sallies.

(Sallies of memory. Mr de Montesquieu has many of them: Italiam, Italiam... “paternal hands,” leaves to the winds ), etc.)

Sunday, July 1.

— When the places are taken (Homer in Greece, Confucius in China), then what had to be said has been said. Such books can be made only by explaining to men what they think and by telling them what they know.

The epic poem must be a better-arranged tale, and a fine treatise of philosophy must be prejudices justified.

July 2.

Of necessary prejudices, or those that form in the soul inevitably and without its knowledge (natural ideas). That they are truths; or at least the only appearances under which the soul can habitually conceive certain truths. In making them clear to men, one does not teach men to have them, but teaches them to keep them, which puts their minds at ease and gives them great pleasure.

Without prejudices, one could not judge. Of prejudices that precede experience, so to speak, thought, — or that one feels without holding them as opinions. Secret, involuntary acts, invisible impressions.

T100.The source has plural souls and singular body, followed by collective men and singular arm. Those number relations remain visible; the English does not add violence or a particular threat.

T101.The relation of features to beauty is compared with sounds insufficiently joined. Features retains the bodily sense of traits here, distinct from the later verbal strokes in Montesquieu’s style.

S1.Source editor’s annotationVariant: “in the midst of crime.” And, in this other version, Joubert adds: “The plumpness of the Cleopatra is health unto death and in death.” Then (June 29): “The beautiful is the beauty of the soul, or beauty for the soul. — That beauty is opposed to contemplation: it occupies the body through emotion, and the body thus occupied diverts the soul.”

T102.The equation of remorse with innocence after crime remains, followed by a separate source variant. Health, innocence and the beautiful retain different conditions. No moral exception is silently supplied to complete the comparison.

T103.Beaunier’s alternative wording and its following June 29 entry remain separate from the main passage. The Cleopatra is a named representation whose exact object is not established here; its plumpness remains physical. The final That clause is an unfinished proposition, not an editorial assertion.

T359.The June 29 date belongs to the quoted alternate wording, not to the undated main block.

T104.The wordplay depends on fille, girl, and folle, madwoman. Joubert explicitly welcomes a printing error, so the repeated girl is not corrected to madwoman. Sensibility, imagination and reason receive distinct household roles.

T105.The unnamed he is not replaced by a name in the body. The repeated killed gives the second act a metaphorical object, glory; neither occurrence is weakened to harmed.

T106.The bodily head and tongue remain distinct. Naïf is rendered artless for a quality lacking calculation, rather than gullible. The cold metaphors are contrasted with movement; the unnamed man is not identified from neighboring entries.

T107.Oblige names the binding force of true law, even without a legislator’s prescription. The passage contrasts the reason of man with the reason of God as Joubert’s response to the quoted definition.

T361.The source dates return from June 30 to June 29 and then June 28 in this order. The paragraph before the page break is followed by an ambiguous solid mark, not a securely identifiable asterisk; an independent facsimile comparison preserves one block across 452–453. Source spellings fesoit, peut être, aprécier, boulleverser, authorité, voye and abbandonne remain. Fold-damaged line openings on page 453 are contextually restored from their visible remainders, including même, paroles, the continuation of insuffisance, et, the continuation of authorité, ici, the continuation of aujourd’hui, livre, saillies, d’un, du, les, curiosité, avertie, entendus, naissent, Une, talent, l’intelligence and the continuation of caractère. The source’s blank [ ] after certaine is not completed from Montesquieu or another edition. The final paragraph has one opening parenthesis and two closing parentheses; both closings remain, and the phrase feuilles aux vents has no supplied quotation marks.

T108.Adultery preserves the unusual adultère image for contamination of the law’s legitimacy, rather than silently replacing it with usurpation or adulteration. Civil legitimacy is then expressly defined through citizens’ votes. The account of capital punishment and its justification is historical text and Joubert’s argument.

T109.Le peuple is rendered by collective English they. Esteem and preferences remain distinct, as do reason and passions. Cleon and Varro are left at the level of identification supplied by the source; the French political assessment remains Joubert’s.

T110.The shared inability concerns both peoples and kings governing themselves. Their recourse to wisdom preserves authority; the English does not insert a particular council or constitutional arrangement.

T111.Sallies renders saillies as sudden intellectual or verbal leaps. Salient strokes keeps the related traits saillants, followed by goads that awaken intelligence. The blank after a certain remains empty and is not repaired from another edition. Show everything and say everything remain explicitly different aims.

T112.Italiam is Latin for Italy and remains repeated. The remembered phrases are not completed with imported passages. The single opening parenthesis and two closing parentheses follow the source, and leaves to the winds receives no added quotation marks.

T114.Places are left as Joubert’s spatial metaphor for the positions occupied by founding authors. Confucius renders the source’s Confutzée; the English does not add a book title or a historical claim beyond Joubert’s comparison.

T115.Préjugés here are judgments or conceptions already present before philosophical justification, rather than necessarily hostile or irrational biases. Prejudices retains the repeated word linking this fragment to the following discussion of necessary prejudices and judgment.

T116.The opening Of and That preserve Joubert’s fragmentary exposition. Les éclaircissant refers back to the prejudices or natural ideas: philosophy clarifies what people already possess rather than teaching them to possess it. Appearances is retained without deciding whether these are misleading appearances or the forms in which truths can be conceived.

T117.The repeated préjugés and juger connect what precedes judgment with judgment itself. The compressed ordering of experience, so to speak, and thought remains open; the English does not turn the passage into an unqualified assertion that every prejudice precedes all thought. Feeling something and holding it as an opinion remain distinct.