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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

ANNÉES 1779-1783

No individual date printed

1

— Reflection belongs to the head alone; but the whole body has memory. A dancer’s feet, a skilled musician’s fingers possess, to an eminent degree, the faculty of remembering.

— I suspect that the organs of thought are divided into several classes. Through some we imagine, through others we reflect, etc., yet in such a way that none is moved without moving the others. Men of great genius are those in whom these organs have such strength and such unity that they are always moved together, in exact proportion.

— The dominant faculty in each man is the one whose organs have been exercised more. Exercise gives our inner organs, like our outer limbs, greater mobility, strength, and suppleness.

— The poet questions himself; the philosopher looks at himself. Reflection produces the passions because it is the repeated contemplation of an object.

— Do you wish to know the mechanism of thought and its effects? Read the poets. Do you wish to know morality, politics? Read the poets. Examine deeply what pleases you in them: it is the true.

— I have said elsewhere, “touch is the one of all our senses that gives more complete and fuller enjoyments”; and so pleasures, when we taste them a second time through memory and reflection, are sweeter than at the moment of their actual enjoyment. It is because we then embrace them, clasp them, handle them. The pleasures we remember are sweeter and less vivid than those we imagine.

— One could imagine an artificial skeleton in which thought could be shown, those fibers that elude the anatomist and are the principle of intelligence in man. Our inner organization is very little known. I have observed that the ocular fibers are intimately united with the organs of imagination, that there is a close correspondence between these fibers and the erector fibers. If the eye is kept closed in a state of very strong contraction, it is impossible to imagine; if it is kept open in a state of extreme dilation, the same thing happens.

— Imagination is the one of our faculties that most requires the cooperation of all the others. Without imagination, sensibility is confined to the moment in which we exist. Sensations are more vivid, shorter, and have no harmony in their succession.

— There are doubtless no final causes; but beings are made for one another by the same necessity that makes them exist.

— Virtue is the health of the soul.

— Crime makes us see enemies everywhere, and virtue friends.

— Benevolence joins to our faculties and enjoyments the enjoyments and faculties of all the objects it embraces. Man is, in a sense, an immense being who can exist partially, and whose existence is all the more delightful as it is more complete and full.

— The arts, philosophy, and all the efforts of human intelligence and ingenuity can have only one aim: to extend man’s individual limits.

No individual date printed

Nos. 2 and 3.

(I shall seek the relations of words to thoughts and of periods to the harmonious succession of our affections.)

The habit of virtue at last makes it cease to be a sacrifice. It becomes taste, instinct, moral habits. Noble, generous characters are those who have a swift instinct for their true interests.

— Man’s happiness lies in his complete and absolute existence.

— The beautiful is one; but we find beautiful everything that approaches the truly beautiful. For example, there is only one proper term for expressing each idea, but we find many terms proper that are not that one but approach it.

— Virtue leads to moral habits; moral habits lead to virtue; manners are an essential part of moral habits. We must acquire beautiful, simple, and fitting manners on every occasion to attain sublime wisdom. It would be good to do nothing and say nothing according to custom when we wish to feel and think only for ourselves.

Manners are to feelings what words are to thoughts. The art of speaking must precede the art of thinking; in this way, by a natural progression, manners could precede feelings and lead to them.

— Honor! Taste! Expressions that we in France make belie their true meaning, perhaps every time we use them.

— We should write what we feel only after a long repose of the soul. We must express ourselves as we remember, not as we feel. I shall give the reason.

— Justice and rightness are two qualities that flow from the same source.

— Without intelligence, man is merely physical; that is, he is confined to the existence of the moment, to sensations; he knows neither the past nor the future, he knows only the present. He has neither moral needs nor moral pleasures. His individual bounds, his self, extend neither beyond the place he occupies nor beyond the instant in which he occupies it.

No individual date printed

No. 4.

Our sweetest pleasures are in them, our finest needs can be satisfied only by [them]. Even amid all the enjoyments of luxury and the arts, man cannot do without man. So strongly does nature unite us when our institutions separate us!

— Everything that multiplies the bonds attaching man to man makes him better and happier.

No individual date printed

No. 5

— Public opinion is in great need of enlightenment on two great subjects: morality and the arts.

— We should do the smallest things from the greatest motives, and see the greatest relations in the smallest objects. This is the great means of perfecting in ourselves the man of feeling and the man of intellect.

— The humblest style gives a taste for the beautiful if it expresses the condition of a great and beautiful soul.

— Imagine the universal order. Everything in ideas, images, feelings, and institutions that accords with it is beautiful; everything in actions, plans, and undertakings that accords with it is good. That is the rule.

— Duration is one of the first means of man’s perfectibility.

— Perfect beauty exercises at once all of man’s faculties, developed to their full extent.

— To write perfectly, we would have to write and think as a man perfect in his constitution would write and think at the moment when all his faculties were perfectly ordered within him. This condition would be possible in that state of the soul in which all its passions were developed in their full strength and extent, and combined in perfect balance.

S1.Source editor’s annotationIn this way I bring together a series of fragments that Joubert did not date. In assigning them to this period, I rely on the fact (which I assume) that they concern an essay on Universal Benevolence that Joubert was preparing at that time. And not all of them concern it, as will be seen; but one of them, clearly relating to benevolence, draws along the rest of what is found on the same leaf. Then analogies of idea or thought call for another leaf. Besides, there is as much conjecture here on my part as firm assurance. In any case, these leaves do seem to me to belong to Joubert’s youth.Concerning the essay Joubert prepared in Diderot’s vicinity and under his inspiration, the best document we have is a passage by Joubert dated 1804: “In 1783. The work in which Diderot had engaged me ought to have been reduced to this point — prospects for the mind — and whether it can be content without them — whether the same breadth that makes it capable of conceiving a great idea does not make the desire for boundless glory inevitable for it — finally, whether ‘vast thoughts’ and ‘long hope’ are not naturally, indissolubly linked, etc. — In 1779, ‘universal benevolence.’ The substance failed. It would have been necessary to determine ‘what its bounds ought to have been’ and to observe that he had not had time to determine anything. Halted at the decisive point of so lofty an operation, etc. There, as I have said, the material failed, etc...”

T1.In these early reflections, organs, fibers, and bodily organization belong to Joubert’s speculative account of thought. Erector fibers renders the printed fibres érecteurs without identifying a particular organ. In L’homme et un être, the print has et; English reads the evident intended copula is. The historical anatomical claims are retained as written.

T2.The retrospective quotation in Beaunier’s p. 43 note prints the anomalous Pavois [a] été. The same passage on volume I, p. 433 clearly reads j’avois été engagé par Diderot. Both facsimiles were inspected. That parallel supports the first-person English in which Diderot had engaged me; the p. 43 French anomaly and bracket remain visible. Later in the quotation, the shift to he is preserved. The quoted passage’s date is 1804, not the date of the early fragments.

T3.Periods are rhetorical sentences or complete rhythmic units, not spans of time. Moral habits renders mœurs in the argument linking virtue and habitual conduct; manners renders the distinct manières. Justice and rightness preserves the difference between justice and justesse, which also lets the French suggest their common root.

T4.The opening eux has no named antecedent within the printed numbered block. English retains them, including Beaunier’s later supplied [eux] as [them], without inventing a missing noun.

S1.Source editor’s annotationJoubert wrote “possible would be.”