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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

... spending their lives contradicting their childhood, — erasing it.

To live without a body!

The ancients. Their errors and their truths are better expressed than ours. For example, when they said: “It is the brain that makes our senses and is the cause of sight, hearing, smell...” (Vid Phæid.) How poetic and felicitous this turn of phrase is. One can even let it stand for the truth by adding: “The soul is the cause of the brain.”

March 14.

She had none of her children to mourn.

March 12.

Heaven has given children a great abundance of tears.

In the French language, words drawn from gaming, hunting, war, and the stable have been noble.

March 13.

— one risks being mistaken, it is true! But “what a beautiful danger!” as Plato says.

The sparing of words.

Thursday, March 14.

Almost always (always), those who invoke the appearances of logic so loudly do not possess its reality; they lack inward and natural logic. It is less from a right feeling than from a certain idea they have formed that they also cry out against the false mind.

So it is that those whose conscience is determined only by the law do not have within them a better rule, equity.

He gave (God) religion to the Hebrews, and philosophy to the Greeks, as he gave politics to the Egyptians and the Persians.

Theology too is a philosophy. But it seeks truth beyond the world and rests on an authority other than that of souls and bodies.

...poetic, not through pomp, but through simplicity and, so to speak, through a certain heroic nakedness.

Longinus speaks of a certain noble vigor that style must have. In Longinus’s own there is the vigor of a porter.

Of Longinus. He brings everything back to his word (the sublime), or rather he brings this word back everywhere. One is sometimes quite astonished to see it reappear where he places it.

T252.The sentence remains an opening fragment without an assigned plural subject. The infinitive after the dash repeats the relation to their childhood: to contradict it, to erase it.

T253.Vid Phæid. is preserved as printed. A close parallel occurs in Plato’s Phaedo 96b, where Socrates recalls an inquiry into whether the brain produces sight, hearing, smell, and other sensations. Joubert’s added sentence about the soul is his proposed addition, outside the preceding quotation. The translation retains “makes our senses,” rather than substituting the more explanatory “produces sensations.”

T254.The feminine subject is not identified. The past statement concerns having no child to mourn; it does not say that she had no children.

T448.The printed date returns from March 14 to March 12. Abbondance retains its double b.

T255.“Noble” concerns the accepted dignity of words in literary usage, though the listed sources also evoke social rank and pursuits. The perfect tense preserves Joubert’s historical claim without extending it expressly to every later usage.

T256.Compare Phaedo 114d, where Socrates treats belief in the soul’s fate as a risk worth taking. “Beautiful danger” follows Joubert’s French wording, rather than replacing it with a familiar English version of Plato. The introductory dash, lowercase opening, and two exclamations are retained.

T257.The parenthetical toujours intensifies “almost always” into “always.” Esprit faux denotes faulty or unsound judgment; “false mind” keeps the recurrent mind vocabulary, without reducing it to dishonesty. Sentiment droit is an inward rightness of feeling or judgment, contrasted here with a constructed idea.

T258.The plural souls and bodies, and the distinction between an authority and a search beyond the world, remain as printed. No particular institution or revelation is supplied as the unnamed authority.

T259.The adjective begins an unfinished fragment. “Nakedness” keeps the exposed, bodily metaphor in nudité rather than substituting plainness or austerity.

T260.Portefaix is a carrier of burdens. The contrast is between noble vigor in style and the physical strength of a burden carrier, not a doorkeeper. In the following paragraph, “his word” is identified by Joubert’s parenthesis as the sublime.