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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

On such subjects, when language is not beautiful, the matter is disfigured. One speaks the truth, but masks her and makes her unrecognizable through the thickness and deformities of the clothing.

The ancients (philosophers), it is above all their language, at once poetic and mathematical, that one must scrutinize studiously.

So that the body would be made only to carry the head, placed on the neck as on the seat of a chariot, — whose legs and arms are like the spokes of wheels, — whose shape they indeed seem to trace in the movements of walking.

December 4.

Instead of the poetic and mathematical style in which metaphysical subjects must be treated, and of which the ancients left us some examples, our modern ideologists have made themselves a kind of geographical and catalogical style in which they assign a fixed position and dimensions to everything spiritual. Wretches who harden everything and turn the soul itself to stone.

Of morality without metaphysics. If it is not purely preceptive, but dogmatic, [it] is body without spirit, a thing without a place, an earth without air, pure fullness. Hence it follows that Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus...

By separating the true from the beautiful, one makes it impossible for oneself to perceive and show true truth.

December 3.

“Healthy antiquity,” says Dacier (life of Pythagoras). For there was a sick and delirious antiquity. Like that of Porphyry, of Iamblichus.

December 5.

Earthly by birth, but heavenly in origin, our body alone is of this world.

December 6.

Who can believe that he returns his soul to God better than he received it?

Saturday, December 7.

(Departure from Villeneuve. 3:30, at Melun.) Why languages (idioms) harden (become brusque, assertive, categorical) as they age. Necessity — remedies, etc. (At 10 in the evening, arrival in Paris.)

December 8.

I do not know whether that is true, but I know that heaven does not want us to believe any of it.

December 12.

... who believe they have rid themselves of an illusion whenever they have lost a glimpse. Or: those who believe they had been mistaken whenever they no longer perceive what they used to see, — not supposing that one can ever pass from truth to error.

T207.The first relative loosely carries the body-as-chariot image forward; the second follows the wheels, whose shape the arms and legs seem to trace. Both dashes remain. The conditional would be preserves the proposal’s tentative form.

T208.Ideologists names theorists of ideas in this historical setting and should not be reduced to the modern meaning of political partisans. Catalogical preserves Joubert’s unusual formation catalogique. The hardening and petrification remain physical metaphors.

T209.Preceptive means giving precepts; dogmatic means stating doctrine and need not itself imply obstinate dogmatism. The English supplies [it] before is because the printed est has no repeated subject after the conditional. Pure fullness renders du plein tout pur and keeps the spatial image. The unfinished Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus clause is not completed.

T381.The printed est follows the conditional clause without an expressed subject. The final Marc Aurèle et Epictète clause ends in three dots and remains incomplete.

T210.The printed parenthesis names Dacier’s life of Pythagoras, but gives no page. Healthy preserves the contrast with sick and delirious. Those judgments of Porphyry and Iamblichus remain Joubert’s; an exact location for Dacier’s phrase has not been established.

T382.The printed date 3 décembre follows the earlier 4 décembre; source order is retained.

T211.The French opens with plural adjectives but then gives the singular our body as grammatical subject. The compressed construction concerns our earthly birth and heavenly origin; the English does not add a new main clause to regularize it.

T212.The time at Melun is printed as 3 h. 1/2 without morning or afternoon specified; only the Paris arrival explicitly says evening. Idiomes means particular languages or forms of speech, not only idiomatic phrases. Why remains an inquiry fragment ending with a period.

T384.The opening and closing travel circumstances and times remain inside the paragraph. The masculine affirmatifs and tranchans follow the parenthetic masculine idiomes; the source also names the feminine langues. The Pourquoi clause ends with a period.

T213.Apperçu is a glimpse or insight. Both formulations are retained, including the shift from removing an illusion to thinking one had been mistaken. Truth to error keeps the direction of the transition that these people fail to consider.