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Art and beauty

Aesthetic grace

grâce

In aesthetic passages, grâce is an attractive manner, movement or tempering quality distinguishable from beauty itself.

From the book

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volumes I–II

Joseph Joubert · Diotimos Editions · 2026

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Orientation

At a Glance

  • The wordIn aesthetic passages, grâce is an attractive manner, movement or tempering quality distinguishable from beauty itself.
  • In JoubertJoubert assigns bodily grace to clothing, movements and manners, while beauty lies in nude forms and solid bodies in relation.
  • In this editionThe English translation preserves the clothing/flaying relation and uses ingenuous for naïf.
  • A place to beginBodily grace and beauty have different locations.
English renderings
grace; graces

Meaning

In aesthetic passages, grâce is an attractive manner, movement or tempering quality distinguishable from beauty itself.

Use in the book

Joubert assigns bodily grace to clothing, movements and manners, while beauty lies in nude forms and solid bodies in relation. He immediately changes the mapping for feelings: beauty belongs to elevation and spirituality, grace to moderation. This explicit shift prevents a single physical definition from covering every setting. The garment image makes grace beauty’s natural clothing and compares artistic strength without it to a flayed figure. In a reflection on style, ingenuous fluency can possess grace without precision; elsewhere too rigid a precision is said to be incompatible with grace. The quality is therefore a relational fitness, not merely an additional ornament.

Places to read

  1. II, p. 519, entry 7, ¶1Bodily grace and beauty have different locations.
  2. II, p. 519, entry 7, ¶2The distinction changes when applied to feelings.
  3. II, p. 567, entry 8, ¶1Grace clothes beauty; strength without it resembles a flayed figure.
  4. II, p. 512, entry 4, ¶1Ingenuous expression may have grace without precision.
  5. II, p. 717, entry 6, ¶1Overly rigid precision is judged incompatible with grace, through a qualified damaged reading.

Translation in this edition

The English translation preserves the clothing/flaying relation and uses ingenuous for naïf. Aesthetic grace is distinguished here from divine grace or an act of pardon; these different uses are not one doctrine. The English [incompatible] on II.717 is contextual: the damaged French incom[…]atible does not certify every lost letter.

Source note

Beaunier 1938, II, pp. 512, 519, 567, 717.