From the book
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volumes I–II
Joseph Joubert · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordAnimal names living creatures and can mark an aspect of human life contrasted with intelligence or spiritual participation.
- In JoubertMere masonry houses a person as a thing or animal, while architecture unites beauty with utility and engages intelligence.
- In this editionThe English translation retains the trained animal’s limited “intelligence” and does not convert the passage into a modern account of conditioning.
- A place to beginShelter for the animal differs from architecture addressed to intelligence.
- English renderings
- animal; animals
Meaning
Animal names living creatures and can mark an aspect of human life contrasted with intelligence or spiritual participation. Such contrasts belong to the particular argument, not to a modern classification of cognition.
Use in the book
Mere masonry houses a person as a thing or animal, while architecture unites beauty with utility and engages intelligence. The discussion of the trained pig cautiously allows the intelligence of linking words and movements, while denying that the display demonstrates more. It is therefore inaccurate to summarize the entry as saying that animals have no intelligence whatever. A broader cosmological fragment refuses to treat the world as an animal, calling it a place instead.
Places to read
- II, p. 501, entry 10, ¶1Shelter for the animal differs from architecture addressed to intelligence.
- II, p. 933–934, entry 1, ¶3A trained performance has a narrowly specified associative intelligence.
- I, p. 231, entry 2, ¶1The world is distinguished from an animal or machine.
Translation in this edition
The English translation retains the trained animal’s limited “intelligence” and does not convert the passage into a modern account of conditioning. The notebook’s hierarchical judgments are preserved as Joubert’s.
Source note
Beaunier 1938, I, pp. 231; II, pp. 501, 933, 934.