Benevolence

Use in the book

To extinguish benevolence is figuratively to kill a person in part. Yet a heart that spends all its benevolence on an abstract totality can dry up its power to love individuals. A retrospective notice of the proposed Universal benevolence acknowledges a related difficulty: its bounds were never determined and the material failed. The later poetic prescription gives benevolence another use, as a clothing or gentle mediation placed between oneself and every object. That relation joins being good and being a poet, without requiring the observer to falsify what is seen.

Places to read

1. I, p. 56, entry 2, ¶1Extinguished benevolence is represented as partial death.
2. I, p. 134, entry 6, ¶2Abstract universal love can exhaust particular affection.
3. I, p. 433, entry 8, ¶5A retrospective project fails to determine benevolence’s bounds.
4. II, p. 867, entry 7, ¶1Goodwill mediates the poet’s way of looking.

Translation in this edition

The English translation renders bienveillance as goodwill in the clothing image, where amenity means gentleness or pleasantness. The reference to 1779 is retrospective within a later unit; its damaged date and shifts of pronoun remain. No finished treatise or settled universal doctrine is inferred.