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 wordCritique names a practice and its practitioner.
- In JoubertThe complaint about L. and L. makes critical talent arise from misplaced importance and the patience to treat bad works as if they deserved the attention due to good ones.
- In this editionThe English translation leaves L. and L. unidentified, preserves the reversal in the bad-critic note and treats the Euripides example as Joubert’s historical report.
- A place to beginCritical talent may be wasted on objects given excessive importance.
- English renderings
- criticism; critic
Meaning
Critique names a practice and its practitioner. Joubert separates the critic’s character, the quality of an individual saying, and the value of the object receiving attention.
Use in the book
The complaint about L. and L. makes critical talent arise from misplaced importance and the patience to treat bad works as if they deserved the attention due to good ones. That is a criticism of allocation as well as judgment. A bad critic can nevertheless speak very well in the statement about fixed genre boundaries; the repeated bad does not cancel the concession. The reported censure of Euripides is praised because it refuses gratuitous wickedness in a character. Critical value therefore may include fitness and moral intelligibility, not only policing formal defects.
Places to read
- I, p. 474, entry 9, ¶2Critical talent may be wasted on objects given excessive importance.
- II, p. 621, entry 8, ¶1A bad critic can produce a good statement.
- II, p. 924, entry 5, ¶1Censure of unnecessary wickedness is judged honorable.
Translation in this edition
The English translation leaves L. and L. unidentified, preserves the reversal in the bad-critic note and treats the Euripides example as Joubert’s historical report. Inline Nota. is Joubert’s cue, not a translator’s comment.
Source note
Beaunier 1938, I, pp. 474; II, pp. 621, 924.