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 wordExistence names that something is, but Joubert tests what existing means for a sensing creature, a physical object, and an imagined thing.
- In JoubertThe thermometer and diamond provoke questions about heat and light beyond the limits of our sensations.
- In this editionThe English translation retains “more existent,” rather than reducing the comparison to importance alone.
- A place to beginHeat and light are questioned in relation to objects that register or undergo them.
- English renderings
- existence; exist; be
Meaning
Existence names that something is, but Joubert tests what existing means for a sensing creature, a physical object, and an imagined thing. It is not everywhere synonymous with tangible material presence.
Use in the book
The thermometer and diamond provoke questions about heat and light beyond the limits of our sensations. Their existence “for” an instrument or a stone is posed interrogatively: the passage does not supply a worked-out account of nonhuman consciousness. Elsewhere pleasure and pain are called more existent than metals or marble. The deliberately comparative expression makes experienced reality weigh more than the solidity of bodies.
An imagined thing introduces a further distinction: appearance can take the place of solidity and itself constitute existence and reality. This is a contextual account of the purely imagined, not permission to merge all the notebooks’ uses of existence, truth, appearance, and being.
Places to read
- I, p. 251–252, entry 7, ¶1Heat and light are questioned in relation to objects that register or undergo them.
- I, p. 242, entry 4, ¶1Pleasure and pain are emphatically more existent than bodies.
- II, p. 572, entry 2, ¶2Appearance supplies existence and reality to the purely imagined.
Translation in this edition
The English translation retains “more existent,” rather than reducing the comparison to importance alone. At II.572 it also retains the printed “immaterial” despite the difficult contrast with “purely imagined”; the translation note explicitly rejects silently changing the French to material.
Source note
Beaunier 1938, I, pp. 242, 251, 252; II, pp. 572.