Hardness and softness

Use in the book

In the account of artistic labor, clay is too soft for a chisel, marble too hard to obey the hand, and bronze too brittle without melting. Resistance belongs to every worker’s material, and opposed defects require different responses. The movement exercise uses an even stranger reproductive image: the hard body admits nothing, while the soft one retains nothing. In a different, compressed formulation, thought has softness by nature and roundness by perfection. The physical adjectives there should remain available to imagination rather than becoming conventional moral praise or blame.

Places to read

1. II, p. 757, entry 10, ¶1Opposite material limitations explain different kinds of artistic labor.
2. I, p. 237, entry 3, ¶5Hardness and softness are opposed through admission and retention.
3. II, p. 552, entry 12, ¶1Softness belongs to thought’s nature, distinct from perfected roundness.

Translation in this edition

The English translation preserves vulva, not valve, in the movement comparison. Beaunier identifies that material as a separate exercise book, suspects a debt to Nollet whose extent is undetermined, and reports his own omissions. The analogy is not represented as independently established mechanics.