Intelligence

Use in the book

Joubert says that all art comes from intelligence while allowing intelligence to exist without a fixed art or talent. The distinction is between a source or capacity and a specific determination of it. His fragment “Intelligence (principle)” also warns that the words offered to clarify a notion may obscure it instead; the parenthesis does not itself establish a developed theory of first principles.

Calling imagination the singular “eye” of intelligence gives this power a means of vision. Elsewhere books exhibit will and judgments while lacking intelligence: assent and refusal do not amount to seeing. These comparisons place pressure on any rendering that treats intelligence as accumulated information or merely the ability to conclude.

Places to read

1. I, p. 390, entry 1, ¶2Explanatory words may obscure the easily understood notion.
2. II, p. 541, entry 13, ¶1Intelligence is distinguished from fixed art or talent.
3. II, p. 830, entry 7, ¶1Imagination is the singular eye of intelligence.
4. II, p. 483, entry 6, ¶1Judgment and will can operate without intellectual seeing.
5. II, p. 738, entry 3, ¶1Understanding sufficient to know and savor exquisite things is preferred to limitless ambition.

Translation in this edition

The English translation retains intelligence in the conceptual contrasts but uses understanding for the amount needed to know and savor divine and human things. The singular eye on II.830 is a deliberate correction of plural eyes, not an accidental grammatical variation.

Use in the book

Guérin can treat intelligence as a living growth. Knowledge enters in an orderly way when work becomes calm; later the mind develops through free exposure to the country, its own sap warmed into a vigorous shoot. This organic model qualifies the assumption that intellectual increase must be proportional to strenuous study. For this particular observer, receptivity and apparent idleness can supply what deliberate effort cannot.

Yet understanding remains a demanding standard. In March and April 1835 he identifies deficiencies in deduction, method, comparison, and the sustained connection of one truth to another. The complaint is specific: impressions and intuitions do not reliably become a coherent sequence. It should not be reduced to a vague modesty about literary talent. Equally, the reader should not mistake his severe self-description for an objective assessment of his abilities.

Intellectual life is also distinguished from moral progress. The June 1835 reflection rejects the idea that a person's beauty depends on a brilliant mind. His productions quickly grow old in his judgment, while his conduct remains distressingly unchanged. The capacity to recognize weakness is therefore neither identical with overcoming it nor the sole measure of worth.

The term can rise to a cosmic register, naming what receives and echoes the created world's symbolic forms. But the shepherd imagined as divine mirror is also an ordinary person watching clouds. Guérin repeatedly places intelligence between exalted function and vulnerable embodiment.

Places to read

1. 27 March 1833 · ¶1Orderly reception of knowledge accompanies restored trust and steadier work.
2. 4 August 1834 · ¶1Six weeks of receptive country life produce growth figured as the mind's natural sap.
3. 10 December 1834 · ¶5The human intelligence appears as echo and mirror within creation, then returns to the modest reality of solitary spectators.
4. 30 April 1835 · ¶2Arranging, comparing, and deducing are named as distinct operations that exhaust him.
5. 4 June 1835 · ¶1Intellectual inadequacy is separated from moral beauty and the harder task of changing conduct.

Translation in this edition

The supplied English appropriately varies “intelligence,” “understanding,” and “mind.” In the educational essay “leur intelligence” becomes “their understanding”; in August 1834 “mon intelligence” becomes “my mind.” Reading only the English can therefore hide the recurrence of a single French term.