Prejudice

Use in the book

The remark that one could not judge without prejudices connects the words themselves: something prior to explicit judgment may be felt without being held as an opinion. The later description restricts its praise to natural and unacquired prejudices, imagined as guides along necessary paths. Neither passage vindicates every socially inherited bias. Indeed, Joubert calls contemporary unbelief a prejudice and distinguishes sources in people and time from sources in books and novelty. The supposedly new opinion can therefore be as received as the old one.

Places to read

1. I, p. 453, entry 3, ¶2Prejudices can precede or support judgment without becoming explicit opinions.
2. II, p. 832, entry 8, ¶1The favorable account is limited to natural and unacquired guides.
3. II, p. 648, entry 7, ¶1Novelty and books can generate prejudice as well as tradition.

Translation in this edition

The English translation retains the potentially disconcerting prejudice instead of silently improving it to intuition. “Today” belongs to Joubert’s statement, not the date of this lexicon. The compressed order of experience and thought on I.453 remains qualified by “so to speak.”