Sensibility

Use in the book

The wish to need nobody is called a sign of a soul without feeling: dependence can testify to receptivity. The note on nerves, however, says opinions may influence sensitivity toward cruelty, so heightened responsiveness is not automatically kindness. Finally sensibility is imagined as having a vapor around it, as intelligence radiates; together they give a person an atmosphere. That material image should remain an image rather than becoming a newly supplied physiological explanation.

Places to read

1. I, p. 33, entry 1, ¶2Refusal of all obligation signals absence of feeling.
2. I, p. 347, entry 9, ¶1Nervous sensitivity can be affected by cruel opinions.
3. II, p. 791, entry 6, ¶3Sensibility contributes vapor to a person’s atmosphere.

Translation in this edition

The English translation uses feeling in the social maxim, sensitivity in the nervous account, and sensibility in the vapor image. The cruelty fragment leaves the object of “make fit” unstated, and the translation does not decide whether the person or faculty is meant.

Use in the book

The word appears in strikingly opposed settings. In the Preface, the author interrupts his account of objections to Aubry’s severe teaching with a sarcastic parenthesis about how much sensibility ‘we’ possess nowadays (p. 5). The target is the reader who rejects a painful proposition merely because it hurts. The debate concerns human attachment and forgetfulness; a claim to tender feeling does not settle what is true.

At the end of René, the frame calls Chactas’s response sensibility and says it draws Souël into speech (p. 189). Tears and embraces make the old man’s sympathy visible. The same narrator immediately states that Souël has a compassionate heart in secret despite his inflexible exterior. Accordingly, displayed emotion is neither the sole proof of concern nor automatically its opposite. The two listeners embody contrasting ways of responding to suffering, and the text does not reduce their difference to feeling versus feelinglessness.

Amélie’s account of religion gently deceiving an âme sensible (p. 186) makes receptiveness the medium of transformation. Calm and innocence mingle with remaining turmoil and pleasure. That susceptibility can be turned toward religious life rather than simply suppressed. Her nursing of sick companions later shows feeling extended into action, which is a firmer ethical criterion than the beauty of an emotion alone.

René’s own tears sometimes disclose sympathy and sometimes direct attention back toward his exceptional pain. On Etna he weeps over barely visible mortals; before the happy Indigenous passers-by he envies a life he projects onto them. To read sensibility carefully is to ask who is actually perceived, who is imagined, and what follows the feeling.

Places to read

1. Preface p. 5nous avons aujourd'hui tant de sensibilité — The author’s parenthetical irony challenges sentiment as an automatic judge of truth.
2. p. 186une âme sensible — Amélie describes a soul whose susceptibility allows a gradual religious redirection.
3. p. 189la sensibilité du Sachem — The frame names Chactas’s openly emotional response.
4. p. 189un cœur compatissant — The narrator independently attests Souël’s hidden compassion before recording his severe rebuke.

Translation in this edition

The supplied English renders sensibilité as ‘sensibility’ and âme sensible as ‘a feeling soul’. The difference is justified by ordinary English usage and should not be mistaken for two unrelated French concepts. The Preface’s sarcasm is authorial; Souël’s claim that René deserves no pity is character speech within a frame that has already qualified it.

Use in the book

Fusées XVIII opens with a prohibition: do not despise anyone's sensibility. This gives an ethical consequence to aesthetic individuality. If another person's way of feeling is that person's genius, contempt may discard something irreducible before understanding it. The instruction is striking in a collection full of contemptuous portraits; it is neither erased by them nor enough to neutralize their violence. It establishes an internal standard against which they can be read.

The same section locates a nervous shock in the birth of sublime thought. This is the notebook's physiological speculation, not a verified account of the brain. Its presence nevertheless prevents sensibility from being treated as wholly detached from the body. Sublime thinking and sensory disturbance are imagined together, even while other fragments oppose spirit and brute appetite.

Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXII credits leisure with developing sensibility, meditation and the capacity for dandyism, while acknowledging its financial cost. Sensibility is thus both singular and cultivated. Fusées XII's apparently unfeeling regular object provides the complementary aesthetic problem: art must engage a response rather than merely satisfy correctness. The honour given to individual feeling in Fusées XVIII does not mean every response is infallible; the hallucination and bewitched-mirror passages make that impossible. It means that judgment must begin by recognizing the existence of distinct perceivers.

Places to read

1. Fusées XVIIINe méprisez la sensibilité de personne. — The maxim places a limit on contempt.
2. Fusées XVIIILa sensibilité de chacun, c’est son génie. — Genius is distributed as individual responsiveness rather than restricted to celebrity.
3. Fusées XVIIIune secousse nerveuse qui se fait sentir dans le cervelet — Sublime thought is associated with a bodily event in a speculative assertion.
4. Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXIIrelativement à la sensibilité, à la méditation — Leisure is credited with developing capacities even while increasing debt.

Translation in this edition

In Fusées XVIII the edition retains ‘sensibility’, avoiding the narrower modern sense of easily hurt feelings that ‘sensitivity’ might suggest. In Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXII, however, the same French noun becomes ‘sensitivity’; readers tracing the faculty should keep the two English words connected. ‘Object perceived by the senses’ in Fusées XVI correctly distinguishes the other use of sensible. ‘Each person’s sensibility is his genius’ preserves the force and universality of the claim, rather than changing it into the weaker idea that gifted people are sensitive. The translation does not add a scientific endorsement to the cerebellum statement.