Thought

Use in the book

Socrates asks to hear Hippothales’ διάνοια rather than his meters or a lyric. The genitive διανοίας continues the construction with “hear”: what matters is what Hippothales means and the attitude toward his beloved expressed in his language.

The passage therefore supports “thought” or “content,” not a technical division of cognitive faculties. Socrates is seeking enough information to assess the lover’s manner of address. Attention shifts from poetic form to whether the utterance helps or harms its speaker’s purpose.

Places to read

1. 205bἀλλὰ τῆς διανοίας — but rather the thought.

Use in the book

The survey of psychic powers reports a division between thought proceeding without imagination or perception and the opinion-forming activity that accompanies them. Some authorities instead posit one rational substance with different activities. The ensuing criticism distinguishes intellect’s all-at-once activity from discursive thought’s successive procedure. The report therefore presents both contested terminology and an evaluative distinction.

Places to read

1. I.49.24.4Different classifications separate thought from opinion or distinguish activities.
2. I.49.24.5Intellect’s simultaneous activity is contrasted with thought proceeding step by step.

Translation in this edition

“Discursive thought” is used where succession is explicit; ordinary “thought” remains appropriate elsewhere. Dianoia and nous are not forced into an invariant opposition.

Use in the book

An explicit contrast on II.605 associates thought with fact and assertion, idea with cause or affinity and an opening perspective. This compressed distinction is useful locally, but it should not be imposed on every pensée in the notebooks. The writer on I.251 seeks a thought he does not yet possess whole, so thought need not always be a finished assertion. The reference to Sophocles asks what constitutes the simplicity of thoughts; it praises an effect without completing the proposed explanation. The image of thought lowering itself before the forbidden gives the same word an ethical bearing without turning every use into a moral faculty.

Places to read

1. II, p. 605, entry 10, ¶1A compact thought/idea distinction opposes assertion to perspective.
2. I, p. 251, entry 2, ¶3The thought sought through words is not yet whole.
3. II, p. 879, entry 6, ¶1Sophoclean simplicity becomes an unfinished question about thoughts.
4. I, p. 155–156, entry 10, ¶1Thought lowers itself before a figurative barrier.

Translation in this edition

Thought is retained across these settings. The incomplete “In what” and “Of what” formulations about Sophocles remain research prompts, not completed explanations supplied by the translator.

Paradox

French: paradoxe.

The sole definition says that a paradox most often states a true proportion whose contrary is also true. The English translation retains proportion because that is the printed word; substituting proposition would silently repair the witness. Most often remains a limit, and the fragment supplies no example. The article therefore records Joubert’s formulation without converting it into a general theory that all contradictions are true.

Places to read: I, p. 109, entry 11, ¶1.

Use in the book

Thinking is easy in its bare occurrence and difficult in its right direction. Habit has made good thought seem laborious, although fitting thoughts are intrinsically delightful. Their rightness is measured by value: to think as God does is to esteem objects according to their actual excellence.

The world in a thought is therefore more than a pale duplicate of the material world. It is the world knowingly received, enjoyed, and offered back to its giver. Its greater excellence in this respect follows from its being the end for which external things are provided. This does not deny their independent reality or licence arbitrary invention. A thought that misvalues them would fail precisely at the act that makes thought so important.

Places to read

1. I.8The difficulty of thinking well is traced to bad habit rather than nature.
2. I.13Right thought prizes objects as God prizes them.
3. III.18Thought ranges beyond visible boundaries and asks after creation’s beginning.
4. II.90The world in thought is a spiritual act and returning offering.

In this edition

“World in a Thought” in II.90 concerns apprehension and response. It is not a claim that private thought manufactures the external earth or determines truth by wishing.

Use in the book

Guérin seldom depicts thought as a series of disembodied propositions. Thoughts ferment, grow, travel, sleep, awaken, and circulate. Their multiplicity can be generous: the ocean of intelligence imagined with Élie places individual minds within a wider life before God. A shared thought of freedom can likewise become a sustaining moral passion, giving small practical efforts a purpose larger than their maker.

The same mobility can prevent knowledge or self-command. Anxious thoughts buzz around study like mosquitoes; the mind pursues luminous forms without reaching a resting place. Thinking may be involuntary enough for Guérin to say that its government does not belong to him. This is not identical with an absence of thought. It is often precisely abundance without settled relation that causes distress.

The late labor passages make a useful distinction between thought's margins and its depth. In October 1834 paid occupation consumes the shore while the inward sea remains untouched. By April 1835 material subsistence usurps the time of thought and drains the river into sand. These are changing reports of a lived balance, not interchangeable descriptions of an eternal opposition between art and work.

In convalescence thoughts become interlocutors again: they console one another, remember suffering, and await what existence will bring. The word therefore links cognition to affection and duration. A thought may be measured by its truth, but also by the freedom of its movement, its power to sustain life, and its susceptibility to being injured when forced into speech.

Places to read

1. 6 March 1833 · ¶1The imagined ocean of thoughts puts each individual intelligence in relation to a vast created order and to divine thought.
2. 16 July 1834 · ¶2The thought of freedom animates active service and becomes almost indistinguishable from a governing passion.
3. 22 October 1834 · ¶1Work reaches thought at its margins while the deep sea remains reserved.
4. 26 January 1835 · ¶1Practical progress has not given him government over the mind's incessant flights.
5. 30 April 1835 · ¶1Recovering thoughts resume a quiet society of memory, hope, and inward exhortation.

Translation in this edition

The English sometimes renders “pensée” as “thought” and sometimes gives a fuller mental expression required by context. Keep distinct “une pensée,” a particular conception, from the singular mass noun in “le temps de la pensée,” the time available for thinking.

Use in the book

The positive report connects thinking with likes and ignorance with unlikes, adding that thought is either the same as perception or closely similar. The qualification is essential: the witness does not choose unambiguously between strict identity and resemblance. He then explains why blood is the chief medium of thinking, since the elements are especially well blended there. Differences in spacing, size, density, and local balance account for intelligence, slowness, impulsive quickness, and specialized skill.

The objections test the account's range. If thought and perception have the same constituents, everything would share in thought; if thinking is alteration, like acting on like appears insufficient to produce it. Bloodless animals and relatively blood-poor sensory regions challenge blood's privileged role, while bone and hair challenge an account resting only on possession of all the elements. Finally, similar explanations of knowledge, ignorance, pleasure, and pain appear to predict unwanted correlations.

These claims should be distinguished from Aëtius's identification of mind and soul and from the late school's two kinds of madness. They can inform a reconstruction of Empedoclean psychology, but the dossier does not give one continuous argument joining them. Nor does it print the often-discussed argument that a god lacking Strife cannot know Strife; that argument must not be smuggled into this volume's lexical evidence.

Places to read

1. A 86 §§ 10–11 (testimony)Theophrastus, On the Senses 10. Relates thought to likeness and cautiously compares it with perception.
2. A 86 §§ 10–11 (testimony)Theophrastus, On the Senses 11. Explains differences of ability through bodily blending.
3. A 86 §§ 22–23 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 23. Raises universal-thinking, alteration, bloodlessness, and experiential-distinction objections.
4. A 96 (testimony)Aëtius. Offers a separate identification of mind and soul.

Translation in this edition

The commentary's claim that thought “is not a faculty but a state of a fluid” overstates the reported physiology. The witness explains thought through blood and also speaks explicitly of faculties; the lexical evidence should preserve both.