Foreword
The enigma of Joseph Joubert was not made any the less impenetrable by the pretence that it did not exist. A secretive author, Joubert was addicted to the pleasures of reading and writing compulsively all his life, whatever his public activities happened to be at any given time.
Initially a teacher, then secretary to Diderot, he became an adminis- trator and Justice of the Peace during the difficult years of the Revolution, an inspector of the Université Impériale, and a welcome guest in the literary salons of the period. Pauline de Beaumont, Chateaubriand, Fontanes, Bonald, Chénedollé were among his friends.
By the time of his death in 1824 his probing, speculative intelligence had accumulated a great wealth of ideas. Unable to choose among the infinity of doubts, solutions, and further problems it constantly discovered, his mind became hopelessly entangled in the web of analogies linking the arts, the sciences, and language to imagination and creativity. Except for letters, Joubert could never finish a text to his satisfaction. He became a prisoner of the written word.
In 1824, that was difficult to understand. The mass of jottings, notes, and manuscripts that Joubert had consigned to the now famous trunk concealed his true self, but rendered him vulnerable to interpretation.
So when Chateaubriand and Duchesne perceived that certain fragments of his work fitted into a recognizable genre, or could be made to do so, Joubert was presented as an author of Pensées, as a moralist. The solution was retained, and more evidence to substantiate it was produced, four years later, in 1842, by Raynal in his collection of the Pensées, essais et maximes, which became the standard edition until 1938, when Beaunier published the major part of the Carnets in two substantial volumes.
After Chateaubriand, Raynal and Sainte-Beuve rediscovered, almost invented, Joubert, Matthew Arnold introduced him to the Anglo-Saxon world of criticism, translations of selected ‘thoughts’ appeared, and his reputation grew on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same time his personality was transformed. It is true that, with the years, the urbane, sociable, professional, and family man was assailed by the weaknesses of age, but the critics imagined Joubert as an eccentric recluse, with peculiar notions about diet and sleeping attire and prone to destroy the books he in reality cherished. His name became associated with Platonism, Romanticism, Spirituality, and many other concepts. As David Kinloch points out, the ‘recluse’ has even been compared to Marcel Proust. Admittedly, the critical assessments of Joubert’s aims and contribution to aesthetics were not always completely void, but they were of necessity founded on insufficient evidence, and often on hearsay.
As the Carnets published by Beaunier reveal, the working methods of Joubert were determined by his habit of writing down comments on the authors he was reading and dissecting their ideas. This discipline, and its results, constitute the starting-point chosen by David Kinloch.
He has correlated the notes, usually made on slips of paper, with the marginalia Joubert penned in his books and with the draft texts that were either abandoned, or patiently reworked. This painstaking recon- struction of an accurate chronological framework has enabled David Kinloch to reveal the astonishing variety of Joubert’s interests, his constant reappraisal of the philosophical and artistic principles debated in the polemics of the day, and his alert response to new ideas in the sciences and even in political theory. For the first time Joubert appears as an important witness to the changes that took place in the transition from Enlightenment to a spiritual revival in violent reaction to materialism.
Independent, individualistic, a convinced humanist, willing, even, to take his master Plato to task, Joubert rendered the interrogation of his century, of antiquity, of the forms of matter, of the cosmos, subservient to his obsession with the origins of art, of thought, of language. He was a poet whose intensely concentrated meditation upon the universal dynamics and resonances of his art reduced him to immobility, to silence, and to destruction. Yet, this slow negation generated its own poetry. The fascination of this paradox has been sympathetically and brilliantly conveyed by David Kinloch. His study lifts Joubert from the ranks of the more obscure writers and leads the reader to appreciate the unique vision of Beauty and Unity that inspired him to write:
je joue de la lyre antique, de la lyre a trois ou a cing cordes, de la lyre d’Orphee ...
London
Brian Juden
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