Antonio Porchia: Man of few words

1. Burglary

One of the great burglaries in literary history occurred around 1960 in a suburb of Buenos Aires. Three men, strong-arm burglars, barged through Antonio Porchia’s front door, which was never locked. Porchia, who was about 75, greeted them as “friends.” He invited them to take what they wanted.

It was a humble house, a shed with four rooms, scrupulously neat. The burglars saw nothing of value. The men looked at the art on the walls. But the paintings were inscribed “to the poet” and “to the philosopher.”

“We cannot rob a philosopher,” one of the men said sadly.

Porchia had a little bread, cheese and salami in the house. He invited the men to sit and share it. They ate and talked with Porchia until 4 a.m., but they had to go back home while it was still dark.

2. ‘Friends’

Porchia lived in Olivos, a modest neighborhood 14 miles north of the city center. The house was painted brown, with a door dead center. It had a low-pitched tile roof.

Portia would have been wearing a pajama top and would have stumbled into his trousers. In my mind, he was wearing a yellow pajama jacket and gray slacks.

The paintings that the burglars inspected were by Quinquela Martin, Di Taranto, Lacomera and Victorica. The artists, unknown to the burglars, were among the founders of Impulso, an association that promoted arts and literature. Many members were anarchists.

Porchia never wrote this story. If he had, he would have objected that the story was not about a burglary but about friendship. We learn about ourselves through encounters with friends.

But Porchia didn’t write stories. He wrote aphorisms.

3. Discovery

Porchia showed how little a person needs to be a writer. He had little education. He had to work to support his extended family.

One of the remarkable features of his life is that almost all the details are cloudy. This much is fairly clear:

Porchia was born in 1886 in Italy. His father died, and his mother brought the family to Argentina when Antonio was about 25.

Antonio, the eldest son, had begun work as a basket weaver at 14. He assumed responsibility for supporting the family.

My father, when he went, made my childhood a gift of a half a century.

It’s an unusual way of looking at a father’s death. But Porchia never married, never started his own family. He didn’t have the chance to do those grown-up things.

Antonio and his brothers worked as laborers. He worked at the port and then got a job in a print shop. He and his brothers eventually saved enough to buy a press and set up a business.

Antonio was frugal. He saved money for a house. His diet was simple. He had little clothing and preferred pajama tops to shirts.

But he allowed himself one luxury: writing. He thought about what he saw and read, and tried to distill his reflections into aphorisms, a record of lessons learned, ideas considered.

In 1943, at age 57, he published a collection under the title Voices.

When the books came from the bindery, Porchia stored them at Impulso’s offices in La Boca, a neighborhood near the port.

The books didn’t sell. When members complained they were in the way, Porchia gave the books to libraries.

In 1947, someone sent a copy to the French critic Roger Caillois, who is known for introducing South American writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, to French readers. Caillois had fled France in 1939 and had spent much of World War II in Argentina. After the war, Caillois reviewed and commented on books by South American writers for Sur magazine. He was scanning a new stack of new books when he saw Voices, which was humbly printed. Caillois read it cover to cover. He brought out a French translation. The book was translated and became known throughout Europe.

4. An interview

Porchia was interviewed by a literary magazine. He was asked about the title: Why “Voices”?

“Everything is heard,” he replied.

People think about art in various ways. Those ways tend to run together, as streams run together to form rivers, and we have two competing schools.

The first believes that art is made. Those who advocate for this view emphasize the struggle of the artist.

The second school believes that art is found or discovered by a person while he or she is living a life. An ordinary fellow like Porchia can live his life, reflect on it and write about it. A person can do all that if he or she is simply open to whatever ideas come up. 

Man goes nowhere. Everything comes to man, like tomorrow.

Where do those voices come from? It’s hard to say, but if you simply sit quietly and reflect long enough, you will hear them.

5. Controversy

One of the remarkable features of Portia’s life is the disagreement about the most basic facts.

You can find scholars who see Voices as a work of metaphysics, politics or literature. Others view it as poetry.

Some people are sure that Porchia himself sent a copy of Voices to Caillois. Others are not.

Some see Caillois as Porchia’s champion. Others see him as a patronizing snob. 

Some people say that Porchia saved money to buy his house. Others say one of his brothers handled his finances and bought a series of ever-smaller, cheaper houses for him as his money ran out.

When Porchia worked at the port, was he a porter or a clerk? You can find testimony for both. 

English readers usually find Porchia through a selection of aphorisms chosen and translated by the American poet W.S. Merwin. Scholars have argued over the merits of the book.

Why so much controversy over work that is notable, mainly, for its brevity?

Here’s one theory: If Porchia had been better educated, wealthier or of a high social standing, the facts of his life would have been better documented. Since he was a poor, common worker, few people paid attention.

There’s also this: A writer of aphorisms leaves a lot to the imagination.

James Geary, a connoisseur of the aphorism, said the aphorist’s impulse is to read, discuss, study and reflect — and then distill the product of reflection to a few words. The writer assumes the reader will go through a reverse process, that the aphorism is the start of a period of reflection.

You don’t read aphorisms for information, meaning you don’t read them quickly. You read aphorisms because they prompt you to start their own lines of thought. 

People have read a lot of things into Porchia’s work.

6. A life of its own

Porchia said the details of his life weren’t important. The aphorisms were what mattered.

I am not amiss anywhere, because I am nowhere to be found.

The aphorisms became a kind of common property after Porchia died and his name was no longer associated with them. Argentina, which has endured periods of authoritarian rule, underwent a reign of terror in the 1970s.

When students would enter classrooms in the morning, they would sometimes see sayings — unattributed to any writer — on the blackboard. The sayings were lines from Voices.

An imprisoned political prisoner, allowed to send a Christmas card to friends, sent lines from Voices, without reference to the author.

Love that is not all pain, is not all love.

It’s as if one writer’s voice had been taken up by others.

7. Mysteries & certainties

Writers, it seems, are especially prone to telling stories about themselves that are not literally true. These stories might have a grain of truth in them but are mythic. They are an explanation of something in the broadest sense — they ask the hearer to look at the teller in a different way.

Was Porchia’s father a former priest who had renounced his vows and started a family? Did the family have to move from town to town in Italy, facing the disapproval of the devout? Was this why the family was living on the margins of society?

Did Porchia fall in love with a prostitute? Did he find, later in life, a woman whom we wanted to marry?

"But did her “owner” threaten her over the relationship? Did they stop seeing each other out of fear?

You can find people who believe these stories are literally true and people who are convinced they are not.

So many things about Porchia’s life are uncertain, it’s easy to overlook the things that we know.

• He was content. Those who knew him agree that Porchia never expressed dissatisfaction with his lot. He didn’t resent having to work to support family members. He was satisfied with his little house, his modest diet.

• He was an extraordinary listener. People talked to him because they had the sense that he was listening carefully, paying attention, not missing a detail.

• He was humble. He was interested in the people and things around him. He was not just interested in himself.

All of this was so obvious that it could almost escape attention. After Porchia died in 1968, his friends said and wrote things about him. On these points, the the testimony is unanimous.

8. What kind of writer?

Porchia is important to three reasons.

• First, he showed that anyone can be a writer. If you are looking for the minimum of what it takes to be a writer, Porchia is a good place to start. Henry David Thoreau went to Walden to confront some essential business, to show that it took little to satisfy a person’s physical needs for food and shelter and that one needed little to do the work of thinking for oneself. Porchia was more minimal than the minimalists.

His lived simply, and he wrote simply. He said that thinking and writing are natural — something people do. A person eats when hungry and sleeps when tired. Writing is just an expression of another natural drive.

When I say what I say, it is because what I say has overcome me.

• Second, Porchia showed that you can write a book of your own in your own way.

I used to think that everyone should write such a book, a book that reflects your own thoughts and opinions, your own view of the world.

Michel de Montaigne showed the way with his Essays, written almost 450 years ago. He started small, trying to record his own ideas about some of the questions that human beings keep coming back to — what it means to get an education, to love, to live honorably and to die a good death. As he thought, he wrote. The book grew, question by question, topic by topic.

Walt Whitman’s wrote the same kind of personal book in poetry. Leaves of Grass began as a collection of 12 poems. It grew as Whitman grew. Each day, Whitman went out into the world and reported on what he saw. He wrote one book, and it grew with him.

This kind of book admits many forms. Montaigne wrote essays. Whitman wrote poems. Porchia wrote aphorisms.

The “voices” Porchia heard grew from a small collection in a notebook to more than 600. He edited and refined them as he went. Early aphorisms disappeared in later editions, replaced by a similar thought expressed more clearly, more concisely.

• Third, Porchia thought and wrote about the things most human beings think about.

Perhaps the most frequent theme is suffering, including grief. But the topic that strikes me is how a person, in observing life and in thinking about it, can sometimes lose a sense of self. It’s the sense that the separate individual is merging with the whole cosmos.

You will find the distance that separates you from them — by joining them.

It’s as if the burglars and the burgled are one.

Bibliography

Antonio Porchia, Voices, translated by W.S. Merwin, Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2003. For English readers, this is the place to start. The aphorisms quoted in this essay are from this edition.

James Geary, The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2006. This is a delightful quick tour. 

González Otero, A. (January - June 2014). Hermeneutics of the Void: Antonio Porchia and Expressive Brevity. The Word (24), 69 – 77."

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb - selected aphorisms

 

Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts—we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences. Further, we seem unaware of this backward fitting, much like tailors who take great pride in delivering the perfectly fitting suit—but do so by surgically altering the limbs of their customers. For instance, few realize that we are changing the brains of schoolchildren through medication in order to make them adjust to the curriculum, rather than the reverse.

Since aphorisms lose their charm whenever explained, I only hint for now at the central theme of this book—I relegate further discussions to the postface. These are stand-alone compressed thoughts revolving around my main idea of how we deal, and should deal, with what we don’t know, matters more deeply discussed in my books The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.*

* My use of the metaphor of the Procrustes bed isn’t just about putting something in the wrong box; it’s mostly that inverse operation of changing the wrong variable, here the person rather than the bed. Note that every failure of what we call “wisdom” (coupled with technical proficiency) can be reduced to a Procrustean bed situation.

An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
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Pharmaceutical companies are better at inventing diseases that match existing drugs, rather than inventing drugs to match existing diseases.
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I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.
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Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
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An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant, the opposite.
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Those who think religion is about “belief” don’t understand religion, and don’t understand belief.
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Don’t talk about “progress” in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.
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Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.
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Most of what they call humility is successfully disguised arrogance.
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Usually, what we call a “good listener” is someone with skillfully polished indifference.
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Some people are only funny when they try to be serious.
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There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.
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You cannot express the holy in terms made for the profane, but you can discuss the profane in terms made for the holy.
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Atheism (materialism) means treating the dead as if they were unborn. I won’t. By accepting the sacred, you reinvent religion.
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If you can’t spontaneously detect (without analyzing) the difference between sacred and profane, you’ll never know what religion means. You will also never figure out what we commonly call art. You will never understand anything.
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To mark a separation between holy and profane, I take a ritual bath after any contact, or correspondence (even emails), with consultants, economists, Harvard Business School professors, journalists, and those in similarly depraved pursuits; I then feel and act purified from the profane until the next episode.
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The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane: everything else on your eyelids manipulates you with an ad.*– [*A comment here. After a long diet from the media, I came to realize that there is nothing that’s not (clumsily) trying to sell you something. I only trust my library. There is nothing wrong with the ownership of the physical book as a manifestation of human weakness, desire to show off, peacock tail–style signaling of superiority, it’s the commercial agenda outside the book that corrupts.]
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Many people said to be unbribable are just too expensive.
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You don’t become completely free by just avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.*–[*Versions of this point have been repeated and rediscovered throughout history—the last convincing one by Montaigne.]
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“Wealthy” is meaningless and has no robust absolute measure; use intead the subtractive measure “unwealth,” that is, the difference, at any point in time, between what you have and what you would like to have.
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Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
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What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment.
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Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.
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Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.
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The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.
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For most, success is the harmful passage from the camp of the hating to the camp of the hated.
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Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
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You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.
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People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.
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Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
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The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
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It seems that it is the most unsuccessful people who give the most advice, particularly for writing and financial matters.
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Rumors are only valuable when they are denied.
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Over the long term, you are more likely to fool yourself than others.
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There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
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Social media are severely antisocial, health foods are empirically unhealthy, knowledge workers are very ignorant, and social sciences aren’t scientific at all.
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For so many, instead of looking for “cause of death” when they expire, we should be looking for “cause of life” when they are still around.
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Social networks present information about what people like; more informative if, instead, they described what they don’t like.
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The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
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My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill.
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If you need to listen to music while walking, don’t walk; and please don’t listen to music.
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Men destroy each other during war; themselves during peacetime.
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Sports feminize men and masculinize women.
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With terminal disease, nature lets you die with abbreviated suffering; medicine lets you suffer with prolonged dying.
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Their idea of the sabbatical is to work six days and rest for one; my idea of the sabbatical is to work for (part of) a day and rest for six.
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For most, work and what comes with it have the eroding effect of chronic injury.
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What they call philosophy I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip; and what they call gossip I call (generously) voyeurism.
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Critics may appear to blame the author for not writing the book they wanted to read; but in truth they are blaming him for writing the book they wanted, but were unable, to write.
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No author should be considered as having failed until he starts teaching others about writing.
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A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
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Newspaper readers exposed to real prose are like deaf persons at a Puccini opera: they may like a thing or two while wondering, “what’s the point?”
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For pleasure, read one chapter by Nabokov. For punishment, two.
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Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some day, find something to say.
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Today, we mostly face the choice between those who write clearly about a subject they don’t understand and those who write poorly about a subject they don’t understand.
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The information-rich Dark Ages: in 2010, 600,000 books were published, just in English, with few memorable quotes. Circa AD zero, a handful of books were written. In spite of the few that survived, there are loads of quotes.
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We are better at (involuntarily) doing out of the box than (voluntarily) thinking out of the box.
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Many are so unoriginal they study history to find mistakes to repeat.
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There is nothing deemed harmful (in general) that cannot be beneficial in some particular instances, and nothing deemed beneficial that cannot harm you in some circumstances. The more complex the system, the weaker the notion of Universal.
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What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried.
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The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.
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The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.
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The role of the media is best seen in the journey from Cato the Elder to a modern politician.* Do some extrapolation if you want to be scared.
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Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around..Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from people’s heads.
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The role of the media is best seen in the journey from Cato the Elder to a modern politician. Do some extrapolation if you want to be scared.
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My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal.* [*Former U.S. Treasury secretary “bankster” Robert Rubin, perhaps the biggest thief in history, broke no law. The difference between legal and ethical increases in a complex system … then blows it up.]
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You can only convince people who think they can benefit from being convinced.
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Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.
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The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.
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The role of the media is best seen in the journey from Cato the Elder to a modern politician.* Do some extrapolation if you want to be scared.
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Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.†Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from people’s heads.
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Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.
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Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession. This has been rarer and rarer since the Middle Ages.
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Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant.
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The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist an imbecile-proof one, or, even better, a rationalist-proof one.
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For the robust, an error is information; for the fragile, an error is an error.
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They agree that chess training only improves chess skills but disagree that classroom training (almost) only improves classroom skills.
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Games were created to give nonheroes the illusion of winning. In real life, you don’t know who really won or lost (except too late), but you can tell who is heroic and who is not.
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Fragility: we have been progressively separating human courage from warfare, allowing wimps with computer skills to kill people without the slightest risk to their lives.
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Since Plato, Western thought and the theory of knowledge have focused on the notions of True-False; as commendable as it was, it is high time to shift the concern to Robust-Fragile, and social epistemology to the more serious problem of Sucker-Nonsucker.
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The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds.
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It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.
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They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).
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The ideal trivium education, and the least harmful one to society and pupils, would be mathematics, logic, and Latin; a double dose of Latin authors to compensate for the severe loss of wisdom that comes from mathematics; just enough mathematics and logic to control verbiage and rhetoric.
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A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see.
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To be a philosopher is to know through long walks, by reasoning, and reasoning only, a priori, what others can only potentially learn from their mistakes, crises, accidents, and bankruptcies—that is, a posteriori.
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For the classics, philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me, a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.
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There are designations, like “economist,” “prostitute,” or “consultant,” for which additional characterization doesn’t add information.
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A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a “solution” and creates a problem.
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Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending.
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You can be certain that the head of a corporation has a lot to worry about when he announces publicly that “there is nothing to worry about.”
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The stock market, in brief: participants are calmly waiting in line to be slaughtered while thinking it is for a Broadway show.
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The main difference between government bailouts and smoking is that in some rare cases the statement “this is my last cigarette” holds true.
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The difference between banks and the Mafia: banks have better legal-regulatory expertise, but the Mafia understands public opinion.
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At a panel in Moscow, I watched the economist Edmund Phelps, who got the “Nobel” for writings no one reads, theories no one uses, and lectures no one understands.
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One of the failures of “scientific approximation” in the nonlinear domain comes from the inconvenient fact that the average of expectations is different from the expectation of averages.* [*Don’t cross a river, because it is on average four feet deep. This is also known as Jensen’s inequality.]
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Mediocre men tend to be outraged by small insults but passive, subdued, and silent in front of very large ones.
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The only definition of an alpha male: if you try to be an alpha male, you will never be one.
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The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.
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In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.
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The weak cannot be good; or, perhaps, he can only be good within an exhaustive and overreaching legal system.
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The classical man’s worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man’s worst fear is just death.
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When someone says “I am not that stupid,” it often means that he is more stupid than he thinks.
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What organized dating sites fail to understand is that people are far more interesting in what they don’t say about themselves.
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For company, you often prefer those who find you interesting over those you find interesting.
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If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more.
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The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.

The bed of Procrustes: philosophical and practical aphorisms

Invisible Joubert, by Paul Auster

Some writers live and die in the shadows, and they don’t begin to live for us until after they are dead. Emily Dickinson published just three poems during her lifetime; Gerard Manley Hopkins published only one. Kafka kept his unfinished novels to himself, and if not for a promise broken by his friend Max Brod, they would have been burned. Christopher Smart’s Bedlamite rant, Jubilate Agno, was composed in the early 1760s but didn’t find its way into print until 1939. Think of how many writers disappeared when the Library of Alexandria burned in 391 A.D. Think of how many books were destroyed by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. For every miraculous resurrection, for every work saved from oblivion by freethinkers like Petrarch and Boccaccio, one could enumerate hundreds of losses. Ralph Ellison worked for years on a follow-up novel to Invisible Man, then the manuscript burned up in a fire. In a fit of madness, Gogol destroyed the second part of Dead Souls. What we know of the work of Heraclitus and Sappho exists only in fragments. In his later years, Herman Melville was so thoroughly forgotten that most people thought he was long dead when his obituary appeared in 1891. It wasn’t until Moby-Dick was discovered in a secondhand bookshop in 1920 that Melville came to be recognized as one of our essential novelists.

The afterlife of writers is precarious at best, and for those who fail to publish before they die—by choice, by happenstance, by sheer bad luck—the fate of their work is almost certain doom. The American poet Charles Reznikoff reported that his grandmother threw out every one of his grandfather’s poems after he died—an entire life’s work discarded with the trash. More recently, the young John Kennedy O’Toole committed suicide over his failure to find a publisher for his book. When the novel finally appeared, it was a critical success. Who knows how many unread masterpieces are hidden away in attics or moldering in cellars? Without someone to defend a dead writer’s work, that work could just as well never have been written. Think of Osip Mandelstam, murdered by Stalin in 1938. If his widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam, had not committed the entire body of his work to memory, he would have been lost to us as a poet.

There are dozens of posthumous writers in the history of literature, but no case is stranger or more obscure than that of Joseph Joubert, a Frenchman who wrote in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth. Not only did he not publish a single word while he was alive, but the work he left behind escapes clear definition, which means that he has continued to exist as an almost invisible writer even after his discovery, acquiring a handful of ardent readers in every generation, but never fully emerging from the shadows that surrounded him while he was alive. Neither a poet nor a novelist, neither a philosopher nor an essayist, Joubert was a man of letters without portfolio whose work consists of a vast series of notebooks in which he wrote down his thoughts every day for more than forty years. All the entries are dated, but the notebooks cannot be construed as a traditional diary, since there are scarcely any personal remarks in it. Nor was Joubert a writer of maxims in the classical French manner. He was something far more oblique and challenging, a writer who spent his whole life preparing himself for a work that never came to be written, a writer of the highest rank who paradoxically never produced a book. Joubert speaks in whispers, and one must draw very close to him to hear what he is saying. He was born in Montignac (Dordogne) on May 7, 1754, the son of master surgeon Jean Joubert. The second of eight surviving children, Joubert completed his local education at the age of fourteen and was then sent to Toulouse to continue his studies. His father hoped that he would pursue a career in the law, but Joubert’s interests lay in philosophy and the classics. After graduation, he taught for several years in the school where he had been a student and then returned to Montignac for two years, without professional plans or any apparent ambitions, already suffering from the poor health that would plague him throughout his life.

In May 1778, just after his twenty-fourth birthday, Joubert moved to Paris, where he took up residence at the Hôtel de Bordeaux on the rue des Francs-Bourgeois. He soon became a member of Diderot’s circle, and through his association with Diderot was brought into contact with the sculptor Pigalle and many other artists of the period. During those early years in Paris he also met Fontanes, who would remain his closest friend for the rest of his life. Both Joubert and Fontanes frequented the literary salon of the countess Fanny de Beauharnais (whose niece later married Bonaparte). Other members included Buffon, La Harpe, and Restif de la Bretonne.

In 1785, Fontanes and Joubert attempted to found a newsletter about Paris literary life for English subscribers, but the venture failed. That same year, Joubert entered into a liaison with the wife of Restif de la Bretonne, Agnès Lebègue, a woman fourteen years his senior. But by March of 1786 the affair had ended—painfully for Joubert. Later that year, he made his first visit to the town of Villeneuve and met Victoire Moreau, who would become his wife in 1793. During this period Joubert read much and wrote little. He studied philosophy, music, and painting, but the various writing projects he began—an appreciation of Pigalle, an essay on the navigator Cook—were never completed. For the most part, it seems that Joubert watched the world around him, cultivated his friendships, and meditated. As time went on, he turned more and more to his notebooks as the place to develop his thoughts and explore his inner life. By the late 1780s and early 1790s, they had become a serious daily enterprise for him. At first, he looked upon his jottings as a way to prepare himself for a larger, more systematic work, a great book of philosophy that he dreamed he had it in him to write. As the years passed, however, and the project continued to elude him, he slowly came to realize that the notebooks were an end in themselves, eventually admitting that “these thoughts form not only the foundation of my work, but of my life.”

Joubert had long been a supporter of revolutionary views, and when the Revolution came in 1789, he welcomed it enthusiastically. In late 1790, he was named Justice of the Peace in Montignac, a position that entailed great responsibilities and made him the leading citizen of the town. By all accounts, he fulfilled his tasks with vigilance and fairness and was widely respected for his work. But he soon became disillusioned with the increasingly violent nature of the Revolution. He declined to stand for reelection in 1792 and gradually withdrew from politics.

After his marriage in 1793, he retired to Villeneuve, from then on dividing his time between the country and Paris. Fontanes had gone into exile in London, where he met Chateaubriand. Eventually, upon their return to Paris, Joubert and the two younger men collaborated on the magazine Mercure de France. Joubert would later help Chateaubriand with many passages of Le Génie du christianisme and give him financial help in times of trouble. During the early years of the nineteenth century, Joubert was surrounded by many of the most successful men and women in France, deeply admired for his lucid ideas, his sharp critical intelligence, and his enormous talent for friendship.

When he died in 1824 at the age of seventy, Chateaubriand, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, eulogized him in the Journal des débats: “He was one of those men you loved for the delicacy of his feelings, the goodness of his soul, the evenness of his temper, the uniqueness of his character, the keenness and brilliance of his mind—a mind that was interested in everything and understood everything. No one has ever forgotten himself so thoroughly and been so concerned with the welfare of others.”

Although Fontanes and Chateaubriand had both urged him to put together a book from his daily writings, Joubert resisted the temptation to publish. The first selection to appear in print, entitled Pensées, was compiled by Chateaubriand in 1838 and distributed privately among Joubert’s friends. Other editions followed, eliciting sympathetic and passionate essays by such diverse figures as Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold, who compared Joubert favorably to Coleridge and remarked that “they both had favorably an ardent impulse for seeking the genuine from nature an art they thought about, and an organ for truth on all matters they thought about, and an organ for finding it and recognising it when it was found.” Those early editions all divided Joubert’s writings into chapters with abstract headings such as “Truth,” “Literature,” “Family,” “Society,” and so on. It wasn’t until 1938, in a two-volume work prepared by André Beaunier for Gallimard, that Joubert’s writings were presented in the original order of their composition. I have drawn my selections for this book from the nine hundred tightly printed pages of Beaunier’s scrupulous edition.

No more than a tenth of Joubert’s work is included here. In choosing the entries, I have been guided above all by my own contemporary and idiosyncratic tastes, concentrating my attention on Joubert’s aesthetic theories, his “imaginary physics,” and passages of direct autobiographical significance. I have not included the lengthy reading notes that Joubert made during his study of various philosophers—Malebranche, Kant, Locke, and others—or the frequent references to writers of his time, most of whom are unknown to us today. For convenience and economy, I have eliminated the dates that precede each entry.

I first discovered Joubert’s work in 1971, through an essay written by Maurice Blanchot, “Joubert et L’espace.” In it, Blanchot compares Joubert to Mallarmé and makes a solid case for considering him to be the most modern writer of his period, the one who speaks most directly to us now. And indeed, the free-floating, questing nature of Joubert’s mind along with his concise and elegant style have not grown old with the passage of time. Everything is mixed together in the notebooks, and reflections on literature and philosophy are scattered among observations about the weather, the landscape, and politics. Entries of unforgettable psychological insight (“Those who never back down love themselves more than they love the truth”) alternate with brief, chilling comments on the turmoil around him (“Stacking the dead on top of one another”), which in turn are punctuated by sudden outbursts of levity (“They say that souls have no sex; of course they do”). The more you read Joubert, the more you want to go on reading him. He draws you in with his discretion and honesty, with his plainspoken brilliance, with his quiet but utterly original way of looking at the world.

At the same time, it is easy to ignore Joubert. He doesn’t point to himself or bang on loud ideas. Those of us who love him know him more as a treasure secret, but in the 164 years since his writings were first made available to the public, he has scarcely caused a ripple in the world at large. This translation was first published by Jack Shoemaker of North Point Press in 1983, and the book failed to arouse anything but indifference on the part of American critics and readers. The book received just one review (in The Boston Globe), and sales amounted to something in the neighborhood of eight hundred copies. On the other hand, not long after the book was published, Joubert’s relevance was brought home to me in a remarkable way. I gave a copy to one of my oldest friends, the painter David Reed. David had a friend who had recently landed in Bellevue after suffering a nervous breakdown, and when David went to visit him in the hospital, he left behind his copy of Joubert—on loan. Two or three weeks later, when the friend was finally released, he called David to apologize for not returning the book. After he had read it, he said, he had given it to another patient. That patient had passed it on to yet another patient, and little by little Joubert had made his way around the ward. Interest in the book became so keen that groups of patients would gather in the dayroom to read passages out loud to one another and discuss them. When David’s friend asked for the book back, he was told that it no longer belonged to him. “It’s our book,” one of the patients said. “We need it.” As far as I’m concerned, that is the most eloquent literary criticism I have ever heard, proof that the right book in the right place is medicine for the human soul. As Joubert himself once put it in 1801: “A thought is a thing as real as a cannon ball.”

P. A. August 11, 2002

Introduction to The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert

***

Amid the recent tributes to Paul Auster, who died on April 30, 2024, at age seventy-seven, one important work of his that was overlooked was his translation in the early 1980s of The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert. Joubert was a French writer from the late 1700s and early 1800s, a man of both the Enlightenment and the Romantic age. You may not have heard of Joubert before—he never actually published in his lifetime, and he’s not famous for his maxims like Pascal or La Rochefoucauld—though you may have encountered his saying “To teach is to learn twice.” Joseph Joubert is, however, an original thinker, a writer of piercing aphorisms of surprising modernity and warm humanity who is well worth reading and rereading. He was a friend of Diderot and Chateaubriand among others, and he saw both the aristocracy and the common folk up close, before and after the French Revolution. (...)

In his meditations on the natural realm, there is a spiritual quality that is reverent toward life and creation. His musings on eternity and dimensionality would sound familiar to readers of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Joubert’s interest in the physical world, his sensitivity to the divine that is in nature, might have made him of interest to American Transcendentalists, and indeed it was a publisher in Boston that printed the first American translation of Joubert’s Thoughts (1867).

His perceptions are like flashes of light. “Where do thoughts go? Into the memory of God,” and “The breath of the mind is attention.” One of the most intriguing, and hopeful, is from 1798:

Nothing in the moral world is lost, just as nothing in the material world is annihilated. All our feelings and thoughts on this earth are only the beginnings of feelings and thoughts that will be completed elsewhere.

Less cynical than La Rochefoucauld and more universal (less religious) than Pascal, as a moralist Joubert is more than tolerant; he is merciful (“Sincere and simple minds can never be more than half mistaken”). In his cultural history From Dawn to Decadence (2000), Jacques Barzun describes Joubert as “one of the most sought-after conversationalists of the ensuing two decades [after the Terror]. . . . His epigrams do not attack but explain and advise.” One of the thoughts Barzun quotes is “If you want to be heard by the public, which is deaf, speak in a lower voice.” Again, as Auster observed, “Joubert speaks in whispers.” (...)

The first American edition was Some of the “Thoughts” of Joseph Joubert (Boston, 1867) translated by George H. Calvert, and a British translation by Henry Attwell was published in the 1890s. The aforementioned biography by the British historian Joan Evans, The Unselfish Egoist: A Study of Joseph Joubert, was published in 1947, and in 1992 Oxford University Press published the Scottish scholar David P. Kinloch’s The Thought and Art of Joseph Joubert, 1754–1824.

New Criterion

The Shame of the Animal Kingdom

 It is a cruel paradox that, whilst we all seek joy, whenever we meet a person who is truly joyful, we suspect that she must be either stupid or crazy. For how could one be truly happy in this vale of tears? Wouldn’t you have to be completely ignorant about life or, worse, a little mean, to be happy about all the misery that surrounds us?

Zen monks seem to have got used to being seen as eccentrics. According to an ancient koan, when you asked the venerable Ma-Tsou ‘show me what wisdom is’, he tweaked your nose. At least he didn’t get bothered that way. Dogs aren’t so lucky. Despite the exceptional qualities they are renowned for – such as helping shepherds, or hunting, guiding blind people, smelling diseases even – they are subject to extraordinary injustices. Whether it’s Dingo, Pluto, Scooby Doo, or Santa’s Little Helper, our dogs are often unfairly referred to as cowards, clumsy, clowns, not to say imbeciles (Stupid is even the name John Fante gives to the dog in his eponymous novella, albeit lovingly).

There is no ‘dog in boots’. It is Reynard the Fox who appears in a fable that extols animal intelligence, and in the modern fairy tales of Disney cartoons it’s a mouse, Mickey. The marvellous animals in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are the mysterious Cheshire Cat and the March Hare, not the common dog; in The Jungle Book the Serpent Kaa and the panther Bagheera, but not the dog. In the Bible, the lion, the ox, and the eagle are the animals that represent the Apostles – not the dog. The French have their Gallic rooster, the Russians their bear, the Americans their bald eagle – but no country has a dog as its national symbol. Even the English, with their Churchillian bulldog and the Queen’s corgis at hand, gave preference to the lion, although no lion has ever walked the soil of Albion …

There are exceptions. Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, and Tintin’s Snowy all seem like persistent and heroic characters. But are they really? Is their unfaltering faithfulness anything more than blind obedience? We can hardly praise them for it, any more than we can praise watchdogs trained by drug dealers to defend them against the police, or White Dog in Romain Gary’s eponymous novel for attacking black people on sight. In fact, these sanctimonious stereotypes can even render dogs positively irritating. Up to a point, the imbecile may invite leniency and compassion, but anyone so desperate to please is just asking for rejection. Worse, if it turns out that dogs aren’t stupid, then we can only imagine that they must be slackers and cowards. For Jean de La Fontaine, the moral of the fable ‘The Wolf and the Dog’ is that the dog is not idiotic but contemptible. The dog has deliberately renounced his freedom, selling it for a mess of pottage. Unable to fight for its share of the kill, it has had to get used to begging for it instead.

And there is an even worse accusation: the dog is not just cowardly, it is vicious. It actually enjoys being dominated, takes pleasure in it. It genuinely likes eating repugnant stuff and sniffing filthy smells. Why else is the word ‘dog’ an insult in almost all cultures? It was once common practice to name a dog Rex or Prince. During the nineteenth century, Bismarck was a popular name for dogs in France. Before that, many dogs were called Turk. Such names were rarely given in homage, but more often to humiliate the powerful, to bring them down and put them on all fours. Donald Trump, the first president of the United States not to own a dog, knows something about this, since he calls all of his political adversaries ‘dogs’.

The fact that women are often called ‘bitches’ from the moment they manifest any kind of sexual desire comes from the same source. In the male imaginary women must enjoy being ‘dominated’ just as dogs do. ‘Bitch’, ‘woman’, ‘homosexual’ and ‘foreigner’ are all words used interchangeably to designate those beings who have been humiliated and rendered invisible by phallocratic civilisations unable to understand that the values of freedom and dignity may not belong in principle to the male sex in its erectile form.

Unfortunately, although reparations are finally under way to restore the formerly ‘dominated’ to their rightful place, it does not seem that the dog will ever be afforded the same consideration. For the dog has perhaps one additional failing. Dogs never ask for any redress. They truly love the patriarchal order. Like those unfortunate women in the 1950s who agreed with their husband that they shouldn’t be given the right to vote, or like those alienated workers who vote billionaires into government in the honest belief they will defend their interests, the dog belongs to that negative faction that seems fated always to spoil things for the wider minority. Indeed, the dog is such a complex case in our culture that sometimes it puts off even defenders committed to the cause of animal liberation.

Obviously, all animal rights supporters agree that dogs should be protected against mistreatment; the Brown Dog, a statue erected in London in the twentieth century in honour of a canine victim of unnecessary medical experiments, bears historical witness to this cause. But when it comes to knowing how to treat dogs ‘well’, divisions emerge. According to some, the abandonment of dogs should be severely punished, since evidence suggests that a lone dog is condemned to a life of misery. But others believe – and anarchists such as Élisée Reclus and Bakunin already suggested this – that dogs should be ‘liberated’ from their masters and delivered back into the wild, even if this is, in some sense, against their own will.

In his Abécédaire, Gilles Deleuze, who was a great friend of animals, clearly indicates that dogs do not deserve the same respect as the other beasts that roam his writings, from splendid wolf packs to Jakob von Uexküll’s humble tick. The dog’s bark, he says, is ‘the shame of the animal kingdom’. What better way to say that, even if (according to Deleuze) every man needs to experience a ‘becoming-animal, a becoming-woman, a becoming-minor’, the dog is too much of a minority within the animal kingdom for us to lower ourselves to its level? And yet, in this expression of a feeling of ‘shame’, how can one not sense what it is that brings us close to dogs?

Shame is a very specific emotion. We do not feel it in relation to any animal other than the dog, for shame presupposes empathy and identification. To have a dog, to love a dog, and to love it precisely for all the reasons that make us ashamed is in fact equivalent to loving the dark part of ourselves, to making peace with it – precisely to overcoming shame, and therefore overcoming the self-hatred that shame involves. And that would be true wisdom, yes – and perhaps true joy. So much so that it might be better to say, against Deleuze or right beside him, that it is only by experiencing a becoming-dog that one can truly experience becoming-human.

Mark Alizat

Dogs

Selection from Lichtenberg - Philosophical Writings

 

When one believes—as metaphysicians often do—that one understands something one really does not, it could be called affirmative nescire.

The discovery of the most significant truths depends upon a subtle abstraction, yet our everyday life, with its competencies, habits, and routines, constantly endeavors to make us incapable of this. It is the work of philosophers to unlearn these trivial mindless abilities, which we have acquired through observation since childhood. Thus even as a child, a philosopher should already be educated differently.

To match versification to the thought is a very difficult art, the neglect of which is responsible for much ridiculous verse. Versification and thought are related to one another as in everyday life savoir-vivre is to occupation.

If we wish to create a philosophy of use to us in life or wish to give general principles for a perpetually contented life, we must certainly abstract from what introduces too much diversity in our observations—much as in mechanics we ignore friction or other similar particular properties of bodies, so our calculations are not so cumbersome, or we at least replace them with a single letter. Insignificant mishaps undeniably introduce much uncertainty into our practical principles, so we must dismiss them and attend to overcoming the significant ones. This is undoubtedly the true meaning of certain propositions in the Stoic philosophy.

Habit might be called a moral friction: something that does not allow the mind to glide easily over things but joins it to them so it cannot easily free itself.

Prejudices are, so to speak, the acquired instincts of human beings: through prejudice we can accomplish many things we would find too difficult to think through to the point of decision.

Whenever we read a good thought, we should see if something similar might be thought and said about another matter, assuming here that it has some affinity with the former. This is a kind of analysis of thought that perhaps some scholars adopt without saying.

Understanding the meaning of a word in our mother tongue often takes us many years. I also have in mind understanding the meaning tone can lend to a word. The meaning of a word is, if I may express myself mathematically, given by a formula in which the tone is the variable and the word is the constant quantity. This opens the possibility of infinitely enriching language without increasing the number of words. I have found that the phrase “It is good” is pronounced in five different ways, each time with another meaning, which is often determined by yet a third variable, namely, the facial expression.

Minds or spirits without an external world must be strange indeed; since the ground of every thought lies within it, even the most fantastic combinations of ideas would always be correct. We call people insane when the order of their concepts no longer corresponds to the sequence of events in our orderly world; thus a careful observation of nature, or even mathematics, is certainly the most effective preventative of insanity; nature is, so to speak, the guide rope by which our thoughts are lead, so they do not stray.

The conflict over meaning and being, which has done so much harm in religion, might have done more good had it been fought on other fields, for it is a common source of our misfortune that we believe things actually to be what they really only mean.

When Plato says passions and natural desires are the wings of the soul, his expression is enlightening; such comparisons illuminate the matter and are, as it were, translations of the difficult concepts of one man into a language understood by all—true definitions.

The world is a body common to all people; changes in it bring about changes in the souls of all people who are facing only a part.

Not to exist means to natural scientists, at least a certain class of them, the same as not to be perceived.

It never occurs to the peasant who believes the moon is no bigger than a plough wheel that at a distance of a few miles an entire church appears no larger than a white speck, while the moon always appears the same size. Since he possesses these ideas separately, what prevents him from connecting them? In his everyday life, he does connect ideas, perhaps in more elaborate ways than these. This reflection should grab the attention of philosophers, for in certain connections of thought they are perhaps still peasants. We think early enough in life, but we do not know that we are thinking any more than we know we are growing or digesting; among ordinary people, few ever realize this. A close observation of things outside us leads quickly back to the point of observation, that is, ourselves; conversely, anyone who once becomes fully aware of himself is readily led to the observation of the world around him. Be attentive, experience nothing in vain, measure and compare—this is the entire law of philosophy.

Whatever one sees, does, or reads, it should always be brought to such a degree of clarity that one can at least answer the most general objections against it and then it can become part of the structure of our science. To this structure nothing disputable should be added. If something generally assumed cannot be united with our system, then perhaps we are still missing foundational ideas, and discovering this is a great achievement.

Growing wiser means becoming increasingly acquainted with the errors to which our instrument of feeling and judging may be subject. Today, cautiousness in judgment is to be recommended to each and every one. If we reap but one incontestable truth every ten years from each philosopher, our harvest would be rich enough.

Rain, snow, and wind follow one another in such a way that we discern no certain law in their order. But we conceive of laws only in order to simplify our conceptions of things, just as we create races.

The Stoics deny degrees of morality; according to them, all crimes are equal when one abstracts from their damage.

Some scholars have understood truly higher or abstract reason is for man an unnatural thing, and erudition, an illness.

Things most often forgotten, places overlooked, and things accepted without question deserve most often to be investigated.

A single word might be replaced with six; we express too much with one and the same word.

To investigate what is mutable and what eternal in a matter, and at least to indicate where certainty ceases.

We know for certain how to designate the limits of error, and where doubt remains, precise inaccuracy begins.

What am I overlooking here as a result of my limited understanding?

Whenever he had to reason, he felt like someone who had always used his right hand but was now forced to do something with his left.

In recalling our past pleasures, we depart from our present physical body, transporting ourselves entirely in abstracto back to a previous time as an Arcadian being without debts, cares, or needy relatives, for we are not able to imagine for ourselves the unified effect of different impressions as easily as we can that of a single one.

We infer, perhaps too quickly, from the intelligent constitution of the instincts of animals, the existence of a supremely intelligent being; it need only be more intelligent than we are.

There are very few things we can conceive of through all five senses.

We see absolutely nothing of the soul unless it is manifested in the face. The faces of a large assembly of people might be called a history of the human soul, written in a kind of Chinese ideogram. Just as a magnet arranges iron filings, the soul arranges around itself the features of the face, and differences in the arrangement of these parts indicate differences in that which gave rise to them. The longer one observes faces, the more one will notice in so-called unremarkable faces traits that make them individual.

The thing of whose eyes and ears we see nothing and of whose nose and head we see very little—in short, our body.

He used his little stick to measure all kinds of things, physical as well as moral, and would often say, “I am not so concerned with it,” indicating on the stick with his thumb nail his degree of concern.

Who is there? Only I. This is already saying too much.

In our premature and often all too extensive reading, by which we acquire numerous materials without constructing anything from them and which accustoms our memory to keep house for sensibility and taste, a profound philosophy is often required to restore to our feelings their initial state of innocence: to extricate one's self from the detritus of alien ideas, to begin to feel for oneself, to speak for oneself, and, I might almost say, to exist for oneself.

The hypotheses of some newcomers do not yet contradict the evidence, but I fear the evidence will soon contradict them.

One can really make oneself morally heavy, just as children believe they can make their bodies heavier—one can intentionally suppress a fond desire and do what is right.

It is an open question whether it is more difficult to think or not to think. The human is compelled to think, and we all know how hard it is to suppress such a compulsion. Surely then, the small-minded really do not deserve the contempt with which they are treated in every country these days.

We could have continued to think and live without ever concerning ourselves with why or how thought occurs; indeed philosophy first investigated things outside of us before finally turning the microscope inward. A curious and observant mind asked, “How does it come about that we think?”—few, indeed not one in a million, even among professors who have explained psychology, would have posed such a question. And yet how many now ask why objects fall toward the earth? (...)

The question: should I philosophize for myself? must, I think, be answered in the same way as the question: should I shave myself? If someone were to ask me this, I would answer: if you can do it properly, it is an excellent thing. I always think that though we try to teach ourselves the latter, we do not make our first attempt on the throat. Act as the wisest before you have acted, and do not begin your philosophical exercises where an error can deliver you into the hands of the executioner.

In grasping their meaning, it was impossible for him not to disturb the words.

It is well known to any observer of man how difficult it is to explain experiences without the interference of judgment.

Is there then no difference between justice and oppression?

In perceiving something, we cannot withhold our judgment; that we do this also with people is the foundation upon which someone has built physiognomy.

Because of the plurality of our senses, we need not be so attentive with individual senses to the many features of an object. It is easier to recognize something by its appearance or smell than its color or structure.

Do you perhaps believe that your convictions owe their strength to arguments? Then you are undoubtedly mistaken, for if it were true everyone who heard them would have to be as convinced as you are. The theologians call Voltaire delusional, and he in turn calls them delusional; but since they cannot prove with certainty that they are more reasonable than he, and since he is more sophisticated and a better philosopher, the advantage is his. One can be deluded in favor of a proposition as well as against it. Reasons are often, and for the most part, only explanations of entitlements, by which we give a coloring of legitimacy and rationality to something we would have done in any case. Nature, it appears, did not wish to make such an important thing as human conviction depend on logical deductions alone, as these may easily deceive. The impulse to act, thank heavens, often takes us by surprise, before we are half finished proving its necessity and utility.

Most people merely adopt the same opinions as others. Germans go unbelievably far in this. In England, nearly everyone has his own opinion, which is not to say that each has a different one.

I too am awakened, friend, and have attained that degree of philosophical sobriety at which the love of truth is my only guide, and with the light granted me meet all I regard as error without exclaiming I regard that as error and even less that is error.

To undertake a comparison between what we think and what we say. We may say without fear of flogging that half the population would be flogged if they said openly what they think—and yet man is that which thinks, not that which speaks. Two people complementing one another would clash immediately if each knew what the other thought of him.

The inhabitants of Otaheite eat alone and cannot understand how one could eat in company, especially with women. Surprised by this, Banks asked why they eat alone: they do it because it is the right thing to do, but why it is right they would not and could not say.

What are the thoughts and ideas we have while awake if not dreams? If while awake I think of friends who are dead, the story unfolds without it occurring to me that they are dead—just as in a dream. Or I imagine that I have won a grand lottery, and in that moment I really have won it; the thought that I have not won it, I encounter only subsequently as proof to the contrary. The actual possession of something sometimes gives us no greater pleasure than merely imagining we possess it. Our dreams are made benign if we avoid eating meat in the evening, but what about these other thoughts?

Like a great philosophical chatterer, he is concerned not so much with the truth as with the sound of his prose.

In giving incomprehensible, nonsensical things a reasonable interpretation, one arrives often at excellent thoughts; thus Jacob Böhme's book might be as useful to some as the book of nature.

One could create a dietetics for the health of the understanding.

Every person has their own sphere of knowledge in which they can orient themselves better than most of our philosophers can in theirs. Within it, a person notices in a glance what is ridiculous, subtle, stupid, or superfluous. When I understand the purpose of something and have acquired familiarity with the established methods, it should be easy for me to recognize error in any new method—and how could it be otherwise? If I wished to describe to a kitchen girl a new dish and were to tell her that it is an interesting meal with an exceptional flavor and that some grain should be sprinkled on the edge of the dish, she would certainly mock me. Many authors approach their subject in this way without noticing its absurdity. If we wish to make something comprehensible to other people, we must use examples drawn from their own circle, and from this experience we may also learn what we must do to make a certain science a part our own circle.

According to Alembert, the most excellent logical systems are of use only to those who can dispense with them. With a telescope the blind see nothing.

I imagine that when we reach the limits of things set for us, or even as we only approach these limits, we gaze into the infinite, just as from the surface of the earth we gaze out into immeasurable space.

One can repeat something in a way that it has already been said, remove it from human understanding, or draw it closer. The shallow mind does the first; the enthusiast, the second; and the true philosopher, the third.

I doubt it will ever be possible to prove we are the work of a supreme being and not rather fabricated for its own amusement by a very imperfect one.

You must never think: this proposition is too difficult for me; it is only for great scholars; I will concentrate on this other one instead. This is a weakness that will degenerate easily into complete inactivity. You must not think yourself too humble for anything.

He had constructed for himself a certain system, which thereafter exercised such an influence upon his manner of thinking that onlookers always saw his judgment walking a few steps in front of his perceptions, though he himself believed it followed.

If one is to read judiciously, one must keep two aims constantly in mind: first to remember what is said and unite it with one's own system of thought, and second to appropriate for oneself how others have previously understood the matter. Everyone should thus be warned against reading books by dilettantes, particularly when they have included their own arguments and demonstrations. One can indeed learn from their compilations, but they cannot teach what for the philosopher is equally if not more important, namely, how to bring appropriate form to one's own manner of thinking.

Many know things in the way one knows the solution to a riddle after reading it or being told of it. It is an impoverished kind of knowledge and the kind least to be cultivated. One should rather cultivate the kind of knowledge that enables one to discover for oneself, when needed, what others must read or be told in order to know. Many simplicia. Here again we arrive at a thought that has been thought before.

To do exactly the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely, an imitation of its opposite.

Nobody has bad taste, but many have none at all. Most people have no ideas, says Dr. Price; they speak about things, but they do not think. I have often called this “having an opinion.”

Helvétius' Discours I. Judgment is sensation. Differences in judgment depend upon passion and ignorance; the side we see, we take to be the only one, or we do not retain in memory those things we must know in order to judge something properly. The misuse of words has led also the greatest men into error. En effet s'il faut tirer tout le parti possible de l'observation, il faut ne marcher qu'avec elle, s'arreter au moment qu'elle nous abondonne et avoir le courage d'ignorer ce qu'on ne peut encore savoir. [“Indeed (let me be allowed this reflection) if we are to avail ourselves as much as possible from observation, we must walk only by its side, stop at the very instant when it leaves us, and nobly dare to be ignorant of what is not yet to be known.” See Helvétius, De L'esprit, Or Essays on the Mind and Its Several Faculties]

Something might have been made from his ideas, had an angel arranged them for him.

In all intelligent people, one finds the inclination to express oneself succinctly, to say expeditiously what needs to be said. Languages thus give no weak indication of the character of a nation. How difficult it is to translate Tacitus into German. The English, at least their talented authors, are already more concise than we are. It is to their great advantage, in this respect, that they possess particular words for a species while we are more oblique, using the genus with a qualification. It could do no harm to count the words in every phrase and endeavor always to express it with the fewest.

Merchants and traders have a waste book (Sudelbuch, Klitterbuch in German I believe) in which they enter daily everything they purchase and sell, messily, without order. From this, it is transferred to their journal, where everything appears more systematic, and finally to a ledger, in double entry after the Italian manner of bookkeeping, where one settles accounts with each man, once as debtor and then as creditor. This deserves to be imitated by scholars. First it should be entered in a book in which I record everything as I see it or as it is given to me in my thoughts; then it may be entered in another book in which the material is more separated and ordered, and the ledger might then contain, in an ordered expression, the connections and explanations of the material that flow from it.

There is a great difference between still believing something and believing it again. Still believing that the moon influences plants reveals stupidity and superstition, but believing it again indicates philosophy and reflection.

If it were true, what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this of such great advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would not be able to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.

What? One should understand the matter if one wishes to debate it? I say it is essential to a debate that at least one party not understand the issue under discussion and that in so-called current debates, in their most perfect form, neither party understands the issue—indeed, they need not even understand what they themselves are saying. […]

I have no idea what the man means. He has got it into his head that certain words have certain meanings that they must always retain. Is this a royal decree? Who will prevent me from taking here a word and there a meaning and combining them? Obviously this is a lack of contact with the wider world, which is the only world there is.

Once people have gotten such ideas into their heads, they are not so easily removed. The best thing they can do is take a sound system of logic and go through their entire system of beliefs piece by piece until they have cleaned it up.

One of the most fruitful means of discovery, rivaled not even by the questions quid, quis, ubi, is when upon hearing something one asks, is this true? and searches for reasons for one's answer. The dictum that one should never speak or write before thinking reveals the good will of its author but no genuine reflection; to express myself provincially but forcefully, the good man did not consider that you cannot obey this law without breaking it. Indeed, many would not be able to speak at all; thus I believe exactly the opposite. Many people have said something brilliant out of desperation, having to defend something without previous consideration, and to venture claims is to do philosophy.

Truth must overcome a thousand obstacles to safely reach the page and a thousand more to travel back from the page to the mind. Liars are its most feeble enemies. The enthusiastic writer who speaks of everything and views everything as other honest people do who have had one drink too many; the sophisticated, pretentious student of human nature, who sees and intends to see his whole life reflected in every human action like angels in a monad; the worthy, pious man who believes everything out of respect, examines nothing he learned before the age of fifteen, and builds the little that he has examined upon unexamined ground—these are the enemies of truth.

A shot of reason.

If mankind suddenly became virtuous, thousands would starve.

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it, an apostle is unlikely to look out. We have no words for speaking about wisdom to idiots. Whoever understands the wise is wise already.

There is no art in saying something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say. When one has nothing to say, however, and yet writes a book and makes truth, with its ex nihilo nihil fit, into a liar—that I call an accomplishment.

The man who believes a compendium is a book or to record facts is to write history.

That it is true does not matter, as long as the people believe it—that is the devil.

He cannot even distinguish between active and passive reading.

Do not deride our metaphors; after the strong fabric of a language begins to fade, they are the only way to revive it and to lend the whole life and warmth. It is incredible how much our best words have lost: the word reasonable has almost entirely lost its impressiveness; we understand its meaning but no longer feel it because so many men have been called reasonable. Unreasonable is in its own way more impressive. A reasonable child is a dopey, pious, good for nothing tattler; an unreasonable child is much better. The sound of Liberty.

Fools would be better than our finest philosophers because they still believe what they see and sense, while certain English philosophers, turning their backs on nature, believe what they do not sense or perceive. Yet I am far from ridiculing this; I believe denying one's senses is a daring flight of reason, while speech, suicide, and insanity are merely the hops of a flea. This I call freedom; indeed, such enterprising souls need not return to the barracks of the earth in order to eat and drink; they have deserted the love of God entirely and live like the devil apart.

There are people who believe everything done with a solemn face is reasonable.

A good expression is as valuable as a good idea because it is nearly impossible to express oneself well without casting a favorable light on what is expressed.

I was acquainted with a few astronomers in England who altered their findings, and they were right in doing so. Should one not lend nature a hand sometimes? I do not see why not. If in wishing to connect two uncooperative propositions, I push one of them a little, what is wrong with this? People who reason this way have always the truth in view. Is a system of no importance then? The truth is not impoverished when I make of a 3 a 2, but my entire system may collapse. This is why I always enjoy it when I read from our best writers in physics the brave philosophical statement that the experiment they employed for proving some proposition was successful beyond expectation. There is something here that is more easily felt than expressed. I cannot comprehend how people could ridicule this. It brings tears of joy to my eyes.

Once we thoroughly understand nature, even a child will see that an experiment is nothing more than a compliment we pay her. It is merely a ceremony. We know in advance what her answer will be. We ask nature for her consent as great rulers ask their provincial representatives.

I am really not joking, my dear countrymen, when I confess Germans have no esprit, for the little bit of atheism found among us cannot be called esprit. A French atheist with esprit is expected to be converted only when he is severely ill and on his deathbed, while ours are usually converted every time there is a thunderstorm.

Overly subtle men are rarely great men, and their investigations are often as useless as they are precise. They distance themselves further and further from practical life when they should come closer to it. Just as the dancing or fencing instructor does not begin with the anatomy of the legs and hands, so a sound and useful philosophy can begin much higher than with such subtle musings. The foot must be positioned in this way, or you will fall down; you must believe this, for it would be absurd not to—these are very good foundations. People who wish to go further may do so, but they must not think that they are thereby doing something great, for when they are successful they discover only what the reasonable man has long known. Someone who once again proves Euclid's twelfth axiom deserves at most to be called an ingenious man, but he will make no contribution to the expansion of the limits of science that he could not have made without this discovery. And the skeptic? You will never succeed in refuting the skeptic. For what possible argument could be given to convince someone who would believe absurdities? And indeed does everyone who wishes to be refuted really deserve to be? Even the greatest fighters do not fight everyone who challenges them. These are the reasons Beattie's philosophy deserves respect; it is not an entirely new philosophy, but it begins at a higher level. It is the philosophy not of the professor, but of man.

Our philosophers listen too seldom to the voice of feeling; or rather, they rarely possess sufficient sensitivity, so that to every event in the world they respond by expressing more what they know than what they feel, which is useless. It brings us not one step nearer to true philosophy. Is what a man can know necessarily what he should know?

The enthusiasts whom I have known all had the appalling fault that when the smallest spark fell upon them they burst into flames like long primed fireworks, always in the same pattern and with the same clamor; but in the reasonable man, feeling and sensation are always proportionate to the impression. The foolish man argues coldly from the first impression, while the sensible man occasionally turns around to hear what instinct has to say.

We should follow our feelings and express in words the first impression a thing makes upon us. I say this not because I wish to save the truth in this manner but because it is the unadulterated voice of our experience, the result of our best observations, and because we too easily fall into compulsory chatter if we first reflect. In this respect, I advise one read Beattie's philosophy.

People who have read a great deal seldom make great discoveries. I do not say this to excuse laziness, for discovery requires extensive introspection and observation of things. One must see for oneself more than let oneself be told.

If people recounted their dreams honestly, their character might be read more easily from these than from the face.

The utility of systems consists not only in allowing us to think about matters in an ordered way in accordance with a particular scheme but also in allowing us to think about the matter at all; the latter utility is incontestably greater than the former.

It is an admirable observation by Herr Hartley that false judgments are corrected through differences between languages. For we think in words. It deserves to be considered to what extent the acquisition of foreign languages clarifies the concepts in our own language—an excellent question.

What effect must it have upon a people if it learns no foreign languages? Presumably an effect similar to what a complete withdrawal from all society has on an individual.

A on his lips and not-A in his heart.

The expression “I will not forget this for all eternity” is false.

In most cases, it is more difficult to make clever people believe you are what you are not than really to become what you wish to appear to be.

The welfare of many nations is decided according to the majority of votes, though everyone admits there are more evil men than good.

Experience, not reading or hearing, is important. It is not all the same whether an idea enters the soul through the eye or through the ear.

Leibniz defended the Christian religion, but to conclude straightaway from this that he was a good Christian, as the theologians do, shows very little knowledge of the world. Vanity and the desire to say things better than the professionals are, in the case of such a man as Leibniz, who held firmly to few principles, much more likely motivations for doing such a thing than religion would be. If we search more deeply into our own heart, we will discover how little we can assert of others. I would even dare say that I could demonstrate that often we believe we believe something and yet we do not believe it. Nothing is more unfathomable than the system of motivations behind our actions.

Thinking for oneself is often recommended while studying only for the purpose of distinguishing between truth and the errors of others. It is useful, but is that all? Is reading then studying? We could spare ourselves much unnecessary reading. It has been said with great truth that while printing certainly propagated learning, it also reduced its content. Much reading is harmful to thinking. Among all the scholars I have known, the greatest thinkers I have known are those who had read the least. Is enjoyment of the senses nothing at all then?

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Philosophical Writings

Translated, Edited, and with an Introduction by

Steven Tester

Some thoughts of Chomfort

To despise money is to dethrone a king.

The beginning of wisdom is the fear of man.

The world either breaks or hardens the heart.

He who has no character is not a man-he is a thing.

Love-agreeable foolery: ambition-serious stupidity.

The loves of some peoples are but the result of good suppers.

Prejudice, vanity, calculation; these are what govern the world.

The public! the public! How many fools does it take to make a public?

In politics and in gallantry really wise men do not fight for conquests.

Enjoy and give enjoyment, without injury to thyself or to others;
this is true morality.

Intelligent people make many blunders because they never be­ lieve the world as stupid as it is. 

Love pleases more than marriage for the reason that romance is more interesting than history.

You run the risk of being disgusted if you pry into the processes of cookery, government, or justice.

A man in deep mourning is asked: "Good God! whom have you lost?" "I?" says he, "I have lost nothing, I am a widower."

We have three kinds of friends; those who love us, those who are indifferent to us and those who hate us.

The best philosophy to employ towards the world is to alloy the sarcasm of gaiety with the indulgence of contempt.

In love all is true and all is false. It is the only thing on which you cannot possibly say an absurdity. 

The ambitious one who failed in his aim and lives in despair re­ minds me of Ixion broken on the wheel for having embraced a cloud.

An Englishman condemned to be hanged received the King's pardon. "The law's on my side," he protested, "they shall hang !" me.

Our happiness depends upon a multitude of circumstances which do not manifest themselves, which one does not, and can not speak of.

We may wager that any idea of the public, or any general opin­ ion, is a folly since it has received the approbation of a majority of the people.

"The difference between you and me," said a philosopher, "is that you say to masked hypocrites 'I know you' while I leave them to think that they have deceived me."

Someone asked a child "Is God the Father, God?" "Yes."-"And God the Son, is He God?" "Not yet, that I know of; but on the death of His father He cannot fail to come into the succession."

Mr. L. to turn Mrs. B. (for long a widow) from the idea of mar­rying, said to her "Don't you see, it's a grand thing to bear the name of a man who can commit no more stupidities."

Hope is but a quack who cheats us continually and I for one felt happy when I had lost my hopes.

I should put on the gates of Paradise the words which Dante put over the entrance to Hell: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

The physical world appears to be the work of a powerful and good being, who has been obliged to leave the execution of a part of his scheme to a demon; but the moral world seems to be the product of the whims of a demon gone mad.

Milton after the restoration of Charles II was on the way to se­ curing again a lucrative office which he had lost. His wife urged him. He replied: "You are a woman, and you want a coach; as for me, I want to live and die an honest man."

Someone told M. "You are very fond of consideration." He re­ plied in a way that struck me: "No, I have consideration for my­ self and that sometimes secures me the consideration of others."

A bright woman told me once that when choosing a sweetheart a woman pays more regard to what other women say about the man of her choice than to her own opinion of him.

One must be able to combine the contraries: love of virtue with indifference for public opinion: taste for work with indifference for glory: the care of one's health with indifference for life.

When one has been tormented and fatigued by his sensitiveness, he learns that be must live from day to day, forget all that is pos­sible, and efface his life from memory as it passes.

A man passed all his evenings for 30 years with a lady other than his wife. He finally lost his wife; one believed be would marry the other, and recommended him to do so. He refused. "I should not know," said he "where to go to pass my evenings."

I asked R., a man full of wit and talent, why he had shown him­self so little in the revolution of 1789. He replied: "It was be­ cause, for 30 years, I had found men so wicked privately and individually, that I did not dare to hope any good of them in public and taken collectively."

A young man asked me why Mrs. B. had refused the homage he offered, to run after Mr. L. who seemed to refuse her advances. I told him: "My dear friend, Genoa, rich and powerful, offered its sovereignty to several kings, who all refused it; yet they went to war to possess Corsica, which produces nothing except chest­ nuts, but which was proud and independent."

Rousseau, it is said, had been favoured by the Countess of Bouf­flers, and had even gone so far as to neglect her, which put them in a bad temper with one another. One day someone remarked in their presence that the love of the human race extinguishes love of country. "For my part," said she, "I judge by myself and I feel it is not true. I am a very good Frenchwoman, and I none the less interest myself in the happiness of all." "Yes, I understand you,'' said Rousseau, "you are French at heart, and cosmopolitan as regards the rest of your person."