Does anybody know, in English, what Rochefoucauld said about love that goes something like - There are people who would not know about love if they hadn’t heard about it. Several of us were sitting around the other day after tea arguing about this until cocktail time.
"True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen."
Is that the one you mean?
Maxim no. 136:
“Many would never have fallen in love, had they never heard the term.” Translation by John Heard, Jr., Houghton Mifflin 1917.
Or, more literally, “There are people who would never have been in love if they had never heard love spoken about.” Translation by Peregrine, today.
(Il y a des gens qui n’auroient jamais été amoureux s’ils n’avoient jamais entendu parler de l’amour. Original by Le Duc de La Rochefoucauld 1665 or so.)
Merci pour le tradruissez et aussi pour l’originale de cet quotation. Je suppose he meant that those who hadn’t heard of love and thus who never felt it were stupid or unfortunate or both, but by stretching this quotation we can apply it as the theory of how things like falling in love are culturally determined instead of “natural” or “biological” or primary. Et je ne connais pas trop de
Francais so if you reply, remain in English s’il vous plait.
P.S. the postmodernist philosophers often use the term “always already.” I wonder if that would be toujours something, or something touchours in French.
La Rochefoucauld’s maxims are loosely grouped by theme. No. 136 is in with a bunch about vanity and affectation. I take it to mean that dullards are influenced by the opinions of others, even to the extent of feeling what they think they are expected to feel.
Searches on “always already” and “toujours déjà” keep leading to Hegel and Heidegger; so I thought “immer schon” might lead to the source. It seems to be just a common expression in German, though.
Here is a French example in a discussion of Hegel:
La conscience ne commence jamais à partir de l’immédiat, elle est toujours déjà-là, en situation, insérée dans une histoire, des rapports sociaux, des discours, toujours déjà conscience pour l’Autre et langage.
I just re-read the Maxims (I got to help out on a French/English combined edition forthcoming from St. Augustine’s Press–click on “Upcoming Titles” to find the blurb).
Just when you think you can classify the maxims, they slip away from the topic you thought they were about. They are very elusive, and very evocative, so I think you are quite right to say they are “looslely grouped.” Here’s my take on No. 136: Some people are so hard-hearted (v. dull) that they would never have known love was possible if they didn’t hear others talk about it. La Rochefoucauld is quite cynical about both our intelligence and our capacity to feel for others.