crisis of the mind_valery

8/3/2019 Crisis of the Mind_Valery

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PAUL VALERYAn Anthology

Selected, with an Introduction,by James R. Lawler

fromThe Collected Works of Paul Valeryedited by Jackson Mathews

ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL

LONDON AND HENLEY

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The Crisis of the Mind[ 1919]

First LetterWE LATER civilizations . . . we too now know that we aremortal.

We had long heard tell ofwhole worlds that had vanished,of empires sunk without a trace, gone down with all theirmen and all their machines into the unexplorable depths ofthe centuries, with their gods and their laws, their academiesand their sciences pure and applied, their grammars and theirdictionaries, their Classics, their Romantics, and their Symbolists, their critics and the criticsof heir critics. . . . We wereaware that the visible earth is made of ashes and that ashessignify something. Through the obscure depths o f h i s t ~ r y wecould make out the phantoms of great ships laden with richesand intellect; we could not count them. But the disasters thathad sent them down were, after all, rione of our affair.

Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were bu t beautiful vague names,and the total ruin of hose worlds had as little significance forus as their very existence. But France, England, Russia . . .these too would be beautiful names.Lusitania, too, is a beautiful name. And we see now that the abyss of history is deepenough to hold us all. Weare aware that a civilization has thesame fragility as a life. The circumstances that could send theworks ofKeats and Baudelaire to join the works ofMenanderare no longer inconceivable; they are in the newspapers.

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That is not all. The searing lesson is more complete still. Itwas not enough for our generation to learn from its ownexperience how the most beautiful things and the mostancient, the most formidable and the best ordered, can perishby accident; in the realm of thought, feeling, and commonsense, we witnessed extraordinary phenomena: paradox suddenly become fact, and obvious fact brutally belied.

I shall cite but one example: the great virtues of the German peoples have begotten more evils, than idleness everbred vices. With our own eyes, we have seen conscientiouslabor, the most solid learning, the most serious disciplineand application adapted to appalling ends.

So many horrors could not have been possible without somany virtues. Doubtless, much science was needed to kill somany, to waste so much property, annihilate so many citiesin so short a time; but moral qualities in like number were alsoneeded. Are Knowledge and Duty, then, suspect?So the Persepolis of he spirit is no less ravaged than the Susaofmaterial fact. Everything has not been lost, bu t everythinghas sensed that it might perish.

An extraordinary shudder ran through the marrow ofEurope. She felt in every nucleus of her mind that she wasno longer the same, that she was no longer herself, that shewas about to lose consciousness, a consciousness acquiredthrough centuries of bearable calamities, by thousands ofmen of he ftrst rank, from innumerable geographical, ethnic,and historical coincidences.

So-as though in desperate defense of her ovm physiological being and resources-all her memory confusedlyreturned. Her great men and her great books came back pellmel!. Never has so much been read, nor with such passion,

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HISTORY AND POLITICS

as during the war: ask the booksellers. . . . Never have peopleprayed so much and so deeply: ask the priests. All the saviors,founders, protectors, martyrs, heroes, all the fathers of theircountry, the sacred heroines, the national poets were invoked . . .And in the same disorder ofmind, at the summons of hesame anguish, all cultivated Europe underwent: the rapidrevival of her innumerable ways of thought: dogmas,philosophies, heterogeneous ideals; the three hundred waysof explaining the W orId, the thousand and one versions ofChristianity, the two dozen kinds of positivism; the wholespectrum of intellectual light spread out its incompatiblecolors, illuminating with a strange and contradictory glowthe death agony of the European soul. While inventors werefeverishly searching their imaginations and the annals of former wars for the means of doing away with barbed wire, ofoutwitting submarines or paralyzing the flight of airplanes,her soul was intoning at the same time all the incantations itever knew, and giving serious consideration to the mostbizarre prophecies; she sought refuge, guidance, c o n s ~ t a t i o n throughout the whole register of her memories, past acts,and ancestral attitudes. Such are the known effects ofanxiety,the disordered behavior of a mind fleeing from reality tonightmare and from nightmare back to reality, terrified, likea rat caught in.a trap. . . .

The military crisis may be over. The economic crisis isstill with us in all its force. But the intellectual crisis, beingmore subtle and, by its nature, assuming the most deceptiveappearances (since it takes place in the very realm of dissimulation) . . . this crisis will hardly allow us to grasp its trueextent, its phase.

No one can say what will be dead or alive tomorrow, in


literature, philosophy, aesthetics; no one yet knows whatideas and modes ofexpression will be inscribed on the casualtylist, what novelties will be proclaimed.

Hope, of course, remains-singing in an undertone:Et cum vorandi vieerit libidinemLate triumphet imperator spiritus.

But hope is only man's mistrust of the clear foresight ofhis mind. Hope suggests that any conclusion unfavorable tous must be an error of he mind. And yet the facts are clear andpitiless: thousands of young writers and young artists havedied; the illusion of a European culture has been lost, andknowledge has been proved impotent to save anything whatever; science is mortally wounded in its moral ambitions and,as it were, put to shame by the cruelty of its applications;idealism is barely surviving, deeply stricken, and called toaccount for its dreams; realism is hopeless, beaten,' routed byits own crimes and errors; greed and abstinence are equallyflouted; faiths are confused in their aim-cross against cross,crescent against crescent; and even the skeptics, confoundedby the sudden, violent, and moving events that play withour minds as a cat with a mouse . . . even the skeptics losetheir doubts, recover, and lose them again, no longer masterof the motions of their thought.The swaying of he ship has been so violent that the besthung lamps have finally overturned . . .What gives this critical condition of the mind its depth andgravity is the patient's condition when she was overcome.

I have neither the time nor the ability to define the intellectual situation in Europe in 1914. And who could pretendto picture that situation? The subject is immense, requiring

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HISTORY AN D POLITICS

every order of knowledge and endless information. Besides,when such a complex whole is in question, the difficulty ofreconstructing the past, even the recent past, is altogethercomparable to that of constructing the future, even the nearfuture; or rather, they are the same difficulty. The prophet isin the same boat as the historian. Let us leave them there.

For all I need is a vague general recollection ofwhat wasbeing thought just before the war, the kinds of intellectualpursuit then in progress, the works being published.

So if I disregard all detail and confine myself to a quickimpression, to that natural whole given by a moment's percep-tion, I see . . . nothing! Nothing . . . and yet an infmitelypotential nothing.

The physicists tell us that if the eye could survive in anoven fired to the point of incandescence, it would see . . .nothing. There would be no unequal intensities oflight leftto mark offpoints in space. That formidable conta41ed energywould produce invisibility, indistinct equality. Now, equalityof that kind is nothing else than a perfect state of disorder.

And what made that disorder in the mind of Europe? Thefree coexistence, in all her cultivated minds, of the mostdissimilar ideas, the most contradictory principles oflife andlearning. That is characteristic of a modern epoch.

I am not averse to generalizing the notion of "modem"to designate a certain way oflife, rather than making it purelya synonym of contemporary. There are moments and places inhistory to which we moderns could return without too greatlydisturbing the harmony of those times, without seemingobjects infinitely curious and conspicuous ... creaturesshocking, dissonant, and unassimilable. Wherever our en-trance would create the least possible sensation, that is wherewe should feel almost at home. It is clear that Rome in the

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time of Trajan, or Alexandria under the Ptolemies, wouldtake us in more easily than many places less remote in timebut more specialized in a single type ofmanners and entirelygiven over to a single race, a single culture, and a singlesystem of life.

Well then! Europe in 1914 had perhaps reachec! the limitof modernism in this sense. Every mind of any scope was acrossroads for all shades of opinion; every thinker was aninternational exposition of hought. There were works of themind in which the wealth of contrasts and contradictory ten-dencies was like the insane displays oflight in the capitals ofthose days: eyes were fatigued, scorched. . . . How muchmaterial wealth, how much labor and planning it took, howmany centuries were ransacked, how many heterogeneouslives were combined, to make possible such a carnival, and toset it up as the supreme wisdom and the tr iumph ofhumanity?In a book of hat era-and not one of he most mediocre-weshould have no trouble in finding: the influence of he Russianballet, a touch ofPascal' s gloom, numerous impressi ons of heGoncourt type, something of Nietzsche, something o f R i m ~ baud, certain effects due to a familiarity with painters, andsometimes the tone of a scientific publication . . . the wholeflavored with an indefinably British quality difficult to assess!. . . Let us notice, by the way, tha,t within each of the com-ponents of this mixture other bodies could well be found. Itwould be useless to point them out: it would be merely torepeat what I have just said about modernism, and to give thewhole history of the European mind.Standing, now, on an immense sort of errace ofElsinore thatstretches from Basel to Cologne, bordered by the sands of

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Nieuport, the marshes of the Somme, the limestone ofChampagne, the granites ofAlsace . . . our Hamlet ofEuropeis watching millions of ghosts.

But he is an intellectual Hamlet, meditating on the lifeand death of truths; for ghosts, he has all the subjects ofourcontroversies; for remorse, all the titles of our fame. He isbowed under the weight ofall the discoveries and varieties ofknowledge, incapable of resuming this endless activity; hebroods on the tedium of rehearsing the past and the folly ofalways trying to innovate. He staggers between two abyssesfor two dangers never cease threatening the world: order anddisorder.

Every skull he picks up is an illustrious skull. Whose wasit?* This one was Lionardo. He invented the flying man, butthe flying ma n has not exactly served his inventor 's purposes.We know that, mounted on his great swan (il grande uccellosopra del dosso del suo magnio cecero) he has other tasks in our daythan fetching snow from the mountain peaks during the ho tseason to scatter it on the streets of owns. And that other skullwas Leibnitz, who dreamed of universal peace. And this onewas Kant . . . a71d Kant begat Hegel, and Hegel begat Marx, andMarx begat. . . .

Hamlet hardly knows what to make of so many skulls.But suppose he forgets them! Will he still be himself? . . . Histerribly lucid mind contemplates the passage from war topeace: darker, more dangerous than the passage from peaceto war; all peoples are troubled by it . . . "What about Me,"

. he says, "what is to become ofMe, the European intellect? . .And what is peace? . . . Peace is perhaps that state of hings inwhich the natural hostility between men is manifested in creation,rather than destruction as in war. Peace is a time of creative

*Hamlet's words are in English in the French text.-J.M.10 0

THE CRISIS OF THE MIND

rivalry and the battle of production; but am I nor tired ofproducing? . . . Have I not exhausted my desire for radicalexperiment, indulged too much in cunning compounds? . . .Should I not perhaps lay asidemy hard duties and tran scendentambitions? . . . Perhaps follow the trend and do like Poloniuswho is now director of a great newspaper; like Laertes, whois something in aviation; like Rosencrantz, who is doing Godknows what under a Russian name?

"Farewell, ghosts! The world no longer needs you -o r me.By giving the name of progress to its own tendency to a fatalprecision, the world is seeking to add to the beneflts oflifethe advantages of death. A certain confusion still reigns; bu tin a little while all will be made clear, and we shall witness atlast the miracle of an animal society, the perfect and ultimateanthill."

Second LetterI was saying the other day that peace is the kind of war thatallows acts of love and creation in its course; it is, then, amore complex and obscure process than war properly so-called, as life is more obscure and more profound than death.

But the origin and early stages of peace are more obscurethan peace itself, as the fecundation and beginnings ofli fe aremore mysterious than the functioning of a body once it ismade and adapted.. Everyone today feels the presence of this mystery as anactual sensation; a few men must doubtless feel that their owninner being is positively a pa rt of the mystery; and perhapsthere is someone with a sensibility so clear, subtle, and richthat he senses in hirl.self certain aspects of our destiny moreadvanced than our destiny itself.

I have not that ambition. The things of the world interest10 1

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me only as they relate to the intellect; for me, everything relates to the intellect. Bacon would say that this notion of theintellect is an idol. I agree, but I have no t found a better idol.

I am thinking then of he establishment of peace insofar asit involves the intellect and things of the intellect. This pointof view is false, since it separates the mind from all otheractivities; but such abstract operations and falsifications areinevitable: every point ofview is false.A first thought dawns. The idea ofculture, of ntelligence, ofgreat works, has for us a very ancient connection with theidea ofEurope-so ancient that we rarely go back so far.

Other parts of he wor ld have had admirable civilizationspoets of the first order, builders, and even scientists. Butpart of he world has possessed this singularphysical property:the most intense power of adiation combined with an equallyintense power of assimilation.

Everything came to Europe, and everything came from it.Or almost everything. _Now, the present day brings with it this importan t question:can Europe hold its pre-eminence in all fields?

Will Europe become what it is in reality-that is, a littlepromontory on the continent of Asia?Or will it remain what it seems-that is, the elect portion of

the terrestrial globe, the pearl of the sphere".the brain of avast body?

In order to make clear the strict necessityof his alternative,let me develop here a kind ofbasiCitheorem.

Consider a map of the world. On this planisphere are allthe habitable lands. The whole is divided into regions, andin each of these regions there is a certain density of popula-

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THE CRISIS OF TH E MIND

tion, a certain quality of men. In each of these regions, also,there are corresponding natural resources-a more or lessfertile soil, a more or less rich substratum, a more or lesswatered terrain, which may be more or less easily developedfor transport, etc.All these characteristics make it possible, at any period, toclassify the regions we are speaking of, so that at any giventime the situation on the earth may be defined by aformula showingthe inequalities between the inhabited regions of its surface.

At each moment, the history of the next moment willdepend on this given inequality.Let us now examine, not our theoretical classification, butthe one that actually prevailed in the world until recently.W enotice a striking fact, which we take too much for granted:Small though it be, Europe has for centuries figured at thehead of he list. In spite of her limited extent-and althoughthe richness of her soil is not out of the ordinary-she dominates the picture. By what miracle? Certainly the miraclemust lie in the high quality of her population. That qualitymust compensate for the smaller number of men, of squaremiles, of tons of ore, found in Europe. In one scale put theempire of India and in the other the United Kingdom: thescale with the smaller weight tilts down!

That is an extraordiri.ary upset in equilibrium. But itsconsequences are still more so: they will shortly allow us toforesee agradual change in the opposite direction.

We suggested just now that the quality of her men mustbe the determining factor in Europe's superiority. I cannotanalyze this quality in detail; but from a summary examination I would say that a driving thirst, an ardent and disinterested curiosity, a happy mixture of imagination and rigorous logic, a certain unpessimistic skepticism, an unresigned

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mysticism . . . are the most specifically active c h ~ r a c t e r i s t i c s of the European psyche.A single example of that spirit, an example of the highestorder and of the very first importance, is Greece-since thewhole Mediterranean littoral must be counted in Europe.Smyrna and Alexandria are as much a part of Europe asAthens and Marseilles. Greece founded geometry. It was amad undertaking: we are still arguing about the possibility ofsuch a folly.

What did it take to bring about that fantastic creation?Consider that neither the Egyptians nor the Chinese nor theChaldeans nor the Hindus managed it. Consider wha t a fascinating adventure it was, a conquest a thousand times richerand actually far more poetic than that of the Golden Fleece.No sheepskin is worth the golden thigh of Pythagoras.

This was an enterprise requiring gifts that,. when foundtogether, are usually the most incompatible. It required argonauts of the mind, tough pilots who refused to be either lostin their thoughts or distracted by their impressions. Neitherthe frailty of the premises that supported them, nor the infi-nite number and subtlety of the inferences they exploredcould dismay them. They were as though equidistant fromthe inconsistent Negro and the indefinite fakir. Theyaccomplished the extremely delicate and improbable feat of adapting common speech to precise reasoning; they analyzed themost complex combinations of motor and visual functions,and found that these corresponded to certain linguistic andgrammatical properties; they trusted in words to lead themthrough space like far-seeing blind men. And space itself became, from century to century, a richer and more surprisingcreation, as thought gained possession of tself and had more

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confidence in the marvelous system of reason and in the original intuition which had endowed it with such incomparableinstruments as definitions, axioms, lemmas, theorems, problems, porisms, etc.I should need a whole book to treat the subject properly.I wanted merely to indicate in a few words one of the characteristic inventions of the European genius. This examplebrings me straight back to my thesis.I have claimed that the imbalance maintained for so long inEur


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more manageable or consumable forms; it was to be distributed to a more and more numerous clientele; it was to becomean article of commerce, an article, in short, that can be imitated and produced almost anywhere.

Result: the inequality that once existed between the regions of he world as regards the mechanical arts, the appliedsciences, the scientific instruments of war or peace-an inequality on which Europe's predominance was based-istending gradually to disappear.

So, the classification of the habitable regions of the world isbecoming one in which gross material size, mere statistics andfigures (e.g., population, area, raw materials) finally and alonedetermine the rating of he various sections of he globe.

And so the scales that used to tip in our favor, althoughwe appeared the lighter, are beginning to lift us gently, asthough we had stupidly shifted to the othe r side the mysteriousexcess that was ours. We have foolishly made force proportiotlalto mass!This coming phenomenon, moreover, may be ~ o n n e c t e d with another to be found in every nation: I mean the diffusion of culture, and its acquisition by ever larger categoriesof individuals.

An attempt to predict the consequences ofsuch diffusion,or to find whether it will or not inevitably bring on decadence,would be a delightfully complicated problem in intellectualphysics.

The charm of the problem for the speculative mind proceeds, first, from its resemblance to the physical fact of diffusion and, next, from a sudden transformation into a profounddifference when the thinker remembers that his primary object is men not moleCliles.

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A drop of wine falling into water barely colors it, andtends to d i s ~ p p e a r after showing as a pink cloud. That is thephysical fact. But suppose now that some time after it hasvanished, gone back to limpidity, we should see, here andthere in our glass-which seemed once more to hold purewater-drops. of wine forming, dark and pure-what a. ,surprIse . . . .

This phenomenon of Cana is not impossible in intellectualand social physiCs. We then speak of genius, and contrast itwith diffusion.Just now we were considering a furious balance that workedin inverse ratio to weight. Then we saw a liquid systempass as though spontaneously from homogeneous to heterogeneous, from intimate mingling to clear separation . . .These paradoxical images give the simplest and most practicalnotion of the role played in the W orId by what - for five orten thousand years-has been called Mind.But can the European Mind-or at least its most preciouscontent-be totally diffused? Must such phenomena as democracy, the exploitation of the globe, and ,the generalspread of technology, all of which presage a deminutio capitisfor Europe . . . must these be taken as absolute decisions offate? Or have we some freedom against this threatening conspiracy of things?

Perhaps in seeking that freedom we may create it. But inorder to seek it,we must for a time give up considering groups,and study the thinking individual in his struggle for a personallife against his life in society.

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