(1964)
In a letter to Paul Souday dated May 1, 1923, Paul Valéry recounts the circumstances under which his dialogue Eupalinos came into being.1 He had been commissioned to write a text for an album of architectural ground plans and layouts but the length and the layout had already been set and the typeface selected so that the remaining space for Valéry’s contribution could be determined exactly, down to the number of characters—that is, 115,800—to which, however, he also had to adhere. Valéry mentions this, as he writes, “à titre de curiosité” [as a matter of curiosity] (L 147). But it can easily be inferred from these and other statements that he did not consider the genesis of Eupalinos as atypical of his own mode of working or of the conditions under which works of art arose. Not only did he accept, but, as he admits, he ultimately found the narrowness of necessity, the “bizarre contrainte” [bizarre constraint], to be interesting. Choosing the form of the dialogue made it easier to meet the exact length, he explains, and he ironically leaves open whether the text might not have suffered a little under these circumstances, before finally invoking the great example of the ancient sculptors who had to accommodate their Olympian cast of characters to the obtuse triangles of temple pediments.
Now, this was a commissioned work, a prose piece, which could be wrested from Valéry only from time to time and through external incentives.2 This might not hold for poetry—of it one is inclined to believe that it emanates from the manner of spontaneous excitation and conception. But in a letter to George Duhamel from 1929 (L 178ff.), Valéry relates the formation of his first poetic work after the self-imposed pause of a quarter-century, the Jeune Parque (The Young Fate), during World War I. This great poem of crystalline serenity admittedly did not come about under conditions of external coercion but through the experience of the loss of inner freedom. He had wanted to force himself at a set hour of the day to work under the self-imposed strictures of formal requirements, and let the poem emerge from the most extreme pressure: “Je m’imposai de faire des vers, de ceux qui sont chargés de chaînes” [I forced myself to make verses, of the kind that are weighed down by chains]. There had not been, he writes, any sérénité in him whatsoever and the poem attested to the fallacy of inferring from the mood of the work the mood of the author, who had reacted to deep disturbances and catastrophic foreboding with fearful resistance, but indeed by not reflecting these feelings.
Back to the origin story of Eupalinos. More than ten years after the letter to Paul Souday, Valéry returns to this prehistory (Letter to Dontenville, January 20, 1934, L 214–215) and confirms once again that he had chosen the form of the dialogue for its elasticity and malleability. And there can be no doubt that it is this form that led to Socrates carrying the dialogue. All this, including the choice of the name “Eupalinos”—an ancient architect Valéry found in an encyclopedia—is of paramount facticity, which, if not labored, was certainly perceived as adequate. But this facticity, which befell the poet, was at the same time provoked by the needs of his poetic self-understanding—and was, of course, stylized in retrospect.
It is in this arbitrary manner, then, that Socrates ended up in this text. It is a conversation in Hades, a subject that can no longer claim any originality.3 But this Hades is not the place of a higher perspective on things; rather, one could say that it is the position from which the world presents itself from its “reverse.” The Hades of Valéry’s Eupalinos is different from the afterlife discussed by the Platonic Socrates in one crucial respect: it does not possess the same finality as the judgment of the court of the dead, nor the finality of the last possible intuition of truth in and of itself, seen from an unsurpassable standpoint; instead, this Hades is again only one perspective on things, possibly a privileged one, but if so, then only because not everyone can occupy it at any given time. For the position Valéry wants his Socrates to take, Hades is above any suspicion of the “naturalness” that gives truth no chance. In the notes that are published as Cahier B 1910, Valéry formulated this principle of the non-natural aspect as follows: “La vérité, la découverte du nouveau, est presque toujours le prix de quelque attitude anti-naturelle. La profonde réflexion est forcée.… Il faut faire ou subir violence pour voir mieux ou autrement” [The truth, the discovery of the new is almost always the price of some antinatural attitude. The deep reflection is forced.… We must do or suffer violence to see better or differently] (II 580).
But something else characterizes Valéry’s Hades: the inexhaustibility of time and a form of thought appropriate to it—a thought that does not know the termination of its immanent intentionality, which in all things can carry itself out up until the final consequences, and which is, precisely because of this lack of any material resistance, condemned never to be distracted: “We are now too much simplified not to undergo to its very end the motion of some idea.”4 Giving up interest is chained to the most agile form of mental self-realization. What is deemed so bothersome in life, thinking’s finitude and potential for confusion, is shed, but at the same time thought has lost its living relevance. The dialogue does not wait for a more fortunate hour; it has become an atmospheric omnipresence: “They speak aimlessly, and their shades drone on.”5 Socrates and Phaedrus stand at the shores of Ilissus, the river of time, in which all things lose their contour and substance—even anamnesis [recollection] cannot be conjured up in the face of the shapelessness of what floats by. The sensual no longer aids thought.
One could title this Hades situation “the disappointment of finitude.” Truth has become apparent, but no one is interested in it anymore—nor, however, does it evade being present and considered, as if closing one’s eyes had become impossible: “Here everything is negligible, yet everything counts.”6 The unfurling of the situation in Hades commences the critique of Platonism that pervades the dialogue. The dead Socrates and his interlocutors have left everything behind that once was corporeality, temporality, and appearance, and still they have not achieved what the Platonic Socrates had attached to these conditions: fulfilled immediacy of the true and the beautiful, finality in the face of the ideas,7 pure intuition as the epitome of happiness. The noncorporeal position that was defined as the final goal of all striving for knowledge turns out to be the place in which the exposed truth can no longer be “grasped.” “But from here all is unrecognizable. Truth is before us, and we no longer understand anything at all.”8
The initial circumstances of the dialogue must be kept in mind in order not to abandon the ironic abeyance that they give to Socrates’s progressive insight into his own intellectual development. But at the same time, this insight receives its dignity from being set in Hades; for as Socrates turns more and more toward his memory by recurring to the decisive situations of his intellectual biography, he frees himself from the awkwardness of the “Platonic” disappointment Hades had caused him. Memory here does not mean to conjure up image-like reproductions, but to carry out once more the life decisions that are irrevocably made. Already in the very first phase of the dialogue, the great self-correction of Socrates is initiated, namely, in the instant in which Phaedrus asks him for the origin and the meaning of that goût de l’éternel [taste for the eternal] that can be observed in the living and which Socrates himself had shown in his striving for knowledge, just like those who build temples and tombs with the effort of making them indestructible. Socrates replies that this is folly, but it is a senselessness indispensable to man’s existence that was assigned to him by fate. Without it, there would be neither love nor science, nor the energies from which human culture emerges. Thus, immortality exists, but it compromises itself as the motive of all the monstrous efforts of which in this dialogue the architect is the thematic figure.
Phaedrus’s memories steer the conversation toward the figure of the master builder Eupalinos. He radiates a fascination to which Phaedrus testifies, and it unfolds from the antithesis between the resistance of the material and the circumstances—between the disobedience of what is given on the one hand, and the ease of the mastered form, the reality that complies with the word on the other. This architect, to whom Phaedrus imputes the power of Orpheus, seems to build only with language; everything he does comes to fulfillment in the word: to the untoward chaos of the material he foretells its future as being realized in a building, and the things seem to follow his voice to the place appointed to them. His speeches to the workers act as forces within his master plan, and Phaedrus expressly reports that from the difficulties of his nightly considerations nothing emerges but the pure shape of command and number. What can Socrates reply to this evocation other than, “That is the very way of God.”9
The very way of God? Let us consider where the accent is placed in this highest of distinctions an idea can receive in our intellectual history. The demiurge in the myth of Plato’s Timaeus runs into difficulties in the execution of his work of making the world as soon as he is faced with anankē [necessity], and the way he masters this difficulty is tied to the word: it is persuasion. The biblical creator does not seem to hit on any difficulty, unless he does not achieve the totality of his work at once but gains, in the first access of creation, only the formless void. The ease with which he demonstrates his power over things lies in the immediate succession of the command and its realization; only once command becomes commandment, that is, in relation to the obedience of man, does it meet with resistance. What the Platonic Demiurge and the biblical creator have in common—and what tends to be overlooked in highlighting the difference that in one case matter is given and in the other there is only nothingness—is that the origin of their concept of the world remains unquestioned. This question is, in the case of the demiurge, answered right from the start by the forms that are given to him, and, in the case of the biblical creator, by the seeming obviousness of the fact that the words of his commands had a “meaning” before the things they referred to came into existence, that is, through some kind of implicit Platonism. Eupalinos’s divine way, on the other hand, lies wholly between the nightly meditations and the word that eventually transpires from them as a command, encouragement, formula. Everything that follows and lies between the word and the temple’s stony reality is only a transposition, an illustration of what was achieved in that first phase. Of course, this word is not only the command that orders to transform a given and presupposed intuition into reality, that is, to re-create an idea; instead, it is the instruction to bring this reality itself into being. The Platonic idea is no longer an image but a rule whose execution alone makes visible what was wanted. Only at this point is the systematic or hidden Platonism rejected that is common to the Bible as well as to the Timaeus. It is a rejection that Socrates, in this phase of the dialogue, does not yet recognize but which Phaedrus puts into words by saying that the idea and the technique of the work’s realization have become identical to him: “I no longer separate the idea of a temple from that of its edification.”10 That, of course, is the exact opposite of what “wretched nature”11 does, which, by constantly repeating itself and bringing forth the new always as a re-creation of what has already been, provides the Platonic model; it is a pitiful process that may know the eternity of form but not the uniqueness of surprise, and thus, seen from the perspective of Hades, has a desperate similarity to what is not or no longer living.
At this point, Socrates does not yet understand what Phaedrus finds so fascinating about the figure of Eupalinos. For him, it is simply the enthusiasm of a shadow for a phantom. Only the automatism of all conversations in Hades taking their course appears to let him continue in the business of asking questions and of listening to Eupalinos’s rules that his interlocutor praises so highly. These sentences immediately grow from the definition of the idea as having a genetic law-structure. The unity of becoming, which, despite its temporal expansion, cannot be divided or atomized, takes the place of the shape-like [gestaltartig] unity of the idea—“There are no details in execution.”12 In the dialogue, the ambiguity of the French word détail plays a role: Socrates understands it to mean particulars; Phaedrus interprets it as trifles. The one possibility yields a proposition about the homogeneous continuity of a work’s becoming, the other a proposition about the equal value of the states of this becoming that may, after all, be discrete. That in becoming there are no trivialities appeals to the attention of the practitioner; that there are no “particulars” in it justifies the mystery of the productive process and the impossibility of transferring it.
The second statement of Eupalinos deals with the relationship between the work of art and its viewer. “ ‘My temple,’ this man from Megara would say, ‘must move men as they are moved by their beloved.’ ”13 Socrates again replies by dealing out the highest accolade: “That is divine.”14 Valéry, who admittedly loved to play down, in favor of formal difficulties, the intellectual presuppositions of his works and especially his knowledge of their ancient background, cannot have overlooked the fact that between Eupalinos’s proposition and Socrates’s predication there exists a more precise relationship than any superficial hearing of the phrase would reveal. What Eupalinos says about the effectiveness of his temple corresponds exactly to what Aristotle had said about the mode of action of his god, the Unmoved Mover: he moves the world, himself resting, simply as an object of love. The temple, too, this seemingly purely static structure, is and shall be, according to the second sentence of Eupalinos: an unmoved mover. By picking out the Aristotelian formula of the divine here, he initiates the dialogue’s second counter-Platonic evolution. Socrates recalls an expression he heard about Alcibiades and his beauty, an expression of quite a similar type and yet a reverse tendency in meaning: “Looking at him, one feels oneself becoming an architect!”15 An ambiguous sentence yet again, and we do not learn which interpretation Socrates choses. For, read closely, this sentence goes one step further into the counter-Platonic direction than Eupalinos’s second sentence—not only by giving up the ideal of relaxed contemplation, of lingering in the presence of the beautiful, the true, and the good, and by demanding movement as the true correspondence of the viewer onto the presence of the beautiful. In addition, he specifies the type of the viewer’s corresponding movement: it is the movement that has as its aim the production of the object seen, that is, a conduct that parallels that replacement of the Platonic idea through the unity of the process of becoming. The aesthetic object mobilizes its viewer, always also letting him potentially become the creator of the object. Socrates at this point does not yet know the difference between the theoretical and the aesthetic object; he accuses Phaedrus of having to be much unhappier than himself, who has never sought and loved the sensual presence of beauty but only set his life into the pursuit of truth, of which he could in Hades at least hold onto the idea of continuing the progress of its gaining: “I gladly seek among the shades, the shade of some truth.”16 What an anti-Platonic irony that Socrates freed from his body should now be all the more bound to the cave that Plato had him make into the allegory of the earthly situation of the minds! But he who seeks the shadow of truth in the shadowy realm seems to be better off than he who is fulfilled wholly by the wish for beauty—he from whom, now that bodies are nothing but memories, everything has been taken. It is only in this moment that Socrates is reminded of Plato. When Phaedrus is forced to confess how beauty is bound to finite and mortal life: “What is most beautiful finds no place in the eternal!” it occurs to Socrates to ask: “Is Plato not in these parts?” And this in turn compels Phaedrus to confess: “I am speaking against him.”17 He opposes the idea of immortal beauty that has its home in those models outside nature and viewed by noble souls as binding norms of its plans and the secret example of its efforts. The idea behind Plato’s ideas seems too simple to him now and just as if it were too pure in its conception to make conceivable the difference between types of beauty and the change of their hierarchies in human appreciation, that is, its historicity, its possibility to connect with the radically new and creative—its power for recurrence that cannot be put into any law. Everything converges toward the antinomy between the idea and the facticity of the aesthetic as creation and as history.
If there is something that we believe to be an essential part of the historical figure [historische Gestalt] of Socrates, it is that he insists on the definition of concepts. Valéry’s Socrates in Hades thus acts in a manner “consistent” with his intellectual biography in now insisting to know what indeed truly is beautiful and thus proper to man, by astonishing without confusing him, by gripping without inuring him. He thus wants to see the characteristics of an objecthood be determined that would be capable of such appropriateness and effect. But Phaedrus evades the question’s precision by defining the topic only from the perspective of its effect, which is that which, without effort, elevates man beyond his nature. Phaedrus palpably does not dare to force Socrates across the decisive threshold and uses the recourse to Eupalinos as a detour to lead Socrates toward an experience of which he believes that he had missed it in his lifetime. This inhibition toward Socrates and what was unquestionably valid to him and still seems to be, must appear as the dialogue’s device by which the whole difference between the tradition that springs from Socrates, in which the beautiful as a matter of course participates in the eternal substantiality of the true and the good, and the basic idea of the constitutive finitude of the beautiful, its participation in man’s mortality. The object of aesthetic enjoyment is not an autonomous world of appearances, characteristics, and qualities. The object of aesthetic enjoyment is, through the mediation of a sphere of objectivations [Objektivationen], man himself. Phaedrus has Eupalinos say not only that he had exercised his art the more he thought about it, and that he experienced himself in happiness and suffering to the extent to which he thought and executed as a master builder—and so experienced himself with a pleasure and clarity that became ever more secure. Instead, the artist’s self-experience is heightened by another degree, from self-enjoyment to self-creation. The architect becomes his own building: “By dint of constructing … I truly believe that I have constructed myself.”18 One can feel how Eupalinos’s statement about himself is geared toward a provocation of Socrates’s maxim of self-knowledge. And so the interjection comes (with a shadow’s resigned indulgence) whether or not these are two different things: to construct oneself and to know oneself. It is as if in horror at this question’s scale that Phaedrus evades it and proceeds with his report, which continues to deal with the artwork’s unsolvable unity of conception and execution, with the exclusion of the priority of the form [Gestalt] over becoming.
By an inner consistency, the conversation with Eupalinos that Phaedrus reports reaches the topic of music. Music offers an exemplary counterweight against architecture, which became a topic through the external occasion. An aesthetic interpretation of architecture was, due to its object, initially very close to the ontological position of the Platonic Socrates: the artistic building does not fit into the category of representational arts [darstellende Künste] that Plato had criticized as a copy of imitations and it is, moreover, closest to the pure intuition of the static eidos that is free of any illusions. But this approximation to the stasis of the archetype was already called into question by the first proposition of Eupalinos, which considers the conception of the work not as seizing the image of an already finished object,19 but as the anticipation of a process, whose last phase is the finished work. This shows that the “completion” of the work in its thingliness is only an arbitrary break, and that the work, having stepped out of the process of its becoming, immediately enters into a new process, namely, that of communication with its natural and human environment. The scale of resulting possibilities—from sterility to the highest level of intensity—is denoted through the metaphor of the silent, the speaking, and finally, the singing buildings, as Eupalinos was said to have distinguished between them. The metaphorics of music has an anti-Platonic implication: the pure idea has no relation to time whatsoever, and music stands in this relation not simply by chance, but by necessity. It is the projection of figure onto time or even time as a figure.20 The “divine analogy” between temple and music that Phaedrus had felt when he first beheld the temple of Eupalinos, the latter had called an arbitrary association of remote things, which nonetheless reveal an admirable necessity of the inner unity of form and time: “that strange parallel of visible forms with the ephemeral combinations of successive sounds.”21 What the spectator feels as the musicality of the building is, already in the creative potential of the architect, a mysterious mixture, a form of the highest self-possession and an ambiguity—“this state of divine ambiguity”22—which is all the more productive for being yet undecided of that which, as a unity of analysis and ecstasy, may not remain a dream, but must become knowledge and technical sovereignty. Isolated ecstasy must be transformed into discursive analysis, the profuse opportunity of the moment must be “stopped,” the undivisible must nonetheless be divided. Phaedrus had suggested that Eupalinos tried to slow down the ideas—again and again, that is, the assemblage of ideality and temporality that linguistically is already so resistant. As the aesthetic problem of the timeless idea emerges and unfolds, the problem of the soul, supposedly imprisoned in the body and to be freed, approaches as well—the very metaphysical commonplace that Socrates had only just mentioned in an interjection when he spoke of his death and his imprisonment, which segued into the dictum that in reality the only prison he had ever known was that of his body.23 And now, Phaedrus has Eupalinos explain that in the process of creating his works, his own body seems always to have played a role: this admirable instrument, of whose services the living fail to make the fullest use.24 This turn against Socrates’s body-soul dualism is artfully prepared through the steering and inner teleology of the dialogue. The passage culminates in the invocation of the body through the soul, the “unexampled prayer,”25 as Socrates will call it disconcertedly, in which the body is praised as the transformer and moderator of the soul’s dreams, as the anthropocentric reference point of the universe, which the quasi-heterocentrically attuned soul does not dare to or cannot proclaim for itself—a thought that, ascribed to the historical Eupalinos, seems anachronistic and, ironically, is supposed to appear this way, because the anthropocentric world that is thought of here as artistic fiction, was still a reality to ancient thought, or at least could have been. And it, too, is an anti-Platonic intention when the body is evoked, by altering Protagoras’s saying, as “the measure of the world.”26 One might say these were trivialities that had been expressed often enough, but here they have the very precise function of undermining the position on which Valéry’s Socrates still believes himself to be standing. The disappointment of the metaphysical liberation from the body, the reversal of the direction of the longing from the hereafter toward the here and now, is the punch line of the whole passage; Socrates immediately grasps it: it seems strange to sing the body’s praises in Hades, and lamenting the loss of the body is curious in those who longed to be freed from their bodies. He is captured by the excitement of the problem of the arts, and one can easily see that the exemplary rank of architecture and music as similar when compared to all other arts fascinates Socrates because the criterion of this rank has been put in anti-Socratic (and, here, that always means anti-Platonic) terms. It is only these two arts, as Socrates now surprisingly picks up the thought, that create more than a mere sight, more than a form around which one can move, but a space into which one can enter, an exclusively human, self-sufficient reality that is not derived from nature, finite and close universes into which we can step away completely from our ordinary reality. To enter fully into the human work, to be spellbound by it, to live and breathe in it—Socrates describes all this as a type of ecstasy, yet it is an ecstasy into immanence and thus it is no longer Platonic, but directed against Platonic transcendence. To be in the universe that is constituted of pillars or of sounds likewise means both to be beyond oneself and at the same time to remain within the human, but in a way that not only leaves man the freedom to enter and leave it, but realizes the consciousness of his freedom precisely in this act of entering and leaving. The result, as Socrates puts it, is: “There are then two arts which enclose man in man.”27 Architecture and music are nonrepresentational [gegenstandslos] arts. They do not require mediating signs and representatives in the way the painter does when he uses the color green in one spot of his painting, and paints a tree as the vehicle of this green, as it were, that carries and leads it, and allows him to bring it to this spot. The relationship of the actual tree to the essential green is compared with the concrete and fabulous idea that allows an abstract connection to be made visible: Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, which illustrates the problem of the continuum. The topic of art is not a factual objecthood [Gegenständlichkeit], but “that hidden power which makes all fables.”28 This hidden power interprets and produces itself in an inexhaustible abundance of possible images and factual transformations, in thousands of transient lives and forms, in an infinity of imaginations. Painting and poetry are, he says, always only these factual correlates; music and architecture realize the ground of their source themselves. Music and architecture restore the soul into its pure potentiality from which everything object-like [alles Gegenständliche] springs, but as an already determined givenness, whereas it has already lost this freedom to what in each case has been realized in its formations. One can immediately grasp the proximity to the way the modern age has regarded nature, which does not make forms its object but the laws from which the abundance of formations becomes possible, and which themselves are the epitomes of these possibilities. It would be easy to show in greater detail that we are confronted with a theory of art here that uses the basic concepts of Platonism by turning them against their systematic origins and roots. Socrates speaks the language of Platonism when he says that in this world, music and architecture are like the monuments of another world, to which to draw attention is their function. But this other world of laws is so different and incomparable that it does not allow the bridge of imitation. Its difference would be that between noise and pure sound. Pure sound is a human creation, while nature “has only noises.”29 But the law the symphony recalls to the mind if it makes its listener forget its own sensual presence, is, as a law of nature, not nature itself, but that which only intellect can formulate, that which was not yet there before man put it into words, “true creatures of man.”30 The intelligibility of the law no longer points to the fact that there is an autonomous object world of pure forms, but rather to the fact that man, and man alone, could have created it. Socrates returns to his great topic, the geometric shapes, whose essence now is no longer that they always have existed and can be gathered from recollection but rather that they are constructed on the basis of a coherent command, a formula—that they emerge from the movement that adheres to this law. The formula that entails the law of the shape entails nothing yet of the shape and is nevertheless the spiritual energy from which the concrete shapes spring in arbitrary variety. Between the law of the action and the product of the action lies the decisive difference. By having the geometric object emerge, by dint of the definitional command, from movement and action, Socrates has found his own way to Eupalinos’s dictum that becoming brings forth the object without containing it in a preformed way from the very start. We can find or create this command without already having its result eidetically before us; the word is the potency of the figure: “No geometry without the word.”31
Socrates rightly admits now that Eupalinos’s words had awakened something in him that was similar to those maxims. Phaedrus immediately misunderstands him, however, by confusing potentiality and preformation and by taking Socrates’s insight for the expression of something already existing: that Socrates contained an architect in himself. Socrates does not correct Phaedrus; it may remind him too much of his own idea of maieutics, so he takes up the thought: yes, there was an architect in him whom circumstances had not brought to maturity. Between birth and death, he says, an existence’s potentiality actualizes itself by discarding its possibilities and deciding for its realities. “I told you that I was born several and that I died one.”32 The possibilities that do become reality act as doubts, create contradictions, and push toward the crossroads of existence.33 And it is at this point that Socrates introduces that strange thing which he calls “the most ambiguous object imaginable.”34
What is this ambiguous object, this objet ambigu all about? This is the key question of interpreting the dialogue and, moreover, the aesthetics of Valéry. To being with, it is obvious that the objet ambigu is meant as the exact correlate of young Socrates’s potentiality prior to his decision in favor of philosophy. He reports that the discovery was bestowed on him by chance when he was still at the point of departure of different possible ways of existence, and that he realized this situation by means of that strange entity as an inner hesitation, so that the ambiguity of the discovered object exactly corresponded to the indecision of his self-image. But if this situation was characterized as the alternative between philosophy and art, then the ambiguity of that strange object must have consisted in its indeterminacy with regard to its theoretical or aesthetic objecthood [Gegenständlichkeit] or objectification [Vergegenständlichung]. The endless considerations to which this discovery gave rise played between the possibilities “to construct” [construire] and “to know” [connaître].35
Phaedrus is eager to hear a description of this object, but the very possibility of such a portrayal would be in contradiction to the potentiality of the object, in which alone its meaning rested. Instead, Socrates tells of his discovery at the shore and of youth’s drunkenness with a life still indeterminate. This narration is one of the most beautiful pieces of prose that I know. Each move of this description, its indissoluble unity of outer scene and inner assessment of life, runs concentrically toward the mysterious discovery, in which this situation finds its most straightforward representation. In his memory, the Socrates in Hades—who had just been irked by the praise of the body and its sensuous self-enjoyment—discovers himself as having once in his life been absorbed in the sensuous totality of a unique experience. Valéry lets him find a language that the living Socrates would never have spoken, and on whose almost imperceptible appearance he comments with the words: “I have let my talk run on.”36 It is a language of which Phaedrus declares, in awe and admiration, that it lets him come to life again. The thing—that objet ambigu—lay on the edge of the sea, embedded in a spectacle of nature that is “alienated” by its being recalled from memory in Hades as something that is irretrievably lost, even though it has been most ordinary and most accessible to everyone, and therefore also most easily lost to everyone. The objet ambigu, however, is not just embedded in this setting but is also the product of the forces that are effective in it. Again, Socrates goes far afield to describe the contention between and intertwining of these powers on the border where land and sea, earth and air, meet. It is one of the things the sea flings onto the beach, “a white thing,”37 hard, delicate and lightweight, polished, of the purest white. Socrates picks it up, cleanses it of sand, rubs it on his cloak, and immediately all his thoughts are ensnared by the uniqueness of this form. We already know whence stems the excitement this object causes: it is a condition lacking interpretability within a Platonic ontology. Socrates recognizes this immediately—it is an object that is not reminiscent of anything and yet is not without a shape. Immediately, one thinks of the discussions of the Platonic dialogues on the question of how far down the exemplary nature of the ideas reaches into the value order of things, and whether one has to assume them to exist even where the canon of a nature self-reproducing in its forms no longer applies.38 Who could have made this object? is the first question Socrates asks himself. Doubtful is the origin, doubtful the matter of which the thing consists—“matter for doubt.”39 The object that defies definition, that is, gives no answer to the stereotypical Socratic questions, does not enter the ultimate classification of ancient metaphysics either, the duality of naturalness and artificiality. But it is precisely that the objet ambigu is “nothing” and means “nothing,” its nonobjecthood in any traditional sense of the word, that increases its meaning to an incalculable level: it poses all questions and leaves them open. This doubtful object repeats as a form what we have already noted in Eupalinos’s dictums—dictums that meant nothing or something altogether trivial, which were, so to speak, mere incentives for the self-expression of thought by those who heard them.
The objet ambigu is produced by the multiplicity of the natural forces active in this zone in time,40 and what infinite time produces looks as if it had sprung from an artist’s intention guided by the idea, or has its place somewhere in the series of experiments of nature, which tests organs with regard to their functional expediency, and selects or discards them. A thought, which the classic Socrates could not possibly have had, looms large here from the perspective of the modern age’s natural science: the long durations’ responsibility for the evolution of organisms and the diversity of forms of erosion, sediments, drifts, and cuts, for the innumerable “patterns” that inorganic as well as organic nature produce. In the background, there is always the permission to calculate with tremendously long periods of time and the accumulation of tremendously small forces of action within them; Socrates himself says what hardly any thinker could have said before Bacon: that the centuries cost nothing, and that whoever knows how to put them into his calculations can transform what he wants, into what he wants.41 It is significant for the subtlety with which this dialogue is wrought that the same Phaedrus, who had at first inspired and excited Socrates with his report on Eupalinos, now hardly can follow. His clumsiness is shown, for instance, in a minute difference—Socrates speaks of “infinite time,”42 while Phaedrus takes up this idea under the title of “indefinite time.”43 But Phaedrus, in his own way, pushes forward this thought by contrasting the work of the artist with the efficacy of nature precisely with regard to the dimension of time: the work of the artist must create the objects, for which nature has reserved the infinity of chance and time, within time’s finitude. More than once, Valéry expressly denied being influenced by Bergson and even having known him only before he had been elected to the Academy (see, for instance, L 163–164). As credible as that may be, it does not really touch on the essence of a statement whose truth does not depend on the fact of literary influence; even in opposition to the zeitgeist, the commonality of spiritual and historical prerequisites leads to deeply related structures. The poet, who has imposed on himself as law the strictness and exactness of form, shrinks from the infinitism of the évolution créatrice [creative evolution], just as he wants to assess the relation between philosophy and poetry by the criterion of form. But the figure of Socrates—in whom he wishes to trace the philosopher’s self-actualization back to the point at which the potentiality of being an artist was laid out equally ready and was ignored—compels him to leave the relationship between philosophical intention and poetic form not simply unchallenged as a factual opposition, but to explain it from the starting point of their compatibility.44 The encounter with the objet ambigu is supposed to designate precisely this point: despite the infinite complication of factors and the infinite time of its impact, the product of nature is, after all, the finite and, at every moment, perfect form; for it is apparent to Socrates that the instant of this object’s discovery is an accidental point in time, and the state in which the object is found is thus an arbitrary fixation of the process. The artist’s work stands in contrast to “infinite time,” but in such a way that the predicate of infinity shifts from time to work. An artist makes up for a thousand, or even a hundred thousand, centuries, if not more, by replacing nature’s blindness and randomness with thought. Art is the finite equivalent of infinite creative development, but as such, it is “un labeur infini” [an infinite labor], as Valéry writes in a letter to Albert Mockel in 1917 about the creation of his poem The Young Fate, and this infinite effort is enforced by the self-chosen “jeu difficile” [difficult game], the strictness of his self-imposed conditions (L 123). Into this context belongs the fact that for Valéry there is no such thing as the entirely successful work, perfect in form, since the infinite task is precisely that which can never be solved. He therefore stresses the failure of this claim again and again as the artist’s experience of the poetic structure’s nature that succeeds in self-observation. Valéry’s poetics is empirical, both a result of the despair he observes in himself and which all poets experience, as he writes (L 161), and of the “idée de l’impuissance consciente” [idea of conscious helplessness] (L 141). To the charge of the obscurity of his poems, which Valéry had to face constantly, he replies that this obscurité was not deliberate but rather the expression of the powerlessness to be clear (Letter to Aimé Lafont, 1922; L 144). But this inadequacy in the face of the poetic claim is indeed not judged negatively, but positively endorsed as the stigma of the pure aesthetic imperative, as the source of the poet’s conscious consciousness, his conscience consciente.45 In poetry, the infinite is justified only as a deficiency, as a sign within form, as formlessness shining through form that is nevertheless banished and not admitted. I believe that the meaning of Valéry’s self-testimonies about the conditions under which Eupalinos originated, which I quoted at the beginning, can be grasped in the following way: the limited latitude, created by the narrow confines of the task or the poet’s self-imposed rules, has the function of spawning the indications of the absolute claim and the infinite work—indications that let the form, wrested from chaos, remain recognizable as “wrested” form and do not allow the submission of language to fully dissolve in the illusion of a total availability. Valéry never understood the aesthetic stock phrase of the “creative” in analogy to biblical creation as the command to emerge from nothingness, but demiurgically as overpowering the apeiron and anankē [the infinite and necessity]. What interested him most about the unbounded activity of the artist who needs to create the goal, the means, and even the resistances for the work, Valéry once wrote (1942, L 237), was the latter condition, for it is the real condition of the artist’s self-experience: “en créant, je me suis recréé sur un point” [in creating, I re-created myself at one point].
Young Socrates, at the water’s edge, the objet ambigu in hand, contemplating it from all sides, stood like this for some time, questioning it without accepting any of its answers—and threw it back into the sea.46 But Socrates remained the prisoner of the thoughts stirred up by this thing, whose direction was determined by the preponderance of one of the possible questions and which either had to point toward a comprehensive conception of nature or an aesthetic behavior, be it enjoyment or creativity. This unknown object serves only to make clear how close these possibilities were to each other originally and how apt to be confused they were at this initial point. The alternative to become either philosopher or artist, then, is concentrated in the objet ambigu as the plurality of its aspects and the consequence of choosing a particular point of view. The situation as a whole defies the ancient ontology, which had to consider the problem of the natural or artificial origin of an object to be an always decidable question, and which regarded the artificial—and not only according to time or the material substratum—as secondary to the natural from the start. The relevance of the objet ambigu lies precisely in the fact that it cannot occur in a world conceived of as Platonic. To admit its ambiguity—let alone describe it—Socrates in Hades must step out of the tradition of his own ontology and add to his conception of nature the modern component of evolution and a state that can factually only be grasped when viewed across time. Only thus does he arrive at a possible relationship between nature and art in which the products are equivalent while their genesis is radically different. Just as there exists the essentially unprecedented in art, in this nature, too, the surprise of novelty and improbability exists, without the possibility that any anamnesis of the ideal cosmos could be prompted. Invention and construction—terms around which Valéry’s thought revolves, and which he made key terms in his essays on Leonardo—allow man to compensate entirely for the evolution of nature, to wait for which or in which to set his hopes his existence is too short.
The next step in this consideration is the insight that the difference between an unknown object of the objet ambigu’s type and the sphere of known objects is not objectively relevant, but that the same perplexity toward the object is also conceivable for the known if we were only able to reach the same attitude of being unbiased and not already in the know. But in the face of the familiar, our vision is always fixed on one aspect—for example, by knowing that and how nature produced such an object.47 Since we are already in possession of the answers, or believe ourselves to be so, we no longer ask the questions. Our “first education” stands in the way of our “deeper education,” as Valéry put it in the first essay on Leonardo.48 We keep the “obvious standpoints”49 and “beautiful views”50 always ready for the things and thus the perspective from which we are able to and wish to see them as that which is already familiar and with which one has come to terms. The painterly technique of the central perspective, which assigns the observer his preferred and standardized place as a spectator, is an expression of this defense against the infinite variety of possible aspects.51 The anthropocentric tradition—which understood man as a contemplator caeli [observer of the heavens] and, ordained by nature and according to his essence, placed him at the center of the world—has, with metaphysical legitimacy, equated the familiarity with the things and the understanding of the world. It is here that Valéry sees the function of the artist, who regains the freedom of intuition, “pure observation,”52 and does not presuppose the cosmos as the guaranteed given, but turns it—as an achievement that man always has to perform, as a constant transition from disorder to order—into a task. To consider a house, a door, or a jug in such a way that one does not already have all the answers to possible questions, and thus does not actualize the questions in the first place, requires, as Socrates takes up the thread of this idea, that I distance myself from this object in such a way that I see it as a savage who has never seen such things and, therefore, does not know that they are human products. The artist accomplishes the same feat by disturbing the mind of the beholder with a new view of things. Even thought has its own inertia, which can be broken only under the influence of new forces: “One stops, and then one is off again; that is what thinking is!”53
The moment at which Socrates throws the objet ambigu back into the sea contains, as it were, the decision about the direction of his existence, the decision in favor of philosophy. Socrates lingers on the last question he addressed to the subject: ought it to be classified as a natural product or as an artifact? But by ridding himself of the object provoking this question, he has at the same time lost the other possibility of behaving immediately aesthetically toward it, of letting it stand in its very indeterminacy, and enjoy it. Valéry has, under the heading of “Art,” given a definition of beauty: “The beautiful demands perhaps the slavish imitation of what is undefinable in things.”54 This characterization is strangely contradictory, for it takes up the traditional concept of imitation, but defines the objecthood of this imitation in a quite untraditional way by making indeterminacy, the inability to be determined, the essential feature of the beautiful. The aesthetic attitude here differs from the theoretical attitude in that it does not take indeterminacy to be the provocative stimulus to posing questions, searching for features and specific differences, but lets it be and takes pleasure in it. Socrates, however, turns away from the seashore and its indeterminacies and heads inland, carrying with him the burden of the question concerning the determinability of the indeterminate. From here on, it no longer matters to think carefully about the answer that Socrates finds to this question: the farther one theoretically penetrates into its details and subtleties, nature incrementally adds to the complexity of its parts, the wealth of its structures increases; man reduces nature, by taking from it the materials for his works, to abstract materiality, and he does not care about the found structure, but rather gambles for a new whole, which is less complex than the substrates that were taken from nature and are absorbed into this whole. The formative principle of human works is thus the destruction of a found order: “Their structure is … a disorder!”55 Man is only ever interested in the material taken from nature with regard to a small selection of its properties. The strength of man as a demiurge lies in forgoing the complete insight into nature, in being able to neglect irrelevant quantities. Even his most exact procedures are possible only through tolerated inaccuracy: “Man … fabricates by abstraction.”56 As an aesthetic, technical being, man does not require integral nature. The finality of homo faber ruthlessly thwarts the finality of nature, constructing and knowing are antinomies, and vis-à-vis nature artificial and artistic work is based on renunciation: man can act and create only because he is able to “ignore.”57 In frustrating the intrinsic structure of the natural, art is fundamentally violence; the order it posits rests on the disorder it causes, just as the art of the strategist, Phaedrus reminds us, is based on the training of individuals whose individuality he disregards: “whereas each element of those figures was the most complex object in the world, a man.”58 The creations of man, then, are founded in the conflict of his order with the order of nature and in the economy that is the condition for man’s ability to enforce his thought against that of nature. But the resistance that nature pits against the creative will of man is not overcome and reduced to zero by the human form, but enters into the form; the figure of the Phoenician shipbuilder, Tridon, who is soon introduced to the dialogue, illustrates that in the highest elegance of form, the tension of the resistance that it had to master is still preserved.
The eighteen-year-old Socrates, who had flung the objet ambigu back into the sea, became a philosopher the moment he went inland and began to raise questions about the object, which could no longer be questions to the object. This means that he was not ready for the acts of renunciation that precede aesthetic attitudes. The philosopher cannot renounce: “The philosopher is one who has a greater idea, and wishes to have need of everything.”59 He is the one who always lays claim to a little more knowledge than is necessary. Phaedrus reproaches Socrates for killing the artist in him by immersing himself all too much in the problem of a seashell fragment; in doing so, he had accepted his share in the manifold efforts of men to fill or shatter the eternal silence of the infinite spaces that they find so frightening.60
Almost naturally, Phaedrus, in his architect Eupalinos’s stead, now has the adventurous and versatile shipbuilder Tridon enter the scene, whose works are incomparable to Eupalinos’s temple in that they realize beauty only secondarily, but primarily serve man’s conflict with nature and that of the ship with the powers and the resistance of the sea. Mastering the formula allows this enterprising man not simply to follow tradition in his constructions—not once more to copy the ship of Odysseus—but to exercise his skill from the ground up, that is, to replace the complex of circumstances by analysis of the factors, to imagine the ship as a body on which certain effects are exerted. The formula he eventually finds contains the form that can be opposed to the circumstances and resistances. When Phaedrus tells Socrates about the studies the Sidonian conducts with the fastest fish of the sea, Socrates quite artlessly asks if it is not enough to exploit nature’s treasures directly and simply imitate such a fish. Again, the antithesis of imitation and construction appears: imitation takes the forms of nature as such, adheres to their presuppositions, as it were, from the outside, and believes that it can emulate its achievements through repetition; construction is the development of a form [Gestalt], as it were, from within, its production from the formula of the law that regulates the relations between the forces and the forms, between the circumstances and the achievements. Phaedrus describes the launching of one of these purest forms of a ship and in that moment elicits from Socrates the longing cry for the lost life. In contrast, the memory of that holy ship’s black sails arise instantly, whose return from Delos signaled his death knell—a death that no longer seems to him to be the attestation of his wisdom, and which to see turned into a kind of masterpiece now appears highly dubious to him: “Life cannot defend herself against those undying death scenes.… Man’s deepest glances are those that go out to the void.”61 The pain of the life unlived conquers the memory of the life lived in fact.
With horror, Phaedrus attends the judgment in which “Anti-Socrates” sits over Socrates.62 This self-judgment is as unjust as only the judgment can be that is passed over reality by the measure of possibility. Anti-Socrates admits to the most ruthless self-realization, even at the price of breaking through and reversing the cosmic order; he forgets that the living Socrates had not turned the universe upside down precisely because he already considered it anthropocentric; and because the cosmos had an inviolable binding force, art could not appear to him as an absolute reality. But Phaedrus also sees that this shadow, who wants to start his life over again, is, for this very reason, Socrates, the philosopher, to whom the mere fact of a life that has not found its decisiveness from complete insight is an annoyance—as his own life now appears retrospectively from Hades. “You must not wish to begin again,”63 Phaedrus objects. Socrates, however, has discovered the purpose of Hades in the use of this immeasurable leisure so as to judge himself again and again, to give ever different answers to the questionability of the lost life, to defend himself with the illusion against dissolving in nonexistence, as the living do against the recognition of their existence. The image of Anti-Socrates, who must be a “builder” [constructeur],64 is yet again—and this is the irony that accompanies every step of Hades-Socrates’ self-correction—the image of a seeker of truth. He, admittedly, now has a different and new concept of truth that does not conceive of truth as the prerequisite of correct action and identifies virtue with knowledge, but lets truth emerge from action, suspecting knowledge of the universe to be possible only by means of action, by putting oneself in the place of the very God who made the universe through action. In this “great act of constructing,”65 which in its perfection comes close to the master builder himself, the demiurge is understood solely through his engagement with chaos. Anti-Socrates sees the essential relation determining his work from the beginning not between the demiurge and the cosmos of ideas but in the confrontation of the will to order with the shapelessness and impurity of matter.66 The master builder, whom Anti-Socrates imagines himself to be, comes upon the already finished work of that demiurge, but for his part he sees it as so much chaos and raw material, as an unfinished work that is not sufficient for man and on which he again must set to work. Where the god stopped acting, the artist’s action begins. And the necessity of the architect and his action, which encounter nature as the given, but not as the binding, rests in the fact that the demiurge created the world only for himself, for his distraction or out of boredom; art draws its necessity precisely from the fact that it competes with nature’s disregard for man, that art imposes on nature consideration for and a focus on man: “The Demiurge was pursuing his own designs, which do not concern his creatures. The converse of this must come to pass.”67 Art is a teleology that is opposed to the ateleology of nature, has to overcome it, and force it into art’s order.68 Socrates’s train of thought—when viewed from its emergence in the objet ambigu, which seems to contain in itself the connection of nature and art as mere perspectives that are easily confused—has reached the extreme opposite, the antithetical alienation of nature and art. This makes it understandable that the enthusiasm of Anti-Socrates, who still carries in himself so much of Socrates in an ironic way, at the end of the dialogue turns into the melancholy of someone who, as a shadow in Hades, finally no longer trusts his own reality and who, through the rupture in the identity of his intellectual history, begins to doubt the authenticity of all of his thoughts, which appear to him as alienated from himself as if they had sprung from the imagination of someone still alive—and in this way, Socrates seems to restitute these thoughts to their author. In the end, then, and on the whole, it is a futile immortality.
The dialogue Eupalinos is central to Valéry’s work in that it contains and deploys almost the complete toolkit of the art theorist’s concepts. In addition, it suggests a confrontation with the metaphysical tradition that is hidden in or stands behind these concepts. But the meaning of the dialogue and its Socrates character goes a little further: an attempt is made not only to accept as a fact the reversal of the basic aesthetic concepts’ tradition, but to make it intelligible through its projection into the history of an identical person—identical beyond death—that of Socrates, who sees the conclusion of the whole tradition conceived as originating in him, compressed in his own life. This leads or misleads to positing analogies between the process of intellectual history and the fictional biography of Socrates. While the reader is nowhere encouraged to make this transfer, he is nowhere warned not to do so. The schema that would be obvious here could almost be described as a piece of biologism, that is, the basic biogenetic law according to which phylogenesis is repeated in ontogenesis, so that conclusions from the later to the former are admissible. For instance, if Valéry’s concept of nature proves to be extremely empty and unproductive, as the epitome of misleading and distracting orientations of the artist and of aesthetic theory, and if his Socrates turns out to be the one disappointed by this very nature, then this indeed creates a motivation for conversion in Hades, which centers the dialogue—but an interpretation that would attempt to use or transfer this as a schema of the historical process would be very close to an illusion if not already ensnared in it. The sufficient interpretation of the objet ambigu so central in the Eupalinos requires that we return once more to Valéry’s concept of nature. The figures of Socrates and Anti-Socrates possess a certain symmetry to one another, whose axis, as it were, is represented by the objet ambigu. It seemed that the result of the objet ambigu lay in the fact that the decision falls either on nature as this object’s horizon of origin—and then the theoretical consideration is the appropriate attitude—or that artificiality dominates the impression and the presumption of the object’s origin, and then the admiration of the object immediately continues into the will to attain the power to such creation as an artist. The antimetaphysical background of this Socrates has the effect that even the interrogation of the object already leads toward the alternative between nature or art, and this insoluble question as such implies Socrates’s philosophical turning inland. But this function of the objet ambigu, leading to the original alternative of ancient, traditional metaphysics, does not quite stand out as the solution that Valéry would have sought or found for himself. His concept of nature is, at bottom, not suited to constituting the alternative to art, and his concept of art is no longer essentially dependent on drawing its meaning from the opposition to a nature that is understood as unfinished, ugly, or poor. The bracket of the conceptual antithesis of nature and art remained effective in the whole process of intellectual history in that valuing the one side was possible always only at the expense of the other, that is, that nature’s primacy in being could only be stabilized by reducing all artificiality and artifice to the imitation of the ultimately binding exemplarity of nature; else, the accumulation of human self-valuation in art seemed to be feasible only through depriving nature of its essence [Entwesentlichung]. Valéry’s position, taken as a whole, is indicative of a neutralization of this antithesis and thus of an aesthetics beyond the traditional metaphysical fixation of expressive possibilities. The Socrates of the dialogue Eupalinos would then already have taken the wrong path by wanting to remove the objet ambigu from its indeterminacy; likewise, he would have taken a wrong—which in this context always means “philosophical”—approach even if he had decided to regard this object as a work of art and to retain it in enjoyment. The defining preliminary decision was the question, and not one of the possible answers. In fact, Hades-Socrates need not reproach himself: there was nothing in his younger self that would have enabled him to absorb the object’s indeterminacy and inability to be determined as such. Valéry’s aesthetic presuppositions, his concept of nature as well as his concept of art, are still beyond the last verdict that Anti-Socrates passes about himself in self-judgment. In this, above all, I see the significance of the peculiar resignation with which he, as it were, gives the floor back to his author.
In a note from Cahier B 1910, Valéry writes: “La ‘nature,’ c’est-à-dire la Donnée. Et c’est tout. Tout ce qui est initial. Tout commencement; l’éternelle donnée de toute transaction mentale, quelles que soient donnée et transaction, c’est nature—et rien d’autre ne l’est” [“Nature,” that is, the Given. And that’s all. All that is initial. All beginning; the eternal givenness of every mental transaction, whatever the given and the transaction may be, is nature—and nothing else is] (II 572). This definition of nature starts from its temporal relation to human action; nature is not a certain range of objects or processes, but what is present to man when he begins to be intellectually active and what in the “transaction” cannot and does not remain what it has been. Such action is by no means bound to the field of art; the essays on Leonardo are suffused by the basic idea that the theoretical hypothesis of the natural scientist is essentially nothing else but the inventor’s technical construction or the artist’s aesthetic constitution. Only the beginning is nature, and in this sense Socrates would have been right if he had considered the objet ambigu as “nature.” But for the ancient thinker, this would have meant something quite different, namely, to leave the object be in theoretical contemplation [Anschauung]. Man, as Valéry sees him, is not opposed to nature, he does not rival her, he does not build his cultural world into or beside the natural world, in competition with it; rather, as soon as he moves away from his beginning, as soon as he becomes involved in his “transaction,” nature ceases to be nature and dissolves in the transformations of the human mind. The most absurd program that humans can prepare for themselves is therefore the demand to go “back to nature.” In the Rhumbs, Valéry writes that there can be no more naive striving than that which wants to discover “nature” every thirty years. Nature, he writes, does not exist at all, or rather: what one considers to be the given is always already an “invention” [une fabrication].69 The idea of gaining a relation to the original state of things admittedly possesses an exhilarating power, but its presupposition—that there must be something that virginal—is a groundless imagination, for the sea, the trees, the suns, and, above all, the human eye itself, all that already is art, he writes, and art presupposes that what was initial and original has been forgotten.
In this way, we can understand that in Valéry there is no aesthetic antithesis between object-like figurativeness and nonfigurativeness [Gegenständlichkeit und Ungegenständlichkeit]. Valéry’s idea of painting, which he develops by the example of Leonardo, is certainly bound up with the object-like figurativeness of the painting, but this figurativeness is secondary and instrumental in relation to a nonfigurativeness, which in the artist is primarily present as the colors’ disposition on the surface. Only secondarily does he use objects as a vehicle of this disposition, so that the “induction”70 of the object-like thing leads back to the elementary structure of color that is restored in the viewer, just as—as Valéry puts it in a marginal note in the same passage—a piece of poetry finally finds its denouement in being read “musically.”71 Although the ateleology of nature justifies the artist in not adhering to the bindingness of its stock, and instead to make use of it for a new order, Valéry seems to assume a teleology of a different type, which conceives of the world as not only disposed to this servitude but, according to Mallarmé, whom Valéry quotes, also as urging toward being expressed. This has nothing to do with the statement that nature tends toward being imitated or represented. Valéry tellingly uses this Mallarmé quote in a passage in which he speaks of Leonardo’s excessive notion of painting, which he sees as the “the final goal” of a universal spirit’s efforts.72 The idea of an original nature more or less amounts to subtracting man and his creations from the total stock of reality, to think him away from this total stock and to afford the contradiction of a “view” of things without the eye. But “nature” is as much a linguistic hypostatization as “the world.” In this instance, thought has already freed itself from the autonomous powers of language and has paralyzed the immanently linguistic “realities.” The expression “nature” is of just this kind, Valéry believes: “It’s becoming a mere sound with no thought behind it. All these words seem more and more to be—just words.”73 He, the opponent of infinitism, joins ancient metaphysics in understanding the infinite as the indeterminate and nonexistent, and thus ascribes pure nominality to a universe that is “no longer any whole or center.”74 According to another note by Valéry in the Choses Tues, the fact that we nevertheless have the experience of reality of a natural world with which we are confronted—which endures alongside us and against us—is due to the resistance the things put up to our cognition. If no remnant of the enigmatic were ever left to be deciphered, then a completely illuminated universe would have no more permanence than an unveiled swindle (une escroquerie dévoilée) or the trick of a magician (un tour prestidigitateur) whose secret has been found out (II 506). The reality of the world is based on the resistance man meets, and the correlate of this resistance is the effort in which he measures himself. To this general concept of the relation of man and world belongs, as the outstanding special case, the work of the artist. This basic schema dominates the aesthetics of Valéry, it makes itself felt everywhere in his linguistic preferences, especially in his decisive rejection of the idea of inspiration that places the ease and obviousness of the artwork, which has been developed but not perfected, back at the origin of his conception, and thus before the conscious and accomplished part of the author. In the ease of what has become, the burden of its becoming pays off. Here, further light shines on the objet ambigu: its reality lies in the insurmountability of its ambiguity, in the unanswered questions that it takes back into the sea and that yet remain urgently close to Socrates going inland. But at the same time, this is also the description of the aesthetic work’s character of reality; it condenses the enigma the world sets against man anyway, but its impenetrability is no longer in any relation to man’s necessities of life. His reality does not need to be dissolved as a foreign and thus dangerous quantity; rather, one can let this reality be, resting in itself, because this is the mystery that man presents and assigns to himself. Unlike the scientist’s hypothesis, the work of art seeks not to dissolve the riddle of the given, but to substitute the human for foreign indissolubility, to put the pleasing, enjoyable indissolubility of the human work—whose character of reality as resistance is thus equivalent to the given but lacks the sting of theoretical unrest—in place of the agonizing indeterminacy of what is encountered from an inscrutable source. The interpretation of the work of art will therefore always be satisfied with a solution that is not the dissolution of the given but may leave conscious the indeterminacy of other possibilities, while the scientist’s theoretical hypothesis is burdened with the possibility of other, surpassing solutions, of which none can, however, definitively rule out that their verification may fail. The specific difference between aesthetic work and theoretical achievement is located in this aspect, while both have their generic identity in the structure of the “transaction.” The thematically fixed objecthood therefore is the work of art’s weakness; the thought must be hidden in the poem as the nutrients in the fruit that may be nourishing but only offers itself as enjoyment, so that one only feels pleasure while in fact taking in substance.75
Here, too, we can recognize the reason why in the letter to Duhamel cited above Valéry considers it necessary to correct traditional literary criticism by means of the principle that it is inadmissible to make conclusions from the mood of the work to its situation of origin. Valéry summarizes his self-observation that took place in the creation of The Young Fate: “Il n’y avait aucune sérénité en moi. Je pense donc que la sérénité de l’œuvre ne démontre pas la sérénité de l’être.… Sur ces questions, toute la critique littéraire me semble à réformer” [There was no serenity in me. I therefore think that the serenity of the work does not demonstrate the serenity of being.… On these questions, all of literary criticism seems to me to be in need of reform] (L 181). The poem’s formal weightlessness is an aesthetic effect that is valid for the reader’s perspective and produces the essential illusion of completion, but it is not normative for the author’s self-observation, who experiences his work as unfinished and the resistance as unbroken, and for whom no work can complete the challenging and affirmation of the self. Again, on the creation of The Young Fate, Valéry writes to Albert Mockel (1917, L 122–125) that the real benefit he had gained from this work was the “observations sur moi-même prises pendant le travail” [observations about myself made during the work]. A poetics of aesthetic production will therefore have to look very different from a poetics of aesthetic reception, without one excluding the other or invalidating it by contradiction; one will, in any case, have to ask about every statement to which of the two poetics it belongs. It is, then, not true that the viewer, spectator, or reader would have to repeat the very actions the author has taken, or should feel put into his situation and mood. The reader cannot share the author’s experiences; the author’s self-observation may gain more from the unsuccessful attempt to cope with the conditions of the work than from mastering them successfully—the reader obtains no immediate gain from such shipwrecks of the poet. In the draft of a letter to a friend intended for publication (1926; L 160f.), Valéry deliberately confronts the standpoint of the admiring reader of his verses with what these verses mean to him. Once again rejecting the mythology of inspiration, he goes back to the self-observation of the laboring poet, to “ces efforts de poète contre les étroites conditions que je m’étais données” [these poetic efforts against the narrow conditions that I had given myself], to the “problèmes sans issue” [dead-end problems], and describes the poet’s brain as a seabed on which lies the wreckage of many a poem that was shipwrecked by a trifle. Precisely these are the affairs of the spirit, he writes, and the observer learns more about them in defeat than in success, because consciousness and the experience of resistance are inseparable: “Ce qui se fait facilement se fait sans nous” [What is easily done can be done without us].
That which has objecthood appears as an aesthetic temptation that tends to set the conditions for its realization by itself; against this, the “narrow conditions” of form should keep the object from reaching the full presentation of its determinateness, but should push it back into that indeterminacy that allows the ambiguity of the merely aesthetic “object” to persist.76 The rhyme most clearly demonstrates the indifference between object and form; it pushes the object out of the poem’s dominant foreground, precisely by making its externality palpable: “Rhyme constitutes a law independent of the subject and is comparable to an external clockwork.”77 It is, Valéry says, the great benefit of the rhyme that it offends the simpleminded who, in their naïveté, believe that there is something more important under the sun than a convention, and who, just as naively, believe a thought could have greater depth and duration than any convention—and for that very reason, rhyme offers aesthetic enjoyment.78 Elsewhere, Valéry does not hesitate to explain this fact through a probability statement: if one starts from a fixed notion, it is much less probable to find a rhyme that fits it than if one starts from the rhyme and seeks a fitting literary “idea”—all poetry is founded on this fact, and in particular the poetry of the period between 1860 and 1880 (II 582). After all, this is the theory that underlies the aesthetic meaning of the objet ambigu. The aesthetic object does not possess the determinateness of a point, but rather the potentiality of a horizon. As poetic language relinquishes its firm attachment to objects and frees its intentionality from the full determination of these objects, indeed, as language in the final analysis contradicts itself and shatters its referential function, it becomes thing-like itself—even the objet ambigu that does not push man away from itself and to other, more authentic things. In The Nature of Things, Francis Ponge imagined language as a shell-like casing excreted by man. He thus took up the image of the objet ambigu by envisioning that after the extinction of our species, these empty shells would end up in the hands of other beings who look at them just as we look at shells on the seashore. We, however, are denied the chance to regard the linguistic shells as things unknown in their meaning—as Socrates considered the objet ambigu; to let ourselves encounter our speech shells as unknown things, we need to destroy the words’ use function, their objective meaning-value [Bedeutungswert], so that the words—still according to Ponge—become things: produced by us but not comprehensible to us. This ontology of the aesthetic object, which surrenders the criterion of the appropriateness of form to content and of language to that which is signified thereby, in doing so also forfeits its ability to rule on the question of the completion of the aesthetic work. “Instability” [Unbeständigkeit] essentially belongs to the aesthetic judgment, which, qua judgment, is constantly resisting the legitimate aesthetic illusion of perfection and compares the factual (as the in each case latest) state of the work with its possible final state. The statement that a work is completed fails because of its essential indeterminacy [Unbestimmtheit].79 This is related to the fact that the author is no more competent to evaluate and judge his work than the reader; the author judges, observes and controls only the process in which the work is produced, but not that work itself, as if it is only the telos of the process (this reminds us again of the architect Eupalinos). “When the work has appeared, its interpretation by the author has no more validity than any other by anyone else.”80
I would now like to try one final approach to the objet ambigu, taking as a cue a remark found in the second Leonardo essay of 1919.81 Here, Valéry speaks of a substantial difference between the artist and the philosopher; the artist’s sense of wonder related not to the fact that anything exists at all, but that the things are as they are and not different. It should be noted that these sentences are preceded by a discussion of the necessary incomprehensibility of death for consciousness.82 The consideration of absolute contingency, of the possible nonexistence of the world, appears here as an alternative without any meaning and from which nothing can be inferred. But the relative contingency that the world might be different than it is, implies, as Valéry puts it, “the secret of inventors,”83 and that means that the “pattern [figure] of this world”84 can be regarded as arbitrary and surpassable. The metaphysical radicalism of Leibniz’s question: cur aliquid potius quam nihil [why something should come to exist rather than nothing]85 is pushed aside; but similarly, the question of why this and no other world exists is not asked to prove its sufficient reason, but in the sole interest of legitimizing the claim of art to leave the factual world aside and turn to the unrealized. Amazed by the facticity of the world, consciousness perceives its own freedom. What, for philosophy, must negatively tend toward the rational annoyance at its limitation in asking for grounds becomes, for aesthetics, a positive impulse and justification of its will to regard nature as that which is merely given. This freedom is based on the nature of consciousness as a formalism, as a system of variables that can factually be occupied; consciousness assures itself that things might be different from what they are, without itself having to be otherwise than it is.86 The body and the world appear to it therefore as almost arbitrary restrictions on its function. Art and technology are based on the fact that the event “world” is essentially material, and the event “consciousness,” essentially formal. Consciousness represents a “surplus” over the needs of the factually given world, a surplus that as such can be, and actually is, formulated and represented in art. Art is the reflection of consciousness in its transcendence of the world and its autonomy from it. Therein lies the precedence of the formal in art; it does not vary facticity but reflects possibility itself. The objet ambigu now is an object that cannot be accommodated in the factual world, and that eludes classifiability and identifiability. It is potentially aesthetic because it does not represent a “restriction,”87 but already appears to be in the process of breaking it. Socrates, who has not yet converted to Anti-Socrates, throws this doubtful object into the sea, because he does not and cannot know anything of the world’s facticity, since for him there can only be the world that actually exists; because of that, he has to reject the objet ambigu’s transcendent character, which he cannot bring to language. At the same time, it becomes clear what is actually enjoyable in aesthetic enjoyment. The aesthetic-receptive subject does not enjoy the object as such and no specific aspect of it; rather, the subject enjoys, through the object or by way of it, its own not-being-constrained by the factual world, its freedom toward the “given.” The aesthetic object, considered from the perspective of the world, is the improbable; considered from the perspective of consciousness, it is (given the possible’s indeterminacy compared to reality’s finitude) pure probability, whose absence always puts the factual under the unbearable suspicion of being necessary.88
Translated by Hannes Bajohr
Originally published as “Sokrates und das objet ambigu: Paul Valérys Auseinandersetzung mit der Tradition der Ontologie des ästhetischen Gegenstandes,” in EPIMELEIA: Die Sorge der Philosophie um den Menschen. Festschrift für Helmut Kuhn, ed. Franz Wiedmann (Munich: Pustet), 285–323; from Hans Blumenberg, Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 74–111.
1. I quote Valéry’s works according to the two-volume Pléiade edition with volume and page number; the general correspondence, Lettres à quelques-uns (Paris: Gallimard, 1952) is abbreviated as L, and the correspondence with André Gide (André Gide/Paul Valéry, Correspondance 1890–1943 (Paris: Gallimard, 1955) as GV.
2. Valéry writes the statement that he only produces prose by commission and request in a letter to Jean de la Tour, July 28, 1933, where he adds, illuminating the circumstances of such commissions: “sujet imposé et parfois conditions fort bizarres” [imposed topics and sometimes perfectly bizarre conditions] (L 207).
3. As early as 1893, Gide had hinted to Valéry that nevertheless the genre of the dialogues of the dead contained untapped possibilities: “Mais le dialogue des Morts est peut-être possible entre autre chose que des poncifs” [But, among other clichés, the dialogue of the dead is maybe possible] (GV 187).
4. Paul Valéry, Eupalinos, or The Architect, in Dialogues, trans. William M. Stewart (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956), 65.
5. Valéry, Eupalinos, or The Architect, 66.
6. Valéry, 67.
7. Valéry, 67.
8. Valéry, 67.
9. Valéry, 70.
10. Valéry, 70. In 1906, Valéry had written to Gide: “But the final shape of constructed things no longer attracts me. I am too concerned with things under construction.” André Gide/Paul Valéry, Self-Portraits: The Gide/Valéry Letters 1890–1942 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 252.
11. Valéry, Eupalinos, 70.
12. Valéry, 71.
13. Valéry, 75.
14. Valéry, 75.
15. Valéry, 75.
16. Valéry, 75.
17. Valéry, 75.
18. Valéry, 81.
19. Granted, the temple of Eupalinos is an image, too, for it is the memory of a Corinthian girl put into stone, but it is expressly this lover’s “mathematical image,” Valéry, 82. The concept of image is used almost ironically here.
20. The Pythagorean element in Platonism has somewhat mitigated the sharpness of the difference that must have existed between an ontology, for which authentic being excludes the element of time, and an art, which includes it so essentially and necessarily that of it no nontemporal reality can be thought. It is not by accident that music first found an adequate foundation in its own reality in that epoch, which for the first time granted time an absolute reality. Even late Scholasticism still found it difficult to bring to systematic congruence the singing of the blessed in heaven and its necessary temporality (that is as the transience of each of its elements) with the eternal physis of heaven.
21. Valéry, Eupalinos, 86.
22. Valéry, 86.
23. Valéry, 84.
24. Valéry, 90.
25. Valéry, 92.
26. Valéry, 91.
27. Valéry, 96.
28. Valéry, 97.
29. Valéry, 100.
30. Valéry, 100.
31. Valéry, 95.
32. Valéry, 109.
33. At this point, it is necessary to recall how Valéry treated another central figure of his chosen ancestry, namely, Leonardo da Vinci. Especially in the second of the three great essays on Leonardo, the “Note and Digression” of 1919, he described his method of penetrating into the presence of a historical figure [historische Gestalt]. The true task of historical understanding is, according to Valéry, to go back to the possibility of the figure and to understand the historical and real Leonardo, who is attested to in his works and the sources, from the “potential Leonardo.” Paul Valéry, “Note and Digression,” Leonardo Poe Mallarmé, 70. Just as the Socrates of Eupalinos, Leonardo, too—of whom we know much more historically—is the expression of an “inner law” conditioned by factual circumstances and decisions, a Gestalt formula in which we grasp the latitude of the freedom of an existence’s self-expression. What is at issue in historical understanding is the relation of potentiality and decision, that is, the freedom from which history becomes fact, and not this fact as such. Here, also, the root of Valéry’s opposition against any Platonizing ontology becomes recognizable: the preformation of appearance in ideality leaves, systematically, no place for freedom. The dialogue Eupalinos thus again takes up the theme and method of the Leonardo essays in a more audacious and poetic conception, in which the historical figure is, as it were, given the “opportunity” to find its way back to its own potentiality in a kind of anamnesis of that “inner law” that resides in the “force that has no object” (ibid., 70, 95). This is closely connected with the theory of pure consciousness as a formal system that can be occupied variably (see below), which is developed in the essays on Leonardo. This theory also determines what, if anything, can “mean something” and thus can occupy a position, and it determines what must remain excluded as an incomprehensibility. The mutual illustrative relation of the essay on Leonardo and the Eupalinos cannot be exhausted here; only the function of music in the second Leonardo essay must be pointed out, which metaphorically represents the “pure I” as the “power of the corresponding universe” (“Note and Digression,” 102; translation modified). [Such an exhaustive account can be found in Hans Blumenberg, “Paul Valérys möglicher Leonardo da Vinci: Vortrag in der Akademie der Künste in Berlin am 21. 4. 1966,” Forschungen zu Paul Valéry/Recherches Valéryennes 25 (2012): 193–227.]
34. Valéry, Eupalinos, 110.
35. [Valéry, 81.]
36. Valéry, 113.
37. Valéry, 114.
38. See, for instance, Parmenides 130a–e.
39. Valéry, Eupalinos, 114.
40. The border zone between land and sea as a region in which purely quantitative units of force become images—that is, characteristic evidence of the link between formula and Gestalt—already appeared in 1893 in a letter to Gide. In it, Valéry articulates the writer’s admiration for the mathematician, whose ability to make reality comprehensible he had stumbled upon by randomly opening Laplace’s work: He was able to grasp in formulas “la déglution de la mer” [the swallowing of the sea] in the calculable action of the tides, and could nevertheless—or rather, precisely because of this—summon the spectacle without any image: “le glouglou et le déhanchement m’en vint, le ton d’acier, le gonflement et les fuites précipitées à l’Ouest. Le mot: syzygie! l’odeur de ce machin qui bouge et luit entre azimuths, coordonnées, parallaxes, etc., la hauteur du soleil,—tout” [the gurgle and the sway came to me, the tone of steel, the swelling, the sudden leakage to the West. The word: syzygy!—the smell of that gadget that moves and shines between azimuths, coordinates, parallaxes, etc., the height of the sun—everything]. Paul Valéry, “Letter to André Gide, August 26, 1893,” Moi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 143.
41. [Valéry, Eupalinos, 115–116.]
42. [Valéry, 115. Translation modified.]
43. [Valéry, 116.]
44. In the letter to Souday (May 1, 1923, L 146) already quoted above, Valéry describes this theme as the véritable pensée [true thought] in the intention of the Eupalinos: “J’aurais essayé de faire voir que la pensée pure et la recherche de la vérité en soi ne peuvent jamais aspirer qu’à la découverte ou à la construction de quelque forme. Je n’oppose pas tout philosophe à l’artiste, mais seulement m’oppose à celui-ci le philosophe qui ne parvient pas à cette forme finie, ou qui ne se doute pas qu’elle seule peut être l’objet d’une recherche rationnelle et consciente” [I tried to show that pure thought and the search for truth in itself can only aspire to the discovery or construction of forms. I do not set the philosopher against the artist, but only set against him the philosopher who does not reach this finished form, or who does not doubt that it alone can be the object of rational and conscious study]. The finitude of form as an infinite task—that is, a fundamental idea that strikes Valéry repeatedly, especially in relation to his own philosophical notes, in which The System once seemed to announce itself (Paul Valéry, “Letter to André Gide, February 22, 1897,” Moi, 188). A quarter of a century later, he writes about tout ce fatras [all this junk], about his own inertia in the face of the hopeless demand for ordering and forming this hylē: “et enfin songer à la forme, terrible affaire, et infinie!” [and finally, to contemplate form, a terrible affair, and infinite!] (L 150). One’s own philosophy, “ma philosophie,” in quotation marks, that is, what ought to have become “mon œuvre véritable” [my own true work], is now “exactement le contraire d’une philosophie” [exactly the opposite of a philosophy]. Another ten years later, the antithesis of philosophy and art has resolved in the slogan “philosophy as art.” “Le philosophe ne veut pas avouer qu’il fait et ne peut faire qu’œuvre d’art et se refuse à centrer cette œuvre sur soi-même, tel qu’il est. Je crois que prétendre a quelque chose de plus est une absurdité” [The philosopher does not want to admit that he makes, and can only make, a work of art, and he refuses to center that work in himself, such as he is. I think that to pretend to anything more is an absurdity] (L 208, July 28, 1933). Another decade later, Valéry confesses to someone who inquires into the word “nothingness” in his works, “que je ne suis point philosophe le moins du monde, peut-être même quelque chose comme un anti-philosophe” [that I am not a philosopher in the least, perhaps even something like an anti-philosopher]. This is grounded on the relation to language, its formal rather than material use, so that also the one Néant [nothingness] that was inquired after is only used “comme un peintre emploie une certaine couleur: il a besoin d’un noir, il met un noir” [as a painter uses a certain color: he needs some black, he applies some black] (L 242f., November 23, 1943). The inclusion of Hades-Socrates in the process that becomes visible and its immanent finality is easy to carry out according to this.
45. [Valéry, L 144.]
46. [Valéry, Eupalinos, 116.]
47. Valéry, Eupalinos, 118.
48. Paul Valéry, “Introduction to the Method of Leonardo,” in Leonardo Poe Mallarmé, 20.
49. Valéry, “Introduction to the Method of Leonardo,” 20.
50. Valéry, 19.
51. Valéry, 22.
52. Valéry, 27.
53. Valéry, Eupalinos,” 119.
54. Paul Valéry, “Rhumbs,” in Analects (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 240.
55. Valéry, Eupalinos, 120.
56. Valéry, 121.
57. [Valéry, 124.]
58. Valéry, 122–123.
59. Valéry, 123. [Translation modified.]
60. Valéry, 125. Pascal apostrophes, like these, are innumerable in Valéry. Only their careful interpretation could provide elucidation about the inner connection between anti-Platonisms and anti-Pascalisms. In 1923, on the occasion of Pascal’s 300th birthday, Valéry published the complete paraphrasing of the pensée “Le silence éternel.” Paul Valéry, “Variations on a Pensée,” Masters and Friends (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 86–107. In a letter to Pierre Louÿs (May 21, 1917, L 121), he announces a “éreintement sauvage” [savage roasting] of the Pensées, but with the balancing addition “au bénéfice du ‘Traité de l’équilibre des liqueurs’ ” [with the benefit of the doubt granted the “Treatise on the Equilibrium of Liquids”]. The biggest annoyance to him is the argument of the wager (L 165; alluding to it, with the finest irony, in the letter on the clothing of a nun: L 202–203); the conciliatory discovery that Pascal had discarded the sheet from the preparatory work for the apology was made only after Valéry’s death. Regarding these materials as a whole, I would limit myself here to the pithy formula in which Valéry expressed his own opposition to Pascal as that of Leonardo to Pascal: “An abyss would make him think of a bridge” (Valéry, “Note and Digression,” 79). Faust, too, on the hermit’s ridge in My Faust, is an anti-Pascal when he says: “Looking into the pit of an abyss, I can feel curiosity. More often, indifference.” Paul Valéry, “My Faust,” in Plays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 151.
61. Valéry, Eupalinos, 141.
62. [Valéry, 144.]
63. Valéry, 143.
64. [Valéry, 83.]
65. [Valéry, 146.]
66. Valéry, 146–147.
67. Valéry, 148.
68. In Valéry’s Socrates, two motivational strands of the technical-artistic interpretation of the world are formulated: first, the idea of an as-yet-unfinished universe, either predisposed to the definition of man as a “creative” being, or presenting itself as a bare fact in need of his “work”; second, self-assertion against a nature that is no longer thought capable of being the cosmos, or in which man can no longer believe that he is provided for and equipped with a sufficient fund of existence. I refer here to two other works of mine: the section “Incomplete Universe” in Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 55–61, and “Ordnungsschwund und Selbstbehauptung: Über Weltverstehen und Weltverhalten im Werden der technischen Epoche,” in Das Problem der Ordnung: VI. Deutscher Kongreß für Philosophie, München 1960, ed. Helmut Kuhn and Franz Wiedmann (Meisenheim: Hain, 1962), 37–57.
69. Valéry, Rhumbs, 186.
70. Valéry, “Method of Leonardo,” 46.
71. Valéry, 47.
72. Paul Valéry, “Leonardo and the Philosophers,” in Leonardo Poe Mallarmé, 143.
73. Valéry, Rhumbs, 190.
74. Paul Valéry, “Bad Thoughts and Not So Bad,” Analects, 376.
75. Paul Valéry, “Literature,” Hudson Review 2, no. 4 (1950): 539.
76. Valéry brought the whole complex described into contact with formulas for the indeterminacy of that which has objecthood long before the Eupalinos, such as “une étrange substance” [a strange substance] in the important note of the Cahier B 1910 (II 592), the “objet vague” [vague object], which is the presupposition of invention and its self-experience (“j’invente, donc je suis” [I invent, therefore I am]) (II 594). The emphasis on the hyletic aspect and the “travail contre ce hasard” [the work against chance] is directed against the “unbearable idea” of poetic inspiration (II 681), which implies that what costs nothing is the most valuable (II 550), that is, against the acheiropoieton as the boundary notion of the aesthetic conception. That the indeterminate and formless—as opposed to the human and authentic language estranged from things—could be, so to speak, the language of things themselves, things not yet “objectified,” comes to light in a nice passage in a letter to Madame Gide, in which he reports on his son Claude’s first experiments at producing sounds: “Il commence à tenir des discours informes. Mais cela me connaît. L’informe est ma partie. Lui, l’enfant, profère tout d’abord ce que je cherche si souvent, tuant la phrase, cassant le mot, évoquant le babil même des organes, c’est-à-dire des … choses!” [He begins to give shapeless speeches. But that I know. The shapeless is my subject. He, the child, first utters what I am looking for so often, killing the sentence, breaking the word, evoking the very babbling of organs, that is to say … things!] (December 26, 1903; GV 402).
77. Valéry, “Literature,” 543.
78. Valéry, 543.
79. Valéry, 544.
80. Valéry, 547.
81. Valéry, “Note and Digression,” 93.
82. Valéry, 91.
83. Valéry, 93.
84. Valéry, 93.
85. [Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “On the Radical Origination of Things,” in Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 487.]
86. Valéry, “Note and Digression,” 94.
87. [Valéry, 94.]
88. The present work is the first of a four-part study of Valéry, which will also consist of the chapters “Leonardo,” “Faust,” and “Monsieur Teste.” I owe essential insights to a seminar on Valéry’s poetics that was held in the summer of 1962 together with my colleague at Gießen, Hans Robert Jauß.