The Outlook for Intelligence

by Paul Valéry, Denise Folliot (Translator), Jackson Mathews (Translator)

The description for this book, The Outlook for Intelligence: (With a preface by Francois Valery), will be forthcoming.

Genres: Philosophy, Essays, Nonfiction, France, Literature

258 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry (October 30, 1871 - July 20, 1945 ) was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher.

His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath. In addition to his fiction (poetry, drama and dialogues), he also wrote many essays and aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events.

Valéry is best known as a poet, and is sometimes considered to be the last of the French Symbolists. But he published fewer than a hundred poems, and none that drew much attention. On the night of 4 October 1892, during a heavy storm, Paul Valéry entered an existential crisis, which made a big impact on his writing career. Around 1898, his writing activity even came to a near-standstill, due partly to the death of his mentor Stéphane Mallarmé and for nearly twenty years from that time on, Valery did not publish a single word until 1917, when he finally broke this 'Great Silence' with the publication of La Jeune Parque at forty-six years of age. This obscure but superbly musical masterpiece, of 512 alexandrine lines in rhyming pairs, had taken him four years to complete, and immediately secured his fame. It is esteemed by many in France as the greatest French poem of the 20th century.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short book won’t take you long to read.

Actually, it’s only a rather metaphysical - in the broader, ruminative sense - essay.

But as a record of the fin-de-siècle rêveries of a noble - again in the broader sense - clear, and disinterested French writer of the muddled entre-deux-guerres thirties on what mankind’s future might hold, it is wonderful.

Just look at the quotation below!

Society, says this scientifically, mathematically and theoretically minded man Valéry, exists for the isolated and rare blossoms it produces.

And that’s from a largely ineffectual but intellectually great writer who wrote only for the delight of a select few who might enjoy his meditations.

An intellectual titan, but in practice, just a weary old man with a perpetually quizzical appearance - an old man who NEVER lost his sense of wonder at the infinite varieties and mysteries of literature and science.

And saw as sacrosanct his wide-ranging intellectual freedom. As I did, and still do.

Back when I first read him, in 1968, I was a uni freshman...

In the first semester of college, football (and drinking!) remained the choice autumn diversions of most uni newbies. And, to a certain small extent, I went along with the routine.

My prep work for this game - the Canadian championship for which our boys were competing - was to buy a pint of Lemon Gin; and to borrow a copy of Valéry’s Meditations on a Seashell from our central library.

My planned inebriation went badly awry, thankfully, when - during the first quarter of the game - I passed my gin to Big Paul, my travelling companion, for a snort... and he dropped it.

Yikes: back then all Mickies were made of glass.

So, quite ruefully, I turned my attention to the game, after tossing some murderously choice words in the direction of my inept seat mate in those Toronto bleachers.

The game was quite good.

We clobbered the team from Western Canada. The Jubilation was universal among my fellow bus passengers. And of course, most of them passed out on the bus during the return trip to our campus...

We had won the Vanier Cup!

But I, sober as a judge, was led ever onwards through the densely worded landscape of a Valérian paysage moralisé of dreams, recollections and ever-unattainable conclusions about the oneiric and symbolic value of seashells to the cultivated imagination.

And, you know what?

In the end I was glad Big Paul dropped that bottle.

For, clear-headed as I now was, I had found a new fave author:

A writer whose wonderful dreamscapes seemed inexhaustible to my youthful mind!

[Szplug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jaysus, but can Valéry ever string together one polished and pearly sentence after another. The words—lovingly translated by the duo of Mathews and Folliot—glide across the mind like a silk streamer, producing a velvet mental tickling and leaving the heady literary scent of a seven o'clock brandy when their final syllables slide down the cerebral funnel towards the frictionless and labyrinthine depths that comprise the storehouse of one's soul. I like the cut of his jib—such as his opening remark in the foreword he penned back in that inclement period of 1931:

This little collection is dedicated above all to those persons who have no system and belong to no party and are therefore still free to doubt whatever is doubtful and to maintain what is not.

The European events he refers to are, of course, quite dated, but his skeptical, pragmatic, and searching intelligence is such that each elegant essay is bursting at the seams with a fulgid thought that never gets old. One of the shorter pieces—A Fond Note on Myth—is crammed to the brim with the kind of prose that ripples and refreshes like an eventide wind:

She is worried about my attitude toward God and love, whether I have faith in both; she would like to know if pure poetry is fatal to feeling, and asks me if I practice analyzing my dreams as is done in Central Europe, where no right-thinking person fails to fish up out of his own depths every morning some abysmal enormity, some obscenely shaped octopus he is proud to have fostered...Myth is the name of everything that exists and abides with speech as its only cause...Myths decompose in the light within us made up of the combined presence of our body and the utmost degree of consciousness...What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving toward a phantom. We can love only what we can create.

A fitting example of the man's natural genius is The Conquest of Method, a piece he whipped off for a British magazine in the waning years of the nineteenth century—Valéry, far from an expert on the subject, applied his acute powers of observation and reasoning to the subject of the German Empire, laying out for his British—and French—readers the manner in which the Germans had methodically and carefully and thoroughly set out to vault their energetic and populous nation, one only recently united under a common purpose and government, into the highest echelon of the first tier of nations. Their methodology consisted of studying what had worked for their Age of Empire competitors, giving the results the typical and required German refinements, and then setting out to implement their vision in a manner that detailedly configured the requisite support networks, educational institutions, government participation and oversight, bureaucratic organization, economic infrastructure, etc. An off-the-cuff article from the brilliant Frenchman presaged the entirety of the imposing and disciplined structure the Germans would bring to their military, an all-around competency that came close to spelling disaster for the French in the opening weeks of the First World War. Now I want his entire lengthy—and goddamn expensive—collected works.

[Henri Pech de Pluvinel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Effrayant.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a remarkable collection of essay that speak or in conversation with our current moment. Valéry intuited these massive changes that occured from the transition of early-mid Modernity to what we can call late-Modernity. His writing is absolutely beautiful as well.

One of the essays in this collection inspired this piece on - Napoleon, Mad Max, DODGE, and Trump.

https://medium.com/@WeWillNotBeFlatte...

[TL · Rating 5 out of 5]

Valéry is a skeptical shooting star. Don't forget him.

On History [1931] (entire)

'History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. Its properties are well known. It causes dreams, it intoxicates whole peoples, gives them false memories, quickens their reflexes, keeps their old wounds open, torments them in their repose, leads them into delusions either of grandeur or persecution, and makes nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable, and vain.

History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.

How many books have been written entitled "the lesson of this, the teaching of that"! Nothing could make more absurd reading, after the events that actually followed, instead of the ones the books told us would be the way of the future.

In the present state of the world the danger of letting oneself be seduced by history is greater than it ever was.

The political phenomena of our time are accompanied and complicated by an unexampled change of scale, or rather by a change in the order of things. The world to which we are beginning to belong [1931], both men and nations, is only similar to the world that was once familiar to use. The system of causes controlling the fate of every one of us, and now extending over the whole globe, makes it reverberate throughout at every shock; there are no more questions that can be settled by being settled at one point.

History as it was formerly conceived was pictured as a group of parallel tables, between which certain transverse accidentals were sometimes marked here and there. A few attempts at synchronization produced no results, apart from a kind of demonstration of their futility. What was happening in Peking in Caesar's time, or on the Zambezi in Napoleon's time, happened on another planet. But melodic history is no longer possible. All political themes are now intermingled, and each event as it occurs immediately takes on a number of simultaneous and inseparable meanings.

The policy of a Richelieu or a Bismarck loses its way and its meaning in these new surroundings. The notions they employed in their schemes, the aims they could propose to the ambition of their peoples, the forces that figured in their calculations, all these have become unimportant. The chief business of politicians was—and still is, for some—to acquire territory. Force was applied, the coveted land was taken from someone, and that was that. But who can fail to see that those enterprises which used to be limited to a talk followed by a duel followed by a pact, will in the future inspire such inevitable generalizations as nothing can ever happen again without the whole world's taking a hand; that no one will ever be able to predict or circumscribe the almost immediate consequences of any undertaking whatsoever.

All the genius of the great governments of the past has been exhausted, rendered impotent and even useless by the enlarged field and the greater number of connections between political phenomena, for there is no genius, no vigor of character or intellect, no tradition—even the British—that can henceforward pride itself on countering or modifying at will the mood of reactions of a human world in which the old geometry of history and the old mechanics of politics no longer in the least apply.

Europe makes me think of an object suddenly transported into a more complex space where all its known characteristics, though remaining the same in appearance, are subjected to quite different relations. In particular, the forecasts that were possible, the traditional calculations, have become emptier than they ever were.

The aftermath of the recent war [WWI] has shown us events that would formerly have determined for a long time, and precisely in the direction they indicated, the shape and progress of general policy; but now, after a few years and in consequence of the number of parties engaged, the enlargement of the theater and the complication of interests, those events are deprived of their energy and absorbed or contradicted by their immediate consequences.

We must expect such transformations to become the rule. The farther we go the less simple and predictable the effect will be, and the less any political operations and even interventions of force—in a word, obvious and direct action—will turn out as they were expected to do. The sizes, areas and masses involved, their relations, the impossibility of localizing anything, the prompt repercussions, all will more and more impose a policy very different from the existing one.

Effects are so rapidly becoming incalculable from their causes, and even contradictory to their causes, that henceforward it will perhaps be thought puerile, dangerous, and senseless to look for the causal event, to try to produce it or prevent it; perhaps the political mind will stop thinking in terms of events, a habit that is essentially due to history and sustained by it. It is not that there will be no more events and even "monumental moments" in time; there will be immense ones! But those whose function it is to anticipate them, to prepare for them or against them, will necessarily learn more and more to be wary of their sequel. It will not be enough to have both desire and ability to engage in an undertaking. Nothing was more completely ruined by the last war than the pretension to foresight. But it was not from any lack of knowledge of history, surely?' (114-7)

[Barak · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first encountered this thinker when reading "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), by Walter Benjamin, where at the top was placed a quotation by Valéry. I "wrote" back then a mental note to read him one day. Luckily, I ended up acting on it, if many years later.

I was highly impressed by the prescience of Valéry on many topics, predicting trends that took decades to materialize, while at the same time claiming that if he learned anything looking back 50 years, is that there is no way to predict the next 50 years. Well, he did manage to predict the deterioration of culture, the reduction in book reading and in attention spans, and even, to a large extent, the invention of Audio books. But don't take my word for it; rather, read his essays for yourselves.

[Ellyrah · Rating 2 out of 5]

C'est un râleur ce Paul Valéry. Tout le livre n'est qu'une longue plainte. Tout est critiqué, absolument tout : le langage, les hobbies, l'avancée scientifique, l'architecture, l'éducation... Mais jamais il ne propose une solution ou évoque les bons côtés. Il diabolise la cible de ses critiques incessantes et complexifie ses propos avec des tournures de phrases qui n'ont ni queue ni tête pour aucune raison valable. Il fait comme tant d'autres ont fait, font et feront après lui : il critique le monde moderne et les futures générations qui ne sont encore que des enfants et des ados.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 3 out of 5]

The selection is a bit repetitive but interesting bits crop up in each one.

[Assia · Rating 3 out of 5]

(1935)

[Isabelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ceci est un livre à lire ou à relire parce que nous y trouvons les traces de ce que nous sommes, indubitablement ce que nous avons été, et de ce que nous pourrions cesser d'être

[Marie Bouteille · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ecrit en 1935, on a l'impression qu'il s'agit de notre époque. Je serais curieuse d'entendre ce que Paul Valéry aurait à nous dire s'il écrivait une analyse de notre époque.

[Tarbuckle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Il n'y a que les montagnes qui ne se rencontrent pas. C'est le monde moderne comme on le voit par les yeux de l'homme presque parfait. N'atermoye pas de suite ni ne réfléchis à l'épreuve, mais lis.