Paul Valéry’s Vitalism: Life and Entropy

Abstract Paul Valéry’s interest in the life sciences is an important yet little-studied aspect of his work. Although Valéry was known primarily as a reader of mathematics and physics, his fascination with the life sciences has often been ignored or regarded as mere curiosity. This article examines Valéry’s writing on the subject of biology by focusing on the unique status he accords to the notion of life. In both his theoretical and poetic writings, Valéry addresses the notion of life as a category endowed with distinct ontological attributes — as a phenomenon that encompasses a distinct type of order. Life, as an independent force, is capable of resisting and even reversing the principle of entropy, which Valéry regards as a universal tendency towards degradation and dispersion that affects all inanimate matter. Valéry’s thought thus exhibits a complicated yet clear affinity with the intellectual tradition known as vitalism. The article discusses this affinity by analysing the presence of vitalist ideas and imagery in Valéry’s corpus, giving special attention to his most expressly ‘biological’ work, the essay ‘L’Homme et la coquille’ (‘The Man and the Seashell’).