Cahiers / Notebooks 3 [Hardcover]

Valéry Paul (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 624 pages
• Publisher: Peter Lang (July 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3631367643
• ISBN-13: 978-3631367643
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,880,249 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Volume 3: Explores Psychology, September 19, 2008

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P. Nagy "revreader" (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cahiers / Notebooks 3 (Hardcover)

Cahiers: Notebooks (Volume 3) by Paul Valéry, chief editor and translations by Brian Stimpson, translations by (Peter Lang) This volume explores the parameters of mind in its affective and intellectual limits. As always Valéry circles against the common drift seeking a personal and sometimes downright idiosyncratic basis for experience as his own. As in the previous two volumes this is the best representation of his notebooks in English.
The present volume takes forward the investigation into the nature of intellec­tual and affective being which is introduced in volume 1 of Valéry's Cahiers/ Notebooks, and the exploration of the different dimensions and expressions of thought and creativity in volume 2. It is perhaps not surprising that an enterprise devoted to examining the functioning of the human mind in all its aspects, should concern itself so specifically and so comprehensively with the different facets of 'Psychology' as are grouped together in the present volume. What is rather more astonishing is to note, firstly, the full extent and range of Valéry's enquiries, which were begun, if not in a total vacuum of knowledge, certainly at a time when psychology was in its infancy as a human science; and secondly, that even as the subject evolved rapidly throughout the early part of the twentieth century, Valéry's approach remains rigorously personal, at times even, for certain readers, idiosyncratic, but always radically alternative in its determination to chal­lenge received wisdom.
Many of the notes reveal extensive readings on the subject and a close famil­iarity with the scientific journals of his day. It was perhaps inevitable that as the 'sciences of the mind' developed, they would adopt the methodologies of the pure sciences of the time, establishing their credentials through the specialism of focus. But always one encounters in Valéry's notes his determination to bring his own 'way of looking at problems, seeking to move the questions on to a higher level of integrated, systemic analysis. Nowadays we might be tempted to call his approach holistic, such is the insistence upon the living system as a complex whole, composed of many separate but interrelated factors -- some of which we are aware of, some of which have an autonomous function, unbeknown to us, but ever in the background -- all of which are constantly responding to their mi­lieu.
To read these passages is not only to be presented with a challenge to the orthodoxies of Valéry's own times, but to be brought up against some myths surrounding Valéry himself, which have tended to see him as irrevocably assert­ing the power of ratiocination, of mind over body, of intellect over emotion. In fact, analysis of the functioning of the mind encompasses conscious and uncon­scious responses alike; his recognition of the power of the imagination to pro­voke deeply visceral reactions leads him to interrogate the very nature of mental images; his fascination with dreams and dreaming is explored in parallel to the different approaches of Surrealism or Psychoanalysis. And while Descartes barely figures in these pages (unlike the scientific chapters in volume 4 and PHILO­SOPHY in volume 5), there is underlying all the ideas, a constant interrogation and rebuttal of Cartesian dualism. The understanding of the mind is seen as in­dissolubly linked to a deepening reflection upon the self's sensory and emotional responses both in the lived present and in the past-made-present that is memory, each of these reactions in turn rooted in the experiential encounter with the world around. Hence the profound significance of Valéry's triad: Corps-Esprit-­Monde, or CEM, representing the multi-faceted connections of Body-Mind­-World.
The first chapter PSYCHOLOGY, aims to analyse the nature of mind in terms of a theory of the operations it performs; Valéry describes it as a pattern of in­terlocking mechanisms that is constant and independent of its application and he frequently expresses this in terms of mathematical analogies: it is a geometry with no reference to particular events, or an algebra in which the particular values of x and y are subordinate to the established relations between x and y. SOMA AND CEM is concerned with the interaction of the mind and the body both with each other and with the context of the surrounding world in which they function; taken together they are the 'three cardinal points of knowledge', the 'three at­tributes or dimensions of sensibility'. ATTENTION considers the active process involved in the focusing of consciousness upon a particular phenomenon, a pro­cess which is seen by Valéry as a higher form of accommodation and coordin­ation. SENSIBILITY examines the role of the senses and the feelings in the recep­tion and decoding of impressions received from the physical world, which in­cludes the internal world of the body. MEMORY introduces the element of time, and here Valéry looks at the relation between past and present experiences and at the respective roles of mind and sense in the creation and assimilation of memories. Finally, DREAM examines the nature of mental activity in sleep, in the waking state, as well as in the crucial intermediate states of transition from one to the other.
Despite the differences of emphasis that these distinct fields of enquiry repre­sent, a certain underlying current permeates all the chapters and most clearly, perhaps, in the chapter DREAM. In his examination of the interaction of mind and sensibility, inner and outer worlds, Valéry's language frequently reveals a vi­sion of that interaction as more akin to a battle than a partnership. In that battle, although everything is staked on the victory of the mind, which is essentially the victory of the Self, he is obliged to confront the limits of that power and the full force of other factors and constraints, including of course, the unconscious ('This business of the unconscious really needs to be sorted out' he writes in PSYCH­OLOGY). What emerges, above all, is Valéry's sustained attempt to delineate the structures and movements of consciousness as an integral process that functions independently of the objects of consciousness. Each of the areas represented by the chapters in this volume serves as an opportunity to explore the limits of this activity, either as a particularizing feature, as with ATTENTION or MEMORY, or by contradistinction, as is the case with DREAM.
The extent to which these features are interrelated is most evident in the notes dating from the early 1900s which are to be found both in the manuscript Cahiers and in various parallel thematic dossiers and loose-leaf pages: among them, notes for a 'Mémoire sur l'Attention', a notebook entitled 'Somnia', dos­siers of notes titled 'Rêve', 'Surprise-Attente' and so on. The overall coherence of the research is very clear, not least through the circulation of passages between the different material forms, sometimes recopied by hand or on the typewriter, sometimes with variants or entirely new developments, but also through the hesitations over how to group the notes at the time of writing and later when Valéry was attempting to classify them.2 The notes in 'Somnia' for example (C, IV, 491-585) written between 1911 and 1914, are located here almost entirely in the chapter DREAM. They show that Valéry's prime concern is to determine, by means of discrimination between different states of awareness, the mental pro­cesses at work in the waking state, and thereby define the different phases of consciousness. The movement from one state to another is particularly fertile in enabling him to identify the overlap between the two systems of sleep and wakefulness. He is struck by the immediacy of experience in dreams: 'Modifica­tions of the kind that constitute and people dreams are produced without prepar­ation. What happens, happens without any links having to be established.' There is, in other words, no mediating conceptual superstructure, rather an im­mediate identification between the perceiving subject and the object of perception.
Questions of language are of crucial importance in this volume. For while the attempt to redefine terms in a language freed from arbitrary associations and cap­able of expressing pure analytical functions is a central part of the original pro­ject or 'System', Valéry encounters ultimate barriers of meaning when dealing with dreaming and sleep. What language can be used to define phenomena which, by definition, are beyond the realm of the referential system of language? When language is based on an arbitrary association of signifier and signified -- a notion that Valéry acknowledged long before Saussure's teachings became widely disseminated --, how can this be applied to dreams where 'there are no signs properly speaking' because there is no distinction between the sign and the meaning? Any attempt to speak about dreams or to describe sleep can only be realized by means of a translation into another language of a different order; but 'translation into the language of waking life necessarily destroys the true phenom­enological nature of the dream -- (like poetry translated into prose)'. It is, further­more, an aspect that Valéry constantly evokes to distinguish his own approach from that of Freud: 'These theories of Freud's are based on narratives told by one awake person to another. -- There's no way of checking them.' Nevertheless, as Malcolm Bowie has pointed out, Valéry is less distant from Freud than he ap­pears to acknowledge, in so far as both ultimately recognize the non-translatability of the unconscious. But where Freud held that the movements and urges of the unconscious might be grasped through the paradoxes, tensions and slips of language, and the Surrealists, that it might... Read more ›