FORM IN ACTION: MORPHOGENESIS AND LIFE SCIENCES IN PAUL VALERY

This contribution explores the relationship between esthetics and biology in two texts by Paul Valery: introduction to the Method of Leonardo do Vinci (1894) and Man and the Shell (1937). In these essays, Valery develops a morphogenetic theory that assigns art the function of reappropriating the formative forces at work in nature, in order to produce, in turn, the same variety of forms. He thus reinstates the link between esthetics and life sciences that Goethe had been the first to establish. Valery's morphogenetics is essentially dynamic, privileging the form's process of becoming, and the movement of production which results in a finished form. However, neither the physics nor the biology of his period were endowed with explanatory principles capable of accounting for both the spontaneity and the organization of morphogenetic processes in nature. As this article shows, the epistemological obstacles identified by Valery would lead him to sketch a theory of dynamic morphology that anticipated the theories of complexity developed since the end of the 1980s.