Reality, as Valery conceived it, is composed of forces in a constantly shifting equilibrium; any given situation tends to produce its opposite. Such a constantly evolving reality sometimes undergoes actual mutations, involving even the mind itself. Indeed the milieu is inseparable from the ob- server, by virtue of their effect on each other. This is a strict relativism, in which there is no fixed or permanent system of reference. Valery's dialectic has this peculiarity, that it has no metaphysical extension; it does not open out toward any absolute.
The direction of his thought led him to an attitude that was primarily critical. This is the fundamental view in most of the essays of the present volume. But toward the end of his life, faced with the spectacle of world politics in the years just before the second World War, his views became far more radical.
He planned to draw up what he called the "Principles of Planned Anarchy." Just what he meant by the word "an- archy" he took the trouble to define: "Anarchy is the indi- vidual's effort to refuse obedience to any injunction the basis ofwhich cannot be verified." In the rough draft he left among his papers, we see Valery attacking every kind of myth, one after the other. The myth of politics: "The art of making people pay for, fight and torture one another for something they neither know nor care anything about/ the mythic democracy:”