L’envers de la nature Jalons pour l’interprétation d’Empédocle

Empédocle and the Chant de la Contingence develop a striking, intuitive vision of nature—nature understood to be softness, incompleteness, and the disconnectedness of all things. As Sartre was no longer a Bergsonian when he wrote these texts, a question arises about the conditions and origins of this sort of intuition. This article studies this question by following Sartre’s argumentation and studying several ways that he differs from one his predecessors, Paul Valéry.