Gaston Bachelard

Critic of Science and the Imagination

Cristina Chimisso

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415269056
• eBook ISBN: 9781136453885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this new study, Cristina Chimisso explores the work of the French Philosopher of Science, Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) by situating it within French cultural life of the first half of the century. The book is introduced by a study - based on an analysis of portraits and literary representations - of how Bachelard's admirers transformed him into the mythical image of the Philosopher, the Patriarch and the 'Teacher of Happiness'. Such a projected image is contrasted with Bachelard's own conception of philosophy and his personal pedagogical and moral ideas.
This pedagogical orientation is a major feature of Bachelard's texts, and one which deepens our understanding of the main philosophical arguments. The primary thesis of the book is based on the examination of the French educational system of the time and of French philosophy taught in schools and conceived by contemporary philosophers. This approach also helps to explain Bachelard's reception of psychoanalysis and his mastery of modern literature. Gaston Bachelard: Critic of Science and the Imagination thus allows for a new reading of Bachelard's body of work, whilst at the same time providing an insight into twentieth century French culture.

CHAPTER ONE

Painting an icon: Gaston Bachelard and the philosophical beard

Le grandes images ont à la fois une histoire et une préhistoire. Elles sont toujours à la fois souvenir et légende

(La poétique de l’espace)

I shall start analysing Bachelard from his beard. I believe this is a very appropriate starting point for this book which presents philosophical knowledge as inextricable from its cultural, historical and social setting. By considering philosophy in this way, the distinction between ‘philosophical texts’ and their ‘context’ becomes blurred and loses part of its importance. Philosophers and their admirers (or enemies) can be studied as more than authors and readers of philosophical texts. They can be studied as agents who, through their social relationships, contributed to philosophical ideas, to the success of such ideas and the success of themselves as individuals or groups in various ways. Sometimes, philosophers can be examined as the embodiment of values and aspirations, i.e. as symbols, and their bodies become very important. In other words, if philosophy does not belong to the kingdom of disembodied and timeless ideas, beards have a place in philosophy, especially if, like Bachelard’s, they are philosophical beards. His beard, his face and his body are known by anybody who has read his work, as they appear on the covers of books by him and about him. The latter often have photographs on plates. Obviously, these photographs did not circulate at the beginning of his career: nobody would expect to see a photograph or a portrait of the author in a PhD dissertation or in somebody’s first book. When the body of the author does appear, it can no longer be separated from the content of the book and the readers’ perception of it. Interviewed by Christian Delacampagne for the newspaper Le Monde, Michel Foucault chose to be anonymous. When asked about the reasons for concealing his identity, he said it was:

out of nostalgia, for a time, when, being quite unknown, what I said could be heard. With the potential reader, the surface of contact was unrippled. The effects of the book might land in unexpected places and form shapes I had never thought of. A name makes reading too easy.¹

A face conveys even more messages than a name, especially in societies in which images are a crucial way of communication. In the same interview, Foucault pointed out:

In our societies, characters dominate our perceptions. Our attention tends to be arrested by the activities of faces that come and go, emerge and disappear.²

Bachelard’s body, reproduced in various publications, and commented on, has been a crucial part of his construction as a nearly mythical character. Gaston Bachelard was professor of history and philosophy of the sciences at the Sorbonne, director of the Institut d’Histoire des Sciences et Techiniques, member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, and an academic who received many honours including the national Grand Prix des Lettres. Nevertheless, for such a conventionally accepted figure on his death, in Paris in 1962, the obituaries emphasised his unconventionality. His ‘public’ remembered him as a lonely yet friendly old man, who was fond of the countryside. From many of the descriptions of him written in the Seventies and Eighties, it would be impossible to guess his actual academic position, as it was hardly mentioned. This successful man was constituted as the embodiment of the Philosopher, the Sage and the Patriarch.

The analysis of Gaston Bachelard’s beard helps us to describe processes of formation of authority which are often neglected, but which can contribute to the creation and to the success of philosophical ideas. It highlights the non-institutional circulation of philosophical ideas and their transformation at the hands of people who do not aim to write philosophical texts. The construction of Bachelard as an icon is social in several senses. First of all, it is the result of the encounter between what Bachelard contributed to his own persona—his unkempt beard and hair, his behaviour, his obsession with psychoanalytic symbolism—and other people’s interpretation and manipulation of it. The image thus produced was effective because it employed symbols already available in the culture. Finally, it succeeded in appealing to an audience because it represented their aspirations: they could identify with the character Bachelard, even though he was by definition out of reach.

Furthermore, the analysis of fabrication of characters provides elements for the study of the process of legitimisation. Michel Lamont describes legitimisation as follows:

legitimisation results from two distinct but simultaneous processes: (1) the process by which the producer defines himself and his theory as important […]; and (2) the process through which, first, peers, and second, the intellectual public defines and assesses a theory and its producer as important and, by doing so, participate in the construction of the theory and the institutionalisation of that theory and its author.³

My study will consider one of the ways in which the ‘intellectual public’ defined Bachelard ‘as important.’ However, what is significant here is not the actual success of that process, for example, in making Bachelard famous. Rather, I shall examine it as a cultural product, in terms of the images and ideas it created. His psychoanalysis of ‘objective knowledge’ consisted of isolating the emotional reactions that certain images provoke. He intended to analyse them in order to make the link between images and emotions explicit. I shall illustrate. He examined the attention that late eighteenth-century natural philosophers paid to the difference in the rapidity with which paper and coal burn. He connected these scholars’ interest with children’s fascination with the liveliness of fire.⁴ For Bachelard those eighteenth-century authors did not overcome the impressions which the image of fire made on them as children.

In La formation, he examined with particular care alchemy and eighteenth-century natural philosophy; in the books on the Elements his main focus shifted to poetry, seen as a repository of human ‘complexes’ which he often presented as Jungian archetypes. If, on the one hand, he believed in the necessity of removing any trace of imagination from science, on the other hand, he valued the ‘rest’ afforded the mind by the exercise of imagination. This became increasingly explicit from L’eau et les rêves onwards. In his later books La poétique de l’espace and La poétique de la rêverie, he completely abandoned the psychoanalytic project to give himself up to the joys of reverie: he now wanted only to study ‘the phenomenon of the poetic image when it emerges into the consciousness as a direct product of the heart, soul and being of man, apprehended in its actuality.’⁵ He described in the most attractive terms the activities of imagination and the contents of daydreams. Bachelard’s books were full of fantasies, images and myths. At the same time he was an indefatigable advocate of the separation of rationality and imagination and of the necessity for science to overcome and remove continuously the ‘obstacles’ posed by imagination.

BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

In the fourth chapter of Lautréamont, Bachelard discussed the problem of biography.⁶ He denounced the limitations of an ‘external’ biography, which aims to offer a psychological portrait of the personage on the basis of events in his life. Instead, he defended a biography based on the work of the author under study. What he attempted was a sort of psychoanalysis of texts. For him, the real author—and his neuroses—were revealed by his work rather than by the details of his life.⁷ He believed that an artistic work was the privileged means of understanding its author’s psyche and life. This belief was consistent with his general conception of art: he always emphasised the role of imagination in the production of a work of art, rather than technical and formal aspects.

Bachelard never wrote an autobiography. Nonetheless, in his books on imagination, he talked about himself, his reveries and his childhood. These books were about subjectivity and—especially in the late works La poétique de l’espace and La poétique de la rêverie—written in a subjective manner. They were the works which were supposed to express Bachelard’s life. As he thought that one’s real personality was revealed in one’s production—literary, artistic, or other—he must have expected that his own books would disclose his personality. Dreams and childhood were the focus of his books on imagination, although, rather than with dreams proper, he was concerned with reverie, i.e. with fantasies on which the subject has a degree of control. In the reverie, there is always a critical distance between the subject and the reverie itself. Moreover, in Bachelard’s books, that distance was increased by critical analysis. In his view, both reverie and the capacity to ‘master’ it were crucial clues in the analysis of the psyche.

From ancient times, anecdotes about childhood have been employed in biographies, funeral orations and doxographies, in order to show the exceptional gifts of a personage. The fact that a person had proven to possess remarkable capabilities in his or her early life has been taken to suggest that such capabilities are not the result of training but are rather innate. For instance, anecdotes about the childhood of a painter were traditionally used to show how early his talent was apparent, and hence that it was due to his inherent genius rather than to practice. Giotto, a humble shepherd boy, revealed his talent by drawing animals on stones.⁸ Subsequently, psychoanalysis confirmed and gave a certain scientific credibility to the interest in childhood. While nowadays such anecdotes as the story about Giotto are not likely to be taken seriously, information about a personage’s childhood is still employed as a means of understanding his or her personality.

To provide information about a philosopher’s life is a way of making him a hero, especially when the pieces of information correspond to a well-known model. Bachelard’s wife died a few years after their marriage. He did not marry again, and throughout his career as a philosopher, he was a widower. The absence of a wife is a very common characteristic in philosophers’ lives. Indeed, the first philosopher reportedly never to marry is Thales, as Diogenes Laertius wrote in his Lives of Philosophers.⁹ Celibacy suggested independence and complete dedication to knowledge, analogous to the dedication to God demonstrated by monks and nuns. Bachelard had a daughter and it has often been emphasised that he brought her up by himself. He was not a husband, but he was a father. Thus, his paternal image, which will be analysed below, could be substantiated with a real fact.

The most frequently mentioned circumstance of Bachelard’s life is perhaps his ‘humble’ origins. His upbringing in the provinces and his employment at the Post Office offered a kind of synthesis of ancient and modern myths. On the one hand, he is the hero who comes from a simple world from outside the city: a sort of Cincinnatus. Bachelard’s li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The formation of Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy
• Chapter 1 Painting an icon: Gaston Bachelard and the philosophical beard
• Chapter 2 Culture générate and the new scientific spirit
• Chapter 3 Bachelard’s pedagogical rationalism
• Chapter 4 Philosophy between the Sorbonne and the Collège de France
• Chapter 5 Philosophy, history and the history of the sciences
• Chapter 6 The study of man
• Chapter 7 The study of the psyche
• Chapter 8 Bachelard as a reader
• Afterword
• References
• Index