Bachelard, Gaston (1884-1962)

BACHELARD, GASTON (1884-1962)

Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher, was born on June 27, 1884, in Bar-sur-Aube and died in Paris on October 16, 1962. He held a Ph.D. in philosophy and was a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. His career was far from ordinary. He was born into a family of modest means and began his professional life as a temporary employee in the postal service. In 1919 he became a teacher of physics and chemistry at the Bar-sur-Aube grammar school and prepared for his degree in philosophy, which he obtained in 1922. In 1927 he defended his doctoral dissertation and was appointed a professor of philosophy in 1930 at the University of Dijon and later at the Sorbonne (1940-1955). He received the Grand Prix National des Lettres in 1961.

His work is divided between considerations of the scientific mind, rationalism and the need for truth, and reflections on the imagination, daydreams, and poetry. Psychoanalysis, as Bachelard understood it, could serve as a link between these two approaches and, at times, there are echoes of a Jungian approach in his work.

In 1938 he produced La Formation de l 'esprit scientifique: Contributionà une psychanalyse de la connaissance objective and The Psychoanalysis of Fire. The word psychoanalysis was pivotal; the study of fire paved the way for a discussion of the epistemological problem of heat and thermodynamics. Bachelard introduced a powerful and disturbing poetics. For him the scientific mind's idea of the unconscious could be understood not on the basis of dreams but of reverie, that is, fantasies organized into complexes. By grasping the link between electrical fire and sexual fire, he develops the idea that dream-like values are an obstacle to true understanding and that it is necessary to engage in repression, a voluntary intellectual act of inhibition, which brings with it resistance, defense, and rupture. Psychoanalysis serves as a source of inspiration, it enables us to understand the formation of the scientific mind as an activity that is always subject to revision, not by a purely logical subject but by a superego animated by a rationalist tension that makes sublimation a positive and necessary factor and, in contrast to Freud, one that is also a joyful activity.

In working to frame Freudian concepts within a dialectic structure, Bachelard attempted to substitute a fecund surveillance of the mind for a repetitive and neurotic censorship. He was thus led to distinguish two types of knowledge: common knowledge and scientific knowledge, which consists in the repression of the former. For Bachelard, psychic conflict and resistance were ideas that could be used to conceive of truth as an error that has been rectified.

Bachelard's work found an echo in both the philosophy of the sciences and in literary criticism. But it is to Jacques Lacan that we must turn to fully assess what Bachelard attempted to introduce: the idea of a science whose subject is science.

Roger Bruyeron

See also: France.

Bibliography

Bachelard, Gaston. (1964). The psychoanalysis of fire (Alan C. M. Ross, Trans.). Boston: Beacon Press. (Original work published in 1938)

——. (1968). The philosophy of no; a philosophy of the new scientific mind (G. C. Waterston, Trans.). New York: Orion Press. (Original work published in 1940)

——. (1969). The flame of a candle (Joni Caldwell, Trans.). Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute Publications, c1988.

——. (1972). L'Engagement rationaliste. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.