The visitor entering the Sorbonne from number fifty-four Rue Saint Jacques soon comes upon one of that building’s many amphitheaters, or amphis as they are familiarly called: l’amphi Gaston Bachelard. This honor, which Bachelard shares with such personages as Descartes and Richelieu, commemorates the years from 1940 to 1955 when the professor with the provincial accent and the flowing beard would challenge his students to make philosophy take its lessons from science or to wonder with him at the surprising originality of a literary image. Standing before the students who had crowded into his small classroom on the second floor or who, with varying backgrounds in philosophy, had come to listen to one of his public lectures, Bachelard would find the most paradoxical example, the most unexpected figure to explain a difficult abstraction. Yet he would do so without sacrificing the concept to the illustration. It is a process he would often use in his writings on the philosophy of science. In both his teaching and his published works, whether dealing with science or the imagination, the undogmatic Bachelard would discard the superficial immediacy of the merely visual in favor of a much deeper understanding of his subject. He had a rare talent for illustrating his lectures without diluting them, for charming his listeners into understanding his often difficult material, and for introducing those students too easily dazzled by abstractions to the wonders of an imagination inspired by matter. He was, as one student put it, “Gaston the magician.”1
Not surprisingly, his colleagues at the university were not always comfortable with a “magician” occupying the chair of the history and philosophy of science. After all, virtually all his books before coming to the Sorbonne had dealt with the epistemology of science. They had included philosophical studies on the science of thermodynamics, on the theory of relativity, on chemistry and physics, as well as broader analyses of the “new scientific mind.” It is true that with La Psychanalyse du feu (The Psychoanalysis of Fire) and Lautréamont he had revealed an interest in the imagination shortly before assuming his Sorbonne post, but those works had seemed an innocent aberration. Indeed, one of Bachelard’s colleagues was convinced that there had been a misprint in the title of La Psychanalyse du feu and that it was really meant to be a much less disconcerting La Psychanalyse du fou (The Psychoanalysis of the Madman).2
Bachelard’s subsequent publications on water, air, earth, and the dreaming imagination certainly did nothing to moderate the disquietude of some of his fellow scholars. Yet this new direction in his thought attracted its own followers and supporters, among them the poet Jean Lescure, with whom Bachelard shared a long friendship, and the engraver Albert Flocon, whose work Bachelard admired for its synthesis of the abstract and the concrete.3 Besides, Bachelard’s fellow philosophers of science were soon reassured by the publication, beginning in 1949, of three new epistemological essays in which he took up with renewed vigor and insight the particular relationship of rationalism and empiricism in modern science. Yet his work on the imagination was far from over. Following his retirement from the Sorbonne, he guided his reader through reveries of space and candlelight in his three most poetic books. It was an apt conclusion to his life’s work, for his was a lamp that burned with two flames—that of the rationalist and that of the dreamer. Once lit, both flames did not always burn with equal intensity, but neither one was ever fully extinguished.
As an epistemologist, Bachelard was probably most influenced by the theories of the French philosopher of science, Léon Brunschvicg (1869–1944), who directed one of his two doctoral dissertations. From Brunschvicg Bachelard learned to respect the dynamic rationality of discovery and to avoid the danger of relying on the didactic logic of prior synthesis. Such an approach was revolutionary at a time (the late 1920s and early 1930s) when many French epistemologists still followed the lead of Émile Meyerson, for whom identity, deduction, and a priori reason were fundamental principles in science. Brunschvicg also taught Bachelard to be receptive to the scientific revolution that took place, particularly in physics, during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Yet, as François Dagognet has shown, Bachelard was more willing than his mentor to enter into the fray and to consider specific problems of science in his epistemology.4 It is from this willingness that stem some of his most original observations, particularly his notion that knowledge itself can become an obstacle to learning and that error can have a positive value in science.
Although Brunschvicg’s influence was both direct and profound, the broader context of Bachelard’s epistemological position includes the work of Henri Poincaré, whose emphasis on the importance of the imagination in formulating hypotheses Bachelard found particularly congenial, and Henri Bergson, about whom Bachelard was later to say that he accepted everything save continuity. Among earlier philosophers Bachelard owes much to Kant and, of course, to Descartes, against whom most Western philosophers, especially if they are French, seem compelled to define their thought. Bachelard, with his “non-Cartesian” epistemology, was certainly no exception.
Yet Bachelard was more than an epistemologist, and much of the transition from the rational to the realm of dreams, or the “oneiric,” found its theoretical basis in Bergson, Freud, Jung, and other, lesser known figures, including Brazilian psychoanalyst Pinheiro dos Santos and French psychoanalytic critic Marie Bonaparte. But, as his work progressed, the impetus for this transition came less from theoreticians than from creative writers themselves. References to Poe, Novalis, Mallarmé, Valéry, Proust, and a host of surrealists and dadaists abound in his oneiric works. Bachelard’s gargantuan appetite for literature, particularly poetry, was limited neither by established canons nor by national boundaries. The more his interest in the imagination grew, the more he relied on writers as his guides. His essays on the imagination are marked by progressively more intense attacks on positivistic literary criticism, whose rationalistic assumptions blind it to the originality and beauty of much contemporary literature. Bachelard is only occasionally specific about the targets of his complaints, but, given the critical context of the time, we can assume that these include the heirs of Taine, Faguet, Brunetière, and Lanson.5
An informed appraisal of Bachelard’s contribution to literary criticism must be delayed until both his rationalistic and his oneiric works have been thoroughly discussed, but it should be made clear from the outset that, despite his growing interest in literature, his approach was primarily that of the philosopher interested in the imagination and, later, of the naive reader rejecting all scientific pretense. He rarely saw criticism itself as his task, so that there is little dialogue with contemporary critics whose positions might have been similar to his own. The reader will find an occasional mention of Albert Béguin, or of younger critics such as Jean-Pierre Richard, but he or she is even more apt to encounter references to a favorite poet such as Henri Bosco, Pierre Jean Jouve, Jules Supervielle, or Rainer Maria Rilke. Bachelard is often seen as a founder of continental “new criticism,” but, while he has affinities with Marcel Raymond, Georges Poulet, Jean Starobinski, Jean Rousset, and Roland Barthes, he belongs to no particular school. His scientific background and his tendency to reduce the literary text to its most striking images in order better to understand the workings of the imagination make him distinctive. His association of a “material” and a “dynamic” imagination with the four elements of antiquity make him unique.
Gaston Bachelard was born on June 27, 1884, in Bar-sur-Aube, about two hundred kilometers southeast of Paris. The son of shopkeepers and the grandson of shoemakers, he grew up in the modest, earthy surroundings of this riverine town flanked by the low mountains and sloping vineyards of eastern Champagne. After completing his secondary schooling at Bar-sur-Aube, he spent a year as a teaching assistant in the nearby town of Sézanne before successfully applying for a position as a substitute clerk for the Postes et Télégraphe of Remiremont. There, despite an early ambition to become a newspaper editor, he developed an interest in telegraphy and, two years later, it was as a telegraphist that he enlisted for his tour of military service. Returning to the Post Office in 1907 he was assigned to the Gare de l’Est in Paris, where he was to remain until the eve of World War I.
With his sights now set on a career in engineering, Bachelard lost little time in taking advantage of the opportunities for additional training that Paris offered. For three years he took evening classes at the Lycée Saint Louis, and in 1912, now twenty-eight years of age, he obtained his first diploma, a licence in mathematics. The same year he took an entrance examination for one of two openings in the École supérieure de télégraphie only to be refused admission when he placed third. Undeterred, he took a leave of absence from the Post Office, obtained a scholarship in mathematics from the Lycée Saint Louis, and prepared for the elimination examination offered to engineering students in telegraphy. But his life was soon interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. Married only three months, he was mobilized in 1914 and fought in the trenches for over three years.
Returning from the front with life, limb, and the Croix de Guerre, he gave up his plans to become an engineer and accepted a position teaching physics and chemistry in his old secondary school at Bar-sur-Aube. The following year, at age thirty-six, the recently widowed Bachelard took the first explicit step toward a new vocation when he successfully completed a licence in philosophy. Upon obtaining the agrégation two years later, he might have been expected to devote himself exclusively to teaching philosophy at Bar-sur-Aube, but, in an unusual step, he refused to abandon his science courses. Rather than changing his responsibilities, he merely increased them, working all the while on his two doctoral dissertations. His toil was rewarded when he obtained his doctorate at the Sorbonne in the spring of 1927. His two theses, an essay on knowledge by approximation, directed by Abel Rey, and a historical analysis of the problem of heat transfer in solids, under Brunschvicg’s tutelage, were published the following year. At forty-four years of age, Bachelard had now begun his career as a philosopher.
Although he continued to teach at Bar-sur-Aube for three more years, he was invited by Georges Davy, professor of philosophy at the University of Dijon, to teach two courses there every fortnight. During this period Bachelard pursued his interest in the philosophy of science, publishing La Valeur inductive de la relativité in 1929 and, the following year, accepting an appointment to the chair of philosophy at Dijon, where he was to remain for a decade. It was here that he established a close friendship with Gaston Roupnel, a physicist whose interests ranged far beyond his discipline.
In his 1927 book, Siloë, Roupnel, who was ultimately concerned with the relationship of reason and faith, developed a biological theory of time and habit. Following so closely on Bachelard’s analysis of relativity, Roupnel’s essay pointed to the possibility of a further exploration of time as a human experience. Moreover, Bachelard found a congenial colleague in this author of works on the French countryside for whom a special chair on the Burgundy dialect had been created at Dijon, and whose father was a modest railroad employee. Although he showed no signs of sharing Roupnel’s concern with questions of faith, Bachelard became more adventuresome intellectually as a result of his encounter with this fellow provincial. In 1932, he published Intuition of the Instant, wherein he pondered some of the notions that Roupnel had advanced in Siloë. While many epistemological studies were still to follow, this signaled the first time that Bachelard had allowed himself to transcend the strict confines of his discipline. It would not be the last.
His years at the Sorbonne—where he occupied the chair of the history and philosophy of science from 1940 to 1954 and remained as emeritus professor for 1954–55—were particularly marked by the uniquely Bachelardian tension between science and poetry.6 He would take pleasure in calling his students’ attention to this duality by saying that he had the feet of a philosopher of science but the wings of a poet.7 His writings, too, during this time reflected the science–poetry polarity with three works of epistemology and four on the imagination. And his appetite for reading in both areas was voracious. He literally “lost track of time” because of his reading when, as Albert Flocon reports, he removed the pendulum from his clock in order to make more room for books.8
But it was retirement in 1955 that gave Bachelard the greatest opportunity to chase the dreams that his reading inspired. The works of this period—The Poetics of Space, The Poetics of Reverie, and The Flame of a Candle—exhibit a surprising freedom from the taxonomic restraints that had guided his earlier essays on the imagination. The epistemologist, who some twenty years earlier had assumed the directorship of the Sorbonne’s Institute of the History of Science, had now become a well-known and respected guide to the mysteries of the literary imagination, a status that was confirmed in 1961 when he was awarded the Grand Prix National des Lettres. The last major honor he was to receive (he had been elevated to the rank of Commandeur in the Legion of Honor the previous year and had been elected to the prestigious Academy of Moral and Political Sciences upon his retirement from the Sorbonne), the Grand Prix National des Lettres represented a national recognition of Bachelard’s contribution to literary discourse. He died shortly thereafter, on October 16, 1962, and his body was returned to his native Bar-sur-Aube for burial.
Within a decade of Bachelard’s death, three posthumous collections of some of his previously published articles would attest to a continuing interest in both his scientific and poetic theories. In 1970, the philosopher Georges Canguilhem presented, under the title Études, five short essays that Bachelard had written between 1931 and 1934. Four of these essays show early signs of a broadening of Bachelard’s epistemological concerns beyond the highly technical analyses of his early work to a more general consideration of the relationship of science and philosophy. But one essay in particular, “Le Monde comme caprice et miniature,” (The World as Caprice and Miniature) stands out as an early discussion of the role of reverie in humanizing the world.9 For Bachelard the epistemologist was already beginning to assert what he would later call his “right to dream.” With the publication of The Right to Dream (1970) Philippe Garcin and Les Presses Universitaires de France applied Bachelard’s declaration to an anthology of some twenty-six pieces dealing with the arts, literature, and reverie, all representative of the flowering of Bachelard’s oneiric interests. In L’Engagement rationaliste (1972), its counterpart on the scientific side, Georges Canguilhem gathered thirteen articles showing Bachelard’s “commitment to the rationality of reason, against its own tradition … against … the smug expression of a first success at rationalization.”10
Clearly, Bachelard continues to have much to say, both to those interested in epistemological questions and to students of the literary imagination. Will that continue? Or will one of the two aspects of his work eventually eclipse the other? The questions are speculative, of course, but they do lead to the related question of Bachelard’s unity for which the text rather than an inscrutable future can be consulted. Some commentators conclude that Bachelard’s obvious duality is just what it seems and is essentially irreconcilable, while others perceive hidden strands of unity within a tapestry that depicts the separation of science and poetry.11 The issue may never be resolved in any satisfactory way, but, as subsequent chapters will show, its consideration is unavoidable in any serious treatment of Bachelard. For it is a fact, unaccountable as it may be, that the author of an epistemological analysis of Einstein’s theory of relativity and the writer of a poetic essay on candlelight are one and the same.