Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Louis Pierre Bachelard was a French philosopher, literary theorist, and essayist who worked across the philosophy of science and poetics.
Born on June 27, 1884, in Bar-sur-Aube, France, Bachelard pursued his education at the Faculty of Arts of Paris. He went on to work as a university teacher and as an employee of a public institution, applying his training across several disciplines. His intellectual range was considerable: in addition to philosophy, he worked as a mathematician, physicist, poet, and writer, producing work in French throughout his career.
Among his notable works is The Psychoanalysis of Fire, which reflects the dual orientation that defined much of his output. His contributions fell across two broad fields — the philosophy of science and poetics — and within the former he introduced the concepts of the epistemological obstacle and the epistemological break, theoretical tools that addressed how scientific knowledge develops and what impedes its progress. These concepts proved consequential for subsequent French intellectual life, as Bachelard went on to influence a number of significant thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dominique Lecourt, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and Bruno Latour. His work was recognized formally through the award of the Grand Prix National des Lettres and the rank of Commander of the Legion of Honour.
Bachelard died on October 16, 1962, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. His sustained engagement with both the rigorous demands of scientific epistemology and the more imaginative registers of poetics remained the defining characteristic of his career as a philosopher and writer.
Quotes by Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard's insights on:
Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images affect a very simple communion of souls.
How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
The poetic image is not an echo of the past. On the contrary: through the brilliance of any image, the distant past resounds with echoes.
The metaphor is an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.
The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
The lock doesn’t exist that could resist absolute violence, and all locks are an invitation to thieves. A lock is a psychological threshold.
Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event.
In my book entitled ‘L’eau et les reves, I collected many other literary images in which the pond is the very eye of the landscape, the reflection in water the first view that the universe has of itself, and the heightened beauty of a reflected landscape presented as the very root of cosmic narcissism.
In our life as a civilized person in the industrial age, we are invaded by objects; how could an object have a “force” when it no longer has individuality?
