Gaston Bachelard

Gaston Bachelard (born in Bar-sur-Aube, Champagne, in 1884; died in Paris in 1962) was a French philosopher, epistemologist, physicist, teacher and literary critic. His work moves between two areas that he regarded as complementary: a reflection on how scientific knowledge advances and a study of poetic imagination. He is usually placed within the tradition of historical epistemology, and his influence reached many later French philosophers, from Michel Foucault to Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu.

The son of craftsmen, Bachelard first worked for the postal and telegraph service between 1903 and 1913, and then taught physics and chemistry in his home town. He came to academic philosophy late. He completed a degree in philosophy in 1920 and earned his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1927, with theses supervised by Abel Rey and Léon Brunschvicg. He held posts in Dijon and, from 1940 to 1954, at the Sorbonne, where he succeeded Abel Rey in teaching the history and philosophy of science. He served in the First World War and was decorated with the Croix de Guerre. He was widowed in 1920 and raised his daughter Suzanne alone; she later became a mathematician and philosopher.

His epistemological thought begins with The New Scientific Spirit (1934) and The Formation of the Scientific Mind (1938), in which he proposes a kind of psychoanalysis of the scientific mind. For Bachelard, knowledge does not grow in a straight line. It advances by overcoming epistemological obstacles: entrenched habits, received opinions and naive observation that hold research back. From this comes his notion of the epistemological break, which describes changes of theoretical framework, such as the move from Newtonian mechanics to relativity, in which concepts change their meaning instead of simply being added to. Rejecting empiricism and rationalism taken separately, he defended an applied rationalism and a rational materialism, in which the scientific fact is always constructed from a theoretical problem. He developed this position in The Rational Materialism (1953). He also held that science never yields absolute truths, only successive corrections of earlier errors.

Alongside this work, Bachelard devoted a large part of his output to poetic imagination. The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938), Water and Dreams (1942), Air and Dreams (1943) and The Earth and the Reveries of Will (1948) examine the four elements as images that nourish literature and daydreaming. Later books such as The Poetics of Space (1957) found a wide readership among architects and literary theorists.

His influence is twofold. In epistemology, his concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break became standard references in the history and philosophy of science. In literary theory and the study of the imagination, his method inspired Gilbert Durand, Roland Barthes and others who saw in his books a new way of joining psychology, poetry and reflection on matter.