Gaston Bachelard

Gaston Bachelard

Gaston Bachelard (born June 27, 1884 in Bar-sur-Aube , † October 16, 1962 in Paris ) was a French philosopher who dealt with the theory of science and poetry equally. In science and artistic imagination , Bachelard saw two different but equal opportunities to open up to the difference of the new, to grow as a person. In the area of ​​philosophy of science, his terms cognitive barrier and epistemological profile are important.

Life

Gaston Louis Bachelard was the son of a tobacconist. In the small town near Troyes in French Champagne he also went to high school and graduated from high school; in 1902 he was a tutor (répétiteur) at the Collège de Sézanne. He did his military service from 1903 to 1905 in the twelfth Dragoon Regiment of Pont-à-Mousson.

From 1907 he earned his living as a postman in Paris. In his spare time he studied mathematics, physics and chemistry at the Faculty of Science in Paris under difficult financial conditions and prepared for the entrance exam for the École supérieure de télégraphie . Shortly before his exams, however, he had to interrupt his studies because he was drafted into service in the First World War . He spent 38 months in combat units and earned the War Cross.

After the war he took his exams at the Sorbonne and from 1919 to 1930 taught physics and chemistry as a high school teacher at his old school in Bar-sur-Aube. During this time he was interested in the problems of didactics and he criticized the various forms of déformation professional - distortions that resulted from the way scientific results were presented in the school books of his time.

Parallel to his work as a teacher, he studied philosophy and obtained the doctorat d'état , the state examination in philosophy , in 1922 . His dissertation is entitled Essai sur la connaissance approchée and contains the secondary thesis Étude de l'evolution d'unproblemème de physique: la propagation thermique dans les solides . His actual university career did not begin until the age of 46 at the University of Dijon, from where he moved to the Sorbonne in 1940, at the age of 56, and took over the chair of history and philosophy of sciences from his former teacher Abel Rey and became director of the institute for the History of Science (L'Institut d'Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques) .

From 1940 to 1954 he taught history and theory of science at the Sorbonne. In 1947 he founded the philosophical journal Dialectica together with Paul Bernays and Ferdinand Gonseth . In 1951 he was awarded the Medal of the Legion of Honor (1959 followed the title Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur ). In 1955 Bachelard was appointed to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques . Until his death on October 16, 1962, Bachelard wrote 24 books and in 1961 received the Grand Prix National des Lettres for his work .

philosophy

Dynamism

Gaston Bachelard's early works (1928–1940) are of an epistemological nature. In them he attempted to dynamize philosophy. What do you mean with that? At the beginning of the 20th century there were fundamental changes in the natural sciences that required new forms of the history of science. Within a few decades one was confronted with a non-Euclidean geometry , a non-Aristotelian logic , a non-Newtonian mechanics. Bachelard believes that the repeated reorientation of reason that the new physics brought with it gave physicists a flexibility in thinking that philosophy prevented rather than encouraged. Bachelard tried to make philosophy as flexible as the sciences themselves by reflecting on the conditions and possibilities for recognizing the new .

Scientific materialism

Because a closed philosophical materialism abstracts matter, imposes a schematism in the form of "everything is matter" or "matter is ...", i.e. speaking of matter purely metaphorically, this way of speaking is superfluous. Science says what can be meaningfully said about matter because it speaks of certain material phenomena. A philosophical materialism, independent of the actions of the scientist, is pointless: If a philosopher wants to say something about matter, he has to get involved with the actions of the scientist, try to understand it. One such - improved - materialism is open materialism : it stands in an open context of justification.

Applied Rationalism: Surrationalism

The truth is neither only offered by matter ( empiricism ) nor only by spirit (rationalism), and certainly not idealistic mediation, but rather the interplay of matter and spirit. The difference must be preserved. Bachelard argues for a pluralism of philosophical attitudes: Every philosophy represents only one aspect of the range of terms; If one wants to reach the entire spectrum of concepts of particular knowledge, one cannot avoid dealing with the philosophical life of concepts in the development of scientific thought. A philosophy that appears as the governor of the general or even of truth is definitely out of date for Bachelard.

Because ratio is always real only in application, in its own transgression, applied rationalism and rational materialism form the two aspects of a philosophy that is applied to science and a science that is dependent on philosophy. For Bachelard it is not an exaggeration “ to define instrumental science as a transcending of science based on natural observation […]. For there is a break between sensory and scientific knowledge. You can see the temperature on a thermometer; but one does not feel it. Without a theory, you would never know whether what you see and what you feel correspond to the same phenomenon. ”In other words, scientific activity, when it experiments, has to fall back on rationality; if it is based on reason, it has to experiment.

Against Descartes

Bachelard criticizes the idea of ​​immutability in Descartes' cogito: not “I think, therefore I am”, but “I think difference, so my self changes”: Thought changes in its form when it changes in dealing with its object changed. René Descartes committed, according to Bachelard, the fundamental mistake of propagating a method that claims to be able to make statements about real experiences that are as simple as possible from a skeptical distance: “The Cartesian method is reductive and not inductive . Such a reduction falsifies the analysis and affects the expansion of objective thinking. Without such an extension, however, there is no objective thinking and no objectification . ”The real task of objective research is not only to explain the world, but to complicate experience.

Descartes wanted to start from clear and simple ideas, Bachelard believes that there are no “simple”, but only complex ideas. The best theory is not that which tries to explain reality in the simplest possible way, but that which tries to do justice to the phenomena in their actual complexity. A theory that is surrational and takes into account the network of relations of the material world.

Against Bergson

Henri Bergson's concept of élan vital , the life force , is converted by Bachelard in the form of élan intellectuel : Because science generates new models of thought , we are beings gifted with profound flexibility: Spiritual revolutions are discontinuities in thinking, they generate mutations . Humans are a species that needs these mutations, that suffers if they don't change. In the two writings L'intuition de l'instant (1932) and La dialectique de la durée (1936), Bachelard turns against Bergson and polemicises both against his acceptance of two concepts of the ego ( surface ego and concrete ego ) and against Bergson's concept of duration (durée) as continuity. ( For a contrary view of the Bachelard-Bergson relationship, see the Wikipedia article Épistémologie .)

Three-stage law of the scientific mind

Bachelard specifies Auguste Comte's law of three stages in order to make it clear which phases the scientific mind goes through in its formation :

1. The concrete stage: the mind enjoys the first images of the phenomena and is based on a philosophical literature that glorifies nature and, in a miraculous way, sings about the unity of the world and its rich diversity.
2. The concrete-abstract level: The mind brings geometric schemes to the physical experience and is based on a philosophy of simplicity. The mind is still in a paradoxical position: the more clearly this abstraction is presented to it in a sensual perception , the more certain it is of its abstraction .
3. The abstract level: Here the mind undertakes explorations that willfully elude the perception of real space, that willfully detach itself from immediate experience and even stand in open contradiction to the always unclean, always shapeless primary reality.

To this three-stage law, Bachelard adds a kind of law of the three states of mind , which are characterized by interests :

1. The childlike or sophisticated mind: it is dominated by naive curiosity, stands with the greatest astonishment in front of the slightest orchestrated appearance, plays with physics for its diversion in order to have a pretext for a serious attitude, it takes the opportunity like a collector, is passive up to the happiness of thinking.
2. The professorial mind: it is proud of its dogmatism , remains immovable in its first abstraction, all its life invokes the school successes of its youth, speaks every year of its knowledge, sets its proofs entirely in the deductive interest of these so comfortable sentences of authority , it teaches the servant as Descartes did, or any bourgeoisie like the associate professor.
3. The mind sick of abstraction and over-refinement (unhappy scientific consciousness): it is always exposed to imperfect inductive interests, it plays the dangerous game of thinking without stable support in experiment ; It is constantly confused by the objections of reason, it constantly casts doubt on a special right to abstraction, but is certain that abstraction is a duty, the duty of science, the finally purified possession of the thought of the world.

According to Bachelard, these interests have to be subjected to a psychoanalysis , as they represent the basis for “valuations” that devalue objective knowledge.

Cognitive obstacle (obstacle épistémologique)

In the unconscious of the act of cognition, there are obstacles to cognition, certain values ​​and assumptions that oppose the striving for ever greater abstraction. This is e.g. B. (see the criticism of Descartes) the search for generality and simplicity as an end in itself. But individual terms, images and words also attract the pre-scientific spirit and thus prevent scientific progress. (However, these are not obstacles such as the weakness of the senses or the human mind!) Bachelard examines the epistemological obstacles on the basis of historical analyzes, which, in retrospect, make visible which errors and obstacles have been removed after successful knowledge could become. Here, too, he uses a three-way division:

1. Pre-scientific period: animism , indifference between science and poetry under the spell of nature (classical antiquity, Renaissance , 16th, 17th and 18th centuries).
2. Scientific period: stage of classical physics, science under the spell of the simple; Spirit of order and classification (from the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century).
3. New scientific period: science in its emancipation from immediacy, clarity and given reality - “surrationalistic” concept of science (begins with Einstein's theory of relativity in 1905).

Science is not "improved" everyday experience: in everyday experience the complex is converted into the simple, science converts the simple into the complex. The function of a psychoanalysis of objective knowledge is to show that scientific thoughts are an expression of difficulties, errors and obstacles that have been overcome.

Even if a theory is factually right, it is wrong if it does not recognize the fact - one can “also be wrong in the right”.

Epistemological profile

Since no epistemological break with the (historical) previous way of thinking is total, in the more advanced form of knowledge there are remnants of earlier stages (i.e. remnants of overcome epistemological obstacles) - Bachelard now proposes, using a differential philosophy, the development of concepts, the transformation of his realistic in its rationalistic form, to trace. In the Philosophy of No (1940), Bachelard exemplifies this through the historical analysis of concepts such as substance , mass, intuition and the principles of logic.

Psychoanalysis of Fire

When Bachelard set out in 1938 to show how certain archetypal images, which we pre-scientifically associate with fire, can be represented as obstacles to knowledge, he discovered, counter to his own plans as it were, that fire is not just an epistemological obstacle: in the poetic ones Images that arise from the basic elements have an independent, different "truth".

Bachelard's psychoanalytic "method" has more in common with Carl Gustav Jung's theories than with those of Sigmund Freud : In contrast to Freud, Bachelard (1) emphasizes the formative role played by the relationship between human beings and matter (not: instinctive-sexual humanity) , (2) the intellectual (not: sexual) origin of this affective interest in the world and (3) the origin of poetic images is not located in the depths of instinct , but in the "intermediate zone" (zone intermédiaire), the area between the unconscious and rational awareness. Poetic images belong to the zone of material daydreams that precede any contemplation .

Conceptually, Bachelard distinguishes dream (rêve) from dreaming (rêverie) insofar as the latter expresses the poetic imagination , which is always stimulated by objects. Dream, on the other hand, is pure subjectivity (with no difference due to an outside world): the night dream , without any awareness of the world. In reverie, however, there is always an aspect of consciousness, active presence of the dreamer. Poetry creates the dreamer and his world at the same time. The idea of ​​a material imagination influenced Jean-Paul Sartre's “Psychoanalysis of Things” in L'Être et le néant .

Philosophy assumes a kind of mediating role between the two types of access to reality : "All that philosophy can hope for is to make poetry and science two complementary areas, to combine them like two well-coordinated opposites."

Imaginative reading

From 1940 Bachelard's interest turned to literature. His book Lautréamont is a first attempt to counter the rational reading of the literary criticism of his time with an “imaginative reading”. Using the “ Gesänge des Maldoror ” by Comte de Lautréamont (= pseudonym for Isidore Ducasse), Bachelard shows how this proto-surrealist prose poem can be understood as a sum of literary (animal) images that are associated with one another. What Bachelard is particularly interested in here is the dynamic of the metamorphoses with which the first-person narrator Maldoror describes his change from human to animal form. Bachelard discovers a “poetic speed” here, which he contrasts with the “poetic slowness” of Franz Kafka's “ Metamorphosis ”: Kafka's story serves Bachelard as an example of a negative Lautréamont complex .

Bachelard's phenomenology of the soul

In the late 1940s, Bachelard increasingly turned away from psychoanalysis because exploring the unconscious was insufficient to grasp the creative imagination that created literary beauty. Using a phenomenology of written images, he now examined the poetic act and tried to establish the autonomy of the imagination. In the Poetics of Space (1957) the image thus becomes an ontological reality. The poetic image is an independent phenomenon that is no longer just a symptom of an archetypal content. According to Bachelard, what makes a poet special cannot be deduced causally from his past: poetry is essentially new and topical. An intellectualization should be contrasted with reliving in reading. Only in this way can the poetic image create an echo in the reader and take root in the reader himself. The result: the reader participates in the creativity of the poet and thus becomes creatively active in his dreams.

While on the objective intellectual side the preoccupation with science gives our thinking flexibility and the thinking opens up so creatively to the future, the subjective preoccupation with poetry is a means to revolutionize the imagination and to discover new forms of language. The poetic image strengthens life, makes it more lively, by making it possible to "dive into" the meaning-bound language.

Impact history

Bachelard's Influence in France

Bachelard's influence on science in France spans a wide range of disciplines, ranging from the natural sciences to literary theory, particularly the Nouvelle Critique . The work of authors such as Georges Poulet , Jean Starobinski and Jean-Pierre Richard , including that of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault , is influenced by Bachelard.

In the institutional sector of the Sorbonne, Georges Canguilhem , a student of Bachelard, took over the chair of the history and philosophy of the sciences. Canguilhem continued Bachelard's approach to epistemology and extended it to the history of medicine and biology. Georges Canguilhem emphasized the need for discursive agreement within a scientific community, which is outlined by Bachelard's term union des travailleurs de la preuve , and which contrasts the “scientific community” in its work with the individual creative achievement of the poet. (Bachelard's term can be found in Le Rationalisme appliqué .)

Bachelard's daughter, Suzanne Bachelard, later succeeded Canguilhem at the Sorbonne, continuing her father's work.

Louis Althusser , also a student of Bachelard, counted his teacher among the preferred maîtres à lire in class and tried to use terms from Bachelard's epistemology for a new theoretical reading of Marx's main works.

Above all, Bachelard's writings critical of the literature continue to be well received. His theory of the de-rationalization of literary reception , which resulted from philosophy and philosophy of science, is today understood as the forerunner of the Nouvelle Critique . Bachelard countered the positivist-oriented biographism, common in French literary historiography before the Second World War , with an analysis of the poetic image inherent in the text. The focus of interest is not the biography of the author and direct text references to the poet's experience, but the primary fact of the work and imagery. The return of the imagery to a dominant complex, which is itself the individual formation of a human primal experience in contact with the elements (fire / water / air / earth) is still justified psychologically in Bachelard's early literary theoretical writings, but then increasingly gives way to a phenomenology of Dream images.

Reception abroad

Bachelard's reception abroad takes place with a considerable delay: During Bachelard's lifetime, only five of his works are available in translations. ( The formation of the scientific mind and L'Air et les Songes were translated into Spanish in 1948 and 1958, respectively; The Psychoanalysis of Fire was published in German in 1950 , and finally the Poetics of Space in 1960 ; an Italian translation of The New Scientific Spirit was also published in 1951 .) Only after 1970 this should improve somewhat. But even today only five of his books have been translated into German.

In the Anglo-American region, the focus of academic interest is on Bachelard's poetological works.

It is only understandable from the history of translation that Bachelard was hardly received for a long time. Twenty years before Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - today a standard work of the epistemological debate - Gaston Bachelard emphasized discontinuity as a decisive characteristic of scientific development : Kuhn used the term "coupure épistemologique" (epistemological break) Concept of crisis instead of the concept of progress: Scientific disciplines do not develop linearly, in the form of a continuous accumulation of knowledge, as a summary and structuring of immediately evident empirical facts, but because from time to time they are able to get into crises that affect their worldview completely change and lead to a revolutionary change in their basic assumptions. The “mediator role ” between Bachelard's and Kuhn's terms seems to be assigned to Alexandre Koyré's reinterpretation of the epistemological break.

Whether the parallels in the epistemological writings of Bachelard and Karl Popper can be traced back to Popper's knowledge of Bachelard's thesis of approximate knowledge (connaissance approchée) has not been proven. What is certain is that Bachelard and Popper both took part in the eighth Congress for Philosophy (September 2-7, 1934) in Prague and that Bachelard further developed this thesis published in 1928 in his lecture there. Popper's approximation theory from Logic of Research (1934) is comparable to Bachelard's approach: Both philosophers argue that every increase in knowledge is a step beyond the level of a (recognized) error , which means that every advance in knowledge reveals a history of errors. The error thus becomes a positive index of scientific progress. For both philosophers, the following applies: A certain knowledge of the truth is denied the empirical sciences. The scientific mind strives for truth, always approaches it, but reaches and never finally possesses it. In contrast to Popper, however, Bachelard is more interested in the description of the dynamics of the progress of knowledge, in the actions associated with it, than in the search for a logical criterion for progress, such as Popper's criterion of falsifiability .

Catalog raisonné

• Essai sur la connaissance approchée. Paris 1928. (attempt on the approximate knowledge)
• 'Ètude sur l'évolution d'unproblemème physique: la propagation thermique dans les solides. Paris 1928. (Study on the Development of a Physical Problem: Heat Propagation in Solids)
• La Valeur inductive de la Relativité. Paris 1929. (The inductive value of relativity)
• Le pluralisme cohérent de la chimie modern. Paris 1932. (The coherent pluralism of modern chemistry)
• Le Nouvel esprit scientifique. Paris 1934; German edition: The new scientific spirit . Translated by Michael Bischoff . Suhrkamp, ​​F / M 1988.
• L'Intuition de l'instant. Paris 1935. (The intuition of the moment)
• Les intuitions atomistiques. Essai de classification. Paris 1935. (The atomistic conceptions. A study of the classification)
• 'La Dialectique de la Duree. Paris 1936. (The Dialectic of Duration)
• 'L'Expérience de l'espace dans la physique contemporaine. Paris 1937. (The experience of space in contemporary physics)
• La Formation de l'esprit scientifique. Contribution to a psychoanalysis de la connaissance objective. Paris 1938; German edition: The formation of the scientific mind. Contribution to a psychoanalysis of objective knowledge. Translated by Michael Bischoff . Suhrkamp, ​​F / M 1978.
• La psychanalysis you feu. Paris 1938; German edition: The psychoanalysis of fire. Translated by Simon Werle. Hanser, Munich 1985.
• Lautréamont. Paris 1940. (Lautréamont)
• La philosophy du non. Paris 1940; German edition: The philosophy of no. Attempt at a philosophy of the new scientific spirit. Translated by Gerhard Schmidt u. Manfred Tietz. Wiesbaden 1978 (New: stw 325)
• L'Eau et les rêves. Essai sur l'imagination de la matière. Paris 1942. (The water and the dreams. An experiment on the imagination of matter)
• L'Air et les songes. Essai sur l'imagination du mouvement. Paris 1943. (The air and the dream images. An experiment on the imagination of movement)
• La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté: essai sur l'imagination des forces . Paris 1948. (The earth and the dreams of the will: experiment on the imagination of forces)
• La Terre et les rêveries du repos: essai sur les images de l'intimité. Paris 1948. (The earth and the daydreams of calm: attempt on the images of familiarity)
• Le Rationalisme appliqué. Paris 1949. (Applied Rationalism)
• L'Activité rationaliste de la physique contemporaine. Paris 1951. (The rationalistic activity of contemporary physics)
• Le Matérialisme rationnel. Paris 1953. (The rational materialism)
• La Poétique de l'éspace. Paris 1957; German edition: The poetics of space. Translated by Kurt Leonhard. Hanser, Munich 1975. (as paperback: Fischer, F / M 1997. [fi 7396])
• La Poétique de la rêverie. Paris 1961. (The Poetics of Reverie)
• La flamme d'une chandelle. Paris 1961; German edition: The flame of a candle. Translated by Gloria von Wroblewski. Hanser, Munich 1988.
• La Poétique du Phénix. Unfinished Manuscript (The Poetics of the Phoenix)

A translation of the anthology of epistemological writings under the title Epistemology (Selected Texts, selected by Dominique Lecourt) was also published in German. And in 1991 Bollman published the book on the work of the engraver Albert Flocon with texts by Paul Éluard and Gaston Bachelard: The Books of Albert Flocon. (Both titles are currently out of print.)

In 2017, Monica Wulz published a volume with texts translated into German entitled Der Surrationalismus , ISBN 978-3-86253-086-1 , at the publishing house of the Paderborn Konstanz University Press .

literature

• Paul Ginestier: Pour connaître la pensée de Bachelard. Bordas, Paris 1968.
• Dominique Lecourt : L'épistémologie historique de Gaston Bachelard (1969). Vrin, Paris 2002, 11e édition augmentée.
• Dominique Lecourt: Pour une critique de l'épistémologie: Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault (1972, réed. Maspero, Paris, 5 ^e éd. 1980).
• Dominique Lecourt: Bachelard, Epistémologie, textes choisis (1971). PUF, Paris, 6 ^e édition 1996.
• Dominique Lecourt: Bachelard, le jour et la nuit . Grasset, Paris 1974.
• Mary McAllester Jones: Gaston Bachelard: Subversive Humanist. Texts and Readings. Univ. of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1991.
• Sandra Pravica: Bachelards tentative philosophy of science . Passagen Verlag, Vienna 2015.
• Mary Tiles: Bachelard, Science and Objectivity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1984.
• Kaja Tulatz: Epistemology as a reflection of scientific practices. Epistemic spaces in the exit of Gaston Bachelard, Louis Althusser and Joseph Rouse . transcript, Bielefeld 2018.
• Franco Volpi (ed.): Large dictionary of works of philosophy . Volume 1: A to K. Kröner, Stuttgart 2004.
• Jean-Jacques Wunenberger (Ed.): Bachelard et l'épistémologie française . puf, Paris 2003.
• Monika Wulz: agents of knowledge. Gaston Bachelard and the reorganization of knowledge . Kadmos, Berlin 2010.

The German editions of Bachelard's books (see catalog raisonné ) mostly contain illuminating forewords and afterwords. The following are particularly recommended:

• Joachim Kopper: Scientific and poetic spirit. On the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard . In: The Philosophy of No. Pp. 167-188.
• Wolf Lepenies : Past and Future of the History of Science - The Work of Gaston Bachelard . In: The formation of the scientific mind. Pp. 7-34.
• Florian Rötzer : The melancholy of an enlightener. Comments on Bachelard's plural philosophy . In: The flame of a candle. Pp. 109-130.

In the English translation of Maurice Blanchot's L'Entretien infini (Paris, 1969) - unfortunately only fragmentarily translated into German in Das Unzerstörbaren (by Hanser, 1991) - Blanchot's essay on Gaston Bachelard's poetics of space can be found under the title: Vast as the night. (Vaste comme la nuit). Here Blanchot pays tribute to Bachelard as a philosopher who freed the meaning of poetic images from the reductive reading of a psychologism and was thus able to assign them the power of the original: images, therefore, not as images of remembered experiences, but as genuine events of poetic language.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gaston Bachelard in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Gaston Bachelard  in the German Digital Library
• Website of the Center Gaston Bachelard at the University of Bourgogne (French)
• Text excerpts and pictures of Bachelard and his daughter on the "Friends of Gaston Bachelard" website (French)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The philosophy of no. Attempt at a philosophy of the new scientific spirit. Translated by Gerhard Schmidt u. Manfred Tietz. Suhrkamp, ​​F / M 1980, p. 24.
2. ↑ The new scientific spirit. Translated by Michael Bischoff. Suhrkamp, ​​F / M 1988, p. 137.
3. ^ The formation of the scientific mind. Contribution to a psychoanalysis of objective knowledge. Translated by Michael Bischoff. Suhrkamp, ​​F / M 1978, pp. 39-43.
4. ↑ The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Translated by Simon Werle. Hanser, Munich 1985, p. 6.

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on July 25, 2006 .