Gaston Bachelard: Critic of Science and the Imagination

CRISTINA CHIMISSO, Gaston Bachelard: Critic of Science and the Imagination. Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, 9. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Pp. xi + 285. ISBN 0-415- 26903-9. 71.99 (hardback).

DOI: 10.1017/S0007087404426120

Gaston Bachelard’s work in the history and philosophy of science receives relatively little discussion amongst historians and philosophers of science who work primarily in English. By contrast his work had a major impact in France during the twentieth century. To the English-speaking world he is better known for his works on the poetic imagination; most of these have been translated into English, whereas few of his works on science have been translated. For those who have written on Bachelard’s philosophy the fact that his works fall into two such very different genres has presented a challenge and many have chosen to deal with one at the expense of the other.

In this new book Cristina Chimisso offers something rather different, more with the feel of an intellectual biography, even though she says it was not her intention to write one. She situates Bachelard’s work within the French cultural life of the first half of the twentieth century. The book in fact presents many Bachelards – bearded and venerated patriachal philosopher, teacher of physics and chemistry at the secondary school at Bar-sur-Aube who analysed and criticized secondary-school textbooks and syllabi, author of books on the history and philosophy of science, critic of Bergson’s dure, promoter of his own version of psychoanalysis, avid reader and more. She situates Bachelard’s approach to the philosophy of science both within the context of his early career as a science teacher and within the context of his debates with his teachers and contemporaries. She also combines the dual foci of Bachelard’s attention – scientific rationality on the one hand and poetic imagination on the other – revealing how they were related as aspects of the intellectual life of a situated historical individual. The principal vehicle used for integrating the dual aspects of Bachelard’s work is her portrayal of Bachelard as embarked on the pedagogical and moral project of seeking ways of improving the mind. This is the unifying thesis of her work. Her other stated reason for writing the book is her conviction that some of Bachelard’s ideas can offer a stimulating perspective on currently debated topics in the historiography and philosophy of science. These would be, for example, his conception of science as a discursive practice, which develops only in a social context, of the scientific object as artefact and of the dialectic between the knower and the known in which, just as scientific enquiry shapes and creates the rationalized object of its knowledge, the object so created in turn has the capacity to transform the rational structures of scientific thought.

Bachelard, like many French academics, started his academic career as a schoolteacher, then became a professor at a provincial university (Dijon) before being offered a chair in the history and philosophy of the sciences at the Sorbonne in 1940, when he was 56. He believed that people have two distinct points of view on nature – one affective and the other rational. He also believed that a rational scientific approach to nature could only emerge as the result of a psychological process in which the power of imagination is disciplined and intuitive judgements are put aside. His view of the history of science is that of a chronicle of the overcoming of epistemological obstacles presented by undisclosed natural attitudes. His view of science is of a human enterprise whose history is integral to its present constitution. Bachelard insisted, in sharp distinction from the direction taken by logical positivists and analytic philosophers of science, that neither philosophy nor science can dispense with history. Bachelard has in turn been criticized by historians of science for blurring the boundaries between philosophy and history of science. Certainly his own historical precision does not match that of French contemporaries, such as Alexandre Koyr, or his teacher Leon Brunschvicg. But Bachelard insisted that the history of science is also a history of the rational structures of human thought.

Chimisso shows that Bachelard was throughout concerned to answer questions about the human mind, questions which were of concern not only to philosophers and historians of science, but also to the ethnologists, psychologists and sociologists. She contributes valuable insights into the intellectual milieu of Parisian academia, revealing the kind of disciplinary space philosophy occupied during the inter-war period. Chimisso argues that the configuration of this space was such that it allowed for the kind of disciplinary boundary transgression Bachelard’s works engage in. This is a fascinating work which makes a good case for the continued relevance of some of Bachelard’s ideas.

MARY TILES

University of Hawai’i

Copyright Cambridge University Press, Publishing Division Sep 2004