Gaston Bachelard Subvers Human

Gaston Bachelard, who died in 1962, left 12 works on the philosophy of science, nine on the poetic imagination, and two on time and consciousness, written in an image-laden style that rejected traditional academic discourse in favour of a subversive, allusive, highly metaphorical way of thinking and writing. Gaston Bachelard, Subversive Humanist offers an introduction to Bachelard’s idiosyncratic writings about the relation of science, poetry, and human consciousness. The extracts are framed in succinct critical essays that explicate the development of his ideas and clarify his relation to the contemporary French intellectual revolution more commonly associated with Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The matrix of Bachelard’s thought is 20th century-science, the new scientific mind that he dates from 1905, and Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Like the discovery of America 500 years before, the discoveries of mathematics and physics today have undermined our familiar epistemologies. Modern science has forced us to revise our conception of the rational subject and of the relation between reason and reality, subject and object. A psychic revolution has accompanied this revolution in reason. If we try to grasp the dialectics of matter and energy in physics, or the dualism of waves and particles, we shall learn to maintain difference and handle complexity; we are shaken out of the reductive, identity-ridden habits of ordinary life and thought.