Reinstating ‘the Value of Solitude’: Gaston Bachelard on the Imagination and Moral Life

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to show that what Gaston Bachelard called the “psychology of the imagination” often doubles as moral psychology. In Water and Dreams, for example, Bachelard presents “water’s morality,” which is a morality attained by an imagination of water’s purity. Similarly, in Air and Dreams, he explores the aerial imagination that forms the moral thought in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and calls the will to dynamism in Nietzschean philosophy “an experimental physics of moral life.” In Earth and Reveries of Will, numerous terrestrial images are considered and the moralities they embody are discussed—among them the supreme hardness of the oak tree in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and the “counsel of solidity” it gives. As Bachelard becomes more inclined to call his endeavor a “phenomenology of the imagination,” concern for morality becomes less pronounced. And yet in two of his later works, The Poetics of Space and The Poetics of Reverie, Bachelard continues to delve into the ways imagination allies with moral life. Sensitively heeding the solicitations from the material world and our responses to them, Bachelard’s psychology of the imagination is a project of self-knowledge of an unusual sort: it uncovers “the autobiography of lost possibilities” and revives confidence in human strength. Finally, a comparison between Bachelard’s moral psychology with the work of Theodor Adorno and of John McDowell shows that its philosophical significance is best viewed as a re-enchantment project—the re-enchantment of nature and our relationship with it.

KEYWORDS:

• Gaston Bachelard
• imagination
• moral psychology
• naturalism
• re-enchantment

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Gay, “On Imagination,” 100.

^2. Ibid., 101.

^3. Eagleton, “Imagination,” 22–24.

^4. At the opening of his first book, Essai sur la connaissance approchée, 9, Bachelard writes: “To know is to describe in order to retrieve.”

^5. Smith, Gaston Bachelard: Philosopher of of Science and Imagination, xx. The book is a reissue, revised and updated, of his Gaston Bachelard (1982). While Smith presents the renaissance to be largely occurring in the Anglophone world, Bachelard studies beyond that world have also been witnessing a strong revival as attested by the following: in addition to the 2012 Colloque de Cericy, the launching of a new journal Bachelard Studies, whose first issue was published at the end of 2020; the reissuing of new critical editions of his works by the Presses Universitaires de France; the publication of a new biography, Jean-Michel Wavelet’s Gaston Bachelard, l’inattendu: les chemins d’une volonté (2019); and ambitious studies such as Charles Alunni’s Spectres de Bachelard: Gaston Bachelard et l’école surrationaliste (2019). Similarly, new studies in English include: Adventures in Phenomenology, a collection of essays on “the relevance and fecundity” of Bachelard’s thought for philosophical debates today, with ethics presented as the concern most of its contributors share: as Eileen Rizo-Patron notes in the introduction, throughout the volume “the ethical implications of Bachelard’s thoughts… [are shown] from a variety of critical perspectives” (1, 7).

^6. Worms, “Le foyer moral de la philosophie de Bachelard,” 287–88.

^7. Wunenburger and Pierron, “Introduction,” 6.

^8. Williams, “Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Psychology,” 300.

^9. Smith, Gaston Bachelard, xxvii–xxviii.

^10. Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, 33.

^11. Ibid., 36.

^12. Ibid., 47.

^13. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 239.

^14. Ibid., 228.

^15. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 94, 95.

^16. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 36–39.

^17. Kotowicz, Gaston Bachelard, 12.

^18. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 259.

^19. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 154, 156.

^20. Sloterdijk’s discussion of Nietzsche’s “Height Psychology” in You Must Change Your Life recalls some key elements in Bachelard’s treatment of Nietzsche that I present here. While Sloterdijk acknowledges his indebtedness to Bachelard only indirectly in an endnote where he directs the reader to Air as a source of “height fantasies in general” (463 n. 65), elsewhere he is quite enthusiastic about what he takes from Bachelard. In one interview, he speaks of the “very important” role “Bachelard’s program for a poetics of space” played in his conception of the Spheres trilogy (Neither Sun Nor Death, 179). Indeed much of what he does in the trilogy will be far better appreciated with Bachelard’s program in the background. Sloterdijk provides a case in point where interesting interdisciplinary work on contemporary issues is done under the influence of Bachelard.

^21. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 124.

^22. Newman, Newton the Alchemist, xvii.

^23. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 113.

^24. Ibid., 121.

^25. Ibid., 153.

^26. Ibid., 233.

^27. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 162–63.

^28. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 66.

^29. Ibid., 239.

^30. Woolf, Orlando, 18–19.

^31. Ibid., 19.

^32. Melville, Moby-Dick, 436.

^33. Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, 129.

^34. Bachelard, “The Poetic Moment and the Metaphysical Moment,” 173.

^35. Bachelard cites in The Poetics of Space, a passage from the Dictionnaire de botanique chrétienne, published in 1851, for an example of a botanist’s miniaturizing daydreams. In the passage, a description of a flower quickly becomes a description of a “wedded life in miniature” (154). He also cites a passage, written in the same spirit, from Victor Hugo and comments that, if Hugo gave the botanical miniaturizing reveries “literary dignity,” his “ambition” is to give them “philosophical dignity” (160). That it is an exercise in “metaphysical freshness” endows the miniature with philosophical dignity.

^36. Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, 225.

^37. Bachelard, Fragments of a Poetics of Fire, 9.

^38. Canguilhem, “Présentation,” 10.

^39. Kaplan, “Gaston Bachelard’s Philosophy of Imagination,” 1.

^40. Bachelard, L’activité rationaliste de la physique contemporaine, 39.

^41. Putnam, “McDowell’s Mind and McDowell’s World,” 187.

^42. McDowell, Mind and World, xi, xiii.

^43. Bernstein, “Re-enchanting Nature,” 218.

^44. McAllester Jones, Gaston Bachelard, 13.

^45. Bernstein, “Re-enchanting Nature,” 218.

^46. Hullot-Kentor, “Back to Adorno,” 29.

^47. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 167.

^48. Adorno, “Sociology and Psychology,” 72.

^49. Adorno, “Sociology and Psychology II,” 85.

^50. Ibid., 86.

^51. Ibid., 95.

^52. Adorno, “Progress,” 151.

^53. Adorno, “Sociology and Psychology II,” 95.

^54. Ibid., 77.

^55. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 124.

^56. Adorno, “Sociology and Psychology,” 70.

^57. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 284.

^58. Bachelard, Lettres à Louis Guillaume, 35.

Additional information

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Sunjoo Lee

Sunjoo Lee, PhD, has taught until recently at Yonsei University and at Kyung Hee University, in Seoul, South Korea. Her publications include articles on Ray Bradbury, Thomas Mann, Nietzsche, and Adorno, as well as translations into Korean of works by Oscar Wilde, Doris Lessing, and Philip K. Dick.