Professional Documents
Culture Documents
35 (2004) 873–881
www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa
Essay review
Kuhn’s missed opportunity and the
multifaceted lives of Bachelard: mythical,
institutional, historical, philosophical, literary,
scientific
Teresa Castelão-Lawless
Department of Philosophy, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI 49401-9403, USA
At the end of the 1940s, Thomas Kuhn (1924–1994), carrying with him a letter
of recommendation from historian of physics and astronomy Alexandre Koyré,
visited Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) in his Paris apartment at the rue St. Gene-
viève. A couple of years prior to that meeting, Kuhn had read Bachelard’s La phi-
losophie du non: Essai d’une philosophie du nouvel esprit scientifique (1940) with
great interest suspecting that they might share important philosophical and histori-
cal insights on scientific progress. But the encounter with Bachelard was utterly
disappointing. As Kuhn recollects, ‘I delivered the note, was invited to come over,
climbed the stairs . . . I’d heard he did brilliant work on American literature, and
on Blake and other things of the sort. I assumed he would greet me and be willing
to talk in English. A large burly man in his undershirt, came to the door, invited
me in; I said, ‘‘My French is bad, may we talk in English?’’ No, he made me talk
French. Well, this all didn’t last very long. It is perhaps a pity, because although I
think I have read a bit more of the relevant material since, and have real reserva-
tions about it, nevertheless he was a figure who was seeing at least some of the
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874 T. Castelão-Lawless / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 873–881
me realize that reading his literature on the imagination was pivotal for under-
standing the evolution of his historical epistemology of science.
But the reaction of Kuhn was understandable. He needed help. At the time of
his encounter with Bachelard, philosophers of science in the United States were not
particularly interested in a historically or sociologically-based philosophy of
science, as disciplinary boundaries between these fields of inquiry were then quite
rigid. In fact, Kuhn admitted in the preface to The structure of scientific revolutions
(1962) that most of his intellectual mentors were not American but Europeans such
as Emile Meyerson, Alexandre Koyré, Michael Polanyi, Ludwik Fleck, and Hélène
Metzger. He also recognized that parts of his research required delving into the
sociology of the scientific community (Kuhn, 1996, p. ix; first published 1962). It
was therefore only on the Continent that he could find support for his inter-
disciplinary research. The hope of being able to discuss some of these matters with
Bachelard was reasonable. Even if, as it seems to have been the case, Kuhn read
only La philosophie du non carefully, the book already illustrated chief character-
istics of Bachelardianism, including a special blend of history, philosophy, psy-
chology, and sociology of science.
Bachelard’s work is extremely complex. In fact, one is puzzled at every step not
only by the rhetoric, the constant coinage of concepts, the borrowing of terms
from philosophies he vehemently rejected, his strong convictions on the role of
education for citizenship, but also by his refusal to take a stand on the political
turmoil of inter-war France and his apparent blindness toward the destructive
powers of science. In addition, many questions remain regarding the philosophical
and historical underpinnings of his work. Why did he choose discontinuity over
continuity to explain scientific change? Why did his contemporaries criticize him
for arguing that the categories of the mind are fluid rather than static? Why did he
spend so much effort studying alchemy when he believed it was a serious obstacle
to science? Why did he consider Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Priestley, Lavoisier,
and Boerhaave as pre-scientific? Why did he turn midway in his work from psycho-
analysis to phenomenology? Why did his criticism of science teaching bear more on
secondary school than on university education? What was psychoanalysis doing in
a territory that should belong to philosophy?
Chimisso’s Gaston Bachelard. Critic of science and the imagination (2001) answers
many of these questions. Furthermore, the book puts Bachelard’s epistemology
into perspective without, in turn, destroying the respect one owes to his revolution-
ary and powerful thinking. I agree with her that the challenge of deconstructing
Bachelardianism bears on the legitimation, through ‘the manipulation of his physi-
cal appearance’, of the myth of Bachelard the Philosopher. She shows convincingly
how he gradually became not only the proudly provincial ‘teacher of happiness’
(p. 13), but part of a long line of white-bearded figures in the Western canon, all
supposedly following the via contemplativa and carrying with them the wisdom
and the ‘moral authority’ given only to truth seekers (p. 8). This is the ‘icon’ whose
T. Castelão-Lawless / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 873–881 877
traces Kuhn and I found at Bachelard’s apartment in Paris. But other parts of
Bachelard are equally real.
The alternative offered by Chimisso is an account, not of his personality, which
remains ever elusive, but of Bachelard’s ‘philosophical perspective, style, choice of
sources and his approach to texts’(p. 248). She does so by peering carefully into the
institutional history and the cultural setting in which this work took place and then
weaving them with claims made by Bachelard about the cognitive structure of
science and the human psyche. She shows that the chaotic choices in bibliography
made by Bachelard were not unusual for the time. An examination of the official
timetables of lycées and collèges in France in the mid-1920s demonstrates that psy-
chology (sensation, perception, abstraction, and the relations of thought and lan-
guage), logic (processes of thought and the methods of the sciences), morals
(personal, family, social, economic and political life), and general philosophy (epis-
temology and metaphysics) all belonged to the territory of philosophy (p. 58).
Another purpose of Chimisso’s book, connected to the blending of fields in second-
ary schools, is to prove that Bachelard’s philosophy is a rich and coherent body of
sustained pedagogical and moral concerns about the limitless possibilities of the
human mind. It is my belief that these two perspectives fill important gaps in
French and English Bachelardian scholarship.
I agree wholeheartedly with Chimisso’s thesis in her magnificently crafted work
that ‘there are many Bachelards in this book’ (p. 247). She demonstrates that the
plurality of Bachelard’s activities, his devotion to the arts and to the sciences, his
interest in ethnography, sociology, history, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, sur-
realism, alchemy, and natural philosophy, are inextricably intertwined with the
debates in French academia over the role of culture générale for citizenship and the
controversies over disciplinary boundaries during the second half of the twentieth
century. Also included in her book are those Bachelards that have been recon-
structed over time by both critics and admirers. They cover an ideological spec-
trum stretching from Louis Althusser’s Marxist interpretation to Michel Vadée’s
idealistic approach, and from the search by materialist Dominique Lecourt for a
night-and-day Bachelardian dualism to Georges Canguilhem’s attempt at making
Bachelard’s discourse dialectic in the Socratic (but not the Hegelian) sense. To
these I would add social constructivism. Bruno Latour’s appropriation of Bache-
lardian concepts such as ‘phénoménotechnique’ contributed to the assumption
made by some intellectuals on this side of the Atlantic that Bachelard was a relati-
vist avant la lettre (Castelão-Lawless, 1995). I concur that all of these authors ‘fail
to recognize the crucial epistemological consequences of Bachelard’s pedagogical
stance’ and to ‘pinpoint the historical reasons for his defence of rationalism’(Chi-
misso, 2001, p. 80).
Bachelard was first and foremost a teacher. From 1919 to 1930, he taught phys-
ics and chemistry at a secondary school in his native town of Bar-sur-Aube. He got
878 T. Castelão-Lawless / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 873–881
5. Scientific controversies
by French philosophers and scientists alike, especially before 1916. Bachelard never
attempted to explain the controversy that quickly originated between those who
sided with Emile Meyerson and Paul Langevin, and who saw relativity as continu-
ous with Newtonianism, and those who, like Pierre Duhem and Léon Brunschvicg,
believed that they were discontinuous with each other (Duhem, of course, was to
find this discontinuity unacceptable). He just explained the controversy away.
Second, there was the conflict over quantum mechanics between scientists such as
Einstein and De Broglie (after 1951), who saw it as an incomplete picture of
reality, and Heisenberg and Bohr, who believed otherwise (Castelão, 1997). Again,
there are no traces in Bachelard’s writings of this extraordinarily important scien-
tific and epistemological controversy.
There is more. Bachelard attended scientific conferences with De Broglie, Ein-
stein wrote the introduction to Meyerson’s Identité et réalité (1908), De Broglie
expressed his amazement at the intuitions of Bergson over quantum mechanics,
Bergson wrote Durée et simultanéité (1922) to disagree with Einstein’s conception
of time, and Bachelard wrote La dialectique de la durée (1936) to disagree with
Bergson. The connections between scientists and philosophers were definitely there.
But a history of the scientific and institutional setting of this period in France is
still to be written. Until this happens, Chimisso’s methodology comes in handy.
For just as Bachelard did in the case of the humanities debates—he read the scien-
tific sources, observed the conflicts, listened to the scientists and the philosophers,
and then made up his mind. His works present us not with his thinking processes,
but with his final decisions on the matter. In the first case, it is clear that he
decided on a compromise similar to the one he found over the interpretation of
ethnographical data (and even perhaps because of it). The mind tends to stabilize
itself confidently when working inside a system of knowledge such as New-
tonianism, but it needs intellectual supervision by itself and by those minds of
other scientists (‘la surveillance intellectuelle de soi’) to be constantly prompted
into becoming ever dialectical (the ‘philosophy of no’). In the second, and without
ever mentioning it directly, he opted for the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quan-
tum Mechanics, which was, not surprisingly, the official view among professional
physicists. Objectivity is not lost, but correspondence has to be substituted by com-
plementarity. This time he used the humanities, that is, phenomenology, as a lab-
oratory for testing the epistemological viability of the hard sciences.
References
Bachelard, G. (1978). Le nouvel esprit scientifique (14th ed). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (First
published 1934).
Bachelard, G. (1986). La formation de l’esprit scientifique. Contribution à une psychanalyse de la con-
naissance scientifique (13th ed). Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. (First published 1938)
Bachelard, G. (1994). La philosophie du non: Essai d’une philosophie du nouvel esprit scientifique (4th ed).
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (First published 1940)
Bachelard, G. (1988). Fragments d’une poétique du feu. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (First
published 1942)
Castelão, T. (1997). Gaston Bachelard et le milieu scientifique et intellectuel français. In P. Nouvel (Ed.),
Actualité et postérités de Gaston Bachelard (pp. 100–115). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Castelão-Lawless, T. (1995). ‘Phenomenotechnique’ in historical perspective. Its origins and implications
for philosophy of science. Philosophy of Science, 62, 44–59.
Kuhn, T. (1996). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (First pub-
lished 1962; 2nd enl. ed. published 1970)
Kuhn, T. (1997). A discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn, a physicist who became a historian for philosophi-
cal purposes: A discussion between Thomas S. Kuhn and Aristides Baltas, Kostas Gavroglu, Vasso
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Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1979). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Merton, R. (1996). On social structure and science. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.
(First published 1942)