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Essay review

Kuhns missed opportunity and the multifaceted lives of Bachelard: mythical, institutional, historical, philosophical, literary, scientic
Teresa Castelao-Lawless
Department of Philosophy, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI 49401-9403, USA

Gaston Bachelard. Critic of science and the imagination. Cristina Chimisso; Routledge, London & New York, 2001, pp. xii+285, Price 68.00, hardback, ISBN 0-415-26905-9.

1. Encounters with Bachelard At the end of the 1940s, Thomas Kuhn (19241994), carrying with him a letter of recommendation from historian of physics and astronomy Alexandre Koyre, visited Gaston Bachelard (18841962) in his Paris apartment at the rue St. Gene` vieve. A couple of years prior to that meeting, Kuhn had read Bachelards La philosophie du non: Essai dune philosophie du nouvel esprit scientique (1940) with great interest suspecting that they might share important philosophical and historical insights on scientic progress. But the encounter with Bachelard was utterly disappointing. As Kuhn recollects, I delivered the note, was invited to come over, climbed the stairs . . . Id 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 didnt 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 reservations about it, nevertheless he was a gure who was seeing at least some of the
E-mail address: castelat@gvsu.edu (T. Castelao-Lawless). 0039-3681/$ - see front matter # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2004.08.002

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thing. He was trying to put it in too much of a constrain . . . He has categories, and methodological categories, and moved the thing up an escalator too systematically for me. But there were things to be discovered there that I did not discover, or not discover in that way (Kuhn, 1997, p. 169). It is plausible Kuhn was not aware that, since 1942, the year of the publication of Leau et les reves, Bachelard had become keenly interested in the elements of the imagination (re, water, air, earth), and had published three books on literary creativity and the liberating function of its images. By the time he returned to epis temology of science with Le rationalisme applique (1949), Lactivite rationaliste de la physique contemporaine (1951), and Le materialisme rationnel (1953), the purpose and the methodologies he used had been transformed from a historical and psychoanalytical interpretation into an intensely phenomenological and surrealistic approach to scientic practices and objects. After this return to the studies of science, he went back, this time permanently, to the side of reverie with works such as La poetique de lespace (1957), La poetique de la reverie (1960) and La amme dune chandelle (1961). Nevertheless, the epistemology in-between that Bachelard was producing at the time of Kuhns visit no longer contained the kind of rigid categories towards which Kuhn had reservations. In fact, at this point Bachelard was already drawn to the socialization of scientic claims, the importance of rhetoric in science, and the defence of scientic claims against charges of scientic relativism. These were insights that Kuhn should have been looking forward to discussing with Bachelard. In 1991, while still a graduate student in Science and Technology Studies at Virginia Tech, I too chanced to enter the same building. I had been recommended to Bachelards daughter Suzanne by one of my Ph.D. mentors, philosopher and historian of biology Jean Gayon. This was a unique opportunity to gain almost rsthand knowledge about aspects of Bachelards work that had always intrigued me, including the connections of his epistemology of quantum physics and quantum chemistrysciences that he had explored relentlessly after 1949to the philosophical writings of Heisenberg and Bohr. Professor Suzanne Bachelard, herself an accomplished philosopher of mathematics and phenomenologist, was generous with her time. We spent a couple of hours at a cafe nearby, drinking hot chocolate and discussing biographical and epistemological issues. After the interview, I climbed with her the three ights of stairs that led to her apartment. Before we departed, she made me wait outside of her door while she rushed to pick up a copy of Bachelards Fragments dune poetique du feu (1988) and wrote a short dedication celebrating our encounter. More than a decade later, a French colleague told me that climbing those stairs was a privilege given to few. Most interviewers were only allowed to remain on the ground oor of the building. Just as Gaston Bachelard had been with Kuhn, Professor Bachelard was protective of her fathers work and still holding strongly to the mythical legacy of his public persona. Although she did not answer my question about the relations between Bachelards conceptions and German-language scientists, I was not disappointed by the outcome of the interview. In fact, it increased my admiration for the work of Bachelard. It also made

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me realize that reading his literature on the imagination was pivotal for understanding 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 elds of inquiry were then quite rigid. In fact, Kuhn admitted in the preface to The structure of scientic revolutions (1962) that most of his intellectual mentors were not American but Europeans such ` as Emile Meyerson, Alexandre Koyre, Michael Polanyi, Ludwik Fleck, and Helene Metzger. He also recognized that parts of his research required delving into the sociology of the scientic community (Kuhn, 1996, p. ix; rst published 1962). It was therefore only on the Continent that he could nd support for his interdisciplinary 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 characteristics of Bachelardianism, including a special blend of history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology of science.

2. What about Bachelards epistemology of science? Bachelard had been writing on the discontinuous structure of knowledge since 1927, the year of his Essai sur la connaissance approchee (one of his two doctoral theses). From his study of the historical record he concluded that scientic knowledge is approximate, and that modern science, which according to him started in 1905 with Einsteins theory of relativity, demanded an epistemological break with immediate experience, with Newtonian science, and with chosisme. Metaphysics of science such as rationalism, realism, positivism, all of which had derived their images of science from textbooks and biased science pedagogy, gave an incomplete picture of how the scientic mind develops through constant ruptures with out moded (perimee) ways of thinking. Actually, the expectation that science is about the given and that truth is correspondence between theories, xed categorical men` tal structures a la Kant, and physical reality, constituted to him obstacles to the progress of science. In La philosophie du non, he charted the epistemological prole of the development of his own conceptions of physicalist terms such as energy and mass to demonstrate their hold on ones mind and the resistance that even the scientically educated tend to oer towards innovations that require radical breaks with previous systems of thought (including metaphysics). Furthermore, to Bachelard science constructs its objects and each object stays glued to a stage in the historical development of a scientic discipline. Instruments in modern sciences like quantum mechanics are materialized theories, extensions of the mind rather than extensions of the body (Bachelard, 1978, p.133; rst published 1934). This technical construction was not possible in pre-modern science because of the trust scientists had in immediate knowledge up until the end of the nineteenth century. To Bachelard, this was not so much direct or empirical

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knowledge as it was a reection of the tendency, illustrated in alchemy, natural philosophy, and even in Lavoisiers chemistry, to project pre-scientic desires and attitudes into the interpretation of data. It is a tendency that needs, in addition, to be counteracted at all times because of its being permanently attached to the complexes of the unconscious and thus to the act of knowing itself. Bachelards notion of objectivity, therefore, diverged radically from the logical positivist tradition in philosophy of science. Scientic objects are constructed against nature. But the more one constructs scientic entities and the more scientists subject them to rigorous rational and technical scrutiny, the more objective knowledge becomes truly intersubjective, that is, free from the reveries of the solitary mind and bounded by collective agreements. Unfortunately, Bachelards applied rationalism, together with the rejection of the dichotomy between object and subject in favour of the historical nature of scientic entities and the underdetermination of theories by data came to America only after Kuhn and Popper, and then later in the 1970s when it became attached to the social constructivist movement in science and technology studies (Latour & Woolgar, 1979).

3. Bachelards multifaceted lives Bachelards 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 scientic change? Why did his contemporaries criticize him for arguing that the categories of the mind are uid rather than static? Why did he spend so much eort 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-scientic? Why did he turn midway in his work from psychoanalysis 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? Chimissos Gaston Bachelard. Critic of science and the imagination (2001) answers many of these questions. Furthermore, the book puts Bachelards epistemology into perspective without, in turn, destroying the respect one owes to his revolutionary and powerful thinking. I agree with her that the challenge of deconstructing Bachelardianism bears on the legitimation, through the manipulation of his physical 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 gures 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

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traces Kuhn and I found at Bachelards apartment in Paris. But other parts of Bachelard are equally real. The alternative oered by Chimisso is an account, not of his personality, which remains ever elusive, but of Bachelards 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 ocial es ` timetables of lyce and colleges in France in the mid-1920s demonstrates that psychology (sensation, perception, abstraction, and the relations of thought and language), logic (processes of thought and the methods of the sciences), morals (personal, family, social, economic and political life), and general philosophy (epistemology and metaphysics) all belonged to the territory of philosophy (p. 58). Another purpose of Chimissos book, connected to the blending of elds in secondary schools, is to prove that Bachelards 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 ll important gaps in French and English Bachelardian scholarship. I agree wholeheartedly with Chimissos thesis in her magnicently crafted work that there are many Bachelards in this book (p. 247). She demonstrates that the plurality of Bachelards activities, his devotion to the arts and to the sciences, his interest in ethnography, sociology, history, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, surrealism, alchemy, and natural philosophy, are inextricably intertwined with the debates in French academia over the role of culture generale 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 reconstructed over time by both critics and admirers. They cover an ideological spec trum stretching from Louis Althussers Marxist interpretation to Michel Vadees idealistic approach, and from the search by materialist Dominique Lecourt for a night-and-day Bachelardian dualism to Georges Canguilhems attempt at making Bachelards discourse dialectic in the Socratic (but not the Hegelian) sense. To these I would add social constructivism. Bruno Latours appropriation of Bache lardian concepts such as phenomenotechnique contributed to the assumption made by some intellectuals on this side of the Atlantic that Bachelard was a relativist avant la lettre (Castelao-Lawless, 1995). I concur that all of these authors fail to recognize the crucial epistemological consequences of Bachelards pedagogical stance and to pinpoint the historical reasons for his defence of rationalism(Chimisso, 2001, p. 80).

4. Science pedagogy and morality Bachelard was rst and foremost a teacher. From 1919 to 1930, he taught physics and chemistry at a secondary school in his native town of Bar-sur-Aube. He got

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his philosophy licence (equivalent to an American Masters degree) in 1920, his agregation (equivalent to tenure in an American high school) in 1922, and the Doctorate in 1927. Until 1940, the year he was called to the Sorbonne to replace Abel Rey as professor of history and philosophy of science, he taught philosophy of science at the University of Bourgogne, in Dijon. Although he was already fortysix years old when he got to the Sorbonne, his academic career was not unusual. In fact, from 1909 to 1939, seventy ve percent of all Sorbonne professors started as secondary school teachers and then obtained university posts through degrees and academic aliations (Chimisso, 2001, p. 51). It is therefore not surprising that much of Bachelards epistemological work is interspersed with subjects included in the philosophy syllabus and also with criticisms of the scientic curriculum in secondary schools (where the status of chemistry and physics was not well dened). To this he added compelling remarks about how mistakes in scientic education at this level percolate into positivistic conceptions of science at the university. Two main reasons were at the core Bachelards critique of science education. First, there was his stance on the academic commitment of the French government ` vis-a-vis the culture generale. Bachelard agreed with most educators that national education at secondary school was a moral and political problem, because it was about the formation of the individual and the citizen (ibid., pp. 5253). Second, there was his attack on how science was being taught. To him, modern science is anti-intuitive. To teach science as if it were continuous either with common sense or intuitive imagination was therefore immensely problematic. A responsible science teacher must constantly ght against, rather than stimulate, these natural propensities of the mind. By fostering an acritical acceptance of authority and encouraging easy associations between abstract thought and childish imagery, these tendencies quickly become epistemological obstacles to science. Bachelards antagonism toward French pedagogy comes out as late as 1953 when, in the introduc tion to Le materialisme rationnel, he accuses Maria Montessoris teaching methodologies of arresting the development of the scientic mind in the adolescent. Scientic education was for Bachelard also bound up with morality because morality belonged to the very cognitive structure of the sciences (ibid., p. 80). In my view, the link that he found between the increasingly rational force of science and the moral improvement of scientists as practitioners is similar to Robert Mertons conception of the self-correcting mechanisms of science. In fact, in The ethos of science, Merton claimed that institutionalized values and norms such as universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism are transmitted by precept and example, and reinforced by sanctions . . . [and] are in varying degrees internalized by scientists, thus fashioning their scientic conscience . . . inferred from the moral consensus of scientists as expressed in use and wont . . . (Merton, 1996, pp. 267268; rst published 1942). But Bachelard went even further than Merton in his optimism regarding the evolution of science when he argued that the mind has to change because it has to improve itself morally (Chimisso 2001, p. 92). The dialectic between the teacher and the student fosters a morally improved mind in both, which in turn leads to a morally improved citizenry (ibid., p. 97). In fact, Bachelards philosophy of pedagogy promoted a

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movement of liberation based on rationality and criticism, and believed that human beings can and should free themselves from prejudices and false beliefs (ibid., p. 99). This is why to him Society will be made for School and not the other way around (Bachelard, 1986, p. 252).

5. Scientic controversies Although Chimisso is exceptionally thorough in her detailing of the institutional and cultural settings in which Bachelards work was produced, she does not cover the scientic context of early twentieth-century France. Here, the controversies were not so much over disciplinary boundaries as they were about the epistemological consequences of non-Euclidean geometries, relativity and quantum theory. I did nd, however, that Chimissos treatment of the academic conict over boundaries in the elds of psychology, sociology, ethnography, and so on, could be applied here. The same can be said of her suggestion that the way Bachelard used his sources reected the closure he brought to whatever intellectual conict he wit nessed. One of the examples she oered was the impact of Levy-Bruhls La menta lite primitive (1923) on the study of the mind, and how the book originated a divide between philosophers, sociologists, and ethnologists. Those following in the steps of Auguste Comte, Levy-Bruhl, and Emile Durkheim, believed that the development of the mind toward rationality could be illustrated by the evolution from primitive (religious) to scientic thinking. Then there were those who, like Meyerson, Marcel Mauss, and Metzger, thought that ethnographical data proved that reason works in the same way everywhere. Interestingly, this was also an insti` tutional divide between the College de France and the Sorbonne. Bachelard resolved it when he found a compromise between the xidity and the historicity of the mind by breaking the unity of the mind: on the one hand he emphasized the historical character of the scientic mind, on the other regarded the mind as relatively xed and stable(Chimisso, 2001, p. 176). His compromise was the result of his using physics and chemistry as his philosophical laboratory. He tested both sides of the divide against his observations of the scientic mind at work and concluded that xidity and mobility were complementary rather than opposite. Let us apply Chimissos method to Bachelards reaction to the scientic context of the time. Bachelard was very much aware of the epistemological consequences of revolutionary developments such as Einsteins relativity, Louis de Broglies wave mechanics, and Heisenbergs quantum physics. They came to deform primordial concepts. From then on, reason multiplies its objections, it dissociates and relates fundamental notions, it rehearses the most fundamental abstractions (Bachelard, 1986, p. 7; rst published 1938). Later in his work he added Bohrs quantum physics to the list. I always found this categorization problematic, because it made invisible two historical episodes that would have provided perfect case studies for his claim that tension and consensus are part of the normal dialectical movement of science. First, there was the skepticism with which relativity had been received

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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 Leon Brunschvicg, believed that they were discontinuous with each other (Duhem, of course, was to nd this discontinuity unacceptable). He just explained the controversy away. Second, there was the conict 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 (Castelao, 1997). Again, there are no traces in Bachelards writings of this extraordinarily important scientic and epistemological controversy. There is more. Bachelard attended scientic conferences with De Broglie, Ein stein wrote the introduction to Meyersons Identite et realite (1908), De Broglie expressed his amazement at the intuitions of Bergson over quantum mechanics, Bergson wrote Duree et simultaneite (1922) to disagree with Einsteins conception of time, and Bachelard wrote La dialectique de la duree (1936) to disagree with Bergson. The connections between scientists and philosophers were denitely there. But a history of the scientic and institutional setting of this period in France is still to be written. Until this happens, Chimissos methodology comes in handy. For just as Bachelard did in the case of the humanities debateshe read the scientic sources, observed the conicts, 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 nal decisions on the matter. In the rst 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 condently when working inside a system of knowledge such as Newtonianism, 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 Quantum Mechanics, which was, not surprisingly, the ocial view among professional physicists. Objectivity is not lost, but correspondence has to be substituted by complementarity. This time he used the humanities, that is, phenomenology, as a laboratory for testing the epistemological viability of the hard sciences.

6. More research is needed I agree with Chimisso that, independently of the institutional and disciplinary motives that underlie it, much in the epistemology of science of Bachelard can contribute to contemporary debates in philosophy and historiography of the sciences. Her list includes conceptions that she analyzed and explained throughout her book: scientic objects as the outcome of social relationships and technical outcomes; of science as a dialectical activity; and of linear and progressive history of

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science as rationalized and anachronistic reconstruction of events (p. 252). Let us not be like Kuhn and miss the opportunity. References
Bachelard, G. (1978). Le nouvel esprit scientique (14th ed). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (First published 1934). ` Bachelard, G. (1986). La formation de lesprit scientique. Contribution a une psychanalyse de la connaissance scientique (13th ed). Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. (First published 1938) Bachelard, G. (1994). La philosophie du non: Essai dune philosophie du nouvel esprit scientique (4th ed). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (First published 1940) Bachelard, G. (1988). Fragments dune poetique du feu. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (First published 1942) Castelao, T. (1997). Gaston Bachelard et le milieu scientique et intellectuel francais. In P. Nouvel (Ed.), Actualite et posterites de Gaston Bachelard (pp. 100115). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Castelao-Lawless, T. (1995). Phenomenotechnique in historical perspective. Its origins and implications for philosophy of science. Philosophy of Science, 62, 4459. Kuhn, T. (1996). The structure of scientic revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (First published 1962; 2nd enl. ed. published 1970) Kuhn, T. (1997). A discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn, a physicist who became a historian for philosophical purposes: A discussion between Thomas S. Kuhn and Aristides Baltas, Kostas Gavroglu, Vasso Kindi. Neusis, 6, 145200. Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1979). Laboratory life: The construction of scientic facts. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Merton, R. (1996). On social structure and science. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. (First published 1942)