CASTELÃO, Tereza. Kuhn-and-Bachelard.pdf

Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 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 Tere sa Castela Cast ela˜ o-Lawles o-La wlesss Department of Philosophy, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI 49401-9403, USA

Gaston Bachelard. Critic of science and the imagination.

Cris Cristi tina na Chimi Chimiss sso; o; Rout Routled ledge ge,, Lond London on & New New York York,, 2001 2001,, pp. pp. xii+ xii+285 285,, Pric Pricee £68.00, £68.00, hardback, hardback, ISBN 0-415-26905-9 0-415-26905-9..

1. Encounters Encounters with with Bachelard Bachelard

At the end of the 1940s, Thomas Kuhn (1924–1994), carrying with him a letter ´, of recomme recommenda ndatio tion n from from histor historian ian of physics physics and astrono astronomy my Alexand Alexandre re Koyre Koyre visited Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) in his Paris apartment at the rue St. Genevie` ve. A couple of years prior to that meeting, Kuhn had read Bachelard’s La philosop los ophie hie du no non: n: Ess Essai ai d’u d’une ne ph philo ilosop sophie hie du no nouve uvell esp esprit rit sci scient entifiq ifique ue (1940) with great interest suspecting that they might share important philosophical and historical 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 reservations about it, nevertheless he was a figure who was seeing at least some of the E-mail address: castelat@gvsu address: [email protected] .edu (T. Castela C astela˜ o-Lawless). 0039-3681/$ - see front matter # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2004.08.002

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T. Castela˜ o-Lawless / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 873–881

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 L’eau et les reˆ ves, Bachelard had become keenly interested in the elements of the imagination (fire, water, air, earth), and had published three books on literary creativity and the liberating function of its images. By the time he returned to epistemology of science with Le rationalisme applique´ (1949), L’activite´ rationaliste de la physique contemporaine (1951), and Le mate´ rialisme 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 scientific 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 poe´ tique de l’espace (1957), La poe´ t ique de la reˆ verie (1960) and La flamme d’une chandelle (1961). Nevertheless, the epistemology ‘in-between’ that Bachelard was producing at the time of Kuhn’s 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 scientific claims, the importance of rhetoric in science, and the defence of scientific claims against charges of scientific 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 Bachelard’s daughter Suzanne by one of my Ph.D. mentors, philosopher and historian of biology Jean Gayon. This was a unique opportunity to gain almost firsthand knowledge about aspects of Bachelard’s work that had always intrigued me, including the connections of his epistemology of quantum physics and quantum chemistry—sciences that he had explored relentlessly after 1949—to 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 flights 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 Bachelard’s Fragments d’une poe´ tique 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 floor of the building. Just as Gaston Bachelard had been with Kuhn, Professor Bachelard was protective of her father’s work and still holding strongly to the mythical legacy of his public persona. Although she did not answer my question about the relations between Bachelard’s 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

T. Castelaõ-Lawless / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 873–881

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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 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 Koyre´, Michael Polanyi, Ludwik Fleck, and He´le`ne 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 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 Bachelard’s epistemology of science?

Bachelard had been writing on the discontinuous structure of knowledge since 1927, the year of his Essai sur la connaissance approche´ e (one of his two doctoral theses). From his study of the historical record he concluded that scientific knowledge is approximate, and that modern science, which according to him started in 1905 with Einstein’s 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 scientific mind develops through constant ruptures with outmoded (‘perimeé’) ways of thinking. Actually, the expectation that science is about the given and that truth is correspondence between theories, fixed categorical mental 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 profile of the development of his own conceptions of physicalist terms such as ‘energy’ and ‘mass’ to demonstrate their hold on one’s mind and the resistance that even the scientifically educated tend to offer 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 scientific 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; first 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 reflection of the tendency, illustrated in alchemy, natural philosophy, and even in Lavoisier’s chemistry, to project pre-scientific 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. Bachelard’s notion of objectivity, therefore, diverged radically from the logical positivist tradition in philosophy of science. Scientific objects are constructed ‘against’ nature. But the more one constructs scientific 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, Bachelard’s ‘applied rationalism’, together with the rejection of the dichotomy between object and subject in favour of the historical nature of scientific 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. Bachelard’s multifaceted lives

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 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? 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 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 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


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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 lyce´ es and colle` ges 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 Chimisso’s book, connected to the blending of fields in secondary 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, surrealism, alchemy, and natural philosophy, are inextricably intertwined with the debates in French academia over the role of culture ge´ ne´ rale 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 spectrum stretching from Louis Althusser’s Marxist interpretation to Michel Vadeé’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 Bachelardian concepts such as ‘pheńomeńotechnique’ contributed to the assumption made by some intellectuals on this side of the Atlantic that Bachelard was a relativist avant la lettre (Castelaõ-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’(Chimisso, 2001, p. 80).

4. Science pedagogy and morality

Bachelard was first 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 agre´ gation (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 five percent of all Sorbonne professors started as secondary school teachers and then obtained university posts through degrees and academic affiliations (Chimisso, 2001, p. 51). It is therefore not surprising that much of Bachelard’s epistemological work is interspersed with subjects included in the philosophy syllabus and also with criticisms of the scientific curriculum in secondary schools (where the status of chemistry and physics was not well defined). To this he added compelling remarks about how mistakes in scientific education at this level percolate into positivistic conceptions of science at the university. Two main reasons were at the core Bachelard’s critique of science education. First, there was his stance on the academic commitment of the French government vis-a`-vis the culture ge´ ne´ rale. 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. 52–53). 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 fight 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. Bachelard’s antagonism toward French pedagogy comes out as late as 1953 when, in the introduction to Le mate´ rialisme rationnel , he accuses Maria Montessori’s teaching methodologies of arresting the development of the scientific mind in the adolescent. Scientific 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 Merton’s 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 scientific conscience . . . inferred from the moral consensus of scientists as expressed in use and wont . . .’ (Merton, 1996, pp. 267–268; first 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, Bachelard’s 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. Scientific controversies

Although Chimisso is exceptionally thorough in her detailing of the institutional and cultural settings in which Bachelard’s work was produced, she does not cover the scientific 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 find, however, that Chimisso’s treatment of the academic conflict over boundaries in the fields 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 reflected the closure he brought to whatever intellectual conflict he witnessed. One of the examples she offered was the impact of Le´vy-Bruhl’s La mentalite´ 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, Le´vy-Bruhl, and Emile Durkheim, believed that the development of the mind toward rationality could be illustrated by the evolution from primitive (religious) to scientific 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 institutional divide between the Colle`ge de France and the Sorbonne. Bachelard resolved it when he ‘found a compromise between the fixidity and the historicity of the mind by breaking the unity of the mind: on the one hand he emphasized the historical character of the scientific mind, on the other regarded the mind as relatively fixed 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 scientific mind at work and concluded that fixidity and mobility were complementary rather than opposite. Let us apply Chimisso’s method to Bachelard’s reaction to the scientific context of the time. Bachelard was very much aware of the epistemological consequences of revolutionary developments such as Einstein’s relativity, Louis de Broglie’s wave mechanics, and Heisenberg’s 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; first published 1938). Later in his work he added Bohr’s 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 continuous with Newtonianism, and those who, like Pierre Duhem and León 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 (Castelaõ, 1997). Again, there are no traces in Bachelard’s writings of this extraordinarily important scientific and epistemological controversy. There is more. Bachelard attended scientific conferences with De Broglie, Einstein wrote the introduction to Meyerson’s Identite´ et re´ alite´ (1908), De Broglie expressed his amazement at the intuitions of Bergson over quantum mechanics, Bergson wrote Dure´ e et simultane´ ite´ (1922) to disagree with Einstein’s conception of time, and Bachelard wrote La dialectique de la dure´ e (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 scientific 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 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 official 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: ‘scientific 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 scientifique (14th ed). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (First published 1934). Bachelard, G. (1986). La formation de l’esprit scientifique. Contribution a` une psychanalyse de la connaissance 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 poe´ tique du feu. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (First published 1942) Castelaõ, T. (1997). Gaston Bachelard et le milieu scientifique et intellectuel français. In P. Nouvel (Ed.), Actualite´ et poste´ rite´ s de Gaston Bachelard (pp. 100–115). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Castelaõ-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 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 , 145–200. 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)

CASTELÃO, Tereza. Kuhn-and-Bachelard.pdf

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