Philippine E-Journals

Gaston Bachelard’s Poetic Ontology

Mira Tan Reyes

Discipline: Education

 

Abstract:

The author introduces post-modern thinker Gaston Bachelard, a professor, scientist, and philosopher, who revisioned the philosophical basis of science as well as its pedagogy. The paper presents the trajectory of Bachelard as a philosopher in a remarkable shift of focus from science to poetics. The first part shows Bachelard’s critique of the history of science as foundation list and of the Cartesian rational subject as dualist. He will deconstruct through his basic philosophical ideas of epistemological field, rupture and obstacle the antiquarian view that science is not moving towards a universalization of truth but towards a rectification of already established truths. He says that the truths of science are not built from deduction and intension, but rather, via induction and extension. Truth is not found but built; it is relative and not universal. The second part shows Bachelard’s effort to debunk essentialist metaphysics and redesign a poetic ontology of imagination from Jungian theories of psychology that will explain the mobility of ideas and rectification of scientific truths in the epistemological field. The paper will culminate on a note that Bachelard’s vision of uniting poetry with science serves to heal the scientist’s alienation from the world she tries to examine, sponsored by the Cartesian subject/object fragmentation, and rehabilitates abstract reason in a more intimate relation with imagination.