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https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominique_Lecourt
https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=7D95A8B50EB1F92AC31E102BE25CE492
https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=2C95EA6B4315AA065BF58DF105E10D42
"Bachelard was Cangnilhem's 'teacher', and Cauguilhem Foucault's." (p.120)
"
(pp.120-126)
" [From Bachelard to historical materialism]
"Gaston Bachelard was not a Marxist, nor even a materialist ; as a reminder, the passage from Applied Rationalism will be cited where materialism is presented as a 'flat', 'abstract' and 'crude' philosophy; it will be recalled that "discursive" as it may have been, Bachelardian epistemology explicltly wlsed to be idealist ; it wil! be Fointed out, lastly, that the most obvious point of agreement in this apparently contradictory -epistemologlcal and 'poetic' - œuvre is precisely a dynamistic conceptin of thought, which is fundamentally very 'psychologistic'." (p.129)
"From the 'realism' of Meyerson to Sartre's existentialism, no philosophy escaped his sarcasms. This perpetual polemic, far from arising from a personal psychological disposition, has a precise and profound theoretical meaning. It has to be taken seriously. Its principle can be found outside philosophy in the upheavals experienced in the actual history of the sciences at the beginning of tins century: the development of non-Euclidean geometries, the theory of Relativity, the beginnings of Micro-physics, etc. The new disciplines then inaugurated seemed 'unprecedented' to Bachelard ; his first works are but the reflection of this radical novelty: they take note of a rupture in the actual history of the sciences." (p.130)
"[Dans Le nouvel esprit scientifique, il] proposes a novel philosophical category - whose function at this stage is still descriptive: the category of 'No' or 'Non-'. This category was formed by a controlled extension of the negation which had served to think the disconcerting novelty of the non-Euclidean geometries: in the same way, one can speak of 'non-Newtonian' mechanics, 'non-Lavoisierian' chemistry, etc." (p.131)
"The discontinuity he registers in The New Scientific Mind is opposed to the principle that governed the then dominant philosophy of science, that of Emile Meyerson: The Inductive Value of Relativity (1929) is counterposed to La Deduction relativiste (Relativist Deduction), in which Meyerson, with some courage and considerable ingenuity, had undertaken to 'deduce" Einstein from Newton by showing that, at least in its principles, the theory of Relativity was already present 'in germ' in the Principia of 1687. Meyerson, convinced of the identity of the human mind in all its manifestations, held that the discontinuous was an illusory appearance attributable to the philosophical ignorance of scientists. Hence one must state that Bachelardian epistemology, 'starting not from a philosophical 'principle' but from a summons addressed to philosophy by the contemporary re-organization ofthe exact sciences, ran, in the very recognition ofits object, into a set of philosophical theses which were obstacles in its way. This collision was first thought by Bachelard as a delay (retard) of philosophy with respect to science, a delay which was still awaiting its concept." (p.131)
"But the 'encounter' with Meyerson's philosophy had another, still more. decisive consequence: in it Bachelard discovered the solidarity between a thesis concerning the theory of knowledge: 'realism', and a thesis concerning the history of the sciences 'continuism'. In it the historical continuity of learning (savoir) is supported by the homogeneity of the forms of knowledge (connaissance) - ordinary and scientific. An attack on the former could not but ruin the latter: such is the double, historical and epistemological, meaning of the now famous thesis ofthe 'rupture' as it functions in Bachelard's works. It is clear in what sense this epistemology has to to be called 'historical' ; it was so from the very first ; from the
moment it took as its task to draw the philosophical implications of the 'no' which the new scientific mind addressed to previous science. A task which received its formulation and the beginnings of a realization six years later in The Philosophy of No: the question, it says there, is 'to give science the philosophy it deserves'.
Bachelard was to carry out this undertaking during the next ten years: from The Philosophy of No (1940) to Applied Rationalism (1949). In doing so he steadily acquired the conviction that this philosophy' could only be elaborated marginally to all the existing 'theories of knowledge'. Not only 'marginally to' but also against them. What he had defined as the 'delay' of philosophy now seemed to him to be a systematic 'displacement' of every philosophical theory of knowledge with respect to the scientists' actual work. That is why
Applied Rationalism, which can be said to realize, but also to rectify in many points, the programme of The Philosophy of No, opens with several crucial pages in which Bachelard sets out what I propose to call a 'topology' of philosophy. This topology takes the form of a 'spectrum' in which all the types of theory of knowledge appear dispersed around the reality of the work of production of scientific concepts, in which this topology proves to be a 'typology'. Allow me to reproduce this spectrum (on p. 133) in order to analyse it. This spectrum has two very remarkable characteristics: (a) every philosophy -to the extent that it contains as a principal component a theory of knowledge- is defined in it by its place - its specific 'displacement' - with respect to scientific knowledge ; (b) scientific knowledge has the role of an axis, that is to say that by a mere 'fold' around this axis it is possible to make the various typical forms of philosophy coincide. Three conclusions can be drawn from these two characteristics: ,(a) what is given as the content of philosophy is none other than tlte hallucinatory materialization of its peculiar dispersion (teart) from science ; (b) the always possible coincidence of symriletrical and opposed typical forms of philosophy is the index of a fundamental identity: each form is merely the 'inverted' but identical form of an opposite form ; (c) the essence of philosophy can only be determined from the point of view of the axis, i.e., from a non-philosophical point of view.
Idealism
+
Conventionalism
+
Formalism
+
(philosophy ofthe production ofscientific knowledges:
applied rationalism and technical materialism)
+
Positivism
+
Empiricism
+
Realism
This 'identity in inversion' that I have just emphasized is analysed at length in Bachelard's last works. He there remarks that it is supported by a certain number of philosophical couples, each term of which can by turns be dominant or dominated. These categorial couples form the apparent 'content' of the philosophical theories of knowledge. Stated as such in Applied Rationalism, they are as follows: subject-object, abstract-concrete, given-construct, etc.; they are interchangeable and complementary. They all have as correlate and cement the philosophical category of truth which presents itself as the concept of their accord and closes the space of philosophy. Now this last category, implying that the completion of the process of knowledge is always possible in principle or realized, makes inconceivable the actual history of scientific knowledge: its ruptures, its reorganizations, its failures, its contradictions, its risks.... That is why an epistemology which is historical will pay more attention to error, tofailure, to hesitations than to truth: its space will thus be open, and non-systematic." (pp.131-133)
"The philosophy ofthe scientists is contradictory: to use an expression of Bachelard's, it mixes together a 'diurnal philosophy', the clear philosophy of the science, and a 'nocturnal philosophy', the philosophy of the philosophers to which the scientists inevitably turn when they reflect on their own practice. I shall say that the scientist maintains an imaginary relationship to his own practice and that the philosophy of the philosophers plays its part in the constitution of this relationship." (p.134)
"The first concept to be constructed, the one which sustains the whole edifice, is the concept of 'epistemological obstacle'; it designates the effects on the scientist's practice of the imaginary relationship he maintains with this practice. This concept is still famous thanks to the many and often terrifying illustrations Bachelard gave of it on The Formation of the Scientific Mind (1938). It must be said that, preoccupied with what was most urgent, he concerned himself less with its mechanism than with its effects. Or rather with its unique effect ; for, although 'polymorphous', the obstacle functions in a single direction: going back on the 'no', it closes the rupture between ordinary knowledge and scientific knowledge and reestablishes the continuity threatened by the advance of scientific knowledge.
It may arise at the moment of the constitution of the knowledge, in the form of a 'counter-thought', or at a later phase in its development as a 'suspension of thought' (arrêt de pensée). Whatever the case, the obstacle reveals 'a resistance of thought to thought'. More precisely: assuming that scientific thought only advances by its own reorganizations, it can be said that the epistemological obstacle appears whenever -but only then- an existing organization of thought -whether it is already scientific or not- is in danger. Let me add that it appears at the point at which the rupture threatens - which other efforts than those of Bachelard have been able to show to be the site of an 'overdetermination', of an accumulation of contradictions. Localized in its appearance, the obstacle is solidary with a determinate structure of thought which will later appear, by recurrence, as a 'tissue of tenacious errors'. The status Bachelard attributes to the 'philosophy of the philosophers' is now clearer: it is the vehicle and support of the epistemological obstacles, since it is
what structures the relationship of the scientist to his scientific practice. It registers scientific ruptures and reorganizations by inversions in its spectrum ; and, in the closed field of its basic categories, it thereby assimilates the advances of scientific knowledge and lives by their exploitation. It is easy to observe its action, to describe it, even to foresee it: Bachelard, for provocative reasons -in order to shake the philosophers out of their 'torpor'- more than once tried this out. But one question about the epistemological obstacles remains unanswered: once their effects and the mechanism of their intervention in scientific practices have been described, that of their formation remains to be thought. Rather: what necessity is there in the fact that epistemological obstacles are always being formed and reformed ? We shall find that this question reveals the limits of Bachelardian epistemology.
First we must examine the positive categories released by the recognition of the obstacles as such and by the respect for ruptures and re-organizations. We can say that all these categories are ordered according to an unprecedented conception of the dialectic. In Bachelard this category designates the reality of scientific work: the process of mutual adjustment of theory and experiment. Now, given the rejection of every fixed point -through an initial and polemical rejection of the subject-object couplet- this adjustment
has to be thought not as a formal adequation but as a historical process. In a history which implies no certainty, no fate destines theory always to find the means of its realization. The risk is that at a given moment the language of the physicist and that of the mathematician for example, should become contradictory. Philosophy will hasten to see in this a 'crisis' of science. For the mathematicians and physicists, it will be the opportunity for some work: the former will revise their theories, formulate other hypotheses, the latter will
refine their experiments, check their instruments. Neither the former nor the latter will hesitate to reconstruct the edifice of their science 'from top to bottom' if need be. Georges Canguilhem has shown that this category of the dialectic cannot be assimilated to any classical conception of the dialectic: this is readily understandable once the meaning and implications of Bachelard's anti-philosophical polemic have been grasped. The dialectic that emerges is the 'spontaneous' dialectic of scientific practice: it affirms -against philosophical scepticism- the existence of the objects of science and proceeds by a reorganization of learning (savoir) 'from top to bottom'." (pp.135-136)
"Bachelard's polemic against the philosophical theories of knowledge has one last effect: it demands a rectification of the philosophical category of experience by correct appreciation of the function of instruments in the production of scientific concepts. Everyone knows Bachelard's thesis that scientific instruments are 'materialized theories' ; but it is essential to add the following counter-point: the 'materialization' of theory is not for him an acessory phenomenon. On the contrary, he ceaselessly stressed that it is one of the most characteristic features of the contemporary sciences that they are 'artificialist', that they contain as one of their essential components a technique for the production of phenomena ;
what, in parody fashion, he has called a 'phenomeno-technics', and which is the object ofthat new discipline programmatically adopted by Applied Rationalism: 'technical materialism'.
The notion of phenomeno-technics has to be taken seriously: it enables us to understand in what sense the word 'production' is to -be understood : not only the 'theoretical' production of concepts, but indissociably the material production of the object of theoretical labour; of what can no longer be called its 'data' or 'givens' (donnees), but rather its 'material'. The philosophy of the philosophers, when it is confronted with this material intervention of instruments in the production of concepts can only think it as an inessential 'mediation', and leave it to fall within the general and vague category of 'experimental method', a specification 'for the use of the scientist' of the philosophical category of experience. According to Bachelard, this general category, ignoring the specificity of the cases in which instruments function, gives no real knowledge of what takes place in scientific practice. It is unable to explain the new fact that a concept must from now on integrate into its constitution as a concept the technical condition of its realization. Ultimately this is because the notion of 'method' and the philosophical category of experience are solidary with the conceptual couplet 'abstract-concrete'. Now, the practice of phenomeno-technics consists precisely of proceeding- to couplings (couplages) between the abstract and the concrete by the expedient of the setting up of theoretically defined instruments and systems of apparatus according to programmes of rational realization. Thus the 'objects' of science, far from being poor abstractions drawn from the wealth of the concrete, are the theoretically normed and materially ordered products of a labour which endows them with all the wealth of determinations of the concept and with all the sensitivity of experimental specifications. It can thus be said, following Bachelard, that these objects are 'concrete-abstracts'.
The dual status of scientific instruments has the additional interest of revealing -materially- the 'eminently social' character of contemporary science. Bachelard's last epistemological work, on chemistry, Rational Materialism (1953), is particularly instructive in this regard. In it he systematically opposes what the chemist calls a 'substance' to what the philosopher means by substance. Among the essential characteristics of a chemical substance is 'purity'. Here is what Bachelard writes about it:
It can be said that there is no purity without purification. And nothing better proves the eminently social character of contemporary science than the techniques of purification. Indeed, purification processes can only be developed by the utilization of a whole set of reagents whose purity has obtained a kind ofsocial guarantee. Elsewhere, as is well known, Bachelard could write that only 'society can send electricity along a wire'. In short, he reveals rhe need, in order to think the history of a science, to take into account the state
of the 'technological city' (cite technicienne). But that state is quite clearly linked to the history of the techniques of production ; i.e., to the City as such. What type of determination is there between the history of production techniques and that of scientific instruments, between that scientific instruments and that of concepts ? These questions remain unanswered." (pp.137-139)
"In the case of,the statu~ 0:'scientific instruments', what is missing
fr~m Bachelard s analySIS IS a concept that would enable him to
thmk together several histories with different statuses; in short, the
concept of a differentialIzistory. When it is a matter ofthe formationof epistemologicaCobstades, the same lack is felt, but the consequences, as ,;e shall see, are much more serious. Once the rupture I be~een or.di?a~ knowledge and scientific knowledge has been
regls\ered, It IS mdeed a matter of determining the constitution of
that 'tissue of tenacious errors' with which science 'breaks'. At the
same time, this.is ~lso ~o account for the necessarily imaginary
nature of the relatIOnship the scientist maintains with his own
practice.
. B~chelard attempted this in two directions, unevenly explored
m his.work.. The fir~t, evoked above all in The Formation of the
Sctentific Mmd, consists of casting doubt on scientific education
whic?, both in its.lessons and in its 'practical work', displaces th~
true mterests ofsCience behind the mask of pedagogy: the constant
appe~l to the images and experiences of everyday life made in
physI.cs cou~ses .se~ms to him particularly damaging. The philosophy
classIS a!so ~ncnmmated, but for a different although complementary
reaso?: tt diffuses an undeserved valorization of 'general culture' to
the disadvantage ofthe scientific specializations, which are, however,
the only motor of the advance of the sciences. Thus, by means of educational institutions, the conditions of the reproduction of
scientific knowledges have their effects on the forms of their. pro.
duction.
The second direction is intended to be more profound, and it is
more minutely analysed byBachelard; it constitutes the object ofthe
new discipline he believed he had founded: the 'psychoanalysis of
objective knowledge'. It must be candidly stated: all that enables
Bachelard to think the necessity of the 'epistemological obstacles'
is a certain conception ofthe human soul which roots the 'imaginary
relationship' in the imaginary ofthe images produced bythe imagination. The pages - and they are numerous - in which Bachelard
describes this iuhibitory intervention ofimages in scientific practice
are still famous. But their crucial theoretical status must be understood: they attempt to elaborate a system of concepts which will
I
make it possible to think the intrication of two histories: that of the
scientific and that of the non-scientific in the practice of the scientists. Hence it is not surprising that this historical epistemology
culminates, in The Rationalist Affectivity ofContemporary Physics
(1951), with the project of an epistemological history which is
presented as a dual history: a 'ratified history' (or history of the
scientific in scientific practice) and a 'lapsed history' (or history ofthe
interventions of the non-scientific in scientific practice).
But if we turn to the realizations of this double history, we find
that the only example of a ratified history that h~ elaborated - in
Applied Rationalism - he elaborated vis-a-vis the history of mathematics, whose very special character was stressed by Bachelard
himself, following Cavailles, for mathematics immediately manifests
the existence of what he calls a 'logical time', a continuous identity,
which is not found as such in the other sciences. As for lapsed
history, illustrations of it will be sought in vain: it is thought very
precisely as a non-history: as a 'museum of horrors' or an 'unformed
magma'. Given this, the conjunction of the two histories and thei~
mutual determination remain obscure. .
His resort to the libido ofthe scientists to explain the constitution
of epist~mological obstacles here at once reveals all its meaning:
it compensates for Bachelard's inability to think the differential history of what I shall call sciences and ideologies. By that very fact,
all Baclrelard's epistemological concepts are haunted by psychologism: in theterm 'scientific mind' it is the term mind that tends to
become dominant; the notion of scientific labour and, correspondingly, philosophical laziness, take on a subjective connotation; the
application of 'applied rationalism' threatens to capsizeinto psychopedagogy; obstacles, finally, can" be understood as mere difficulties,
whereas the scientific city is conceived as an 'inter-subjectivity'. It
has to be admitted that many pages ofBachelard are open to such an
interpretation.
But ifthe notion of an 'imaginary relationship' is referred, not to a
psychologyc,fthe imaginary, but to the scientific concept ofideology
as it features in 'historical materialism', in the science ofhistory, and
which designates precisely the 'imaginary relationship of men to
their material conditions of existence', it is clear what is designated;
but not thought, by Bachelard: the necessity, in order to construct
the concept of a history of the sciences, to refer it to a theory of
ideologies and oftheir history.
Such a reading really does allow us to assign limits to Bachelard's
epistemology since it reveals the 'psychologism' that sustains his
'poetics' as a point ofretreat, better as a 'return of philosophy', ifit is
true that, unable to think the relation scientific non-scientific as a
differential history, Bachelard based it on the repetitive permanence
of great themes, myths or complexes in an eternal unconscious. In
short, paradoxically, he turns to the analogue of a theory of knowledge. Hence it has to be said that Gaston Bachelard's historical
epistemology remains a non-philOSophy in philosophy. Nevertheless, by its respect for the spontaneous dialectical materialism ofscientific practice, it provides us with precious elements for a theory of philosophy and ofits history, and on condition that we know how to read it, precisely where it is inconsistent it reveals the ways to supplement it so as to construct a materialist theory ofthe history of the sciences." (pp.139-141)
-Dominique Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology. Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault, NLB, 1975, 223 pages.
https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=7D95A8B50EB1F92AC31E102BE25CE492
https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=2C95EA6B4315AA065BF58DF105E10D42
"Bachelard was Cangnilhem's 'teacher', and Cauguilhem Foucault's." (p.120)
"
(pp.120-126)
" [From Bachelard to historical materialism]
"Gaston Bachelard was not a Marxist, nor even a materialist ; as a reminder, the passage from Applied Rationalism will be cited where materialism is presented as a 'flat', 'abstract' and 'crude' philosophy; it will be recalled that "discursive" as it may have been, Bachelardian epistemology explicltly wlsed to be idealist ; it wil! be Fointed out, lastly, that the most obvious point of agreement in this apparently contradictory -epistemologlcal and 'poetic' - œuvre is precisely a dynamistic conceptin of thought, which is fundamentally very 'psychologistic'." (p.129)
"From the 'realism' of Meyerson to Sartre's existentialism, no philosophy escaped his sarcasms. This perpetual polemic, far from arising from a personal psychological disposition, has a precise and profound theoretical meaning. It has to be taken seriously. Its principle can be found outside philosophy in the upheavals experienced in the actual history of the sciences at the beginning of tins century: the development of non-Euclidean geometries, the theory of Relativity, the beginnings of Micro-physics, etc. The new disciplines then inaugurated seemed 'unprecedented' to Bachelard ; his first works are but the reflection of this radical novelty: they take note of a rupture in the actual history of the sciences." (p.130)
"[Dans Le nouvel esprit scientifique, il] proposes a novel philosophical category - whose function at this stage is still descriptive: the category of 'No' or 'Non-'. This category was formed by a controlled extension of the negation which had served to think the disconcerting novelty of the non-Euclidean geometries: in the same way, one can speak of 'non-Newtonian' mechanics, 'non-Lavoisierian' chemistry, etc." (p.131)
"The discontinuity he registers in The New Scientific Mind is opposed to the principle that governed the then dominant philosophy of science, that of Emile Meyerson: The Inductive Value of Relativity (1929) is counterposed to La Deduction relativiste (Relativist Deduction), in which Meyerson, with some courage and considerable ingenuity, had undertaken to 'deduce" Einstein from Newton by showing that, at least in its principles, the theory of Relativity was already present 'in germ' in the Principia of 1687. Meyerson, convinced of the identity of the human mind in all its manifestations, held that the discontinuous was an illusory appearance attributable to the philosophical ignorance of scientists. Hence one must state that Bachelardian epistemology, 'starting not from a philosophical 'principle' but from a summons addressed to philosophy by the contemporary re-organization ofthe exact sciences, ran, in the very recognition ofits object, into a set of philosophical theses which were obstacles in its way. This collision was first thought by Bachelard as a delay (retard) of philosophy with respect to science, a delay which was still awaiting its concept." (p.131)
"But the 'encounter' with Meyerson's philosophy had another, still more. decisive consequence: in it Bachelard discovered the solidarity between a thesis concerning the theory of knowledge: 'realism', and a thesis concerning the history of the sciences 'continuism'. In it the historical continuity of learning (savoir) is supported by the homogeneity of the forms of knowledge (connaissance) - ordinary and scientific. An attack on the former could not but ruin the latter: such is the double, historical and epistemological, meaning of the now famous thesis ofthe 'rupture' as it functions in Bachelard's works. It is clear in what sense this epistemology has to to be called 'historical' ; it was so from the very first ; from the
moment it took as its task to draw the philosophical implications of the 'no' which the new scientific mind addressed to previous science. A task which received its formulation and the beginnings of a realization six years later in The Philosophy of No: the question, it says there, is 'to give science the philosophy it deserves'.
Bachelard was to carry out this undertaking during the next ten years: from The Philosophy of No (1940) to Applied Rationalism (1949). In doing so he steadily acquired the conviction that this philosophy' could only be elaborated marginally to all the existing 'theories of knowledge'. Not only 'marginally to' but also against them. What he had defined as the 'delay' of philosophy now seemed to him to be a systematic 'displacement' of every philosophical theory of knowledge with respect to the scientists' actual work. That is why
Applied Rationalism, which can be said to realize, but also to rectify in many points, the programme of The Philosophy of No, opens with several crucial pages in which Bachelard sets out what I propose to call a 'topology' of philosophy. This topology takes the form of a 'spectrum' in which all the types of theory of knowledge appear dispersed around the reality of the work of production of scientific concepts, in which this topology proves to be a 'typology'. Allow me to reproduce this spectrum (on p. 133) in order to analyse it. This spectrum has two very remarkable characteristics: (a) every philosophy -to the extent that it contains as a principal component a theory of knowledge- is defined in it by its place - its specific 'displacement' - with respect to scientific knowledge ; (b) scientific knowledge has the role of an axis, that is to say that by a mere 'fold' around this axis it is possible to make the various typical forms of philosophy coincide. Three conclusions can be drawn from these two characteristics: ,(a) what is given as the content of philosophy is none other than tlte hallucinatory materialization of its peculiar dispersion (teart) from science ; (b) the always possible coincidence of symriletrical and opposed typical forms of philosophy is the index of a fundamental identity: each form is merely the 'inverted' but identical form of an opposite form ; (c) the essence of philosophy can only be determined from the point of view of the axis, i.e., from a non-philosophical point of view.
Idealism
+
Conventionalism
+
Formalism
+
(philosophy ofthe production ofscientific knowledges:
applied rationalism and technical materialism)
+
Positivism
+
Empiricism
+
Realism
This 'identity in inversion' that I have just emphasized is analysed at length in Bachelard's last works. He there remarks that it is supported by a certain number of philosophical couples, each term of which can by turns be dominant or dominated. These categorial couples form the apparent 'content' of the philosophical theories of knowledge. Stated as such in Applied Rationalism, they are as follows: subject-object, abstract-concrete, given-construct, etc.; they are interchangeable and complementary. They all have as correlate and cement the philosophical category of truth which presents itself as the concept of their accord and closes the space of philosophy. Now this last category, implying that the completion of the process of knowledge is always possible in principle or realized, makes inconceivable the actual history of scientific knowledge: its ruptures, its reorganizations, its failures, its contradictions, its risks.... That is why an epistemology which is historical will pay more attention to error, tofailure, to hesitations than to truth: its space will thus be open, and non-systematic." (pp.131-133)
"The philosophy ofthe scientists is contradictory: to use an expression of Bachelard's, it mixes together a 'diurnal philosophy', the clear philosophy of the science, and a 'nocturnal philosophy', the philosophy of the philosophers to which the scientists inevitably turn when they reflect on their own practice. I shall say that the scientist maintains an imaginary relationship to his own practice and that the philosophy of the philosophers plays its part in the constitution of this relationship." (p.134)
"The first concept to be constructed, the one which sustains the whole edifice, is the concept of 'epistemological obstacle'; it designates the effects on the scientist's practice of the imaginary relationship he maintains with this practice. This concept is still famous thanks to the many and often terrifying illustrations Bachelard gave of it on The Formation of the Scientific Mind (1938). It must be said that, preoccupied with what was most urgent, he concerned himself less with its mechanism than with its effects. Or rather with its unique effect ; for, although 'polymorphous', the obstacle functions in a single direction: going back on the 'no', it closes the rupture between ordinary knowledge and scientific knowledge and reestablishes the continuity threatened by the advance of scientific knowledge.
It may arise at the moment of the constitution of the knowledge, in the form of a 'counter-thought', or at a later phase in its development as a 'suspension of thought' (arrêt de pensée). Whatever the case, the obstacle reveals 'a resistance of thought to thought'. More precisely: assuming that scientific thought only advances by its own reorganizations, it can be said that the epistemological obstacle appears whenever -but only then- an existing organization of thought -whether it is already scientific or not- is in danger. Let me add that it appears at the point at which the rupture threatens - which other efforts than those of Bachelard have been able to show to be the site of an 'overdetermination', of an accumulation of contradictions. Localized in its appearance, the obstacle is solidary with a determinate structure of thought which will later appear, by recurrence, as a 'tissue of tenacious errors'. The status Bachelard attributes to the 'philosophy of the philosophers' is now clearer: it is the vehicle and support of the epistemological obstacles, since it is
what structures the relationship of the scientist to his scientific practice. It registers scientific ruptures and reorganizations by inversions in its spectrum ; and, in the closed field of its basic categories, it thereby assimilates the advances of scientific knowledge and lives by their exploitation. It is easy to observe its action, to describe it, even to foresee it: Bachelard, for provocative reasons -in order to shake the philosophers out of their 'torpor'- more than once tried this out. But one question about the epistemological obstacles remains unanswered: once their effects and the mechanism of their intervention in scientific practices have been described, that of their formation remains to be thought. Rather: what necessity is there in the fact that epistemological obstacles are always being formed and reformed ? We shall find that this question reveals the limits of Bachelardian epistemology.
First we must examine the positive categories released by the recognition of the obstacles as such and by the respect for ruptures and re-organizations. We can say that all these categories are ordered according to an unprecedented conception of the dialectic. In Bachelard this category designates the reality of scientific work: the process of mutual adjustment of theory and experiment. Now, given the rejection of every fixed point -through an initial and polemical rejection of the subject-object couplet- this adjustment
has to be thought not as a formal adequation but as a historical process. In a history which implies no certainty, no fate destines theory always to find the means of its realization. The risk is that at a given moment the language of the physicist and that of the mathematician for example, should become contradictory. Philosophy will hasten to see in this a 'crisis' of science. For the mathematicians and physicists, it will be the opportunity for some work: the former will revise their theories, formulate other hypotheses, the latter will
refine their experiments, check their instruments. Neither the former nor the latter will hesitate to reconstruct the edifice of their science 'from top to bottom' if need be. Georges Canguilhem has shown that this category of the dialectic cannot be assimilated to any classical conception of the dialectic: this is readily understandable once the meaning and implications of Bachelard's anti-philosophical polemic have been grasped. The dialectic that emerges is the 'spontaneous' dialectic of scientific practice: it affirms -against philosophical scepticism- the existence of the objects of science and proceeds by a reorganization of learning (savoir) 'from top to bottom'." (pp.135-136)
"Bachelard's polemic against the philosophical theories of knowledge has one last effect: it demands a rectification of the philosophical category of experience by correct appreciation of the function of instruments in the production of scientific concepts. Everyone knows Bachelard's thesis that scientific instruments are 'materialized theories' ; but it is essential to add the following counter-point: the 'materialization' of theory is not for him an acessory phenomenon. On the contrary, he ceaselessly stressed that it is one of the most characteristic features of the contemporary sciences that they are 'artificialist', that they contain as one of their essential components a technique for the production of phenomena ;
what, in parody fashion, he has called a 'phenomeno-technics', and which is the object ofthat new discipline programmatically adopted by Applied Rationalism: 'technical materialism'.
The notion of phenomeno-technics has to be taken seriously: it enables us to understand in what sense the word 'production' is to -be understood : not only the 'theoretical' production of concepts, but indissociably the material production of the object of theoretical labour; of what can no longer be called its 'data' or 'givens' (donnees), but rather its 'material'. The philosophy of the philosophers, when it is confronted with this material intervention of instruments in the production of concepts can only think it as an inessential 'mediation', and leave it to fall within the general and vague category of 'experimental method', a specification 'for the use of the scientist' of the philosophical category of experience. According to Bachelard, this general category, ignoring the specificity of the cases in which instruments function, gives no real knowledge of what takes place in scientific practice. It is unable to explain the new fact that a concept must from now on integrate into its constitution as a concept the technical condition of its realization. Ultimately this is because the notion of 'method' and the philosophical category of experience are solidary with the conceptual couplet 'abstract-concrete'. Now, the practice of phenomeno-technics consists precisely of proceeding- to couplings (couplages) between the abstract and the concrete by the expedient of the setting up of theoretically defined instruments and systems of apparatus according to programmes of rational realization. Thus the 'objects' of science, far from being poor abstractions drawn from the wealth of the concrete, are the theoretically normed and materially ordered products of a labour which endows them with all the wealth of determinations of the concept and with all the sensitivity of experimental specifications. It can thus be said, following Bachelard, that these objects are 'concrete-abstracts'.
The dual status of scientific instruments has the additional interest of revealing -materially- the 'eminently social' character of contemporary science. Bachelard's last epistemological work, on chemistry, Rational Materialism (1953), is particularly instructive in this regard. In it he systematically opposes what the chemist calls a 'substance' to what the philosopher means by substance. Among the essential characteristics of a chemical substance is 'purity'. Here is what Bachelard writes about it:
It can be said that there is no purity without purification. And nothing better proves the eminently social character of contemporary science than the techniques of purification. Indeed, purification processes can only be developed by the utilization of a whole set of reagents whose purity has obtained a kind ofsocial guarantee. Elsewhere, as is well known, Bachelard could write that only 'society can send electricity along a wire'. In short, he reveals rhe need, in order to think the history of a science, to take into account the state
of the 'technological city' (cite technicienne). But that state is quite clearly linked to the history of the techniques of production ; i.e., to the City as such. What type of determination is there between the history of production techniques and that of scientific instruments, between that scientific instruments and that of concepts ? These questions remain unanswered." (pp.137-139)
"In the case of,the statu~ 0:'scientific instruments', what is missing
fr~m Bachelard s analySIS IS a concept that would enable him to
thmk together several histories with different statuses; in short, the
concept of a differentialIzistory. When it is a matter ofthe formationof epistemologicaCobstades, the same lack is felt, but the consequences, as ,;e shall see, are much more serious. Once the rupture I be~een or.di?a~ knowledge and scientific knowledge has been
regls\ered, It IS mdeed a matter of determining the constitution of
that 'tissue of tenacious errors' with which science 'breaks'. At the
same time, this.is ~lso ~o account for the necessarily imaginary
nature of the relatIOnship the scientist maintains with his own
practice.
. B~chelard attempted this in two directions, unevenly explored
m his.work.. The fir~t, evoked above all in The Formation of the
Sctentific Mmd, consists of casting doubt on scientific education
whic?, both in its.lessons and in its 'practical work', displaces th~
true mterests ofsCience behind the mask of pedagogy: the constant
appe~l to the images and experiences of everyday life made in
physI.cs cou~ses .se~ms to him particularly damaging. The philosophy
classIS a!so ~ncnmmated, but for a different although complementary
reaso?: tt diffuses an undeserved valorization of 'general culture' to
the disadvantage ofthe scientific specializations, which are, however,
the only motor of the advance of the sciences. Thus, by means of educational institutions, the conditions of the reproduction of
scientific knowledges have their effects on the forms of their. pro.
duction.
The second direction is intended to be more profound, and it is
more minutely analysed byBachelard; it constitutes the object ofthe
new discipline he believed he had founded: the 'psychoanalysis of
objective knowledge'. It must be candidly stated: all that enables
Bachelard to think the necessity of the 'epistemological obstacles'
is a certain conception ofthe human soul which roots the 'imaginary
relationship' in the imaginary ofthe images produced bythe imagination. The pages - and they are numerous - in which Bachelard
describes this iuhibitory intervention ofimages in scientific practice
are still famous. But their crucial theoretical status must be understood: they attempt to elaborate a system of concepts which will
I
make it possible to think the intrication of two histories: that of the
scientific and that of the non-scientific in the practice of the scientists. Hence it is not surprising that this historical epistemology
culminates, in The Rationalist Affectivity ofContemporary Physics
(1951), with the project of an epistemological history which is
presented as a dual history: a 'ratified history' (or history of the
scientific in scientific practice) and a 'lapsed history' (or history ofthe
interventions of the non-scientific in scientific practice).
But if we turn to the realizations of this double history, we find
that the only example of a ratified history that h~ elaborated - in
Applied Rationalism - he elaborated vis-a-vis the history of mathematics, whose very special character was stressed by Bachelard
himself, following Cavailles, for mathematics immediately manifests
the existence of what he calls a 'logical time', a continuous identity,
which is not found as such in the other sciences. As for lapsed
history, illustrations of it will be sought in vain: it is thought very
precisely as a non-history: as a 'museum of horrors' or an 'unformed
magma'. Given this, the conjunction of the two histories and thei~
mutual determination remain obscure. .
His resort to the libido ofthe scientists to explain the constitution
of epist~mological obstacles here at once reveals all its meaning:
it compensates for Bachelard's inability to think the differential history of what I shall call sciences and ideologies. By that very fact,
all Baclrelard's epistemological concepts are haunted by psychologism: in theterm 'scientific mind' it is the term mind that tends to
become dominant; the notion of scientific labour and, correspondingly, philosophical laziness, take on a subjective connotation; the
application of 'applied rationalism' threatens to capsizeinto psychopedagogy; obstacles, finally, can" be understood as mere difficulties,
whereas the scientific city is conceived as an 'inter-subjectivity'. It
has to be admitted that many pages ofBachelard are open to such an
interpretation.
But ifthe notion of an 'imaginary relationship' is referred, not to a
psychologyc,fthe imaginary, but to the scientific concept ofideology
as it features in 'historical materialism', in the science ofhistory, and
which designates precisely the 'imaginary relationship of men to
their material conditions of existence', it is clear what is designated;
but not thought, by Bachelard: the necessity, in order to construct
the concept of a history of the sciences, to refer it to a theory of
ideologies and oftheir history.
Such a reading really does allow us to assign limits to Bachelard's
epistemology since it reveals the 'psychologism' that sustains his
'poetics' as a point ofretreat, better as a 'return of philosophy', ifit is
true that, unable to think the relation scientific non-scientific as a
differential history, Bachelard based it on the repetitive permanence
of great themes, myths or complexes in an eternal unconscious. In
short, paradoxically, he turns to the analogue of a theory of knowledge. Hence it has to be said that Gaston Bachelard's historical
epistemology remains a non-philOSophy in philosophy. Nevertheless, by its respect for the spontaneous dialectical materialism ofscientific practice, it provides us with precious elements for a theory of philosophy and ofits history, and on condition that we know how to read it, precisely where it is inconsistent it reveals the ways to supplement it so as to construct a materialist theory ofthe history of the sciences." (pp.139-141)
-Dominique Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology. Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault, NLB, 1975, 223 pages.
