SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought

Gaston Bachelard

Eileen Rizo-Patron, Edward S. Casey, Jason M. Wirth, Eileen Rizo-Patron, Edward S. Casey, Jason M. Wirth

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781438466071
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Like Schelling before him and Deleuze and Guattari after him, Gaston Bachelard made major philosophical contributions to the advancement of science and the arts. In addition to being a mathematician and epistemologist whose influential work in the philosophy of science is still being absorbed, Bachelard was also one of the most innovative thinkers on poetic creativity and its ethical implications. His approaches to literature and the arts by way of elemental reverie awakened long-buried modes of thinking that have inspired literary critics, depth psychologists, poets, and artists alike. Bachelard's extraordinary body of work, unduly neglected by the English-language reception of continental philosophy in recent decades, exhibits a capacity to speak to the full complexity and wider reaches of human thinking. The essays in this volume analyze Bachelard as a phenomenological thinker and situate his thought within the Western tradition. Considering his work alongside that of Schelling, Husserl, Bergson, Buber, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Deleuze, and Nancy, this collection highlights some of Bachelard's most provocative proposals on questions of ontology, hermeneutics, ethics, environmental politics, spirituality, and the possibilities they offer for productive transformations of self and world.

PART 1

ADVENTURES IN TIME

Chapter 1

The Difference an Instant Makes: Bachelard’s Brilliant Breakthrough

EDWARD S. CASEY

Le temps ne coule plus. Il jaillit.

—Bachelard, L’Intuition de l’instant (106)

One can read much, perhaps all, of the philosophy of the last two centuries—from Kant and Hegel to Bergson and James, from Husserl and Heidegger to Derrida and Deleuze—as a series of meditations on this one question: Is time continuous, or is it disruptive? Does it flow, or is it punctiform? The crux of the question, upon which any coherent answer depends, is often the status of the instant: Is it just a phase in time’s ongoing movement? Or is it a decisive cut in time’s streaming, something that brings time itself to a dead halt—at least momentarily?

This is not an arbitrary question, a mere artifact of doing philosophy in a certain way, much less a matter of staying within one’s schooling in the field. It cuts to the heart of the matter: How do we experience time after all? Or (putting it less subjectively): What is time itself like? Does it occur in uninterrupted succession, one event after another with no breaks in between, or does it happen in punctuated units? These questions are asked equally of the creation of the world, of the way things are, and of how we take them to be. Here I shall focus on the experiential aspect of time-features that concerned a medley of thinkers in the last one hundred and twenty five years (dating from the publication of James’s Principles of Psychology in 1890) and that qualifies all, or most, of them as “phenomenological” in some sufficiently generous sense. (Even Bachelard affiliated himself with this trend in his last works, most notably in The Poetics of Space).1 It is from this largely phenomenological standpoint that my own brief contribution will be set forth.

A false start is often taken (I started taking it myself only a few minutes ago; I couldn’t seem to help it): this is the antithesis between the continuity of duration as sheer becoming, a kind of gapless becoming on the one hand, and on the other, the discontinuity introduced by the instant conceived as a mere point, a cut, an interval, and so on. The contrast is that between time as a thickly flowing band that draws all differences into itself in what Bergson would designate as “heterogeneous multiplicity,”2 and a punctiformity that disintegrates this same band into a powder of instants: in which the point (the “now-point” as Husserl called it) is at once indivisible and divisive. This is not just an antithesis, it is also an antinomy in which one can argue coherently for either model taken one at a time, yet one has to acknowledge that the two taken together are incompatible with one another.

It is into this very impasse that Bachelard boldly strode by reconceiving the instant not as a mere cut, nor a geometric point, nor simple location, but as a creative source of time itself. This is the thesis of Bachelard’s remarkable book Intuition of the Instant, published in 1932 during the hegemony of Bergsonian thought in France. My aim is to explore different dimensions of this thesis than the ones that Bachelard, embroiled in a polemic with Bergson, emphasized in the space of such a short text. In what does the creativity of the instant consist? How may we understand this today?

A premise of his reconstrual of the instant is stated bluntly by Bachelard in The Dialectic of Duration, a sequel volume published four years later in 1936: “psychical continuity is not a given, but something constructed [une oeuvre]” (DD 19/viii, trans. modified). Constructed from what? From instants, concatenated rhythmic patterns that provide the sense or structure of continuity that we cannot afford to ascribe to the flow of duration itself. An entire “rhythmanalysis” ensues (DD 136–55), anticipating Henri Lefebvre’s later employment of this notion in The Production of Space, a book that accomplishes for social space what Bachelard attempts to achieve in the instance of personal time.3

Apart from this special thesis, what is of most interest for us is the claim that the instant, far from being a desiccated or desiccating entity, is itself creative. Heidegger takes Aristotle to task for his analysis of time in terms of the punctiform now—the “now no longer” and the “now not yet”—leaving a void in the center of temporal experience which only the ecstasis of Dasein’s temporality in the form of its future-directedness can fill. Perhaps, however, we can reconstrue the now itself, the instant that occurs in (and as) the present, in a way that does not require such radical surgery and that restores to the present itself its own integrity and power. This is the direction suggested by Bachelard, who is not averse to ecstasy—he is perfectly capable of speaking of “the very ecstasy of the newness of the image” (PS xi)—but who proposes that there is something in the instant itself that is generative of the new that is the basis of temporal ecstasy. This is a unique flashing-forth from within the experience of time itself in the instant. Bachelard describes it as “the flare-up of being in the imagination [la flambée de l’être dans l’imagination]” (PS xiv/2). But it is not enough to replace one graphic metaphor with yet another more graphic one: flashing or flaring for ecstasy. Can we be more specific about what constitutes the inherent creativity of the instant? If so, then we might be able to support the radical view, first articulated by Bachelard, that the instant deconstructs the false antinomies of continuity versus discontinuity, duration versus the cut, becoming versus being, line versus point, and so on. We can do so by proposing not just a third term to set alongside two opposing terms, or some summation of all three, nor even a composite or assemblage in the manner of a Heideggerian Versammlung. The task for us, in the wake of Bachelard’s breakthrough, is how to grasp this new sense of the instant taken as a source of the new itself, what Husserl cryptically called the “source-point [Quellepunkt]” that is at once “originary [ursprünglich]” and “creative [schöpferisch].”4 But just how, where, and in what way is it creative? Bachelard himself tended to interpret it in terms of the “act/action,” “decision,” and especially “newness.”5 Here I would like to explore two additional parameters of the creativity of the instant: dimensions that are closely affiliated with newness and that are suggested, and sometimes explicitly mentioned, in Bachelard’s analysis yet never fully pursued.

Human existence, doubtless all animal existence, is a jumpy affair, always on edge. Contrary to the assurance which we so often seek at personal and metaphysical levels alike—whether in settled dwelling or in the deliverances of a metaphysics of presence—the plain truth is that we experience our lives disjointedly, nomadically, in an ever-decentered and deferred way. Just as perception (the very paradigm of the epistemically stable source) takes place by way of quick glances, cast casually yet tellingly into every surrounding scene, so time (the putative paragon of continuous flowing) is lived in terms of disparate instants: now this event, now that one, then still another: not in a steady succession of discrete and datable occurrences but in upheavals of happenings and congeries of contingencies, whose corresponding emotional states are commensurately diverse. The live perceptual world is a glance-world—a world at a glance—where “time no longer flows, it leaps [il jaillit]” (II 60/106),6 as Bachelard says so acutely. But in this jaillissement, this inconsistent gushing and unstable sprouting, we receive time’s gift. And we do so in two guises: the sudden and the surprising.

The sudden is a subterranean but potent concept in Western thought. It first shows up officially in Plato’s Parmenides, where as to exaiphnes it signifies what happens so quickly that it cannot be contained by the usual categories of thought—all of which valorize “determinate presence” in Heidegger’s term for metaphysical notions that freeze Being rather than let it stand out into the open. The sudden cuts across such notions, just as it disturbs our ordinary expectations; it catches us conceptually defenseless as it were: a point not lost on Kierkegaard, who also recognized its importance in his Philosophical Fragments. Yet, for this very reason, it offers us insights not otherwise available—insights that can only occur all of a sudden, with a startle or a shock. These insights are in effect encounters with what comes upon us so rapidly that we have no chance to attend to it carefully, much less to cognize it in the usual patterns. We are in the domain of the Aha Erlebnis, but we are not limited to experience in any of its normalities and expectancies. We are “caught unawares,” that is to say, unaware of what to say or do with what happens to us. Such suddennesses range from delicate but definitive moments of realizing that something is not working in a personal relationship to the experience of a poetic image—as in Bachelard’s exemplary instance is a poetic image as “a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche” (PS xi)7—to events of epic proportions such as Kennedy’s assassination or the 9/11 attacks. The fact that in the latter cases we almost always remember just where we were when we heard the catastrophic news is the placial equivalent of the temporal instant of reception.

Suddenness is a primary dimension of the instant: it qualifies the instant itself. Every instant occurs suddenly; there are no drawn out instants: what is drawn out in distentio animi (St. Augustine) is, rather, the moment, der Augenblick, as well as what every instant proffers, its specific content: the very rapid arrival of what we had not exactly expected to be the case. (It follows that no expectation is ever fulfilled perfectly: gaps of excess or deficiency besiege even the surest best, disappointing or delighting us, either way.)

With the sudden we are already in the arms of the surprising. The two terms are coeval if not precisely coextensive. Only what happens suddenly can truly surprise me; and what surprises me arises suddenly. But the sudden is, strictly speaking, a predicate of time as instantaneous, while the surprising characterizes what arises in time: what “takes us over” (as “sur-prise” signifies in its original meaning), what supervenes in our lives, captivating us.

The surprising is a late modern, and by now a postmodern, avatar of wonder, that basic philosophical mood valorized from Aristotle to Descartes. If wonder is close to awe in its sweeping scope (ultimately, it is the world itself, or being-in-it, that is the proper subject of wonder, as both Fink and Heidegger suggest), surprise has a more restricted domain that is, however, no less significant. This is an arena of poignant intensity: of configurated events. Only something with shape can surprise; but the shape is not that of habitual perception or thought: it is a supervening shape that studs the field of the customary body. “I’m surprised to see you here,” I say, though not amazed, not wonderstruck, not set back or overwhelmed. Instead, I find your recognizable presence something supererogatory, even gratuitous. I had just planned to give a talk at SPEP; I come into the prescribed room, and there you are: welcome or not, a distinct and distinctive entity in my purview, something to pin my glance on for an instant.

“For an instant”: that is the point. The surprising, no less than the sudden, occurs in and as an instant, instantaneously. Even if it arises at the end of a long process of meditation or rumination, still it emerges in an instant. As I attend to something, turning it over carefully in my mind or perception, convinced that I have fathomed it fully, I remain subject to surprise at any moment.8 Something like this happens in diverse domains: running steadily in training for my personal marathon, I feel bogged down within my ever increasing bodily limits until, one day, I am surprised—and certainly pleased—to discover that I can run one more lap of the quarter-mile track than ever before. Likewise in writing: Husserl wrote every day of his adult life, often repeating and restating ideas of the previous few days but then, in an instant, he was surprised to come upon a new spur of thought not hitherto accessible to him. It is as if Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between the “habitual” and “momentary” body were suddenly to dissolve into one body of surprise. The very locution “surprised to [learn, hear, know] X” underlines the instantaneous character of surprise: the sharp prepositional “to” emphasizes the pointed discovery of what acts to surprise us.

Both the sudden and the surprising are creatures of the instant, together constituting its most closely fitting and effective armature. Linking them is a temporal structure I have not yet mentioned: the all at once, the totum simul that Aquinas attributed to God’s perception of the created world. But I mean by it something much more modest, as invoked in the ordinary phrase “all of a sudden.” All of a sudden we are surprised. In other words, the sudden and the surprising happen tout d’un coup. They co-occur, but in such a way that the occurring itself takes no time; or rather, it takes the stroke of an instant, which occurs by impaction as it were, all-at-once and here-and-now: “[W]hen it strikes, the instant imposes itself all in one blow (tout d’ un coup), completely (tout entier)” (II 15/27). This is no ordinary but quite an extraordinary factor of time. For it does not happen in the ordinary taken-for-granted way—successively, in some linear or nacheinander fashion: an ineluctably horizontal model. Rather, it exhibits what Bachelard calls “verticality”: “The aim [of a poetic instant] is verticalit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Sigla
• Introduction Bachelard’s Living Philosophical Legacy
• Part 1 Adventures in Time
• Part 2 Adventures in Methodology
• Part 3 Adventures in Language
• Part 4 Adventures in Alterity
• Appendix A Preface to Buber’s I and Thou
• Appendix B Testimony on Gaston Bachelard
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover