A spiritual phenomenology of miniature spaces : reading Gaston Bachelard’s The poetics of space

Abstract

Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) was a French philosopher whose intellectual journey led him from the sciences to poetics, and from epistemology to a deeply introspective phenomenology of the imagination. His early academic career was rooted in the philosophy of science, in which he made significant contributions to the understanding of scientific knowledge, discontinuity, and epistemological rupture. In the 1940s, however, Bachelard’s focus shi!ed toward a different kind of knowing, not analytic or empirical, but intuitive, poetic, intimate. The Poetics of Space (La poétique de l’espace) was published in 1957 near the end of Bachelard’s life. It stands as one of his most enduring and widely read works, partly because it marks a decisive turn away from scientific thought to phenomenological reflection. Bachelard does not analyse space as a geometric or physical category, but as something deeply lived and experienced, especially through poetic imagery. [excerpt]