Читать книгу Inseminations - Juhani Pallasmaa - Страница 39

The relation between scientific and artistic knowledge, or instrumental knowledge and existential wisdom, requires some consideration. The scholarly and literary work of the unorthodox French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who has been known to the architectural profession since his influential book The Poetics of Space (first published in French in 1958), mediates between the worlds of scientific and artistic thinking. Through penetrating philosophical studies of the ancient elements, earth, fire, water and air, as well as dreams, day‐dreams and imagination, Bachelard suggests that poetic imagination, or ‘poetic chemistry’,⁴³ as he says, is closely related to pre‐scientific thinking and an animistic understanding of the world. In The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind, written in 1940⁴⁴ during the period when his interest was shifting from scientific phenomena to poetic imagery (The Psychoanalysis of Fire was published two years earlier), Bachelard describes the historical development of scientific thought as a set of progressively more rationalized transitions from animism through realism, positivism, rationalism and complex rationalism to dialectical rationalism. ‘The philosophical evolution of a special piece of scientific knowledge is a movement through all these doctrines in the order indicated’, he argues.⁴⁵

Significantly, Bachelard holds that artistic thinking seems to proceed in the opposite direction – pursuing conceptualizations and expression, but passing through the rational and realist attitudes towards a mythical and animistic understanding of the world. Science and art, therefore, seem to glide past each other, moving in opposite directions.