Science as poetics of intelligence

Abstract

Gaston Bachelard’s double aspect of philosophical reflection is nowadays an optimistic philosophy which integrates diverse orders. In other words, the French thinker intended the instauration of a new philosophical spirit, a new non-Cartesian, complex cogito with open frontiers, located both at the base of his epistemological reflection and at his ontology of imagination. He was fully convinced that, in taking elementary energies and then transforming, transmuting them, "dreaming" them as a poet, mathematician and dreamer, they would find themselves in a new inventive rationalism, prone to novelty and invention.

The Bachelardian philosophy of imagination was directed towards a prolific, amazed thought which poetically moves on the metaphors of human liberty. This represented a paradigmatic effort, aimed at showing that science and art are not in conflict. On the contrary, rigorous, objective thought undergoes a "surational extension" as it benefits from the powers of imaginative thought. This inquiry will try to take advantage of the suggestive Bachelardian method of poetic envisioning and its rich implications as a philosophical, highly suggestive way to de-instrumentalize, vitalize and thus humanize thought in its techno-scientific production.