Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement (Bachelard Translation Series)

If you've never been taught to fly, this is a great place to learn. Bachelard will show you how to discover your buoyancy, remove your reliance on the intellectual feathered wings of angels, and make a pure leap into thin air, supported only by dreams. It's one hell of voyage to take with this wonderful man. It's frequently bewildering, and oftentimes leaves one longing for the solid ground of a more traditional discourse. But if you can find your way through the poetic fog to meet Bachelard on his own terms, you may be lucky enough to rediscover the boundless terrain that is poesis, to unleash your imagination from intellect's grasp, and then discover verticality as you take flight in the metaphor that is subtle air, as I did. Warning: This is no book for the literal minded.

Excellent information on the material and dynamic imagination.

Air and Dreams (1943) is one of Bachelard's four studies on literary imagination, imagination whose destiny is determined by four fundamental elements. The other three are: The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938), Water and Dreams (1942), and the two "earth" books (The Earth and Reveries of Rest (1946), The Earth and Reveries of Will (1948)). If the reader wants to see Bachelard the philsopher of imagination at work, Air and Dreams may be the best place to start, since it is here that he posits his philosphical positions a little more clearly and explores them in more depth than he does in other works.To Bachelard, imagination, as a fundamental psychic value, is what makes human freedom possible. To imagine is for our psyche to experience "openness" and "novelty," and in this regard, imagiation and perception--habitual way of seeing things--are antithetical. As he writes in the Introduction: "Imagination allows us to leave the ordinary course of things ... To imagine is to absent oneself, to launch out toward a new life." Such "form of human boldness," however, is never an escapist lapse into fantasy, since to Bachelard the materialist, "the imaginary is immanent in the real" while "in the realm of the imagination transcendence is added to immanence."Since the advent of psychoanalysis, sickness of normality or normality of sickness in our mental life are taken for granted. Everybody is neurotic, more or less. So, Freudian psychoanalysis is generally credited with revealing the dark recesses of human psyche, giving it the name of "unconscious," and hence with accepting 'unreason' as a strong force in our mental life. But has it explained 'unreason' adequately? Bachelard says no. To him, the blindess of classical psychoanalysis is that it misses the "aesthetic" aspect of dreams. With its essentially rationalizing tendency, psychoanalysis usually turn dreams into a text of symbols, which in turn is made into an array of concepts. Hence, to rational psychoanalysts, dreams of flight always symbolize erotic desires, which can be explained with a variety of conceptual tools made for anayzing human sexuality and its repression.Limitations of such approach are obvious when we read, for instance, images of flight in Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" or images of ascending, or conquering vertigo, in Nietzsche. All testaments to a profound and simple life, to the power of imagination as a liberating force, these images have little to do with the poets' voluptuous desires, repressed or not. Indeed, neurosis to Bachelard is essentially a mal-function of imagination. As he notes in the Introduction: "A person deprived of the function of the unreal is just as neurotic as the one deprived of the reality function. It could even be said that difficulties with the function of the unreal have repercussions for the reality function. If the imagination's function of openness is insufficient, then perception itself is blurred."The chapter on Nietzsche ("Nietzsche and the Ascensional Psyche") would be of particular interest to Nietzsche students. Here we see how Bachelardian attention to imagination can reveal the hidden law at work behind the apparently accidental arrays of literary images. In the case of Nietzsche, his numerous images of conquest and domination, his intoxicated affirmation of will to power, were generally seen as indications of his megalomania, perhaps inevitable but still an uncomfortable aspect of his philosophy. Walter Kaufmann for instance thinks of such element as clearly an expression of Nietzsche's "snobbery" and "infatuation" with domination, which, he is quick to add, are perpetually sublimated and spiritualized. To Bachelard, these images of Nietzsche form an "experimental physics of the moral life," which lets us experience an "accelerated becoming," or "transformation of energy." They are ones that faithfully follow the destiny of Nietzschean soul.With this tour-de-force chapter on Nietzsche, Air and Dreams has many more magical chapters, chapters on individual poets such as, yes, Shelley, and Poe, and more theme-oriented ones on "sky," "clouds," or "trees." The book can be read as an implicit plea for curing the ills of modernity, and in this sense, would be read fruitfully together with such notable critics of modernity as Adorno, Benjamin, or even Lukacs.

The subtitle of this is ‘an essay on the imagination of movement’, and its focus is on oneiric movement; and it seems to include the idea that movement has the ability to imagine. ‘When Gaston Bachelard (1929-1962) was named to the chair of history and philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1940, …after he had previously looked at the expansive poetic mind in contrast to the taciturn scientific mind, no one could have thought of his next project, to explore material imagination, with reference to the four classical elements of earth, water, fire and air.’ So we have a writer with a scientific disposition – psychoanalysis, with a strong interest in literature, and especially poetry and the role of the imagination – but in a refreshingly un-Colereridgean way, and a way much more in harmony with Blake, Keats and Shelley.The first thing that strikes you as you start reading, is the lucid quality of the prose, almost musical in its fluency, and very often crystal clear, startlingly clear as in his opening remarks: ‘If there is no change or unexpected fusion of images, there is no imagination, no imaginative act. If the image that is present does not make us think of one that is absent, if an image does not determine an abundance – an explosion-of unusual images, then there is no imagination.’ And to support this, he cites Blake, then Rilke, then Shelley. Chapter One is titled ‘The dream of flight’; the experience is oneiric, and the superimposition of wings, he calls rationalization, because if anything moves in the air, from the linear perspective of the phenomenological world, wings are needed; but real flight conforms not to linear perspectives, but a vertical one. While he does not specifically refer to it, flight is on the axis of the present, which can intersect the horizontal one of chronology, at any point; something Goethe fully understood. From ‘Flight’, we move to the ‘Poetics of wings’, and then to the ‘Imaginary Fall’, which opens with the observation that there are more metaphors for falling than ascending; a comparison between Neitzsche and Shelley; the penultimate chapter being titled ‘The literary image.’This is one of those books that I can honestly say ‘I have never quite read anything like this’, and it is due not only his insightful sensitivity to poetry; or the way that his psychoanalytic perspective has informed it; or even the way that when we are startled, that we also find we have been challenged; what dominates is the beauty of the prose. I read his ‘The Poetics of space’ when I was doing a project on aesthetics and language; I enjoyed it but it did not prepare for this beautiful essay; and the references to Bergson has prompted a wider reading. There is obviously many quotations from French writers/poets, but he is so seamless with quotes in his exposition, that it is hardly noticed as an irritation, and perhaps it is unfair to ask, and what about Yeats, or Seamus Heaney? Perhaps someone else will pickup the gauntlet he has clearly laid down? The Dallas Institute are to be commended. I now find that I have to look at Blake and Shelley again – but a lot of the stereotypical perspectives have been, shall we say, wafted away. Super.

good

Sadly neglected philosopher