Abstract
This article contributes to a renewed interpretation of the place of imagination in Gaston Bachelard’s thinking. Attempting to restore an esthetical framework that supports Bachelard’s poetic thesis, two main arguments are developed in this paper. Firstly, an attempt is made to demonstrate that the affirmation of autonomy of man’s primitive symbolic dimension seeks to protect poetic imagination from the rational effects of a historical dialectic. At the same time, the current relevance of imagination leads us to consider its critical dimension within history itself. We will focus on two important moments of this process which place culture and poetic literature at the core of the system; namely, the primitive moment of birth of the symbol by fire, as a mix between technè and phusis, and secondly the moment of the cultured person, who seeks to poetically live his humanization of the world through aquatic matter, thus returning to the symbol’s nature.
Keywords:
Bachelard; poetical imagination; symbol; complex of culture; myth