The Proximity Between the Merleau-Pontian Redefinition of the Imaginary and Bachelard’s Philosophy

The first point that Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty have in common is their commitment to a dialectical conception of sense. Bachelard makes the emergence of a signification in matter that occurs independently of the action of a constituting consciousness one of the primary grounds of his reflections on the imaginary. Like Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard proposes to take full stock of the power of fascination wielded by the imaginary, and this leads him too to show how a sensible manifold can secrete a signification. Bachelard wants to understand how a daydream, a poem, or a painting can have such a tenacious and remarkable coherence even when no concept imposes the theme and order of the sensible manifold. It is a matter of no longer reducing poetic reverie to a simple “formal imagination,” that is, to a fanciful flow of images or a frivolous distraction. Thus, after describing, in the first chapter of Water and Dreams, a host of disparate, superficial, and shifting images, Bachelard makes us feel how, “owing to the unity of the element, these images arrange and organize themselves,” why a profound kinship connects them. Substantial or elementary water is the “principle on which the images are based.” Here the notion of ‘element’ is taken in its original sense: for the pre-Socratics, such as Thales, Anaximander, or Heraclitus, who took water, air, or fire as the principle of all things, the elements are not the little bits or particles of inert matter that they will later become. If they serve to explain the formation of the universe, it is not as “parts of a complex spatial combinatorics.” Rather, it is from their own power and plasticity that this infinite diversity emerges. An element is therefore the positive power of an endless diversification for which it gives “the rule” or, more precisely, the theme. The notion of element enables us to go beyond the duality between a dispersed matter and a form imposed from without that would lead us to wonder how it could ground the genuine unity of a world. This notion also enables us to recover a profound kinship between images that have extraordinarily diverse forms, in the same way as Merleau-Ponty managed to regard a large sensible manifold as a set of variations on a single theme. The notion of element is related to the Merleau-Pontian notion of wild essence. It denotes the emergence of a certain differentiation, a certain ideal transtemporal axis in the matter itself, that is, without the contribution of a pure form or a concept projected by an overarching consciousness. “It seemed to me that the individualizing power of matter was underestimated. Why is the notion of the individual always associated with the notion of form?”